General Motors, Ford and other established automakers risk becoming relics if they don’t catch up to Chinese carmakers and technology companies in electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
General Motors, Ford and other established automakers risk becoming relics if they don’t catch up to Chinese carmakers and technology companies in electric vehicles and self-driving cars.
Ew, fuck off. I don’t trust those things being on the road near me, not with how much worse they are than human drivers right now.
As someone who works in the bay area California. The Waymos are unfortunately better than most human drivers. It is noticeable…
Which isn’t a high bar to clear. Humans are horrible at driving.
At least theres a human to be responsible though, in most places with mandatory insurance.
Personally, I think waymo should be allowed to operate, but each car should be tied to someones ownership/ liscence (ie the CEO’s) and that it should come with an automatic guilty / full at fault in any accident or incident.
Agreed. I’ve also seen a lot of hits (and sometimes runs ) in San Francisco. I haven’t seen a Waymo hit anyone yet and they have been able to navigate people parallel parking on the street. Waymos are not the best but they haven’t hit anyone and def know how to drive better than the average person in the city.
It’s the lidar, my dude. If musk hadn’t demanded those be ripped out then Teslas wouldn’t be such absolute shite at driving with their lame cameras.
It’s
When it comes to average driving skill.
Depends on whose. The Waymo ones do remarkably well. Other makers aren’t nearly as good.
Isn’t waymo just using remote workers to drive the cars?
Not exactly; they’ve got a remote worker facility where they’ve got about 1 person per 100 cars, who maps out what to do in situations where the software can’t handle it, but doesn’t do a full-on remote-drive.
I’d prefer that to them just letting an AI do it
I’d rather pay a taxi driver.
For a lot of people, the main risk with a taxi is being attacked by the driver.
They said taxi, not uber.
Those have the same problem, but less concentrated ownership
Well, yeah…
I don’t care. Any self driving car is resigning my autonomy to a corporation. That is not fucking happening.
Yeah, but the whole point of a car is autonomy and independence. The person’s, not the car’s. If you’re looking for someone, or something, to transport you places, buses and trains are much cheaper and safer.
Self-driving cars can give an amazing level of autonomy and independence to people like never before. Think about elderly and disabled people who normally would have to rely on others to get around having the ability to do so on their own terms.
Also think about freedom of time you would get back. Stuck in a traffic jam? Watch a movie, read a book, get some road head. Everyone suddenly has their own personal drivers.
Accidents would decrease too (Waymo has published a peer reviewed paper showing that it’s almost 12x safer than people). No having to worry about drunk or tired drivers.
Most people don’t care about driving, they just want a way to get from point A to B, and self-driving enables all of that.
I’d rather live somewhere with buses and trains. You can get places when old and/or drunk, you build a better world for everyone, and you don’t funnel money into shitty privately owned tech companies.
And until we can tear down and rebuild the world, that’s not going to be possible for a large swath of people. Think about places that don’t have good mass transit infrastructure and probably won’t. This gives those people access.
There are many, many, people that could be granted good bus service without tearing down and rebuilding the world. The problem is political. Every day and every dollar we put into other lesser solutions comes with a large opportunity cost.
Imagine if we’d focused on buses for the past 22 years instead of waymo. How many people could be served by the $16 billion in funding waymo got?
I don’t want a driver. Even if I had enough money to pay a personal chauffeur, I wouldn’t want one. I prefer to drive my own car.
But maybe I’m in the minority on that one. Maybe most people would prefer self-driving cars. That’s fine, I guess, but I just hope someone keeps making regular cars, because I ain’t interested in being driven around by a robot.
Ideally I’d be able to live in a city or town designed around people, not cars. So I wouldn’t have to own a car, autonomous driving or otherwise, to get around.
Eventually your auto insurance will go up to the point where it’s unaffordable to drive yourself.
This isn’t a near future prediction, but it’ll happen once self-driving cars reach a critical mass.
Why would the cost of insuring human-driven cars increase? It’s not like the risk of a human drivers will suddenly go up with driverless cars on the road. In fact, driverless cars, if they worked, would lower the claims rate of human-driven cars.
And the insurance companies won’t pressure owners to switch to driverless vehicles. True self-driving vehicles won’t require insurance at all. If the manufacturer is completely responsible for any risk, then it’s the manufacturer that has all the liability. Your self-driving car would just have a lifetime worth of insurance coverage built into the purchase price. A world of only self driving cars is a world where car insurance companies don’t exist.
Because humans are terrible drivers and would be responsible for the vast majority of crashes. And the fact that self driving cars don’t need insurance would drive up the costs since the premium pool would be much smaller.
That makes zero mathematical sense.
Then I’ll sell my car for scrap and walk or bike. And when I can’t walk or bike anymore, well, there’s always mobility scooters.
Well then… you’re the market they’re talking about.
Because I know I’m never going to buy a self driving car (or at least not any time in the next 20 years) I’m not particularly annoyed by the risk of me owning one. My concern is instead with someone else buying one and then hitting me with it, because I keep hearing about how Teslas specifically are way worse than a human at driving around and not getting into “accidents”.
Self-driving cars are already safer than human drivers.
Hopefully you can admit you’re wrong, but I doubt it.
It is specifically Tesla I don’t trust, but they are also the loudest about “full self driving” by a lot. And before you tell me Tesla is better than human drivers they are the company that intentionally obfuscates any details from incident reports involving their vehicles and are the cars that have “max max mode”.