Auto Automation - Do We Really Want to Go There?

In My Humble Opinion
1

Just read about the cars that showed up at CES:

In addition to driverless cars and electronic locks and ignition, we now have laser this and camera that - not to mention a cloud-based database of open parking spots.

Fine?

Aside from the couple who managed to lock themselves in their car (and nearly died) because they didn’t know how to unlock the thing without the fob (does anybody remember what a fob was?), there is the issue of what happens when the car is 10 years old, a bit of debris cracked a lens, the “driver” is in deep snow and the sensors by the license plates can’t “see” anything.

Audi now has permission from CA to operate driverless vehicles in the State.

Yes, I’m old and won’t be around to see most of this nightmare implements.

I still want a big red button (mechanical, not electric/electronic) that reverts all critical functions (steering, brakes, head/tail lights) to operator control.

I grew up with cars which were junk at 50,000 miles. We have spent the last 40+ years making cars bulletproof. Still, a serious electrical bug will make a car worthless.

Now we are going to multiply that exposure by a factor of 1000? Your right front scanner is out - you flunk the required safety inspection - cost to repair is greater than the cost to replace.

The body and drivetrain will last 300,000 miles, but the electronics will kill it within 5 years.

My vehicle is a 4 cylinder, 5-speed stick shift with minimal electronics (I did have to replace an IAT sensor). It can be rebuilt.

My fav - a car that can be unlocked and started by a wristwatch. A “Mugger’s Special”.

2

No, sorry, but your fears mostly stem from ignorance.

The electronics of these cars will follow the same curve that existing electronics has followed, meaning that price and capability will increase exponentially with Moore’s law. There will be a price increase in the beginning but eventually prices will drop to where changing out or upgrading the entire autonomous driverless system will be like replacing your computer, then the price will drop such that it will be like replacing your cellphone, the prices will drop further until it’s like replacing your USB stick.

This is great news that holds the promise to eliminate all drunk driving deaths, in fact probably most all car related deaths.

3

As long as the failures happen at nice, convenient times and places (and no mugger ever grabs another watch).

With a mechanical key, the mugger may know the make of car it fits, but will not know which one.

I wait until you walk into the parking lot and take your watch. I now unlock and start a car. All I need do is see which car is running. It would be real nice if the car beeped or flashed its lights to signal its actions.

In 1988 I first encountered an electronic lock on a car - pressing the button caused it to beep.
The owner, of course, kept the fob on her key ring with the ignition key.
Perfect.

As to ease of replacement: go try to replace the wiring in your car. Go ahead - get an estimate.

Wiring is buried. Since safety inspections already require functioning lights, you’d think that at least the lamp wiring would be easily replaced.
I had a roomie who had to junk a perfectly good car because of a short circuit somewhere in its guts (Volvo). Without consideration of the fragility of the devices (and their precise alignment*), just multiplying the number of wires will cause even greater chances of failure.

    • the unthinkable happens and something smacks your car-come-computer, denting it so as to throw off the alignment of sensors. Will the thing even allow it to start if the self-diagnoses says it can’t see properly?
4

I suppose that’s why a TI-83 costs just a few dollars now, being nearly two decades old.

And I think your dream of swapping out your cars electronics is not going to happen. These electronics are going to be proprietary and manufacturers have no incentive to make them cheaply available. Repairs to a cars electronics generally require a trip to the dealer or at least a mechanic and therefore cost more than repairs that don’t involve electronics. Driverless cars may cost a whole lot less, but they may make up for it by not being user repairable at all.

5

Yeah, I think that user repairable autonomous driverless car system has always been out of the card deck there buddy.

6

usedtobe–I just want to point out that your username says it all.

Yeah, I’m a luddite, too, approaching retirement age, and glad that I won’t have to deal with the robot overlords. But they’re marching closer and closer to us every day, and there’s no way to stop them. (Like one of the first video games called Space Invaders…remember the scary music and the sense of impending doom ?)

I feel sorry for the young generation who will never know the pleasure of real driving. Just like my grandfather felt sorry for the young ones who never learned to ride a horse. :slight_smile:
I bought my current car 15 years ago, and one of the reasons I chose it is that it was the only car on the market with absolutely zero gadgets. (Even has manual windows I can roll down with my own hands, I love it!)

7

Grin! So true! (And, of course, just as I can go out to a ranch and pay for a day’s ride on a horse – and rue it bitterly as my butt gets all sore and stiff! – so, in future, people will be able to go out to special tracks and pay for a day’s ride in a car.)

The crossover point will be when the robotic-chauffeur is a better driver than I am. Right now, I have faith in my ability to handle emergencies, which a robot can’t deal with. I know how to countersteer from a skid, how to “skate” out of a tight spot, etc. But in time, robot drivers will exceed the skill of any human, and that’s the point where I am willing to give it all up and let them have the wheel.

Not today. Not tomorrow. But…some time in the next fifty years? Pretty likely. And…great! It’ll save a ton of lives!

8

What happens when some bad guy finds an old “dumb” car and wreaks havoc on the nice Orwellian “the cloud knows everything and is infallible” highways.

Topic for futurists:
The “cloud” as a god figure. Worse analogies have been made.

9

Let me know when the car can sense the approaching storm and seek shelter.

Hell, let me know when they have relief tubes, if you want a useful bit of low-tech.

