Anyone who wants to register their car so they could drive it on public roads.
- Big Brother
Let me say first you have had some very bad luck w/ tickets.
I think it will come about with the gov’t admitting that exceeding the speed limit and running a yellow light when you could stop are semi-ok, as long as brief periods of speeding (for passing) are also sort of OK. So a very complex formula will be set up in your car’s computer. Fines will be lowered, but imposed more often. Some examples:
Driving to work, all highway @ 65 mph limit, you drive @ 63 = no fine.
Lets say you are running late the next day and drive at 73 for your 10 mi trip, you get fined $3, which is saying it is semi OK. When you pass a truck you take her up to $89 mph for a short time, which they bang you for another $2.50.
The next day you are really running late and risk loosing your job, so you throw caution to the wind and drive 95 mph, you get a fine for $100.
It could also mitigate such fines, like if the traffic is going 10-15 above the speed limit your fine would be lessened for keeping up with traffic.
A digital readout would allow you to keep track of your total fine for the year, and your fine for this trip.
Nope. All of a sudden, I’d either pay $100,000 per year in fines if I had a new car or nothing if I didn’t… Every time speed enforcement gets more automated, highway patrols get reduced. You enforce one (trivial) law very strictly and it makes it more difficult to enforce the other ones at all… Britain has a huge problem with stolen/untaxed/uninsured cars now that they have speed cameras nearly everywhere.
Tickets are handed out by local law enforcement.
If too many tickets are handed out by some automated system, the voters will have a word with City Hall, or the county commission, or whoever.
I’m not concerned.
Well…I’m not sure how it’s related to the current topic. We weren’t talking about suppressing cars altogether.
Unless you’re refering to the bit about me not having a driving license. In this case, yes, the main reason why I still don’t have a driving license is because I don’t really need one in Paris. I do not intend to buy a car, for instance, when I’ll have the license.
Sure, theorically, I could get my money back. I’m sure the crooks will have to reimburse defrauded people. But how likely is it that they’ll actually pay, and when? They’ll surely be sentenced to jail time, especially since amongst other things they were selling “authentic fake” licenses (If I understand correctly, the document itself was real, but not registered anywhere. I assume they had an accomplice in the equivalent of the DMV). So how likely is it that they’ll ever be able to pay in any foreseeable future?
I’m going on the assumption that I won’t get my money back, since this way I can only be pleasantly surprised.
Maybe not. Can you drive a horse carriage on major highways, for instance?
And concerning the part about paying taxes, don’t people who don’t own a car at all also pay taxes for roads they never drive on? I certainly do.
Besides, if it happens, it will take time, and you’ll surely have plenty of advanced warning.
Actually, I think if cars with these features become popular, it would require a total re-think of the entire system of traffic enforcement.
For instance, speed limits are based on human factors such as reaction time. I wouldn’t see the point of a blanket speed limit applying to cars with either these V2V features or outright autopilots, since they could coordinate their movements much more easily than human drivers.
Consider a given stretch of your local highway that currently has a 65 mph speed limit. The partially- or fully-autopilot cars could certainly navigate that stretch at a much higher speed, say 90-100 mph, with the same margin of safety. (Heck, even marginally trained humans probably could, too, if they were the only cars on the road.)
But then add human-driven cars to the same highway. What happens then? The autopilot cars would either have to slow down to avoid the human cars, or be segregated into lanes allocated for their exclusive use.
And suppose a computer-driven car is right alongside a human-driven one, each going 20 mph above the speed limit? The autopilot gets the traffic ticket, while the human likely gets away with the exact same crime. IANAL, but there has to be some kind of constitutional issue with that kind of selective enforcement.
Basically, I can’t see these cars selling unless they were to get their own lanes on the highways, the way carpool lanes are currently used. I have to think that that would be a tremendous selling point for the harried commuter who lives 40 traffic-choked miles from his job: Use our cars and you get a guaranteed 90 mph even at rush hour!
But that begets a chicken-and-egg scenario. Can you create a market for these cars before the state legislature grants such privileges as exclusive lanes? Alternately, can you persuade the legislature to pass laws creating these lanes before there’s a lot of cars out there that can use them?
And let’s add to the mix ideas such as UncleRojelio’s traffic service; instead of owning a car, you purchase a subscription that will summon an automated car to take you wherever you’d like to go, at a per-mile fee. That idea alone could augment or eventually replace public-transit systems such as buses or even Amtrak, if the vehicles were engineered for high speeds and long-distance comfort (with features like bathrooms). Anyone think that idea won’t generate any momentum underneath the dome of your state capitol?
Frankly, there’s lots of reasons to think that these technologies will meet public acceptance in one form or another in the coming years.
Looks like Mercedes has a few glitches in their system.
So as long as you’re not driving in a tunnel, or under an over pass, you “might” be okay.
Well I was figuring more like $500 or so a year for the ‘normal’ driver. Add we can take into account other social issues like that $500 might be only $100 if you drive a small hybrid car, while it might be $2000 for a Hummer. Then again any fines while the check engine light is on would be doubled, as well as work zones and school zones (so driving a Hummer through a workzone in a school zone w/ the check engine light on would be 32x the normal rate)
Your old car woud have to be retrofitted with this system to be legal to drive on public streets. Cars not properly registered would be ‘deactivated’ by a wireless signal, cars w/o a computer link would alert cops in the area when they pass certain sensors in the road.
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Yes it would, I could see a system where you say your destination and a menu comes up with options like:
1 - Travel Time 1h.15 min cost = $65.99
2 - Travel Time 1h 23 min cost = 10.74
3 - Travel Time 1h 45 min cost = 1.25
4 - Travel Time 2h 14 min Credit = $ 5.75
E = Emergency travel Time 1h 6m valid 1/year (no cost)
But this would be a totally automated system.
