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Americans Still Deeply Skeptical About Driverless Cars, Says Poll (theverge.com)
A new poll was released today that basically repeats data we've seen in previous surveys: Americans still don't trust self-driving cars, and are nervous about the coming onslaught. The Verge reports: Asked how concerned they'd be to share the road with a driverless car, 31 percent said they'd be "very concerned," while 33 percent said "somewhat concerned," according to the poll which was just released by Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. A majority (63 percent) said they would not support "mass exemptions" from federal motor vehicle safety standards for self-driving cars, and were not comfortable (75 percent) with automakers having the power to remotely disable vehicle controls, such as the steering wheel, and brake and gas pedals, when the autonomous vehicle is being operated by the computer. And people overwhelmingly support (75 percent) the U.S. Department of Transportation developing new standards related to driverless vehicles. The poll surveyed 1,005 adults between December 7-10th, 2017, with a margin of error of +/- 3.09 percent.
My main concern is not safety. I worry that driving will become cost prohibitive if driverless cars have a certain amount of adoption. Insurance companies will say "use driverless, or you pay X times more". That would relegate driving to the rich. Also, it would make current cars worthless overnight. Poorer people wouldn't be able to afford personal transportation at all any more, since there won't be enough second hand driverless cars. All in all a rather bleak future in my eyes.
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
I will ride in them, when I verify they have no special liability protection! Being involved in IT and Sensors and such. I do not think the time it right! It will come in 10 -15 years. But it sure is not ready today.
;)
The only way they put these things on the road is with blanket complete liability protects from the GOV saying they are not responsible for anything bad that happens.
Just my 2 cents
Think I'm going to let Intel, Microsoft or Google drive me around at 100 km/h? HAHAHAAH
If so sign me the fuck up
What if a gorilla walks across the road in front of you?
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
The speeds are lower, the roads and boundaries are better defined. I wouldn't ride one on a twisty mountain road in Bolivia though.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
When the tech is ready, it will go in to pilot less airliners first! No cockpit crew! Until I see that I know cars are not ready.
;)
Just my 2 cents
We already know driverless cars get rear ended constantly because they unexpectedly stop for stupid reasons and catch normal drivers off guard. I have no illusions; they'll be foisted on us regardless because, as always, fuck drivers.
I have a friend who works for an insurance company. They've noticed over the past year that there has been an increase in accidents. Doing further research into each accident, they've discovered that people have been over relying on driver assist features.
One story he told me was about a guy who slammed his car into the rear of a late 1960s Thunderbird which was stopped at a light in his new BMW. He apparently had gotten so used to the automatic braking system that he just never bothered to hit the brake. This being the one time it just didn't work for some reason.
Call me a Luddite, I don't care. I don't trust computers and I don't trust cars driven by them, especially in this post-NSA car hacking world.
I just don't want one that's powered by software from evil companies like Google. Since internet-free, advertising-free, non-privacy-invading driverless car software will never happen, I'll pass.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
I think most people haven't shared a street with them. I spent two years in the same city with these things, as a pedestrian, driver, and cyclist. They're infinitely patient with cyclists, hyper-paranoid about pedestrians wandering in to the street, like a parent is with their toddler.
Two weeks around self driving cars and you pretty much immediately realize that humans are just sacks of meat piloting cars, is about the dumbest idea, and the pedestrian fatality statistics back that up.
If I were to describe the "personality" of a self driving car, imagine a super chilled-out Mr. Rodgers paitent type, but he's also double-dosed on adderall and hyper alert for pedestrians, got 9 hours of sleep last night, good blood sugar, and his cell phone is on silent, locked in the trunk. And he has an IQ of 175 and can see in all directions and does not blink, and has a third eye that can see through shrubs and around cars.
Compare to the sleep-deprived, over caffinated, underfed mother who is juggling three kid's schedules and probably running late to pick up johnny from swim class while answering a phone call and trying to remember if she needs to pick up groceries on the way home.
moox. for a new generation.
Seriously. How many are on the roads in NON-TESTING situations? Have you seen the testing reports? GM reports every collision they have with their autonomous vehicles in California to the state. (https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316+) The others?
Do you know how your state would handle a collision involving a driverless vehicle? Who, as a person or corporation, is liable for damages if the driverless vehicle broke the law in does damage to something/someone?
