Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 759 posts

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#61

Post by alecbz »

intrasight wrote: post #35
jjordan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.

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

In the long-long-term, self-driving will get good enough and people will be relying on it so thoroughly that allowing people to drive on their own, with barely any practice, will probably be more risky than it's worth. In say, idk, 100 years (probably sooner), I doubt people will be able to drive their own cars in the way they do today.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#62

Post by mossTechnician »

lefra wrote: post #49
intrasight wrote: post #35

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.

They have a reason: profit.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#63

Post by jedberg »

jjordan wrote: post #50
jedberg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why? Insurance companies use detailed risk data. If they discover that letting you drive your own car is a much higher risk than an auto-drive, why should they not be allowed to account for that? Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.

Yes, I definitely trust insurance companies to do the right thing here.

Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.

We saw this before -- they used to charge people who lived in high crime areas more money. They had to stop because it turned out that those high crime areas also had a lot of poor people, so the government stepped in and stopped allowing pricing by zip code.

But the insurance companies weren't wrong about the risk -- those customers cost them more. So instead they had to raise everyone's rates to account for the fact that they (rightly) could not discriminate.

I suspect the same would happen here. That poorer people could not afford self driving, and they same anti-discrimination rules would apply.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#64

Post by SR2Z »

entropi wrote: post #51
bko wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing proof that comment sections from tech forums have been overrun with unhelpful negativity unrelated to the actual posts they're commenting on.

You are dismissing this as "unhelpful negativity", but are not addressing in any way the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out. This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.

Can you actually define what the kool-aid is here? Because AV companies are saying "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."

I have NEVER seen a single person accuse anyone of being a bad person for still preferring to drive a car manually. Not once, not even the usual one or two crazy people you can find to support almost any other crazy statement.

Where is the kool-aid from the robotaxi side that's so visible? Keep in mind that "kool-aid" implies that something is factually incorrect.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#65

Post by 4d4m »

parapsychic wrote: post #24
n0us wrote: 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.

Reminds me of that scene from I Robot where Will Smith was not supposed to drive his car himself.

Didn't this just happen in an internet company's self driving car with couple kidnappings in the past month? (They were done according to the companies terms of service is what the internet company says if I remember reading correctly)

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#66

Post by bluGill »

raincole wrote: post #41
jjordan wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.

There should be laws taxing people who insist on driving themselves. And the money should be used to subsidize people who switch to self-driving or install automatic assisted systems on their old cars. That'd partially mitigate the externality generated by human drivers.

How about prison for attempted murder?

I've lost enough friends to drivers who made a mistake. If self driving is better in just that, but worse every other way: I'm for it.

That might be a big if above, but of true them I support it. Drive on a private track or a video game if you must. Leave the real world to safe.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#67

Post by tikhonj »

n0us wrote: 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.

If driving is dangerous and carries a bunch of negative externalities, shouldn't we expect "good people" to look for alternatives? Not self-driving cars, necessarily, but maybe transit and walking and biking.

And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#68

Post by notahacker »

jpcfl wrote: post #8
dlisboa wrote: post #4

ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers. Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.

There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers: > Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1] I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-oper…

I'm not sure why a semi autonomous system of equivalent driving capability would be more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles because of "over-trust" unless one assumes that the driver that overtrust the autonomous vehicles and looks away is also inclined to try to override the semiautonomous system whilst doing so. Humans overtrusting a system capable of imperfect Level 5 driving will certainly not be alert to correct all its errors, but on the other hand they should be capable of correcting more than the baseline (especially if the autonomous system is good enough at general driving under most conditions for the human driver to be restricted to "get me off this road train track or flood the system shouldn't have stopped in" and "follow instructions" type edge cases rather than misidentifying objects at high speed type edge cases.)

If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#69

Post by SR2Z »

CM30 wrote: post #32
n0us wrote: 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…

So you mean to tell me that when I called a Waymo a few weeks ago at 1AM because I was drunk at a bar and wanted to go home, it was actually because my government and Google wanted me to go home?

Woah! This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought! Next you'll tell me that a taxi ride requires mutual consent between me, the taxi driver, and the dispatch company!

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#70

Post by uuddlrlrbaba »

officeplant wrote: post #31
redwall_hp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction. The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.

>Automatic braking alone is a huge deal Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident. I left the warning system o…

Fords seem notorious for this but usually can be fixed. Have you tried driving it to a dealership and trading it in?
Post reply on HN