Author Topic: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?  (Read 24216 times)

YttriumNitrate

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #100 on: October 07, 2018, 09:56:01 PM »
About 35,000 people a year die on American roads. Driverless cars offer the possibility of reducing that to near zero, and almost entirely remove the eleventh largest cause of death in the US.
For what it's worth, we could easily accomplish a similar result with old technology that prevents cars from being moved out of park until A) everyone is buckled in, and B) the driver blows in a breathalyzer.

80% of people wear seat belts, but a seat belt isn't worn in about half of all in car fatalities:
https://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/defective-products/seat-belts/seat-belts-statistics.html

Alcohol is involved in about a third of all auto fatalities:
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811155

HBFIRE

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #101 on: October 08, 2018, 08:59:30 AM »
About 35,000 people a year die on American roads. Driverless cars offer the possibility of reducing that to near zero, and almost entirely remove the eleventh largest cause of death in the US.
For what it's worth, we could easily accomplish a similar result with old technology that prevents cars from being moved out of park until A) everyone is buckled in, and B) the driver blows in a breathalyzer.

80% of people wear seat belts, but a seat belt isn't worn in about half of all in car fatalities:
https://www.edgarsnyder.com/car-accident/defective-products/seat-belts/seat-belts-statistics.html

Alcohol is involved in about a third of all auto fatalities:
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/811155

Texting/personal computing is now causing more auto accidents than alcohol. 

scottish

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #102 on: October 08, 2018, 09:03:15 AM »
Indeed.   Self-driving technology is a very expensive band-aid to the problem of drivers not driving responsibly and refusing to use existing safety equipment.

More gadgets for the masses.

Slow2FIRE

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #103 on: October 08, 2018, 09:19:00 AM »
Is it a band-aid?  Perhaps.

Are you going to be able to go out and change the behavior of the masses in any meaningful way?  Probably not, there are already education programs, fines, and increased costs associated with failing to use the "appropriate" techniques and equipment that exists.

Is it possible that an error could be made while driving that has nothing to do with a person using electronic devices or poor judgement?  Absolutely.

Would you feel safer if everyone on the road had more driver aids?  I think so.  The data collected by the IIHS from insurance companies and other sources seems to support the idea that the "band-aids", contrary to making people worse drivers, are actually reducing the probability of an accident.

Have you ever had a close call backing up out of a parking stall?  I certainly have, driving a smaller vehicle and having large pickups and/or SUVs parking on either side of you pretty much eliminates any ability to actually see what is coming up the parking lot lane not directly behind you and I don't see how any amount of careful driver training will give you the ability to see around a behemoth vehicle.  You can pull out of the stall slowly, but you can't force a driver coming up the lane to drive cautiously or courteously and I'd rather completely avoid the accident in the first place instead of being in the position of saying "it was the other persons fault, their driving was poor"

Cadman

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #104 on: October 08, 2018, 10:57:01 AM »
Indeed.   Self-driving technology is a very expensive band-aid to the problem of drivers not driving responsibly and refusing to use existing safety equipment.

More gadgets for the masses.

And the only way driver-less cars are going to sell is if they deliver on the promise of absolving the owner of any responsibility, otherwise, what's the point? They won't get me to my destination any faster. Won't cost me less than my current car. One could argue 'potentially safer' but then try selling that to someone that's never had an accident. And there will be plenty of accidents until the state of the art is perfected, so that's an uphill battle as well.

If one can't use their car as a rolling office during commute time, or summon it after a night out then why wouldn't I just call an Uber and put the driving 'responsibility' on someone/something else. And that's one more reason it'll be tough to integrate driverless fleets. Are you, being the only thing in the car with a SS number, willing to take the heat if something happens with a driver-less Uber?

This is where both insurance and the law are going to have to keep pace with the tech. Better add another decade or two to the estimate.

HBFIRE

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #105 on: October 08, 2018, 11:12:38 AM »


And the only way driver-less cars are going to sell is if they deliver on the promise of absolving the owner of any responsibility, otherwise, what's the point?

So that you don't have to spend your time driving and can do something else productive while traveling.  Presumably driverless technology will have exponentially faster reaction time and hence will be better at avoiding the mistakes of other drivers.   I personally look forward to the day I don't have to drive.  Less stress, less accidents, more time.  I trust my own driving, but I don't trust the driving of others -- that's the problem.

Cadman

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #106 on: October 08, 2018, 11:44:59 AM »


And the only way driver-less cars are going to sell is if they deliver on the promise of absolving the owner of any responsibility, otherwise, what's the point?

So that you don't have to spend your time driving and can do something else productive while traveling.

Yep, exactly my point. I'd rather do something else while the car does the driving. But if I'm still on the hook for wreckless driving, speeding, manslaughter because of a hardware failure outside of my control, then this idea is still going to be a tough sell for the masses.

Syonyk

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #107 on: October 08, 2018, 09:57:36 PM »
Presumably driverless technology will have exponentially faster reaction time and hence will be better at avoiding the mistakes of other drivers.

