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Autonomous Cars Will Save Money and Lives
cartechboy writes "Autonomous cars are coming even if tech companies have to produce them. The biggest hurdles are the technology (very expensive and often still surprisingly rudimentary) and how vehicle to vehicle (V2V) communication happens (one car anticipates or sees an accident, it should tell nearby cars). So what are the benefits to self-driving cars? They may save us thousands of lives and not a small amount of cash. A new study from the Eno Center for Transportation (PDF) suggests that if just 10 percent of vehicles on the road were autonomous, the U.S. could see 1,000 fewer highway fatalities annually and save $38 billion in lost productivity (due to congestion and other traffic problems). Right off the bat you can imagine autonomous driving easily topping your average intoxicated drivers' ability behind the wheel. At a 90 percent adoption mark those same numbers in theory would become: 21,700 lives spared, and a whopping $447 billion saved."
Cops won't like it because they'll see lower revenue from DUI fines, speeding fines, and all that crap they love taking money for.
I like my horse, cars? no thank you.
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30 minutes more sleeping?
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or put another way, what'll happen when we have half a trillion dollars less economic activity? Since our entire civilization is based around getting people to trade among themselves. I just don't see all these productivity gains are ever going to make it down to my level...
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You know . The way they're painting this , it seems like there's not going to be any unforeseen problems with it.
I can already predict crashes due to hacking/ buggy softwares and etc.
Don't get me wrong. I agree with the fact that automated cars are a step in the right direction. However, what I dislike is how it is being presented here. It is presented as if it was a holy grail of driving. The solution of all problems. That's very misleading and dangerous. That's what I can't stand. The dishonesty of it all.
We should be very honest here with the end users about what auto cars can accomplish at this point and what they can't.
Only if either A. you have access to a park-and-ride facility that is closer to your house than your workplace is, or B. the bus stops very close to both your home and your workplace. I've usually found that unless your commute is at least half an hour by car, you'll spend more time walking to and from the bus than you would spend driving, and even if you don't count the walking time, it still takes 2–3 times as long to get there. As always, YMMV.
Public transit is great for moderately long commutes, particularly if parking sucks at your destination. If I'm going into San Francisco, I take public transit. If I'm going to work, though, there's actually enough parking, so it isn't worth the 20 minutes of walking and 30+ minutes on a bus just to save 15 minutes in my car. It would probably be slightly cheaper, but the inconvenience is pretty severe. And that's without having to change buses at all.
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I'm extremely frugal and I'd still buy one the instant an affordable one is released simply because an autonomous car represents a potential savings of 4,000 hours of my life over the life of the car. That's represents 2 years of a full time job. That's time that could be spent doing whatever I usually do at home, including sleeping, entertainment, and personal work/finances. It's incredible to think about.
People are willing to endure a risk orders of magnitudes higher of crashing by human error than by machine error.
Much as they're okay with the risk of dying from flu every year by not vaccinating, but not the comparatively negligible risk of a terrorist attack.
That's the problem.
Currently, they're looking at data for autonomous vehicles in a complete vacuum.
I'm quite sure that having such cars on the roads in percentile quantities will yield their own sets of unique fatalities sooner or later.
In the mean time, I'm not an quadriplegic. So I'll choose to drive my own damn car.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
I like my standard too, but I hate it when I have to drive 2000 miles in it. Can I just put it on auto and be there by morning, please?
Driving 2,000 or even just 500 in my manual shift Jeep is fine, but it is the 5 mile trips that are annoying. Still, not annoying enough to trade it for an autonomous car. Do I want to ban these new-fangled cars? No, of course not. However, I sure as hell don't want it to be the only choice in automotive transport either.
Time Bomber the Book coming soon.
Yeah, but your boss can't expect you to work on your commute. This is really about adding 10 hours a week to your workweek.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Right off the bat you can imagine autonomous driving easily topping your average intoxicated drivers' ability behind the wheel.
Um, what? Self-driving cars will drive better than drunks? That's an endorsement?
And when you plow into a pedestrian in your Audi A4 while checking a Facebook message, better call Saul!
Yup. There are plenty of apologizers keeping that worry to themselves just to avoid the 'conspiracy nut' label, and/or who don't care about anything besides convenience (until someone else's form of it intrudes on their own lives, of course). These people project their own whims onto everyone else and become surprised/fearful/offended when the rest of us don't step it up. If there's a root dynamic to today's societal ills, this is it.
It's one thing to automate repetitive tasks and another to automate living life; the latter being what happens when the control of this automation is handed to governments/corporates. At that point it's slavery. Because of this, these technologies only become interesting to me when the leadership and cultures of so-called free nations are sufficiently mature to understand and handle the concept of freedom. Currently, they are not, and now we see how every new device with a computer inside has some kind of remote use-tracking featureset built into it, marketed as convenience of course.
It is highly unlikely they've worked all the flaws out of these cars. The problem is just too intractable for that. The last thing I want is to hurtle 70mph down a highway under the control of cheap chinese embedded computers programmed by the lowest bidders when the manufacturers still can't get their relatively simple electronic throttle controls working right.
Public Transportation: A great way to get from someplace you don't live to someplace you don't work.
Because you know that as soon as your car is recognized as autonomous, some asshole kid is going to say "Let's make it crash!"
What?
