Tech Crunch reports California DMV Changes Rules to Allow Testing and Use of Fully Autonomous Vehicles.
The California Department of Motor Vehicles is changing its rules to allow companies to test autonomous vehicles without a driver behind the wheel — and to let the public use autonomous vehicles.The DMV released a revised version of its regulations and has started a 15-day public comment period, ending October 25, 2017.
“We are excited to take the next step in furthering the development of this potentially life-saving technology in California,” the state’s Transportation Secretary, Brian Kelly, said in a statement.
With the newly revised regulations, California drives a bit farther down the road for autonomous vehicle testing, but it’s not alone. Singapore has already established zones for autonomous vehicle testing, and other nations are pushing to assume the pole position in the autonomous vehicle race.
Within one year or so of final approval (not just testing), driverless trucks on interstate highways will be the norm, not the exception. Airport taxis will follow.
My 2022 date for trucks may very well be too pessimistic.
If you have a job driving nearly anything but specialty services, it will likely be gone by 2025.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Driverless trucks will happen for long haul, but there will be a lot of bugs to iron out for short haul, which poses some great potential liability issues.
All electric would require massive (trillions)infrastructure investments by Government(s), all of whom are currently insolvent, and also a lot more fossil fuel power plants. Not going to happen.
“Within one year or so of final approval (not just testing), driverless trucks on interstate highways will be the norm, not the exception.”
I can’t see this happening in a year. Every company owning trucks would just scrap them all in a year? What is the average lifespan of a truck on the highway? Production might be the norm in a year but not the highway traffic.
I can’t wait for the driverless RV. Since CA will not be part of the US in 20 yrs, their devalued currency, call in the Brown dollar, should make their vehicles relatively cheap.
Ok. This truck just killed an over the road “driver” job but became a boon to the transportation attendant industry because the technology exists to safely and efficiently move large amounts of people and stuff.
link to youtube.com
>I am more optimistic about driverless than I am about all-electric. I believe autonomous will advance faster than all-electric over the next 15 years, as the cost/benefit will advance faster. I still think that most autonomous vehicles will be hybrids with both battery/electric propulsion and gas/diesel propulsion.
@Realist
Oh, growing up in the country I know in my heart you’re right on a much larger scale than a lot of urban people realize. In the country, electric tractors and farm trucks just aren’t going to cut it and seem even more ridiculous if the energy that’s charging it is some other fossil fuel that can only be accessed through a wire. How much of the country still isn’t electrified for crying out loud and is that really our long term goal? Wires everywhere? I digress. No. I think where EV could be very impactful is in population dense areas where a lot of people drive no faster than 35 miles per hour on and don’t go more than 10-20 miles one way to work. Everything about that and light engine hybrids has the potential to change if no longer viewed as something meant for “federal highways”.
I love what you’re saying about hybrids. I also love what California is doing to induce/protect innovation. When I lived in Minnesota I worked real hard to get our representatives to deregulate our state roads so that local companies like Polaris and Arctic Cat to experiment with lighter engines and lighter bodies for lighter use applications like the deep country and dense urban areas. I didn’t get much traction but we get so much more out of so much less, I feel like we’re holding ourselves back because things used to be done the way we do them now.
link to coroflot.com
link to google.com
Automated buses would still need to pick up, drop off and service *people* somewhere too. They’ll sell a lot fewer CB’s but maybe rent more devices? Fun to think about.
I suspect Flying J can easily be modified to become a truck service facility instead of a food roadstop. He may just want the real estate.
If the trucks are going to be driverless, and impact on gas stations negative, why did
Buffet just buy 25% of Flying J? Anybody have any insight into what he sees that I can’t?
Mish you are naive to think fully autonomous trucks would be used for long hauling before the next decade. There are so many factors that prevent this technology from becoming pervasive –sensors are still not nearly as effective as the human eye when dealing with adverse weather conditions, glare, poorly maintained roads, issues with signage etc. Processing still has a long way to go before the vehicles have the ability to make split second decisions on par with the human brain. And then there is technological vulnerability- hacking. There may be limited use of autonomous vehicles in the next several years, but its at least a decade before they will be pervasive enough to wipe out jobs. Remember that right now, most Americans are against the concept of self driving vehicles. There is zero tolerance for any missteps taken. It would only take one disaster where a multi ton autonomous truck misreads a Detour sign or disregards a sudden road closure for the public backlash to create a tremendous setback in the industry. Companies will not be rushing into this any time soon.
Driver-less is just part of the disruption, the impact autonomous *and* electric also shouldn’t be overlooked. What does it do to the grid, what does it do to the gas station whose only margins are on the items they sell when people fuel up or when their cars go fuel themselves up?
