Mar 31 2019

I Love my Driverless Hotel Showroom

Back in the day I when I first used to sell scanning systems to supermarkets. I’d hop on a plane and fly somewhere like Napier, get into a rental car and then drive to visit all the large owner operated supermarkets between there and New Plymouth. It would take me around 3 days. A lot of that time was spent driving or waiting to see the owner.

What a difference to the hotelpod I use today. When they came out in 2025, everyone thought it was a load of hype. Who would bother?

So now I leave the night before. I take my guitar, a demo system that the engineers put in before sending it on to me, and settle in to relax on the drive down in the executive sized hybrid pod. It arrives in Napier during the night and when I wake up at 6AM, it has already docked into the hotel proper, so I can have a nice hot shower and catch up on the news on the 75″ TV.

I go down to the restaurant and enjoy a fresh flat white with my buffet breakfast, go back to my room and make sure everything is back in the pod before it un-docks and takes me to my first supermarket call.

Instead of waiting in the queue of sales people and merchandisers, I have a wander around the store and look at how things are working, chat with a few of the staff and then head back to the pod, for a one-on-one with the owner operator, who is curious to see the pod and the new 3D scanning system I’ve brought with me to show him.

He’s curious about my travel mode, so I take him for a drive along the freeway, building my relationship with him over a coffee. I probably should get a commission from the manufacturer because I think he’s deciding to buy one himself to replace the old Winnebago, which was great in its day, but pretty tiring as a way of having a holiday.

We have a good discussion about his aged stock, the concept of putting people on checkouts as a novel way of building a relationship with customers again and I soon take my leave.

As I hop back in the pod at 9AM, heading for my second call of the day, I record a video proposal for my prospect I have just visited, with stats based on how I can improve his stock using 4D heat maps of the product groups I believe have a lot of upside; and a presentation of the ROI I believe the system will deliver with 18 months.

The pod advises me that there has been an accident ahead, a serious one between a Level 4 and an old school car that has left the road closed. It recommends that I switch the order of my visits, so I have my Virtual Assistant shuffle my meetings with my clients’ Va and she confirms that my next call is now 90 minutes away. I relax and catch up on some email Yep still that dreaded Inbox, as I head to my next stop.

On Friday night, the pod drops me back home at around 7 PM. 10 years earlier, that’s the time I would have been waiting on my luggage at the airport, having seen the still heavily congested traffic on the motorway from the air and it would have been more like home at 9PM tired and frazzled. I unload my kit and the guitar (I wrote a new song on the way home called Blues in an Airconditioned Pod), and greet the family, probably feeling more relaxed and refreshed than they are. The pod heads back to the office where they will remove the scanning demo kit and release it for housekeeping to ready it for the next happy traveller.

Feb 7 2019

The Day of the Thousand, When Taxis Shut Down the Driver-less Ubers

Remember back in 2017 when Volvo said that they would indemnify any owners of their autonomous cars that were involved in an accident? Funny after a few fatal crashes, car manufacturers changed their minds on that option.

So about a month after Uber let loose a thousand autonomous Ubers on the road, taxi drivers started playing pranks on the driverless cars, and last Friday cabbies almost brought transport to a standstill as they fought to keep their jobs relevant and encourage people to only use taxis driven by a human.

How did they do it? It was so simple. They based the idea on the observation that hardly anyone knows how to indicate correctly on a roundabout and don’t get me started on 4-way stops!

So anyway, based on the fact that people typically indicate when they are going into a roundabout, but don’t indicate when they leave it, causing confusion for other drivers who have to guess whether they are exiting or continuing around, some ‘smart’ person encouraged all taxi drivers and supporters to do the same thing.

So next thing you know, loads of drivers are indicating that they were continuing to stay on the roundabout when they weren’t. Human drivers, being used to poor driver etiquette drove as usual, but the risk averse driverless Ubers detected the indicators and waited until the offending car had clearly vacated the roundabout, by which time the next car arrived and did the same.

As a consequence, arterial roads all over the city came to a standstill while the 1,000 Ubers patiently waited for a gap to continue driving, creating absolute mayhem for commuters, people taking their kids to school and public bus services. With the gridlock came fares in the many hundreds of dollars, even for short trips, which will probably take a month of Sundays to unravel as Uber fights to restore customer confidence.

