nang2
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I think a potential blind spot of your research is to simply look at the cars for transportation purpose. Before cars were invented, there were transportation vehicles. Car brought in something new. I think missing that "new" part is to miss the whole point of having cars. For many people, owning a car means a sense of freedom and independence. Networked car, by itself, won't damage that. Much like networked computers. But networked autodriving will certainly do. If someone else can decide, not just suggest that you take another route or slow it down or speed it up, where would be your sense of freedom? In addition, when some hacker gets control of my networked computer at home, it is bad but not the end of the world. Getting control of my running vehicle could literally mean my end of the world.This is a hard question to answer and a very complicated one.
A car's paradigm will shift with time and technology and the surrounding conditions. We know that cars are rarely used when road availability is limited by infrastructure or traffic conditions. Its use rate also changes according to traffic and speed of transport in the car. Basically in my thesis study, the car use rate is always below availability rate and as road clears and traffic improves through lets say road enlarged or more networks, the car use rate increases to immediately fill. However, even then the use rate is much higher than availability rate.
Many planning departments then considered share use autonomous vehicles being the urban car's future. High density living suits this as car spaces are also a cost on development and recreational space. The whole aim is to move towards better efficiency in space and emissions too as by-product to paradigm shift.
A car will develop within 15 years into two very distinct categories or types, first would be the conventional understanding and second will be like those autonomous minibus that carries 7 people or so that has been used in some cities in China for over 3 years now. This is the second category of future car although the form and use may be slightly more different to these existing autonomous cars.
The point is to solve personal transportation problem for lower wealth people and offer similar utility. Private personal car in conventional form where today's consumer values are still going to be the same will remain as main demanded form as these products continue to be affordable to Chinese middle class but poorer people at the moment have only public transport option or extremely cheap cars or second hand cars which cost in maintenance and repairs. Basically there is a market and there is a planning requirement from urban design and emissions.
Networked autodriving is to bring these two categories together with autonomous bus and every other node status and platform. You may think cars and trains and ferries are separate but to integrate all transport forms and nodes together means being able to vastly improve the efficiency of everyone to the point a day in a major city you end up saving 1 million collective hours. Or so the maths suggest at optimal performance. As in you can calculate the gap between observed current conditions and what is possible to achieve. In sense that no individual requires any wait above let's say arbitrary 10 seconds between nodes and platforms. A person who needs to use his shared auto vehicle to get from his apartment to train station with connection required to go to rural town can do it without waiting for the train and this train and all users requiring a seat on this train is optimized where they arrive together and the entire city's journeys are calculated so that just the right number of people need to arrive at this station without overcrowding it and the system distributes a collective optimal solution to all user.
My language is poor so explain and honestly this requires maybe 50 pages to explain properly but I hope you understand the general idea. It isn't to say all users who need this will overwhelm one service. It is to balance the whole thing and only a properly integrated system provides the foundation for this but the software algorithm solution is the brains and already this is solved in China. Even the computing hardware to run this AI is pretty much ready. What is missing is the implementation of the scale and each node and platform to be upgraded to even be able to take this on. By 2025, more EVs will be used and these OS will be more in trial.