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Comment by strebler | Hacker News Reader

Tesla took the opposite approach of what I described (the Subaru approach).

Tesla took the approach that the machine is in control and the human has to detect and take over when the machine makes a mistake. That is known to be a very problematic strategy, it's easy for the human to get distracted.

What Subaru has done is to leave the human in control, the machine only steps in when it sees a problem.

It's totally different safety outcomes. In fact, not even the same problem - one is "self driving", the other is "crash prevention".

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Yes they are different. They are also WILDLY different value propositions. Crash prevention is nice, just getting safer and safer is nice--though I personally wouldn't stop driving ~$5k cars for even "really good" crash protection.

But a car that can drive me while I sleep and become a Taxi while I work is something I would go into debt for.

But a car that can drive me while I sleep and become a Taxi while I work is something I would go into debt for.

I don't think most regular people will actually own fully autonomous cars to rent them out. Big players will do the capital expenditure to buy a fleet, and rent out transportation service. Renting in uber style will be basically the price of owning, but without the up-front capital expenditure, and it will provide the convenience of choosing the type of car for the specific transport needs of the moment. The margins of these rent-a-fleet services will be low, so you won't have a hope as individual car owner of actually buying a car and renting it out without turning it into a loss compared to just renting.

Certainly if most people owned them, there wouldn't be a market to rent them out.

I would go into debt for that also!

> Tesla took the approach that the machine is in control

That's not really accurate. Tesla says the driver is ultimately responsible. That holds unless a court determines otherwise. The same is true for Toyota/Subaru. They're all SAE level 2 systems.

The opposite approach from this would be Waymo/Volvo who intend to take responsibility for decisions made by their vehicles. Those are SAE level 4 or 5 systems.

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