Last night me and my buddy were talking about the future of personal transportation and how when cars (or helicopters) start flying themselves people will resort to jailbreaking them to take back control.
Cars have had antilock brakes for a long time now. Sometimes those are sensitive enough to harm braking performance when the car is driven by an expert under race conditions. It is not uncommon for people building race cars from street cars or racing cars they also drive on the street to disable ABS.
Now, traction/stability control is mandated by law. Worse yet, if there's a switch to disable it or set it to a "sport mode" that intervenes less aggressively, it must reset to full-on every time the engine is started. It's that last bit I really dislike; I generally appreciate help from computers in various aspects of my life, but once I make my intent clear, I want the machine to respect my decisions.
Apparently similar laws exist in Canada, Australia, and the EU. I guess you learn something new every day.
[1] http://www.nhtsa.gov/Laws+&+Regulations/Electronic+Stabi...
ABS for road cars is usually tuned to prevent wheel lockup and loss of steering control no matter how unreasonable the driver's inputs. I have the feeling that any ABS designed for racing will behave quite differently. Thing is, there aren't any knobs to turn on a road car, so people often just disable it. It would be more fun to have knobs.
> 9.3 Traction control
> No car may be equipped with a system or device which is capable of preventing the driven wheels from spinning under power or of compensating for excessive torque demand by the driver.
> Any device or system which notifies the driver of the onset of wheel spin is not permitted.
Traction control was allowed between 2002-2008. 2008 saw the introduction of standardised, 3rd party ECUs (Engine Control Units). This made the policing of the ban much easier than it had been in the past because teams couldn't reimplement traction control in their own engine firmware.
[1] http://www.formula1.com/inside_f1/rules_and_regulations/tech...
That said, in order to get the true efficiency of computer controlled vehicles, it really helps to have them all computer controlled.
That never happens. People that love surfing will surf at every opportunity you give them, people that love eating will eat nearly anything you put in front of them. People that love driving.....well I need a ride to North Dakota.
Many people enjoy driving a sports car down a mountain road with light/no traffic though. If you wanted me to drive you from Flagstaff to Sedona[0] in a Mazda Miata, I'd do it happily, over and over. I would rather do that myself than let a computer do it, even if the computer can do it safer and faster.
[0] https://maps.google.com/maps?q=flagstaff+to+sedona&saddr...
Even if you let the car/plane/misc operate itself, the legal ramifications of rooting are interesting (presuming you've already reached the point of having cars without manual overrides, that is).
Imagine the impact of rooting your car on your insurance, for example.
Devil's advocate: For humans who insist on trying to drive anyway, we can give them race tracks or have designated "Human Driving" areas. It won't ever go away completely.
In areas with significant congestion however, such as the entire city of Seattle, requiring computers to do the driving and navigation could significantly improve commute times (by, like, an order of 10 during peak hours), but only if everyone is on board.