This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
“Let’s invent metal boxes with wheels that follow lines one the ground automatically to get you places.”
“Oh, you mean like trains.”
“Ew, no. They’re nothing like trains, these are ‘self driving cars’. They’re fool proof!”
tesla hits someone in a dense fog because it doesn’t have lidar
Queue surprised pikachu.
Wait. Those things rely on visual sensors only?? That moronic! I mean, more so that I originally though. Please tell me that they have them, but this particular one was malfunctioning.
Musk has sai d multiple times that humans can drive with vision alone, so cars shouldn't need LIDAR.
He ignores that humans also regularly experience optical illusions that contribute to poor driving and collisions, and that LIDAR is far less susceptible to such abberations.
Very early on, Tesla used lidar in addition to optical sensors. However, they only use optical sensors today and have for a while. Like many of the poor decisions at that company, the change to optical-only was made at Musk's demand.
IIRC, they uses to have radar, not lidar.
Correct they've never used lidar. However I will say that no manufacturer has actually solved the self-driving issue yet so nobody can definitively say what is and isn't required.
Trains are great for moving people but only from one designated area to another. With most commuters, they might be all headed to the same city but completely different parts of the city that aren't easy to access. Their homes might all be in the same city but a 45 minute bus ride to the 40 minute train ride to the 20 minute bus ride, which isn't helpful for what might have been a 45 minute commute by car to begin with.
Imagine if all the space between the primary radial arms of trains was filled in with street cars and pedestrian/micromobility centric spaces. Like the problem you are saying cars solve just doesn’t exist in the first place and people can still get around very easily. Even more rural folks can simply drive to the edge of this style of urban design if they need access to something. The reason bus rides are 45 minutes is because of the number of cars they have to put up with. The density of people that can be moved with shockingly good area coverage if cars are not a factor is incredible.
This sounds great but isn't really feasible in cities that are already built unfortunately.
Unless you replace every road with train tracks, trains can’t replace cars.
LiDAR is affected greatly by dense fog btw.
There is an obvious answer here that both the author and the people in this thread are ignoring.
Driving as a transportation method is a high risk/cost high flexibility/comfort solution.
Pretty much everyone who has accepted driving as their transportation method understands that it’s not the safest way, so a lot of drivers are always willing to take a little bit more risk to save money or something like that.
A better question is, why are we so okay with accepting such high risks for transportation. The human mind is terrible at risk assessment so I think it’s just a culture thing that car accidents are a part of life.
I don't know if you've noticed, but Americans are real good at ignoring issues that don't affect them personally.
Oh I won't wreck my car, I'm a "good driver"!
I can't catch Covid because it's not real!
School shootings are just false flags the government uses to pass gun control laws!
Donald Trump only wants to remove the dangerous immigrants, not the ones I hire for my business!
We need more people part of the FuckCars, Walk, Bike, & Public Transit online cultures
Need more outreach to get things happening even more. Also my comment on this post would solve a lot of things by not having to redo outreaching to people
Even better, the equivalent irl cultures. Most cities have groups advocating for better bike and pedestrian infrastructure and better public transit.
The technologies mentioned in the article:
lane-keep assist, automatic emergency braking (AEB), and blind-spot detection
AI-powered traffic systems
On-demand breathalyzers, smartphone saliva tests, and eye-tracking sensors
Only one of my cars has just one of those things (2015 Toyota Highlander and it's the blind spot monitor). That aside, all of my vehicles - cars and motorcycles - are paid off. I'm not going into debt just to have nannies yelling at me.
My vehicles are a means to an end. I would absolutely love more public transit, but there is just a single train station about 12 miles from my house, while my work is only 6 miles in the same direction. "You could bike" you might say, which is a fantastic idea. However, 90% of my commute is on a 55mph rural highway with minimal shoulders and zero bike lanes. It's literally a perfect candidate for a bus route, yet there are none, and I am not risking my life on a bicycle next to 55MPH traffic during commuting hours.
Now tell me how I'm the problem.
with every section it just became worse
All of those things are garbage and don't work, they just drive you nuts until you turn them off.
Public transportation or bust
I'm all for better safety features but perhaps an easier, cheaper, and more likely to succeed option to use is city planning/enforcement and change of current regulations. For instance, closing the loophole that lets car manufacturers ignore safety and emissions rules for "light truck" classified cars, which at this point is most of the oversized SUVs and pickups.
