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Comment by joshagogo | Hacker News Reader

Makes me wonder what kind of placebo buttons will be put inside self-driving cars. Maybe a "vroom" button to tell your self-driving uber to take the fast route, or maybe even a "NY Cabbie" button to make it super aggressive in the city, along with a few honks. Latest research shows that people think biggest benefit of SD cars will be time to do other things (http://unu.ai/self-driving-cars/), but I bet one of those other things might be to hit the placebo button....

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> Maybe a "vroom" button to tell your self-driving uber to take the fast route

I hope uber will have some way of adjusting the route. I can tell the driver that the address is misplaced on google maps, or that a specific one-way is always blocked, but I can't say the same to the car unfortunately.

> Maybe a "vroom" button to tell your self-driving uber to take the fast route

No, this will become something you pay for (unfortunately). Higher priority in the traffic routing algorithm will go to those who pay more.

> No, this will become something you pay for (unfortunately). Higher priority in the traffic routing algorithm will go to those who pay more.

Doesn't this require for there to be only one self-driving car operator? What if there are multiple competitors that all route high priority traffic in a way that ends up making a route congested?

They're probably likely to collude, but it could still be an issue.

Are there placebo buttons in regular cars? Why would self driving cars have this as a feature? Especially whoever is paying for the car which would have to pay money for this useless feature.

The additional cost is negligible. Current cars don't need placebo buttons because you can drive aggressively yourself.

Current cars do have placebos though. Some newer sports cars would play engine sounds thru the speakers to make users feel more power.

Also electric cars by law are required to play engine sounds because they're so quiet otherwise

Outside the cabin, to protect pedestrians. That's not a placebo.

That is so very Brave New World.

Well, there are certainly buttons that do things that have little real-world impact on the car. Like on high-end German cars you get seven different levels of ride stiffness etc. that can be selected.

Classic example:

https://youtu.be/gRwR1WH0rR8

The second part also shows a counter example.

As far as placebo effects in cars, a lot of newer cars are putting in "sound enhancing" tubes to pipe sound into the cabin from the engine bay to make the car sound more powerful. VW went so far as to actually play engine noises out of the speakers regardless of if the stereo was on.

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