Self Driving Cars

Most likely in some wholly new city in the Middle East or China.

 

We are all about convenience and status. When I want to nip out for a pint of milk I don't want to dial up a Prius and wait for it to bobble along. I want to get into 100 years of German engineering and excessively horse power my way down the garage. I want to do so in a car that tells everyone exactly what kind of a twunt I am.

 

Yes I expect those horrible unions will block it. The car manufacturers and petrochemical giants will be a pushover by comparison. None will raise an objection to the end of their business model.

 

No one will subsidise this model. It has the enormous risk of making transport purely the concern of business. Instead of being able to buy a cheap jalopy and maintain it you will have to buy a season ticket. Prices would not come down anymore than they do with the current railway system.

If it gets us all on bikes then maybe I'm for it, but it sounds like a solution for even lazier and fatter.

 

Perhaps the way forward is for self driving technology to become mandatory in your own car meaning manual driving in rural locations or at certain times only. If the majority of the population owned self driving cars then those cars could be put to use by others when not required by the owner, so subsidising the cost. It would still mean less cars on the roads and parked.

I think less cars on the road would make cycling massively more popular.

 

I think that would be great and very sensible. Something has to be done. My neighbour and her husband have two cars and their grown up kids have three. Our ordinary street is a slalom to drive down. Everywhere you look cars are choking up the place.

My doubt about it is that car clubs, for example, have a very limited popularity. This is because the car outside your own home is so convenient. We also use cars in quite personalised ways. My car has a towbar for a big bike rack and the interior, despite attempts not to do so, gets muddy and scuffed about from bikes and bike kit. I wonder if anyone would really want to share a car with me, a car that I never want to share at the weekends? Sure, someone could use it during the week when I get the train. But if I am going to pick Mrs Moose up because of a train delay I don't want to wait for my car to come back. Ok maybe she can get in someone else's and I don't have to bother, but somehow I don't see this becoming any cheaper than current modes of transport (would you want your car out there on its own prostituting itself for less than a bus fare?) and I can't see it leading to any less journeys, because our lifestyle increasingly makes us travel further to work and consume more. We need a revolution in how we live rather than how we drive.

I do despair of the lines of cars each morning making journeys, 50% or more of which we all used to walk. I also cannot understand why so many people wish to spend Saturday driving into town to go shopping, when all the worlds good can be delivered, yet they do.

Maybe I'm too sceptical, but I do think there are lots of big ideas in this age that won't make it. Drones to deliver £20 Amazon parcels? Not a chance. Pilotless passenger aircraft? Possible and to an extent already here and yet never going be the norm to dispense with the professional on board.

 

Well if it's anything like Uber then people "renting" your car could be rated and banned if it comes back in a bad way, as could people providing the cars.
Something has to be done though as no matter what journey you undertake it just takes one small incident to cause mayhem. This morning for example there was an hour delay on the A40 into London because a van broke down, no accident, nothing to clear up, just a breakdown. There are too many cars on the road, many of them totally not required for that journey especially in London.

 

You've hit the nail on the head.

Self drive cars are going to achieve nothing except make a bunch of technology companies incredibly rich and everyone else poorer.

It's all a bit of smoke and mirrors anyone as I understand it. The cars aren't capable of making decisions in complete isolation relying only on data from onboard sensors, they also have to use very accurate 3D maps of the road. There are billions of miles of road around the world, and it's constantly changing, and much of it is going to range from green lane to sand or mud tracks. The challenge to map and maintain an up to date map for that lot is simply staggering.

I can see driverless cars in some cities, I just don't see it as practical beyond that. But if you are in a large city then the chances are there will be an underground / overground, great bus network etc anyway so why not focus on making that more effective.

A far more sensible future if safety is the objective is the group of technologies increasingly found on cars now around assisted driving - automatic intelligent cruise control, braking, lane departure warning, tired driver sensors etc

If congestion is the objective there is no magic bullet, the solutions have to range from things like more home working, more flexible hours, better public transport, better local planning, city cars etc.

 

I'd like to know why it is that people specifically take lorries and vans onto the M25 to set fire to them. That's what I'm gathering from radio traffic news. And on the M25 a lorry fire between...

 

if cities are subsidising bus services already, then i don't see why they wouldn't with this. instead of a fleet of large buses, drivers and complicated city planning, you just have smaller automated 12 person buses that are programmed to run the most efficient route depending on where the people on them actually need to go, ala uberpool

 

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/c...th-on-demand-public-transportation-2017-07-11 looks like it's already happening!

 

Strange horse to bet against.

 

I didn't say it couldn't be done. It just won't be on a large scale and not to the average door step. Possibly business to business, but the CAA would put massive restrictions on it.

 

It is 100% going to happen for the majority of areas. Granted, isolated buildings in BFE might not be reachable, but anyone remotely close to a metro area will see this happen, certainly well within the next 10 years based on Amazon's progress. It's not just Amazon either - pizza chains are another example.

Any government blocking drone delivery will soon back off once the governments that don't start seeing businesses resident in their countries gaining competitive advantage...because they will. Stuff like this is the future:

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/12/29/amazon-flying-warehouse-deploy-delivery-drones-patent.html

 

Seriously, pizza by drone? You're having a larf, surely? The costs of insuring a drone to fly in an urban area and the cost of a skilled drone pilot vs a pimply 17 year old on a moped?

Got to hand it to you, had me going there for a while you scamp.

