So what is the solution? Let emergency services have a remote control STOP button? But it would have many implications for passengers too
With driverless self-driving vehicles, you have no such comfort. Even if your software correctly handles 99.9% of the use cases, the remaining .1% will get someone injured or killed, and people climbing into taxis cannot self-select whether their route will pass by a fire, in which case "take a cab with a human driver."
Driverless cars have a huge moral hazard here. Their incentives are all around serving their passengers, but the downsides are offloaded onto pedestrians, cyclists, other automobile users, and now firefighters and the citizens they are protecting.
No "solution" should "beg the question" by taking it as axiomatic that driverless cars at the current level of capability are necessary. They are not.
We are not curing cancer or feeding the world here, we are trying to make people get rich by eliminating the cost of labour for a human driver. No way this calculus should prioritize investors over human lives in any sane society.
> We are not curing cancer or feeding the world here, we are trying to make people get rich by eliminating the cost of labour for a human driver. No way this calculus should prioritize investors over human lives in any sane society.
How about, we're trying to make transportation cheaper for everyone by eliminating the most expensive part of taxi cabs (human labor)? Transportation being cheaper means people can get better jobs further away from where they live, see family more often, etc.
Before you mention public transportation, realize that it would benefit from driverless technologies as well (aka, not zero sum).
Which has been in place for years in some places (ie Docklands Light Railway).
> we're trying to make transportation cheaper for everyone
Call me an old cynic but I'll believe it when I see it - I'm old enough to have seen many, many events where the supply cost of something has gone down but the consumer cost has not (or even gone up in some cases.) Why will driverless taxis be any different?
no great loss there.
Is that a problem?
And if it is, are you implying that we cannot one day have driverless cars without imposing life-threatening externalities on citizens who did not give informed consent to participate in the testing of driverless cars?
I'd much rather be around a driverless car today, which drives overly cautious and comes to a complete stop at every stop sign, than a car driven by a human driver. So that's my "informed consent", and I suspect many others agree. Is that how democracy works?
If we cared about transportation and climate change, we'd be investing into buses, trams, trains, biking and walking paths, and other such solutions.
The attitude designation belongs with self-driving car enthusiasts, who are perfectly happy throwing out decades of safety research and progress.
It may be the opposite, as driverless cars can potentially be utilized more efficiently. If I drive to a destination, my car will sit in a parking space doing nothing and wasting space. A driverless car could drop me off, then drive away to taxi other people around. There's much less need for parking lots, freeing up valuable urban land.
It may reduce car ownership overall. I have a car because it's more convenient than public transport, and far cheaper than a taxi. If I could have a self-driving car at my door in, say, 15 minutes, and it was competitively priced, then I probably wouldn't bother owning a car. Another advantage would be that if I needed more seats, or more space, I could order a vehicle to my specifications.
It may increase utilization of roads, as self-driving cars that can communicate with each other can make more efficient use of them. Less need for stopping distances if all cars can brake simultaneously, and being able to slow down in advance reduces the impact of traffic jams.
That said, I think my own personal carbon footprint would likely fall, because most of the time I could use a much smaller vehicle. Unless I doubled the amount of time I spent on the road, I'd probably use less energy overall, as I could use a 2 seater car with half the mass.
Public transport is, of course, much more efficient; but it's also much less convenient, and at least in my country, more expensive. It costs less to run my car for a year than it would be to pay the equivalent bus fare for a year. If buses were self-driving, maybe the opposite would be true.
The whole idea of autonomous robo taxis is bad on its face for many, many reasons.
When will we grow up and admit it?
Sure, but by how much? What's the average extra overhead per person? By that I mean, what's the average distance that a taxi would need to drive between dropping one person off, and picking the next person up.
The more taxis there are, the lower the overhead, as the more likely it is a taxi will happen be nearby to someone who wants one. We're used to taxis being rare, especially outside of major cities, but if taxis were common, the overhead might be very low.
I can look outside right now, and see maybe 20 vehicles parked within 50m of my home. If that were 5 self-driving taxis instead, that would be easily be enough capacity for my immediate neighborhood, at least most of the time.
So you could likely reduce the amount of cars locally by a factor of 4 or 5, and I'd still have a vehicle less than a minute away at most locations. Yes, if you had a 5th of the cars they'd have to do 5 times the work; but likely not much more than that. In other words, the maintenance cost wouldn't significantly worsen, and may even improve; cars aren't immune to entropy while stationary.
The other advantage of having self-driving taxis is that you can more easily specialize. I have a pretty typical 5 seater car because I sometimes need that space. But most of the time, I could make do with a 2 seater with half the mass. My choice of car is determined by the edge cases, but my choice of taxi would be determined by what I needed at the time.
If the average trip is short the rob taxi does more trips and the effect is the same.
Who cleans up the car when a drunk stranger pukes in it while you are sleeping?
Who fuels it or charges it?
There are many reasons people don't share cars.
Lacking proper control software is not one.
Sure, but you also need less cars, and the cars can be more specialized (i.e., smaller on average). Two 1500kg cars travelling 10km each, might be replaced by one 750kg robotaxi travelling 20km. Overall a significant reduction in fuel for the same two journeys.
