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If driverless cars work at all, they'll be substantially safer than human-driven ones. There's a strong moral case for banning human-driven cars on public roads
by scarmig 10y ago
If driverless cars work at all, they'll be substantially safer than human-driven ones. There's a strong moral case for banning human-driven cars on public roads if it'll save tens of thousands of lives. There's also a strong possibility of media-driven moral panics. Think of poor little Billy, hit by one of those irresponsible human drivers!
Insurance companies will charge steep premiums to the risk takers who want to drive their own car. Alphabet etc. will have a well-oiled team of lobbyists in every state and country to pass laws to make driving safer for everybody (i.e. more optimized for Waymo cars).
There will be a lot of people who join the NRA (National Retrovehicle Association), who'll make a stink about things. And they'll fight a rearguard action and probably win some guarantees in the more rural states. But where 90% of Americans live, the economics and legalities will work out to push everyone to self-driving cars.
And then economies of scale will be lost, and even in the remaining areas human car driving will become a luxury for people who own their own private roads.
- ghaff 10y ago>Insurance companies will charge steep premiums to the risk takers who want to drive their own car. People make this claim. Why would there be a premium over what is paid today? Maybe there's a big premium relative to much lower premiums associated with new types of vehicles although there will still be insurance needed. But that's relative to a future state, not relative to today.
- Neliquat 10y agoAnd as less and lass cater to your now fringe activity, you will be herded into a specialty insurance, and it will go up. It will be a 180 from 100years ago. The rich will pay to drive themselves.
- Qwertious 10y agoInsurers will be able to 1. pay out less, and 2. sue auto companies if the car crashes, since they wrote the car's driving program.
- notahacker 10y ago> If driverless cars work at all, they'll be substantially safer than human-driven ones. That sounds like a bold claim. I mean, the current standard of technology works to quite a good extent already, performing many aspects of driving with considerably greater acumen than humans and being able to operate for extended periods without human intervention. It's also fairly well documented that the number of situations in which the software would have caused an accident without human intervention is above the average accident rate for human drivers, despite being tested in favourable conditions with sensibly conservative rules around humans intervening for a wide range of reasons before a critical situation can develop. So it already works whilst being substantially less safe than the average human driver (without human intervention). They're working on the making-it-safer part, but given the number of edge cases they've got to deal with for Level 5 driving capability I'm not sure we should be so sure it'll surpass human driving abilities in all road conditions.
- scarmig 10y agoI agree with your evaluation of where things stand now. I disagree that you can really call that "working." Working, for me, is when a typical consumer can buy it and use it day-to-day, on typical routes.
- notahacker 10y agoFair enough. I agree that there's no way they'll be allowed to be sold as a consumer product to operate hands-free on regular routes unless they become regarded as substantially safer than the median driver.