i’ll def use a self driving car for commuting but, can’t replace a 1970 muscle car with a bad ass v8. the joy of driving will always be there.
The big problem is that self-driving and manually driven cars don’t belong on the same roads. The only way to be truly safe in a self-driving car is if all other cars on the road are self-driving too.
AFAIK every single accident with self-driving cars was caused by human error, even the famous fatal Tesla crash. As long as humans are allowed to drive cars themselves, you’ll need hefty insurance premiums etc. Even more so when they only start driving for recreational driving, as that will mean people’s driving skill will be reduced because they actually drive much less.
So on the one hand I’m all for completely banning manual driving.
On the other hand people driving cars themselves is a good thing … at least for those waiting for a new organ. If road fatalities are reduced to almost zero, there will be very few organ donors compared to today.
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Humans Need Not Apply - This video has a lot of interesting points, and is one of my favorites. The point made around 3:10, and the subsequent part about horses being replaced with cars is how I think Meat-Guided Missiles will be replaced with computer managed transportation.
I know a ton of people who would rather die than to give up their freedom to drive. I knew similar people who loved carburetors and would rather die than learn these new-fangled computers. I quickly abandoned ship on carburetors when my mother was able to buy a used car for $1k that had fuel injection, knowing I would spend the rest of her life fixing her cars and they would all be computer controlled. If there were more electric cars around, to the point that they were filling up junkyards, I would mostly abandon working on internal combustion engines.
tl;dr The cars of the present will be relegated to the pasture as was the horse.
I love driving and don’t expect it to become illegal in the next 20 years, but manual driving will probably be naturally phased out by people not bothering to get a license when it’s more convenient with a self driving car.
Where I’m from this is more commonly referred to as a train/bus/taxi. You get on and others drive for you. You don’t even need a license to use a cab/bus/train.
The problem is, where does the edge of automated driving begin and end? What about Motorcycles and Bicycles, will they be illegal? For your own and others safety? Then there’s also cost and ‘class’ the poor vs the rich. Self driving vehicles will not be cheap, for a very long time to come still new and used ‘manually operated’ vehicles will be cheaper and more prevalent. You’d have to enact government control to ban people from using those and use self driving cars.
Which is a whole new sort of rabbit hole.
This all goes to the idea & illusion of that through automation we are able remove chaos and control our environment towards our own safety.
Something that I argue is a core aspect of our illusion of choice and control.
I think ultimately at some point in time people will realize the futility of automated driving. For with the problems it solves it creates opportunities for new ones which ultimately gain the individual very little new freedoms and takes away many more in our search for more control.
Driverless cars will likely be primarily owned by large organizations that operate fleets of them across a city ferrying people from transportation hubs to various buildings and from building to building.
Similar to how a taxi organization already operates.
The vehicles will log and aggregate your personal commuting patterns, correlating your online traffic with your offline traffic.
Driverless vehicles will have government mandated builtin remote overrides for use by law enforcement.
The data from driverless vehicles will likely be shared in realtime wth city traffic management centers.
In order to drive a manually operated vehicle you will likely be required to both visibly mark your vehicle and attach telemetry hardware that uploads it’s position to the city traffic management system.
There likely will be areas in the world where driverless vehicles do not function or fallback into a manual operation mode. Either due to bad terrain or missing data & lack of network connectivity.
Exploitation of this complex web of digitally mobile infrastructure will occur. Car jailbreaks and rooting will be performed to force locked modes of operation.
Political activists and those with a need for security that are otherwise watched by government or other parties will move around on foot or with alternate means of transport.
Personal Privacy will be at an all time low.
Not only will driverless cars create and upload information about its occupants, they will also create detailed 3D scans of their environment that aside from being used for navigation can be analyzed in realtime for faces, number plates and conversational keywords among other details.
They will be able to log wireless networks and devices within their reception range.
This is not your childrens Future.
It is our present and future.
I haven’t mentioned aerial drones.
The Canadian heavy metal band RUSH did a song about this called Red Barchetta back in the 70’s
Recreational driving will continue , it will just get more expensive.
For winter bumper car riding an AI vehicle will be better. Regular people would get so pissed seeing children holding on to the bumper @ 30 mph on snow covered roads. One bus driver ratted us out to the principle!
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i know i’d fight to death for my right to drive recreationaly.
