self-driving cars

TRX
September 28, 2013
81:
@20:
1. Truck-driving, as noted before, becomes automated
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And hijacking moves from an occasional crime to a recognized industry.

TRX
September 29, 2013
124:
@111:
who is going to want to use a smelly car after someone has slept in it for several hours?
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That's pretty much how I feel about public transport. Let's see, this seat and the floor below appear to be wet with urine, this seat has suspicious damp stains, the other seat is sticky with what appears to be hard candy, this one would force me to share the seat with someone who has apparently not discovered either bathing or toilet paper, this other seat... or the compartment is full of smokers, so if I even board, I'll come out smelling like a used ashtray.

TRX
September 29, 2013
126:
If the technology and infrastructure for self-driving cars dropped onto the market today, there are still some thorny legal problems to deal with, at least in countries with legal systems using or descended from English Common Law.

The primary problem is liability. Your vehicle injures someone or damages their property, who is responsible?

Your wife, who was aboard the vehicle at the time?

You, as the registered owner?

The vehicle's manufacturer?

The subcontractor who wrote the software?

The individual programmers who worked on the software?

In the USA, at least, liability law is very flexible. Early adopters will be facing the possibility of bankruptcy or imprisonment with their purchase of a new Auto-Zippitymobile.

Also, I'm still skeptical about this magic software that is supposed to guide these vehicles. A friend of mine works for an airline that maintains a whole fleet of flight simulators. The software base on them is half a century old; every bit of it tested and signed off by the FAA. The investment in the code base is so huge, they have custom-made computers running the original 1960s FORTRAN compilers.

An airplane autopilot is almost trivially simple compared to a car... and after fifty years of maintenance, bugs still show up. But in a simulator, all it does is flag a bug report instead of killing people.

Devices like the THERAC-25 and the Airbus, in the hands of certified professional operators, only kill a few people at a time. An auto manufacturer thinks in terms of millions of units, operated by entities not quite as smart as chimpanzees. Who file lawsuits at the drop of a hat.

The first autodrive lawsuits will probably be on reality TV, more entertaining than Watergate or the OJ or Zimmerman trials...

TRX
September 30, 2013
210:
@176:
I can't stop thinking about the potential for government directed movement of people. The first thing a government does in relation to automated vehicles is to dictate the roads vehicles should preference. Traffic managers can finally predict and plan with accuracy.
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Remember Alice in Wonderland; "You can't get there from here."

The USSR used to play games with maps, distorting the locations and distances between cities and bases, or sometimes not showing them at all.

When everyone is using the same electronic maps, the same satellite view, the same satellite navigation, and the same autodrive, whole sections of a country could simply vanish. Even if you detected a "hole", you'd have to hike or bicycle in to find out what was there. And then you'd likely be eaten by a grue...

TRX
October 1, 2013
247:
@226:
One of the problems of the USPS (US Postal Service) these days is Amazon using them for the "Last Mile", they drop a pallet of packages to be sorted and delivered on the dock at the local Post Office every day. For which the USPS receives the minimal local delivery rate, which may or may not be enough for their costs.
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Shippers with pallet loads of mail negotiate "bulk rates" with the USPS. Generally, these are presorted to some degree, usually down to the individual carrier level.

The USPS does not lose money on bulk rate mail, no matter where it enters the delivery chain.

The reason for the USPS' monetary troubles boil down to, basically, Congress and the way it plays three-card Monte with the USPS' financials. Money in, money vanishes into the General Fund, substantially less money left for operations, oh my...

TRX
October 1, 2013
248:
> self driving cars

A further thought on unattended vehicle operations is that once a vehicle leaves Surveillance Land for the real world, there's nothing much preventing it from becoming a ready source of spare parts. Even if the vehicle isn't completely dismembered, there'll always be a ready market for tires and batteries if nothing else.

Even in Surveillance Land, I doubt having a car drop offline is going to result in a high-speed police response.

TRX
October 1, 2013
251:
> tanks

Modern armor thinking seems to be set along the Guderian concept of tank divisions maneuvering on plains. As they've gotten larger, their theater of operations has been reduced. In the latter days of WWII, several German operations to the east stalled when their bigger-better-heavier Tiger IIs were unable to negotiate soft ground that the Soviet T-34s, at less than half the weight, had no great problem with.

Barbara Tuchman's "The Guns of August" describes how the German tanks operated in WWI. They advanced through wooded areas, between or over trees, negotiated narrow lanes with stone fences, and similarly were able to enter villages with narrow streets. Most tanks had motorcycle outriders to find clear paths the tanks could negotiate; many tanks traveled with troops in trucks or on foot. Basically, they were mobile light artillery and armored tactical command points.

Tanks got bigger and heavier by WWII, but looking up the size, the Panzer II was only slightly larger than a Nissan Armada SUV. While the reference material I have mostly discusses Kursk and other large armor-to-armor engagements, it appears that, at least in the early days, the Germans were still using a lot of light tanks for basic troop support.

By Desert Storm, the US Army was sending "tank companies" into Iraq, consisting *only* of tanks; no trucks, no infantry, and no real air support.

