Originally Posted by Chris Lord:
I strongly disagree. We will see driverless cars in the near future. The BMW i8 in Germany can detect people/wildlife on the side and direct a portion of the headlights at them.
You don't see driverless cars anywhere near rural areas and only on well-travelled urban areas with excellent roads and GPS signals. Know all those places out in the middle of nowhere you can't get a cell signal or the GPS steers you oddly? They don't go there and for good reason.
Manufacturers are indeed working toward it in experimentation, but none are looking to place them out in the sticks, and for two primary reasons:
- Nobody wants to have to go get them from a ditch or mudhole in a dirt road anywhere
- The nightmare scenario for all of them is liability issues. The first time a driverless car has any situation where a kid steps out in front of one (which is inevitable if they keep trying to get them onto main roads) and hits anything or anyone, imagine the massive, crushing lawsuit which will descend upon them. There'll be lawyers looking to make names for themselves lined up around the block, many willing to take the case for no cut of the settlement, to be involved in the precedent-making case against a company that built a car that ran over someone's kid all by itself.
I know this for certain because I work in the auto liability field for an insurance carrier. We're all just starting to look into the liability issues. Nobody wants to go first in that regard.
In the 60s, the Feds looked into making tracks in roads like the current system that massive HO scale layout in Germany uses for their model vehicles, where they follow an imbedded magnetic core in the road. Problem then was how to keep it powered in an era of weak electrical grids being common, and that idea was abandoned.
Now, we're in a litigious environment and this is why you're seeing these unmanned cars in such limited circumstances. I don't see that changing anytime soon.
In fact, self-parking cars might be a thing of the past from what I'm reading. They've already caused a few pedestrian injuries but good luck finding much info on that.
It's not common, but it's happening already, to cars that represent a tiny fraction of all the cars out there.
There's also the issue of maintenance for cars that drive themselves, as many people and companies will drive a vehicle until tis wheels fall off, but I'll address that sometime later if it comes up...