Be Excellent To Each Other

I think maybe you don't realise how far along this stuff is, Chris. Or how fast it got there.

https://www.recode.net/2017/2/2/1447480 ... ngagements



That's eight years after Google started working on autonomous vehicle technology.

These systems are routinely driving tens of thousands of miles with full autonomy after less than ten years of R&D. I wouldn't bet any of your body parts on this rate of progress suddenly slowing down. 20 years is a long time.

The same as everyone else who's job is being automated out from under them: die in poverty after bitterly voting for some right-wing monster who couldn't actually give a fuck about them! Yay!

This is literally America's coal industry right now.

Freely available driverless cars in 20 years? Absolutely. Banning manual cars? We've not banned smoking, don't forget.

Depressing feex.

Except we have, in situations where it affects other people's health, which manually driving will as soon as the algorithms are safer. You'll almost always be able to drive a car on a private track/road; but publicly? Nope. It'll become even more anti social than smoking.

I believe it'll happen, but not in 20 years.

Eventually probably. In twenty years? Not a chance.

£200 says it does.

In twenty years it will be illegal for a human to drive a car on our roads? I'll take that bet.

What exactly are we betting here? That driverless cars that need no manual intervention (so the "passenger" can get pissed or whatever) will be mixed on the road with manually-driven cars? In 20 years?

If so, probably. Might even be ten.

You didn't read the article, did you?

No, the article said that human driven cars would be illegal in 15-20.

There would need to be the costliest scrappage scheme ever conceived or it won't get anywhere in that timescale. And the value? 2000 deaths or whatever it is a year is quite a few but suddenly scrapping the entire national fleet of manual cars and dealing with the attendant uproar vs banning new ones and waiting while that number comes down even quicker than it already has? Nah, not happening.

The only thing that will see driverless cars overtake 'normal' cars is the cost.

Same as with any technology, like blu-ray players, or home computers, the take up will increase as the cost becomes closer to an acceptable level to the average consumer.

No, I meant they've been saying that about jet packs and flying cars for decades. Just around the corner!

Also I wasn't being entirely serious. However, there has been a tendency to over predict the next big thing so I'll take with a pinch of salt predictions on driverless cars. Aside from the technological difficulties (which I'm sure will be overcome at some point) the mental hurdle everyone will have to get over to allow this (particularly governments) is quite big and the task of regulating it and making sure its safe is fairly fraught with difficulties.

For a while, but the future is likely most people not owning a car and calling on the enormous fleet of Ubers.

Driverlerss cars is definitely one of the things I think we'll see become the norm in our lifetime, but not in the next 20 years.

Yeah once it's cheap enough it'll surely gain traction but running a small car is fairly cheap and very convenient. Also a lot of the ways that people currently use their cars just doesn't really fit with this travel pod vision. Families use them to go out for the day and the car serves as a sort of base for them while they're out. There's countless other examples of how actually having the car there supports people's activities, sports and suchlike. I dunno perhaps people could get given little trailers or something.

There's also the fact that once you get away from more densely populated areas the costs of running this travel pod service will rise and the convenience will diminish. The pods will have to travel larger distances unoccupied and there won't usually be a pod within minutes of your location. Of course people might adjust to this new regime over time but it will be a lot of time, I think people are underestimating how interwoven cars are with current society or seeing it only from the perspective of their own situations.

Lulz

I assume you think you're only going to live 20 more years?

Indeed. I keep forgetting the forum is full of youngsters

I'm 44. I'm definitely hoping to not be dead in 20 years.

I'd be ok with dying at 62. I want a driverless hearse though.

I'm not convinced that's true if the tech is good enough - and remember; it's likely we won't be buying a car, we'll be calling one for a ride.

I do wonder about farmers, and the other folk who have to drive their cars in places where there aren't roads.

We can offer a driverless horse.

Mark makes a damn good point about the mobile base for family activities. I can't imagine loading the kids, bikes, wellies and everything else that comes with an autumn day out into a rented pod that would glide away as soon as we got to our destination. There would have to be an 'all-day' option.

There is also the possibility of owning your own self drive car with all of the associated storage potential.

Nope. Highway code rule 52 says the horse must be under the control of the person with it, meaning it must have a person with it, meaning it can't driverless.

Meaning that the times I let my horse walk home on its own I was BREAKING THE LAW CODE!

Or: Take less shit.

Ha! Good one.

“Choose our Day Hire SUV option, or why not treat yourself to a full week in the Luxury SUV, featuring ten charging points and eight screens! Hire for five days and get two free!”

How this all tallies with our car being a mess and kids throwing shit all over the place, I don’t know.

