The end of petrol and diesel cars? All vehicles will be electric by 2025, says expert

i read the report. Expert? I need to get some business cards then with EXPERT in bold letters. Similar to when I see "Scientists say...", anything with "experts agree..." just immediately gives me the internal eye roll, "Yeah right...".

In summary it is just a hit piece on the ICE (internal combustion engine), I suspect paid for "in some ways removed" by Tesla or an associated trade organisation. Purpose: reduce confidence in ICE vehicles.

The comments are interesting. Many miss the point. The report isn't about EV (electric vehicles), it is about self driving vehicles. Some magical tipping point (they see driverless vehicles like smartphone adoption) occurring in 2021. After that point the take-up will be logarithmic in nature, and by 2030 95% of US passenger miles will be by autonomous vehicles.

The report is centred around some magical US city of the future. Which certainly doesn't exist now, cannot be created by 2030 and also is a city and cultural model than has no relevance to much of the world.

Just quickly lookin at that from an engineering viewpoint, an IT viewpoint and a social viewpoint.

We have the Dog of Doom. A big great dane decides it has had enough and goes for a run around the driverless city. One dog, gridlock. Unless you program to say "dog? don't emergency stop".

Activists/pissed off with something/teenagers for the fun? Just a bunch of them walk out into the street at selected points. Everything stops. There is no taxi driver to shout "Get out of the way asshole!"/threaten with a tyre iron. The occupants? Well they aren't paying attention, and even if they were, would the vehicle let them out with the car on the highway? Not just for safety, but because one more body on the road causes a living obstruction. And unless we want our vehicles to be given the right to decide whom to run over or not, then the vehicles stop.

Of course you could then totally segregate vehicles. But then that is worst than now re effective use of space, and life of the city. And think of the infrastructure changes.

Then there is issue that human and computer driven vehicles do not mix and will have to be segregated.

Then of course there is the one event, the chaotic system moment, that no amount of testing will be able to minimise. The alignment of events such that a major accident occurs that causes people to lose confidence OVERNIGHT. You know, the dog chasing the cat in a storm, just as the alignment of cars causes the emergency braking to trigger etc etc...

This isn't an IT issue. It isn't just a upload of the latest software patch. We are talking about large engineered objects. What if the problem is found with the sensors? Or with the latency of physical components?

Nowhere in that report did I see the agreement on standards. Without that agreement nothing will take off.

Socially, what about the interior state of taxis now? Then think about a taxi without a driver to keep an eye on things. They will be unpleasant places to spend any time. Of course you could have full on-time, real-time surveillance. Then who wants to travel where every word and movement is monitored?

With such a rapidly expanding market, the technology will never stand still. How to guarantee interoperabilty? Infrastructure changes will take years, how do they cope with an ever changing target?

You could go on and on...

The speed of this things will be limited to say 20 kmh. I think the reality is for cities is that people will self-drive, but more likely drive an electric pod-type bicycle/tricycle, i.e. weather protection.

And there are so many other social aspects. but the greenies will want to override them to force this. "This is the way!". The Tesla/Apple/Goolge fan-boy elite. Against the luddites, ignorant and the "old" (these terms are being used already) And as we have seen over the last few years, democracies will eventually push back.

Then the area of what effect the power of these super corporations will have. The market, individual choice? The Trabant was not defined by the market but by the regulations.

Microsoft was never about innovation it was creating a monopoly. The effects of that can be seen now this weekend with the WannaCry episode. Imagine that with automated passenger vehicles?

We can go further with the Intelligence services? Needing the system to have unknown vulnerabilities.

Just some off the cuff remarks in the morning.

An intelligent driverless battery car, would leave the Tesla showroom, and drive itself direct to a recycling centre, alerting Fire and Rescue Services to its presence en route.

Fires amongst piled-up unwanted rubbish in recycling centres, are all the rage in the UK at the moment, they go on for weeks, unsustainably, and none of the energy is recovered. This is Green Blob "Rip-Off Britain" at its most wasteful and contaminating.

Obviously the Taxpayer has to pay for it all, with subsidies, because no one with intelligence would risk their own money, in case it went up in smoke.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/cars/comment/traffic-sign-recognition-doesnt-work-like-deadly-game-numberwang/

This article sums up some of the problems.

Robot cars will never take off until you can sit in the back and have a kip. Taxis maybe but as you identify, the hazards are numerous.

Part of the problem is the mindset of "anticipating designing a shit-picker-upper for the projected number of horses just before the car turned up"...

For this idea to work, the advancements in technology would have to be major. Yet when you have those advancements there is no way of knowing where they will lead. It isn't linear, it isn't cause and effect.

The point is, the car (or equivalent trasnport vehicle) is not the solution. The developed technology will lead is in all sorts of directions, history has always shown this.

That want to make the whole world static and advance autonomous cars. Advancements do not work like that.

It is another chaotic system.

May 17, 2017 at 7:52 AM | Jiminy Cricket + others

There exists a generation of people (all ages groups) who believe in other people's visions of the future.

In the film "Back to the Future", the DeLorean car reappears from the future, able to fly, AND powered by household rubbish. I am sure it would have worked even better, if powered by horse crap, but that would not fit with the "clean" Green Blob Agenda.

I reckon it will be electric jet-packs propelled by the ejection of discharged AAA batteries.
The horse shit picker-uppers can be re-employed as battery picker-uppers.
Think of all the jobs.

Think of all the jobs.

May 17, 2017 at 10:18 AM | expert

The battery picker-uppers will have to have a horse drawn cart, to carry all the batteries, including full environmental decontamination unit in case the batteries leak or catch fire.

