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AI Transportation

GM Car Executive Says Self-Driving Cars Are the Only Way Forward (medium.com) 147

Posted by EditorDavid from the come-with-me-if-you-want-to-live dept.
jmcbain writes: In a blog post last week, Dan Amman, the CEO of Cruise Automation (General Motors' electric self-driving car division), laments the pollution, waste of space, accidents, and cost of cars as we know them today. He says "here we are, living in a state of cognitive dissonance with exactly this — the human-driven, gasoline-powered, single-occupant car — as our primary mode of transportation." He notes that public transportation is still useful but ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are only contributing to the problem. He says the only way moving forward is self-driving cars.
Amman argues in our current system, "Most of the time, the equipment will sit unused, occupying prime real estate and driving up housing costs." And in addition,"If you're young, old, or living with a disability, then you can't use it."

He also points out that traffic accidents are still the leading cause of death for 5- to 29-year olds, and concludes that ultimately "the status quo of transportation is broken."
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GM Car Executive Says Self-Driving Cars Are the Only Way Forward More

GM Car Executive Says Self-Driving Cars Are the Only Way Forward

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  • Partly agree (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Saturday December 21, 2019 @12:38PM (#59544630)

    but I don't think that's going to happen until they stop trying to cheat and "train" a black box and go back to developing Expert Systems that can be validated, and can have intentional safety modifications made.

    If you just have a trained black box, and you're ordered to handle a specific situation slightly differently, you practically have to start over, or at least redo all your validation at the theoretical minimum.

    • Re:Partly agree (Score:4, Informative)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Saturday December 21, 2019 @02:11PM (#59544890) Homepage Journal

      until they stop trying to cheat and "train" a black box

      Double standard. That's how we do it with humans. We expose that pint of bean soup in their skull to a set of inputs as that soup tries to make the car do things like parallel park or get on a highway.

      Many of the same legitimate criticisms you can make of machine learning you just as legitimately make of human learning. One of the things people consistently underestimate is the limitations of their experience, valuable as that experience may be it's hard to tell when you are outside the domain of that experience.

      • until they stop trying to cheat and "train" a black box

        Double standard. That's how we do it with humans.

        Yes, and it kills on average 3,287 people every day. Are you sure you want to advocate for that?

        Many of the same legitimate criticisms you can make of machine learning you just as legitimately make of human learning.

        Yes, that is in fact the argument against it.

    • "If you just have a trained black box, and you're ordered to handle a specific situation slightly differently, you practically have to start over, or at least redo all your validation at the theoretical minimum."

      You mean it has to drive through red lights and stop signs 75% of the time like a human driver?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      All self-driving tech is hybrid. The expert-system parts have been in development for about 50 years. The "AI" part is just a new component that helps in some situations and for some tasks.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ras ( 84108 )

      But, but ... validation doesn't stop bugs. If you mean formally validated then we've can barely do it, and even then formally validated systems have failed because the world is so damned complex we can't imagine all the scenarios that must be described by the formal system. In reality, on a minuscule number of systems are formally validated, and all we really do is develop something that appears to work, write unit tests to ensure it works in all the ways we thought about, then put it into the field to fi

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      That's how most of these systems work. AI is only used for image recognition, spotting cars and pedestrians on cameras. The decision making process for which path to take and how to react to events is logic.

  • For the massess, sure. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by TigerPlish ( 174064 ) on Saturday December 21, 2019 @12:45PM (#59544654)

    You can have my car when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I'm not the masses. I *enjoy* driving. Love it.

    I've dealt with trains. In Europe and UK, brilliant.

    In US, trains are derp and have been ever since WWII ended and the aviation industry took off.

    If people weren't such ignorant twatwaffles the whole thing would work better. Drive right, pass left. Don't camp out in the passing lanes. Learn to work a zipper merge. Set your mirrors right. Look before you leap. Abandon stoplights for roundabouts.

    But nooooo, the rabble at large can't be assed to learn any of this.

    If GM made fun cars it'd help, but other than camaro and corvette they got nothing at any price range. Where's my 3000-pound 250-hp RWD Chevy? Nowhere? Check. That's why I go elsewhere for my wheels.

