We had a Pinto station wagon when I was growing up. We used to ride around in the way back most of the time. That was fun. This was pre-seatbelt laws obviously.
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I think they can already got from most point’s A to most points B. Most of the issues are now are can they go from A to B under any condition (snow on the road, heavy rain, construction makes the road look weird, etc) and do they drive from A to B in a way that a human setting behind the wheel is going to let them drive. They can be jerky and do weird things with lane changes and whatnot.
Yes, well I meant A to B when I want to go. Which means they have to be at least as good as I am at driving in rain, snow, sleet, freezing rain, fog, smog, etc.
One of the lines in the sand on AO was a car without a steering wheel or brakes. If I’m going to have such a car then it can’t leave me stranded in the middle of the New York State Thruway when it’s 0 degrees out because it can’t distinguish between lane lines and snow. That could literally kill me.
I mean, I’m hard-pressed to think of a road trip I’ve ever taken at any point in my life that involved
- zero road construction and
- zero heavy rain and
- zero snow / ice and
- zero driving off of clearly marked lanes
And I like road trips, so I’ve taken a lot.
A car that can’t handle those conditions at least as well as I can is useless. Worse than useless, actually. It’s FAR more dangerous than my current car.
Just 10 days ago, same day as the infamous exploding-snake-in-the-air-conditioner incident that I documented in the Annoyed Thoughts thread, I went to the third of three graduation parties. Parking was in a designated area on the grass. There was a handmade sign that said “park here, back in” and an area marked off with pink plastic streamers tied between four stakes. It was trivially easy for the other guests and me to park appropriately in the designated area. I mean, maybe someone had an issue backing in, but I had a backup camera so it was easy for me. And most cars have backup cameras these days. But even so, if a person had to make four or five adjustments before being satisfied that they were properly parked… we’re talking about 5 minutes.
I think it would be very very difficult to program a computer to figure that out.
I don’t know that programming that is necessary or useful. With AVs, they will either be taxi-like where it would just drop you off or if it’s privately owned, it may go park nearby itself or require driver input/control to park in irregular spots. With minimal driver input the car could park in that scenario easily. Cars now self-park in both parallel and front/back “spots”, so it would just need some user input as to where the “spot” is in an irregular situation.
I generally agree with you that AVs are much further away than media would like, but that’s in the bottom 0.0001% of scenarios.
The latest Revisionist History podcast episode with Malcolm Gladwell tackles the idea of pedestrians and AVs “sharing” the road in the future. He goes to AZ to test how Waymo cars react to a beach ball and him running along the side of the road and in front of it. His conclusion seems to be that AVs will mean better road sharing with pedestrians and bicyclists, but at the cost of gridlock for the cars.
Yeah, except for hypothetical vehicles with no user controls at all, I see no reason not to turn over “park in easy but unusually marked location” to the human. Even my friend who has given up driving due to vision problems (not complete blindness) could manage that. So could my mother who is too old to drive.
so we’re just coming up with fringe scenarios now to convince yourself…of what, exactly?
I’m sure people were convinced that cars were far more troublesome than horses too, especially with no good roads around. Yet it only took 50 years to make that transition, starting from cities (with better roads) and branched out from there.
Also with horse-drawn carriage + car collisions being pretty common.
1905:
1905:
1904:
Hmmm, seems the people with horses generally get the worst of it.
It’s a common enough scenario. It’s just that a car that can drive itself from my garage to that field, but can’t handle that scenario would still be incredibly useful.
in a world of AVs, I would think the scenarios would change to accommodate AV “thinking” (like putting up markers an AV would easily understand)
probably wouldn’t need parking anyhow
First, I don’t think that’s a fringe scenario at all.
Second, there’s this notion that cars without steering wheels are just around the corner. Early predictions on AO said we’d already have such cars now, in 2021.
I think we’re really far away.
Where? On someone else’s private property?
This was out in farm country along a county highway, one lane in each direction, no street parking, no businesses for miles. That sounds horribly inconvenient, and a tremendous waste of fuel.
It will be interesting to see what that might look like. I have yet to receive an answer as to how AVs that lack steering will know where I want to park at Costco. Do I prefer to pull in the first available space or search for something close to the entrance, or seek out “dent-free-zone” parking further away from other cars? Can I tell it not to park in the spot with a big puddle or dog poop or what looks like it might be a nail? Can I tell it that I have my mother-in-law with me and thus can park in a handicapped spot today even though normally I can’t? Will it know not to park in the “employee of the month” space?
