Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

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I guess there's a mismatch in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be.

It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful. Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use all those: they're great.

I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods; they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep; they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences later.. etc.

These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-transit.

> in some people's understanding of what a driverless car should be.

I don't understand at all what you mean by "should". The comment I was responding to said that [whatever this is] "wasn't a reality". This was a top-level comment to the announcement itself, not a response to a comment claiming "well, human-operated cars are officially over". Doing exactly what a current, human-operated car is an irrelevant, arbitrary point of comparison, introduced by the GP comment.

This makes exactly as much sense as saying that the first motor vehicles "weren't a reality" until, like a horse, you could take them on trails, jump over low obstacles, and live in the wilderness with them indefinitely.

That's what I'm pushing back against: it's classic ignorant Luddism to set imaginary bars for new technologies and then insist that the new tech isn't valuable at all on that basis. I know this is super-common, but it's an eternal pet peeve of mine, as I can't help but imagine how much better the world would be without people like this.

> They don't get me to a party in the woods;

Many cars today have severely limited ability to drive on even rough roads (let alone off-road), that doesn't make them not "cars".

In general, I think the argument you are poorly phrasing the argument you are trying to make.

You seem to be trying to say that until self-driving technology can handle all use cases, you don't want to own a car without human driving controls.

I don't think such exclusively driverless cars will be marketed to consumers for a long time.

What we will see in the nearer is more standard consumer cars with varying ranges of level 4 self driving capabilities. These cars will match every one of your criteria.

> If an autonomous car don't let me run over someone it's not really a car.

... do we even need n-gate anymore?

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