I know Google has gone the route of removing the steering wheel but it seems that even if vehicles have self-driving capabilities some level of "manual override" will be desirable especially if you're not in a densely populated area. Using a car to pull a stuck vehicle out of the mud is certainly a valid use-case that not everyone will want to give up. Yeah it might become illegal to use manual driving modes on public highways or something but I can't imagine that we're going to be strictly limited to what the GPS software says is a valid destination and I'd find it impressive if software was written for every action people do with cars.
That being said these technology companies always seem to move towards smaller feature sets that intersect with the use-cases of the largest user bases and power users are often forced to hack together their own custom solutions if they don't fall into the general population of users so if anything this article is a warning to not let the Apple's and Google's define how we use self-driving cars.
Software has a long, long way to go before it accounts for every possible situation where normal people use cars. We'll need manual controls to work around shortcomings in the software for a long time after mostly-autonomous driving becomes the norm.
Since you wouldn't use it frequently, maybe it would make sense to have a less obtrusive control in place of the steering wheel. Maybe a joystick by the armrest, or something.
I recall a science fiction story (or maybe more than one) in which a fun activity for teenagers was punching a destination at random. There's adventure for you. :-)
I'm currently sitting in a train station parking lot watching my Uber drive around in circles. Apparently Google maps is unaware there is a new easier entrance and still instructs drivers to enter through the old construction site.
This has gone on for the 3 months I've used them as part of my commute.
I'm looking forward to the day where I get into an argument with a wheelless self-driving car about taking shortcuts and avoiding traffic. Simply because I have local knowledge on traffic patterns which most maps still lacks.
The #1 pro tip with Uber is never, ever call for a ride unless you have clear blue sky overhead. Otherwise, because you can't enable the satellite view, it's hard to be sure what location is actually going to be reported to the driver. Location services can be way off base when GPS reception is poor, and in many urban settings an error of a hundred yards might as well be ten miles.
Uber could make life a lot easier for everyone if they'd just enable the satellite view, so you can verify that the driver will be sent to the location where you actually are.
(Edit: Instead of downvoting, consider explaining why I'm wrong. Maybe there's something extremely silly that I'm missing.)
I'm not sure I understand this at all. You can move a pin to set your exact location in Uber and Lyft, you don't need to rely on GPS at all. Whether the directions supplied to driver get them there are accurate doesn't depend on GPS.
You can move a pin to set your exact location in Uber and Lyft, you don't need to rely on GPS at all. Whether the directions supplied to driver get them there are accurate doesn't depend on GPS.
If I don't know where I am on the map, what use is moving pins around going to be?
Case in point -- I was in Las Vegas recently, and made the mistake of calling Uber from under the covered walkway at a large casino/hotel entrance. The driver ended up being dispatched down a back road leading off into the desert behind the hotel. Because the map showed nothing but nearby streets, there was no way to tell that it was reporting my position incorrectly.
In the satellite view that's normally available in map-based applications, it would be very obvious that my reported location was nowhere near the hotel entrance.
Ok, now I understand the confusion. When you said "unless you have clear blue sky overhead," it seemed like you thought the weather was important, like there is a satellite broadcasting video back down to earth that would be interrupted if it were cloudy. What you meant is that it's visible from above, not blocked by some kind of bridge or something.
And yes, that's absolutely true. I've been on streets that are right underneath bridge decks and drivers can't find. One way to avoid this is to set your pickup location to a business if one exists (i.e. a bar, hotel, restaurant), so the address is correct.
The misunderstanding seems to be because of "unless you have clear blue sky overhead". People (including me) thought that you meant clouds, rather than man-made overhangs.
This is South Florida, 40% of the Uber drivers don't speak English well enough to drive and comprehend at the same time.
And my worry is automated cars with no steering wheel still rely on these mapping services. They aren't 100% accurate and if you don't have any controls you can't correct for that.
The GIGO is caused by our antiquated addressing scheme. I very much would like for 'street names' to cease existing. Instead label intersections by (slightly) rounded GPS co-ordinates.
