Future Cars: Electric and Autonomous Vehicles

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RailBaronYarr
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby RailBaronYarr » December 22nd, 2015, 9:38 am

If anything, driverless buses should bolster transit by improving service for the same or lower costs. Stop hiring new drivers over a 10 year period, pay out folks to retire early, shift drivers to bus fare inspectors or TVM cash collectors, etc as new buses have driverless technology (and, I have to believe some company will offer a retrofit solution for trucks and buses). All of a sudden it becomes very cheap to run buses all day and night at high frequencies.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby min-chi-cbus » December 22nd, 2015, 11:19 am

If you don't think that computer assisted and potentially computer driven vehicles isn't going to happen I don't know what to tell ya... It is going to happen.
Yes, it's going to happen. No one here disagrees with that. The current discussion concerns whether automatic vehicles will have a significant impact on congestion. I'm quite skeptical about that. I though that you believe they will but the quote above makes me question whether we're even talking about the same thing.

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I agree. In fact, I could see congestion INCREASE as self-driving vehicles could be held to more stringent safety standards, such as keeping a safe distance between cars. But I'm really just guessing. We also have to assume populations will continue to increase and any slow-down in increased congestion would be a step in the right direction. Even achieving the same levels of congestion today and 5-10 years from now would be great.

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Tiller
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Tiller » December 22nd, 2015, 11:25 am

If self-driving cars make cars more pleasant and easier (which they probably will) to use, then that would also stimulate more use and thus congestion.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby moda253 » December 29th, 2015, 3:12 pm

Do any of you guys use social apps such as the waze navigation app? It might not seem like something that relates to this conversation but it does. Here's the idea when you are using apps such as waze your GPS is tracked and with it being tracked the amount of time on the route that you are taking is considered when others enter in a route. I assume other traffic monitoring data are used as well. But what waze will do is try to come up with alternative ways (waze) to get to where you are going. Sometimes I am amazed at the routes it figures out for me. I have an unbearable commute and unfortunately public transportation isn't an option for me. I would say that for me it hits it out of the park about 9/10 times.

So what does that have to do with driverless cars? Part of the problem in my opinion is that we have an absurd number of roads which many of them are highly under utilized. But this is my point when thinking about networked vehicles. Leveraging this type of data (which isn't very developed yet) combined with automated vehicles starts to take on congestion.

So to recap my thoughts on what future transportation looks like.
Automated cars (they are going to be on the consumer market in a matter of years not decades)
Networked cars to make lane prioritization, spacing, speed decisions out of the hands of drivers aided by using the roads we already have to their best ability.

That all will take some time to accomplish and it certainly will not be perfect. I think the idea that your car will drive itself off to go park somewhere is a bit of a ways off though. It's going to be driver assisted for a period of time until the concept of the car being fully automated is a near-future hurdle. That hurdle seems like it is still a ways out, but that's the thing with tech... some problems become easier to solve when we've solved other things that are related.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby VAStationDude » December 29th, 2015, 4:31 pm

Practical consumer self driven cars are not years away. Google admits their vehicles can't handle ice and snow and some believe a solution is decades out. A decade from now futurists will still be telling us about the coming self driving revolution.

http://www.thestar.com/business/2015/01 ... d-ice.html

Creeps like Pat Garafalo love the idea of networked self driving cars because they hate the poor. They fight tooth and nail against improving poor people's mobility through transit. Fantasy self driving cars are the latest part of that disgusting effort. The self driving freeway system would exclude the poor from the freeway system by requiring expensive networked automobiles. Creeps
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Anondson
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Anondson » December 29th, 2015, 5:20 pm

How about a car that had wheels converting into a motorized unicycle?

http://www.citylab.com/tech/2015/12/for ... nt/422151/

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby amiller92 » December 30th, 2015, 10:53 am

If anything, driverless buses should bolster transit by improving service for the same or lower costs. Stop hiring new drivers over a 10 year period, pay out folks to retire early, shift drivers to bus fare inspectors or TVM cash collectors, etc as new buses have driverless technology (and, I have to believe some company will offer a retrofit solution for trucks and buses). All of a sudden it becomes very cheap to run buses all day and night at high frequencies.
Who straps in the wheelchairs?

