We get a lot of links posted or emailed to us that just aren’t quite relevant enough to be individual posts. In the spirit of that, here’s our first Saturday Link Fest.

Google has created a ‘neural network’ of over 16bn connections. Its first effort? It taught itself how to recognise a cat here. Thanks Paul Godsmark.

Thanks Gabriel S for the next few:

P2P Car Rental now available through GM’s OnStar here.

P2P Taxi Services now operating in San Francisco : Cyrus Faviar takes a fascinating ride here.

Automate or Perish here. All about the most recent developments in automation of business.

Since starting this blog, we have seen quite a few different names bandied about for autonomous vehicles:

Whistle Cars and Robo Cars have been names promoted by Brad Templeton.
Apeless Carriage is the idea of reader Lars and the name of his new blog.
Autonome is a word proposed by reader Paul Godsmark.

The most common terms we see around the internet are (with “vehicles” being a substitute for “cars”):

Self Driving Cars
Driverless Cars
Autonomous Cars

When deciding what to call this blog, we chose to use the name Driverless Car HQ for these reasons:

1. We don’t believe in fighting against the grain of popular usage trends. To do so is basically impossible.
2. The Google concept is called the Google Driverless Car Program. Given that they dominate the news for this industry with their program, there’s every chance that this is the term that will be popularly accepted.
3. Self-Driving Cars may statistically be the most used term in searches, but Self Driving Car HQ doesn’t quite have the same ring.
4. We felt the term autonomous vehicle is less accessible and will most likely be used in legislation only as opposed to popular usage. However, that being said, if Google had used the word autonomous we probably would have fallen in line.
5. To coin our own term only serves to heighten confusion. For the sake of discussion on the internet including blogs, Twitter and Facebook it can fragment the conversation to have multiple terms being used interchangeably.

Obviously we have now invested a fair amount of time and because of this would now prefer the term Driverless Car to transfer into common parlance.

If another term does become popular, we will use this. We are smart enough to follow the winds of change. At the same time, we won’t start using terms “just because” as this will only serve to create confusion and ambiguity.

What is your opinion? Are we wrong?

*edit – reader Mohammad P points out that “*Google program is named “Self-Driving”, not “Driverless”. Further investigation proves him correct!

Parking lots.

They’re a necessary but ugly blight on the landscape of many fine cities and we arguably have far more than we’ll ever need.

For example: according to the New York Times, Houston has 30 car spots per resident.

What happens when we suddenly no longer need to park our cars?

Slate’s talking about this today.

Every metropolitan area in the United States contains many, many more parking spaces than automobiles. When you’re at work, the space allocated for your vehicle at home sits there empty. When you’re at home, the space allocated for your vehicle at the office sits empty. Malls build parking to accommodate demand during peak hours, and the spaces mostly sit empty off-peak. But if the cars could drive around without a human pilot, there’d be no need for such lavish supplies of vehicle storage. In principle, a metro area could get by with fewer than one parking space per car since even at minimum-demand times a nonzero quantity of vehicles would be in use. That’s probably extreme, but right now depending on how you count we have somewhere between three and eight spaces per car. If the cars don’t need to sit idly waiting for you until you want to leave (imagine a world of cheap, ubiquitous taxis) that number is going to become totally ridiculous. After exploding for about 60 years, the torrent of parking construction is going to halt very suddenly and then start shifting into reverse. That should even make some rail lines more useful.

Brad Templeton, who has a fantastic RoboCar section on his site, has these thoughts:

Robocars should be able to outdo even the best parking valet when it comes to parking densely in a lot. This is not just because of their ability to do details moves in close quarters, it’s because they can coordinate. For example, if rearranging a valet lot requires moving every single car, that’s something the robocars can all do at once, and an almost impossible task for human valets.

Of course, robocar lots will try to organize so that cars that may be needed soon can get out more easily, and cars with known (and later) need times will be more blocked, but in truth no car will be very blocked, because of the robocars ability to move in concert.

The combination of smaller cars and super-valet parking should allow typical parking lots to hold several times more vehicles than they can today.

If we ever need to build more parking lots, lots designed for robocars could be even denser. For example, they could have sections with very low ceilings — because humans almost never go in there. A parking structure could thus have twice as many storeys.

Aside from the above, I find myself disagreeing with most of Brad’s other thoughts on parking but he’s got just as much chance at being right. For example, he posits that double-parking might be the way of the future:

Robocars might not only park blocking driveways. At low-traffic times (which are exactly the times that the most parking is needed) robocars could double-park or even triple park on the streets. One could imagine a street with 6 lanes at rush hour that, during the night or middle of the day is reduced to just 2 lanes with 4 lanes of parking. Or even to a single one-way lane. This works well because cars have to be somewhere. They either will be moving in the driving lanes or waiting in the waiting lanes. The total amount of space remains similar (parked cars are of course denser on the ground than moving ones.)

Robocar double parking doesn’t mean a problem for the cars on the curb lane, even if the cars are quadruple parked. Of course, cars would be encouraged to try to organize themselves so that cars needed soonest are on the outside, and long-wait cars are on the inside, but that just reduces the amount of moving.

That’s because robocars could, when double-parked on a block of moderate length, always leave one “gap” in the line of cars. This gap could be in the middle, or it could be a more natural gap at one of the ends. If there’s a frequently used driveway, there will already be a gap.

I’m not sure I see this happening though. As discussed above, we’re going to be up to our eyeballs in redundant parking lots so you’d think they would be the first port of call. Not only this but Driverless Cars will need to charge themselves somehow and the double parking solution doesn’t fit that vision.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this -

Matthew.

“Hey, is that a Driverless Car? Wow, look honey! That guy’s not using his – ”

SMASH.

