Self driving cars yay or nay?

For me it's a big Yay mostly due to the fact that I can't stand other drivers not paying attention on the road and texting. It's so damn annoying you can always tell who these people are they are farther back then other cars at a red light. Also I hate congested parking lots with a passion I rather have the car work through that mess. Overall I think self driving cars will be good for society less deaths and accidents.

Sign me the f*** up. Humans should not be allowed to drive - or do many other things, for that matter.

Looking forward to it, but I don't think it will be really reliable for another 15-20 years.

Sounds ok. Except for the fact that the government can take control of your car.

The movie "I Robot" did something like this and look how that turn out. So Nay. A.I cannot be trusted. I'm not ready for Skynet.

@davillain-:

Meh. "Governing themselves" is another item on my list of "things humans shouldn't be allowed to do."

If it works, then I, for one, welcome our new machine overlords.

Nay for me, yay for others who may want them.

I will drive my self myself thank you very much.

Yay for me. Though as a feature it requires extensive experimentation and testing in order to convince me of its total reliability.

Absolute yay.

This will save money, time, lives, and lower the cost of insurance and maybe even gas.

I kinda want to say yay... but knowing my luck, I'll be in the one out of a million cars that decides to glitch and drive me off an overpass.

Just skip self driving cars and build magnet rails all over the roads and have people jump into pods.

Yay!

...but not until everyone is required to use them and they're all monitored. Get rid of street lights and stop signs and just let it work as a finite element system; each car feeding back to the surrounding vehicles. We'll all get to our destinations a whole lot quicker and with many fewer wrecks.

I don't care if you like manual driving - I don't trust you.

I'm cool with that.

I think at some point we really don't need to own our own cars.

Depends.

I'm ok with systems like front end collision protections as this has always been a weak area of my driving and all my accidents have been rear ending people, and I've been saved once by one. But in terms of steering itself, **** off with that noise. My parents have a new Subaru Outback 2019 which attempts to preclude lane departure by yanking the steering wheel back (if the blinker isn't turned on). It can be overridden with marginal force but I nevertheless hate it. I'm only for fully automated cars if every vehicle on the road is operating in concert with each other over a network (such as in Minority Report). But as far as cars being independently automated, eh. I don't think the tech is nearly there enough to justify it.

However if it got to the point where it could be statistically demonstrated that it was drastically reducing accidents and fatalities, what could I say? My argument then would be that I'm against automation simply because I love to drive. It's exhilarating, and I don't wish to give it up.

Hey if it reduces traffics and accidents I am all in.

@pyro1245: Even if people don't own their own cars, the government could manipulate the car in which you are riding to wherever they please. You could be kidnapped if you are a "threat" to their own interests. Not to mention the possibility of a government creating malfunctions in any part of the car they choose.

But on the other hand it would be sweet to be able to read or sleep without someone molesting me in mass transit.

@DEVILinIRON:

Yeah there are issues that are probably impossible to solve. Nothing is really ever perfectly secure. Even if you could trust the entity in charge of the cars, or the government, there are always other rogue entities to worry about.

I just like the idea of removing all of the control infrastructure like stop lights and signs... How quickly could traffic flow if all the cars were controlled by a very optimized algorithm? How fast could the cars move in optimal conditions?

Not to mention the fact that now ad corps will be bidding on our travel info. Oh I guess they probably already do because Google.

@warmblur: A definite YES! But it will also create massive job losses around the world. The taxi drivers, bus drivers, delivery trucks/vans, couriers!

I cannot even imagine the backlash it will create.

I have a habit of striking conversation with taxi drivers (they’re very informed people generally) and whenever I get into the car of a young driver, I warn them to get out of the industry.

That won't take long to prove. Even the assist systems today have probably brought the rate of accidents down.

every morning when i'm driving to work and tired and just want to sleep i anticipate the day when i can just doze off until i'm at work.

don't get me wrong, i love driving. i hate commuting however.

ideally we have cars when the automation is there and handles a high % of conditions perfectly but the driver still has the authority to override the systems if they want to.

thought i can see insurance companies building in clauses that will not cover accidents if the driver was in control of the car. it will be interesting to see how the regulations around driverless cars adapt in the coming decades..

Shouldn't be allowed to do that. The insurance companies I mean.

nay.

i guess that all depends on how good their lobbyists are.

