Be Excellent To Each Other

How would the payment model work there? Like a cab for the journey, or would you buy a package of X miles?

Also wonder if like Uber how long it would take for them to be available outside of big towns.

Old cars are mostly less safe for the driver and passengers who have chosen to get in it, though (barring some questions around bonnet hard points for collisions with pedestrians.) Whereas in a world of near-perfect driverless cars, manual cars are going to be more dangerous for everyone around you. So there's a consent angle there that means the two scenarios are not the same.

But I broadly agree that the adoption cycle would have to work around the economic and ecological concerns of forcing everyone to junk still-working cars before their time. Still, I imagine the car companies would love it, it'd be like the early 00s when everyone upgraded to HDTV in the space of a few years.

The rest of Europe will get it sorted and we'll all be going round on carts made of bits of their old cars, pulled along on our decayed roads by horses.

What happens when you choose emergency shutdown and it was the wrong decision, causing you to crash?

Certain large software companies have a gaggle of lawyers trying to work that out at the moment.

The same thing that happens now if I do something wrong and crash, I would presume.

I doubt it, otherwise you'd have to be paying attention to what's going on all the time. And if I ain't drinkin' in my technocar, I'm bangin' hawt chix in my technocar.

You have to wash technocar and take the kiddies to the park.

Don't marry her, bang me!

Bravo!

No, if the car is driving and you intervene causing an accident it is your fault, irrelevant of alcohol. It counts as driving with undue care and attention. There is no expectation that you would need to use the emergency stop button, but should you do so frivolously then in the car of an accident, you are to blame.

Ah, I read that backwards, as in what happens if you don't press the button but doing so would have avoided crashing.

I bet there won't be a button anyway.

I'm actually really quite excited about the idea of driverless cars. If the cars don't have any human 'over-ride' controls then they can just tootle along by themselves, right? I could see useful scenarios from this - go pick up the kids from school/park/club and bring them home safely. Go collect my shopping/takeaway dinner and bring it home. Come pick me up from the airport after my plane lands (saving expensive parking costs).

Sleeping while the car drives overnight to a holiday destination would be ace.

Boozing and banging chix would be awesome too.

That's what insurance is for, right? Just like it is now.

I was thinking about it some more, and suppose it depends, is the emergency shutdown is going to be 'cut all power, apply 100% brakes immediately' or a 'stop ASAP'? If the cars can not only drive themselves but also communicate with each other (I'm sure I read about car-car communication to warn of upcoming dangers a while ago) and react faster than a person could, they should be protected even more against poor use of the stop button.

Personally think the emergency button should lock the brakes on and shut off the power, and entirely bypass any self-driving stuff.

Imagine what you'd want it to do if the car suddenly took off across a field and kept accelerating - that's what I'd want the big red button for.

Also more mundane things like a fire or the inevitable folk getting carsick.

You need two emergency buttons, I think. "Pull over and stop safely to the best of your ability, computer," and "holy shit stop right now."

And a turbo boost button.

And the all-important blue shell launcher.

The button aims you at the fat man on the bridge.

Nah.

Insurance will fall to the manufacturers, under liability policies. Nobody is entirely sure, to be fair, but that is the way it is headed. Now where it all falls between hardware/software will be for them to sort out. They could theoretically be dicks about it and make you pay a premium for it anyway, but then one manufacturer will be confident enough to add in free insurance for all their cars, and it'll be hard for the others not to follow suit. Though, people being people, they'll just work out what the insurance costs them and build it into the road price.

Unless more people prefer the Uber-model of not actually owning your driverless car, but whilst that does have loads of benefits, it's not much help if the former user pisses themself or does some other shitty thing in the cab.

Pretty straightforward case of driverless car kills its occupant - didn't pick out a big lorry turning across the road ahead.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ ... -elon-musk

Erk.

Ah - in the other thread I commented that there was no source for the 'could not distinguish the trailer against the sky' comment, but that link does cite Tesla themselves.

Pretty tragic I think. Will this put back the plans they have? I reckon so.

A truck turning is a pretty common occurence I'd say. I'm surprised the car didn't manage to avoid it.

The real crunch is going to come when one of them kills someone outside the car, in the nightmare scenario a pedestrian or something like that, and the car didn't avoid the accident even though it should have 'seen' the danger (as was the case in this accident).

