I have a retinal degenerative disease, and have been too visually-impaired to drive for 20 years. Right now, I depend on family members, friends, or public transit to get me where I’m going (when out of walking range). To have the ability to travel point-to-point whenever I want would be fantastic. As soon as the law allows self-driving cars to operate without a licensed driver on board, I’m there.
Despite your protestations, odds are you’ll cave. The convenience and cost will just make it too difficult not to. Every once in a while you’ll take your car out “off-system” to relive the thrill and find out that it wasn’t all that.
Lots of people said they’d never ride in elevators when they were first invented, either.
I feel it’s worth pointing out that the number of seniors in America just keeps growing. Can we just agree that seniors tend to be bad drivers or do I need a cite for that? It’s a very difficult thing to admit that your senses are failing or that your judgement and reflexes are shot. To lose your license because of it is to lose your independence and adulthood.
But, with an autonomous vehicle that’s not an issue. You can still go where you want, when you want without having to rely on some one to drive you. I see senior citizens voting for autonomous cars in a big way.
You may say ‘But seniors don’t trust these newfangled contraptions!’. I was recently at a Jewish retreat for seniors. Not counting the staff, I was the only one under forty. All the seniors, folks in their seventies and up, had smartphones. All but four had iPads. Two of the remaining folks had laptops. I say that seniors will embrace autonomous vehicles as a means to dignity and independence the same way they’ve embraced iPads, FaceBook and Skype as ways to stay in touch with family.
It would rock to have a car that drives itself. As long as the perfected the technology and showed that they were actually safer than human driven cars over say a three year period I’d get one. In fact, once they did away with the steering wheel and drivers position up front facing the glass they could design the cars to basically be crash cages on wheels. Bring them on.
Si Amigo That’s something I often wonder about. An autonomous vehicle means there’s no need for a human driver to sit facing forward. What design changes will this mean? Will all the seats eventually face center? I assume that windshields will remain so that passengers can watch the scenery. But what if you had a windowless body with LCD monitors on the inside and buttons so you could select what mini camera to view from?
Which usually is better than the place you had in mind anyway. Just roll with it.
Make the seats rear facing! If you don’t have to look forward, you can withstand the G-forces of a crash much more easily if your back is in the direction of deceleration!
Not a remote operator, Google the entity as a corporation. Their firmware, their software. Not necessarily a bad thing, unless you mistrust Google – plenty of people do.
Google Now. Targeted ads. Vehicular control. Information lookup. If you’re a sketchy kinda guy, there’s probably plenty that Google would gladly hand over to law enforcement. They already do it with Gmail and such.
It’s not their autonomous nature, it’s their high-tech appeal that will cause manufacturers to include these things, kinda like the Prius or Tesla tend to come with more gadgets and infographics than your run-of-the-mill Camry.
Personally I would love all this. Some people would be paranoid about it.
I think they’re already safer, no? Humans can’t react very quickly, or very well, and tend to panic or fall asleep or get drunk, etc.
In America, I don’t think self-driving cars is a technological problem but a sociological one. We’re awfully luddite in a lot of ways. Japan will probably have robochauffeurs in all their major cities before we launch our first tiny experimental program in a Mountain View neighborhood.
I just see it being far too much effort for not enough profit. Did the passengers just have a conversation about killing the President? Or are they just watching a movie about a terrorist? How would you separate all the sources of sound? Did one of the passengers just say they wanted to buy a cherry pie? Or are they listening to a song?
I agree. But I see changes a’comin’
Did you go?
Acceptance is growing rapidly.
I’m repeating myself from an earlier thread (one which I vowed to bump to taunt the disbelievers when these become a reality) but the generation in diapers now will be amused, and maybe a little impressed, by your stories about “driving” yourself.
Red Wiggler I’m trying to come up with some “Cadillac of worms” joke tied in to autonomous vehicles. But I just didn’t get enough sleep last night.
Driverless cars can’t happen soon enough.
Yes, ever since i was a kid i wanted to live in the future. So driving around in my google self driving car would be cool and amazing.
HELL NO!! If Google cars are as reliable as their other products, we’re all toast! For a whole year my Android phone thought I worked in Corte Madera. I’d drive to Sunnyvale, Google Maps watching me the whole time, then suddenly, I would arrive in Corte Madera. Google Now would tell me the weather in Corte Madera, it would let me know all Corte Madera businesses that were “nearby”. It would tell me how long it would take to drive home from Corte Madera. If I looked at Google Maps, it would show me at a specific intersection in, you guessed it, Corte Madera.
So now, imagine I get into a Google car and say, “Google, drive me to work”. I’m gonna end up in Corte Madera! Yeah, no.
Of course I would get a “Google car”. I drove from San Antonio, TX to Phoenix, AZ a couple of months ago and the fact that I had to stay in control through the endless corridor that is I-10 was just deadening. A 12 hour drive through deserts and I had nothing else I could do except keep the car on the road… what a friggin waste of my days.
Eh, so Google would now know where I am? Why would I give a crap about that?
Yes,your cited article says that people like the idea of a robo-car, especially if it has much lower insurance rates. But the same article, in the next paragraph says "Three out of four said that they wouldn’t trust a driverless car to take their kids to school. "
hmm…we’ll have to wait and see, but I think that when today’s diaper-wearing kids take the test for their drivers licenses in the year 2031, they’ll be sitting behind a steering wheel and brake pedal just like today. (although there will be an automatic mode for parallel parking )
There are a few dozen robo-cars on the road right now… Have any of them ever been used on a winter day when the road and curbs are invisible under 3 inches of snow?
Yes, I would. I look forward to a self-driven car.
Sounds like we’re just differing on the pace of development. I keep accelerating my estimates based on the innovations that keep surprising me. Seventeen years from now feels like another century.
You know it’s not just Google that’s working on a driverless car, right? All the auto companies are. Because they know it’s the future. Google just gets the most publicity.