Step away from the hype and futurism, let the researchers research, the engineers engineer, and tell the marketers to calm down because all the non-research oriented VC is in cryptocurrency right now. Autonomous vehicles will be here eventually, but if we can't even get automatic braking, dynamic cruise control, and lane assist all modern vehicles, then we're nowhere near having 100% autonomous vehicles on the road in any significant number.
The roads are sheer ice out there right now. I wouldn't trust a human driver let alone an automated one. Something tells me the folks in Mountain View California haven't tested their cars in weather like this.
Unproven tech, several thousand pounds of steel. No shit Sherlock we don't trust them.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
The biggest advantage of autonomous cars is that road carrying capacity goes way way up... which not only increases overall transportation efficiency but will require less lanes and less real estate, which is a huge cost driver in metro areas. I envision someday soon that certain roads in and out of congested urban areas will be autonomous cars only for certain hours of the day.
The visions of the future promised all this wonderful stuff but the reality is that everything is tied back to centralized corporate control systems. You donâ(TM)t own or control the automation so why trust it?
I can't wait for driverless cars. Not only am I lazy, I'm a geek.
Sadly, there's not many geeks left on Slashdot.
heading to -14 (temp not wind chill) the roads are snow covered with random slick spots and banks from plowing ;) Driver less cars right!
;)
They will only do it with absolute liability protections from the deaths.
Just my 2 cents
If you rear-end somebody, it is your fault 100% of the time. The only possible exception is if their brake lights are out. If you're close enough that you can't react in time to an instantaneous stop, you're too close. The problem with human drivers is that none of them believe the laws of physics apply to them. Everyone assumes their stupid driving will be fine because nobody else will do something stupid, too. Several examples:
1) I had a friend tell me a story about when he was going ~100 MPH on a motorcycle on a rural road. A semi ran a stop sign at an intersection he was approaching and he was forced to stop in an inelegant way that led to damage to himself and his motorcycle. He lamented that his speed would have been perfectly fine if the idiot semi driver hadn't run the stop sign. He didn't appreciate when I pointed out that the semi's running the stop sign would have been perfectly fine if the idiot on the motorcycle hadn't been going 100 MPH.
2) In snowy areas like mine, big 4x4 trucks zoom past at 15 MPH over the speed limit with black ice all over the road. I have known several who do this. I point out how stupid and dangerous this is. They respond it's fine because their trucks have 4-wheel drive. I point out that 4 points of contact on a friction-less surface is still just a friction-less surface and offers no additional protection from sliding.
3) Ever time I hear about someone rear-ending someone else, the offended sounds exactly like you and blames the person they rear-ended for stopping too fast. As I mentioned before, it's your own damn fault. Every time.
Yes, the software will have bugs. No, it won't be perfect. But I sure pick their defect rate over the defect rate of human drivers.
With the exception of a handful of cars driving about, this is an unproven technology. So when one here about Telsa "autopilot" plowing into the side of a truck without even slowing down, it gives one pause. I agree that they aren't the same technology but this isn't about tech savvy people. Consumer technology has become "fuck the customers, they're our beta testers" so more than a few people are concerned about the possibility of cars suddenly veering and shoving them off the road or driving off a bridge.
Apple Maps is a good example of to minor errors causing major malfunctions.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The features most new cars have is better than most humans. I *wish* a good portion of the old people around here had auto stop. Florida would rejoice that a good portion of their population wasn't behind the wheel.
ISO26262 is no small certification. There's a reason my RTOS and compiler cost tens of thousands of dollars.
It's the same stuff Aviation / Defense has been using for a while: https://www.ghs.com/AerospaceD...
The real question is, are they more or less skeptical about driverless cars or cars controlled by other drivers?
I know which one I want following me on the highway: the driverless car, not the texting tailgating person who is late and frustrated.
A key use case for autonomous vehicles is to allow people who can't (or shouldn't!) drive themselves to once again have mobility. Think senior citizens. Seniors vote early and often. This is going to be approved sooner then you think. I bet it starts in Florida or Arizona -- states that have large and vocal retiree populations. Once it starts, it will be very difficult to stop it from spreading to other states. No politician wants to tell grandma that she must be stuck at home.
I don't care for these cars because the way they drive.
