

Why Email and Cars are heading down the same road - mathouc
http://blog.frontapp.com/why-email-and-cars-are-heading-down-the-same-road/

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j10t
> "Parking? Solved! Once we arrive at our destination, the car can self-park
> while we go on with our day."

Doesn't solve the worst part of parking: reserving that much space for car
storage.

The author's vision seems to be one in which everyone owns a self-driving car.
Why own the car? Just pay for use, Uber et al. can handle logistics. Only the
reserve portion of the fleet should be parked, like buses.

~~~
visakanv
Yep. Why should the cars be parked? Why should we own cars? All we actually
need is a very high % chance of getting access to a car whenever needed. If it
were 99.9%, and wayyy cheaper than owning a car, why own the car?

~~~
jpollock
In order to control what happens in the car when you're not in it.

I would expect driverless taxis to end up like public toilets.

~~~
danielbln
You don't have to register at the toilet with your ID/driver's license. You do
however, have to do that when you use e.g car sharing, and the first question
the system usually asks you, is: "is the car clean?". If no, then the previous
renter will be liable. So this is already a solved problem.

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wylee
The notion that we don't "pay atrociously high fees" to own and operate cars
is a pet peeve of mine. People look at bus fare, for example, and think it's a
lot, but compared to the _actual_ cost per mile of driving (payments,
insurance, fuel, maintenance, &c), it's often cheaper, even for short trips.

And this doesn't even get into the costs of pollution (including noise
pollution), deaths, injuries, and poor health associated with sedentary
lifestyles.

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rayiner
The optimism surrounding self-driving cars is just mind-boggling to me.
Decided to drive to work this morning (usually take the train). Siri totally
shit the bed and took me on a 45-minute scenic tour through DC. Took me off
the highway too early onto busy local streets, kept trying to take me onto a
road that was closed for construction, and tried to get me to turn left at a T
intersection of two 2-way roads where only right turns were allowed. Just an
utter disaster.

And it's not unusual. Siri loves to take my mother in law on harrowing trips
through the ghettos of Baltimore.

~~~
ser_tyrion
Using Siri as a counter argument for self-driving cars completely misses the
point. You ignore Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication and using a multitude of
sensors besides phone GPS. IDK why you think Siri is the epitome of
sophisticated trip pathing, there are better options out there and solutions
that will continue to be improved.

~~~
rayiner
I don't think it does. The technology we have for self-driving cars in the
near term relies on a known map, and the route-finding core of that technology
isn't going to be appreciably better, any time soon, than what's in Siri. You
can improve the technology by adding vehicle-to-vehicle communications, etc,
but now you're pushing out the "5-6 years" timeline that people keep throwing
around.

I have no doubt that in 50 years we'll have self-driving cars. It's not an
intractable problem by any means. But I have friends who were researching
self-driving cars a decade ago, as part of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and in
many ways those techniques were more sophisticated than what's on the table
for commercialization in the near-term. It's going to be a very long slough
from here to there.

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chollida1
> But traffic jams won’t even be a problem anymore: freed from the wheel,
> we’ll be able to make phone calls, work on a computer, or have a business
> meeting from inside our car (and maybe a doctor appointment, cf cosmopolis).

This just seems foolish. If i'm on my way home to my daughters birthday party,
then traffic is traffic. If I"m on the way to the airport, then traffic is
still a problem.

I can already make a call when driving and I can already take Uber or a taxi
allowing me to do the things the author mentions any time I wish.

Self driving cars don't solve any of those problems. Self driving cars have
many uses, but the author's use cases aren't any of them.

Traffic is still a problem regardless of whether or not i'm driving.

~~~
dkrich
I think that the answers to a lot of these problems lie in extremely complex
algorithms and a drastic change in technology. Instead of each person owning
and operating a car that operates exactly the same way that cars do today, I
imagine pod-like cars that can connect and disconnect with any other car.
Then, if every car knew where every other car in the area was headed and could
coordinate, they could join and travel together, then disconnect and reconnect
until each reaches its destination. So essentially a hybrid between trains and
cars.

