Self-Parking Car Available In Japan 352
sinjayde writes "Yahoo!/Reuters is reporting that Toyota has released a car for sale in Japan that is able to park itself: 'Toyota's new hybrid gasoline-electric Prius sedan uses electrically operated power steering and sensors that help guide the car when reversing into parking spaces.'" No need to rely on the reverse parking formula anymore?
self merging cars,... (Score:4, Insightful)
later,
epic
Re:Who pays? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:self merging cars,... (Score:5, Insightful)
Unfortunately merging is one of the maneuvers that requires the most communication; in busy traffic you really have to negotiate with the other people on the road--signal and move over a little, watch to see if the approaching driver acknowledges you, and then, depending on the reaction, either move over a little more or retreat and wait for the next gap.
Exactly the sort of procedure I'd imagine to be most difficult to automate....
--Bruce Fields
Re:Who pays? (Score:2, Insightful)
In that case, the state can adopt a no-fault policy, thus eliminating frivolous lawsuits and those "middlemen".
Re:dependency (Score:1, Insightful)
Yuck (Score:1, Insightful)
These days, cars are so complex that to even think about servicing one, you need a Ph.D. And fault finding in your own garage? Forget it. I'm probably well set up, well beyond most even normal revheads, and yet I look at this car and just wonder how the hell I could even possibly think about maintaining myself.
But that's not the part that really gets me. What really gets me is that cars are becoming so much more simple and dumb to operate, the real level of skill to drive one is lowering appreciably. Now, when it comes to suspension and brake technology, that's not a bad thing, you cant have a car that stops and handles too well. But it's more of the throw the thing in D and accelerate off, switch off brain that the rise of technology is beginning to breed.
I personally find driving a pleasure, but I truly hate when the car begins to interject. Traction control? It should be my right foot (given I drive RHD). Skid control? That's called appropriate steering / accelerator / brake response. Looking out for danger? That's called my eyes and ears. Being able to park? That's called learning how to do it properly!
My preference is for a good, high performance 4wd turbo. No Anti-lock, no skid and traction control, just lots of power, good tyres, a car with really good response to my inputs and a chassis that communicates what is goign on to me.
Enough of these rubbish do-dads that frankly, no good driver would ever need. Bring back some purity into the driving experience. I dont care how advanced this Puris is, I will not even think about going near one.
Frankly, a 1920 Model T is a more rewarding experience and those things are POS. But there really is something about the skill needed to drive an old car with a crash box..... somethign that brings a smile to your face and you truly enjoy the experience. Or doing 9,000 rpm in a loud rotary. Or pulling burnouts in a massive V8. Or dirt road drifting in a turbo 4wd.......
As if this.... appliance could ever match that. Bah. Turn them all into scrap.
Only in America (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Yuck (Score:4, Insightful)
Traction control and anti-lock brakes both can accomplish feats that the best driver on the planet Earth couldn't accomplish, given that they are modulating their input thousands of times per second, absolutely optimizing power/braking and acceleration. They aren't necessities, and you could approximate them, but don't fool yourself into thinking that you could do a better job. If you claim otherwise, then I'd suggest that you should have relay wires installed in your dash to let you handle the spark timing yourself as well.
Where technology has just finally offered a better choice is in transmissions: Until recently the "standard" was always the superior driving choice, as the automatic options were hydraulic circuitry turds often with 3 gears. Now there are continuously variable automatic transmissions that achieve the absolute perfect coupling between power plant and road surface all of the time. Alternately the computer controlled 5 or 6 speed automatics are quite extraordinary now as well.
Re:Yuck (Score:2, Insightful)
I hear people say this, and I wonder if they've ever even seen a modern engine.
Granted, I can't fix a broken engine computer. Luckily, engine computers are solid state devices that almost never break. Other than that, what can't you fix about a new car? You can still change water pumps, do brake pads and rotors, change clutches, replace power steering pumps, alternators, ball joints, etc, etc, etc, same things you would have done on a 60's car.
Of course, instead of rebuilding a carb, you swap out an injector, though I've never had one go bad. And instead of doing timing/replacing points/caps/etc., you do... nothing. Other than some past VW and GM design flaws, solid state electronic ignitions don't tend to go bad, being solid state.
Re:Yuck (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, though, I think the driving tests need to be 10x harder. If half the people failed them, the roads would be a whole lot safer and more pleasent.
Why stop there? (Score:1, Insightful)
What happens when we forget how to shift gears ourselves? Technology is good, but people are getting too darn lazy these days. Is shifting gears really that hard?
What happens when we forget how to ride horses ourselves? Technology is good, but people are getting too darn lazy these days. Is riding horses really that hard?
Etc etc etc...
