Category Archives for "Autonomous Vehicles"
Recently, Hyundai released a flying car concept that it was bringing to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. The full-scale prototype was then displayed at CES. Now the South Korean automaker has upped the ante.
Not only will Hyundai mass produce these electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft, but it will also deploy them for Uber’s promised air taxi network.
Uber announced its aerial ambitions back in 2016 with a white paper that outlined a future “Uber Elevate” project. The ride-hailing company has said it wants to perform its own test flights in 2020, and plans to launch some version of an air taxi service in 2023, starting in Dallas Texas, Los Angeles, California and Melbourne, Australia.
Following the articles I've written recently about self-driving cars and the effect that it's going to have on us as Uber drivers, effectively making us redundant, a (small) number of Rideshare Guy subscribers have unsubscribed.
That's OK. It's human nature to bury our heads in the sand and try to ignore things we don't like. And clearly we don't like someone telling us that a source of income that we might be relying on is about to disappear.
But the fact is, folk, they are not about to go away.
Australian transport officials have travelled to Sweden to look at getting driverless buses brought to our shores.
The city of Barkaby is one of the first in the world to allow the autonomous buses to run in regular traffic.
Image Provided by Uber
Recently I've been posting about my belief that the days of the Uber driver are numbered because autonomous, self-driving cars are just around the corner. The technology advances have been so rapid that most of the potential problems are already solved and governments will be driven to early adoption in order to reduce the road toll and congestion.
I've had a lot of feedback in support but also some disagreement, from people who just can't see it happening that quickly, if at all.
That's OK. It's human nature to believe that the future will be just like the present.
As I mentioned in a previous post, I'm no longer driving for Uber.
This came about by accident or, perhaps more accurately, by force of circumstance. But it turned out to be a good thing.
It happened when I had a (very) expensive repair bill - $9,000 to source and replace the high pressure fuel pump, which lives inside the fuel tank and so is labour-intensive to replace. Along with all the ancillary components that support it.
Unfortunately, it happened while I was transporting Uber riders to the airport. I managed to flag down another Uber driver, who got my passengers to their destination and I then spent the rest of the day organising roadside assistance and a tow truck to get the vehicle to a specialist dealer for the repair.
Imagine if you woke up to the headline tomorrow "38,000 dead. More to come." You'd be horrified. You'd be demanding that the government do something about it.
Yet that's "just" the number of people killed on American roads last year.
In the five years from 2014, the number of US road fatalities was 181,168. That's over 180,000 lives lost in just five years. Plus even more injured or disabled for life.