How Europe Will Lower Emissions — Self Driving Cars 317
thecarchik writes "Scientists in Europe are working closely with industry and government as part of a new initiative called SARTRE (SAfe Road TRains for the Environment), which hopes to develop self-driving technology that will allow vehicles to drive autonomously in long road trains on the highway. The team behind SARTRE has now conducted its first real world test, using a sole Volvo S60 sedan that followed a lead truck around the automaker's test facility near Gothenburg, Sweden. In the video, the driver is free to take his eyes off the road and his hands off the wheel. In fact, he uses neither his hands nor feet during the test. Subsequent phases of the work will be carried out in 2011, and early 2012 will see the concept demonstrated on a five-vehicle road train with strategies handling interaction with other road users."
If I were that guy (Score:5, Funny)
Don't blame the driver (Score:3)
My car is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, it is responsible for everything it does.
Should've called it... (Score:2, Funny)
Safe Automobile Trains Is Reducing Emissions
No. Way. (Score:3, Insightful)
If people wanted to be on a train in Europe, they have plenty of opportunities to do so.
Re:No. Way. (Score:5, Insightful)
That is completely beside the point.
Driving is fun when you're out driving for fun. But the daily commute is annoying and tedious. Especially with high traffic and traffic jams, such a system could free a lot of time for the occupant of the car.
On top of that, the risk of collision through inattention would be lowered. All around a good idea and not comparable to actual trains, because the moment you leave the highway, I'd assume, you'd be in control again and free to travel everywhere and not just where the buses and trains go.
Basically, this takes the pros from trains and replaces the cons of personal travel with them.
And nobody said you couldn't keep driving yourself on a leisure cruise.
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Only problem I see is if the driver behind you doesn't pay attention when you leave the train and you get a shadow following you home.
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Driving is fun
That is completely beside the point.
Agree...
Basically, this takes the pros from trains and replaces the cons of personal travel with them.
Except, trains will be a lot safer, have less maintenance and be even more energy efficient... But definitely some of pros from trains...
Re:No. Way. (Score:4, Interesting)
Not all that energy efficient
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/images/2008/08/04/transenergy.png [coyoteblog.com]
My first conclusion is that we would get more efficient by pushing
small, fuel efficient vehicles instead of pushing transit, and at
a lower cost.
A full bus or trainload of people is more efficient than private cars,
sometimes quite a bit more so. But transit systems never consist
of nothing but full vehicles. They run most of their day with light
loads. The above calculations came from figures citing the
average city bus holding 9 passengers, and the average train (light
or heavy) holds 22. If that seems low, remember that every packed
train at rush hour tends to mean a near empty train returning down
the track.
Transit vehicles also tend to stop and start a lot, which eats
a lot of energy, even with regenerative braking. And most
transit vehicles are just plain heavy, and not very aerodynamic.
Indeed, you'll see tables in the DoE reports that show that over the past 30 years,
private cars have gotten 30% more efficient, while buses have
gotten 60% less efficient and trains about 25% worse. The
market and government regulations have driven efforts to make cars
more efficient, while transit vehicles have actually worsened.
In order to get people to ride transit, you must offer frequent
service, all day long. They want to know they have the freedom to leave at
different times. But that means emptier vehicles outside of
rush hour. You've all seen those huge empty vehicles go by, you just
haven't thought of how anti-green they were. It would be better
if off-hours transit was done by much smaller vehicles, but that
implies too much capital cost -- no transit agency will buy enough
equipment for peak times and then buy a second set of equipment for
light demand periods.
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I just wonder why no one ever tried to push a mini on demand rail system, where you have small capsules of max 2-4 passengers and they are pushed to their destination points on demand.
Sounds more ecologically sane to me than the stuff we have currently because in low usage times only a small fraction of capsules are pushed in high traffic times you push a lot. Of couse you cannot get rid of dedicated stops that way and stops because a capsule in front of you has a passenger leaving, but given the small size
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Such solutions have been proposed many times. The main problem appear to be economic: You need a lot of those rails before they are interesting. So it's a big investment, and when it is build, will enough people actually use it?