10

The most stolen cars are mid 90s Honda Accords and Civics. Not because 20 year old mid range cars are particularly desirable or valuable today, but because car security got drastically better in the late 90s. Today’s cars are empirically radically more secure than old cars, despite your belief to the contrary.

11

I can’t see self-driving cars ever working in busy cities or other areas with lot of non-vehicular traffic. There are too many pedestrians wandering willy-nilly in front of cars for anything automated to react quickly enough. It helps to have a driver who can tell if the pedestrian on the pavement (not on a pedestrian crossing) standing facing into the road is sensibly looking left and right or stupidly looking down at their phone. The latter is much more likely to just step in front of your moving car.

Even if the car has a sensor so it will stop if a pedestrian walks in front of them, there are problems with this: pedestrians too small to set off the sensor (a very young child that has slipped loose of its parent’s hand to chase after a balloon, or a dog, or air, the way even well-behaved toddlers with careful parents occasionally do); lots of cats being run over because the automatic car doesn’t see them as a problem while the driver might; the car being oversensistive to obstacles and shutting off, so the driver disables them; the sensor not working well in certain weather conditions.

They could work well on motorways but they would never work in city centres. I hope that they would all have a manual over-ride because of that - I mean, even planes have manual control options and they don’t have toddlers running out in front of them.

Also, we’ve been talking about this since before I was born, and I’m 39.

12

Current navigation aids get real time traffic data and can suggest rerouting to avoid them. Bringing in weather information is a trivial addition. My phone already pings me for weather warnings based on my location - adapting navigation tools to use that data is in the works, I’m sure, if not already available.

13

The overwhelming counterargument is just watching the general public drive. They’re BAD, in a deep, sustained, thorough way. Each and every time I drive even a dhort distance, I observe people ignorant of, or violating, traffic laws and safety practices. Sometimes it’s many people at the same time. The list of just simple, obvious things taught in driver’s ed that some people seem utterly unaware of is too long to type out.

Traffic deaths in the US are what? Let’s say self-driving cars are imperfect, and unanticipated interactions with the complex environment cause ten thousand deaths a year. Ten thousand!

That “nightmare scenario” would constitute a dramatic and large-scale reduction in highway deaths and accident costs.

14

Honda sold a metric buttload of these cars, lots of them are still around and functioning and they get in wrecks or fender benders. Honda charges an arm and a leg for replacement parts. These cars get stolen and run through “chop shops” where they are parted out and the pieces sold to repair damaged vehicles. This is the reason the insurance companies and gummint wanted ALL of the parts on a car coded for tracing purposes. The cops keep an active lookout for chop shops because they are a link to lots of car thieves.

15

They are going to HAVE to allow an override for people to drive them. No way in hell an autonomous car will figure out how to get up my driveway, or pull a neighbor out of the ditch. Or plow snow for that matter.

16

I predict self-driving cars aren’t going to be satisfactory until most every car on the road is self-driving. They will be handy on Interstates and other limited-access highways though. Bad weather, accidents, detours, and construction will confound them.

Until if/when AI is perfected I think we will see a lot of self-driving cars pulling to the side of the road or even stopping in the middle of the lane when their software has a fault, faulty inputs from the sensors, or just an unworkable situation given the software parameters. Hopefully the car will be made so an attentive driver could just take over when the software can’t handle it.

This was a good article in Wired about riding a self-driving Audi: I Rode 500 Miles in a Self-Driving Car and Saw the Future. It's Delightfully Dull | WIRED

17

another viewpoint:

18

:dubious:

Or were you under the impression that most people paid professionals to select their computers, phones and flash drives?

19

There are massive numbers of 1990s cars in junkyards to satisfy this demand. (and if it is just a fender bender: with cars this old people usually just keep the fender bent–body work is very high priced).

20

That was a very good article. The self driving Audi is essentially a cruise control that allows the driver to let go and sit back under some road conditions. Audi was very careful to make sure the driver was fully trained in a driving school before letting him even try it. They made it sound like enhanced cruise control for the professional driver.

The limiting factor in the near and perhaps far future is not going to be the AI ability of the vehicle but the condition of the infrastructure, the roads. There will be corridors between certain locations that have driver-less dedicated lanes. That much is almost certain. But the cars will be like a trolley without rails. I can see certain urban areas with enhanced road work where the smart, driver-less car could work well, and certain stretches of freeway with a driver-less lane.

You are going to need the equivalent of a smart road to talk to the smart car. We are very far from being able to afford any such thing. Most roads are still just crushed rock held together with tar, constantly under construction. People constantly bitch about the crumbling infrastructure and the cost to maintain it. The expression is follow the money, the driver-less car is not going to be able to follow the money that does not exist.

The state cannot even keep the road reflectors in my area on the road, each winter the snow plows scrape them off. And the fog lines last about a half a season, when winter gravel isn’t covering them up. Hell, the current self driving cars cannot even see a traffic control signal if the sun is blinding the sensors. And that is what we are really talking about, the ability of the sensor technology to interpret road conditions.

Do self driving cars have a place in the near future? Absolutely, in certain limited applications. Will they be able to take you anywhere? Oh, no, not anytime soon and maybe never. The money for the infrastructure isn’t there. Hell, it isn’t here now to maintain the shitty roads we have.