    This sounds very communist to me. No personal possessions, use everyone else's.

    So what if my car's in my garage, stone-cold, with no one using it? I paid for the car, I paid for the garage, so get off my back you socialist fuck.

    • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday December 21, 2019 @01:03PM (#59544712)
      Comment removed based on user account deletion
      • I agree with a lot of what you’ve said, but I think the central thesis is wrong and that self-driving cars will only increase the use of cars, especially as we move to electric. Ultimately an electric vehicle is simpler in design and as battery costs decrease, cars will become more affordable. Similarly automation will reduce other costs of ownership and even enable people who can’t own cars for one reason or another to purchase a vehicle. Finally, automation completely changes the game as far

        • It may be another 20 years or more before we reach that point, but cars arenâ(TM)t going anywhere. I donâ(TM)t think theyâ(TM)ll completely kill other types of public transit, but those arenâ(TM)t going to deny cars either and a move to autonomous electric vehicles removes most of the major downsides of cars.

          You've missed the other major downside of cars which is they're massively aggressively wasteful of space on the road. They'll never displace public transport in big cities because th

        • I agree with a lot of what you’ve said, but I think the central thesis is wrong and that self-driving cars will only increase the use of cars

          I think you may have missed the thesis of the article. The main problem with cars as we have them now is that they spend 90+% of their life sitting in a driveway doing absolutely nothing. With autonomous vehicles we could reverse that and have them driving 90% of the time. Under this model, almost no one would actually own a car, just summon one when they need it.

          (Of course, it doesn't help that the jackass said that ride-sharing services contribute to the problem -- they're helping alleviate all of the

          • Re:For the massess, sure. (Score:4, Interesting)

            by Pentium100 ( 1240090 ) on Saturday December 21, 2019 @06:14PM (#59545618)

            Under this model, almost no one would actually own a car, just summon one when they need it.

            Which is to say that in the future, taxis will be cheaper.

            I like to own my car, even if I was forced to use a self-driving one, I would still buy it. So what if it sits unused 90% of the time? My bed is also unused 60% of the time, it doesn't mean that I would like to use a common bed.

            Maybe I am old fashioned, but I like to own things instead of paying for services.

            Or would I be able to "summon" a car with an audio system that I modified for better quality, my things in the trunk and so on?

            • There're always going to be people who'd want to own their own car, of course. But there're a lot of people who'd like to offload the maintenance to someone else, if it's price-equivalent, and who'd like to recoup the floorspace in their garage to repurpose as, say, a workshop. Or an apartment for your kid/parent/renting to whomever. And if if a significant portion of the population can be shifted to ride-summoning, requirements for businesses to have so many parking spaces can be significantly decreased

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by shmlco ( 594907 )

              It's entirely possible to spend $10-15K a year for a car, fuel, maintenance, plates, registration, taxes, and insurance. Some have estimated that electric self-driving autonomous vehicles could get your transportation costs down to a third of that.

              So... is owning your own car worth an extra $7-10K in disposable income per year? How about for your wife and a second car? Son/daughter and yet another one?

              • $10K-$15K for maintenance - that's a lot, well at least in my country. I got rear-ended once and they had to weld in a new trunk, I paid ~1300EUR for that (well, the other guy's insurance did), so I could probably get my car to look brand new for $15K. I spend maybe 500EUR/year for patching rust holes and some other minor repair.

                Here's what I do not count in that sum:
                Fuel - since fuel does not really evaporate that much when the car engine is not running, however much fuel I buy gets burned by me driving. I

      • 100% car usage is unsustainable.

        Depends on how many cars you're talking about. It's unsustainable if you're not willing to curb population growth, but in the end everything is unsustainable in that case ... even breathing.

        making it impractical to make simple journeys like home to convenience stores by foot

        That's physics you're angry at, not people. A person cannot walk and carry groceries for a family of four. The reason Americans have a higher standard of living than any other country that isn't dependent on a welfare state is specifically because our infrastructure is designed to foster individual independence, not depe

        • That's physics you're angry at, not people. A person cannot walk and carry groceries for a family of four. The reason Americans have a higher standard of living than any other country that isn't dependent on a welfare state is specifically because our infrastructure is designed to foster individual independence, not dependence on government services and handouts.

