Good news... dreaming of BEV Class A

DrewE wrote:


Of the major transportation systems to be fully automated, trains would seem to me to be the most straightforward. The steering is already automated, so it's only speed control--and, with that, collision avoidance--that is required of the crew; and the speed cannot be changed any too quickly due to physics. There are plenty of fully automated small-scale and medium-scale train systems in operation carrying passengers already, such as for instance the Dubai metro.

At any rate, there's no real requirement for a driverless truck to be an electric truck; it's not really a more complicated problem for a computer to control an engine and transmission and braking system with a gas or diesel engine than it is for an electric motor. Indeed current engines are almost universally computer controlled already, as are modern automatic transmissions, and braking systems partly computer controlled with ABS and stability control systems. The much trickier problem to sort out is how to reliably navigate and interact with other vehicles and drivers on the road system, which is not really designed for automated/driverless vehicles.

Agree, seems logical and for safety reasons, to have someone immediately available to intervene should an emergency situation occurs.

In fact, recent accidents on auto-pilot happened when the computer signals conflicting reading alerting driver to take control and did not.

Drriver can be napping or doing posting on forum on the wheel but should take the wheels when computer is seeing a mis-reading of road conditions.