D.O.P.-T.

[weofodthignen]

Small white cars with autonomous vehicle things on their roofs passed by me twice as I was walking this morning, with different company names on them. One was Nuro; I forgot the other before I could look it up. I presume they're test vehicles for future self-driving taxi services, but Nuro has been rolling out package and food deliveries with autonomous vans for a while and we're just inside their licensed area.

Comments

[dubhain]

Here's hoping the dammed things don't run over the cats, by accident. (Sorry. I'm gr0mpy, today, and adamantly do not trust self-driving cars.)

[weofodthignen]

Or dogs, or children, or me ... yeah I don't trust them either, or the companies monetising them. But Mountain View is ground zero, so except for the crackpots who start out with taxi service in San Francisco, they're mapping and test driving in the Silly Valley cities. (And apparently in Houston, which is similarly flat.)

[cowboy_r]

I'll confess that I was an early enthusiast about self-driving technology, and I'm honestly surprised it hasn't advanced faster than it has. I remember telling someone back in 2017 that I expected no one would be driving themselves, at very least on the freeways, in five years. I seriously misjudged that.

[weofodthignen]

Living where I do, I read too many stories demonstrating their programming limitations. From the early Google self-driving car (Feb 2016) that swung out in front of a bus on El Camino and expected it to politely give way (at Castro Street, one of the best-known corners in Silly Valley, I was gobsmacked that nobody got cellphone video but luckily the bus video system was turned on) to the dude (Mar 2018) who let his Tesla autopilot drive him right into a divider where two highways diverge, that hadn't been repaired from the last accident so didn't cushion the blow. If you envisage smart highways, with only autonomous vehicles allowed, packed tight—kinda like Asimov's highways of travelators moving at incrementally higher speeds—then yeah, but the last mile would be a really high hurdle and the system would wind up eating up even more space because the existing highways couldn't just be converted overnight.

Plus I've seen what "bus highways" do to the neighbourhoods they're imposed on, and to passengers who aren't going end-to-end (crossing to get to the bus shelter in the central reservation to transfer from the non-express bus running in the normal lanes was enormous fun—not—on top of waiting for the rare non-express bus in the first place!) Turns out monorails would have worked better after all. So I don't trust the planners any more than I trust the software designers.