> We've already had fatal self driving crashes while the self driving system was in operation.
There is no true (level 5) self-driving system yet, only driver-assist where the system may hand back control at any moment. It's only true self-driving when there's no human in the car.
> Imagine what a change it was going from horses to cars operating on internal combustion engines and relying on brakes to stop these vehicles going far faster than any horse.
> I expect self driving cars to have an emergency brake
An emergency brake isn't the end of all sadly.
> laws require you to be present and focused to drive on the road
Sure, I'm not arguing the current state of self driving car (which I wouldn't really call self driving car, but more like fancy cruise control, on the Volt they called it adaptive cruise control, which make more sense). I'm arguing about the future without a wheel to drive. It's not happening right now, that's for sure, but Google is working on it and there's no
> You still get a dui on a horse even if you are passed out on top and the horse is walking itself home.
You still can act on a horse though, what made you unable to control it is your consumption (which is your responsibility not to). In a self driving car without a wheel, you no longer have any control, even if you wanted to. It may have an emergency brake, but that's can only do so much. In a world where going on a horse would cause you to be inebriated, you wouldn't get a DUI for riding one ;).
> We also don't need to use cars even in cities with poor transit. Most people's car trips are biking distances. Everyone can also own a moped and enjoy 100mpg, easy parking, and experience less congestion than what the 20 foot car introduces to a city.
Where do you live? Have you lived outside of there? In most cities you still need a car. Sorry for the accusation but theses sentences made it seems like you never lived outside of there. I'm close to Montreal in Quebec, even my car yesterday had trouble in some streets, believe me, even though we are lucky to have some amazing bike lane here, biking distance get thrown out of the window for the next 4 months. Walking is much slower right now, a moped would be actually illegal. I traded 2 hours of transit a day to 30 minutes by buying a car. I know so many people that currently do more than 2 hours a day, and that's in a city with a relatively good public transit in a pretty dense area.
Inside most cities, you still need a car. Without cars, you couldn't support the current society. You are free to disagree that our current way of living is alright, but sadly, we can't change that easily and it will certainly not happen before self driving car become the norm.
>What I am against is the premise that people are so dangerous and terrible at something they've been, mostly, able to do safely for about a century that their freedoms need to be taken away.
People are dangerous and terrible drivers. There are 30k vehicle accident deaths each year in the US (1.3 million world wide), and it used to be much higher (especially per mile driven).
Number of deaths per mile driven has been going down drastically in large part because technology has limited a driver's direct control of the vehicle.
> Autonomous cars are fine - trying to take for granted that personal freedom is dangerous and stupid and that people need to be controlled like herd animals is not necessarily a good thing.
ABS/traction control/drive-by-wire takes direct control away from the driver and gives it to a computer. Self driving cars are just the next layer of abstraction above this. You're still in control of the car, it's just that the interface is a touchscreen with a map instead of a steering wheel.
> A lot of us are skeptical of self-driving cars because a lot of their advocates want the next step to be banning private citizens from driving, which you've just confirmed, thanks.
Lol, i think you're mistaking my (attempted) logical thinking towards some type of agenda towards banning humans driving cars. You seem far more agenda driven, heh.
Just because i think we are extremely unqualified for driving, does not mean i want to ban the act. It be extremely improbable to achieve, with all the costs of upgrading the entire infrastructure alone making your defense of this almost seem like a half hearted joke. Moreover, even if in some magic realm where we can make all cars into self driving cars to abolish human driving, i'm just simply not in favor of removing human rights.
Yes, i would want to make it difficult for you to drive, but for your own (and mine!) safety. Our safety standards for driving tests are incredibly, and i mean incredibly, laughable. How often we enforce rules and laws for driving are also laughable. Almost no one even follows some of the most basic rules, like speed limits, and the more extreme people often break sobriety laws.
Self driving cars would give us a platform to A: Raise the bar for who can drive, and what sort of training you need. and B: Be more willing to ban someone from driving if they put others at risk, through speed, drugs, alcohol, or whatever.
