Starting later this month, Uber will allow customers in downtown Pittsburgh to summon self-driving cars from their phones, crossing an important milestone that no automotive or technology company has yet achieved. Google, widely regarded as the leader in the field, has been testing its fleet for several years, and Tesla Motors offers Autopilot, essentially a souped-up cruise control that drives the car on the highway. Earlier this week, Ford announced plans for an autonomous ride-sharing service. But none of these companies has yet brought a self-driving car-sharing service to market.
Uber’s Pittsburgh fleet, which will be supervised by humans in the driver’s seat for the time being, consists of specially modified Volvo XC90 sport-utility vehicles outfitted with dozens of sensors that use cameras, lasers, radar, and GPS receivers. Volvo Cars has so far delivered a handful of vehicles out of a total of 100 due by the end of the year. The two companies signed a pact earlier this year to spend $300^aEURmillion to develop a fully autonomous car that will be ready for the road by 2021.
The robotisation of transportation – personal, professional, commercial, and industrial – will be one of the most far-reaching and uprooting developments in recent human history. Transportation is a relatively large part of the workforce, and over the coming decades, many of those jobs will disappear – putting a huge strain on the economy and society.
On top of that, car ownership will start to slow down, and since automated cars will make more efficient use of available road surface, we’ll eventually get to the point where we need to rethink our entire infrastructure and the way we design our living space – only 60-70 years after the last time we completely rethought our living space.
We’ve talked about this before, but The Netherlands completely redesigned (at least the western half of) the country for two things: one, to maximise agricultural production, and two, to prepare the environment for mass car ownership. We succeeded at the former (The Netherlands is the second largest exporter of agricultural products, after the US, but before Germany – despite our tiny surface area), but we only partially succeeded at the latter (traffic jams are a huge problem all over the country).
As an aside: when I say “redesigned the country”, I literally mean that the entire map was redrawn. This map should illustrate really well what the Dutch government, the agricultural sector, and industry agreed upon to do; the ‘messy’ part is the swampy, irregularly shaped way it used to look, while the straight and clean part is what they turned it into. Gone are the irregularly shaped, inefficient patches of farmland only navigable on foot and in boats, and in their place we got large, patches of land, easily reachable by newly drawn roads to make way for cars and trucks (still countless waterways though; they are crucial for making sure the entire western half of the country doesn’t flood).
My parents and grandparents lived through this massive redesign, and according to them, it’s very difficult to overstate just how massive the undertaking really was.
It’s unlikely said redesign will be undone on a massive, regional scale, but at the local level, I can foresee countless pro-car infrastructure and landscaping changes being undone because it’s simply not needed anymore. For instance, many towns in my area – including my own – used to have a waterway (like so) running alongside their Main Street (generally ‘Dorpsstraat’ in Dutch), but in order for a Main Street to be ready for cars, people had to walk elsewhere; the waterways were often filled up and turned into footpaths or sidewalks, so cars could drive on Main Street.
Over the coming decades, I can definitely see such changes being undone in certain places – especially more tourist-oriented towns such as my own. With fewer and fewer cars on the roads, we can start giving space back to people, and while this may not be a big deal in a spacious country like the United States, it will be a revolution here in The Netherlands, the most densely populated western country (that isn’t a city state), and in classic cities like, say, Rome or Amsterdam.
All I’m trying to say is that self-driving car technology will, inevitably, have side-effects that many people simply haven’t even considered yet. All of us consider cars a normal aspect of our everyday lives and environment, to the point where we’ve forgotten just how much space we’ve conceded to the things. Once the dominance of cars starts to come down like a house of cards, our environment will, quite literally, change.
That’s an astonishing statistic. It’s also completely untrue.
The US, China and India each produce more agricultural commodities by weight each year than the entire European Union.
Edited 2016-08-18 22:59 UTC
Made an error – it should read “exporter”, not “producer”. Fixing.
Being NL such a Northern Nation, with such a world class commercial heritage, surprise me a lot their strategic insistence at becoming an agricultural power, also
[NL could buy anything they want, from all over the World].
Because Netherlands’ agriculture is an industry, with “artificial” production methods : Growing oranges under plastic greenhouses, huge hangars where cows or chicks never see the sun, perfect flowers grown in a perfectly controlled environment…
Next stop is these kinds of things:
http://www.digitaltrends.com/cool-tech/japan-automated-factory-lett…
What always surprises me is how long that took.