There are a bunch of companies working towards this and figuring out a) the legislature required and b) insurance and liability is one of the trickiest parts. As far as the technology goes, in terms of companies that have real production cars on the roads today Tesla is probably the furthest along. The latest of their cars have pretty advanced lane keeping. In late 2018 they added the ability for the car to change lanes on the highway and automatically take highway exists and interchanges based on your nav unit destination (Navigate on Autopilot) which is a pretty big step towards self-driving. More recently they've released updates that allow the car to drive around in parking lots with nobody inside to come pick you up and further updates that now visualize stop signs, traffic lights, etc on the instrument display using visual computing data collected by the car's many cameras (released as a preview of their future Full Self Driving tech).

I'm all for the idea. The dream is a car that can drive me home from a party while I sleep it off in the back seat.

As long as it is possible to take control over the vehicle, the driver is liable.
Although yeah I want ti do something else than focus on the road while driving.

Yay, will people still need a driver's license since the car is driving by itself?

@horgen: have you seen the recent Nova on self-driving cars (Look Who’s Driving)? It’s excellent. Ends by talking about what type of statistical numbers would be needed to warrant allowing full automation. IIRC it was argued it needed to be pretty much flawless, though the only way I could ever see that becoming a reality is again a network where all vehicles are aware of each other.

No I haven't seen it.

For fully automation I expect it to be pretty flawless as well. Which may very well make use of the method you described. Problem then is all the veteran cars. Will those be outlawed?

Yay!

The idea of being able to get absolute shitfaced downtown then have my car drive me home is very appealing.

Also the safety (allegedly) is another thing that appeals to me, but I don't think they will be as safe as they could be until most or all human driven cars are off the road.

My ideal view is that no one owns any cars and they simply figure out how many cars are really needed for people, and fleets are built and maintained of self-driving cars. Everyone puts in their home address and their work address and times of departures and you carpool when you can and you step outside at 7:30 (to get to work at 8:00) and there is a car waiting for you with a couple other people in it. There's be "extra" cars for people that need to run errands at random times, plus "emergency" cars (ambulances, etc).

If you're in the system, you get a dongle or something. You simply click a button (maybe a button for home, a button for work, or a button for errands) and the next available car shows up. I don't know just dreaming here...

I mean when you come down to it, the average American family of four needs less than one car, but often own at least two.

When I was commuting to Oakland from my home in the East Bay it took me about an hour to go a few miles. On a day with no traffic, it took me about 20 minutes. I imagine intelligent self-driving cars all talking to each-other would eliminate traffic and accidents. Plus even if there is traffic, I could just sit back and read and listen to music and sip my coffee.

Yay. Can't wait.

@horgen: good point.

It's a 90% yay from me. Reduction in accidents, getaways, stuff like that. So many people drive home after work (when they are too tired to drive) or drive while calling on a phone (handsfree or otherwise) or take (medicinal) drugs/alcohol that affect their ability to drive.

It's a 90% yay from me. Reduction in accidents, getaways, stuff like that. So many people drive home after work (when they are too tired to drive) or drive while calling on a phone (handsfree or otherwise) or take (medicinal) drugs/alcohol that affect their ability to drive.

And there's so many people driving who aren't up to date on all the rules. And there are so many confusing intersections (in Europe). And think about all the emergency services that get stuck in traffic. And the increasing traffic jams.

It needs to happen.

it's interesting that we tolerate flawed human drivers WAAAY more than we're willing tolerate flawed computer drviers..

In the ideal form, very much yes. Idea being that you really don't have to worry about getting from place to place because the car is going to do it for you, and everyone has one which is also communicating with the cars around it which helps to avoid accidents and improve traffic.

In the current form however, not so much. I haven't been impressed with the cars that are self-driving considering that you must keep your hands on the wheel at all times, eyes on the road, and if you crash it's still somehow your fault despite the fact that you weren't technically the one driving. It's like tech companies are saying, "Give us your money, but you are the ones responsible for our ****-ups."

Because with human drivers you could just say that one specific driver was horrible(and perhaps completely ignore the low qualification to get the license), but with a computer it is much more systemic.

i agree to a degree. a sw defect present in a version of code could be affect millions of cars. the upside is its fixable far faster than generating a new driver :P

Oh indeed, but the maker of the program is responsible. First you gotta write the laws so that firm gets off easy while the individuals in those affected cars carry the responsibility. :P

I saw that same NOVA episode. It was really good! It was so good my wife and kids watched it with me (they're more into reality TV and cartoons).

shouldn't be too hard $$$

Yeah, that's the tricky bit for sure. In the current systems, they are not considered "full" self driving so the driver is still 100% responsible for what the car does. Even with Teslas, the expectation is that the driver needs to be alert with hands on the wheel the whole time and be ready to take over at a moment's notice.

