Comment by brc | Hacker News Reader

Comment by brc | Hacker News Reader

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I disagree.

When cars started to take over from horse and cart, it still took 20+ years for them to become commonplace. It takes time for reliability to go up, and cost to come down. It takes time for the laws to catch up.

What seems like a blink in time to us now (1880s-1900) was 20 years for the people living it at the time. Cars were, at first, a freak sighting - then gradually, little by little, they caught on, and millions of horses were, ahem, retired.

A big step change isn't needed at all. Just gradual introduction and refinement until they are a compelling proposition.

As for the legal issue - the first generation of cars will require a human driver behind the wheel. They'll remain repsonsible for the foreseeable future. Likely the answer to long-term compensation for injured victims will be a shared insurance scheme - you pay the registration on your self-drive vehicle, and a portion of that goes into an insurance fund. If there is an accident and property/people are adversely affected, they get paid out from that fund according to a pre-determined formula ($x,000 for a limb on a 25 year old, $y,000,000 for a 45 paraplegic, etc). This isn't greatly different from schemes in place around the world today, where pinning fault on someone comes second to making sure those injured in traffic accidents are compensated + rehabilitated properly.

This a very context-free analogy.

The biggest reason why it took a long time for cars to replace horses was high price (simply stated: most people couldn't afford a car even if they wanted one) and lack of infrastructure (it takes years to build roads).

We already have the infrastructure and the price will favor self-driving cars.

The laws heavily favor safety in cars (not everyone likes seat-belts and yet we have laws requiring people to use them; we have laws banning using a cell-phone while driving, driving while drunk; cars have to build in a way that withstand crashes etc.).

As long as it can be demonstrated that self-driving cars are safer (and they are), there will not only be pressure to allow them but to require them and eventually ban human drivers altogether.

Once the self-driving cars are allowed, the lower price and greater convenience will make it a blockbuster. I don't want to own a car, I don't want to operate it, I just want to get from Mission to SOMA fast and cheaply and self-driving cars will be able to offer that.

Roads existed long before cars. Even the Romans had paved roads. That is not a valid argument.

The reason people took a long time to take up cars was cost. It took time for cost to come down and reliability to go up. Once that happened, they were adopted widely. Even then, it took a long time for cars to disappear.

Any photo of San Francisco around 1915 or so will show plenty of horse-drawn vehicles on the roads, and cars will be present, but scarce. This is 7 years after the Model T entered production.

abruzzi has answered this well - not everyone can afford a self-drive car. They will not be cheap initially - far from it, in fact. I'll grant you that the cost-reduction time will be faster in this instance - nobody has to invent the modern production line - but the cost of development and warranting of all the parts will be expensive.

Replacing the vehicle fleet takes at least 10 years. Replacing it with self-driving vehicles could easily take twice that long, even if you started today, which we are patently not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Roads_Movement

Needs a modern 'good broadband' movement. Thanks for the link.

Price will favor self driving cars? What about all the lower income people that are limping along with $2000 fifteen year old cars? So if we give the industry 20 years to get to the point where you can but an old used first gen self driving car for $2k, how well do you think all those automation mechanisms will still function?

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