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.'"
In Soviet Russia puppet regime (Score:1)
In former German Democratic Republic, car parked YOU!
What is plural of "Prius"? (Score:1)
Priui? Pri?
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In the Southern US, we say "Pri-ya'll".
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According to Wikipedia, Prius derives from Latin. Typically, this would mean it is pluralized as Prii, though prius itself as a word can not be pluralized in the original Latin.
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Prius is both an adverb ("previously") and the neuter, singular, nominative form of an adjective ("previous, prior.") Declining the adjective starts with a stem from the masculine/feminine form (prior) and in the neuter, plural, nominative form would be priora. Nouns and pronouns that end in -us and decline to plural ending in -i are only for the second declension. There are many other -us words in the 3rd and fourth declension that do not result in -i plurals.
Re:What is plural of "Prius"? (Score:4, Funny)
I hear you talking, but all I can think is "People called Romanes, they go, the house?!"
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Which, incidentally, would make a Lada [wikipedia.org] out of Toyota.
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Does that mean the real plural is Priodes, like octopodes? Priodes ... I like it!
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Do Vegas Elvii drive Prii?
Sheesh (Score:1)
'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.'
Well certainly not with that attitude, lady. The tech has been available for some time, and legal in-roads have been paved for their use. Now someone just needs to step up to the plate. Thanks for announcing that that someone wont be you.
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.
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I have an inflated sense of safety when I'm the human in charge, but just the opposite is true when I'm in a car with any other human in charge (especially my mother, she's scary). I'd feel safer in a car controlled by Skynet than I do in a car being driven by another human.
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That's because all human beings are different and a mistake is just that, where as a fleet of identical machines can all have the same design fault. They are not the same thing.
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Having the same design flaw is good, it means it's easier to avoid and fix it. Random errors are much harder to prevent.
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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
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Perfection is hard, but beating a human operator is not. Humans constantly crash vehicles, but we just accept it as a matter of course.
I don't, and I don't. The failure of your argument comes when you realize that you would be replacing a large number of independent operators, most of whom do not "constantly crash vehicles", with a unified system that, when it fails, can potentially crash many of them.
I don't crash my car very often (once rear-ended at a stoplight). I also don't hand my keys over to someone I don't trust to drive my car. By using an automated driving system, I would be replacing a known quantity that has a proven track r
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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.
Stop, just stop with the argument that it will destroy work places. Of course it will, but the problem is something else. Less work was the initial argument of introducing machines in industry and home: it will do the work for us and we can enjoy more free time.
Why this doesnt work is that the "small" people don't see anything of the profit they make with the work of machines because the corporations and bosses just keep the profit for themselfes.
So, next time you complain about loss of work place you blame
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It is rather short-sighted and pessimistic for him to say. The technology is already there. The only things holding it back are intricate details and liability concerns. The latter being the bigger issue.
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.
Re:Sheesh (Score:4, Informative)
The topic probably would've made more sense if the bullshit summary had actually contained a video of the experimental system: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfgn6evkMpw [youtube.com]
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'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.'
'People are surprised when I tell them that you're not going to get a car that flies you from A to B, or door to door, in the next 100 years.'
Re:How does the insurance industry feel about this (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
By insuring car makers against crashes caused by their software. And, of course, it's not the rates they care about, but the profit....they may be able to maintain their profit whilst reducing rates by paying out less and getting rid of administrative overhead by dealing with a few big customers.
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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
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 $X', with breakdowns. Add in the thousands probably saved in insurance, etc... It adds up.
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If he thinks the car insurance company will have it bad, wait what is going to happen to us.
Fully automated cars means less cars and lower fuel consumption, that will translate in fewer bought cars, less car mandatory insurance, less road taxes and less fuel sold. Our governments will have their tax income cut in half.
If you think we are in a bad position now ...
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It's all about the price you are willing to pay for this luxury.
If it costs you 10k$ a year to own one, as opposed to let's say 500$ to rent one when you need it, you will think about your priorities.
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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.
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.
Self Parking isn't new (Score:2, Informative)
wikipedia says: [wikipedia.org]
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There are plenty of automatic parking garages:
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=automatic+parking+garage [lmgtfy.com]
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In Soviet Russia, car parks YOU.
Ok, let the hate begin...
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Yeah, after all.. look at the problems we had getting all the cell phones to work on the same systems. And getting all our appliances on the same voltage and frequency standard. And getting all modems and routers and switches to communicate...
Oh. Wait.
