Fully automated vehicles - 'not in our lifetime'?

kinger101

GreatApe wrote: »

Lots of people have no love for their cars they just use them for transport and if there was a robot uber which had a massive fleet so that the cars arrived within seconds and only cost 30p a mile it would be cheaper and better than owning your own car so that's what people would do. Especially young drivers. Why pay £2k insurance to drive a crap car that costs you £2k to buy and £2k of lesions and fuel. That's £6k upfront to start driving a crap car. Or just hail a nearly new robot uber for 30p a mile. A lot of the young will just stop learning to drive its a big upfront cost at a time in your life when you are poor. That's an additional three quarters of a million customers per year even if the old don't like them the young will

I have no love for cars, but my motoring costs are already under that. I typically buy used cars for about £3-4K, get about seven years out of them. About £500 maintenance (in a bad year), £300 insurance, £200 tax, and 12 p per mile fuel. About 12K miles per year.

It's there when I need it, and doesn't decide I doesn't want to go to the Isle of Skye because it's not economical to do so, or have to wait 30 mins because it's rush hour (or more likely, charge £1 a mile due to dynamic pricing......nobody is going to put in enough for low cost peak demand to have them sitting idly 90% of the day.

Cars are about convenience. If I need to set out early tomorrow, I can load up the night before. And people with kids don't need to remove child seats etc. I don't see robo-taxis ever replacing the needs of the majority of people who own cars now.

I appreciate insurance is more for young people but in cities, they largely rely on public transport (or get a black-box fitted and drive like grandma).

Herzlos

I can see robo taxis making a lot of 2nd cars redundant, if they are cheap and accessible enough, but most households will probs my still want a private car even if it drives itself.

LHW99

What that means is you will literally never be more than a few meters from one.

Maybe in towns / cities.
Where I am no-one can even find the house, let alone get here in seconds, even though the nearest small town is only 3.5miles away.


In addition, I would certainly be reluctant to get myself stuck in a robo taxi with a complete stranger.

System

You don't need to invoke problems of morality and responsibility to see obvious problems with fully autonomous cars. Just consider some typical non-standard motoring circumstances:


A road repair worker waves traffic past a temporary traffic light that has stuck on red. A human can distinguish instinctively between a genuine council employee and someone larking about. What would an autonomous vehicle do - wait for ever at all red lights, or use judgement in ignoring one?


A stretch of newly sprayed tar has a warning notice directing traffic into the other lane. The sign has blown over. A human would either spot the sign and guess what had happened, or recognise the appearance and smell of fresh tar.


The road ahead appears as a sheet of water. It might be a few inches of rain, or 2 feet deep because the road dips. A human would judge the depth by the changing width of the verge, or watching the wash from a passing lorry.


A single headlight appears coming towards the vehicle. A human would judge whether this was a motorbike or a car with a failed offside lamp. Would an autonomous vehicle stop for all motorbikes just in case it was a car?


An autonomous car on a main road is forced to give way to a joining vehicle because its driver knows the autonomous vehicle is programmed to be cautious. Once it has stopped, a long stream of other cars follow through. Will the autonomous car wait until the end of the rush hour before moving, or will it become aggressive at some point and force a car to yield to its right of way?


An autonomous car meets an ordinary car on a narrow road. The driver refuses to reverse to a nearby passing place. How long will the autonomous car wait? How far will it be willing to reverse itself.? Will it give way to every oncoming car?


How will an autonomous car judge the firmness of a grass verge when passing on a narrow road? Will it give way and get itself bogged down if a passing car refuses to move over?


Etc etc. Ordinary motoring is full of such non-standard situations.

GreatApe

Herzlos wrote: »

You'd need an awful lot of cars roaming around to get one to a house within seconds.
5 minutes is more a more realistic goal.

5 seconds would be the goal and yes there would be millions of them in the UK probably around 10 million

On the no private cars thing; how do you propose they deal with things like car seats? We need 2 of them. We also keep 1 or 2 buggies in the cat, change bags and stuff and use the car daily. That's a lot of crap to move in and out of taxis.

You would have an option for any and all that. Probably an option to hire the taxi for a day if you wanted. All of it will be cheaper than owning your own car because when you own your own car you have lots of downtime and overheads

Also how is cleaning handled if everyone is using these things round the clock?/QUOTE]

They will go to a central point to charge and be cleaned and maintained. The first lot will be used almost 24 hours a day but as the fleet approaches 10 million robo taxis they will on average be used perhaps 5 hours a day and be idle 19 hours a day.

Or caravans bike racks or trailers?

An option for all of that

They'd presumably spend a lot more time driving and can park themselves more densely somewhere the land is cheaper. You can really pack cars in if you don't need humans to take them back out in any order.

They would most likely park exactly where human cars park today but since there would be roughly 1/3rd as many cars on the road they wont take up as much space.

In fact if you use a robo taxi most mornings at say 7am its likely the night before one of the taxis will stop outside your house and be ready to go for you at 7am

GreatApe

Clifford_Pope wrote: »

You don't need to invoke problems of morality and responsibility to see obvious problems with fully autonomous cars. Just consider some typical non-standard motoring circumstances:

A road repair worker waves traffic past a temporary traffic light that has stuck on red. A human can distinguish instinctively between a genuine council employee and someone larking about. What would an autonomous vehicle do - wait for ever at all red lights, or use judgement in ignoring one?

