In future driving will no longer be fun, if you want to drive "non-automated" car or disable "auto-pilot" your insurance company will automatically jack up your premium, since they would consider self driving cars "safer"
Too many of my commutes were made an unnecessary 50% or more longer because of drivers who were probably having a lot of fun until they caused an accident and backed up the road for everyone else.
My car, that I justified it's sportiness because of this hobby, is more expensive at the track, burns more, fuel, has more maintenance issues, and could just never perform the 3gs that a kart can.
Beyond commuting woes, density is also more efficient for providing services and for environmental concerns.
So I'm slightly worried that a move towards self-driving cars will allow us to backslide on this progress. Obviously I want the technology - it will be safer, more efficient, and healthier - but I'm worried about how culture could shift around it.
fun driving and reckless endangerment of the people on the road around you, including aggressive disregard for the rules of the road, especially driving on the shoulder are two very, very, very different things.
Raise the speed limits and make fines and enforcement more frequent for not using turn signals, aggressive lane-changing where other people are on the road, tail-gating, driving in the shoulder (REALLY???) and so on.
Oh, and make that driving test harder.
And then of course ban non self-driving cars from public roads the moment it becomes feasible.
EDIT: disregard the "lower the speed limits" part. I'm not sure why I wrote it (it was a long and tiring day...). Speed limits are mostly fine, but adherence to them is not. I stand by the rest of the comment.
The two are not disjoint things. A lot of people, particularly teenagers, engage in reckless driving behaviors because it's fun.
You're associating the two more closely than I am. Then again, I have a lot of fun driving many of the roads that I drive on and the fun that I have doesn't include the things I mentioned in my negatives list.
If self-driving cars prove objectively to have fewer accidents and resulting injuries and deaths, wouldn't that just make them a superior technology?
In that case, why shouldn't insurance charge more for traditional driving if self-driving were available on your car? That's just how insurance works, nothing new there.
I drive a manual transmission car, and enjoy using the flexibility that provides in my daily driving.
I drive emergency vehicles of various sizes, in a lot of less than ideal conditions (I live in upstate New York, so weather is a big factor in driving conditions).
I have no problem believing that a computer will be able to do an objectively better job of driving than I can. It will be able to react more predictably in routine driving, and respond _much_ faster to exceptional situations. In a collision, a modern car is _done_ processing the event (detecting the impact, deciding which safety restraints to deploy, and deploying them) before your body even recognizes that it happened.
A computer controlled car will make fewer mistakes and react better in emergencies than a human being will. It has nothing to do with the skill of the driver. It has everything to do with the amount of data that the car can gather (do you have 360 degree radar vision or direct access to sensors built into the car), and the speed with which it can process that data. This technology still has a lot of maturing to do, but it has made amazing strides in the past decade, and I'm confident that it will continue to do that.
I, for one, welcome our new robot chauffeurs.
Until someone misuses the protocol to gain an advantage or to cause a disruption (assuming it is peer to peer, decentralized).
If it is centralized, then um, there are other worries (privacy, control, etc).
Even if their reaction processing times are orders of magnitude faster and the sensors give you significantly better awareness, if there are conditions where the sequence of AI responses and priorities are conflicting or wrong, then you'll just be faster and better at getting the wrong solution, sometimes tragically so.
I don't doubt that we'll ultimately be much better off with self-driving cars being the rule, but it may be a bumpy road to get there.
I absolutely agree there is still a ways to go before this is mainstream technology. I also agree that we will get there eventually, and the world will be a better place for it.
I would guess it is more like 15 or 20 than it is like 50 (but of course I'm guessing).
[1] www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
1) you can still drive traditionally on private courses. 2) your right to enjoy hurling yourself around in a 2 ton missile shouldn't be more important than my right to life
If you want to have fun, have it at places where it doesn't kill people. It's like smoking, outside is fine - you are only killing yourself - but don't do it in bars/the office/hospitals/other places where you might kill others.
I’m also pretty sure that there were people waxing poetically about the joys of using horses for transportation a century ago and predicting doom and gloom because of the joyless and horseless future they foresaw. Those people probably didn’t shut up about it for the rest of their life, but in the end it all didn’t matter because they died and that’s that.
The thing is that most people on the street do not drive for fun, they drive to get from point A to point B and that’s that. Self-driving cars improve the quality and safety of going from point A to point B for them.
It depends on how much pleasure you get out of driving. I certainly think it's worth some fraction of a life. And of course, a certain amount of the risk comes from inattentive drivers who don't enjoy driving, and would rather read a book or eat cereal (or both) on the road.