We have a hard time banning drivers these days because it very negatively impacts your life if you cannot drive. In a world with self driving cars though, you can still have a first class life. Driving is now something of leisure.
Anyway, nice try at putting words in my mouth - next time make them a little less tinfoil though, please.
> In their current state self driving cars would kill far more people than humans if all cars used self driving 100% of the time, and no one knows if we will ever move past that.
Really? No one knows if we will ever improve on self-driving cars than the current technology today? I'm going to stick my neck out and say "Yes, I know that will move past that."
-- so your doubts are anachronistic to say the least.
> Self-driving cars have way too many hurdles to overcome before they reach that point. I mean, Europe hasn't even moved over to automatic transmission yet.
> When it works most of the time, it lulls you into a false sense of security, and then when it fails, you aren't prepared and you die.
That still doesn't _necessarily_ imply that 'partially self-driving cars' are worse than actually existing humans. Really, anything that's (statistically) better than humans is better, right?
I don't think it's reasonable to think that even 'perfect' self-driving cars would result in literally zero accidents (or even fatalities).
>That being said, I still want this tech on the road ASAP, not because it's perfect, but because human drivers are So. Fucking. Awful.
This narrative is so pervasive and I must admit a bit strange to me. Millions and millions of people strap themselves into thousands of pounds of metal and then drive 80 down the highway while texting and changing the radio and telling your kids to please stop fighting surrounded by other people doing the exact same thing. And we do that every single day and almost all of us are fine and will never have a 'major' accident. Humans are pretty fucking great at driving.
Besides to say that human are bad (or good) at driving would require some comparison, we're bad at it compared to what? As far as we know humans are the best drivers in universe. There's no evidence that self-driving is currently better than human drivers and there's no evidence that self-driving cars will soon be better than human drivers and there's no evidence that if we allow tons of self-driving cars on the roads then they will be better than humans. It's just blind hope, it really makes me want a word for whatever the opposite of a luddite is, instead of a belief that we can destroy machines to benefit people we believe we can destroy people to benefit machines. It's all twisted up.
If you want to be an Uber or Tesla crash test dummy and walk/bike across a test track while they see if their vehicle can avoid you then by all means go for it. But don't just foist that upon average people.
>>> I've seen actual self-driving cars on actual roads.
No you haven't. You've seen supervised cars with pilots ready to take over when needed. No manufacturer yet has dared release a truly hand-and-eyes-free vehicle onto public roads.
>there is insufficient data to conclude that such a system would improve safety at this time.
The hype behind self-driving is getting out of control. Sure, from a technological viewpoint it appears that, one day, computers should be able to drive better than humans.
> If you're going to go down that route (no pun intended), why not eventually ban everything but officially certified driverless cars from public roads?
I agree. That's the way its going to go. People kill 40K/people a year in the US simply driving, and injure/maim hundreds of thousands. There's no way self-driving cars aren't better than that.
Want to build your vroom vroom car? Own the entire stack down to the atoms? You'll get to drive it at track day at a track, not on a public road.
> Personally, I prefer the latter even if it means I could get killed at any moment because the risk is all part of the experience; not only of driving but really just life itself.
Agree, but that sentiment will die a slow death over the next few decades, just as those fond of the horse and buggy are no longer with us.
> Not everybody wants a self-driving car just like not everybody wants a big mac.
I don't think this will work, because self-driving cars will reveal drivers for what they are: impatient, reckless, anti-social maniacs. People want to speed, to swerve into the bike or parking lane to overtake a left-hand turner, to inch out into traffic to force themselves into a lane, to tailgate, etc, etc. You can't really have a system where x% of the cars are calmly and mechanically following the rules and manually-operated vehicles are taking advantage of that.
> but there's just no way you can drive a car around private property or something without a license.
Yup, sure can. Farmers have been doing this for decades.
> HUDs are distracting and I would certainly be a worse driver personally if I had that in my car.
It's all in the implementation; consider this one: If a car is detected that is at a radically different speed from me, a red box starts to flash around it. I would certainly end up being safer, since it would let me change lanes/slow down long before my eyes and brain could detect such a speed differential. Avoidance becomes a normal maneuver, instead of an emergency maneuver.