A stretch of newly sprayed tar has a warning notice directing traffic into the other lane. The sign has blown over. A human would either spot the sign and guess what had happened, or recognise the appearance and smell of fresh tar.

The road ahead appears as a sheet of water. It might be a few inches of rain, or 2 feet deep because the road dips. A human would judge the depth by the changing width of the verge, or watching the wash from a passing lorry.

A single headlight appears coming towards the vehicle. A human would judge whether this was a motorbike or a car with a failed offside lamp. Would an autonomous vehicle stop for all motorbikes just in case it was a car?

An autonomous car on a main road is forced to give way to a joining vehicle because its driver knows the autonomous vehicle is programmed to be cautious. Once it has stopped, a long stream of other cars follow through. Will the autonomous car wait until the end of the rush hour before moving, or will it become aggressive at some point and force a car to yield to its right of way?

An autonomous car meets an ordinary car on a narrow road. The driver refuses to reverse to a nearby passing place. How long will the autonomous car wait? How far will it be willing to reverse itself.? Will it give way to every oncoming car?

How will an autonomous car judge the firmness of a grass verge when passing on a narrow road? Will it give way and get itself bogged down if a passing car refuses to move over?

Etc etc. Ordinary motoring is full of such non-standard situations.

Which is why AI is likely to be used to self learn, have it shadow humans for 500,000 years of driving and it will encounter all you can think of and most you cant think of. More importantly a very rare situation a human may only see once a lifetime the fleet will have seen it thousands of times and know how to react to it better than the humans.

All this is trivial we will probably have super human AIs before 2050 driving taxis will be the least of our worries

AnotherJoe

GreatApe wrote: »

What facts where does a large fleet of millions of self drive taxis exist for you to be drawing facts from?

The fact that Uber useage (using it as a proxy for self drive cars) in cities where its really taking off, such as Boston Seattle and San Francisco, and more recently New York, are finding right now that the displacement is not from personal car ownership to uber useage, but from public transport usage, and that is already having a noticeable effect on congestion, especially at peak times as taxis flock into, and patrol areas, where commuters wish to be picked up from.

So the congestion is happening now, and we are nowhere near the point of millions of them. It will obviously be far worse if the number goes up to the millions.

How could it be any other way? If you have a automated car "every ten metres" then you can forget going anywhere in it as the city will be gridlocked.

AnotherJoe

GreatApe wrote: »

Which is why AI is likely to be used to self learn, have it shadow humans for 500,000 years of driving and it will encounter all you can think of and most you cant think of. More importantly a very rare situation a human may only see once a lifetime the fleet will have seen it thousands of times and know how to react to it better than the humans.

All this is trivial we will probably have super human AIs before 2050 driving taxis will be the least of our worries

All sounds plausible until you consider the automated car that couldn't get out of the way of a 3mph truck, or saw a bicycle with a person hundreds of metres in front of it and ignored it, or a stationary whacking big red fire truck stopped at red lights and ignored that until physics intervened.

Maybe when the easy stuff like that is covered, we can then listen to experts tell us how the difficult stuff will be fixed.

GreatApe

AnotherJoe wrote: »

All sounds plausible until you consider the automated car that couldn't get out of the way of a 3mph truck, or saw a bicycle with a person hundreds of metres in front of it and ignored it, or a stationary whacking big red fire truck stopped at red lights and ignored that until physics intervened.

Maybe when the easy stuff like that is covered, we can then listen to experts tell us how the difficult stuff will be fixed.

Because the one thing we know to be true about technology is that it never gets any better or improves

GreatApe

AnotherJoe wrote: »

The fact that Uber useage (using it as a proxy for self drive cars) in cities where its really taking off, such as Boston Seattle and San Francisco, and more recently New York, are finding right now that the displacement is not from personal car ownership to uber useage, but from public transport usage, and that is already having a noticeable effect on congestion, especially at peak times as taxis flock into, and patrol areas, where commuters wish to be picked up from.

So the congestion is happening now, and we are nowhere near the point of millions of them. It will obviously be far worse if the number goes up to the millions.

How could it be any other way? If you have a automated car "every ten metres" then you can forget going anywhere in it as the city will be gridlocked.

There would only be millions if they displaced private cars there wouldn't be millions if they just took over the current stock of uber taxi rides

They will likely take over most private car ownership because they will be cheaper and better for the typical user.

The manufacturers could also design EV power trains for much longer lives. You don't need to design a personal car to do a million miles because the average new car buyer may only keep the car for 50,000 miles. But a fleet operator (which night be the manufacturer itself) would value much more robust cars.

A self drive robot EV designed to do 1 million miles over five years would have a very low per mile capital cost and no driver cost. $50,000 for the car over a million miles is just 5 cents a mile add 2.5 cents for electricity and 2.5 cents for insurance and upkeep and you get to a marginal cost of 10 cents a mile. Charge 15-20 cents a mile and you have a hugely profitable venture and a price point at which personal car ownership will decline each and every year. Especially for the young who have to fork out around £6k to learn to drive buy insurance and buy a crappy second hand car much more likely they would just use the robot taxis for 15-20p a mile.