This reminds me of a Planet Money episode (a great podcast). http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/07/29/427467598/episo... . In it, they talk about people not wanting to ride elevators not controlled by a human operator, and how companies got people to ride them. In the same way as elevators, people will eventually adapt to self driving cars even if the industry needs something like a manual mode for emergencies or a big red button.
Exactly. This article is just as silly. Wide-spread adoption and integration of driverless cars is a long way off yet. I don't know how long, but I also don't care since it isn't my job to predict the curve. I have zero doubt that it will happen. Humans are horrible operators of machinery. At some point the machines will absolutely be better at operating themselves under our direction. So in the meantime, let's find some people who are unnerved by all the media conversation and get some click bait out of it.
Love Planet Money. I started listening back in mid 2009, and about 2 years ago I went back and listened from the start. I highly recommend it, because they started literally right when the market was crashing, and the show was so interesting. I'm now about 1 year behind again... time for a full week of Planet Money.
I know quoting Jobs is passe, but this seems relevant: "But in the end, for something this complicated, it's really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don't know what they want until you show it to them."
In Henry Ford's (apparently apocryphal) words, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” One is reminded of how much preferences can change when faced with options they couldn't previously imagine, every time one hears of grimly determined "in-control" rush hour commuters.
This is just a temporary migratory phase. Time saved in actual lives, sleep, work, child care, tracking, transport and delivery, insurance, etc. It's literally a matter of time.
Already starting to happening. I know a kid in high school who's annoyed by his parents insisting that he learns to drive. Some of that is because he believe the tech is going to get good enough by the time he gets out of college, the rest is because I've set an example that it's possible to achieve a car-free lifestyle already if you make it a major priority.
I wonder how this compares to airplanes -- when the first commercial airlines came into existence, did people complain that they weren't able to fly the plane? What about autopilot?
> did people complain that they weren't able to fly the plane
...no. Turboprop and commercial jet aircraft complemented general aviation, they didn't supplant it.
It's part of why I find the autonomous car argument so absurd. People are investing billions upon billions of dollars to create a more convenient and energy-efficient transportation infrastructure using cars... the LEAST efficient method to do so, and the most expensive to implement.
It's for this reason why I think truly autonomous vehicles are much further away than people think, and when they DO arrive I'd predict that the vast majority of them will be 10-12 passenger on-demand autonomous vans that optimize per-person efficiency and reduce traffic.
So I'll spin the title a different way: "Billions are being invested in a robot that will truly liberate an aging population, the injured and the disabled, and those that simply don't care to own an automobile."
The poor title notwithstanding, the trust issues cited in the article are good to be aware of. Nevertheless, I'll be shocked if self-driving vehicles aren't a technology that utterly reshapes transportation in the U.S.A. in very short order.
We'll probably see automated driver only roads, which allow a separate mode to be used where the AI can assume (or at least assume with much more certainty) that the other drivers are AI, and optimize accordingly. Shorter gap distances, higher speeds, etc. As long as human drivers are allowed on a particular segment of road, AI will always have to be somewhat more cautious, as the risk is still too high.
The problem there is cost. Even Uber and Lyft are too pricey for most people to rely on them for a daily commute. If autonomous cars drive that cost down to something comparable to bus fare, that's going to cause a major shift in the way people get around.
It's not entirely humans' fault, even when humans are at fault. Road implementation is a contributing factor, for example.
I'm amazed that so many people in technology think that these rolling physical software boxes are going to be reliable enough to be better than us. We're pretty good at processing new, ambiguous situations.
We can't even build a secure internet. Which, by the way, these cars will be part of.
I think what will happen is that some accident categories will go down, others involving autonomous cars will go up, and there will be a lot of instances of people who can't get where they need to go because the car can't figure out some ambiguous situation.
Or a car will try to follow a Google route that goes around a block three times before it's (hopefully) finally routed on its way. And there will be rare instances of cars trying to drive to Ireland through the Pacific Ocean.
You're intentionally mis-understanding what he wrote. He means it isn't always the human driver's fault. Driverless cars aren't going to re-implement roads (not at first, not for a while).
> And there will be rare instances of cars trying to drive to Ireland through the Pacific Ocean.
