I have never learned to drive and I don't plan to learn it anytime soon, unless I move to somewhere with abysmal public transport for some reason.
Of course it all depends on your personal mobility habits and where you live, but in many big cities, you can absolutely get by without ever sitting in a car.
Yeah, my car doesn't charge me surge pricing. I never have to stand in the rain waiting for it to show up. I can set the HVAC controls the way I want. The mechanic doesn't take my money up front and bleed it away for boondoggle politically motivated projects then ask me to pay more to do the work I already paid him for.
For day to day commuting public transit can be less stressful but for going where you want when you want it's hard to beat a car.
This is a perspective from a very specific environment. If you live in a dense city, chances are you won't get to keep your car near you house or the other places you're going to, so you'll have to walk in the rain to and from it. Plus, European gas prices feel like surge pricing every day :|
I live and work in a city in the Northeast US. The number of easily accessible parking spaces to me is less than the number of vehicles and people who need to use them in my household. It's no different than college where parking is a "long enough to be annoying in the winter" walk away.
I generally walk anywhere under two miles and avoid driving between 7am and 7pm. Having a means of transportation under my personal control readily available to me is well worth it. Tonight I'm going to go meet someone selling something on Craigslist. It's about the size of a milk crate and weighs >50lb. I could carry it on the subway and do it for free (monthly pass).
Next week I have to get a coffee table. Sure, I could buy one online but I think buying a used high quality one for cheap/free on CL or from a thrift store and having the ability to get precise measurements in advance
I could take an Uber or taxi but it only takes a few Ubers a week to be more expensive than owning a car (if you own it outright).
If your life involves doing anything more than being a worker bee who goes lives by a schedule and pays someone else for assistance with transportation outside that scope then having your own means of transportation is invaluable in terms of convenience and possibly cheaper.
Like everything else (including riding a bike), this is true of the beginner, and relegated to your subconscious after a few dozen hours. It all just becomes automatic.
I drove past half a dozen stop signs, hundreds of cars, several traffic lights, four different speed zones, and made a cross-traffic turn, and was thinking about testing code this morning.
You can pay attention without having to actively think about what you're doing, just requires making it a habit.
Once you get past that point, though, you're faced with your personality type.
In my 20s I loved driving, I had my radio, complete privacy, my 1.5 commute was tolerable.
Now I'm in my 30s, and I hate my hour spent in the car everyday. Not because I can't find a good song or a good podcast, it's just that it feels like such an enormous waste of time. At least if I used public transit I'd be getting exercise. In my car, I'm just forced to sit and pay attention to the road, I can't read HackerNews or watch a show or read a book that isn't available in audio.
I think this is something which is brushed off too often in these conversations. In the context of US-posters (in many forums I've seen), it seems very likely to them that within 20 or so years, autonomous cars will take over. There's already a big change there happening in consumer driving habits, and I guess that because it's where a lot of the technology is being developed the roll-out is a lot more obvious.
Here in places like Australia, I don't forsee it happening on the same scale in the same timeframe. There are different factors here such as the immense distances, inconsistent road surfaces and those bloody Kangaroos which is going to pose real challenges for automakers, as they already have been.
I don't think it's going to be that long before learning to drive is purely an optional thing in the same way learning to ride a horse is, but I think it'll be a fair bit longer than people are mentioning here. At least globally.
There is a large portion of land in the US (area, not population) that is in the same boat as you - minus the kangaroos.
Challenges in my area and others:
Cell reception is not just poor, it often doesn't exist.
GPS on my phone and car drop now and then. Maybe to many trees?
Roads are of varying condition and can change anytime. Some you know not to go on in certain weather, etc.
Road maps are still wrong. I've fixed the ones I care about on Google. Some roads don't exist, others have addressing issues that are so bad it will put you in the wrong end of the county.
I'd enjoy a self driving car, but they are a long ways off in my area and many others. I'm sure it will happen, but it is a whole different world than a city.
I don't know that making it work in the middle of nowhere is worse than a city, but it is a different set of problems and manufacturers will of course target the cities first. So to you in the outback (not the Subaru), you aren't alone. Most discussion about what life is like in the US doesn't apply to me either.
