KCRag Forum

Meet the car that runs on compressed air. The Tata Airpod. It goes 125 miles on a tank with fill up cost about $1.50 per tank. Top speed around 40 mph. It seats three adults and takes about two minutes to fill the tank. Maybe at some point in the future, the City, or some entrepeneur, should set up a car-sharing program with these downtown, around Westport, and at the Plaza.

Tata Motors in India is manufacturing them. They sell for around $10,000.



http://www.core77.com/blog/transportati ... _23193.asp

I'd rather not like to see what happens when a Ford Expedition t-bones one of those.

Airbags!

Who needs a license? Self-driving cars coming

While most industry officials don't envision a fully self-driving, or autonomous, vehicle before 2025, features such as adaptive cruise control or traffic jam assist that automatically slow or apply the brakes for a car in certain situations are already being introduced. And much like anti-lock brakes became the norm after initial resistance, these new technologies will prepare drivers for a future where they are needed less.
"The whole concept of a car being able to drive itself is pretty profound," said Larry Burns, GM's former research and development chief and an adviser for Google's self-driving car project. "This is the most transformational play to hit the auto industry in 125 years."

Autonomous cars will change the shape of cities...probably for the better. I can't wait.

Volker Dad wrote:Autonomous cars will change the shape of cities...probably for the better. I can't wait.

perhaps, but this isn't one of them

flyingember wrote:

Volker Dad wrote:Autonomous cars will change the shape of cities...probably for the better. I can't wait.

perhaps, but this isn't one of them

I was referring to KCMax's post, of course.

you still have to find places to store all of the cars; that's a big part of what killed cities. driverless cars won't save us.

DaveKCMO wrote:you still have to find places to store all of the cars; that's a big part of what killed cities. driverless cars won't save us.

Though driverless cars offer the potential for much more efficient car-sharing, meaning less total cars and places to park needed.

AJoD wrote:

DaveKCMO wrote:you still have to find places to store all of the cars; that's a big part of what killed cities. driverless cars won't save us.

Though driverless cars offer the potential for much more efficient car-sharing, meaning less total cars and places to park needed.

You could have a fleet of two seat, electric, driver less cabs that would serve the "core". No other cars would be allowed in the "core". (I'm thinking something a little bigger than the Tata Airpod up there, maybe a Smart Car sized vehicle.

Build light rail, commuter rail to serve the urbanized parts of the city. Build parking garages for everyone else on the perimeter of the "core" with CODEC (Core Operating Driverless Electric Cab) stops at the garages.

Bada boom, bada bing, Bon Jovi. You just changed the entire dynamic of your urban core. No reason this couldn't be done in KC or NYC or Lee's Summit.

You could walk to your destination for free. You could BikeShare for a few bucks. You could ride a street car for a few bucks more. Or, for a price similar to a regular cab, you can still have privacy in the CODEC.

You would still have to maintain city street big enough for delivery trucks. OH, UNLESS you built a "loading dock" for the core where trucks and rail cars could be unloaded onto a CODEP (Core Operating Driverless Electric Porter) that would wisk off to a grocery store, or Best Buy, or a restaurant with its order. For small multi package deliveries a clerk could ride around on the CODEP. But for full loads to a single destination you could leave it unmanned.

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I have often thought that driver-less cars will, at least initially, still be mostly be driver-run. The only real way I see solely driver-less cars being efficient is with a comprehensive communications network not just to put down the path that the car is going to run and communicate with other cars, but also to take into account of little quirks such as road conditions, driveway locations, places that are off-road, and the desire to stop someplace that piques one's interest passing by. With some spots in this country, that can end up becoming very difficult.
Where they will be driver-less in on the highways (something that would definitely be nice on long hauls), as well as in the developed urban cores (I really like the remote parking potential).

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mean wrote:I'd rather not like to see what happens when a Ford Expedition t-bones one of those.

Looks safer than a 2 seater "Smart".

You can invest all the technology you want in automating cars, but it's still dumb. Rubber + asphalt is not efficient, and not easy to control given environmental factors such as rain, snow, and ice. Why we have this perverse fetish with personal automobiles with rubber tires on asphalt pavement is completely beyond me. There are better ideas out there. Shit, there was a time when a car in the street was an annoyance. Streets were for people, maybe horses and carriages. Now streets are wholely the domain of multi-ton metal death machines, and we accept this as though it were gospel to the point that we reject any alternative transportation concept. How sad.

mean wrote:You can invest all the technology you want in automating cars, but it's still dumb. Rubber + asphalt is not efficient, and not easy to control given environmental factors such as rain, snow, and ice. Why we have this perverse fetish with personal automobiles with rubber tires on asphalt pavement is completely beyond me. There are better ideas out there. Shit, there was a time when a car in the street was an annoyance. Streets were for people, maybe horses and carriages. Now streets are wholely the domain of multi-ton metal death machines, and we accept this as though it were gospel to the point that we reject any alternative transportation concept. How sad.

"Nay" said yea, yea naysayer.

I'm not naysaying, I'm yeasaying. Yea to the idea that cars are fucking stupid. Get on board.

In 1982, they said we would have flying personal transports by 2019. Where's my Spinner?

pash wrote:Yes, early driverless cars will still require a "driver" to monitor things. I'm sure that will be true for quite a while for legal and regulatory reasons, if not technological ones.

Many of the driverless cars now in development use LIDAR to build a detailed model of the physical environment around them. This gives them the ability to respond to unusual events much better than can cars that rely primarily on GPS and more primitive technologies to help them figure out what's going on in the immediate vicinity.

I suspect that LIDAR will likely be used in conjunction with both GPS and wireless systems set along highways/urban environments (a possible use for the Google Fiber network?).
One element that I believe is an integral key for automation is inter-vehicle communication. In an automated setting, even at high speeds, it should allow for completely seamless flow (imagine, lane merging where every car understands and cooperate with each other) and contribute towards road information, and in a manual setting, such communication can end up compensating quite a bit for gaps in human senses. I would even suspect that even old manually-driven cars would required to be retrofitted with such a system if they are to be road-worthy, and they may still be barred from entering certain locations (a high-speed automated highway for example).

If anything, an automated system should seriously decrease the need for increased lane size in highways, even with large volumes of traffic.

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