241–250 of 286 posts
The driver is not the problem of cars. It is the fact that in average 1,5 t and 10 m2 are used to transport 100 kg and 1 m2. Driverlessness does not change the bad physics of car transportation decisively.
That's not the problem it is trying to solve. The problem description is: drivers cause accidents.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It sorta kinda might, if the cars have high utilization and don't need to park at their passengers' destinations.
There is already working car sharing. No driverlessness needed.
This is why we’ve programmed our cars to pause briefly after a light turns green before proceeding into the intersection I programmed my brain to do this after learning to drive in Miami. I always look both ways before proceeding, just as I would before crossing as a pedestrian. When approaching an intersection, especially at night, I also try to look for what's coming from the side. Intersections can be scary places…
The driver is not the problem of cars. It is the fact that in average 1,5 t and 10 m2 are used to transport 100 kg and 1 m2. Driverlessness does not change the bad physics of car transportation decisively.
Imagine that for a moment: Self driving car companies could promise to pay all accident expenses provided it was on auto drive at the time of accident. Not only is that a marketing win, potentially reducing accidents and saving costs for owners... if you jump forward many years of Google (or other) defending owners in court you would reach a point even judges would be biased to believe that the auto-driven car could…
The driver is not the problem of cars. It is the fact that in average 1,5 t and 10 m2 are used to transport 100 kg and 1 m2. Driverlessness does not change the bad physics of car transportation decisively.
Self driving cars might not be more compact, but if they can keep themselves occupied for a higher percentage of the day they can be a big win for efficiency.
This is why we’ve programmed our cars to pause briefly after a light turns green before proceeding into the intersection I programmed my brain to do this after learning to drive in Miami. I always look both ways before proceeding, just as I would before crossing as a pedestrian. When approaching an intersection, especially at night, I also try to look for what's coming from the side. Intersections can be scary places…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It doesn't work, or so I've heard. Drivers in those cities learn to expect the safety margin of the delay, and statistically they become more willing to run a red light right after it changes.
Back in the day they tried the overlapping red thing in my city. Once everyone got used to the new way of doing things the time when both light were red became a sort of anarchy zone. Everyone assumed that everyone else would strictly observe the red so they didn't have to. We don't do that anymore...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Accidents, when non fatal, are such a waste of anyone's resources. And there are so many way to be cheated. I'm stunned no manufacturer included a logging device. Nowadays you have dash cams though.
Many new cars have black boxes that log what the vehicle was doing, and they can be pulled in case of an accident. It's one of the benefits of having everything be electronically controlled these days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If we can require all self-driving cars to take orders from a central authority, we can do some pretty amazing things: - Most traffic problems are a result of human (over)caution and poor merging technique. A centrally coordinated system of self-driving cars are perfectly aware of each other's intentions and could run much smaller safety margins, as well as make lane/exit access perfectly equitable. The effective car…
Designing such a system to use a centralized authority, as opposed to having a distributed architecture, sounds like an invitation for all kinds of chaos. Given how seductively "easy" centralized solutions seem to be I don't doubt things will go this way, with results varying from hilarious to frustrating to tragic. (I'm not saying that distributed architecture is a panacea, but it seems like a centralized system is…