Ford CEO: we "overestimated" self-driving cars

boing
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Yeah, but when?

As I noted here on another comment thread, aircraft autopilots have been steadily being perfected for ninety years. And in aviation:

  • the airways system is highly standardized worldwide, the “roads” are all geometrically laid out
  • the sky is big, and planes under IFR fly with lots of separation
  • all but the simplest planes have avionics which can track and report the aircraft’s position, horizontal and vertical movement, and separation from other traffic with very high precision

Despite all that, there isn’t a civil aviation authority anywhere in the world which will let you operate an unpiloted, autonomous plane anywhere in its airspace. (other than perhaps the smallest drones)

Now look at road travel. None of those things apply.

Maybe when it’s commonplace to have a pilotless aircraft carry a hundred passengers from Cleveland to Omaha, driverless cars will be only a decade or two behind.

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A lot of those walkable and bike-able cities on your list seem to be the same cities that I hear a lot of complaints about here on BB.

You know, the cities where most people are pushed out to distant areas with 20+ mile commutes because housing costs in the nice, walkable city core are through the ionosphere.

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83

Yep, that’s my life right now in the outer ring of Austin, Texas.
I hear you.

A friend tells me “they either getcha on sky-high rents, and you don’t need a car; or they getcha on fuel, vehicle maintenance and auto insurance costs, where the rents are lower.” She nailed it alright.

Taking a quick look here:
http://blog.walkscore.com/category/lists-rankings/#.XLFKSNFJnwc
one sees that there’s a “top 25” list of U.S. cities and some listed are Bayonne, NJ and Hyattsville, MD.

A retired friend tells me that she will be moving to a pretty nice walkable town in Colorado. (It’s not Durango or Grand Junction but I can’t remember the name… it may be near Fort Collins).

Another friend who moved from Austin to Burlington, VT tells me it is definitely walkable and she loves her new living situation. Is it walkable in winter with 99 feet of snow or whatever? What metrics constitute walkability? Etc. etc.

Here’s a debatable list:
https://www.pbs.org/americaswalking/travel/travelmost.html

Assuming that one is willing to accept certain tradeoffs re

I still think walkable is doable. I’ve lived in some parts of Germany and the Netherlands (with yes insane tax rates and serious money for rents / mortgages) and these countries, while admittedly far more compact than the U.S as a nation, had walkable cities and had been that way for decades. In this way, cities are much the same, no matter which country.

I have been chewing on this series quite a bit. It’s well-written and fact-based. It does not varnish anything and I find the comments threads (“comment is free”) bracing and often hilarious… some articles talk about walkability:
https://www.theguardian.com/cities

This was fun, and I found it useful:

I love CityLab. Love 'em. They do their homework.
https://www.citylab.com/solutions/2012/12/10-techniques-making-cities-more-walkable/4047/

There may be a call for activism here re walkable cities. If you love where you live, if you find something like walkability important, and if you feel like investing time and energy in your home area / hometown, this can be a way to improve a lot of people’s quality of life, not just your own.

Some of my friends are bailing out of Austin.
They may be choosing towns with some key important things to offer, including walkability. I hope wherever they end up, they serve their new hometowns well.

https://www.citylab.com/equity/2013/07/how-walkability-shapes-political-activism/6097/

I expect to do some couch-surfing soon, as I am curious and eager to live in places where the housing costs are more lithospheric, not ionospheric.

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84

Only if your previous ride was a 1971 Pinto… maybe.

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HA HA HA

See it’s funny because socialists love bureaucracy right?

Good thing buying a car in the good old capitalist U.S.A. doesn’t require any paperwork, and getting a loan to pay for it doesn’t require the approval of boring little men in gray suits BOO socialism sucks

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Yeah, well, if the cops ever chase me I can just drive into a Cracker Barrel parking lot and disappear.

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I certainly agree we need more of those, but not sure how private investment in autonomous cars competes with needed public investment in mass transit?

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The United States would function with fewer cars, by following european examples, just like we should be doing with health care.

It may be hard to imagine now… but if you go to the district in any american city thats most fun to walk around in, thats the district that was planned out in the horse and buggy era.

No, its not very realistic to uninvent 100 years of urban “planning”. Its far more realistic to imagine endless oil wars, and then gasoline soaring to $10 a gallon, and a nationwide economic collapse when few people can afford to spend the fuel to do anything.

There’s certainly little indication that car culture is going to give way to bicycle culture or mass transit culture anytime soon. We will give up on the automobile when the american empire falls, and not a day sooner.