And, currently, advertised as "driverless" tech manages to drive into semi trucks, lane dividers, stopped fire trucks...

Waymo's tech is more promising, but it requires highly detailed maps of a city, and (presumably) a small server farm in the back of each car.  They've quite conspicuously avoided going with electric cars - and it's almost certainly because the power required to run the server farm containing a detailed 3d map of the city, and all the processing to handle all the sensors, draws so much power that you can't get a useful range out of an electric car.  I wouldn't be surprised if they required 2-3kW of server hardware in the back of each car to accomplish their self driving, and a couple hundred TB of data, minimum.  To get around Phoenix or Mountain View.

I think it's still over a decade out from being "generally useful" outside certain very constrained test markets, and likely closer to 2 decades from being able to operate without detailed maps - if it's even possible.  Silicon Valley has a very distinct arrogance about their software skills - because they can operate competently in the purely synthetic software environment of the internet, they assume they have the skills to operate in reality, and they reliably screw this up - badly.  Phones that die because the hardware is bad, cars that... are just crap drivers, self flying... wait, that was cancelled... the list goes on.  They consistently very badly overestimate their ability to interface with reality.

Slow2FIRE

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #108 on: October 08, 2018, 10:33:54 PM »
Presumably driverless technology will have exponentially faster reaction time and hence will be better at avoiding the mistakes of other drivers.

And, currently, advertised as "driverless" tech manages to drive into semi trucks, lane dividers, stopped fire trucks...


This is incorrect.  The technology that has lead to the results you describe is not advertised as driverless tech.  That is drivers abusing the tech and treating it as driverless when it is not.

At best, they have advertised that the cars can be configured this year with all the hardware necessary to have a fully driverless vehicle (which I don't know if that is accurate).

Quote
I wouldn't be surprised if they required 2-3kW of server hardware in the back of each car to accomplish their self driving, and a couple hundred TB of data, minimum.  To get around Phoenix or Mountain View.

That is probably pretty close to reality for currently fielded systems.

The new Nvidia AI focused GPU that was just announced this year for autonomous vehicle use claims it can handle all the processing tasks at a power draw of 160Watts.
« Last Edit: October 08, 2018, 10:35:51 PM by Slow2FIRE »

HBFIRE

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #109 on: October 08, 2018, 10:48:07 PM »
Driverless accidents will make headlines even if they are statistically insignificant.  Same goes for accidents involving any new tech like electric.  Tesla makes the safest cars on the planet but you regularly read about any accident involving one.  Of course the technology is still primitive.  How far away are we from mature tech?  Hard to say, probably depends on how much money is involved and how many players are competing -- the answer to that I'm guessing is "a lot".  Decades seems like an overbid.  I'm expecting less than 10 years.
« Last Edit: October 08, 2018, 10:53:13 PM by dustinst22 »

neo von retorch

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #110 on: October 09, 2018, 05:36:48 AM »
What "autonomous" systems aspire to do is make cars that adapt to conditions and make decisions. Or, you know, a form of A.I. And while we do have machine learning which takes big Data sets and tries to find matches, it's only kind of effective given good (and comprehensive) data and great feedback on accuracy. So you can point it at 2D photos and have little worker bees playing with your app and saying "hot or not!" and that's all well and good. But again, it's very hard to apply to reality, and when safety is involved, negative failed matches can result in injury or death. And it's not decision-making, which is a much more sophisticated form of intelligence than pattern-matching. A.I. is a mind-boggling problem, and if there's anything software developers are bad at, it's estimating how long it will take them to do something they haven't done before, even more so if no one has done it yet successfully. Of course, if no one spends money on developers, research and testing, no progress would be made. But throwing lots of money and bodies only ensures "some" progress is made, and not that we figure out how to create a new form of intelligence any time soon.

I'm not saying effective broadly useful autonomous driving needs fully developed artificial general intelligence, but even specific dedicated forms of artificial intelligence are very difficult to create for massively varied physical environments full of wildly unpredictable human behavior (and most likely, competing but somewhat different A.I.) And all of that not only has to reach really high levels of competency, but also fitting into the regulatory environment, staying cost-competitive, and convincing the mindshare of the masses.

It's going to take a while.

scottish

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #111 on: October 09, 2018, 04:02:00 PM »
I find all the talk about how driver-less cars will be better than people (driving) a bit disingenuous.

Automated cars will all tend to make the same mistakes.    They have the same software, they'll have the same failure modes.

I'll be a lot more confident when there's some independent oversight instead of allowing manufacturers to self-certify.    Before we allow these vehicles on the road, we should establish things like:
- liability.   When a automated car is involved in a crash with (another automated) car, who is liable?   Owner?  Manufacturer?
- accuracy levels for sensors and features detectors and other key parts of the car.   How reliably must a car detect a stop sign?
- critical failure points.   For example, if the vehicle loses GPS, what is it supposed to do?
- discussion on emergency behaviour.     Is the car allowed to make an emergency stop on a freeway?
and so on.

