How did I get in this taxi?
The door opened. You got in.
Posted on 02/14/2020 4:55:44 AM PST by Moonman62
That’s what I was thinking. A ride is a ride - as long as it gets you where you’re going without any excitement or delays there’s not much to distinguish one from another. Now, in a test vehicle you’d expect they might be better maintained/monitored etc. As you say, the fact that it was a BMW 5 series, likely new or nearly new, probably has more to do with the high marks than the actual driving from point A to point B. If the test vehicles were 4 year old Hyundais I’d bet the average ratings would be lower even with the exact same self driving tech.
Wait till the underclass discovers that these small, slow electric vehicles are packed with groceries.
I still don’t understand how the insurance is going to work. I’m not buying auto insurance if my car is making all the decisions for me. I guess Ford can buy my insurance for me.
I suppose that it might be possible for automated cars to operate in synchronous fashion on a smart highway that 'slots' cars into the traffic pattern, sort of allows for individual "flight plans". That might work... The problem is getting there. For a significant period of time there would remain human-piloted cars that would be outside the system's control, and so you're right back in the trap of having individual automated cars reacting to unanticipated moves of other vehicles. And that can never be near enough to 100% effective to preclude a significant number of crashes.
Self driving cars leave no one to take responsibility for mistakes.
Reminds me of a joke I read somewhere: To ere is human, to be able to blame it on a computer is divine.
How did I get in this taxi?
The door opened. You got in.
“on a smart highway”
I’d take a car that could drive itself only on smart highways because I think it will be easy to make thousands of miles of roads, especially open highways, smart.
Or maybe the car tell the highways it can handle just by knowing the highway it is on and knowing that it has been deemed ok for the car to handle.
When not on an “ok” highway the car would turn the driving over to me. Perhaps the car would turn the driving over to me if it felt it was in too much traffic or for other reasons.
The car’s brain should be very conservative, turning the driving over to me whenver it was even a little bit uncomfortable.
There are a lot more Democrats than that; and, they are wrong.
Yes, there will be growing pains, people will die, but in the long run, self-driving cars will essentially eliminate deaths due to driving under the influence, falling asleep, texting-while-driving, etc. People in “our generation” will find it difficult to adapt to this, and we probably will be the last holdouts, but this technology will definitely become widely used within 20 years.
Good post.
The goal at first is to reduce accident and fatality rates along with being more economical.
It’s good to see that not every FReeper is an extreme pessimist and complainer.
I liked that we didn’t crash.
For SCUBA diving you always go with a buddy...no need to out-swim the shark; just your buddy.
In this instance, the computer control only needs to outperform a human driver.
And human drivers are not all that good.
But WHERE are they driving? In downtown core? On freeway? In neighborhoods? Article doesn’t say.
Farther out, 50 to 100 years, I wonder what transportation will be like. It isn’t hard to see a world where no vehicles have any human driving controls.
Exactly. Self-drive accidents are like airplane crashes.
You're gonna hear about every one even though it is safer.
But a human driver means that somebody is ultimately held responsible for the accident and damages. Who is responsible when the automated system fails, or has to make a choice? Ford Motor Company? You and I know that ain't happening. And the insurance industry isn't willingly going to get our of the auto insurance business just because technology and common sense reasoning says that they are no longer necessary.
Plus when technology 'fails' it fails spectacularly.
Here’s Red Barchetta being performed on the Snakes & Arrows tour (I saw one of the shows from that tour):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-LMrL2-8OA
“Automation can work in a controlled situation in which nothing unexpected happens. There is no street or highway anywhere in the world where nothing unexpected happens.”
BINGO... well stated. I’ll take my chances with the human element.
“Farther out, 50 to 100 years, I wonder what transportation will be like. It isn’t hard to see a world where no vehicles have any human driving controls.”
Flying cars, of course :-)
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