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The risk the risk of collision through inattention may be lowered, but what happens when one car has a blow-out or mechanical failure. Some people drive too close but no as close as these road trains would!
Re:No. Way. (Score:4, Informative)
That's why the lead driver is a professional in a special vehicle.
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That is incorrect. Only certain vehicles can be lead vehicles. In the video it's a truck, and in the article it's a bus. SATRE has always stated that a professional driver will be in the lead.
How the driver gets paid is a different question, though.
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Only certain vehicles can be lead vehicles.
At least until the system is cracked. There must be all kinds of fun things you can do if you spoof it.
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Re:No. Way. (Score:5, Insightful)
Only certain vehicles can be lead vehicles.
At least until the system is cracked. There must be all kinds of fun things you can do if you spoof it.
Yeah, you can also throw a washing machine from your pickup on the highway. No need to spoof anything.
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Not quite the same as taking charge of a construction convoy and using it to surround and trap a government official with very large and heavy vehicles, before burying him alive with the cement from your captured cement truck.
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There are tons of buses on the motorway all the time, especially during rush hours.. Just equip them with this system and you're done. Though if the bus is in a bus lane I don't know how it would work legally, maybe the cars attached to the bus would have special permission to use the bus lane?
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Or pay by the mile? There's not a large leap in tech there since our smartphones will be integrated with the car soon enough. Join a private road train network, GPS keeps track of distance, pay up electronically when you get off the train.... I drive the family 1000 miles away twice a y
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No more stopping at Burger King? The horror!
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There is one con though - I assume the car just blindly follows the car in front, which itself follows the car in front of it, all the way to the lead car. Thus the driver in front can become the proverbial old goat that lead the herd off a cliff. I mean what happens if the car in front really runs of a cliff. Nowadays he risks just the life of his family. Tomorrow we might have news such as "A driver fell off a cliff. The train of 200 drivers who had been following him fell as well".
It's turtle's all the way down!
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This is the problem with all automation: you make the amount of incidents dramatically smaller, but when something goes wrong, it is a complete disaster.
I think we (as humanity) have accepted this idea long ago.
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Going to be fun for heavy sleepers.. fall asleep for a couple of hours.. oops, you're now 150 miles past your destination!
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"Listen to books on tape/ipod."
Your suggestion isn't right for everyone. I find audio books quite distracting when driving and besides, I'd rather have a full choice about what to do while commuting rather than always be forced to listen to audio books.
"I leave at 6am. No traffic jams."
Not an option for everyone. I'm required to start my work between 08:30 and 09:00. In order to minimise time wastage this means I have to leave my house around 7:30.
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"Seriously? Who, under the age of 80, actually reads newspapers anymore?"
I do, when I have the time to do so. It is quite enjoyable and you should try it some time. Reading a book, play a game or even have a nap seems like a very suitable thing to do rather than drive.
I honestly don't care that you disagree. You're free to ignore this innovation.
Re:No. Way. (Score:5, Interesting)
Did you ever notice how car ads always take place on small roads in beautiful mountainous territory?
Driving cars on the highway through flat country is pretty boring; driving cars on a highway in traffic through the same flat country twice a day for a couple years on end is downright tedious.
I think driving is incredibly fun --- through european cities and over small roads in the countryside. I would love to be able to drive to the highway, read the newspaper for half an hour, and take control again at the exit.
Re:No. Way. (Score:4, Interesting)
I guess that the large US cities are much the same? We've not driven there, yet. Actually, we've hardly even visited the country yet (no history and no unique wildlife, and that's what we travel for).
That's not true -- the US obviously joined modern civilisation a lot later, but there are prehistoric settlements to see (I liked this place [wikipedia.org]), and on the east coast there's a little stuff from the 17th century.
I don't know so much about wildlife, but I'd not see chipmunks, raccoons or skunks before. I didn't see any bears.
Some of the national parks are excellent, for instance Yellowstone [wikipedia.org], Yosemite [wikipedia.org], Death Valley, Sequoia, ... and all the rest, probably; I've been to seven or eight, and all were worth visiting.