Alternatively having safer options for pedestrians and cyclists would help too, like having separated bike roads, and pushing highways and stroads out of residential areas and reclaiming city space for pedestrians. Public transit investment also helps reduce the number of drivers, which helps traffic and safety too.
I don't hate the idea of these extra AI tools like emergency braking being required or at least encouraged with stuff like safety ratings, but I think it's going to be very hard to get that implemented anytime soon considering you'd be fighting consumer interest(higher cost cars) and companies who don't want to have to make or license AI tools.
Edit: also the current regime in the US is more interested in de-regulating things to the point where I can get a happy meal wrapped in asbestos with a nice lead toy. So uh... Good luck
I don't hate the idea of these extra AI tools
Those are not AI.
considering you'd be fighting consumer interest(higher cost cars) and companies who don't want to have to make or license AI tools.
Openpilot is FOSS. Any OEM could use it without even asking permission.
The Problem is, the whole pedestrian and cyclist centric society only works of we also restructure the entire economic system to where workers have an extra hour and a half to two hours of free time outside of work. Because we already don’t have enough time for our families and children.
Like me for instance. I have like 3 waking hours to spend with my child (once you minus, cooking, cleaning, adulting) if I’m lucky each day. Driving to work is a highway exit away on the other side of town. With a car, that’s 6 minutes each way. On a bike? 40 minutes minimum. Public transit? With transfers, even longer.
And then you have to juggle picking up your child from childcare, etc with is ridiculous without a car. And living closer to your work is a funny idea unless you expect every neighborhood to have offices and warehouses representing every industry. I mean it sounds great for the upper middle class with shorter office jobs and the finances for that kind of lifestyle, but that’s just not feasible for real working class Americans in the economic system as it is currently
It’s for singles who can tralala themselves around on a bike or have a leisurely stroll to wherever they’re going and who don’t really cook or anything themselves.
but that’s just not feasible for real working class Americans in the economic system as it is currently
Nothing to do with economics, everything to do with city planning and resource allocation. Public transit and bikes are a bad option in the US because the transit is completely underfunded, "only poor people take the bus", and bike paths, even pedestrian paths (if they even exist) are sent on detours around car infrastructure instead of cutting through everything.
And then you have to juggle picking up your child from childcare, etc with is ridiculous without a car.
My mum did just fine first coming by with the bike, putting me on the back seat, then swinging by the supermarket, groceries in the front basket, later on coming by with the bike, me riding along on my own, still swinging by the supermarket. We were driving on calm backstreets and through a park which was actually the most direct route, much more direct than with a car as you'd have to get onto the collector, first. Got more than one kid to wrangle? Put them in a trailer, or get a suitable cargo bike. They can even have seatbelts.
No, you don't need a warehouse full of washing machines in every neighbourhood. People don't shop for washing machines daily. People don't need cars to shop for them, either, delivering bulky stuff makes a ton of sense. Groceries? Wherever you were that day, a supermarket should only be like a two or three minutes detour.
And it's not like European cities didn't go down the car-centric route, mind you. Difference being we realised it's a stupid idea.
It seems really time consuming still for not much gain. I mean I value public transit because I’ve always wanted to live in a big city with a metro, but bikes seem impractical with the weather, terrain etc. and I hate going for groceries, etc so don’t it more often along the way is a nightmare.
I just don’t think people have that kind of free time, because how many people can work ten minutes via bike from where they live?
The question is rather "how many people have a metro station within walking/biking distance" and "how many long-haul trips do you need to make".
Over here we don't set aside half a day (or more) to to drive to walmart to buy groceries for a fortnight, we pick stuff up as we need it when we're out, anyway. Dropping into the supermarket to grab some things is like a five minute detour if you know what you need and where it is. You can spend the metro ride thinking about what to cook, buy what you need, then get going.
According to statistics commute times in Europe are actually slightly longer than in the US, but that doesn't take into account that combining trips is much easier over here and that riding public transport gives you time to, whatnot, knit, biking or walking counts as exercise, while driving a car counts as, at best, nothing, at worst, the road rage will ruin your day.
