[gutnor]

3 years ago was also before the diesel gate.

Here in Europe, we moved from Diesel is king to the specialist press running article on why you can still consider buying a Diesel car in 2017 in some condition. That triggered countries like Germany to announce plan to ban gas car sales in a decade.

Regardless what Volvo CEO thought 3 years ago, the market has shifted in a clear direction and it is his job to adapt.

In a similar fashion Porsche CEO said he did not believe in automated car. You don't buy a 150K Porsche sport car to let it drive itself. That's probably true, but I expect him to change his mind less than a second after it is clear that some countries will forbid non-automated car to access some public road in the near future.

[petre]

Diesel engines can be ran on DME (dimethyl ether) with a redesigned fuel system. DME is clean and its's storage requirements are nearly the same as for LPG: pressurized containers at 0.5 MPa (roadbike tyre pressure).

Volvo Trucks has partnered with Oberon Fuels and converted several trucks to run on DME.

http://www.volvotrucks.com/SiteCollectionDocuments/VTC/Corpo...

Also Mack Trucks is looking into DME as an alternative truck fuel.

https://www.macktrucks.com/community/mack-news/2013/dme-truc...

Petrol engines can also be ran on an 70/30 LPG/DME mix.

[_ph_]

And where would the DME come from? It would still produce CO2 when burnt, even if there are less toxic byproducts. If created from atmosphere CO2 it most likely would use way more electricity than a battery powered car.

[petre]

What are the feedstocks for DME? There are so many: food waste, dairy manure, landfill gas, natural gas and methanol.

[laxentasken]

I wonder how Porsche and the alike will adapt to that situation. Sure it will take some years before someone will start pushing it...

[harshreality]

I don't think they're mutually exclusive.

When level 5 self-driving is available, it won't be too difficult to add a wheel back and have modes where the self-driving capability maintains safety for other drivers on the road, but allows the driver to assume some risk for their own car and personal safety.

Different modes could allow the driver to accept different levels of risk to themselves and of their car, while still providing automatic protection and avoidance of other drivers on the road. Probably some more... extreme... modes could require posting a bond with the insurance company or government to cover personal injury.

If someone doesn't mind risking their car (collision insurance would no longer apply in these modes), and can pay for any injuries they sustain, as long as they aren't risking other people's health and safety, the computer could let them drive how they want, within certain risk limits.

I'm not so sure people will bother, though. Once car-to-car transponders are mandatory, creating an intelligent grid of vehicle awareness, what fun is it to zoom around other cars as if they're stationary if they know you're coming?

I don't believe people want the actual risk associated with aggressive driving. They just want to beat other drivers. Computer games should take up most of the slack. Even really simple games like Race The Sun offer plenty of adrenaline and reflex development with no actual risk. If you want actual (substantial) risk, go rock climb above your ability, or skydive without a reserve chute.

[gambiting]

This here is one of the reasons why I think manual cars will never go away, or at least they won't be banned outright - new cars will have enough systems to stop you from crashing in almost every situation, while allowing you to "drive" - so why ban it?

[xoa]

I'm not sure what you mean by "manual cars" there. When there are discussions about future bans on "manual cars" that means cars as we have them right now, without any sort of level 5 automatic control. A theoretical level 5 car that also lets drivers have control for fun as long as some set of conditions are continuously met wouldn't be a "manual car" I think, it'd be a self-driving car with an operator recreation mode as allowed by local laws/ordinances. In that situation the system is always ready to take back over should a condition fail, or for that matter should the driver merely decide they want it to. If you meant though that there would be a mix of manual and self-driving cars allowed because the self-driving ones have collision avoidance, then that doesn't make sense, as a manual car could still create collisions that were unavoidable (even by accident). It's not like self-driving cars have force fields.

Having said all that, even if we're talking only about "manual modes" in l5 rather then "manual cars", there are still reasons why they might be banned or at least massively restricted in general, and that's due to infrastructure economics, not crashes. Well developed L5 cars will be capable of operating with a level of precision (in terms of actual road lines and such) and reliability that is beyond the general population, so once all cars reach that level it significantly changes how roads and support infrastructure themselves can be designed. Purely self-driving vehicles simply won't need the lanes to be as wide for example, which directly translates into newly available free space on exisitng roads. That could be used to make them purely thinner (less paving = massive cost savings), gain an extra mechanized vehicle lane for free (higher capacity for the same price), maintain existing numbers of lanes but gain new lanes for walkers/bikers, or some combination. There will be a lot of minor to radical optimizations available with significant economic and quality of life benefits, so long as you don't have to worry about having human drivers at all. That's probably going to tempt a lot of jurisdictions sooner or later.

[netcan]

Douglas Adams on the internet affecting media in the 2000s: ”It's like trying to explain to the Amazon River, the Mississippi, the Congo and the Nile how the coming of the Atlantic Ocean will affect them. The first thing to understand is that river rules will no longer apply.”

