Weird Stuff
Why I’m Uncomfortable About Driverless Cars
The automotive news overseas is humming about how Ford has just managed to put its driverless cars through its paces in a model city in snowy conditions. This is a big breakthrough for the world of driverless cars, because snowy conditions usually send the LIDAR (like radar but using lasers) sensors that make driverless cars “aware” of their situation berserk. To say nothing of what snowy conditions do to your traction when cornering or braking.
I’m not comfortable with the idea of driverless cars. This is not because I’m a technophobic Luddite (now there’s some big words for you to start the year off). It’s more because I spend a lot of time behind a computer and I know all too well that computers don’t always do what you want them to do. They stop working for mysterious reasons. They get too clever for their own good and try to do things that you don’t want them to (such as the time that my son borrowed my smartphone to check his Facebook feed, with the result that all his friends ended up on my contact list and I pocket-dialled them). Even those super-smart algorithms that customise the ads you get on social media make mistaken guesses about the sort of thing I am likely to buy (I’m already with that bank and I have bought my first home, thank you. And I am not interested in a university course. Or special offers on sunglasses. Or weird old tips.). So I can just imagine how things can go wrong with a driverless car.
This is especially the case if said driverless car is plugged into the sat-nav or GPS system. I’ve heard stories about navigations systems that have decided that the most efficient way to go is to take a 4×4 track that is marked as an official road but is only open for a handful of months a year, or decides to send you down a road that was permanently closed last year (and the system doesn’t know it). And what about all those stories from the UK about delivery trucks getting stuck in tiny old alleyways that barely fit a little wee Fiat 500?
So you can imagine what would happen with a driverless car. What if it decides that the best way to get to the shops is via the local golf course? What if it suddenly crashes like all computers do in the middle of a busy intersection?
The inventors, designers and legislators agree with me, too. Just last month in the US (in California, of course), the Department of Motor Vehicles decreed that all driverless cars must also have traditional controls, rather than the no-steering wheel, no-pedal Google prototype. In addition, the same governing body said that responsibility for crashes and traffic violations will still be squarely on the shoulders of the “driver” of the driverless car.
As for the inventors, one of Toyota’s inventors who just landed a nice big funding packet, Daniela Rus, points out that there are tons of things that robots and artificial intelligence can’t do for you, as they don’t have the sensitivity. Heavy weather like fog, snow and torrential rain is still an issue for driverless cars – which is why Ford was so thrilled about getting a driverless car to work in the snow – and so is heavy traffic.
The place where driverless cars are really likely to stuff up is in shared spaces. Shared spaces, as covered in one of my posts last year, are where pedestrians and cars aren’t in separated zones but share the same bit of “road”. This helps with road safety, as drivers (and pedestrians) have to stay fully alert to what and who’s around them, and use a bit of courtesy and common sense to avoid collisions. In situations like these, drivers and pedestrians communicate in subtle and very, very human ways: a quick cock of the head to one side, a raised eyebrow, a glare, a smile, a brief hand gesture… Computers, even the most sophisticated, just can’t handle these things. They may be able to recognise your face in a crowd but they can’t recognise your emotions. These shared spaces are becoming more common in town plans, just to make things more interesting.
Driverless cars also have trouble with other places where humans or other sentient beings have overridden the norm. They won’t spot the line of ducks or the boneheaded spaniel on the road ahead. They don’t really know how to tackle the situation commonly encountered on a country road where a farmer is moving stock along the road. Around town, cops on point duty when the traffic lights have failed, a ball bouncing into the road closely followed by a crazy kid, a pedestrian suddenly stepping out, the road works crew’s hand signals and the local school crossing are all things that autonomous cars (to give them their official name) can’t really cope with.
Yes, I know jumbo jets fly on autopilot around the world all the time. However, I also know that jumbo jets with autopilot function (i.e. all of them) have a pilot-in-charge and two back up copilots on hand, all of whom have trained for much, much longer than the typical driver has, just in case things go wrong.
Anyway, where’s the fun in a driverless car?
Safe and happy driving (computers don’t get the “happy” bit),
Megan
More info is available at these links:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/sf/national/2015/12/27/aianxiety/
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35280632
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-33676388
The Fastest Boat On The Road And Other Amphibians
Along with flying cars, amphibious vehicles would have to make the list of highly desirable vehicles from sci-fi movies, books and graphic novels. We are still waiting for the flying car but progress has been made in the amphibious vehicle department.
In fact, a lot of progress towards amphibious vehicles was made back in the World War 2 and Cold War era, with the two most successful being the Schwimmwagen and the Amphicar, being produced during WW2 and in the early 1960s respectively. Both were made in Germany.
The Schwimmwagen was based on a Volkwagen (in fact, the Volkswagen and Porsche factories were responsible for making them). As they were made for the army, they still hold the record for being the most widely produced amphibious car, with around 14,000 originally turned out. However, less than 200 remain today, although the few that are in existence are highly prized collectors’ items that only occasionally risk going onto the water. What happened to the rest of them is uncertain. Possibly some of them sank. Or they may have been bombed to smithereens.
