Why Are Driverless Cars Cool? 2
Why Are Driverless Cars Cool? After all, we’ve been driving vehicles for over 100 yrs and it seems to work very nicely, right?
Ok, think back to that old western movie (or The Three Musketeers ) when the cowboy whistled to his horse and the horse moved where she/he was needed for the fast get-away. Remember how nice that was – great animal, neat trick, right?
But what does that have to do with driverless cars?
Driverless Cars Will Change the World
How?
- No more valet parking.
- No more long-term airport parking. Get dropped off at the airport and tell the car to drive home and park there.
- No more wandering where your ride picking you up at your home airport is – you’ll have told the car when to arrive outside the terminal.
- Going shopping will be completely different. Dropped off at the door, the car will go and park itself somewhere. When you are leaving the store, it will come and pick you up at the curb with all the stuff in your hands. Popping the trunk will still be something necessary.
- Need to drop off kids at school? Put them in the back seat and send the car to school.
- Soccer practice?
- Need to be somewhere at 7am, but still want to sleep? Get in the back seat and tell the vehicle when you want to arrive (assuming it is within 1 tank of gas distance).
- Hotel check-in and drop-off. Nice.
- Delivery services will be changed forever.
- Pizza guy? Why have one anymore? The new delivery vehicle will have slots on the side with remote access to open the cubby where your food is located.
- Or do you just send the car to pick up food instead? Your vehicle has a cubby built-in for stuff to be placed securely, without access to other inside parts.
See what I mean?
Taxis and Other Driving Services
Imagine how taxis will all change. It will be Johnny Cab from Total Recall. I suppose it will be limited to smartphone users who can provide directions via GPS through an app. Pick me up here, A and drop me off there, B. No more cabbies going the long way. No more I don’t know where that is problems. Of course, if you don’t know a location/place and google doesn’t either, having a human (who speaks your native language) is really nice.
Car Rentals
No more hunting for your vehicle. OTOH, the rental company must know where the vehicle is, always.
I Can’t Wait for This Stuff
It is going to be amazing. Science fiction is coming true.
Privacy, Tracking, IoT Worries
This is also very, very, scary. A vehicle that doesn’t have a driver will need to know where it is. That means knowing how fast it is traveling, where it has been. Bet insurance companies will add some privacy-sucking items to our insurance policies – I just bet that will happen.
Police override. Do you really believe this will not be mandatory? I’m not actually too worried about this, but with the override will come with auto position, history, reporting back to some central database. After all, the controls for the vehicles will be hosted at some cloud provider ….
Those are all different, scary, ways that vehicles have been hacked.
How will all this be controlled? Smartphone. Gee – THOSE ARE SECURE, not.
I’ve attended some security conferences and have seen demonstrations of people taking over both iPhones and Android devices. In short, don’t do anything on your smartphone where privacy is desired.
More IoT stuff needed. How can your car drive home and park itself? It has to know where you live, how to open the garage, and park inside. It will need to open the garage again to leave and come pick you up at the airport later. If you car can do this, then police can do it and anyone capable of hacking the vehicle will be able to do it too.
No more speeding tickets or other traffic infractions if the car is driven by an algo. So local governments will have to make that revenue up somewhere.
@Dave – thanks for the comment. Guess that I’m lucky in that my local law enforcement has better things to do than sit and hand out speeding tickets. That wouldn’t be any challenge at all, with almost everyone speeding constantly around here.
Every time I’ve been pulled over, the police have been very professional, even if it was a waste of their time and mine. Got a ticket for getting into a left turn lane too early – since then, the lane has been tripled in length (new lane markers), so moving over where I moved over is normal today.
Got 3 non-moving tickets which forced a visit to court. All the charges were dropped, thanks to a nice DA and Judge. Didn’t even have to pay court costs. Guess I’m living in the right place for me. ;)
Think I’ve been pulled over less than 8 times in my life. Deserved 2 speeding tickets, even if I was late for a wedding AND was in the wedding party AND was wearing a tux at the time. Couldn’t get out of that one, for some reason.