All cars will be required to have dashcams. Either by insurance companies or by governments.
All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time. This is already the case with the majority of commercial vehicles.
Incremental steps in autonomous cars, first starting with 'drone' cars. Cars and trucks that are operated from a remote location. This will be piggy backed on existing technology. Cheap cameras, cheap cell networks etc. Think of delivery car, one person drives a truck from a remote location and one person is inside sorting packages, carrying them to the door. People with kids can work from home as Uber drivers and delivery drivers.
Our current cellular data infrastructure isn't nearly reliable enough to allow routine use of remote operated vehicles in public roads. What happens when a construction crew accidently cuts the backhaul fiber and takes out a whole group of base stations? And no, that problem won't be solved by 5G networks or satellite service.
That problem already occurs! How many of us stopped working for hours when github went down? When aws went down? When some construction cut a wire and took out some of the internet?
The eCall system - which automatically phones the emergency services with your position after a crash - is already mandatory on new cars in the EU. The GPS is already there. Making further use of it, perhaps to assist self-driving cars, doesn't seem like such a stretch. (Which is not to say I welcome it.)
I don’t like this. I’m okay with dying in a cold river or a burning car after a crash if it means I don’t have to be worried about being tracked every second of my life.
At some point, its going to cost extra to buy cars without GPS trackers, houses without police-force endorses surveillance nets, or phones with an actual “off” button. This is much more pressing, in my opinion, than people buying into heavily processed meat substitutes.
I think there's quite a gap between, 'built into every car' and insurance companies requiring access to it. GPS is in every customer phone but insurance companies don't require access to that either.
They should. It wouldn't be hard for carmakers to add a camera at the top of the windshield. The US already requires every new car to come with a backup camera.
It's arguable that dashcams are "required" now as insurance in many ways already. At least as much as adequately insuring your vehicle, and arguable to reduce the likelihood of police abuse.
I recall a discussion of this point on HN a long time ago, but GPS is only one way to charge taxes based on vehicle miles traveled (VMT) - another, which is less invasive, is just to read the vehicle's odometer on some regular basis, either by hand when doing an annual vehicle safety inspection, or automatically by having the vehicle transmit the data. Certainly those have risks of tampering, but so does GPS.
Your last point got me thinking about people sitting in a dark room waiting for autonomous cars to have trouble on the road then alert them to intervene, turning 1 driver:1 car into 1 driver:20 cars.
I can see that. Or, even simpler, a delivery person hopes out with a package and the remote driver circles the block. Garbage trucks might be the first to have this system installed. You need two people to operate a truck currently, a driver and a guy in the back. It drives slow along the road, very predicable routes. Needs to be driven back to the yard once filled, and another truck to take over the route.
Also the ability to drive the truck, at least to some degree from controls at the back of the truck. In my neighborhood there are too many parked cars to be able to let the robotic arm do everything. I often see the driver at the back of the truck moving it forward and hoping off to position trash cans where the robotic arm can pick them up.
I feel that this was the big trend that people missed; instead of AI we simple rebuilt the system to mechanically function better. First with standardized shipping containers, then progressed to other boring stuff.
There are all sorts of people. To some art is “boring”. To some being a refuse truck operator is interesting or being a remote crane operator is exciting. I’ve met people who straight up love “cold calling”. I cannot cold call for the life of me. Some people are excited by engaging with strangers and trying to get them excited about a product or service.
Sure, some people may find being a garbage man to be even erotically stimulating, but that doesn’t mean the majority of garbage men think it’s all that great. It’s a relatively pointless observation.
If this happens, I bet police cameras and trackers are still unreliable at convenient times while all the other commodity cameras and trackers work 100% of the time.
If you ride a rented scooter from e.g. Lime or Bird, your GPS location is being streamed in real-time to many of the departments of transportation in the cities in which they operate[1][2]. It's not a quantum leap to assume cars will follow, especially if they're autonomously operated by some central service, doubly so if they're rented (e.g. from Uber) and not individually owned.
I would think it should be the other way around where gas cars would need to pay carbon tax. Or we can just call it even. Or in a hopeful scenario, stop oil and gas subsidies.
Depending on location, we already pay carbon taxes. In gasoline, tax on the new car, green sticker for being able to drive into low emission zones. Electric cars have none of that, yet they contribute heavily. For example by using electricity produced from coal. It’s just that the owner does not see the emissions.
In most of the world, gasoline is mostly tax already. The US is an exception.
E.g. in the Netherlands the "raw" price of gasoline (a few months back) was 0.61 euro/liter to that, add 0.6 gasoline tax and then add VAT, to come to the price at the pump (pump costs + profits come are included in the 0.61 raw price) of 1.46 euro/liter.
So about 58% of the cost of fuel is tax.
This is ignoring various other taxes that have to be paid, such as foreign taxes on the gasoline, profit tax, company tax, transport tax, road tax, approval tax, vat on the vehicle you're powering, ... All those taxes are either included in the raw gasoline price or are paid separately by the customers. So let's minimize that and say that 70% of the cost of gasoline really funds government (though not necessarily the local one), and should be considered tax (I do believe it'd be closer to 80% if you went really deep). Now of course, a number of those taxes are implemented on electric vehicles as well.
There's no way the government is going to let that tax income lower when it starts eating into their budget, so there will be some sort of tax, probably doubling the price of electric vehicles in the next 10 years or so.
And this is tax. It doesn't matter that you're not doing anything negative to the environment. Already the government is taxing companies generating their own electricity (the Netherlands) in various ways, and they're talking about taxing people who cut their grid connection.
The cash for clunkers program paid $4k to everyone with an old car. A couple of hundred dollars for GPS trackers (and transmitters, which is presumably what is meant) seems well within the collective budget of all parties who pay for cars in the US.
If I had to implement it, I’d do a two stage system. If you install a tracker you pay ten cents per mile. If you don’t have a tracker you have to report mileage every year and pay twelve cents per mile plus a $40 processing fee.
Not everything is done for a rational choice, or even moderately good reasoning. Insurance companies what to know where you drive, when, and have a dashcam video if you get into an accident. Government want to experiment with different forms of taxation. Police and courts want to track people convicted of crimes. Employers want to know that their company car is being used responsibly. Car companies get sued for making fast cars, start to install GPS for liability. Municipalities want to fine/tax speeders. Cars that are on lease can be tracked and shut down remotely if payments stop. All these reasons start to add up.
How so? Why would a new car not come with GPS navigation on the dash? Why would a new car not come with a data connection? These are commodities, your phone has them.
Why limit it to tracking? Why do we put these powerful machines in the hands of users that we know with certainty will kill themselves and others at a predictable rate and then just ask them nicely not to do harm?
The technology required to geofence, speed-regulate, and otherwise control where, when, and how fast cars can go already exists. Why aren't we using it? We don't need fully autonomous cars. There are all kinds of things we can do incrementally. I have to imagine some jurisdictions are going to realize this, eventually. And once they do the totally predictable savings to life and property will be unignorable.
Put appropriate limiters in the vehicles, with a button to disengage all the limits that also notifies the police that you have done so, so that they can decide whether they need to come help, whether (as they later review the case) there was appropriate cause, &c.
All cars will be required to have GPS, and be tracked in real time. This is already the case with the majority of commercial vehicles.
Incremental steps in autonomous cars, first starting with 'drone' cars. Cars and trucks that are operated from a remote location. This will be piggy backed on existing technology. Cheap cameras, cheap cell networks etc. Think of delivery car, one person drives a truck from a remote location and one person is inside sorting packages, carrying them to the door. People with kids can work from home as Uber drivers and delivery drivers.