Results for “driverless car”
101 found

First license for driverless cars

…on Monday, Nevada became the first to approve a license for “autonomous vehicles” — in other words, cars that cruise, twist and turn without the need for a driver — on its roads.

The license goes to Google, the Silicon Valley technology giant known more for its search engine and e-mail service that nonetheless has been known to dive into other big ideas such as space elevators to Internet-enabled glasses.

The story is here, and for the pointer I thank John Chilton.  I am curious to see how liability evolves.

The real competitor to driverless cars

Enter the Tacocopter.  It does not seem to be a hoax:

The Internet is going wild for Tacocopter, perhaps the next great startup out of Silicon Valley, which boasts a business plan that combines four of the most prominent touchstones of modern America: tacos, helicopters, robots and laziness.

Indeed, the concept behind Tacocopter is very simple, and very American: You order tacos on your smartphone and also beam in your GPS location information. Your order — and your location — are transmitted to an unmanned drone helicopter (grounded, near the kitchen where the tacos are made), and the tacocopter is then sent out with your food to find you and deliver your tacos to wherever you’re standing.

You pay online, so the tacos are simply dropped off at your feet by the drone helicopter, which then flies back to the restaurant to pick up its next order.

The article is here. And yet there is bad news afoot, and it is no surprise:

The U.S. government is single-handedly preventing you from ordering a taco and having it delivered to you by a totally sweet pilot-less helicopter.

For the pointer I thank @ModeledBehavior.  I believe that drone delivery is an idea worthy of further consideration; imagine delivering medicines to the elderly.

Driverless car navigates Berlin streets

It can talk, see, drive and no longer needs a human being to control it by remote. The car of the future — completely computer-controlled — is on the streets of Berlin.

All summer, researchers from the city’s Free University have been testing the automobile around the German capital.

The vehicle maneuvers through traffic on its own using a sophisticated combination of devices, including a computer, electronics and a precision satellite navigation system in the trunk, a camera in the front, and laser scanners on the roof and around the front and rear bumpers.

This is working — now — all we need is to have the price tag fall from 400,000 euros to a bit lower.  It’s already safer than human drivers.  The article is here, hat tip to Steve Silberman.

What do the laws against driverless cars look like?

A few people have asked me this question, here is one example, from Falls Church City:

No person shall operate a motor vehicle upon the streets of the city without giving full time and attention to the operation of the vehicle.

Of course that wasn’t intended as a law against driverless cars per se, but that would be its practical effect.  Ask yourself the following question: let’s say you sat in the back seat, singing rap songs with your shirt off, while the computer piloted the car flawlessly.  In a 35 mile per hour zone, the car would go exactly 35 mph and you would smile and wave — with both hands — at each police officer you passed.  For effect, you could stick your two feet out the window as well.  How long could you go before they pulled you over?  How far could you get?  When would you get your car back, with computer of course?  How would they respond if you asked: “Officer, please show me where in the books this is illegal?”  In which state would that question go over best?  Worst?

Liability and public opinion issues loom larger still.  The driverless car, if it proves feasible, is most likely to come first to a smaller, higher-trust nation such as Denmark.  In some countries, if the government announces “X is safe” people believe “X is safe.”  The United States is not one of those countries.

In praise of driverless cars, don’t regulate them into oblivion

My column is here, one excerpt is this:

The benefits of driverless cars are potentially significant. The typical American spends an average of roughly 100 hours a year in traffic; imagine using that time in better ways — by working or just having fun. The irksome burden of commuting might be lessened considerably. Furthermore, computer-driven cars could allow for tighter packing of vehicles on the road, which would speed traffic times and allow a given road or city to handle more cars. Trips to transport goods might dispense with drivers altogether, and rental cars could routinely pick up customers…

The point is not that such cars could be on the road in large numbers tomorrow, but that we ought to give the cars — and other potential innovations — a fair shot so that a prototype can become a commercial product someday. Michael Mandel, an economist with the Progressive Policy Institute, compares government regulation of innovation to the accumulation of pebbles in a stream. At some point too many pebbles block off the water flow, yet no single pebble is to blame for the slowdown. Right now the pebbles are limiting investment in future innovation.