It's silly to assume that a car is going to trust a mapping service over its own sensors saying "there's no road or path here".
That said, I absolutely do expect cases of "I wanted to visit a friend in the next state, fell asleep overnight, and woke up in a different town of the same name eight states away".
The idea of software developers deciding how a 2-ton hunk of metal and plastic should whip around the road at 70mph is horrifying.
Even with MISRA, we had the Toyota unintended acceleration case (not to say the developers were following it though. Grab the court transcripts if you have the time, they're brilliant). Probably dozens of other corner cases we'll never know about either.
If those accident categories are the ones that don't include fatalities or even injures (which is likely) then it's a win. Computers and computer vision systems are probably less likely to fail on a highway, than a human is. Computers can also integrate road data in ways that humans can't. To be honest, I think the argument you're offering is just the reason why we'll start seeing automation of route-following vehicles first.
Trucks, buses, and taxis going to airports and hotels, don't necessarily have hard route-finding problems. You also say things like "Can't build a secure internet" as though that's ever been tried, or necessary in this case.
The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13).
It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's quite high.
Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the numbers for fatalities then it's 99.99999%.
So the human track record for fatalities is a failure rate of 0.00001% - driverless cars are going to have a VERY hard time beating that.
Would you like to calculate what that works out to for the reliability of each individual computer, or order to have such good results in aggregate?
This is an interesting analysis, but I'm not sure we have enough data on autonomous cars to know one way or the other. Perhaps failsafe protocols can help mitigate catastrophic effects from computer hardware and software failures, and that edges out humans who override equivalent "failures" like impaired driving capacity. The data on US traffic fatalities [1] is interesting, because you point out it will be hard for the autonomous vehicles to beat the average, but in some sparsely-populated states the rate is dramatically lower, which could potentially challenge autonomous vehicles' safety records even more in those states. If a lot of their safety is developed from training, and they don't train much in the sparsely-populated states because they're so low population, then maintaining the safety rate will depend a lot upon whether the training in more populous states adequately covers use cases encountered in the field in the sparsely-populated states.
I suspect that at the end of the day, unless autonomous vehicles are much worse on the fatality rate, they only have to roughly match the human driver-based fatality rate, and commercial interests will push extremely hard for autonomous vehicles. The number of miles driven in the US is tracked by the Federal Reserve among others [2]. Current 12 month moving total is 3,147,579 millions of miles (3.14*10^12).
Latest figure for just crashes (not only those with fatalities) is a 2011 article [3] that asserted 185 per 100 million Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). The Insurance Information Institute has a report [4] that cites a $277 billion in 2010 cost of crashes, not including quality of life valuations. Autonomous cars don't have to move the needle that much over the current regime before insurance will put in very strong incentives to use them; there is a ton of room to improve, and the insurance companies stand to gain a huge windfall by not lowering rates commensurately with actual cost savings. The trucking companies must be going bonkers over the possibilities to run diesel trucks 24x7.
As soon as one person dies in an accident that might be caused by a software error, the lawyers are going to be all over the case quicker than you can say "Astronomical compensation claim."
It's bad enough now with ambulance chasers, but when the "guilty" party is a corporation worth billions, it's going to get a whole lot worse.
Personally I'd love self driving cars - tomorrow, if not sooner. Most driving is boring and pointless and I'm totally happy to let a competent machine do it.
But politically too many people have been conditioned to see driving as an expression of personal freedom, and the whole industry is politically vulnerable in a way that the smartphones and the Internet never were.
Generally there's a whole extra layer of legal, political, social, and psychological confusion around any kind of computing that doesn't live in a box with a screen, but starts being present in and manipulating physical reality.
Cars are just the start, and I think they'll turn out to be one of the more straightforward problems.
>too many people have been conditioned to see driving as an expression of personal freedom
Conditioned by some of the very same companies that are going to take away the expression, but the citizens will blame the government for this "restriction of freedom," while those same companies keep making profit regardless.
> Conditioned by some of the very same companies that are going to take away the expression
Those companies have been very good at various reshapings of public demand when it served their interests, I'd be very surprised if, when it suits them for automated cars to be the next thing, they aren't just as good as when they made minivans and then SUVs must-haves through marketing (when the real motivation for each was to exploit regulatory exceptions.)