Automation for aviation has gone through all of this.   We should be able to learn from this.


GuitarStv

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #112 on: October 09, 2018, 06:55:45 PM »
Automation for aviation is an awful lot easier than for a car.  There's a known flight path with known elevations.  There's almost nothing up there to run into.  If the TCAS kicks on because it has detected another aircraft nearby usually it just reverts control to the pilot.

Purple Economist

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #113 on: October 09, 2018, 09:14:01 PM »
There will always be folks who opt for car ownership and maybe even stick with gas power but they will probably end up paying a significant premium in fuel, parking and insurance to do so.

Can you explain why there will be a "significant premium" for all of these things?

If lots of people are traveling in electric cars, why won't gasoline be cheap?

If not very many people need a parking spot, why will parking be expensive?

If everyone else is driving a super-safe autonomous vehicle, why will insurance premiums be high for a driver with an impeccable driving record?  Additionally, why would insurance premiums not be substantially lower than they are now, even for someone insuring a car that is not autonomous?

Slow2FIRE

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #114 on: October 09, 2018, 10:02:15 PM »
I find all the talk about how driver-less cars will be better than people (driving) a bit disingenuous.

Automated cars will all tend to make the same mistakes.    They have the same software, they'll have the same failure modes.

I'll be a lot more confident when there's some independent oversight instead of allowing manufacturers to self-certify.    Before we allow these vehicles on the road, we should establish things like:
- liability.   When a automated car is involved in a crash with (another automated) car, who is liable?   Owner?  Manufacturer?
- accuracy levels for sensors and features detectors and other key parts of the car.   How reliably must a car detect a stop sign?
- critical failure points.   For example, if the vehicle loses GPS, what is it supposed to do?
- discussion on emergency behaviour.     Is the car allowed to make an emergency stop on a freeway?
and so on.

Automation for aviation has gone through all of this.   We should be able to learn from this.

While I don't believe they actually have any standards to follow, from what little I know auto manufacturers already follow procedures for software validation on these type of systems that at least matches TSO for aircraft.

runbikerun

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #115 on: October 10, 2018, 01:42:33 AM »
There will always be folks who opt for car ownership and maybe even stick with gas power but they will probably end up paying a significant premium in fuel, parking and insurance to do so.

Can you explain why there will be a "significant premium" for all of these things?

If lots of people are traveling in electric cars, why won't gasoline be cheap?

If not very many people need a parking spot, why will parking be expensive?

If everyone else is driving a super-safe autonomous vehicle, why will insurance premiums be high for a driver with an impeccable driving record?  Additionally, why would insurance premiums not be substantially lower than they are now, even for someone insuring a car that is not autonomous?

Assuming an environment in which 95% of journeys are via extremely safe on-call electric vehicles (which I acknowledge is not a given):

-Gas stations pretty much cease to exist. Many will turn into convenience stores, or storage and charging sites for electric vehicles, but virtually none will continue to maintain gasoline tanks and pumps - it'll be far too high a cost for far too small a market. Some will survive, but they'll be few and far between - and their operating costs will be far higher as the distribution network they currently depend on withers away. You'll be left with substantial distances between stations, and so the few that remain will charge a high price.

-Parking will be expensive for the same reason: it won't be available. With virtually nobody owning a car, there's no reason to factor in parking spaces. Again, a few spots will remain, but most of it (especially in urban areas) will rapidly be repurposed, and the handful of spots that remain in good locations will, again, command a premium. Not as much as the gas stations (those guys will be able to really gouge drivers, as a lot of them simply won't have the fuel to get to an alternative station).

-Insurance will be expensive, as 99.9% of crashes will involve the 5% of cars that are manually driven. The accident rate will fall heavily, but as it falls alongside the manually driven share of the market, the population of people needing insurance and the population of people who crash will come closer and closer together. Let's imagine that the shift to electric cars eliminates 90% of road fatalities, and that the 99.9% figure I gave turns out to be accurate. The average manually driven car is now twice as likely to be involved in a fatal crash - the only way insurance doesn't rise is if accident rates fall far faster than the manually driven share of the market - and even if that happens, governments may opt for punitive measures against manual-driving holdouts. If every twenty manual cars off the road means one less death a year, governments would be out of their minds not to.

In this scenario, only the wealthiest members of society can afford to keep driving manual. At that point, we enter a world of pure premium pricing: everything to do with driving your own car might as well double in price, because nobody who drives their own car will be able to hide the fact that they're rich as all hell. On top of that, driving then becomes even more of an engine for conspicuous consumption.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2018, 02:16:58 AM by runbikerun »

Linea_Norway

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #116 on: October 10, 2018, 02:41:12 AM »

-Gas stations pretty much cease to exist. Many will turn into convenience stores, or storage and charging sites for electric vehicles, but virtually none will continue to maintain gasoline tanks and pumps - it'll be far too high a cost for far too small a market. Some will survive, but they'll be few and far between - and their operating costs will be far higher as the distribution network they currently depend on withers away. You'll be left with substantial distances between stations, and so the few that remain will charge a high price.


