Michael Copeland at Fortune has his priorities straight. “In my rusted jalopy, a 1991 Volvo 240 sedan, I have installed the future,” he boasts. His use of the “f-word” tells you he’s not talking about a V8, forced induction or any other fossil fuel-sucking upgrade. What then? An EV conversion? That would be too interesting. Too car-related. No, Copeland’s future shock was a simple feat: “All it took was a friend whose iPhone came along for a ride.” His argument is the same tired trope we hear every time a business writer dips a toe in the product-analysis game: make it more iPod-phone-y!
when you think about it, the car is the ultimate mobile device. And automakers need to start acting more like consumer electronics companies if they don’t want to cede one of their last great opportunities to Apple, Research in Motion or Google [Ed: as if!].
Sigh. Didn’t we go through this when Thomas Friedman called for Steve Jobs to take over GM? Incidentally, whatever happened to the Draft Oprah movement?
But this line of thinking is not only played out as a macro-industry commentary, it’s also fait accompli on the product front. After all,
Ford, in partnership with Microsoft, has been offering in its cars its “Sync” platform, which cleverly uses your mobile phone to connect to navigation, entertainment, and other applications
But this isn’t enough. The point of this whole thrust isn’t to merely make cars the next frontier in the endless barrage of tweets, status updates and instant messages. The point is to remove the car part of the equation, and create vehicles which allow you to keep your nose buried in your iPhone while whisking you from place to place. Rather than causing dangerous distractions, melding the car-phone interface will actually make us safer!
I don’t care how much you love your smartphone, a driverless car is much cooler… …What the Stanford team has done is break driving down into a computer science problem. They reduced the act of maneuvering a car into software code that, to oversimplify greatly, takes data from a series of sensors and a navigation system and combines the data with certain rules — stay within a portion of the road — to create a virtual driver. Some computers in the trunk act as the brains for the car, crunching all the data that gets fed on-the-fly into the driving program.
Earth to iPlanet Innovation: this exists. It’s called public transportation, and it’s incredibly popular in much of the world. Meanwhile, here in the US, the rush to make cars as iPhoney as possible has caused “distracted driving” to become one of the hot topics to blog, tweet and chatter about while we’re driving. In the futurist’s mind, the short term distractions are but a step on the way to robot chauffeurs. In reality, it’s more of a step towards the line for the bus. Or the emergency room, at the hands of a texting driver. Phones are phones, cars are cars. Let’s enjoy them one at a time.
oy vey
An article on TTAC yesterday reported on a California cop and his family who all died because his car went out of control. I don’t think we’re quite ready for anything nearly as advanced as cars driving themselves.
Thanks Ed, I think you’ve just filled the entire internet’s annual quota for common sense in this one blog post.
Classic… I wonder if he realizes that iphone probably costs more that his car?
Why do people who clearly hate to drive think they can build a better car?
“Sigh. Didn’t we go through this when Thomas Friedman called for Steve Jobs to take over GM?”
I would bet a lot of money that Jobs would do a much, much better job of running GM than have any of GM’s past several CEOs.
Jobs came back to Apple and took it from Has-Been to Force-of-Nature in a decade. Very few people have that kind of track record.
Would we WANT a world in which driverless cars are the norm? I don’t think consumers would…not in the least.
IIRC, DoD has been working on this for a while. They have run competitions of robotic vehicles tasked to navigate open desert.
I have assumed that robotic driver-less vehicles will be the end-point of automotive evolution, and the point where automobiles fuse with “public transportation.” It will be a disappointment for those, like me, who love cars and like to drive them. But, the ability to to get to travel on current 65 mph highways at 130 mph, while I nap, will make up for it.
FreedMike: Consider carefully who your fellow drivers are. I used to have a neighbor who smoked a cigarette, talked on the phone and drove her M-B G-550 while her little dog jumped up on her lap and licked her face. Fortunately, she moved away.
An article on TTAC yesterday reported on a California cop and his family who all died because his car went out of control. I don’t think we’re quite ready for anything nearly as advanced as cars driving themselves.
Well, you forget on that same day, as on any other, 100 people died and thousands were injured by their own poor driving ablity and/or doing stupid s**t behind the wheel.
The question isn’t will the automation be perfect, the question is – will the automation be better than the humans. When “the humans” are the average american driver – its not that high a hurdle.
Which of us hasn’t, at some point, wished for a car that drove itself while we took care of some other business, interacted with friends, napped, etc.? At times and to destinations where public transportation wasn’t on option? I would welcome self-directed cars, especially in the hands of the terminally distracted, multi-tasking morons that I see all too often. But I don’t want more gizmos in the car until the car drives itself! And I want the self-drive to be selectable, like cruise control, so I can make the decision to use or not.