Glasgow is the closest to an American city for driving that I know of in Europe -- the motorways cut straight through the middle. The difference is in the US the motorway might be 5+ lanes on each side going through the city and everyone's more relaxed -- there's less overtaking and less difference in speed between any two vehicles. The metropolitan area of Glasgow has 2.5M people, the motorways are 3+3 lanes. Albuquerque has a population of less than 1M, the interstate road is 6+6. I doubt there's anywhere cheap to park in the middle of Glasgow, but there's good public transport and a park+ride service. A car is unlikely to be a necessity in any European town (though it may save time, you could manage without it). That's not possible in much of the US, they've built stuff too far apart.
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Well, I can get quite a thrill at driving through cities like Paris or Barcelona. Traffic is fast and mean, and you have to think and react quick or get cut off.
Amsterdam, especially central amsterdam (where I live) is fun in a maze-solving way with one way streets, narrow canal streets totally blocked by moving vans, etc. Traffic is horrible at rush hour but quite doable during the day and evening and in the weekend.
I haven't driven in England but Edinburgh is certainly doable outside rush hour.
US cities e
This is just pure ignorance (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, probably shouldn't feed the trolls, but:
Regarding history - just as a quick example, we had this little thing called the Civil War. It went on all over the continent for a period of years and killed millions of people. In the process, a large number of very colorful and interesting figures appeared on the scene, and a number of innovations in warfare were developed. The war settled a number of lingering political issues left over from the American Revolution, abolished the evil of slavery, and arguably set the stage for later American domination of the international scene.
History: just because ours doesn't appeal to you doesn't mean we don't have any.
Your statement with respect to wildlife, if possible, is even more ludicrous. A huge proportion of North American birds is made up of species not found in Europe. There are numerous mammal, reptile, and amphibian species found here that exist nowhere else. To claim there's no unique wildlife is just plain dumb.
Hey, don't get me wrong - if you'd rather visit Reykjavik, knock yourself out. But let's not pretend that there's nothing worth seeing in the US.
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and this is bullshit thing to reduce emissions. Individual's driving make very small part of the total emissions/pollution in the world, so small it doesn't matter at all in grand scale...
Driving well DOES save gas (Score:3)
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Drive a couple of times 1000+ miles across Europe from let's say the Hook of Holland to Mare Marmaris or the Greek coast and I will talk to you again.
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Requires revisions (Score:5, Funny)
When questioned about trouble with their algorithms when encountering other cars, developers replied "Hell is other vehicles"
Mod parent up (Score:2)
Genius pairing the references. Though I'm not sure how familiar the average slashdotter is with literature;)
Just stop it (Score:3)
Stop bolting technology onto a 19th century design. How about designing something from the ground up that solves the issues of our time ? We already have something that allows you to do other things while traveling, it's called a train.
Re:Just stop it (Score:5, Insightful)
Excuse me for being blunt, but you're an idiot.
Switzerland has one of the best public transportation systems I am aware of. And still, a 45 minute commute by car can often turn into 1.5h or more on public transportation, including standing around in the cold in winter for any amounts of time.
If you live in a city and work there, too, then yes, public transportation is a great thing. I wouldn't use my car to get to work there either. But believe it or not, even with all the congestion around Zurich, it was still much faster to drive when I had to back in the days.
Frankly, everyone else can go fuck themselves if they believe I'd sacrifice between one and three hours every day because they can't fix the society so they expect me to fix their problems for them.
Because, make no mistake, using public transportation is very stressful for me and don't even get me started on doing something productive with that time. Because you can't. If you have to change transportation every 10 to thirty minutes, you just CAN'T concentrate on something of consequence. Especially with all the noise that goes on around you. I know, I've tried for four long years.
Now that might be different if you're travelling first class. But, keeping the lack of flexibility in mind (because owning a car AND using public transportation is economic bullshit), public transportation becomes very, very expensive all of a sudden.
So I'd like to ask you to shut up and stop applying your situation to everybody else. Just because YOU can be happy and content with public transportation does not mean everybody else can.
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Translation: I live too far away from my job by choice, and the unavoidable commuting overhead makes me uncontrollably angry.
