Bring on the Robot Cars Already
It’s been almost a year since Google announced that they were testing robot cars in California, and that those robot cars had already logged over 140,000 miles of real-world driving. The program quickly expanded into Nevada where Google convinced the state to issue special licenses allowing the operation of the autonomous cars.
A few days ago a Google robot car rear-ended another car at low speed, but the human driver was in control at the time. Silly humans and our organic reflexes. I can only imagine that the robot car’s logs were full of
* APPLY 50% brake pressure.
WARNING: Brakes unresponsive.
* RIGHT TURN 80 degrees
WARNING: Steering unresponsive.
* APPLY 80% brake pressure
WARNING: Brakes unresponsive.
Based on the current rate of expansion, it’ll be another thirty years before robot cars will drive me around. I want to speed that along. Even if robots don’t “get” driving and aren’t as efficient and capable as the best human driver, I am absolutely sure they are better than most drivers most of the time. And they’d be consistent. To quote Short Circuit:
It doesn’t get pissed off. It doesn’t get happy, it doesn’t get sad, it doesn’t laugh at your jokes. It just runs programs.
How do we get the robot car adoption rate up? How do we quicken the creation of a commuter’s utopia where we can sit back, relax, and enjoy the delicious combination of mass transit autonomy and personal car convenience? Simple.
Guarantee that no passenger in a robot car will ever get a ticket or be at fault in an accident.
And you’re done.
Ideally I’d go further down the avenue of potential and change car ownership to a subscription model. You wouldn’t actually own a specific car, but subscribe to the availability of a car. At maintenance time, monthly, or whatever; the car hub would send a “new” car to drive to your house and swap out with your current car.
Want to not have to worry about moving your things from the old car to the new? Pay more to be able to schedule a time for your car to drive back to the hub first. There the staff would move everything to the new car and send it on its way.
You now have absolutely reliable personal transportation that drives you wherever you want to go. Put this all into an electric car and we’ll cut back CO2 emissions like it’s not even a thing. Need a big gas car for a road trip? Sure, just schedule it with the hub and it’ll show up on time and ready to go.
But don’t limit this to just road trips. Grocery stores are experimenting with curbside service: you place your grocery order online, drive up to the curb, they load it in, you drive off. Combine that with a robot car and you just went to the grocery store without leaving the house.