A few points:

1. I couldn’t fit it in the column, but it is an interesting question why there is no popular movement to encourage driverless cars.  Commuting costs are very high and borne by many people.  (Here is Annie Lowery on just how bad commutes can be.)  You can get people to hate plastic bags, or worry about a birth certificate, but they won’t send a “pro-driverless car” postcard to their representatives.  The political movement has many potential beneficiaries but few natural constituencies.  (Why?  Does it fail to connect to an us vs. them struggle?)  This is an underrated source of bias in political outcomes.

2. In the longer run a lot of driverless cars would be very small.  Imagine your little mini-car zipping out and bringing you back some Sichuan braised fish, piping hot.

3. If a traffic situation gets really hairy, the driverless car can be programmed to pull over and stop.  Oddly I think that perfecting the GPS system might be a trickier problem than making them safer than driver-run cars.  Computers don’t drink, but they will drive around the same block forever and ever if they don’t understand the construction situation.  Even the best chess-playing computers don’t very well “understand” blockaded positions and perpetual check.

4. This isn’t a column about driverless cars at all.  It’s about our ambivalent attitudes toward major innovations.  It’s also about how the true costs of regulation are often hidden.  A lot of potentially good innovations never even reach our eyes and ears as concepts, much less realities.  They don’t have tags comparable to that of the driverless car.

5. Via Michelle Dawson, here is a list of driverless trains.  Here are links on robot-guided surgery.

Driverless vehicles, on their way

Uber passengers in Pittsburgh will be able to summon rides in self-driving cars with the touch of a smartphone button in the next several weeks. Uber also announced that it is acquiring a self-driving startup called Otto, co-founded by Israeli Lior Ron, that has developed technology allowing big rigs to drive themselves.

Via Mark Thorson, here is more.  And in Finland:

Residents of Helsinki, Finland will soon be used to the sight of buses with no drivers roaming the city streets. One of the world’s first autonomous bus pilot programs has begun in the Hernesaari district, and will run through mid-September.

Finnish law does not require vehicles on the road to have a driver, making it the perfect place to get permission to test the Easymile EZ-10 electric mini-buses.

So perhaps Finland can become a market leader in this area.

Driverless taxis coming to Singapore

Delphi Automotive Plc, the vehicle-electronics supplier that last year conducted the first coast-to-coast U.S. demonstration of a self-driving car, will begin testing autonomous autos in Singapore this year that may lead to robot taxis by the end of the decade.

The test will involve six autonomous autos, starting with the modified Audi Q5 the supplier used last year to travel from San Francisco to New York in self-driving mode. In Singapore, the cars initially will follow three predetermined routes and by 2019 will range freely based on customer requests, without a driver or a human minder, according to Glen DeVos, a Delphi senior vice president.

“We actually will have point-to-point automated mobility on demand with no driver in the car,” he said at a briefing with reporters at Delphi’s Troy, Michigan, operations base. “It’s one of the first, if not the very first, pilot programs where we’ll demonstrate mobility-on-demand systems.”

Here is more from Keith Naughton.

When will self-driving cars be a real thing?

We discussed this at lunch yesterday, here are my predictions:

1. Singapore will have driverless or near driverless neighborhoods in less than five years.  But it will look more like mass transit than many aficionados are expecting.

2. The American courts and regulators will not pin too much liability on the car companies or software architects.  That said, the regulators will move slowly, and for some time will require a human driver stay at the wheel, even though this seems to be more dangerous.

3. Mapping the territory, reliably, will remain the key problem.  Until that is solved, driverless cars will be a form of mass transit — except without the mass — along predesignated routes.

4. A Chinese city will do it before America does, but Singapore first of all.

5. In less than two or three years, you will see some American car dealership advertising “driverless cars,” but in a gimmicky way.  You’ll still have to sit at the wheel and…drive them.  But they’ll park themselves and have super-duper cruise control and the like.

6. The big gains come from everyone having driverless cars and that is more than twenty years away, but well under fifty years away.

Here is a related NYT article.  I thank Megan McArdle, Robin Hanson, Alex, and others for their contributions to this conversation.

Addendum: We also talked about whether “Virtual Reality” will be a revolutionary technology.  It will have its fans, but I don’t see it as a major breakthrough.  It makes too many people dizzy, and doesn’t really have a killer app; perhaps it will change sex however.

Three counterintuitive scenarios for driverless vehicles

The standard story is that traffic deaths will dwindle, cities will spread out magnificently, and you’ll all be reading MR on your morning commute rather than fighting the traffic.  Maybe so, but what other options are at least worth considering, if only out of contrarian orneriness?:

1. Driverless cars are not actually much better than the really good German streetcar systems.  Those come closer to door-to-door service than many people realize, and of course they have lower energy and congestion costs.

