Found this fascinating article:

Driverless Cars Could Spell the End of Domestic Flights

What’s fascinating about the article is not only the impact such vehicles would have for domestic flights, but another thing I hadn’t considered: The effect on Hotels and reststops/restaurants along a commonly used route.

The crux of the argument is this: In the future, when we have self-driving/driverless cars, the vehicles may no longer resemble what we commonly think of when we think of cars.

Imagine there is a fleet of “rentable” long distance vehicles (you wouldn’t need to own one of them). You decide one weekend that you’d like to go to, say, a beach some five or more hours drive away.

You pull out your smartphone and call in the vehicle once you have all your and your family’s gear ready.  The vehicle arrives and you put away your suitcases, etc. and get into the driverless car.

What you have inside the car is like a small room.  The car’s seats fold down to make beds and you have a screen (or several!) available for entertainment.  Should the trip be a very long one, you can order your car at night and sleep in while the driverless car takes you to your destination.

You wake up/arrive at your destination refreshed and ready for fun instead of tired of driving all that way.  If you’ve “rented” the car for several days, it will sit waiting for you.  If not, you may use a Hotel and after you’ve had your vacation, call in another car to take you back home.

Which brings us back to the article above.  Why use an airline for relatively short flights when you can use a driverless vehicle?  If, say, you want to take a trip from New York to Atlanta or Atlanta to Miami and are loathe to spent most of the day driving, you might take a flight.

In the driverless future, however, you finish up your work, head home, grab your bags, and call in a driverless car to take you to your destination.  The interior of the car will be comfortable and filled with entertainment or work options.  You are essentially in a bedroom or an office on wheels and don’t have to worry about the trip at all.

No ticket/boarding passes, no checking in luggage, no driving seven plus hours…

On the minus side: Yet more job disruptions.  The Hotels that may lie in the middle of longer trips and service people who need a rest stop will of course be impacted, as will restaurants.  Given our move toward electric cars (which I believe will also happen), there will come a time when gas stations will no longer exist, replaced (perhaps) with charging stations.

As for airlines, they’ll have to contract their services.  Airlines will continue to exist but they will deal with longer trips.  And think about it: What will be considered a “short” trip?

If the theoretical uses of driverless cars are taken to their limit, we might have driverless cars running in specific highway type lanes at better than 100 miles per hour.  Now say you wanted to go from Miami to New York or 1089 miles.  If you had a self-driving vehicle that managed 100 miles (or more!) an hour, you’re looking at a trip of 10 hours.

Let’s return to that vacation scenario I mentioned: You get home, pack your bags, have a meal, and summon a driverless car.  Let’s say you’re in the car by 8 pm.  That means if we have a car capable of speeds of at least 100 miles per hour, theoretically you could be in New York ten hours later, or by 6 am the next day.

Again, you were not driving.  You might well have spent a few hours catching up on movies or listening to music then sleeping in the driverless car’s bed.

When you wake up, you’re in New York and at your destination, fresh and ready to have some fun or get to work or what-have-you.

As I’ve said many times before, the future of the self-driving car is a fascinating one.  Let’s see how it all works out…

As those who frequent this blog must know by now, I’m fascinated with what I predict is the future regarding cars: They will all be self-driving.  In fact, I predict that in the very near future people will no longer own cars at all.  We will use our smart-phone and a Uber-like app to to call in a self-driving car and it will take us to our destination for a very low fee and, when we’re done at our destination and need to go somewhere else we again whip out our smartphone and viola! call in another vehicle to take us.

It wouldn’t surprise me if my daughters’ children (or, if there’s a delay, their children) wind up being the first generation of people who never bothered to learn to drive at all.

(A random thought here: How will movies deal with the idea of driverless cars?  Will that action staple, the car chase, eventually disappear from films?)

Having said all this, we’re still a few years off from having that fleet of driverless vehicles at our disposal.  In the meantime, Tesla has released a new model of their car and it features driverless functionality, though the auto maker is clear that this should be used as an aid to driving and the driver should not take their hands off the wheel even in the driverless mode.

Will Oremus over at Slate.com offers an interesting look at the current state of driverless vehicles and, specifically, the Tesla models and I encourage anyone who, like me, is interested in this topic read his thoughts:

The Paradox of the Self-Driving Car

What Mr. Oremus gets at is the thought in some quarters that if you’re making a self-driving vehicle, you should probably go all the way toward it, like Google is doing (ie eliminating the steering wheel from the driverless car and anticipating a future where all the cars on the road are driverless and therefore human error is completely eliminated).

