Is Google CEO's "Tiny Bubble Car" Yahoo CEO's "Little Bubble Car"? 190
theodp (442580) writes "Back in 2011, then-Google VP and now-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer brainstormed with BMW to sketch out an idea she had for self-driving 'little bubbles' that could ease office commutes. Here's Mayer's pitch from a BMW film short: 'All I really need is a little bubble that drives itself and when it runs into something, it doesn't hurt that much...and...you know, like it doesn't actually take up that much fuel because it's so lightweight and it's good for the environment for that reason.' So, with Google's newly-built, steering wheel-less self-driving car being described as a 'tiny bubble-car', one wonders if Google CEO Larry Page's "Tiny Bubble Car" has its roots in Mayer's 'Little Bubble Car,' especially considering the striking similarity of Mayer's concept car sketch and Google's built vehicle." Seems to me there's been plenty of concept art (as well as actual tiny bubble-like cars, even if they generallly have had steering wheels) for car designers to draw on.
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what's wrong with public transportation? (Score:5, Insightful)
why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?
lobby SF and California to build some train tracks and stops at the big corporate parks to start and build out from there to the smaller towns.
i'm all for car ownership and driving on weekends but when you have the same trip that so many people take everyday there should be a public option
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Google and others tried a similar thing with buses.
The Locals howled and picketed.
The City Government pontificated and demanded money for using publicly funded (through tax dollars) bus stops.
Google, et al, did this to provide bus transportation in the Bay Area for their employees because the infrastructure does exist to deliver their employees from their homes in the suburbs to the urban office.
You really should try to keep up with the news.
Re:what's wrong with public transportation? (Score:4, Insightful)
Public transport is the answer, but the entitled class confused nature of the California Ideology squanders forward movement for the sake of narcissism. The collateral damage is massive. Example: the asshole renting a 2 BR apt at 19th and Valencia for $10,500 a month. That comes out to about $350 a day. Someone who has that kind of dosh isn't going to want to spend time rubbing shoulders with someone who pays $1000 a month to share a flat in the Sunset. It just isn't going to happen. They're both fucking peasants (one is an extremely well paid peasant) but the well paid peasant thinks he's something special. Besides, every racist knows poor people have kooties.
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Agreed. But then all these Internet Addicts would have to actually SIT NEXT TO SOMEONE!!! Eeeew! The KOOTIES!!!!
Not necessarily [wikipedia.org].
(crap, mylkeyboard ls now spewlng spuriouls pipe chalacters. sletimes in place lf a keystloke, somelimes jsut lxt to onl. lhis islabout thelweirdestlkeyboard flailure I'le ever exlerienced.l)
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Example: the asshole renting a 2 BR apt at 19th and Valencia for $10,500 a month.
I'm wondering here why you think he's an asshole. Because he's rich? Your post doesn't make that clear.
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Example: the asshole renting a 2 BR apt at 19th and Valencia for $10,500 a month.
Please not the definite article the. May be Ralph Spoilsport is talking about a very specific person renting a 2BR in 19th @ Valancia.
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Getting rich and being rich are behaviours which are observed across all ethnic boundaries.
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Probably. Rich people aren't like you and me.
No, they actually are like you and me. We're both assholes.
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I actual know a lot of rich people; through marriage.
Guess what? the vast majority of them are just like you and me.
Funny how you call them an asshole as a blanket statement; that kind of makes you an asshole.
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It takes me 20-30 minutes to get to work by car depending on traffic. It takes an hour, with 2 changes to get there by public transit. I sometimes have to work late hours without warning - if I'm too late for the last shuttle from my workplace, I'm stuck with a $50 taxi ride.
I work at a national lab. With overhead I cost the taxpayers something like $150/hour. Would you prefer I spend an extra hour a day working or sitting on a crowded bus? I pay taxes that help support public transportation, it just doesn
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Well, slap a yellow light on the top and it might be able to provide a much, much cheaper taxi ride.
This would also be great for car-share programs.
If the costs get pushed down, and they're being built as commodity devices and not model-of-the-year, then it might even make sense to go the next step and operate them as public transit. They deliver you to your destination, and then instead of driving in a circle like a bus, they drive to spread out to be available for the next person. There is no reason for p
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Besides, every racist knows poor people have kooties.