          I believe they're referring to the simple fact that one cannot -walk-, in my cases, to a convenience store; between the dual problems of distance and the hazard/illegality of crossing highways that may lay between your home and your destination on foot. Car culture tends to incentivize building residential areas away from commercial ones. They're not talking about doing two weeks' worth of shopping, just going to get some more milk or something.

        • In many cases - New York is a prime example - privately owned public transport was profitable. The government takes it over by some means, and it becomes unprofitable and a political football. In the case of New York, fares were frozen by law and when expenses went up the transit companies couldn't make money and went bankrupt. Then the city took over.
      • If you don't drive a car: you don't have the perspective necessary to really understand.
        If you do drive a car: you're being myopic, and would scream and yell if they told you you weren't allowed to have your car anymore.

        People take their personal transportation for granted, and just like 'privacy rights' they don't understand what it is they're giving up until it's too late.

      • Most Americans only "want" to drive because the alternatives have been made unusable.

        Either that or there is no demand for alternatives unless you make driving punitive.

      • No you are an idiot. Look at the territory of North Atlantic megalopolis

    • You can have my car when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I'm not the masses. I *enjoy* driving. Love it.

      Sure lots of people do. I think he's missing the point that many people can afford a car and many of those won't want to give up the convenience of having a car right now without waiting, and neither do they want a random car. They want their car with all their stuff in it, arranged just-so and either sparkly clean or with a dead raccoon in the trunk as per the owner's preference. And people are cl

      • You get it about how people like and want personal transportation, and not being stuffed into smelly buses full of smelly people and being subjected to being treated like cattle. Humans have preferred personal transportation, preferably they're in control of, for longer than there's been human civilization, even if it was an ox they were riding, and I seriously believe it's a survival trait/evolutionary advantage to want that, for so many reasons, and people are not ever going to willingly give up personal

        • You get it about how people like and want personal transportation, and not being stuffed into smelly buses full of smelly people and being subjected to being treated like cattle.

          America isn't the world. You might have perfected urban sprawl but you suck at buses judging by the usual comments here.

          • Buses suck period. At best they have the problem that they do around two orders of magnitude more damage to roads than do cars. If you mix them with cars, then they perturb traffic. If you don't, then they need their own lanes.

            Elevated PRT is a much more civilized way than buses to do public transportation. Because you use small cars, it doesn't need heavy rail infrastructure like trains do.

            Minibuses and midibuses are relatively reasonable, being basically just bigger vans which are better-designed for ingr

            • how many minivans would it take to replace a full double-decker bus and what space would it take up on the road, what would the resultant weight of those minivans, and what amount of fuel would be consumed/pollution emitted?
              Minivans may work outside rush hours when a lot less people are using transport but the amount needed to replace 2 full double-deckers (they always come in pairs in rush hour) would cause gridlock

              • Oh you're the van guy.

                Hi.

                We've had this conversation a bunch now. I think this would make it the fourth or fifth time? I'm not sure. Last few times, I posted numbers about peak passenger traffic, road use etc and showed it would be very hard to replace double decker buses around choke points in rush hour.

          • So what? This is where I live and that's all I care about. IDGAF about your EU public transportation.

            • So what? This is where I live and that's all I care about.

              That's about the most perverse attitude I think I've ever encountered. Yes there is no way you could adopt ideas and improvements from abroad, that's unAmerican. You have to suck at buses otherwise the terrorists win.

        • Not only do you have to be rich in NYC, but driving is a provably worse mode of transportation, as far as getting to your destination in the minimum amount of time. NYC has great public transportation, between subways, busses, and the fact that you often can just walk to most of the places you'd need to go every so often; unless you've got a chauffeur (or a self-driving car that doesn't exist yet,) driving in NYC just sucks.

          • Which is why I do not and would not want to live in a big crowded city. I hate public transportation and I hate crowding. Lucky for me I have a choice. Sucks for everyone else I guess.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        And people are clearly willing to pay for that and self driving cars won't change that logic.