I too enjoy driving my car - hell, I chose a manual and not an automatic for a reason. And I would love to fly my own plane too, for pleasure of course, not to get from A to B.
Well, think of it in terms of cost prohibitiveness. He doesn't fly a plane because it's too expensive. If things pan out well it will also be too expensive for him to continue manually driving.
I doubt the underlying economics will ever deliver a rental jet at an all-in cost under $4/mi. My piston single-engine airplane (wildly cheaper than a turbine to purchase, maintain, and operate) runs over $1/mi.
When I poke around Google flights at my common trips, it's hard to estimate tightly the cost of a first class ticket, but it seems around $1/mi for most of my routes (some Carribean routes are much cheaper than that). There's no way to operate a jet for that amount. Even if you take a family of four (where the personal airplane cost doesn't go up much, but the first class tickets obviously do), you can't quite cover even the variable costs of the Cirrus SF50 (the cheapest variable cost jet). That doesn't leave anything for maintenance, positioning flights (which require crew), capital costs, insurance, hangaring while not rented, training, or profit for the rental outfit.
I'd love to be proven wrong, because I'm absolutely in the target market for even a $2/mi all-in rental jet (and already have the pilot quals/hours to qualify, except for the type-specific type-rating). I doubt it can be done for under $8/mi to the end user.
I am really fascinated by how this is going to play out. I am actually somewhat skeptical that fully autonomous (in the sense of arbitrary A to arbitrary B) is really going to happen anytime soon. I heard John Siracusa on his podcast outline convincing reasons why it wouldn't happen "in our lifetime". Conventional wisdom at this point seems to be that Siracusa is wrong, but his doubts resonated with me. I hope I'm wrong!
This. For sure. Most roads will need to be upgraded to 'robo friendly' the little English lanes, hedges either side, one track with passing places (got to do a lot of reversing or bumping up the hedge to get past.) These will all be tricky for robots to navigate.
Yes. Roads are built things, so they are designed to be usable for the vehicles that use them. When most of these are robot cars, then the roads will be optimised over time to match.
I don't want driverless cars because half the time I don't even know where I am going. I routinely drive aimlessly around to discover new locations, listen to music and explore. Could driverless cars be programmed for a "scenic mode" and take me on curated tours by other people? Sure, yeah that might be cool. Though nothing will replace the spontaneity of deciding street by street, if I should go left, right or straight at an intersection; where I should stop to enjoy food or drink in an unfamiliar place; or accidentally discovering a part of town I never knew existed. Driverless cars, to me, feels like a small death in the spirit of human exploration.
There's no reason you couldn't do that in an autonomous car, you just wouldn't directly control the car. E.g., you instruct the car to change its route at your whim.
So why can't you just say turn left or turn right etc... Just not being the one driving.
I've done exactly what you've described but also had the passenger telling me spontaneity saying go left right forward.
There is nothing inherent that says you can't do that with autonomous cars. But also it's likely that there will always be cars you can drive for fun just like you can still ride horses for fun.
Also, if it's the car itself doing the driving, you're free to look around the surroundings and say "find a turn onto ____ street going north" when you see something over there thataway that looks interesting. (My city has one-way streets and no-turn streets everywhere, so getting from point A to point B can often be much, much harder than it looks.)
I bet if you look at polls from the 1990s about the internet, you'll find a lot of people saying they're just fine without it, thank you very much, and they prefer the warm, personal experience of calling up a real human to book their plane tickets or whatever instead of punching their credit card number into some newfangled machine.
But in the end, people went ahead and developed more and more infrastructure for the internet regardless, and now most people couldn't live without it.
You don't have to go back that far. In 2007-2008, I remember polling friends and coworkers about smart phones. Just as you suggest, most said they were fine without it and didn't want to carry around a computer.
I'd just read Kurzweil's book and I remember saying they'll probably have one by 2010-2011 because smart phones will be the free phones by then. I was right for one simple reason: Most people tend to dismiss new tech right up to when it stops becoming a luxury item. As soon as people find value in something and they can afford it, adoption is practically inevitable.
I hope my self driving car has a nice sleeper option so I can take long road trips and wake up at my destination.
