Posted on 03/18/2015 6:41:09 AM PDT by kosciusko51
Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk thinks every car on the road today — and many more in the future — will eventually be outlawed.
The reason? They require humans to drive.
“In the distant future, [legislators] may outlaw driven cars because they’re too dangerous,” Musk told NVIDIA CEO Jen-Hsun Huang at company’s annual developers conference Tuesday. ”You can’t have a person driving a two-ton death machine.”
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
I think they are going to have go through years of self-limiting cars before they go full-auto. By that, I mean cars that will limit speed in wet/icy conditions, fog, etc. And reduce general speed and maintain standoff distance in traffic conditions.
I wonder how they plan to account for something like a herd of deer who bust out from cover and run in front of a car. Human peripheral vision and a knowledge of local conditions might get you through whereas a camera/sonar system might not.
There is no way this is ever becoming main stream.
You might be right. As time goes on, driverless cars will get better and better at the more difficult situations. It is only a matter of time.
“I wonder how they plan to account for something like a herd of deer who bust out from cover and run in front of a car. Human peripheral vision and a knowledge of local conditions might get you through whereas a camera/sonar system might not.”
An animal in the road is a fairly common condition that any automated car would need to be able to handle from the get go. I don't think multiple animals at once would be much more of a difficult problem to handle. The video I posted in comment #89 sheds some light on how these cars perceive objects.
There seems to be a lot of ignorance among city dwellers. I live in the mountains on a dirt road. Think how much money it will cost to prepare all rural roads for this city dweller utopian wet dream. How are the cars going to put on chains to drive in the ice and snow? How are the cars going to find the road and not say try to take off on a frozen river. This idea is not totally useless but not much more than 50% practical.
Like they said about the personal computer, the internet, the cell phone, the horseless carriage.
Ok so how much does all that radar and laser range finders cost? The idea of a car is cheap AFFORDABLE transportation. That stupid Google car probably costs 100k. Whose going to repair that stuff? What if a range finder goes out driving on a suburban road that has kids on it? This is just fantasy mental masturbation.
We don’t have access to natural gas lines or cable tv in the country but we will have robo cars? LOL.
Yes ... freedom is VERY dangerous to tyrants.
I don't see why programming an automated car to know how to drive on a dirt road is an insurmountable challenge.
“How are the cars going to put on chains to drive in the ice and snow?”
They won't, but they can ask the human occupant to do it for them.
“How are the cars going to find the road and not say try to take off on a frozen river. This idea is not totally useless but not much more than 50% practical.”
The cars have a built-in map database that is getting better and better every year. It will be easy for the car to understand the difference between a river and a road.
Have you ever been out of the city or on a four wheel drive road? These ideas would be so expensive that they would be impractical. It is a good utopian wet dream though.
FTA: but they lack the software necessary for it to be safe.
The computer OS we use has so many bugs in it would you want to be in a car that needed a software update the first Tuesday of every month and hopes it fixes the problem?
Would you like it knowing that Jeb Bush or any politician or news reader is getting paid off to promote the defective product?
I don’t see why....
You remind me of Willy Green.
Or we can do away with cars altogether and use public transportation.
PS bus drivers hit pedestrians (when they have right of way) in Houston.
PSS When an expensive (but ineffecient) rail system was added, Houston’s solution was to make it illegal to be hit by the new trolley train.
The goal is to do away with personal people movers.
Cameras and laser sensors are cheap. The cutting-edge technology here has nothing to do with the hardware and everything to do with the software.
“What if a range finder goes out driving on a suburban road that has kids on it? This is just fantasy mental masturbation.”
What if the brakes/steering/etc on a normal car goes out driving on a suburban road that has kids on it? Regardless, it would be painfully simple to program these cars to pull over and come to a stop if something malfunctions.
Like I said in my original post, so many people are worried about the one-in-a-million deaths that this might cause and don't worry about the one-in-a-thousand deaths that human drivers cause. It is psychology.
..it might be old Choo Choo Willy.
Apart from personal injury protection, why would anyone need insurance for a perfect, non-human operated, supercar?
Who said they would be perfect? The premise is that they will be much safer than humans, not perfect.
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