Funny thing about carbs i know some guys like that, one guy has a really good setup, like REALLY GOOD. It’s like 356 cubi inches naturally aspirated and it’s pulling times closer to 450+ cubic inch tuber charged. basically he says he hasn’t seen anyone who was able to get a drag car tuned right. of course the flip side of that is the only people he’s seen tune efi are people who keep changing their tunes for faster times vs making any worth while physical changes.
there’ve also been some less common but, very good carbs over the years. like this one
it’s basically mechanical throttle body injection. Lectron used sell some like this. Also Predator carbs for v8s were similar concept.
still don’t get easy quick start in the cold like you would with EFI. also you can’t run forced induction with a complete re-tune and modification. one of the reasons i want to put EFI on my big block.
if they did ban manual cars, i could see people running rouge
That’s also begs the question of what they would do with law enforcement and emergency services and other special use cases like say concrete trucks where not only must they drive on road daily but, off orad on constructions sites.
I could also see both existing. if they can make facial recognition systems that can tell if your bluffing or maniacally depressed they could get really good at predicting bad driving and red lights about to be run.
Maybe VR driving gets really good in just a couple of years.
Don’t play on the road.
you could have graphics indistinguishable from life and the best hydraulic gyro money can buy but, it still won’t compare to the feel, sound, smell and vibration of the real thing.
I think self driving cars is just going to add to the de-skilling in the world. I hate the idea that driving is going to be seen as a “fun thing to do” in 20 years. My kids will learn how to drive.
I welcome AI and self driving cars. Most people don’ think of driving as anything but a necessity. Most people are shit drivers. Where I live, 25% of people are extremely aggressive drivers, the rest are beyond pathetically fearful. It makes the roads hell. If those people got the fuck out from behind the wheel, I’d be very happy. Hell, I’d even enjoy an autonomous ride to work so I could use that time to trawl the interwebs. And frankly, the roads I drive for fun, don’t see a lot of regular traffic. I’m up in the canyons where only the hoons and crotch rockets go for the most part.
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Let’s take a guess when autonomous vehicles will be the norm. I guess: maybe in 30 years, at the earliest.
There won’t be a ban on piloted vehicles in Europe before they are ubiquitous. That is simply too hard for a democracy to achieve without hefty external pressures. Maybe there will be a ban on piloting of vehicles with a certain maximum speed and a maximum gross weight (both limits could be progressively lowered).
But I guess you will still be able to drive something that weighs something from half a ton to a ton and goes something like 65 miles per hour for decades to come.
Reasoning being: You are allowed to ride a bicycle. You are allowed to ride a bicycle that has electric assistance. Both will not be automated to to costs -> therefore you will be allowed to drive some sort of vehicle on your own.
TL;DR:
You will still be able to pilot a vehicle on your own in traffic for decades to come.
I did think about this recently as my gut reaction is to be negative towards autonomous cars. Then I started to think about electrification and then that means many cars will have acceleration similar to sports cars now and then do I really want the average numpty to be able to accelerate their 2+ ton cars possibly almost silently to dangerous speeds in busy traffic without a nanny override! So it may be that it’s needs to be a fully automated and integrated car/traffic system to work efficiently.
OK I realise there are irresponsible drivers aplenty but it just gets worse.
Maybe as a car enthusiast I may have to restrict my manual hooning to private tracks/roads. It’s already happening as in the UK it’s getting much harder to find quiet roads free of slow traffic, speed calming & speed monitoring devices. There’s still tracks, sprints, autocross and hill climbs to use my RX7 + V8 
we have an outlaw track not too far from town but, it sucks ass. in fact decently fast car you might actually get side ways since it isn’t as flat as it once used to be. good tracks are farther and fewer inbetween. my friend has decent car and he has to drive a few states over to get to a decent track it costs over 1K and an entire weekend.
it’s like gabe newel said, piracy is a service problem.
they use the street because it’s much more accessible than track. some tracks also ban you if your too fast.
EDIT: self drivers would be great 20 mph big cities traffic jam commutes. could get work done.
We may see tracks become a lot more popular for people who like driving and tinkering.
Scenic routes and will probably be expanded and set for pleasure driving. Bet there will be large signs saying “Warning Manual Automotive Operation Allowed for Next XX Miles” and another cheerful sign saying “Please Drive Safe”
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I think manual cars will always exist in some capacity. Maybe it will become like driving a stick shift today where only the wisest few still hold such ancient knowledge.