Report: By 2035, Nearly 100 Million Self-Driving Cars Will Be Sold Per Year 325
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The rise of autonomous cars might turn out to be more rapid than even the most devout Knight Rider fans were hoping. According to a new report from Navigant Research, in just over two decades, Google Cars and their ilk will account for 75 percent of all light vehicle sales worldwide. In total, Navigant expects 95.4 million autonomous cars to be sold every year by 2035. That's pretty astonishing. For one thing, that's more cars than are built every year right now."
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
They start making up figures on a market that has not started yet?
Seems like a real great (and useful) idea to me...
Re:I personally wouldn't trust (Score:4, Insightful)
You want full control? You can't handle full control! Nobody can. Self driving cars will save thousands of lives. It will be that much safer. The proof is in the airline industry. Operator error is by far the most important factor in all accidents.
Re:I personally wouldn't trust (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally wouldn't trust any auto driven care made by anyone. Its all about control baby and i want full control.
I trust other drivers far less than I trust engineering, and I find driving long distance to be a tedious chore.
So I can't wait until driverless cars are on the market. I just hope I'll be able to afford them when they are, and I hope they won't require any oversight from me by the time I'm old and gray, so I can happily nap at the wheel.
Lets get these cars rolling (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I personally wouldn't trust (Score:4, Insightful)
You want full control? You can't handle full control! Nobody can. Self driving cars will save thousands of lives. It will be that much safer. The proof is in the airline industry. Operator error is by far the most important factor in all accidents.
You mean, the same airline industry that is now questioning whether pilots rely too much on automation technology? [yahoo.com]
Hindsight - it's always 20-20.
Sharing will soar (Score:4, Insightful)
Ridiculous. If a car can drive itself, it is much easier to share with others. No need for a family to have 3 cars anymore if you can just send one to go pick some one up.
There'll be a taxi style service, or cars shared by people living in the same block, and cars will just go where they're needed.
Re:For the love of Junior Johnson... (Score:5, Insightful)
self-locking doors
auto ride control
auto headlights/self-diming & on-off
automatic seat belts
airbags
proximity keyless entry
ABS
lane drift monitoring
auto brake on object detect
...what part of 'automatic' snuck up on you over the last 50 years?
Re:Sharing will soar (Score:5, Insightful)
Ridiculous. If a car can drive itself, it is much easier to share with others. No need for a family to have 3 cars anymore if you can just send one to go pick some one up.
It also creates a market for a box-on-wheels that is not intended for human transport. You send it to the dry-cleaners. They load it with your clothes and send it back to you. Every single delivery or drive-thru business model can use this. No need for expensive seats, seatbelts, airbags, crumple zones, roll bars, etc. It doesn't need a long range or a high-performance engine. This can immediately replace 75% of the traffic from "running errands"
What's even better is that you don't even need to store it. When it's not in use, it drives to some nearby fleet facility that handles refueling, maintenance, etc. You don't even need to own it because it's an impersonal, fungible box-on-wheels. You just rent it and let some company benefit from the economy of scale.
Re:For the love of Junior Johnson... (Score:2, Insightful)
How many of these are actually common on normal cars?
1) Auto trans
These are clearly inferior to manual transmissions in every way, except for some of the most recent models with the advent of DSG transmissions (which are mechanically nothing like an actual "automatic transmission").
2) self-locking doors
These are somewhat common, but it's such a simple function it can hardly be compared to an auto trans.
3) auto ride control
Not present on normal, non-luxury cars, and definitely not on any performance-oriented cars.
4) auto headlights/self-diming & on-off
Still mostly confined to American luxury cars, though becoming more common in lower-end cars, but again a fairly simple function.
