Not necessarily. These aren’t the upscale OnStar-like services we’re talking about here.
Lawyers don’t actually wish bad things to happen to people.
Well I’m only talking about new car electronincs, you really can’t stop the manufactuers from putting thes in vehicles and they are a known feature. These things that car dealers install can be done with or without the knowlege of the buyer, most likely hidden in fine print on the loan document. Used car dealers commiting shady acts, who would have thought?
It might be the only real useful application of “The Club”.
I find the assumption that this feature would only be accessible to ‘authorized dealers’ to be risible to an extreme. Automotive companies have taken cybersecurity about as seriously as your typical Congressperson has of fiscal ethics, and any override system widely available to dealerships is almost certainly going to be abused almost as soon as it is deployed, notwithstanding how it might be employed by dealers to force people to commit to subscription services for various features lest a dealership arbitrarily determine that the owner is somehow in arrears.
Thank you, no. I’ll provide my own financing on a car that isn’t going to drive itself away the first time someone figures out how to break the trivial security scheme or just gets access to a ‘dealer’ account.
Stranger
I think your concerns are well founded. But when cars are fully autonomous, remote control will be a feature that all owners will surely want for themselves - your partner doesn’t need to pick you up at the airport, you just tell your car to come.
So security and authorization for remote control will need to be rigorously sorted out, both from a technical and regulatory standpoint. I don’t think that the narrow repossession issue is the real concern here.
AS though auto dealers, finance companies and repo guys are nice and polite.
There would be various bodily fluids and waste to clean up.
Asphyxiation by anoxia is pretty benign; in essence, the victims—sorry, “clients”—just pass out and then expire, so as long as you remove the bodies before putrification begins it’s an easy cleanup. However, if you let the body melt into the carpet you’re going to have some remodeling to do.
Stranger
Don’t people often piss and shit when they die, because the muscles holding it in relax?
Elon is working on autonomous bowel implants.
Er… death leads to loss of sphincter control. You’ll have bodily wastes to clean up. Also, if one of the “clients” falls while expiring there might also be some blood, depending on injuries that occur between upright and prone. Of course, the longer you wait to clean up the worse it will be.
Why on earth would you think that? Making it easier to implement an erroneous or fraudulent repossession would obviously make it more, not less, likely. The argument that there would be more warning doesn’t really hold up – conventional repossessions are (supposed to be) preceded by warnings in any case (just not warnings that say exactly when the repo man is going to show up).
That’s not obvious at all.
Something deliberately fraudulent is simply theft. As we’ve discussed in the thread, cybersecurity and authorization procedures are a valid concern when remote control of fully autonomous vehicles is widely available. But this has nothing to do with the narrow repossession issue. All owners will want the remote control feature to be enabled for their own use, to tell their car to pick them up at the airport, or to go and pick the kids up at school. So owner remote control will need to be secure from theft.
The issue is erroneous repossession. And this problem derives principally from the antagonistic situation where the repo guy needs to be secretive about repossessions. But if you cannot abscond and hide an autonomous vehicle, this removes any incentive for the lender not be completely open in contacting you multiple times to warn you, including sending reminders direct to the car. A repo guy will certainly not warn you at the last minute, but for people in financial difficulty, last minute warnings may elicit payment. So this may also reduce the number of valid reposessions that could have been avoided with a last minute payment. No lender wants to carry out more repossessions if they can be avoided, it costs time and money, and with erroneous repossessions potentially a lot of money in lawsuits.
Not if the car is fitted with a ‘steer by wire’ system, i.e. no mechanical linkage between the steering wheel and the front wheels. The software could then disable the steering wheel and steer the front wheels by controlling the electric motors inherent in such systems. Very few cars have this at the moment but my guess is more are likely in the future.
Yes, when cars are fully autonomous, the manual steering wheel will surely be something that not only isn’t moving around, but also folds out of the way.
Couldn’t a system like this totally end the problem of dangerous police car pursuits? The cops spot your getaway car (or stolen car, or car hijacked with a kid in the back seat, whatever) do some sort of override procedure and order the car to pull over and park itself.
They’ve been working on this kind of technology even before the advent of autonomous vehicles:
I kind of agree, except there would still be a concern that the soon-to-be ex-owners might trash the car.
I think it’s a moot point though. Once there are fully autonomous vehicles most people won’t own one.
If (I’m not optimistic enough to see it as when) cars are ever fully autonomous, I’d hope the licensing structure changes such that the vast majority of people aren’t allowed to use the steering wheel. The current system, where we let everyone except the top 0.1% of reckless idiots drive a car with basically no enforcement of safety rules, is not necessary in a system where you can summon a car with the push of a button. Driving would ideally become a serious professional qualification, with continuing education requirements and strict enforcement of even the most minor violations.
Yes, no doubt pretty soon after fully autonomous driving there won’t be any steering wheels at all. A failure of the autonomous driving system would result in a tow, just like any other mechanical failure. And we won’t be waiting around for the tow. As @CaveMike says, private car ownership will plummet except perhaps in remote areas. We’ll just be summoning the nearest vehicle.