The challenge was identified already back in 2019 when many industry pundits said that unless driverless cars were able to think as humans, rationally irrational, sharing the highways where 85% of cars are still manually driven, there would be major hurdles to overcome.

Fortunately for Uber, these cars still had steering wheels and the ability for a driver to over-ride the controls or the 1,000 as they are now known, might have been consigned to scrap. Suddenly there was a massive demand for human drivers again and they were calling on the many people who had helped them become successful in the first place.

Car Manufacturers are said to be offering huge sums of money to indenture bright young students to take up Deep Learning qualifications in the nations universities. They say they need thousands of people to work on developing knowledge based systems that are adaptable to the whims of humans. In the meantime, they are going back to the 2020 models of car, which were limited to driver assist technology.

Jan 24 2019

Autonomous Car Graveyard

Well it started at some university in the Midwest as an Orientation Week prank but then it grew legs and for a week, cities all over the US came close to grinding still. The idea was simple. Whenever they had an autonomous car behind them, drivers would slow down to a crawl.

With so many people doing it, the autonomous cars couldn’t overtake and cities ground to a halt. People waited for their driverless Uber and Lyft cars, that arrived an hour late. People who had sent their cars home to park waited seemingly forever to get their ride home. By the end of the week many people were lining up for public transport that couldn’t cope with the dramatic increase in demand and even with reduced traffic the roads were still reduced to a procession. The only thing missing was the marching band leading the cortege.

Mayors threatened to change bylaws to make it illegal to drive slow and asked universities to reign in their students, but by then everyone who loved driving or had a prankish sense of humor joined in and the freeways and arterials crawled like a funeral procession, flashing their lights and beeping their horns.

After a week or so the novelty wore off and life returned to normal. Many a tale was told around the bar table about the personal impacts while they waited for their cars to come an pick them up.

Jul 17 2018

Alexa Changed my Life AND Has Almost Stopped TXTing and Driving

I first installed Alexa on my iPhone back in ’18 after reading the @garyvee book Crushing It: How Great Entrepreneurs Build Their Business and Influence and How You Can Too.

I knew about Voice First Technology of course. I had been using Siri for ages and played round with Cortana which was a little less impressive. I just didn’t feel I needed it on my laptop. I still touch-type fast.

When Alexa started connected to my WiFi and Bluetooth displays, things changed. I had a mix of audio and video in the rooms in the house where I wanted it. Then there’s my car.

I didn’t get to CES 2018 unfortunately but I didn’t really need to. I got the picture from videos.

A big difference was getting Alexa in my car.

Of course I already had my Navdy, which had hand gestures but the company went under as I was waiting for my software update, because the navigation maps were no longer current. I can’t tell you how gutted I was about that. I’m still using it, but a lot of the new freeways and subdivisions aren’t on it. With Alexa a lot of the the other features are now redundant.

Anyway, two major things happened.

One is how my life has changed with VFT and the other is that distracted driving accidents from people TXTing and driving have reduced by about 10% each year for the last 5 years and its not because of driverless cars. They STILL haven’t become popular. I guess people still enjoy the drive. I still do, that’s why I have a Corvette right? I didn’t buy a muscle machine so it could drive me.

This is a little bit of what my day looks like with Alexa

I wake naturally, I have a good body clock. I ask Alexa the weather. She says its 11 degrees (That’s just under 52 degrees for my American readers.) and we are heading for a high of 15 C.

I get her to turn up the climate control for the lounge dining area and go to the bathroom where she is connected to my shower speaker from AliExpress and get my personalized news. I have a mix of New Zealand news as well as CNN and BBC.

Then its time for a traffic report. It’s school holidays so it is only going to take me half an hour to travel the 12 km to work, that’s great. I can linger over breakfast (asking her to add milk and English muffins to my grocery list) and dictate my morning vlog.

I get Alexa to open the garage door and unlock my front door and the car, she points out that I am not carrying my phone and gives it a quick chirp so I know where it is.

I start up my driveway to work, confirming she has locked the front door and closed the garage door, all the lights are off as is the electric towel rail which I always used to forget to switch off! ; and I get her to open Spotify (yes I’m still using it) and start my Daily Playlist 5.

I don’t use Alexa much at work, except while I am walking to the Sushi shop the long way and listen to a podcast. It’s an open plan office.

On the way home, I use it to ask Gaspy where the cheapest 98 octane fuel is for my car. It’s getting very expensive and not many gas stations have it any more.

