Future Cars: Electric and Autonomous Vehicles

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mister.shoes
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mister.shoes » July 12th, 2016, 9:00 am

Funny you mention that. I saw a Nevada Tesla just this past weekend and immediately started imagining the route they would have taken to hit Supercharger stations the whole way.
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby xandrex » July 12th, 2016, 9:09 am

The reason I don't think we'll see full automation is that we already have everything we need for people to get from point A to point B while napping, making out, eating tacos, watching movies, etc. We have trains, buses, taxis, etc. We could waste a tremendous amount of money trying to take drivers out of cars, or we could put that energy into making mass transit, public transportation, and private transportation a better alternative. We already have everything we need for the latter. Have we as a population gotten so anti-social that we'd rather be shuttled around by extremely expensive robots on extremely difficult networks of chaotic systems instead of interacting with another person at any point? Don't want to sit with people? Pay some money to a driver. It's already there, and in ten years it's likely to cost you less than buying an automated car, plus all the infrastructure that will be needed to make that safe. Plus, the tech won't be there in ten years anyway.

An elderly woman I know recently paid $450 to hire a cab from a small town in Iowa to drive her to Minneapolis. Absurd! Well, given that she'll need to make that trip at most a couple times a year, she'd have to get a lot of use out of an automated car before it became nearly as cost-effective as that cab ride. And that ignores the storage problem, the fact that she would have to maintain it, fuel (either with gas or electricity) it, carry insurance, etc.

When we envision the problems with single-passenger vehicles, we shouldn't think that automating single-passenger vehicles will solve any of those problems. It just makes us more indebted to tech companies, while continuing all the problems with single-passenger vehicles. Taxis and ride-shares are much better solutions for actual private transportation, and public transportation is *ALWAYS* a better choice where it's feasible.
You’re right that all of those are options right now – but they still include failure points. The purpose of automation is that it can (hopefully) reduce human error. And if we assume automated cars are 30-40 years out, do we really believe that there won’t be people who aren’t well served by those modes in everyday life given how our infrastructure is currently built?

I don’t really see why it’s any more anti-social to have a fully automated car drive you to work/on a date/etc. than it is to simply drive alone anywhere as many do now. Are we really calling the average commuter in the Twin Cities anti-social? Automated cars could even improve socializing because a driver wouldn’t need to have their full attention on the road – a robot would do that for them. Mom/dad could talk to the kids in the morning as the car drops them off at school (yes, in an ideal world they’d walk, but being realistic here) before being whisked to work. Transit is inherently a social environment, but there isn’t necessarily a whole lot of socializing happening. My morning commute both ways involves headphones in with MPR streaming. That’s pretty much par for the course for everyone on my bus. That’s not being anti-social – it’s coping with the cattle car nature of South Minneapolis transit at rush.

And, of course, this point has been brought up before, but the tech that powers driverless cars isn’t just for the SOV – it’s also valuable for many types of transit where we again have error-prone humans driving us around.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Mdcastle » July 12th, 2016, 10:27 am

We're not living in an era where you hop on a stagecoach and then stay in a shared dorm in a tavern anymore. If you look at the past 50 years, culture has demanded and expected a lot more privacy:

* Shared bedrooms for kids? Mostly gone.
* Showering stark naked in front of all you classmates after gym? Mostly Gone
* Open wards in hospitals? Mostly gone. Even semi-private rooms are being phased out in new construction and for services where patients ave a choice.

Even the explosion in single family houses with private yards are in part due to this, to say nothing about legacy cars. So I don't think the desire for a car instead of a bus is an indicator of being "anti-social". When I take the train I see a lot of people isolating themselves to the fullest extent possible by using their phones with headphones the whole time. Is that any more anti-social than wanting an auto-pilot in a car so you can play board games with your family rather than staring at the road?

Taxis, Buses, and Trains all have bugs that are un-resolvable. Taxis, whether traditional or what is termed ride-sharing, are not private and with even 80% of the people in Minneapolis having cars, are a lot more expensive than taking the car you own. Buses are certainly not private, have a greater potential for obnoxious or even criminal behavior by other riders, and only go certain places at certain times. This geographic restriction on trains and planes is even more. Maybe they're fine if you want to go from downtown Minneapolis to downtown Chicago and not have a car there, but if you live in Bloomington and want to get a hotel in Rolling Meadows for half the price of downtown, or stay with your friend for free in Skokie and have a car in Chicago, you drive to the train station, pay to park, pay for a ticket for each member of your family, then rent a car in Chicago. Maybe the rental model of self-driving cars will make this easier- be dropped off at the station in St. Paul and picked up by another in Chicago. But if so then why not take the same vehicle all the way and have the entire trunk space be available the whole time?

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby talindsay » July 12th, 2016, 3:12 pm

Are we really calling the average commuter in the Twin Cities anti-social?
Yes.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby xandrex » July 13th, 2016, 12:41 pm

Are we really calling the average commuter in the Twin Cities anti-social?
Yes.
I mean, that's just silly. But carry on.

