Even now, several years into the current news/development arc of self-driving cars, I still can't believe this is going to be the future.

We're really never going to european (or japanese) style train networks ? We're really going to keep binging on roads ? We, as a nation of fat slobs[1] are really not ever going to return to a culture of walking ?

I always thought of car culture (and we absolutely live in a car culture) as some kind of 20th century aberration ... eventually, LA would get their streetcars and subways[2] back ... eventually Minneapolis and Denver would have 20, not 2 light rail lines ... eventually we'd graduate from shitty bus networks operated badly, for poor people.

Tesla cars are awesome. Successful self driving car software would be an incredible achievement. I worry that there is an arc of societal and urban development that has gone very badly awry and that this will further keep us from fixing it.

[1] That is not hyperbole.

[2] Yes, I know there is currently a tiny, minor subway in LA.

Public transport only works inside of cities, and there's a lot of infrastructure already built to support sprawling metropolitan areas where everyone has 1/4 acre of land surrounding their detached home. There's not a lot of push to tear all that up and forcibly relocate the residents to inner-city apartments.

You know the benefit of electric, self-driving cars, though? An intelligent car isn't going to run you over on your bike. Be happy about that.

Three of the best public transit systems in the world are Berlin, Tokyo, and New York, which are both amongst the densest large cities in the world (Berlin is almost exclusively 5 story apartment buildings). The Berlin subway is largely self-supporting without public subsidy, Tokyo's system is composed of two competing but interoperable systems, the larger of which is privately run, and New York's system was privately run until 1940. The lifestyle, weather, and zoning of the cities where it works kickstarted the construction, and there exists enough demand that they would have great public transit systems even without government initiative.

What matters is if the 82% of Americans who live in cities are forced to crawl through sprawling car-choked landscapes, or are able to live in a walkable environment. High reliance on cars prevents the latter.

By the way you were wrong about that Japan vs US comparison as well. USA has a higher proportion of urban residents than does Japan. And they have plenty of trains in Japan.

Yes, I'm guessing that many of those urban areas are within half an hour of a freeway--though this may be less true in the West. But the vast majority of those 82% don't live in places that are remotely walkable.

According to my Google search, Japan's urban population is 90%+. The US is around 80%. That's why I mentioned the two places.

/s obviously.

God I hate the responses on threads like this that insist on the impracticality of public transport worldwide because it doesn't work in the US. It's like mass Stockholm Syndrome or something!

Notice how I even said "it works in places like Japan"? Notice that? See it? Good. Now quit acting like like you're being oppressed every time someone mentions the US. Yes, the world is a big place, but guess what? The US exists and a lot of people live there. Deal with it.

Jesus christ it's like I insulted your mother or something.

And income inequality means that people can literally afford to pay for other people to not be near them as they travel.

Busses and trains and other mass transport will return when income inequality is reduced to the point where the amount it costs people to pay for their own space is no longer affordable for them, but if you're earning 500 times the person next to you, you'll happily pay what it takes for them to disappear.

Heck, to a certain extent we're already in that scenario, with some sharing services are cheaper than cars(@ridewithvia, @ridechariot, and maybe uber pool and lyft line) - and yet people prefer cars.

[1] https://www.postauto.ch/en/news/start-public-testing-autonom...

While self driving cars will do great things for people such as yourself (and overall I fully support their development/adoption), I also share the fear that it will prevent American urban centers from a desperately needed shift away from cars dependence in favor of better public transit and urban density. I really don't see the idea of every person in the country having their own personal transportation device (or even shared self-drivings car with something like uber) as a sustainable path for the US to continue down.

The technology for good transportation in/among major cities already exists: walking, biking, mass-transit, and high-speed rail. I wish Americans would be more open to these concepts rather than dismissing them in favor of the form of transit that has yielded nothing but horribly designed and polluted cities.

http://www.boredpanda.com/space-required-to-transport-60-peo...

But this is much more likely to actually happen. A grid of self driving cars powered by renewable energy. I will take it over the current state.

Trains are intrinsically unequal, they serve hub towns at best and cities only at worst, they are dirty, cramped, noisy, unprivate and they don't go when or where you want to go. Even with Google maps seaming together journeys out of trains and busses, you end up waiting and walking a lot. And trains are an intrinsic monopoly with a staggering up front investment, you can't make them better with market forces. I foresee self driving cars cannibalizing the train's market of people who just want to pay for journeys rather than the vehicle.

[1] public transit is great for when you have a lot of time and aren't carrying a lot of things. Doing, say, your weekly groceries by bus or walking is annoying af. Source: living in a European city without owning a car.

PS: I live in the US now and not having a car is much more convenient than it was in Europe. Uber and zipcar and getaround are magic. We didn't have that in my city

plus in many if not most countries rail simply doesn't go where people need to be. in countries with a choice cars are winning out and with autonomous and eventual ev powered cars it won't be a bad thing

Space? Roads take up way more space than tracks.

Efficiency of cost? Roads are very expensive. Often more expensive per passenger mile than railroads.

Efficiency of energy use? Moving a 2000kg electric car around for 1 person is never going to be efficient.

