

If the car were invented today... - jesusmichael

How would you design it?
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jlebrech
It would be a hybrid tram/car, they would have to follow a track but that
track wouldn't be electrified fully it would be a guide for where they can go,
just at stops and parking is where the car could charge. the cars would have
an urban and rural mode. rural would work without those tracks.

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6d0debc071
I don't know a lot about car to suggest changes to wheels and engines - that
line of thing.

Automating cars... well, that's a relatively hard problem to do wholesale.

I suspect the first thing I'd look into would be simplifying.

Lane changing is stressful, people tailgating is stressful, parking can be
difficult.

Lane keeping isn't as hard a problem as automating the entire drive. And it
doesn't seem like it should be hard to link that up to something that says
move one lane over. And from there to check if a space in the next lane is
clear - iterate that until it is and then move over.

Replace the steering wheel with a clicky joystick. Set it up so that when
someone's near a parking space and they move the joystick towards it the car
parks in that space.

Keeping distance isn't hard, but a lot of people don't do it. It's not hard in
a mathematical sense either. Replace the gearstick and so on with a slider
with a desired speed setting. Approximate that speed as closely as possible
while maintaining a decent distance from the car in front.

And, incase the software went squify, a big red button that would stop the car
via some non-software set-up.

You can probably break it down into many more sub-points. This is like a five
minute 'if I', after all. But, I suspect that sort of thing would remove a lot
of the day to day aggravation of driving. You'd be indicating your _intent_ to
the car, doing the planning, but the car would be doing the stressful
implementation details.

And as computer vision, general automation, got better you could start to do
things like automatically moving out around junctions to maintain a smooth
flow of traffic, executing better zipper merges - and so on. So that there
wouldn't be that hard line between the driver being in control of the car and
the computer being responsible. Each iteration would just require the person
to touch the controls less, until they didn't have to touch them at all.

