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A million dollar bond from the state seems kind of excessive
by geogra4 15y ago
A million dollar bond from the state seems kind of excessive
- AndrewDucker 15y agoA pile-up could easily cause a million dollars worth of damage. A measure that makes sure that the responsible businesses are serious about safety doesn't sound that unreasonable to me.
- geogra4 15y agoI guess it makes sense when only large businesses are the ones to own these automobiles. It puts individual ownership out of reach.
- endtime 15y ago>Businesses wishing to test their self-driving cars have to buy a million dollar bond from the state. It's not for individual owners.
- baconner 15y agoWell its not about individual ownership its about businesses testing commercial self driving cars right? Seems to me that a company is going to need to sink many millions in to design, build, and test a truly road safe self driving car no? Even considering it as a hardware and software mod to an existing model.
- SideburnsOfDoom 15y agoIndividual ownership of driverless cars is out of reach, and always has been. This pilot program brings it a step closer, despite clearly just a test (e.g. requires two drivers in the car)
- maxerickson 15y agoIt isn't even that big a number. People with lots of assets carry that much or more liability insurance and they aren't paying enormous amounts for it.
- stonemetal 15y agoHow is a robot caused pile-up any different from a human caused pile-up? Do human Nevada drivers have to carry a million dollar bond?
- tzs 15y agoHuman drivers are not a new technology being field tested in a new and challenging environment.
- jcdreads 15y agoDrivers in most U.S. states (I can only speak for VT, PA, and MA) are required to carry liability insurance in order to drive legally. The amount varies. Robot drivers are a new and unproved technology. After not too many years I'd expect that they will cause way fewer accidents per mile driven than human drivers.
- protomyth 15y agoAdd that there is not a whole lot of case law on robot driven vehicles to understand how far the accident will go legally (unknown expense for an unknown number of parties)
- damoncali 15y agoFunny. I was thinking it sounded low.
- maigret 15y agoNot excessive as long as Nevada has a complete monopoly ;)
- larrik 15y agoOne crash survivor with a broken neck could eat up that million quick.
- bh42222 15y agoThat would restrict it to big business. But the requirement that two drivers need to be in the car will restrict it to no one who wants to invest in it to be more profitable. Right now this is simply for experimentation and I wonder who'd drop one million dollars just to experiment?
- Schwolop 15y agoLet's see now: CMU, Stanford, MIT, UPenn, USC, LAAS, USyd, Oxford, Caltech, just to name a few. All of these universities have already dropped at least that much building technology for the DARPA Grand Challenges or related research demonstrations.
- bh42222 15y agoRight. But I want my car to drive me to work and back while I sleep or read. But to get there I think first business must commercialize it through their simple desire to increase profits, then it may become cheap and accessible enough for average Joes like me. When you require two people with a driver's license in the car at all times you kill any profitable commercial reason to use self-driving cars. And that to me is a huge mistake. Commuting to work (if you drive > 2 0minutes at highway speeds) is probably the most dangerous thing by far that all of us do on any given day. Distracted drivers, drunk drivers, sleepy drivers (like me!) this is why we need self-driving cars. But I think the path to mass use of self-driving cars goes through commercial use of self-driving cars.
- wmf 15y agoI guess it wasn't clear enough that this is the regulation for testing autonomous cars on public roads, not for deployment of autonomous cars.