Driverless cars were the future but now the truth is out: they’re on the road to nowhere
Driverless cars were the future but now the truth is out: they’re on the road to nowhere
The dream of these vehicles ruling the roads remains just that. Focusing on public transport would be much smarter, says transport writer Christian Wolmar
Driverless cars were the future but now the truth is out: they’re on the road to nowhere::The dream of these vehicles ruling the roads remains just that. Focusing on public transport would be much smarter, says transport writer Christian Wolmar
Self driving cars have always been a solution to the wrong problem.
The problem isn't really "I don't want to steer this car". It's "I want to fast+safe+cheaply get from where I am, to where work/school/fun is". So you could spend billions on machine vision and car tech to try to accomplish that, and maybe you will eventually. Or you could invest in historically proven solutions that have incredible side benefits like public transit and better zoning. Because having your self driving car cart you around suburban sprawl is still going to suck. Living spaces that are built for humans first instead of cars are better on like every metric.
I heard this guy going on about this amazing machine a company had invented to sequester carbon. They were not happy when explained that a tree does the same thing and they grow like crazy just about anywhere.
We already know what we need to do but people don't want to do it.
We already know what we need to do but people don’t want to do it.
That's the thing that gets me about AI solving global warming or whatever. You think a computer telling you that you have to get off oil is going to make a difference?
Soon it'snot going to be we don't want to do that it's we are going to have to.
Also if you look at happiness. We do want that some people don't know that, some don't know it's possible and some people have been outright lied to.
You missed part of the problem. It’s actually,
“I want to fast+safe+cheaply get from where I am, to where work/school/fun is, and I want to do it without sharing transportation with anyone else who might be sick, annoying, crazy, or a member of an ethnic group or economic class I don’t care for”
The good solutions for transit do not account for how much people hate being around each other. My city has phenomenal bus infrastructure, that often gets you to your destination faster than driving. But people drive anyways, because there are sick people and crazy people on the bus.
You're not wrong, but I don't really think society should bend too far to the whims of it's most antisocial members.
Like, if they don't want to share the bus with a black person they can leave. And I don't want to subsidize their selfishness by ceding space to cars, for example.
Also that's a bit of induced demand, probably. People drive because it's easier. Take away the subsidies or internalize the costs of driving, and people's habits will change.
The problem is not that driverless cars won't be viable. The problem is the same as several other tech developments where a few startups promise tech that hasn't matured yet, taking in billions of 'stupid' money from investors who are greedy but not knowledgeable about the underlying viability of what can realistically be done in a decade.
One hundred years from now? Driverless cars will be old news, so common or maybe even surpassed with something newer. But investors want a 10 year explosion of cash, not a 50 year investment.
One hundred years from now, it’ll probably mostly still be cars. Aerotaxis for the rich, maybe
It is because the tech is dumb. All cars should exist on a network together like ants don't make them respond to bullshit other people do it will never work and it will always make mistakes with judgement.
Or you know just give me fucking trains and trolleys
If only there were a way for people to take an automated vehicle from A to B safely and consistently.
Shame no one has ever designed one of those before.
And it’s a damn shame no one has ever designed such a thing on multiple occasions only for it to be shut down by bullshit dreams of a nonsense technology only devised to maintain a transport monopoly that depends on people spending the equivalent of a small house every 10 or so years.
“ Artificial intelligence is a fancy name for the much less sexy-sounding “machine learning” “
This article is just a plug for this guys book and if the quote above from the article is anything to go by then I doubt the book will be anything more than a poorly researched 300 page opinion piece.
Yeah I'm mega anti-car and not at all optimistic about self-driving but this article says very little of substance.
I wouldn't bet against self-driving cars even now. It's fairly clear that existing AI technology is insufficient, but we're seeing such rapid progress in that field that a more advanced AI that can drive might be invented relatively soon.
A perfect self-driving car is still way worse than a robust public transportation system. People are starting to catch on to the fact that cars are pretty fucking annoying/dangerous and hoping on a train/bus is less stressful. By the time self-driving is completely ready a significant portion of people are not going to want them.
Sure, but a public transportation system only vastly improves the lives of millions of people. How is that supposed to increase the bottom line of the car monopolists etc, eh? Nobody's thinking how their selfish demands of "a comfortable life for the majority of people", "a livable planet for future generations" or "letting the bottom 99% of the world's population have a little money too" affects the richest few individuals on the planet - they might have to refrain from buying another couple dozen yachts or villas each year! Won't somebody think of the poor, poor billionaires!
