Cars Are Death Machines. Self-Driving Tech Won’t Change That

It's not the same thing. You can still get your learner's permit even if you don't complete high school or the driver's ed graduation requirement.

Walking outside can result in deaths. Should we ban that too? What a silly premise.

Obviously cars confer a lot of benefits. They are fast, and in areas that are not high-density, they save time relative to ANY alternative (walking, biking, buses, trains) and therefore drastically improve your quality of life. They don't require you to wait on someone else's schedule, especially given the often inconsistent timing of buses. They don't require you to risk sitting down on dirty seats (6-year-old girl stabbed by uncapped needle on bus: https://metro.co.uk/2019/06/08/girl-6-injected-needle-hidden...). They don't require you to risk personal injury (40 to 60 teens rob train: https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-5...). They let you travel all over, including away from cities, and therefore give you a greater degree of freedom than the reach of fixed rails or transit systems that are limited to cities.

Yes cars can cause deaths. So do a lot of other things. But the rate of vehicle-caused injuries/deaths has been dropping sharply since the 80s (see CDC data). It will continue to drop as backup cameras, lane departure prevention, collision detection, collision avoidance, and other assistance features become ubiquitous or required. Nothing is ever perfect, and this is the fundamental reason why efforts like Vision Zero are flawed. Zero deaths is not the goal, and generally any such absolute goal is unrealistic.

We get massive benefits from fast, private point-to-point transport. Let's not forget that and work to retain those benefits, instead of damaging the benefits of vehicles with low speed limits and other 'road diet' suggestions.

There was nothing in the article to support the notion that self-driving cars won't address the danger of cars. Sure, as long as there are human drivers there will be accidents caused by human drivers (and obviously there will be human drivers for a long time, just as horse drawn vehicles remained around for a long time after automobiles arrived [1]), but if the only argument related to self driving cars is that they won't replace human drivers 100%, that is a weak argument.

The author completely avoids taking on the fact that self driving cars will eliminate -- for that vehicle -- the major cause of traffic deaths, human error, and the hypothesis that they will not significantly replace it with machine error. Obviously some people argue they will never get that technology right, and while I disagree with that, I'd at least appreciate it if the author even addressed it.

I'm all for getting rid of most cars, but I think the most realistic path to that is driverless taxis and small busses (i.e. vans) that are economical and efficient. The latter can be highly efficient if enough people use them, especially if they reward people with a few cents discount for scheduling a few minutes or a few hours ahead of time, and for using them at least busy times of day, and for being willing to have a couple quick stops along the way.

You'd need far fewer of these vehicles total, since many would have multiple passengers at once, they would be in near constant use, and they aren't wasting driving time and valuable space by the need to park near their endpoints.

1. and remain, especially in Amish country.

Unfortunately "Self-Driving Tech" is only in the headline and missing from the actual op-ed, aside from the one line, "So far, I’m unpersuaded."

Self-Driving technology is a broad term that also includes active safety features such as emergency braking and pedestrian detection and avoidance. The TM3 recently won a 5-star rating in AU, in main part due to their performance on self-driving safety features. [1]

Beyond the active safety measures designed to assist an attentive driver, the allure of FSD (Level 4 or 5) as a way to increase safety and reduce or eliminate fatalities is very strong.

The NHTSA estimates that the direct economic cost of car accidents is $277 billion per year, but if you include the economic harm from deaths and injuries (pain and suffering) the estimate rises to $870 billion. Per Year. [2]

What we have here is a trillion dollar cost of doing business that could conceivably be almost entirely eliminated with the right advances. That is just the benefit of eliminating the gruesome side effects of driving. With a technological solution, you don't just reduce cost but dramatically increase value, productivity, convenience, etc. That's roughly another trillion dollar proposition.

A $2 trillion dollar annuity which pays in perpetuity, at 3% discount rate, is worth $2 trillion divided by 0.03 or roughly $66 trillion dollars NPV. That's the scale of the investment that would pay off if it resulted in a mandatory-use nationwide Level 5 autonomous driving system which could eliminate 99% of traffic accidents.

By the way, if you can only eliminate 50% of accidents, and provide 50% of the productivity benefits, the annual savings are worth merely $16 trillion dollars.

I believe Level 5 autonomy is one of, if not flat out the greatest challenge for software in the 21st century, and it is no less than a moral imperative to achieve it.

IMO a significant portion of that investment is not to just somehow create AGI, but several trillion in infrastructure improvements, new standards and regulations, which allow an extremely advanced AI system circa 2025/2030 to be able to function at Level 5 nationwide on highways and local streets.

There's no question in my mind that within 50 years we will look back and wonder how it was possible people actually manually operated these 2-ton machines. It's a bet against humanity to think otherwise.

[1] - https://twitter.com/ANCAPsafety/status/1156060826404438016?s...

[2] - https://www.cooneyconway.com/blog/economic-and-societal-impa...

Our ability to travel allowed us to do that though. Instead of living in crowded slums the poor can afford to get out a little bit, it might not be much but I see poor people with a garden in their own yard - a yard that before the car the almost rich would have instead.