Driverless Vehicles

ICBM

PolarityMan said:

on the other hand there are a hell of a lot of drivers who aren't really competent to be safely operating a ton of metal travelling at up to 90mph.

If you want to improve safety via automation it would actually make a lot of sense to simply limit all cars to 70mph. While speed in itself does not usually *cause* accidents, it does always make them worse.

PolarityMan

I dont think speeds over 90 are a big killer although id be prepared to be proved wrong, i think a better approach would be limiting speed where accidents are more likely to happen, which isn't actually on motorways.

So maybe speed limit to 40 on country A roads rather than national speed limit might be statistically a better apprach than limit to 70 on the motorway.

PolarityMan

Although of course automation can respond much faster than a person so in a significantly automated ecosystem I would expect safe speeds to be much higher, required gaps between vehicles smaller etc.

Heartfeltdawn

crunchman said: There will be an Uber (or similar) app still, but it will call a driverless car.  The Uber drivers and the cabbies will all be out of a job, which is why it is a pointless spat and why they would be better off looking for an alternative career.

And what will those alternative careers be? 

Sporky

They could work in route planning for the driverless cars that replaced them. In a dark, smelly basement somewhere.

Cirrus

Heartfeltdawn said:

And what will those alternative careers be? 

Pauper.

Phil_aka_Pip

Heartfeltdawn said:

crunchman said: There will be an Uber (or similar) app still, but it will call a driverless car.  The Uber drivers and the cabbies will all be out of a job, which is why it is a pointless spat and why they would be better off looking for an alternative career.

And what will those alternative careers be? 

There will now follow a slanging match between them that think "society doesn't owe you a living, you should man up and skill up for something else" (you can move anywhere and take on anything if you want to badly enough) and them that recognise that there are quite a few people who are drivers because it's what they are best at and not much cop at other things, besides which there are a hell of a lot of factors which influence whether you can just up sticks and go somewhere else.

get your popcorn and sit back ...

crunchman

A lot of speed limits are getting stupid now.

There is a road near where I was brought up in Devon which is now a 40mph limit.  It's not in a built up area, it's dead straight for a mile or more, it's wide enough for cars to pass safely.  The road always was, and still should be, national speed limit.

The problem is that all the local boy racers used to hoon along there at 100mph so rather than do something about that they decide to put a 40 in and penalise all law abiding people who do 60.  They are making an ass of the law as well with a stupid speed limit.

Where I live now in London, our borough wants to make all the roads 20mph.  On 90% of them this is the right thing to do, but the problem is that they are also planning to do it on the more major roads that actually go somewhere and not just the residential roads.  Again, they are going to get limits that no-one will respect.

lloyd

crunchman said:

A lot of speed limits are getting stupid now.

There is a road near where I was brought up in Devon which is now a 40mph limit.  It's not in a built up area, it's dead straight for a mile or more, it's wide enough for cars to pass safely.  The road always was, and still should be, national speed limit.

The problem is that all the local boy racers used to hoon along there at 100mph so rather than do something about that they decide to put a 40 in and penalise all law abiding people who do 60.  They are making an ass of the law as well with a stupid speed limit.

Where I live now in London, our borough wants to make all the roads 20mph.  On 90% of them this is the right thing to do, but the problem is that they are also planning to do it on the more major roads that actually go somewhere and not just the residential roads.  Again, they are going to get limits that no-one will respect.

I got caught by a van somewhere like this a few years ago-countryside for miles around, straight road and they changed a small stretch from 60 to 40 for god knows what reason...

Heartfeltdawn

Phil_aka_Pip said:

There will now follow a slanging match between them that think "society doesn't owe you a living, you should man up and skill up for something else" (you can move anywhere and take on anything if you want to badly enough) and them that recognise that there are quite a few people who are drivers because it's what they are best at and not much cop at other things, besides which there are a hell of a lot of factors which influence whether you can just up sticks and go somewhere else.

I worry about the technology that wipes out jobs at the lower end of the spectrum. 