Also yes, the 'intersection' of a building and one or more roads is a subordinate intersection.
I can't tell you how much I hate that idea. Humans should always come before machines. Numerical street designations would be unusable for anything but automated transportation, with the exception of cities laid out in regular grids and numbered with small integers. That is: completely impractical for anywhere that I'd actually want to live.
I'm also surprises uber doesn't take destination into account when requesting drivers.
AFAICT it just asks based on distance so a driver that will be heading the wrong way to pick me up on a one way street takes the request and then I'm stuck waiting 5-10 mins as he passes me on the wrong side of the street, then calling me, then having to go several blocks to get back
It's frustrating to not know if theyve tried this or not
I completely disagree that self-driving cars are un-American. In fact I would go so far as to say that self-driving cars are the future to the American suburb. If America was founded on freedom and the pursuit of happiness, what could be more American than having a robot car chauffeur you to and from work while you work in your car? The ability to be free from an oppressive commute may lead to a resurgence in the American suburbs. It's a far-fetched notion but I wouldn't be surprised by it either.
In theory, it could help reduce housing costs, by making cheaper land still usable for commuting.
In practice, many of the cities with the highest housing costs are now strongly anti-infrastructure and anti-transport anytime it involves cars. (What good is a self-driving car if it's getting stuck in the same-or-larger traffic jam everyday?). Cities like this problem because it adds to the inflation of their own property values, and they get to pretend they are being "greener" or "safer" (even though self-driving EV cars eliminate the majority of those issues).
So I suspect that in practice, self-driving cars won't lower housing costs much in most major markets. It could help smaller cities, but they already struggle less with housing costs in the first place.
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The biggest changes will probably be felt elsewhere. Such as by professional drivers (school/city bus drivers, truck drivers, taxi/uber, etc). I also suspect some spill over against flights. It might soon be cheaper for a family of four to rent a self-driving Chevy Bolt to drive from ORD to MSP or ORD to ATL, than to fly there. Especially since, once you land in MSP/ATL, you'll need a car to get around anyway.
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Wealthy people will continue to be mostly unaffected, as they can already afford to live where they work, and can already choose to have no meaningful commute, anytime they desire to.
> In practice, many of the cities with the highest housing costs are strongly anti-infrastructure and anti-transport. (What good is a self-driving car if it's getting stuck in the same-or-larger traffic jam everyday?).
These cities would still be better off with SAE Level 4/5 and inter-communicating cars, which should reduce the frequency of traffic jams significantly. Traffic jams are almost ALWAYS caused by human error at some point in the chain.
> Traffic jams are almost ALWAYS caused by human error at some point in the chain.
Sometimes, sure. But there are a lot of key areas where urban roads / freeways are simply past usable capacity (even with smarter self-driving cars communicating together).
Most major cities have experienced significant population growth in the last 10 years, and have also built little-to-no new freeways or additional car capacity in the last 10 years. If I had to guess at the future, I would predict both of those trends to continue.
>> what could be more American than having a robot car chauffeur you to and from work while you work in your car?
Really? The American myth of self-reliance and independent determination doesn't mesh with being driven around by a robot. The person who buys an diesel f150 or a Shelby Mustang isn't the sort of person who likes being driven around by other people, let alone by a cellphone app. The American myth is the lone cowboy on the horse, not the rich man in the stage coach.
Cars are not rational decisions. If they were, we would all drive gray electric minivans. Cars are a means of expression. They are class identifiers. They are thrill machines. They are weapons. They are Freudian. I'll be convinced about autodrives in the US when I see ONE autodrive car take ONE spectator to a nascar event. It won't happen in my lifetime.
Autodrive advocates should avoid comparisons to the horse. They are dangerous beasts. They have per-hour serious accident rates 10x or 20x greater than motorcycles. And there is little that can be done to mitigate the problem. If the horse wants you off, you are going off. Horses are just used so little that the stats seem insignificant. They aren't. Boys break their necks in traffic accidents. Girls get thrown from horses.
