
BMW to crowdsource the design of their megacity-centric future car  - evo_9
http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/137343-bmw-crowdsource-megacity-future-car
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potatolicious
$5 says it ends up something like this:

<http://simpsons.wikia.com/wiki/The_Homer>

Seriously though, I'm not sure if the future megacities will really have many
cars, at least not the personal vehicle variety.

I'm sure BMW is looking for ideas, but IMO the solution is outside of the box
they're willing to work within (i.e., private car ownership that is
substantially similar to what we have today).

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danielweber
This is 100% PR. They are not going to make any kind of car out of this.

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thejabus
First Sentence of the article: "What will the 2025 BMW be like? Know one knows
for sure, which means your guess is more valid than you might thing." I know
grammar isn't everything but two major typos before I even get into the
article. How am I supposed to begin taking this seriously when I can barely
read it.

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justinjlynn
Honestly, I think it would be nice if we started designing cities to be
single-occupant car unfriendly. There is a lot of wasted space that could be
more efficiently used by both commercial and community owned and operated
people moving technology that is currently used by parking structures, roads,
alleys, and thoroughfares. At the very least, I think that point to point
automated transit should be a highly preferable option for retrofit. But of
course, this sells fewer cars to the general populace so we probably won't see
anything like this from companies who's main revenue stream is from precisely
that.

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pchristensen
tl;dr: Changing land use is the only way to make transit of any kind more
effective than private cars. Technological improvements that made point-to-
point transit as effective as private cars are completely infeasible due to
social and societal constraints. Self driving cars will be a feature for users
but will NOT change or accomodate existing cities.

Point to point would be great, but it's really, really expensive and doesn't
change the economics of land use.

Look at what cars cost. Most US cities have ~1 car per adult, and to average
expensive cars and paid off cars, let's assume ~$5000 in payments per car per
year, plus about that much for gas, maintenance, insurance, etc. So
~$10,000/adult per year.

Now assume with automated p2p 1 car can do the work of 10 private cars at the
same vehicle cost. But barring some efficiency changes, operational costs
would be the same as 10 cars, so each car would cost ~$55,000/yr. This means
$5,500/adult, about half the cost of a private car - big savings!

For a city of 1M, assume 50K cars, and you need almost $3B/yr just for the
cars, the whole organization (gov or private) would probably cost another $1B.
$4B/yr would be a big savings over private vehicles and free up all the space
used by parking.

Big caveats:

1) For reference, Nashville (~650K city, ~1.5M metro) had a mass transit
budget of $60M, or about 1.5% of this back of the envelope budget. The entire
municipal budget was $1.5B, or about 37% of this budget. This demonstrates
that however beneficial such a system would be, it' would require a complete
restructuring of government and society to shift that kind of spending into
centralized transportation infrastructure.

2) These fairly affordable unit economics only work if everyone participates.
But the system also only works if you continue to maintain the existing road
network, which makes the switch from private cars that much more difficult to
justify.

3) A p2p network is an attempt to get people who live in non-transit areas to
use transit. But many (many many many) of those people live there specifically
_because_ they want privacy and seclusion from other people, so any kind of
transit system is wrong on principle.

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ctdonath
Self-driving is obvious. The infrastructure will be in place to allow, if not
require, highly automated traffic. Just get in the car and tell it where to
go; leave navigation, congestion issues, etc. to the onboard computer linked
to the city traffic network.

Which obviously leads to an otherwise not obvious major design factor: round.
Once the norm is for the occupying humans to not have much, if any, control in
driving, the paramount drivetrain issue will be how to move the vehicle in any
suitable direction on very short notice. Replace the "front wheels turn a few
degrees" paradigm with zero-turn-radius or any-direction movement, and the
vehicle's ideal shape is a circle.

Seems obvious to me.

What's not obvious to me is how crowdsourcing will come up with such a model.
To wit: how does crowdsourcing overcome non-ingrained memetic patterns?

ETA: _BMW is partnering with crowdsourcing pros Local Motors of Phoenix to run
the contest. Local Motors already has a crowdsourced, on-sale car to its
credit, the Rally Fighter._ Then the outcome of this contest will be amusing,
as the _Rally Fighter_ seems the utter opposite of the design pursued here.

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thruflo
Those prizes are derisory.

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kmfrk
I assume they are subject to taxation, too.