If you've ever been behind a Google car, it drives way below the speed limit and constantly hits the brakes. CONSTANTLY. it's like being behind a teenage girl just learning to drive.
CONSTANTLY HITTING THE BRAKES.
Some will undoubtedly die from this technological punchline foisted upon the unsuspecting masses, but the biggest, broadest hassle I see are these things being completely befuddled by the irregular, but everyday, happenings on our roads which humans don't even have to think twice about to handle. Traffic will be choked by the most minor of occurrences. Pay close attention to your commutes and you will see what I mean. Just today, my folks saw sleeves of Styrofoam coffee cups being blown about the freeway. What do you think these autonomous cars would do, despite the 70 mph traffic behind it?
Most people are probably okay drivers. They keep their eyes on the road, don't drink or cell phone or text while driving, drive mostly courteously and intelligently. I commute through heavy traffic every day and that's what I see.
HOWEVER: There's that core of imbeciles who can't get insurance because their driving records are so terrible - they're the ones most likely to wind up killing someone. I see a smaller group of people driving like idiots. (for example: during a snow/ice storm in Maryland one night, I was driving on a main highway. It seemed like everyone was leaving following distance, driving cautiously. There was ONE car I saw speeding and weaving in an out of traffic. Probably had a really miserable driving record. Also, the most aggressive drivers I've known have had really awful driving records, again, so bad they could not get private vehicle insurance).
I wonder: Of all the accidents, the fatals in particular - how many of those people could not get private automobile insurance.
A lot of Americans are still skeptical about evolution, and a not insignificant number are skeptical about the earth being round. So it's hardly surprising that they'd be skeptical about a technology they haven't yet seen working in real life.
one of those skeptics. I'll be in total control of my car thank you very much.
The questions in this poll are slanted to make people feel negatively about autonomous cars. They talk about removing control and reducing safety standards, things that people are unlikely to agree with. They got their intended result.
This doesn't actually say much about overall public opinion on the cars.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/business/autos/general-motors/2018/01/12/gm-driverless-car-fleet-cruise-av/109381232/
Yeah they are not keen on it. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure.
Get up!
I'm with the very concerned crowd.
However, after seeing three vehicles run red lights in one day last week, I'm starting to reconsider. I mean the lights were clearly red because the cross traffic where I was sitting had a green light. It had been green for at least 2 seconds. Normally I accelerate as soon as the light turns green, but not any more. Now I look both ways before I venture into the intersection.
There seems to be a real breakdown of respect for rules of the highway occurring in my area. It's getting more like anarchy all the time.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
More pointless non-existent problem solving to employee over-populated society.
What happens when the same kinds of people who now derank search results and ban links get into car data?
Attend the wrong political meeting and their car has terms of service issues?
Use the wrong words in their car and get locked out?
Look at the wrong web sites and their car wont start?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
It's just too early to be confident in their abilities...
What kind of stupid question is this? Who in their right mind would want to lower safety standards?
I've never heard a good argument for driverless cars that doesn't involve driver cars. Why do we need cars at all? By which I mean a transportation system that's based on individual and widespread ownership and use of vehicles for one or two people. What problem will driverless cars solve?
But that is in fact what they are doing, so.. what are they supposed to say? Would you be driven in a car by a clown with purple hair?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Most people use Windows computers.
As a benchmark, I would expect a computer controlled car to be “mostly” reliable.
When it crashes, I can try rebooting it right?
I have found that the only way to consistently maintain a safe position (5-7 seconds of empty space in front of me [if I manage to get up to speed] with minimal brake application) on the road is to yield to virtually everything that moves (preferably while they are still behind me), prevent anyone from boxing himself in beside me, and to occasionally deliberately make my lane very unappealing.
When I switched from considering only following distance and speed limit to active collision avoidance, it dropped the near-misses from several times per minute to a very small fraction (once every other week or so). I still get tailgaters occasionally. When I know they're back there, I basically forget how to *accelerate and focus instead on pre-emptively reducing my speed so I don't have to hit my brakes if I get cut off (and thus become less likely to get hit in the rear). Oh, and getting rid of that tailgater.
It's great. Some days, my driving is like a massive collectively imposed collective punishment. People one by one cut me off as they pass, forcing me to continue driving slowly, provoking more people to pass, resulting in more unsafe lane changes in front, resulting in continued slowdown. Quite amusing to see traffic backed up all the way to the horizon - you're all just a bunch of individuals, and, rather than blowing your horns (and failing to draw any sympathy), you should all be happy that you're moving at all, instead of reduced to a crawl by the sort of wrecks your driving causes.