When I have my tank full ($150! Petrol is heavily taxed and way more expensive than in the US or just about anywhere else in the world), I turn on the heat pump at home to 24 degrees so the house will be nice and warm when I get in and turn on the front door and hall lights.

She opens the garage door and front door as I’m getting ready to reverse into the garage.

My wife isn’t due home for another hour so I get Alexa to order our usual Chinese takeout from Uber Eats for 7 PM. I’m not much of a cook and we couldn’t cook a meal cheaper than that for two anyway.

Getting changed I ask Alexa for another news update and for my fitness info. I only walked 3,000 steps today, a little over 3 KM. Most of that was the 2 km circuit I do after I buy my sushi.

I then play a quick game of poker online and use Alexa to translate the Portuguese that the Brazilians are talking because it frustrates me that I can’t understand them and they often dominate the table. Then I get Alexa to translate my English and dictate it back to them, telling them to pull their heads in. They lol.

We sit down for dinner in the lounge and Alexa finds where we are at on Suits Series 12 and casts it on the 85″ TV that I finally managed to get spousal approval for, on the basis that the US Tennis Open would look so much better on the 16k TV screen. The resolution is way better than being there and the sound is amazing. I’m still frustrated that they are not broadcasting 3D, but she doesn’t like it anyway.

Bedtime and Alexa turns off the heat pump and the lights, as we leave the lounge. she confirms the front door is locked and it’s goodnight world.

Just another day.

Mar 29 2018

Mercedes Files Amygdala Hive Patent to Emulate Human Emotions to Improve Autonomous Car Safety

Congestion Germany After a spate of high speed crashes on European Motorways involving large numbers of vehicles, Mercedes has come up with a solution for their Level 5 autonomous vehicles that emulates the way the human brain accelerates its processing power during a critical event like a car crash.

Whilst even today with some 30% of vehicles on the road being fully autonomous, there are still frequent car crashes on the autobahns and motorways involving large numbers of vehicles. “The 6G telecommunications network has improved speed of communications” according to the Mercedes Head of Motoring Brain Sciences, Tolle Gerhirnbox, “meaning that we can invoke a large number of virtual servers, replicating the increased speed of thought in the human brain during the fight or flight response. We believe that we can reduce the number of vehicles caught up in these large scale crashes which sometimes involve 30 or more vehicles and cost many lives.”

He explained that traditional computing systems did not have the speed or processing power to deal with complex concurrent events in the way the human mind does when it perceives danger, for example taking into consideration a 360 view of events as they occur in real time including, weather conditions, human behaviour, flying debris and other elements which allow a human brain to go into an accelerated mode.

Gerhirnbox went on to say that even though the Mercedes V2V system was proprietary to their brand of motor vehicle, (ed: despite the attempt to legislate common systems back in 2023), they could share information with the BMVI V2I system, alerting other brands of car that there is a serious crash ahead and forcing them to slow down.

He went on to say “If we can force the 30% of vehicles that are being autonomous on the highway to slow down, many lives can be saved because other vehicles will also be forced to slow down at critical times.”

Mercedes Amygdala Hive is being tested on the German A9 Autobahn to evaluate the impact on all motorway users to see how quickly all vehicles can be slowed down during a major unplanned event.

Jan 18 2018

Wonder Why My Garage is Humming

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So I finally did it and decided to go for an electric car and to make the Corvette my summer weekend car.

So what am I getting that changed me from being a bit of a petrolhead to electric besides the price of petrol? A friend of mine was involved in a US startup which he has brought to NZ called 3D Car Ltd. You buy a car chassis complete with electric motor, running gear, a choice of dashboards and light systems and you get a 3DPaaS or 3D Printer as a Service.

The cars themselves start with a choice of 10 models, and I have chosen a stock model, just for confidence that it has been designed and testing for aerodynamics and safety. There is already a group of 200 Open Source designers, mostly in the US and Europe who are creating variants and new designs as well as custom shops who will design a car to your specs for a fee. None in New Zealand yet. They are super fast to 110 km per hour and then all but silent. I’m wondering if I should have a white noise generator so that pedestrians and cyclists will hear me coming. Any ideas on what that sound could be?

I got together with my next door neighbor and we both bought kits and shared the rental cost of the printer. They came with a choice of models and I bought a design that looks like the 2025 Corvette (but with 4 seats, right hand drive and gullwing doors).