Milk robots have existed for much longer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Vo4NJU5wTk
“The US, China and India each…”
Even if today’s China is probably the more capitalistic country in the World, They, nor Indian People are considered that much “western”, yet.
Nobody suggested they are.
China isn’t even remotely capitalist… it’s communist. The largest companies there are government owned and controlled.
The USA is currently corporate.
Free market capitalism could thrive but corruption keeps it down…
Sorry, but that’s simply not true. The only thing about China that’s communist is the name of the leading party. China is nowhere near to communism. Heck, they don’t even claim to be communist. They might claim to be socialist, but even that is only true for a part of the population.
And that is just as silly as saying the US is socialist/communist for the people that serve or served the military, which might be even more true (education, benefits, …).
China is simply has a pretty different political culture, but it’s still more capitalist than anything.
And not saying it’s democratic. It’s kind of its own thing, with a giant party, that in itself sometimes(!) has more differences than Democrats and Republicans to give an example.
The main reason for me to point that out is that there are and were south American countries that are closer to communism/communist socialism, and current China is neither politically close to them nor to the Soviet Union.
Sorry, but despite calling themselves socialist/ socialistic communist they today just are not anywhere near to any kind of serious definition, other than a party claiming to be and maybe the authoritarianism (which is authoritarianism and not communism!).
Yes, they are not western, yes the are not democratic and authoritarian, they do things that authoritarian regimes did (left, right, nationalist, socialist, religiously fanatic, monarchies, …), but they are still not socialist or socialist communist . which is the idea it a long time was based on “a thousand years of socialism will lead to real communism”.
For more on what I mean see Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ideology_of_the_Communist_Party_of_Chi…
Edited 2016-08-19 20:06 UTC
China is a corrupt Oligarchy practising limited free market principles. Their government is basically fascism by committee. Rather than just having one fascist dictator. The party is the dictator. The fascist ^A¨Communist^A¨ party controls the majority of the wealth of the country for the benefit of its own members not the benefit of the general population.
Self driving cars are a problem in that right now Uber is going to gain a global monopoly on transport. There needs to be a proper debate held now on government vs private ownership of companies which employ no one and which seek to charge rent for services. Companies like Uber are going to lead to a vast shift in financial fairness in economies, there are going to be fewer people holding a bigger share of the wealth than we currently have.
Edited 2016-08-21 22:35 UTC
Isn’t it strange that people still think China is communist?
Lots of variables. Expecting a rails come back, as oil cease to be exploited as energy resource. Planing has to be reassessed in order to reduce that huge, daily human transit pulsating in and out of metropolitan areas [as far as 2h+2h for some World cities. This is important for CO2 policy].
Just a personal perspective, but staple-supplies-delivery an earlier&easier target to land drones [than Human transport].
Lacking Systemic-Tech&Legislation&Infrastructure pushing air drones farther in time.
I’m not believing these stories about how self-driving cars will change everything.
The future will certainly be different from now, but all these theories about future cars and trucks (lorries ?) reminds of the flying cars and atomic trains predicted in the 60’s for 40 years later. We’re still waiting.
First, having for the 2020’s real self-driving vehicles where you can get rid of the driver on public roads and arbitrary destinations is, IMHO, total bullshit. Uber’s announcement is pure PR.
For the transformation of roads and car ownership, there is no direct relation with automatic driving. Reducing security distances between vehicles is dangerous even with electronic devices reacting faster than humans, because electronics and software sometimes fails, or something falls across the road, or a tire explodes, or it rains, etc.
Self-driving cars will actually respect speed limitations, security distances, and may actually lower road capacity.
For ownership, many people already don’t have cars in large cities, and there are all sorts of vehicle renting for many decades. What is new here ?
European cities have focused a lot since the last 40 years on public transport and are quite hostile to cars (high car park prices, narrow roads giving preference to busses and bicycle lanes…). All cities in the 70’s where gray with layers of pipe exhaust smoke.
There is no reason to encourage traffic jams in self-driving cars where you can have subways (many have been automatic for more than 20 years), tramways, busses and electric bicycles.
Giving way to cars is so backwards in Europe, even if it is a self-driving electric metal can.