Today gas stations (in Norway at least) are used for buying gas, but also for coffee, fast food, sodas, candies, dinner ingredients, ice creams and restroom visits. If the gas part disappears, we'll need more places there you can buy all this shit, because we need at least some of this. Car passengers also need to stretch their legs from time to time, although you'll won't need the mental rest  that you need today when your car drives you.

And what about electrical loading? Today loading a non-sports model Tesla takes approx. 20 minutes. If there are many cars in queue, you can have to wait for 20-40 minutes before it's your turn. How will they solve this in the future? Will we have comfortable loading stations, or will be transferred to another public car, including carrying our luggage to the new car? Or can we somehow swap to a full loaded battery package?

runbikerun

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #117 on: October 10, 2018, 04:14:05 AM »

-Gas stations pretty much cease to exist. Many will turn into convenience stores, or storage and charging sites for electric vehicles, but virtually none will continue to maintain gasoline tanks and pumps - it'll be far too high a cost for far too small a market. Some will survive, but they'll be few and far between - and their operating costs will be far higher as the distribution network they currently depend on withers away. You'll be left with substantial distances between stations, and so the few that remain will charge a high price.


Today gas stations (in Norway at least) are used for buying gas, but also for coffee, fast food, sodas, candies, dinner ingredients, ice creams and restroom visits. If the gas part disappears, we'll need more places there you can buy all this shit, because we need at least some of this. Car passengers also need to stretch their legs from time to time, although you'll won't need the mental rest  that you need today when your car drives you.

And what about electrical loading? Today loading a non-sports model Tesla takes approx. 20 minutes. If there are many cars in queue, you can have to wait for 20-40 minutes before it's your turn. How will they solve this in the future? Will we have comfortable loading stations, or will be transferred to another public car, including carrying our luggage to the new car? Or can we somehow swap to a full loaded battery package?

I'd expect to see a substantial part of the non-gas aspect of those businesses to keep going. Charging will, I suspect, be a fairly rare occurrence: the vast majority of driving will have aa power outlet at the end of the journey, and so very few people will need to charge up. Those who do will probably be long-haul travellers, and so cafes and coffeeshops onsite will turn a 20-minute charge into a fairly pleasant break rather than a frustration. In urban areas, I'd expect to see gas stations turn into 24-hour shops and electric-vehicle parking and charging locations.

neo von retorch

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #118 on: October 10, 2018, 06:25:43 AM »
Definitely two discussions here, maybe three... the progression of autonomous vehicles, the conversion from gasoline to electric, and the reduction in vehicle ownership as on-demand rentals improve.

I already think I addressed the software challenges being faced in reaching autonomy, which is a key component of reducing costs for on-demand vehicles. Given that, I also think that on-demand really has to be drastically cheaper than vehicle ownership, and vehicle ownership has to become a hardship. Otherwise, it won't happen. At least not in the "owning a car is 80% of how you express your status to your peers" mentality of the United States. I found an article from 2016 that states this:

Quote
The increase is slight: 9.1% of American households didn’t have a car in 2015, compared to 8.9% in 2010, a 0.2% change that represents about 500,000 households.0

OK, so it has begun to increase, but it has not been dramatic. Basically, the enlightened few that prefer bikes, mass-transit and on-demand cars have made the change, by choice. For that kind of thing to become mainstream, it not only has to be much less expensive to be on-demand, but it has to be better. More convenient. Less expensive, and not just a little. Maybe even recognized as something "better" people do, so valid as a social cue.

I think the shift to electric will happen much faster than the switch to autonomous, on-demand, ownership-less driving. But even that has a lot of hurdles to cross. It's easy to look at a sedan and see it being replaced by electric. And with that example proven enough to go mainstream, other examples can follow. But it was already pointed out that gasoline has huge advantages over batteries. It's a factor faster to refill. You can put it in a gas can and refill almost instantly for all the other things we use gas for: lawn care, forestry, power tools, etc. Look at landscaping companies. How many do you see that have an electric fleet of mowers and weed trimmers? Are snow plows and road crews using electric machines? And can they stop in the middle of their work to recharge for 20+ minutes (one would presume much longer for a battery packed snow plow!)? Many people even have gasoline generators for making their own electricity when the infrastructure fails them... All of these things will have to shift to majority electric before gasoline infrastructure starts to become less necessary, and can become sparse. Obviously we can envision a future of all-electric, autonomous tractor trailers, and once we move rapidly there, gas consumption will decrease quickly. But I don't believe we're going to see this happen rapidly, at least not for quite some time.

0After decades of decline, no-car households are becoming more common in the US

runbikerun

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #119 on: October 10, 2018, 06:47:22 AM »
I don't anticipate refuelling being nearly the problem some other people expect: there will be charging points at owners' homes, and eventually workplaces and shops. In a world where almost every journey ends at a refuelling point, how much of a need is there for intra-journey fuelling?