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Slightly off topic but: Why are we still calling Uber and Lyft “rideshare” companies? Who ever shared a ride with someone who happened to be going to the same way using an Uber app? They’re clearly taxi services.

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Yeah, you’re right- I was conflating private money with pubic. We can’t expect private capital to fund public infrastructure (what incentive do they have), but that autonomous car investment does compete in some very real ways, albeit indirectly. For example, anytime a city or state delays expansion of a public transit project because they mistakenly believe that a future tech will make current investment obsolete. The kind of hype built up around autonomous vehicles has created expectations that our car lifestyle won’t need to change, and continues to erode faith in busses and trains. This adds to a lack of public investment, and those private investors are happy about that (read what Elon has said about public transit). But the other thing is, it’s a crime how much private capital is just floating around and chasing bad investments. Reporters love a story of government waste, but not so much corporate.

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Agree! Haha…

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Man, I’d love to not have to drive. But (as others here have mentioned) I live/work in the Seattle area and without some seriously convenient bus setups, it’s not going to happen.

People that take the bus a lot internalize all the little weirdsies that bus lines have, and people that don’t take the bus at all forget about them entirely. My wife and I lived in Seattle proper for years and she took the bus every day - let’s go over a list of the problems:

  • Busses get full, or get late, or (possibly) get early, so you’re out at least 10 minutes ahead of time if it matters for you to be on time. And sometimes, through no fault of your own, there just isn’t one for that timeslot, so good news: you’re late. If you’re poor and working a job that thinks you’re replaceable, you can’t be late very often or you’ll be replaced.
  • If you’re a woman or look vaguely like one, welcome to regular public harassment, which my wife experienced about once a month, while taking a fairly upscale busline even. This includes several times men followed her off the bus and she had to take evasive actions around (boarding other busses, ducking inside buildings, etc)
  • Busses and other surface transportation are slower than cars, generally significantly, especially if you take into account that you’re also having to get there early. For me, if I were to drive to work not in traffic, my commute is 21 minutes (approximately 45 minutes or so in traffic). The bus is an hour and a half and includes a mile and a half walk - and if there’s significant traffic it can also be delayed further.

I used to bus all through college and early into my career. I miss a lot about the bus, like being able to just spend some time mostly without responsibility and just kind of slowly wake up properly. I don’t even mind the walking associated. But the time lost was such a killer for me - at one point in my professional career I didn’t have a car, and I worked 10 hour shifts, and I had a three hour bus commute one-way, because I couldn’t afford to live anywhere closer to work.

Some of this stuff is fixable (throw enough public funding at it so that busses don’t get overloaded and add more direct routes and it’ll go a long way), but not everyone can Marie Kondo their life and live in a 300 sqft studio so they’re in a walkable neighborhood, and it’s kind of insulting to keep seeing people assuming everyone can. My wife and I are dual income / no kids and we can barely afford where we live currently, in the north suburbs of Seattle, and without a huge house.

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I would have thought with autonomous cars you distribute the insurance costs across all the drivers with the same or near same models, e.g. drivers of a Ford Foo known to have an increased risk of accident compared to the Ford Bar would all pay more. Obviously insurance companies would have to factor in whether people have patched their car’s software or not. Fundamentally this is why actuaries exist and I’m sure they would find a way.

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It would change.

It seems to me that the dispersion is largely the result of the cars. Development and transportation infrastructure have always had cause and effect in both directions. You might build a road to get to a mine site (infrastructure following development - and genuinely a geographic necessity if you’re going to get the minerals) but then towns spring up along the road (development following infrastructure - not a geographic necessity this time, but a choice, a convenience, and ultimately changeable one).

Development patterns in the US have been directed at turns by sailing ships, the Conestoga wagon, canals, riverboats, the railroad, the automobile, the interstate highway, and the airplane. We’ve had upheaval like this before, and I don’t think we regret it.

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It’s not even just a result, it was planned that way. 70-80 years ago the auto industry killed public transportation, influenced legislation to make it easier to run over people in the street, and got public works to tear down public transportation and put in freeways. Had we done the opposite, then it would be “how would America work without street cars?” like it was back then.

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In conjunction with cultural factors.

Consider the links between American car culture, the development of segregated suburbia, redlining, sunset towns and White supremacy.

Also the links between the Cold War and the development of the interstate highway system.

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I’ll give an event simpler instruction: rewatch Roger Rabbit , but realize that in the real world the same evil plot of the villain actually happened - but the toons lost and the judge paved over Toontown.

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Don’t forget the designated hitter rule and the advent of fat-free ice cream.

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