For many trucks which travel hundreds of kilometers on the highway and fixed paths automation is certainly easier, but having fully automonous, safe vehicles is incredibly expensive and more prone to failures, as shown by aeronautics : Safety critical equipment are redundant, with several independant sensors and actuators, and overprovisioning, and years of fine-tuning.
And maybe Netherlands agricultural changes are also related to having larger farms with fewer peasants from traditionally inherited small fields scattered among many families (In France, this was called “remembrement”, and results from the radical changes in agricultural production and mecanisation). The revolution was the tractor, the combined harverster (“moissonneuse-batteuse”), which allowed larger fields, far more than railways, highways and roads across the countryside.
Finally, It is quite crazy that companies as Google which are so much involved in “cloud computing”, remote applications, conferencing… are so hostile to letting people work from home. Why should you sleep to work in your self-driving car clogged in traffic jams instead staying at home ? A significant part of the workforce could spend at least half their work time at home.
“Robotisation of transport” : Meh.
But the main difference here is that the complexity and cost vs the potential gains doesn’t play out. I think it has more to do with economy than anything else.
I am not saying there are no gains, but just that the gains compared to costs are not anywhere as near as you not having to pay a truck driver, that for very long roads doesn’t need to do very complex work.
For a flying car you probably would need new infrastructure, many systems to avoid bad things to happen, you would need to educate “drivers” way better, you would need someone that knows piloting and driving and everything that combines it.
Or you would maybe need some automation, which is what self driving cars offer.
Might turn out to be wrong, but to me flying cars never really seemed to be a plausible evolution. You’d more likely advance aircrafts and maybe teach them to drive.
And then there is hovering. That would probably make city life more annoying. Know how it is when a car goes through mud next to you and you get in on you? Imagine something like that with every kind of dirt. It’s not pleasant to stand next to a helicopter.
I think automation of something that’s there is much more sane.
I see flying cars more like jetpacks. They are cool, just like flying cars, but they are pretty impractical for most things and both face problems like stability and energy efficiency.
You are right, this is a bad analogy.
I’m also quite biased by my experience in aeronautics where everything safety critical is incredibly complex and expensive to develop. One must prove the behaviour of the equipments for all inputs values and scenarios, with all weird degraded modes where the system must gracefully support losing sensors or actuators. And there is redundancy. And dissemblance between independant critical systems. And even more redundancy to allow flying for some time with some defective equipments. And a crazy amount of documentation… etc…
Of course, the economies of scale of cars can reduce costs in a way that many other industries can only dream of, but there is nothing simple in making a reliable self driving car and it is orders of magnitude more complex than an aircraft autopilot following waypoints and TCAS avoiding collisions. And still there are accidents sometimes, because a Pitot tube freezes, because an old screw worns out…
Maybe it is more doable for cars because when an aircraft crashes there is a lot of media attention, an official investigation and mandatory corrective actions. For cars, anything better than the average human is progress, even if sometimes some drunk software will randomly kill pedestrians.
The “self-driving trucks” future could be also be compared to the situation in Switzerland, where they actively try to minimize the number of trucks crossing the country, using trains, digging railways tunnels (Gothard…).
You can put a truck on a train, keep the chauffeur for the next load or make him sleep in the train, for long distances it can be faster and more efficient, and generate less pollution, and make motorways less dangerous.
There are many ways to change how people and goods are transported. Automatic cars everywhere is just a possible future, among many others.
A plane can’t stop in mid-air. A car can simply slow to a halt with the hazard lights flashing if something goes wrong. The driver can simply hit the ‘Manual’ mode switch and start driving again.
That said I still think autonomous cars are mostly hype.
Durrr, they can! Haven’t you seen The Fifth Element? Multipass!
I agree and I agree on your note that we are in a hype and that it will likely not be the way people expect, just because there are many things that can happen and it’s not good to have people predict the future and thing “that’s exactly how it will be like”.
I also think that we are in a current phase of hype, where predictions, especially further than a few months make seem people mostly ridiculous.
Of course that’s what companies kind of have to do, selling visions to potential investors and customers. That’s just the way things are done in the current times.