"In his paper Hazards of Horse-riding as a Popular Sport, Dr Silver cited a study from 1985 that suggested motorcyclists suffered a serious accident once every 7,000 hours but a horse rider could expect a serious incident once in every 350 hours. [...] The majority of people admitted to hospital in such circumstances are women. "
For some reason, I thought of Jay Leno when you said that. Jay is a fairly high-profile car collector. But I bet if you retain Jay to speak remotely, he expects a driver. These days, having wine with dinner, then driving, might end up badly.
You also bring up the F150 and Shelby - I drive a Nissan Frontier ( D40, Navara ) mainly because I get truck-function and it sits lower and doesn't corner-dive like an F150. You can't confuse it with a Shelby but it's plenty of ... "hoss". The only way I'd have either instead of the compromise is that I had a rolling stock fetish (and was appropriately resourced to feed it ) and was collecting them.
I've seen what the F150 is really used for. It's a work truck in its bones.
Also also - Larry McMurtry tied the cowboy myth back to, of all things, some variation on Le Morte d'Arthur. That's not particularly American :)
>The person who buys an diesel f150 or a Shelby Mustang isn't the sort of person who likes being driven around by other people
Indeed, it feels hard like a hard message to convey on these boards: some people (me) enjoy the act of driving a car. And almost every reasonably wealthy culture seems to like watching other people do it competitively.
I work in IT and it's incredibly hard to find like-minded petrol heads. Seriously, I have people who tell me on almost daily basis that they can't wait until they don't have to drive any more and when all manual cars are banned. It's nonsense. I love driving my car to work and for leisure, I spend at least few hours every week cleaning, polishing, waxing it, it's really my pride and joy. But for a lot of people it's this expensive box that is a constant source of problems and they can't wait to get rid of it.
This isn't all that difficult of an analogy to computers for most people. Most of us here like computers enough to program them or mess around with them for our careers, but most people can hardly wait for the day they don't need to use a computer as they currently use it - it's an appliance to them mentally.
If I could work in my car, I could also work at home, and more effectively. I think it more likely that I would rest or entertain myself in my car, and work when I get to work.
As cool as it may sound to be able to work in your car during your commute, it's even cooler to work from home and have no commute at all. If my corporate overlords won't countenance the latter, they almost certainly won't allow the former.
I think there is a big difference between working completely remote vs working an hour or two a day remote. Some companies provide flexibility to work remotely when a person is sick or has to be home to get a package or be there for a repair, but still want people in the office most of the time to be available for in-person collaboration.
I started to loath the sound of heavy acceleration, especially when walking or cycling, even when I'm driving myself. The only thing I can think is "what a dipsh*t". It's the noise, the menace of that lurch forward. It's not appropriate for the public realm.
I love cars, the analog character of an internal combustion engine. But I can't wait until most cars are electric. It's so much more civilized. ICE cars will be left for recreation, race tracks, impressing a date. Fun curiosities that a toddler would point at when it roars by. But in large numbers, I dislike them with a passion.
I recently picked up a used Leaf as well, and I'm absolutely loving it.
One thing I've noticed in addition to what you mentioned is how conspicuous the smell of cars with ICEs has become, when I get near them or in them.
There will always be reluctant holdouts who cling to the American machismo of a loud, stinky, rumbling ICE, see so-called "coal rollers" who modify their diesel trucks to terrorize other motorists and cyclists by emitting huge clouds of soot on demand. It sure doesn't sound or look impressive; however, there is something deeply convincing about the instant and effortless authority of the electric motor's acceleration. And the Leaf is relatively anemic compared to other EVs available today!
Joking aside, they've snuck up on me more than once when I'm about to cross the street and they're trying to right-on-red. I'm surprised they don't have some artificial noise to improve awareness.
This article reminded me of David Cronenberg film "Crash" based on J.G Ballard book. Its interesting and worth a watch, although it might not be for everyone. There's a few different versions and I think I saw the uncut one.