Vancouver’s Skytrain rapid transit system is already driverless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SkyTrain_(Vancouver)
But I don’t want more gizmos in the car until the car drives itself!
I don’t think self directed cars will be possible with out continued develpment and real world testing of technologies like lane departure warning, blind spot warning and radar cruise control etc.
The purpose of self-driving cars would, in part, be to allow high-speed, high-density traffic. The first implementation you’ll see will be on closed sections of freeway, and access will be limited to self-piloting vehicles. You will be able to switch it off for travel on other routes, but you won’t be able to switch it off on the “autoroute” section.
It will be a long time, and maybe never**, before you see self-driving cars on regular surface streets.
** I say never because, if you believe the likes of Jim Kunstler, there is no future in individual motoring. At least not to the point where an investment of this magnitude would make any sense.
The question isn’t will the automation be perfect, the question is – will the automation be better than the humans. When “the humans” are the average american driver – its not that high a hurdle.
You’d be surprised. Thirty years ago I would have agreed with you. I was just starting out as a newly minted computer scientist doing research and development in artificial intelligence. The sky seemed the limit.
I took a different path in life. But my brother and my friend both have PhDs in computer science and focus on artificial intelligence. They say computers still have a tough time, compared to humans, on even simple tasks like driving. Computers driving cars, from their perspective, seems decades away.
It’s hard to say what the future holds. Certainly computers do as good, or even better, than humans in piloting big jets. But I’ll be very surprised to see a computer doing better than even a poor human driver in my lifetime. Maybe. But probably not.
As usual Mr. Niedermeyer those who write for TTAC fail to understand the population trend.
What we could do 50 years ago on country roads with a lot fewer of us on the roads just can’t be done very often on our crowded city loops.
Nostalgia is fun, I remember the time four of us in a 1958 Chevy came up over a hill and around a corner doing about 80. We didn’t know there was a heavily traveled 3 lane ahead and we shot across it and came to a stop in an apple orchard. We were lucky, the 3 lane happened to be empty.
Those days are gone. The 3 lane is now a divided 4 lane and the only way to get on it safely is at a traffic light.
We have two choices hope that the next flu takes out 1/2 the population or learn to live with new technology that helps us travel fast and safe.
Couple of points – have a look at Volvo’s CitySafe system. Think about v2 of that.
Also check out lane following technology. I don’t think anyone sells it… yet
Now combine the two.
Secondly, suppose we do have these robot drivers, and they prevent practically ALL fatal crashes, but of course they will have Lexus moments and occasionally kill their occupants due to software or hardware problems. Would you prefer that your family ride in a car that is demonstrably much safer than if you were driving? Does your ‘right’ to drive override their right to life?
Three things;
1. I can’t understand why controlling cars by computer would be hard. We already have train/plane systems largely computer controlled. Cars controlled via central computer (via GPS and other feedback) would be perfectly possible right now (like a Mars rover perhaps). I’d see it like warship’s weapons system that can track multiple targets, just that it’s directing them too. A self-aware car would be something altogether harder.
2. Steve Jobs is a cleaver marketeer – he knows a good interface and can exploit a niche, but he’s also responsible for pricing the Mac (the computer for the “rest” of us) at more-than-double an IBM PC and wondering where “his” market went.
3. Steve Jobs also believes in unsustainable disposable manufacturing so that you are on the upgrade path. I had two iPods that failed (hard disk then battery) and gave up. 18-24 months is the target life of the current iPod/iPhone.
That Nissan Cube would serve better as the ultimate amusement device as most people seem to chuckle when they see one… 70’s shag carpet, mood rubbers and all! It’s really sad the direction the future is going.
PeteMoran,
I am a computer systems engineer. I work with computer failures all day, every day. Most of the problems I deal with are from the software encountering situations the programmers did not anticipate. Unlike a human, computers cannot guess. They cannot reason a solution to a problem they have not been programmed to deal with. Think about how many completely unexpected situations you have to deal with whilst driving. Just yesterday I was behind a pickup with sheetrock in the bed not tied down. Pickup hit a bump and sheetrock went flying out of the bed, broke into three pieces and went bouncing around the road. I had to weave in and out amongst the pieces to avoid hitting one. My mind boggles picturing a computer reacting to that.
The video makes a great point, this vehicle will NEVER make any forward momentum. Eh?..hehe.