Hacker News Reader

Comment by jklowden | Hacker News Reader

Free-market ideology if you ask me. The first sentence suggests the hapless government wants to spent $4 billion on research for something you you can have today for $20K. A little later it mentions Washington's "time and billions" spent on fuel-efficiency instead of "saving lives". The government has also funded electric-car research and encouraged Detroit to build them. Contrasting self-driving with electric drive is just another way to suggest the dead hand of bureaucracy is impeding the invisible hand of the market.

By the way, the government has saved drivers' lives, too, by the thousands, more often than not over industry objection. Seat belts, unleaded fuel, crumple zones: it's a long list. The article's bias isn't just bias; it slants away from the facts.

View on HN

It was stupid for this article to start talking about the $4 billion Obama has talked about for research.

This article is about features and not a real self driving car. If anything the features make this car very dangerous in the hands of people concerned with their phones and tablets and kind of proves the need for investments like the $4 billion.

To me it sounds like the free market is about to make the road damn dangerous for the rest of us. To quote the article, "For instance, some owners have posted videos of hands- and foot-free driving on YouTube and the car inevitably makes a mistake.".

In all fairness, the assistive driving features introduced to date are probably a net win. (After all, they've been available on high-end vehicles.) However, we're probably approaching the point where the automation is sufficient that people will routinely stop paying attention given that it "mostly works" for highway driving in good weather.

"mostly works" can get you eventually killed on a highway

In cases like these, if a collision occurs, who is at fault? Presumably it is the "driver", especially in this case, right? But if/when this gets into the court system, when do people start going after the "self-driving" manufacturers, who have much, much deeper pockets than your average car owner.

Especially if people start arguing that the manufacturers are effectively going "pay full attention at all times. Nudge. Nudge. Wink. Wink." knowing that people routinely don't pay attention when automated systems like these are used.

There are places in the world(I saw it in Netherlands) where you have a "cruise control forbidden" signs. Yes, even the dumb cruise control that only holds a set speed. I saw those signs near construction zones and such, I guess the idea is that people should pay 100% attention in there.

This, unsurprisingly, has generally been the death of previous attempts at automated cars, especially when the efforts included modified roads and attempts to have cars form convoys to cut down on air resistance. [1]

[1] Granted, this is anecdotal, but it comes from a former faculty member who taught my control systems course in college. Last I heard he was working on systems for auto landing UAVs on aircraft carriers. He had worked on a number of grants related to autonomous driving and said that every time they had something technologically ready the lawyers basically couldn't find a way to make it happen.

To me (who, to be fair, has no experience in this area), it seems that the only long term solution to this liability issue is a government-funded and controlled fund accompanied by legal changes prohibiting these cases from going to "normal" court.

For something that is a demonstrable way of saving huge numbers of lives, but still carries some risk, using the model of the vaccination side effect fund seems like a good one to me.

For complete self-driving cars, it's seems obvious that the manufacturer should be liable. And a lot of people want it that way:

- Google wants to be liable. - The passengers doesn't want to be liable. - Insurance companies would perhaps like to go after the entity with deeper pockets, too?

Also the $4b isn't for research, it's for regulation and testing, according to

http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self...

Oh, and efficiency saves lives in and off itself. (One possible path, using less oil for cars, we can use more oil instead of coal in other applications. Thus mining less coal. Coal mines are crazy dangerous per Joule mined comparatively.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox

In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.

The only solution out of this paradox with respect to carbon fuels is taxation. Unfortunately, as much as we'd like, a global carbon tax regime is not practical, nor enforceable. So we're stuck.

Doesn't need to be global. European countries (and others) had high taxes on petrol for a while now. Extending that to a general carbon tax might be workable.

That doesn't stop it from pushing coal out a bit.

This is what happens when Rupert Murdoch runs a "news" source.

How is this in any way a reply to the parent comment?

