Growing proof that PR for autonomous car companies has aligned on a strategy of painting you as a bad person if you want to drive your own car, and therefore you should pay them money to continue being a good person.
You are dismissing this as "unhelpful negativity", but are not addressing in any way the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.
>the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
The author Lawrence Ulrich references research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Why would it be "obvious" that they are paid PR shills for Tesla/Waymo?
I'm jaded and cynical but so I can accept that they may be secret PR mouthpieces but isn't it reasonable to expect a little evidence rather than just throwing out a random accusation?
Can you actually define what the kool-aid is here? Because AV companies are saying "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
I have NEVER seen a single person accuse anyone of being a bad person for still preferring to drive a car manually. Not once, not even the usual one or two crazy people you can find to support almost any other crazy statement.
Where is the kool-aid from the robotaxi side that's so visible? They're making big claims but they seem to be mostly true.
Yeah, and it should not be understated how bad only having autonomous cars would be for privacy and security conscious folk.
A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.
If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.
So you mean to tell me that when I called a Waymo a few weeks ago at 1AM because I was drunk at a bar and wanted to go home, it was actually because my government and Google wanted me to go home?
If driving is dangerous and carries a bunch of negative externalities, shouldn't we expect "good people" to look for alternatives? Not self-driving cars, necessarily, but maybe transit and walking and biking.
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
But.. what if it's true? It's like not wearing a seat belt, or smoking, or drinking while driving. If AV are widely available it becomes similarly opt-in high risk behavior.
You cannot deny the evidence though, driverless cars are safer per-mile than human drivers on average. 1/100 deaths in the United States are due to car accidents, even shaving off 10% of those would save ~4000 people per year.
Didn't this just happen in an internet company's self driving car with couple kidnappings in the past month? (They were done according to the companies terms of service is what the internet company says if I remember reading correctly)
There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.
Why? Insurance companies use detailed risk data. If they discover that letting you drive your own car is a much higher risk than an auto-drive, why should they not be allowed to account for that?
Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.
We saw this before -- they used to charge people who lived in high crime areas more money. They had to stop because it turned out that those high crime areas also had a lot of poor people, so the government stepped in and stopped allowing pricing by zip code.
But the insurance companies weren't wrong about the risk -- those customers cost them more. So instead they had to raise everyone's rates to account for the fact that they (rightly) could not discriminate.
I suspect the same would happen here. That poorer people could not afford self driving, and they same anti-discrimination rules would apply.
I agree with your first statement but certainly not with the second. Rates for human drivers should and will skyrocket.
Individual states may try to push back with regulation but it won't succeed in the long-term
In the long-long-term, self-driving will get good enough and people will be relying on it so thoroughly that allowing people to drive on their own, with barely any practice, will probably be more risky than it's worth. In say, idk, 100 years (probably sooner), I doubt people will be able to drive their own cars in the way they do today.
Rates for human drivers are currently at the correct level for insurance companies to pay for damage and make some profit.
If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
Why should they skyrocket? As more autonomous vehicles appear on the roads, incidents with non-autonomous vehicles will go down. Driving will become inherently safer.
There should be laws taxing people who insist on driving themselves. And the money should be used to subsidize people who switch to self-driving or install automatic assisted systems on their old cars. That'd partially mitigate the externality generated by human drivers.
The law put into place would be that the people who put autonomous cars on the road would risk their freedom and safety just as much as a driver if that car causes an accident through their neglect.
This will never happen, because the entire purpose of the corporate structure is to avoid responsibility.
It is understandable that you think this is the case as someone who is not above the age of 50. You will see that health and life insurance premiums rise precipitously once you reach certain milestones. Once you reach 90 years old, you will find that car insurance companies will discontinue your policy based on a single traffic ticket.
We replaced preexisting condition coverage with age-based tiered pricing. If you doubt me it's trivial to validate this using your state's ACA marketplace.
Thats too much of an honest assessment. An age old playbook. I'd like the tech do actually do things that are hard for me, like taking control of the car in a high stress situation. Sub-milisecond reactions to correct for a mistake. Something, anything more useful than a fancier cruise control.