You are correct [0]. For both iPad's and general tablet sales [1].
Of course this does not confirm that tablets are falling out of favour - they could simply have reached their saturation point. Does anybody know if saturation sales are expected to look like this normalish (gaussianish) graph?
Yup. That looks like the first derivative of bounded growth. The integral of that graph would look like a logistic function [1]. It's often used to model population growth.
Clearly tablet sales performed better than critics expected, but they never matched the phone because owning a phone significantly diminishes the value proposition of a tablet. Sales may get better as manufacturers figure out new ways to add value for the consumer or to successfully absorb the PC market.
> In 2007-2008, I remember polling friends and coworkers about smart phones. Just as you suggest, most said they were fine without it and didn't want to carry around a computer.
things changed when a computer appeared that people really liked to carry. The same wait is here - for the iPhone of autonomous cars. What right now drives around in Mountain View seems to be more like HP Treo.
You really think people will prefer driving themselves to work rather than kicking back and doing whatever they fancy on the way? Driving a long distance? Punch in the destination and get some sleep, glorious
This does not need any shiny packaging to be a no brainer. It's a drop dead delicious invention.
That some even entertain the notion that they don't want one goes to show how clueless people are. They are just saying what they think everyone else thinks, without engaging thier brain.
> I bet if you look at polls from the 1990s about the internet, you'll find a lot of people saying they're just fine without it, thank you very much, and they prefer the warm, personal experience of calling up a real human to book their plane tickets or whatever instead of punching their credit card number into some newfangled machine.
The enjoyment of driving is not about human warmth, it's about control and adrenaline. I don't think the comparison makes sense. I'd be more excited about autonomous cars if I could turn it off in the country (as some cars today allow) for recreation.
I definitely agree with what you're saying—I know I'm probably in the minority for enjoying driving at all—but I frankly can't imagine anyone enjoying reading their credit card over the phone.
The thing about a horse though, is that it knows the way home. You might think that this means you can get drunk and still have a way to "ride" home. I mean, that has to be better than driving drunk, right?
"On average, Americans drive 29.2 miles per day, making two trips with an average total duration of 46 minutes."[1]
For how many of those 46 minutes do you think they are enjoying control and adrenaline? I would guess approximately zero, and once you tell them that they can spend that time instead surfing the internet, or eating breakfast, or videochatting with their family, they will.
Obviously, whenever someone responds to you, they're ALWAYS against you. Because people never agree with you. Never ever ever in the history of communication.
I think there's a lot of things I'd rather be doing on a commute than drive or do work. For on thing, with a self-driving car, I could do things that many people are already doing while driving, albeit unsafely. Things like eating breakfast, talking on the phone, and fiddling with the radio. Hell, if the commute was long, I might use the time to catch up on sleep.
In my city, you're lucky if public transit only takes an hour (I'm lucky, so I still ride). Also, the bike racks only take two bikes; if there are already two on there, you might as well just ride the rest of the way because your other option is to wait an hour for the next bus.
(hi; I live in a city run by "fiscal conservatives")
Yeah, I could get a solid four to five hours of sleep if I took public transit to work since it would take so long. And then the bus system in my area is shut down by the time I get out of work...
This is exactly what makes autonomous vehicles so great - they eliminate the public transportation problem.
I took public transit to work for three years. It had its ups and downs. Then, within the span of about a week, (a) somebody peed in their seat about 12 feet from me, and then (b) somebody threw up all over the floor about 3 feet from me. After that it was goodbye Trimet, hello Honda.
The bus is not a great place to do any of the things mentioned above.
I personally love the bus, but it can vary greatly from place to place (and even from bus line to bus line).
But this is a great illustration of self-driving cars: it's public transit for the upper-middle class. (The middle class can't afford a reliable car for the whole household; the rich have chauffeurs.)
Yeah, I've had several bus drivers go by the drive-through so I can get breakfast and let me fiddle the radio on behalf of all passengers while also being on the phone the whole time.
That's a nice guess, and I guess it's meant to scare me from driving in the future, but it won't really.
Long before "automonous cars are ubiquitous" something else is going to happen - automatic collision detection and prevention will become ubiquitous, long before all cars are fully automatic. So even if I drive the car myself, it will be very difficult to crash, therefore the insurance will have no reason to increase.