I'm not seeing that kind of mass armor in the relatively near future. As the miracle of cheap electronics makes targeting and guidance cheaper, the big tanks will start looking more like targets than fortresses as they become more vulnerable to bombers and drones.

A 9-ton Panzer II is barely more than an armored car by modern standards, but I see the utility of that sort of vehicle becoming much more important in the future. There are always those danged wooded areas, and then the urbs and suburbs.

A car following a marked road, or a tank on the plains or desert, is one thing. You could probably use IR and radar to judge how large and what kind of a tree you might have to go around instead of over. But when you get into populated areas your software has to get *much* more sophisticated.

- that stream: we radar the depth at .7 meters, with a 7.5 degree approach at the embankment. But is the embankment dry clay, wet clay, soft dirt, or stone? A whole class of "tank retriever" exists for that specific problem.

- that nice open area between the houses in the suburbs: the grass is always greener over the septic tank

- that open field of flowers: might be a moor or a bog

- and, of course, et cetera

For a tactically effective tank, or one used for infantry support, I think you're doing to see tank crews for the forseeable future.

However, considering the "target" problem, we might see a lot of the crews operating their tank from outside the vehicle, nearby, where they are available to support the vehicle when needed, but not actually inside it.

TRX
October 2, 2013
308:
The pyramid is much taller when you figure in the non-military support. And then there's the entire civilian defense industry behind that...

I'd heard the usual "an army marches on its stomach" and "firstest with the mostest", but it wasn't until I read the six volumes of Churchill's history of WWII that I got an idea of how much of war is logistics; how much infrastructure it takes to get one armed fighting man to the right place at the right time. The fighting part is important, but in many cases the real war is between the opposing teams of bean counters.

TRX
October 3, 2013
355:
I don't see roadside motels going away. At least in the USA, rising airline costs and TSA hassle seem to be pushing a lot of travelers back to cars.

I can't do 24-hour Road Warrior trips any more, but the last few times I've decided to break up a trip and get some sleep, I was astonished at how hard it was to find a motel that had a vacancy.

TRX
October 3, 2013
356:
> paved roads

While useful, they were uncommon and quite expensive. Many required continual maintenance until the paving depth was enough to prevent them from sinking in the rain. Meters of depth.

The big advance in land transport wasn't paving, it was the ditch, which wasn't invented until the 1700s/1800s, depending on who you credit for it.

The ditch, low-tech and mostly ignored (or cursed), provides a place for water to go, so all your fine paving stays put. In fact, the ditch lets you build an all-weather road with loose gravel, or (depending on the soil type) plain old dirt.

The ditch was a bigger, more important advance than self-driving cars will ever be, because the ditch is what makes it possible to have useful roads.

TRX
October 4, 2013
399:
@372:
I can't imagine EMP weapons being deemed WMDs; they don't hurt people at all.
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I know two people with pacemakers, and two more with insulin pumps.

TRX
October 4, 2013
402:
@392:
What if there has been a drone hovering at the windows of the WTC, looking those trapped people in the face?
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If that person was me, and I survived, I would hunt down whoever was operating the drone and it would be very ugly afterward.

The helicopter news vultures who got shot at during Katrina kept pretending they didn't understand why.

"Hey, I see you're going to be burned to death|drowned|eaten by a grue; I'm going to profit by selling video of your misfortune for the benefit of our corporate sponsors."

TRX
October 5, 2013
427:
> I think the self-driving passenger car will be the last
> desperate gasp of an automotive industry

I'm still wondering where the software is going to come from, how it's going to be tested, who is going to be liable for it, and how patches and upgrades are going to be handled.

Even comparatively simple applications like engine management, transmission control, and antilock braking were a long, tough slog for most automotive companies and their vendors. How GM managed not to get sued into oblivion over the Delco II ABS system is still a mystery to me. Or why the early Suzuki TLR1000s would just stop running, or the "PROM of the month" program for the GM P4 ECMs, or...

*Then* you're going to have to persuade the insurance industry, which likes hard numbers to feed their calculators, that your self-drive system is at least as good as a human operator per vehicle mile. Few people can buy a car with cash; financing generally requires insurance. No insurance, no sale. It was suddenly-inflated insurance rates that killed off the horsepower wars of the 1960s and the turbo cars of the 1980s; it didn't matter if it was a "Rabbit Diesel Turbo" with 23 raging horsepower; the "turbo" part made the insurance as expensive as a luxury or muscle car... assuming your carrier wasn't one of those that refused to insure any turbocharged vehicle, period.

Even with all the planets in alignment... "Sorry, no MOT for you. Your Volvo Estate is four years old now, and the manufacturer hasn't come out with an update for the new self-drive spec yet. You'll have to hire a wrecker to take it away; it's unsafe to operate on public roads. And being that the car is so old, I wouldn't expect any updates to be available. There's a breaker's down the way, you might get 50 for it."

TRX
October 11, 2013
504:
@470:
What usages would there be for a vehicle that would slavishly follow it's owner wherever possible?
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In Vernor Vinge's "Marooned in Realtime", that was where you kept your life support and extended-brain bits after the Singularity...