Posted on 05/06/2015 9:39:00 AM PDT by Idaho_Cowboy
Self-driving cars seem likely enough; there’s still several tech and legal hurdles to clear, not to mention the question of how much they’ll cost, but most experts inside and out of the auto industry see them as inevitable given enough time. Now, Daimler’s Freightliner unit wants to push long-haul trucking in the same direction.
Unveiled atop the Hoover Dam, the Freightliner Inspiration Truck is the first semi granted a license in the United States for autonomous driving, for tests on Nevada highways (note the special license plate in the photos below.) Equipped with arrays of cameras and radars, along with extensive software controls, the two Inspiration Trucks built by Freightliner can steer in a lane, maintain speeds and brake without human intervention at highway speeds. It also has to know when to alert the driver to take control; that driver of course has to handle all non-highway duties as well.
(Excerpt) Read more at yahoo.com ...
I hear that’s going to be an option in a later model.
There have been many discussions on this board about the great job imported low wage programmers are doing. Sure you want to trust your life to that? :)
I would trust a truck controlled by computers over some driver high on cocaine who has not slept in 20 hours. Computers can react to the environment thousands of times faster than a human.
We do every day already. Those same guys make the software that runs your car, microwave, TV, climate control, the electric grid and your 401k.
Your challenge puts me in mind of my own reaction to plans for automated airline piloting. My objection related to an amazing bit of airmanship which occurred after a midair collision sheared off the tail of an airliner. The plane plunged toward the earth, and of course did not answer the elevator control. The pilot’s response? He firewall the throttles! As he hoped, this caused the nose to rise - with the result that the airliner pancaked in a (relatively) controlled crash, from which there were survivors who walked away. Sadly, the pilot himself was unable to free a passenger from a jammed seatbelt buckle - and died trying.I thought, “What computer would figure THAT out?” And on reflection, I realized that the relation of the aircraft pitch to power setting is in fact something the program could know, and therefore could try to exploit when all else failed.
It will take time, analysis, and experience (some tragic, no doubt) - but it now seems improbable to me that people will still be driving automobiles manually two decades from now. The computers may not be perfect - but then, drivers aren’t, either. An awful lot of casualties due to that, as it is. An automated system does’t have to be perfect to be better than what we’ve got. IMHO.
More importantly, the cars can be controlled by our central authority and will go where and when they tell them too. It reminds me of that old commentary about why Fascists love trains. People go when and where the government allows, and the government has full control.
This technology will simply allow them to do the same thing with cars. Eventually they will say that human drivers are unsafe, and therefore prohibited.
Does it include an automated union steward too?
With the correct sensors and logic, yes, and probably far better and sooner than any of us.
In the year 5555
Your arms are hangin’ limp at you side
Your legs got nothin’ to do, some machines doin’ that for you
The engineers are hard at work designing the robotic lot lizards now.
First self-driving semi hits family of four, crushes them.
Coming soon.
Trucks cut people off all the time. So do car drivers. So do kotorcyclists, which do other stupid crap. No class of driver is free from a$$holes.
There is a huge amount of differences between those things and an 80K pound semi.
At least one stock market crash (1987) has been blamed on bad software that “panicked” and turned a hard dip into a major sell off.
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