Either way, I am sure fully automatic cars won't become ubiquitous in our lifetimes no matter what manufacturers say, so I'm not too worried.
> I'd be more excited about autonomous cars if I could turn it off in the country (as some cars today allow) for recreation.
Why assume that you won't be able to? Even the most elaborately "uncarlike" self-driving car concepts have a steering wheel hidden somewhere, for the simple reason that there's always the chance of some extreme conditions that a self-driving car can't navigate.
This isn't the right way. An in-car steering wheel will always require a licensed driver. Several better ways:
1. For minor uncertainty, the car could ask what to do. For example, the user might confirm that an object blocking the road is harmless and can be run over or bumped out of the way. This is not real-time; the car only asks after it comes to a stop.
2. The above can be done by remote humans.
3. When the car is really confused, you should get power assistance while you stand outside and push. It should be possible to push the car up any San Francisco hill with just one person. Put your hands on the bumper, press hard, and the car responds to the pressure. Unlike traditional car pushing, the steering should respond. You should be able to parallel park, park on grass, force the car up onto the sidewalk a bit, go the wrong direction, and so on.
Because the attractive argument for driverless cars that makes sense (to me) is that they're safer than human drivers. Presumably at some point humans will not be allowed to drive anymore.
>...they prefer the warm, personal experience of calling up a real human to book their plane tickets or whatever instead of punching their credit card number into some newfangled machine.
That was before they turned calling up a company into an audio version of the 90's internet.
For me 100% of the enjoyment of driving is from getting somewhere that I want to be. If I could get away with never touching a steering wheel again, I would.
Well, each of those things created new unforeseen problems, such as cyber-crime (and, I believe, a decline of quality in journalism). On the other hand, none of them actually presented the possibility of direct physical harm, which might occur with failure in autonomous vehicles. And which is something people are wary about.
In my own opinion, being a passenger in a self-driving vehicle wouldn't be riskier than being a passenger in a normal vehicle. On the contrary, I think it's safer. But there's the issue of how human drivers might behave or be forced to behave once self-driving cars become widespread.
What if human drivers' become more trusting of other cars' behavior and start paying less attention? Human drivers might become involved in worse crashes between themselves.
What if there's an adverse selection effect? If the public is convinced that self-driving cars are safer for individual passengers, then the most risk-averse drivers might be more likely to join in, leaving less risk-averse (and prone to accident) drivers on the road.
How would human drivers interact with platoons? What if a human driver is stuck in a suddenly decelerating platoon? Would he panic and swerve? Would he crash?
My point is that there might be all kinds of unforeseen consequences. Maybe good, maybe bad. That's reason why I'm not particularly enthusiastic about self-driving cars (or anything else for that matter): we'll only know whether it's good or bad in hindsight.
If you asked people what they want, they'd ask for cloud-connected thermostats that fail ungracefully and stop working when their manufacturers get acquired
I'm sure you recognize this, but your opinion is far from universal. I have a few friends who share your opinion and it's certainly valid, but I have many more friends who are much happier to book a flight / pay a bill / shop for insurance etc. on a higher bandwidth medium than a phone call. (Myself included) There are still instance where the company really screws up their UX to the point where a phone call is preferable but it's becoming much less common in my experience.
I think what GP is referring to is calling someone and saying "book me through to San Francisco on the 20th. I need to be there by 11:00am. Bye."
That's what we mean by "calling someone to book a flight" i.e. an agent who will take your request and do the legwork. Not simply talking to someone at a call center and dictating everything you'd otherwise be typing into an online form.
That service is available. You can get virtual assistants to do this. You can get a credit card that offers this kind of concierge service. If you claim that this is the experience you want and that you are willing to pay for it, but you're still booking your flights on Expedia, then either you're lying to yourself or you're just not willing to pay enough.
The actual article presents evidence that Americans are getting more comfortable with self-driving cars, and points out that peoples' concerns aren't very valid.
Honestly, I almost didn't read the article because of the title. Fortunately there was a tiny fit of rage in me that clicked to see what the author actually was saying.
