Friday, April 24, 2015
Week 10
This will be my last post. I hope you enjoyed this blog and learned a few things about new driving technologies and driving safety in general. I appreciated the experience this project offered and enjoyed doing all the research. If you have any unanswered questions, feel free to comment them
Week 9
We have discussed many technologies on this blog, some decades old and others just beginning testing. Currently all these systems are driver assists, but soon enough they could replace the driver completely. Until that day comes, we are still going to have to rely on people to drive their cars safely. Since that is not guaranteed, the computerized car and the systems comprising it are here to help us, but should not be relied on completely. The computerized car has the ability to save thousands of lives and prevent hundreds of thousands accidents and resulting injuries. The blink of an eye can be the difference between a normal day and nightmare for weeks, months, or years to come. If a few new safety systems can prevent that, then I believe it is well worth the extra money when buying a new car.
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Week 8
Looking further into the future, we have autonomous vehicles. But it may not be that far in the future. Modern cars have the necessary hardware to create a self driving car. The existing cameras, lasers, and radar used on cars today for systems, such as forward collision warning and blind spot assistance, can be used for autonomous vehicles. Autonomous vehicles are the next big thing in the automotive industry. Many big car companies, including Audi and Mercedes, newer car companies, like Tesla, and non-automotive companies, like Google and Apple (rumored) are working on creating a viable self driving car.
So what exactly is a self driving car? Well, it is a pretty simple concept. It is a car that can stop, accelerate, steer, and think on its own, without any human input. There is a button to turn it on and off, and that is about it. People make mistake, a lot. People are the cause of the vast majority of automobile accidents. Self driving cars, assuming they have a large portion of cars on the road, could save more than 20,000 lives a year.
If modern cars have the modern hardware necessary for a self driving car, why don't we have them? It is a combination of things holding back autonomous driving.
One, they aren't ready for fully autonomous driving. Google's self driving car, according to a presentation as SXSW, has mastered highway driving. But highway driving is easy compared to city driving. City driving involves more turning and stopping, which autonomous vehicles can handle, but cities also have one thing no one can really figure out: humans. If the car sees someone on the edge of the sidewalk, the car may think he/she is going to cross the street, so the car stops. But the person could just be staring there. There are a myriad of other out of the ordinary situations that can fool a self driving car. The car will have to figure out if the car ahead of it is broken down and it should go around, or if it is just heavy traffic. These cars essentially have to have artificial intelligence. The 2016 Audi Q7, which is equipped with many technological safety features but is not autonomous, has a computer rated at 740 gigaflops (billion floating-point operations per second), which I guess is pretty good since it is almost as fast as the best supercomputer in 2000.
Another challenge for self driving cars, just like some of the other safety features discussed in this blog, is government regulation. Self driving cars are allowed to perform testing on public roads, but we will get the first self-driving car (some companies say by 2020) long before it is allowed to be sold to the public. The Google car has no steering wheel and no pedals, yet, because of government regulation, still has mirrors and windshield wipers even though they do not benefit the occupants.
Another issue is public acceptance. Many people are not ready to trust their lives to a computer, even though people make many more mistakes than computers.
Other issues include cost. These cars, until mass produced, will be more expensive than traditional cars. Liability is also a problem in the case that there is an accident with a self driving car.
However there are many pros of self driving cars other than less accidents. There could be a future where every car is self driving. In this theoretical future, there is no reason to own a car. Cars could be called on demand, like using Uber, but on a much larger scale. There is no need to have parking lots, because the car that dropped you off goes and gets some one else and a different car comes back to get you. Because the cars do not waste time sitting in a parking lot or a garage, the number or self driving taxis to fulfill our current driving requirements is around a third as many cars on the road today. No more traffic jams, less oil consumption, more affordable transportation. This may sound nice, but this isn't a near future. With around 250 million cars in the US and 15 million new cars sold each year, it will be a very long time before self driving cars make up any percentage of cars on the road.
So what exactly is a self driving car? Well, it is a pretty simple concept. It is a car that can stop, accelerate, steer, and think on its own, without any human input. There is a button to turn it on and off, and that is about it. People make mistake, a lot. People are the cause of the vast majority of automobile accidents. Self driving cars, assuming they have a large portion of cars on the road, could save more than 20,000 lives a year.
If modern cars have the modern hardware necessary for a self driving car, why don't we have them? It is a combination of things holding back autonomous driving.
One, they aren't ready for fully autonomous driving. Google's self driving car, according to a presentation as SXSW, has mastered highway driving. But highway driving is easy compared to city driving. City driving involves more turning and stopping, which autonomous vehicles can handle, but cities also have one thing no one can really figure out: humans. If the car sees someone on the edge of the sidewalk, the car may think he/she is going to cross the street, so the car stops. But the person could just be staring there. There are a myriad of other out of the ordinary situations that can fool a self driving car. The car will have to figure out if the car ahead of it is broken down and it should go around, or if it is just heavy traffic. These cars essentially have to have artificial intelligence. The 2016 Audi Q7, which is equipped with many technological safety features but is not autonomous, has a computer rated at 740 gigaflops (billion floating-point operations per second), which I guess is pretty good since it is almost as fast as the best supercomputer in 2000.
Another challenge for self driving cars, just like some of the other safety features discussed in this blog, is government regulation. Self driving cars are allowed to perform testing on public roads, but we will get the first self-driving car (some companies say by 2020) long before it is allowed to be sold to the public. The Google car has no steering wheel and no pedals, yet, because of government regulation, still has mirrors and windshield wipers even though they do not benefit the occupants.
Another issue is public acceptance. Many people are not ready to trust their lives to a computer, even though people make many more mistakes than computers.
Other issues include cost. These cars, until mass produced, will be more expensive than traditional cars. Liability is also a problem in the case that there is an accident with a self driving car.
However there are many pros of self driving cars other than less accidents. There could be a future where every car is self driving. In this theoretical future, there is no reason to own a car. Cars could be called on demand, like using Uber, but on a much larger scale. There is no need to have parking lots, because the car that dropped you off goes and gets some one else and a different car comes back to get you. Because the cars do not waste time sitting in a parking lot or a garage, the number or self driving taxis to fulfill our current driving requirements is around a third as many cars on the road today. No more traffic jams, less oil consumption, more affordable transportation. This may sound nice, but this isn't a near future. With around 250 million cars in the US and 15 million new cars sold each year, it will be a very long time before self driving cars make up any percentage of cars on the road.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)