This topic has been discussed here several times now, but one thing I haven't seen brought up is insurance. If my vehicle is driving itself and causes an accident, then what driver is to blame? The person sitting behind the wheel? Why would my insurance company want to pay for an accident caused by a piece of software when they can go after the company that produced the software? Or what if they will only insure Ford cars and not Chrysler because statistics show that one auto-driving system performs better than the other? If my car's autonomous system just flat out runs over a little girl playing in the street and kills her, could I be charged with manslaughter because I was behind the wheel reading the newspaper?
Think back a few years to the Toyota "auto acceleration" issue, and the lawsuits and government testing, etc, etc that was going on over that one issue. And that was possible hiccup in a single system that merely relayed user input to the engine. It wasn't even remotely as complex as a vehicle actually driving itself.
There's going to be a whole lot to figure out in the legal, insurance and liability areas that makes the technical challenge and development look like child's play.
Better known as 318230.
Or you could put the effin' smart phone away until you get to your destination.
I was wondering how far down I'd need to scroll to find a comment about how this would benefit people who can't leave their phones alone while they're behind the wheel of a car. As it turned out... not very far at all.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
You, obviously, live in a major metro area. Plenty of people don't, and have no viable public transportation options, besides perhaps hitchhiking.
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Except that a johnny cab done today would report your travel plans to the local police dept, insurance company, and any other institution that has a vested interest in judging your behavior. No thanks. I'd rather walk.
airplanes autopilot still don't cover all stuff and they have less to deal with then a car does.
If you want to drive recreationally, on a closed course, I expect you'll be able to do that indefinitely in more or less whatever format you prefer. But there's no reason you need to endanger others with your manual driving just to scratch your recreational itch or satisfy some nostalgic idea of "freedom" (via dependence on the auto industry, the oil industry, and public roads).
He's a socialist for pointing out that cars require huge, mostly capitalist, social support to exist and function?!? Exactly what would he have to do to demonstrate his commitment to capitalism?
Where this is going to get interesting is when nearly all the cars on the road are autonomous and the last remaining hold outs will be preventing many other cool solutions that only work when you have 100% autonomous such as eliminating traffic lights. Eliminating traffic signs such as one way, speed, stop, etc signs. Eliminating speed limits. Even eliminating things such as lanes.
Basically the last manually driven cars will be seen to be a homicidal menace and high cost nightmare.
And some of them might be xenophobes!
You're right!
Self-driving horse? No thank you.
It isn't about benefiting people that can't put their phones down. it is about benefiting the people they run into.
What wold you do with a $2,000 per year raise?
Buy a car and quit taking the bus?
(Sorry, I couldn't resist.)
Anybody care to guess how long it'll take cities like New York to pass a law making it illegal for driverless empty cars to follow any route besides one leading directly to a parking space somewhere, to avoid having 40,000 driverless cars doing laps around lower Manhattan for hours at a time since it's cheaper to run the car for 2 hours than to actually pay to park for two hours?
I can definitely see driverless cars causing massive collapse in downtown parking rates across America. In a city like Miami, the difference between $2-4/day parking (in a reasonable neighborhood) and $17/hour parking is usually about 3-4 miles, max. I can also see lots of tension as urban residential neighborhoods a mile or two from the skyscrapers that traditionally had adequate curbside parking suddenly find themselves inundated daily with self-driving cars looking for a cheap place to park.
If you work 2 h during commute, then you work 6 h in the office. That is all.
On the contrary, there's no reason you need to intrude on his ability to drive on roads he helped pay for just to assuage your fear over the trivial amount of "danger" he presents. It's quite enough that he's required to pass a competency exam and forbidden from driving while impaired.
Instead, I'm going to rent one. For half an hour each morning and half an hour each evening. In between, the car will drive other people to their destinations. It will never (well, rarely) be parked on a street curb or in a garage just taking up space. It will function like a taxi, except MUCH cheaper since by far the largest expense in taxis is the driver's salary.
That's the future. Owning your own autonomous car will still be possible, but why would you do it when you can have the same convenience from a shared vehicle at a fraction of the cost?
When considering whether someone thinks they are better than average in driving skill you should look at this study
Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, 93% of the US sample and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50% (above the median). For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.
It's quite enough that he's required to pass a competency exam and forbidden from driving while impaired.
Either you've never driven on public roads with other drivers around you, or you have very unusual definitions of "competency" and "forbidden".
Yes, I too find it difficult to believe that a vehicle using sensors with centimetre precision on nearby obstacles and penetration through rain and fog, direct feedback from the wheels as to current grip levels, the ability to control the angle of the wheels to a single degree or better, and sub-millisecond response controller times, could possibly be better than a human.
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Or you could put the effin' smart phone away until you get to your destination.
I was wondering how far down I'd need to scroll to find a comment about how this would benefit people who can't leave their phones alone while they're behind the wheel of a car. As it turned out... not very far at all.
Seems a much cheaper solution to distracted drivers (at least by cell phones) would be a $10 chip that simply blocks cell phone reception. If it is illegal to talk and text while driving a vehicle, then block the signal. If you want/need to talk or text, pull over. Or, instead of putting a chip in each vehicle, it could be built into the phone. It seems smart phones are pretty good at telling where you are, what direction you are going and even your speed. If your speed appears to be over 5 or 10mph, it automatically goes into "car mode" which would be similar to airplane mode. The difference being, it can still receive calls and texts, they would just automatically go to voicemail (for calls) and not alert you for texts, until you fall below the speed threshhold, then you have your choice to pull over and do something. (And for those thinking that fine, at a stop light, start using your phone again, as soon as your speed goes above the threshhold, it turns into a receiver only device again).
Seems that would be a lot simpler than waiting for everybody to purchase cars that will drive themselves.