Just this week a truck driver informed me that autonomous trucks are at least “decades away”.
It’s 2016, six to eight years away from my target date, and self-driving shuttles will hit Lyon, France this September.
Via translation from LyonMag.Com, please consider Free Autonomous Shuttle Starts September.
It was only a matter of time. And it is now official. Two Navya Arma shuttles arrive in the Confluence district in September.
These shuttles driverless, 100% autonomous and fully electric task will be to carry passengers between the leisure division and Confluence shopping and the tip of the peninsula, up to the GL Events seat.
Navya Arma has “lasers that sweep space, cameras and precise GPS”. The Navya should be able to circulate in the Lyon area starting early September, from 7:30 to 18:30. Despite the absence of a driver, the shuttle can reach 25km/hour, safe for passengers or pedestrians.
Navya Arma Video
Some may scoff at 25km/hour (roughly 15.5 mph) but not me. For starters, the shuttle operates in city traffic, with pedestrians, not in interstate highway traffic that in most respects is much easier (no bicycles, no kids playing in the street, no stop signs, no stop lights).
Finally, I point out this is 2016. Where will the technology be eight years from now? Six? Even four?
Autonomous truck naysayers, please get a grip on reality.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
The muzzies will destroy them!
Where will it be in 6 years?
Sued out of service. The trial lawyers will have bonanza with this.
You will just need to change the software and then you can have Nice without the driver. Or you can equip with a bomb and the vehicle becomes a death delivery service. Who needs a rocket or a plane.
I wish it wasn’t so, but this is the world as it exists
The video shows it running on a closed street, no traffic, actors doing scripted things. The article suggests the route will be fixed. So this is more like a driverless train, than a car. Unless it’s a total fraud.
Let’s wait until September and see if it actually operates, and for HOW LONG. My guess is towns people won’t be very happy with a pokey 15mph monstrosity that clogs the roads.
The author of this blog has not learned that pre-released tech is often vapor ware — and that marketing videos are NOT REAL.
Yes, it is clearly a fixed route–airport trains moving between various concourses already do this…for example at DFW
nonsense, what you’re describing is no different to the existing situation
plus the legal situation is rapidly becoming clearer by necessity
at the end of the day these cars jst have to kill less people than real people
and with the increasing number of geriatrics on the roads that’s getting easier every week!
Big government supporters
Militant union supporters
Insane minimum wage supporters
Can’t fire anyone supporters
Open borders to have workers to to jobs we don’t want to do supporters
Are you paying attention????
We have just the thing for you
http://gizmodo.com/5454295/this-emp-cannon-stops-cars-almost-instantly
Insane minimum wage? $15/ hr is nothing.
$15/hour is nothing?
Spoken from someone who had never started a business or had to meet a payroll.
BTW – $15/hour is really about $30/hour once taxed, SS, workers comp etc are factored in.
And this nothing is going to lead to lots of automation and lots a low skilled workers not having a job.
$15 minimum wage shutters old-school Brooklyn diner
http://nypost.com/2016/07/22/15-minimum-wage-shutters-old-school-brooklyn-diner/
$15/hour ?! The article is about France & French tech.
You know, dead beat sclerotic bankrupt socialist France with its terrible unions, where a larger percentage of the 25-55 year-olds have to work [have jobs] than in America.
The video is from oct 2015, so these things have been in operation for some time already.
15 miles per hours
sure, lyin’ Hillary, not a self driving car from Lyon France…
History:
drawers of water and hewers of wood
telephone operators
elevator operators
meter readers
stock brokers
gas station attendant
John Henry
Next up:
Package delivery
Mail delivery
Burger flipper
Cashier
Airline pilot
Sex worker
General Practice triage physician
Waitress
Mexican fruit and vegetable picker
Cab driver
Security guard/policeman
Hollywood actor
That’s one great thing about the awful labor laws in France – they are encouraging technology to replace workers at a faster rate than other countries. As it often happens, liberal intentions result in the outcome that they didn’t want!