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby FISHMANPET » December 30th, 2015, 11:09 am

Design the buses so they don't need to be strapped in. It is possible.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby VAStationDude » December 30th, 2015, 11:45 am

Automatic wheel chair strapping seems like a smaller technological challenge than self driving buses.

RailBaronYarr
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby RailBaronYarr » December 30th, 2015, 1:11 pm

Right, and if that's a concern (maybe it is!) then it should also be a concern for driverless cars/vans that are supposedly the way to provide mobility to people with wheelchairs for places transit doesn't serve.

Regardless how you feel about when AVs will become a thing, or how effective they'll be at reducing congestion, it's surprising there isn't more policy & infrastructure discussion around them in MN. Both at the state and local levels. California is leading the charge, and the draft results aren't exactly rosy for a truly automated system (like, how effective will they be if a licensed driver needs to be at the helm? will a driver be prepared to take control at any moment or will they just be texting?).

The Google car's ability to drive around (slowly!) on real streets with actual people walking and biking about shows that it can really work in the general sense; this isn't fiction. Maybe states or cities will allow an empty vehicle to drive <1 mile to find parking. Maybe MN should allow them only during non-winter months until sufficient testing proves them out. Is Metro Transit even looking into firms that could automate their buses, and what this might mean for labor contracts/planning, 20+ year capital planning, etc? Are cities even considering the possibility that arterial/collector street designs that include on-street parking may become totally unnecessary? It's foolish to bank on AVs saving humanity, but just as foolish to be so skeptical of them that we waste opportunities in the near term to avoid costs or at least craft some decent policy.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mulad » December 31st, 2015, 5:58 pm

Ugh, the slow Google "car" continues to annoy me the more I think about it. Google seemed to be doing fine by adding cameras and other sensors to production cars. I'm a bit baffled why they decided to build their own vehicle design, since that's guaranteed to be restricted to 25 mph unless they go through a major design effort (like Tesla), submit cars for crash testing, etc., etc. It's legally a low-speed vehicle or neigborhood electric vehicle. Google has twisted the truth about those vehicles a couple times by claiming the low speed is in the name of pedestrian friendliness -- Nah, it's just what the law requires when you put a glorified golf cart on the street. (Oddly enough, to go highway speeds, all you need to do is make a three-wheeler or build it half as wide instead.)

But that's just a quibble with the form that the vehicle has taken. I think they're better off by stripping down proven production car chassis and putting in drivetrains and other components that they want rather than building something completely new. Despite appearances, I doubt the cutesy bubble vehicles are very cheap -- the low volume of production on vehicles like that tends to drive up the price quite a bit.

Anyway, I guess I've been struggling to find a compelling reason to push much legislation about self-driving cars, at least at the state level. Since cars can travel around, I'd prefer to see uniform standards across the country -- anything about the design requirements of the vehicles themselves should primarily come from the federal government (maybe as regulations from US DOT rather than legislation from Congress).

At the local/state level, it seems like parking requirements are the biggest issue, but how do the specific requirements of self-driving cars differ from the general problem that we have too much parking in the first place? Some parking issues, such as the methods (protocols) for paid parking, are still probably best handled at the federal level.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Mdcastle » January 1st, 2016, 11:50 am

That's pretty much a point I made on my streets.mn article. Even if a Google car is eventually able to drive highway speeds and reasonable distances it's not going to help. Point taken that if the rental/taxi model comes to pass you could have a Google Car drive you to work and then order up a self-driving F-150 to haul your boat up to the lake Friday night, but right now there are *many* two car families, and the second car is something like a Toyota Camry like every other car, not an electric city car, or even a gasoline city car. How many Smart Cars and the like do you see in private ownership, even in the city.

