Not just for navigation around city streets in driverless cabs, but driverless trucks and buses, as well as your own private vehicle. Have to admit, seems a bridge too far for me at the moment, but could well be a complete revolution in personal, public, and business transport.
Seems like everyone is working towards making this a reality, few car makers ignoring it and any who do, likely to be left behind.
Not exactly sure where the motivation for the development springs from. I would think if you asked the general motorist what features they would like to see in new cars, an autonomous driving capability would be pretty low on the priority list.. Eventually, could it be cost cutting /efficiency/better service or even incongruously safety which will be the effect.
The human lorry bus or taxi driver with their human limitations of endurance, needing their breaks, and permitted hours of driving, and overhead of actually paying them for their hours would not apply to businesses using autonomous vehicles.
GM are progressing the autonomous route with this cooperation with Lyft......and another outlet of possible global proportions for their Chevy Bolt platform.
https://electrek.co/2017/02/19/gm-auton ... lyft-2018/
Daimler have entered a partnership with UBER for self-driving cars on their ride sharing network.
https://electrek.co/2017/01/31/daimler- ... g-network/
and what of TESLA couple of quotes from the above article
In 2015, famous Silicon Valley venture capitalist and early Tesla investor Steve Juvertson recalled a conversation he had with Uber CEO Travis Kalanick:
“Travis recently told me that in 2020, if Teslas are autonomous, he’d want to buy all of them. He said all 500,000 of estimated 2020 production, I’d want them all, but he couldn’t get a return call from Elon.”
Regards NeilThere’s also Tesla. The automaker made it quite clear that it plans to operate its own network of self-driving cars, but the vehicles on the ‘Tesla Network’ will be a mix of cars owned by its customers and the company’s own fleet. Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that the majority of ‘Tesla Network’ revenue will go to owners: ‘it’s not Tesla versus Uber, it’s the people versus Uber’ he added.