The stats were driven by the "Vehicle Hacking Vulnerability Survey". " How do you feel about autonomous or self-driving vehicles?" was asked alongside questions like "How big of a problem do you feel vehicle hacking will be in the future?"
If the questions were "How safe a driver is your 75yo mother?" or "Do you think autonomous cars will increase or decrease deaths caused by drunk driving?" the survey might have shown different results.
The question was flawed by itself. Most people rightly expect never to buy an autonomous car. They will just call up a car when they need to go somewhere that is appropriately configured for each trip and leave the problems of maintenance, fueling, parking, and financing to somebody else.
I think the success of driverless cars will depend on the experience. If the cars are incredibly slow/cautious and you look like a segway riding dork but just inside a glass cage.. then I don't think it works.
Get the user experience right. The youtube videos of tesla drivers drinking coffee and reading the paper at high speeds looked like great fun to me.
I'm sure horseless carriages freaked people out when they first came out too. And driverless cars don't mean nobody will ever drive for fun, just like autopilot on airplanes didn't eliminate getting pilot licenses for recreation.
The history of people being scared and unprepared for technological change is pretty thorough:
My grandfather grew up in a rural part of Ireland that had no electricity until the late 1920s. One of his earliest memories was when a man came to town in a car with a battery powered lantern. It was the first most people had ever seen if either, and everyone around went to the pub to see the car and light.
The car was an obvious improvement over a horse, in terms of speed, cost and versatility. Very few people voyages more than 10-15 miles from their place of birth pre automobile.
Autonomous cars are not that. They will clearly be expensive, and being a service with complex liability problems will most likely be an Über-style, pay by the drink model. As amazing as Uber is, riding them is a lot more expensive than leasing a Honda Accord.
They also make occasional distance trips prohibitively expensive. I do a 1,000 mile road trip every year -- which costs about $500. What would a robot Uber cost?
IMO, they are a solution looking for a problem. Negative effects will include undermining public transit, and making suburban sprawl worse.
Wouldn't a 1000 mile trip be far more cost effective to do by flying? A round-trip flight plus some Ubers on the other end could easily end up being under $500.
4 people from Albany, NY to most places is $3000 + rental car. Plus my wife and I are tall, and sitting in a airline seat and dealing with the airport drama sucks.
Or I drive for 20 hours and get another week in a 5 star hotel.
It seems to me that one of the biggest barriers to the driverless car revolution will be sharing the road with human driven cars. If there was a special road or lane just for driverless cars, I could see things moving much faster in that direction. The problem is that's a massive public infrastructure undertaking, and we all know how quickly those go...
This is pretty much the definition of a "faster horse" scenario. Most of the population perceive the world as it is, not as it could be. (This is the S vs N in Meyers-Briggs.)
It will actually be insurance companies that force the change at the consumer level. Charging crazy premiums for irrational holdouts that insist that their love of driving is better than safer transportation will force the hands of many from "no thanks" to "well, if I can save $500/month..."
However, regardless of consumer uptake it's the long-haul trucking companies that stand the most to gain from autonomous vehicles. I don't have a stat handy but robot long-haul would be 25% the price and 4x faster. Something like 20% of highway accidents involve big rigs.
I really don't think people will be the irrational holdouts they claim to be. People say a lot of silly things they don't actually mean. While many of us enjoy the feeling behind the wheel now and then, it's actually a nuisance for most people most of the time.
One thing I'd love to see is a safe racing mode where the computer allows people to drive like maniacs, but intervenes before the situation actually becomes dangerous. I suspect at some point automatic drivers will become so precise they will truly be able to scare the shit out of passengers safely.
As such, I see no reason why insurance companies would have an agenda against human drivers. Insurance companies will charge rational premiums that make them competitive against other insurance companies. It may very well be that insurance premiums for human drivers go down because AI drivers improve road safety.
I think the implication here is just crazy=high, not crazy=irrational. If AI cars end up vastly safer, it stands to reason they will have much lower insurance premiums. (I don't know if it'll be $500/month difference though, that sounds quite high)
> "The probability of having an accident is 50 per cent lower if you have Autopilot on," said Musk, speaking at an energy conference in Oslo, Norway. "Even with our first version, it's almost twice as good as a person."
