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Comment by cardmagic | Hacker News Reader

How do self-driving cars restrict your freedom? You can still tell it where you want to go at any time and it will take you. I'm very confused what freedom I'm losing? Is it to drive over a riverbed if I want to? Never done that. Not sure I'd want to.

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Should give it a try - it's a lot of fun.

To generalize: your lack of interest in an activity is not a good reason to remove that activity opportunity from everybody. I'm sure you have a lot of freedoms that you don't take advantage of - should they be removed as well?

If I tried it, I wouldn't try it with the same car I drive to work with every day. I'd use a car built to drive over riverbeds. Most people aren't saying that self-driving cars should take over every kind of vehicle with wheels. I think the main purpose is to give commuters and truck drivers another option, not to remove options from people.

> I wouldn't try it with the same car I drive to work with every day.

Most people who do this do indeed use their daily drivers. Most people can't afford to own a second $30,000 vehicle they can take out only on the weekends.

> I think the main purpose is [...] not to remove options from people.

And I quote: "Google had long distinguished itself from other companies for committing to the development of a true robot car without a steering wheel or pedals."

http://www.businessinsider.com/waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-self-d...

So you want to limit my freedom of owning a car without a steering wheel so that you can protect your freedom of owning one with a steering wheel? That doesn’t make much sense to me. Just because one company makes a better mouse trap doesn’t mean that everyone is subjected to only buying the new mouse trap. Welcome to free market capitalism.

That’s the thing about removing controls: if they are there, you don’t have to use them. If they aren’t there, you can’t ever use them.

The US hasn’t been purely free market since, well, ever. What’s to stop car companies from buying legislation to force people into subscription based vehicles? They already force the use of dealers for buying cars...

It’s still legal to drive horse and buggies on roads, even though it is 10x more dangerous for the people driving them. Why haven’t they forced us into stopping horse and buggies? Should someone have forced cars to not be invented because they didn’t have horses and if there aren’t horses, you can’t add horses later? I’ve heard horse and buggies are a lot of fun to ride over riverbeds too, after all.

To the extreme so do fences, national borders, private property and the FAA.

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