To hit the real heart of the American buyer, Google needs to build something with the weight an presence of an SUV and look intimidating. Guessing blacked out, two inch high windows, Cylon red light scan in front. But that is for the future when they have gained market acceptance. The Wallace and Gromit car look is nice and non threatening for opening the door.
Yeah I’ve seen enough horrible crashes even in giant SUV’s to know that any impact with a large truck it doesn’t matter if you’re in a 1 Ton Smart car or a 3 Ton Land Rover - the results can often be bad. Case in point, here’s my 3 series when vs the back of a semi (which is less force but more danger due to submerging under the trailer).
The IIHS gives the Smart very good reviews - http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/vehicle/v/smart/fortwo and I recall seeing a video where they purposely smashed a Smart into a brick wall at a very high speed and the “safety cage” held up completely.
Again, the car has a top speed of 25mph - limiting the risks quite a bit.
My girlfriend and I have had the autonomous car several times over a year into the course of our shared hour + drive commute, so when the news popped up the other day we began discussing it again. One of the tensions that is always highlighted (as is here) is how manual cars and automated cars will interact. Are they on the same roads and highway systems? She is sure that at first there would be people that would get some joy out of veering toward automated cars in traffic simply to see them avoid the crash in different ways
Thinking about it I can’t help but think of Minority Report, where you have the commuter MagLev car that docks to your highrise living room,
This is more along the Mike and Maaike approach, and this is what I dream of for our commute.
and then other cars that seem more along the regular manual drivers
the photos definitely reminded me of the Toyota Pod concept from a few years back.
Long time no post…but I had to react to the google car.
I love it…the idea. Not really how it looks. And I agree they are missing out on some opportunities. No more sterring wheel opens up a whole lot of opportunities. The most obvious one is putting the door in front just like on the BMW ISETTA. I did a small friday-afternoon sketching exercice at work to showcase just that. Could be very benificial towards the elderly target group. The car could just drive underneath their bum…just like you slide a chair under granny’s ass when she needs to be seated a the table.
Realistically, I when this gets productized, it will be a feature on regular looking cars, not a car in itself. This is just a PR piece. Think of it like the Mercedes that can parallel park itself and has radar controlled adaptive cruise control and automatic breaking and lame change notification. This will just be the next step on the 20xx model.
Also, the infrastructure costs on building a duplicate road system would be crazy. They will likey drive on regular roads with mixed traffic so they won’t be legal until their real time adaptation of unpredictable moving objects around them is perfected.
Now, thinkin how to game the system. Imagine these cars automatically dynamically react to vehicles and other moving objects around them, and there is a traffic slow down. If hypothetically a fast moving Audi that is full manual approaches from the rear at a velocity much faster than the autonomous car, will it automatically pull over to the side of the road and get out of the way? If so, the manual commute just got more fun.
Well, we’ve been hearing about autonomous cars for the last 3 - 4 years I think, I expected something else than a regular car without a steering wheel. If you are going around the city in a car without driving it, I’d rather use the time for something else than staring at the other cars. For a prototype that doesn’t go over 40 kph, they could have gone to something closer to the FUMU concept IDiot posted before. Public buses use that kind of layout without seat belts, for example.
I understand the reason of the cute look they gave it, but I think the render they showed was a better than the final result. The face was softer and the roof sensors were part of the design, not just an add-on. I personally would like something more serious than this, something that doesn’t look like a toy, but something I can trust. I guess over the next years will see some concepts from car manufacturers including this technology.
The real disconnect is fitting this into the California six lane wide, one person per car, ego show.
Have it be a limousine service. Have Bentley or Maybach build the carriers. A 60 inch LED display should be able to fit in one end. Google’s strength would be predictive analysis of where the units had to be situated. The units would drive themselves to their next pickup. Sell partial ownership. Uber your car out at night to make money. Have a self cleaning unit drive drunk people home.
The function of the car is amazing, I think. I imagine something like car2go but where the car is picking you up or just going on its own to recharge batteries or park itself.
It seems Tesla is already introducing the first step of autonomous driving with the new Model S P85D. Apparently the car also parks itself and comes back to you, but I’m not sure if it’s going to be for this gen or the next.
In my opinion, the human factor of the driver in racing is quite important. It wouldn’t be so unpredictable, it would be just a team of engineers putting together something that could fail for technical reasons, but that probably would behave always in the same way. Race drivers hate or love each other, are funny or serious, follow the instructions or their guts, I think that is also part of the beauty. They suffer physically and emotionally, they have to stay focus and work hard to achieve that.
I love how the technique and different techniques are evolving and it’d be great to have an autonomous car for commuting, but racing is something else. It’s interesting to see how different companies develop different solutions for the same thing though.
Have you seen what Daniel Simon has been up to lately? Just your usual super-duper-sickness from one of our generation’s standout auto/SFX designers…
The novel part is that the software is ‘racing’ software - but no one knows yet if it will be a snoozefest or if audacious maneuvers will be attempted by the AI.