(*) Also, despite what some of you apparently think, increasing my speed only increases the speed at which I get tailgated, so... HA! not happening.
People who express skepticism about self-driving cars always seem unaware of the bloodbath the humans drivers are causing. It's about a hundred deaths every day, just in the United States. For a little perspective, people still make a big deal of the 9/11 attacks, but human motorists do the same thing every month.
If we replaced all drivers with robots, would they kill people? Probably. But no way would it be the Texas Chainsaw Massacre-style clusterfuck we're enduring now.
Bring it on, I say. Put them on the streets, kill some pedestrians, kill some motorists, and fix the bugs.
+1, Advanced Slashdot trolling.
Strange things are afoot at the Circle-K.
I know, as I am one.
What works on a wide sunny road in California isn't going to cut it on a rainy muddy day on a single track country lane in the UK.
I trust the technology, but no way am I going to get into cars built and programmed by people I know are out to get me. I'd be killed in no time.
It will be made illegal to spin around on the sidewalk?
The sad thing is I am sure you are serious. You authoritarian libtards are completely out of control.
And yes, those countries ARE shitholes.
Shitholes, Shitholes, Shitholes.
Oh, sorry. Trigger warning. My bad.
While I don't have any faith at all they can solve the general case of driving in traffic, as an aging retiree who will one day be forced to abandon threatening others with my driving, I still hold a modicum of hope that one day they can solve enough of the special cases to transport me a few places locally. It may require special lanes and various special laws etc, but it might be possible to constrain the problem space enough to work safely for some cases without actually laying down tracks...
Its a brand new high-end high-tech expensive as f*ck machine. Its built for 24x7x365 operation and is used by about 60-100ppl.
It freaks out a few times a day and has to have it cup sensor cleaned be restarted. This machine makes COFFEE! Its sensor to see if there is a cup in place makes the wrong assumption if a single drop of coffee splashes on it. I would like to see a driver-less car make its way through a snowstorm to grandmas house. I have more fate in the future of driver-less drones/automated flying cars than I have in driver-less wheeled vehicles.
Self driving cars sound great until a boy comes to pick up your daughter for a date...
Americans Still Deeply Skeptical About Driverless Cars, Says Poll (theverge.com)
Posted by BeauSD on Friday January 12, 1880 @11:30PM from the fear-of-the-unknown dept.
A new poll was released today that basically repeats data we've seen in previous surveys: Americans still don't trust cars, and are nervous about the coming onslaught. The Verge reports:
Asked how concerned they'd be to share the road with a car, 31 percent said they'd be "very concerned," while 33 percent said "somewhat concerned," according to the poll which was just released by Advocates for Highway and Equine Safety. A majority (63 percent) said they would not support "mass exemptions" from federal equine safety standards for cars, and were not comfortable (75 percent) with drivers having the power to control locomotion when the vehicle does not have a brain of its own. And people overwhelmingly support (75 percent) the U.S. Department of Transportation developing new standards related to vehicles. The poll surveyed 1,005 adults between December 7-10th, 2017, with a margin of error of +/- 3.09 percent.
...mostly racist and stupid too. Whats your point?
Please count me in the 36% who are not concerned.
Google for example has been working on the technology for eights years and has spent over one billion dollars and has like three million miles. How many miles have you driven. When will be enough for you people?
People fear and dislike things that are new and that they don't understand. That's all. It's s constant about people.
People know it''s coming they know in a few years they'll be using this technology and in a few decades driving will be like sewing, a hobby. Something that is fun for some, but largely has been industrialized to be cheaper and better.
I don't care if you want to drive a car. But please don't try to impede my freedom to go driver-less.
I get all the comments about trusting self-driving cars to obey laws, watch out for peds, etc. However there is no question that the human visual system is still worlds better than any artificial visual system at 1) recognizing objects in the face of otherwise ambiguous cues, integrating many visual cues (brightness, color, motion, depth, occlusions, textures, surface reflectance, etc, etc, 2) low light sensitivity. Compare any inexpensive camera (e.g. in smartphones, etc) to what the human eye act see in moonlight, the cheap cameras are terrible. The human retina can detect single photon events. What can typical cameras in consumer devices (and cars) do? I'd love to see what a self-driving car can do on a twisty winding road on a moonless night with possible obstacles in its path. The human eye operates over a 12 log unit range of brightness. It takes very expensive cameras and optical systems to come close to that.