Even with HD video, still doesn’t believe at Franky Zapata creature. If true, no doubt it will be monopolized by military wing. Being of the shelf tech, just until a credible industry is born around the concept.
http://newatlas.com/franky-zapata-flyboard-air-video/42734/
Kind of the same gut feeling -on the near term. Yet they made the announcement, knowing -and maybe pondering- the damage at their own low rank. A rushed attention call to Investors maybe.
Autonomous car relationship to cars is the same as smartphone relationship to early mobile handsets. That means that the paradigms that should be applied, should be the ones of a server and not of a car. This affects the construction period, the usage expectancy, the upgradeability, the security and much more. If we think about the deadly Tesla crash, we must come to the conclusion that in order to make the world more secure because of autonomous driving, we must make the world more computer-friendly, so we must not rely just on sensors, but also invest massively into car-to-X communication to help digital car to find orientation in a completely analog world. I expect that all traffic infrastructure must be upgraded with IoT devices, everything what has wheels (wheelchairs, Segways, skateboards, etc) must have a beacon and even pedestrians and cattle should have them to increase safety. The change will be similar as with introduction of traffic lights and pedestrian lanes.
I keep telling my dad how this will have him out of a job but he seems to think it won’t happen in his lifetime. He works at a truck stop. I don’t think it will be long before haulage companies see the benefits of not needing drivers and of course this means no truck stops either.
I’m a car enthusiast and love driving but at the same time I find this whole revolution going on to be very exciting. Should bring big benefits for many people.
I’m afraid you’ve been drinking the anti-freeze too much.
Back in the early days of motoring in the UK, vehicle speed was strictly limited and even for a while, had to have a man carrying a red flag walk in front of the car.
Fast forward to self driving cars.
I predict that once these get on the road, they will be followed everywhere by at least one car carrying a lawyer who will be recording every movement of the car so that it can be used in the inevitable lawsuit(s) that will result from a collision.
Legal systems will also have to change and that may scupper the introduction. After all, you have to have a license to drive a car. What happens when there is an accident and it is the cars fault? Who suffers the legal panalty then? There is no driver to take a license away from.
For cars, yes, but I don’t think this is a big deal. The car company or the mechanic causing the issue will have to pay.
It’s similar to things like an elevator and other automatic systems. There are only two differences. One is that there are two parties involved and the other that there are is that those systems are of course more complex.
It will of course be effort and take time, but I really don’t think it will be a major burden, as such laws usually get made according to similar/simpler situations. Of course that could mean that there are laws that don’t make much sense, but that wouldn’t be the first time.
Another thing is that it will probably have time to come along. Right now there is a first generation of self driving cars coming up, that is mostly still human controlled. There are already laws being passed, so there is attention to these kinds of topics.
And the argument that it is less likely to be killed when using a self driving cars, which at some point will be verified by long term studies will maybe push that matter.
I wonder more about whether that means that cheaper insurances (or more expensive ones, depending on how you see it), will be a strong push for self driving cars, simply because they might have lower running costs.
Interestingly some of these transformations are already happening elsewhere. The city of Milan for example was crossed by waterways which led all the way to the Adriatic sea. They were mostly covered after WWII to make space for roads but part of them has recently been unearthed and restored and there’s plans to restore more:
https://landscapeiskingston.wordpress.com/2015/04/02/la-darsena-the-…
This is a process which is likely go forward in north-eastern Italy; which had a rich canal infrastructure built during the renaissance – especially in the ares owned by the republic of Venice – and mostly abandoned post-WWII.
The same happens already in the Netherlands (perhaps Thom isn’t aware since he’s stuck in the North-West
), e.g. in Utrecht, where formerly ditched canals are reopened.
Come on, isn’t that done only for the tourists? Urban landscaping etc? There is not economic benefit to reopen old waterways only for yuppies to have a good view…
All mayor towns in Holland are already connected by a canal system (since the 19th century)
Happy yuppies have a positive economic impact. [Unless the urban change stress their quotidian transit].
During the age of exploration, the Dutch were a mini world-power in many things including map making, trading and trade vessels, and the Dutch language served as the language of trade, being acceptable to the Spanish as enemies of England.
I’m sure they’ll handle autonomous driving much better than most, as they have done with cycling and agriculture. Precise and intelligent civil engineering seems to be their wont.
The self-driving car is a pipe dream that will never happen. There are a lot of immovable practical obstacles that make it impossible and that should be obvious once you actually think about it.