JLee

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #120 on: October 10, 2018, 09:14:24 AM »
No.  It'll be a while before driverless cars can compete. :P



Slow2FIRE

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #121 on: October 10, 2018, 09:53:47 AM »
No.  It'll be a while before driverless cars can compete. :P



I may be misquided, but it seems to me that this is kind of the wrong forum for depictions of stomping on and despoiling a beautiful forested area with a 4000lb+ machine burning an explosive and toxic fuel.

Having said that - autonomous vehicles have already conquered Pikes Peak, not sure if the time to complete was competitive though.

JLee

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #122 on: October 10, 2018, 10:06:44 AM »
I may be misquided, but it seems to me that this is kind of the wrong forum for depictions of stomping on and despoiling a beautiful forested area with a 4000lb+ machine burning an explosive and toxic fuel.

Having said that - autonomous vehicles have already conquered Pikes Peak, not sure if the time to complete was competitive though.

Ah yes, I'm on MMM - where having kids and international travel are awesome, but responsibly doing any motorsport activities are somehow the worst thing ever.  The environmentalist priorities here are fucking weird.

Anyway, you misspelled "driving on an established and legal trail."  I didn't see any hikers or cyclists clearing fallen trees from the trail -- if you want to play that elitist snobby game with me, come back when you're packing a chainsaw and trash bags to leave the trails better off than when you found them.

My point is that autonomous vehicles are not likely to replace all use cases for vehicles in the foreseeable future.  Take that as you will.
« Last Edit: October 10, 2018, 10:11:53 AM by JLee »

GuitarStv

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #123 on: October 10, 2018, 10:14:27 AM »
I don't believe that removing trees that have fallen would improve any hike I've ever been on.  People are made to move.  Moving over and around nature is part of what hiking is all about.

JLee

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #124 on: October 10, 2018, 10:21:04 AM »
I don't believe that removing trees that have fallen would improve any hike I've ever been on.  People are made to move.  Moving over and around nature is part of what hiking is all about.

These are legally classified as roads.  Hiking, biking, snowmobiles, etc.  And apparently used for drinking, given the plethora of beer cans/bottles/etc that are strewn everywhere...

Anyway, to the point of this topic -- I am not afraid my (used) car's value will be ruined by the driverless car.  My use case is not normal.

Slow2FIRE

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #125 on: October 10, 2018, 05:21:16 PM »
My point is that autonomous vehicles are not likely to replace all use cases for vehicles in the foreseeable future.  Take that as you will.

8 year old technology:
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-peak/

Also, some use cases aren't worth pursuing.  Take that as you will.

genesismachine

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #126 on: October 10, 2018, 06:17:27 PM »
There's really two threads here. Do electric vehicles and/or autonomous driving vehicles affect a future car's value?

Yes to both, and I've already said I won't be buying a non-electric car ever again partially for that reason. I'm driving my 2 gas cars into the ground.

I own an electric car that I've had for 45k miles. I've changed a cabin air filter. It's better and cheaper in every way vs the econobox car it replaced, even amortizing for what I paid over 10 years. The only problem is the range, but I'm sure that will be solved in 10 years.

As for autonomous vehicles, people tend to assume technology as a linear progression when it's exponential. Could google of today have existed 10 years ago? No. It's running on the latest generation of servers in data farms that didn't even exist back then. 10 years ago, you would be right in saying google of today would not be technically possible. The future technology is not taken in isolation - while autonomous driving software improves, everything else is also improving - hardware, software, infrastructure. That's why it's exponential.

Just think how long 10 years is. 10 years ago, the first iPhone came out. Just think about that.

And for prices for non-electric non-autonomous vehicles to collapse, it does not require every new car sold to be electric + autonomous. The replacement rate on houses is approximately 4% per year. But during the financial crisis when  housing supply increased to 8%, prices dropped by half in 2009. I would argue that auto demand is inelastic, and thus extremely sensitive to increases in supply. If prices decline, people don't buy 4 or 5 cars because they're cheap. They also don't sell in that manner.

But it gets worse than that. A decrease in the cost of transportation may not lead to a 2-3% increase in used cars coming onto the market. It may be virtually no change for quite a while and then within a couple year window, huge numbers.

If total cost of ownership of a gas car is $0.30/mile and the electric+autonomous car is $1/mile, would you want one? What if it was $0.9/mile? No change. What about $0.31/mile, then you might think about it. What if it's $0.20/mile? I bet you would very much consider it all of a sudden. Wouldn't everybody think that at the same time? What happens when everyone tries dumping their car in the span of a few years?

The human brain likes to see a linear pattern when in fact technology behaves in an exponential manner. I think 10 years is an eternity for technology like this.

Lastly, as for people 'choosing' not to buy one because they're uncomfortable with a computer driving them, that's not how America works. 70% of the population has no savings and is one paycheck away from being homeless. If it's cheaper to rely on ride sharing, the moment they lose their job, they will sell their car (or it will get repossessed) and they will live with autonomous cars. If it truly is cheaper/better, they won't go back. This is how the transition will happen. People will be economically forced into it, not by the government.