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Well, most families have 2 working people (at least in the civilized world), which means that usually one of them have half an hour drive time or more (for me, around 30 km). With public transportation, that is about 50 minutes, which does not make me "uncontrollably angry", but I wouldn't mind seeing it reduced, either.
Less Is More (Score:2, Insightful)
While I don't disagree with you I think the point made was that people live far away from their places of work regardless. In terms of planning that's not economically logical or environmentally friendly.
In the past decades we have focused on bringing people to buildings, while we should be looking at this issue from the point of the least possible impact and cost on a macroeconomic scale. Unless you perform a service in person or require expensive machinery there's no reason you should commute.
We should fo
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Ah, yes, working from home. As I am doing right now. Unfortunately, I have to admit that you can communicate far more efficiently when you are *in* the environment than from your home office. But perhaps technology will in time solve that issue.
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I also work from home, and commute to meet colleagues once a month.
I think tech has come a long way towards solving communication issues. The biggest hurdle I have to communicate is that -at the office- it is easy to go chat with someone and speak without disturbing colleagues, but somehow trying to make the same through speakers _always_ disturbs everyone. Every time I need to chat with a colleague in a big office room, the person needs to first walk to a conference room.
OTOH, I can communicate perfectly w
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Sure, but what about the buzz? I often overhear when someone is doing something interesting and/or wrong, and can instantly intervene. Also, whenever someone swears at something it is quite possible someone will say: Just do this or that, and your problem will go away. It is that sort of communication that I think is lost when telecommuting.
Communication Problems (Score:2)
I must admit I'm slightly hypocritical because I just quit my present job (IT) and I also work from home... I'm looking forward to working in an office again.
I know all about the problems of communication and the downsides of home offices. Not least the problem that work is always on your mind.
I still think it's better use of our shared resources to have permanent home offices and simply change credentials when we change employers. My employer even pays me for "use" of my home office as it is.
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Totally agree telecommuting is a much better solution than building more roads etc, even if the majority telecommuted one day a week then there would be a substantial reduction in traffic a day.
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I've worked quite a bit with teleconferences, phone conferences, remote sharing etc. and while it sort of works I'd never choose that over having people traveling half an hour to get to work.
1) The communication is poorer. No camera solution I've seen manages to shift focus between the different people as easily as around a meeting table. Even with a lot of training, users aren't able to sketch something as easily on the computer as they do on a whiteboard. And the general chatter of a group of people worki
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While I don't disagree with you I think the point made was that people live far away from their places of work regardless. In terms of planning that's not economically logical or environmentally friendly.
In the past decades we have focused on bringing people to buildings, while we should be looking at this issue from the point of the least possible impact and cost on a macroeconomic scale. Unless you perform a service in person or require expensive machinery there's no reason you should commute.
We should focus more on creating a new culture, and economic conditions where it's profoundly more beneficial for employers and employees to telecommute. Why waste energy and money unless there's an actual need? Society as a whole should increase the cost of transport for non-essential travel during the morning/afternoon commute and create incentives for telecommuting for everyone involved. And possibly make more use of differential pricing [of road use/fuel] based upon "classes" of users?
You lost me the first time you used bold. Next time try writing all in caps.
So Don't Bother (Score:2)
Yes, of course, I always take advice from people on Slashdot. Too bad I lost you, and if I did, why would I bother adapting to suit your tastes? Nice waste of your time.
I make an effort, you act like a dick.
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Well I just met an old colleque of mine yesterday who commutes 4 hours every day :-)
Re:Just stop it (Score:5, Insightful)
See? Fix the society first. This is exactly what I meant.
Switzerland does not have a real estate market as flexible as America. Once you've bought a home, you're likely going to stay there for a few decades if not your whole life.
Do you expect BOTH me and my wife to find jobs near our home (or vice versa) and keep them for the rest of our lives? Do you truly think that's a realistic outlook on life?
It doesn't matter whether you think I'm just bitching around. Fact is, a lot of people have to deal with these questions. If you don't, great for you. We do. So you'll have to excuse us for making different decisions than you do.
