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...
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It's called "looking for investors"
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...once I have personally spent a few weeks taking one through the centre of London and across the mountains of Spain, rather than watched some other guy entirely choose what route to demonstrate it on.
Sure, I get it: driverless cars are far safer than human-driven cars according to tests performed under the auspices of a dozen people who with a heavy investment in driverless cars. Give random people in random countries some and see how they do.
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Just what the world needs. Driverless car bombs. At least before you were pretty much assured that one terrorist would die.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Interesting)
They start making up figures on a market that has not started yet?
Seems like a real great (and useful) idea to me...
Because by then nobody will remember it. The volume of media these days will take something approximating Big Data mining just to find ordinary headlines, never mind piddly stuff like a weather or technology prediction
I predict over 150 million Veeblefetzers will be in private hands by then end of 2015.
And nearly 25 million homes will have at least one Potrzebie
Re:WTF (Score:4, Informative)
And nearly 25 million homes will have at least one Potrzebie
I would imagine that most homes would have millions of potrzebies. [wikipedia.org]
(So I read this and thought...where have I seen this word before?)
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Projections. TFA follows advances in cruise control, with newer tech added in slowly -- the technology already exists. It's social pressures and fear of litigation that's really what's holding it back.
It looked credible, read an article before you dismiss it as hogwash.
Duh (Score:2)
I will own a self driving car. ASAP. I want it now.
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.
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I hope so. I am a pessimist about how quickly it will happen, however. I could see Google saying "Hey our car works. License our patents." and then all the car manufacturers dragging their heels about implementing the tech for 20 years.
Pretty much (Score:2)
The date is far enough out that folks will have forgotten this report by then. It's one of those hopeful dates meaning "in our lifetime", just like 2001: A Space Odyssey or Star Trek.
Might well be accurate though, as I understand it we'll be getting self-driving technology from the Vulcans shortly after the eugenics wars.
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Its clear they don't know what they're talking about. Ever since the 1950's everyone has known that in 20 years time we will all be driving flying cars.
Re:WTF (Score:4, Interesting)
This reminds me of a guy at work who used to constantly impress the boss by doing presentations that showed projections of the *future* growth of his area. Every time his division would have a bad year or lose money, he would just do a Powerpoint that projected huge growth for his division over the next 5-10 years, making the recent downturn on the chart look inconsequential. Since the boss was a sucker, this actually worked (surprisingly, it even worked on many of his co-workers too), and he was actually lauded for his supposed leadership.
This all worked fine for him until someone with half a fucking brain (i.e., me) took over and canned his ass for being nothing more than a huckster. What's really funny is that no one ever even called him on the inaccuracy of his predictions, when he consistently failed to meet his own projections (of course, he always had a fresh chart showing how NEXT YEAR he was going to do great). Firing him was one of the very few times in my career when I actually enjoyed firing someone.
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Why wait? I predict 100 million bloggers and wankers predicting random shit NEXT YEAR! NEXT MONTH! NEXT WEEK!
(btw, bravo; no mod points or I'd give you them instead of this lame post).
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You could summon a car, based on all sorts of criteria. Mostly I see the big use case as a taxi-van, where a ride sharing system could be in place. Sure a person could request a private car, but I suspect that many people would be happy to share a ride with people who have been matched by computer as good ride matches.
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Predictions.. (Score:2, Funny)
Predictions about something 22 years into the future aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on.
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Sure they are and even more as the paychecks at the research company will show
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Flying DeLoreans!!!
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Predictions about something 22 years into the future aren't worth the paper they aren't printed on.
Yep, because we'll be going paperless by then.
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And Linux on the desktop will be just around the corner by then.
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I think the Amazing Criswell would disagree with you.
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Depends on the prediction. Moore's law, although not strictly a prediction at first, was certainly worth the paper it was printed on.
Here's a prediction that will certainly be worth the (digital) paper it's printed on: Moore's law will die sometime in the next 22 years. Of course, most likely CMOS transistors will be replaced by a more efficient nanoscale switch by then (here's hoping, anyways).
Here's another (at least to me): In 22 years, I'll be making at least 4x the income I'm making now (even accountin
I personally wouldn't trust (Score:2, Interesting)
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: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.
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You mean, if they'd let the computer land the plane with no working navigation aids?
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So you think they should have tried to let the autopilot land with the ILS out of action?
