Self driving buses, trains, trucks etc

eeguy wrote: »

I suppose it's convenience and control.
You don't want to trek out to some business park or housing estate to pick up a rental car, but when the car comes to you it's convenient.

True. That overcomes a big limitation of Go car

Also, you as the owner don't want some lad stealing or rallying the sh*t out of your nice Tesla, but when the car is driving, recording everything that's going on and the user details are logged you feel safer putting it out for hire.

it's quite a different attitude towards your car though. It's a long way from the personal "pride and joy" idea that motor manufacturers are currently peddling. Maybe it will work more like the Netjets model. You pay a big enough subscription and get a guarantee that some vehicle will be available to you at short notice.

plodder wrote: »

though there would have to be some way to compensate the vehicle at the front for providing the "service" but not directly benefiting.

Actually they do benefit, a large portion of the total drag force is from the low pressure region at the rear of truck. The overall drag force on the two is less than if separate and gets distributed between the two (not fully sure ratio but suffice to say they both end up with less than if separate). In a three truck one the middle does get more advantage but it is still spread across them.

I do think it's not far off, it's not much more than adaptive cruise control which is in fair few new cars already. Definite saving to be had.

Also the idea of not doing it due to job losses is nonsense, so should we never of invented the spinning wheel or computer?

magicbastarder wrote: »

an article touching on one part of research i'm not hearing much about; the word 'autonomous' is usually used for self-driving cars, which implies their driving aids are self-contained, but is there much research being done into cars which talk to each other? surely there could be some robust, low-range (e.g. 500m) signal broadcast by cars - a bit like an IFF signal in airplanes - announcing location, direction, speed, etc.
would not have to be high bandwidth stuff - plus it could also assist with the issue of cars dealing with cyclists - e.g. if i had a GPS unit on my bike that would warn a car (or HGV) that i was 30m behind, it could have benefits here too.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2017/apr/07/autonomous-vehicles-will-only-work-when-they-stop-pretending-to-be-autonomous

Part of the autonomous will be communications. Car A will be going to location C and join a convoy of vehicles travelling to the same location. Similar to the HGV testing announced it'll mean that the majority of cars in the train will be using less energy. As they approach a junction priority will already be assigned so we won't need traffic lights for vehicles, pedestrians will still have lights to stop cars and since they are autonomous they won't be a risk of them running reds.

When fully autonomous vehicles are out I don't see people buying cars and homes will change to reflect this. Why would you own something that you can't control? People don't care about the taxi or bus that they take, bar that it's clean, so I can't see many owning a vehicle in cities. So therefore we can build without the need to consider cars as autonomous vehicles will be able to use much less space

magicbastarder wrote: »

i guess one possibility would be that there would be an app where i could input 'i want to go from A to B at approx. 7 this evening' and a people carrier would swing by and pick me up along with other people nearby it has matched to me with similar transport requirements; but this should be possible (albeit more expensive) with a human driver. would be curious if it's ever been tried.

The International Transport Federation are currently doing a desk study on Dublin and 3 or 4 other cities to model replacing ALL city transports (buses, cars, taxis) with a network of 6 and 12 seater vehicles for shared journeys. They did one city last year (Lisbon possibly) and projected a huge reduction in number of vehicles and a 92% reduction in space taken up by parked cars. This is potentially revolutionary stuff - changing how cities work completely.

tipp_Gunner wrote: »

The whole driverless vehicle concept still doesn't sit easy with me.

That said the lunatics I've encountered on the road overtaking strings of cars on bends recently, etc.... well perhaps driverless cars couldn't be any more dangerous

That's my immediate reaction - all the 'safety worries' about automated vehicles seems to ignore the current track record of human operated vehicles. We kill 3 or 4 people each week on Irish roads. in the US, about 100 people a day are killed on the roads. The automated drivers won't be falling asleep after driving for 16 hours, or checking WhatsApp on their phone or getting angry with other drivers.

I do have some concerns about the employment aspects, but it really is inevitable. We need to plan for those issues and manage them.

Yeah so with buses:

We currently don't have buses with two doors outside of Dublin. I've never heard a good reason for this. My guess is that the bus companies believe there would be too much of an issue with revenue protection - there are so many scummers here who would jump in without paying if there was a door not under the driver's nose. How's a driverless bus going get over that? How will it cope with 89 year old Bridie who simply won't put her FTP on the reader - she's never had to before and she's just not going to start now. And the tourist from Spain who wants to know how to get to "Dunes es tores" (pronounced Dunnes Stores by most of ye) - yes she has Google maps, but map reading is HARD work for some.

They'll all be replaced with driverless pool cars, you say? How many seats will be in each one - enough for Mam, Dad and the four kids? Or will the kids be expected to travel separately - how old do you have to be to travel alone? What if the kids car gets there before the parent one - will it hold them inside until the parents arrive? Will they have car seats and booster cushions that magically adapt to the child's age? Ramps that automatically roll out to cater for grandad in his wheelchair? What happens when the passenger starts having a seizure when the car is half-way from Dublin to Galway - if the car's not smart enough to detect that, pull over and call an ambulance, then we have a major reduction in service. What do you do if your pool car arrives, complete with used needles or condoms that the last passenger left in it? How many rural residents will be prepared to wait the extra 20 minutes that a pool car will take to get to their house at times when there's usually low demand - eg at 2am when someone's waters have broken earlier than expected and they'd like to get to the hospital before giving birth, please!

I'm sure that some driverless technology will be implemented sooner than we think. I'm equally sure it won't be as pervasive as you expect for a LONG time. The issues aren't technical, they are social. And enormous.

Hell - we've had electric vehicles for maybe 5 years. There's now talk of them being compulsory by what, 2040? that gives some idea of the timeframe for even a small technical change.

prinzeugen wrote: »

This report is a perfect example of why driverless trains (and even trains without guards, aka DOO (Driver only operation) should never happen.

https://www.gov.uk/government/news/report-112017-derailment-and-subsequent-collision-at-watford

Very, very lucky.

So even if we get to the stage where driverless trains are proven to be safer than human driven trains they shouldn't happen?

the driver can see the incident or hazard before hand meaning they can avoid it. the computer will only react at the last minute, which even at it's speed may not be enough. we are multiple decades off driverless trains on an open network anyway.

prinzeugen wrote: »

In effect that is a movable crash barrier, going at slow speed.

Not even close to a Driverless HGV going at 60 mph.

AI will only know something has happened after the incident.

A human can see a incident unfolding and take actions to avoid it. There are 100's, if not millions of dashcam vids on youtube of drivers doing some lightning fast maneuvers to avoid collisions etc.

You seem to be missing the blindingly massive point that ALL car crashes are due to human error.....
There are no such thing as accidents. They should be called negligents.