McDonald’s in France is a pleasure to visit. Beautiful large touchscreens allow you to order exactly what you want (sauces as well.)
The humans behind the counter only have to call out a number and hand you a bag.
Looking forward to Uber taking over in less than 6 years with their driverless service.
When are we going to have a robotic dog poop scooper?
Robot dogs don’t poop.
Sure they do. The just have little nanobots that are mixed in with the poop to convert it to dirt.
Self driving cars – looks like a golden ticket to me.
1) Joe reads an article on the internet about limitations of the sensors on self driving vehicles. He finds the blind spot or flaw where the sensors don’t work as well as believed by the mfgr.
2). Joe finds where one drives regularly.
3) Joe exploits said flaw, receiving a terrible soft tissue injury or worse. He’s a mess and his story will make you cry.
4) Joe sues the owner of the vehicle, the seller of the vehicle, the mfgr of the vehicle, lots of individuals involved with this group, the state for licensing the vehicle, the city for allowing it on the street.
5) Joe settles a rich man.
6) Jane reads Joe’s story. Jane retires a rich woman.
7) Syrian refugees aka ISIS see a good thing, abstain from violence. hire good personal injury lawyers and destroy western civilization from within.
8) Hillary creates a government program to promote the safe use of tech and bail out friends in tech and insurance industry. ISIS says “thanks, Hillary.”
4a) Defense attorney subpoenas Joe’s Google search history and alleges/proves fraud. Case is thrown out, Joe is countersued, and steps 5-8 don’t happen.
Assume no google search history, or any search history. Joe’s like me. My system is clean enough to eat from. Search histories only exist in the movies or with really stupid people.
Or, assume an actual injury and a real personal injury lawyer.
I rest my case.
CDR: It’s got nothing to do with your privacy efforts when Google (or any other search engine) keeps the history and your ISP logs all traffic. Unless Joe leaves his cell phone at home and does all his research at a library or roams around stealing WiFi his history details can be learned. But he had better not drive there because the license plate readers and facial recognition cameras also know what his cell phone provider would have yielded. Real privacy is very hard to manage anymore.
FL, Besides being a licensed CPA, I also wrote a book on computer networking. It’s authored under my real name, which is mostly anon here, although Mish might be able figure it out from the email address if he ever cared to. The book is online but I choose not to link to it because it would look crass and I like being mostly anon here. Hundred of people read it daily.
I know computer security and computer privacy well. i also know conflating issues, as your reply did. I repeat, it’s not too hard to be anon. On windows, you can still easily keep your computer contents private. In Android you may be right since Google is an advertising machine, but only an idiot would expect to have privacy on Android.
Now, if your device is hacked or MS decides to do some fruity Win 10 thing, that’s a different story.
FL, Hundreds of people daily, not hundred. Proofreading has always been a problem for me.
Autonomous everything. An economy with no consumers. Add in eternally declining interest rates…
Dis thing ain’t ready for prime time. Shoulda floored it. Whack that jerkette bicyclist outta da road.
Putting aside the massive liability and public safety issues, I am having a really hard time understanding how driverless cars even work in the real world, ie on real highways, real city streets. I live in NYC metro, and the road infrastructure is terrible and there are constant accidents. Its very, very complicated to drive here. So here a few questions. If an obstacle appears in front of the DC, can it senses it at speeds higher than 15mph? how? 3D optics? What range? Can it see an accident developing a half mile off (or further), can it sense errratic driver behavior in other cars? How much tech does it need in terms of sensors to have NO blind spots and to be able to know where everyting is around it at all times out to a certain range? Is it infrared at night? How much power do all these sensors and computational power use? What about other car behavior around it if vision is obscured? What about noises? Lets say it sees the object, but calculates it doesnt have time to stop, do they brake but plow through it anyway? Swerve? Into traffic, into sidewalk pedestrians? Which one? How do they determine which one? What is the algortithim going to tell it to do? Do they have any ability to go around fixed obstacles if the route requires deviating from the lane (eg a stalled car in front of them, or someone who doesnt know the light has changed). Or a bicyclist just checking their phone! Are they going to swerve for small animals? Run over them? Can they see potholes and variations in road grade? How? Do they have some sort of forward laser scanner that is projecting the surface of the upcoming road? Do they spot Road debris? What do they do about it? How do they merge into interstate traffic??? Will they just let themselves be run off the road if a car is within X feet of them and guides them off the road? Or do they hold their lane no matter what? What is X? 1 foot? 3 feet? 6 inches?
