625
Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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Cars being parked idle all day isn't necessarily going to be a bad thing, most Vehicles self driving out there are EV's and even if it's a standard combustion, those have migrated over to an engine off when stopped ideology where it just doesn't run until someone presses the gas. It wouldn't be infeasible for the company's developing the technology to have an electronic climate control system that just auto-offs when there isn't a passenger in the seat, a sensor that would be a hard requirement for a self-driving vehicle anyway. Which means that it's very likely that the vehicle could even if it was a combustion engine be idle for extended period of time without it taking up too much more resources.
That being said I do believe that electric vehicles would be the optimal vehicle for this, as the only thing it would need to do when it didn't have an order would be have the radio transmitter on which shouldn't take all that much electricity which means it shouldn't drain the battery and furthermore there could be designated charging stations that the car can idle at near these population hotspots like described.
You have to remember as well that once Society transitions to a system that's like that, there is going to be people that don't bother having vehicles themselves so I believe that there's going to be more space freed than space used by doing this change
My complaint specifically was about cars parked on the street where I'd rather have a bike lane, wider sidewalk, outdoor dining, or almost anything else other than a parked car taking up that space.
Yeah but specifically they usually would have been parked in a designated parking area due to the fact that they would need to charge in between uses as well so it's unlikely that those Vehicles would be parked on the sidewalk like standard consumer vehicles are
I think what happened here is I went off topic and was making a complaint about cars in general and how all the space they take up is annoying, but you stayed on topic and are talking more specifically about self driving cars and waymo. So given that I see what you're saying.
I will say that building parking structures (is: homes for cars) instead of homes for people feels kind of bad.