Wide-scale fully automated cars will change everything. First, I think fewer people will personally own cars, perhaps a small fraction. Vehicles will need to be less “general purpose,” if they’re not personally owned. One or two seaters, low speed electrics are better/cheaper if you’re getting around a congested city on your own. If we don’t own our own, we don’t always need cars that can fit a family, handle highways…

[arethuza]

As an aside, the Congo and the Amazon used to be the same river before the Atlantic came along...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_River#Geology

[knob]

TIL! Thanks!

[bitJericho]

I'm going to buy a car with a bed, and wake up 1000 miles away for weekend vacations :)

[gambiting]

>>that some countries will forbid non-automated car to access some public road in the near future.

I am sorry, but I don't believe that will happen in anything that could be described as near future. I don't see any actual bans to be introduced any sooner than 30-50 years from now, and even then only if:

1) the technology gets really good, not just "kind of good but only when the conditions are optimal"

2) the technology gets cheap enough that you can put it on a kind of car that nowadays is sold new without A/C and electric windows and don't impact the price of the car too much.

[gutnor]

That's my point actually. You can't predict that, like you could predict the sudden demise of Diesel only 3 years ago.

3 years ago you could probably have done exactly the same reasoning with electric cars (eg: London 0-emission goal are for 2050). And I mean, if my country decided to go full electric in 10 years, I have no idea how I could own a car, unless charging speed, or street infrastructure, or millage vastly improved. Nothing of that has a clear 10 years roadmap. Yet here we are.

[bitJericho]

I think it will happen as soon as it's good enough. The incredible death rate of non-automated cars will make things happen faster than normal, imo.

[xoa]

Beyond gutnor's reply, cars are just fundamentally ripe for disruption. The benefits of personalized arbitrary-point-to-point mechanized transport are so compelling that society has been willing to put up with an enormous price for it, but that doesn't mean the current situation isn't still terrible and ready for a real tipping point effect the instant it becomes feasible. The only reason we've had manual driving at all was because humanity's development of mechanical tech greatly outstripped its development of information capture and processing tech, but that was always a temporary situation. Think about the incredible pressures on the current system:

- Well over a million deaths a year worldwide, if we're talking America then 30k-40k+ here alone. Tens of millions disabled/injured, at ruinous expense. Even more accidents that "merely" cause significant damage, again at major expense.

- The huge insurance and societal costs necessary to sustain the above.

- People who cannot drive in a society where that's immensely limiting. This sandwiches both sides of demographics. Particularly in the First World, demographic trends are resulting in an ever increasing number of elderly who cannot drive any longer. And it's always been a hassle and disruption for parents to need to shuttle around children, or arrange for the same, or just do without.

- A fear, justified or not, that terrorists will make increasing use of the fact that cars are an excellent way to deliver a tremendous amount of energy into a set of targets even without any sort of purpose-made weapons onboard and are not something that can be done without.

- The immense waste in incredibly valuable land resources needed for overbuilding parking, wide lanes, and other support infrastructure needed for human driven vehicles.

- The immense waste in human time and stress due to traffic and other conditions that could be ameliorated or even eliminated by automatic control.

Etc etc etc. The principle problem with both your arguments 1 & 2 is that you make them in a vacuum outside of the massive negatives that we live with right now. As with many disruptive new technologies, self-driving cars don't have to live up to any particular ideal, they merely need to be better then what we've got. And frankly that's just not a very high bar. It's not just economics it's politics, if you look through the above list you should be able to easily identify some of the most powerful interest groups and societal motivators in existence, touching almost all of society in general. Once the avalanche gets going feedbacks are going to reinforce pretty rapidly.

[gambiting]

I don't dismiss the benefits of automated driving on society, literally everything you said is true and I agree with it 100% - I'm just saying that I feel like the tech isn't anywhere near ready for mass deployment, it feels like a gimmick or a really fancy adaptive cruise control at best, or that people who talk about it come from a Star Wars universe where being surrounded by super high-tech stuff is just normal and indistinguishable from magic.

Seeing the current state of the best-of-the-best from Tesla and Deimler, autonomous driving is decent, but it seems full of the same issues as image recognition - and that was predicted to take at most few years to perfect 50 years ago. Today in 2017 you can fool the best image recognition algorithm with a sofa in a zebra print - it comes with 90% confidence match for a zebra because the pattern is right. I firmly stand by my feeling that getting to anything approaching L5 autonomy will take half a century, and that's not near future in my mind.

[njarboe]

Imagine in the middle of every American interstate a light-weight, elevated track holding up a lane in each direction designed for automated cars. Tech today could easily drive vehicles in such a controlled space at high speed and density. Switch to manual upon exit. At 100mph and 40ft per car one gets a rate of 13200 cars per hour. This is on par with the capacity of the current 5 lane Bay Bridge at 9,000 per hour [1]. This could be the future, if society could embrace it. (Electric?) automatic cars would be adopted very quickly if you got to use such a system for commuting and cross country travel. As driving tech got better cars could travel right next to each other on long trips to get the aerodynamic benefits of trains. Google, Apple - you have billions sitting around. How about building a demo track and start building the system on the 280 and 101 for a nice loop.

[1] Wish I had a better reference (http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/matier-ross/article/Peak-hour-...)

[Pica_soO]

Also, new core-tech, new game - especially for those car manufacturers beaten at the market by the great three, this is a chance to recover lost ground.