201–210 of 497 posts
Still worse than public transport, wastes more resources and endangers cyclists and pedestrians. I have yet to see anything that deserves to be called progress in self-driving. Yet another scam to sell more wasteful, inefficient vehicles.
So one day my car insurance company will tell me: "you have to pay us more because you are driving yourself".
It's already borderline happening with the satellite supervision. Here in Italy insurance is 20% more expensive at the very least and the gap is widening if you don't put a tracking device on your car which checks position, speed, etc. I have a hard time justifying why one would not want it (besides privacy), all people that complain about it are people that regularly drive above the speed limit or pull dangerous ove…
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Why would insurance need to get more expensive for manual drivers as self-driving adoption increases? Ideally, insurance cost for self-driving cars would just be lower than insurance costs now (proportional to risk), and even insurance costs for manual drivers might go down because their risk decreases as well.
I think it's more about when the market is still majority manual. 20% self driving might see premiums for manual cars go up significantly because manual drivers would have more at fault accidents per mile than before (assuming the same rate of accidents, but most accidents with a self driving car are the manual driver's fault). There will also be things like not having DWIs and even cheap parking (since the car can d…
This is a very shaky assumption in my view; more realistic would be (to me):
1) Overall accident rate reduction even for manual drivers
2) Reduced damage in accidents even for manual drivers
3) Slight increase in "at-fault" allocation toward manual drivers
It seems very likely to me that those would result in net favorable effects even for manual drivers.
I believe a lot of driving will move to full auto once viable, but not all of it because lots of people like to drive recreationally, and I simply don't see insurance rates for manual drivers spiking out of control-- just compare insurance pricing for less-safe vintage cars, which is also perfectly reasonable.
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> Soviets using pencils wasn't a clever scrappy solution, it was an absolute nightmare for the Soviets Note, too, that NASA didn't pay to develop the pen. Fisher did. > If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)
> Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.) I genuinely don't know. Do they use pencils still or switched to the space pen?
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/nasa-did-not-spen...
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Like the Borg, every Waymo is the same driver. So in column A, the insurance company has a meta-driver with many millions of miles of statistics. In column B, we have slow-reaction and non-lidar-equipped you, who had a fender-bender last year and a speeding ticket 3 years ago.
That's initially true, but as the car ages, and maintenance is done (or not done, or done improperly) the car's aspects will change. And as new cars are developed, obviously there are more "drivers". Essentially every year there'll be new drivers for every company that makes autonomous cars, possibly multiple. Yeah, it's still a lot fewer than the individual humans, but it's definitely not just "one driver".
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Yes, and of course you must pay because the autopilot doesn't work when there's snow or rain or sun on the horizon or it's too dark, or the volcano near you is throwing ash and there's wind so you're now in a sandstorm, or wind is carrying sand from the sahara all over the mediterranean to you. (all of these regularly happen all in the same place)
What's the place?
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That sounds great for Waymo: I'd love to experience a ride in one and I'll make sure to catch a ride next time I am in CA. I wonder what it does in common situations, like stop-and-go traffic with two streets joining at an angle, where one has to yield? In that case, if everyone simply followed the rules, the cars in the yielding street would never get through. While I am passive-aggressive myself as a driver, I reli…
> I wonder what it does in common situations, like stop-and-go traffic with two streets joining at an angle, where one has to yield? Plan a better route? I can’t picture the situation you describe. Yielding traffic just… yields. When there’s an opening they take it. On my ride the Waymo took a right turn on red. How is the situation you describe different? Do you still yield unnecessarily when there are cars behind y…
Picture two streets joining together, both with long lines of vehicles in them. One of them has right of way, the other one doesn't. When everyone drives "passively aggressively" (like Waymo is being described to), an opening never shows up, and "yielding" cars wait until the rush hour clears up, causing people in that street to go bonkers.
This happens quite frequently in many old European cities I've been to in the rush hour or when anything unusual happens (because there are no alternative routes and streets are tight: like a crash or broken-down car ahead might cause this with lots of traffic). Not sure how much it applies to Waymo and SFO, but I can imagine it certainly happens in some areas.
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For "last mile", we already have bikes, scooters, skates, plain walking...
Really fun stuff but most people have a limited amount of time in the day so if they can afford to take a car they're going to take a car.
For trips shorter than 2 miles, I can bet you that it's faster for me to hop on my bike (or to find an electric scooter) and get to my destination than it is to drive. And let's not even talk about the time to find parking.
If you rigorously enforced those limits on regular drivers and additionally imposed an interlock device to prevent DUI and remote insurance company monitoring of driving habits-- that's the comparison population I want to see. Otherwise, this is a press release disguised as an academic paper.