Certainly the attentiveness is. But that isn’t just due to driver aids; it is also the result of new distractions like texting. social media, and portable video devices which drivers decide to engage in despite the clear evidence that it increases the potential for an accident. And it isn’t just “the millennials” who are responsible for it either; I see drivers of all ages paying far more attention to their mobile devices than the road in front of them.
Stranger
Isn’t saying that drivers of automatic vehicles may be dumber than drivers of manual cars, like saying that marksmen (oops! or women) with state of the art telescopic-sighted rifles. are dumber than users of bows & arrows ?
I really enjoy driving, and I think I’m very good at it. It would be hard for me to get used to being chauffeured around by my own car as if it was an Uber. Also, its speed would most likely be far too pokey for my taste.
It’s not a case of “dumber”, it’s a case of losing skills. A marksman with a telescopic rifle is going to be shit at using a bow and arrow if they are unaccustomed to it. The issue is that the better automation becomes, the less we are able to deal with the car when the automation reaches its limit and hands control back to us, unless we practice.
Which skills do you mean? The “skills” of manipulating gears simply are not necessary to operate an automatic vehicle. Have you any evidence the drivers of automatics are more prone to accidents than drivers of manuals? and what is the ‘limit of automation’ ? I’ve driven every kind of vehicle during over half a century & my present car, a Honda Jazz, is both auto & optionally manual by the use of paddles on the steering wheel as developed for modern F1 cars, - ask those drivers would they prefer to return to manuals with clutches; I never use the manual option, preferring to give all my attention to the driving, as I think they do.
First, I assume it’s clear that I used “dumber” as shorthand for not having the skills needed for driving, not as a commentary on overall intelligence or aptitude in other areas.
Second, your analogy is faulty. You’re comparing using less advanced and more advanced technologies to accomplish a goal that requires a certain level of skill. A more apt comparison using your analogy would be a skilled archer vs. the operator of a robotic sniper rifle who just turns it on and selects a target, and relies on the machine to determine range, measure and compensate for winds, select appropriate ammunition, and whatever other things a real sniper has to do. The operator may have some idea of what they are, but doesn’t know how to do them.
With the drivers aids in today’s cars, and even more so with coming autonomous vehicles, the car is taking over things that drivers once had to learn to do, whether shifting gears, emergency braking, staying in lane, etc. People will have less experience doing those things and therefore won’t do them as well. In the case of automatic transmissions, they may be entirely unable to use a manual transmission. A terrible loss? Perhaps not, but when it comes to handling the car in challenging circumstances, the lack of experience and skill in other areas of car handling could be potentially fatal.
If it were only a matter of automatic vs. manual transmissions, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. When it comes to automating nearly every aspect of piloting the vehicle, it’s an entirely different matter.
Obviously, we’re not going to go backwards and ban advanced technologies in cars, or stop the development of new tech. And there are lots of people who don’t like driving and won’t make any effort to learn beyond the minimum required. It may sound like I’m suggesting all drivers should have to take advanced driving courses, and I do think it would be a good thing if teenagers got more hands-on instruction in accident avoidance techniques. But I know none of these things will happen.
I’m just pointing out what I think are the inevitable consequences of the upward curve of vehicle automation and the downward curve of average driver skill levels. It won’t be pretty. Will society be willing to accept x number of fatal accidents caused by AVs as long as x is lower than the number now caused by human drivers? How much lower does it have to be to be acceptable to the public? To manufacturers? To insurance companies? To Congress? Could a certain number of highly publicized accidents (or even one?) caused by AVs put an end to their development, or freeze the tech at some point? Who knows?
commasense; But you did say today 12:12 am "The very process of making cars smarter is making drivers dumber. This probably started with automatic transmission. When you have to know how to shift gears, you gain a better sense of what is going on with your car. With auto, all you have to know is “right foot down = faster.”
Some automatics don’t actually have gears in the sense of your meaning, it is one seamless continuous progression up & down, so I’m not sure why you would need to know ‘what’s going on’. The handling of the car & road sense seem to me the most important factors in today’s driving conditions, which are much more crowded & requiring of more attention than perhaps they once did.
