Does American driving public want autonomus vehicles.

Discussion in 'Political Opinions & Beliefs' started by 61falcon, Apr 23, 2019.

  1. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    There s a great push worldwide today to remove drivers from behind the wheel and put robotic computerized driving systems in charge of all vehicles operating on our highways and byways.Is this what we really want??Personally I enjoy driving and have driven cross country on several occasions.A lot of people derive their livelihood from driving both local and long distance,they will all lose their occupation.Are we sure this is the direction we should be taking?
     
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  2. HonestJoe

    HonestJoe Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I think plenty of people in plenty of situations would welcome it while others won’t. Like pretty much every technological advancement, it will bring adjustments and difficulties to address. I’m sure the people who cared for horses resented their being replaced by motor vehicles as the primary personal transportation but we moved past it and still have the opportunity to ride horses or horse-drawn vehicles for fun if we want.

    Similarly, there has long been and will continue to be whole job sectors replaced or at least massively reduced by new technology but also entire new ones created. This is a much wider question that just automated vehicles and it’s a development that requires good management to minimise the impact and disruption but it’s something we’ve dealt with since the industrial revolution and will continue to do so indefinitely.
     
  3. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    If an autonomus system is doing the driving there will be no point in owning your own vehicle,so it will kill auto sales and dealerships as well as driving jobs.
     
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  4. modernpaladin

    modernpaladin Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I support the advancement of all technology, and I would pay decent money for a car that could reliably/safely drive itself.

    However I would only buy such a car so long as I could also choose to drive it manually, and I'll resist any laws to ban manual driving as fervently as I resist laws restricting firearms.
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2019
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  5. MolonLabe2009

    MolonLabe2009 Banned

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    No.
     
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  6. garyd

    garyd Well-Known Member

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    Somebody has to make the autonomous vehicles. And we will never get all the way there. The biggest problem they have so far is they can't seem to adjust quickly enough to the weird and stupid things human drivers do on the high way. Me I'd love it. But I've never been a fan of driving. By the way there are certain things hauled long distance that I would insist there be human back up hazmats for instance.
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2019
  7. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    First we had TV that was free to operate in the home,you just paid the electric bill,then along came PAID cable service.Then came Sony Beta Max VCR's,then VHS VCR's and the CD players as Blockbuster and other movie rental places across the country rented first movie tapes then movie CD's,then along came Netflix and HULU and other add ons to cable service knocking out the movie rental business.From the first entry of cable TV to the end of the movie rental business only took at most 40 years.VCR's and CD players had very short life spans yet they sold hundreds of millions of them while they were popular. can't help but wonder whether autonumus vehicles will have a similar fate.Will our next venture into owned vehicles be ones which do not require a road to operate on, but instead fly at low altitude from one location to another?
     
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  8. TrackerSam

    TrackerSam Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    I'm going to assume that these cars would never go over the speed limit. There are times when you're running late and need a bit more speed. There's going to be a glut of accidents. Who gets the ticket? The owner or the car? Pedestrians will be most at risk.
    This is a stupid idea that no one asked for. These cars will be super expensive. I won't deny anyone wanting one but I'll stay behind the steering wheel. You'll be required to sit behind the wheel anyway so you might as well be the driver. It's not like you can lay back and read the newspaper. You'll still need a licensed driver behind the wheel.
     
  9. Spooky

    Spooky Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Personally I would absolutely love it.

    I've driven and I know how to drive, been there done that, it's overrated.

    I would much rather prefer to let Mr. Robot take me to work while I get another 15 minutes more of sleep in the back seat.

    And the tech is getting there, many companies are now putting out self driving cars going back and forth across the nation for their tests and although they do crash sometimes the crash rate is way, way behind humans driving.

    Nothing will ever be perfect.

    I would much rather drive with a Robot in charge than a 16 yr. old girl texting her boyfriend.
     
  10. Spooky

    Spooky Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    You can set the speed manually.

    It's like a video game where you go into the options menu and adjust the things you want changed.

    If you want to go 80 instead of 65 you can easily set that or you can just hop in and press go and the car will do it regularly.

    In fact you have to do that because there is no nationalized grid for speed control which is the biggest problem they are working on.

    The car drives at a speed according to geographics, traffic congestion, and a bunch of other stuff, not speed limits.

    Basically the car doesn't know when you hit a 35 mph hour speed zone but it knows that in a residential neighborhood it is supposed to slow to 25 mph.
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2019
  11. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    With the steel and aluminum tariffs and the tariffs added on to most imports the average price of automobiles is now over $35,000.They are already priced out of the reach of the 40% of American workers paid less than $15 per hour.And of c ourse as new car prices creep upward so do the prices n used cars.
     
  12. perdidochas

    perdidochas Well-Known Member

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    I don't see this coming for a long time. What I do see is that most of us will have safety enabled cars. Cars with radars that will automatically stop us, keep us in the center of our lane, etc.
     
  13. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    That does not appear to be the direction we ate going it's full speed ahead for fully autonomus vehicles.
     
