"
It will seat two people, propulsion will be electric, and at the start it will be limited to 25mph (40km/h) to help ensure safety.
"
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » Stuff
Google car - top speed 25mph
(15 posts)-
Posted 10 years ago #
-
"Pictures of the Google vehicle show it looks like a city car with a "friendly" face, designed to make it seem non-threatening"
as it crushes you under its wheels.
Posted 10 years ago # -
This is the future and I think will actually reduce car ownership and the number of large cars on the road.
A Google car* combined with an Uber style app could finally make City Car Clubs take off.
Why keep a car at your house when you can "hail" one via an app that will then send the car to your house then drive you to your destination. No need to keep a huge 4x4 for those occasional fully loaded trips. A two-seater "smart" Smart car will be enough for most people's every day needs. If you need a larger car for a journey then just request one on your app.
*other brands will be available
Posted 10 years ago # -
It would be perfectly possible to pool and share conventional cars right now. People don't because they invest in their vehicles emotionally. To many people you are what you drive.
I'd guess that this will be a generational divider. Neither of my niece and nephew have learned to drive. They couldn't afford to insure a conventional car even if they could buy one. Renting an autonomous vehicle may well make sense to them.
The crux will come with the first road death. It's bound to happen eventually, even if it takes years. Who, if anyone, will be liable? Manufacturer, operator, occupant?
Posted 10 years ago # -
That's an easy one to answer......
The Cyclist who got in the way!
Posted 10 years ago # -
Today's youngsters will possibly have more faith/greater confidence/less scepticism of autonomous vehicles, being brought up when readily-accessible powerful computing, digital mapping, digital image recognition and other forms of reliance on computer automation are already pervasive, if not all mature. For people old enough to remember Tomorrow's World, Autoroute's primitive vector mapping and cameras which didn't do things like detect/automatically focus on/wait for smiles to appear on faces there's bound to be some "what's different this time?" going on.
I want to know what happens around roadworks - presumably anything which looks like a cone or a stupid blown-over purple plastic barrier will be recognised and flagged in the car's brain. Presumably cars will share data with each other and pass anomalies to some form of centralised human operator (or some sort of equivalent of Amazon's Mechanical Turk or ReCaptcha's human-outsourcing pattern-recognition-harnessing service) in order to establish rules for any exceptions.
Going over the roadworks on the Black Isle end of the Kessock Bridge last week involved a couple of bits where the spacing between and arrangement of cones was not particularly clear at indicating where you were supposed to go. Will it rely solely on electric mapping data for route-possibilities or will it be able to follow a black-on-yellow "DIVERSION" or "DIVERTED TRAFFIC"-plus-arrow sign without freezing until it's remotely unlocked and told how to handle it?In some places, lane-demarcing paint is fresh, clear and visible. Elsewhere...
Posted 10 years ago # -
It would be perfectly possible to pool and share conventional bicycles right now. People don't because they invest in their vehicles emotionally. To many people you are what you ride.
Why do folk want to live in their own houses, when most of the time all the rooms are empty? Everybody likes *their* stuff, cars are no different really.
Posted 10 years ago # -
"Everybody likes *their* stuff, cars are no different really."
'Tis true.
Current Gov wants to stop people having 'too many rooms' (public sector only). This isn't very popular - for various reasons.
Govs could try something similar for 'under-used cars left at the side of public roads'.
But it wouldn't dare!
IF driverless cars become (near) 'perfect' then there would be no need to learn to drive, which could mean less attachment to the 'individual transport pods' and less car ownership.
Until then there is much more that can be done to alter the car/bike ownership/use 'balance'.
Posted 10 years ago # -
From what I've seen, driverless cars are already safer than human drivers, and that is at the very early stages of development (with the disclaimer that this is in sunny California, on limited & well modelled roads).
All the talk of the first person to be killed by one is very pessimistic. Who will be liable? I imagine the accident will be very well documented by every sensor/camera on the car, and show the car was not at fault.
The first accident involving one of these will be when a bad driver crashes into one.
On my commute this morning, all I could think of was "can't come soon enough".Posted 10 years ago # -
"People like their stuff"
Yes, and the stuff they like changes with time and technology: ebooks, mp3 downloads, Flickr accounts, cloud storage.....for many people more convenient/flexible/cheaper than what they replaced. (And I know that there are people who still like the physical object, but that doesn't change my point).
If the cost of owning/maintaining/storing a car reduces or disappears and a better alternative arise then people will choose it and they will have more to spend on other stuff: nicer houses, nicer bikes, donations to charity, whatever. And it will make the roads safer and less congested. It's all positive.
Most driving journeys aren't "for pleasure" - if they were then we wouldn't witness people reading/texting/doing make-up at the wheel like we do every day.
Driverless cars are going to have so many benefits that people will embrace them, from time freed up to do other things when commuting to changing the type of housing that people will buy. The thought "where will I park the car?" won't be a deciding factor anymore.
It may take 10 years or more to arise but it will happen. I may sound unduly optimistic but looking back at history it's been technological changes that have made the biggest transformation to lifestyles and I see no reason for this to change.
Posted 10 years ago # -
The biggest problem might be: what if the car/oil industries don't like the sound of it? What sort of aggressive shouldering might they employ to ensure people keep frittering money away on 'owning' their own vehicles?
Posted 10 years ago # -
I don't follow these things closely but it seems that a lot of people already don't own the car outside their house. They seem to use two year rental deals where you can walk away with nothing at the end of it, so long as you have low enough mileage and no dents.
Posted 10 years ago # -
They may not "own" the car but they are paying a large monthly outgo and also, in many cases, a premium for having that car parking space.
Posted 10 years ago # -
I understand the Chinese are planning what Dr. Karl from Radio 5 calls a moonshot project; in this case to convert the nation's cars to electric, and during the 22-23 hours a day that they sit idle, use them as a gargantuan battery to even out their grid's peaks and troughs.
Whether it could work over here through corporate convenience and hugeness rather than scary authoritarian government, I dunno.
Posted 10 years ago # -
I don't follow these things closely but it seems that a lot of people already don't own the car outside their house. They seem to use two year rental deals where you can walk away with nothing at the end of it, so long as you have low enough mileage and no dents.
You are indeed right, and that's why there's so few "old" cars on the road and it's so easy for people to "buy" cars. The manufacturers (or their banks) are lending people the money to "buy" the car and making the profit on the finance, not neccessarily the car.
Posted 10 years ago #
Reply
You must log in to post.
posts
