The Everyday Automotive Future Could Be A Slow Back-Seat Ride To Boredom

With Google's spin-off ride-sharing startup Waymo giving journalists a first taste of its vision for the future of everyday travel, the outlook isn't good
The Everyday Automotive Future Could Be A Slow Back-Seat Ride To Boredom

Waymo has opened its Californian doors to the media, showcasing the self-driving tech that it says could feed the next generation of ride-hailing and public transport systems, and the slowness of the experience is an unavoidable future reality.

It might be advanced, but that doesn’t stop even non-car-journalists calling Waymo’s self-driving cars slow…

Waymo’s fully-autonomous cars drive around even more slowly than we petrolheads might already fear, according to an unexpectedly reliable source. But even we wouldn’t realistically want it any other way.

The Everyday Automotive Future Could Be A Slow Back-Seat Ride To Boredom

The notoriously anti-car Guardian newspaper isn’t normally a source of automotive insight for us. That said, when a media brand that so detests CT’s favourite subject calls a driving experience slow, you know it really must have been.

In a piece that largely praises Waymo’s technology for being able to handle ‘random’ cyclists, human-driven cars and more, as part of a carefully controlled test environment (just like the real world, then), journalist Julia Carrie Wong described the cars as “driving with the level of care you might take if you had a wedding cake in the backseat.”

The Everyday Automotive Future Could Be A Slow Back-Seat Ride To Boredom

Now, on the face of it you might expect us to fly off the handle and slam this impeding snooze-fest. Believe me, we’d love to. But would you really want to get on board a Johnny Cab only to be slammed back in your seat, flung hard enough around corners to smack your head into the side glass and send your smartphone tumbling out of your hand toward cracked screen hell? Probably not.

When you’re not in control of the car, driving fast is much, much less fun. It’s okay to admit that your one friend who always drives too fast around other traffic is actually being a bit of a tool. Near misses happen, but to invite them with bad driving is an experience no passenger enjoys. A vehicle where everyone inside is a passenger has to put comfort and relaxation as its priorities.

Could it be made fun? Not in any way that people like us are interested in, no. The only fun would come from in-car entertainment, like a big stereo or Blu-ray players. The future of ‘driving’ looks like it might be hellishly boring. Can we accept that? Well, perhaps the more important question is: will we even have a choice?

Comments

Sniff Petrol

The sad thing is the fact that most people have failed to realise that we already have self-driving cars…they’re called taxis

11/05/2017 - 08:02 |
101 | 1

Top Gear reference

11/05/2017 - 08:26 |
30 | 0

[DELETED]

11/05/2017 - 09:23 |
8 | 0
V-Tech and EcoBoost kicked in yo

In reply to by Sniff Petrol

Unlike taxis these won’t try to rip you off 24/7.

11/06/2017 - 04:10 |
0 | 0
Tomislav Celić

Doubt it. Auto-pilot is an asssist, not a driver replacement

11/05/2017 - 08:11 |
9 | 1

Full autonomy is not possible with today’s tech

11/05/2017 - 08:38 |
7 | 0
TheMindGarage

I’m not bothered if self-driving cars become common in cities. Heck, I’d probably use them myself. But lower-populated country roads better stay petrolhead territory.

As for the slowness, this just shows that SELF DRIVING TECHNOLOGY IS NOT READY TO BE ROLLED OUT! Despite what the media and Musk wants you to believe, I don’t think the tech will be properly ready for mass consumer rollout until the 2030s. Until we can make an AI that drives significantly safer than humans and can keep up with an average driver (or even go faster), it won’t be ready. And that’s before you look at stuff like inter-car-communication and ethics.

11/05/2017 - 08:44 |
30 | 0
ᴶᵘˢᵗᴬᴿᵃⁿᵈᵒá

In reply to by TheMindGarage

Agreed

11/05/2017 - 09:17 |
4 | 0

Totally agree. And If only lower populated Country roads would stay Petrolhead territory I’d move to Canada or Australia….somewhere with no big city around

11/05/2017 - 13:54 |
1 | 0
ᴶᵘˢᵗᴬᴿᵃⁿᵈᵒá

I really hope there’s a way.A way so that we can manually control the car by ourselves.That’s what you call driving.This,this act just shows how humans are so lazy even a basic task such as commandeering a vehicle is assisted by machinery.

11/05/2017 - 09:16 |
3 | 0

I don’t mind if in the cities, we have self-driving cars with no steering wheels that you can hire (because 95% of a privately-owned car’s life is spent parked). It’d be like a driverless taxi system. But outside the cities, steering wheels and 2-3 pedals please!

11/05/2017 - 09:24 |
3 | 0
Anonymous

THEY NEED TO GET BOMBED!!!!

11/05/2017 - 09:32 |
0 | 3
Danny S

The big driving factor behind driverless cars isn’t, I think, safety. It’s because the majority of people are so flippin’ lazy and tech-addicted that they can’t bear the thought of putting effort into something that takes them away from their online social life even for a short commute to work.
But I don’t think that we’ll have to worry about being banned from actually driving for a long time. There will always be motorbikes and bicycles on the road the cars have to work around (because if anyone tried banning those it’d destroy millions of jobs and two massive industries), so there’s no reason they couldn’t work around manual cars as well.

11/05/2017 - 10:29 |
16 | 0
T_StreakMLP

Yep, Robots are making the world ‘perfect’… HOW!?

ROBOTS ARE MINDLESS, SOULLESS PILES OF METAL!

11/05/2017 - 10:47 |
9 | 2

…So are cars.

11/05/2017 - 12:47 |
6 | 4
Anonymous

I didn’t sign for this …

11/05/2017 - 11:38 |
4 | 0
Soni Redx (MD Squad Leader) (Subie Squad Leader)

What happens if you need to go to the hospital and you get one of those? The person is gonna die or have a child..

11/05/2017 - 14:27 |
2 | 0
LEitner

Let’s make everything even more even and plain and boring… yay

11/05/2017 - 17:46 |
0 | 0

Topics

Sponsored Posts