@shellcase86: Nova could make a 1 hour show on paint drying enthralling. Always so well done. Great show.

Nay. It'll just be people losing more privileges.

All government has to do is set curfews and limit where you can go and what you can do in self-driving cars, and pretty soon you are a prisoner to your city. You want to stop off at the little creek down the hill? Too bad, the closest stop is X number of miles away from that. You want to visit the park? It closes in an hour, you won't make it, choose a different destination. And it will be like highways with tolls, just way worse.

But hey, people won't die in auto accidents unless there are computer malfunctions I guess. Oh yeah, one less way you can choose to kill yourself lol. Unless you're somebody like Epstein...

If by "full" self driving meaning you don't need a steering wheel or pedals, I would consider the seller of said program to be first level responsible. They might take it further to the maker.

taking a nap on your way to whereever you go sounds fantastic.

Tesla's aiming for what they call Full Self Driving with their regular cars, so they would still have normal controls but theoretically you wouldn't need to even be in the driver's seat. Even with my hardware and software version I can direct the car to drive around a parking lot with literally nobody in it. Tesla is promising Full Self Driving will be enabled "soon" but it'll likely be in beta for a long time and still be regarded as a very fancy cruise control system. During that time it'll still be driver responsibility if the car gets in an accident on autopilot (which is how it is today). My car will require both a hardware and software update before it'll be capable of that (once it releases). Teslas sold today already have the hardware theoretically.

I don't think the current Tesla cars has the computing power to be fully self driving.

Either way they are not built from the ground up to be self driving.

That's... complicated. :)

So there are several hardware revisions for autopilot. The original platform they released in 2014 was built by MobileEye, a company who specializes in autopilot systems for cars. It had one forward facing radar, one optical camera, and a 360 degree arc of ultrasonic sensors. These days that system is referred to as Hardware 1 (HW1).

Tesla used this until 2016 when they decided to create their own system they had been working on for years. They went from 1 camera to 8 that see 360 degrees. They also updated the radar and ultrasonics and replaced the computer with an Nvidia built self driving computer. The entire system is an optical driving system that uses machine learning. This is the HW2 platform. This platform is the one that Tesla has promised would eventually reach full self driving through software updates and they began selling "FSD" as an option even though it wasn't functional yet. They also made the computer swappable in the event that they couldn't get there with the current platform.

A year later they quietly upgraded the wiring and computer, and replaced the 1 color channel cameras with 2 color cameras. This didn't change any functionality but it enabled a few extra features like the ability to use the cameras as dashcams and security cams thanks to the new computer. This platform is referred to as HW2.5.

Fast forward to mid last year and Tesla replaced the 2.5 Nvidia-based computer with their own computer/chips built from the ground up internally. All of the rest of the hardware stayed the same as HW2.5. This computer is dubbed their "full self driving" computer and it offered as a retrofit for any car with HW2 or greater. This is also what's included in every car they sell now. My current Tesla was bought at the end of 2016, so I'm on the HW2 platform. I have not yet received my retrofit.

So Tesla claims that their current hardware suite will be capable of FSD, and as a "preview" they've enabled visualization of everything the car sees including traffic lights, street signs, parking spaces, turn lane markings, road cones, etc but it only works on cars that have the latest computer.

So does that mean that it'll be capable of FSD? Maybe. Tesla says "yes" but until they actually do it it's still theoretical. They also thought they'd be able to pull it off on a computer two versions ago before they realized that wasn't gonna happen, so always take a forward looking statement with a grain of salt. However, they are targeting "feature complete" self driving for this year so I doubt they will do another hardware refresh before turning it on.

@Byshop: They have done more computer upgrades than I was aware of. I knew HW1 wasn't capable, andd highly unlikely HW2 would be able to do it properly as well. The ones after that I wasn't aware of. Maybe they will pull it off.

I don't believe it before I see it in this case.

You're not wrong in that until they actually pull it off, it's all hypothetical regardless of what they are claiming.