Thread: Autonomous Vehicles

Originally Posted by bee utey

The best results for AV tech will be when they are in the majority and can communicate with each other. Human drivers will become a minority. A bit like horses and cars coexisting on the roads, soon horses were made obsolete by being too unsafe in mixed traffic.

You perhaps want to think about the "soon". Cars started coexisting with horses around 1900, but horses were still on the roads in significant numbers when I got my licence in the 1950s.

And I don't think there are any plans for communication between cars and kids, roos, wombats, etc that we share the roads with.

Roos are quite predictable - they always run across in front of you.

The most obvious nearer future use for autonomous vehicle tech seems to be ignored.

Buses and trains.... surely the train has to be a perfect choice, lets face it, regardless if its a person or a computer driving a train anything jumping in its path is death or destroyed.

Trust LR, won't make a basic defender type for the masses, but will cater for the high end of the market. Pretty soon you will be able to load the 4x4 with all you need at the other end, set the computer, then fly to Fraser, just to cut out that annoying drive.

Land Rover to make autonomous cars capable of off-roading a reality

Yep, remove all those pesky challenges, skill requirements, the need to use experience and stored knowledge to make judgement calls - life will become so ****** boring that people will turn to recreational drugs, violence and suicide, just to get some thrills. Oh, wait. We're there already, aren't we?

Originally Posted by donh54

Yep, remove all those pesky challenges, skill requirements, the need to use experience and stored knowledge to make judgement calls - life will become so ****** boring that people will turn to recreational drugs, violence and suicide, just to get some thrills. Oh, wait. We're there already, aren't we?

I don't want an exciting daily commute, but a weekend in the bush, that's where driving skill can be lotsa fun. People who get excited out on a busy public road are called "hoons". Back in my 20's and 30's I spent nearly every long weekend out with my dune buggy mates, but the skills I needed there weren't learned on the way to work every weekday. No reason to believe that all cars will be AV only for the foreseeable future or that you won't be able to drive yourself out in the sticks for the fun of it.

Automated buses and trains could be great. Imagine if we copied parts of Beijing and reserved the kerbside lanes for continuous automated mini-buses. It would be so much more efficient than a mash of traffic.

Originally Posted by bee utey

I don't want an exciting daily commute, but a weekend in the bush, that's where driving skill can be lotsa fun. People who get excited out on a busy public road are called "hoons". Back in my 20's and 30's I spent nearly every long weekend out with my dune buggy mates, but the skills I needed there weren't learned on the way to work every weekday. No reason to believe that all cars will be AV only for the foreseeable future or that you won't be able to drive yourself out in the sticks for the fun of it.

Glad to see you agree with me. I wasn't commenting on the daily commute, but on the previous post with the link - "Land Rover to make autonomous cars capable of off-roading a reality"
They seem to be losing sight of the fact that to a whole lot of people, driving off road is NOT a chore, to be handed off to a software program at the first opportunity.