Really? Autonomous Cars Will Take Over?

That's because the way people get from Point A to Point B is about to undergo the most radical change since the early automobiles replaced horses. Autonomous driving vehicles are about to change how cars are driven, powered and used. In the future, far more people will probably buy rides, rather than cars.

Source: The existential threat facing the auto industry

What I see is even more poor people being excluded from the U.S. economy. Poor people can't afford taxicabs. They can't afford Uber or Lyft. However, at least some afford older, inexpensive used cars that they rely on for grocery shopping, transportation to work, and sometimes, even housing after their house is foreclosed or they're evicted from an apartment.

I recently had the joyful experience (NOT!) of riding in a taxi with my wife to St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson where she was being treated for a broken arm (caused by St. Mary's, but that's another tale). The hospital is 30 miles away from our house. The taxi cost $69.75 each way, for a round trip total of nearly $140. Just for grins, I priced the same trip on Uber and found it would have saved $10. Woo-hoo!!

How are people of lesser means going to afford rides in autonomous vehicles? Will they be THAT much cheaper than taxis and Uber. I think not. So exactly how can a person that works 5 days a week, 30 miles away from home, to afford the fare? Even if each round trip is bargain priced at $100, that's still $1,000 a week, or $4,000+ per month.

Contrast that with a cheap used car for $5,000 or less. Monthly payments would be about $125 per month, minimum legal insurance about $50 per month, and gasoline about $150 per month. Total cost about $325 per month.

Please, automakers, explain to me how poor people benefit from autonomous vehicles owned by profit-seeking rideshare corporations? Pretty please?

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boriscleto's picture

People will buy Teslas, then instead of having them sit in a parking lot all day while they're working, the car will be out giving rides to others autonomously. The top 10% extracting that much more from the 90%...

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" In the beginning, the universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry, and is generally considered to have been a bad move. -- Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy "

Bollox Ref's picture

sitting in a car, without control, during a Minnesota snow 'event' are zilch.

I'd rather walk... and hang on to the trusty Subaru.

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Gëzuar!!
from a reasonably stable genius.

k9disc's picture

Vault 7 - CIA "Looked Into" Hacking Cars in 2014

https://hangthebankers.com/wikileaks-vault-7-cia-hack-cars-kill-michael-...

Heh... Gotta love a site with a name like that, right? Lots of links there...

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

gulfgal98's picture

@k9disc

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Do I hear the sound of guillotines being constructed?

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." ~ President John F. Kennedy

No way I can afford one as things stand now, but I kind of like the idea of sitting back and watching the scenery as I enjoy a good beer or something similar.

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Beware the bullshit factories.

please discard

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Beware the bullshit factories.

we're all sitting here saying, "NO WAY! I'm not giving up control!", but the average schmuck just goes along ... kicking off his shoes before getting on the airplane, handing over the keys to his privacy to facebook and alexa, smiling cheerfully at the now ubiquitous surveillance cameras ...

And when 90% meekly submit, your resistance is futile.

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The earth is a multibillion-year-old sphere.
The Nazis killed millions of Jews.
On 9/11/01 a Boeing 757 (AA77) flew into the Pentagon.
AGCC is happening.
If you cannot accept these facts, I cannot fake an interest in any of your opinions.

Pricknick's picture

to see how they work in a city Like Ann Arbor.
Crosswalks everywhere and the pedestrian has the right of way.....always.
I've had people staring down at their phones walk right into the road expecting everybody else to avoid them.
Should make for a good day just watching the carnage.

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Regardless of the path in life I chose, I realize it's always forward, never straight.

snoopydawg's picture

However, at least some afford older, inexpensive used cars that they rely on for grocery shopping, transportation to work, and sometimes, even housing after their house is foreclosed or they're evicted from an apartment.

This is what I'm planning to use my car for in case things go south. Mine is 20 years old with some recent work on it and more needed plus tires, but it's been paid for awhile and I only have uninsured motorists for it. Gas is paid for by my work comp insurance. I had to use uber and it was more than my insurance.

My first thought when reading this was the same as k9' disc's. Sure thing. Put people in autonomous cars and then the PTB hack the ones that have dissidents in them and takes them to FEMA camps. Gee. What could go wrong?

