This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
So they are going to change public transportation infrastructure to support them right? They will get dedicated bus lanes and protected stops right? It's definitely going to be affordable right? This is going to help with lessening car dependency RIGHT? ๐ฎโ๐จ
I don't trust them to do the right thing at all.
Weโve had them here in Phoenix since before the pandemic. They operate just like Uber, except theyโre cheaper and thereโs no driver. You can sit in any seat besides the driver seat, and store items in the trunk of the vehicle. You can pair your phone with the car and play your own music on the speakers. Pretty good experience all things considered. The cars are pretty good at finding a place to stop and load/unload passengers, but sometimes they will drive right past you when finding a place to park and you have to walk 10-15 feet to the car.
So they are going to change public transportation infrastructure to support them right? They will get dedicated bus lanes and protected stops right?
Why? They already work fine on the existing infrastructure.
The end of the article when it talks about the fire trucks that the car failed to yield to; the article claimed it was because they were yellow instead of red. What about cop cars that are white, black, blue? How about ambulances? This seems super shady behavior to me.
I can't speak about these cars, but I know that Waymo's cars identify the siren/lights to determine the presence of emergency vehicles. Because without the lights and siren, there's no emergency and no need to yield, so they get treated like any other vehicle on the road.
Not sure why Zoox is identifying based on body color. Surely they know paint exists?
There's also unmarked emergency vehicles.
Yes, This. An unmarked huge truck with a massive ladder a big control panel full of dials and stuff, and big-ass hoses everywhere, driven or surrounded by big dudes in red or yellow fireproof jackets, with those cool helmets with the visor backwards, could be confused with a UPS van.
There's plenty of cops driving in civilian cars or doctors on emergency that use their own cars, both can use those little emergency lights they pop onto the roof of their car.
The whole point of unmarked police cars is you can't tell they're a police car until the lights come on.
Also, why wouldn't an unmarked fire truck be useful? It would still function as a fire truck, and the lights would identify it as such. This is a weird take.
Joking about how for a firetruck to be unrecognizable as a fire truck, you'd have to remove so much useful stuff from it/limit access to things from the outside so much as to render it ineffective, and also being kind of absurd by pretending that unmarked firetrucks are at all the subject of what they were talking about
Self-driving? This again?
If a Zoox robot taxi encounters a construction zone it has not seen before, for instance, a technician in the command center will receive an alert
Seems perfectly sensible
You're right, doesn't sound great. In the example they shared, sounds like the issue wasn't that the car couldn't drive around the fire truck, but that it couldn't break a programming rule about crossing into a lane that would normally be opposing traffic. Once given the "ok" to follow such a route, the car handled it on its own, the human doesn't actually drive it.
I could imagine a scenario where you need one human operator for every two vehicles. That's still reducing labor by 50%.
Obviously they want it to be better than that, they want it to be one operator per ten vehicles or no operator at all.
And the fundamental problem with these systems is they will be owned by big corporations, and any gained efficiency will be consumed by the corporation, not enjoyed by the worker or passed on to the customer.
But I think there's true value to be found there. Imagine a transportation cooperative - we're a thousand households, we don't all need our own car, but we need a car sometimes. We pool our resources and have a small fleet that minimizes our cost and environmental impact, and potentially drives more safely than human drivers.
Well self driving cars are best but not for now because the algorithm to detect object & pedestrian still needs tuning. I remembered Tesla still had same issue that made them crashed
In Asia self driving cars doesn't work because we drive like maniac & can cause huge traffic crash compared to Europe or USA.
Wake me up when we have Johnny Cab
NEW, automated children's bicycle. Guaranteed to teach the little tyke how to ride! *
Ha, no.
