The insurance industry makes its money because people do crash. They’d be absolutely crazy to support anything that gets rid of the driver’s liability. MADD would probably prefer that we spend development time on a foolproof ignition interlock against blood-alcohol content. The automobile industry definitely appreciates the added sales they get due to cars being wrecked, and particularly the profits off the people who need another car and don’t have the ability to really shop around because they need another car by Monday…
A self-driving car by definition knows where it is, where it is going, and broadcasts this information to every other car around as well as to a central monitoring station. If you remove non-self-driving cars from the roads, you ensure that someone knows where all the cars are going or can find out… if a cop pulls me over, and asks me where I’m going, I can tell the truth or lie and he doesn’t have any practical means of determining which happened.
I’m not sure there would be much of drop in their sales. The majority of people customizing their cars are the same people who would trailer their manuals cars to designated zones.
Increased liability? That and this paragraph make me think that you are talking about a generation or two of self-driving cars before the generation I am.
Why? Because everybody feels the same way about driving that you do? Some kids will love it. Some will hate it. I think most will ram a go kart into a wall, another go kart, or get rammed and realized what doing the same thing in a car would be like.
Say what? The insurance industry would be thrilled to collect premiums on a policy that they never pay out on.
Maybe. But I never said anything about MADD supporting development of a self-driving car. I said that once the technology is proven safe and reliable, MADD would throw its full support behind a ban on manual cars. A car that drives itself does not get drunk.
Wrong.
A self-driving car by definition drives itself. It may receive information about its immediate environment by a variety of means. Navstar used a bunch of small cameras. They broadcast nothing, being hardwired to the car’s computer. The transponders in the linked articles do broadcast, but not very far. That would defeat the purpose of transponders designed to alert cars to others close by. A self-driving car would know where it was going. Why would it broadcast this information? You enter your destination, the car uses maps already on its hard drive to plan a route from your starting point. This would be quicker than signalling a central station to request a route and would allow the car to drive in storms, power outages, poor reception areas, and other situations in which the central station was not available. The car would broadcast things like ‘turning right in 50 feet’ to nearby cars. Today, the same thing is done with turn signals, brake lights etc. The car would broadcast its present location. Any GPS does this. Currently, cars with the OnStar system are broadcasting their locations to the people back at OnStar everytime they use the onboard map.
No, I don’t. Assuming the car has a GPS navigation system, then somebody could hack into the GPS provider’s computer and try to find out which of the millions of codes belongs to a particular person. Once they did that, they could find your present location. That’s it.
When do cops ask where you’re going other than as a rhetorical device ('Where you going in such a big hurry?). Assuming a cop is asking you that question, a self-driving car does not magically destroy your fourth ammendment rights against unreasonable search and seizure. Without probable cause, he could not check your computer to see what your destination was.
a) Most customized cars are done by teenagers and twentysomethings. I definitely couldn’t afford a towcar and trailer - my car cost me less than six paychecks and I couldn’t have spent much more on it.
b) The liability for a shop is increased because they’re responsible for much more now. Right now, I doubt shops would have to face claims on anything but negligently installed brakes, tires, and steering parts. All of a sudden, a lot of other components become mission-critical.
c) I’ve seen many people who thought of cars as appliances step out of 6-hp rental racing karts and start talking about buying a Corvette or a Miata. If that’s what happens when people who do have to manually control their cars now climb into a real kart, it’ll be amplified several times for people who’ve never controlled a real car themselves.
d) If you couldn’t be held liable in an accident, would you buy insurance against liability? The average motorist spends $600 per year on liability insurance and is liable for $150 per year in damages, and submits to this even in no-insurance-required states because there’s the chance that he could cause a bad crash and be liable for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
chaparralv8 A small bolt on gps/wireless device could be easially attached to let the network know of this vintage car, as I’m sure by 2010 we can figure out how to convert 6vDC to 12VDC or figure out how to reverse the wires so that a positive ground car could power a negative ground device.
This assumes that this vintage car can pass emisions testing.
Pre-1968 cars don’t have to pass emissions testing. If I had to I could probably get a plain carbureted car with no oxygen sensors through about the 1986 standards.
Hmm… I know you can step down the voltage with a series resistor, so you can go down from 12VDC to 6VDC, but I don’t think there’s a passive circuit element that can increase 6VDC to 12VDC. Anyway, this unit’s gonna have to be under the hood, so I can get a non-shielded alternator and just overwhelm the input signals with arcing and a non-constant-frequency AC signal…
My state doesn’t require any emissions testing at all. Years ago, Michigan’s legislators realized that emissions testing was a pointless waste of time. The vehicles that failed the test were pretty much all made before 1968, and hence were grandfathered out of the law. A few post-1968 vehicles failed the test, but these were mostly beat-up junkers owned by poor people who couldn’t afford to fix the car. Eventually, the state said “fuck it” and stopped requiring emissions tests.
I’d like to see a self driving car try to get up my driveway and turn around.
Drivers will still need to interact with the vehicle. You will still need to know how to drive. Taking the incentive to get GOOD at driving away is a bad idea.
Once again, how many industries were killed when cars replaced hose carriages? Did it prevent this from happening?
And many kids growing currently have great fun riding horses. It seems also that renting a horse carriage for a holyday’s week visiting the countryside is becoming quite popular, at least here. People don’t seem to push for a ban of cars, though. They ride horses where it’s possible, convenient and pleasant to do so.
You hating the idea doesn’t mean that implementing it 80 years down the road will result in a popular uprising. I can’t quite well picture these people asking on the straight dope :
“A friend told me that in 2005 they had XXXXX people killed each year driving vehicles. I don’t buy it. Nobody in is right mind would have used a man-driven vehicle if it were that dangerous. What’s the straight dope on this?”
Or “Why are some people opposing the ban on human-driven vehicles? Automated are quicker, more efficient, and safer (it’s not like I want to find myself o the highway besides a vehicle whose driver can at any moment make a fatal mistake, fall asleep or something). And of course, you don’t have to actually drive the fucking thing for hours on a row. If people really want to drive, they have tracks for this sport. So, what’s the fuss about? Is there any doper who opposes the bill?”
In the US, at least, the car is an icon for personal freedom. You can anywhere, anytime, without restrictions (for the most part). A LOT of people would oppose such a law as an attack on personal freedoms.