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This is bad news (despite being a BMW owner) In future driving will no longer be fun, if you want to drive "non-automated" car or disable "auto-pilot" your ins

• saraid216 13y ago
  More terrible than killing someone: Spending more money to do it.
• sliverstorm 13y ago
  In future driving will no longer be fun 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)
  • CanSpice 13y ago
    Note that "The Ultimate Driving Machine" doesn't imply that a human is the one driving. :-)
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• robinhoode 13y ago
  Is the cost to society (in lives lost) worth the cost to individual enjoyment?
  • barrkel 13y ago
    The cost of all your enjoyment is your own life; you too will die. 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.
    • ewoodrich 13y ago
      Car accidents have unfortunate side effects, in that generally more than one driver's life is put at risk.
      • barrkel 13y ago
        Indeed. That's why I ride motorcycles instead.
    • bdamm 13y ago
      There is, I believe, a certain amount of risk simply be being on the road at all. No self-driving car is going to prevent that. 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.
  • Crito 13y ago
    Life becomes less valuable when you can do less with it. In the extreme case, we could all spend our lives in styrofoam boxes hooked up to feeding tubes, but what sort of life would that be? I would argue, a valueless one. 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.
    • saraid216 13y ago
      > Consider if we cut down all trees within a dozen or so meters of roads, and installed guardrails everywhere. You realize that we did that and it resulted in more deaths, right?
      • Crito 13y ago
        Whatever, bad example then. My point stands unless you lack an imagination. 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.
        • saraid216 13y ago
          Well, I wasn't trying to debate your point, but if you insist on being huffy, 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.
• akgoel 13y ago
  Disagree. Driving will now have increased insurance prices associated with increased risk. The roads will be safer.
• deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
• jonnathanson 13y ago
  Either that, or you'll take on some sort of hazard liability, and they'll find a way to see that you waive all coverage during the periods in which you're personally operating the vehicle. 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.
• imgabe 13y ago
  If you want to have fun, there will no doubt be private tracks where you can go and drive in a fun way. As someone who just gave up commuting about 1 traffic-laden hour each way, driving stopped being fun long, long ago. 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.
  • rayiner 13y ago
    As someone with a similar commute, I lament I can only upvote this once. Every time I-95 severely backs up because some asshole managed to crash on a day with perfect weather and visibility, I think to myself: "I hope it was worth it."
    • wwweston 13y ago
      As bad as being stuck in traffic is, usually you're having a better day than whoever was involved in the wreck, most of whom probably didn't do it on purpose.
  • joshu 13y ago
    I would LOVE to have the car drive me autonomously to the track and back. Highway driving is tiring/dangerous/boring.
  • smileysteve 13y ago
    I autocross and take my car to a private track for time trials, I'm starting to face the fact that this is not the best plan because there is now a karting track (0-120 in 6 seconds) that is closer to me. 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.
    • Pxtl 13y ago
      Embrace the Kart. My dad used to do that as a hobby and they're impressive machines. Just remember that you've got no crumple zones and your legs are right at the front.
• Nicholas_C 13y ago
  I think the lives of humans are more important than some thrill seekers who want to drive around a few tons of metal without paying extra.
  • schrodinger 13y ago
    What's the point of a life not enjoyed?
    • mchusma 13y ago
      The issue is only people putting other lives at risk. Driving is statistically unsafe for other people, not just yourself. 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
    • a1a 13y ago
      What's the point of life if you die? I don't want to die, therefore I strongly suggest we make it illegal for humans to drive vehicles on public roads. The trade-off is in my opinion really small compared to the millions of lives saved. 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.
    • freehunter 13y ago
      What's the point of a life wasted when someone loses control of their car and injures someone who was driving responsibly?
    • arrrg 13y ago
      I’m pretty sure people in one century will still be easily able to drive around for fun. Just like I can go horse riding for fun right now, despite horse riding being obsolete as actual transportation. 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.
• ewoodrich 13y ago
  Why the scare quotes on "safer"? 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.
  • WiseWeasel 13y ago
    A self-driving car system might be statistically safer than a human drivers in overall conditions, and still be prone to failure in an exceptional situation a particular driver wouldn't have been. If you have the potential to be that driver in that situation, I could understand feeling the scare quotes are warranted. Which percentile of the population does an automated system need to outperform to be safer rather than "safer"?
    • JshWright 13y ago
      I am (in my own estimation) a very good driver. 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.
      • 13y ago
• ollysb 13y ago
  I can't see any reason why we can't have both; you control the car until it detects a dangerous situation and then takes over. Sounds ideal really, you could go faster than you can now, safe in the knowledge that if things go bad the computer will kick in and take over.
  • bdamm 13y ago
    I think part of the safety boost of self-driving cars is that they don't get impatient, and neither will you since you're reading a book/email/facebook/whatever. 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.
    • m4x 13y ago
      There's no reason why you can't drive it to the brink of a crash and then have it recover for you. The 'brink' in this case is the latest the computer can reliably recover - not a point 100ms before an unavoidable collision.
      • TeMPOraL 13y ago
        But why would you want that? Why wouldn't you want to use a system that can get you to your destination much faster, cheaper and safer[0], only because you want to experience the "fun" of being in a traffic jam? [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.
