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autonomous vehicles & bikes

Falsus Nomen

Falsus Nomen

Lane-splitting Mafia
Joined
Jun 19, 2014
Location
East Bay
Moto(s)
Street Triple, FJR
We are on the verge of having automated cars and trucks on the roads. Google, audi and many others already have them roaming around. So, how does that impact bikes? And from a younger person's standpoint, how does this impact the viability of bike manufacturers in the long run (2050+)
 
As autonomous vehicles become more and more popular there will be "penalties" for people who choose to drive manual cars/motorcycles. Probably in the form of much, much higher insurance premiums. Maybe there will be clauses in life insurance/disability insurance that if you die/injured in an accident in a manual driven car/motorcycle you are not covered.
 
Cars/bikes/user operated vehicles will be relegated to track use only.

And even then, thatll probably be electric.

Ugh.

Enjoy it now boys...we wont see these days again.
 
The autonomous car will save more biker lives than all of the "Share the Road" signs ever could, and I love those signs. It will also cause traffic to become less and less of a problem, over time. I'm no expert but traffic is typically caused by vehicles traveling at different speeds at different intervals. If every vehicle is going the exact same speed traffic is essentially wiped out, on open highways at least.
 
Falsus Nomen said:
We are on the verge of having automated cars and trucks on the roads.
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Yea, not really.

We've seen a lot of clever, contrived demos. But the simple fact is that the cars are still little more capable than a deaf blind person following a rope.

The Audi driving the race track may as well have been a high speed slot car demonstration.

They're getting the basic problems working, but there are fundamental, very (very) difficult tasks in sensing, reliability, and control that they have barely scratched the surface of.

I'll be surprised to see one publicly available within 10 years, even for narrow, private purposes (like an automated semi to move goods across the I10 from Phoenix to Fontana), much less general purpose consumers.

We're likely to have automated drones before then, much simpler problem.
 
Berth, what do you mean by 'contrived demos'?

The Google self driving cars seem to be doing a pretty solid job of taking the roads as they are and dealing with them better than 85% (figure I'm pulling out of the air) of drivers.

I for one welcome a day when anyone who can't be arsed driving doesn't have to.
 
berth said:
Yea, not really.

We've seen a lot of clever, contrived demos. But the simple fact is that the cars are still little more capable than a deaf blind person following a rope.

The Audi driving the race track may as well have been a high speed slot car demonstration.

They're getting the basic problems working, but there are fundamental, very (very) difficult tasks in sensing, reliability, and control that they have barely scratched the surface of.

I'll be surprised to see one publicly available within 10 years, even for narrow, private purposes (like an automated semi to move goods across the I10 from Phoenix to Fontana), much less general purpose consumers.

We're likely to have automated drones before then, much simpler problem.
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I see the Self driving Modified Lexus SUV's that google uses on the roads all the time. I have never seen or heard of one at fault in an accident. That being said, most testing is taking place on residential or commercial roads, not highways, but I don't predict highways will be much different. These are not going to replace all cars and i think the claim that insurance premiums will shoot up like crazy is pretty unfounded. These cars will lead to fewer accidents overall, which in theory should equate to lower insurance rates overall.

By the way, the military has had automated drones for a long time, and Tesla plans to have an automated mode for their higher end cars at least, in the next few years, they will be here sooner then you expect.
 
I know the google cars - the lexus and prius generation - very well, how they are instrumented, controlled and modified.

There is a limit to what I am willing to say about the project out of fear of legal retribution from a behemoth with unlimited legal and financial resources.

But I can tell that I know of no drivers who can drive close to two million miles and not make a mistake, many of them on very busy high ways. Also, I don't know of any drivers who cant track tens of objects around their vehicle, calculate their trajectories, and probability of impact with you or other vehicles, and who never gets tired.

And, yes, they are sensitive to motorcycles who are lanesplitting.

/Soren
 
I, for one, welcome the arrival of our autonomous car overlords :hail
 
Perhaps large heavily traversed roads become off limits for manually operated vehicles? Because I think the drive to efficiency will increase speeds and coordination between vehicles to levels humans cannot achieve. The remainder of roads will have both.
 
hCC812A1F
 
UDRider said:
As autonomous vehicles become more and more popular there will be "penalties" for people who choose to drive manual cars/motorcycles. Probably in the form of much, much higher insurance premiums. Maybe there will be clauses in life insurance/disability insurance that if you die/injured in an accident in a manual driven car/motorcycle you are not covered.
Click to expand...

antidote said:
Cars/bikes/user operated vehicles will be relegated to track use only.

And even then, thatll probably be electric.

Ugh.

