Driverless cars: The way to go?

greenman7

See this link: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/01/09/cars.future.ces/index.html?eref=rss_topstories&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fcnn_topstories+%28RSS%3A+Top+Stories%29

Is this the future of cars?

Dave101t

ha, really? yes and we will all be living on the moon with terminator type machines to do the housework.

thescouselander

I think we'll get there in the end but not for a very long time. Its all very well getting a car to drive itself round in benign conditions since the rules controling how the car behaves are relitively streight forward. Its when things start to go a bit wrong where the difficulty lies.

Eg What if the car approaches a junciton where the traffic lights have failed? In theory, if everyone was in a computer controlled car, the cars could communicate with eachother to decide who's going to go when. The reality is that the cars will probably be based on propritary systems that wont communicate. There will also be human controld cars which may behave unpredictably at which point the while thing falls on its face.

To get round this we're probably going to need some quite sophisticated Artificial Intelligence which is some way off yet.

forgotmyname

When every car is identical and has the same performance in every way it may work.

Doesnt work when cars acceleration and braking varies so much.

Onboard systems monitor braking distance and when you are 1ft over at 50mph it automatically
drives you to the garage for new brakes & tyres.

Just hope kwik fit isnt the closest.