News - Google buys Waze community driven navigation app

[TheAnimus]

Oh no no no! Definately not - the government taxes road users far too much anyway, without actually investing in back into the roads (which are a shambles!). Imagine then getting charged varying amounts on each journey, which they would then probably get wrong with the billing anyway!

Besides all that would most likely happen is that you would just move the peak times, or make B roads busier.

Well the C charge in London is a joke, it costs a fortune to administer, and its £10, regardless of where you are going. This isn't really useful, as it is also pushes areas just outside to be quite busy. You can drive to euston station without entering it, so long as you park in a residentual area....

Having a very gradual dynamic one, would be quite good by comparison, and save some people money.

Another classic is bank holiday traffic in somewhere like Cornwall. It would be a lot better if it said "leave now, pay £5 extra, or leave 3 hours later for free, or use this route for £2 now."

As it stands, many motorists are in rural areas and really have large distance to cover, having such high fuel duty is unfair on those people.

[Saracen]

Because the entire USP of the app is to share your personal knowledge, thus adding 'human' intelligence / experience... You either voluntarily ruin the benefit of your own local knowledge by giving it to others, or you don't upload your own knowledge, making it precisely no better than any other Satnav that relies primarily on metrics.

Or, you use it when it suits you, and don't, when it doesn't. Nothing says you always have to have it with you, and always running. If you have a ratrun, don't use it then. It will still give the benefit of uploads on other times. It's not all or nothing,. It could be 99%:1%, or 80:20%, or whatever. After all, people are better off getting uploads 80% of the time, than 0% of the time because you don't want to share your ratrun. I contribute to Wikipedia from time to time, but I don't have to upload everything I know, or correct every mistake I see.

[wasabi]

Well the C charge in London is a joke, it costs a fortune to administer, and its £10, regardless of where you are going. This isn't really useful, as it is also pushes areas just outside to be quite busy. You can drive to euston station without entering it, so long as you park in a residentual area....

Having a very gradual dynamic one, would be quite good by comparison, and save some people money.

Another classic is bank holiday traffic in somewhere like Cornwall. It would be a lot better if it said "leave now, pay £5 extra, or leave 3 hours later for free, or use this route for £2 now."

As it stands, many motorists are in rural areas and really have large distance to cover, having such high fuel duty is unfair on those people.

In a perfectly logical world, the proposed solution makes sense. But the problem is government. Everyone knows they wouldn't be able to resist turning it into a revenue generation scheme in the name of being 'green'. Plus it discourages government investing in new roads, when it is easier/rewarding to keep upping the penalty for not using the existing overloaded infrastructure the way they want you to. And undoubtedly in the name of anti-terrorism, 'think of the children' speed-reduction mania, they'll use it to track where / how fast people go in an obnoxious big brother way.

[TheAnimus]

I think we will have a private sector thing that heads that way. Already insurance for young people is much cheaper if you have a data logging box in your car. Sadly for me, I worry about the vectors they measure. I think that indicator use would be much better than harsh acceleration.

The recent advances in cars are almost all due to better digital control systems. This is why the car I've just ordered gets ~90mpg. But also we are getting really useful safety systems, not just crumple zones and airbags, but headlights that reduce glare to others, automatic blind spot checking and not to mention automatic breaking.

Tesla are doing some very interesting things with their cars, the real time telemetrity is a very good idea, someone being able to analysis and look at the data for your car too see preciesly what is wrong, and issue over the air updates, this is really good stuff.

But how long before we start joining the dots on this? TomTom sort of do already, but not with a way which will ever get critical mass, they appear to be busily doing a kodak at the moment.

People have been playing with the idea of radar or ladar guided cruise control for years, hell there are a few cars with it already, but it won't be long before the dots can be joined up, a local wireless link between all the members of the convoy, this could allow veichals to be much closer together, and obviously, save for the lead one, no human intervention needed.

Ultimately I do think we will have our futuristic driverless car things at some point, but it will be a minor, gradual shift. Controlling the behaviour of the people who are wanting to go somewhere to avoid congestion appears to be a simpler milestone on that journey. It will happen, the question becomes when.