        That's a bit of a stretch considering we don't yet have that alternative. Taxis are a scarce resource because idle drivers like to get paid and they're the only door-to-door service today. Self-driving cars could operate with a much higher degree of availability because the only thing they do when idle is rust. They won't have any concept of shifts or overtime so capacity will be decided by peak demand and all other hours of the day there'll be an abundance.

        If I could drive one myself outside the service ar

        • Owning a car with deprecation, insurance, maintenance, parking etc. is not cheap either.

          It's not that expensive, unless you have an expensive car or one that's expensive to maintain.

          For me there is a big difference between paying for a thing and paying for a service. I dislike services. Some are needed as there is no other way other than not using them (electricity, internet, TV service), but others are not. I'd rather have my own car than rent one. Even if the rented car would be delivered to where I am.

          I like to do some work on my car, to repair or modify it, I like the audio system. Now, ca

    • So what if my car's in my garage, stone-cold, with no one using it? I paid for the car, I paid for the garage, so get off my back you socialist fuck.

      No probs if your car usage didn't affect anyone else. But that's not how it works. Especially in the US.

      If cities are laid out such that it practically forces people to own a car even if they'd rather take a bus / train or ride a bicycle, that's not okay. If wars are started just to protect US oil interests at taxpayers' expense (and lives of soldiers + innocent civilians), that is not okay. If your 2-ton vehicle pollutes enough that other people's health is affected, you shouldn't get a free pass. If so

      • If cities are laid out such that it practically forces people to own a car even if they'd rather take a bus / train or ride a bicycle, that's not okay.

        I'm not aware of any new cities being built anywhere in this country. Thus, all cities currently in existence were laid out decades, even a century before, at a time when people rode bikes, rode horses, or walked. At this point it's a matter of trying to retrofit them to attempt to accommodate bicyclists (who, incidentally, are well known to ignore traffic

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by hey! ( 33014 )

      Oh, I enjoy a drive along a fine country road or through magnificent vacation scenery as much as anyone, but that describes very little of the driving I have to do, which largely involves stop and go traffic on the same old urban highways.

      The problem with cars as a way of moving everyone is that that solution doesn't scale, even if you transform your landscape and build your society around cars. It was great from roughly 1920 to 1990, and it's still fine in rural areas and small cities, but the *average*

      • It was great from roughly 1920 to 1990, and it's still fine in rural areas and small cities, but the *average* one way commutes tops 40 minutes in many cities today and is getting dramatically worse.

        I'd rather sit in my car with AC (or heat) on for 40 minutes, than wait for a bus outside for 10 minutes and ride the bus (with broken AC) for 20 minutes.

        First they can convert high stress downtime into productive time.

        If I can work from a a car as a passenger (doesn't matter if the driver is a human or a computer), then I can work from home and don't need to go anywhere. If I cannot work from home, then I cannot work from my car either.

    • Most of the problems we currently have with drivers being bad drivers could be solved with reforms in how drivers are educated, trained, and tested.
      Bringing back Driver Ed/Driver Training in highschool curriculums would take care of the next generation of drivers.
      Requiring higher standards of existing drivers would be painful and people would scream and yell about it, but it would force drivers to re-educate and re-train to a higher standard (or be left taking the bus), and it would get habitual, untraina

    • You can have my car when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. I'm not the masses. I *enjoy* driving. Love it.

      Me too. You can call me boomer, but I'm happy to be living in a world that can still enjoy the freedom of driving. I acknowledge that self driving cars will be better for people who can't drive, for whatever reason. At some point there will be a clamor for banning self driving vehicles. The automobile will then be just another appliance. Even further down the road, "they" will be able to control where you go and when you go there. I'm glad I won't be around for that.

      I really like the new Vette. I'm c

    • "If people weren't such ignorant twatwaffles the whole thing would work better. [...] Abandon stoplights for roundabouts."

      If people weren't such ignorant twatwaffles, roundabouts might actually be a benefit. But since they are ignorant twatwaffles, they actually fuck everything all up. I went through a roundabout twice today, and both times the drivers around me drove like total dumbshits, wasting time and fuel.