As ben1040 put it, "the article blows [self-driving] out of proportion." Jklowden hypothesizes that WSJ blew it out of proportion in order to paint a picture that the government is wasting money at best and not letting the free market innovate at worst. It wouldn't surprise me that a publication like Wall Street Journal would advocate in favor of a free market.

Isn't that mostly a pro-business ideology?

(They overlap quite a bit. But eg business don't like competition, especially foreign competition. But competition exactly one of the reasons the market works well for society.)

I imagine a free-market ideologue could make a point like: the government shouldn't spend money on fuel-efficiency, just put a tax on emissions and let the market figure it out.

Seat belts were invented by English engineer George Cayley in the mid-19th century,[3] though Edward J. Claghorn of New York, was granted the first patent.

The government did not invent the seatbelt. All it did was monopolize it through the patent system and later criminalize not wearing it. How heroic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt

I didn't mean to suggest the government invented seat belts. It did mandate them, not only wearing them, but circa 1964 their very availability in cars. The industry, and a fair number of car buyers, didn't want buyers to be reminded that cars could be dangerous.

Heroic? No, but what government is heroic? That seat belts and seat belt laws save lives every year is indisputable. Perhaps to you that's an impermissible curtailment on your right to die in a crash. It might help to remember also benefit indirectly through lower insurance premiums.

(In answer down thread to why I posted my reply, apologies. I meant to reply to another question about why the article mentioned electric cars, but clicked the wrong link.)

I don't think that's true. Nash had made them standard years before, multiple other manufacturers had them as options, and Ford promoted cars with their Lifeguard system[1], including sealtbelts, long before those laws.

The reality is that people didn't care, as evidenced by the fact that in 1981, thirteen years after seatbelts became mandatory in all cars, the CDC estimated that only 11% of car occupants used them[2].

[1] https://books.google.pt/books?id=1FQEAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA47&lpg=PA...

[2] http://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/seatbeltbrief/

Yes, the WSJ is known for its free-market ideology :)

But I think they have a point. The gov't has largely focused on fuel economy for decades now, while tens of thousands of people continued to die or suffer horrible injuries in cars. Sure, seat belts, crumple zones -- a good start. Unleaded? Not sure how that saves you in a crash.

Unleaded fuel doesn't save lives in a crash, but it saves lives just the same by reducing the impact of pollution.

That point doesn't make any sense to me. The government has focused on fuel economy, yes, but it has also focused on safety.

Unleaded fuel has saved many lives and probably prevents a lot of crime. There are plenty of studies that show a correlation between lead and crime rates.

> Yes, the WSJ is known for its free-market ideology :)

Yes, in its editorials. But it's otherwise known for quality, more-or-less objective journalism, which makes this article a bit of a disappointment.

Then again, I'm reminded of that Paul Graham article about working with newspapers―pretty much any topic except politics or war, according to him, is written about because someone with an interest pitched the article to the author. Perhaps Honda has more to do with this article's bent than the WSJ editors.

> But it's otherwise known for quality, more-or-less objective journalism

Sorry but no. Ever since Murdoch took over and replaced the editors the quality has noticeably dropped with a lot more inherent bias even in the non-editorial content.

And within the editorial section the change is pretty clear. It's shifted from being centrist to at times being on the hard right.

Even with politics (and by extension, war). The opposition will be routinely pitching stories to counter whoever is in power.

A huge percentage of stories are pitched by PR companies. I once shared office space with a PR company and saw how much it happened; it's eye-opening. The story in the careers lift-out of the paper - pitched as a profile for a new CEO of their client. The article about working from home, pitched to get a mention for the new consultancy client.

I would say that crime stories might be some of the only ones unaffected. But even then, the stories about crime statistics can be pitched - the giveaway will be a quote from security screen manufacturers or an industry rep.

> Then again, I'm reminded of that Paul Graham article about working with newspapers

Precisely:

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/koch-electric-vehicles_u...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com