2. The need for exact mapping of streets will restrict driverless vehicles to well-known, well-trodden paths, much like bus lines.  There is nothing wrong with that, but ultimately it won’t do more than save the cost of the bus driver.  Or worse yet — some automobile lanes may be turned over to municipal driverless vehicles in a way which makes traffic problems worse.  It will end up as a way to push cars out of the picture, without building up the broader mass transit network very much.

3. Driverless cars will give governments a chance to “redo” the whole driving side of American life.  Is this so great?  (Imagine if we had to write a new Constitution today.)  Just think, with driverless cars and laissez-faire there will be so many car trips, a city might collapse under the weight of its own congestion.  So a quantity-rationed system will be introduced, and ultimately all of driving will end up more controlled and more regulated, based on licenses in fact and no I don’t mean drivers’ licenses.

Most generally, your predictions for driverless cars should depend heavily upon: a) will there be rational congestion pricing?, and b) how rapidly will cities rezone to take advantage of the new opportunities?  I am not sure we should be especially optimistic about either a) or b).

Or put it this way: the absence of congestion pricing in most major urban centers means we are already bad at running roads, for whatever public choice reasons.  So maybe we’ll get a bad version of driverless cars too.

For a conversation related to this post I am indebted to Alex Tabarrok and also Joe Bous.

China pioneers the world’s first driverless bus

While tech companies in America have focused on personal automated cars, China has gone big with what could be the beginning of mass, unmanned bus transit. The spacious vehicle, unveiled at the end of August after three years of development, recently managed a 20-mile trip through the crowded city of Zhengzhou without crashing into other motorists or bursting into flames. That same driver stayed behind the wheel, true, but maybe as technology progresses he’ll be replaced with a Johnny-Cab robot.

There is more here, including photos and video, via Air Genius Gary Leff.

Sunday assorted links

1. Was the original inspiration for James Bond a Jewish guy named Schlomo?

2. Saudi academic markets in everything.

3. Logistics of the Taylor Swift concert tour.

4. Waymo doubles driverless car service area in Arizona.

5. Georgia on homeless policy.

6. “Once student quality and mix of majors are controlled, salary differences between elite and nonelite schools largely disappear.

7. GPT with search.

Monday assorted links

1. New podcast on (serious) natural philosophy.

2. Laos fact of the day.

3. “Her TikTok account as of August 2020 has over 78 million followers.”  Link here, can you name her?

4. Thread on the basics of herd immunity claims.  And the NYT covers herd immunity.  A very good piece in fact.  Semi-herd immunity says I, or “imperfect immunity” to use the terminology of the article.  And you will note the extreme epistemological conservatism emanating from the mainstream experts interviewed.  Appropriate in some ways, not in others.

5. Was Winky Dink the first interactive TV show?

6. “They promised us driverless cars, and all northern Virginia got was this 15 mph one-route public transit shuttle.

7. WSJ review of new Bruno Macaes book on America.  The predictions of the book are holding up very well so far!

Sorry people, but I will always be an independent…

Senate Democrats are pushing back against attempts to pass a compromise bill in the lame-duck session that could speed the introduction of driverless cars onto U.S. roadways, saying it lacks safeguards that would protect drivers.

Link here, and I’m sure you know the House Democrats don’t want to pass the new NAFTA.

Elsewhere, in Chicago, the war on democracy continues:

To get on the ballot, Krupa was required to file 473 valid signatures of ward residents with the Chicago Board of Elections. Krupa filed 1,703 signatures.

But before he filed his signatures with the elections board, an amazing thing happened along the Chicago Way.

An organized crew of political workers — or maybe just civic-minded individuals who care about reform — went door to door with official legal papers. They asked residents to sign an affadavit revoking their signature on Krupa’s petition.

And the background?:

The David is David Krupa, 19, a freshman at DePaul University who drives a forklift part time. He’s not a political powerhouse. He’s just a conservative Southwest Side teenager studying political science and economics who got it in his head to run for alderman in a race that pits him against the most powerful [Democratic] ward organization in Chicago.

Here is the story, it’s not just North Carolina where electoral law is treated with less than the utmost respect.

p.s. if you think or write “false equivalency” in response to this post, you fail the Intellectual Turing test.