The horse drawn cart, will have to be followed by another horse drawn cart, to pick up all the horse sh!t, meanwhil Green Blob Bull Sh!t is spread like muck all over the planet.

I reckon it will be electric jet-packs propelled by the ejection of discharged AAA batteries.
May 17, 2017 at 10:18 AM | Unregistered Commenterexpert

...May not be so far from the truth. I've read that people are already working on drones that can transport people by air over short-ish distances in cities. I quite like the idea and think it will appeal strongly in the market place..

Some of this leads onto a related subject and something that again is not considered.

I have no wish to get into Facebook nostalgia about "when we were kids we didn't..." (and I will resist the word "snowflake"), but I am not sure that future generations in "western society" can cope with risk in same way we have. I am not sure growing up I even had a comfort zone to step out of ("Eee when I was a lad as big as me dad".)

Planes falling out of the sky you often never heard about. Few hundred thousant wiped in China? Towards the end of the Nine O'Clock news. Now one plane downs and it is front page news. One person's risk and the outcomes is everyone's.

People will hand over their lives more and more to technology. Technology will make the risk decisions for them.

But... when that technology fails, and it will, either through negligence, fate or just interacting overly complex systems, what will be the effect on trust?

Look at the time lags on technology to market for aviation and military? Things are out of date before they become operational. Because lives are part of the equation.

Look at HTML? It took over 20 years to come with up a standard and implementation of that standard, that allowed the browser to do everything, and yet it still has variations in the real world implementations. Displaying p0rn properly isn't life threatening.

IT has changed in career. I came up with my own rule to reflect current development quality. The natural quality level is 80%. You can push and push and try your best, and raise it to 90%. But as soon as you take that away it naturally returns to 80%. When all this development overlaps and is in areas of significant risk management then reliability should not be expected.

I was brought up by parents who knew from first hand experience, "Shit happens". But that frame of mind is becoming less prevalent.

I have no idea how this will play out. My Hillman Imp doesn't even have a fuse box or an air bag.
.
The increasingly fast cycles of technological advancement, the encroachment into areas that threaten life, and societies lessening acceptance of individual and self determining risk, will make an interesting recipe. And no one can predict the outcomes.

GolfCharlie. I like your idea of ejecting batteries but I think you miss the point of where the energy comes from. One of the negatives about brexiting is that we give up access to a wealth of subsidized green energy, namely the sugar mountain and the wine lake. Before you jump on the obvious, I am aware that the dilute ethanol of inferior European plonk has too low an energy density to power a go-cart (or in this case a stay-cart), but my point is that after drinking some of it you won't care whether you go anywhere or will have forgotten why you wanted to go. This effect will protect our kids from exposure to uncombusted ethanol fumes which otherwise would make taking them to school very pleasant.

May 18, 2017 at 7:24 AM | Supertroll

The importance of turning wine lakes into "water" albeit with a very high concentration of nitrites and nitrates, has certainly not been missed by UK and EU politicians, and their own strenuous efforts to prove their technical expertise and commitment has led to burbled warnings about globule spawning, o'shun arse seedy vacations, and the decline in articulated ice.

Jean Claude Juncker has been preaching high octane fumes with every breath over the last few years, but fellow Politicians have been slurred to the point of confusion.

I think the EU have been working on taking the piss from themselves, to power their own flights of care free travel, as a trial for schoolchildren to take the piss out of their parents and teachers to power the family car.

The SNP may also have seen that natural resources could repower their own economy, and keep the population happy.

Self-driving cars will add $7 trillion a year to global economy, says Intel

Another article making an equivalence between the rise of mobile phones and the likely same with self-drive cars. Of course this one is pushed by Intel.

Transport is an engineering, social and safety issue. Not just a technology issue like mobile phones. Look what happened to the Samsung Note when a few users had theirs catch fire. In our younger days "shit happens" was an accepted fact of life. Now? One person dies and the whole world knows about it and the reasons and effects talked about. Everyone has an opinion. Risk is not allowed.

They claim to know the future. But with the amount of technical advancement, the amount of infrastructure change, and the amount of social change required to meet their predictions, there is no way of knowing what the outcomes will be.

The future cannot be predicted. It isn't linear. it is chaotic. And that chaos is only going to become greater as the time between events happening and the spread of those events globally becomes shorter and shorter.

The future is not a flat pond where you throw one stone into the water and see the ripples. It is a sea, and as the world becomes more connected, that sea will have more and more waves.

"Self-driving cars will add $7 trillion a year to global economy, says Intel"

Jun 3, 2017 at 6:07 AM | Jiminy Cricket

I wonder how much would be added to the global economy if all Greens were forced to use a single horse and cart?

However much that economy would pay for an eighty hand tall clydesdale and enough giant sequoias to spoke some 400 foot wheels.

Well Grenfell Towers gave an example and "event to effect" ratio will only get worse.

Self-driving cars will have events and their effects will spread immediately around the world on all media.

And if to also show that people are losing their ability to cope with "shit happens"... an engine failure on a flight

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/06/25/terrifying-footage-shows-airasia-flight-shaking-returning-airport/

Rasool Zareie, who was trying to get back home to Iran with his family, said more support should have been offered.

"In this kind of situation you need counselling," he told ABC.

Counseling? But then even the Pilot said everyone should pray. For an engine failure? That is perfectly within the design criteria of the aircraft. It didn't help the flight crew or the passengers. It added nothing to the situation but fear.

Front page of the Telegraph, smartphone video. Self-driving cars will have cameras everywhere. I cannot imagine insurance companies accepting anything else. It doesn't matter what the percentage of events are, but they will be online and shared for to see.