Self-drive cars ahead

[Eli]

Originally posted by: dolph
they've been messing around with this on (private) roads in san diego (and probably other places, too) for the past 10 or more years. the most likely solution won't be an entire retrofitting of every road in the country, but rather individual lanes on highways that are equipped with the technology (like, the 2 left-most lanes), and a heavy gov't subsidy for cars to be equipped too. we're still about 20-30 years from seeing anything more widescale than that, minimum.

True. It would definately take time. They do have to re-pave roads pretty often though, so it does seem plausible for it to be worked into existing roadways.. But you're probably right, seperate lanes or whatever would be the way to go, and that would solve the problem of all the millions of used cars that won't have the system.

It's exciting, really. Knowing that I'll most likely be alive when big changes like this come about is really cool. 🙂

 

[StageLeft]

Yeah individual lanes in the highway sound good. Make it the innermost lane or something. Then when everybody else is in bumper to bumper traffic and you're cruising along at 70mph I think everyone will want to pay for it on their car :0

 

[AgentEL]

This is the project i'm working on now actually. As stated in previous posts, there is a section in San Diego designated to do our testing. In 1997, we outfitted several cars to drive in a platoon without human assistance.

We can also make them merge successfully. I remember the first time I was in the merging car, I was totally unaware they were going to do that so I got all freaked that a car was so close to the side of us. All automated.

Right now, we're working on retrofitting buses and Freightliners to drive themselves.