May I ask if you have actually had much experience of driving an automatic vehicle?
Yes, there are cars with Continuously Variable Transmission (CVT). My wife’s current car, a Camry Hybrid, is one. But they are a small minority of automatics on the road.
I agree completely. As I’ve tried to make clear in my posts, auto vs. manual transmission is the least of my concerns regarding autonomous vehicles.
You might say that. I have been driving for nearly 50 years, in manuals, automatics, motorcycles, sports cars, and race cars. Of the 11 cars I’ve owned (not counting four motorcycles) five were manuals, five were/are automatics, and one (the Camry) is a CVT. In the 12 years I ran or taught High Performance Drivers Ed, I drove about a dozen sports cars or race cars (all manuals, of course) on 20 tracks.
May I ask how much driving experience you have?
Not sure why you’re picking a fight over this.
How much time have you spent driving a manual?
Personally, I’ve had a license for 30 years and in that time have owned at least 10 cars - 4 manuals and 6 autos.
Commasense is making a very good point re: auto vs manual. Not so much on the highway but on “B” roads, hills, in low traction areas etc the two behave very differently. And it IS a part of understanding how to avoid accidents and get our of trouble to understand what you car is able to do.
commasense; That’s an impressive motoring CV, the only thing I can improve on is the duration, by maybe an extra decade, but what the hell? I began (after Motor bikes) with a Riley Pathfinder - right hand drive with right hand gear leaver- then Jaguars; Mk one & twos, Mercs galore, & you name it, finally settling for automatic Hondas, which I wouldn’t want to swap for any of them now, - but maybe that’s an age thing.
No, bengangmo, I’m certainly not wishing to ‘pick a fight’ but I fail to see any condition on ‘B roads, hills or low traction areas’ where I would be disadvantaged in an automatic (& I live in the Swabian Alps) in fact, in mud & snow I find an automatic to be advantageous, notwithstanding that the thought of creeping through Autobahn traffic jams for hours in a manual car is complete anathema to me.
I thought the main purpose of vehicles, motorized or not, on land or sea or sky, was to transport people and objects from place to place, only secondarily as platforms to flaunt one’s operating skill or enjoy speed-gasms. Sport demands skill but AFAIK the vast majority of vehicle users seek to go from here to there via an acceptable route at reasonable cost with the least risk of damage.
I happily lack the skill to ride a penny-farthing bone-breaker bicycle or to pilot a Wright Flyer, a suicidal prospect. I’m glad to not master the contortions needed to start and run a stinkpot car, truck, or boat in the early 1900s. Some skills are for antiquarians.
GPS and online maps change our map-reading skills - I needn’t pull over, or risk reading directions at speed. Automatic transmissions render obsolete stick-shift-and-clutch skills but those can be re-learned if desired. A future roadway filled with robo-vehicles all maintaining safe speed and distance sounds pretty good to me. Get me home alive, HAL!
That is about as bold a non-Elon declaration as I’ve seen. Though, reading further (bolding mine)…
Around here (by which I pretty much mean the entire northeast USA), there are a large number of days between November and April, or even longer, on which snow and/or sleet and/or freezing rain on the roads, at some point along the route and some time during the day, is at least possible. On many of those days no weather report is going to tell you for sure that there won’t possibly be snow/ice on any road you’re starting out on and that there won’t possibly be snow/ice on any of them by the time you’re heading back.
So unless people in a lot of the country are going to not figure on being able to go anywhere for half the year or more, cars that can’t use snowy roads won’t work.
One of the places self-driving cars are being tested is at a 32-acre site in Ann Arbor, operated by the University of Michigan. I assume some of the testing will happen in the winter?
I grant that not everyone wants to make a hobby out of sport driving, nor am I suggesting that everyone learn heel-toe shifting (a skill that only race drivers really need).
However, until HAL can drive your car perfectly in all conditions (which some here think is a long way off, at best), do you think it might be to your advantage to know, when you’re heading down a narrow road and hit a patch of black ice, the best way to control your car in a skid so you won’t smash into a tree or an oncoming car? That is not an antiquarian skill.
