Future Cars: Electric and Autonomous Vehicles

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mulad
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mulad » January 11th, 2016, 9:09 am

Yet another iteration of the idea of a flying car. Both winged and helicopter-style models have been thought about for several decades. As with drones, the advancement of autopilot technology might finally make this somewhat practical, but I think the poor fuel efficiency of flying machines is going to keep them from becoming all that popular.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Anondson » January 11th, 2016, 9:14 am

One trip and back to the charging station. If we imagine an Uber-like/Lyft-like fleet on order of these, I think just a thousand of these in a city and suddenly cities may need some planning.

Then again making electric autonomous aerial vehicles may be like a Segway-dud.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mplsjaromir » January 11th, 2016, 9:15 am

It would be the loudest city ever, I would plan to ban them.

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Tiller
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Tiller » January 11th, 2016, 10:02 am

Segway dud.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby talindsay » January 11th, 2016, 10:37 am

It would be the loudest city ever, I would plan to ban them.
Yes, imagine our traffic jams blocking out the sun, and our minor traffic collisions falling from the sky. Sounds awesome to me.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby NLDenizen » January 11th, 2016, 12:38 pm

Image

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby FISHMANPET » January 11th, 2016, 12:50 pm

Spoilers man, some of us haven't seen the new Star Wars yet!

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Anondson » March 20th, 2016, 8:46 pm

Singapore taxes electric car owner an emissions tax that includes power grid emissions.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/globe-dr ... e29176596/

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mulad » April 1st, 2016, 6:35 am

Tesla had their reveal event for their Model 3 last night. They've gotten a lot of people to sign up for their waiting list (over 115,000), and people were standing in long lines at company stores/"dealerships" around the country. I haven't seen a whole lot of detail about the product itself, but it won't really become available until late 2017 or later.

http://www.startribune.com/potential-cu ... 374151001/

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby PhilmerPhil » April 1st, 2016, 7:42 am


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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby VAStationDude » April 24th, 2016, 9:31 pm

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11447838/s ... -obstacles

Google guy: fully autonomous vehicles are 30 years away.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Mdcastle » April 25th, 2016, 6:28 am

Right now self-driving cars can do routine, well mapped situations pretty well. Once idea might be to designate the freeways and some major highways as "autonomous vehicle corridors". You'd still have to drive your car if you wanted to go to a resteraunt in Uptown on a Friday night but a long commute from the closest house to the city you can afford (which happens to be in Glencoe) to downtown or a vacation trip from the Twin Cities to Chicago would take away the bulk of the boring driving and allow the driver to nap or do other things.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mplsjaromir » April 25th, 2016, 7:50 am

If you think Tesla selling 50,000 cars is good for the Earth's climate you have a baby's sense of scale.

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Tiller
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Tiller » April 25th, 2016, 8:18 am

*400k preordered Tesla model 3s

from VA's article:
Similarly, it wouldn't be surprising to see self-driving buses along fixed routes or trucks that can use autonomous technology to platoon and save fuel on highways. The technology is advancing rapidly, and it's likely to become useful in all sorts of unexpected places.
Which links to:
http://qz.com/290281/forget-self-drivin ... ing-buses/

Sounds like transit will get a boost before cars. #BusDownForWhat

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Silophant » April 25th, 2016, 8:33 am

Yep. That's what's always ignored by the 'self-driving cars are almost here and will obsolete mass transit' crowd: Pretty much every major advancement in the tech will make sense for buses before SOVs, and for trains even before buses.
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby winterfan » April 25th, 2016, 8:35 am

Uh, oh. Now the Dutch are going to start getting fat. Seriously, exercise is one of the main selling points of riding a bike isn't it?

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby David Greene » April 25th, 2016, 8:39 am

If you think Tesla selling 50,000 cars is good for the Earth's climate you have a baby's sense of scale.
Well, you gotta start somewhere. That's 50,000 vehicles I'd rather have on the road than gas-guzzlers.

We love our LEAF. Even at only ~110 miles of range, it's plenty for day-to-day living. With the mass-market 200-mile range vehicles coming out late 2016, it'll be quite practical to use them for in-state interurban travel. We need more charging infrastructure for sure.

BEVs won't completely replace gas cars for a long long time but they'll continue to increase in number.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby VAStationDude » April 25th, 2016, 8:41 am

It's not difficult to envision entire rail transit ROWs covered by cameras feeding information to driver less trains. The systems could be paid by federal capital dollars and save local operations money.

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Tiller
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Tiller » April 25th, 2016, 8:46 am

Many rail transit systems could probably be automated with today's technology, if there weren't political obstacles in the way.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby JT$ » April 25th, 2016, 12:25 pm

Many rail transit systems could probably be automated with today's technology, if there weren't political obstacles in the way.
Many rail yards/switching operations have used remote controlled or semi-autonomous locomotives for a while. Not saying that is the same thing as public transit, but the technology exists in some stage on trains. And I believe some cities have automated tram networks, although the majority of those don't have right of way issues (subways, elevated, self contained airport trams, etc)


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