Axe_meister

A dedicated lane on motorway (potentially with a barrier to separate from normal traffic) will probably be the first allowed instance, with some sort of hub at each exit. At which point the car will switch into manual mode for trips into town (or you pick up a park and ride bus), eventually once In town driving has been proven you will be able to stay in automatic mode.
The question the is. Will you ever buy a car or just hail your personal vehicle to take you to your destination. That could then kill railways, bus and car companies.

ICBM

PolarityMan said:

I dont think speeds over 90 are a big killer although id be prepared to be proved wrong, i think a better approach would be limiting speed where accidents are more likely to happen, which isn't actually on motorways.

That is true. Motorways are the safest roads, statistically - and more accidents are caused by inappropriate driving in poor weather than by high speeds as such. But I think a 70mph maximum speed limiter would be a start - it could then be made more useful once people have got used to the idea that they don't control the car fully any more.

Automatic traffic spacing control would be useful too - it would actually improve traffic flow, since a big problem is the start-stop 'waves' in heavy traffic. In theory, if everyone maintains a exact constant speed and distance from the car in front you don't get hold-ups.

crunchman

People would find a way around the speed limiter.  If nothing else put some bigger tyres on it.  Or cars would come with a "Track Mode" , or a "German Motorway Mode" and people would just switch it into that mode.  Officially electric bikes are limited to 15mph on public roads, but a lot of them have an "off road" mode that allows people to do about 25mph.  It's illegal but proving it would be very difficult.  If you are doing 25mph on an electric bike, how are the plod going to prove that you weren't doing it by pedalling very hard?

The only way to enforce it would be a Big Brother style monitoring system.  That is somewhere we don't want to go.

Phil_aka_Pip

ICBM said:

Automatic traffic spacing control would be useful too - it would actually improve traffic flow, since a big problem is the start-stop 'waves' in heavy traffic. In theory, if everyone maintains a exact constant speed and distance from the car in front you don't get hold-ups.

Isn't that partly behind the idea of variable speed limits on the M25?

Chalky

@crunchman I'd be careful in believing the hype. US road driving is very different to European road driving, most notably in size/space, predictable junction rules, and pedestrian behavour. And don't mention roundabouts.

Sure California will have some but I think even your 2030 prediction for the UK is way too early. Remember my last point was that the cost has to come down to a utility level - I really do not see the need for a driverless car converting all those people who drive secondhand cars. Even then, the rich have to buy new ones and they will need to age and be proven over 5-10 years before they get passed on in sufficient numbers in the secondhand market.

Has any estimate been done on what the demand for driverless cars will be?

ICBM

Phil_aka_Pip said:

Isn't that partly behind the idea of variable speed limits on the M25?

Yes, but it doesn't work perfectly because you still have human optimism and reaction time involved - ie speeding up too much when the traffic seems to be starting to move, then braking slightly later and therefore harder than a fully-automated system would, so you still get waves.

Waves cause accidents as well as hold-ups, because the wave propagates backwards faster than driver reaction speed, so if anyone has closed up to less than the stopping distance while the traffic is moving, there will come a point where they simply can't stop in time even if they react immediately. Auto spacing fixes that too.

Phil_aka_Pip

@ICBM you're right it's not perfect, but I think it helps to reduce the waves

EDIT

funny how we keep using that euphemism "accident" isn't it?

ICBM

Phil_aka_Pip said:

@ICBM you're right it's not perfect, but I think it helps to reduce the waves

Yes, which is why automation would be even better - the "speed limit" would then be continuously variable, effectively - set by the density of the traffic itself.

Cirrus

crunchman;960895" said:

... they decide to put a 40 in and penalise all law abiding people who do 60...

If they're doing 60 in a 40 they're not exactly law abiding, are they?

Cirrus

ICBM;960919" said:

 In theory, if everyone maintains a exact constant speed and distance from the car in front you don't get hold-ups.

And if cars could travel at the speed of light, there'd only be one or two cars on the entire UK road network at any given time. That'd be quite handy. >-)