Self-driving home anyone?

No, I don't think I'd be showering while the motorhome is driving itself to work! :E

I wonder if it will be accurate enough to find the RV Park, then back into your Space by itself.

I just turned 72, my family history suggests lifespan to the middle to late 90's with limited function at 90-92 years. I do not expect the infrastructure and technology for what you envision in what is left of my lifetime. What I expect is limited use of low-speed self-driving taxicabs in dense urban areas, particularly where other types of traffic have been severely restricted.

Like Coolerman, I come from a 30 year career of software development, and my experience has been that you can program only for the situations you envision, and hope for human intelligence to compensate for the situations you didn't think to cover. Commercial aviation is approaching the autonomous stage (still cannot handle takeoffs and maneuvering to cruise) yet frequently encounter unanticipated situations requiring immediate human intervention. Their tightly managed traffic environment is several orders of magnitude less complex than today's road traffic. Self-driving vehicles in the broader context will require either an external control system, or intervehicle communication, along with elimination of all uncontrolled traffic, including pedestrians and bicycles.

For all you nay sayers realize you more than likely have ridden aboard an airplane that self landed that otherwise could not have landed at that airport due to low visibility. I my 34 yrs of airline flying I never had not once an autoland fail.

I'll put my faith and life into a robot before I risk driving next to a distracted/incapacitated/mad/suicidal driver. I'm 67 and do believe that totally autonomous cars will be available in my life time. The general public will demand and pay for it and car manufactures will meet that demand.

I can't wait for my motorhome to be self driving. We'll start from home after dinner, watch some TV, go to sleep and wake up the next morning in a campground next to the Grand Canyon. It's coming weather you like it or not, just wish I was 10 years younger.

I also can't wait for self-driving vehicles, including motorhomes. IMO, it'll be a great boon to maintaining mobility into old age, and would allow one to do other things during those long, boring, parts of the drive.

timjet wrote:
For all you nay sayers realize you more than likely have ridden aboard an airplane that self landed that otherwise could not have landed at that airport due to low visibility. I my 34 yrs of airline flying I never had not once an autoland fail.

Apparently you missed this part of my earlier post in this discussion thread - here is the portion of my post related to what you stated above:

"We watch a lot of those docu-dramas that show what happened, and what caused, major air disasters ... AND it's just plain scarry in many of those episodes as to what the final findings were.

Many of the reasons were that the pilots were so "used to" the plane's computer systems handling so much - flight after flight - that when the systems went haywire (often a transducer problem or a small mechanical part failure) the pilots didn't know what to do to manually counter-act what the systems were erroneously trying to do. The airline industry has had to actually retrain their pilots on how to fly an airliner the old fashioned manual way so as to be able to override a failing automatic-fly system!!

P.S. We don't fly ... not due to lack of knowledge of the statstics about the millions of safe miles people fly ... but due to full knowledge of the seriousness of the consequences when one of the multitude of things that can go wrong does go wrong. We'll take our chances at 55 MPH on the ground in an RV instead of at 550 MPH a long way from the ground in a plane.