Assuming it's true and not some stretch of the truth for marketing purposes, it's twice as good as some value representing a typical driver. Much better than the current typical driver may not be that much better than the future typical human driver in a future where driving is voluntary (after all the "I don't trust no stinkin computer" people are too senile to drive).
The people who choose to do something because they are personally motivated to do it tend to become much better than the people who do something because they have to... a phenomenon which is clearly observable in most high-school math classes.
Insurance companies will force the change. Starting, as you pointed out, with trucking.
The trucking industry will be forced to automate. As soon as it is demonstrable that automated trucks are far safer - and faster, as they need no breaks - then trucking companies will be forced to automate or die.
Passenger cars will follow thereafter. People will maintain the right to drive their own cars, but only at prohibitively high insurance rates.
When humans are no longer responsible for piloting the vehicle, it no longer makes sense to sell the vehicle to them, as there is no need to assign the risk to one individual. Instead, rented / leased vehicles will be much cheaper, and timesharing / ridesharing will be much more feasible.
From the article: Sherman, 21, a mechanical-engineering student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, trusts the technology and sees these vehicles eventually taking over the road. But he dreads the change because his passion is working on cars to make them faster. “It’s something I’ve loved to do my entire life and it’s kind of on its way out,” he says. “That’s the sad truth.”
That group has already been obsoleted by Tesla. It's embarrassing to the gas car guys that Tesla's family sedan has a better 0-60 time than everything except a few supercars. Supercars that are not only insanely expensive, but unusable for ordinary driving. (Top Gear had a funny video in which they're trying to get a Veyron out of a driveway without scraping the undercarriage.)
If you're really into that stuff, you have to get into electric supercars.[1] A friend of mine who grew up in a rural town fixing cars now works for the company that makes those. Zoom is not dead, but it now sounds like "chunk-whine", instead of "vroom".
0-60 times do not make supercars. People keep repeating that but that isn't really why they are interesting. A car is more than its engine.
Fast in a line is not the same as fast overall. One of the best parts of Spec Miata is the frustrated point-bys by Ferrari drivers.
A properly equipped supercar will still eat a tesla in turns and handling etc. The Renovo is actually a supercar and has more going for it than just the power train. (I have been driven in one by the founders)
I am all for autonomous vehicles ruling the road. People shouldn't be driving like idiots there anyway. And I believe they are interesting on the track too: http://selfracingcars.com/
For the vast majority of drivers, the 0-60 speed does make a super car. They aren't going to be racing top speed for hundreds of miles, or cornering like in an actual race. They are going to be racing from stop light to stop light faster than just about anyone other than the real super cars.
You can do that in a Corvette too. A top fuel dragster is MUCH faster than any of these things but is also not a supercar.
You are just redefining things without proving your point. I do not think you know much about this stuff, just have a bunch of opinions without experience.
there are literally thousands of types of cars that people modify and drive, for a lot more than just drag racing.
when autonomous cars dominate the roads, there will still be lots and lots of people driving around in their sports cars or classics or canyon carvers, for fun.
When (if) autonomous cars dominate the roads, it will either be prohibitively expensive (via insurance requirements) or more likely simply unlawful to manually operate vehicles on public roads.
i don't buy it. they aren't going to make the entire existing fleet illegal for at least several decades.
there's a difference between letting/forcing people to adopt new technology in new purchases, and forcing people to give up their expensive cars. pretty much all automotive legislation tries to avoid this scenario.
[It's embarrassing to the gas car guys that Tesla's family sedan has a better 0-60 time than everything except a few supercars.]
I think the term "embarrassing" may be a little excessive here since you are singling out only a single aspect of a car's performance (0-60 time in this case).
Sure, the Tesla beats many (family) cars of a similar price range at short-burst/short-term acceleration, but it falls really short when you need that kind of power over longer periods of time [1], such as around an actual race track with turns. For example, a GTR is known to be a few 10th's slower in terms of 0-60 times, but would destroy any Tesla in nearly all other forms of racing. The GTR is also a 4 seater Nissan, which can arguably be considered just as practical as an electric car of today.
When you compare overall performance to other sport oriented family cars (such as the M3 or M4), the Tesla isn't embarassing anyone.
