A German Parking Garage Parks Your Car For You 131
moon_unit2 writes "Tech Review has a story about a garage in Ingolstadt, Germany, where the cars park themselves. The garage is an experiment set up by Audi to explore ways that autonomous technology might practically be introduced; most of the sensor technology is built into the garage and relayed to the cars rather than inside the cars themselves. It seems that carmakers see the technology progressing in a slightly different way to Google, with its fleet of self-driving Prius. From the piece: 'It's actually going to take a while before you get a really, fully autonomous car,' says Annie Lien, a senior engineer at the Electronics Research Lab, a shared facility for Audi, Volkswagen, and other Volkswagen Group brands in Belmont, California, near Silicon Valley. 'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that drives you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 10 years.'"
Self Parking (Score:5, Insightful)
While it's a neat idea for a self parking garage. I saw a concept(?) previously where you drive your car into a "single car container" and when you left, your car in it's container would be shuttled off to a compact/secure storage array like a tape in a server room storage rack. Even though it requires more track and sensors, that system seems to be more realistic than a system that requires every car be programmed to understand the signals being broadcast by the garage.
Fahrvergnügen (Score:5, Insightful)
The Germans love driving. They love driving fast. I can see why it is set up so that "the first self-driving vehicles will perform only specific tasks." To numerous of them driving isn't just something to get from point A to point B. Which is why most German cars didn't have cupholders, etc that American cars did back in the 80s.
I was recently working in Germany and a coworker mentioned that some lawmakers want to put a speed limit but there is heavy, heavy resistance funded in part by VAG and Benz. He likened it to America's gun culture. and with that analogy some of the stuff some of our gun rights advocates say makes sense to them. (Not all of it, some of it is crazy rhetoric.) You don't touch Germans' driving/cars and you don't touch Americans' guns.
Re:Life Safety Critical (Score:5, Insightful)
It's only "very, very hard" because people have an inflated sense of safety when a human is in charge. People can regularly cause accidents, but a single error by a machine will threaten the entire technology.
Re:How does the insurance industry feel about this (Score:5, Insightful)
How will the insurance industry make up for the rates charged if cars are fully autonomous? They will lose a very lucrative market if and when this comes to be.
Charging people at a risk level that has substantially dropped? They'll be pissing their pants in excitement. The reduction in risk turns directly into profit.
Re:How does the insurance industry feel about this (Score:2, Insightful)
If GM ends up assuming additional liability for each car they sell, I'd expect them to largely self-insure. Then again, utilizing existing insurance channels might be for the best.
I would NOT be surprised to see a legislative bill that indemnifies manufacturers of a autonomous car and puts the onus on the owner/operator, or even a switch to 'no fault' type insurance, in order to encourage them, so long as
Re:Life Safety Critical (Score:2, Insightful)
Life safety critical autonomy is very, very hard.
Perfection is hard, but beating a human operator is not. Humans constantly crash vehicles, but we just accept it as a matter of course.
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/12/06/mbta-driver-crash-held-second-full-time-job-with-bha/4M66jdB3J0HCnx2DwEwt7K/story.html
How fucking had is it to design a system that prevents two electric trolleys from colliding? It's really fucking easy. Wire it up so drawing a load from any two adjacent blocks trips the circuit breaker for the block in the back. It's a practically bulletproof design-- get too close to the train in front and you lose power. Humans...even humans with "a decade of experience and a perfect safety record" really suck at this stuff.
The REALLY hard part about autonomous vehicles is that they eliminate jobs in the short term. Go tell the Teamsters that $75/hr truck drivers aren't needed in this world, and then go run for office.
Re:Sheesh (Score:5, Insightful)
10 years is the time it takes to bring a technology that is fully available now to mass production. Nothing to do with optimism or not, it takes several years to design and produce an incremental upgrade on existing cars.
Just have a look at electric car and a modern company like Tesla. They announced their first car in 2006. Produced it in 2008, upgrade it to something slightly more usable by Joe User in 2012. If they keep it up at the same rhythm they could maybe have a real mass production (i.e. with the problem of the masses fixed) model in 2016. 10 years.
Same thing here, you will get more and more automated car (there are car that park themselves, and can drive on the highway available now), but for a mass market, robotic taxi, 10 years does not seem so pessimistic.
Hit submit by accident... (Score:5, Insightful)
If GM or other major car companies ends up assuming additional liability for each car they sell, I'd expect them to largely self-insure. Then again, utilizing existing insurance channels might be for the best.
I would NOT be surprised to see a legislative bill that indemnifies manufacturers of a autonomous car and puts the onus on the owner/operator, or even a switch to 'no fault' type insurance, in order to encourage them, so long as they test as being safer than average human drivers to a high confidence level, probably using DUI convicts as test beds.
Given a reasonably self driving car, I see a shift away from breath testers for driving to 'you can only take self-driving cars for X years', even if the system costs $40k. Just the breath system is like $10k for the first year, what with all the maintenance required, going by the road signs declaring 'YOUR FIRST DUI CAN COST $X', with breakdowns. Add in the thousands probably saved in insurance, etc... It adds up.
Automatic parking, of course (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in my DARPA Grand Challenge days, I saw fully automated parking as the first "killer app" for automated driving. Everybody was obsessed with automated freeway driving, but that's not what annoys people. Looking for parking annoys people. The general idea is that you get out of your car at your destination, and it goes and parks itself somewhere. When you want your car back, you call it and it comes to you. Parking then need not be as close to the destination; a big parking garage a mile away is fine.
The first application of this should have been for airport rental cars. You rent the car via your phone, and the car comes to the loading area near baggage claim and picks you up. When you're done with the car and at the airport, you get out at the departure area, and it drives itself to rental car return. Customers would save an hour on every plane trip. That would sell.
It's workable. At no time is autonomous operation above about 20MPH necessary, which means slamming on the brakes is sufficient to deal with most problems. All the rental cars are new and under common ownership and maintenance, so the self-driving systems can be checked out on every rental. The system could be expanded to include the top 10 destinations for rental cars - major hotels, convention centers, etc.
After 9/11, no way would autonomous vehicles be allowed in an airport terminal area. So that didn't look promising back in the mid-2000s. Today, though, with terrorism down to nuisance levels, it's worth looking at again.
As for VW thinking that automated driving is more than a decade away, both Ford and Mercedes have said they expect to have it in production vehicles in five years.