  14. modernpaladin

    modernpaladin Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    New cars, sure. But a new car is the absolute worst investment you could ever make because you lose ~30% of it immediately. The prices of used cars do not scale with the prices of new, they scale with the price of scrap + cost to haul away. Barring skyrocket scrap prices, there will always be the '$500 clunker.'
     
  15. garyd

    garyd Well-Known Member

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    Most people won't own a car they'll just dial one up as needed. What you'll wind up with is really large fleets of driverless taxis.
     
  16. perdidochas

    perdidochas Well-Known Member

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    Doubtful. Autonomous driving isn't showing much promise by consumers, especially in areas like Arizona, where a self-driving car has already mowed down a pedestrian, and people are hostile to self-driving cars. The self-braking, etc. cars are offered by almost every manufacturer, and the price level for that is going down rapidly.

    https://www.motortrend.com/news/google-waymo-autonomous-self-driving-cars-attacked/
     
    Last edited: Apr 23, 2019
  17. perdidochas

    perdidochas Well-Known Member

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    I don't understand why this is the inevitable conclusion. It doesn't seem intuitive to me. I still want my own car. I don't want to be reliant on the whims of the rest of the area. I can see in a big city area where this idea might be popular, but not so much in suburban/rural America.
     
  18. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    We need to develop low flying vehicles that do not require roads and bridges etc, as we are no longer financially able to keep them up and modernize them.
     
  19. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    Maybe we should consult the National Farrier's Union.
     
  20. Primus Epic

    Primus Epic Well-Known Member

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    Autonomous driving technology is not ready for prime time. It does not yet have the points of integration between GPS, Radar, Optical and Sonar within a 3-dimensional continuously changing (dynamic) environment having a high rate of environmental variability along XYX axes - both of the vehicle and of the vehicle's immediate surroundings. We have bits and pieces coming together right now. Volvo and Tesla, may be two of the leaders involved in the integration of these technologies, but no one manufacturer has solved what is a highly complex set of problems.

    It may seem very ironic on the surface, and many have made the comparison, that if we can design and build aircraft to essentially be pilot-less in most all phases of flight, then we should be able to get a ground based vehicle from point "A" to point "B" even easier. The truth is that traffic environments on the ground involving vehicles is a much more dynamic object oriented and spatially challenging environment in which to accurately and safely move or operate a vehicle. It will take a highly creative algorithmic, programming and hardware solution to make full autonomy in passenger vehicles truly safe. We are simply not there yet, and I don't see the safety component required to make it work efficiently coming out of our current generation of technologists - given the current set of statutory rules and the physical environment in which a vehicle now operates.

    We could get there sooner by changing the physical environment in which the vehicle operates and we will see partial-autonomous solutions emerge with greater regularity (we are seeing some of that already). However, a full blown transformation of our transportation paradigm as such is just not technologically feasible at this time. My own personal opinion an as engineer (among other things).
     
  21. Golem

    Golem Well-Known Member Donor

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    To be honest, I think we need to find a way to outlaw human driving.
     
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  22. 61falcon

    61falcon Well-Known Member

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    It is guesstimated we need between $4 and $5 TRILLION spent on our infrastructure to bring it up to reasonably safe modern standards,money we do not have.If we cannot maintain roads and bridges etc,then just maybe we should not be looking at newer technology solutions that require them???Just a thought!Maybe we should be looking at methods of transportation that do not need roads and bridges which will require constant maintenance and upgrades.
     
  23. Primus Epic

    Primus Epic Well-Known Member

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    But, then you run into the problem of having to pay for the high cost of maintenance associated with each occupied drone. You would also have to carve out sections of Class G airspace and finally begin to "control" it and quite possibly portions of the lower levels of Class E which is already controlled airspace. There would probably need to be a merger of both Class G and Class E, or the creation of a new classification of airspace "Class H" to accommodate this kind of public use transportation airway. You would also need to establish departure and arrival rules/protocols for each autonomous flight while maintaining separation of traffic given the shear number of airborne vehicles using the system at one time. No doubt, each vehicle would need to be equipped with ADS-B In and Out and I would expect full integration with GPS/WAAS and even converting ADS-B into the enabling autonomous flight technology itself. You would need to do all of this (at minimum) in order to remove the need for operators to have a Pilots License. Operating in 3-dimensional space has a different set of skill requirements than operating in a 2-D environment on the ground. And, that's just the beginning of problems on the airspace control side.

    Given the number of tailgaters, unsafe lane changers and people who lack adequate spatial orientation, hand eye coordination and relative speed recognition skill sets being exhibited on the road today, the last thing I want to do is share the sky or any portion of the air above the ground with the typical driver. So, fully controlled, autonomous, airborne occupied drones would be the only thing I would support. I would not support people merely being able to jump into an "aircraft" and go "flying" to their next destination unfettered, untrained and uncontrolled. Total chaos would be the result.
     
  24. ToddWB

    ToddWB Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Yeah.. they'd be a great idea..... on Mars.
     
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  25. tecoyah

    tecoyah Well-Known Member Past Donor

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    Here 'ya Go:
     

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