What I'd like to know, though, is that as self-driving cars become developed, the labs are calculating the risk factors of various intersections, streets, exchanges, etc. That is, different roads can be analyzed by the robot cars and independently assigned a risk factor for a given section of street.
The resulting impact to traffic engineering and city resource prioritization could be a very interesting side-effect to the introduction of self-driving cars.
Is a collective devaluing of human life worth saving a few individual lives?
Consider if we cut down all trees within a dozen or so meters of roads, and installed guardrails everywhere. We could probably save many lives, but at the cost of devaluing the beauty of the countryside. Everyone's lives would become just that much more depressingly monotonous and sterile, for the sake of a preventing a few roadside deaths.
Safety should not be our society's primary concern. Quality of life is a much better thing to strive for.
You realize that we did that and it resulted in more deaths, right?
We could string safety nets between all skyscrapers and under all bridges. We could ban convertibles. We could put fences along all rivers and ban backyard swimming pools. We could ban fireplaces.
There are any number of things that we could hypothetically do to prevent accidental or untimely deaths that we do not do because they would degrade the quality of our lives.
Skyscrapers generally don't have windows that can be opened or easily broken, and very rarely have balconies. When's the last time you heard of someone going through a skyscraper window? It's a safety net.
We probably couldn't string safety nets under all bridges. However, we have already been fencing them off to prevent jumpers.
I'm not clear on why you are targeting convertibles specifically; I'm unaware of any special danger they pose. However, I would argue that banning cars entirely would raise our quality of life, if combined with other measures.
I'll concede the river one since there are too many possibilities there to argue exhaustively.
I could prevaricate on the swimming pool thing, since my parents own one and our quality of life probably would be better off without it, but not worth it.
I'm not clear on enough building codes to know how much we discourage fireplaces, but most new buildings don't seem to be built with them. We appear to have invented central heating over the last several decades, which is both safer and more effective.
The point being that the reason we don't implement a lot of "safety" measures is not because they "degrade the quality of our lives" but because they don't work. In fact, most of the so-called safety measures you luridly imagine actually should be done because they'd increase the quality of our lives... so really, the question is why we haven't done them, if QoL is such an important factor.
Automated driving is only useful if you know where you're going. If you're on a leisurely ride through the country or are looking for a place with no address, you can't use automated navigation. So disabling it would be a necessity for a variety of driving purposes. As an aside, motorsport enthusiasts would be up in arms if they had to pay a premium just to be able to drive their expensive sports sedan the way they want on a closed track.
What will probably happen is a black box will record if the car was in automated mode when a crash occurs. If it was driving itself, the manufacturer will probably be at fault and forced to pay the insurance company. If you were driving it, the standard rules apply.
I have to say though, automated drifting is really depressing. I used to drive a Toyota MR2, which is an ass-heavy car that was very susceptible to snap oversteer. Unlike most other cars, if you felt like the car's rear end was about to slide out of control, you had to PUNCH the gas to get traction back. You basically have to fight all your instincts and do something crazy in a split second or end up spinning backwards towards god knows what. It's the most exciting thing i've ever experienced in a car (even more than sitting in on hot laps with an indy driver in a Lexus IS-F), and I would never get to experience it with automated driving.
As for non-drifting, automated driving is definitely an amazing and useful feature. Writing code on my way to work sounds like fun. And I know it sounds controversial, but if there was some way to couple a breathalyzer with automated driving, we might be able to use our cars as taxis that pick us up and drop us off without us having the ability to drive. But perhaps that's hoping for too much...
I love to drive. I do not enjoy dealing with major backups. When I'm leisure driving, it's out to a small town in the middle of nowhere later in the afternoon or when everyone is at work; or, it's out in the boonies because wow that view when I take a certain turn is just absolutely spectacular.
I don't think those are impossible problems to solve. For the leisurely ride, define a radius or area and let the car do a 'random' walk (or ride on only small roads), or visit beautiful spots where g+ users have shared pictures, etc. For a place with no address, give a lng,lat or drop a pin on a map.
Sure you would pay more than owner of automated car, but probably not more than you are already paying. People on bicycles don't pay any insurance at all, I don't see anybody complaining about them (for that reason anyway).
Automated cars open the doors to:
- A potentially larger market for private tracks where you'll be enjoying racing, or even pleasure driving. It would be totally possible to have roads that are only here for pleasure driving. I can picture the Izu Skyline or other really beautiful roads that you pay to get a marvelous driving experience.
- A much safer world. If every car on public roads would be driving itself, you would not have to worry about a driver having an abnormal behavior and hurting/killing you in the process[1].
- Cheaper insurance? I don't really believe this, but it could happen, as there would be a lot less accidents.
