[ExI] Driverless racecars

[spike]

From: extropy-chat [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Monday, February 16, 2015 7:52 PM
To: ExI chat list
Subject: Re: [ExI] Driverless racecars

 

On Mon, Feb 16, 2015 at 1:45 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:

 

> Soon we will have open market self-driving cars, but even those of us who anticipate these things will not trust them.  I won’t: I will be a Nervous Nellie the whole time the thing is driving.  But consider once they get good enough you have a stadium motocross with a pack of guys chasing one robo-bike and can’t catch it.  That entire stadium will be transformed.  I can’t help thinking there must be a way to make a buttload of money off of this.

 

Maybe self driving bicycle messengers would be the best way for people to grow accustomed to driverless  vehicles on public streets, bicycles aren't very big and don't go very fast (although faster than cars stuck in traffic jams) and so would be pretty non-threatening.

 

  John K Clark   

 

 

That is one hell of an idea John.  A bicycle is light, sturdy, cheap, a perfect testbed vehicle.  It wouldn’t hurt it to fall over.  The forces are light, so you could do battery power with a 10 Ah lithium.  The biggest risk might be theft we might suppose, but for a testbed vehicle, it sounds like just the thing.  We could even attempt a robo-unicycle.  

 

Again I think of racing, so we could imagine a standardized 1 cubic inch displacement 2-stroke single cylinder IC such as one might find on a model airplane, and have a closed course time-trial race.  With a bicycle and the kinds of speeds one might achieve with a 1 cid motor (probably about 40 mph) we wouldn’t need to worry much about sliding and such.  We might even be able to retrofit a standard bicycle with about a 19 tooth front sprocket and the 6 sprocket rear with derailleur aft.  Something like that would be cheap to build out of standard bicycle parts.

 

The visuals would be striking, changing hearts and minds.

 

spike

 

 

 

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