But it is a skill that very few people are going to have any interest in acquiring, once you exclude people who are driving enthusiasts.
For example, I rather enjoy driving, and for the last 20 years I’ve thought it would be fun to go to one of those weekend things were you spend a day learning how to drive better. But, between time and expense, it’s never happened.
So if some bit of technology makes the mediocre driver just a little bit better, but makes great drivers worse, it’s still a huge net benefit.
But to your point, I fully agree that some of these technologies are far less mature than advertised. Add on top of that, abuse seems to be too common. I do think that we are in probably the most dangerous period of these technologies, where they are still buggy but people are trusting them too much.
But unless there’s some actual data showing that cars with driver assistance features are actually getting into more (or worse) accidents, I’m just not buying that making cars smarter makes people dumber and makes things worse overall. I think the vast majority of drivers will continue to be of average skill no matter what technology is in cars, and the skill difference between someone at the 20% proficiency level and the 80% proficiency level is very likely not very great.
Once things get back to normal, go out to Summit Point Motorsports Park in Charles Town, WV (near Harper’s Ferry, about an hour from DC), and take their Friday at the Track course. It’s a blast and you’ll love it. It’s where I started track driving, and where I did most of my instructing.
Traction control and ABS in particular definitely enhance safety across the board. I don’t think there are any systems that make good drivers worse, and I wasn’t making that claim.
Actually, I think it’s going to get worse, because people are going to be trusting them more and more, and assuming that the car will take care of them even if they’re not paying attention. It’s completely contrary to human nature to reduce or take away someone’s control over something and yet expect them to continue to pay attention as if they were still completely in control. The Uber fatality in Arizona was caused, in part, at least, by the safety “driver” watching a video on her phone at the time. And it appears that most of the five Tesla Autopilot fatalities were caused either by driver inattentiveness or unwarranted faith that the car would avoid the collision.
Along with this increased faith that cars will be able to handle more and more of the driving themselves, I perceive a growing feeling among people, especially young people, that driving is boring and that learning how to drive isn’t that important, and a dislike of anything that distracts from things they would rather be doing on their devices.
All of the media reports and buzz about self-driving vehicles seem to be making a large portion of the population think, “Oh good, driving is something I won’t have to bother with soon. So there’s no need to learn to do it well now, since I won’t need that skill in a few years.” I think it’s going to be lot longer than a few years, and that in the meantime, average driving skill levels will decline.
Kids are getting their driving licenses later than in previous generations, as described in this Washington Post article and this one from the Wall Street Journal (both are paywalled, and I can only read the first few lines of the WSJ article). The reasons include the cost of private driving schools (since driving lessons are no longer available in many public schools), as well as the cost of gasoline and auto insurance. Plus what I’ve heard from friends and co-workers with kids is that they can use Uber or Lyft to get where they need to go. (One woman mentioned that her daughter and her friends would split the cost of an Uber ride.)
As someone with kids in their 20s, who had quite a few friends who didn’t get licenses until they were at least a couple years past 16, I can agree with some of this. I don’t buy blaming the price of gasoline or insurance. Taking drivers ed out of school is indeed a factor, no doubt, and I also understand how Uber/Lyft have diminished the need for a license.
Thats exactly what I’ve had my eye on for ages, and I’m sure I would love it… but like the vast majority of people, taking a day off of work to drive a couple hours to learn to drive better and go faster than I really ought to be allowed to is… well, kind of a fantasy.
I meant “this period” is the most dangerous as in a few years from now, like 5 or 10, the self-driving systems will start to improve a lot. We are in the period of danger, and it won’t get better for quite some time.
I realize I’m talking to a driving enthusiast, but the vast, vast amount of driving IS boring. Between the average commute being a hour or more per day, which zero people enjoy; and road trips where the fun is companionship and not the 400 miles of highways. I would have a hard time believing that for the vast majority of Americans, 90% or more of their driving is time that if it were possible they would rather spend watching TV, playing games, or doing anything but remaining attentive to the death machines buzzing around them.