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My prediction of autonomous vehicles

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At first, I believe, that car software will try to mimic humans while staying clear of other erratic human behavior. It will also mean learning nuances of different municipalities road construction idiosyncracies. At first, this will seem like an AMAZING success. This will be followed by a few major accidents killing 50 or more people all at once. The news will be jumping all over the stories and politicians will be calling for more regulations. Then the pressure will really be on the car manufacturers to do a spectacular job. This will lead to standardized testing.

During the next phase, autonomous cars will become amazingly safe. People who look at the math will start pushing for outlawing human drivers. Moreover, the car manufacturers will suggest that without humans on the road we could improve safety and efficiency by 3X. For example I could see cars packing together, driving at 90 miles per hour with only one centimeter between them all.

At this point, you will start to see many changes in laws and businesses. Drinking and driving laws will start to change. Wet bars, desks, and big screen TVs will be what people want in a new car. Wealthy children may get their own car to take them to school. Less well to do will use services like Uber rather than owning their own car.

I think airport parking will be a thing of the past. Gas stations will only be on interstates. McDonald's will be the largest vehicle charging company. Rental properties might need to redo their electrical, giving some of their residents chargers.
 
I believe we're in for more safety at first. AP 2.0 autonomy won't roll out until it's going to be safer than a human driver by at least a factor of 2. The first thing for the safest possible autonomy is getting rid of the human element. Once (almost) all variables are known, things become far easier to predict and you can indeed start to eliminate human inefficiencies such as traffic. So your prediction will be pretty spot on, except I think we will start to see car ownership models go away, especially for those in major cities where parking is difficult and expensive. There's a big reason why UBER is so popular and efficient, and the Tesla Network will have a huge role in that.

Drinking and driving will be a thing of the past, but we'd still see public intoxication infractions.

Napping to work should become a thing, although some employers will probably capitalize on the newly found time.

Roads will not work like they do for human drivers, another form of infrastructure will be rolled out just for autonomous vehicles. This will eliminate stop signs/lights and possible even lanes as we know it. Although this is much more likely in the distant future.

I am thinking we will see roads dominated by driverless vehicles by 2030, and by then there will be a call to eliminate non-autonomous vehicles if possible.
 
Aggressive drivers are going to bully self-driving cars

Will robo cars retaliate if anti-bully mode is activated?
No, they should be docile. There are laws for blocking traffic, and it's an infraction. If you keep doing so, you will surely get in bigger trouble. I'm sure the cars will alert the user that there's something blocking its path and it will not be able to continue, and probably send a picture back to the user showing why it's unable to move.
 
Due to the fact that every autonomous car will have cameras with the ability to see night vision - it essentially brings CCTV to the road.

Being aggressive?
Doing an illegal manoeuvre?
Speeding?
That's recorded and can easily be sent to the police. Perhaps it is sent automatically and immediately to authorities by the very recognition of said illegal choice by human driver.
 
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...This will be followed by a few major accidents killing 50 or more people all at once. ...

It's the autonomous apocalypse!

Screen Shot 2016-11-29 at 7.46.37 AM.png
 
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...This will be followed by a few major accidents killing 50 or more people all at once.

The deadliest car accident in the history of the United States killed 28 people. You are predicting SEVERAL accidents even worse than this just because an autonomous car makes a mistake somewhere? What's the mistake exactly - a crazy programmer puts "Mow down pedestrians at the farmers market" in the code somewhere as an evil easter egg?

Survivor of biggest fatal vehicle accident in U.S. history comes forward to tell his story 50 years later | Daily Mail Online
 
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Yeah, I agree with the previous post. Why in the world would you imagine accidents killing 50 or more people all at once???? Once I read that, I had trouble taking anything in the post seriously because that is such a ridiculous statement. A random car could totally lose control and the odds of it accidentally killing 50 people are almost non-existant.
 
The deadliest car accident in the history of the United States killed 28 people. You are predicting SEVERAL accidents even worse than this just because an autonomous car makes a mistake somewhere? What's the mistake exactly - a crazy programmer puts "Mow down pedestrians at the farmers market" in the code somewhere as an evil easter egg?

Survivor of biggest fatal vehicle accident in U.S. history comes forward to tell his story 50 years later | Daily Mail Online

Here is the type of thing that I think will happen sometime in 202X.

I think a group of autonomous cars will communicate with each other, and group together on a trip. Each about a 3cm apart running at 80 MPH. One of the font cars will encounter a software bug driving it into a head-on collision. The following cars will follow blindly. Much like the blue angles did years ago.

Now it could be something completely different, but it will be an unforeseen software bug. Likely because two different sets of automotive engineers would have never guessed others would have done things differently.

