Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/04/12/but-2021-fersure.html
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I’m sure the timing of this announcement has nothing to do with an undiversified (comparatively, anyway) competitors impending IPO?
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Good. We should be abolishing cars altogether anyway.
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LOL. Not going to happen in America. It is too closely tied to independence and autonomy.
As for the OT, it’s coming. Possibly there may be limited use on highways first with a “auto pilot lane only”. It will revolutionize the trucking industry and kill hundreds of thousands of jobs. It is one of many jobs that robots and AI will eventually take…
Which I am forced to admit is going to require us to change to a more socialist model.
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And not only the culture but very large areas of the good ol USA are built around the idea of YOU HAVE A CAR TO GO EVERYWHERE YOU NEED TO GO.
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To be fair, Ford’s new line up of vehicles is tech straight out of the early 2000s so maybe he doesn’t know what year it is.
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How would someplace like the US function without cars? I’m not being snarky here, I’m really curious what one would envision replacing the transportation function provided by automobiles in a vast country like this with a lot of dispersed population.
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Do their CD players finally read MP3s on a disc?
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Even in mildly dense area like small cities or even more so the surrounding suburbs having a car to do just about anything is a requirement.
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They can’t make driverless vehicles that will replace the need to possess your own car? That technology has existed since the 1960s.
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Sigh. I was really hoping, as a Californian, that I’d have autonomous car hires to help me get around in years to come. But it’s become obvious that wasn’t going to happen any time soon; this is just confirmation.
Should be, definitely. (I’m baffled by the people who claim that we don’t need to worry about building new public transportation because there will be autonomous cars, as if autonomous cars wouldn’t greatly increase the need for mass transit.) But the US is so far from that being possible, yet. (And to some degree, it never will be, entirely. Too many rural areas where there’s no alternative to something like a car.)
I’d say it’s worse than that - that almost all the US is so set up. Not just rural areas, not just suburbs, but even those urban areas built - or substantially altered - after the automobile are designed around the personal car. That’s really the entire country minus a handful of cities. I suspect the number of US cities that are on par with most European cities, in terms of being able to go carless, could be counted on one hand.
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You will be required to relocate to your designated Urban Concentration Zone, citizen.
Your state-assigned bicycle will be allocated when you have submitted Forms 11983472R and 34-8928 (a)(1)(d) along with the required DNA sample.
And there’s good news. The chocolate ration will be increased by ten percent.
All we have to do, then, is lay down rails on every street and highway lane in the country. Slam dunk!
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And for most of those cities it would only be the core of them that can do that which are priced out of range for people that would benefit from being able to be without a car.
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Well, taking into consideration
maybe we should just
Snark aside, without light rail systems connecting suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas to the nearest metropolis, we can’t get rid of commuters in cars. And even then, cars are needed to get to the nearest station, so maybe there should be an on-call system of electric shuttles to pick up people from the far-flung places & deliver them to light-rail stations…
We need to develop a decent battery so solar/wind/whatever can be stored and used for vehicles. To my mind, that’s needed more than autonomous cars.
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I whole heartedly agree, and we should abolish obesity too. Maybe without cars, more people will walk and bike and drive obesity rates down.
No, most large cities have bus systems. Poor people often can’t afford personal transportation, and the big companies and rich people that hire poor people need them to be able to get there, so there’s still support for public transportation in most metropolitan areas. Now, it’s often under-funded, with spotty service and shoddy buses, but it exists.
Now walkable cities, that’s a different story than being able to go carless.
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It’s deeply embedded in our language too.
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We do have a socialist model. The capitalist way would be to auction off all the roads to toll operators.
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Yea I agree but it’s not just Ford, I saw this earlier in the week on Jalopnik, “Remember, just a few years ago, how automakers like Volvo said that it would have 100 self-driving cars on the road by the end of 2017? (That project wound up getting scaled back.) Uber famously promised hailable self-driving cars in 2016, but momentarily halted the project after a deadly accident in Arizona. Even Tesla and Google now say that they don’t have firm dates and situations for when and where cars can drive themselves.”
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