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“When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
~ Hannah Arendt

k9disc's picture

@snoopydawg

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“Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.” ~ Sun Tzu

Does every car suddenly stop and become immovable?

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Beware the bullshit factories.

edg's picture

@Timmethy2.0

There've been stories about people blindly following GPS and ending up in a lake, a ditch, or over a cliff.

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"... but the average schmuck just goes along ... kicking off his shoes before getting on the airplane, handing over the keys to his privacy to facebook and alexa, smiling cheerfully at the now ubiquitous surveillance cameras ..."

As anyone who has flown recently knows, dealing with the TSA checkpoints at airports is quite intimidating. Everyone is well aware that if you protest or are seen as uncooperative in any way you can end up being taken to an isolated room and interrogated, possibly strip searched and almost certainly miss your flight. The only way you will ever see the public standing up to this treatment is if everyone on the security line refuses to cooperate. Things have not reached that critical mass just yet.

As far as privacy is concerned, it is possible to avoid Facebook (I know people who do) and to avoid having a listening device--Alexa or whatever--in your home. But this whole deal of invading our privacy to benefit big data is something that has been put on by stealth--you have to read the fine print in agreements full of legalese to even begin to comprehend what is going on, or you have to be obsessive about researching this stuff, which most people simply do not have time for. There is nothing cheerful about this; it is a matter of a gradual encroachment on people's rights that would, again, take mass protest to reverse.

This does not mean that people don't care about their rights to travel unmolested, to privacy, etc. They just don't see what they can individually do about it without suffering worse consequences.

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A major impediment to the widespread adoption of driverless cars and trucks is liability. These machines will have accidents, people will be hurt or killed (it has happened already) and so, who will be held responsible? It could get really confusing and expensive trying to figure out how to deal with all this. Unless/until this is all sorted out, you will not see widespread adoption of driverless technology.

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is increasing, report finds Cheap gas and SUVs, that is what the capitalists are selling and the consumers are buying. Moar asphalt, more paving continues, more freeway parking lots. The infrastructure is based on oil, all else is kabuki to distract from yet another failure of government to provide... anything the planners have been tasked to provide. Autonomous profits for Wall Street, the untouchables get rich as the world burns.

California is failing to meet its goals to reduce vehicle travel, imperiling efforts to achieve ambitious greenhouse gas reduction targets, according to a state report released Monday.

The report by the California Air Resources Board, the state’s climate change regulator, found that carbon emissions per capita from vehicle travel in California were increasing. That’s despite a decade-old law that required regions across the state to plan for housing growth so that people could live closer to where they work or public transit and reduce their time on the state’s roadways.

“California — at the state, regional and local levels — has not yet gone far enough in making the systemic and structural changes to how we build and invest in communities that are needed to meet state climate goals,” the report said.

blah blah blah the report said. Same as it ever was, CORRUPT. Anyone else ever lived in the same area for six decades? As things fall apart, so do the political promises. lather rinse repeat

amerika's coming attraction
the future happens here first

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Daenerys's picture

@eyo for every gigantic pickup truck I've seen left idling in parking lots these days. *rage* Diablo

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This shit is bananas.

Still smelling of barf and cigarette smoke and god knows what else on the seats?
I would buy one for myself. I'm not that far away from 80 years old and having a self-driving car would be better than being marooned like so many old people who have to give up driving.

Besides, I worked a long time as an embedded systems programmer, so I know all the things that can go wrong, yet, as I told my wife, "I still would trust a microprocessor, even one programmed by a clueless H1-B, over Illinois drivers." You really don't know how horrible they are here. As soon as you get out of state into Indiana or Wisconsin, you see the difference. New York has the rudest drivers, but at least they are competent. Illinois drivers drive like they are half-drunk and staring at their smart phone.

EDIT: Soon Illinois will have legal pot. I'm for that, but shudder to think what the roads will be like when half of them are toking while driving.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness LA driver basically, learned to drive in Southern CA. I found when I lived in the Chicago suburbs and would drive into the city that my LA driving skills were pretty critical - being aggressive when necessary, paying lots of attention to the other whack jobs on the road, etc. and I became personally rather proud of that - even with the cabs I was not intimidated. Course, that was almost 20 years ago now and while I am still a somewhat aggressive driver even my old LA brethren scare the shit out of me now.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

travelerxxx's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness

I would buy one for myself. I'm not that far away from 80 years old and having a self-driving car would be better than being marooned like so many old people who have to give up driving.