TIL poor people are a race of their own.
Re:what's wrong with public transportation? (Score:5, Insightful)
why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?
lobby SF and California to build some train tracks and stops at the big corporate parks to start and build out from there to the smaller towns.
i'm all for car ownership and driving on weekends but when you have the same trip that so many people take everyday there should be a public option
1. Freedom.
2. Groceries.
3. Children.
Not necessarily in that order.
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1. Freedom.
2. Groceries.
3. Children.
You take your children to work? Everyone does a major grocery shop during their lunch break? By "freedom" do you mean the freedom to sit in stationary traffic for an hour a day, breaking in all that lovely PM2.5, or something else?
Public transport is not designed to meet all your needs, just the needs of a lot of people making similar journeys while largely unencumbered.
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Sounds like you are referring to 'mass transit' ie: commuter trains. Not 'public transit' ie: busses
Public transit is routinely used for ferrying children and groceries. In fact, in many municipalities, that is its majority use. Additionally, there is a significant stigma associated with its usage in many areas. I haven't used it personally since I was a teenager in Denver, but judging by those whom I see waiting at bus stops, the patterns haven't changed much in 30 years. People who cannot afford cars
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are you kidding, California is nearly bankrupt. Absurd "green" laws have made the state's resources (which could be used in a "green" way with known engineering solutions) to be increasingly off-limits and that has precipitated a slow-motion economic collapse.
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are you kidding, California is nearly bankrupt.
Even a state teetering on bankruptcy can fund boondoggles by issuing bonds payable in the far future. California is in the process of building a bullet train from SF to LA, that is budgeted at nearly $100 BILLION, and take 30 years to complete. On average, these big ticket projects run over budget by a factor of three, so it they will likely burn through $300 billion or more before it is completed, or cancelled. That will be about $10 million per seat. The projected cost of a ticket on the train is far
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It costs that much because of corruption.
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It cost that much becasue it's a huge engineering and land problem.
The rest of you post just indicates you can't actual thing about paying off over decades ans some how thing,it need to be paid for on the first trip.
Re:what's wrong with public transportation? (Score:4, Informative)
no, California can't do that any more, massive amounts of bonds already issued (tens of billions of dollars worth) haven't been bought yet as investors are wise to California's plight
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hardly, about 11% of agriculture, and nothing they make can't be bought elsewhere
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I know math is hard, but being at the end of your credit isn't the same as being out of money, or in a state of economic collapse.
Certainly failing to invest is the worst thing you can do in that situation.
Blaming '"green" laws" is kinda silly. You might investigate that and find some numbers before believing in it. I mean, unless you heard it on AM radio, in which case it just has to be true...
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Math is easy, California is near the end of their ability to pay interest on their massive credit.
Blaming "green" laws is exactly what mainstream economists analyzing California are doing.
I know, you're probably a patriotic resident of the land of fruits and nuts and like to think of your state as some independent super-state in the world
Re:what's wrong with public transportation? (Score:4, Informative)
are you kidding, California is nearly bankrupt.
No, it isn't [bizjournals.com].
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Those two thing are not related. Prop 13 is why Ca. is Bankrupt.
Self driving cars offer way more advantages (Score:5, Interesting)
why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?
I like public transportation to some degree, but self-driving cars are WAY more useful.
They could really get anyone from anywhere, to anywhere. With public transport you might have to arrange a few transfers, defiantly have to figure out how to get to a pickup location. And it may not go very close to where you want to go.
But a self-driving car solves all those issues. If you think longer term, you could even have self-driving public transports that took a group of people going to roughly the same place to where they wanted to go with a few stops along the way.
So getting self driving cars working helps public transport as much as private transport...
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self driving cars are public transportation. they are public transportation 2.0. they make it cheap enough to run individualized public transportation.
people and companies may own these first batches as they perfect them, but the ultimate model will be public or leased transport. no need/desire to own/park/maintain these machines.
