Ask The Best And Brightest: Will We Still Be Driving In 2020?

Edward Niedermeyer
by Edward Niedermeyer

Ars Technica has a fascinating interview with Kaveh Hushyar, CEO of Telemetria Telephony, who argues

I believe in 2020, the car will drive itself. The infrastructure will be in place, and that infrastructure will be very significant and hefty. But in that target environment, you and I don’t have to be sitting behind the wheel. In that environment, everyone will be a passenger, and you want to have full connectivity with full access to any media, or any person anywhere via the best videoconferencing available. So you need a rich media experience in the car.

At the same time, there will be a significant amount of safety applications that will be running in the car, making sure that the car is fully protected and is communicating through the infrastructure to other cars. That would be the nature of how I see the driving experience transforming in ten years plus.

Obviously, as CEO of an in-car connectivity solution firm, Mr Hushayr is heavily invested in a driver-free future… but is his vision the product of more than just wishful thinking? I certainly have some difficulty imagining giving up driving before I turn 40… but then, I’m not sure that most of my peers would. Surf over to AT and read the whole interview before letting us know what you think.

Edward Niedermeyer
Edward Niedermeyer

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  • M 1 M 1 on Feb 05, 2011

    Lawyers will never allow self-driving cars in the US. Period.

  • BuzzDog BuzzDog on Feb 05, 2011

    This has long been something I'd like to see, and I've got to admit I daydream about it quite a bit during long drives across Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas. As the road system is built for this, and as new vehicles become equipped with compatible hardware/software, I see it this as an opt-in system: In other words, there is an additional, special lane - not unlike an HOV lane - that is reserved for self-driving vehicles. I'll admit I'm skeptical of the time frame, but I prefer to see opportunities, not obstacles. After all, this is the country that put a man on the moon just eight years and two months after barely putting a man into space. Yeah, I know that a lot of grumpy old men out there will argue that this country is not the same as it was in the 1960s, and that we're all going to Hell in a hand basket. That's their prerogative; however, I choose to be a clever, optimistic old man who happens to embrace change - even though I don't always agree with certain messengers of change...

  • Michael Blechinger Michael Blechinger on Feb 05, 2011

    First off the heavy use of GPS worries me. I work for a land survey company which uses very accurate GPS tecnology (can get you within a few centimetres). But yesterday due to solar storms the GPS became very finicky and unresponsive. Could you imagine the chaos if this happen to your car while no one was paying attention. Second watch the episode of Top Gear when they talk about self-driving cars. I tried to find it but couldn't. Their first point is that most commercial planes can take off, fly and land themselves right now, but how many people would jump onto a plane without a pilot? Their second and best point is about maintenance. How could you feel safe and relaxed knowing that somewhere on the road with you someone else has a car going that they did all the fixing on the car themselves. I am not talking about the people who would have the knowledge to actually maintain the car properly, but about those people who are just to cheap to get something fix properly.

  • Tagbert Tagbert on Feb 05, 2011

    I think that the first thing would see will be "auto-trains", a series of cars with self steering abilities but slaved to a single vehicle in front with a human driver. This would be for long drives from point to point on the interstates. There are test systems out there now. The advantage is that it requires less sophisticated sensor and control systems. It also avoids much of the liability risk. You essentially have a "chauffeur" human driver handling the parts that a human is good at and a computer has difficulty with. Eventually the "chauffeur" function could be automated and perhaps transferred to the individual vehicles again. This is probably a bridge solution. None of the automated systems will be useful in urban or more challenging road situations for quite a long time.

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