Posted on 03/31/2016 7:00:43 AM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
It’ll eventually be there.
They use the redneck robo-chauffeurs for the muddy roads.
As long as you have a tag, if someone wanted to track your car electronically they likely could.
“The goal is to make cars so expensive that the masses are force back to the city-gulag where they are more easily controlled.”
A Honda Civic with the sensing package costs $23,000.
It can follow a curving road and prevent a collision between the car and a pedestrian (or another car).
$23K is not an expensive car.
That’s a far cry from seeing a broad software glitch mysteriously, yet quite plausibly, hit “certain people” trying to get to the polls on election day. Perhaps their self-driving car suddenly can’t quite read the road sensors, you know, just enough where reliability is suspect and these certain people just don’t feel comfortable using their car for that day or that week.
You’re right, stuff like that would never happen.
Shoddy roads = real world conditions.
And, in flyover country we have these things called “gravel roads”, that don’t hold paint too well.
“No, actually the goal is better cars. “
Touché!
We have a Honda Pilot with Honda’s sensing package and it’s wonderful.
The car steers itself around corners, keeps a reasonable distance behind the car in front and rocks the steering wheel if I happen to cross onto the shoulder. The sensing package is available upon virtually every Honda as a $1,000 option.
It’s a better car. I know it’s not a Honda exclusive, but Honda has made it available at a very desirable price point.
It would certainly raise a scandal, though if we are going to be tinfoil about it, a system that deals poorly with a large pedestrian presence would be one that might deal poorly with Election Day. After all, these things do have to park unless a competent driver is on board to do that, or if it will just leave off the passenger then come back later.
Charlotte NC has been under near perpetual road construction for decades.
To you.
Inflation calculator:
What cost $24,000 in 2015 would cost $3891.90 in 1970.
I would say cars have doubled in cost.
In 1970 my dad paid cash for a 1970 Ford Maverick it cost $2,300 with taxes. Yeah that is $14,183.31 in 2015 dollars.
So a Civic and a Maverick are pretty much the same economy type car. Except the Civic is $10,000 more than the Maverick in 2015 dollars.
Same here, but I turn it off when I'm driving on two lane roads. It doesn't like the lines I take through the curves. I don't need the car to nag me. It's a '15 Outback, in case you were wondering.
Ahem...opposition to self driving cars makes one a luddite?
You know, those machines the Luddites smashed were doing their jobs BETTER than they could do manually. However, I have yet to be convinced that self driving cars perform their task better than, or even as well as a human driver. And frankly, I don’t see much promise of it ever achieving even parity with a human driver in the far off future.
So, perhaps the term Luddite should be replaced with Realist.
This Luddite has worked with LIDAR - one of the technologies being used on self driving cars. I know how it works, I know its capabilities, I know how it is able to recognize a cloud of 3 dimensional points as an object from its library...neat stuff. I also know that it is a sensitive instrument that is currently being shipped halfway across the globe for calibration. I also know that it takes a large amount of computing power...’on board’, because cell coverage isn’t everywhere (I suspect Google’s test fleet is always in a coverage area to mask this need), and I know that the computing power is heavy (we’re talking about a car here and weight matters), expensive, needs its own air conditioner (more weight), and delicate. I also know that in the real world, stripes fade, snow piles up, rain falls, and sometimes my car is caked with mud for weeks.
I have no idea what the fascination is with the self driving car - but don’t get your hopes up.
I remember when they used paint “mud” cut with gasoline.
Then it was the rubberized “tape” that peeled off in rolls after about 20 minutes.
Here in Seattle, every time you see a REALLY bad driver, they are driving a Honda. When you get close enough to see the driver, it is usually a little old oriental gal looking THRU the steering wheel.
> Nobody developing them is doing ANY form of central control,
Yep, just for liability reasons alone. Also, who would trust that any interface wouldn’t be hacked?
So what happens when some prankster paints fake lane lines that turn into a fake tunnel entrance Willie Coyote style?
Whoa! So these self-drive cars depend on road markings?
I see some SERIOUS pranks in the near future.
Hey! I see pies in the sky!
LOL!!!
There’s plenty of choices. Buy lower end cars. I just bought a car in November that has no big crazy features. No GPS, no rear camera. 16 grand, maintenance included, only things I have to pay for on that car for the next 10 years is gas, tires, and probably a battery. If the average person can’t 1600 buck a year for a car INCLUDING maintenance then this economy is way worse than anybody is saying.
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