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Comment by okareaman | Hacker News Reader

I have an honest question. Why do people want self-driving? To read a book, take a nap, or watch a movie? I like to drive. It keeps my body occupied while I think, day dream or meditate. Driving is pleasurable for me. In fact, letting the car drive itself would be stressful, because I'd feel compelled to monitor it's performance. It would take me out of the moment.

Zen Driving - Be a Buddha behind the wheel of your automobile https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/2089307

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I truly hate driving and find it a colossal waste of time. I always found that since I can drive. I work in the car like I do at home. So yeah self driving cars would be most excellent. Until that time, I make sure I always have someone who finds it pleasurable like yourself. Although day dreaming or meditation would give me some pause; seems both would take away some emergency responses because loss of focus? I rather have someone who actually likes the driving itself and luckily I have a few friends like that.

When you like driving, you tend to take a lot of road trips, which develops the skill required to do it automatically. I've also taken driving jobs just to get a break from the software business. I suppose that's another reason I don't understand self-driving because I don't think it's a better driver than me. I will likely be proven wrong eventually.

Most of the driving I do is in traffic to drop kids at school and pick them up. If I could do anything other than monitor the distance to the car in front of me and resent people cutting the line, it would remove a great deal of stress from my life.

You would really trust software to drive your car around children? I couldn't do that.

We're in hypothetical, but yeah I would trust it more than myself, and also would trust more other cars to be driven by software. The standards for driving software validation will likely be very high, while those for getting a driving license are ridiculously low.

Driving is not pleasurable for a lot of people, especially when there is an objective destination in mind. I used to commute 2 hours a day by driving. It can be a really stressful experience. Other people can also be terrible, reckless drivers

Driving cuts into other more profitable activities, like shopping, watching The Office, gaming, and defending your social media turf.

Can you image how much money Amazon Retail loses every year due to people wasting time driving when they could be on Amazon.com ??

People with disabilities like epilepsy, which affects 2% of the worlds population.

If you have uncontrolled seizures, then you cannot drive a car, ever.

Uber, Lyft, and Self driving would be a huge boon to these people, enabling them to live independently and still commute.

Well you aren't supposed to, you mean to say. It does sound like a good idea for someone who has just been risking it, to get self-driving as a backup.

Generally if the state finds out you have epilepsy, you'll need to be seizure free without medication for some period of months or more (depending which state), and perhaps need a doctor to sign off, before you can get a driver's license.

I had to stop driving for four months after I had a sudden major seizure episode. Changes to medication also meant not driving for a similar amount of time.

I have not had an event in years, and no longer take medication, but anxiety about driving and being independent is still something I carry with me.

2 out of 3 of those exist already (and cabs before Uber/Lyft). Full self-driving would be great, but that's not what you're doing. You're paying for Tesla's RnD, but aren't seeing the investment upside if it pays off. You're better off just buying Tesla stock or bonds if that's what you believe.

You’re right that Uber and Lyft exist as solutions; I don’t accept cabs as an equally good solution since uber and Lyft’s user experience is way better.

Self driving takes Uber drivers out as the middle man and allows prices to go to 1/5th the current cost; so that is an even better solution, which IMO is a real difference from Current Uber and Lyft.

Yeah, I don’t believe Tesla’s doing self-driving the right way, but I still think the industry itself has a worthy goal.

> I don’t accept cabs as an equally good solution since uber and Lyft’s user experience is way better.

And I consider cabs to be a superior user experience in cities with good cab service to Lyft or Uber. Which is most major cities. I know I put no effort into defending my view, but I put in as much effort as you did.

Self-driving won't drive down the prices of Uber and Lyft. They will cause them to stop hemorrhaging money and possibly even become profitable.

I love driving also. I think the saving grace of all this though is the people that will want self driving are the people that are basically addicted to checking their phone and ridiculously dangerous on the road.

I don't expect to ever ride in a self driving car personally but the bar is so low for safety with distracted drivers and the target audience that you have to welcome this even if the marketing is bullshit.

Just to add I love audio books and 3-4 hour drive. I feel like that is my best thinking time.

People say the like to listen to music or podcasts on the subway too, therefore saying subway commuting time is not wasted... Yet if you ask them if they ever listen to podcasts for an hour or two on their days off, they'll reply 'of course not'.

Suggesting to me that these people don't actually want to dedicate an hour of their life to listening to podcasts - they're just fooling themselves to justify spending 2.5 hours a day on the subway commuting to their jobs.

It's useful on long drives where you get tired and not as alert as usual.

Also useful for traffic jams, nothing pleasurable being stuck in traffic and moving once in a while.

I've been debugging software my entire adult life. I guess I'm an outlier in not trusting the self-driving software. I couldn't relax and let it drive without paying close attention.

I can drive for hours with the Volvo lane keeping on. It’s not that I’m not paying attention; but not doing the little micro adjustments to speed and lane keeping actually leaves me much more refreshed at the end of the drive.

Yep, drove (my wife did the driving) 2000km a few days ago with almost only highways. That used to be tiring; now with lane and traffic assistance it is much less tiring. On the highway you basically have to do nothing.

Same here, but I trust humans, including myself, even less...

While I certainly do not trust any existing or near-future self-driving cars, I also don't enjoy regular driving. So conceptually, I am in favor of self-driving cars over having to manually drive. In practice, I don't really like being in cars at all, and so I live in a city with a subway and can walk most places.

Really depends where and when.

Some locations are so packed with moronic drivers you really can go insane if you're on a schedule. Also accident rates are high.

This week I took biking to work, I'm lucky to have 75% river path to ride on and I literally have nothing to worry about for 40min. Quite a change. (Honestly, I cities were like Amsterdam, people would drop cars and self driving desires quickly)

I want self driving cars because I want literally everyone else on the road using them. Between distracted drivers, drunk drivers, inexperienced drivers, overconfident drivers, scared drivers and just plain stupid drivers we're pretty bad at it.

Plus one of these days I might be 70-80+ years old and at some point should probably stop driving myself.

To me people wanting to do something else while driving their cars is the same as people burying their faces in their phones while sitting in a cafe: mindless escapism.

Be present in the world, enjoy the moment, whether it's sipping a cup of coffee or driving or doing the dishes.

If you commute to work, you can already start working. Then the travel time counts as working time.

It has been a dream of mine to go to sleep and wake up in a new country. This would be my only use case. Living in Europe, I do not find the commute time to be horrible (around 15 minutes anywhere I go).

Get a train

Have you tried the night trains?

You live in Europe and have never taken an overnight train?

Not everyone enjoys driving. Some see it as merely a means to get to a destination. Just another chore (an incredibly dangerous one at that).

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