Didn't save Elaine Herzberg.

A vision of a possible future where capitalism might go with the rise of self-driving cars: https://youtu.be/040ejWnFkj0

This is real and good news. Autonomous driving systems have gotten very good and safe (well, Waymo and Tesla FSD).

Taking vehicle out of the hands of humans WILL save hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.

Yet most comments here want to complain that we should be building public transit instead. Glass is always half full on this topic for some reason.

what about when an autonomous car kills someone, and the car company remotely deletes important onboard logs to avoid culpability?

I love this conversation as the death spasm of driver culture. On the one hand, a lot of hard data. On the other hand, myths.

Honestly, mount a front and back dash camera, and allow people to submit tickets for speeding and tailgating themselves.

I’m not kidding excessive speed and not keeping a safe distance equates for some 50% of all deadly traffic incidents. It’s because a small and vocal minority drives like absolute fucking assholes and they will rally lawmakers not to introduce speed limits and to loosen grip on enforcement. The ADAC (German motor association) is a perfect example. When they announced after decades that they support a 130km max speed limit members jumped by the doves.

The only vastly meaningful improvement I can see in FSD is faster reaction times when it comes to assholes. Coincidentally those are the people who insist on driving petrol and will never upgrade to FSD because they like to drive like assholes.

IMHO it’s time for strict enforcement. Let’s ban them from the road finally. Set fines in percent from income. Allow self reporting via dash cams. Add stricter penalties for recurring offences, if you’re caught speeding 5 times in 2 days your licence is suspended.

That’ll have a much bigger impact than FSD. Maybe we can rally our representatives making them all giddy with all the extra cash they can earn from these offenders?

I feel like we never get real data on autonomous cars as we never do with data centers. It’s hard to tell if bad stories are anecdotal or rooted in truth. I hear the vast majority of accidents would be things that no human could avoid either - but then I’d also be anecdotal.

Tesla has tons of data to the same. Elon ftw.

You have to remember that this is data from the US, where the road death rate is just about level with Somalia, something like 30% of road deaths involve drunk drivers, and something like 50% of fatalities overall are because the casualty wasn't wearing a seatbelt.

Driver training is non-existent, vehicle safety inspections are frankly comical.

I have been driven in a car by an American colleague, supposedly trained to a high standard (former public safety) and frankly I think you could train a pigeon to peck buttons to control the car better.

We'll have arrived at the automated transit network when they stop putting up road signs. The cars know where they are, and how to get there. Signs are for fallible ignorant humans.