As I wrote this Red Barchetta: Part 2 I thought about my rural life and how they’re pushing self driving for urban crowded streets. This is because driving on urban crowded streets sucks, but it’s a hard challenge. It’s possibly the worst place to try mixing unusual vehicles.
My daily driver is Dodge Ram 3500 dually; truly a Goliath machine. I regularly pass one horse Amish buggies. We’re on the same road. I wave to them. They wave to me. We have no enmity.
Say it again; the biggest truck you can buy (non-commercial) and a buggy from 1830 already share the road.
I’m a rural guy, I pass all sorts of weird shit on the road; like farm tractors and combines. Combines are enormous! It’s no big deal to us. ATVs and snowmobiles zoom around in the ditches adjacent to the roads. We don’t care. It wouldn’t be weird to pass a combine, an ATV, and a horse drawn buggy on the same road.
It’s not the same in a city. A horse and buggy clopping down the Strip in Las Vegas would wreak havoc! Imagine a tracked tractor pulling a big ass planter. Imagine the planter towing a bulk tank of anhydrous ammonia. Imagine the farmer’s kid following up that rolling assemblage with a side by side to get Dad back home. All of this driving right over the shit the horse just left! I’ve already seen that. Rural places can and have tolerated diverse machines forever.
To us it’s just a road and we just use it. Hay wagons and tractor trailers and horse buggies and motorcycles and dump trucks and people out walking their dog… all at once. There’s less bullshit. Cities will fight over “zoned for self driving” lanes (which is really the feeding frenzy over who gets to control how many millions of dollars of “technology funding”). Think about how much they’ve pissed away on cycling lanes. Cities will vomit forth reams of regulation, all sorts of licensing, official software updates(!), all the things government does to fuck things up.
For the hinterland self-driving is already “good enough” technology. A self driving car trundling down a rural two lane blacktop isn’t any weirder than a horse. I hope ti happens. I don’t want to see lawyers and politicians fuck up another bright future. I know people like to stampede over cliffs whenever a new idea appears, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In the long run it might be fine. Perhaps some day I’ll toss a recently shot elk into the cabin of a self driving vehicle? Wouldn’t that be a hoot!
Of course, I’ll still keep my truck and motorcycles!
“Of course, I’ll still keep my truck and motorcycles!”
IF the authorities allow it. They can decide on making it difficult for fuel stations to exist, perhaps taxing them with onerous regulations (Are your storage tanks safe ? Think of the water table !!). Many of our freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution are under attack. I wonder how long our personal vehicles will remain under our control. I know I will be dead before this happens (I think – fingers crossed !) but my children I am not so sure.
All that is possible but I also know they’ve been saying such things since I was a kid in 1970’s. (Remember the OPEC oil embargo? I was told as a kid that cars would be rare by the time I would be old enough to drive… which would be the late 1980s.)
I think there are people who’d love to outlaw personal cars (and every other liberty) but only occasionally do they get in power (like during COVID). What’s more likely is that we’re deliberately kept in a constant state of agitation over the epic nasty bullshit that going to happen in some ill defined future time.
I’m an engineer that deals with a number of vision systems for stuff like quality checks on production machinery. The more I do it, the more it makes me appreciate the level of complexity in the human eye and mind that it takes to recognize the horse, combine, and truck and differentiate what they are. Throw in a person riding a horse and there’s almost no way to account for all the variety and complexity of things you’ll see just going down the road with visual recognition code.
That’s on surface roads. Where I think the self driving stuff is really going to shine is on limited access type roads like interstates going through major cities where there’s much less probability of anything besides other vehicles. Imagine being able to zipper merge while doing the speed limit. That’s the kind of thing I can get behind.
Educated Savage