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ocktick t1_iudnayl wrote

Reply to comment by LetsGoHawks in Ford and VW Abandon the Self-Driving Road to Nowhere. Big story that with little fanfare by newleafkratom

In all likelihood it just requires changing the infrastructure to support AV. Right now it’s like we’re trying to make a general purpose AI that can act like a human rather than change the roads to be AV compatible.

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StrudelStrike t1_iue91lz wrote

My favorite semi-autonomous vehicle infrastructure is trains. What’s that? The technology has existed for over a century?

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DevCatOTA t1_iuf6vev wrote

Start by creating an elevated tram system that services 80%+ of the population. Envision something like the rail-based individual PeopleMover cars at Disneyland. For those unfamiliar with the PeopleMover, picture a small train car able to hold six people at most. If these were independent of one another, they could be called up using an app on your phone and take you to major shopping or event locations.

This reduces road congestion and frees up real estate. It also reduces the amount of data an FSD system has to deal with. You can now concentrate on using fully autonomous cars that travel the roads servicing the remaining 20% as well as transporting people to and from PeopleMover stations.

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ocktick t1_iueh1yz wrote

Sure, if a train could take you everywhere that a car can then it would be amazing. I don’t think AVs are trying to solve the same problem as trains though.

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fizzlefist t1_iueo3ra wrote

Well it’s hard to overcome a century of terrible car-centric city planning.

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StrudelStrike t1_iuf0m7b wrote

If we’re going to completely rebuild the infrastructure to support AVs on roads, it would be dramatically more effective and ecologically friendly to replace them with trains, bus rapid transit, standard busses, bike paths, etc.

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ocktick t1_iuf16my wrote

Bike paths don’t work in climates unsuitable for biking for large parts of the year. And a train will never achieve the granularity of a vehicle. There are too many use cases where a vehicle needs to access an individual address for the solution to be “just do trains.” In terms of environment, AVs would be drastically more efficient since they could be shared. Again comparing it to rail is silly since a train will never deliver your sofa to your doorstep or wait for you to take your Costco haul of groceries inside.

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TokenMenses t1_iuehpec wrote

Changing the infrastructure to fit autonomous vehicles is incredibly expensive and becomes a way to shift liability off of the autonomous vehicle manufacturers and on to pedestrians and drivers and cyclists. AVs need to drive on the road just like any other car or stay off of it.

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[deleted] t1_iuf5vot wrote

Where are the fucking flying cars I was promised 30 years ago? Seems like those would be easier to automate. And they're flying cars.

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FruitbatNT t1_iufbywj wrote

30? More like 70 years ago. Post war was where all the “city of tomorrow” nonsense came from.

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jrockwar t1_iueqgie wrote

The problem is that changing the roads to make things easy for AI includes removing drivers from them. If it were feasible to remove all manually driven cars, the problem would be a lot easier... But we can't will drivers out of existence.

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