I enjoy driving, I really do, but I'll use a self driving car any day, and I'm totally willing to pay an extra to drive in a safe and controlled environment like a private track. I think it's a win for everyone. If you enjoy driving, you'll enjoy staying safe, and self driving cars are bringing this safety.
[1]: I recently had an accident while coming back home, an old driver panicked because he didn't know where to go, and suddenly pushed hard on his brakes.
I haven't run the numbers myself, but it'd be worth checking to see what insurance numbers look like for private yachts or horses.
It's funny seeing BMW try to be a forerunner in this space, after all of their "BMW: The Ultimate Driving Machine" ad campaigns. They were one of the few car makers that actually spoke of driving fun! (Or, well, driving pleasure)
Insurance companies have to compete on rate pricing to some extent, so there isn't too much room to move radically north there. But I could definitely see their getting into real-time pricing models, and/or denying coverage as a means of minimizing their responsibility in your agreement.
Spending more money to do it.
Unless, of course, the manual drivers counteract by driving more dangerously. Why stop for a red traffic light if all other cars are driven by computer? Can you try and get an autonomous car to drive into a ditch by moving your car very close to it?
I think there will have to be laws governing such behavior ('harassment of an autonomous vehicle'), with video cameras in the autonomous vehicles providing the evidence.
That also is a reason that I think driverless cars will not work everywhere for quite a number of years. In the typical old city in Western Europe, an automated car will have to negotiate with pedestrians and cyclists for room. Once the pedestrians know that a car will brake if 'challenged', they will change their behavior. I know I would (I guess driving a self-driving car through the center of London or, better yet, Amsterdam in rush hour must be one of the hardest challenges)
Also, why would pedestrians or even cyclists care about one way streets? Even if they do, consider the case where streams of cyclists enter a one way street just in front of an automatic car. That could easily happen in Amsterdam (for an impression, see http://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/03/28/amsterdam-bicyc... or http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/world/europe/a-sea-of-bike...)
Did you understand segregated routing to mean separate streets?
However, I'm not aware of the same being true for airplanes, plane crashes, and autopilot systems.
On the other hand, it's a lot hard to get a pilot's license compared to a driver's license. (What are the requirements for a driver's license these days? Having a pulse? No, I don't think they check for that...)
Self-driving cars ought to also be capable of driving like grandmothers. That's part of why I expect them to be safer. The idea that you can drive a car to the brink of a high-speed collision and then magically expect it to out-react a seasoned driver into avoiding an essentially unavoidable accident is juvenile fantasy.
[0] - self-driving cars constantly talking with each other could drive much closer to each other than current "safe distance", much faster, while utilizing aerodynamic effects to conserve fuel, and that system would still in principle be safer than human drivers.
My Audi
- makes the steerwheel vibrate if I veer off my lane, actively works against that (limited 'self-steering', but really, really crappy, useless and stupid in its current incarnation)
- has lights in the side mirrors that light up when someone's left or right behind of me. If I set the turning signal to a 'blocked' direction, the lights flash. This system is immensely satisfying for me, works awesome.
- stops the car on its own if it believes that a crash cannot be avoided and while I still go 30km/h or less. It breaks _immediately_
- issues a high pitched warning noise if it assumes that a collision might be imminent but outside of the safety zone (> 30km/h)
- supports automated cruising control, that breaks/accelerates on its own, depending on the traffic ahead and to the side (it won't overtake a car while you're right of it).
That said: I love driving. I love leisure rides, love to drive on the Autobahn. That car's rather 'slow' (compared to previous company cars) and tops out at 220km/h. When it is safe I really like to drive at that speed.
I think the resistance to self-driving cars is based on mistrust (you give up control, after all) and ego mostly - but it doesn't help the industry or supporters of that idea to paint everyone that likes to drive as a potential 2 ton bullet. A little perspective on both sides would help a lot here.
Here that's not combined, if there's something in my blind spot I just have those lights (flashing if I set a turning signal). There's an assistant that is supposed to keep me in my lane. In theory it ignored lane changes only if I set the turning signal (-> intended by me) and otherwise steers in the opposite direction (I can still beat it, it just tries to convince me otherwise). Plus, it vibrates the steering wheel.
It doesn't work, though. Audi was obviously so afraid that people start leaning back and drinking a nice cup of coffee that they added a very annoying 'are you still alive' test. That assistant is going to power down on its own as soon as it things you're not steering anymore. Which often happens without reason (just driving straight).
Basically that thing is only working if you hold the steering wheel like a 50's/60's Hollywood star, turning left and right on a dead straight street. Maybe the next incarnation will improve this design..