Yeah, I know, science-fictiony and a stretch of the imagination, and I don't
expect to see anything resembling this in my lifetime, but I do think there
are ways that self-driving cars could operate in a much more efficient
network-based system than with each driver making their own decisions based on
what is immediately around them.

~~~
philwelch
The biggest cause of traffic is wrapping each individual person in a 6 by 10
foot steel cage. [http://giftrunk.com/gif/public-transit-vs-
gridlock](http://giftrunk.com/gif/public-transit-vs-gridlock)

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jordanpg
This is a fun analogy to think of, but it stops at the comparison of the
ubiquity and resistance to change for the things.

Replacing cars with driverless cars is fundamentally different because it also
involves a massive replacement of infrastructure and safety regulation at a
level that humankind has never before seen.

Wrapping email protocols in innovative clients doesn't seem like the same
thing at all.

~~~
cliffbean
The argument is that self-driving cars would reuse existing roads, fuel,
service, and manufacturing infrastructures that have been developed for
existing cars. And, adoption can be incremental. Start with cars which drive
themselves highway only, and require a capable driver to be at the wheel at
all times. That may be soon. Gradually add more use cases at the speed of
engineering, regulation, and social acceptance.

Some of the hard things to change in the world are hard because they require
many people to change their behavior in coordination. Cars to self-driving
cars doesn't. Email to Email with innovative clients doesn't. Introducing a
new communication protocol does (though of course it's not impossible). Of
course, this is only one aspect of a complex world.

~~~
jordanpg
Let's consider just one aspect of this that I see as a show-stopper out of the
gate: networks.

Driverless cars, even even in a narrowly adopted context, like a single
highway, will need to be networked. Not only will they need to be networked
during the time that they are on that highway, for cars in close proximity, it
needs to be a network with 99.999999999% uptime. At a minimum, the cars will
need to have a transponder with nearly zero bandwidth (like planes); but more
likely, this connection will need to send more data than just position. GPS
isn't nearly accurate enough unless cars can be spaced 100s of feet apart.

Do you know of any networking technologies that you would trust with your
life?

Compare driving on a highway to being in a plane. In a plane, there are
usually _minutes_ following a worse-case equipment failure or total loss of
communication. In a car, there are seconds or less.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Nobody suggests driverless cars are working open-loop from GPS coordinates; no
current driverless cars work that way. Its generally a combination of gps,
local sensors including sonar, radar and cameras, and car-to-car networks. The
UofIowa Driving Simulator has done studies of trains of cars linked by short-
range networks, where they coordinate braking and acceleration to achieve
inter-car distances of a few feet.

~~~
jordanpg
Sure, in principle; my point is that even the best networks fail way too much
for this to be practical. In the context of this particular thread, I'm saying
that implementing driverless cars even in a narrow context is a non-trivial
infrastructure upgrade, whatever form it takes. These networks will need to
have reliabilities and uptimes on par with medical or nuclear safety systems.

~~~
cliffbean
We don't need any networks. Self driving cars will always need to be able to
share the road with normal cars. That mechanism will support the case of
sharing the road with other self driving cars too. Networks can add fancy
features, but they can happen on their own time, incrementally.

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michaeljurena
A declaration of love to emails! Original but very true comparison. Mail will
always be the base and the best way to communicate

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ColinWright
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8535919](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8535919)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8536014](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8536014)

Both deleted. It appears this was submitted, then deleted, then submitted
again, until finally it got traction. So the item is of interest, obviously,
but is this a god thing to be doing?

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JNox64
There's also a bit of pleasure in driving for many, sports cars,
convertible's, that pleasure doesn't correlate to emails, there's no sports
car email client. maybe not? =/

I've got a feeling that as cars start driving themselves, us motorheads/car-
fanatics will be like horse owners, relegated to car farms (tracks with much
larger garages and warehouses attached).

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raphkomjat
I've had this exact position about cars for a while, but never took the time
to think about emails that way. Makes per-fect sense for me.

~~~
cissou
Are you a genius?

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acqq
"Driving in Circles: The autonomous Google car may never actually happen."

[http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/...](http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/google_self_driving_car_it_may_never_actually_happen.html)

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ecocentrik
Self driving email? Yes please.

