Fully automated vehicles - 'not in our lifetime'?

kinger101

kabayiri wrote: »

Well, it's a harsh truth but other societies are willing to take more risk.

I'm not sure I agree with you there. Around two years ago we decided to leave perhaps the greatest economy and trading block in the world. All so we could get a passport that might be blue or black (nobody can quite seem to remember), and would be made by the French to show how bloody great we are.

On a side point, I think US companies just want a less litigious environment to test the technology. Killing American citizens is very expensive.

GreatApe

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

However the nuclear cheerleaders of the 1950's were busily predicting nuclear powered aircraft, nuclear powered cars, and nuclear powered homes in the media of the time.

In reality those cheerleaders massively over-estimated how quickly the technology would progress and massively underestimated the costs and risks of it.

Well it seems like the technology cheerleaders of today are making exactly the same mistakes anyway...

Those ideas didn't come from respectable engineers they mostly came from quaks and the media.

Physicists were well aware of the thermodynamics and limitations of nuclear power. The primary goal was the bomb and important secondary goal was nuclear subs both if which worked well.

Russians did try a nuclear plane but the shielding made it too heavy. The Yanks tested some nuclear rockets but didn't get too far with them.

I do recall seeing an old advert for a nuclear car I don't know how real it was but any engineer can tell you it would be a silly idea not least because cars only operate about an hour a day and you don't cycle nuclear reactors in that way plus the double or triple cooling loops would make it far too heavy and not viable plus about a dozen other obvious flaws into he idea. Either it was BS or ideas that were thought of by non engineers

The technology for self drive cars is just software not hardware.
Sure humans are complex but you only need a rat level intelligence

Herzlos

You still need hardware capable of running the software.

In terms of cost; it'd maybe be about £100 for my taxi to/from work buttress less than £10 in fue (can probably bring that down to £5 woth an economical car or lower woth electricl. Maybe £5 in insurance, depreciation and so on.

So a taxi would need to be 1/6th of the cost to hit the break even point. Its pretty ambitious to think taxis will take over private cars on the basis of either cost or convenience unless there's a huge environmental shift somewhere.

GreatApe

Herzlos wrote: »

You still need hardware capable of running the software.

In terms of cost; it'd maybe be about £100 for my taxi to/from work buttress less than £10 in fue (can probably bring that down to £5 woth an economical car or lower woth electricl. Maybe £5 in insurance, depreciation and so on.

So a taxi would need to be 1/6th of the cost to hit the break even point. Its pretty ambitious to think taxis will take over private cars on the basis of either cost or convenience unless there's a huge environmental shift somewhere.

The average new car costs $32,000 and lasts about 150,000 miles over 15 years.

The capital cost is thus $250 a month plus another $80 in fuel.

The total capital and fuel cost is 40 cents a mile.
Let's ignore the insurance and maintenance etc and assume they are both the same for a robot or private car.

Let's say a robot EV costs $40,000 but does 500,000 miles over 5 years. The electricity cost of 2.5 cents a mile plus the capital cost of 9 cents a mile gives 11.5 cents

So the comparison is 40 cents vs 11.5 cents per mile. The biggest saving is from capital and capital interest per mile.

If the fleet owners charge 20 cents a mile the cost of using a robot fleet would be half that of ownership.

That isn't even assuming any shared trips. If you share trips then the 11.5 cents a mile cost goes down a lot more. With an average of 2 persons per car it would be less than 6 cents per person per mile.

A 6 seated vehicle would have a cost of 2 cents a mile. The 100 mile trip from London to Birmingham would be $2 cost per passenger. If they charge you $4 look at how much cheaper and faster that is vs coach it train.

There will probably also be areas that are robot fleets only. Eg London because it would allow better traffic control better policing and more productive land usage with millions fewer cars.

GreatApe

The sensor hardware already exists and is very affordable. A $200 smartphone already has all the sensors needed. The processor might not be powerful enough but given another 12 years processors will be 100x the power of today. Application specific chips will be used so that's another 10-100x up which brings us towards 1,000 - 10,000 x the power of a smartphone today which is probably more than enough.

