You guys are on a forum for enthusiasts that like operating a certain type of vehicle (motorcycles) yet are promoting a technology that will eliminate any operation of probably any road vehicle in the not so distant future. Makes no sense to me. Personally I like cars nearly as much as motorcycles. Not nearly as fun to operate but I still enjoy it. Keep the self driving cars away as long as possible.
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great car technology
- Thread starter nearace
- Start date
You guys are on a forum for enthusiasts that like operating a certain type of vehicle (motorcycles) yet are promoting a technology that will eliminate any operation of probably any road vehicle in the not so distant future. Makes no sense to me. Personally I like cars nearly as much as motorcycles. Not nearly as fun to operate but I still enjoy it. Keep the self driving cars away as long as possible.
Haha. I don't get enjoyment riding within laws, I prefer to ride in the dirt and have real fun. I can't wait until I can load my bike on the back of a self driving vehicle and rest on the way home.
I love riding just as much as the next person - scratch that, MORE than the next person (so what, wanna fight aboudit?), but public roads are simply not what they used to be. Mass populations need to be able to move around and in between dense and distant cities. Everyone owning and driving their very own slice of pie is slowly becoming an unreasonable expectation. There are more and more vehicles making their way onto the roads, the same roads which are not changing quickly enough to meet the demand. Drivers are pulling licenses out of cereal boxes and using their inherited funds to put cars on the road for which they know only the price they paid for it. More traffic, more congestion, more accidents - all things that we hate experiencing when on the roads
I want to continue to be able to ride my bike and drive my car on the roads as long as possible, eventually roads are going to be a strict utility. It's going to be a slow process, it's going to have its growing pains, but I look forward to seeing self driving cars. Just as there are people who hate the idea of relinquishing the joy of driving and riding (myself included), there are people who would happily concede that privilege to an affordable and more efficient (and arguably safer) alternative.
Besides, those of us with the itch will certainly be wanting to find a cure for it, and I suspect private enterprise will provide a few more off-the-road alternatives for drivers and riders who can't get enough.
If you don't ride on the road why would you be concerned about your road-riding safety (which is what this thread is about)?
So you're saying hurry up and bring in the technology that will prevent us from being allowed to ride on the road altogether?
Huh? I can be concerned about other people's safety can't i? Not to mention that in fairer weather I ride a bicycle to work....on the road.....where I'm supposed to......with cars......
LoneRonin
Well-known member
like that yappy navigation **tch who cuts out my music and never shuts the **** up, even when the half the screen shows you the actual ****ing exit, kinda like this...
Thank Tata, having ownership over Jaguar/Land Rover and there being billions of bikes, scooters and motorcycles in India I wouldn't be surprised if they pioneered this technology. Looks like they're only putting it in their high end cars right now but 10-15 years from now it will probably be the standard
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That's what I'm talkin'bout. Take the HOV lane, allow only self-driving cars in there, and watch how quickly that traffic moves. A speed of 150km/h could be sustained by vehicles at only a cars length from each other. The last car in the train would do exactly what the first car does, allowing them to drive much closer together than is safe for humans, and avoid the nasty stop-and-go accordion of human driven traffic. Tired of teaching people the Zipper merge? No problem. Self-driving cars can modulate their speed and distance to allow for seamless merging.
The trouble is integrating those vehicles with the rest, which are still being driven by people in the other lanes. First, design the vehicle to drive reactively - people are unpredictable and expected behaviour cannot be relied upon. Once the number of self-driving vehicles reaches critical mass, we can integrate active behaviours relying on the predictable programmed behaviour of self-driving cars.
Our roads are the unbeknown foundation for the largest mass-transit system we could ask for. We have the network, we just need to re-invent the wheel.
Don't bet on fully self-driving cars any time soon. What you've seen of them so far have been in cherry-picked environments. They have a lot of trouble dealing with real world scenarios. There is a ton of legal liability. If a self-driving car gets in a collision that can't be blamed on someone else, who's liable?