Driving itself is stressful for some people but I'm not sure how simply being in a self-driving car is worse than being on a bus. I can see how public transportation might be cheaper than a self-driving taxi but I don't see how it might be better if price isn't an issue. Why would someone prefer a method of transportation that (1) isn't directly door-to-door (2) runs on someone else's schedule (3) is often much slower than driving and (4) has to be shared with strangers over a method of transportation that has none of those disadvantages?
Funny how, if we had weight and trip class segregated traffic infrastructure, walkable cities, car-free areas, etc. Then we would probably already have several successful self-driving taxi companies. As indeed, a point A to point B exclusive use highway would definitely be cheaper for mid and low density traffic areas than trains. But since everyone insists travel to be from front door to front door, then the transport network is just too complex and dangerous for the machines to deal with.
since everyone insists travel to be from front door to front door
When it is wet and cold outside and you have a week's groceries for the family, nobody wants to walk for awhile with all that crap in the cold, then get into a public transit system, then walk even further at the destination, again having to hold all their crap in the wet and cold. Is the transit system going to let one wheel a cart into it? Because I can't hold the week's groceries for my family with just my arms in a single trip.
There are millions of families in Tokyo (and other cities too) who don't own a car, and manage to get their groceries without one.
It can be done.
But yeah it usually involves getting groceries more than once a week.
If we could rethink everything from scratch we could probably easily solve that use case.
Of course the hard part is changing from what we have now to whatever better solutions exist.
Like, things would be better if suburbia wasn't just an ocean of houses with sparse islands or shops. If every house was in a community with most of the basics reachable by foot... But how tf do we get to that?
You don't have to get a week's worth of groceries when you don't live in a car-first dystopia.
You walk five minutes to the store, spend 5-10 minutes grabbing stuff, then walk back with like a single bag. You shouldn't even need to get on public transit for basics like groceries, but even if you do a single bag isn't a problem.
Yeah, the solution to that is to have local groceries shops where you can go shopping on foot or just with a simply grocery cart walking less than 10 minutes. The idea that you have to haul several tonnes of food from 20+Km away is stupid.
Add: I find laughable how, whenever anyone makes this kind of comments, there comes out of the woodwork the whiny manbabys who assume that it argues for taking away their cars. Read again, never did I suggest to take anyone's car away, I'm making suggestions towards a better city, better living and better infrastructure. It says a lot that you're so openly willing to hurt and inconvenience others to defend against an entirely imaginary threat against your 2 ton toy. A car is a tool, not a personality. And if your personality is your car, I think you have a POS personality.
Waymo seems to be the best and most successful robotaxi service. My friends in Pittsburgh and the Bay speak highly of them.
But it's a shame that none of the other robotaxi companies in the US were able to succeed.
We had a thriving robotaxi scene in Pittsburgh (R&D, no actual taxis), mostly because of CMU. But most of the work has shutdown since the pandemic (Uber ATG, Aurora, ...). Waymo still seems to be doing well here though.
Waymo the one.
Just because most of the other car companies are full of shit doesn't mean waymo isn't making slow yet consistent gains in the area. It might take 5 years it might take 10. But mass roll out of self driving cars is coming.
We are just in the "this touchscreen phone isn't ever going to take off" part of history.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Moreover, the recent withdrawal from the market of a leading provider of robotaxis in the US, coupled with the introduction of strict legislation in the UK, suggests that the developers’ hopes of monetising the concept are even more remote than before.
The attempt to produce a driverless car started in the mid-00s with a challenge by a US defence research agency, offering a $1m prize for whoever could create one capable of making a very limited journey in the desert.
In 2010, at the Shanghai Expo, General Motors had produced a video showing a driverless car taking a pregnant woman to hospital at breakneck speed and, as the commentary assured the viewers, safely.
It was precisely the promise of greater safety, cutting the terrible worldwide annual roads death toll of 1.25m, that the sponsors of driverless vehicles dangled in front of the public.
The trouble is there are an enormous number of potential use cases, ranging from the much-used example of a camel wandering down Main Street to a simple rock in the road, which may or may not just be a paper bag.
That is why it is clearly a misplaced priority on the part of the government, headed by tech bro Rishi Sunak, to put forward a bill on autonomous vehicles while sidelining plans to reform the railways or legislate for electric scooters, which are in a legal no man’s land.
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Nobody with a functioning brain thought they were the future
I don't really understand why you're getting downvoted, if you ever genuinely thought about them and how they'd possibly ever be implemented you would've figured out it was a dumb idea very quickly.
Because blahaj.zone disabled downvotes I can't even see them lol