I am of the opinion that bending over backwards for some concept like environmentalism is pretty stupid. If we, as a society, want to reach certain goals (clean environment) then we need to implement global changes that will make it easier for us to achieve those. Not just demand everyone buckle down and 'do their part'. Because then someone has to define what this 'part' is and you can bet your sweet ass it's going to be defined by people who aren't inconvenienced by what they define.
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Actually my wife works in the local city council as a lawyer and I am an IT pro who has to go into international banks. So she cannot move I have to commute to customers often thousands of kilometers away. So guess what you cannot really move in that situation even if you want to :-)
Be glad that you and your wife can find a job very nearby, I cannot because the local customers pay lousily pretty much every IT guy leaves the city after a short period of time because of that.
I simply settled down to a combina
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So I'd like to ask you to shut up and stop applying your situation to everybody else. Just because YOU can be happy and content with public transportation does not mean everybody else can.
Politeness counts, the above sentence could apply just as well to you as it does to me substituting car for public transport.
You seem to have missed my main point, which wasn't about public transport but the fact we are hacking things onto an ancient design instead of truly innovating. We've had these pipe dreams of "robotic cars" for decades and they belong in the same category as flying cars: fun sci-fi but wildly unpractical. Fact is automobile travel is becoming impractical in a lot of places (no, not e
Re:Just stop it (Score:5, Insightful)
Impressively polite rejoinder :-)
However, I disagree with your premise - road trains ARE an example of innovative thinking.
Coming up with a likely-to-be-practical transportation system of the future isn't that difficult. There are several personal-rapid-transport proposals around that would probably work well if you were building a new city from scratch.
The hard part is the TRANSITION, and building a new system while we're still using the old. Road trains are an excellent transition technology.
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I apologize for my rudeness. Obviously I have confused you with environment zealots, and those really annoy me.
I agree with you. Personally, I see salvation in completely autonomous cars like in Minority Report IIRC. Being able to enter a car wherever you want and exiting it wherever you need is important for a society that believes in globalization. This flexibility is a must, IMO.
On the other hand, the network of fuel stations to support private vehicles must be an astounding drain on resources. Also, a c
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Being able to enter a car wherever you want and exiting it wherever you need is important for a society that believes in globalization. This flexibility is a must, IMO.
Not really. Ultimate flexibility is nice as an abstract goal, but there are always tradeoffs, and they vary by circumstance.
If you live in a dense urban area, but insist that even a 2 minute delay, or a 5 minute walk to a station, or sharing with even one other person or ..., is too much you'll end with an unworkable system, simply because there isn't enough room to accomodate that without devoting the majority of your space and resources -- and you'll end up with a less efficient system, and a far less p
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I lived in the NL and right now live in Paris.
Did you ever stop to think about the amount of space it would take just to park the cars if the majority of people (say in The NL or in Paris) were not using public transportation?
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Do you carpool? If you do you're still a decent guy. If not you're a selfish prick.
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Since I have a minivan in anticipation of a family (and my do-it-yourself mentality), I offered. Nobody took me up on the offer.
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I would love to carpool. But my working hour are so that it is like if every morning I have to roll a D20 to know when i will go to work and the same in the evening to come back. This make carpooling unpacticable in my case :-( And I can't use public transportation without getting crazy (10 min by car, ~1h by public transport, and by bike, there is no way to cross the 2 motorways without doing a crazy detour)
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When I use public transportation I need an hour in the train and 30 minutes of walking (or 10 minutes bus) to arrive at the office. In a car the time is reduced to 30 minutes. I still prefer public transportation because the traffic is stressful and the time behind the steering wheel is wasted. When I use the public transportation I usually read some book and half an hour of walking has done wonders to my health. I say, to hell with cars.
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Guess it really depends on where you live in swizerland, if you live far away from the next railway station then it is really slower bug given the density of the swiss railroads, I guess 60% of the people are faster by train. I dont live there but often are there and I am really amazed how great it is despite the often rather old technology they use. Within the zurich it is often a matter of minutes to reach the point where you want to go and commuting is also possible because of the 22 express train lines
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So I'd like to ask you to shut up and stop applying your situation to everybody else. Just because YOU can be happy and content with public transportation does not mean everybody else can.
