Autonomous cars are the next revolution in the automotive industry. They will have impacts that reach into most aspects of our lives: Lower mobility costs, lower energy, resource and space consumption, greater personal freedom for those who currently can not drive (because of age or other reason), and many fewer traffic accidents and fatalities.
The goal of this website is bring attention to the great advances which are currently occurring in this field and to accelerate the adoption of this crucial and highly beneficial technology.
(Disclaimer: Please ignore the spelling mistames as I have not spell checked the following.)
I like your website. I have been an intelligent vehicle enthusiast for some time. As hundres of thousands of people are killed every year the intelligent vehicles are not for the most part on the transportation community ‘s radar.
In US the Dept. of Transportation is studying the warning systems to death rather than active control (breading, steering etc.). DARPA was a great publicity getter but it was for the autonomus vehicles in hostile teritory not for urban environment. Why can’t we have DARPA for civilian use? The department of defence has more resouces and descretion on its use.
Auto makers are offering this technology as smart/ intelligient package but only in high end models e.g., Mercedes Benz and BMW and now Ford. There have been so many claims of driverless cars over the years that general public does not believe it will be a reality. GM has been claimng this since 30s and nothing to show for it yet. I think we should stop using the term “driverless” since you would still need a dreiver in case of malfunction. True dirverless cars will not happen for long time to come.
The auto makers have heard mentality if one has it than others need to have it, for example, hybrid vehicles, electric vehicles and vehicles running on Eathonal.
So, when one auto maker offers more of adaptice control features in mid and lower models the others will follow soon. Probably this happend with the cruise control but I cannot find material on this on the net.
After market installation of adaptive controls is a possibility but eventually the auto makers will integerate into their cars as perhaps happened with cruise control.
Thank you for your site and for the opportunity to provide my comments.
Yogesh
I wonder the same thing. A lot of my frenids say I’m not supporting my country because I bought a Honda. My vehicle was more expensive than a domestic one would have been, but I looked at the gas mileage and the reliability of it. The model of my car has very few problems with breaking down, little things going wrong so I figured the investment was well worth it. If I could do it all over again, I would still buy the car I have now. Maybe if domestic manufacturers learned something from the foreign manufacturers, there wouldn’t be an issue of people not wanting to buy domestic.