Efficiency of through-put? Roads even with autonomous cars will never have the throughput of a train-line.

Also I think you significantly underestimate the cost of road building and maintenance.

Roads are indispensable and essential for last mile connectivity. No matter if trains and subways become 10 times more popular they will always exist in addition to the road infrastructure. Thus autonomous electric cars are a huge boon, its just common sense.

That depends on how you are defining efficiency (doesn't it always), an electric motor with a good battery backed by a good powergrid (nuclear/renewables) is about the most efficient solution to "one person going from Point A to Point B" in many ways, I'm in favor of public transport but even in a European country it can let you down.

Also in the future with electric self-driving cars I'd happily not own a car (I don't now) and just rent one as and when it's needed from a pool of cars, that would take cars off the road compared to now.

>Space? Roads take up way more space than tracks.

Highways can now be minimised to two tracks, the standard width of a vehicle, vibration reports can tell the councils where pothole repair is most needed.

>Moving a 2000kg electric car around for 1 person is never going to be efficient.

Car's are 2000kg in part to protect the driver, as crashes trend to 0 there's no reason they need to be so big.

>Roads even with autonomous cars will never have the throughput of a train-line.

Trains are rarely full. Cars can get smaller, we can mitigate traffic jams.

Eletrics cars are 2000kg because a the battery weighs a lot.

Trains get smaller too when it's not rush hour. France regularly runs one carriage trains the size of a bus.

Mitigate and smooth flowing aren't the same thing. On way to work I see cars backed up for miles. Doesn't matter if they're self driving or not when cars move bumper to bumper already.

I'm impressed with this self-driving on California's spacious streets in perfect weather. I'll be really impressed when I see a self-driving car go down a London street in pouring rain, realize it needs to allow someone to come from the other direction and reverses and moves to the left to allow them through.

tl;dr: don't trust the client (or other drivers).

Simple scenario to illustrate this: car X enters a narrow bidirectional road which is lined with cars. There is enough room only for one car to pass at a time, safely. Car Y enters from the other end. Several more cars enter behind car Y (we'll call these Y1, Y2, Y3, Y4).

One car must reverse back down the road from the midway point, in order for any cars to pass through.

Car X and its driver cannot see what is behind car Y, but for car Y to reverse it must rely on Y1, Y2, Y3, and Y4 reversing. In order for this to happen, Y4 must first reverse despite not being able to see why it needs to reverse (either through meat or tech sensors).

The optimal solution is that sensor data reviewed in the aggregate by each car leads to a cooperative decision that car X should reverse until it can pull over, and allow the other cars to pass before proceeding.

In an emergency situation it's also possible to envisage scenarios in which shared data analysis and cooperative decision making are optimal. For example, consider cars X and Y now destined for a high speed, head-on collision. The right lane of the road (car X's right, car Y's left) is clear and the left lane (car X's left, car Y's right) is a deep trench. A primitive or non collaborative AI might suggest that both cars swerve to the same direction to avoid collision, which results in a collision of similar magnitude. A better solution than swerving the two cars into each other might be to swerve one into the ditch and one into the road. The optimal solution is likely to swerve only one car and hard stop the other, knowing that the other car is going to move its direction of travel significantly. This can only be done by giving the cars the ability to make decisions collaboratively.

Not as tight an example as yours I'm afraid, but humans make cooperative decisions all the time where we use information and continue to be suspicious of it and hedge against lies. I think any realistic cooperative tech system where there are untrusted components needs to stay skeptical as well.

I'm probably super naïve, but I think there's probably a way of digitally signing hardware components so that we can trust sensor data from other cars.

And on the other hand there is plenty of opportunity to include encryption with gov/mfn signed keys, crosscheck received data with sensor values, etc.

The benefits far outweigh the risks.

People seem to hand-wave and make up what these supposed future self driving cars will do - and worse, they hand-wave and assert they'll be objectively better at X than humans, without any evidence to backup the assertion.

Self driving cars are made by fallible humans using fallible programming languages and constructs. They can't possibly account for every situation or scenario - but people hand-wave and say it magically will.

Sure, one day you'll be able to sleep in the back seat of your car or read a book while it precisely weaves you between traffic only to navigate you right off a cliff. Or the neighbor's kid with a laser pointer prevents your car from turning into the driveway.

Driver-assisted cars are the real future.

Google's road tested self driving car is already safer[1] than a human driving. Suggesting that a computer will be a more reliable processor of data and computer of maths than a human is not something which needs data to back it up. The ability of drivers is so variable and in the aggregate there are so many of them that it's almost self-evident that a self driving car which crosses a very low threshold for entry ("being road legal") will be better than a human.

> They can't possibly account for every situation or scenario - but people hand-wave and say it magically will.

Nobody is saying that they will any more than people argue that autopilot on a plane will. It's very plain to see that right now, as of this second, there is a self-driving car which is safer than a human driver. It is not yet legal to buy, but it doesn't change the fact that it's safer. It may be that a bug crops up which kills a few people. But that doesn't make it less safe, it makes the cause of death for some of the users different to "human error".