I think instead you'll see cars getting bigger and bigger with people not having to drive, store, and maintain them; people will buy a house for cheap in Dassell or Litchfield and commute to Minneapolis, using the time to sleep or catch up on social media.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby David Greene » January 1st, 2016, 3:35 pm

People don't buy Smart Cars because they're a terrible financial proposition. I'd buy a small car like that in a heartbeat if it was at all price-competitive and/or gas-efficient. As it is, we're getting a LEAF as our primary vehicle.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Anondson » January 6th, 2016, 7:53 am

A scenario where the self-driving car future won't give us fewer cars.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/won ... you-think/

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mulad » January 8th, 2016, 3:31 pm

GM has unveiled a near-production version of the all-electric Chevy Bolt this week. It made the rounds as a concept car last year, but is expected to be put on the market late this year as a model year 2017 vehicle. Unusually, GM previewed it to the media at the Consumer Electronics Show rather than a regular auto show setting (the Detroit Auto Show starts next week).

Not to be confused with the Volt (a plug-in electric hybrid), the Bolt is probably going to be the first mass-market EV with a high range (claimed at 200+ miles, at least if driven gently). The price is still up there a bit, probably at least $37,500 on its own, but that translates to $30,000 with a federal tax credit. This slots it decently into the mid-market price-wise, since the average price for a new car was $33,560 last year.

Other EV cars have been available in this general price range, but have been stuck with driving ranges of 80-100 miles. Generally, that would be fine for me, but my parents live 80 miles away. Unfortunately, EV range can be impacted pretty badly by cold weather, so I've desired something with a range of 120-160 miles. I could work around the problem by just renting a car for those trips, though, and there are a growing number of range-extended-electric/plug-in-hybrid options on the market.

This is partly expected to be a competitor to Tesla's long-planned mass-market "Model 3" (currently expected sometime in 2017), so it will be interesting to see if they end up duking it out or if it ends up more directly fighting existing offerings like the Nissan Leaf or BMW i3.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Mdcastle » January 9th, 2016, 9:41 am

So would this be practical for a road trip to Chicago in January? Can you charge it as fast as a Tesla?

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mulad » January 9th, 2016, 4:19 pm

It took a little hunting, but here's an article including charging information. The Bolt uses the "Combo Coupler" variant of the SAE J1772 standard, which has two extra pins for DC fast charging. GM claims it will give the car an 80% charge in an hour, which is about half the rate claimed by Tesla and their Supercharger system.

While there are a lot of 240-volt AC J1772 chargers out there, the high-voltage DC variants are still fairly rare. Looking at the corridor on the PlugShare map, the ones with the combo connector are clustered around the Twin Cities, Milwaukee, and Chicago. Other installations will need to go in to make this more practical -- this isn't hard, but someone needs to put forth the resources to do it.

Nissan has made their dealers install charging stations, and they've often included a CHAdeMO connector -- a different DC fast-charging system. There's slightly better coverage along the corridor for that, since there's one available in Madison. I think more automakers are going for the Combo Coupler system, though.

I was halfway wondering if GM would give in and go with the Tesla Supercharger standard, since that already covers the corridor, but I guess not. Tesla has made their patents openly available, but I guess that hasn't been enough to get other automakers interested yet.

GM claims that the Bolt can get 25 miles from a regular 240-volt charger per hour, so it would be possible to start off with a fully-charged vehicle and fill up a couple times along the way with those. It would be a long day, but doable, and will get better as more Combo Coupler chargers appear.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Anondson » January 10th, 2016, 5:19 pm

The single passenger autonomous drone?

http://blog.caranddriver.com/stop-every ... e-is-here/

What if our self"driving" vehicles of the future fly instead of plug up our ground spaces to get around? I'm imagining the infrastructure to support this would be much cheaper than roads.

Suddenly urban planning needs to account for air routes too, maybe we should start thinking of that?

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mplsjaromir » January 11th, 2016, 8:38 am

The single passenger autonomous drone?

http://blog.caranddriver.com/stop-every ... e-is-here/

What if our self"driving" vehicles of the future fly instead of plug up our ground spaces to get around? I'm imagining the infrastructure to support this would be much cheaper than roads.

Suddenly urban planning needs to account for air routes too, maybe we should start thinking of that?
Congrats to those guys, they invented the helicopter.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby grant1simons2 » January 11th, 2016, 8:41 am

Word you're looking for is innovated.


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