Real world scenario 1: A policeman is directing traffic, for whatever reason. How does the auto-driving system distinguish the cop from a general pedestrian? (They can't) How does it know it should follow the cop rather than the traffic signal?
Real world scenario 2: Something happens and a private citizen opts to direct traffic (it has happened - e.g. in the massive power failure of 2003 that knocked out all traffic signals). How does the auto-driving system distinguish that person from a general pedestrian waving their arms randomly? (They can't) How does the system discern scenario 1 from scenario 2? (They can't)
Real world scenario 3: Construction crews have painted temporary lines to shift lanes but residue of the original lanes is still there and the new temporary lanes aren't the "pre-programmed" lanes that are on the master traffic map. What happens?
You will see "driver aids" that help the driver (or stop the driver from doing something stupid) in more and more situations - mostly automatic braking systems that will have more and more scenarios that they can detect. Eventually, the dreaded car left turn in front of motorcycle won't happen any more.
"Automatic mode" will probably happen but it will almost certainly be restricted to very specific circumstances: steady highway driving, low-speed traffic-jam driving, no snow/ice conditions, no construction zones, and the driver will have to be kept ready to take over when a situation develops that the auto-driving can't deal with.
Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is necessary for this to work properly. Motorcycles are being considered in this. (VW, Mercedes, BMW, Honda all have an interest in this system working for bikes.) Most likely the bikes won't have any active intervention, but they'll show up in the V2V systems of the vehicles around them so that they can deal with it, and the other vehicles will show up in some sort of operator-interface system so that the rider can deal with whatever the other vehicle is doing. Bicycles, pedestrians, and "legacy vehicles" that don't have the transponders are a problem. Data privacy is another legal headache. (Your vehicle has to broadcast its existence for this system to work, so the theoretical possibility exists that "the man" could follow your movements - not like they couldn't already do this, given sufficient roadside camera systems - there are some kinks that the legal system has to work out)
Real world scenario 1: A policeman is directing traffic, for whatever reason. How does the auto-driving system distinguish the cop from a general pedestrian? (They can't) How does it know it should follow the cop rather than the traffic signal?
Real world scenario 2: Something happens and a private citizen opts to direct traffic (it has happened - e.g. in the massive power failure of 2003 that knocked out all traffic signals). How does the auto-driving system distinguish that person from a general pedestrian waving their arms randomly? (They can't) How does the system discern scenario 1 from scenario 2? (They can't)
Real world scenario 3: Construction crews have painted temporary lines to shift lanes but residue of the original lanes is still there and the new temporary lanes aren't the "pre-programmed" lanes that are on the master traffic map. What happens?
You will see "driver aids" that help the driver (or stop the driver from doing something stupid) in more and more situations - mostly automatic braking systems that will have more and more scenarios that they can detect. Eventually, the dreaded car left turn in front of motorcycle won't happen any more.
"Automatic mode" will probably happen but it will almost certainly be restricted to very specific circumstances: steady highway driving, low-speed traffic-jam driving, no snow/ice conditions, no construction zones, and the driver will have to be kept ready to take over when a situation develops that the auto-driving can't deal with.
Vehicle-to-vehicle communication is necessary for this to work properly. Motorcycles are being considered in this. (VW, Mercedes, BMW, Honda all have an interest in this system working for bikes.) Most likely the bikes won't have any active intervention, but they'll show up in the V2V systems of the vehicles around them so that they can deal with it, and the other vehicles will show up in some sort of operator-interface system so that the rider can deal with whatever the other vehicle is doing. Bicycles, pedestrians, and "legacy vehicles" that don't have the transponders are a problem. Data privacy is another legal headache. (Your vehicle has to broadcast its existence for this system to work, so the theoretical possibility exists that "the man" could follow your movements - not like they couldn't already do this, given sufficient roadside camera systems - there are some kinks that the legal system has to work out)
The side airbags take up some space in the A-pillar, but the big blame here is the combination of side-impact, roof-crush, and the new "low offset" IIHS frontal crash, all of which require the "door ring" to be strengthened - that is the inner structure that goes all the way around the front doors - up the A-pillar, along the edge of the roof, down the B-pillar, forward along the floor and back to the A-pillar. Combine that with the desire for a sleek, low, aerodynamic shape with the windshield inclined back very far, and you can get some visibility problems.