The software will cost a huge sum to create but once its done the marginal cost of the software would be zero.

Even if the software cost $100 billion to develop. per decade the world builds more than a billion vehicles so the per vehicle cost would only be about $100

The overall cost of self drive hardware and software could be below $500 per vehicle

Out,_Vile_Jelly

What I find fascinating about old Sci Fi is that the gems of ideas are there, but they turn out differently. So in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the future there will be loads of channels, as BBC 12 is shown being watched (12 channels, wow!). What they couldn't imagine was watching telly on a slim portable device, any kind of telly, whenever you want.

Or you get technology that is genuinely ground breaking, like with Concorde, but it can't be justified on cost grounds.

Basically The Future is looking at us and laughing.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

GreatApe wrote: »

Those ideas didn't come from respectable engineers they mostly came from quaks and the media.

Indeed.

And it's been 'Quacks and the Media' promoting the ideas we've seen over the last decade or two about technology replacing all the jobs...;)

Mass adoption of computer age technology has been with us for many decades now.

Employment in the UK recently reached an all time record high.

System

GreatApe wrote: »

T Also it does not need to be perfect even if it kills a million people each year that is still an improvement over human drivers.

Yes it does need to be virtually perfect.
Electorates are remarkable tolerant of faults in other humans, and will accept a million deaths caused by others, because they are just like us. There but for the grace of God ....


But robots will be judged much more harshly. Just wait until autonomous cars kill a mere 100 people, and the project will be killed stone-dead by angry public opinion.


Autonomous cars have all the necessary sensors except for the only one that really matters - sensing public opinion.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Out,_Vile_Jelly wrote: »

What I find fascinating about old Sci Fi is that the gems of ideas are there, but they turn out differently. So in 2001: A Space Odyssey, in the future there will be loads of channels, as BBC 12 is shown being watched (12 channels, wow!). What they couldn't imagine was watching telly on a slim portable device, any kind of telly, whenever you want.

Or you get technology that is genuinely ground breaking, like with Concorde, but it can't be justified on cost grounds.

Basically The Future is looking at us and laughing.

Good point.

I remember TV shows in the 70's promising us all Flying Cars in our driveways by the year 2000.

The technology theoretically exists for such a thing but mass production and adoption has not proven viable yet and we're already almost two decades behind where the techno-cheerleaders said we'd be.

We might in the next few years see the larger quadcopter drones currently being developed doing very limited passenger work to and from fixed locations in a few places such as Dubai.

But that's a long, long way from everyone having a flying car... Or even from a flying car being available and legally useable for anyone in developed nations such as the UK.

Malthusian

GreatApe wrote: »

Sure humans are complex but you only need a rat level intelligence

From which we are still a million miles away.

We can program a computer that can beat humans at chess, but only if humans shoot themselves in the foot by telling it that checkmating is a good thing and being checkmated is bad.

We cannot program a computer that can run through a maze to find some cheese, unless we tell it beforehand that finding cheese is desirable. A rat can work out for itself in its pea brain that cheese is desirable. A computer cannot. This is the nut we have to crack. We can't make a rat level intelligence and we have no idea how to go about making a rat level intelligence, although we're trying really hard and we'll probably get there eventually.

(Let us say I am playing a chess novice with an IQ of 180, and I sportingly point out that if he sacrifices his rook on g7, after the forced capture he can fork my king and queen. Who's better at chess after he wins? Me, because he couldn't have won if I hadn't told him how. Who's better at chess between AlphaZero and its human programmers? The humans, for exactly the same reason. If you say "The beginner / AlphaZero because they beat you and they're really clever", you are ignoring who was responsible. When they manage to win without their opponent shooting themselves in the foot by showing them how to win, we can acknowledge that they are superior. Their superior brainpower is neither here nor there until they can use it to replace external instruction. AlphaZero is superior at the calculations of chess but until it can work out for itself whether checkmating is good or bad without a human feeding it the answer, it is not superior at playing the game.)