 

https://www.cnbc.com/2016/11/16/dom...r-pizza-by-drone-to-a-new-zealand-couple.html

https://qz.com/838254/dominos-is-de...utonomous-drones-to-customers-in-new-zealand/

https://www.engadget.com/2017/03/30/domino-pizza-delivery-drone-germany-netherlands/

Ask and you shall receive*!

* By drone.

 

If I’m not at home when the drone drops the latest Nike Air trainers off to me, what is to stop a local hoodlum nicking it from my door step? If I am hime how will I know the drone is at the door, do I have to have Alexa to tell me? (Don’t tell me, I’m the only bloody one who hasn’t got Alexa, right?) you’re all, ‘Alexa, post on WFC Forums for me’

 

This:

 

Fcking ‘ell Alexa, that should have been dispatched to the mother-in law !

 

You have identified the reason why this drone nonsense will fall flat on it's face.

I'm not going to stand out in the middle of my garden in all sorts of Great British weather looking up in the sky for my delivery when a spotty moped driver can bring it right to my door.

Drones have lots of brilliant uses, home delivery is about the most stupid thing the stupid americans have come up with since roller discos.

 

You're fundamentally misunderstanding how the tech works.

You won't be out when the drone delivers your overprice POS pair of trainers because you literally just ordered them 10 minutes ago. It doesn't show up 2 days later between 9am and 6pm.

As for how do you know if it can't ring the doorbell? Email. Text message alerts to cellphones. Automated phonecall. You have all three of those, right?

 

Do you think that local unsavoury types might be able to bag themselves a drone as it touches down? Or will it automatically arm itself with taser mode?

 

I might be out when I place the order or at work (assuming my delivery job still exists)

 

Can drones even fly in bad weather anyway? Gusting winds? Snow? Sleet? Does the pizza box arrive soggy?

 

I'm in the middle of a loft conversion, I'm half serious when I say I might put a landing pad up there.

 

Your shoes are not coming in 10 minutes. They simply won't travel the two miles of shed in which they are stored in that time. If a single drone was then waiting to deliver your shoes Amazon would need 10's of thousands of them. Prohibitively expensive for a company that currently outsources its final fulfilment. They simply couldn't all take off at the same time and if they did nimbys who can't even deal with a nearby wind farm would object.

It's a ludicrously over engineered model. We could have flying cars like in Blade Runner, we don't. 3D space is very hard to manage compared to roads.

I can see how drones could really help get vital supplies to far flung habitation or to emergencies. But no pizza or fresh creps anytime soon. This is a gimmick, maybe a upgrade offer for the very rich with a helipad.

 

You could either wait until you get home and order it then, or schedule the delivery for when you'll actually be there.

Drone delivery will essentially be on demand and to your schedule - that's the entire point of it.

 

The staff struggle to cook the pizza. I'm not sure they are ready to fly what is essentially a commercial aircraft, in bad weather.

 

My street gets deliveries all the time. Who manages the airspace that Amazon and a n other company are trying to use at the same time? Who pays for that system?

The safety margins required mean lots of queuing to enter the airspace. Soon gets jammed up.

 

The first ever delivery they made was 13 minutes from order to touchdown.

That's from a POC system without any of their planned distributed hubs all over the place.

Obviously times will vary depending on how far you are from the nearest DC (especially if you live out in BFE), but it certainly won't be by a factor of hours for the vast majority of people.

But hey, if you want to believe you understand the challenges and realities better than large multinational companies with banks of analysts, massive business intelligence divisions and highly skilled engineers collaborating for years then it is, of course, your right to do so. Personally, I think these large, successful tech companies actually have a rather good idea of what they're talking about and they have a proven track record of delivering on their visions... so like @Diamond, I'm thinking about a drone helipad.

 

The staff won't be flying them at all. They'll be self-piloting.

http://www.zdnet.com/article/who-will-fly-all-those-amazon-delivery-drones/

People radically underestimate what automation is about to do to the world, which isn't surprising because western governments don't seem to be preparing for it.

 

It will be very interesting to see if it can be scaled up. We should sticky the thread!

 

So once again back to the 3D mapping challenge which is a major obstacle to self driving cars
Who is going to map, and maintain a constantly changing 3D map of the globe. If I put up a garden shed are drones going to be flying into it and ruining my pizza?
Google can't even keep the pictorial map on google maps updated within 5 years, apparently if I zoom into my street on google maps I live in a cow field!

You can't rely on GPS because its not accurate enough, +-5metres is good going but that's the difference between the middle of my garden and crashing into the roof. Radar and other sensors add weight... so the thing has to be bigger and payload reduced and you're stuck in a vicious circle...

Pay load see above

Weather conditions

Distance from a distribution centre, or do drones just get f***ing massive like helicopters? At what point does it become a... helicopter?

Who's going to write the international rules on airspace (which these things need to embed at a fundamental level in their code) when we can't even negotiate a free trade agreement with the EU?

Safety - these things can't be put up in the sky en mass without being built to acceptable safety standards

What are you going to do when a pet dog (or heaven forbid a child) gets injured by a rotor?

Come on this is a gimmick, americans love gimmicks, especially ones which help them to spend yet more time on their fat arses

 

Having recently seen a Crow send a Red Kite packing it'll be interesting to see how a small drone copes when under attack.

Particularly when this lot of Crows start to identify it with pizza.

 

Certainly there is a big political dimension. The current rules on commercial drone flying are very strict. The company that pays sweet FA in taxes will have to do some serious donating to get through the legislation required.

https://www.google.co.uk/amp/www.te...drone-laws-in-the-uk--what-are-the-rules/amp/