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Uber admits to self-driving car 'problem' in bike lanes as safety concerns mount
Uber has admitted that there is a “problem” with the way autonomous vehicles cross bike lanes, raising serious questions about the safety of cyclists days after the company announced it would openly defy California regulators over self-driving vehicles.
An Uber spokeswoman said on Monday that engineers were working to fix a flaw in the programming that advocates feared could have deadly consequences for cyclists. -
The brave new world spin rumbles on:
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Oliver.. SDCs will indeed reclaim urban property. They transform motorcars into a service platform. Just we see the data center being shifted to some PaaS we also see vehicle ownership disolving into consumption of a service provided by some utility. SDCs don't need parking slots. Personally I see the future of SDCs being as a kind of public utility-- if not in many cases as a state operated service. Issues of road costs, taxation etc. parallel the issues with metropolitan rail, public bus services, electricity etc. in the last century. Sure we have seen re-privatization of rail and other services such as post and electricity in many places but other than telecommunications these moves have all failed-- often miserably. I might suggest the only reason that telephone communications has not crashed and burned was due to the extreme level of technological developments (and massive public investments)-- not that there has not been loads of crashes and burns in the telco sector (Colt, KPNQwest, WorldCom, Cable and Wireless, ....)
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At least a real useful reason for driverless cars. To save pubs. Designated driver cars
https://www.rte.ie/news/2017/0124/847413-driverless-cars-could-save-rural-pubs-seanad-told/ -
Trust the Irish* to find that particular silver-lining :/
(*I'm also Irish)
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To save pubs.
Might well have said "to find leprechauns, get their gold and balance the budget".. The impact of SDCs on the rural landscape is quite unclear. While the motorcar helped fuel suburbanization the SDC will quite likely fuel expansive urbanization.
The assumptions needed, I think, to support SDCs as suporting rural pubs are (among others):
- that rural pubs are interesting enough to get people wanting to visit them-- and they can retain their "charm", independance and real ale (many unique rural pubs were liquidated already decades ago).
- that small British pubs can be profitable. Taxes (Ireland has the 2nd highest alcohol tax in EU, higher even than the UK which is placed 4th) have done much to undermine things and while leading to a stready decline of beer consumption in pubs has absolutely not "solved" bringe-drinking-- which remains particularly fashionable.
- that people continue to have a taste for beer. On the whole, excluding binge drinking, beer consumption has been in consistent decline throughout Europe. Germany, for example, has seen average consumption constantly decline since the 1970s.
- that SDCs are personally owned and have, if electric, sufficient range.
In many urban areas special "bar" shuttles have been put in operation. They have not contributed much to increasing business but towards safety-- keeping drunks from driving.
- that rural pubs are interesting enough to get people wanting to visit them-- and they can retain their "charm", independance and real ale (many unique rural pubs were liquidated already decades ago).
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ICYMI – @NissanUK driverless car guilty of "close pass" overtake of UK cyclist: bikebiz.com/news/read/niss… #highwaycode163 pic.twitter.com/mkEC4FTC2d
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Horizon does driverless cars...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b08wwnwk/horizon-2017-dawn-of-the-driverless-car
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I started watching this yesterday and the amount of "we all love our cars soooooooo much" wankery in the first five minutes made me turn it off.
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The theme of the "end of the motorcar" can be found in newspapers and magazines across the planet. The motorcar is, in fact, doomed. The first step will, of course, be killing diesel. Already now many cities are planning to disallow them-- including in Germany (alone in Stuttgart, home to Daimler-Benz, over 70000 cars will be effected in 2018). Given most motorcars sold-- prior to the scandals-- in Europe were diesel ...
Now throw in the observation cars have increasingly lost their status value among young people and ... -
Lyft-- recall GM funding ($500M investment in 2016 which amounts to around 1/4 of the total money they have raised) for just this purpose-- has now launched Level5:
https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/21/lyft-launches-a-new-self-driving-division-called-level-5-will-develop-its-own-self-driving-system/ -
This is the (French) Navya bus
https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/aaa-and-keolis-launch-nations-first-public-self-driving-shuttle-in-downtown-las-vegas-300551187.html marketed in the US through Kreolis (French company in the business of transport services).Navya: http://navya.tech/en/
Crunchbase: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/navya-technology -
"city officials said was the fault of the human truck driver. He was given a ticket."
"before it crashed" no, before it was crashed into.
Simple solution in the future: bann ALL non-autonomous vehicles. While the statement was intended to be somewhat facetious it is, unfortunately, what the signposts for the future read just as many of the roads restored or constructed under pressure from the bicycle lobby in the late 1800s (after years of neglect) came quite quickly in the wake of the success of the motorcar to exclude same.
skydancer
NotThamesWater
Oliver Schick
EdwardZ
RubberDucky
Brun
Doctor_Cake
boristrump
Colonel_of_Truth
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About
Robocars - Autonomous Drive, Self-driving, Driver-less cars
Posted by
@hippy
"The Open Source Car Control Project (OSCC) enables engineers to build their own self-driving development vehicle using existing by-wire technologies on the 2014-or-later Kia Soul. We’re launching on GitHub and can be integrated into a new or used vehicle for less than $1,000."
http://oscc.io/
-- the Kia Soul costs around 16K EURO / $18K USD / £12K new.