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Comment by mindvirus | Hacker News Reader

This is really cool.

I suspect that when we have self driving cars, it's going to take off very quickly due to insurance. In particular, if you are in a non self driving car and in an accident with a self driving one, it'll be hard to not be shown as at fault. So insurance I would guess go up based on the percentage of self driving cars, and likely be really cheap for self driving cars.

I wonder if there's a period though where people cut off self driving cars, knowing they won't get hit. I suspect pedestrians in cities will jaywalk a lot more (and maybe that's ok).

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I suspect the adoption process will be slow because consumers really don't want this product. Self driving cars will drive the speed limit and infuriate both other motorists and their owners who are getting passed by speeding human driven cars. There will also be well publicized stories of the few times that self driving cars perform worse than humans. All drivers think they are above average and therefore the statistical comparison to the average driver does not apply to them.

> because consumers really don't want this product

> Self driving cars will drive the speed limit

Tesla is proving both to be false, today.

Tesla's aren't self driving. They are helping humans drive. For a Tesla to not drive the speed limit it would have to either be told to do so or fail.

Maybe you should drive a Tesla before you claim what it does.

It will gladly speed without driver input. There’s an offset setting since not everywhere has the same customs. Here it’s about 7% increase is safe without getting pulled over.

The FSD beta is rolling out to everyone that wants it (which is a lot) in the next week or so. Yes it’s not perfect, but saying it’s not self driving is doing a huge disservice to the entire development team.

If I take a drive on a highway in the Tesla and the signs says 80 the car won't just decide to suddenly go 125 just because it feels like having some fun. You speed, your car doesn't, unless it is faulty.

Tesla's aren't self driving no matter how many times Elon says so. It's not even the best in most tests in being a driver assistance..

Being a fan of a car and not being able to see it's faults isn't healthy.

If there's one thing I don't care about on the road, it's infuriating other motorists with my safe driving. But, for what it's worth, I drive the speed limit and I pretty much never see anyone get angry at me for it. If you hang out in the right lane, all the type A people driving 20 over are in the other lane, zipping past you. You simply don't encounter the type of people who would get mad at speed limit driving in the slow lane. As long as the self driving cars are implemented to follow passing rules, it's not going to be an issue if they were to drive the speed limit (although as another person pointed out to you this is a counterfactual).

Consumers definitely want a self driving product.

What they don't want is a self driving product where they bear liability for the mistakes the self driving product makes.

> and their owners who are getting passed by speeding human driven cars.

I personally drive 5-6 mph over the speed limit on freeways when the weather and visibility is good.

But I absolutely 100% do not care if the vehicle is driving the speed limit if I do not have to be controlling it. What do I care if the vehicle takes an extra 10 minutes to get to the destination? It'll just mean 10 extra minutes of work or nap time.

When I was young people would never buy a car with automatic gearing because that was not cool (in Europe).

I remember the first mobile phones and everybody said that will stay niche, because why would you need to call if not at home? (Except sales people)

Convenience is a very, very strong motivator.

I think people will want it. They'll get to watch netflix or read or take meetings on their commutes. They'll get to live further from the city in a bigger place than they could otherwise.

I also suspect we'll see cars looking more like living rooms or offices.

The other thing is that as we have more self driving cars, speed limits will be able to be relaxed. Most humans can't safely drive at 100mph, but on a road of only self driving cars that seems very possible. So that 1 hour commute radius gets bigger and bigger.

I agree that a world of 100% fully self driving cars that talk to each other makes the road capacity and travel speeds much greater. I don't see any way, however, to get from here to there (at least in the US). Are we going to give cars to people that currently rely on beat up used cars to get to their jobs? It's the same reason we can't have single payer healthcare -- the chasm is too far for us to cross politically and economically even if the destination would be superior.

There are plenty of people who are afraid of driving. They might be self driving car audience, if self driving cars would not require driver license.

I have two conflicting thoughts on self-driving cars.

* On the one hand I totally agree with you, the majority of people don't care about driving and just want to get from Point A to Point B. Given the opportunity to sit back and watch Netflix vs fighting traffic and having lower insurance premiums I think will make self-driving cars a tempting combination.

* On the other hand though, outside densely populated places where there is less traffic and more unpredictable terrain, self-driving cars are going to have an extremely uphill battle. First with the lack of extreme traffic, there isn't much of a case for needing for a car to drive itself.

Then there's the issue of trust. Say you're out in rural Idaho, nearest anything is 50+ miles away. Out there all those cool tech gizmos and self driving tech is a massive liability. If you're out in the boonies and your car looses connection and refuses to drive what do you do? What about if some wired internal computer system breaks? This is why cars like the Toyota 4Runner and Tacoma are so so popular, they are old school simple cars but more importantly, you can take the thing out the middle of nowhere and trust that you won't get stranded by "cutting edge technology"

On the other hand, if self-driving cars are as good at avoiding accidents as the article says that may cause the price of insurance for non-self-driving cars to fall.

I recall reading a few years ago that insurance companies are looking to partner with car manufactures. The idea is, when you purchase a full self-driving vehicle, insurance will be included with the cost of the car.

So who's going to pay for that? Tesla?

No, tech companies will just hide a "Not actually self-driving, driver takes full responsibility" sticker near the VIN. It'll be easy to blame the human for negligence then.

It's easy to be cynical. Volvo has already said they take responsibility [0], and I assume other manufacturers will also accept blame if their self-driving was involved.

0 - https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a15352720/volvo-will-take-...

Will Volvo directors go to jail if Volvo car would kill someone? I don't think so. That's not a responsibility.

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