I'm not saying that you, personally, can flip a switch and make it work for you, on the contrary: The reason that you're not doing it organically is because the infrastructure where you live is right-out designed to not make it work for you. What I suggest is that instead of saying stuff like "It cannot be the case that Europeans are living better lives, they must be imagining things" you say, to your compatriots, "How are those bloody europoors better at this we are supposed to be the best let's figure out how to beat them". Or at least that's how I imagine motivating Americans looks like.
Agree also a good catalyst to help solve almost all of our problems is having Revolt, & Matrix community servers setup where people can join based on their State, & also other community servers for their Country too.
With the goal of having a single spot where people get together online to get things done collectively, inform each other about all kinds of good and bad things, discuss topics, make stuff happen for better, collaborate on projects, have fun together, educate each other, & much more
I'm one of a couple hundred people working on it but need more people on board to do it.
We The People means Unity in every sense of the word in person and online to get things done together by doing. Being focused, & locked in instead of all of us doing things by ourselves
Because too many people in too many industries that would be negatively affected have too much money.
The technologies to end a lot of problems exist. We aren't using them because the oligarchs think it's better this way.
This is definitely a great example of individuals being obstinate and entitled. Just mention you support speed cameras on all roads and find out how many of your friends think speeding is a good given human rights.
Speed cameras are a privacy issue that doesn't solve the problem of speeding. People are most comfortable driving the speed the road is designed for, and if that speed is too high, the solution is to modify the road for a safer speed. The speeders in your example are right here, for the wrong reason; speed cameras should be rare if they're allowed to exist at all. They have, at most, a short term benefit, and broad public surveillance is a very serious issue they contribute to.
It's my understanding that speed cameras don't actually make roads safer, they just generate revenue for the city.
In my city a program of speed cameras was instituted about a decade ago. A private speed camera corporation lobbied the city to install, maintain and administer the system. Whoever it was that they bribed to approve it did so and the system was installed. For the first year it brought in a bunch of money extorted from the citizens. Then the revenue dropped below the minimum amount that the corporation wrote into the contract as their cut (people figured out where all of the cameras were). At that point the system was costing the city money rather than generating revenue as the corporation had promised. So they started using mobile cameras. This worked for a short time but the blowback was sharp. In the end the system was scrapped.
One of the many things I like about Subaru is that they seem to move useful features from optional to standard, once they've had a chance to prove themselves. I bought an Outback in 2016 and paid extra for the EyeSight safety system. Two years later that car was destroyed in an accident (I was T-boned and rolled over twice, without anyone being hurt). I bought another Outback to replace it, but by that time the EyeSight was a standard feature. Subaru now includes EyeSight on all their cars because it saves lives.
They had done similar things with other safety features. Four-wheel disc brakes, anti-lock braking, and all-wheel drive became standard on Sabarus relatively early.
It is also worth noting that the more intrusive EyeSight features, like lane assist, are easy to turn off. There's a button on the steering wheel for that one. Even if you turn it off, the car will still warn you if you start to cross lanes without using your turn signals, but it will not adjust for you.
What technology?
Safety features like lane-keep assist, automatic emergency braking (AEB), and blind-spot detection...
... AI-powered traffic systems that predict and prevent accidents....
Impaired driving is also solvable. On-demand breathalyzers, smartphone saliva tests, and eye-tracking sensors... Uber is already testing real-time driver sobriety verification...
Why aren't we using it?
The article doesn't have an answer.
A Tesla in FSD randomly just veered off the road into a tree. There is video. It makes no sense, very difficult to work out why the AI thought that looked like a good move.
These tools this author is saying we have do not work how people claim they do.
Because people want to drive theur cars instead if let a system handle everything perfectly. Theres no way to have safe driving with people behind the wheel.
Autonomous vehicles. They don't get high, they don't get distracted, and if they're made by literally anyone except for Tesla, they have superhuman vision and not only don't have blind spots, they can also see in the dark and see through steam and fog.
More sensors in the car might help a bit, but the real problem in US is its car dependent infrastructure. If the only way home after a night in the pub is by car, then you’re going to get a lot of drunk drivers. Add to this that bikes have to share road with cars, then it’s a death sentence to ride bike by night.
My cars are old and don’t have any of this, and my one experience in a rental car with lane keeping assist was that it pushed me towards a highway barrier in construction where the original lane lines weren’t in use. Terrifying.
