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Comment by geogra4 | Hacker News Reader

A million dollar bond from the state seems kind of excessive

A pile-up could easily cause a million dollars worth of damage. A measure that makes sure that the responsible businesses are serious about safety doesn't sound that unreasonable to me.

I guess it makes sense when only large businesses are the ones to own these automobiles. It puts individual ownership out of reach.

>Businesses wishing to test their self-driving cars have to buy a million dollar bond from the state.

It's not for individual owners.

Well its not about individual ownership its about businesses testing commercial self driving cars right?

Seems to me that a company is going to need to sink many millions in to design, build, and test a truly road safe self driving car no? Even considering it as a hardware and software mod to an existing model.

Individual ownership of driverless cars is out of reach, and always has been. This pilot program brings it a step closer, despite clearly just a test (e.g. requires two drivers in the car)

It isn't even that big a number. People with lots of assets carry that much or more liability insurance and they aren't paying enormous amounts for it.

How is a robot caused pile-up any different from a human caused pile-up? Do human Nevada drivers have to carry a million dollar bond?

Human drivers are not a new technology being field tested in a new and challenging environment.

Drivers in most U.S. states (I can only speak for VT, PA, and MA) are required to carry liability insurance in order to drive legally. The amount varies.

Robot drivers are a new and unproved technology. After not too many years I'd expect that they will cause way fewer accidents per mile driven than human drivers.

Add that there is not a whole lot of case law on robot driven vehicles to understand how far the accident will go legally (unknown expense for an unknown number of parties)

Funny. I was thinking it sounded low.

You were not alone, that I can say.

The bond does not represent Max liability. The coproration and probably even the individuals in the vehicle would be liable as well.

But I agree that it is low.

One crash survivor with a broken neck could eat up that million quick.

That would restrict it to big business.

But the requirement that two drivers need to be in the car will restrict it to no one who wants to invest in it to be more profitable.

Right now this is simply for experimentation and I wonder who'd drop one million dollars just to experiment?

Let's see now: CMU, Stanford, MIT, UPenn, USC, LAAS, USyd, Oxford, Caltech, just to name a few. All of these universities have already dropped at least that much building technology for the DARPA Grand Challenges or related research demonstrations.

Right. But I want my car to drive me to work and back while I sleep or read. But to get there I think first business must commercialize it through their simple desire to increase profits, then it may become cheap and accessible enough for average Joes like me.

When you require two people with a driver's license in the car at all times you kill any profitable commercial reason to use self-driving cars. And that to me is a huge mistake.

Commuting to work (if you drive > 2 0minutes at highway speeds) is probably the most dangerous thing by far that all of us do on any given day.

Distracted drivers, drunk drivers, sleepy drivers (like me!) this is why we need self-driving cars.

But I think the path to mass use of self-driving cars goes through commercial use of self-driving cars.

I guess it wasn't clear enough that this is the regulation for testing autonomous cars on public roads, not for deployment of autonomous cars.

Not excessive as long as Nevada has a complete monopoly ;)

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