Exception: People in rural areas with low population density may not be affected by this because the TCO may never become cheaper. But their existence does not negate the effect on the used car market of the other 90% of the population.

Cranky

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #127 on: October 11, 2018, 02:02:36 AM »
What is google doing for me today that it wasn’t doing for me 10 years ago?

runbikerun

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #128 on: October 11, 2018, 05:20:08 AM »
What is google doing for me today that it wasn’t doing for me 10 years ago?

GPS navigation, running your phone, providing software solutions to your business in a lot of cases, playing music and TV wirelessly in your house, smart filtering your email, offering a pretty good live translation service, providing a far better search system, renting films to you over the internet, enabling you to pay for things without a card, remotely controlling the heating and lighting systems in your home...

Cranky

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #129 on: October 11, 2018, 05:27:26 AM »
Or, in my case, still just googling things - which it did better, with less advertising, 10 years ago. And that's why I'm not so awfully convinced that this fleet of self-driving cars is going to suddenly appear in the next couple of years.

runbikerun

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #130 on: October 11, 2018, 05:56:58 AM »
Or, in my case, still just googling things - which it did better, with less advertising, 10 years ago. And that's why I'm not so awfully convinced that this fleet of self-driving cars is going to suddenly appear in the next couple of years.

There is no way Google was producing better search results in 2008 than now.

Anon in Alaska

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #131 on: October 11, 2018, 05:57:17 AM »
No, because driverless cars rely on knowing what the road is supposed to look like. It will be a long time before they can deal with roads that have snow on them over five months of the year. By then my relatively new car will be old and I won't care. I only have a relatively new car because, after 19 years, my old car was dying.

GuitarStv

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #132 on: October 11, 2018, 06:59:02 AM »
What is google doing for me today that it wasn’t doing for me 10 years ago?

GPS navigation, running your phone, providing software solutions to your business in a lot of cases, playing music and TV wirelessly in your house, smart filtering your email, offering a pretty good live translation service, providing a far better search system, renting films to you over the internet, enabling you to pay for things without a card, remotely controlling the heating and lighting systems in your home...

Don't have a GPS.  Don't have a phone.  My business doesn't use Google for software solutions.  Don't stream audio or video from the internet.  Don't need a live translation service.  Don't rent films over the internet.  Don't pay for things without a card.  Don't remotely control heating/lighting in my home (why the fuck would anyone need this?)

So basically, they filter my email and provide a pretty good search system for the internet.  They were doing that 10 years ago though.  :P

Lan Mandragoran

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #133 on: October 11, 2018, 07:13:00 AM »
If my car was worth more than like a hundred bucks I would be ;P.

Lan Mandragoran

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #134 on: October 11, 2018, 07:19:20 AM »
Indeed.   Self-driving technology is a very expensive band-aid to the problem of drivers not driving responsibly and refusing to use existing safety equipment.

More gadgets for the masses.

It has the potential to be >nearly< perfectly efficient (as opposed to cars that sit unused 95% of the time), perfectly safe (google traffic deaths per year), and save humanity immense time that would otherwise be spent staring at a road.

Sure it would be nice if everyone would just bike, live in a small community and adopt the MMM way. Perfect is the enemy of good though right?

 Obviously a complicated subject, and it has its risks like humans using it more to increase sprawl, increasing drive times, obesity, pollution etc.  I'm not sure if that will lead to a net positive or negative. Overall though innovation and our ability to forever optimize, seems like the primary difference between us and the beasts.

runbikerun

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #135 on: October 11, 2018, 07:25:33 AM »
I actually forgot - Google have made a pretty decent first pass at a Babel fish. That's pretty staggering: they took a joke about the most useful thing in the universe and decided they could probably hammer together a prototype.

Lan Mandragoran

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #136 on: October 11, 2018, 07:27:01 AM »
What is google doing for me today that it wasn’t doing for me 10 years ago?

GPS navigation, running your phone, providing software solutions to your business in a lot of cases, playing music and TV wirelessly in your house, smart filtering your email, offering a pretty good live translation service, providing a far better search system, renting films to you over the internet, enabling you to pay for things without a card, remotely controlling the heating and lighting systems in your home...

It also has a pretty sweet smart speaker infrastructure where you can install whole home synched audio for a few hundred bucks in literally less than an hour(they also do most of the above things, just by talking to them). Wonder what that would have cost in 2008?

Quote
I actually forgot - Google have made a pretty decent first pass at a Babel fish. That's pretty staggering: they took a joke about the most useful thing in the universe and decided they could probably hammer together a prototype.

If I'm not mistaken google's new headphones have this functionality baked in. They dont make a smart towel yet though :\.
« Last Edit: October 11, 2018, 07:28:49 AM by Lan Mandragoran »

Cranky

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #137 on: October 11, 2018, 08:11:27 AM »
Or, in my case, still just googling things - which it did better, with less advertising, 10 years ago. And that's why I'm not so awfully convinced that this fleet of self-driving cars is going to suddenly appear in the next couple of years.