      Traffic lights are better for ignorant twatwaffles, and since they are in the majority, they are

  • Is he willing to foot the bill for every accident his self driving cars have because of shitty programming? I rather doubt it, because the majority of accident these things have will be down to shitty programming. Expect intense lobbying in congress to offload that burden on the driver instead of the car company that messed up the self driving AI.
    • If you're the owner/driver of a car and an accident was caused by something totally not your fault, whether a flaw in the car design or someone rear-ending you causing you to hit the person in front of you, you can still be sued and so you'll still need to bear the cost of insurance. The way around that will be to hire a self-driving car owned and run by a service, which also works toward solving the problems this guy is talking about.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      And where do you take the facts showing that self-driving ones cause more accidents? Oh, right, you do not have any because there are no such numbers and it is actually completely irrational with the available facts to think that.

  • I am not sure what the point of making this statement is. Is it that nobody agrees with him, and nobody is committing people and resources to make self-driving cars a reality already? Just saying this isn't going to make self-driving cars magically appear out of the air; it's a hard problem to solve.

    • I am not sure what the point of making this statement is. Is it that nobody agrees with him, and nobody is committing people and resources to make self-driving cars a reality already? Just saying this isn't going to make self-driving cars magically appear out of the air; it's a hard problem to solve.

      What are you talking about? This isn't some random blogger off the web, it's an executive from Cruise Automation.
      They are literally working on making this happen, not just hoping something magically appears out of thin air.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by axlash ( 960838 )

        What are you talking about? This isn't some random blogger off the web, it's an executive from Cruise Automation.

        They are literally working on making this happen, not just hoping something magically appears out of thin air.

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        So he should just keep on doing what he's doing, if he believes it's the right and profitable thing to do. There's no need to make any statement - if he's right, then his actions should ultimately speak louder than his words.

  • Just do electric cars, first (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Saturday December 21, 2019 @01:00PM (#59544702)
    Really, buddy, nobody is buying this self driving car bullshit except for absurdly wealthy investors looking for something to throw their money at. Maybe just focus on making a good lineup of electric cars, first, because you haven't done that yet, and nobody is going to be doing a self-driving ICE car.

    • Really, do you not read the news?

      Most manufacturers are already testing EVs (which takes years for a totally new model) and most are ditching or cutting their ICE production lines already.

      • Funny that, considering how much effort GM and the auto/oil industries put into killing electric cars back in the 1990's when GM had a very popular and well received EV car already.in production.

        https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0... [imdb.com]

        and for those who just want a summary

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        and the car itself
        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        • BS (Score:2)

          by JBMcB ( 73720 )

          1. Car companies don't care what their cars run on. Electricity, gasoline, alcohol, hydrogen, whatever. They care about selling cars. They don't get money from oil companies, they get money from people who buy cars.

          2. The EV1 didn't sell nearly well enough to continue production. It had nothing to do with conspiracy theories or oil companies, it had to do with basic economics. It cost a TON of money to develop that car, sales would have to be very strong to continue production, and they weren't. Source: I k

    • SDCs using the current half-assed ersatz 'AI' won't ever make it across the finish line, there'll always be this-that-the-other 'exception' that it can't handle because it has zero capacity for 'thought/reasoning', therefore it has to come to a stop and get a human to 'help' it. No one will tolerate that for long which is why it'll fail. Then there's when it screws up because, again, it can't 'think', and gets people killed. It'll happen. Not acceptable.
  • So we're going to make them more expensive and less convenient. Also the jury is still out on whether they will ever be safer, especially in cold icy climates where accident rates are much higher. Yeah that sounds like what a car exec might say.

  • I hope all automotive execs learn from this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

  • i pretty much had no choice in owning a car. Kids travels and other issues ate a lot of miles. I could have minimized it by taking the bus to work, but it took over 2 hours (each way) for a 20 minute drive...

    I haven't had a car in a few years now, and for the most part, really don't miss it.

    I wonder if the auto execs have thought through what will happen to their sales when you can just order up an autonomous car anytime you want with an app on your phone?

    • I can't see that autonomous car ordering service ever being much cheaper or better than a taxi, which you can do today. Sure there is no driver but autonomous cars will cost much more in terms of hardware and maintenance and people running them will still want to make a profit.

