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Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

spectrum.ieee.org

181–190 of 759 posts

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.

Let me guess… you live somewhere warm and mostly dry? Probably on the younger side and don’t have any kids.

I'm in a 200 inhabitants village in eastern Europe, we have 3 bus stops in the village (so at most you're 10min away from a stop), the bus goes to the closest city every hour from 4:30 to 22:30 except on Sunday (every two hours from 6 to 21), from there you can take a train to every major city in the country, my neighbor is a 76 year old widow who goes to the city by bus regularly and who bikes around a lot. Half of the kids go to school via this bus, many people go to work with it. It's free for kids and retired people too.

When public transportation is designed properly it works fine for the extreme vast majority of people, and taking a taxi for the last mile if you're disabled, obese, lazy, etc. will cost you less than owning and maintaining a car.

I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#184
post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

> 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.

Wouldn't the accident rate for humans go down as well as the percentage of SDV increase? After all, the humans won't be exclusively having accidents with each other.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#185
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad." I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close,…

Good here is in reference to the average crash statistics. Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.

It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports).

I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#186
post #32
post #7

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.

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…

Given the state of cybersecurity, the car goes wherever anyone with sufficient motivation wants it to go. Including into pedestrians. And, such a scenario could happen at the scale of a botnet swarm. In other words, hundreds of thousands of vehicles could be simultaneously hijacked.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#187
post #15

So can 100% public transport, non-autonomous. But there is less lobbying money for award winning journalists.

That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.

If the bus service is good and available, people will use it eventually including in off hours. Induced demand.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#188
post #15

So can 100% public transport, non-autonomous. But there is less lobbying money for award winning journalists.

That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.

Depends at the scale you're looking at. How much money is wasted by 30 people driving 30 cars when a bus could take them all? Taking into account car wear, gas, etc.

Low density public transport work very well in places where people simply can't afford personal vehicles, it's not a tech logical or financial problem at all, if anything it's cultural and mostly political

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is, at least in a place like LA. Fares are like less than 10% the actual total cost of an average bus ride. https://www.reddit.com/r/LAMetro/comments/1orftnt/should_you... Now if you’re ONLY serving high density and high passenger volume times, buses are incredible.

Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be? I am sure if you did the math, having the occasional empty bus does not hold a candle to the amount of dead mass being dragged along in single-occupant cars. The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses. So regardless of density and passenger volume, busses are incredible.

> Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?

Because late stage capitalism brain rot doesn't allow for nuanced things such as "public services".

They'd rather have everyone spend 50k on a car and Xk per year on insurance and maintenance than $100 of their taxes going to public infrastructure

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#190

It has been, from the start and even before FSD had any basis in reality and was just sci-fi stories, obvious that FSD would eventually get here. The only question has been when. We clearly aren't there yet but it is pretty obvious we aren't as far away as the naysayers make out. I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the…

Agreed.

I didn't even take the insurance monitor they offered because the difference in cost turned out to be something stupidly low (like a saving of $1/month, or similar).

I don't want my car monitored, I don't want my movements monitored, and I certainly don't want my car reliant on the continuing goodwill of some upstream provider.

They need to sort out the software and privacy implications before I'm biting, especially as my personal accident history beats current SDV anyway: over a million kilometers with a single accident.

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