And navigating clearly marked spots at Costco seems easier than plastic streamers 3 feet off the ground marking off a whole area in the grass.
(I don’t think Costco actually has special employee of the month parking, but some stores do… it’s a consideration, anyway.)
If there is an option to turn it over to a human, then fine. But I think you’d still want mostly the same requirements of being a licensed driver in that case. I’m not sure about vision problems. What kind of problems? A lot of accidents happen while parking. If your friend can’t pass the vision test to get a license then I don’t think I want your friend to be permitted to drive in a parking lot, or backing into a designated parking area in extremely close proximity to other cars and children and pets.
You certainly can’t be drunk or blind or an unlicensed tween in that case.
Eh, that’s not my understanding at all. It was easy to see that cars were WAY lower maintenance than horses. The fact that you don’t have to feed them twice a day or clean out their poop was a major advantage from the get-go. Plus there were a lot of accidents with horse-drawn carriages. A horse would get spooked by lightning or a loud noise and do something dangerous.
I think people saw the advantages of cars pretty quickly. I wasn’t around back then but that’s always the impression I had.
I know that my one great-grandmother had a lot of trouble with cars though. She couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that you had to straighten the steering wheel after you turned. You don’t have to do that with a horse. The horse knows when to stop turning! She didn’t do much driving, I’m told.
But bicycles have the same phenomenon of needing to straighten out after a turn and bicycles existed long before cars. So I think this particular issue was unique to my great-grandmother and not widespread. It’s a story my grandfather’s generation told often, though.
Probably true, good point
Certainly untrue
My opinion is that no privately owned AVs will lack steering wheel and controls, at least not for decades (maybe a century at the pace we update infrastructure) until the world has reconfigured itself better for AVs. That would be true of special purpose taxi style AVs only. I picture a simple video screen like parking modes on cars now with a selection for front or back and left or right side of the car, then just select the highlighted area. Again, this would be an AV with steering wheel for you to help get it near the right area if it’s not adjacent to the road.
The parking lot scenario is much simpler. You won’t care where it parks because it will drop you off at the front and pick you back up when you’re done in the store. I believe there are a few cars that can do this already (like Tesla although there were some hilarious videos of it failing). Eventually retail spaces will reconfigure to have a better “drop-off” zone and tighter parking spaces to reflect this.
This. The cars with no controls were supposed to be taxi-like, or mini-bus like, working a regular route. A new vehicle option, not a straight-up option to replace the existing fleet.
And this. You won’t have to tell the car whether to park near the dog poop, because you won’t know or care. It will drop you off at the designated area close to the entrance, then go look for the parking area, which can be a little farther away, like airport “cell phone lot” parking, and which will be designed for self-driving cars to understand. That’s if you are driving a car you own. With self-driving cars, more people may opt for taxis, in which case the car drops you off and then looks for the next person to pick up.
You don’t need a license to drive a car on private property. And there are lots of people who aren’t competent to drive on the public roads who are competent to make low speed maneuvers. Heck, the low speed maneuver here might be to exit the car and ask one of the attendants to park it. Not something they can do for everyone, but no big deal to do for the handicapped.
Similarly, it’s easy to see that there are tons of situations when a self-driving car would be nice. Increasing the mobility of the elderly and tweens is high on that list. And yes, I’m more comfortable putting my kid in a self-driving car than into an Uber with a potential sketchy driver. Getting home from dinner after a few too many drinks is another great use case. Your car will know how to park in it’s own garage.
They aren’t ready for prime time, yet. But the situation you describe is not one that’s going to prevent their uptake.
At Costco? That sounds God-awful. It takes a long time to load Costco purchases into cars. No way is there enough space up by the door for that.
Also, even if that were true I still might have a preference to park in the shade when it’s 102 and the sun is beating down, but far away from trees when their flowers are in bloom and it’s raining down a slurry of water and petals underneath.
I keep hearing that the advantage is that blind people and drunk people and kids can use them though. On AO people were definitely discussing this possibility.
If the thinking has changed to where this is not the end goal, or there’s acknowledgment that this is significantly further away then fine.