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I live in a small city of around 10,000. In my lifetime, I have seen virtually all of the commercial business move from the city to just outside of it. There are big box stores with parking lots with more area than the stores. Just by eliminating the parking lots, it would save half of the area needed. By timing things well, one could even have the products be unloaded from the trucks to the self driving cars and totally eliminate the need for the stores. One could totally use all of the space in a sto
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No, you have to stay in your bubble and swear at those human drivers and check yahoo email with android phone to get ahead in your insane work schedule designed to keep other people unemployed so they can lower your salary. With public transport you might have conversations with real people and those usually lead to some truth. Stay in your bubble.
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For the most part, they already do ... the penisula has Caltrain which runs from San Jose to San Francisco, and it also has light rail line which between Mountain View and San Jose
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Re:what's wrong with public transportation? (Score:4, Interesting)
I mean, the short list? Off the top of my head this solves problems like:
- Public transit only becomes economically viable above certain volumes. Anyone in too small an area doesn't have access to it and never will.
- Sometimes public transit doesn't run where you want it to go, especially if you need to make an unusual trip.
- Sometimes people need to go places at times when public transit isn't running, or need to go faster than public transit will allow.
- Some people are disabled, and would have a hard time getting to the nearest public transit stop even in an area that supports it.
There are lots of reasons why this is a useful solution. So many people in my city (Boston) keep a car that they use about once a week for odd or off-hours trips. A solution like this would take all those cars off the side of the road and replace them with about 1/20th the number of shared cars.
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Conventional public transportation has lots of problems that all are well known and most of it comes down to the simple fact that mass transport needs masses and while some part of your route may coincide with enough other people (especially in rush hours of densely populated areas) but most probably not all of it.
The driverless cars actually could be the foundation of a new generation of public transport: you could think of these bubble-cars as the atoms of a peronalised public transport.
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why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?
Because even when public transportation is good, it still takes longer to get places. I saw a survey of drivers in LA once. Something like 70% of the people surveyed wanted improved public transportation........so that other people would take the train and the roads would be cleared for them.
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Because even when public transportation is good, it still takes longer to get places.
That isn't good public transport. Good public transport is faster than driving yourself once you factor in time wasted in traffic and looking for a parking space, and costs far less. The problem in the US is that you really don't have any good examples so you think it must always suck. Decades of building cities to be unsuited to public transport doesn't help either. Try living in Japan or any number of western European cities for a while.
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Because most public transportation is less efficient than autonomous cars.
The exceptions are very high bandwidth routes carrying a consistently high amount of riders.
Most of the time for most routes you have large, expensive, low gas mileage vehicles running mostly at a loss.
Autonomous cars will be able to work efficiently in a dense configuration where they can operate very close together achieving almost the equivalent of the best of mass transportation.
And for the rest of the time (probably > two thir
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My commute in my car is 10 minutes. By bus it would be 40 minutes plus a 5 minute walk, often in the rain. That is an extra hour and ten minutes a day if I rode the bus. I used to work in the suburbs. I missed a bus one night. It took me over three hours to do what would be a 30 minute drive. Another time I needed to go to a suburb on a Sunday. It would have been a 35 minute drive but it was a 2 hour bus trip. Buses run infrequently to keep riders per bus up and make it look good but they also waste a lot o
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Public transit is slow. It takes me two to three times longer to get anywhere via public transit than to drive there... and I live in the downtown core of a major Canadian city.
Why is it slow? Because on either end of the journey, I have to walk to/from the public transit stop, then I have to spend time waiting for the bus/train to arrive, then it stops frequently on the way to my destination, and I also possibly have to wait for transfers between busses/trains... The trains come infrequently (only three tr
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Sure. Call it a driverless taxi... If it gets me there faster than public transit, and costs less than a regular taxi, I'm sold.
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don't u see that these cars ARE PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION?
they're not MASS TRANSIT, but they would awesomely form the backbone of next gen public transportation.
Tens of thousands of these guys can be on the road, using minimal fuel, picking up people and dropping them off for a fare.
you could make larger versions for main routes, but small ones would suffice for most uses.
they will support at least 2x density on the roads bc they will tail each other super close...maybe they can even link up to each other at ti
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"why can't google and everyone else support public transportation?"
Because that is damned dirty communism.
