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Comment by tobiasu | Hacker News Reader

Something completely lost on tons of nerds seems to be that people genuinely enjoy operating their cars (and motorcycles).

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I don't think it's lost on people discussing the subject, but it won't be able to stop this technological trend for several reasons.

Autonomous cars will be safer than human operated ones so they will at some point be cheaper to insure. This will continue until it is either unaffordable for the average person to operate their own car or outright prohibited because of safety concerns.

Driving will become a hobby which people will be able to pursue on dedicated (race)tracks.

Once Congress is shown that at least 20,000 of the 30,000 deaths per year could be eliminated by forcing autonomous vehicles on everyone, it will be illegal to operate a vehicle manually on first the Interstates, then eventually on every public road.

Remember when people genuinely enjoyed riding horses?

I was just going to post this but forgot to login and here was your post. The hard part is the initial adoption when most cars are still manually driven and the good stuff comes when none of it is manually driven. How we get there will be and adventure.

The way we get there is through car sharing schemes like Zipcar and Getaround.

v1 Zipcars automatically move themselves around between designated spots to rebalance supply and demand

v2 Zipcar can come pick you up much like Uber << taxi industy is screwed at this point

v3 Zipcar can pick you up and then drives you to your destination << Zipcar becomes much more desirable than owning a car at this point

This will happen at first in big cities like NY or Sydney here in Australia where parking, registration and other costs make car sharing already popular.

This is different. This is a horse you ask nicely to take you there but once you're locked inside it can take you anywhere. The issue is not safety, it's control.

Horses have control issues as well. And a properly designed autonomous car is likely to have a manual override or emergency stop, things for which there are no good equivalents on a horse.

The "manual override" will just be another button.

The manual override for a horse is a bullet in the brain. Why do you think cowboys carried six shooters?

Safety or the electorate's perception of safety is ALWAYS the issue.

That's a completely different argument. tobiasu's point was that driverless cars take away opportunities for pleasure from mechanical aficionados.

I'm pretty sure there are still people that genuinely enjoy riding horses.

That's the point. Like riding, directly operating a motor vehicle can be an enjoyable an rewarding experience without being a good way to get around town. Someday, I hope, driving will be reserved for purpose specific tracks, cars that are actually enjoyable to drive, and drivers who can afford to pay the unsubsidized cost of such a leisure activity. I like a good drive myself, but I'd rather let a computer handle drudgery like stop-and-go on a large freeway through LA twice a day.

Yup. I have a friend who trains horses for a living and another that really wants to get into that business. But her customers aren't average workaday people: they're people who are willing and capable of and interested in investing time and effort and money and space into cultivating their relationships with horses, who want to learn more about them and use them for very specific ends.

Already today a lot of people have no idea how the internals of cars really work, do not properly care for their vehicles, and ultimately couldn't care less if someone set up a teleporter instead. The vehicle isn't the point for most people. For the people for which it is the point, they're the ones who obsessively follow Top Gear, wish they could buy Ferraris even if they have to rebuild the engine constantly, happily tinker away under the hood on the weekend: they already do that to the extent that their finances allow.

Driverless cars take nothing away from them except traffic jams during commute.

People genuinely enjoy doing lots of things, and perhaps there will be tracks and courses where they may continue to do so, but allowing members of the public to operate massive vehicles on public streets leads to thousands of deaths and injuries and millions of dollars in property damage. Driving will become like smoking: you're still allowed to do it, but only in isolated places where you can't harm nonconsenting people.

I genuinely enjoy driving cars and bikes. I blow through 40-50K miles a year driving country roads and highways, for no other reason than enjoyment.

I am completely on-board with having my commute automated. If public transportation was an option, I'd take it. This is the next best thing.

People who enjoy that are also a kind of nerds; I was one and the feeling was about the same as I get now when I switch on one of my 70s/80s computers. I changed nerd-ness as an awful lot of people died around me on motorcycles and in cars.

It's not important though; you are a menace to society if you drive yourself once robot cars are commonplace and thus you need to take your driving pleasures/status symbol to the track.

Yes, and I'm one of those people. However, I basically don't drink because I drive. I have a 6 month old, if he's home I don't drink because I can't have more than a beer and run out if I need to. When he's at grandma's I'll drink, however I'm still conservative because I know I'm getting up early in the morning and can't drive hungover.

I know in my cousins area they have a keys-to-us service. You drive to the party or wherever and they drop off a driver to drive your vehicle with you in home. Why? Because it's cheaper than a cab because you only pay one way, and you can get where you're going on time because you don't have to wait for a cab, which on say New Years Eve won't be on time or even in the ball park.

It's foolish to believe that leisure will beat practicality. People will get automated cars because it means they can work on their commute. Forget the dash it's a desk. Or you could watch a movie. Heck, not only could you predrink for the party, you could drink whilst on your way there.

Or the kids out at the movies and you decided to have a few drinks. They call wanting to be picked up? No problem, just send the car.

You'd no longer have to pay for expensive downtown parking, you could either pay for it to park in a cheaper less convenient lot or you could have it drive home if it's a short distance.

Yes I like to drive, but I also like starting fires with a bow and stick... but I normally just use a lighter.

One point missed in all the comments about enjoyment, is disruption doesn't care about enjoyment, just dollars and cents.

No one in a position of authority cares if you liked your bank teller or not; you're simply told you're going to be using an ATM now for financial reasons. Ditto office automation vs clerks and secretaries. Did you enjoy getting magazines and newspapers before the web wiped them out, well, no one in a position of authority cares what you enjoyed.

If people liked bank tellers and magazines more than ATM's and the Internet, they'd still be in business. (Wait, they are!)

I like the idea that in the future the only people manually operating cars and motorcycles will be doing it for fun rather than for the drudgery of daily life. That sounds like a better place to live. If the net benefit of driverless cars is reducing vehicles on the road and reducing traffic congestion think about how much more fun it will be to drive?

The driverless cars will automatically take the safest action and let you through when doing something reckless like cutting them off on the freeway etc. It kind of sounds amazing, you could be a total asshole on the road and no one would care... Imagine cruising down the freeway at 90MPH in rush hour swerving between drone vehicles and watching as they politely get out of your way. Its a driver's utopia

And as status symbols go, they pretty much tick all the required boxes.

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