So, this will work great in Downtown someplace - but not so well outer whoknowswhereville - I spent a majority of the last three years driving on; roads not on maps, dirt roads, logging roads, roads with no internet access, and poorly marked roads.
We might be able to replace taxicabs thru automation likely in the next 20 - I dont think we will ever replace drivers. I see automation in a car taking the same route as autopilot in the airplane - not total automation, just partial.
I agree in part, but think it'll go further than you expect. I suspect manual driving will, in the next twenty years, require lots of additional training, licensing, insurance, and certifications. And you'll have to prove special circumstances (farm use only, etc). As the technology gets there maps will catch up, and likely become more and more real-time. It seems impossible now, but I'll bet the next wave of mapping will marry a thick web of satellites and machine learning to essentially figure out what is a road, a dirt road, a road with construction, etc. And that will be fed to the cars in their respective areas. The present situation will seem quaint indeed. So even in rural areas, there will likely be auto cars everywhere by in the most remote of areas (similar to how in some places the snowmobile and ATV are more heavily utilized than cars simply because of environmental/geographical reasons). I also inside this sea change will heavily impact rural areas and many of them will either be transformed or erased. Think about what happened when the interstates were built. Many towns which had previously prospered on state highways and the like almost literally overnight just vanished...Or turned into just a gas station, diner, and bar for what few travelers remained.
Good article, the mention of rural America is interesting though since self driving cars to my knowledge still can't operate in an unmapped dirt road properly or otherwise handle the challenges of going off the beaten path.
I'd like to see one of these self-driving cars tackle a mountain road in a blizzard, just not when I'm on that road ;)
The driver in the American Myth will go the way of surrey with the fringe on top.
Back when my grandmother was still alive, I was doing a crossword with she and her friend. Crossword hint was "has a fringe on top". Her friend said "surrey", the correct answer, and followed up with "my family had a surrey with a fringe". My gobsmacked grandmother said dripping with envy "your family had one with fringe?!"
Two generations later, I drool over phones and gadgetry. So yeah, the driver will go the way of the fringe.
Note that the crossword was almost certainly referring to the song from the musical Oklahoma. The pretend envy might have been about having something from the popular lexicon, rather than fringe being like a technological feature.
You are probably right about the crossword clue. But the grandmother's envy was not pretend, but perhaps colored by surprise. I think the surrey with fringe was a luxurious status symbol, like having a Mercedes-Benz or something. The surprise would be like finding out that your plain Jane unassuming friend grew up in a fairly rich family.
Yes. Conservative areas may make a point of banning them. The house and the car are the pinnacle of consumption in America.
On the flip side, car culture is already on its last legs. Cars became hideous in the 80s, and monotonous in the 90s. And increasing gearheadom is derided as lower class, non-white, or rural.
Cars themselves with their reduced noise, better suspensions, and more sealed interiors isolate their inhabitants from the outside world and the feel of driving. I once had the joy of riding an MG-TD: thrilling at any speed.
Does the Man with No Name have the same aura about him if he rides into town on a self guided horse?
Transportation with know destinations (planes trains and self driving cars) diminishes the role "fate" plays in ones destiny. The invisible hand becomes visible because all arrival in a place is preceded by intent to be there.
So yes, it does signal at least a change to the American Myth.
78 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 108 ms ] threadThat being said these technology companies always seem to move towards smaller feature sets that intersect with the use-cases of the largest user bases and power users are often forced to hack together their own custom solutions if they don't fall into the general population of users so if anything this article is a warning to not let the Apple's and Google's define how we use self-driving cars.
The American Myth survived our abandonment of horses. It didn't seem to crush the importance of the Western in our culture.
Transportation in the early US relied on MULE teams more than horses. And east of the Mississippi, we rowed.
Sounds a lot like cars.
This has gone on for the 3 months I've used them as part of my commute.
I'm looking forward to the day where I get into an argument with a wheelless self-driving car about taking shortcuts and avoiding traffic. Simply because I have local knowledge on traffic patterns which most maps still lacks.
