Fully automated vehicles - 'not in our lifetime'?

antrobus

GreatApe wrote: »

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If people abandon their cars and mostly use self drive taxis it will mean you wait only seconds for a self drive taxi and self drive taxis could pick up 4 customers per trip.

Then obviously the wait will be greater than "only seconds", because person 2 will have to wait for the car to get to them from pick up point 1. And person 1 will have to wait while the car has trundled around the place picking up other people.

GreatApe wrote: »

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Imagine a normal car but with all four seats separated by a wall. Or even 6 persons per people carrier.

I can imagine a flying car with RPGs. Is anyone planning to actually manufacture a walled car? Why do you want a walled car?
We don't have walled buses as far as I'm aware.

GreatApe

antrobus wrote: »

Then obviously the wait will be greater than "only seconds", because person 2 will have to wait for the car to get to them from pick up point 1. And person 1 will have to wait while the car has trundled around the place picking up other people.

That would be true at current uber usage type levels but if 90% of trips are done with self drive fleets then there will be many people starting and ending at very close points to each other so the trip will not digress much if at all. You could also have mains routes done by larger cars eg 4-8 passengers and the end points done by 1 seater vehicles.

It will also kill point to point systems like trains.
Going from point A in Birmingham to point B in London takes 4-5 hours by train/bus/taxi/walking/waiting with the self drive cars it will be half the time and a shared people carrier will be super fuel efficient per passenger mile and much cheaper than the trains.

antrobus

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

I'm prepared to bet there won't be a single commercially available fully autonomous car (end to end journey, no human intervention or oversight, no human driver required) for sale to the general public in the UK that also has the required legislative consent for fully autonomous use and is insurable for fully autonomous driving for at least the next 2 decades - and more likely 2050.

I suspect that you are more right than wrong.

What is much more likely to happen, and is happening, is that many of the components of a fully autonomous car will become commonplace. Things like park assist or automatic braking. I expect the move to the fully autonomous car to be incremental.

GreatApe

antrobus wrote: »

We don't have walled buses as far as I'm aware.

That would be impracticable for obvious reasons but a car with 4 doors could be segmented at very little cost and no downgrade in usability.

GreatApe

antrobus wrote: »

I suspect that you are more right than wrong.

What is much more likely to happen, and is happening, is that many of the components of a fully autonomous car will become commonplace. Things like park assist or automatic braking. I expect the move to the fully autonomous car to be incremental.

all of those are toys and irrelevant, only level 5 matters

It is also a $10 trillion + prize so the tech companies will pour billions of dollars and hours into it

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

antrobus wrote: »

many of the components of a fully autonomous car will become commonplace. Things like park assist or automatic braking..

Sure.

The component bits are largely here now - and string those bits together and we'll have cars which vastly improve safety - but importantly, still require a human driver.

But these are merely party tricks to convince the masses that 'the robots are coming'...

Truly driverless cars (full autonomy, no driver required) in regular use by individuals (while asleep, or in the passenger seat, or drunk, etc) are still 30 or so years away at a minimum and probably more like 50 before they're commonplace.

GreatApe

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

Sure.

The component bits are largely here now - and string those bits together and we'll have cars which vastly improve safety - but importantly, still require a human driver.

But these are merely party tricks to convince the masses that 'the robots are coming'...

Truly driverless cars (full autonomy, no driver required) in regular use by individuals (while asleep, or in the passenger seat, or drunk, etc) are still 30 or so years away at a minimum and probably more like 50 before they're commonplace.

Do you really think computers are 50 years away from mouse level intelligence and image processing?

A number of companies already seem to have the first true AIs in their hands like googles deepmind
A piece of software that learns rather than is coded

When we look back I think 2015-2030 will be seen as the exponential explosion in near AI software.
Not only is software and general hardware improving but the hardware companies have started making AI specific hardware increasing performance 3 magnitudes compared to CPUs

kinger101

GreatApe wrote: »

Aviation is very different

2 men fly 500 passengers.
If they get paid say a combined £500 for a 10 hour flight its about 10p an hour per customer to have the human. Even less of a cost for trains.

In a taxi the human labor cosy per passenger is closer to £10 per hour per customer

So there us a 100x bigger human cost per passenger hour in cars than on planes.

There is little need to automate the pilots away.
At most a £300 ticket cost falls by £1 or just 0.3%

But in a taxi automating the human will more than half the cost from £1 a mile to less than 50p a mile.

Another classic figures plucked from nowhere.

Crew costs on 150-200 seat planes are already in the region of $500 per flight hour.

The 500-seaters are likely to be the A380s, which are going to have three crew who can fly (as 8 hours exceeded) and will tend to be the most senior staff (plus another 20 flight attendants). Add in fuel, maintenance, ground-staff, airport charges and the cost of operating a 500-seat aircraft are likely to be in the region of $10K per hour.

kabayiri

The notion of legality and liability has a flaw I suggest.

There's a parallel. In California there is a lot of money going into meditech. Interestingly, their target markets are often Asia and Africa, not USA/Europe.

Why? Because it's easier to get acceptance in a place where there are less political or regulatory hurdles.

If we don't adopt autonomous cars, why would this stop India or China or Brazil or any other of a bunch of countries? Arguably, they have more to gain.

We may be playing catch up rather than playing a leading role in all this.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

kinger101 wrote: »

Add in fuel, maintenance, ground-staff, airport charges and the cost of operating a 500-seat aircraft are likely to be in the region of $10K per hour.

An Airbus A380 costs in the region of $30,000 per hour to operate.

For smaller aircraft operating costs vary greatly by region, but for the USA...

- A Boeing 737 costs in the region of $3000 per hour to operate assuming maximum efficiency with an airline. Substantially more for BBJ variants.

- 737 crew costs in airline configuration are roughly $1000 per hour for a legacy/flag carrier - somewhat less for budget airlines.

Costs to base/operate in Western Europe will be higher than that.