When will cars be able to drive themselves?

Chauffeurs are expensive. When will most Americans be able to buy a car that will drive itself?

 

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There are all ready cars that can drive automatically, there are aeroplanes
that can fly without pilots, trains that can work without drivers, why do we still have people at the controls--------------.

 

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-------in case the computer unexpectedly reboots.

 

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Don't know where you live but most Americans (and pretty much all countries) don't HAVE chauffeurs.

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When they return to being "legs"

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Screw legs. I want a car that I can tell it where to go and it gets me there, while I drink champagne in the back and watch football on t.v.

 

Well, they can already park themselves.
We will have cars that can drive themselves when we make roads that work with them. It will never happen with the roads we have now.

 

Why won't it work with the road we have now? We have GPS. That'll tell the car where it is. We have cell phones and long distance radio transmitters. This will tell the cars where they are in relation to one another, as well as their speed.

 

How accurate is GPS? even a metre out will send you into a ditch.

 

The GPS system would never handle it - not our current one, anyway. Given the millions of cars on the roads at peak driving times and their density and speed, updates from the GPS birds would be needed for EACH one every few milliseconds. The system is NOT designed to handle that kind of volume.

Mass transit is a much better answer - and it will get even better.

 

Why not cell phones. The car can broadcast exactly how far it has driven and what changes in direction it has made every millisecond. That should keep the car out of a ditch.

 

Never had a dropped call or fade-out? Two seconds of that and you're dead.

And even if they place towers MUCH closer to prevent that, you want to pay the phone bill? Be my guest. (Hiring a driver would be cheaper.)

 

Fly by wire aircraft will not work without computers, if they fail the pilot could do nothing.

 

Once the computer scientists have created reliable vision systems we will then see automated automobiles. I personal cant wait but I'm not holding my breath for it. The greatest benefit will be the lives saved. Over a million people die a year and many more suffer horrific injury and disability from cars. Who does not know of someone that has been effected by the carnage on our roads?

This is not to say that there will no long be any road deaths, you cant stop kangaroos, dogs or people crossing the road, you cant stop mechanical failure. But you can stop the drunks, speeders, the inattentive and idiots from wreaking peoples lives.

 

Cars will be obsolete soon, but the technology already exists. I saw it on TV, the Darpa Challenge.

 

Car's driving themselves isn't the problem. The problem is in fact down to "Chaos".

Cars could easily be interlinked into a traffic control supercomputer, where people log their journeys and the overall system would identify not just the best route but deal with congestion control.

However this is a very uniform world, where everything is calculated and ordered, the problem occurs when you add the "Chaos" caused by people that want to drive themselves, utilizing old cars that don't automatically monitor temperatures, tyre pressures, fuel consumption etc. Erratic Humans driving around on the roads is the downfall to any automated system, after all if you've ever played an RTS game is extremely easy to fake to the AI what your intensions are, this could be greatly amplified on the road by vehicles attempting collision avoidance by some numbnuts hotrodder playing chicken.

 

I've always thought the simplist and most safe way to do this would be to link the cars to a track in the road, like a roller coaster. People would drive from their houses to the freeway where they would drive onto some spot where a hook will come from the middle of the road and just "pull" them along in line with the rest of the cars, and when you want to get out of the queue, you have the hook release and you get off onto the off-ramp. Perhaps some way could be devised so your car wouldn't even need to be on for your medium to long distance travel, that would save gas by the boat loads.

 

Yeah, I can't see people wanting to do this either. Can you imagine a man logging in a trip to his mistress? Or someone logging in a trip to rob the bank?

 

Car vision systems could deal with erratic drivers. Considering the response time of computers, these visions systems would be better able to avoid accidents. I hope I don't have to wait until I'm 80 before these cars come out. Imagine having a lazy-boy in the back seat.

 

What good would that do? Car speedos aren't that accurate, so the car could not use it to calculate exact distance travelled. GPS is the best way, but that isn't perfect (plus the signal varies in accuracy, the portion civilians can use gets lowered in accuracy occasionally (like when we invaded Iraq) plus the signal drops out in built up areas. The only way would be to embed RFID tags in the road, that counted down to junctions etc, and have the cars follow the white lines and use GPS. You couldn't rely on one single system as the consequences of failure are immense.