The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit

I am considering it entirely rationally. I believe that we should be investing more money into research that could save 30,000 lives every year. Never did I suggest in my initial post that human driving should be banned before self-driving cars are capable of replacing humans in this capacity. If done correctly, self-driving cars will have all the benefits of current automobiles, and then some.

As for the pleasures of driving - that's what a whole lot of people said about cigarettes, but look where we are now. And don't be silly - no one's personal "pleasures" override the safety of other people's lives.

what is this host of pleasures? I get that some people enjoy driving. I loved it when I was a teenager, now I hate it. Most of my driving is done in traffic and I'd much rather read a book or take a nap insted of micromanaging my 20km/hr commute.

Not only would autonomous cars give me back my 1.5hrs/day that is dead time... but the roads would be incredibly more safe.

And for people who like to drive... how about a racetrack?

I'm skeptical about totally autonomous cars, but I think freeway driving will be increasingly automated. Thrun has said that he's let his car drive him from the bay area to Reno several times. I assume he's exaggerating a bit, but probably not by much. It's a solvable problem for good road conditions.

Admitting that driverless cars cannot be truely perfected, does not preclude mass adoption - because they merely need to be safer and cheaper to operate than the current human-only traffic situation. I think we are less than a decade away from that tipping point. Does anyone else agree?

The flying cars argument is silly. Yes it was a fanciful 1950s dream that never made it to reality... however autonomous flight is real.. a good portion of commercial air flight is done under autopilot (including landings).

We never even got close to flying car tech... but saying that truly self driving cars that require no dynamic input from humans at any time is something we'll get asymptotically closer to, but will never quite achieve is silly, we're already very close to this reality. I'd be very surprised if in 10 years we don't have a completely computer controlled car.

At that point we can do away with all traffic lights except for pedestrian crossings. Not only will stop signs be unnecessary, cars could approach intersections at speed, knowing that there was a gap in the cross-traffic for them to fit through. If you let a single human-driven car onto those streets you couldn't implement anything like that, though.

You could ask the same questions about human-driven cars. When the stoplights don't work and there's ice over all the roads, sensible people stay off the roads, and people with a death wish go out for a spin.

How about the upside. Every bike rider I've ever talked to bitches about stupid "cage drivers". Imagine if every 4 wheeler was autonomous.. no more bitching, you'd be able to zig-zag between them easily, and if you do happen to lose concentration for a moment you can rest assured that a computer will (probably) stop before it kills you.

the minute you make every thing super safe people will kill themselves out of boredom.

Really? You think people would kill themselves because they no longer had to manually do one of the most boring, repetitive, tedious everyday things they have to do? Personally I'd read a book.

What you're not realizing is that it's often not the person causing the accident that gets hurt, the idea of making something as tedious as driving automated is that it's safer for everyone.

Drugs already are banned. The ones you're most likely talking about are anyway. And the reason is because they fuck people up.

How about people do something productive with their lives instead of taking drugs, developing diabetes from sugar, overweight from fat, and kill people with large heavy steel motorized machines?

You can try to belittle 30,000 people but if you stop cleaning your guns to think about it long enough you might actually appreciate that all those people probably didn't want to die from theirs and other people's driving mistakes.

Having seen the possible consequences of a bad decision first-hand does not, in fact, stop people from making bad decisions.

A lot of people drive without a license.

This is the way things work in south africa. Gettting a license is really, really difficult and expensive, so people don't do it.

Which is the scarier dystopia? Your phone keeps a running tab on your location, which could be accessed by the state or Google? Or your mode of transportation is tracking you, _and can be over-ridden or disabled at any time by the state or by Google_...

As for the automation stealing jobs argument, that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

Almost a decade ago, traffic studies demonstrated that if only 20% of cars used adaptive cruise control, then traffic jams would be greatly diminished at then-peak carrying capacity. Or more cars could be carried on a particular road before traffic jams occurred.

Adaptive Cruise Control is currently a feature on many luxury cars, but will trickle down to mass market cars during the transition to driverless vehicles.

A similar effect is in play with 'metering light' systems - total throughput may be increased (counter-intuitively) by reducing localized traffic densities and smoothing irregularities in flow.

But people tend to perceive speed more readily than time to destination, and tend not to be very aware of total traffic throughput at all.

It's important to note that there isn't an obvious relationship between traffic volume and traffic speed. If you model traffic separation as a constant two seconds (front-to-front) your traffic flow is 1800 vehicles per hour at all speeds.

Of course, your average person cares more about how close the back of the car in front of them is, so flow rates at very low speeds are lower than at high speeds. At higher speeds you get other problems, though - traffic gets "patchy" as some people get a little nervous, as people drive at different speeds and so on.

You probably get the most people per hour through a lane of traffic at around 60km/h. Everyone's travelling at about the same separation and about the same speed, and they're all tailgating the guy in front of them trying to make him go a little faster. The speed leaves enough breathing room for everyone to drive consistently, which is supposed to be the big benefit of these self-driving cars.

Of course, these lower limits seem to increase travel times in a very obvious way, and the congestion relief they provide is pretty abstract. It's understandable that people aren't entirely convinced.

Driverless cars are fully attentive, and should have a lower error rate than normal / tired / drunk / distracted / angry / frustrated humans. This I welcome.

Lack of sufficient climbing lanes on most of the original interstate system. Poorly designed junctions, including merges into the high-speed lanes Inadequate road thickness (autobahn is 55-75cm, US is 28cm), initial quality, drainage capability and maintenance. Inadequate driver training. Lack of enforcement for failing to bear right (though the US is doing this more now) and other minor moving violations that disrupt traffic flow.

The US interstate system would need considerable re-engineering, more funding to keep up with the required maintenance, and both tougher licensing requirements and stricter enforcement of minor moving violations that increase risk. It's a huge cost, that doesn't provide proportionate benefit in all parts of the country, and a questionable ROI. Trust me, I'd love higher speed limits, but I realize the giant mountain of money and effort that would be required to make it happen.