Seriously, you miss that there's a transitional form - where autonomous cars are parked autom
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They have those in Japan, but they are more like giant rotisseries and the cars only sit on skiis, not in crates. They work pretty well.
Uh-huh. (Score:2)
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.
Oh really now?
Google has already been testing the cars on the road in Nevada, which passed a law last year authorizing driverless vehicles. Both Nevada and California require the cars to have a human behind the wheel who can take control of the vehicle at any time. So far, the cars have have racked up more than 300,000 driving miles, and 50,000 of those miles were without any intervention from the human drivers, Google says.
Source dated Tue October 30, 2012 [cnn.com]
Someone's a touch behind...
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Re:Uh-huh. (Score:5, Interesting)
Last summer I was in New England. A buddy and I were driving down the interstate and I wanted to stop at a pharmacy and get some antacids. We had the GPS unit find the nearest pharmacy and it began directing us to a CVS just two miles away. The unit kept telling us that we were getting closer, but I didn't see any exits. Just before we crossed an overpass the GPS announced, "Your destination is on the right." Sure enough, I looked down and there was the CVS -- forty feet below us.
I have often wondered how a driverless car would handle that situation.
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Autonomous cars don't just rely on GPS, so it would see there is no exit lane and probably ask you for navigational assistance.
This sort of thing us not a big problem now thanks to street level cameras like Google uses. Nokia have them as well apparently. The difference in accuracy between Google/Nokia and say TomTom is huge, as Apple discovered.
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Google has been making these claims for quite a while, but refuses any independent test that could back them up. For a company notorious for putting out products at a "public beta" stage, they certainly take their time with technology they claim to be having for years.
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.
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The Germans love driving. They love driving fast.
I have difficulty reconciling my wife's crumbling New Beetle with both of these ideas.
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Yet here in the UK where we don't drive around at stupid speeds our death rate in motor vehicle accidents is lower than in Germany by any measure you choose to use.
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Yeah, but I'll bet you're all bored to tears driving from Point A to Point B. :-)
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Don't know where you live in the UK, but I have easily seen people hit 130mph on motorways (about 200km/h, which is the maximum recommended speed on autobahns).
In fact it is getting so that even the "slow lane" has people doing 70mph, the middle has 90mph, and 100mph+ is in the far lane.
Not sure about the death rate between the two countries, but I would have thought the UK's would be higher, primarily because people in the UK don't seem to know that you should slow down in adverse conditions. People seem t
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I can only assume that budget cuts mean most of them no longer work. Since the coalition took over the number of camera's that actually work have reduced (I believe the Tories talked about reducing the cameras as part of their platform, along with other generic "easing the burden on the motorist" promises) .
Additionally, most speed cameras are not on motorways, but on A roads and smaller. Some motorways do have them, so as long as you know where they are and take care, you should be ok (just pay attention t
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I was under the impression that there were a lot of average-speed cameras (where the system tracks you from point A to point B and fines you if you get there in less time than it would have taken if you drove the speed limit), which would only work on limited access roads (i.e., motorways).
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You would think so, but I have passed those average speed cameras many times, never actually going at the speed limit and just keeping in time with the traffic, and never got a ticket.
I honestly don't know if they even work, or if they just turn them on at set hours of the day or something (someone told me that they can't track lane switches, but I find that hard to believe).
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I remember in England the speed camera locations are clearly marked by patterns painted on the roads. I took a taxi in the early morning to the airport and the driver pretty much slammed on the breaks as he entered these areas (which I thought were very long pedestrian crossings) and accelerated afterwards, which is how I learned this. There are also signs beforehand showing a camera.
Makes sense if the purpose of the cameras is to actually get the speed down, rather than to collect revenue.
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- I live round the London area, the M1 has speed cameras that don't seem to work, and I have seen people exceed 100mph there.
- The M20 has no cameras as far as I saw, but they do have unmarked and marked police cars. My only interaction with the coppers was with my mate in his car for doing 155mph, but only after we pulled over ourselves (i.e. no blue lights or anything, they just followed us), and we didn't get booked for speeding. They just asked us why we were in such a hurry.
- The M40 is more of the sa
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if it were up to VW... (Score:2)
If it were up to VW, no advanced technology would ever be ready for the showroom. The company likes to tinker around the edges of existing technology and charge huge amounts of money for it. And Germany isn't going to allow anything that new-fangled on its roads anyway.
