Self-driving cars

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If a self-driving car is known to be better at driving, thus causing fewer accidents and fewer deaths, would this be superior to having human drivers? I'd say yes, any thoughts?

they just have to be better than bad drivers.


it wouldn't help with motion sickness. technology still has a long way to go.

And if they glitch or are hacked?

I hope these become affordable in my lifetime there is no way I could drive and it would really improve my life.

You mean "better at driving" until the computer crashes, thus causing the car to crash into / topple a busload of schoolchildren?

You couldn't PAY me to have a self-driving car!!

Preciously.

These kinds of cars scare me. They’re death machines waiting to be hacked.

Plus, driving needs intuition. Most of us know if kids are playing sports to watch out - if that ball goes into the street, that kid is going to run out and try to get it.... computers can’t know that.

As long as a self-driving car has sufficient algorithms to detect what it can and cannot drive into. And if the car knows how to navigate different situations and not be hacked, then self-driving cars would be superior to human drivers. Still would be good to have an option for a person to be able to drive though, just in case something goes awry in the system that autopilot has to be disengaged.

But we are getting closer to self-driving cars that are better able to drive regardless of situation than humans. The problem is more of moral ethics in regards to self-driving cars: how does the car determine who dies (the car owner or someone else) if death to someone is the only option?

When self driving cars get into crashes, which party pays?

Didn't you hear of the Uber fatal incident?

And what if the computer routes your car the wrong way because you didn't put in the address right or didn't put in the town and state? It can also make you take longer routes to places. This will also increase bad driving because why learn if the computer does it for you? What if signal gets lost? Would the car just drive itself into the river or the sand to the ocean or onto the tracks?

Well, people already get lost all the time. It may be easier for people to put in an address correctly than figure out a complicated map. If you say, that they can just use Google Maps or something, then the risk of putting in the address incorrectly is just as present. Right, it would increase the number of people who don't know how to drive, but if we have self-driving cars, why would it be important that they know how to? If the signal getting lost does result in the car driving into the river of sand or something then that's not at all a safe vehicle and should never be placed on the market, if it is it's because of an institutional failure which might as well be a car with faulty airbags or an exploding engine.

No, but there are so many fatal car crashes by nonself-driving cars that the pros outway the cons (the question was regarding a self-driving car that can drive more accurately than a nonself-driving car)

I'm not sure, that's a really interesting question. I would guess insurance of the owner of the car that caused the incident. Perhaps the car companies could provide customers with insurance since any crash would technically be their fault? I'm not really sure about that one.

No, I mean better at driving including glitches. Because, while sure that could hypothetically happen. It's far more likely that the busload of schoolchildren will get toppled by someone drunk, or texting, or who is just a bad driver.

I mean, yeah, that could happen. I suppose that would result in a crash. But if glitches were possible it wouldn't be better than a human driver, and shouldn't be on the market. If it's hacked then that would probably result in a crash, but that would still be less than the number of people who die because of human error in driving (if it's not than that car shouldn't be on the market either).

Most good drivers know that, most drivers aren't good drivers. And computers have better reflexes than people.

Self driving cars could still get in crashes, but they drive much better than me

If self driving cars had a low financial cost, then I would get one

While people's concerns are valid, I think people tend to forget that this isn't the 90s any more.

Robots are already better at flying planes than people, and it seems to me that it's probably only a matter of time before they get better at driving cars too.

I'm not concerned about the risk of glitching (seems likely to be significantly lower than for people), getting lost (likewise), or hacking (just don't connect them to the internet). I am somewhat concerned about the vision problem, but I suspect that's relatively minor compared to angry drivers, frustrated drivers, bad drivers, short-sighted drivers, distracted drivers, and drunk drivers.

I know people who feel that piloting a car with an automatic transmission and cruise control isn't real driving.

Yesterday I had already slowed from 70 mph to about 35 mph in some heavy rain and then experienced an overwhelming downpour that reduced my vision to almost zero. The rumble bumps at the side of the road told me when I had finally managed to get completely off the road before stopping altogether, and I wonder what a self-driving car might have done to keep me from having a heart attack in total fright while it just kept rolling right on along.