Thinking about why we still have train drivers despite this being ripe for automation is merely the tip of the iceberg.
Good point with trains.
well, kind of.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_s…
No kind of about it. Even trains which are supposedly automated have staff to oversee them.
The notion we are going to get people loaning out cars that will drive around by themselves picking people up as taxis is an utterly fanciful notion dreamed up by people in glass towers.
well, I guess you didn’t spend much time there. There are some fully automated trains listed. There are also some fully automated trains that also have human operators that don’t do things. So a few that support your position and a few that go against. Its tough to judge just from whats there. I certainly have read of human operator error with trains, and witnessed the aftermath of a few ” train driver fell asleep at wheel” after maths. Not scientific, but I’d trust the robot train operator. Probably would trust a driverless uber in an urban enviornment too.
I’m afraid you’re not thinking hard enough about the corner cases of this, and those corner cases only have to happen once.
I to believe that the self driving car is more a great lab experiment than something in the real world. But training drivers is not the issue. We train drivers to give them the mechanical skill of apply the right amount of force to the various gadgets in the vehicle in order to position the car properly on the road. We also train them in knowledge of traffics laws, signs, and responsibilities of drivers. Nothing about driving a vehicle is intuitive.
What we should be amazed by is the simple truth that we have no automated train systems out in the wild. Outside of the shuttle systems within airports and what not, we’ve had them for some time.
But not in public transit. And an automated train is a far far easier problem to solve than a free roaming vehicle.
BART at one time was fully automated, but it proved unreliable.
So, public transit trains are still facilitated and supervised (if not actually operated) by human beings. Not because of “Unions!”, but because the risk is too high. Still.
Los Angeles is still adding lines, and adding trains. And there is no talk whatsoever of automating this system, as it runs street level. With humans driving the trains, and humans driving the cars, we still routinely have collisions.
So, get me an automated transit system. Solve a simpler problem first. Until then, yea, I think we’re at the 90% phase of automated driving, and the last 10% is going to take far, far longer then many think.
So, it was business as usual whether automated or not.
This is an automated railway…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway
It isn’t. Staff are always on the trains – and for very good reasons.
They think this is a good idea… in Pittsburgh, of all places? Granted, if one of these could navigate Pittsburgh it could probably navigate damn near any city in the country. If is the operative word however, and I’ve sure got my doubts.
Has a lot of sense… It will be a lot easier to blame the impacted, human driver </joke>
Harvesters are about to be CPU upgraded…
And given ‘executive’ power
Sonny was right
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I,_Robot_%28film%29
“The Center will aid in local job creation and further the well-deserved reputation of the Steel City for its growing innovation sector. Uber and CMU will hold an event in Pittsburgh to formally kick off the partnership in the coming weeks.”
From the land of BASIC, to the World.
Resource https://newsroom.uber.com/uber-and-cmu-announce-strategic-partnershi…
Via http://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2016/08/uber-self-driving-c…
Always have seen this as a way for government to use large sum of money for something else for the very reason of improving the self driving capability of cars and extending the solutions for powering them (solar roadways or what are they calling them now).
We moved a long way in this department (thanks to mobile devices) especially in car renting or accessing means of transportation based on public reviews / certifications but having this automated and putting your life at stake just because someone else says it’s safe to use is childish.
IMHO pretty radical.
In crowdd countries like The Netherlands, UK, etc, I predict that in 20 years we won’t own the cars that we use every day.
We will have city and even nationwide Car Clubs. Where we get the use of a car for a defined period for our OWN use. The rest of the time we will be using shared driverless cars.
I hear people already bleating about their 30mile commute to work.
Many of those journeys will not be needed as you commute electronically from home. Those that need to travel will do so via train, bus etc. With less cars on the road your journey will be speedier. Cars will be either Electric or Hybrid. Hopefully leccy cars will have 300+ mile ranges as a minimum.
All houses will have solar panels and storage.
Naturally, the USA will be still in the dark ages with the latest version of the F-150 getting only 22mpg from its 10 ltr engine. Ok, so I’m joking but the models that work in many places just won’t work in places like the USA. In some cities it will but like current US Public transportation, it is patchy.
Sadly, I probably won’t be around to see this next transport revolution.