US actually has a considerably competitive advantage in that their roads (especially in cities) are so much easier to navigate than in Europe.
"Autonomous" vehicles are SO far away from navigating European cities. Picked a few random locations (all two-way roads by the way, often with pedestrian and bicycle traffic). It's probably 30 years out when a car can drive these:
It will be a very long time before self driving cars are practical in parts of the US that do not have comparatively easy conditions for all the reasons you mentioned. Some cities in the southeast that have good automotive infrastructure will see adoption soon after the southwest. Self driving cars won't be typical in Boston or NYC for longer. Those sorts of cities don't have stupid proof markings for traffic flow the way cities that were built out post WWII do so there's a lot more subtle things involved in day to day driving that are hard problems by themselves. Odd intersections, potholes, situations where typical behavior is dependent on traffic volume, snow, etc. Rural areas add another set of unique edge cases.
Nobody is gonna pay extra for a car that can't deal with a set of conditions they encounter frequently. Have any Indian companies poured big money into driver-less cars lately?
Different yes, but they only started looking into them in 2015. To claim that it would be a blocking factor for getting l3 cars operational in Oz is a stretch.
In my parts even the deer aren't the same. The white tail and mule deer don't behave the same. I know I react differently to them. I can see why a kangaroo might cause issues too.
i would guess one decade at most in many countries. The last person to ever need a driving license for private transportation has already been born imo*
*in countries with reasonably advanced infrastructure and somewhat stable economies
I come from a 1st world country where the average car is 12 years old. Unless you can buy a level-4 car today(tip: you can't) 90% saturation in a decade is just impossible. I think 40-50 years is the likely target.
I'll believe that when I see it. Try using autonomous driving in the snow and get back to me. Nothing they've presented or have even talked about being on the roadmap solves the issue.
Autonomous ride services will come to sunny cities first, but the amount of money to be made in transportation guarantees that snowy cities like NYC and Boston won't have to wait many more years after.
So, 5mph on roads that already have tracks for the car to follow and barriers for it to see on either side. Curbs that aren't buried. Street signs and lights lining the road.
I live 5 miles outside of the nearest town and frequently have to drive long before a plow hits the road and long before it has warmed up enough for blacktop to be visible. That video doesn't even prove they can handle ACTUAL conditions when it's snowing in anything but the most ideal situation and at a speed that would require me spending 4 hours to get to work.
I mean... it's better than nothing but it's definitely not something that changes my mind on it being ridiculous to think that's replacing a human driver anytime soon.
It heartens me to see this. Still very early in the process though - that's pretty close to the best case snow (it is awfully wet, which can be a pain), perfectly clean sensors, great visibility, and moving at about 5mph (as a point of comparison Montana drivers would be going at or near the speed limit in similar conditions - >45 for the gentle curves, 25 leading into the right angle turns).
I also saw the car starting to break free (i.e. start a sideways slide) just as they clipped to another scene; that's what I want to see more of. It's an unavoidable occurrence in winter driving conditions, and the proper recovery to those is the most important skill to learn to drive on snow.
I saw thin layer of ice appear on parking sensors after few minutes of driving in snowy conditions, triggering "close object" warnings. And cars get dirty all the time, I wonder if cars will end up with separate wiper for each sensor.
Google has a wiper on one of their car-top sensors. Another trick is to alternately spray wiper fluid and air to clean sensors. We had that on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle, and the upcoming Continental LIDAR seems to have a spray nozzle. The SICK LMS is available with a scanner glass with heating elements, so ice can be cleared. All those problems have been solved by good mechanical engineering.
> All those problems have been solved by good mechanical engineering.
And yet we're still limited to scraping blades made from rubber over tempered glass with the help of a bit of liquid cleaner...
Given how bug guts require a good bit of manual scrubbing to clear off a windshield and the cumulative impact of rock impacts, I'm not convinced they'll stay clear for any meaningful amount of time - at least not on a commuter vehicle timescale.
Heated glass will help, but it's not a guaranteed thing; ask anyone with a rear window defroster how long it takes to clear ice and snow off.
