Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Autonomous Cars and Transport Finance

A few links of interest:
CNN has a video with a UT researcher working on autonomous cars.


The LA Times reports on car to car communication to improve safety.

And two from the NY Times on transport finance:

The federal tax credit for alternative powertrains will increase to $10,000. Will this lead to a corresponding increase in prices? We shall see!

And a post about whether or not electric vehicle drivers should be taxed for road use. As gasoline and diesel decline in importance as a transport fuel for personal travel the conventional way to pay for transportation will also decline. In my opinion, the sooner we shift towards more user fees to finance transport the better.

Two bonus links:

The unions finally have some good news.

Lots of new money for NASA's space taxi. There are lots of private companies also developing space taxis.  The good news is space travel will be cheaper. The bad news is that there will be more space travel, which will accelerate climate change emissions entering the atmosphere.  These effects will likely more than offset any reductions in emissions from ground transport. More bad news is that orbital space junk will make private space travel impossible. Or so says Policymic. Unless this works.


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