any thoughts?
any thoughts?
Yes, you need to think, read, and listen instead of throwing up crap.
The big savings will first be of trucks. As I have pointed out at least a dozen times, most of the issues you raise are not a problem. As for city driving I believe the success of the tests speak for themselves. In essence you throw up a bunch of crap, hoping some of it sticks.
If any of that crap did stick, the driverless tests would have already failed.And as I also point out, this is 2016. All off this technology will be far better in 4-8 years.
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/542626/why-self-driving-cars-must-be-programmed-to-kill/
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/how-will-driverless-cars-make-life-or-death-decisions/
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/driverless-cars-will-face-moral-dilemmas/
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/06/06/automobiles/autonomous-cars-problems.html?_r=0
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/07/19/think-self-driving-cars-could-mean-an-end-to-traffic-jams-think/
Huge fan of your blog by the way, been reading it for years.. I just happen to really disagree with you on the future of driverless cars. Probably because I spend lot of time on I-95!!!
Mish — several US airports have had autonomous shuttles for years. So what?
Atlanta’s people mover is mostly autonomous, has been for years. But corrupt city unions tried to force taxpayers to put drivers on all the trains (for “safety”???).
Meanwhile, corrupt union drivers have bled the Washington DC Metro system into bankruptcy, while crashing into each other. The technical solution (in Atlanta and other places) exists and is widely known. The corruption that is Washington DC is also widely known.
Having the technology to fix the problem does not mean it will get fixed. There is a LOT of corruption in the way.
Next, take a look at the automated shuttles in many airports — I went through Tampa FL recently, and the “train” shuttles between airport terminals are 100% autonomous and have been for as long as the Tampa resident I spoke with could remember (decades).
As a resident of Illinois Mish, I assume you have seen the shit hole known as O’Hare airport? Notice any clean, efficient, self driving shuttle trains there? The technology has been available for decades, and is in use in many airports — you see them all over Asia, parts of Europe, and in a number of US airports.
But OHare? JFK? LGA? LAX? Boston/Logan? Newark NJ? The airport cities that desperately need something that isn’t a global embarrassment? The technology has been available for decades, but **** implementation is still DECADES away ***
THUNDERBIRDS ARE GO !!!
http://www.plan.london/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/1_Aestheticsofautonomous.png
….ok … another fifty years or so … give or take …
I just read the advertising copy underneath the “bus” photo… supposedly you can cram 15 people into that clown car? Not sure if that includes the horns and oversized red noses; definitely have to remove the clown shoes.
Maybe in Chicago, they can fit 15 dead bodies after the shoot each other? The auto-boose can automatically deliver them to the morgue, maybe take out a few more people en route (lawyers will LOVE this thing).
“I don’t want to go! I’m not dead yet!”
When you realize that leisure is not idleness, but self directed and self chosen constructive purpose, that the business model of Finance has been problematic for at least the last 5000 years and is a coalescing monopolistic international power that falsely lays claim to ownership of the credit it cretes out of nothing, that AI is going to destroy employment at a rate ten times faster than modern economies have ever created jobs to replace those destroyed by innovation and finally that the economy does not tend toward general equilibrium….you have to realize that the policies of Social Credit/Wisdomics-Gracenomics are the only actual solution to our economic problems.
wisdomicsblog.com
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