Another way of looking at it: Today’s driving tests are designed to cost no more than is necessary to give us enough confidence that one driver will be not too likely to cause too much injury and death. If a self-driving car algorithm is responsible for one million times more lives, shouldn’t we be roughly a million times more confident that it works?
In large parking lots it would not be that hard to embed some detectable markers (optical or magnetic or RF) that will draw the general pattern and the robocar be able to use to navigate through it.
Because they want one and can afford it and have the space for it. Because they have a pile of things they have to cart around all day and they’d rather keep in the car and unload only those they need at any particular point. Because they do not live in a NY/London/HongKong type superdense urban area and they prefer transportation that expresses their style. Because they simply *do not want *to rideshare.
(And this is someone writing who lived carless in a US city for almost 8 years. So it’s not like I’m in love with the private car.)
I’m not going to read through 200 posts to see if this suggestion has been given before, but as soon as airplane autopilots came in, some pilots joined the mile-high club. Some car owners will join the 70 MPH club.
OK, then, give the test to each individual car, then. But it won’t be long before we realize that that’s a silly waste of time and money, when all the tests are going to have the same result.
And in terms of testing I am sure that a given self-driving program will be tested millions of times longer than a human driver (bear in mind the program can be tested in many cars as the same time). With each run gathering vastly more information being than a driving instructor could record. And systematically testing every permutation of every scenario we can think of.
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Those are reasons people may want to own a car. There’s a big difference between need and want.
No I know what it means. It was a term we all seemed to agree in this thread meant a car that didn’t have any controls for the human occupant. I was using it because I think someone else made the distinction earlier and I found it useful enough to distinguish between a car that can drive itself but needs a human “driver” for legal or technical reasons, and a car that can drive itself and doesn’t need a human or even provide controls for them. If you found the terms “self-driving” and “driverless” confusing then I’m sorry. Feel free to search and replace all with “manned” and “unmanned” or anything else that works for you.
First of all, on your need vs want comment above. Nobody needs any vehicle at all. I mean “need” in the context of maintaining my current lifestyle. After all, what is the benefit of new technology if it results in a loss of freedom and quality of life?
Ok, a couple of scenarios. Let me know how you think these would work in a drive sharing world.
- My partner is out for a bike ride while I have baby minding duties. The deal is, as soon as she gets back I will drive my car with my mountain bike on the back of it to a forest with bike trails about 30 minutes drive away. My mountain biking journey will take about 3 hours including the drive and I need to be home in time for dinner. I don’t know when she will be back. With a private car I load up the car with the bike and anything else and then hang out at the house until she gets home.
How will I achieve this same freedom using car sharing? What would be the likelihood of a car sharing service having a bike rack that I know how to use and will fit my bike and is available exactly when I want it?
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I work late at night typically from 7pm to between 3 am and 6am. When I get back I want to get straight in my car and go home, no stuffing around calling one up and waiting. I need to maximise my sleep-time at home. The last one to two hours of work I have no phone service and I don’t know when exactly I will be ready to go. How do you expect that to work without being a net loss in convenience for me?
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My daughter has just passed out, something is very wrong with her and she needs to get to a hospital. The hospital is a five minute drive away. The ambulance is busy with another call. Every minute saved will improve her chance of surviving. At the moment, I put her in the car and drive to the hospital. How would that play out in a car sharing world?
A ride-share system should have larger vehicles in their fleet. Just call a van ahead of time, load all your stuff, and instruct it to wait in front of your house. You’d probably pay a minimal per-minute waiting fee, but it should be much cheaper than having a taxi wait for you.
You could request a car to wait in front of your workplace starting at 5am. Or the car service may anticipate demand and do it without your having to request it. (The cars will be under-utilized at night anyway, and it would cost them nothing to have a few cars waiting near every employer of shift workers.)
I think medical professionals would advise you to wait for a paramedic anyway. But when a self-driving ride-share system becomes ubiquitous, the closest empty car will almost always be closer than the closest ambulance. So perhaps the ride-sharing system should get integrated with the emergency response system, and for some types of emergencies, the 911 operator will send you the closest available car, and give it priority in traffic.
My parents always said I had to understand the distinction between needs and wants but they were wrong.
I need water only if I want to live.
People draw the line between needs and wants based on their particular perspectives but no one else shares your perspective so no one else shares your division between needs and wants. It also doesn’t matter when we’re talking about the choices people will make. Whether people choose something because they believe they “need” it or they “want” it is basically irrelevant if that’s the decision they make.