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Because it's awful, that's why. I can either drive myself in 30 minutes, or sit my butt on a series of 3 buses for an hour and a half, and that doesn't count the time walking to or from the first bus stop. Sometimes it's hot out, so I'd get to the office all sweaty. Sometimes it's cold out, so I'd be cold waiting at the bus stop. Getting in my own car and driving is just so far and away a better solution. That's why.
The solution is not to convince everyone that riding public transportation isn't actual
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Google actually does support public transportation. They're paying some $6.8 million to fund a San Francisco public transit program, for example.
Honestly, the big problem with public transportation isn't companies like Google. It's racism and classism. Here's a good article [slate.com] describing how racism has crippled Atlanta's public transportation and exacerbated the effects of this winter's snow storm, for example.
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This - so much this. For popular journeys, mass transit is going to be considerably more efficient.
But keep the bubblecars for trips to rural/remote locations, and the elderly and disabled who need door to door service.
Perhaps a shuttle-type tram/train with 'pod docks' would be the ideal combination, maximising takeup, reducing stop frequency and offering end-to-end service for those who needed it.
Something like this [businessinsider.com] adopted for pod cars too.
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For popular journeys, mass transit is going to be considerably more efficient.
Not true. Most public transit is not particularly efficient. Trains and buses are very efficient when they are full, but they often run partly empty. On average, they are about as efficient as two people in an average car. An efficient self-driving on-demand electric car is probably better, both economically and environmentally, and they will be more widely used because they are more convenient. Eventually, self-driving taxis will kill public transit. There will no longer be enough demand.
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Eventually, self-driving taxis will kill public transit.
Not if they're owned by the local public transit organization. ;)
This is the future of public transit for people who insist on transportation freedom. It will be like an electric magic carpet. Instead of whistling out the window, and stepping onto the magic carpet as it flies up to the door, you just enter your destination on your phone/tablet, and the electric bubble drives over from the neighborhood underground automated parking.
Re: what's wrong with public transportation? (Score:5, Informative)
Please give me some sort of source to your claim.
According to this page [wikipedia.org] the average number of bus passengers in the UK is 9, and buses get about 6 MPG. So that is 54 passenger-miles per gallon, which is about as good as one person in an electric car, or two people in a gasoline powered car. But even that overstates the case for buses, since they drive a fixed non-optimal route, where a car goes directly to the passenger's destination, so the "miles" are not equivalent.
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Please give me some sort of source to your claim.
According to this page [wikipedia.org] the average number of bus passengers in the UK is 9, and buses get about 6 MPG. So that is 54 passenger-miles per gallon, which is about as good as one person in an electric car, or two people in a gasoline powered car. But even that overstates the case for buses, since they drive a fixed non-optimal route, where a car goes directly to the passenger's destination, so the "miles" are not equivalent.
So ... us "bitter clingers [go.com]" with our icky big families in our minivans have that beat by a country mile :)
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Nice.
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Think about all the traffic jams that exist in busy cities, and how much less congestion there would be with an organised public transport system where each passenger takes a fraction of the space.
A swarm of electric bubble cars could also prevent those traffic jams by using traffic-aware re-routing. That is really easy for computers, but humans are better at following known routes. Humans wait until they're stuck in traffic and then it too late to change the route. Computer cars with good sensors can also drive much faster when packed tight, by accelerating in unison. Humans add 1-2 seconds of delay for each car in a line that has to start moving.
A few bubble cars will just be more cars on the road,
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Bubble cars could also enhance public transit. You could use them like park-and-ride, only without the problems of parking.
And in terms of cost, well, owning a car is super expensive... $150 a month just to park the thing in your apartment building, then there's insurance, gas, maintenance, lease...
I bet that you could get a lot of bubble car trips for the cost of owning/storing/using a car...
Re:what's wrong with public transportation? (Score:4, Insightful)
All government services are based on "theft" of resources from people who don't use that government service. This includes the roads that private cars drive on, which are funded in part by gasoline taxes but mostly through non-user-pays revenue streams such as income taxes.
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Which "non-users" would those be? Even among those who do not own a motor vehicle, how many of them buy no products or services or otherwise engage in the modern economy; or rely on no public services like fire depts, ambulances, police,
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Unless you are living a more off-the grid lifestyle than Dick Proenneke [wikipedia.org], you can not honestly claim to be a "non-user" of the road system.
