Update Speculation thread

The fact that you'd rather die than live in a world where people has more access to electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles than they do now is, wow, just wow. I am absolutely left speechless by everything you said here. How am I supposed to react to this?

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I'd also call it fear mongering, or at least an attempt to fear monger.

I seriously doubt the future would be anything like that. I can still see manually driven vehicles still being a thing. I'd say a lot of autonomous vehicles in the future will most likely be public transport, like buses, trains, and taxis (Johnny Cab anyone?). Personal autonomous vehicles will probably be popular among various demographics, but I don't see manual operation being phased out because of it. In fact, I can also see autonomous vehicles having options for manual driving too, especially for when something in the system goes wrong, and a passenger has to take over.

Also, both public and personal autonomous vehicles would be great for people like the elderly and people with various forms of disabilities, considering not all of them can drive. In the case of personal autonomous vehicles, it could probably help some elderly people live on their own too, and not have to end up in a nursing home or rely on a relative(s) and/or friend(s) to get them around.

 

So many people in this thread are clearly on the wrong forum, and likely in the wrong country as well. If you want to see manual driving banned, you are welcome to move to your authoritarian nightmare of choice. I recommend China - I hear they are in desperate need of organ donors. You'll fit in quite nicely.

 

Who is saying that manual driving needs to be banned? I know I sure didn't.

 

Not you, but one or two people earlier in the thread were suggesting it. In fact, your take is probably the most reasonable one I've seen.

 

Finally someone else says it. I frankly don't understand how so many people can call themselves car enthusiasts when they quite obviously want the car hobby confined entirely to racetracks and think we need robocars to save us from ourselves.

 

Also: one of the aforementioned one or two people's arguments as to why human-operated vehicles are "obsolete" and need to be replaced completely is that autonomous vehicles are more predictable and deterministic than manually-driven ones, and therefore may not be able to react in time to a human driver's actions. Ethically speaking, though, the burden should be on the new technology to adapt to its human masters, not the other way around. Otherwise, it's literally the beginning of an AI takeover.

I think we have trolls again...

 

All true. Sadly I don't think they're trolls; too many of the robocar fans have been active forum participants for too long to blame it on trolls. I get similar responses when I suggest that it's excessive to haul someone in front of a judge over an 8-month-old moving violation that harmed no one and that no one even knew about until some manifestation of The Man stumbled over footage in the process of investigating a real crime. No, this is just what car culture looks like now.

We're completely hosed.

 

This isn't car culture, it's politics. I came here to defend the Lexus SC 430, not the very existence of the automobile as we know it...

Think about all the jobs fully automated roads would destroy relative to how many they would create. There are around 200,000 taxi drivers and chauffeurs, over 750,000 Uber drivers, over 1.4 million Lyft drivers, around 3.5 million truckers, amounting to nearly 6 million jobs that would be lost in the pursuit of one more nine of safety for Big Insurance. Transportation workers would protest en masse.

Oh, and then there's the little fact that many people (myself included) find driving enjoyable even while following the laws and using best practices. We need better drivers, not no drivers - drivers who respect and enjoy driving within the rules and are willing to put their damn phones away for 30 minutes.

 

This is probably, one of the only things I'd actually agree with you on.

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And I think it's not only that, autonomous vehicles will also come with their issues, as nothing is 100% infallible.

Much like an ordinary computer, the systems that dictate the car's behavior, like the AI, especially as it gets older, could stop working and require repair. If the car is driving and the AI quits for any reason, the best thing to do is allow the passenger to take control of the vehicle, though one possible problem is if they're in the passenger or back seats. If that is ever the case, the vehicle would probably require some kind of emergency backup system, and or some kind of system that allows them to control the car from their position.

That's another reason why I don't see manual driving being 100% phased out entirely. Some people may fear possibilities like that I just laid out, and would feel safer if they just drove the car themselves. Some people will put 100% of their faith in an autonomous car, some people won't put in any.

 

Despite numerous news reports, the percentage of drunk drivers, sleepy drivers, road ragers and other illegal priticipants are very low, compared to responsive ones. It's very difficult, if not impossible, to lower the AI failure rate that much. Even more, when a computerized system fails, it often fail catastrophically. For human beings, we can correct mistakes before things goes wrong. Also stair walking is not being phased out entirely, stairs and elevators coexist without any problem.
But why we need ABS/ESC? Because we are not octopuses and cannot control individual braking so we use them(ABS/ESC) to assist us.

OT: Revamped Port/ Industrial, another Halloween and Winter update would be nice.

 

Update Speculation thread

 

Nah, the Swedish car engineering culture is too conservative and staid for that.
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This is what J. Schumpeter called "creative destruction" - there would also be new jobs created, since the savings from eliminating those would put more disposable income in the economy, therefore encouraging the creation of new goods and services, and the jobs needed to produce and distribute them.

I'm damn sure far more people don't enjoy driving.

 

I would disagree. While Volvo was conservative in adopting new non-safety technologies, Saab was on the cutting edge of technology, introducing aerodynamic designs and helping trigger the Turbo-everything craze in the '80s.

 

Saab's creativity was less "let's be on the cutting edge" and more "let's try to get more out of the Triumph lump we have".

 

They developed clutchless manual gearboxes, pioneered direct injection, were an early adopter of variable compression and invented a electronic brake force redistribution system.

 

Oldsmobile, 1937.

Junkers, 1916.

First production cars? Goliath, 1952 (2-stroke) and Mercedes-Benz, 1955 (4-stroke).

Nissan, 2018.

Opel (Bosch system), 1994.

 

That'd be interesting for sure. Though I'm not sure how realistic a turbine engine swap in a car would be, even if it has been done before

Yes, please. A Scandinavian car with a wankel would make just about the quirkiest vehicle in BeamNG, if it became official content.

 

Except that it doesn't fit the relatively simple Scandinavian engineering culture.

 

Wankel engines are as simple as it gets, you can count the amount of moving parts with the fingers on one hand