Quote:
Originally Posted by VancouverOfTheFuture
driver-less cars do exist technically. if you look at the Mercedes-Benz S-Class it can fully drive itself. it just doesn't want to do it. but with destronic, parktronic, active lane keeping assist, active blind spot monitoring and everything else. it does fully drive itself and keeps itself in the lane. but, it just doesn't like to. it has a panic attack if you take your hand off the wheel for a few seconds.
but yes, driver-less cars do "technically" exist currently.
it should be interesting to see when it becomes mainstream with more cars and when people actually let it drive, since it can.
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Actually that "panic" is to keep the drivers attention on the road.
Like, certainly the technology does exist to make a car "drive itself" but the necessary communication networks do not exist. Even if a mobile network (eg LTE) is available, it's not available over every square meter of the planet, it's often only available within 1km of a major roadway. The Rogers/Telus/Bell network is pretty sad in that aspect. AT&T likewise between Seattle and Chicago. You're lucky if you even get a 3G connection at all.
Without a high bandwidth network available, realtime navigation maps are not possible. The amount of bandwidth required to do what google does is an entire scale different (it has essentially millimeter level 3D data and compares it with realtime scanning to detect "what is there" from what isn't supposed to be there)
Like, in the next 30 years we will see safety features creep into vehicles, and eventually they will become standard, and then the insurance companies will mandate that the features, making expensive retrofits or face reduced operational areas.
The "insurance mandated GPS" is pretty close right now. There's just a lot of privacy issues that haven't been figured out yet. Kiss running red lights/stop signs and speeding goodbye, because such a system will certainly punish with impunity even accidental mistakes.
Which maybe is the push needed to move to automation.