The Extra Dimension

What exciting new forms of transportation does the future hold for us? How will self-driven cars change our travel habits? What even is a hyperloop? Ian, Brian, and Ryan have done the research on all of this and more!

Transportation Miniseries

• Cycling
• Public Transit
• Individual Car Ownership
• Long Distance

• Self-driven cars allow the concept of transportation as a service to really come to fruition.
  • The future of Google with Sundar Pichai – YouTube
    • 4:07-4:42
    • The seed that got Buck thinking about this whole topic, especially transportation as a service with self-driven cars.
    • Cars currently sit idle 90% of their lives. If we do not individually own cars, they can drop one person off and immediately go pick up another.
  • Tesla considers its own ride-sharing business – Autoblog
  • Anytime you need to go somewhere, summon a ride. A car comes to pick you up, drives you to where you are going, and drops you off.
  • Car distribution can be tailored based on expected demand.
  • If you have a regular schedule/put things on your calendar ahead of time, the system can dispatch a car to you before you even ask for it.
  • The system can send different types of cars based on the needs of the trip.
    • Going to work? Smart car.
    • Going out to eat with a bunch of friends? Van.
    • Hauling furniture? Flatbed.
    • Price can be tiered by how much you want to be alone.
  • Parking (and its frustrations) are a thing of the past.
    • Self-driven cars can park much closer together.
    • Electric vehicles could plug into the grid, serving as distributed energy storage.
  • Transportation will be much easier for the very young and the very old.
  • Can get stuff done during a commute.
  • Will encourage more urban sprawl.
    • Potential prevention: it will be comparatively expensive to drive out to the middle of nowhere.
• The Driverless Economy – Federico Pistono – Medium
• The transformative potential of self-driving electric cars – Vox
  • Electric cars can take almost any form you can imagine.
  • All they need are wheels, a platform for batteries and passenger(s), a user interface, and wires to connect everything.
  • Electric cars convert higher percentage of energy to movement (~60% vs ~20%).
  • Infrastructure is (by necessity) designed for peak use. This applies to not only streets, but also parking.
  • Accidents will be far less common.
    • No need to armor up vehicles, so they can be much lighter.
    • Use less energy to move.
    • Use less material in construction.
  • Light Traffic / MIT Senseable City Lab
    • With only self-driven cars on the road, we won’t need traffic lights. As cars approach intersections, they will coordinate their timings and routes so they have to slow down at the most.
    • Using a slot-based system, pedestrian and bicycle traffic can be accommodated.
  • Way less pollution.
  • Security
    • A lot of data will be collected about individual citizens.
    • Who can access the data? What can it be used for?
    • Targeted advertising will be lucrative, no doubt.
    • A lot of effort will have to be put in to protect against attacks.
• The future of America is driverless | Verge 2021
  • Self-driving won’t just apply to cars; trucks, ships, trains, etc will be largely automated.
  • Trucks will be able to drive much closer together, reducing drag and saving fuel.
  • Data will have to be shared between manufacturers, so AIs can learn from each other.
  • Real-time reporting of road conditions.
  • Labor concerns as jobs that rely on driving become obsolete.
• Safety is a huge topic when it comes to self-driven cars
  • • The Extra Dimension #28: Infotainment Interface Design for Automobiles › The Nexus
      • No matter what interface you use, the driver is still going to be distracted.
  • How do we decide a self-driven car’s response to ethically tough scenarios?
    The Messy Ethics of Self Driving Cars – YouTube
    • Self-driven cars will have more opportunity to respond to situations in an ethical manner, as events are often so fast a human would only have instinct.
    • Laws do not cover all ethical conundrums, and sometimes run contrary to what is ethical in a particular situation.
    • Who is at fault if a car does something harmful? The owner of the car? The manufacturer? The programmers?
    • Now that we have neural networks, it may be possible to teach a computer to figure out the answers to ethical conundrums based on examples.
  • Self-driving cars can be fooled pretty easily in ways humans cannot.
    Google self-driving cars lack a human’s intuition for what other drivers will do.
    • If a driver does something the self-driven car does not expect, it has more trouble reacting than a human driver would.
    • The National Highway and Traffic Safety Administration ruled that AI software can count as a driver.
    • Drivers in different regions have different norms. Sometimes a driver has to be aggressive to merge, but if an AI is programmed to follow all laws, it may never make it into the lane.
• Flying cars
  Uber’s Flying Cars Plan | WIRED
  • Not really cars, but small electric VTOL aircraft.
  • Uber wants to offer an on-demand service that uses them within five years.
  • Infrastructure won’t be much of an issue, since they just need helipads instead of runways. There are already ~6,000 helipads in the US.
• Hyperloop
  • A proposed solution for high-speed travel between cities with large traffic that are less than 900 miles apart. It would consist of a tube with a rail inside it, where air pressure is kept low. Pods would travel through this tube at subsonic speeds.
    Hyperloop | SpaceX
  • It’s a cross between a Concorde, a railgun, and an air hockey table!
    Full Video of Tesla and SpaceX Head Elon Musk at D11 – Liz Gannes – D11 – AllThingsD
  • SpaceX announced the concept in 2013 and started a competition for independent teams to design and build a hyperloop pod. The big event will take place on a test track near SpaceX headquarters in January 2017.
    Hyperloop | SpaceX
  • Dubai may be the first place we see a hyperloop in the wild.
    In the loop: Dubai is to test the feasibility of hyperloop trains | The Economist
  • Building hyperloop on Mars would be a lot easier, because the air pressure is already low enough so you wouldn’t need the tube.
    Elon Musk talks Hyperloop on Mars – Business Insider

• Free Music Archive: Remain – Acid

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This episode of The Extra Dimension has a Fringe episode. You should really listen to The Fringe #408: TED #17 — Nothin’ Like Some Saliva and Friction!!

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