Hacker News Reader

Comment by JulianMorrison | Hacker News Reader

Meh, all the purposes are real. It's a win-win. Get warned of idiots, collect data that will be useful to insurers (and probably to self driving cars too, I can imagine Google cars giving detected hotheads a wide berth).

I can see one group of people having a legit beef with this though: car rental companies. One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to scrap.

View on HN

That's imagining this system in the most perfect light: shiny, new and not gamed.

The opportunities for misinformation and asymmetricality are huge. Don't like someone? Clone their license plate for a day and drive like an ass. How could you ever prove your innocence?

Loan your car to a friend and they could tarnish your reputation. It would make it inhibitive to share vehicles.

This is technology that drives us farther apart as people in favor of a few insurance companies making even more profit than they do already. Think critically.

It would also give police even more excuses to profile innocent people.

If you want people to drive more safely, then think up ways to get more people to drive more safely. Don't expand the surveillance mechanism to every moving vehicle.

Cloning someone's license plate isn't exactly trivial and isn't exactly legal.

"One idiot behind the wheel, and their fleet car might as well go straight to scrap."

Unless, of course, they pay this nice fee to have their fleet cars whitelisted in the app, call it "bad driver protection money"!

The point being, once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot. Even the safest drivers make stupid moves. Even worse, by what metric is an idiot made? I drive aggressively, trying to find open space on the road whenever I can. To do this I speed and otherwise make abrupt lane changes. If I'm on a road trip and someone is following me too closely I'll speed up to 140 MPH to put some distance between us in short order. The thing is, I've never been in an accident and have literally raced cars on the Nurburgring in Germany without incident. I have a driving style which works for me and works for others around me as I'm not in accidents and I don't cause accidents. My mother-in-law on the other hand who drives five under everywhere and by most people's metrics is a safe driver has been in two accidents in the last five years. Neither of which were her fault of course (said with some sarcasm).

All I can see this accomplishing is adding yet one more gadget app for people to be distracted by.

This sounds like you drive like an idiot. And so you should be marked as one, and are grumpy about it. Well, tough.

Basically what you're doing is playing Russian roulette, and you keep "winning", well yeah, that happens, right up until it doesn't.

Drive like a Google car. Stop being an idiot. Get a smiley face score.

Honestly, I bathe in idiocy because it works. One of the "tricks" I've picked up is that if I'm being tailgated in town or someone is otherwise driving next to me and won't stop I'll turn off traction control and "light up" the rear end of my car. Everyone 'scatters' at that point. A lot of people don't understand this driving style. I look like a complete idiot, but people pay attention to the idiots. They watch them, they hang back, thus making the idiot a lot safer. My car stops from 60 to 0 in 97 feet. It takes someone in the average sedan nearly twice as far. The further I can keep those people away from me the better. When I'm driving I'm engaged. I drive a low fast sports car which requires full engagement. This makes me the safest person on the road no matter how bad I look to other drivers. This is a key concept when on a motorcycle as well. If you are blending in by being "good", no one is paying attention to you. If you are driving a loud bike, speeding up and slowing down aggressively, popping wheelies, and otherwise behaving like an ass, you are visible. Scare those around you and those around you will give you room and on the road and room is king.

I agree to an extent. I also drive "like an idiot" and haven't been in an accident aside from being t-boned in traffic when a very old person didn't stop for a red light. I'm also very engaged while driving and pay lots of attention to everything going on around me. I don't listen to music or eat or have children or do phone calls while driving. I also consider driving a hobby / sport and value continual life-long improvement in it. I practice in realistic driving games and I've been doing so since I was very young. I'm very interested in participating in track days and auto cross events. I do most of my own car maintenance, drive a manual, and I know how my vehicle works in quite deep detail. I also know how it handles at and beyond the limit, when it will break loose in the front and rear, how quickly it can stop and accelerate, how hard it can swerve.

This app and the related one about insurance liability (posted here maybe a week or two ago) would unfairly rate me, because I go against the risk model and win consistently. I also agree that there are MANY "safe" drivers whose indecision and timid driving leads to bad situations; merging at 45mph, slowing way down for ramps, stoping at yield signs, driving under the speed of traffic, braking unnecessarily in traffic, etc. However, since in my situation, the insurance company gets to charge me a lot more, they're incentivized against modeling drivers like me as less risky than someone who is involved in more accidents than me but drives well within the limits and doesn't understand what happens when they approach or exceed them.

I'm in exactly your same boat. Do all the work on my car myself, only drive a manual, know how my tires will perform on various pavement at various temperatures, wear driving shoes, leave the radio off, etc., because I'm an enthusiast. A few years ago I was teaching my son to drive on slick roads so we were spinning cookies, doing bootlegger turns, and using engine power rather than braking to get out of situations in the county fairgrounds parking lot. There was no one around, nothing to run into, but yet a local officer started circling us on the perimeter lot road, at which point I had my son back off for safety reasons since there was another car in the parking lot. Anyway, he decided to light us up, then threatened my son and myself (because he had a learners permit) with reckless driving charges. And so it is in the US, land of the ignorant when it comes to actually learning how to drive or having the ability to teach our kids how to drive in an abandoned parking lot. I much, much, much prefer Germany in this regard. They really do get it on this front.

> The point being, once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot.

I tell this to anyone who rages: You drive and meet a LOT of people on your way. You don't make a lot of mistakes, but you make a few at least every drive.

Now given that you meet a lot of people you are most likely seeing a ton of mistakes by people. But individually they are not really making many mistakes.

Sure some people are horrible, but not all. And often the horrible ones are behind you.

And also, no matter how "safe" you are, it only takes 1 mistake to kill a person. Example, yesterday I was driving, a guy went nuts behind me and almost killed a motorcyclist. I saw that and it distracted me long enough to almost not notice the car that short-stopped in front of me. Literally 2 more seconds and it would have been a wreck. And I consider myself a safe driver, but it only takes one moment of distraction.

> once everyone has this thing in their car and everyone is being watched while they are driving, everyone will be marked as an idiot.

I wouldn't expect that to be a yes/no thing. Shouldn't it be based on compared to the average driver, as determined by the same system?

The Yelp extortion model applied to individuals.

Maybe there'll be an opportunity to drill down in the data. There's a huge wide spectrum of people who suck at driving (senile old people, oblivious soccer mom, boy-racer, etc) and I would be very surprised if they're all roughly equivalent.

Minor nit: I think your comment would be greatly enhanced if you changed some stereotypes, e.g. "soccer-mom" for "soccer-parent", "senile old" for "old" or "people with less reflexes" and "boy-racer" for just "racer". None of those relate 100% to the gender or age of the driver, IMHO :)

Soccer mom is an accepted phrase with known meaning. "Soccer parent" isn't.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com