Even the Unabomber used the U.S. mail...
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Tiny Bubbles???? (Score:2)
Law of headlines (Score:3)
Betteridge's law of headlines says no and the summary pretty much nails it.
The bubble shape maximizes the amount of internal volume given an amount of materials, or minimizes the amount of materials needed to make a car with a given volume. Take a bubble and attach crumple zones front and back and you have the shape of a typical car. I suppose the idea is that these self-driving cars won't need crumple zones. We'll see about that...
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I suppose the idea is that these self-driving cars won't need crumple zones. We'll see about that...
Indeed. In fact her statement "when it runs into something, it doesn't hurt that much" is oddly ignorant: your vehicle running into something is part of the issue, but something running into you is the other part. You do not want to be in a "tiny bubble" when a truck or SUV or bus hits you.
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How curiously short-sighted of you. The "you do not want to be in a 'tiny bubble' when a truck or SUV or bus hits you" is a statistically insignificant period of time spent in a state of unhappiness. The vast majority of time aside from that, novbody cares.
Cardiff (Score:3, Interesting)
Bubble cars have been around since the 1940s (Score:2)
This type of design seems to be news only to Americans. You could call the current Smart car the descendent in spirit of those early cars due to its profile and 2 seater layout. In fact I believe there are even electric Smarts for sale now and unlike Googles car which look like something designed by a 5 year old girl, they don't look too bad.
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Or maybe (Score:2)
(Mostly written, but there are some drawings, paintings, and videos that have those.)
I know it's hard to find, but you really should check out some of the really old sci-fi from the 1900s. You'd be amazed what they wrote about in the 20s, 30s, and 40s.
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no, there were real bubble-shaped electric cars from 70+ years ago
It's a PRT (Score:3)
Lots of little shared-use autonomous pod cars running around? That's a PRT, a Personal Rapid Transit [wikipedia.org] system. The idea has been around for decades, and a few prototype vehicles have been built. Older designs were rail based. Later designs used guideways, but the vehicle had some steering smarts. The latest designs steer themselves, but still use dedicated roads. Nothing much has been deployed, except for a few small systems at airports and fairs.
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Another Timothy community building exercise?? (Score:2)
We get it, you want the newbs who like the shiny to feel at home, but you're just pissing everybody else off by intentionally lowering the topics and quality of discussion!
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Tiny little death-traps (Score:2)
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Once this becomes the norm..
You're making an assumption that it will ever be allowed to 'become the norm' at all, which I and many others believe will never happen. I'll ask you the same question I asked to someone else who commented: Why do you want to give up your ability to choose, and more to the point, where do you get off thinking it's OK to take away MY or anyone else's ability to choose? How do you feel about it when someone else takes away YOUR choices? Do you really think that's right?
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Because I truly believe someday cars like this will do a better job than I can, and will let me do things I'd rather do than drive.
I think it's like smoking. I really don't care if you go home and smoke all you want, just don't make me do it with you. If we someday get to a point where there are 2
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If you can keep your self-driven car from hitting anything else, fine. You can't.
I've proven year after year that I'm a competent driver that doesn't cause accidents (which debunks your 'dog' analogy), yet, again, you're mroe than happy to take away MY choices just to satisfy YOUR desires. You sound like a jerk that just doesn't like dogs, regardless of whether or not they're behaving themselves. Good thing that people like you don't get to decide for everyone else, you're obviously the exact wrong sort of person to be allowed that sort of responsibility. Your 'dream' will NEVER become
Solution = trains + small battery motor cycles. (Score:2)
Rethink rail transportation. Design small battery powered motor cycles, one or two riders, w
Road Trains (Score:2)
I think we need to have stations where you drive your electric vehicle into the station and it gets linked in a line to a tugboat device that pulls it into the city. Then you are separated and can go park your vehicle. The battery you need is only to go from station to destination.
The tugboats could run on dedicated roads. The tugboat could even charge you through the link.
The new tech bubble (Score:2)
No - Google's has advanced beyond napkin sketch st (Score:3)
Simpsons did it (Score:2)
Bubble Car Tautology (Score:2)
Google's car reminded me of Steve Urkel's car, which is in fact a BMW Isetta, so maybe this is BMW's Isetta revisited?