The first driverless cars will be slug-slow. People will do all kinds of crazy and dangerous stuff to pass them and avoid them
Yes, eventually speeds will improve. I even kinda believe the optimists who say that once the entire fleet is automated and interconnected, traffic jams will be eliminated and overall flow will increase
But, in the beginning, they will drive like nearly blind old people, high on cannabis
- Permanent tracking of my whereabouts that I cannot shut off or leave at home contrary to my cellphone. Enables remote control by others ( big government).
- Dependency on an IT infrastructure ( navigation system minimum ) that is controlled by big company.
- They are driving surveillance boxes with tons of sensors that are explicitly designed to track people both inside and outside of the car.
- Encourages monopolism because cars that can talk to each other internally obviously have an advantage over competitor cars that cannot and there is not initivative to provide this info to competitors. There may be standards but companies may be tempted to drop them once they surpass a certain market share (see Apple).
effetively NOBODY wants driverless cars...... NOBODY WHAT'S THE GOV'T TO CONTROL THE CAR THEY ARE DRIVING.....
So answer this QUESTION: who want's these accidents waiting to happen [with God Knows who actually in control of our cars WHEN WE ARE IN THEM?
WHO? and WHY?
You want to wind up crashed and burned with your engine blown 200 yards away....like VT Journalist HASTINGS got, in LA a year or two ago.
POOF! No more car and no more HASTINGS. Google it!
Do you want say George W Bush or Dick Cheney REMOTELY CONTROLLING YOUR CAR when you are cruising at speed????
ARE YOU CRAZY ????
Dennis Morrisseau
USArmy Officer [Vietnam era] ANTI-WAR
LIBERTY UNION founder
Lieutenant Morrisseau's Rebellion
FireCongress.org
Second Vermont Republic, VFM
POB 177, W. Pawlet, VT 05775
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802 645 9727
I still get into a dangerous road situation, when following GPS, about once every 2-3 trips. That's entirely too often for comfort. If something that coarse can't be done right, how can the same companies be trusted to produce much more finely-tuned driving adjustments associated with fully navigating a car?
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
driverless cars = literate. americans = not literate.
Is it really shocking that there are Americans that are skeptical about driverless cars. Who would have thought?
I mean, there are Americans still 'skeptical' that the earth is older than 4000 years, or that the earth is round, or that we've been to the moon, or that Elvis Presley is dead... Recent American culture seems to have really outdone itself with such 'skepticism'.
I think the general consensus should be 'Americans... just calling ignorance 'skepticism' now'
I double clutch every time I downshift because clutches are easier to replace than synchros. I had my clutch stick shut once and I drove home matching revs. My car is 2011.
I also weld using oxy-fuel, not some argon and spool nonsense. And I program C with vi, GCC, and gdb. I still use commas to separate three or more things in a sentence.
Get off my lawn!
I'm not even 40 yet. I can't imagine how bad I'll be by the time the self driving cars are the norm.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I have been told the last one is often still ruled your fault for not leaving enough gap that you cannot be knocked into the car in front of you. I had a different experience. I was in a 4 car. First car stopped for no reason. I stopped in time. Third car was a giant dually diesel truck packed with welding equipment. It might have stopped in time but it got hit by a sedan whose front end was completely crumpled to the passenger cabin. The impact of such a large loaded vehicle bumped me into the first car but not enough to cause visible damage. She left saying I didn't hot her. Not sure why she stopped then. My rear license was bent and a small ding on the bumper. The truck was undamaged. My car was Avis and they never contacted me for a fee. GEICO did contact me to verify the account of the truck.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
What about intersections where there are always a few cars in line? How would you ever turn left? I think I must be confused about what you mean. Like the gp I was taught first to the sign/blinking red goes first in all cases. The rule kind of makes sense except for the constantly backed up case which could lead to a pretty bad deadlock it seems like.
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
I'm skeptical about human drivers, including myself. I welcome the safer and less congested roads that we will have when driverless cars take over and we ban human driving.