Brad Ideas - Robocars: The Roadmap to getting there - Comments

Drafting

Floccina — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 11:44:30 -0700

Cars that drive themselves could be made to communicate which would allow close drafting on the highway greatly reducing highway fuel use.

Robocars alone

brad — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 15:22:43 -0700

The problem is that developing special road networks is expensive, and banning human drivers on them is really expensive. Especially when there is a chicken and egg problem. Few robocars exist, so what justifies their dedicated lanes? Few dedicated lanes so who buys an expensive (at first) robocar that can only do what it does best in a limited area?

There are some possible intermediates. For example robocars on highways (with human drivers) but not on city streets. Or possibly vice versa, because possibly slow-speed complex driving is easier to solve than high speed simple driving because reaction times are better. One can’t say.

But I think the challenge must go out the engineers to be much safer than humans on today’s roads. That vehicle then is an easy choice to buy as it can go everywhere that it’s legal to go in one, ie. your whole city or whole state highway network or whole interstate system etc.

Your approach seems easier, but the question is, which happens faster — the political and financial changes necessary to build a large network of dedicated robocar-only roads, or the robocar engineers working so as to not need that?

Robocars

Ash6 — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 22:06:28 -0700

One of the overall problems is that the intermediate stage (ie mixing Robocars with human driven vehicles) is going to be much more difficult to acheive than the end stage of Robocars only(particulaly from a safety point of view).
I am a strong believer that robocar will happen. But despite the excellent arguments you make in your road map, I think that the ability of Robocars trying to avoid accidents would be unable to compete against the ability of humans to cause them.
Also in the early years of development, robocars will need to travel at a slower speed than humans and this would cause too much frustration.
I think that it will prove necessary to install a robocar network that uses roads free of general cars.
The concept could be first developed in a large test area (perhaps a gated community beside a major university) and then set up as a hub and spoke model in a major city (maybe a very congested European city running out of tranport options).
The hub could be the CBD and the spokes could run out to residential areas and car parks. This I think would be a more technically acheivable option than putting humans and computers together on our roads.
Humans can cause computers to crash just with a few key strokes, imagine what they could do to them with a 2 ton SUV.

links

Ian — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 12:48:00 -0700

I hope you will consider joining the Advanced Transit Association (advancedtransit.org) if you haven't already. Some of our members promote your ideas and are developing them. I haven't seen a link here to cybercars.org, which gives a lot of links to European companies and research. There are some cybercars/robocars in operation in Europe.

getting there without admitting it

John Markos O'Neill — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 05:51:14 -0700

I suspect that we can get much of the way towards the robocar vision without actually admitting it. That is, as you described, robocars will be sold as regular cars with crash-resistance built in as a feature. Then, as people realize that they can tune out while "driving," they'll start paying less and less attention. At some point, people will admit that they are actually passengers and not drivers, but at first it will be, "I'm just letting the crash-avoidance system take over for a few seconds while I find my kid's sippy cup." Those few seconds turn into minutes as people learn what they can get away with.

Whoops

Yoozer — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:37:58 -0700

edit: Should've read the "Objections" page. Since the roads are already very wide, just painting lines and making laws protecting cyclists might do the job in the meantime.

Not only robocars, but infrastructure

Yoozer — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 03:32:50 -0700

While there's few things I'd love more than step into a car and not worry about driving at all to work - it's not driving for pleasure at all, but a stress- and congestion-filled mess - the bigger issue is that right now, the US is very much based on the idea of cheap fuel. It's not just the efficient robocars that have to change the transport landscape, but also the infrastructure.

Changing the infrastructure and allowing people to use a bike or to just walk instead of infrastructure being hostile to these forms of transport would also do good - because it'd eliminate the need for a car for smaller distances. The 3-wheeled Aerorider you showed can negate concerns about weather and carrying things - it's just that the cost is much higher than that of a conventional bike, which couldn't work as smoothly in regular traffic due to its lack of speed.

Robocars: The Roadmap to getting there

brad — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 14:39:19 -0700

In part two of my series on Robocars, let me introduce:

The Roadmap to Robocars

Here I outline a series of steps along the way to the full robocar world. We won’t switch all at once, and many more limited technologies can be marketed before the day when most cars on the road are computer driven. Here are some ideas of what those steps could be — or already are.