Posted on 05/26/2014 3:15:22 PM PDT by Kaslin
In August of 2013 I wrote Message to 5.7 Million Truck Drivers "No Drivers Needed" Your Job is About to Vanish.
The key word in that sentence is "about". I did not mean immediately, but I did mean a lot sooner than truck drivers and the general public expect. Most protested. I received many emails saying this would not happen for decades.
Many truck drivers thought it would never happen. Most mentioned insurance issues. Yes, there are problems, but time has marched on even quicker than I thought.
TechCrunch reports California Will Start Granting Licenses For Driverless Cars In September.
Come September, the California Department of Motor Vehicles will begin granting licenses to select driverless cars and their human co-pilots, which will make it a bit less legally iffy as to whether or not they’re actually allowed to be on a public road.
The good news: The license will only cost $150 a pop, and that covers 10 vehicles and up to 20 test drivers.
The bad (but probably actually good) news: You probably can’t get one, so don’t go trying to make your own Googlecar just yet.
Stiff License Terms
Yes, the terms of the license are stiff including $5,000,000 insurance against personal injury, death, or property damage. And a test driver has to be able to take immediate control of the car at all times.
Nonetheless, the licensing is a big step forward. Totally driverless cars are but a single step away. All that needs to happen is for California to eliminate the requirement that someone has to be in the car at all times to take control.
A big issue is that radar can detect size and shape of objects, but it does not have human judgement regarding danger. For example, a balloon blowing across the road is a much different thing from a hunk of metal the same size sitting in the road.
Such difficulties will be overcome.
Incentives and Implications
The implications on the shipping business are staggering. A full-time truck driver might cost as much as $100,000 a year. The incentive to get rid of millions of full-time drivers is massive.
A July 2013 Truckers Report headline reads ATA: Self-Driving Trucks Are “Close To Inevitable”
However, the article itself dismissed the idea totally.
“People come up with these grandiose ideas,” says Bob Esler, a commercial trucker for almost 50 years. “How are you going to get the truck into a dock or fuel it?”
And then there’s loading and unloading. Pre-trip inspections. Signing for drop-offs and pickups. Making sure cargo is properly secured. Making sure the cargo that’s being loaded actually gets loaded. The list just keeps going on and on.
The Last Mile
Many of the objections in the above article have to do with the last mile. Let's assume someone has to load the truck. Let's also assume an actual skilled driver has to dock the truck and make the final delivery (arguably a bad assumption).
Yet, even if those assumptions are true, nothing stops a trucking company from having distribution facilities right off an interstate near major cities, where local drivers deliver the goods the last mile.
Why can't all but the last few miles be driverless even if a skilled driver is needed some step of the way for safety reasons?
Technology marches on at a breathtaking pace. We might actually see commercial driverless vehicles on the roads within a few years.
You persist in oversimplifying the problem....as if the only thing a driver ever does is cruise on the freeway.
Just this morning, in my driving to and from meetings, I encountered:
- Bridge Construction
- An accident on the interstate
- A funeral procession
- Parking at a large hospital complex with a myriad of specialty parking signs
- Parking at city offices, with specialty parking signs
- Interpreting signage in a parking garage
- Parking on a parking garage
- Yielding to jaywalking pedestrians
- Going around a stalled bus
- Going around parked delivery vehicles
- An intersection getting re-painted, with an army of idiots moving cones and flailing their arms to direct traffic
That’s just this morning!
None of the technology on the road today would address ANY of the situations I encountered in a span of four hours. You can deny it, you can oversimplify it...but you cannot explain to me how on earth any of the features in a car today could handle my very typical morning, driving around the city.
All of which can be dealt with without having you LIDAR knowing the exact number of millimeters between you and everything else. Half of them GPS already handles.
It’s a lot easier than you want it to be. Remember, drunk people can do this, just not very well. We don’t need to throw Deep Blue at a problem that can be accomplished by your average drunk.
You don’t understand what Google is using LIDAR for. Think in terms of facial recognition. It uses a cloud of points to identify “traffic cone”.
So no, it is not using the LIDAR to try and gain any sort of high precision. It is using it to map the world around the car, and simplify it - again into ‘blocks’. And in a GIS type way, they are assigning ‘attributes’ to the block, which have a ‘library’ of possibly actions that the block might take.
Since you have stated that GPS could handle half of the examples from my morning commute, I have a simple question:
Name one.
Name one of the events from my morning commute that GPS can handle. And explain in detail how GPS would work through the situation.
We’re in circles here. So here’s my final comment on this one.
First off understand that Google has ALREADY done thousand of miles self driven, and is planning on 100 more cars by the end of the year:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/3160840/posts
Then remember these great declarations throughout history:
It will take 2000 years to explore America
all the major scientific discoveries have been made
man will never run a mile in under 4 minutes
man will never fly under control
man will never control a vehicle over 100MPH
man will never break the speed of sound under control
man will never land on the moon and come back safely
You are, quite simply, on the wrong side of history. This problem you insist is insurmountable has been surmounted, now it’s just a matter of doing it cheaply enough for a production car.
So I take it you can’t explain how GPS can handle one of the situations I listed from my morning commute.
as long as a self driving car is google dependant it is a failure.
Google is racing to put out their system in order to track individual locations in order to sell the information.
Kids and thieves won’t be hacking in to control these cars and trucks. No way no how.
It won’t be Google dependent, they’re just the guys pushing hardest on the envelope. Meanwhile car companies continue to put more and more autonomous features in cars, which will close the gap less dramatically.
Recalculating.
according to reports on this project, the google car needs google maps. Also most states that allow this require a licensed driver who can take over instantly. Hard to do without brakes or human steering.
Yes the google car requires google map. And any self driving car will need somebody’s map (else it can’t know where it is), but GPS are basically standard equipment now so that’s solved. Most states currently require a licensed driver, emphasis on “currently”. CA is already working on the tweaks and as the tech spreads away from Silicone Valley other states will follow.
Cute...but you can’t respond to the challenge.
Its not hard to say something is easy, but too hard for you to explain how to actually do it.
This is a softball...you have your pick of a half dozen scenarios. Which one can you do today, with GPS?
We’re done. Good bye. You’re also wrong. Have the last word, but I won’t be reading it. See you in our self driving cars.
No, I don’t want the last word. In fact, for the last two posts, I have been begging you to provide the last word.
Just a few short hours ago, you dismissively stated that GPS could handle ‘half’ of the situations I listed.
Well I’m not greedy, so I didn’t require you to explain every one...but I did ask you to explain just one.
Can you do that?
You see - the last word is yours to have...
See. You read to the end.
Excellent point.
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