Fully automated vehicles - 'not in our lifetime'?

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

kabayiri wrote: »

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

If by 'catch up' you mean allowing other countries to make the mistakes and suffer the consequences before we do - yes - I suspect you're right.;)

GreatApe

kinger101 wrote: »

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.

what has fuel and maintenance and ground staff and airport charges got to do with robo taxis or robo airplanes?

vivatifosi

kabayiri wrote: »

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.

That makes a great deal of sense. Plus we can already see a parallel. The number of Africans who have mobile phones but have totally bypassed landlines.

The way in which technology becomes adopted is fascinating. At the opposite end of the scale we have over 65s who have bypassed computers with keyboards have gone straight to tablets.

kinger101

GreatApe wrote: »

what has fuel and maintenance and ground staff and airport charges got to do with robo taxis or robo airplanes?

More the made up staff costs. As the salaries for the 3 pilots are likely to be in the region of £200K combined (before NI, pensions), and they are restricted to 1000 flight hours per year, 10 pence per passenger hour is nonsense before we've even bought in the other crew members.

Herzlos

GreatApe wrote: »

It will also kill point to point systems like trains.

Not at all; it'll make them easier to use.


Taking your Birmingham to London example, with a train that can carry, say 400 people. You can do that centre to centre in a single train, on a dedicated line, minimal congestion.
Ride sharing you'd still need ~100 cars (maybe as low as 50 if you're using 8 seaters). You'd generate huge congestion at both ends and any road junctions in between, whilst also providing less comfort - on a train you have more leg room, can get up and walk about, get food, use a toilet, work without feeling travel sick.


Self-driving cars will make connecting between routes much easier; you get off at station A and straight into a car taking you to station B, all included in your ticket price.




There's also plenty of demand for the mid stages; for instance having cars that can valet park themselves will save a huge amount of space, hassle and expense in car parks. You get to a hospital, car drops you off at the door and goes to park (and recharge). You page it as you're leaving and it comes back down to you.

The car park can be human free so much simpler for the car to navigate.


Similar also applies to cars being able to bring themselves into/out of parking spaces and so on.


Those things all have limited scope so are possible now. We can presumably make cars now that can do journeys on their own but socially we're more than 12 years away from it. We may start to see self-driving trucks doing depot to depot on motorway and dual carriageways in the 2020's but we're not going to see unattended AI cars doing any 'driving' until well into the 2030'sor 2040's I think. There's just too much infrastructure and cultural change to deal with.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

vivatifosi wrote: »

Plus we can already see a parallel. The number of Africans who have mobile phones but have totally bypassed landlines..

It is an interesting concept.

I can alrready see commercial drones being used initially in places like Africa, large open skies with very little low level air traffic, good business case for things like urgent medicine delivery where the roads are virtually non-existent.

Likewise I can see driverless cars achieving faster implementation in places like the Middle East - oil rich nations with the ability to rapidly build new segregated road lanes and support infrastructure - and that have absolute monarchs in charge with the ability to vary legislation and remove liability issues at the stroke of a pen.

But the other cold hard reality is that life is cheap in places like the Middle East and Africa - if a company kills a worker or passenger or bystander it's viewed as a 'cost of doing business' and the tiny amount of compensation to be paid will hardly break the bank.

Also there isn't much of a free press in those places, and Western media doesn't seem to care all that much how many people die over there... So headlines about cars murdering their drivers, with the associated company-damaging bad press, are unlikely to bother the manufacturers all that much.

But in more developed parts of the World the risk/benefit equation is very different indeed...

Parliaments won't tolerate companies using consumers as road safety Guinea Pigs - and the press/liability-lawyers would be all over them if their cars were programmed to kill either drivers or other road users when faced with such a choice in an emergency situation.

So for the moment, driverless cars in widespread use throughout developed world countries appear to be just anther techno-fantasy, and look likely to remain so for the next few decades at least.

HAMISH_MCTAVISH

Herzlos wrote: »

The car park can be human free so much simpler for the car to navigate.

Similar also applies to cars being able to bring themselves into/out of parking spaces and so on.


Those things all have limited scope so are possible now. We can presumably make cars now that can do journeys on their own but socially we're more than 12 years away from it. We may start to see self-driving trucks doing depot to depot on motorway and dual carriageways in the 2020's but we're not going to see unattended AI cars doing any 'driving' until well into the 2030'sor 2040's I think. There's just too much infrastructure and cultural change to deal with.

Completely agree.

The next couple of decades will be "party trick" stuff for cars.