I got plenty of socializing on the bus today...if you define socializing as standing in the aisle of a full bus, pressed between several sweaty bodies and getting shoved around as people tried to exit. It really made my day.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby talindsay » July 13th, 2016, 3:31 pm

I mean, I was being snarky, but the point is of *course* people are anti-social. They don't want to interact with people who aren't like them, and that is a major driving force in our commuting behavior. It's a dominant characteristic that's driven all post-war suburban development, the growth of the auto industry, our highway designs, and our infrastructure investments. We equate "freedom" with being alone, especially in a car driving to work. It makes no sense at all to put piles of energy into propping up single-vehicle transportation where there's a mass of people all going the same direction, at the same time, and yet we talk about automating the single-passenger vehicle for commutes instead of talking about how we could use the same technological innovations to make mass transit more efficient, more convenient, etc.

Not to get all mattaudio here, but people think the great thing about vehicle automation is that it will somehow erase the fundamental problem with everybody commuting in single-occupancy vehicles, as though suddenly that will be okay because people will be able to do other stuff. They already can do other stuff on mass transit, and the cost structures surrounding the infrastructure for single-occupancy vehicles for the purpose of daily commuting are absurd.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby mattaudio » July 13th, 2016, 3:46 pm

Not to get all mattaudio here
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby talindsay » July 13th, 2016, 4:11 pm

Judas!

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Sacrelicio
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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Sacrelicio » July 13th, 2016, 4:15 pm

I'm currently car-lite with my girlfriend for about a year and a half now, we share her car, we both bus and bike to work regularly, and I've been Ubering and Car2Going regularly for social occasions. Works pretty well.

And ride-sharing is booming, we went to dinner at Heyday a couple weeks ago and sat outside. More than half the arrivals/departures that we saw during that time were via Uber. I think a big change is happening as we speak.

I think that's the future, sharing cars and using other modes, rather than having every single adult purchase, insure, maintain, and store their own individual $10,000-$50,000 machine that seats up to five people just for commuting and errands.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby moda253 » July 14th, 2016, 9:39 am

I'm sorry but that's just not going to happen. The future being car sharing/transit thing. It is a neat thing for *some* people. And it IS a necessity for others. But it is always going to be The Future, and will never be The Present here unless there is a major economic breakdown where people ultimately cannot afford to buy vehicles. And even then there is a terribly high markup on the price of vehicles that automakers can reduce the price a LONG way and still make a metric shit ton of money. So basically when that time comes we have significantly large problems.

I keep hearing about the mindset that millennials don't want to buy "things"..... yeah because they don't have money. Sorry but that's the truth. Every generation in their earlier years claim something only to be at least lessen their stances on those issues or become completely hypocritical. I didn't want a house at one point in my life too. All I needed was a nice apartment! Married, kids...Next thing I know I have a house and a garage full of stuff. And no not all people live that way but the majority do. But where you have two working adults with kids and activities it's pie in the sky thinking to think this is going to change any time soon. The overwhelming majority of people are never going to work 8 hours a day taking transit both ways and then rely on ride share/transit programs or catching transit to meet their obligations. The sum of money being 10k-50k cited above works out to what using rideshare/transit for a family of 4 for all their trips? So then you start getting into things like reorganizing the way people live. "Do your children REALLY need to be involved in X,Y,and Z?"... "Do you really need to make a couple stops between work and home?"...... it just isn't going to happen.

The overwhelming majority of families are going to own at least one vehicle. And they are going to use them frequently. That is why in addition to good transit systems, which IS absolutely critical to our transportation needs, we need to revisit how the personal vehicle operates on the road.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby David Greene » July 14th, 2016, 11:40 am

I generally agree with that, though I think there are economic realities that will drive changes in behavior. But the SOV is not going away any time soon and is still going to be the dominant mode of transportation for a long time, probably long after we're all gone. What that SOV looks like will undoubtedly change a great deal.

Somehow I just can't get myself to try Uber or ridesharing in general. I think it's my general risk-averse nature. There's an aspect to it that's just scary to me. I have nightmares about being held up in an Uber car and so on. Maybe they're irrational but I'll bet other people wonder about that stuff too. There's a sense of security that comes with regulation of cabs. It may be in Uber's best interest to get some kind of certification process going, or make it more visible if there is one.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Mdcastle » July 14th, 2016, 12:12 pm

Are we really calling the average commuter in the Twin Cities anti-social?
Yes.
I mean, that's just silly. But carry on.

