DVLA Over 70 Eye Tests

[Murphyv310]

Well have a look at this link and see what the benefit of really well thought out systems can "actually" do

Sorry two videos have been removed so I have had to edit this post.
They were of Tesla's avoiding accident situations and take of control to do so, they were impressive and if I find them elsewhere I'll add the links.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TtODhB-008

Found this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfOL7AxWicY

[Valvebloke]

My new car has a radar sensor plus cameras and issues false warnings because it can't tell the difference between a genuine obstacle and a roadside sign !
(it's been back to the dealer but was found to be working correctly...)
The single-track roads around here have no white lines to follow either so driverless cars will never work on these roads.
Also, how good will they be at avoiding pot-holes ?

Andy

The problem is we're thinking small here. Trying to make a cheap black box which will drive today's cars in today's traffic on today's roads is going to be very second-best. We need to think a bit bigger.

In the early days of railways there was a problem with individual rails springing loose from their sleepers at the rail joints, bending up, piercing the carriage floor and creating carnage inside. The solution was not to abandon the idea of railways. It was to make the joints better. Potholes could be managed with some combination of better road surfaces and maintenance, so they don't occur in the first place (they're already rare on motorways) and perhaps more tolerant vehicle suspensions so small holes aren't the end of the world.

VB

[Sparks]

Valve Bloke.
Although your Cassini/Huygens may be travelling at tens of thousands of miles an hour, when they dump their driverless vehicles on the "other planet" they (the driverless vehicles) are NOT travelling at tens of thousands of miles an hour. They are probabaly trundling along at walking pace!
Ageing population
What most experts cannot grasp, is that all 100-year-olds were born in 1917 or before, long before just about everything from the seas, the air, the land, the food, the medicines were polluted my noxious chemicals. They just had smoke to contend with. We are already seeing a decrease in life expectancy in younger folk. Don't believe me? then just do a bit of research. I believe that life expectany will soon drop dramatically in a manner that simply cannot be denied.
They say that a driveless car costs about $75,000 at the moment! The maintenance and repair costs will be enormous, and probably the insurance will be enormous as well!
Some years ago, a modern satellite communications sytem came under my care. I was told that if it broke down, I was under no circumstances to try and repair it myself other than identying the defective PCB. A new one would be supplied for a "nominal" cost. When I asked what that "nominal" cost was, it was about £1,200! With the conventional short wave transmitters and receivers, if they broke down, I repaired them myself, for the cost of components only.
When I was required to send out a distress message on Satcoms, far off the trade routes on a passenger liner, I could not do so, because the fluctuating power upset the gyro compass that was then unable to keep the dish on the satellite! Even the main transmitter was useless when the emrgency generator choked on the smoke, and stopped. I summoned help with a two-valve battery transmitter using morse code. The responding ship arrived within two hours, but it was certainly not due to the "finest communications system in the world i.e. Satcoms!"
With complex technology, if anything can go wrong, you can be sure it will!
Still, its nice to hear other people's views!
Bob

[Murphyv310]

Brilliant post Sparks and oh so true, just wait till the next massive solar flare and all this modern way of things goes down the tubes.

[pwdrive]

"What most experts cannot grasp, is that all 100-year-olds were born in 1917 or before, long before just about everything from the seas, the air, the land, the food, the medicines were polluted my noxious chemicals. They just had smoke to contend with.".....If only so....

...Rickets, TB, infant mortality, influenza, loads of other bugs and nasties, chemical pollution big time....War!...No radar to guide the ships safely...

Lawrence.

[Valvebloke]

Honestly Bob, the absolute speeds don't matter. What matters is that if we set our mind to it we can achieve remarkably complex things under autonomous control. As complex as this http://sci.esa.int/cassini-huygens/34956...eparation/ and this https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/7580/.

More to the point we have regularly been landing passenger aircraft autonomously under circumstances where it would be just too unsafe for a human pilot to do it https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoland. The capability's been around for decades. Autoland is not perfect yet. One major problem is that the safety standards for it are set so high that the number of autolands per hour is limited - when fog descended on Heathrow in Dec 2006 airlines were so used to relying on autoland that they all turned up only to find the landing capacity had been halved, but in a sense that's testimony to its everyday acceptability.

As for your assertions about life expectancy, maintenance costs, repair costs etc I'm afraid the onward march of progress simply refutes them. Mrs VB was a telecoms engineer with Vodafone for 25 years. When she began there the phones were large, expensive and unreliable. They handled voice only. Look where we are now. When I was a student in the early 80's telex was sometimes easier than e-mail and I was still driving an (admittedly old) car which had a choke and a starting handle. Look where we are now. The first domestic VHS recorder was huge and expensive. Look where we were fifteen years ago when you could buy one for £19.99 in Comet.

As a sceptic you have some eminent bedfellows though. I think we're going to have to agree to differ on this (I certainly am ) but I'll leave you with four quotes from fellow sceptics:

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers" - Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

"Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night" - Daryl Zanuck, executive at 20th Century Fox, 1946

"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home" - Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, 1977

"Almost all of the many predictions now being made about 1996 hinge on the internet's continuing exponential growth. But I predict the internet will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse" - Robert Metcalfe, founder of 3Com, 1995.

Cheers, VB

[Sparks]

All those things you mention are on the rise again - especially chemical pollution!"
Radars don't guide ships safely! They are a valuable tool in safety, but until recently, the information had to be interpreted correctly by the officer of the watch, and could lead to radar-assisted collisons such as Andrea Doria and Stockholm. Nowadays, with modern radars, you "acquire" the targets, and the radar tells you their course, speed etc and whether they represent a collision threat. The modern officer of the watch is then lulled into a false sense of security, and if the system fails, they are back to the old ways, with which they cannot always cope!
In 1992, I had had enough, and quit the rat race at the age of 48, after 32 years at sea. Since then, I have been very suspicious of all this "high technology!"
Bob

[pwdrive]

I wouldn't be too suspicious, you got your driving license renewed by way of "high technology"

Lawrence.

[Sparks]

No I didn't!      The "high technology" was at the hospital, the previous week but that was not good enough for the  DVLA, and they sent me to Specsavers to have it confirmed!      I would hardly call Specsavers "high technology," flashing lights at me.   I could make one of those machines myself!      Anyway, my gripe was not with having to do the Specsavers "high technology" test, it was having to take a one-hour bus journey to another town, and then having to wait a week for the results!    
Very few people will be able to afford a driverless car and that will put the stoppers on them in the unlikely event that they work properly!
I rode in an electric car recently, and was most impressed.    I would love to have one - but they are simply too expensive!
Don't get the impression that I am anti all "high technology" because I am not.     I love having the computer, and my skills on it improve every week (I have had one since 1983!).    I love digital photography, and am relieved that the days of groping about in a darkroom are over.   I have got rid of my enlarger, and all the developing equipment in favour of photo software, negative scanner and good quility printer.
Bob    

[pwdrive]

I got that wrong then, I was thinking it might have arrived by post.

Lawrence.