What's interesting here though is that Tesla are saying that even though the car can drive autonomously, the driver should still almost be 'shadow driving' and ready to take action at any time if it looks like the car has missed something or is going to fuck something up.

For me this kind of eliminates the whole point of having a driverless car, (since you've almost got to drive it anyway), and also raises questions about how they're going to handle things going forward. Like, if a fatal accident happens where the car fucked it up, from a legal perspective does the driver still get the blame because they didn't take over quick enough?

If that'll be the case I can't see people exactly falling in love with driverless cars, TBH.

It eliminates a lot of the convenience aspect, but they're very much pushing the idea that overall the driverless car is a safer driver than you are.

No way dude. I've got an A class licence with a safety rating of 2.67.

How many people died in human-driven (drove?) cars in avoidable accidents yesterday?

You'd need to work out how many miles Teslas have driven themselves without killing anyone vs the stats for human drivers to get a meaningful comparison. But a car that can drive itself only not very well so you need to not drive it but still give the road your full attention as though you were driving seems like a pretty half arsed thing that's not ready for the road.

The article says something like the Tesla car had the equivalent of 134 million miles driven before a fatality vs 94 million for human driven cars.

Well, Tesla have been perfectly clear that the Autopilot feature on their cars is "public beta" and cannot be relied on.

Personally I don't think it should have been enabled on consumer vehicles, or at least not without some sort of limitations (e.g. using GPS to ensure that it can only be activated on motorways.)

It's a litigation shield. Tesla (and I'm willing to bet, every driverless manufacturer) is never going to assume full liability for accidents that occur in their vehicles.

That's entirely not what I'm getting at though. Humans making mistakes in cars and killing people is as old as cars themselves, and we have procedures and laws and insurance etc etc to deal with it, self-driving cars killing people because they made a mistake is something completely new.

If a Tesla driving autonomously makes a clear mistake that kills someone, who is to blame? Is it Tesla? Is it the driver because they were supposed to be shadow-driving and intervening if necessary? And how do you prove it one way or another? The window of opportunity for a driver to take corrective emergency action could be a split-second, what's the metric going to be for if it was their fault or the car's fault?

There's a massive list of considerations to be dealt with before driverless cars can be let loose on the roads IMO.

So who on earth is going to want one?

LOOK AT OUR AMAZING DRIVERLESS CAR! BUY NOW! (Oh but you still have to sort of drive it anyway, and if there's a crash it's your fault.)

Yeah, it seems like a bit of an all or nothing type of deal. Either you make something that is going to cause few enough accidents that you can deal with the claims or you don't bother. But that halfway house is never going to get much traction.

They'll assume liability in the end (the manufacturers). It'll just be priced in to the cost of the car.

Driverless cars will have to be shit slow.

It's not up to them whether they exclude liability for negligence, though. There will be ways around Tesla saying "can't rely on this system" arguing on the size of font.

I've been thinking about this and my thoughts lead on to stopping distances but then I thought about speed limits.

Would self driving cars be programmed to stick to the speed limits no matter what?

Almost certainly.

This alone would make them a hell of a lot safer than a lot of other cars I see on the road.

I'm not saying negligence though. Say that today 5% of accidents are genuinely unavoidable (kid runs out from behind a parked van, no way to spot, no way to stop in time, even when at a safe speed for the conditions). If Tesla can reduce that to 2%, that's fantastic. But they're not going to trade that 5% of driver liability for 2% of Tesla liability.

I just wonder whether human drivers and pedestrians will take the piss out of them. You can imagine every kid everywhere realising that if they run across a pavement when one's coming that it'll slam the brakes on. Or other drivers realising that as soon as they go to overtake the robocar will slow down to let them etc.

But they don't get to decide, though.

Through lobbying they might.

Surely they get to decide to some extent by saying 'you need to remain alert' rather than 'feel free to have a kip'?

Will Robocars fall for the 'invisible rope across the road' trick?

Or unscrupulous chalk artists drawing gaping holes in the floor?

Oh, do they actually scan the road surface for potholes and stuff?

That's arguable - your responsibility from a product liability point of view is dependent on "reasonably foreseeable use", and you can’t necessarily get around that by just putting warnings/disclaimers in the product manual saying "don't do this".

Myp makes a very good point though, but I suspect if we get to the situation where the government has to pass a law saying "driverless car manufacturers won't be liable if their cars flip out and murder people" the line of people prepared to buy one might end up quite short.

I wonder if Robocar will get pissed off if I cut him up.