True innovation will have to come from other companies in other countries. There are easy ways of getting useful self-driving tech into cars right now, with little of the complications of Google, no laser 3D scanners, and little risk. All it
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I remember reading about a self driving car with a 486 processor running Linux back in 97 or 98.
In the year 2525 (Score:1)
Your arms hang limp at your sides...
Oh! Great! the last few jobs for part timers gone! (Score:1)
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People who need charity should get charity, not anything else that hides the fact that they're getting charity.
Perhaps we need a 3rd type of licence (Score:2)
Automatic : Those that can drive a real car but don't understand how it works
And Self-Drive : Those that should have taken the train; and should not be allowed on the road without all of their assists.
Obviously the latter fits in with the two former; modern driving aids like auto park, lane detection, radar follow and brake - even ABS and ESP mean that really, if that's all you have ever driven, you should not simply be allowed on the streets, with me and my kids
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Do you really think there were much more capable drivers before ESP and ABS? Of course not, most people don't really care for driving, they just want to get where they are going. If you don't really care for it then you'll never get good in the edge cases, where ABS and ESP help a lot.
Most people will never respect the fact that they are using a 1000 kg killing machine to get from A to B. Technology can, should and is used to h
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My point was that with all the techno wizardry, if you pass your test on a self parking, self lane following, self braking, self radar guided cruise control car, then you shouldn't be allowed to drive anything more simple.
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I had a similar discussion with 'er indoors about Formula 1 recently - I am of the opinion they should have to go back to manual gear boxes, clutches, etc and remove all the auto-tweak controls. It's getting to the point that (IMHO), excellent as they might be, F1 drivers are more pilots than drivers.
There is hardly any auto-anything allowed in Formula 1. Manual gearboxes are obsolete technology, it would border on the ridiculous to use those.
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Also are you confusing auto gearbox with auto clutch, perhaps ?
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Traditional automatics are just as obsolete, of course. When a semi-automatic can shift gear in 50ms, why would you want anything else?
We are talking Formula 1 here. Supposedly the pinnacle of racing, the ultimate series. Why should they be saddled with manual gearboxes? Performance cars do not have them anymore. There are rally and stock car racing series for those who like that kind of thing.
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When a semi-automatic can shift gear in 50ms...
Clearly they need to be banned or at least restricted to require the driver has to swap gearboxes every 5 shifts. Anyone who needs to shift more than 5 times must be up to no good.
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Yes, it DID happen to me 2 years ago. I got a broken foot and I couldn't walk or drive for two months (and I consider myself lucky). But of cour
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And did you learn the lesson life was trying to teach you, or do you still cross a street as a pedestrian?
My favorite statistic: more drunk pedestrians are hit by sober drivers than sober pedestrians are hit by drunk drivers. Almost as if the pedestrian has an important role to play is his own safety, or something.
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I was sober. I did look carefully before crossing and saw the car about 100 yards away. Considering its speed, the driver had plenty of time to stop by braking only mildly. Actually he could probably have reduced his speed without stopping and I would have had more than enough time to cross. But he thought he was such a great driver that he did not actually need to keep his eyes on the road at all time, but it was ok to change a CD or dial a phone number or whatever other stupid cr
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I did not step out in front of a moving car, I stepped out 100 yards from a moving car. When you are on a main street and there is a secondary street with a stop sign crossing the street you are on, do you stop to make sure that car 100 yards away from the stop sign will indeed stop?
And on what planet do you live where there are parked cars and/or trees on the whole length of pedestrian crossings? Traffic must not be very fluid.
My point is, I am tired of this category of drivers who don't give
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I see you did not learn the lesson life was trying to tech you: the 2-ton chunk of iron rolling your way doesn't care whose fault it is. An ever-growing percentage of drivers are simply incapable of paying attention, and really do need to be forced into only self-driving cars. But that hasn't happened yet, and I'm sure it wasn't any less painful knowing that you were in the right.
Finally a use for Illuminati technology (Score:2)
Of course this happens in Ingolstadt. [wikipedia.org]
I'll go back on my meds now.
You sure the smartest people are in the Valley? (Score:2)
>> Annie Lien, a senior engineer...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.'"
Are you sure that the smartest people live in the Valley?
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.
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Terrorism has, speaking from a public health and epidemiological standpoint, always been at nuisance levels.
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Security issues? (Score:2)
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It's easy to augment the data with onboard sensors, my moms Chrysler minivan already has radar for blindspot detection and the backup system detects the space through video analysis and overlays the vehicles footprint on the space so you can see if you'll fit, it's hardly a leap to integrate those two sensors into the self parking system.
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