We’ve had a fair amount of fun up to this point sharing some of our favorite Driverless Cars from around the world. Check out some other posts of ours to see past concept vehicles.

Today we present to you many that you may have missed – and some very cool ideas to boot.

The Transport as a Service model (TaaS) will mean that Driverless Car companies of the future will seek differentiation in order to win clients just as they do today. Some will compete on price, and we can easily imagine that they will be hyper-efficient, super-aerodynamic, light and tiny.

Others will push into the luxury space and be like rolling lounges, kitted out with luxurious leather and wood-grain fittings. It’s these kinds of imaginings which have gone into the images below. Hat Tip to Eco Friend for helping us to discover many of these:

Click Any Image To See The Full Size.

The ATNMBL - From Mike and Maaike  :

The seats facing outside would make me quick sick. I doubt I’d be the only one! A stylish vision, however.

Hat Tip To A Distinctive World

Name Unknown – From Forbes:

A touch more functional.

The Driverless Taxi By Peter Kubik

Hat Tip : Environment Team

The Guardian by John Bukasa of Casser Design

Complete lack of privacy, but it would suit sporting parades and others who want to be seen.

Hat Tip: Yanko Design

The Zagato

Not to be confused with the real world Zagato.

The iMove by Liviu Tudoran

What it would be like if Apple were to release a car:

Hat Tip : Car Guide Blog

The Autonomi

EV 2020 by Robin Long

Jaguar Mark XXI by Chris Pollard

This one pushes the boundaries of the imagination, however we can definitely see car-makers moving to develop vehicles that have efficiency as priority #1, #2 and #3. Given that form won’t be an issue any more, cars will most likely be sleek and could well be covered in solar panels.

Hat Tip : Car Body Design

Hi Everyone

Just wanted to say a big THANK-YOU to so many of you who are beginning to make this blog something really fantastic:

1. To those who have been sending us stories, thank-you! We rely on you to find so many of these stories. Most special mention goes to Gabriel S who has sent us a heap of links to sift through. To all : please keep sending them!

2. To those who have been commenting – mostly on Facebook and Twitter and now in the comments section – thanks for your kind words and feedback. Please continue!

3. To those who have been sharing the blog by email, Facebook and Twitter – we have been noticing traffic coming from these sources and it means the world to us. Please keep it up.

4. To the silent majority – thanks for being a part of it and coming along every day. We’d love to hear from you and get your feedback sometime.

5. To anyone who owns a website – the best compliment anyone could give us is to link to us from your website, article or blog. It would be of enormous benefit to us and if you could do so, we’d appreciate it immensely.

We have plans to re-shape and re-make the blog further beyond what it is. As it stands today is just a foundation. The design will improve as will the content available on the site.

There’s a quick piece over at the Technology Review today talking about the question : will Autonomous Vehicles save fuel?

Of course they will:

Simulations suggest that only a few cars need to have the technology to make a significant impact. If 1 percent to 5 percent of cars can send real-time data about their speed to a central hub, traffic jams can be spotted within five minutes, and cars equipped with GPS systems can be offered alternate routes to avoid them.

Adaptive cruise control could also prevent many traffic jams from forming in the first place. Drivers tend to change speed on hills or when approaching tunnels, which can cause traffic to bunch up. They also brake too much in response to vehicles ahead of them. After a few drivers in a lane do this, traffic can come to a halt. Cars with adaptive cruise control keep a steady speed on hills and brake more gradually if cars slow down.

Thanks to Gabriel for sending the link over.

I’m going to make a prediction: hip young women will go online clothes shopping while commuting to work in driverless vehicles – it will be one of the main ways women buy clothes.

Why do I make this prediction? As the sole man in an office full of young women I can confidently assure you that the major killers of productivity are:

1. Facebook

2. Clothes shopping at sites like asos.co.uk

3. My chiselled good looks.

Women love clothes shopping and with the rise of virtual billboards, virtual fitting rooms and the ability to return clothes bought online or via smartphone app, it’s getting easier and easier to buy clothes online. I’m suggesting that a lot of the extra free time women have whilst commuting in driverless cars will be an advertisers paradise and retail stores will spend big bucks getting these new virtual billboards into driverless cars and in front of women’s eyeballs.

Imagine – you’re sitting in your driverless car, browsing the latest threads on the dashboard (or your iPad 14) and you see some garments you like. They arrive via driverless car, you try them on and send the car back with anything you don’t want to keep. I’m even going to predict there will be delivery trucks with, wait for it – with fitting rooms onboard for women people who can’t find anything to wear in the morning or need a new outfit for the night out but don’t have time to go home and change.

It’s the perfect solution to every glass of wine spilled between Wedding and Wedding Reception.

The temptation for impulse buying will be immense.

In short, driverless car interiors will be the new train station billboards – probably in cheaper models, like in Amazon’s Kindle – and if you sell clothes, you’re going to be very rich happy.

One big thing predicted by most analysts of driverless car technology is that most transportation will be conducted in single-passenger vehicles.

Here’s some of our favourites. Most are only concepts but it’s fun to think about it.

LIT Motors C1 (currently a concept car, but production is planned. More info here)

GM – EN-V (concept car - more info here)

This one is technically 2 passenger but we love it, so it’s in. This vehicle has two wheels, using technology borrowed from the Segway in order to balance. The range is 25mi/40km but we can give battery tech a bit of time to work it out! In any case, most trips are less than that length.

Moville (concept - more info here)

Credit - Tuvie.com

Credit - Tuvie.com

Tango (limited production – more info here)

Credit - Unknown

Credit - Unknown

Honda 3R-C

Credit - Unknown

Volkswagon NILS

Credit - VW

Credit - VW

 MIT Citycar (now beginning production)

Credit : MIT