    • I wonder if the auto execs have thought through what will happen to their sales when you can just order up an autonomous car anytime you want with an app on your phone?

      Yes, they all have. PSA has a service called Free2Move that in theory lets you book an entire journey across multiple transportation types, including rental cars, buses, trains, and e-scooters (not to mention Chevrolegs). The US big 3 are all laying plans to own fleets of AVs. Bob Lutz believes that all cars will eventually be self-driving minivans whose shapes are all extremely similar, and brands' style differentiation will be achieved by different interiors, and exterior finishes. Etc.

  • The huge energy use is still there. What we need is smaller, more efficient vehicles, and more government protections for the people who use them. Have you ever heard of a bicycle thief being caught--in your lifetime?

  • So instead of helping kids to, you know, not become idiots ... you want to take away the right of self-determination from the non-idiots aswell?

    Great job!
    YOU are one of the people that *directly and deliberately cause* our current idiocracy! I hope your dick falls off.

  • The tragedy of the commons [wikipedia.org] is the tendency for people to abuse a shard public resource, because they can derive as much benefit as they want from it, but the costs they impose onto it are shared by the rest of society. The bus driver or Uber driver isn't just wasting space. He's discouraging the tragedy of the commons. If we moved from personally-owned vehicles entirely to shared self-driving cars, you hail for a ride only to find that one of the previous occupants used it to haul trash, tracked mud all

    • Re:When good ideas meet the tragedy of the commons (Score:4, Insightful)

      by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday December 21, 2019 @03:40PM (#59545208)

      Complete nonsense. If anybody leaves a self-driving car for hire in such a state, it will be _known_ who did it and they will pay for cleanup or lose access or both. As a customer, you just file a complaint and order another one. This must be the most stupid pseudo-argument against this idea in existence. Unless _you_ would do such a thing?

    • Seems like an easy fix. Install a camera that snaps the state of the back seat between rides. If the seat's clear before a ride and not clear after, you know who's responsible, charge them a maintenance fee, and recall the vehicle back to the depot. Won't help with stuff that isn't immediately visible, like wet dog smell, but should cover the vast majority of things.
  • Really. The CEO of GM Cruise Automation ? His view must be unbiased. Clearly no conflict of interest.

    More seriously, I don't understand yet what automation will solve. A few examples:

    * In urban areas, the day passengers of mass transportation start taking small automated vehicle because it is as affordable, we are doomed. How many automated vehicles do you need for one bus, one subway?

    * People refrain from taking their car sometimes because of parking issues. Now for a short shopping trip, they

    • * In urban areas, the day passengers of mass transportation start taking small automated vehicle because it is as affordable, we are doomed.
      How many automated vehicles do you need for one bus, one subway?

      On the other hand -- a reason that a lot of people -don't- use public transport is the last-mile problem. If you could simply summon a vehicle that'd get you that last mile or three for a buck, that has the potential to significantly increase usage.

  • ride-hailing services like Uber and Lyft are only contributing to the problem.

    I can agree to this

    He says the only way moving forward is self-driving cars.

    In what way does a self-driving car reduce "the pollution, waste of space, accidents, and cost of cars as we know them today"? Accidents are still going to happen. The pollution will get shifted from the exhaust pipe of the gas powered car to the exhaust of the power plant the electric car uses; no economy over a human-driven electric car. The space is still consumed by a single-person vehicle, no savings at all there. The cost will be increased because - not having an ownership stake

    • In what way does a self-driving car reduce "the pollution, waste of space, accidents, and cost of cars as we know them today"? Accidents are still going to happen. The pollution will get shifted from the exhaust pipe of the gas powered car to the exhaust of the power plant the electric car uses; no economy over a human-driven electric car. The space is still consumed by a single-person vehicle, no savings at all there. The cost will be increased because - not having an ownership stake in the vehicle, they'll get vandalized, and they'll have a very much shorter working lifespan over cars owned by people who can't afford to buy a new car every three years. And the riders will be paying for that difference.

      He wants to sell self-driving cars, is what.