I got plenty of socializing on the bus today...if you define socializing as standing in the aisle of a full bus, pressed between several sweaty bodies and getting shoved around as people tried to exit. It really made my day.
Coming soon to a bus near you: Transit Police to make people put away their phones and lead passengers in games of Charades, Pictionary, and the Adventures of Baron Munchausen to make sure they're sufficiantly social.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby David Greene » July 14th, 2016, 12:51 pm

That's just a ridiculous strawman. Intellectually lazy.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby amiller92 » July 14th, 2016, 12:57 pm

Re: displacing the SOV. My brother and his wife are moving out of downtown to South Minneapolis (they are stalking us). The house they are buying only has a single car garage. They only own one car but are trying to figure out if they can expand the garage to accommodate two. I'm trying to talk them out of it. They are both pilots so they don't do a daily commute and she's about to have a baby so will be on leave for awhile. They're likely not going to listen to me to get a second car so she doesn't have to put the baby in a car seat to drive him to work and pick him up. For two trips a week, they will likely buy another car and build more garage. It's what "normal" people do.

Not that I'm one to talk, as we built a two car garage to store a second car that only gets used maybe every two weeks, and then often just because I try to use it every once in awhile. But at least in my defense, the existing single car garage was falling down and needed to be replaced and we already owned the two cars.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Sacrelicio » July 14th, 2016, 2:20 pm

I'm sorry but that's just not going to happen. The future being car sharing/transit thing. It is a neat thing for *some* people. And it IS a necessity for others. But it is always going to be The Future, and will never be The Present here unless there is a major economic breakdown where people ultimately cannot afford to buy vehicles. And even then there is a terribly high markup on the price of vehicles that automakers can reduce the price a LONG way and still make a metric shit ton of money. So basically when that time comes we have significantly large problems.

I keep hearing about the mindset that millennials don't want to buy "things"..... yeah because they don't have money. Sorry but that's the truth. Every generation in their earlier years claim something only to be at least lessen their stances on those issues or become completely hypocritical. I didn't want a house at one point in my life too. All I needed was a nice apartment! Married, kids...Next thing I know I have a house and a garage full of stuff. And no not all people live that way but the majority do. But where you have two working adults with kids and activities it's pie in the sky thinking to think this is going to change any time soon. The overwhelming majority of people are never going to work 8 hours a day taking transit both ways and then rely on ride share/transit programs or catching transit to meet their obligations. The sum of money being 10k-50k cited above works out to what using rideshare/transit for a family of 4 for all their trips? So then you start getting into things like reorganizing the way people live. "Do your children REALLY need to be involved in X,Y,and Z?"... "Do you really need to make a couple stops between work and home?"...... it just isn't going to happen.

The overwhelming majority of families are going to own at least one vehicle. And they are going to use them frequently. That is why in addition to good transit systems, which IS absolutely critical to our transportation needs, we need to revisit how the personal vehicle operates on the road.
What's not going to happen?

Notice I didn't say SOVs were going away, just the idea that every "normal" adult has to own one will likely change. Families owning "at least one vehicle" is not inconsistent with my argument.
Last edited by Sacrelicio on July 14th, 2016, 2:24 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby David Greene » July 14th, 2016, 2:24 pm

Not that I'm one to talk, as we built a two car garage to store a second car that only gets used maybe every two weeks, and then often just because I try to use it every once in awhile. But at least in my defense, the existing single car garage was falling down and needed to be replaced and we already owned the two cars.
We're actually in exactly the situation you describe: a falling-apart one-and-a-half car garage with two cars we already have. We've been saving up for a new garage and will probably build one in a few years.

Since we plan to go solar, I've had this crazy idea of designing the garage for maximum solar sq. ft., perhaps like a small saltbox. Anyone know of companies that do this sort of thing? Architects? I'm sure it'd be outrageously expensive but I'm still interested in researching the possibility.

I don't think we can afford to spring for a full ADU. Would be nice but just doesn't make financial sense for us.

The car seat thing cuts both ways. I have definitely walked to places with a stroller further than I otherwise would because it is so damn inconvenient to get kids in and out of car seats. In your brother's situation, is there some reason using transit to commute is not possible? South Minneapolis seems like an ideal place to use transit to get to the airport. Is it a work schedule issue, with buses not running frequently at needed times?

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Anondson » July 14th, 2016, 2:38 pm

We have a 2 car garage. It was the first owner's workshop. We fit one car because the second half is full in winter of our seasonal furniture.

I'm going to be building a large storage shed with the eye towards putting solar on it once my south neighbor removes his huge old, dying trees.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby Mdcastle » July 15th, 2016, 7:30 am

That's just a ridiculous strawman. Intellectually lazy.

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If you're referring to my comment, then I guess you don't understand the difference between strawmans and snark.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby David Greene » July 15th, 2016, 10:25 am

That's just a ridiculous strawman. Intellectually lazy.

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If you're referring to my comment, then I guess you don't understand the difference between strawmans and snark.
I was replying to the notion that "social" means interacting with people all the time. When people say transit is social, they mean it's a social environment. People other than yourself. That presence actually is very important.

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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Postby twincitizen » July 15th, 2016, 10:58 am

It's almost as if there are inherent issues with responding to something 5 posts ago.


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