Reading the responses here to this article, it reminded me of an article I read a couple of days ago. The article basically said that even if automated cars reduced fatalities by 90%, we would still be more critical of a robot-caused death than we would of a human-caused death. We will criticize them for only being 99.999% safe, while we ignore it if humans might only be 99.9% safe.
There is a human psychology element at play here: we are okay with being killed by factors we feel we have some control over but are not okay with being killed by something that we have less control over, even if it is ten times less likely.
I think that what Poison Pill said in comment #41 is more likely to happen than regular cars being outlawed: insurance rates will be one-tenth what they are for an automated car compared to what they are for a regular car. At that point, it will not take long for 90% of new car sales to be automated cars. Once that happens and we get bombarded with headlines about the tens of thousands of fewer automobile fatalities every year, we will be scratching our heads about how silly we were to not embrace the technology sooner.
Cars can be hacked as it sits.
If it has automatic parking assist, cruise control, and computer aided traction control that uses the brakes, your car can be subverted.
Now, imagine that with a robocar where you are out of the loop.
There is no way an auto car is going to be able to drive in the snow, and a million of other things. Freepers read to much sci fi. Heck trains, WHICH DRIVE ON RAILS, are not robotic.
Did you intentionally miss the point? Elon sure as hell did.
It isn’t the governments job to outlaw or mandate things like this.
Period.
I guess open carry and DUIs will be a thing of the past too.
How much do you charge a mile or kilometer for use?
Can you pick up hitchhikers?
Or will defensive measures be built in?
A brave new day alright.
What makes you think the insurance companies will allow that to happen?
So long as you want to go where they will take you. And when.
You may as well just have mass transit...How silly to have a car!
Won’t it be wonderful when an entire grid section could be placed on lockdown and all the little people held safely in their vehicles while some menace or another is safely dealt with.
One thing we HAVE seen is that if technology CAN be used to curtail individual freedom it WILL be used that way.
I think they are going to have go through years of self-limiting cars before they go full-auto. By that, I mean cars that will limit speed in wet/icy conditions, fog, etc. And reduce general speed and maintain standoff distance in traffic conditions.
I wonder how they plan to account for something like a herd of deer who bust out from cover and run in front of a car. Human peripheral vision and a knowledge of local conditions might get you through whereas a camera/sonar system might not.
There seems to be a lot of ignorance among city dwellers. I live in the mountains on a dirt road. Think how much money it will cost to prepare all rural roads for this city dweller utopian wet dream. How are the cars going to put on chains to drive in the ice and snow? How are the cars going to find the road and not say try to take off on a frozen river. This idea is not totally useless but not much more than 50% practical.
Or we can do away with cars altogether and use public transportation.
PS bus drivers hit pedestrians (when they have right of way) in Houston.
PSS When an expensive (but ineffecient) rail system was added, Houston’s solution was to make it illegal to be hit by the new trolley train.
The goal is to do away with personal people movers.
Apart from personal injury protection, why would anyone need insurance for a perfect, non-human operated, supercar?
It won’t happen anytime soon, because the mapping systems are extremely flawed and will remain so indefinitely. There are already too many instances where the GPS systems have sent vehicles down railroad tracks only to have the vehicle occupants killed in collisions with trains. Then there are the people, animals, and debris which obstruct the paths of the vehicles in ways which will result in the vehicle colliding with the obstructions, skidding off the roadway to avoid the obstructions, and assorted other mishaps the automated controls cannot cope with as well as the human driver.
Why does it have to be either/or? Why not have the best of both worlds where the machine mostly drives the car and the human can override if need be? Seems like a false dichotomy to me.