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And in terms of testing I am sure that a given self-driving program will be tested millions of times longer than a human driver (bear in mind the program can be tested in many cars as the same time). With each run gathering vastly more information being than a driving instructor could record. And systematically testing every permutation of every scenario we can think of.
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Yes. We will want self-driving cars to prove they can safely handle every situation we can think of so they only fail in the rare situations we can’t think of. Then they will be much safer than people.
[QUOTE=Chronos]
OK, then, give the test to each individual car, then. But it won’t be long before we realize that that’s a silly waste of time and money, when all the tests are going to have the same result.
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Well, as I noted above, self-driving cars can’t pass today’s tests because they can’t fit in the building to meet the examiner. Self-driving cars aren’t even old enough to qualify for a learner’s permit so they won’t be eligible to take a driver’s license under today’s standards. More importantly, society doesn’t give computers or cars the right to apply for a driver’s license. We need to re-write the laws to recognize driverless cars (and I’m using that term as Richard Pearse defines it because it’s helpful, not to tweak you). When we re-write the laws to recognize driverless cars, the driverless cars will have to prove they are much safer than teen drivers who are already by orders of magnitude the most dangerous age cohort on the road.
It’s also a matter of consumer acceptance. Today’s driving tests screen only the worst drivers out, such that 20% of 16-year-old drivers have an accident in their first year of driving. If 20% of self-driving cars cause an accident in the first year that buyers own them, buyers will return them to the manufacturers as defective. No one will want self-driving cars with an accident rate that poor. We need different, higher standards for self-driving cars than we apply to people. I don’t know why you can’t accept that.
I only made the statement because someone claimed that people need to own cars even when self-driving cars become commonplace.
If someone wants to own a car just for the joy of ownership, I recognize that as a legitimate reason for owning a car. I’m sure owning a car will continue to be a popular hobby, for the same reason people own horses, classic cars, etc. Or the same reason people buy high-end wristwatches when they have a cell phone in the pocket all the time.
But when people claim they need to own a car for a specific purpose, I propose that most of those reasons will become obsolete as self-driving car shares become commonplace.
If I want a moving van to load up my furniture and truck it across town, I rent a moving van. But there are plenty of people who own giant trucks capable of carting their household across town. And when those people want to move, it’s a lot more convenient for them. The only difference is, they pay for the whole cost of the truck, not just the cost of using it for one day. Most people when they want to fly to Miami rent a seat in someone else’s airplane, but there are also people who own their own airplanes, and those people don’t have to wait to buy a ticket, they can fly to Miami whenever they want.
I’m positive plenty of people are going to own their own vehicles for the foreseeable future. But self-driving cars will make it a lot easier to not own a car, and so the proportion of people who rent the use of a vehicle only when they need it vs those who own a vehicle will change in favor of renting. Older people who grew up in the days when owning your own car was the only convenient way to get around will be uncomfortable with the idea of not owning a car. People who were teenagers/college students but could pay for the occasional ride via a rented self-driving car, and who never got a drivers license because they never needed one, will be a lot more comfortable with the idea of saving money at the cost of a certain loss of convenience.
I doubt private ownership of a car will be seen as goofy any time soon. But today not owning a car or not being able to drive are seen as goofy, and that’s what’s going to change. The hassle and inconvenience of not owning a car will fall, and it will become mainstream to only pay to use a car when you really need one.
I have one for you scr4. We often get about 30 feet of snow in the winter. Last April alone (last month) we got 76"s.
My house has a very steep uphill drive. And the road that reaches that is also uphill. After a dump of snow overnight, I am able to get OUT of my driveway and get to work. There is no way a vehicle would be able to get up it though, at least no vehicle that is also drivable on public roads.
In situations that we get a deep snow while I’m away, I have to park in the road, walk to my plow truck and dig out before I can get home.
And as others have said, I keep stuff in my car that I need. I am not going to cart it in and out of the car every time I go somewhere.
If you have a long private driveway that you want to plow yourself - or cannot be plowed by a standard road-legal plow truck, which appears to be your claim - that sounds like a good reason to own a plow truck. And it could be that since you own the truck for this purpose, it’s economical to use it for general transportation as well. But I suspect over time, self-driving cars will become good enough and cheap enough that it may not be worth paying for registration and fuel for using the truck on public roads.
If your car/truck carries supplies and tools you need at work sites, sure, this capability may be worth the cost of owning a vehicle.
