Be Excellent To Each Other

“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.

And while I appreciate the distinction between smoking harming yourself and traffic accidents harming others, 2000 traffic deaths per year compared to 80,000 smoking related deaths tells me that the push to legislate for that reason just doesn't exist. Maybe as part of a climate change effort, but not road safety.

It's going to be awesome 'brake checking' driverless cars.

I suspect that most (if not all) driver-less cars will be electric, and that the 23 year time limit on diesel/petrol cars will be the thing that drives it.

Except for all the manual electric cars now on sale.

They'll just stop

I wonder if they'll beep their horns if you cut them up.

I guess you'd need to be a bit careful though. Anything you do to one of them and it'll probably just file a Police report with reams of data. In fact they're going to be a fucking wet dream for the security services. The entire road network filled with 360 degree CCTV cameras.

Yup.

I wonder what's going to happen with pedestrians - you'll be perfectly safe to just wander out into city traffic as it'll all stop for you, which will probably cause some problems.

Well you'll be safe from the vehicle but not necessarily from the occupants whose coffee just exploded all over the inside of their car. I was wondering how they would deal with a manually driven car tailgating.

Yes.

Just like normal cars, unless you're at the wheel.

There was that Ford Fiesta in Ireland that shopped is driver for drink driving to the fiveoh.

This is one of the main problems with them sharing roads with cars driven by humans in any significant numbers, they're preposterously easy to 'bully'.

I can envisage all sorts of shenanigans when the split is maybe 10/90 between driverless and human-controlled cars. TBH I can see them just having to make 'driverless only' zones or something like that, where the existing congestion charge zone is, that type of thing.

No more so than human driven cars. You get the odd cunt, certainly, but most people just want to get where they're going as quickly and/or as easily as possible.

They just need the odd random ones with road rage AI, they'll hunt you down like that trucker in Duel if you fuck with them.

How mysteriously timely

http://fortune.com/2017/11/07/google-wa ... iving-car/

Driverless lorry racing would be amazing.

Oh shit, that's huge.

[edit] @ Gaywood

Get to the driverless lorries thread.

Am I right in saying that in the US there's a shit load of municipal control over this stuff? Like, they can persuade the mayor of a town to let them run their cars there, and that's pretty much it. There's not all that much in the way of state and federal driving laws

Phillip Hammond to announce legislation for driverless cars in the UK by 2021 in the budget.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... nouncement

I drove in a driverless car today.. Albeit with a joystick as it was set to manual mode. The joystick was just like an Atari joystick so it was quite fun.

The first picture is of the automated vehicle being forklifted away as it malfunctioned and wouldn't release the brake.

Welcome, Agent Vision!

Amazing! I knew it looked familiar. Good work.

#ftag=COS-05-10aaa0j">https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/waym ... 05-10aaa0j

Onwards we go.

This may set them back a bit:

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... ssion=true

Ouch

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Unidentified Lady from Tempe, AZ