I’m talking about a non-retrofittable car… like a '49 Oldsmobile with a 6-volt electrical system, or a positive-ground British sports car.
Over here, we pay several specific taxes that, while they don’t cover all the costs of the road, certainly help offset the cost. They’re all driving-related taxes - excise taxes on the value of the car, specific taxes on automobile insurance, taxes on gasoline, tires, and oil, registration costs beyond the actual administrative fees involved, speeding tickets, etc.
I can’t ride my bicycle on the Interstate, but I don’t pay to register and insure it. I’d still have to pay to register and insure the old car.
Once legislation passed requiring all cars to be equipped, you’d no longer have to register your old car. Why would you be required to register a car you cannot legally drive? You would no longer be required to insure it either. However, depending on the car, you may want to insure it as you would any valuable antique.
Nope, the oldie would have to get grandfathered in… a Model T does not have seatbelts, four-wheel or hydraulic brakes, or a shatterproof windshield but it is street-legal everywhere its 45-mile-per-hour top speed can take it because it complied with the regulations when it was built. There’s no such thing as a backwards-facing automobile regulation - 1973 cars pass 1973 rules, 1997 cars had to pass 1997 rules, and my '52 Hudson Hornet “7X” would have to pass '52 rules.
Better yet, we get 80 MPH traffic speeds, computer enforced, so the cars will only need sufficient power to maintain 80 MPH. Cop cars can shut any other automobile off, so they don’t need to be able to go faster than this. In addition, since we can synchronize traffic patterns, cars don’t have to be able to accelerate quickly anymore, so we can cut power down to 25 or 30 horsepower per ton.
Meanwhile, my '55 Chevy can still go the 115 MPH its engine can shove it up to… It would be like owning a jet when your competitors have Cessnas. Sure, it would cost more to run than the optimized hybrids everyone else has, but being able to pull out a mile in three on the highway and being able to pass 20 or 30 cars every time I got a clear passing zone would definitely be worth it.
Not yet there isn’t. Again, I believe we will see it passed in my lifetime.
I wonder if it would apply to motorcycles as well. Automatic control of a motorcycle’s gonna be a lot harder than that for a car.
I seriously doubt that it’ll happen in my lifetime and I think I’ve got 80 years left. This is a bill that would instantaneously kill several large industries, would get rid of the Walter Mitty fantasy every racing fan indulges in, and would get rid of 100 years of car culture in the United States. Car and Driver and Popular Mechanics have some of the biggest readerships of any monthly magazines.
250,000 people in the streets, organized by a group that very few of them support, protesting a war that hadn’t happened yet, is enough to bring Washington to a standstill. Imagine 50 times that number of people, including most of the armed forces in the area, marching through the streets of that city. Americans will be relieved of unmonitored mobility at the end of a gun barrel, and nothing less.
I agree that it would be more difficult. But, as others have pointed out, automated traffic would move at speeds that few humans could keep up with.
I ask this because I genuinely don’t know, not as mock ignorance for rhetorical purposes, which industries?
They could still go to go cart tracks, or take their cars to specially designated areas drive manually.
Car culture has gone through some extreme changes already. Remember the days when you needed goggles, gloves, and a lab smock to drive your Tin Lizzie?
Popular Mechanics covers many things other than cars.
First, I am not talking about unmonitored mobility. I am talking about self driving cars. Second, what about all the Americans protesting for a ban on manual driving? Mothers Against Drunk Driving come to mind. The insurance industry, the liquor industry, and the automobile industry (even if the cost is minimal, a self driving car will cost more) will all lobby for the ban.
However, I think the main thing you overlook is generational change. Try explaining to a ten-year old that your old turntable and a box of vinyl is better than a cd player or an iPod. Now, imagine a generation growing up with self driving cars. Try explaining to them why doing something that can be stressful and tiring, and requires you to travel more slowly is better than sitting back and letting the car drive itself.
I would gladly buy a self-snitching car if it can also stand up for me when I’m innocent. Its data log should prove that I wasn’t speeding, or that the light was green for me when I entered a particular intersection, etc.
As for computer-controlled cars, I think they would have to be used on dedicated lanes. One lane dedicated to computer-controlled cars can probably carry several times more traffic than a manual-only lane. Not because of increased speed, but because the cars can be spaced closer together. (There should be no need for a buffer zone between cars. If one car encounters a problem, it signals following cars to slow down together.) Owners of older cars won’t be forced to give them up, but eventually they may get pushed off to back roads.
If it happens, automated travel will occur at what’s deemed the most energy-efficient, socially-responsible speed - probably only 50 or 60 miles per hour on the highway and nowhere near the car’s cornering limit on back roads.
The industries that would be killed are
- The entire automotive performance aftermarket. Nobody’s gonna want to customize their cars anymore - you can’t make it any more fun to drive if you’re not driving.
- Most of the spare-parts industry. In addition to nobody needing body parts anymore, the very low acceleration rates and very sedate cornering speeds of automated driving will reduce the wear and tear on automobiles considerably.
- This, and the inherent complexity and increased liability of a self-driving car, will probably get rid of all the independent mechanics and speed shops. All of a sudden, liability shifts from the driver (who isn’t doing anything anymore and has no more control over what happens than a passenger on a train) to the last person to fix the car. No mechanics’ shop could afford the insurance coverage required to idemnify them when a wire falls off and the pedestrian-detector doesn’t notice the kid in the road.
A kid who grows up watching self-driving vehicles and plugging in destinations on his parents’ Toyota-Chevrolet Auto-Mobile, and then gets a taste of real, near-the-limits driving, either at the kart track or during an illicit 3-AM blast on the backroads in an old car, is gonna be as hooked as a previously drug-clean guy who just got a shot of heroin.