One won’t need to purchase a self-driving car, one would summon it using an app and pay a ridiculously low fare. The insurance will be an infinitesimal fraction of current insurance because self-driving cars would be nearly perfectly safe.
So posting occurs when you hit enter. Wow.
it is a question of market demand for such a vehicle… what business or individual is going to pay more (there will be a premium) for a vehicle that is slow & limited? And just wait until the insurance actuarial tables are updated w/ driverless vehicle data – the insurance won’t be cheap, either.
I think driverless vehicles will happen, but there are several issues that aren’t addressed. Could someone steal a car, fill it with explosives and have the car drive into a crowd and detonate it? Could someone program a car to run another person over? At least now there’s a driver to blame. Without a driver, where do you start to investigate?
Let’s just wait & see how these tests + trials progress… it is not a question of whether ‘driverless vehicles’ are possible – of course they are – it is a question of market demand for such a vehicle… what business or individual is going to pay more (there will be a premium) for a vehicle that is slow & limited? And just wait until the insurance actuarial tables are updated w/ driverless vehicle data – the insurance won’t be cheap, either.
link to npr.org
The economic impact will be Yuuge:
Should reduce the number of pedestrian fatalities. First order is to implement these units in night driving situations. Then have them programmed to stop at all bars. After we take drunk drivers off the road we install a cellphone shutdown device for non autonomous cars. If you use your cellphone your car shuts off. A cellphone in the car is akin to an open pint of bourbon. There is employment out there for those luddites who refuse to use cell or smartphones, you can be designated drivers for hire. I think in the end that might be better than robotics to have a human driver with no technological dependence.
link to business.financialpost.com “But ever since crude’s collapse sent oilsands producers on years-long cost-cutting drives, the long-term prospects for heavy-haul operators have deteriorated. For instance, Suncor Energy Inc. is hiring such drivers for its new Fort Hills oilsands mine, but the job postings show the positions are just 12-month contracts.
One possible reason for the position’s now transitory nature is that Suncor has been piloting the use of driverless trucks in the oilsands on a fleet of six heavy haulers for two years and will decide whether to implement the autonomous system company-wide at the end of this year.” link to unifor.org ” More recently Local 707A has been resisting Suncor’s efforts to shed good jobs in favour of driverless trucks, something Smith sees as a betrayal of the social license that all extraction companies must maintain.” The buttons on this new site certainly are touchy, I think I got it now.
3 times lucky???
@JohnSellers: Early gains can be spectacular looking in almost any field. Similarly rapid early advances in robotic/AI capabilities were what roped in and committed Honda (and others) to Asimo and such programs back when Japan was at their peak can-do-no-wrong hype era. But then the advances started slowing down. And down. And down. They’re still making advances, so it’s not as if nothing’s coming from it. But the complexity space as you get closer to anything truly useful, is growing at a faster and faster rate as well. IOW Asimo, along with the rest of Japan’s “we don’t need kids ’cause we can build robots” projects, followed the exact same path as the US military’s swooning over AI in the 50s. Early promises, then more promises, then more…… But never anything other than promises………
Whoops, I’ll try this again.
“But ever since crude’s collapse sent oilsands producers on years-long cost-cutting drives, the long-term prospects for heavy-haul operators have deteriorated. For instance, Suncor Energy Inc. is hiring such drivers for its new Fort Hills oilsands mine, but the job postings show the positions are just 12-month contracts.
One possible reason for the position’s now transitory nature is that Suncor has been piloting the use of driverless trucks in the oilsands on a fleet of six heavy haulers for two years and will decide whether to implement the autonomous system company-wide at the end of this year.”
I’m really glad your covering this. There was just an awesome econtalk on the impact of AV and EV.
link to econtalk.org
Here’s the link to the mp3: -http://files.libertyfund.org/econtalk/y2017/Evanscars.mp3
Meh, I guess I get how this thing posts now.
Oh, and this new site posts when you hit enter. My bad. Following up on my last comment, Google’s numbers show them going from 1200 miles in 2015 to 5500 miles in 2016, better than a 4-fold increase. Arbitrarily, if the feds said we need 200,000 miles between manual interventions before some kind of certification, at a 4 fold increase/year, we would see Google hit it in just 3 years. So I guess I’m less skeptical now.
I have been fairly skeptical about AVs, but I recently ran across the numbers on how many miles the vehicles can be driven before a human has to intervene. I thought that was an interesting metric. So if Google is going 2000 miles in one year and then going 2005 miles in year 2, then I assume it would be extremely long (if ever) before we would see them in general production.
I suggest that “last mile” services will still be there.