There is no way Google was producing better search results in 2008 than now.

Says who? Google was producing perfectly useful search results well before 2008. Indeed, more useful because you didn’t have to wade through all the Sponsored sites to get to the actual search results. I seriously just said to my dh how I miss the older google! And I’m not interested in any of that extra stuff - it’s like so many other devices that do 25 things I don’t care about.

JLee

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #138 on: October 11, 2018, 08:22:44 AM »
My point is that autonomous vehicles are not likely to replace all use cases for vehicles in the foreseeable future.  Take that as you will.

8 year old technology:
https://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-peak/

Also, some use cases aren't worth pursuing.  Take that as you will.

Pike's Peak is a pavement/gravel road that race cars run - very different.   Anyway, some people like driving off road, some people like hiking, some people like collecting college degrees, some people like brewing beer, and some people like sitting in movie theaters. "Worth pursuing" is objective.

Indeed.   Self-driving technology is a very expensive band-aid to the problem of drivers not driving responsibly and refusing to use existing safety equipment.

More gadgets for the masses.

It has the potential to be >nearly< perfectly efficient (as opposed to cars that sit unused 95% of the time), perfectly safe (google traffic deaths per year), and save humanity immense time that would otherwise be spent staring at a road.

Sure it would be nice if everyone would just bike, live in a small community and adopt the MMM way. Perfect is the enemy of good though right?

 Obviously a complicated subject, and it has its risks like humans using it more to increase sprawl, increasing drive times, obesity, pollution etc.  I'm not sure if that will lead to a net positive or negative. Overall though innovation and our ability to forever optimize, seems like the primary difference between us and the beasts.

I don't think that would happen unless we were able to break away from the typical 9-5 schedule.  Rush hour periods indicate that a significant portion of people need to be on the road at the same time, so my suspicion is that autonomous cars would also sit idle for much of the time.  It would certainly be a dramatic improvement, though.

runbikerun

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #139 on: October 11, 2018, 09:09:55 AM »
"I don't use any of Google's new products" is not the same thing as "Google's products are not any more advanced than a decade ago". You may not use them, but they're vastly more advanced than they were in 2008.

Incidentally, a Spotify subscription and a Google Home speaker is a remarkably simple way to feel like you're in the distant future. I don't care how blasé people get, being able to tell a robot to play a particular song is goddamn incredible.

mm1970

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #140 on: October 11, 2018, 10:43:10 AM »
I may be misquided, but it seems to me that this is kind of the wrong forum for depictions of stomping on and despoiling a beautiful forested area with a 4000lb+ machine burning an explosive and toxic fuel.

Having said that - autonomous vehicles have already conquered Pikes Peak, not sure if the time to complete was competitive though.

Ah yes, I'm on MMM - where having kids and international travel are awesome, but responsibly doing any motorsport activities are somehow the worst thing ever.  The environmentalist priorities here are fucking weird.

Anyway, you misspelled "driving on an established and legal trail."  I didn't see any hikers or cyclists clearing fallen trees from the trail -- if you want to play that elitist snobby game with me, come back when you're packing a chainsaw and trash bags to leave the trails better off than when you found them.

My point is that autonomous vehicles are not likely to replace all use cases for vehicles in the foreseeable future.  Take that as you will.
That pic could literally be the woods across the road from my stepfather's house. 

That have a dirt road/ rocky path.

That he occasionally drives on to get things to the field on the other side.

(He owns the land too, so there's that.)

Lots of roads like that where I grew up.

genesismachine

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #141 on: October 11, 2018, 10:50:46 AM »
Or, in my case, still just googling things - which it did better, with less advertising, 10 years ago. And that's why I'm not so awfully convinced that this fleet of self-driving cars is going to suddenly appear in the next couple of years.

There is no way Google was producing better search results in 2008 than now.

Says who? Google was producing perfectly useful search results well before 2008. Indeed, more useful because you didn’t have to wade through all the Sponsored sites to get to the actual search results. I seriously just said to my dh how I miss the older google! And I’m not interested in any of that extra stuff - it’s like so many other devices that do 25 things I don’t care about.

A) The internet has grown by leaps and bounds since 2008, so producing the same search results is vastly more difficult
B) The search results are indeed better by leaps and bounds vs 2008, although you may not perceive it
C) By that logic, there has been no improvement in auto technology since the Model T because the Model T got you from point A to point B just like today's cars. Heck, even horses got you from point A to point B.

Cadman

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #142 on: October 11, 2018, 11:34:06 AM »
There's a lot of talk in this thread about autonomous vehicles being safer than human-operated vehicles...less accidents, fewer fatalities. In fact, they can't be just 'as good as' today, they need to be better than today simply because they'll be less flexible than what they're replacing. And we can't assume there won't be new or unexpected types of accidents that would offset those we're seeking to eliminate.

