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Another problem is consumer confidence. Self driving accidents have a much higher impact in the news and people's minds than human error accidents. The percept
by monkeynotes 8y ago
Another problem is consumer confidence. Self driving accidents have a much higher impact in the news and people's minds than human error accidents.
The perception problem is the same as air flight. If self driving cars can't be essentially accident free passengers will be filled with the anxiety of lack of control. Even if the self driving car is 99% safer than human operated cars it's a hard sell to the buyer when you face that 1% risk that the consumer doesn't perceive as being a mitigation toward their own driving safety skills.
Apologies for the incomprehensible last sentence, hope you get the gist though.
- Fricken 8y agoNovel things have a much higher impact in people's minds than routine things. Eventually self driving car crashes will be routine. 1 death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic kind of thing.
- vbezhenar 8y agoI have the same problems with taxis. They might make more economical sense for me. But their drivers are terrible and I fear being a passenger there, so I prefer to drive my car for my own safety.
- bluGill 8y agoGovernment investigators will not have that bias. I expect in ~10 years it will be illegal make a new car that is not self driving because self driving cars will be statically safer. Some years (10?) after that and human driving cars will be limited to parades. Note, I include in self driving cases where there is a human seemingly in control, but the computer will override bad input and even take over all driving as needed.. Edit: originally this implied that it would be illegal to posses a manually driven car. Governments will not remove all the existing cars from the road that quick.
- tudelo 8y agoYou think all cars that are not self-driving will be illegal in 10 years ?!?!?!
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- saiya-jin 8y agosorry but that is a very naive perception. what will happen in 10 years more realistically? things will get a bit better, regulations stiffen, maybe self-driving will be actually banned till it reaches maturity point (how to get there without millions beta testers is another topic). don't hold your breath that some government in indonesia or africa or india will do anything for self-driving soon, nobody will be banning anything there. they'll keep using whatever can drive on the roads till it fails to move, regardless of some fancy self-driving high-tech.
- Jagat 8y agoExcept that a few accidents and news coverage will bring out the suburban and anti-big-corp folks with banners. That'll put enough pressure on the regulators to impose draconian safety rules on the self-driving cars, slowing it down substantially. Regulations are driven a lot by feelings and emotions.
- phicoh 8y agoEven simple things are hardly self-driving at the moment. Take trains for example. No need to steer, have priority over anything else and basically can't brake. Yet, a limited (and mostly subway) trains are self driving. We have hardly any self 'driving' robots in day to day life. Those would be a lot slower and lighter. Given that we have no industry standards for those kinds of things, it would be surprising if even one is considered safe enough in 10 years. Let alone that they would be mandated. What makes them work at the moment is that they formally have to have a human in control. Same thing as an autopilot in a plane. But a few more deadly mistakes and the whole concept may get scrapped.
- massysett 8y agoHa, the DC Metro makes your point. It started out being nearly all self-driving. All the operator did was close the doors. Now they have disabled one automatic system after another. They are all manually driven now, riders endure a jerky ride and wait several seconds at platforms so the operators can manually open the doors.
- Symmetry 8y agoAirplanes have essentially the same problem with respect to accident publicity and we've managed to get a functional industry out of them, even if some people are afraid of flying and so never do. So while this is clearly a problem that will delay the introduction of driverless cars it's one that can be overcome. I sort of suspect Waymo would have been selling driverless cars a year ago if it weren't for this, actually.