Driving Your Car Will Soon Be Illegal | Hacker News Reader

Driving Your Car Will Soon Be Illegal

techcrunch.com

6 pointsfunkyy6 comments

I absolutely can't wait for self driving cars! Then all the slow, inexperienced drivers can be driven around in the right lane and those of us that know what we're doing can stay in the left.

Nothing is more infuriating then a senior citizen that can't look over their shoulder to see who's in their blind spot and driving 10 miles under the limit to be in front of you for miles upon miles of highway. Same thing with young drivers - texting and fooling around listening to music to loud to hear a siren a block away.

And thats not to put either demographic down; I hope to someday be a senior citizen and being a teenager with a fresh license was fun also, but being a good driver is a skill earned via years of practice. If self driving cars can take the less experienced drivers out of the equation, all the better.

You're assuming that your self-driving car will not be slower than today's human-driven cars, but until all (or practically all) vehicles on the road are auto-driven, such cars are unlikely to be configured to exceed the speed limit (in addition to the intense legal pressure - internal (lawyers) and external (lawmakers) - to make sure speeding self-driving cars don't exist (I can already see that phrase "speeding self-driving cars" being used by the media to scare the unaware among the public).

"According to this science fiction scenario we've concocted, and Elon Musk, who obviously knows what he's talking about, it will be illegal to drive your car in exactly 14 years."

... is what this non-story amounts to.

I think it will happen sooner or later, but it will be the market force doing the work. At some point, it will become too expensive to engineer and build a vehicle that is both autonomous and human operable. Offerings will dwindle. Cheaper insurance and maintenance will accelerate people's flight to autonomous cars.

"Soon" here means by 2030.

So when will the last non-self-driving car be sold? 2020? That means it will be illegal to drive one of those 2020s in 2030?

It could happen that way, but I doubt it. I think it more likely that the liability for the accidents makes it economically advantageous to not drive your car.

The article is just clickbait. The ONLY way this could be done it would be requirement around 2050 when driver-less cars will be everywhere, for people that want to drive cars by themselves to pass much more advanced tests.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com