Thread: Autonomous Vehicles

Originally Posted by bee utey

A small trucking company I know of works on road construction in Brisbane, and has real trouble getting truck drivers who don't wreck their trucks. Things like no mechanical sympathy, turning off dash cams to hide their bad driving etc, makes them very expensive to employ. So they employ an older bloke from far away in SA who has marginal health and modest experience in large trucks, simply because he's sane and careful.

The cut a long story short, to imagine there is a large pool of excellent but under appreciated truck drivers out there is simply ludicrous. The number of good, sane drivers is well balanced by the bad, nutso drivers out in the wild. These are the drivers that autonomous trucks will be first to replace. The good ones will hang on until retirement, knowing that they have to allow a company to profit from their work or they're out on their collective ears.

How much does the trucking company pay per hour?
Do they give adequate training?
Are the trucks less than 10 years old and properly maintained?
Do they have a lunchroom and if so what is it like?
What are their toilets like?
Do they give the drivers a reasonable workload, reasonable hours of work and conditions?
Do they come home from work stinking of asphalt and is adequate provision made for working with any asphalt in the heat of summer?

A lot of companies say they find it hard to get good drivers, but they arent good companies. Good drivers and good companies go together.

Originally Posted by rammypluge

Because of their lack of operational knowledge they think they are doing the most cost effective solution but they arent.

Thats an interesting point about autonomous that i havent heard or thought about yet. How easy it makes it for vehicles to be controlled by various agencies. You want to go somewhere, but no, it wont let you. Its the people that want to give away control of their lives that are one of the bigger hurdles.

Exactly. The more autonomous the machine, the less autonomous the human.

But more likely, the machines ‘autonomy’ is controlled by a corporation. Like big data, but physically monitoring, restricting, controlling, depending on the package you subscribe to. High quality roads with fewer ‘incidents’ are more expensive, routes are automated to avoid congestion, system boundaries, fuel availability, trending suburbs, perceived risks.

The freedom we cherish in the automobile will most likely be significantly diminished in the age of the autonomobile..

Fully autonomous vehicles that do away with the steering wheel and controls will be cheaper and thus tempting to the new-tech-junkies, submissive, sheepy, hand-over-control group. You control the car with the navigator, you type or vocalise your destination, and it goes there, if the program decides to allow you to.

Under full control of the government over time, so they can stop vehicles used in terrorist acts, or from going where they are 'not supposed to', etc. Controlled by AI algorithms.

Sometimes it will just not go where you want to go or do crazy things like steer you into a bridge pylon, because of a temporary glitch, as will likely happen with such a complex system. When you are a stressed out or mangled wreck you will hear it repeating the mantra, 'cross your fingers and restart the machine and it should load up okay this time'.

Still amazed at the amount of people on here that are running for their tin foil hats on this subject - it is endlessly entertaining to read some of these conspiracy theorys - keep it up lads, I'm loving it. 👍

So I read today that the driver of the Uber test car that hit the woman on a bike is being prosecuted by the cops as she was watching TV at the time of the accident.
Seems a bit unfair to blame the driver of an autonomous vehicle for a road accident that the autonomous vehicle is supposed to avoid.
That makes it not autonomous.
Regards Philip A

Especially when the Uber test car had disabled the Volvo XC90's collision avoidance systems and overlaid their own Uber specific systems on top....which weren't up to the job.

Originally Posted by PhilipA

So I read today that the driver of the Uber test car that hit the woman on a bike is being prosecuted by the cops as she was watching TV at the time of the accident.
Seems a bit unfair to blame the driver of an autonomous vehicle for a road accident that the autonomous vehicle is supposed to avoid.
That makes it not autonomous.
Regards Philip A

She should be prosecuted the same as if she was driving even if she was paying attention. Drivers shouldnt be allowed to abrogate responsibility.

The same should apply to drunk drivers. If you choose to get drunk, then you should be held just as responsible for what you do as if you did something while not drunk.

Its obvious.

Originally Posted by Homestar

Still amazed at the amount of people on here that are running for their tin foil hats on this subject - it is endlessly entertaining to read some of these conspiracy theorys - keep it up lads, I'm loving it.

When the internet was created it was seen as a free space, no interference. Now look at it. Things are censored, and every single thing you do is stored and available to police or asio or hackers or facebook big business etc whenever they have reason to want it.