      On highways where the vast majority of cars were self-driving (and actually autonomous,) there's the potential to vastly decrease accidents, since each car could communicate with and be aware of the other cars on the road. A car that notices it's slipping because of snow or sand or something can automatically notify everyone else on the road that there's an issue, and they can reduce speed at the appropriate places. The largest cause of accidents is people being stupid, and that can be eliminated. You've

    • In what way does a self-driving car reduce "the pollution, waste of space, accidents, and cost of cars as we know them today"? Accidents are still going to happen.

      In theory, less accidents will happen. Most accidents are due to driver error.

      The pollution will get shifted from the exhaust pipe of the gas powered car to the exhaust of the power plant the electric car uses; no economy over a human-driven electric car.

      Even when charged by a coal plant, automotive emissions are reduced by shifting to EVs.

      The space is still consumed by a single-person vehicle, no savings at all there.

      Traffic congestion will actually get worse when people are summoning cars, because cars will still be doing all the same driving people around, plus driving around empty. The only thing you can do with cars to reduce congestion is actual ride-sharing (not just ride-hailing like Uber and Lyft.) So you're wrong about all your other points, but you

  • One of the reasons the USA became so dependent on individual personal gasoline-powered transport in the first place is... General Motors [wikipedia.org]

  • > ultimately "the status quo of transportation is broken."

    Well, he's right about that, but self-driving cars are going to "solve" the problem in the same way Uber and Lyft do, by making the problem worse but not solving anything.

    Even assuming safe self-driving is possible--which is a VERY difficult technical problem and VERY far from solved--everything know about human nature says that self-driving cars are going to lead to more mindless and low-occupant driving rather than less.

    With self-driving cars we

  • There is no other way forward. And as soon as the difference in people injured and killed is known, manual driving will be outlawed pretty fast except for some experts and special situations.

  • Almost always these posts about the benefits of self-driving cars come with the belief that people shouldn't own their own cars. Yes, taxis will be much less expensive without the cabbie, (and with lower insurance rates) but a lot of the cost is in the actual hardware and energy. More to the point cheap taxis won't get most people in the US to give up their cars. A car isn't just a way to get from point A to point B. A personal car is right there every time without having to make a call or approve a transac

    • " It's a place to store some stuff, and emergency supplies. In a pinch it's a place to live in for a few days. It's a miniature refuge: a place that is yours and you can usually get to within 3 minutes. It's an object of personal freedom and independence. It's a statement of one's values. It's something to care for."

      Then you will have no problem to pay up for it.

  • Driverless cars can't see as well as humans, cannot make the proper decisions because they cannot think and consider the value of human life. Almost all of us were born pedestrian, first--long before we strapped SUVs to our asses, and demanded our entitlement be satisfied.

    • cannot make the proper decisions because they cannot think and consider the value of human life.

      So how is this different from humans, nowadays?

  • then complain about them to restrict competition! Honestly there's too much of the US that is suburban and has the requirement for single family transports. Maybe this will die off with Gen X/Y as our kids don't seem as interested in even wanting to drive.

  • Though about 40K lives per year are lost in accidents in the US, there are over 3 million injuries of which about 2 million are permanent. Over 13 million vehicles are involved in reported vehicular collisions. Who knows what the number is that goes unreported. The cost of the 40K lives is just the tip of the iceberg.

    In a related manner, with an accident rate that high, there is little reason to make cars more reliable. The current accident rate and auto lifetime are a near match with reported accidents hap

  • Single occupant gas powered car is how I travel all over north and Central America. Seems getting rid of single owner cars would leave people stuck and only able to travel by transit systems be it airplane rail or hugely expensive car services. This would be a definitive blow to freedom and mobility

  • "In 1949, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California, Phillips Petroleum, GM, and Mack Trucks were convicted of conspiring [wikipedia.org] to monopolize the sale of buses and related products to local transit companies controlled by NCL; they were acquitted of conspiring to monopolize the ownership of these companies. The verdicts were upheld on appeal in 1951."

    [...]

    "The San Diego Electric Railway was sold to Western Transit Company, which was in turn owned by J. L. Haugh in 1948 for $5.5 million. Haugh was also president

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