Part 15 - A changing world

In the past for long periods of time life was fairly simple, you were born, lived in a local community, did the same thing most of your life, had a family and died, generally quite young.

Technology came along and changed all that. Today most people, at least in cities, live a much longer life and adapt with constant change to their work and private life as technological change accelerates .

This blog is an example of that. Twenty years ago who had heard of a blog? most people hadn't even heard of the Internet and streaming services were a pipe dream.

This blog is about autonomous vehicles and so far I have covered most of the basics about the subject so it becomes more difficult to write a decent length piece on a particular subject that can hold peoples interest.

I am now going to change the format of this blog so it will become more of a news update with the odd longer piece when I find something of interest that I consider worth expanding on.

So lets kick it off...  Driverless cars are not the full story of automated vehicles.

In one of my first blogs I had a story about the  EHANG 184 personal single seat autonomous quad copter.

 At the time this was seen as a concept design that probably wouldn't go anywhere, but as I said earlier things today change quickly.

May 26th 2016 saw the signing of an historic agreement between the state of Nevada and the Chinese EHANG corporation. This agreement will provide the foundation for collaboration between the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems (NIAS) and EHANG Inc in the areas of flight testing, training and development of autonomous aerial devices at Nevadas FAA test site.
The full story is here.

The blade runner future of flying cars may be replace by electric quad copters but the video below is eerily reminiscent of coming into Bangcock by bus with the huge electronic billboards on many of the buildings. I can just visualise it from a quad copter.

On a similar note, autonomous trucks are becoming more and more in the news recently with automated road trains being tested in real world conditions.

In April 6 conveys of trucks from different European countries converged at Rotterdam in Holland after driving in "platooning"mode from as far as Sweden and Southern Germany.

The Platooning method means that the lead truck, with a driver controls all the following trucks. this gives a consistent highway speed and better fuel utilisation. In this test all the trucks were semi autonomous and had drivers on board, but this gives a pretty good idea of what's to come.

Analysts are now saying that 21 Million self driving cars will be on the road by 2035. Many thousands will be on the road in the US by 2020 and that US will lead in this market.

These numbers have been upgraded seriously from the last report as the whole autonomous vehicle scenario is accelerating. As I said in a previous blog, the new space race is well and truly on and I don't think the news for the US in this is as rosy as the article indicates.

I think these estimates are still extremely conservative as China is pushing hard to get the lead in this market. Singapore is wanting thousands of automated taxis on the road in the next few years....

I personally don't think the US has a chance of beating Asia in a race like this, given their legal system and their peoples inert resistance and fear of anything promoted by the government.

If China wants to do it sooner, they will because they can, the US will have to convince their people to try it, the Chinese can just say you will do it.... end of story

In concluding for today I just want to put it out there that robots should look obviously like robots. It creeps me out when they look like people, have a look at these as an example and see if you agree with me.

Cheers