Re:Who cares? (Score:5, Informative)
how about this, or is this 1942 car too futuristic? http://www.inautonews.com/six-... [inautonews.com]
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You mean Marissa Mayer didn't come up with the idea, all by herself?!!?!
Seriously, you'll be telling me these executives are just morons who couldn't tie their shoelaces without a team doing all the work behind them, while the executive pops up to take all the credit.
And then you'll tell me Bill Gates didn't write Windows all by himself either!!!
Hmm-Google is Testing the Bubble Car on Seniors (Score:2)
Don't get into that Google bubble car, Grandpa [staticflickr.com]! Didn't your read this [brianstorms.com]? :-)
Re:CEO in a Bubble (Score:5, Insightful)
Are you nuts?
The SMART is hugely popular and has been so for over a decade. In europe they are one of the most common cars seen on the roads. It's the bullshit that the USA forced on it that makes it a failure in the usa. The SMART is safer than most cars made in the USA, but they had to add a lot of useless safety crap to meet US regs designed to stifle importation. Europe and Canadian safety regs are good, but US regs are designed to stifle importation of cheap cars.
Then they did stupid shit like not importing the Diesel model that get's well over 60mpg. it sells rapidly in Canada, but you cant buy on in the USA. Maybe if the US regulations would allow a real SMART here the ones that sell for $7800 NEW in Europe they would sell like freaking hotcakes as they would be the most affordable car sold and have a market that is huge.
Instead we have only a handful of dealers so anyone that buys one has to have it serviced 150-400 miles away. They choose to not buy one because Mercedes is stupid and will not let the cars be serviced at a standard Mercedes dealership.
Lastly, they took so long to get it here, they got stomped on by toyota. the iQ is all the car the smart is with a dealer network to get it fixed all over the place. Plus it has a huge advantage of being built in the USA so they can side step all the roadblocks that were in front of the SMART. But the iQ is overpriced at $17,000. It's a $9,000 car and the morons at Toyota refuse to sell it as such. Instead they pile all kinds of extra crap in it to try and justify it's sky high price tag. Same problem as the Smart. Overpriced because the executives are too stupid to know how to price a tiny commuter car so that it sells like hotcakes.
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Overpriced because the executives are too stupid to know how to price a tiny commuter car so that it sells like hotcakes.
No automaker wins a race to the bottom. Every automaker wins a race to the top, because there's more profit on cars with added bullshit. They don't particularly care about the people.
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It's true, I've seen those SMART cars all over Europe - and yet, they still look silly.
As a Smart owner, I won't disagree -- I'll just note that there is something to be said for looking a bit silly. Taking yourself too seriously is a recipe for dissatisfaction.
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I don't understand why anyone would want one of those little SMART cars with their horrible gas mileage. They only get around 35 mpg. A 300 horsepower Ford Mustang gets around 30 mpg. That's ridiculous when you think about it.
If you want a truly "green" car that gets good mileage, wait until the Elio starts rolling off the line (next year?). 84 mpg in a $7000 American made two seater.
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I actually wanted to buy the damned thing, but I was stunned that it has such a poor gas mileage. I talked to two owners and read a lot online and the car definitely isn't austere.
Went and had a go in hybrid Toyota Yaris, and the thing was loud, wobbly and glacially slow. I went with Volkswagen Up and couldn't been happier.
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The SMART is safer than most cars made in the USA
That's probably overstating the safety case. The small size hurts it a lot in terms of safety
Re:CEO in a Bubble (Score:4, Informative)
... The other bubble car - Mercedes Smart is a failure in every sense of the word.
For a failure it is doing remarkably well. Here in Europe it has now been for sale for more than a decade, and there are no signs that its market is collapsing. It's true that not everyone is driving it, but if that is the benchmark, nowadays all cars are failures.
And the Google bubble car will be as popular as Segway.
The Segway also doesn't look like it will go away in the near future, it has found a few niches (e.g. getting around fast in large buildings such as airports and shopping malls, and guided tours for tourists).
Also, Google's bubble car is just an experimental platform for now.
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