I used to write storage device drivers. We would all follow the same specs, then we would get together for these plugfests. inevitably things would not quite work. But we got a lot solved in these meetups. But having all cars test with each other is a little more difficult.
 
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Each about a 3cm apart running at 80 MPH. One of the font cars will encounter a software bug driving it into a head-on collision

Not sure about the 3cm apart, but its certainly a possibility.

The car three-cars-back is at a safe distance from the first car, and will start braking as soon as the No.1 car is in trouble ... so only 3-ish cars are in the accident. 3-cars too many, for sure, but it won't necessarily be a 50 car pile up.
 
Not sure about the 3cm apart, but its certainly a possibility.

The car three-cars-back is at a safe distance from the first car, and will start braking as soon as the No.1 car is in trouble ... so only 3-ish cars are in the accident. 3-cars too many, for sure, but it won't necessarily be a 50 car pile up.

They could be even closer. Heck, they could even link up. Imagine several cars realizing the have the same general destination 50 miles away. They attach to each other and alternate propulsion, conserving charge...
 
Before we have full autonomy, we will have years of people and cars working together to drive. As the systems improve, they will depend less and less on humans until the driver is a rarely used redundancy. Today, autonomous systems can handle freeways; soon, urban areas (on clear days with well-marked lanes). Eventually, autonomous systems will be able to understand construction zones, pull over for ambulances, and even follow flagger and police directions... Only then will we have level 5.

Centaur Driving - Semi-Autonomous and the Quest for Level 5
 
Because I am a dork and an embedded software engineer I calculated that at highway speeds a car could travel 4cm in the amount of time for one car to tell the other car it would slam on the brakes. I am guessing to remain safe each car should publish to the car behind it, it's fastest braking speed so that the following car won't run into it.

For example, a semi might need more space if following a model 3.

But you can imagine that the rolling resistance could really be reduced if they could follow close together. Then they could take turns leading so that no one person spends all of his money breaking wind for the others. (I am just waiting for the fart jokes.)
 
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Why do people insist on the idea that autonomous vehicles would drive close together? Collisions at speed are expensive events so there's huge potential gain from avoiding them. Given that autonomy would be likely to _reduce_ traffic volume and raise efficiency anyway, we don 't need to be in a rush to move traffic closer together.
 
Oh, and the other thing that annoys me is the junk about moral dilemmas in inevitable collisions. There won't be any. Here is how autonomous systems will work:
1) Don't hit stuff
2) If you must hit stuff, hit the brakes.
Do (1) well and you dramatically reduce collisions.
Do (2) well and you dramatically reduce the severity of injuries and other damage in the remaining collisions.

Do both well and the results will be so fantastic that we'll laugh at the current concerns.
 
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What I don't understand in the equation is how autonomy would reduce traffic. It could render it smoother (someday, when there are no other human drivers anymore) and it could (immediately) alleviate parking problems, but wouldn't we also all tomorrow be tempted to use an autonomous car much more often, including for journeys which we now do by plane/train/tram/subway/bus?

That autonomy would reduce traffic is something I often read (so there's bound to be truth in it!) but I don't really understand why and how...
 
Why do people insist on the idea that autonomous vehicles would drive close together?

I guess because Drafting would save fuel, as well as increase vehicle-density on the road. No need to do that until the whole thing is sorted though, so a 2-second following gap (actually that's for a human, so closer would still be fine for a fast computer) seems to me to be a good idea during the journey from here to fully-proven-autonomous.

moral dilemmas in inevitable collisions

Not good if the car that I OWN has a choice between hitting a mother and pram that is in the road, or swerving into a tree ...
 
Yeah, I agree with the previous post. Why in the world would you imagine accidents killing 50 or more people all at once???? Once I read that, I had trouble taking anything in the post seriously because that is such a ridiculous statement. A random car could totally lose control and the odds of it accidentally killing 50 people are almost non-existant.
Except in Nice, France you mean, where a Semi truck killed over 80 people and injured hundreds more. Of course, this was on purpose, but still.
 
What I don't understand in the equation is how autonomy would reduce traffic. It could render it smoother (someday, when there are no other human drivers anymore) and it could (immediately) alleviate parking problems, but wouldn't we also all tomorrow be tempted to use an autonomous car much more often, including for journeys which we now do by plane/train/tram/subway/bus?

That autonomy would reduce traffic is something I often read (so there's bound to be truth in it!) but I don't really understand why and how...

I guess the idea is instead of parking close by at the malll your car could go a couple miles away charge and come back to front door to pick you up when you summon or set a time.

And traffic wise there would be less wrecks = less traffic