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Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

sfchronicle.com

581–590 of 683 posts

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#581
post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This commentary assumes self-driving cars are here to stay and become the de facto way we drive instead of driving ourselves. This seems like an extremely myopic "tech bubble" take to me. I'm trying to find a way to put this so that it doesn't sound like an attack, but have you been to suburban or rural areas outside of places like SF, NYC or Phoenix? Being reliant on third party transportation, on roads the are of…

Most of the US population is urban per the census bureau but a lot of that is spread out suburbs and exurbs. I’m “urban” between many acres of orchards and conservation land. Depending on third party transportation day to day would be utterly impractical.

In a typical suburb, providing a 2-3 minute wait would require one idling self-driving car per hundreds of houses. I think that sounds practical.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#582
post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Odds are I haven't since I'm always careful to stop twice when turning right on red. (Once before the crosswalk, and again at the far side of the crosswalk to check for cross traffic before executing the turn.)

Have you ever been rear-ended, stopping twice like that? I have.

Never while turning right on red. I was rear ended once by a fellow who was looking at his phone and did not notice me and the line of stopped cars waiting at a red light. But sometimes what can you do?

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#583
post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla Model 3 is right below that $30,000 mark, Tesla FSD does the bulk of my driving today. I think your core premise is flawed, it will be cheaper and sooner than you anticipate which will alter the conclusions you’ve come to.

Teslas 'FSD' is not the commonly understood HOOTL self driving.

And? Just a few years ago waymo had safety drivers. I really only intercede when I want to take a route different than the Tesla routes me on, or I want to be a bit more aggressive in highway traffic.

Seems like 10 years isn’t too out there for affordable self driving vehicles considering we have one working today at the high end of cost and another getting close at the lower end of cost.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#584

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is fun because until the last couple of decades, private transportation wasn’t very common in China at all, people simply didn’t own their own cars and taxis were (and still are) ubiquitous even in small rural towns (though they might be breadbox vans to supplement shared minibuses). Almost everyone was relying in third party transportation and even today most still are. And really, this kind of thing was common…

The reason it "works" in rural China is people largely don't drive places, at least not the way Americans do. Lots of tech folks love to shit on "car-culture" in the US, and while I agree it has resulted in really crappy urban design for a lot of US cities, you can't ignore that a lot of people love their cars because it gives them a ton of freedom. People like being able to go off at a moment's notice, independently…

Taxis give you most of that for inner city travel. I don’t mean American taxis, I mean Chinese taxis that are everywhere. If that was a fleet of self driving cars, then it really would be like wait one minute for a taxi if you aren’t going somewhere on peak.

My point, though, isn’t how China can show America how to do things, just that American car culture is unusual and unlikely to apply to most of the rest of the world. There are also costs of dumb decisions to consider, which is going to affect the competitiveness of our cities long term (Shanghai doesn’t have to make the same stupid decisions that Denver did, and eventually it just isn’t worth doing business in cities with crappy transit infra), and eventually some more optimal norm is going to affect even the USA.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#585
post #540

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is what .5% of all drivers that need to drive on a curb to inspect a power line? I’m not sure what your point even is here?

Fourth of July, kids sports that take place outside, etc. are all regular occurrences where people need to be able to easily go up onto a curb and park in the grass.

Seems like you’re grasping at straws to find weird edge cases that don’t at all preclude a mostly self driven future. I don’t think these cars will be made without steering wheels, or a mechanism to control the vehicle directly.

But I bet they get a report of how often you manually drive and if you cross a specified threshold your rate increases.

Edit: Also why would you need to park on grass! Hop out of the car and it will park itself wherever in a nearby lot, or just drives around until you need it.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#586

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Sound and reasonable judgement" to save a couple seconds? That still just seems like rationalization of bad behavior. You're right that the basic premise of democracy is that citizens can be trusted as the source of the law, but it seems to me that this particular citizen can't actually be trusted? I mean, they're demonstrating a lack of integrity, are they not?

You're talking about someone who, from their description, slowed down to something like 0.1mph instead of absolute zero. At 3am, in an empty road. How is that bad behaviour, lack of integrity, and a sign someone can't be trusted?

Integrity is commonly defined as "doing the right thing, even if no one is watching", is it not?

I highly doubt this person would have rolled through the light if a cop were sitting at the intersection watching them, and they knew they were being observed.

To several other posters' points, the specific regulation in question exists for safety reasons. Those safety reasons don't go away just because you don't think they apply in the moment. I'm sure every person who has hit (or been hit by) another person when rolling through a right turn like that thought their judgement in the moment was reasonable, too. I'm also sure not every one of those would have been prevented by coming to a complete stop and looking at the turn, but certainly some of them would have, which is a net positive for everyone. This comes at a cost of a handful of seconds, which seems like the most trivial of inconveniences, and wholly worth paying every time.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#587
post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is that not the point? You violated a law and received a penalty. You're not disputing that you violated said law, but are instead trying to justify it with "barely didn't stop" and "it's 3am and there is no traffic". Isn't the point that you got punished for doing something you would have gotten away with had no one been watching?

I don't actually disagree with some level of automated enforcement, but I do disagree with your phrasing/justification of it. I just don't believe violating the law is always wrong, always bad, or always unsafe. While I would agree that most people are bad at risk assessment, and most people are not good drivers, the law should be flexible enough to deal with cases where breaking it is absolutely fine to do. As a per…

I wholly agree that violating some laws is entirely justified.

However, I don't think any violation is justified by what more or less amounts to laziness and the desire to save an inconsequential amount of time.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#588
post #585

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fourth of July, kids sports that take place outside, etc. are all regular occurrences where people need to be able to easily go up onto a curb and park in the grass.

Seems like you’re grasping at straws to find weird edge cases that don’t at all preclude a mostly self driven future. I don’t think these cars will be made without steering wheels, or a mechanism to control the vehicle directly. But I bet they get a report of how often you manually drive and if you cross a specified threshold your rate increases. Edit: Also why would you need to park on grass! Hop out of the car and…

How do you call this grasping at straws exactly ?

Your suggestion that all the cars should just e driving around waiting for you is fanciful, imagine something like a live music event with 100k people? Will there just be 100k cars circling the venue waiting for pick everyone up ?

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#589
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.getnexar.com/

Just tossing a product link into the discussion without any context isn't overly useful - why are you recommending (or are you) and why should I be clicking on that?

They were built to do the things in the comment that I replied to.

Re: Did your car witness a crime? Bay Area police may be coming for your Tesla

#590

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right.. except the whole "argument" falls apart if we consider liability insurance. You can't force other people to have an extra $30k "just in case".

No, just make them pay out 30k in installments if they arw liable for something. Or take them to court. The average person will lose hundreds of thousands of dollars in their lifetime from required insurance for all type of dumb things. We need the government to force everyone to pay an organization that does nothing but hold money in case of accidents and then release it back. We need this because people are too cow…

> The few sane are forced to fit in the sea of the mental midgets, > fact that a lesser human like you

What makes you think anyone wants to see your deranged diatribes?

You might feel better overall if you kept some thoughts like this to yourself (based on what you're saying seeking professional help might be a good idea as well).

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