[1]http://bigthink.com/ideafeed/googles-self-driving-car-is-rid...

How many other sectors have abandoned human interference after computers surpassed human performance?

So far, society seems to not be OK with this (as-in we'd rather a person do the killing, even if we think that killing was wrongful).

We aren't OK with autonomous robots having weapons, even though they might be objectively better at guarding prisoners, military bases, killing "bad guys" in bank robberies, etc. We freak out when a fatality occurs at an automotive plant, and those robots only pivot in place!

If society is going to agree we're all OK with a bug left by some short-sighted engineer being responsible for people's deaths - then OK. However, I wager people aren't really OK with this, most just haven't really considered this aspect yet.

Sure there will be legal issues (in a crash who is responsible, the driver, the manufacturer or the programmers) but they will get resolved with time and case law.

The economic advantages to self driving cars are huge (unless you drive for a living but then progress is what it is), 35,000 people a year die on American roads an order of magnitude improvement would save ~32,000 lives a year (and that's just accidents resulting in fatalities, many many more experience life changing injuries), this generation of drivers might not like it but as the cars get better and better at driving themselves the next generation will hand over more and more of the responsibilities until a human driving a car manually on the road will look like an anachronism.

Also people aren't ever going to be happy with a bug in hardware or software killing someone but we are currently 'happy' with allowing tens of thousands of people to die from car accidents, if the motorcar had been invented in 2000 many people would have wanted to ban it immediately.

"You want to operate a 2500KG metal box at 40mph in proximity to people!? oh hell no!"

In the case of cars some radio comms (uhf, wifi, or even bluetooth?) is probably sufficient since there is no reason for a car in New York cares about the opinions of a car in San Francisco. You'd probably even see performance gains under a distributed system since latency is effectively taken out of the equation (time of flight for local radio being effectively instantaneous).

NB I'm sure "proper" behaviour can be programmed - I'm just keen to see it! (And who waives if it is a self driving car?)

    > Maybe it will have technology to not go on that street until it is good to do so.

It's not technology that's required, barring perhaps flying car technology.

If every way is busy, you can't just wait eternally, you have to communicate with other drivers as parent commenter said, maybe let a couple of people go, and then realise when you just need to go for it and 'force' someone to wait for you if they're not otherwise going to.

It will be really awesome to see a car do that safely and autonomously.

There'll come a time, perhaps, when two cars are flashing their headlights at each other to communicate, for no real reason other than "that's how human-driven cars did it in the old days"!

There will be a huge public to-and-fro about negligence versus freedom, with driving manual being the new driving drunk, but the insurance premiums will settle it.

I predict that many in bigger cities will give up on owning their own car, and join car sharing services.

Then you can choose between a private car just for you, or a shared ride where the car optimizes routes and picks up multiple people.

Other benefits: it's just you? take a small 2 person car. On the way to a party with some friends? Get a nice Mercedes to drive you there. Need to transport some furniture? Get a pickup.

Of course this only holds for cities and densely populated suburban regions. Or if you don't have to drive long routes on a regular basis.

It's worth mentioning - which I already hinted at in another comment - that self-driving cars, awesome as this is, will be yet another area where our privacy gets compromised, same as with mobile phones. This will push governments to favour it in the long run and eventually outlaw "regular" cars altogether as too anarchic (or make using them so expensive and cumbersome that it's going to amount to the same thing).

When they truly understand that it's going to turn them all into taxi makers, that owning a car is completely passé, they'll panic. That will be their DVD -> streaming moment, but it will already be too late.

I'm sure they understand that. Some even do moves in that direction, like Ford ackuiring chariot, the shared ride provider, and Mercedes collaborating with Via.

You probably won't need to own one either, just hail one. So it may be very affordable.

I wrote a little more about this here: https://unop.uk/more-on-electric-vehicles

I think we can apply the Pareto principle here. The car seems to work surprisingly well in ideal conditions, but probably doesn't in less than ideal ones (let's see it operating in a snow storm!). So, let's say that 80% of the work is done, leaving 20% to fix all the little edge cases that are bound to pop in the real world.

According to Wikipedia, the first truly autonomous cars started to appear in the 1980s. Let us round that off to 30 years of development. According to the principle, that means 30 years represents 20% of the time.

Thus, 120 more years before they become available. If the ownership model persists, I'd add another 5 years to let people replace their existing vehicles to reach common status. If the shared fleet model takes hold, as many suggest it will, then that number may be reduced somewhat.

But I think saying this took 30 years is cheating a bit. There were fits and starts and long periods of no development until breakthroughs in other fields (machine learning) occured, which can now get us the rest of the way. Not to mention, the pareto principle doesn't account for Moore's law

And it should be able to automatically detect that it's in the UK and drive on the left side of the road... I'm curious - can you even get a Tesla in the UK (or Japan or Australia, etc), and do they make a right-side driver model?

There is even a showroom selling them + the X in the local shopping centre (mall) and 3 (I think) super-chargers in the car park.

After Model S, most common is the Leaf. (also right-hand drive)