Uber could make life a lot easier for everyone if they'd just enable the satellite view, so you can verify that the driver will be sent to the location where you actually are.
(Edit: Instead of downvoting, consider explaining why I'm wrong. Maybe there's something extremely silly that I'm missing.)
If I don't know where I am on the map, what use is moving pins around going to be?
Case in point -- I was in Las Vegas recently, and made the mistake of calling Uber from under the covered walkway at a large casino/hotel entrance. The driver ended up being dispatched down a back road leading off into the desert behind the hotel. Because the map showed nothing but nearby streets, there was no way to tell that it was reporting my position incorrectly.
In the satellite view that's normally available in map-based applications, it would be very obvious that my reported location was nowhere near the hotel entrance.
Around here, the "satellite" imagery seems to be captured by people flying small planes back and forth.
And yes, that's absolutely true. I've been on streets that are right underneath bridge decks and drivers can't find. One way to avoid this is to set your pickup location to a business if one exists (i.e. a bar, hotel, restaurant), so the address is correct.
What I was hoping for was a comment like, "Hey, dumbass, press [...] and it'll turn on the satellite view. Everybody knows that."
And my worry is automated cars with no steering wheel still rely on these mapping services. They aren't 100% accurate and if you don't have any controls you can't correct for that.
Every time I had to reschedule a package delivery I found myself more cynical about AI.
You can't work around GIGO.
Also yes, the 'intersection' of a building and one or more roads is a subordinate intersection.
AFAICT it just asks based on distance so a driver that will be heading the wrong way to pick me up on a one way street takes the request and then I'm stuck waiting 5-10 mins as he passes me on the wrong side of the street, then calling me, then having to go several blocks to get back
It's frustrating to not know if theyve tried this or not
In practice, many of the cities with the highest housing costs are now strongly anti-infrastructure and anti-transport anytime it involves cars. (What good is a self-driving car if it's getting stuck in the same-or-larger traffic jam everyday?). Cities like this problem because it adds to the inflation of their own property values, and they get to pretend they are being "greener" or "safer" (even though self-driving EV cars eliminate the majority of those issues).
So I suspect that in practice, self-driving cars won't lower housing costs much in most major markets. It could help smaller cities, but they already struggle less with housing costs in the first place.
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The biggest changes will probably be felt elsewhere. Such as by professional drivers (school/city bus drivers, truck drivers, taxi/uber, etc). I also suspect some spill over against flights. It might soon be cheaper for a family of four to rent a self-driving Chevy Bolt to drive from ORD to MSP or ORD to ATL, than to fly there. Especially since, once you land in MSP/ATL, you'll need a car to get around anyway.
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Wealthy people will continue to be mostly unaffected, as they can already afford to live where they work, and can already choose to have no meaningful commute, anytime they desire to.
These cities would still be better off with SAE Level 4/5 and inter-communicating cars, which should reduce the frequency of traffic jams significantly. Traffic jams are almost ALWAYS caused by human error at some point in the chain.
Sometimes, sure. But there are a lot of key areas where urban roads / freeways are simply past usable capacity (even with smarter self-driving cars communicating together).
Most major cities have experienced significant population growth in the last 10 years, and have also built little-to-no new freeways or additional car capacity in the last 10 years. If I had to guess at the future, I would predict both of those trends to continue.
Really? The American myth of self-reliance and independent determination doesn't mesh with being driven around by a robot. The person who buys an diesel f150 or a Shelby Mustang isn't the sort of person who likes being driven around by other people, let alone by a cellphone app. The American myth is the lone cowboy on the horse, not the rich man in the stage coach.