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The tech has to be there of coarse...but machines can do things much faster and more constantly than the human machine, and they don't have moods to deal with. You are distracted, pissed off, bored, lethargic, whatever, all of those will impact your ability to do anything in life, good machines dont have it.
In an ideal condition you say turn left, or tap the roadway on a map to tell the car you want to travel down it, vehicles around you respond in milliseconds to your change in direction and route around y
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And dont forget humans program the cars so they WILL be imperfect. Parts break so they will be imperfect
Parts break now. Software can and will be tested. Google's driven theirs thousands of miles without a mishap.
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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: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.
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+fucking+
I can't wait until I can just get in my car and say "Home" and have it take care of the driving while I take a nap, read /. or whatever.
Speed limits should be re-evaluated (Score:3)
Today's speed limits are chosen with the limitations of human drivers in mind.
But each autonomous driving algorithm should have its own set of speed limits, customized for it.
Whether those limits are higher or lower should depend on how competent a given algorithm proves itself to be, relative to human drivers.
* If a driving algorithm is a little more accident-prone than the average human driver at a given speed, that deficiency could be rectified by forcing it to observe lower speed limits.
* On the other h
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Because sometimes faster -is- better. A fairly significant fraction of travel is done to get from A to B. Sure if the time between is more comfortable, then it's less of a chore, but nevertheless, a shorter travel-trip is a plus.
Not a plus big enough to override ALL other concerns, the concorde for example is extinct because it was too expensive for the benefit it offered. But for most people at current energy-prices, paying the extra it costs to have your car go 70mph rather than 40mph is worth it. Yes it
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Oh yes, we have daily crashes of buildings, planes, trains and bridges here where I live, just like you have at your place.
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Sorry, I can't remember the last poorly engineered consumer product to have killed millions. Citation needed.
Where is Google's incentive to make a secure OS? Nobody gets fined for making crappy admin software - the mass computing companies don't see the requirement (or maybe see a different requirement from Virginia....)
On the other hand, they have plenty of incentive to market a well engineered car: product recalls, negligence claims etc. would make a poorly engineered self-driving car a very expensive m
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.
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I personally wouldn't trust any auto driven care made by anyone. Its all about control baby and i want full control.
The trouble is that most people overestimate themselves - for instance in matters of spelling and capitalization. They often don't even notice the errors they're making. Yet they want us to believe they are the best navigators of two tons of steel traveling at high velocities.
Personally, I'm still kicking myself for a fender bender with a guard rail on an icy curve twenty-two years ago, but
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I personally wouldn't trust any auto driven care made by anyone. Its all about control baby and i want full control.
I hope you drive better than you type...
High numbers (Score:5, Funny)
The numbers are that high because so many of the cars crash into each other and people need to buy more.
They will all be sold (Score:2)
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If there's a place that needs cars that drives themselves, it's China. I'm not racist or anything, but if you search for "china car accident" on YouTube, you'll find some insane shit.
Wait a minute (Score:2)
Self-driving cars in the future? You mean regular cars on the road, still? Where's my jetpack, damnit!
Lets get these cars rolling (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re: Lets get these cars rolling (Score:2)
and by 2040 (Score:2)
world hunger and thirst will be solved by flying magic ponies that poop colored manna and piss purple mineral water
on what the fuck did this "institute" base their figures, tea leaves?
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nonsense, do you see any flying magic ponies over those thirsty or hungry people? no, I thought not. the ponies are coming
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Total nonsense and pessimistic based on zero evidence.
People are slowly starting to wake up -- they are getting tired of the constant fighting, and corporations profiting at the expense of people's lives. Not enough people care (yet) but things are changing. You'll have your proof in about 10 years ...
--
Money is just another form of Energy Exchange.
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: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.
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It's pretty hard to imagine a car that can deal with every possible eventuality on the road. More likely what will happen is that automated cars will be able to get themselves to a safe/stopped spot, then throw control back to the driver to figure out what to do next.
In other words, we may have self-driving cars where you can read a book while it drives, but it'll be a long time before you can send a car out without someone who can take over in the event of something happening outside of its programming.
Ju
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Just as a simple example: There's an accident. The cops are waving cars around the accident, indicating they should drive through a vacant lot. Would a self-driving car understand what to do?
Yes, because the cops would have the equipment to tell the cars how they should reroute themselves. This will also lead to a movie where an inbred hillbilly cannibal hacks the system and reroutes unsuspecting college kids into their backyard to torture and eat.