Good point. I've never considered what a SDV might do for those - for whatever reason - cannot drive at this time.

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Daenerys's picture

@The Voice In the Wilderness Nobody knows where they're going, and they all go 5-10 mph UNDER the speed limit. I'm still amazed I managed to get out without getting in a wreck after four and a half years.

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This shit is bananas.

snoopydawg's picture

@Daenerys

they all go 5-10 mph UNDER the speed limit

in the left lane whilst looking at their phone. Or the family that has ten kids piled in their suburban gets into the carpool lane just because they can and then drive the speed limit. All this happens while people are totally oblivious to cars around them.

Then there's what happens when it snows ....

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“When out of fear you twist the lesser evil into the lie that it is something good, you eventually rob people of the capacity to distinguish between good and evil.”
~ Hannah Arendt

Daenerys's picture

@snoopydawg Always assume every other driver is going to do something stupid.

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This shit is bananas.

Autonomous cars use a machine-learning algorithm as they go. In other words, they practice on us to learn how to drive, with occasionally fatal results. I consider this conducting experiments on human subjects without informed consent. If a scientist or student tried something like this, they'd be in a heap o' trouble. It should be totally illegal on the face of it, but money talks. I hope some communities might be able to use this argument to prohibit autonomous cars.

In the 60's, there was an sf novel out called "The Four-Day Weekend", where autonomous cars under a central machine intelligence decided to take over.

My mother was put in a wheelchair for life when an 85 year old driver mowed her and her friends down. One lost a leg. I can see arguments for removing the human element from machine operation under some circumstances, but I WILL NOT trust this to a market/profit decision!

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@pindar's revenge @pindar's revenge
An 80+ year old driver coming out of a parking garage in the loop hit the gas instead of the brake. A machine wouldn't make that mistake without a mechanical/electrical failure. A human driven drive-by-wire could have such a failure also. (Audi?)

EDIT:
Upon reading that sounds cold and heartless. That was not intended. I'm sorry for your Mom and the other innocent victims.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness
Thank you for your kind words.
I brought that incident up as an example; there are many, like the guy who went up the off-ramp and drove the wrong way on an expressway. I forget how many died.

But my main point, and I can't stress this enough, is: in order to function, autonomous cars learn by experience, on public roads. This reduces the rest of us to mere experimental units for these despicable techlords, who view human beings as mere objects of wealth-gain - typical of the blind idiot god of the market, but in this case an argument can be made that they are violating well-established rules for using humans in experiments. Increase the voltage! er, mileage.

I can see a place for autonomous driving, perhaps limited to expressways, for example (controls on speed limits, aggressive driving, etc.). But the decision of how and where to use this tech MUST NOT be made by the blind idiot god of the market, and there are serious ethical questions which must be addressed by the masses, not the techlords in their enclaves.

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lotlizard's picture

@pindar's revenge  
and Austria for there to be a standard procedure for interrupting radio broadcasts with traffic-advisory warnings about them.

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falschfahrer

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edg's picture

@pindar's revenge

Another concern is who owns the "learned" data. Does each car company keep their own set?

Is there a national standard, i.e. "socialized" autonomy?

Or does it become a marketing tool -- our AI is smarter than theirs, you're less likely to die with ours?

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@edg
is well worth considering, and an aspect I hadn't explored.

Just think: if you're in a city where they're "training" car AIs, YOU are a subject of experiment, a dangerous one with potentially lethal risk, without your knowledge and without your consent. Seems to me like there's a legal case to be made.

And yes, there are, sadly, many casualties of our laissez-faire use of vehicles.

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@pindar's revenge
I knew that guy. He was our plant electrician. retired on Friday, died on Wednesday before Thanksgiving. Sad all the way around.

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I've seen lots of changes. What doesn't change is people. Same old hairless apes.

@The Voice In the Wilderness @The Voice In the Wilderness
I'm sorry to hear that.

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