On land, the Schwimmwagen was a very rough and ready 4×4 with a four-speed manual gearbox and a 25-hp 4-cylinder 1.1-L engine. Four-wheel-drive was only available in reverse and in first gear. When the Schwimmwagen trundled down into the water, the driver lowered the three-blade propeller at the back, which engaged with the driveshaft and got the vehicle moving through the water. Ground clearance was a pretty decent 11 inches and it seated about three people. Creature comforts were next to nothing, this being a military vehicle, although it did have run-flat tyres and a spare wheel mounted on the front bonnet – or should you call it the bow? An American intelligence report described it as looking like “a small civilian sports car”, which suggests that 1940s sports cars must have been rather rough and ready.
The Amphicar was a peacetime vehicle and it was intended for mass production. Sadly, only 4000 were produced; again, these are now highly prized collectors’ items. The Amphicar was a two-door cabriolet with a Triumph Herald engine under the bonnet/bow. This engine was a 1.2-L 32-kW affair that was harnessed to a 4-speed manual transmission. The Amphicar was capable of getting up to a respectable 70 mph on the land and 7 knots on the water, which caused the designers to call it the Model 770. It wasn’t a speedster but, as one owner described it, it was still “the fastest boat on the road”. You can’t have everything, after all. In spite of one review saying that it was a vehicle that “revolutionized drowning”, it was reasonably good on the water, and has been able to cross the English Channel and cross the Yukon River. Well maintained Amphicars are still taken for little jaunts across water quite safely (or at least as safely as any other boat) by enthusiast clubs.
The most famous owner of the Amphicar by far was former US President Lyndon B. Johnson. When not dealing with hassles to do with the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights movement and trying to beat the Soviets in the space race, LBJ liked to drive his Amphicar downhill into a lake in front of unsuspecting people while yelling that his brakes had failed for the fun of watching his victims panic.
Other amphibious vehicles, past and present can be found on the road, in car museums and occasionally on the water, such as the American military DUKW (inevitably called the Duck) and the more recent Gibbs amphibious vehicles (Aquada, Quadski and Humdinga/Amphitruck). They certainly look like a lot of fun, although they’re not in the same league as James Bond’s aquatic Lotus Esprit. Nevertheless, I think that you and I will probably be tying the kayak onto the roof rails or hitching up the boat trailer for some time to come.
Safe and happy driving (or boating),
Megan
Off-Road Driving That’s Out Of This World
A lot of us have discovered the joys of off-road driving. Plenty of modern vehicles come with AWD capacity so you can do a little bit of off-roading of some sort – or so you can get the extra traction that a four-paw provides. There are plenty of very desirable 4x4s out there with all sorts of this and that to help them do better in the rough stuff. But no matter how good your Nissan Pathfinder or your Skoda Yeti is, there are some vehicles that are a lot snazzier than that.
Good-bye Land Rover , hello Moon Rover. The Apollo Lunar Rover must be one of the quirkiest and most famous of all the vehicles designed by General Motors (and a handful of others), although you are never, ever going to get to drive one. Only a handful of people, all from the USA and the former USSR have driven about as far off the road as you can get, going for a wee jaunt about on the surface of the moon before the manned moon landings were scrapped.
So what’s the Lunar Rover like?
The styling of the Lunar Rover is somewhat reminiscent of an old-school farm tractor. Keeping the weight to a minimum was in the design brief, as was the ability to fold the car up for storage (now there’s an idea we could try to apply more widely to avoid parking problems), so flash-looking body kit was out of the question. Aluminium trim was very much in evidence, however. There was also no need for climate control – all that was provided by the space suits. You could say that it was designed for maximum visibility and the whole cabin was one big sun roof, moon roof or possibly Earth roof. It did have a seatbelt that used Velcro to overcome the problems that would occur with inertia reels and the like in one-sixth of the earth’s gravity. The Lunar Rover has seating for two, with both seats being fully foldable and with a shared armrest. The steering “wheel” is a multifunction joystick.
The Lunar Rover was a very early example of an electric vehicle, which does leave one wondering why this technology was pretty much ignored for terrestrial vehicles during the 1980s and 1990s. It was powered by a pair of 36-volt non-rechargeable batteries with a life of 121 ampere-hours each for a total range of 92 km. The wheels were 23 inch aluminium jobs and the tyres had a chevron tread for extra traction. They weren’t your pneumatic rubber jobs, either: they had a mixture of zinc, steel and aluminium. You could call them the ultimate run-flats.
Performance-wise, the Lunar Rover is no speed freak, with a top design speed of 13 km/h. However, this speed was exceeded by Eugene Cernan of the USA, who holds the current lunar land speed record of 18 km/h.
The handling, however, is excellent. For a start, the suspension is superb: double horizontal wishbone with upper and lower torsion bars and a damper unit between the chassis and upper wishbone. The front and rear wheels have separate steering controls, allowing the front and rear wheels to turn in opposite directions for a tighter turning circle, although the driver can select to steer with front or rear wheels only as needed. Each wheel had its own separate drive unit and each wheel could freewheel if needed. Ground clearance is 36 cm.