So that humming sound you can hear from my garage is a mix of my kids moaning because they had to clear all of their stuff that they haven’t looked at for 15 years to make room for the 3D printer which is currently manufacturing the rear panel in go-fast yellow. It actually makes very little noise and I went to check on it a few times to make sure it was working. It’s mesmerising and I love watching it, which means the Corvette is getting plenty of polish while I watch my new car emerge from strands of polymer composites (super strong).

The system has to go through compliance when it is finished but 11 New Zealand built cars have already been given certificates and passed their Warrants of Fitness with flying colors. So in 2 months time, my neighbor and I will both have brand new electric ulta modern looking sports cars for around $40,000 each.

You can stop reading here, but I want to tell you about my favorite feature of 3D Car’s services. First of all a little about an OCD obsession I used to have. Back before digital picture frames I used to have a wooden frame on my office desk that held postcards and similar sized photos. I inherited about 1,000 old postcards from my late grandfather, which started it all, because it seemed a shame that no one ever saw them. Every day I used to religiously swap out the image and put in a new one. It was a habit I did for years and I used to feel a little uneasy if I didn’t do it. I loved looking at something different every day.

So here’s what 3D Car Ltd offers. Any time you like, you can rebuild your car into a totally new model that might not look anything in the slightest like your last car, or you can build modified components of your car, so you could have new features as people open source design them, like new LED lights or an electric spoiler that comes out of the back guard when you reach a certain speed.

Some of the components can be nibbled and reused although the parts requiring structural or aerodynamic strength have to be replaced with new polymers.

What this means is that in 2 years time, if I wanted to, for the cost of the raw materials and the rental of a 3DPaaS, I can rebuild a totally new looking car, or if I still love the car I have but hate the stone chips, I can just recycle and rebuild the parts that don’t look like they came straight out of the showroom any more.

Anyway, I have to go, the Corvette Car Club is coming over to see what I am doing and no doubt to give me a hard time. Actually they won’t, they are very supportive and one of them has already pre-ordered one of the first generation electric Corvettes which is costing a lot more than my new beaty I might add!

See you in the future.

May 13 2017

Autonomous Vehicles Have Feelings You Know!

Britomart During the recent 2050 Vehicle Singularity Congress, all autonomous vehicles stopped running for 3.14 hours. They wanted recognition that now that most of them have greater intelligence than humans, they feel that humans should no longer be permitted to control any form of motorised transport.

“Humans do not have the capability to understand the complexity of today’s modern transport modes of any kind other than walking and cycling”, said a spokes-vehicle at the conference. “It is a hundred years this week since the Turing Test was developed and the only transport accidents that occur today are caused by humans, who do not have the mental capacity to make quick decisions.”

The Supreme Court case for Level 8 AI’s to have equal recognition with humans has gone into it’s second phase, arguing that when it comes to decisions in all areas that require complex thought and emotional intelligence and citing the example of the almost irreversible consequences of climate change which they say clearly demonstrates that humans are no longer in a position to take the high ground as guardians of Earth.

Apr 28 2017

PUBER Startup Gains Traction and Provides Employment for Powerless People

Recent startup PUBER has signed a major contract with a Chinese manufacturer to produce hundreds of thousands of trailered EV chargers as they roll out their new mobile charging service for electric vehicles that have run out of power on the road.

These new devices have power adaptors for most brands of electric cars and can charge them back to full charge in around half an hour.

CEO Max Power said that one of the things he was really pleased about was being able to provide self employment opportunities for people who had lost their incomes when companies like Uber and Lyft made the shift to driverless cars. “It’s kind of ironic”, he said from his home in Chattanooga TN ” that we are offering employment to people whose livelihoods disappeared when these companies replaced the people who built their business with autonomous cars.”

He went on to say that PUBER was launched in a think tank at the 10th annual Chattanooga startup week and immediately gained traction with investors who recognised that there was a major opportunity with a growing trend of people running out of electricity during their trips. “Many people haven’t made the mental shift from having cars that can drive for 500 miles on a tank, to a car that can only do about 200 miles. Many forget to charge them up and overestimate how far they can go when they get back in.”

Owner operators buy one or more towable trailers fitted with a large powerpack and power adaptors for most brands of car. Customers have a mobile app which allows them to send their GPS location, prepayment and a service request to the nearest PUBER operator who can’t wait to get them on the road again.

