I’ve so much terrible driving (some of it mine) that I can’t wait for computers to take over.
If Google gave me one of their latest generation of self-driving cars for free right now, and if Maryland, DC, and Virginia made it legal to drive it in those jurisdictions tomorrow, I’d be all over it. I’m ready to admit that a computer can drive better than I can.
I’m sure there are specific situations where I’m better, at least for now, but day in and day out? I’d bet on the computer.
And by the time they’re legal in all 50 states + DC, and when they’ve been in production long enough so that the price premium for buying a self-driver is <25%, I’ll be ready to lay my money down. When the Firebug learns to drive in just over 10 years, I want him to learn to drive a conventional car, but I want his primary vehicle to be a self-driver.
My assumption is that she’s going to pull an Oprah and buy self-driving cars for everyone in the thread who is willing to try one.
I would like to point out that my “Other” vote qualifies, here.
This +1.
I love the idea of being on a road in a car where NOBODY else on the road has control of the cars. I could get from point A to point B without taking my life in my hands. And if another driver pushes the override button, the other cars immediately speed up or slow down as necessary to give that person a 1000 foot bubble with no other vehicles around him.
No, I would not be interested in these. I find them unpersuasive, and cannot see too many advantages of them. It is pie-in-the-sky thinking all the way - like flying cars and plug-in electric cars. Sure they sound good now, when they are rare, but once everyone has them there will be a whole host of unintended consequences, just like every other technology we have developed.
Here’s a question - who is responsible when there is an accident and one of these was in control? The programmer? The manufacturer? The passenger?
Dang, you ruined the surprise!
Two accidents in 300,000 miles is better than one accident in 165,000?
One accident was when the car was being driven manually so that shouldn’t count at all in the comparison. That leaves just one accident in 300,000 miles under automated control. Being rear-ended shouldn’t count against the automated driving system either but it is fair to leave it in if being rear-ended also counts against human drivers.
The future roadway will be nationalized, mono-directionally tracked and elevated. Though I suspect it will be a long while before we give up our ground-level pathways for those with death wishes.
Other: Yes, if the alternative was riding in a car driven by my Mother, my Brother, or either of the Car Talk guys.
The first “self-driven” car that swerves to avoid a great dane and instead plows into a group of kids will be a certain type of lawyer’s wet dream.
i’ve always wanted a chauffeur.
sign me up the minute i never have to drive again.
I don’t drive, so I have no problem with it becoming automatic. It would, presumably, be safer and more reliable the more auto-cars are on the road, especially if it were 100% of them, and that’s when I’d feel safest and most likely to participate. However I don’t expect that will happen any time soon, if at all, and certainly not within my lifetime.
Yes I can’t wait for self-driven cars to be a market reality. Sign me up I’m ready now!
Semi-automatic cars (i.e., cars monitoring vectors and distance to objects and then taking appropriate action automatically) are already on the road. But I agree that fully automatic (unmanned) cars on public roadways won’t happen in my lifetime (next 30 years). It’s too much of a legal minefield. The only way it could possibly work is if the automatic cars have whole separate lanes devoted only to them and the lanes are sealed off from other ‘drivers’’ lanes and from pedestrians.
The sophistication to handle getting a parking space at the supermarket without running over a baby in a pram, while also not worrying about driving over an empty cardboard box takes more sophistication in hardware and software than is currently available.
I see the increasing state of the art of this technology (in Japan) every month, at least a few weeks before the general public does. It’s going to take a long time before we have fully automatic cars on public roads.
People assuming a self driving car is just “a car, except I don’t have to drive it” is like speculating in 1850 whether you would upgrade to an iron horse.
Consider the following:
[ul]
[li] You would never have to worry about parking again. Your car would deposit you at the front entrance and then whisk itself away to deal with itself.[/li][li] No parking also means no parking lots. Imagine your typical strip mall, except without the soul deadening swathes of parking, making each store an island and increasing urban spawl.[/li][li] No more chaperoning your kids around. Children, no matter how young, could perfectly legally transport themselves to whatever events they need to get to.[/li][li] Never have to worry about drunk driving again. Get as blitzed as you want on a night out and get back home as safely as you got there.[/li][li] Watch TV, surf the web, check facebook, play games with friends, do whatever you want in your car. [/li][li] With a human driven car, you drive to work and then the car sits in a parking garage for 8 hours before you drive it home. Instead of owning one car, you could instead rent access to a cloud of cars around you. Because each car could service more people, costs would go down dramatically.[/li][li] Instead of having to own one car which is a generalist at everything, renting allows you to access cars suited to a specific purpose. You could ride in a low-range electric car for your daily commute and still have access to a roomy mini-van for when you want to take the entire family camping. [/li][/ul]
I cannot wait until self driving cars are a commercial reality. I think we’ll look back upon the era of hand driven cars as a supreme waste of human capital and a relic of a more primitive age.
Then the miles when it was being driven manually shouldn’t be counted in the statistic either.
From I can read that much is trivially simple for what is currently and able to do it much better than humans.
The evaluating which is the Great Dane and which is the child when crashing into one or the other is unavoidable … that seems a step up.
Unintended consequences are part of life, and represent an aspect of progress. You then fix and refine them as you learn and move forward. This is certainly true of current motor vehicles, which took their time to become safer than ever, with room yet to improve.
We have various traffic laws, which in themselves, aren’t even the same across states. We have licensing programs which aren’t consistent across states. We have safety tests which aren’t consistent across states, and in mine (MD), don’t exist at all, aside from the initial one. All of these are with human drivers behind the wheel, who by design, weren’t meant to be moving at speeds of 55+mph. I understand what you’re getting at, but aside from specific hangups and general public perception, I’m not seeing a strong case for preserving the status quo. Computers are proven more reliable and consistent, which is why they’ve already taken over a host of automotive sub-systems.
The bigger question is, will it matter? If the car is truly automated, it will likely include data logging, so the exact details surrounding the accident would be something for the insurance companies to sort out. When you consider some states have no-fault laws, for example, I don’t see why this would be a point of concern for anyone but the actual insurance industry and a few governing bodies at the state level.
If the self-driven cars prove to reduce accidents, I’d see the insurance industry offering discounts on them (as they do with other safety equipment), as an incentive, while maintaining higher costs on accident-prone human drivers.
A guy I knew fairly well in college swerved to avoid a dog on the road, and killed a pedestrian instead. Can’t see why it would be more of a lawyer’s wet dream when a machine does it.