> but if you have $50 billion to spend on the project, then no way should you not try to build a self-driving car with it.
What if you can't build a self-driving car with $50 billion? With $1 trillion? Should you just walk away while dusting your hands and going "well, we tried"?
Because that's where we are. The current efforts are still ongoing, and have been for decades. Few improvements from them are being distilled into consumer vehicles; we really need more.
Make people safer now, instead of "5 years from now".
>It seems to me that self-driving cars can't be just as safe as the status quo, but have to be far far better. It's an unreasonable need, but human nature.
What would be the point of self-driving cars which were no safer than the status quo? That's just removing freedom from drivers and adding more complexity to infrastructure for no added benefit.
It's also exactly the narrative that proponents of self-driving cars have been driving (pun intended), self-driving cars would eliminate all, if not nearly all, accidents and fatalities.
> see self driving cars run into solid and stationary objects, but human drivers do that all the time too.
Human drivers who are distracted do that all the time, AP is supposed to avoid that, it is supposed to be alert all the time, but when it sees a stationary object, the result of their algo is, "it must be a sign we can somehow go through"
We need to make it very clear that self driving cars are better than driving drunk, or when you haven't slept in 24+ hours, but if you are a driver who pays attention, don't use this tech.
And it is not that I don't want the tech to take over the world, I wish I could just put my kids in a self driving car and have the car take them to the school that is 4 miles from home, but we are nowhere close to that, even with me in the driver seat, if I only have seconds to take over before I end up on a ditch or worse.
> This is why I am afraid of the hype behind self-driving vehicles.
Well, they don't have to be absolutely correct. Just a lot more correct than human drivers across a broad range of driving scenarios to justify replacing human drivers.
> it seems to me that all the lessons that we have learned have been chucked out the window with self-driving cars.
I think it’s unfair to lump all self driving car manufacturers together.
The traditional car companies have been doing research for decades (see for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP), but only slowly brought self-driving features to the market with part of the slowdown because they are aware of the human factors involved. That’s why there’s decades of research on ways to keep drivers paying attention and/or detecting that they don’t.
“Move fast and break things” isn’t their way of working.
> You get to read your phone instead of paying attention, and the trade-off is someone might get killed.
You get to drive, and the trade-off is someone might get killed. Your comment almost makes me think you haven't driven a car before, because you would remember the dull terror of seeing your life flash before your eyes for the 40th time this year because some moron ran a red and slammed the brakes in the middle of the intersection you were about to cross.
Until recently motor vehicle accidents were a leading cause of death in the US. Saying that self driving would just be a luxury feature is truly a luxury position compared to those that have lost loved ones to drunk driving, speeding, snow, rain, new drivers, old drivers, blind drivers, and any other of the myriad of ways to get yourself killed on a road. All of which would disappear with level 5 self driving.
> That's a far cry from, "with this technology something that took days and $$$$ now takes hours and $"
Extrapolate the future and realize that once self driving is solved for one vehicle it's solved for all of them, and truck/bus/taxi driving as a profession will go bust. Without having to pay human drivers that also need breaks, pensions, health insurance etc. all these services can offer lower prices.
>The truth is, if full self driving cars actually happened, with safety statistics better than humans and with a low barrier to entry, you can bet that people would change their opinion real fast.
A lot of danger of motor vehicles is when motorist choose to be dangerous though. If self-driving cars force motorists to follow speed limits and other traffic control devices, that will limit their uptake by quite a bit I think
> I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens.
There's no human driver in the car. At most, the cars can stop/pull over and ask for remote navigation from humans (but not remote operation).
There is no true (level 5) self-driving system yet, only driver-assist where the system may hand back control at any moment. It's only true self-driving when there's no human in the car.
> Imagine what a change it was going from horses to cars operating on internal combustion engines and relying on brakes to stop these vehicles going far faster than any horse.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_flag_traffic_laws - knee-jerk legislative response driven by a combination of fear and lobbying is always a risk.
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