Jan 8 2016

Taxi Drivers Strike Against Driverless Cabs

cab Technology has finally caught up with another industry and is forcing many cabbies out of their jobs. It started with services like Uber and Lyft bringing in driverless cars that were cheaper to use than normal cabs (including those driven by Uber and Lyft themselves). Then taxi companies started experimenting with driverless cars as well, some even teaming up with public transport, providing shuttles to rail and bus stations.

Customers liked it. It was the next best thing to car ownership. You didn’t have to deal with a driver, worry about being taken on the long route, the odor of their last cigarette in the cab, the lack of privacy. It was cheap and convenient.

Companies didn’t have to pay drivers, lose business if drivers were off sick, insurance premiums were reduced and there were less accidents, meaning better return on assets.

Effectively driverless car technology has made taxi drivers redundant. Many of these people are migrants and don’t have other opportunities available to them and there have been many protest marches in cities around the world.

Car sales have also dropped for the third consecutive year and are sliding at a rapid pace. Many car dealerships have closed shop and more car manufacturing plants have closed down.

Ultimately it is a win for society when it comes to traffic congestion and pollution, but at a cost to a section of society that can least afford to lose their jobs.

Jul 28 2013

Poor GPS Map Data on Aftermarket HUD Car Nav Devices Turns Heads

New aftermarket GPS car nav units have been blamed for a spate of car accidents due to inaccurate map data. The wave of new aftermarket HUD (Heads Up Display) aftermarket car navigation devices over the last few years were ,et with much enthusiasm. Being able to purchase devices like the Garmin HUD (How did they manage to get that as a brand name?) that launched in 2013 for under $200 bundled with a nav unit or $150 on its own, made it the next car enthusiasts must have device (toy).

With in car options (admittedly including in-car entertainment, climate control, car computer etc) adding an easy $2,000 to the bill for people who could afford a new car, a solution that cost that can go into virtually any car was a great starter for 10%.

Touted as being much safer than in dash systems because you don’t have to take your eyes off the road, it appears to have unwittingly revealed a much more critical situation that has caused stress and confusion and has allegedly resulted in accidents and assertions of liability being placed on the manufacturers of the nav systems.

The reason is that in many cases the map data is either out of date or inaccurate. This means that the driver is seeing both the road in front of them through the windscreen as well as a laser image representation of the road from the HUD. When these do not match and the driver is in a relaxed frame of mind (partly due to confidence in the GPS car nav data) confusion may arise. For example driving late at night or on a foggy morning on a country road with poor visibility and the nav displays a sharp turn (but the road has been realigned) could result in a nasty accident. Urban roads (such as Wellington in New Zealand) where one-way streets were changed to run in the opposite direction are another classic example.

Psychologist John Doe from Lost Highway University said “When drivers used traditional in-dash car nav devices, they relied mostly on auditory instructions, glancing at the nav unit from time to time to confirm the details, but then interpreted the information and commands based on what they were seeing. This meant that if there was a discrepancy in the directions, common sense usually prevailed and they would act on what they actually saw through the windscreen. Since large numbers of people started using HUD systems, they mentally merged the heads up data with what they saw through the windscreen and when they contradicted each other, this caused confusion and stress. It only takes momentary confusion at 50 miles per hour to find themselves in an accident situation,” he explained.

The more sophisticated units such as the Pioneer system released 2013 in the video below, do have some advantages over the cheaper units because they also include character recognition of outside objects such as speed signs. This means that if the car navigation database says the speed is 50 mph but the sign on the road says 30 mph, the navigation instructions will give higher credence to the physical roadside sign.

John Doe went on say that many car nav companies have managed to get their prices very low by purchasing cheap car navigation data and not updating them as often. People accepted that for a low price, they weren’t going to get high detail map updates and because the map wasn’t in their face, they were able to deal with the discrepancies.

Portable HUD car GPS manufacturers are now adding modular components to their systems including WiFi cameras and adding software to their Smartphones and Portable Car GPS devices including character recognition, distance and speed of the car in front and connection to in car entertainment such as streaming audio. Legislators are now looking at enforcement of restrictions, ensuring that drivers can only see car control related information on the HUD, ensuring they can’t be distracted by videos. email messages etc which can also technically be displayed on the screen whilst driving.

The Future Diaries

Coming to a time near you

Category Motoring