More rapid? Not really. (Score:2)
The rise of autonomous cars might turn out to be more rapid than even the most devout Knight Rider fans were hoping.
Considering that Knight Rider was first on the air in 1982, I don't think I can agree.
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Hey, I've been waiting for them since 1965 [wikipedia.org].
Predictions: Any Asshole Can Make 'Em (Score:2, Interesting)
I predict in the next 20 years or so, shit is going to go so horrifically fucking wrong for humanity that "auto-cars" will be removed from the List of Stuff Society Cares About. Whether it be full-on nuclear war, a complete, global totalitiarian state, or a big fucking asteroid obliterating all life, something bad is gonna happen, that makes us, collectively, stop giving a shit about trivial, non-survival nonsense like flying auto-cars.
I guess we've got 'till 2033 to see who's right. I'll go get some beer a
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Agree but not on the date. I'm thinking we have until around 2050.
Disease is possible but natural disease doesn't seem likely.
Designer disease seems fairly likely. Less expensive to make each year. At some point any crazy with a million bucks could probably make something slow to kill but fast to spread. Chance we'll get better at analyzing disease and be able to develop a cure faster.
Asteroids seem unlikely. But if a big one came, we wouldn't be able to do much.
War seems most likely, it would really m
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Oh yea... and I guess if it does get that high, we might be looking at Universe 33.
First market is trucks not cars.. But don't tell t (Score:2)
This tech is commercially viable for longhaul trucking right now. That is the first market.. Not passenger vehicles.
Nobody will say this, of course, because it is going to make an entire industry obsolete overnight.
Not the industry (Score:2)
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The driver also monitors the cargo. I see self-driving trucks coming so there won't be need of sleep breaks, but I think that's not going to be soon.
Brought to you by (Score:2)
The Institute of Pulling Numbers Out of Our Arse. We are responsible for 95.3% of the statistics available on the internet.
What's not to like? (Score:2)
Don't see why I would need one. (Score:2)
These thing will change everything (Score:2)
-Who needs an own car if a car comes to you in 5 minutes when you need it
-Shops will be packing motorized shopping carts which bring you the grocery home
-charging stations will be big and centralizsed with secured parking. after all the car can go a few km
Who's gonna buy 'em? (Score:2)
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not like money will just instantly vanish
it will be invested somewhere and create new jobs that don't exist yet
Been waiting for one of you 0 sum guys :) (Score:2)
Basically, when you factor in the ruling c
I can maybe see self drive only roads / lanes (Score:2)
I can maybe see self drive only roads / lanes that have grade separation. At least at first and even in say a full auto drive system maintenance and utility trucks will need to have some manual control.
Will we even need to own personal cars? (Score:2)
If you believe it, think again (Score:2)
A self driving car will quickly find another and lock in or hook up to it. .... a train!
Before you know it you have
And car drivers that aspire to be on a train are few and far between.
Not if it's electric (Score:2)
Personally, I won't buy one if it's a friggin' electric car. If it's powered by good old in-your-face, enviro-fascists fossil fuels, I'd be interested. But seriously, for a long cross-country trip, this would be great. Even better if they can put it in an RV. That way, I could be making a sammich without having to watch the road.
If a self-driving car crashes, who's to blame? (Score:2)
If my human driven car hits a tree or pedestrian, I or the driver is at fault. If Google's self driving car hits a tree/pedestrian, can I sue Google? Of course, there would probably be an army of lawyers trying to blame every conceivable part of the car just like tech support drones try to find any down level driver on my enter computer to blame problem x. "Ok, the bios update which according to the release-notes says that it fixes the F12 help menu typo, is why my computer crashes..."
Also, normally I ro
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In this scenario you are not changing the loss amounts, just who pays. So it could be a requirement when you drive a car (specifically a licensing requirement to use the auto-drive feature) that you pay the premiums that insure (with some mandated coverage amounts) the developer of the software, similar to having a borrower pay mortgage insurance (which covers the banks risk not yours even though your paying for it). If self-driving cars are truly safer statistically this will end up net less than traditio
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This is probably going to be the biggest obstacle in self-driving car adoption in the US (with the assumption that the technology will steadily progress to make it feasible in the near future). Even if it means a fraction of the accidents that currently happen...it's not a matter of safety, it's a matter of liability.