I'd like to ask you to shut up and stop applying your situation to everybody else. Just because YOU can be happy and content with the concept of private transportation, with its concomitant waste and inefficiencies, does not mean everybody else can.
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The problems with trains and other public transport is that they get you from where you aren't to where you don't actually want to go.
A couple of years ago I got stuck doing a weekly commute which by car took two and a half hours.
that same trip took 9 hours by train.... if I was lucky.
Unfortunatly I didn't have a car so most of the time I was stuck with the bus/train option which was beyond terrible.
It boiled down to the problem that while I essentially wanted to go about 100 miles south in order to go via
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I am in europe.
Europe is not a magical place where all the public transport problems have been worked out.
And simply being close to a train station isn't the end of the problem.
I was living 20 minutes walk from a train station but the trains from that station only went into the nearest large city from which you could catch a train or bus to the other big cities from which you could catch another to the destination.
And I was lucky. A friend got stuck on a similar commute for a few months where there wasn't e
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I assumed you were in the USA, since you used miles and American slang.
I started my reply with "That's rarely encountered in Europe", and I stand by that: it's rare for people to travel 100 miles to work.
Public transport isn't designed to make every single journey perfect. It's supposed to provide many people's most regular journeys using less resources than cars (cost/time/space/energy/pollution). Your original statement "The problems with trains and other public transport is that they get you from where y
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Re: energy/pollution.
not all that much better.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/images/2008/08/04/transenergy.png [coyoteblog.com]
an electric scooter is the ultimate for that with electric cars coming in far ahead of any rail and even regular cars coming in ahead of city busses.
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Stop bolting technology onto a 19th century design. How about designing something from the ground up that solves the issues of our time ? We already have something that allows you to do other things while traveling, it's called a train.
Oh yeah, because trains are sooo 21st century.
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Good one. That's what people are trying to invent though: a train that drives up to your house and that doesn't have all these annoying other people on it. So look at the requirements (and what is realistic in a post peak-oil world) and actually come up with something that solves our problems both with the car and public transport as it exists now instead of this 50's B-movie robocar shit.
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Trains are early 19th century technology, cars are late-19th/early-20th century.
I think this proposal is great, it's not about "bolting" something on a car, it's about creating an entirely new technology, a dynamic, self-assembling train. It merges some of the efficiency in a train to some of the flexibility in a car.
Besides, it's probably the lowest cost and faster implementation technology available for a new transportation system. I don't see any radical improvements in track technology coming soon, we h
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Ah yes, the thing that goes from where you don't live to place you don't need to go when you don't need to travel. The beauty of the car is that it goes all the way to your driveway, on every reasonably flat asphalt/gravel/dirt road and it's always ready to go and will take the most direct route to your destination. If you're going to replace cars you should understand why people use cars in the first place.
Like just take my parents for example, they live around 600 meters from the closest grocery store and
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Spoken like a young, healthy individual who doesn't have to carry a large load of groceries or manage a couple of children while walking several blocks in bad weather. Personally, I prefer to walk the 1.5 miles back and forth to work every day. However, I recognize that my
how does this help? (Score:3, Interesting)
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And, is it more comfortable to sit in a car for 1000km, or in a train/plane where you can walk around/strech/etc..
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At low speeds, rolling friction from the tires is the primary draw on the engine. At highway speeds, aerodynamic drag very rapidly overtakes friction. By drafting one car inches from the next, the drag on each drops tremendously. This system could easily drop highway fuel consumption in half, as well as increase the range electric vehicles can travel before having to kick in their generator.
The idea isn't that everyone will start driving everywhere on their own, but rather that the people who already are
Lower emissions? (Score:2)
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I think you just take the research grants where they are to be found. I mean, I have done optimization work too, where the real agenda was to save on fuel costs, but the research was officially "green" :)
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In this case closer driving reduces wind resistance, but without the risk of mass collisions that happens if humans try it. ..and stop being in denial
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Personally I think it's what's not being done about it that's crazy.
Back on topic: I agree that a rethink of personal transportation is required. I think it is more important to rethink the things that cause us to need or want cars. Living in a different town from one's workplace is rarely if ever required. The centralisation of services that widespread car ownership has permitted (think malls or retail parks) is amongst the myriad of rea
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I agree; society is designed around the car, which causes businesses and residences to become more spread out, which makes even more people switch to driving; the vicious circle continues until just about everyone had a car and a car-dependent lifestyle to match.
