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Google Lobbies Nevada To Allow Self-Driving Cars

Posted by samzenpus on from the to-drive-or-not-to-drive dept.

b0bby writes "The NY Times reports that Google is quietly lobbying for legislation that would make Nevada the first state in which self-driving cars could be legally operated on public roads. 'The two bills, which have received little attention outside Nevada's capitol, are being introduced less than a year after the giant search engine company acknowledged that it was developing cars that could be safely driven without human intervention.'"

8 of 275 comments (clear)

  1. Not yet. by Pollux · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I would not feel safe with self driving cars on the road...yet.

    Google's still a private company, and their word alone that these cars are safe does not a satisfied citizen make. Let these cars be thoroughly tested by both a government entity and a private third party before they be allowed on the road.

    Furthermore, we all know that a program that's still being beta tested still has its bugs. Even if the bugs were worked out so that a car "experienced a bug" only once every 100,000 miles, given the number of vehicles presently on the road and how much they are driven every day, that would still be too many "crashes" for society to find acceptable.

    1. Re:Not yet. by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I would not feel safe with self driving cars on the road...yet.

      It's the combination of self driven and idiot driven ones that scares me most.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    2. Re:Not yet. by Rosco+P.+Coltrane · · Score: 4, Funny

      I would not feel safe with self driving cars on the road...yet

      That's probably why Nevada is a good place to start a real-life experiment: apart in urban centers, if a self-driving car were to veer off course, it could probably drive in a straight line in the desert for hours without hitting anything.

      --
      "A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
    3. Re:Not yet. by sadboyzz · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Humans can drive.

      ...badly.

    4. Re:Not yet. by ACS+Solver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Society is going to be the problem here anyway. People are going to freak out at cases where the driving AI is responsible for a fatal accident. A quick search shows that 33808 people died in road accidents in the US, in 2009. And that's apparently a 60-year low. This still translates to some 92 traffic fatalities per day. But society accepts that... whereas I'm sure they would freak out if a full transition to self-driving cars happened, with the driver AI being responsible for 1 fatality per day. Fatality numbers could go down by almost two orders of magnitude, but people would feel less safe on the road because of "killer cars" out there.

      I feel this is a big problem overall - people are willing to accept human controlled systems where the human factor regularly leads to accidents/injuries/deaths, but if that system can be automated with a much lower accident/injury/death rate, the society would not feel it's safe.

  2. Do this in Nevada! by cvtan · · Score: 5, Funny

    In NY, all self-driving cars will have drivers after they have been on the road for a hour or so. They will not necessarily return home.

    --
    Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
  3. 1 bug / 100,000 mile - I'll take that by OnTheEdge · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Only one error in 100,000 miles -- I'll take that in a heartbeat over the thoughtless people I drive beside each day. I guarantee the best drivers have more than 1 bug in 100K miles.

    1. Re:1 bug / 100,000 mile - I'll take that by sincewhen · · Score: 5, Funny

      I don't have bugs, I have race conditions!

      --
      -- Braden's law of data: All data spends some of its lifetime in an excel spreadsheet.