The future of cars may be self-driving EVs gossiping about their humans and traffic In the future vehicles will talk to each other, relaying key metrics between themselves, as they carry their passengers to their destinations – or so Qualcomm's automotive division hopes. The US chip giant on Monday announced the acquisition of Israeli startup Autotalks, which specializes in the development of vehicle-to- …
I intentionally don't own a cellphone (I'm using a landline instead) to avoid haviing my realtime location being tracked by whomever.
Now my putatively-next new car's gonna particate in an always-on mesh network, spaffing my realtime location to world+dog.
Will there be a "vehicle anonymization" service to protect Very Important People, while the rest of us have our data sold and traded without our consent?
@An Old Dog
"I intentionally don't own..."
I still wonder about the pathological fear people have of not being contactable immediately.
But then, I grew up in an era and environment here my dad worked away from home for months with no means of communication. His general answer about when he will be back was "Expect me when you see me".
Ou favourite holidays/vacations were to accompany my dad during school holidays.
I still rankle when people complain or get angry if they cannot get hold of me within five minutes.
Our forebers by and large had to accept the fact that, when children or family moved away it was most likely that you will never hear from them again.
And yet we survived.
my putatively-next new car
I have sad news for you - many cars already communicate location on a fairly constant basis already. Someone once told me this was an EU requirement to make it easier to locate an accident. Certainly our French car - 2019 registered - doee this, and although there is a buried option in the settings to disallow 'location and data sharing', it seems to have re-enabled itself every time you check. Just like the lane departure warning that has to be turned off every time you start the car. The only control we seem to have is not to pay the 'connect' subscription after the three free years but I think all that does is remove the ability to make a phonecall to the call centre. Not happy.
I see so many stories that suggest that AI related evolution is moving so much faster than our evolution. We climbed out of the trees and started walking around about 30 million years ago, but now we don't need to walk or even drive a car, have we created AI to be so much smarter than we are? Is AI and driver-less cars going to be another asteroid? Certainly we're not walking around these days, will AI be digging up some fossils and saying, "Look this one has something holding the steering wheel, why the hell was that happening?"
"I'm sorry I can't let you stop for a piss Dave, it would jeopardise the mission"
or
"Hi Annie, we just want to take your concentration off the road for as moment to tell you about our great new drive-in prefrontal lobotomy clinic, just around the corner from you, right nooowwww!"
@TheMaskedMan: anyone calling me must input the unpromped, secret DTMF code, or else the call is diverted to my message machine. Yes, even my doctor. I call the doctor back from a payphone. I do not call back anyone telling me, "Your car warranty has expired!", "This is Inspector Smith with Inland Revenue ...", etc.
This is implemented with older-tech, from the times when modems largely ruled the computer communications world. Not everyone wanted to pay for a second landline for their modem and/or FAX, so various end-user front-end devices were built.
It is getting harder to find working pay phones, though ...
I am going to ignore the privacy issues here, because they won't be addressed. It just rolls out and screw your privacy, every time, and complaining about it never achieves anything, because the people complaining aren't the ones making fat donations to politicians. So setting that aside...
From a technical reason there are lots of good reasons for this:
- Cars ahead can warn cars behind what's coming up. Car stopped in the road or just a ladder, everyone knows to avoid the second lane right here. Or maybe 'dog in lanes' or 'mountain lion in lanes' could save some animals.
- Cars can pack much better and change lanes much more smoothly when everyone around knows what all the other cars want to do. Imagine everyone just doing a zipper merge seamlessly at speed, alternating flawlessly without that arsehole in the Mercedes just crashing in without his turn signal (since Mercedes don't have functioning turn signals, based on observed behavior).
- Cars in a 'train' get better gas mileage.
- Everyone gets the fastest route to their destination given the other traffic (aka Waze). Some of you go this way some of you go that way.
- If everyone had this you wouldn't even need traffic lights. Traffic would never need to completely stop ever again. This almost ends traffic jams, and definitely ends stop and go driving.
- This is also the end of accidents barring things coming in from outside the road or physical issues or letting Teslas join in with their terrible 'self-driving'. But even if there are, then traffic behind knows about it and flows around without issue.
Yes, this is boring compared to current driving if you actually like going for a drive, but I'm fine if I can just read or watch a TV show or whatever. Most driving is formulaic and sucks. It also defangs the defective mercedes drivers and the young males weaving in and out at high speed because they've seen a Fast and Furious movie. I'd be fine with my car just getting me there if I don't have to pay attention at all.
This depends where you live and where you're going, of course. I recall one occasion in the UK when a friend tried to get a refund on an unused return ticket and was told he would have to pay BR since the single price was higher than the return he had... and I agree that the base price of UK tickets is almost always ridiculously high. But then again, if you want to do something other than drive while getting from A to B, why would you pay tens of thousands of quid for a car?
But the point remains: there are methods of transport wherein it has been concluded that joining carriages together with a chunk of metal is a more efficient and generally safer method than trying to join them with electronics.
I live in Germany, which has just started a country-wide combined ticket for fifty euros a month. Anywhere in the country, bus, train, or tram, except for the high speed ICE trains. Fuel alone on my car is around nine or ten euros per hundred kilometers. It costs me around seventy euros a month just to insure and maintain said car.
"Imagine everyone just doing a zipper merge seamlessly at speed, alternating flawlessly ..."
I'm imagining someone paying extra for a car that can skip ahead to the front of the zipper. But it won't affect me, because I'm imagining my dumb car will be blocked from using the roadway at all.
All these potential plusses don't make it worth doing if the minuses overbalance the plusses.
One of the biggest minuses is that this sort of thing presumes-and-requires that the technology be perfect, 100% of the time (or else many people are injured or killed).
No technology is that good; and there is no human, or group of humans, that can perform perfectly 100% of the time while they are designing this new, great thing.
A things which makes humans such successful lifeforms (despite their many other faults) is that they deal well with imprecision and 'slop'. I once had a job where part of my duties involved driving forklifts. Our company had two. The old one had 3/4 of a turn of free play in the steering wheel. I was warned about this in advance, and though I found the idea horrific to my engineering soul, I learned to drive the old forklift without crashing or stressing-out.
Why cant the future be, a world where people dont waste hours a day travelling from anywhere to anywhere just because ?
Reminds of a Ted-talk with the head of spacex where she was trying to tell us how wonderful it would be to travel from America to Riyadh by Starship or whatever in 40 minutes...
WHY
Why cant they just zoom ?
There are so many better, less time wasting, less polluting than cars, its almost like nobody is trying.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