Navigation, information and communication systems are also brilliant – modern cars are only just starting to catch up with this 1970s model. Navigation used a combination of the odometer and a directional gyro, plus a sun/shadow monitor to get the right heading. Communications involved two TV cameras, another camera (with film) and several antennae for communication with the Lunar Module. Display panels inform the driver of the current speed, heading, pitch, and power and temperature.
You can see the Lunar Rover in this clip:
The Lunar Rovers (only four were made) were used on three Apollo lunar missions and were left behind on the moon each time (have a look here to see the exact spots). However, if you’re really, really desperate to drive about as far off the road as you can get, there is still hope, but your window of opportunity is closing rather rapidly, if it’s not too late already. The volunteers for the Mars One one-way trip to Mars will get Martian Rovers to drive in as they spend the rest of their lives on the Red Planet.
I think I’ll stick to off-roading in the other half’s Nissan work ute.
Safe and happy driving,
Megan
The President and The Beast
“The Beast” is the nickname of the customized limo of the President of the US of A – a sort of land-based equivalent of Air Force 1. While the name might make certain groups of conspiracy theorists-cum-Biblical fundamentalists have all sorts of conniptions, The Beast is certainly quite an impressive vehicle. It’s almost worth becoming President for – or at least becoming the Presidential chauffeur. That’s if you pass the driving test as well as the safety check – the driver has to be able to do advanced level police-style manoeuvres for evasion if needed.
Although the official marque of The Beast is (no, not 666) Cadillac, the current Beast is actually based on a Chevrolet Kodiak, which means that although it looks like a limousine, it’s a ute at heart. Looks-wise, it’s got many of the classic Cadillac hallmarks, such as the lights and the overall styling. What you might not know is that the outside of The Beast that you can see isn’t actually metal but removable fibreglass panels that look swish while covering the titanium, aluminium, steel and ceramic panelling underneath.
The full list of specs for The Beast is classified information, but they’ve let us know a few little bits and pieces about it, either to deter us from attempting to assassinate anybody, to reassure us that assassinations are unlikely or to make us very, very envious. Or not.
There is not just one Beast but there are 12 identical ones, all tucked away in a very secure underground garage somewhere so they can be trotted out in rotation while the others get fixed.
The Specs of The Beast:
Seating: Seven: two front seats, a rear-facing middle row and two in the very back (this is where the President plus his (or, in the future, her) significant other or sidekick sits). A glass partition separates front and rear, and the rear seats can do the lot when it comes to reclining and adjustment. There’s also a table that can fold up and down in between the middle and rear row.
In-car communications: A highly sophisticated communications console is included somewhere in The Beast. For obvious security reasons, the full details are not available, but it’s pretty safe to say that it’s probably a lot better than what you’ve got in your car. One detail that is available to ordinary Muggles like you and me is that there’s a link that talks to everything else in the accompanying motorcade. There’s also a satellite phone with a hotline to the Pentagon and the Vice President. The car has night vision cameras. Five antennae can be counted coming off the trunk, so there are probably way more communications networks talking to The Beast. Conspiracy theorists are free to speculate as to whether The Beast is in touch with alien craft.
Safety and security: The Beast can withstand biochemical attacks, bullets, grenades and fire, with 8-inch thick doors and some very serious armour plating, including underneath the car. The bulletproof glass is 5 inches thick and is sealed against biochemical attack. Other passive safety features (i.e. those that kick in after or during an accident) include a chauffeur who is a Secret Service member trained in CPR (although he’s not permanently fitted to the car), a blood bank well stocked with the President’s blood type, and a bodyguard in the front seat. Only the driver’s window opens: to a mere 3 inches down. There are rumours that The Beast is fitted with tear gas cannons. Rumours also abound about grenade launchers but we can’t confirm this.
Fuel economy: The engine (reportedly a V8) manages 29 L/100 km, so they’d better have a good source of fuel handy (no, we won’t get into the possible politics of this). Diesel is the fuel of choice, as it’s less volatile than petrol and thus less likely to explode if attacked. The fuel tank is surrounded by foam armour so The Beast won’t become a fireball if the tank scores a direct hit. (Poking around on a few other websites for info suggests that it’s actually run on petrol – so who really knows?)
Tyres: Kelvar-reinforced run-flats made by Goodyear. The steel wheels can keep going even if the tyre blows out completely rather than merely getting flat.
Weight: that’s classified information but it’s pretty darn hefty thanks to all that armour, so it’s a lot. Smart cookies might be able to work out the weight from a combination of the fuel economy and the 0–60 mph time.
Length: 18 feet long
Performance: The 0–60 mph time is 15 seconds, which makes underpowered LPG vans looks speedy. Top speed is reportedly 60 mph.
Ground clearance: Could be better, as demonstrated by one incident in Dublin.
Actually, I think that I like my own Volvo better. It might not have the armour plating and the communications but it’s got better fuel economy, better acceleration and much better ground clearance. And it’s less of a hassle for the local mechanic.
Safe and happy driving,
Megan
Level 2, 9 Help Street