General vehicle thread

Bah it would appear something has gone wrong with my power steering rack on the F150. Got in to make a run to the store today after driving back from Denver yesterday with no problems and I have a steering assist fault message along with a hill start assist message. Quick search says may need a new steering rack. Will likely try a power drain to see if that helps. (not likely but who knows)

It's been over 20 years since I've driven anything without any kind of steering assist and I don't miss it.

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Originally Posted by Gman

Truly autonomous vehicles are about 2 decades away.

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Not just that but a massive amount of legislation and infrastructure restructuring away.

Autonomous vehicles and driver driven vehicles really can't co-exist on the same roads so you'll have to have something akin to HOV lanes on major highways for the autonomous vehicles or you have to completely ban driver driven vehicles (which would be politically difficult if not impossible). And that's just on rural highways and interstates. Autonomous vehicles in town are probably more like half a century away as the AI that can co-exist on city roads with other human drivers, pedestrians and etc is several orders of magnitude more complex than the AI that would pilot an autonomous vehicle down a highway full of other autonomous vehicles.

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Originally Posted by Zundfolge

Not just that but a massive amount of legislation and infrastructure restructuring away.

Autonomous vehicles and driver driven vehicles really can't co-exist on the same roads so you'll have to have something akin to HOV lanes on major highways for the autonomous vehicles or you have to completely ban driver driven vehicles (which would be politically difficult if not impossible). And that's just on rural highways and interstates. Autonomous vehicles in town are probably more like half a century away as the AI that can co-exist on city roads with other human drivers, pedestrians and etc is several orders of magnitude more complex than the AI that would pilot an autonomous vehicle down a highway full of other autonomous vehicles.

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Full autonomous driving will be a thing in the next couple of years. Elon keeps saying "feature ready" for Tesla by the end of this year. I'm done discounting crazy shit he says because he seems to deliver more often than not. The next hurdle will be regulation which could be years to overcome.

Why is it you think they can't coexist on the same roadways? I don't see why separate lanes would be necessary. Even with the vintage autopilot systems we have data on they're safer than manually driving and only improving day after day so I don't see it as such a concern that we need to sandbox them from the people manually driving.

I think Level 5 autonomous driving is going to be a thing sooner than most would imagine. The technology will largely be ready to go within a few years, and they'll continue to refine how it handles edge cases after that.

Between the mainstreaming of the sensor suites needed to enable autonomous vehicles, the massive amounts of resources being dumped into it, and the advent of artificial intelligence systems that are capable of learning on their own and then integrating what they've learned with what other networked vehicles have learned, I see the development of the technology as happening in the medium-term future.

Weirdly, legislators and bureaucrats seem to be very much on board with fast-tracking this technology, and are laying the legal and regulatory groundwork for it more quickly than I've ever seen bureaucrats do anything, ever, in my entire life.

Because people manually driving next to autonomous vehicles will pay less attention.

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Originally Posted by Irving

Because people manually driving next to autonomous vehicles will pay less attention.

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If only we had the technology to prevent people using their phones while manually driving.





https://i.imgur.com/YAGpXPd.png

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Originally Posted by Jer

Why is it you think they can't coexist on the same roadways? I don't see why separate lanes would be necessary.

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The same reason we don't (and likely never will) have flying cars.

Because America is run by lawyers and we constantly complain about how bad people drive ... there will be wrecks, there will be deaths and there will also be opportunistic politicians that want to regulate the crap out of it just because that's what they do with everything else.

Also one thing that makes Autonomous cars work is that they communicate with each other and plan their actions accordingly ... mixing in irrational humans and there's no way the computers will be able to second guess what the idiots in the other cars are going to do.

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
― George Carlin

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Originally Posted by Justin

Weirdly, legislators and bureaucrats seem to be very much on board with fast-tracking this technology, and are laying the legal and regulatory groundwork for it more quickly than I've ever seen bureaucrats do anything, ever, in my entire life.

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Well hell, that's actually a good reason to be even more suspicious of the entire concept. My guess is they want autonomous cars for the same reason they want smart cars and mass transit ... to control the people.

This idea that we need to keep autonomous cars safe from non-autonomous cars is kind of stupid to be blunt.

Our roads are also not perfect and have many flaws, including while they're being repaired/repaved. Then there's weather. It's no surprise as to why most testing is happening in fair weather areas of the country.

Experts say we're decades away from fully-autonomous cars. Here's why.

I see the vehicle manufacturers eventually pulling away from the concept. Currently, the drivers accept all responsibility for collisions. Car manufacturers are having difficulty even maintaining profitability in the current environment. When the manufacturers are providing systems to control the vehicles, there will be plenty of lawsuits, and even if the mfrs. are only found partially liable, where's the money in it?

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Originally Posted by Jer

This idea that we need to keep autonomous cars safe from non-autonomous cars is kind of stupid to be blunt.

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Of course that would be kind of stupid, but that's not at all what I said. Keeping humans safe from the difficulties of autonomous and non-autonomous cars interacting on the roads along with the related legal and liability issues make the introduction of autonomous cars onto the roads significantly more difficult than just addressing the technology issues.

Honestly we're more likely to see the mass adoption of Desktop Linux by the normies before we're going to see autonomous cars far and wide on American roads. I think too often tech savvy folk like yourself forget that you're sharing the planet with people that think HTML is an STD.

At best in the next decade we'll see autonomous semi trucks on the interstate ... but they'll still have a driver and the driver will still have to be behind the wheel the entire time and take the wheel in town.