Mr. Oremus points out that an “assisted” driverless feature like the one the Tesla may create bad habits in drivers.  They may, for example, check whatever is going on with their smartphone more while driving using the feature, which Tesla clearly doesn’t want them to do.

But people are people and it isn’t surprising they indulge in stupid things they shouldn’t, such as…

Watch a Tesla being driven in autopilot – From the backseat

To say the least, seeing the above article/video made my blood freeze.  Yes, I’m all in favor of driverless cars but Tesla has made it clear their driverless feature is NOT meant to be used like this.

Regardless, we most certainly are living in interesting times regarding cars.  The driverless car is coming (if not already here) and, with technological advances regarding battery power, I suspect we’ll see the end of gasoline use as well.

An exciting -and, after seeing hte above video, scary!- time for sure.

…but here’s one more really fascinating article regarding self-driving cars.  Written by Matt Windsor for UAB News, it focuses on a truly interesting question regarding this technology:

Will Your Self-Driving Car Be Programmed to Kill You?

Ok, the headline may seem…cheesy, but the ideas explored are actually very serious: What if we reach a point where self-driving cars are the norm and a situation arises where the car has to choose between saving you or other(s)?

The gist of the article is contained in this paragraph (I have put in bold what I consider the most important question raised):

Google’s cars can already handle real-world hazards, such as cars’ suddenly swerving in front of them. But in some situations, a crash is unavoidable. (In fact, Google’s cars have been in dozens of minor accidents, all of which the company blames on human drivers.) How will a Google car, or an ultra-safe Volvo, be programmed to handle a no-win situation — a blown tire, perhaps — where it must choose between swerving into oncoming traffic or steering directly into a retaining wall? The computers will certainly be fast enough to make a reasoned judgment within milliseconds. They would have time to scan the cars ahead and identify the one most likely to survive a collision, for example, or the one with the most other humans inside. But should they be programmed to make the decision that is best for their owners? Or the choice that does the least harm — even if that means choosing to slam into a retaining wall to avoid hitting an oncoming school bus? Who will make that call, and how will they decide?

Certainly this is not a small consideration and will no doubt be a source of great debate in the years to come.

Having read about how the self-driving cars operate, my understanding is they are very slow and careful, essentially “granny”-drivers and therefore, at least in city settings, would find very, very few examples where they might face a “serious” collision.  On the other hand, there are those who speculate that highway driving will allow self-driving cars to operate at speeds far in excess of the speed limit and that self-driving vehicles might form a “chain” of cars not unlike a train to move along highways.  The possibility for something going very wrong in a high speed situation is obviously raised.

Then again, the point may become mute: There are those who theorize the day that self-driving cars become a reality, “human” drivers and cars will be limited to driving only in certain areas.  Some have even speculated that human driving might become outlawed entirely on public roads.  Before you think this is the rise of some kind of automotive fascism, one must also realize that if self-driving cars are successful, people will likely welcome the technology.  All that time you spend driving could instead be devoted to watching TV, reading the newspaper or a book, or talking with friends on your phone.

Further, if it becomes the norm that no one actually drives themselves and, assuming any software glitches are accounted for and taken care of, self-driving cars may be put into a collision situations only on the smallest of occasions.

At least one hopes that becomes the case!

Regardless, the article is a fascinating look into yet another facet of what I’m increasingly certain will be the future of personal travel.

Ok, ok, I know.  I’m devoting far too much time on this subject so unless something really big shows up, I’ll leave this topic alone for a while.

But before I do, this link to an article by Sam Tracy regarding which jobs will be lost when self-driving cars (inevitably, in my opinion) become a reality:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sam-tracy/autonomous-vehicles-will-_b_7556660.html

Part of what fascinates me about the self-driving car thing is that I can see it as being an incredible boon…and an equally incredible job killer, something this article explains quite well.

Without linking on that article, anyone can think of at least a few jobs that will be heavily impacted by self-driving cars.  Taxis?  Gone…at least the models that are driven by people.  Uber?  Also gone.  Truck transportation?  Also gone.  Mail carriers (USPS, UPS, FedEx, etc.) may also be impacted.  If you can have driverless cars, what’s to stop you from developing some kind of robotic system to deliver mail and packages, too?

Then you dig a little deeper.  With the rise of the self-driving car, what happens to the auto insurance industry?  It will be impacted, perhaps very hard, and that means more lost jobs.

Going into the article, one can estimate some very hard realities regarding anyone who makes their living driving and using a vehicle.

