Posted on 03/16/2017 1:12:53 PM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
New research suggests that children born today will never drive a car. The auto industry's embrace of self-driving technology has been accelerating fast and those technological advances mean that by the time today's toddlers come of age, they'll likely never even have to get behind the wheel of a car, according to Henrik Christensen, the director of the University of San Diego’s Contextual Robotics Institute.
“My own prediction is that kids born today will never get to drive a car,” Christensen told the San Diego Union-Tribune in mid-December. “Autonomous, driverless cars are not 10, 15 years out. All the automotive companies—Daimler, GM, Ford—are saying that within five years they will have autonomous, driverless cars on the road.”
So what does that mean for our roads? Upgrades. And sooner rather than later.
“This transition is happening a lot quicker than we anticipated,” says Ronique Day, a government transportation analyst in Virginia, one of several states studying ways for roads and cars to communicate.
Other states across the country are following suit, installing digital signage above lanes that will aid in communication when self-driving cars become an everyday reality.
The signs are a first step toward what highway planners say is a future in which self-driving cars will travel on technology-aided roads lined with fiber optics, cameras and connected signaling devices that will help vehicles move as quickly as possible—and more safely.
Transit planners also say self-driving cars will unlock bigger benefits, including fewer accidents, faster trips and fuel savings.
While concrete and asphalt have long been the simplest solutions to easing congestion or meeting the need for extra road capacity, these technological advances have created new opportunities for addressing challenges. What that means is that we are going to have to figure out how to begin developing a smarter highway.
So far, the infrastructure behind these autonomous vehicles is lacking, having been built into just a few miles of highway in a handful of states.
How Will it be Done?
So how are states handling this? The first step will be deciding how to communicate with cars as an array of auto makers and tech companies independently have developed autonomous-driving technology. No common standard has been established for how a new generation of smartcars will receive information from smart roads—or how they will handle alerts once they get them.
Policymakers looking for blueprints on designing smart highways should look to the states that are currently piloting studies on their roadways like Virginia, California and Utah.
Utah is undertaking a test of the technology on a stretch of Salt Lake City’s Redwood Rd, a major north-south commuter route. Sensors on traffic lights connect to public buses and can adjust red and green signals to help buses stay on schedule.
But highway researchers say their biggest hurdle is ensuring they have technology that can work. CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFORMATION
Road connections to cars have mostly used dedicated short-range communications, or DSRC, a wireless link commonly used in transportation systems to manage stoplights and tolling. But researchers say the industry may settle on cellular-data systems used for smartphones or WiFi if the technology can handle information more rapidly and reliably.
Virginia has strapped one-foot-square DSRC devices on light poles and bridges on various roads, including Interstate 66 outside Washington, D.C. The gadgets watch the highway and allow workers at a central-control site to change recommended speeds lane-by-lane depending on traffic and communicate that to drivers with the signs mounted over the highway. They also send messages to state government road-maintenance vehicles about traffic flows and road conditions.
Those emergency messages will be communicated on electronic boards on many highways and would arrive through a smartphone-like app that displays alerts on drivers’ dashboards. The sensors can then monitor traffic flows and see that wheels are losing touch with the road as a rainstorm builds. The signs can lower the speed limit for the current situation and the road devices could alert cars miles away to slow down or even give them new routes to their destinations.
Planners say billions of federal dollars will likely be needed to wire the nation’s more than 4 million miles of paved roads and 250,000 intersections and with many states struggling to cover basic highway maintenance, this infrastructure seems far fetched.
Right now, it seems car manufacturers have put the cart before the horse in developing autonomous vehicles before the infrastructure to support it is ready. Still, we hope this means funding for this type of work and plenty of jobs for contractors in 2017 and beyond.
Right. There can’t get trains to have no driver and they are on rails.
Anybody who is in favor of this ought to think twice.
“American jobs for Americans” will fail if driving jobs disappear. Something like eight million jobs for persons of limited educational achievement.
We need a transition plan.
Maybe little cuckbois born to coastal Progressive parents will never drive a car, but I guarantee that every boy in flyover country and especially every good redneck boy will still learn to drive by the time he’s 12.
Will Governments Ban Drivers ?
What could possibly go wrong.
How 'bout we keep the potholes fixed for starters and time the traffic lights?
Transit planners also say self-driving cars will unlock bigger benefits, including fewer accidents, faster trips and fuel savings.
No thanks.
This whole thing just sounds like a stupid waste of money. We are Americans. We love our freedom.
In my case, I get carsick pretty quickly if I try to read in the car. I’d much rather drive than just be bored all the time.