Doesn't seem plausible (Score:2)
1998 production: 52 987 000
2011 production: 59 870 838
And the curve looks fairly flat.
Probably cars lasting/being kept longer is part of the flatness of the curve.
Was hoping to see 1990 since that's 25 years back.
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1990 - 45 million
1985 - 40 million
the flat curve is very flat
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Nah, cognitive dissonance will cause them to place the blame on anything besides the auto-car. Swamp-gas-reflecting-the-light-from-Venus type shit.
Then again, maybe by that point Mental Gymnastics will be an official Olympic sport, and the aforementioned folks can field our team.
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If aviation is anything to go by, the computer will hand control back to the driver a split second before the crash, and the car manufacturer will blame 'driver error'.
Re:Obvious scenario (Score:4, Interesting)
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?
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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
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Are you so out of the loop you didn't notice Ford released a car with auto brake in traffic for under $20k? VW makes cars for similar money that park themselves. When I drove through Sydney last weekend, it would have been brilliant if I had not been the meat filling between a GPS navigation device and the steering wheel.
Re:For the love of Junior Johnson... (Score:4)
I suspect if you look at modern automatic transmissions, you'd be surprised, especially with some models which may see a 1 mpg difference between automatic and manual versions (and this is for vehicles that get over 30 mpg).
Better tech, electronic shifting, and more gears does wonders.
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It helps but it's still not as good (except maybe for some odd cases where they seem to put in a higher top gear for the auto than the manual, leading to better highway MPG for the auto and better city MPG for the stick). And they never get rid of that annoying slushy shifting. Again, this is all moot with the DSGs which don't have these problems, since there's no torque converter in those and these transmissions generally beat the manuals in both city and highway MPGs, plus having much, much faster shift
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Sounds more like red herring argument to me. Deploying automatically, at high speed, at the instant an accident occurs is not at all passive. A seat belt is passive, once the driver attaches it. (At least the older style fixed ones were. Modern ones which lock only in response to a sufficient pull are questionably passive.) And as for not being something a driver had to do previously,
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No, manual seat belts are active: they require the driver to do something to make them work. Airbags are passive: drivers don't have to do anything at all, they just work.
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Automatically. Which is the point that was being made in the post that you originally replied to.
The question of active or passive is a separate issue and is complicated by the government's way of defining it. (Which seems backwards to me.) I would expect active/passive to refer to the device itself, rather than the user's interaction with it. The way the government defines it a self driving car is pretty much a passive device.
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It only seems backwards to you because you're not looking at it from the driver's point-of-view, and instead from the machine's point-of-view. Are you an engineer?
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This has nothing to do with engineering, and everything to do with Federal Law, which defines active and passive according to the interaction required by the driver.
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1) Auto trans
These are clearly inferior to manual transmissions in every way
Not in every way: They leave 1 less way for the driver to screw up. That probably matters more than the fact that automatics don't accelerate as well, are harder to maintain, weigh more, etc.
6) airbags
Red herring. Airbags are passive safety devices, not a device to automatically do something the driver had to do previously.
Automatically not go flying through the windshield during an accident.
One more obvious point that GP didn't include: cruise control.
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10) auto brake on object detect Don't exist except in a few ~$100k cars.
Is available in some mid-range Volvos [wikipedia.org]:
The Volvo S60 and V60 come with Volvo's City Safety system as standard, which is the same system fitted to its sister the XC60. This system stops the car in the event of impending collision in 'City Traffic' below 19 mph (31 km/h). A new safety feature named "Pedestrian Detection", available on both the V60 and S60, detects people in front of the car and automatically applies the brakes if the driver does not react in time.
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Gears are on the way out, soon hybrid or electric will be the norm and they generally don't bother with them.
Auto-headlights are common and the EU is/was considering making them mandatory so people can't forget to turn them on.
Auto-seatbelts are stupid but a warning buzzer when you don't put yours on is pretty common now, and again I think the EU was looking at making them mandatory.
Auto collision avoidance is also likely to become mandatory in the next few years. Parking sensors are already on the EU's lis
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We do need to make sure it's not "either/or"
I want a self driving car to get me to work in rush hour traffic and home on a late Friday night.
I want to keep driving the AWD C300 SRT up and down Big Cottonwood Canyon Rd, It's a really fun Tank.
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It hasn't happened yet. Keep dreaming.