I'm looking forward to self-driving cars because they'll be able to finally eliminate one of the most unnoticed discriminations in society today: the plight of the visually impaired, who are fully capable of working the vast majority of jobs, but ar
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Automation (Score:3)
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Besides, I don't understand your point of us "not needing to exist at all anymore". Do you "need" to exist NOW ?.
"leaving the train" would be difficult (Score:2)
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I would envisage that this would be integrated with satellite navigation. You wouldn't say, "I want to leave the train now", you'd say "I want to leave at junction 12". Not much fun if you need a the toilet!
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Ultimate Goal (Score:2)
This is seriously cool. If they perfect it, the cars won't even need people to be in them; they could drive themselves, and we could stay home!
What the future has in store (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it's pretty obvious that technologies along these lines (self-piloting automobiles) are the way of the future. The big question is how do we make the leap from where we are now to where we want to be? Clearly, the ideal would be to have the autonomous systems able to react and work around existing drivers on the road, but I have a feeling that it won't be too long before systems like these ones are incentivized in some way so that the transition is both easier and safer.
For instance, carpool lanes in some locations already permit motorists driving greener cars to use the lane, even if they're alone. 10, 15, or 20 years from now, whenever this technology finally matures and starts to enter the consumer market, the same sort of thing will likely be applied. We'll simply see the autonomous systems engaged whenever motorists enter a specific lane dedicated to their use. It allows manufacturers to prove that the technology works, instills confidence in it among drivers, gives them obvious benefits for choosing it, and can be used as a transition phase to having roads that are occupied predominately by self-driving vehicles. Over time, what began as a luxury will become a standard feature, just as has happened dozens or hundreds of other times in the industry, and soon enough, all new cars will be equipped with the system. Not long after that, legislation will require it of all street-legal cars.
In the long term, cars driven by actual people will be in the minority, and will likely be barred from driving on regular roads. They'll likely be regulated and restricted to only operating in specific places (e.g. enthusiast race tracks, special lanes in traffic, etc.). I'm not suggesting I like this, mind you, but I have been trying to figure out how a transition from piloted to pilotless automobiles would work and what it would look like once it was completed. The only result I can see is that piloted cars get relegated to a role not at all unlike that of horses today: used by enthusiasts in specific locations and circumstances, but not for general use in travel and transportation.
Crash (Score:2)
It's a good thing they didn't call it Jettison Galactic Ballistic Automatic Leveling Lever Autonomous Rear Drive.
(AKA "JG Ballard.")
Liability? (Score:2)
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Depending on the country I think. At least in the NL, the insurance is assigned to the car and you can have anyone drive it. Although no-risk is personal again.
Rehash of a 1998 Volkswagen Project (Score:2)
A very similar approach was already pursued in 1998 by Volkswagen in their "Convoy-Pilot" project.
http://www.spiegel.de/spiegel/print/d-7907540.html (German)
Maybe practical feasibility has improved in the meantime with advances in computer and sensor technologies, but SARTRE is certainly nowhere as innovative as people seem to think here.
I hope its safer than the S60s collision detection (Score:2)
When Volvo demonstrated their S60 colliision detection to 120 Swedish journalists - they actually served to demonstrate why its not such a good idea to rely on all this safety technology:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJ6z3IArINI [youtube.com]
Not sure how safe I would feel sitting in one of these car train jams... something tells me this tech is still a few years off yet.
Won't happen (Score:2)
Computerising cars to drive themselves will never happen for three reasons.
1) Such a system would cost a LOT of money per car.
2) It allows the government to much more accurately track where you are.
3) No computer is fast enough to be able to compute if a pedestrian is about to jay-walk because they are more interested in their iPod. No computer can see if a dog is on a leash and could run into the road. No computer can decide which pot-hole is "more preferable" to drive through, especially if there's a whol
Or put another way (Score:2)
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Have you read the news lately? Frankly I'm surprised they didn't call it ORWELL.