Yep, I do have a plow truck (along with a Kubota 4x4 loader) and my wife and I each have our own SUV’s. Thing is, to be able to plow, the truck must be chained up on all 4 wheels. So it does not get driven on pavement for at least 8 months out of the year (It takes about 2 hours to chain the monster up). I won’t take the chains off until the end of May. They will go back on Sept/Oct.
I strongly suspect that there’s no actual rule that you have to meet the examiner inside the building, or that if there is, that reasonable accommodation can be and often is made to that rule. There are, for instance, some people who have limited use of their legs. Some of them can still drive, in a car with an appropriately-modified control system. And I’ll bet that those folks can get their licenses without having to enter the building.
As for age, I’m not sure how old the oldest driving program is now, but it’ll almost certainly be 16 by the time it’s ready to take the test. No, the program at that time won’t be exactly the same as it was 16 years previous, but a teenager isn’t the same as they were 16 years previous, either.
So, what you’re saying is, we need to hold teenagers to a higher standard than we do currently before we allow them on the road? I can agree with that.
It’s not just parking lots. Parking lots are merely an example of the sort of terrain that fully autonomous vehicles must negotiate as competently as human drivers do. There are also things like domestic driveways, hotel forecourts, service stations, lay-bys, unmarked side roads, etc. All things that are chaotically non-standard right now, but that human drivers can cope with.
It’s these first and last 100 yards of typical journeys that I think will be challenging to AI-driven cars. Simply working out where you’re supposed to go, faced with unknown terrain, seems to me to be a really hard problem. I don’t believe that self-driving cars will be able to drive themselves to your door any time soon.
Why do you think the existence of driverless cars will suddenly cause people to stop wanting things, and start making their transportation decisions based solely on the ultimate economic efficiency of the transportation system, and only their most basic “needs”? This seems like a fantasy to me.
Sure, there are some people who don’t want to spend any more money on transportation than they have to, and these people will probably switch to ride-shared self-driving cars as long as the economic advantages actually materialize.
But the vast majority of the population in the US obviously have already made the decision to spend more on transportation than they need, in exchange for entertainment, convenience, comfort, “luxury”, status, whatever. They buy a BMW instead of a Chevrolet, a Ford Mustang instead of a Honda Civic, a Jeep Wrangler instead of a Toyota Matrix. They get the heated leather seats instead of cloth. They purchase the upgraded stereo system. They pay for a moonroof. They replace their 5-year-old perfectly functional F-150 with a brand-new one.
None of these decisions are driven by a “need”.
Why do you think of any of this behavior will change simply because of the availability of ride-sharing services?
In what way will a (ride-shared) self-driving car cause you to not pay for fuel, or save on registration fees?
If total revenue from registration fees goes down because there are fewer cars being registered, the government will simply increase the fees. And a ride-shared car is not going to be any more fuel-efficient than a privately-owned self-driving car. In fact, overall, it will be less efficient, since it will spend at least some of its time driving around empty.
Sorry, I didn’t mean ride-shared here, I meant “shared-access”, i.e. the Uber model.
Another interesting factor to consider is that the owners of privately-owned self-driving cars could choose to lease those cars back to a service like Uber when they’re not being used (i.e. during the workday). This might actually reduce the cost of private car ownership: if you have the capital to pay for the cost of purchasing a car, you can buy it and get exclusive use of it when you need it, plus revenue when the car is being rented out.
In fact, it seems pretty unlikely that a service like Uber would actually have a fleet of their own (just like they don’t actually own any cars today). Rather, they would simply have an app that coordinates the activities of whatever privately-owned self-driving cars are not being utilized by their owners.
I think most people will want the advantages of self-driving ride-share companies, compared to what they get from a personally owned car. Advantages include: not having to pay for a parking space, no unexpected expenses for car repair, never having to spend time to get your car serviced, having access to many different types of vehicles, lower cost, etc.
Where do you live that a “vast majority” of people have more expensive cars than they need? My family and co-workers (all in the top 20 percentile income level for sure) all have basic functional cars; the only reason they didn’t get an older used car is because of reliability concerns. (Except for a couple of engineers I work with who drive Jaguars; I expect they will always own Jaguars, and I have no problem with car ownership being an acceptable hobby.)
Because I expect most ride-share cars will be small electric vehicles, which would be far more energy-efficient than the kind of cars people are talking about in this thread as needing to own.
No, most of the time they will be stationary on the road. And if they do increase registration fees because of fewer cars on the road, it will become even more expensive to own a car yourself.