5) automatic seat belts
Completely and utter failure, so bad that they were completely eliminated when airbags became standard issue. They only existed on cars because the US had a stupid law requiring passive safety devices, which could be satisfied either with an airbag or an automatic seat belt, so manufacturers trying to cut costs went with the seatbelts (aka "mouse belts"). It was particularly funny when some cars came with a driver's side airbag but an automatic seatbelt on the passenger side (since airbags were so expensive back then), but on the driver's side, instead of having a matching automatic seatbelt, then had a good ol' manual belt, making it obvious that the automatic belt wasn't an improvement in any way. Now that every car has airbags (and a bunch of them), they ALL have completely manual seat belts.
6) airbags
Red herring. Airbags are passive safety devices, not a device to automatically do something the driver had to do previously.
7) proximity keyless entry
Still not present in that many cars, an expensive option in many, and again a fairly simple function with today's wireless tech.
8) ABS
This one is everywhere now, and really the only thing in your list that supports your argument. Since it's impossible for a driver to modulate the brake calipers at each wheel independently, ABS makes sense, plus it only comes on when there's a large discrepancy in wheelspeeds, not in normal driving, so it's rarely used.
9) lane drift monitoring
10) auto brake on object detect
Don't exist except in a few ~$100k cars.
The problem with auto transmissions is that they aren't actually better than the manual function they replace (again, except arguably for DSG transmissions, which are only found in a couple of makes, namely VW and its subsidiaries and also some Fords). They have significantly reduced performance, greatly increased complexity and reduced reliability, and significantly reduced fuel economy. Maybe when DSGs completely take over and the slushboxes are retired to the dustbin of history, we can stop having arguments like this, but as long as torque converters are used, automatics will never be as good as manuals.
How safe do you think driving is? (Score:5, Insightful)
Engineering is done by humans as as the thousands of poorly engineered building,bridges, cars, planes,trains, consumer products killing thousands/millions have shown us is that engineering is no guarantee of safety.
Could you cite those statistics for death caused not by human error?
Because, according to the CDC [cdc.gov], 35,000+ people died of auto accidents in 2010, compared to only just under 17,000 for all "other" non-transport, non-firearm, non-poisoning, non-fall, non-fire/smoke, non-drowning deaths. And that was a GOOD year for automotive deaths -- one of the lowest in decades. For all the national panic over September 11th, we lose well over 10x that number of people every year thanks to auto accidents. More people die every year from car accidents than from firearms, fire, and poison combined.
That's just the fatalities! Only about 8% of crashes result in fatalities thanks to nearly miraculous advances in modern medicine. There are about 6 million crashes per year and about 2.3 million people sent to the hospital as a result. That's about a $70 billion drain on the economy every year. [cdc.gov] 44% of people with spinal cord injuries obtained them from a car accident.
Getting in a car is the single most dangerous thing you do every day.
While engineering may be no guarantee of perfect safety, but it's practically a guarantee of lowered risks. Human error was the sole cause of 57% of all accidents and a contributing factor in over 90% [visualexpert.com] Mechanical error alone was only 2.4%. The top three contributing factors to accidents are driver inattention, alcohol, and speed. A driverless system (that obeys traffic laws) eliminates all three.
To make the argument that driverless cars would be less safe than humans is a joke, especially when it's such a low bar to reach.
Re:I personally wouldn't trust (Score:2, Insightful)
Your a ignorant fool not looking at the advatages. No more looking for car parking space, you can eat bacon and eggs for breakfast from behind the wheel, It can pick you up after a big night on the town with your friends and no one ever has to drink drive again, you can live hours away from work but your commute you can spend watching netflix and studing for some course, never another speeding ticket or angry traffic cop to talk to. Stop being such a gruppy old man they wont do anything to your grass.
Re:Duh (Score:4, Insightful)
Self driving is the single feature that would ever get me to shell out for a new car. Nothing like having your own car drive you home after a couple of beers after work.
Ultimately, the huge capacity to save lives and the economic advantages of self-driving cars and trucks are going to drive this step very fast. Tens of thousands of lives every year, hundreds of thousands of injuries, tens to hundreds of billions in insurance costs, tens to hundreds of billions in savings on transportation, etc. In the face of the possible gains I think the regulatory aspects will get resolved faster than most people think.