Driving is extinct according to the BBC...!

Driving is extinct according to the BBC...!

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Discussion

rxe

6,700 posts

102 months

Monday 14th January 2019
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It is complete bobbins.

Firstly it depends on fully autonomous vehicles being delivered. Not vehicles that can maintain a lane on a motorway, but vehicles that are fully autonomous under all circumstances: snow, rain, fog, all the stuff they find really hard. Even Waymo, who have been the cheerleaders of this stuff are admitting it is really, really hard and they probably can't actually do it.

It will happen eventually, but I will be surprised if it happens in the next 20 years. I'd like it to happen because I will be going senile by then and an automated car would be handy. I'm not holding my breath.

Let's assume it does happen. They've packed a zillion sensors into a car, and it works. Cool. How are they going to price this staggering feat of engineering with a huge maintenance bill? The maintenance will be horrific - as soon as a sensor goes on the blink, the car will need to be recovered. They either make it massively redundant like an aeroplane (expensive) or have an army of little men fixing it (expensive). How will they make this cheaper than the £200 a month you can stick a car on the drive for? Unless this service costs £100 a month, people will just carry on the way they are, and it will cost a lot more than that.

DoubleByte

1,239 posts

265 months

Saturday 9th February 2019
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It's a complete crock of st written by lefties smile
Will I be able to 'drive' one with a few lengths of 4x2 stocking out the passenger window? Errrrr no.

j4r4lly

595 posts

134 months

Thursday 14th February 2019
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The Wookie said:
I was at a symposium last week organised by another newspaper. It is amazing how anti-car some people are and where some of them are in government.

They almost all live in city centres and are oblivious to how vast numbers of other people live their lives. In some ways it’s understandable, they walk around where they live and they’re surrounded by smelly buses and diesel cars piloted by idiots who regularly kill people.

However these car haters treat Uber like it’s a transport revolution when it’s just an borderline illegal minicabbing service with a clever smartphone app. There are huge holes in their visions that they simply gloss over when questioned about. They seriously think that someone who lives in a rural community will give up their private car in exchange for an on-demand autonomous taxi service that might take half an hour to arrive. Taxis can achieve this now for little money, do we really hate cabbies that much?

Thankfully once electric vehicles with auto braking systems become the norm in city centres, people will hate them less and the gradually the pathological car haters will become as irrelevant as the communist utopia they desire. These people don’t think about why the personal car has played such a massive role in our society and are blinded by the current issues it creates.

Also thankfully it’s easy to underestimate how many people love their cars, we like to dismiss any muggle with a nice car as a badge poser but there are many people who enjoy driving and a nice car without having the anorak knowledge that we all possess.
This……….. exactly.

The car has been one of the greatest liberating factors in history. For the first time, anyone who can afford one can go about their business without a "by-your-leave", at any time they chose and almost no interference from the state. Prior to the invention of mass produced affordable cars, the vast majority of people were unable to travel independently (trains were also a liberating factor of course) and only the very rich had freedom of movement.

The introduction of autonomous vehicles is a backward step as people will far more easily be monitored, tracked, taxed and controlled. As others have said, we already have self-driving vehicles and they are called taxi’s and buses. The industry is spending huge amounts of time and money on this which seems foolish as it will surely destroy brand loyalty and aspiration. If you no longer own the car and just call for it like a taxi, why would your care what make it is?

Eventually there will probably be a mix of autonomous, electric, petrol and diesel vehicles which will cover a wide variety of usage. The problem is, mixing self-drivers with human drivers will be problematic and in the long term they may be separated by areas of usage.

Many young people today are disinterested as they are driven everywhere by parents (I had to walk, cycle or bus everywhere in the 1980’s) and their social life is conducted largely on the internet, so feel less need to actually go somewhere. Once they have a job and family a car will become much more important to them, assuming they live outside a big city, which many people do.

Much of the reason that people hate cars is due to the relentless drip feed of negative information in the media (VW cheating really didn’t help in this respect) injuries and accidents of course and envy that someone has something better than them. They also dislike the fact that owning your own personal transport doesn’t play to their socialist mind think, that we should all be the same, equal and controlled and how dare we want to be individual and do our own thing.

I actually really still enjoy driving, despite the increased congestion which is now common and the relentless war on motorists. I enjoy the physical aspect of controlling the car, the feel of it, the sound and looks, the engineering and industry that gives us something so complex and yet so simple to use. As I mentioned above, I also value the freedom it gives me to go anywhere, at any time in comfort and entirely independent of anyone or anything else. (weather, tax, insurance, road closures aside of course).

I LIKE cars and driving for me will only be extinct when I’m no longer capable, no longer financially viable or the Gov’t actually legislate me off the road………….


NotFromSomerset

19 posts

100 months

Tuesday 26th February 2019
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Don't forget Toyota don't see the future in electricity but rather in hydrogen. We will need a mix, the national grid would have to more than double capacity to meet current targets, don't see many clean power stations being built atm... (Or charging points for that matter)

With a reduced demand in oil from western Europe and America in a decade or so coupled with higher production, the price of petrol/diesel will be viable alongside a mix of fully electric/hydrogen and the biggest share will probably be hybrid electric/petrol engines for the foreseeable future.

I can't see why autonomous driving can't be implemented in petrol/diesel cars when the tech is ready.