I guess we’ll have to adapt. Or maybe we do long-term leases. Or they swap them out at night while you’re sleeping with some sort of valet service.

Ooooh, night time valet service is a money maker!

As soon as this happens I'll be all over one like a cheap suit, until then, they can prise my stupid overpowered performance cars out of my cold dead hands.

I don't think 'normal' cars will be gone in 20 years though, although the timeframe might not be massively longer than that.

Then again, in the driverless world there'll be desirable brands and models, a lot of people will still want to own a car, rather than use one temporarily like a bus/taxi.

This is a straw man based on the idea that 19.5 years from now everything looks like it does today then 20 years from now manual cars will be banned. It'll be a gradual shift over some period, not a sudden change. Gradual shifts don't need "the costliest scrappage scheme ever conceived".

Also: "And the value? 2000 deaths or whatever it is a year is quite a few" is grotesquely underselling it. Yes, those are the deaths, but also: life changing injuries, other injuries, psychological trauma for drivers who hit pedestrians or cyclists... it's much larger than that. RTCs are the leading cause of death under the age of 19. If you announced you cured all children's cancer, you'd be a hero. This is bigger than that.

That's before we talk about urban planning. How much room in cities is given over to support infrastructure for cars? Parking spaces, car parks, driveways, garages. How much is all that land worth? The economic pressure to repurpose it, if possible, is enormous, and very hard to resist.

Also a strawman: all the "but Uber/Lyft cars don't work for me because kids or rural areas or day trips." No-one's saying you won't be able to still buy cars. Just that early uptake by taxi fleets in urban areas will accelerate early adoption in other markets and bring down costs via economies of scale.

There's plenty of cars on the road now that are over 20 years old. Even if you started tomorrow it would still be the costliest scrappage scheme ever envisaged. Mainly because no legislation ever has banned cars from the roads. Even the leaded petrol ban provided the option of fitting a converter.

All I want to know is: Will driverless taxis have one of these in them?



And will there be a joystick so I can heroically take over when followed by bad guys?

Screw you Benny!

No it isn't. It's based on a reckoning of where we would need to be in five and then ten years time. If in ten years even the sale of new manually driven cars is not banned or even if failing that at least a majority of new cars sold are not autonomous then the twenty year target for banning all manual cars from the roads just isn't going to happen.

And given that right now the situation is that you can't even buy a truly autonomous vehicle and you won't even be able to for a few years yet, the legislation to support them is not in place, manufacturers still have firm plans in place for at least the next five years of production and public opinion needs to move quite a lot towards acceptance then I'd be truly amazed if it happens by then.

I mean FFS we won't even get petrol and diesel cars banned from the roads any time even vaguely soon and pollution from those is far worse for public health than traffic accidents.

We've published our plan for banning fossil fuel cars in the UK. It's...uh...in 23 years.

Diesels will be virtually gone well within 20 years. You’ve got the commitment by various European countries including the uk to ban new sales by 2040 which will have the effect t of making them a niche interest well before that.

In addition you have individual cities banning them well beforehand. If you can’t drive a diesel inside the M25 you’ve destroyed half the potential purchaser base for a new car. Cut the supply of cars and forecourts will no longer stock the fuel, accelerating the process.

I suspect the OP's timeline might be a stalking horse designed to shake up a complacent industry (which is a pretty reasonable goal.) 20 years feels like the shortest time all these changes could possibly happen in, with a 25-30 perhaps being more likely. But if you work in these industries, you probably should be contingency planning to be ready for the shorter estimate, not the longer.

They never actually banned it, as such. You had to apply for a licence to sell it, and they were tricky to get.

There are around fifteen places in the UK where you can drive in to fill up with leaded, or places can order it and get it delivered to you.

It's expensive.

Glad we got that sorted then.

Yes, that's exactly what I wrote.

In the German dubbed version of the Johnnycab scene, they couldn't figure out (or couldn't be arsed) to come up with audio for "Hell of a day, isn't it?" so they just made Johnnycab do a mega-loud belch instead, which is all kinds of fucked up.

Well, it pretty much is. He said 15-20 years, we all said bullshit, you have a load of arguments why it wasn't bullshit, we gave a load of reasons why it's bullshit, and now you seem to agree that it's bullshit.

I think it's on the shorter side of a range of possibilities. That doesn't make it bullshit.

I still maintain 20 is nonsense, for the reasons given. I honestly think 25-30 is too short also. Driverless cars freely available, and the norm for new purchases? Absolutely. Legislating manual cars off the road is a pipe dream in that timeframe.

I doubt there will ever be legislation, as I don’t think it will be required.

Insurance costs and liability claims for manual vehicles will do that for us.