Re:Who pays? (Score:4, Insightful)
Speaking from complete ignorance, just trying to think through the economics of this--if the self-driving system actually lead to less accidents, then in general you'd expect there to be less money overall awarded in liability lawsuits. The difference would just be who would be responsible--some liability that was previously the driver's would become the car manufacturer's. So you'd expect the automaker to end up spending more on liability insurance (raising the cost of the car), but you'd expect the car driver's liability insurance to decrease correspondingly.
The driver's insurer could say "buy this (more expensive, because of the technology and the costs of the maker's insurance) self-driving car and we'll give you a discount."
So naively it's not obvious that the increased liability on the automakers' part would make the whole project impossible.
Maybe an automated highway is more complicated than something like a self-parking mechanism, because many more parties are involved (e.g., the people who built and designed the highway), but still, if they could prove that there would be a decrease in accidents, then it might be possible to distribute the costs of risks in a reasonable way.
I sincerely doubt, however, that it is possible for anyone at this point to *know* that the accident rates will be lower. Without more experience, an automated highway sounds like a risky venture--it might initially seem to be safer, but then a subtle bug might cause something catastrophic to happen after it's been in use for a while. Perhaps it was the difficult-to-forsee problems that they were worried about in the situation you describe. But if the threat of suits here is encouraging caution, that strikes me as a good thing--surely radical changes affecting something as critical as highway safety *should* be undertaken very cautiously.
--Bruce Fields
Re:dependency (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it really all that likely? It's simply a navigation task, not some particular combination of voodoo prayer and the position of the moon. Calculators didn't kill the study of math, elevators didn't kill the climbing of stairs, and even if you made those arguments it's arguable that society has grown to a higher level since both these devices came along. So tell me, why would a self parking car make people forget how to park cars? That's a ridiculous, cliche filled, statement.
"but people are getting too darn lazy these days."
People are smarter than they ever were. They do a lot more these days than they did in the olden days. Lazy?
"is parking really that hard?"
If it were, dontcha think that these things would have been around ages ago? Back in the 50's they had a car with a fifth wheel so you could pivot your car into a paralell spot. Didn't exactly take off. However, technology has gotten a lot better these days, it's gotten cheaper, and car companies are in a competition to get more marketshare. What you're seeing here is a result of competition, not some need to park cars. Besides, have you ever had a valet driver bump your bumper? Happens to my car daily.
Re:highways and magnets (Score:2, Insightful)
I think I read somewhere that in 1995, there were nearly 4 million miles of road total in the U.S.A. If it takes a transit team that long to widen one busy suburban intersection, we'll all be driving floating cars by the time they're finished. At least, we hope.
I thought VCR programming was EASY BUT.... (Score:1, Insightful)
This begs the question:
Is programming any VCR to record a program really that hard?
Is setting the clock on any VCR really that hard?
I say NO, but we (I) live in the USA, land of idiots where VCR's freaked people out that the VCR Plus system had to be created, and now PVR/DVR have come to abolish VCR...but it's pathetic the stupidity of my fellow americans...
THUS
I venture to say that parking for most of us isn't hard, but for morons it is...plus even intelligent slashdotters are not awesome at parallel parking on the streets of San Francisco when trying to run down the 1 or 2 hot chicks that are on TechTV...
Re:Glad to see they put this in a hybird car. (Score:3, Insightful)
You claim the Prius rides more smoothly than a traditional car, but I suspect your experience with cars is merely limited to low-end econoboxes. Try hopping into a decent mid-range Benz one day for a smooth ride.
The hybrid concept was not previously embraced because (1) people didn't care about that kind of thing (it doesn't come cheaply or easily), (2) the cars look awful; it is only recently that the national sense of style has been so stunted that the design of the Prius is considerd somewhat acceptable, and (3) the technology wasn't really up to the challenge until recently (in any affordably mass-producible sense). I would also question whether it's actually being "embraced" yet -- I'd say it is still something of a curiosity at best, although it is definitely gaining ground.
We don't have cars that drive themselves because this is a very complicated problem to solve. It may not seem like a hard problem to you because you probably spend too much time watching TV (an admittedly gratuitous conclusion I'm drawing at least partially based on your command of the written word). There are plenty of people doing real work on the problem (here [arizona.edu] and here [pcmag.com] are some examples).
Furthermore, "they" would be facing a mighty huge bill to "implement" these sensors you're dreaming up, and your statement that government involvement would somehow magically simplify everything only further detracts from the value of your commentary. The project you can read about here [berkeley.edu] estimates 7.5 miles of highway will cost $200 million to rebuild with a sensor-based system, with 80% of that cost being borne by "them"... who are, of course, actually us, better known by the name "taxpayers".