They'll park themselves, allow hands free driving over large sections of a route, improve safety by braking quicker than humans can, etc.

But truly driverless cars - legally approved for fully driverless use - useable everywhere in driverless mode, are still 30-40 years away.

Arklight

Considering the "self driving" Uber car that ran over that poor homeless woman in Florida apparently did so because it failed to recognise her as human, I think we're a looooong way from autonomous vehicles being able to make complicated philosophical judgements about the existential value of different types of life.

In reality this AI technology knows roughly where it is through GPS, kind of hopes what it can determine of the road is the same as the maps it has, and sees blobs meandering around which could be anything.

I think if we can accept that this is acceptable driving and that AI drivers have no hope of passing the hazard perception part of the UK driving test (there's a child holding a ball and a distracted mum!), then the tech could be ready for prime time within a decade.

Otherwise, not in the lifetime of many of the users of this board.

GreatApe

kinger101 wrote: »

More the made up staff costs. As the salaries for the 3 pilots are likely to be in the region of £200K combined (before NI, pensions), and they are restricted to 1000 flight hours per year, 10 pence per passenger hour is nonsense before we've even bought in the other crew members.

What part of my argument do you think you have refuted?

I said taxi drivers wages make up the majority of the cost of using a taxi and pilots make up the minority of the cost of using an airplane so automating the role of the pilot in each case has two very different outcomes.

This is true irrespective of the pilot costs being 10p per passenger hour or £1 per passenger hour as you are suggesting. The pilot cost comes to 1-2% for flying using your figures while the taxi pilot cost is still something on the order of 70% for taxis.

So I said taxi pilot costs are significant and airplane pilot costs are negligible and tried to put a first order guess to show it. Somehow you think you are being smart by refuting my figure of less than half of one percent to maybe 2%. 2% is also insignificant its not in the same league as 70%

All you achieved was showing up you have no idea what the discussion point was.
Just to repeated again because you are clearly the smartest man in the room and need it repeated
Taxi pilot costs are far far more significant than plane pilot costs
The cost of a taxi is much much less than a 747
The net result being automating taxi drivers is a much bigger prize for the taxi industry than automating pilots for the airline industry.

Understand Mr ******** ?

GreatApe

Herzlos wrote: »

Not at all; it'll make them easier to use.

Taking your Birmingham to London example, with a train that can carry, say 400 people. You can do that centre to centre in a single train, on a dedicated line, minimal congestion.
Ride sharing you'd still need ~100 cars (maybe as low as 50 if you're using 8 seaters). You'd generate huge congestion at both ends and any road junctions in between, whilst also providing less comfort - on a train you have more leg room, can get up and walk about, get food, use a toilet, work without feeling travel sick.

Self-driving cars will make connecting between routes much easier; you get off at station A and straight into a car taking you to station B, all included in your ticket price.

There's also plenty of demand for the mid stages; for instance having cars that can valet park themselves will save a huge amount of space, hassle and expense in car parks. You get to a hospital, car drops you off at the door and goes to park (and recharge). You page it as you're leaving and it comes back down to you.

The car park can be human free so much simpler for the car to navigate.

Similar also applies to cars being able to bring themselves into/out of parking spaces and so on.

Those things all have limited scope so are possible now. We can presumably make cars now that can do journeys on their own but socially we're more than 12 years away from it. We may start to see self-driving trucks doing depot to depot on motorway and dual carriageways in the 2020's but we're not going to see unattended AI cars doing any 'driving' until well into the 2030'sor 2040's I think. There's just too much infrastructure and cultural change to deal with.

The majority of people don't live on top of a station and want to get to on top of another station.

If you go from say Watford to Birmingham say the south east of Birmingham its what a 100 mile drive that's a 1.5 hour drive.

To do the self drive taxi plus trains you need to first drive into central London at 30mph going the opposite way for 15 miles and half an hours time. You then need to leave the taxi and walk to the station and get a ticket and wait for the train let's say that's 12 mins. So your already down 42 minutes when you get on the train its another 1 hour 25 minutes to Birmingham new Street. Your journey to new street took you over two hours then maybe another 15 mins to SE Birmingham making 2 hours 20 mins

So in this example its 1h 30mins for the taxi or 2h 20mins for the train

The taxi costs £9 in fuel and about £15 in capital costs = about £25 for a ticket assuming you don't share the trip with anyone. Share with 4 persons and its £7 a ticket

Compared to £25 a ticket for the cheapest off peak train ticket today (plus a self drive taxi to and from the station)


So the taxi would be an hour quicker and less then half the price