I think we can also agree that the true test for these vehicles before they're ready for prime-time is how they perform under real-world conditions, accumulating miles traveled without incident. And this is what just about every car company banking on this tech has been doing. And therein lies the problem.
 
According to the Rand Corporation, to statistically demonstrate a 20% reduction in driver fatalities from today's 1.09 per 100 million miles, it would take approximately 5 billion miles of autonomous driving to do so.

"With a fleet of 100 autonomous vehicles test driven 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at an average speed of 25 miles per hour, this would take about 225 years."

Not mentioned in the report, but discussed earlier this week (I work for a company tangentially involved in automation) is that the only way this 'demonstration' will be achievable is through computer simulation. BMW believes 95% of proving the AI will have to be done with software. That puts the onus less on the vehicle and more on the confidence level of the vehicle simulation.

Link to the Report: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1478/RAND_RR1478.pdf

jambongris

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #143 on: October 11, 2018, 11:51:06 AM »

"With a fleet of 100 autonomous vehicles test driven 24 hours a day, 365 days a year at an average speed of 25 miles per hour, this would take about 225 years."


Waymo has close to 100,000 vehicles on order from Chrysler and Jaguar and the roll-out of their driverless taxi service in Phoenix is imminent. That should cut down significantly on the amount of time it will take for them to reach five billion miles. Assuming nothing goes horribly wrong forcing them to halt the service.

FIRE Artist

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #144 on: October 11, 2018, 01:35:27 PM »
No.  When I bought my current vehicle new 6 years ago (pre mustache), I told my father that it was going to be the last gas vehicle that I would own.  I will drive this one into the ground, then the next car I get will be electric, and the following one will be self driving, and quite possibly the last car I ever own. I am not worried about my current car, or the next one for that matter.  I still believe my prediction to be true, if anything, my next car may likely be electric and have at least partial self drive capable. 

genesismachine

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #145 on: October 11, 2018, 02:37:36 PM »
Driverless cars don't have to be safer. I would argue that for many people, they would rather spend their attention reading a book or watching a show vs spending it on driving to get some tiny incremental benefit in safety.

If I have to spend 250 hours/year to reduce my chance at a car accident from 0.001% to 0.0001%, not everyone is willing to make that sacrifice.

Long term it's a moot point; driverless cars will be safer. If computers can beat humans at chess and go, they can figure out how not to collide with other objects while moving. It is only a matter of time. It's not like international diplomacy or something truly complicated - this is a very solvable problem with clear rules and parameters for optimization.

scottish

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #146 on: October 11, 2018, 03:57:57 PM »
I find all the talk about how driver-less cars will be better than people (driving) a bit disingenuous.

Automated cars will all tend to make the same mistakes.    They have the same software, they'll have the same failure modes.

I'll be a lot more confident when there's some independent oversight instead of allowing manufacturers to self-certify.    Before we allow these vehicles on the road, we should establish things like:
- liability.   When a automated car is involved in a crash with (another automated) car, who is liable?   Owner?  Manufacturer?
- accuracy levels for sensors and features detectors and other key parts of the car.   How reliably must a car detect a stop sign?
- critical failure points.   For example, if the vehicle loses GPS, what is it supposed to do?
- discussion on emergency behaviour.     Is the car allowed to make an emergency stop on a freeway?
and so on.

Automation for aviation has gone through all of this.   We should be able to learn from this.

While I don't believe they actually have any standards to follow, from what little I know auto manufacturers already follow procedures for software validation on these type of systems that at least matches TSO for aircraft.


Do you have a reference?   I would like to read up on it.

runbikerun

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #147 on: October 12, 2018, 04:04:48 AM »
Incidentally, I was speaking to someone today who had a startup in 2007 focused on location-specific search, because at that point searching for "bike shop in Longmont" didn't produce useful results.

There is no way that era of search was superior to what we have now.

Cranky

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #148 on: October 12, 2018, 04:39:41 AM »
But it doesn’t have to be “superior “ - it just has to be “good enough”.

The question is - will self driving cars be so vastly superior to today’s system that no one will want a “regular” car? And my answer is - not in the next 5 years, they won’t. A lot of the scenarios offered here seem like arguments *against* self driving fleets of cars. Who wants to ride around in a car designed to be impervious to other passengers making a mess of it? Who wants to call a vehicle and wait 10 minutes every time?

That system saves you time if you live in a dense city center where driving is slow and inconvenient, but it becomes far less appealing as soon as you get even to the suburbs. And don’t discount the issues of transporting children around - it’s not so easy to get an uber with a car seat much less make the multiple trips/day parents often make.

I think it’s going to be a slower process. I’ve been waiting a long time for flying cars, too.

SnackDog

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Re: Are you afraid your new car's value will be ruined by the driverless car?
« Reply #149 on: October 12, 2018, 06:43:47 AM »
Perhaps in a year or two you will be able to purchase an upgrade kit for your existing car to make it driverless.  Oh wait, you can buy it now!

https://newatlas.com/xmatik-lanecruise-self-driving-kit/52257/