Your car does that already. It has a superhuman braking system that saves a lot more lives than cruise control, though not quite sub-millisecond in its reaction time.
Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.
The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident.
I left the warning system on, but I will never give it control over the brakes.
Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
Some years ago, I was in a major crash. The traffic in front of me stopped, I braked hard and stopped in time, the truck behind me rammed me into the car in front. Nearly killed me.
Some time later, I was on a snowy road. The cars in front of me stopped, I stopped, and checked my rearview mirror. There was a truck, who clearly wasn't going to stop. I pulled off to the side, and he hit the car in front of me.
Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely?
I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers:
> Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1]
I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles.
I'm not sure why a semi autonomous system of equivalent driving capability would be more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles because of "over-trust" unless one assumes that the driver that overtrust the autonomous vehicles and looks away is also inclined to try to override the semiautonomous system whilst doing so. Humans overtrusting a system capable of imperfect Level 5 driving will certainly not be alert to correct all its errors, but on the other hand they should be capable of correcting more than the baseline (especially if the autonomous system is good enough at general driving under most conditions for the human driver to be restricted to "get me off this road train track or flood the system shouldn't have stopped in" and "follow instructions" type edge cases rather than misidentifying objects at high speed type edge cases.)
If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...
An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally.
The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
I have a feeling that once everything goes EV and autopilot, they will start phasing out regular cars or will make it more difficult to obtain the license.
More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue.
No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.
Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.
There's no legislated standard in the US, nor pre-sale verification that a vehicle has met most of the other automotive standards. That's just not how the US regulatory environment works.
There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.
While I would like to see that just for the data, from a regulatory standpoint all we really need are the manufacturers being liable in a crash if their cars were driving. The insurance savings of their cars being safer will create the incentive they need.
We've banned this account since it has sunk to the level of posting nothing but flamebait and unsubstantive comments, and has ignored our request to stop.
This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.
The author Lawrence Ulrich references research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Why would it be "obvious" that they are paid PR shills for Tesla/Waymo?
I'm jaded and cynical but so I can accept that they may be secret PR mouthpieces but isn't it reasonable to expect a little evidence rather than just throwing out a random accusation?
I have NEVER seen a single person accuse anyone of being a bad person for still preferring to drive a car manually. Not once, not even the usual one or two crazy people you can find to support almost any other crazy statement.
Where is the kool-aid from the robotaxi side that's so visible? They're making big claims but they seem to be mostly true.
And yet your account shows you joined in 2020... just read further in this thread, will you?
A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.
If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.
Woah! This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought!
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
We saw this before -- they used to charge people who lived in high crime areas more money. They had to stop because it turned out that those high crime areas also had a lot of poor people, so the government stepped in and stopped allowing pricing by zip code.
But the insurance companies weren't wrong about the risk -- those customers cost them more. So instead they had to raise everyone's rates to account for the fact that they (rightly) could not discriminate.
I suspect the same would happen here. That poorer people could not afford self driving, and they same anti-discrimination rules would apply.
If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
I've lost enough friends to drivers who made a mistake. If self driving is better in just that but worse every other way in for it.
That might be a big if above, but of true them I support it. Drive on a private track or a video game if you must. Leave the real world to safe.
This will never happen, because the entire purpose of the corporate structure is to avoid responsibility.
Extremely selfish.
It appears to some degree that we as a society do not want risk priced optimally to each individual.
We replaced preexisting condition coverage with age-based tiered pricing. If you doubt me it's trivial to validate this using your state's ACA marketplace.
Article is short on data instead referencing a bunch of aggregated IIHS studies.
Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.
The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident.
I left the warning system on, but I will never give it control over the brakes.
Some time later, I was on a snowy road. The cars in front of me stopped, I stopped, and checked my rearview mirror. There was a truck, who clearly wasn't going to stop. I pulled off to the side, and he hit the car in front of me.
I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
Yep. ADAS should be mandatory like seat belts and airbags. A regulatory body should be able to come up with a minimum standard for it.
> Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1]
I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles.
1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...
If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...
The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue. No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.
Fyi. Long robotaxis.
Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.
There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.
I passed because I didn’t kill anyone in the span of eight blocks.
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