But there is an upside to all this: By “liberating” (in some cases very much against their will) people from tasks involving driving, it creates a tremendous amount of free time and, it has been noted, it is in this vacuum of free time that people come up with new concepts and, quite possibly, progress.

The pain will come, of that there is no doubt.  Can what comes afterwards be a boon to society in general?

We’ll see.

I know, I know…I’ve devoted an awful lot of space around here to the driverless/self-driving car articles.  If you’re tired of reading these articles, scroll on because here’s another one.

In this case, it involves Elon Musk and his Tesla autopilot…and the fact that he’s already testing it, along with the limits of his version:

Elon Musk Is Already Driving His Tesla on Autopilot.  Would You?

As I’ve stated before, I’m absolutely fascinated with the concept of self-driving vehicles and feel this will be as big a game changer, society-wise, as we’ve seen since the advent of the personal computer/internet (which for better or worse has radically changed almost all aspects of our being as well).

I’m becoming more and more convinced the mass production and use of self-driving cars is just around the corner.  Perhaps in another five years or so we’ll see many of them on the streets of all major cities.  And maybe five years after that people will no longer care to own a car at all and will use self-driving cars they summon via their smartphones.

Interesting times.

So yesterday the news featured stories about four crashes since September in California involving “self-driving” cars.  Much was made of this.

Some was to be expected:  From some quarters alarm that self-driving cars aren’t (gasp!) perfect.  That they could get into accidents at all.  How in the world was that possible?!

To which I have to say: Really?

The self-driving vehicles aren’t in full production yet.  They’re still being tested, for crying out loud.  In California, there are fewer than 50 such cars on the streets and until now they’re under the supervision of either Google or Delphi or whomever is testing them.  Oh, and this testing has been going on longer than last September as the early trials were done in closed circuit courses before the programmers were confident enough in their product to release them under supervision to the streets.

Given the fact these companies are still testing these vehicles, and the further fact that they’re driving on streets populated with real-life drivers, it would have been more surprising to me that the self-driving cars hadn’t had so much as a scratch in all the time then the fact that there have been only four collisions.

That’s not to say, though, that Google and Delphi shouldn’t be more transparent regarding whatever accidents their cars get into.  Of the four such fender benders, the companies claim they were all caused by the other driver/car, and that in only two of the four cases were the vehicles in their autonomous mode.  Further, they state that the accidents happened at very low speeds and were very, very minor in nature.  So no Terminator-level autonomous vehicle carnage to report, thank the Gods.  Having said that, we have to take the company reports at face value as the actual accident information remains out of public reach.

Will Oremus for Slate.com provides an interesting and more detailed article regarding these four collisions and comes to many of the same conclusions I did above.  If you’re as interested in self-driving cars as I am, I highly recommend you read it.  You can find the article here:

Self-Driving Cars Have Been Getting Into Accidents.  Is That A Problem?

If you’ve read my posts in any detail you know that I’m a big proponent of automated cars.  I believe they are the future of transportation but I’m not foolish enough to believe they’ll arrive in some kind of otherworldly immaculate form, both accident and trouble free.

There will be (ahem) bumps along the road.  There may even be injuries to passengers or, tragically, even fatalities.  But every new transportation technology has had to contend with such issues and automobiles today, driven by flesh and blood humans, still get into many accidents on a daily basis and, yes, some do result in death.

Despite all this, I believe the future is bright for self-driving car and expect that in my lifetime I’ll see its full implementation and use on the roads and highways.  I would go so far as to predict that when that happens, we’ll see a precipitous drop in accidents in general and an almost overnight elimination of traffic woes.

We’ll see.

…are they something we can expect to see in our near future?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/28/google-self-driving-car-safety-first-with-city-streets-bicyclists-pedestrians.html

Based on the above article and others I’ve read, the answer would seem to be a resounding “yes”.

I know there are those who enjoy driving and loathe the idea of giving up on doing so, but the reality is that there are probably even more people out there who would love to allow their cars to drive them to and from work each day and give them that time to read the paper or check their emails or make themselves up, etc. etc. and not have to burn a half-hour plus (and in some cases many more pluses) in the act of actually driving through rush hour gridlock.

And because we’re dealing with a computer driver, if many -if not most- vehicles on the highway wind up being self-driving cars, then I suspect that rush hour traffic will become lessened.  No rubbernecking, fewer crashes.

While one can certainly envision perils (bad software, a defective scanner, etc) how is this not a good thing?

One day soon…