Electric driverless cars could make petrol and diesel motors 'socially unacceptable'

Re: Trolley problem.

While the trolley problem is an interesting distraction I think it might be possible to produce systems where the trolley problem is very unlikely to occur. Unlikely to the point of being largely irrelevant. If we have an electric CAV fleet driving around London saving many thousands of lives a year who dies when one of the vehicles quantum-tunnels onto a disused railway line is another address space all together.

Re: Bollocks...

I'd love to be able to relax on a long drive, but paying constant attention to the road is not optional currently.

Having a level 5 autonomous vehicle would be very nice indeed.

Given that the vast proportion of journeys are pretty short then I still see the 'short range electric car' as a potential solution to many people's needs with a couple of (neither exclusive, nor complete) alternatives for longer distances:

- Trailer (with either batteries or a generator)

- Hire car

- Trains for the short range cars (drive to station, onto train, off train carry on)

Re: Bollocks...

The basic fantasy of all these proposals is they do not consider the reasons why people make various choices. Also, too many of the agenda setters assume any reason they do not like is invalid and selfish.

Re: Bollocks...

Hear hear. I think Mr. van Dyck honestly doesn't have the first clue what people who actually spend their time living their selfish unproductive lives are actually up to. Perhaps this is the problem they actually trying to solve.

Re: Bollocks...

Examine London with its comprehensive public transport systems

Slow and shite in my not inconsiderable experience of the same. Many of the interchanges are incredibly tedious, manual and slow, air quality on the underground is appalling (so much for "zero emissions"), and door to door speed is often only about double walking speed.

If London is the poster child for public transport, then we need a different solution.

Re: Bollocks...

Either way the root cause is the same; lots of vehicles

Actually, I don't think that is the root cause.

IMO, it's poor driving standards. I cannot count the number of times I've driven along a 3-lane motorway with some moron doing 60mph in lane 2, with nothing whatsoever in lane 1. That leaves substantially all the motorway traffic having to merge from three lanes into one.

And people aren't good at merging; there's this *need* to be one space ahead of someone you've never met before. So when two lanes merge together, both slow to a crawl or complete standstill. A little self-discipline, and *both* lanes would get through the merge much faster.

Then there's the bunch that leave huge gaps in front of themselves I slow traffic. I cycled across the Itchen Toll Bridge this morning, watching several drivers leave a good 30 yards ahead clear. This just pushes the queue backwards by that amount - and when a queue hits a junction/roundabout, it propagates up all the feeder roads to that junction. It doesn't take many people like this to cause significant congestion.

There are far more examples of crap driving, but those will do to get going with. TL;DR: our roads are able to deal with higher numbers of vehicles than they currently do, if only said vehicles weren't driven by people deliberately trying to stop all traffic.

Vic.

Re: Bollocks...

Have an upvote. I live in a satellite town and take the train in for a weekday commute. For travelling in en-masse with a few hundred other people who are all going from Specific Place A to Specific Place B, mass transit is perfect.

On weekends? Sucks to be me, the trains don't run frequently enough to get me into town on time. Nobody else is going in at 7am on a Saturday so it doesn't make sense to send an entire train either.

On night shifts? No such thing as an overnight return on scotrail, fork out for two singles even though it's literally the same as a dayshift worker's "go into work and back" just with AM and PM reversed.

If I want to visit the parents? Public transport is, according to google, three changes minimum and will take three hours, at god knows what cost, while hopping in the car will get me there in little over an hour with as much crap packed into the boot as I feel like carrying. Even heading into Glasgow, the instant I put a single person in my passenger seat, it becomes cheaper per person than paying rail fare. Another guy I know wanted to travel from Leeds to Birmingham for the bank holiday weekend. It was literally cheaper for two people to go to the airport and hire a car than it was to take the train.

All the ads and viral images I see scattered around the place along the lines of that one with a city street packed with cars and what it would look like if all those people took a single city bus or light rail seem to be oblivious to the idea that not all people are travelling to or from the same places or at the same times.

Re: Bollocks...

Reasons to commute by car...

Council stop the only direct busservice and tell you that you can use 2 busses instead (that take 5 hours in and 4 our out for a 25 mile journey)

Government giving the unemployed a stack of cash to live in a house next to my office that they can't afford while I (stupidly trying to earn a living) have to commute every day because I can't afford the house I am paying for through my tax

Companies that think if I work from home I will be shopping.... and ignoring the fact I am doing it on the itnernet from work anyway!

Re: For inner cities

It doesn't need automated interior cleaning, just internal cameras to see if the user has left mess in the car and give them the option to take it with them or pay for cleaning. When cleaning is required the car drives itself to a cleaner, probably someone working from home. I see an app coming on for this home worker car cleaning business .... lets call in Scruber.

Re: For inner cities

Its quite easy to imagine a sort of automated electric taxi service, because usage will be high enough and dead time low enough.

Cities have their own set of problems when you think about it.

Firstly, you'd need time out to charge the battery, which is in fact a huge array of 18650 batteries, identical to that used on laptop's. In laptops lithium batteries tend to last for about a thousand charge cycles as a rule of thumb before you have to replace the battery because it won't hold a charge.

Secondly, if it doesn't require a meatbag in the drivers seat then it's going to (in practice) be run 24x7 to take advantage of not requiring rest breaks, food, time with family etc resulting in fewer cars doing more mileage. What's that going to do to the battery?

(assuming 1k charges until dead)

@ 1 charge per day = ~ 3 years life.

@ 2 charges per day = ~ a year and a half life.

@ 3 charges per day = 9 months life.

And a thousand charges on a laptop you get what, optimistically 10% of the rated capacity of the battery? If the full charge at new is ~300miles then I'd imagine a 10% capacity (ie 30 mile range) would be a problem for an electric car so they'd require replacement at shorter intervals than my thousand charge rule of thumb. Regardless, I think the electric car companies are going to be making "this is for home use only" rules for the battery rentals if anybody did start using them in any real way and the battery rentals cost a couple of hundred quid a month for home users as it is (more than I pay for fuel doing the uk average mileage!) before adding the cost of the electricity to charge it with.