Cars are not rational decisions. If they were, we would all drive gray electric minivans. Cars are a means of expression. They are class identifiers. They are thrill machines. They are weapons. They are Freudian. I'll be convinced about autodrives in the US when I see ONE autodrive car take ONE spectator to a nascar event. It won't happen in my lifetime.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8339097.stm
"In his paper Hazards of Horse-riding as a Popular Sport, Dr Silver cited a study from 1985 that suggested motorcyclists suffered a serious accident once every 7,000 hours but a horse rider could expect a serious incident once in every 350 hours. [...] The majority of people admitted to hospital in such circumstances are women. "
Also, girls engage in equestrian sports, I'm sure that non-sports horse activities are probably safer.
You also bring up the F150 and Shelby - I drive a Nissan Frontier ( D40, Navara ) mainly because I get truck-function and it sits lower and doesn't corner-dive like an F150. You can't confuse it with a Shelby but it's plenty of ... "hoss". The only way I'd have either instead of the compromise is that I had a rolling stock fetish (and was appropriately resourced to feed it ) and was collecting them.
I've seen what the F150 is really used for. It's a work truck in its bones.
Also also - Larry McMurtry tied the cowboy myth back to, of all things, some variation on Le Morte d'Arthur. That's not particularly American :)
Indeed, it feels hard like a hard message to convey on these boards: some people (me) enjoy the act of driving a car. And almost every reasonably wealthy culture seems to like watching other people do it competitively.
Wouldn't you use a teleporter?
Also, food for thought: http://existentialcomics.com/comic/1
The only way to win the "brutal commute" game is not to play.
As cool as it may sound to be able to work in your car during your commute, it's even cooler to work from home and have no commute at all. If my corporate overlords won't countenance the latter, they almost certainly won't allow the former.
I love cars, the analog character of an internal combustion engine. But I can't wait until most cars are electric. It's so much more civilized. ICE cars will be left for recreation, race tracks, impressing a date. Fun curiosities that a toddler would point at when it roars by. But in large numbers, I dislike them with a passion.
One thing I've noticed in addition to what you mentioned is how conspicuous the smell of cars with ICEs has become, when I get near them or in them.
There will always be reluctant holdouts who cling to the American machismo of a loud, stinky, rumbling ICE, see so-called "coal rollers" who modify their diesel trucks to terrorize other motorists and cyclists by emitting huge clouds of soot on demand. It sure doesn't sound or look impressive; however, there is something deeply convincing about the instant and effortless authority of the electric motor's acceleration. And the Leaf is relatively anemic compared to other EVs available today!
Joking aside, they've snuck up on me more than once when I'm about to cross the street and they're trying to right-on-red. I'm surprised they don't have some artificial noise to improve awareness.
https://www.google.co.uk/#q=adding+noise+to+electric+cars
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_warning_sou...
Blind people really need this sound and so the Leaf has a speaker, the VSP. It cuts out at about 25mph.
We might be able to replace taxicabs thru automation likely in the next 20 - I dont think we will ever replace drivers. I see automation in a car taking the same route as autopilot in the airplane - not total automation, just partial.
I'd like to see one of these self-driving cars tackle a mountain road in a blizzard, just not when I'm on that road ;)
Back when my grandmother was still alive, I was doing a crossword with she and her friend. Crossword hint was "has a fringe on top". Her friend said "surrey", the correct answer, and followed up with "my family had a surrey with a fringe". My gobsmacked grandmother said dripping with envy "your family had one with fringe?!"
Two generations later, I drool over phones and gadgetry. So yeah, the driver will go the way of the fringe.
http://youtu.be/BIG_GVE-KiE
On the flip side, car culture is already on its last legs. Cars became hideous in the 80s, and monotonous in the 90s. And increasing gearheadom is derided as lower class, non-white, or rural.
Cars themselves with their reduced noise, better suspensions, and more sealed interiors isolate their inhabitants from the outside world and the feel of driving. I once had the joy of riding an MG-TD: thrilling at any speed.
Don't mind F1, Le Mans and club racing, three of the most capital and technology intensive activities you can participate in.
Transportation with know destinations (planes trains and self driving cars) diminishes the role "fate" plays in ones destiny. The invisible hand becomes visible because all arrival in a place is preceded by intent to be there.
So yes, it does signal at least a change to the American Myth.