I’ve heard that ABS actually hasn’t shown the expected lowering of the accident rate. It appears that many drivers tend to follow too closely now, largely negating the intended benefit.
Come on, live a little! Your boss can spare you for a day. Even better, persuade your boss to go with you. After that, he (or she) will be much more understanding about giving you the occasional Friday off. (I actually knew someone who did that.) And Friday at the Track is about so much more than just driving faster: it’s about driving better, and will definitely make you a better driver on the street. The hour you spend on the skid pad (in the school’s car) will improve your car control skills immensely, even if you only take the course once. But a warning: HPDE is addictive!
Then we agree on that.
Before I started HPDE, I spent most of a decade commuting from suburban Maryland to downtown DC, an hour on average each way. And I’ve driven across the country twice. So I know about boring driving.
For most of the 20th century, driving was a form of freedom and escape for many Americans, and they enjoyed doing it for its own sake. Many did a lot of maintenance and repair work on their own cars. Of course, as cars got more complex, routine tune-ups weren’t as necessary, and it became harder for shadetree mechanics to work on them. As the environmental impact of cars became clearer, attitudes towards unnecessary driving changed, and a thousand other things have happened to change our relationship to cars and driving over the past several decades.
But one thing that hasn’t changed is the inherent risk involved in moving delicate human bodies at speeds up to 90 mph. The fact that you, or someone else, could be seriously injured or killed anytime you get behind the wheel, regardless of the myriad improvements to automobile safety systems, ought to inspire people with a greater respect for the risks they are taking. In my ideal world, that would mean more and better training for beginning drivers, including accident avoidance techniques. And while I’m at it, periodic re-testing of senior citizens, and the mandatory revoking of licenses if their eyesight, hearing, or reaction times are not good enough to make them safe drivers. (One of my wife’s most brilliant students was killed by a senior citizen who didn’t even realize she had hit him. The young man’s mother has been crusading for mandatory testing for seniors, but has been thwarted by AARP and politicians who don’t want to anger the demographic with the highest percentage of voters.)
I believe that one of the reasons ABS hasn’t worked as well as expected is that people aren’t taught how to do panic braking, and never learn how ABS works until the first time they need it.
When you hit the brakes hard in a non-ABS car, the wheels can lock up and the tires skid. In that state, you can’t control the car: the steering wheel won’t change your direction of travel. It’s like being on ice. Before ABS, drivers were taught to pump the brakes quickly to prevent a skid, because it’s only when the wheels are turning that you can steer. But manual pumping of the brakes was generally not very effective and often didn’t slow the car enough in a panic situation. (That is, assuming you even remembered to do it.)
ABS works by applying and releasing the brakes several times a second, much faster and more precisely than any human can, thereby providing some steering control while you push the brake pedal down as hard as you can. When you slam on the brakes and ABS kicks in, the brake pedal pulsates as the system works. But since most people don’t get a chance to practice panic braking, when they do it in an emergency for the first time, the pulsing startles them, and they reflexively take their foot off the brake. :smack:
I’ve been told that this scenario is at least partly responsible for ABS not reducing accidents as much as anticipated. Once again, it comes down to inadequate training.
And again, bad training and/or over-reliance on technology.
For me (another d. enthusiast), if the weather is gorgeous, I am in 700th heaven (along with my tunes). Extra props if the weather is perfect enough to allow me to go windows down. Yeah, my top place to drive is the Blue Ridge Parkway, a much more intense experience than the interstate, but nothing boring to me at all about an endless unrestricted highway (until the inevitable wreck or jam of course).
As Jack Ma succinctly put it when he owned Elon Musk in this part of the debate they had, why is humanity focusing so much on space and exploration when the greatest need is to fix the problems here on earth and focus on people.
Space and exploration is great, yes, but first get your house in order before you want to start going out and making more. We can’t even solve our own problems on planet earth, why are you concerned about other planets (so that we can move there and just bring our disease to a new paradise?).
Instead of working on self driving cars, let’s work on how to self-drive ourselves…humans still struggle and grapple with self-control as we don’t have mastery over ourselves even after 10,000 years. We still put our hands in the cookie jar.
Ravenman and Dewey Finn: I just noticed that we all joined the SDMB within three months of each other, but you two both have well over four times as many posts as I do. Impressive.
I guess I’d better get to work. 
The issue of space exploration seems essentially irrelevant to this thread. As to the idea that we shouldn’t work on self-driving cars because “humans still struggle and grapple with self-control”–that seems exactly backwards. Those human limitations are surely the argument for self-driving cars, not against them. Self-driving cars would presumably be immune from “road rage”, or succumbing to the temptation to read “just this one text”, or getting “highway hypnosis”. Or just getting tired.
Personally, I am extremely skeptical about whether or not truly robust self-driving capability will actually be technically possible anything like as quickly as Elon Musk and some other boosters of the technology like to claim. I also have reservations about the privacy implications of self-driving cars as they would almost certainly need to be implemented (as “networked” vehicles, and with that networking always switched on). Finally, I have some reservations about the way some people are attempting to frame self-driving technology as necessarily implying moving from an individual ownership model to a “subscription to a service” model, with the “subscription to a service” model being presented not just as a possibly desirable option that many people might freely choose, but as something that might be made mandatory (at least in “dense urban areas”, whatever those may be).
But none of those means that the fact that humans still struggle with self-control is anything but an argument in favor of self-driving cars, not against them.
