Published: July 15, 2009 in future » experience by Thomas Baekdal
Driverless cars are nothing new. We have seen them in countless of movies. A lot of people, and companies are trying to make one, including the US military. But so far the technology has not been able to make it possible.
But the driverless car is interesting because of several things.
And that is just some of the things that the car can do. Imagine what you can do as a person, if you don't have to focus on the driving part. It's like taking the train without all the annoying things about public transport.
Mike and Maaike recently introduce their concept for a driverless car called ATNMBL.
"ATNMBL is short for Autonomobile, a title that merges Autonomy with the Automobile. Upon entering ATNMBL, you are presented with a simple question: "Where can I take you?" There is no steering wheel, brake pedal or driver's seat. ATNMBL drives for you. Electric powered plus solar assist, with wrap-around seating for seven, ATNMBL offers living and/or working comfort, views, conversations, entertainment, and social connectedness."
There is a lot of very interesting things about this car. It's fully designed to be driverless. It's not this kind of mixed design we have seen in the past. It's shorter than most cars today, but its interior is fully focus on you and the space within. It has electric motors in each wheel, and the power is stored beneath the floor.
But the most interesting idea is the about speed. Today we want a car that can go fast. But is that really what we need? Maybe it is not about how fast we can go, but about how fast we can get to our destination. Could a car with less power get us there quicker because it is better at anticipating the flow of traffic?
Of course, I do not actually think that we will give up the idea of driving completely. But the ideas and concepts of the driverless car are certainly exciting, and I see a lot of future possibilities as a result.
(Read more about it over at: Mike and Maaike)
Cool post. I've though a lot about driver-less cars. I think they have the potential to be quite a disruptive technology.
This is that it could solve the problem of drink-driving completely. That would be a very good thing for rural communities and prevent many accidents.
Also, consider what might happen if children & teenagers can own their own cars/vehicles. Very interesting social change would happen.
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Kevin, That is a very good point... the one about kids suddenly having cars.
Intelligent cars cannot predict human behavior, although they can predict that of other driverless cars. That will definitely be a problem in the transition to autonomous vehicles. The transition will have to be pretty much instantaneous. We just can't have both autonomous and human-controlled cars on the roads at the same time!
Interesting.
Some things that came to mind:
1. Motion sickness. If you have it, you tend to need to look out the front window to minimize discomfort so all of the side seating wouldn't work well in that situation. And some people need to be the one driving to alleviate the problem.
2. Darken the windows and 'If this van's a rocking...' goes to a whole new level.
3. This type of vehicle could eradicate the need to own/rent an apartment/house for a percentage of the population. The problem with RVs is that they are too big to park in the city....but if the car can drop you off then this ceases to be a problem.
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This technology would help multi-car families as well, because even if you are 'stuck at the office' you could send the car to pickup children from school, or your wife from her job, etc.
I agree though, it would never work unless it had complete backing - it wouldn't work if we had autonomous and human-controlled vehicles on the road at the same time.
It could also introduce a whole new angle for hackers/terrorism if they were able to gain access to the "transportation grid".
It will be very interesting to see how this technology progresses...
Great concept. But how about car insurance: if it drives itself, the production warranty will be in charge of any problem.
That would be great for some people, but not for the people that actually like to drive.
Hi, I just saw a driverless car cruising in the streets! I looked it up and found an article about it in the newspaper today (with pictures):
http://www.adressa.no/nyheter/trondheim/article1372975.ece
It´s in Norwegian and it says that EU is funding a huge project for developing driverless cars, and Trondheim in Norway is one of the lucky cities to participate in this.
It looked sooo funny and I felt that I was getting a glimpse of the future. The car does only 6 kmt, approximately 4 mph.
It does not use a own roadsystem. It uses lasers and sensors to read the environment so it can stop or avoid different obstacles.
If they can make them safe but boost up the speed to 30kmt / 19 mph then I really think that driverless cars have a future and can replace taxi´s and busses in city cores.
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They have just posted a video as well.
Just a few seconds of commercial and then u can see the cybercar in action.
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Thanks for the heads-up Mattis. Looks interesting!
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This is a great idea. It's another way to give people options when taking a taxi and not be afraid of the cab driver being a murderer or anything like that.
How the door-to-door driving is possible in driverless car for the passenger if we talk about driverless car in highway?
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Jul 15
2009
Saturn2888
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This is /the/ coolest design thus far. I mean, one of the most used machines today is the automobile, probably even more useful than the computer because there is no self-driving car as of yet. Something like this is like public transport but to your destination. This is something I can see happening in 5 years, but only if everyone gets behind it. Having electric motors in the wheels sounds cool, but this car also seems fairly unstable. And if people and moving around, I can see a lot of issues that way. I wonder how cheap building tunnels or large self-driving-car overpasses would cost.