-
It’s Coming…Probably Sooner Than Later
-
If you did not receive investor allocation you are under water.
Like I did with Facebook, I’ll wait until after the lockup period to even consider a purchase. In this space, all eyes will be on Uber.
-
Lyft has NO plan as to how they will make a profit in the future. Today they profit by cutting the drivers pay again and again. These days the only drivers out there for Uber and Lyft are the unskilled unemployable folks who don’t understand that they are actually making less than minimum wage. Going public Uber and Lyft are going to have to make their books public and expose the scam they are running. This is an unsupportable business model in it’s current form. Autonomous cars are many years away from being allowed to drive without a safety driver and once they are, what are you going to do when you get picked up by your driverless car and the last passenger puked in the back seat?
-
Autonomous mail delivery?
NBC News: Self-driving trucks begin mail delivery test for U.S. Postal Service
-
This ought to be good.
-
For the moment I see an expansion of technological features and self driving vehicles as a sure way of eroding the few driving skills that might remain with licensed drivers.
But let’s ignore my bias and try to explain how a vehicle can be considered self driving yet require a driver behind the wheel and an engineer in the passenger seat.
This is going to follow the exact same path we now see with pilots and airplanes and the 737 issues. And yet we keep advocating for it.
-
But let’s ignore my bias and try to explain how a vehicle can be considered self driving yet require a driver behind the wheel and an engineer in the passenger seat.
It’s called Testing.
This is going to follow the exact same path we now see with pilots and airplanes and the 737 issues. And yet we keep advocating for it.
Who’s advocating? I’m simply following the progress of this technology. But I will predict certain features of this technology will soon make its way into motorhomes. We’re already seeing this with the Prevost Aware system.
-
We advocating was meant to mean society is tripping all over itself embracing the advancements in technology leading towards cars and trucks not requiring driver input. Not anyone in particular beating that drum.
While there is no doubt drivers are not going to be needed, just like pilots are no longer needed society has not yet embraced vehicles without a human at the controls.
We no doubt can eliminate engineers on trains, thinking of train systems like a subway, and yet society still expects to see somebody driving it.
-
I sorta look at all of this as the chicken and egg question.
Does reduced human skills require more tech stuff to keep going
OR
Does the tech stuff cause a reduction in skill levels…..
And go…..
-
My skill level has already maxed out so I appreciate help from technology.
-
And, here’s a new entry into the electric bus market:
-
Let’s use aviation as an example to address Mikee’s chicken and egg comment.
In the early days of aviation pilots were forced to control all aspects of a flight because they did not have an alternative. To navigate they followed roads or railroads or looked for landmarks.
As radios and radio navigation became part of aviation pilots actually increased their skills by using instruments solely to help them fly the plane from point A to B and to keep the plane under control when they had no outside visual references. I can tell you the mental exercise of doing that by hand with no autopilot is intense, but if a pilot could multi-task and do it all by hand on the gauges it was likely almost nothing would adversely affect him or the flight.
That techology was supplemented by auto pilots that could “fly the needles” so the pilot did not have to do 100% of the aviation workload. Then came systems like GPS that could do a pictoral display so the task of maintaining positional awareness went from a mental exercise that was quite a burden, to one in which all the pilot had to do was look at the moving map on the GPS to understand where he was, where he was going and how to get there. So the transition from piloting with 100% mental and physical workload morphed into an activity that just required some pilot participation, but not the intensity and burden of 100% involvement. The reduction in involvement meant pilots lost some of the skills like positional awareness or muscle memory to hand fly an instrument approach to minimums. The skills began to erode.
The fact that Boeing and Airbus have systems doing what pilots used to do caused further degradation in pilot skills which were replaced by skills in following precisely written procedures for dealing with issues. Piloting does require some skills but both airlines and the FAA shifted the emphasis towards demanding pilots push the right buttons in the right sequence at the right time, as opposed to being cowboys, turning off the computers and actually hand flying the plane like pilots did in previous generations.
So as pilot skills became less critical to safety, Boeing and others designed and installed systems to prevent inept pilots from crashing. The current 737 problem shows how Boeing had such distrust of pilot skills that pilots couldn’t even over ride the stall prevention system even if it broke.
As automation becomes the norm in motor vehicles we will witness the same degradation of driving skills and will reach a point where the driving test will be to display an ability to punch the right buttons.
We need to admit we have driverless cars today. Those of us that can catch a glimpse into passing cars are seeing people do all kinds of things including texting, reading, putting on makeup, etc rather than driving.
When I was driving in western NY in the winter I always loved driving to the extreme on snow covered roads. A personal challenge was to drive my Corvettes all year with summer tires and never get stuck (I never did), and when ABS came out to see how well I could modulate the brakes for maximum braking performance without feeling the pulsing of the ABS controlling brake lockup. Today drivers are more concerned with their cell phone than driving.
-
I don’t know, it’s hard for me to wrap my head around all this automatic driving stuff. I drove to Dawsonville and Cartersville, Georgia today with 3 GPS’s running and one couldn’t find an address and the other two couldn’t agree where it was.
Driving I was able to go to the area the GPS’s agreed on and then make the determination once I got there. Will an automated give me such options? Does it automatically switch to manual control when something like that happens?
And what about insurance? Do you pay less or more using the auto system? And we’ve talked before about what is shared with insurance, police and government?
Dog gone it many of us love to drive so let’s just drive on dood!
Harry
-
The previous attempt at a double decker conversion was the Neoplan.
Went over like a lead balloon.
-
Based on this story in the Orlando Sentinel, it’s coming much sooner than I would have predicted.
Driverless big rigs could be hitting Florida highways next year. Are you ready, good buddy?
Log in to reply.