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Comment by falcolas | Hacker News Reader

> You still have to stay on the roads and use a seatbelt and use your turn signals 100% of the time, etc.

No, you don't. If you're not on a road, there's no need for any of those. You don't even need a license. Should those usecases be taken away?

> They would be building self driving cars if they cared about safety.

Imagine, for a moment, a car with all of that data that it collects distilled down into a HUD for the driver. Can you honestly tell me that it wouldn't be better than the status quo? Should we not ask for such a thing, since it doesn't remove the human from the equation?

There will never be a 100% safe automatic pilot - putting off adding safety features to cars today until we get that perfect system is, to me, really quite silly.

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> No, you don't. If you're not on a road, there's no need for any of those. You don't even need a license.

I've never heard of any of this and I think you must be oversimplifying. You certainly need a driver's license even if you're going to drive on your lawn or in a parking lot or off the road somewhere, surely? I'll go do my research but there's just no way you can drive a car around private property or something without a license.

> Imagine, for a moment, a car with all of that data that it collects distilled down into a HUD for the driver. Can you honestly tell me that it wouldn't be better than the status quo?

I don't know, it sounds worse. HUDs are distracting and I would certainly be a worse driver personally if I had that in my car. I'm not sure that solution is an automatic improvement in safety.

> There will never be a 100% safe automatic pilot - putting off adding safety features to cars today until we get that perfect system is, to me, really quite silly.

Of course we shouldn't put off features for safety! No way should we do that. But if you have $50 billion to spend on the project, then no way should you not try to build a self-driving car with it. Obviously you can get a safer car with that much R&D capability if directed towards autonomy instead of just adding HUDs and better seatbelts or something.

> but there's just no way you can drive a car around private property or something without a license.

Yup, sure can. Farmers have been doing this for decades.

> HUDs are distracting and I would certainly be a worse driver personally if I had that in my car.

It's all in the implementation; consider this one: If a car is detected that is at a radically different speed from me, a red box starts to flash around it. I would certainly end up being safer, since it would let me change lanes/slow down long before my eyes and brain could detect such a speed differential. Avoidance becomes a normal maneuver, instead of an emergency maneuver.

> but if you have $50 billion to spend on the project, then no way should you not try to build a self-driving car with it.

What if you can't build a self-driving car with $50 billion? With $1 trillion? Should you just walk away while dusting your hands and going "well, we tried"?

Because that's where we are. The current efforts are still ongoing, and have been for decades. Few improvements from them are being distilled into consumer vehicles; we really need more.

Make people safer now, instead of "5 years from now".

Most people in the self-driving cars world are not talking about "taking away" other use cases for wheeled vehicles. It's a strawman.

And by saying "most people", you make a weak man argument - since you can sideline and ignore the people who are advocating for taking away manual driving options (ironically a sibling comment).

And the sibling comment is hardly a tiny minority - you can see them popping up all over the place in the comments on such articles, not to mention the Waymos and Ubers of the world.

Then say what you mean. Instead of trying to limit my freedom of owning a self-driving car, make it clear you are arguing for the right of people to drive what they want to and we’ll be on the same page.

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