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I suspect self-driving mode will be safer than human drivers only when every car is driving itself. Meat and silicon brains sharing the same road in large chunk
by hermitcrab 3y ago
I suspect self-driving mode will be safer than human drivers only when every car is driving itself. Meat and silicon brains sharing the same road in large chunks of high velocity metal is a scary prospect.
- jantissler 3y agoBut that's not enough. What about motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians? You will always have to deal with "meat brains".
- TheLoafOfBread 3y agoTech bros looove to reinvent train over and over again. Let's make self driving, which does not work with other participant, so let's put it on special roads, with special signage and nobody else is allowed to enter such roads. Whoops, train again.
- dgellow 3y agoOr disable self-driving in hyper-dense areas such as cities? I know close to nothing about cars and driving but I guess it's an ok thing to have outside of cities?
- hermitcrab 3y agoA self-driving car is probably going to be safer in dense traffic, because of the low speeds.
- unshavedyak 3y agoI imagine it could also make congestion more efficient. I believe a big factor to congestion is human behavior. We at least have good ideas about better ways to drive during congestion.. which humans rarely follow.
- michaelt 3y agoIf your self-driving car lacks the scene understanding to notice a kid's about to run out from behind that truck, chasing that ball - safer to be on the freeway, where there are no kids chasing balls. Or if your self-driving car struggles with tight corners, or complex junctions? You won't see many of those on the freeway. On the other hand, if your self-driving car suffers random failures to stop, unexpected swerving or a propensity to hit into stationary objects - I agree lower speeds would be safer.
- dgellow 3y agoSure but a city is really complicated, you have people crossing, biking, skateboarding. You have delivery trucks blocking the street, construction work, etc.
- jacobsimon 3y agoAnother option would be to build driverless road lanes, repurpose the carpool and truck lanes, or designate certain streets. Seems like a no-brainer for improving safety. I think it also would have been easier/faster to build networked vehicles that can communicate with one another over a standard protocol, but for some reason the industry didn’t opt to standardize things in that way, and now we have a bunch of rogue driverless cars that make independent decisions instead of taking into account each other’s plans.
- piva00 3y ago> Another option would be to build driverless road lanes, repurpose the carpool and truck lanes, or designate certain streets. Seems like a no-brainer for improving safety. You can call those driverless road lanes "tracks" and put some trains on it.
- jacobsimon 3y agoA radical idea!
- speed_spread 3y agoIf every car is fully self driving, it becomes just a low-efficiency / highly granular public transportation.
- dfxm12 3y agoGiven some of the issues we've seen with other cars driving correctly and predictably or negotiating things that aren't cars on the road, I'm not sure taking the human element out of it is enough. It would be safer still if the cars can talk to each other and to the roads.