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Comment by binkHN | Hacker News Reader

I imagine smell and touch are less valuable when driving a vehicle.

Touch is really important: it's how you can tell if your vehicle is sliding. You can feel the various forces of the vehicle's motion through touch.

Also more basic things like whether your feet are touching the pedals, that you're gripping the steering wheel at all, and how much force those things are taking.

Touch is extremely important when driving a vehicle. You won't know which controls you're using and how much force you're exerting upon your pedals otherwise.

Smell lets me know when it’s time to roll down the window.

also, depending on the area or the AQHI, when to Roll it back up

Unless that smell is oil. Or gasoline. Or burning rubber. Or petrichor. Or just plain old smoke.

Or the touch is the feeling of road surface changing, or the steering wheel getting harder to turn / having no effect at all, or the rush of air if a door flies open...

Touch is probably only needed to feel when you bump into something you didn't see, hopefully at low speed... but taste, yuck!

>Touch is probably only needed to feel when you bump into something you didn't see

I think you're underestimating the importance of touch, especially when it comes to steering and pedal control.

That's a limitation of us. We need touch and indicators to gauge how effective we are, but a machine can precisely throttle 23% or keep the steering wheel at 19 degrees without need to gauge how hard it is pushing the actuators. Touch is nice, but hardly crucial for driving.

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