I drive 30-40,000 miles a year. I just can’t imagine giving that over to a machine. Today, I hit a small patch of ice and the traction control kicked in. Frankly, I would have been more comfortable had it not because the truck jerked hard to the side.
I don’t want a self driving car. I love driving. I want the flying car I was promised in the 1960’s!
No. No. No. A thousand times no!!!!!
Got that right!
In any case there is no such thing as an autonomous vehicle. It proceeds according to a set of rules based on data provided by...government pencil necked bureaucrats who know better than you.
An truly autonomous car might respond to a command of "take me to the nudie bar" with "screw you Mack, I'm following that hot vintage Ford Cobra to the races....sit down and STFU!"
I will only buy a car with a steering wheel and peddles, even with auto drive it must have an on and off auto drive switch.
“children born today will never drive a car.”
Like many other things, I suspect this will lead to the end of Western civilization.
The problem lies in Arthur C Clarke’s quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
Children are now starting out in a time where there is absolutely no visceral connection to how things work. As such, it’s “magic”: they have no idea how it works, and after a couple generations almost nobody will.
I grew up at the beginning of the “personal computer revolution”: buying a computer meant knowing a great deal about how one worked, and it was simple enough that a young mind could easily grasp the totality thereof (even if it might take a career to fully understand). I watched Dad build a ZX-80 computer as a kit. My first real computer was the original IBM PC, which came with complete electrical schematics and BIOS source code; from that I built my own sound card for it. ... but today, every kid has a phone/tablet computer that is absolutely incomprehensible to them.
Likewise my first car was a Ford Escort: I did most of my own maintenance, replacing brake drums, alternators, etc and by that got a good idea how the whole thing worked. I had Fordor’s manuals showing how to disassemble the entire car completely, and to re-assemble it on my own. I eventually stopped out of convenience, and parts just becoming too inconvenient to bother with (d@mn oil filter placement). Being part electrical engineer by training, I understand all the concepts behind the newest car I’ve had - an all-electric Nissan Leaf. ...but for kids born today, the car they’ll drive will likely be a variant of a Tesla, complex to the point they won’t have any idea how it runs.
Put the two together, and you’ll get a car in 2040 that the post-driving occupant will see as little less than outright magic.
And in 2060, having been born into a world where their parents had little idea of how vehicles worked, young adults will be so far removed from how things work that they won’t be able to create anything new. Or make old things work for that matter.
Civilization as we first-world types know it will crash, having no idea how to make anything work.
Just like current third-world cultures that can’t even fix a child’s broken swing, being nothing more than a tire + rope + tree. Yes, that happens.
That won’t be good for the car magazines.
I heard that myself. Except I heard that up to about 30% of jobs outside of fast food and similar involved driving. Maybe that’s just for men.
If that is the case, or if the numbers are more like you stated, then autonomous vehicles will be a complete and total employment disaster.
My dad “decommissioned” his old El Camino, removed the tags and gave the keys to me at age 12. The rules were, stay off the public roads, don’t go where you’re not wanted, don’t tear anything up, don’t hurt or kill yourself and have fun. I drove it all over the farm roads and logging paths around my childhood home. The 350 knocked but ran well otherwise and it had a lot of rust, but I had a fantastic time with it.
“New research suggests that children born today will never drive a car.”
That’s really sad, because I count driving a motor vehicle among the very few activities that I have really enjoyed in life!
Every time an article such as this pops up I comment on how much I love my 71’ International harvester Pick-up truck. Everything is manual from the fuel pump to the windows. It is overbuilt and was assembled by hand as opposed to robotics , that being the case disassembly and access to all of the components can be reached by a human arm/hand. The simplicity of it is why it is a daily driver to this very day. And if you read the comment of the man who hit a patch of ice and the “ride control” took over and pulled him hard right! Traction control = braking wether you want it or not. I even as 16-17 year old did not like cruise control as I looked upon it as something over riding my control of fuel to the engine. Anything that takes control over the 3-5 thousand pound vehicle that I am driving is a no-go to me...Also you would not believe how inexspensive it is to keep the International on the road , comes to just under 260.00 a year for registration/insurance/inspection sticker....so explain to me the logic of BILLIONS of dollars for communication sensors on roadways and then the absurd cost of new cars along with option 1 insurance if money is borrowed?
I think autonomous car operation will only be found in one place, the place that GM envisioned as far back as 1939: on limited access freeways. In short, when you drive on the freeway, you set it for the posted speed limit and a bunch of vehicles travel at the same speed on the freeway (with full compensation for amount of traffic and weather conditions), and there are special sequences to engage and disengage autonomous operation when you enter or exit the freeway.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.