I’m sorry, but this is sci-fi nonsense. No one in their right mind is going to go for this as a means of personal transport.
CBS News asks “Would You Buy a Self-driving Car? ” The vehicle it refers to is a Google experimental car, which is completely independent and uses radar and AI to determine where it is, where other things are, and what to do with respect to that perception of what is around it. It also relies on “the cloud” – in other words, it has to be connected reliably to the internet. There is some Google video footage of the car here. There’s no denying it’s clever – but how clever would it need to be?
As an aside, my TomTom satnav (and the Google Maps GPS app on my smartphone) are very good at navigating across fields and open spaces when the road layout is new and doesn’t quite correspond to the older data Google carries. And don’t even get me started on what happens when connection to “the cloud” is lost or can’t be established!
But back on topic. The latest issue of Despatch – see article immediately below – has a piece on driverless cars. The system here is the EU-funded SARTRE project, and it is nothing like the Google one. It depends on a lead-car with a driver (or maybe it could be one of the Google cars) and all the cars in the so-called “platoon” follow it automatically (as the acronym SAfe Road TRains for the Environment suggests).
At best, people with too much money and too much time on their hands will be able to commute around London – just like with electric cars – whilst pretending they are saving the environment.
It’s scary to think that the SARTRE convoy will no doubt involve electric cars in order to hype up its green credentials. I wonder what would happen if one in the middle goes flat because the owner forgot to charge it properly (or the batteries are knackered and it can’t hold a charge)?
It’ll also be a bit of a pointless exercise if you want to nip down Tescos at 1am for some bread.