And then there's the question of whether it's cheaper to have one car traveling 100,000km over 5 years, or two cars travelling 50,000km over 5 years. My guess is that fewer cars travelling further would be less expensive in most cases.
> Who cleans up the car when a drunk stranger pukes in it while you are sleeping? > > Who fuels it or charges it?
You'd hire someone to do it? The same way it works with rental cars or taxis today. That's part of the overhead I mean: is it more efficient for companies to maintain a specialized fleet of robotaxis, or for individuals to maintain a far larger fleet of generalized vehicles?
No… they are _not_ the primary contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. Road transport accounts for less than 12% of emissions[0].
What does climate change have to do with driverless cars anyway? It seems like you're basically saying we should keep driving miserable under some false pretense that it's responsible for the death of the planet.
> It seems like you're basically saying we should keep driving miserable under some false pretense that it's responsible for the death of the planet.
And no, that's not what I'm saying. Self-driving cars are just trying to patch the problem of terrible traffic and terrible public transportation. By doing so, they aren't solving any real problem, and they will increase problems of congestion and also climate change, since they will continue to bolster cars and thus roads needed to support cars.
Again, this is zero sum thinking. We can have both efficient and safe driverless EVs as well as trains/buses run by the government. Personally, I'd prefer to take the former given how little interest the government has in enforcing laws on public transportation, and this trend seems undue to change.
I'm not sure what you mean by this. Are you talking about HOV lanes and bus lanes not being enforced, fares not being enforced, or literal lawlessness on public transit?
The problems from autonomously operating trains are limited owing to them being a separate, nearly-independent system. Anyways, some parts of the world has fully-autonomous trains with centrally-located operators on bay for overriding if anything unexpected (usually someone jumped into the rails) happens. Airplanes have significant automation built-in (and in theory can even land without input) but at the end of the day we have pilots that can override just in case that an engine became unexpectedly loose or someone on board suffered a heart attack.
The problem with autonomous cars is that a) it's specifically on a mixed-used location and b) often most of the developers want to fully abdicate any control, unlike on other systems where how operators are in standby just something unexpected happens. If both Waymo and Cruise are willing to have an operator-standby system a) might be mitigated. Until I hear that these vehicles are supervised just in case they have encountered something unexpected you will see a lot of similar nuisance issues.
Does anyone really believe that? Right now I could commute to work by taking an Uber - it costs about £10 for a one way trip.
Now you're telling me that a company somewhere, would send a state of the art car equipped with incredibly advanced computers and sensors, car which they need to insure, which needs constant communication and backup emergency controls ready on standby, for which they need to cover maintenance, depreciation and other costs, and would charge me less than £10 for the priviledge? How little exactly?
It's nonsense, that's what it is. Human taxis have pretty much reached the bottom of pricing through gig economy - you are hardly paying for maintenance and fuel at this point with the way rides are structured. What sort of possible margin is there for self driving taxis, which will inevitably end up being incredibly expensive assets until the technology becomes common place and cheaper?
This, in my opinion, is unsustainable. Soon there won't be any new "suckers" in the pipeline, and it will suddenly get a lot more expensive as these rideshare companies need to reckon with the actual cost of human labor and leasing their own cars.
Investing in driverless technology, which can be replicated and will eventually become cheaper as it's mass-produced, is a very smart move. These costs will eventually get passed down to consumers as well once there's enough competition, and then everyone wins.
No, public transportation has completely different technological needs.
Is this going to make people's lives better (shorter work week and/or better pay) or worse (longer commute and expectation that you work in your car)?
Yes, there are a lot of very good use cases. And honestly, I have a far less important use case of my own: If I take a taxi (usually when travelling) I just want transportation, I do not want someone chatting me up in an effort to earn a good review/tip because they don't earn enough from driving the route silently to get by.
I just don't want progress lubricated by the blood of people who did not give informed consent to assume the risks.
I agree. If we both happen to be correct, I wonder in what other areas of automation we may be greatly over the tips of our skis.
Other than working and sleeping, driving is the main thing adults do with their lives. Not having to do it anymore would be transformational. I'd prefer to see that accomplished through urbanism and public transit, but that's about as much of a moonshot politically as self-driving is technically.
"A software handling 99.9% of the cases" wouls be a significant advantage over cars with drivers if it was true.
I think it is just a numbers game, we may not be there today but I believe we will have the a future with safer roads thanks to driverless cars. I am longing for that
So we should push for it instead of trying to shut it down. Solution to the problem in article sounds easy, allow law officers to mark roads as blocked so the car does not even to see the fire truck. Or just put a road signal or a person on the road so the cars (driverless or with drivers) don't step on your hose
And, obviously, emergency stop should initiate stopping, but the vehicle should do so only when it's safe. It's not an escalator that's safe to halt immediately and at any moment.
For an completely unmanned vehicle (driving to pick up or to recharge/park for the night) - probably no big deal.
What is a realistic scenario here? Unless you are in a tank in a warzone...
How is a traditional, non-self driving car protecting you from someone pointing a gun at you? Do you have bullet-proof glass and bodywork?
Note: OP edited the post after my response. Would be good if HN indicated this.
[0]: Cherry Creek carjacking prompts other victims to come forward https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/cherry-creek-carjackin...
That sounds warzone tbh.