It’s not likely to be a mandatory requirement, but from an economic standpoint it makes sense. Aside from housing and food, the purchase and maintenance of automobiles is generally the largest non-discretionary expense in most households, and as an asset automobiles almost never increase in value (save for rare collectable vehicles), nor are they capable of being used as a capital asset or offsetting liabilities in the way that home and real estate ownership can. So, a car is basically a service item that you have to operate yourself and from which you get no material value when you are not driving it. A car that can drive itself, on the other hand, is an obvious revenue stream for those who can make optimal use of it. That leads to two different ownership models; a fleet ownership model where the car is provided as a per-use or subscription service, or a private or co-operative ownership model where the car is primarily dedicated to the owners’ use but can be hired out as available to offset the costs of ownership.
Of course, some people will prefer to maintain their own personal vehicles for exclusive use but once a vehicle stops becoming an item of status or personal expression for most people and is simply a utility for transportation, the appeal of private exclusive ownership becomes largely pointless even for those who can afford it except as a gesture to ostentatiousness, or because it fills a specific occupational or leisure role.
Stranger
John Mace also joined around the same time, IIRC, and racked up like half a billion posts before he disappeared.
I have no idea how he did that.
A New York Times article about the effect of the coronavirus on AV companies. (May be paywalled.)
The article mainly focuses on what the companies are doing to survive the pandemic, but on the topic of this thread, it says
Agreed. A self driving car is a machine that can earn real money for you. It’s basically like SETI@Home but earning legitimate cash.
It is far from certain where the market will settle, but it isn’t a huge stretch to go down the following path:
- Self drive private use car
- Add Uber type earnings at key times when you don’t use the car (increase utilization / lower cost of the asset)
- Add more earnings at all times when you don’t use the car (maximize utilization while maintaining primary usage for yourself)
- Switch to subscription based car model (maximal utilization of the asset across all users)
When the idea of owning media on the cloud came out, I was strongly against it. I want to have it and hold it! Now, I can’t imagine it any other way.
That might be the same with driverless car on demand, but dang it, I like having my own car!
I like having my own car. Until it breaks down, or otherwise costs a fortune to make drivable again. Much as I enjoy having ownership of my own vehicle, it would be far less stressful if I didn’t have to worry about whether or not it’ll start in the morning.
The thing is, for some of us, it’s an expensive and depreciating thing (costing $20-40,000 to buy, plus insurance, fuel, repairs and so forth) that we use perhaps ten or twelve hours in a week (out of 168 hours). The rest of the time, it sits in the garage. So perhaps just paying for the use of a car would make more sense. Even without driverless cars, I read an article a couple of years ago suggesting using mass transit, taxis/Uber/Lyft or renting a car instead.
Amazon announced it is buying Zoox, which has been working on a self-driving car from the ground up for the last 6 years. Amazon says they plan to continue Zoox’s vision for an automated ride-hailing service, although you have to think their real goal is around delivery.
I wonder how long before it will be nationwide? Three to four years?
They are not fully driverless. There are remote operators monitoring the cars.
Nowhere near.
The other big question is how long it takes—and how expensive it is—to expand the coverage area. There are three steps for Waymo to expand into a new area. First, the company builds detailed maps of the new territory. Then the company has its cars drive routes in the area with safety drivers to test how its software performs. Finally, once the company is satisfied with the software’s performance, it begins driverless operations.
Waymo took more than three years to complete this process for its initial 50-square-mile service territory around Chandler, Arizona. Obviously, Waymo will need to dramatically speed the process up if it wants to build a national—or even global—taxi service. The next 50 square miles—or even 500 square miles—will probably not take as long as the first 50.
50 square miles is only 5 miles by 10.
If you look at the map that someone helpfully posted below the article, you can see that it’s in an area where driving is as simple as possible.
It took them 3 years to roll this out - with human operators monitoring the cars - in this one tiny, easy area.
I wonder, at this point, how much money they’ve poured into this. I understand that they’re aslosh in capital and want to diversify it, but it’s hard to imagine a positive return in say the next twenty years. And -(if you’ve been following the thread, you know I’m a complete sceptic) - what it would take for them to abandon it?
You also wonder about covid. So they have remote monitors now (which I agree isn’t autonomous), is someone also going out to spray down vehicles after each ride?
It seems there are a lot problems developing self-driving cars. Just too many variables to contend with on the open road.
There is more progress to be made by being a by first dealing with simpler problems that have less variables. Any vehicle that operates out of a depot that could be dropped off by a driver and could then park itself would save a lot of time and money. If it could be summoned to reception area for collection by a driver at the start of the day, that would be even better. If the vehicles were all the same size and shape and had sensors to match guides and beacons built into the parking space, that would cut down the complexity considerably.
While there is little glamour in how fleets of buses and delivery trucks and vans might save operators time, money and dents by implementing this kind of automatic valet feature, it will certainly interest the bean counters who manage the bottom line of companies that need to operate fleets of commercial vehicles. They also account for a fair proportion of the traffic on our roads.
I suspect much of the publicity regarding self driving cars is just a marketing strategy to sell an image of technical sophistication to the buyers of cars for personal use. Rather like they sell on the basis of 0-60 performance, luxury features and style. It gets talked about, but it is not an essential feature.
Companies like Tesla are innovative, but much of it is in the engineering design going on under the hood and in improvements in the car manufacturing process. All those sensors reporting back to base are collecting valuable performance data that informs them on how to incrementally improve their cars often by updating the software.
The endless discussion about self driving features is a great way to get free publicity and Telsa famously does not pay for advertising.
When an auto valet feature becomes common in a closed, controlled environment like a local delivery truck depot, where there are no people or other vehicles to complicate things, that will be a big step forward.
Even that will take a few years to get right and may not be as much of priority as other features that also change the economics of running a fleet.
Well if you think Waymo will take a long time, then there is Tesla:
Tesla to release self-driving Beta capable of ‘zero intervention’ in a few weeks
Will that be before or after Elon Musk lands on Mars?