There is some hidden new technology that should help here, and it's not some new whiz-bang electronics, but rather a process called "hot stamping" for certain critical structural elements (like the A-pillar stamping). A blank is made from a special low-alloy steel then heated red hot, it goes into the stamping press red hot, the stamping dies are water-cooled, and *whack*, the stamping dies simultaneously form the hot steel into shape and then quench it when the dies are closed together. A fair number of new vehicle designs are using this. The resulting heat-treated stamping is so tough that any further holes that have to be made post-stamping, or edges that need to be accurately trimmed, have to be laser-cut. It can still be spot-welded to the adjacent conventionally-produced sheet metal.
My forward-visibility beef in a lot of cars (including mine!) is the inside rear view mirror! I have a tall upper body so in a lot of cars, the rear view mirror is right at eye level, and you could hide a bus in that forward blind spot. The original manufacturer can't put the mirror higher because of the shape of the roofline (usually because of aerodynamics). In my car, I took the original mirror off and bought an aftermarket one that was a bit smaller and could be mounted up higher closer to the roof, so that I can see under it. The bad side effect is that I can't see very far behind the car using that mirror, I have to duck my head. But I'd rather have the visibility up front than behind ... The side mirrors are more important (to me) than the inside rear-view ...
They're called scooters. Ba-dum-tish!
As usual, the Japanese are working on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mT3vfSQePcs
A few more years and it'll be out-posing humans at Timmies. "Looking good, super-bike! Shame about the sweaty ape on your back though!"
I agree that we won't see fully autonomous cars in the "near" future. The infrastructure wasn't set up for it and the world is simply too dynamic a place for sensor and computing power to cope with full-autonomy right now. But it's coming. Advances are being made every day in the field.
I welcome features on cars that fill gaps in the skillsets and attentiveness of drivers. It would be nice if cars increasingly intervened to prevent dreaded left-turners because their systems recognized my motorcycle approaching the opposite way. It would be nice if cars intervened to prevent them running red lights so I didn't have to feel like a sitting duck every time I enter an intersection. It would be nice to have cars warn their drivers of my presence before they make a lane change (and nicer if the car itself didn't just warn but prevented such a maneuver...)
A subset of these types of systems are already in place in a lot of new cars and the feature set will only increase as time goes by.
I don't want to give up driving to autonomy. I feel like, after 32 years without any incidences, I'm qualified to drive a car myself without running into others. But with so many people out there being soooo bad (ever watch "Canada's Worst Driver"?) I feel that any feature added to cars that improves my safety as a motorcyclist can only be seen as a good thing.
I welcome features on cars that fill gaps in the skillsets and attentiveness of drivers. It would be nice if cars increasingly intervened to prevent dreaded left-turners because their systems recognized my motorcycle approaching the opposite way. It would be nice if cars intervened to prevent them running red lights so I didn't have to feel like a sitting duck every time I enter an intersection. It would be nice to have cars warn their drivers of my presence before they make a lane change (and nicer if the car itself didn't just warn but prevented such a maneuver...)
A subset of these types of systems are already in place in a lot of new cars and the feature set will only increase as time goes by.
I don't want to give up driving to autonomy. I feel like, after 32 years without any incidences, I'm qualified to drive a car myself without running into others. But with so many people out there being soooo bad (ever watch "Canada's Worst Driver"?) I feel that any feature added to cars that improves my safety as a motorcyclist can only be seen as a good thing.
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