Enjoy it now boys...we wont see these days again.
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Do you guys buy your tinfoil hats at the same store, or do you just make them yourselves?
 
SFSV650 said:
Berth, what do you mean by 'contrived demos'?
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The vehicles are blind, barring the coarse sensors that they carry. The cars are driving over prescribed routes that have extraordinary maps to tell the car where it thinks that it is. That makes them as good as their maps. Mountain View probably has the highest resolution maps of any place in the world, with every driveway, parking lot, gutter, mailbox, and stop sign located down to the centimeter.

Elko, Nevada? Probably not so much.

They're also backed up by Carbon Based Lifeforms to bail them out of trouble.

Vehicles may project their trip on a macro scale "drive 3 miles, left on Main, 3rd house on the left", but in the end are operated locally, with the driver adapting to local conditions continually.

The local operation is where things start breaking down. The whole identification of "stuff" problem. That's difficult in the lab, and gets worse with all of the environmental bits kicking in from sunlight to dust to wind to rain to snow. But that's the stuff that makes the vehicles "not dangerous". The reaction to the dynamic environment.

That's what made the Audi demo basically contrived. It wasn't "seeing" the road, seeing braking markers, etc. It didn't figure out it's route, it was told what and where to go. I'm assuming it's not the playback of a recording made by a skilled driver. Perhaps it had controls over speed of moving over that route, but it was effectively eating virtual dots just like Pac Man. Stick that car on a random track and say "lap it", and, well, good luck with that.

It's a magic trick. Not to say it doesn't demonstrate interesting technologies, for sure. It IS an accomplishment, but don't project beyond that. I'm sure that the cars control software lapped that track 100 times that morning on the simulator.

It's like the scene in "The Great Escape" where Donald Pleasence is trying to show that he's not blind. He plants a pin across the room. "Oh, look a pin" and walks over to pick it up. The Officer tells him to try again and sticks his leg out, and, of course, Donald's character stumbles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=EJAjkDX0B4A#t=5060

That's basically the state of autonomous cars today.

They demo great, but they are not anywhere near ready to be released in the wild, and the problems yet to solve are very, very difficult.

Finally, as a friend mentioned, he'd feel far safer on a motorcycle around an autonomous car than not, and you can be assured that if the cars have issues with motorcycles, they won't be out on the road in the wild.
 
Honestly, I feel that the limiting factor for autonomous cars becoming the standard is privacy and security. Autonomous cars means that people can track every single place you go to, from your home to your work, etc. Granted, smartphones already do that (that's how Google Maps live traffic data works), but at least you have the option of turning your phone off if you don't want to be tracked. You wouldn't be able to do that with autonomous cars. Not to mention, hackers would have a field day if they were able to hack into the self driving cars. They're already doing it to several traditional cars (like Jeeps), so they'll probably try to take advantage of any security holes in these cars' software.

Also, there's the issue of who's at fault if two self-driving cars end up crashing.
 
thedub said:
Do you guys buy your tinfoil hats at the same store, or do you just make them yourselves?
Click to expand...
Pass the Reynolds roll, please. More autonomous cars means fewer people buying insurance. Rates will go up for drivers. Not all insurance companies cover motorcycles, now. If self-driving cars hit 'critical mass', why would an insurer cover dangerous bikes, unless it would cost bikers a ridiculous fortune that no one could afford? This, too, already happens with young males wanting to buy a sportbike. They can handle the bike payments, but not the insurance. It's tinfoil hat plausible to me that bike use as we know it could disappear.
 
Cookie Monster said:
Not to mention, hackers would have a field day if they were able to hack into the self driving cars. They're already doing it to several traditional cars (like Jeeps), so they'll probably try to take advantage of any security holes in these cars' software.
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They've demonstrated it, they're not "doing" it, and the stars that had to align to do the demonstration were legion, and it's already been patched.

Car hacking is vastly overblown.
 
berth said:
They've demonstrated it, they're not "doing" it, and the stars that had to align to do the demonstration were legion, and it's already been patched.

Car hacking is vastly overblown.
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Yeah, because it's not really common yet. Most cars don't have two way communications that can easily be accessed. Seems like every once in a while though there's a big scare with cell phone hackers, the most recent of which had close to a billion Android devices at risk.

I'm probably being paranoid but that's one of the many reasons I wouldn't support and wouldn't buy a self-driving car. Hell I wouldn't even buy a car with an automatic transmission.
 
Sometimes it pays to be old. I am 46. I am pretty sure we are decades away from these vehicles being viable on any large scale. I will probably be buried or too old to ride (if that happens) before it becomes a reality.

To the next generation, hope you have fun in your sanitized, risk free world. :teeth
 
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