  • glhaynes 13y ago
    I'd think that very often by the time things have gone wrong, it's too late to prevent the crash even with perfect intelligence. Unless perhaps you have the system take back over so often that it's more frustrating to manually drive than to just leave it on auto-pilot anyway.
• aetherson 13y ago
  We should expect that, assuming that self-driving cars are in fact safer, insurance rates will go down for people with self-driving cars, and remain the same for manual drivers.
  • dwiel 13y ago
    The rates for manual drivers will be a function of how safe that pool of drivers are. If a large portion of the manual drivers do it for fun and are more reckless than the current average driver, their rates may in fact go up.
  • Someone 13y ago
    They will go down for manual drivers, too. If you hit your brakes now, you get hit from behind. If the car behind you is a robot, it will come to a stop at 5cm from your car. 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)
    • maxerickson 13y ago
      It might work out better than you think in your last paragraph. Auto routed vehicles will reliably choose the 'main' route through an area (instead of whichever they feel is fastest), so segregated routing should work better (and with little additional physical infrastructure you can have one way rush hour streets and such).
      • 13y ago
• peterwwillis 13y ago
  I don't think this will be the case. 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...
  • stefan_kendall 13y ago
    Please stop "leisure driving". Traffic is a tremendous drain on my life as it is with superfluous cars on the road.
    • chaz 13y ago
      I suspect people looking for a "leisure drive" abhor traffic as much as you. They're probably on quieter roads with fewer people, cars, and cops.
    • deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
• rayiner 13y ago
  As a BMW owner myself, I say: "good riddance to driving being fun." I used to get a kick out of it when I was younger, but now that I'm married with a kid it's just an exercise in paranoia and frustration. People are fucking nuts in the way they drive. My friend just got T-boned hard enough to flip his car 360 degrees a couple of months ago, by some asshole speeding in the shoulder as traffic was backed up. I see an accident at least once a week commuting into Philadelphia. Teenagers (16-20) just plain shouldn't be on the road the way most of them drive. It's no wonder that traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people 5-35. The government should ban non-self-driving cars as soon as feasible. If you think about it: it's utterly ridiculous that a publicly-funded infrastructure with a crucial utilitarian purpose should be used for "fun."
  • sukuriant 13y ago
    "by some asshole speeding in the shoulder as traffic was backed up." 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.
    • TeMPOraL 13y ago
      I'd say lower the speed limits. And implement ANPR systems on every straight part of every road, make them enforce those limits in a ruthlessly automated way. That should finally let traffic engineers do some real work optimizing the road network. 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.
      • sukuriant 13y ago
        Roads are already engineered in the general case for faster than the speed limit. Why do you want them to go even slower?
• User8712 13y ago
  You'd pay a premium over those that exclusively use auto-pilot. That premium should still be lower than what you pay now. Reason being, you'll still be driving yourself, but now you're surrounded by auto-pilot vehicles. Therefore, you should be involved in less accidents as auto-pilot cars react faster to your mistakes, avoid following you too close, avoid merging into your lane, backing into you in a parking lot, etc. So, driving on auto-pilot might be 90% safer, and driving without auto-pilot, in a world where the majority use auto-pilot, you might be 60% safer than today. Either way, less accidents, safer roads, lower insurance.
• jrockway 13y ago
  Considering insurance companies already insure airplanes, and you can turn the autopilot off without losing insurance, I somehow doubt this future. Airplanes are both more expensive and cause more damage when you crash them, and yet, you can rent them and insure them all the same.
  • raldi 13y ago
    As I understand it, most car accidents are caused by driver error, and the belief is that self-driving cars will have a better miles-driven-to-accidents ratio. However, I'm not aware of the same being true for airplanes, plane crashes, and autopilot systems.
    • jrockway 13y ago
      Indeed, the GA autopilot systems are pretty simple: keep wings level, altitude hold, vertical speed hold, etc. On the other hand; you can take a lot more risks in your plane that will cost the insurance company a lot of money -- tailstrikes, flying into IMC, flying while sleepy, etc. If you total your Piper Cub, that's going to cost the insurance company a lot of money. If you total your Prius, that's cheaper. 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...)
  • eonil 13y ago
    IMO, that's because the AI is not yet proven to be actually safer than human. And it's pretty interesting what will be happen if the AI eventually comes up. Anyway, it doesn't seem to happen anytime soon.
• eonil 13y ago
  I think that's absolutely reasonable that they remove your premium if you want to remove other people's safety just for your own fun.
• wazoox 13y ago
  Driving cars for most people is only fun in ads, where people always enjoy empty streets, wide roads across beautiful wilderness, and the joy of utter freedom. Truth is that almost all of real life driving is a terrible chore, and "having fun" on the road generally means taking irresponsible risks for you and others.
• uniclaude 13y ago
  This is great news to me. 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.
  • saraid216 13y ago
    > - Cheaper insurance? I don't really believe this, but it could happen, as there would be a lot less accidents. 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.
• jotm 13y ago
  Good news is this future won't be in our lifetime :-)