That being said, I realize the Tesla isn't a purpose built track car, and for what it is, it's one hell of a performer, but I constantly see people bringing up the 0-60 time, saying how it destroys so many gas cars, but it's really more complicated than that.
EDIT: Just to add (in reference to your "you have to get into electric cars" comment), a CTS-V with under $10,000 of modifications will beat the Tesla P90D in a drag race, and still be ~$10,000 cheaper all said and done. I don't think it's possible to add performance modifications to the Tesla at all, so this is another area where gas cars have the advantage.
"[If the Tesla didn't go into] reduced power output mode, a B-T-G lap under nine minutes is possible. According to the Bridge To Gantry site, that would put it in the company of some really quick hot hatches."
So if the Tesla didn't have insufficient cooling for going around a race track, it would be about as fast as a Honda Civic Type R. I.e. supercars are way out of its league.
Plus, the Type R is about $40 000. How much is the Model S again?
yet people ride automated trains at the airport all the time. i bet if you asked them right after riding these trains if they'd ever ride a train driven by a robot, they'd say no, right after just riding one.
The general public will quickly start wanting self driving cars when they realize they can drink and get home. No more taking turns to be the responsible driver etc.
You have basically described Uber (1). No co-incidence that Uber is interested in self-driving cars. "Do I want to own one?" is the wrong question, why bother owning one when you can summon one when you want it?
There will be cases where "owning your own self-driving car" will make sense, they just won't be the majority of what's now covered by "owning your own car".
I'm living in Europe, in a city, and looking forward to being driven to and from social engagements this weekend, because drinking. There is going to be a human behind the wheel of that taxi but that's incidental. I don't own a car because the costs greatly outweigh the benefits and there are always alternatives.
I've lived in several European cities and owning your own car has been a liability full-stop.
Interestingly, everyone I know in a city in the US has a car. All they do is complain about traffic, but they own one nonetheless.
For everyone owning a car today, I think tomorrow they'll want a car with self-drive feature.
Its not strange that a survey conducted by car interest groups find their readers uninterested in self-driving cars, as their readers are car enthusiasts. The kind of people who aspire to owning sports cars. The kind of customer who probably doesn't want an automatic either, nor cruise control etc? ;)
Safety sells. Let's say it's 2025. You can buy a Tesla Model Z, or GM's latest sedan for about 30 grand. In addition to the E-MPG rating, there's also a new sticker for deaths and injuries per mile driven. The Tesla auto-drive enabled car has a death rate one tenth that of the GM car. Which one is your spouse going to insist that you buy?
I personally like to drive, especially on road trips, but I like the idea of a car that has much better reaction time that can correct if I do something stupid, or it sees something I can't (via vehicle to vehicle reporting).
Speaking of which, there will be many many opportunities to reduce impact severity. Example: a vehicle pulls out in front of you unexpectedly. If the car can react instantly where you'd take a fraction of a second, it can shed enough speed to reduce the severity of impact significantly (if not avoid it altogether). Reducing speed by 25%, will reduce the impact energy by almost half, so even small improvements will result in big differences in injuries and fatalities.
SO driver-assisted cars will be popular. No reason why it has to go all the way to self-driving. And 10 years of driver-assist gradually taking over more functions will help reduce FUD to the point we'll all find ourselves thinking about driving the way we feel about horses and dial telephones.
What if the GM has a better rating? Will you find some reason that it's wrong, or didn't account for X, Y, and Z, to rationalize your desire to buy the Tesla regardless?
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadhttps://hbr.org/2011/08/henry-ford-never-said-the-fast
...no. Turboprop and commercial jet aircraft complemented general aviation, they didn't supplant it.
It's part of why I find the autonomous car argument so absurd. People are investing billions upon billions of dollars to create a more convenient and energy-efficient transportation infrastructure using cars... the LEAST efficient method to do so, and the most expensive to implement.
It's for this reason why I think truly autonomous vehicles are much further away than people think, and when they DO arrive I'd predict that the vast majority of them will be 10-12 passenger on-demand autonomous vans that optimize per-person efficiency and reduce traffic.
The poor title notwithstanding, the trust issues cited in the article are good to be aware of. Nevertheless, I'll be shocked if self-driving vehicles aren't a technology that utterly reshapes transportation in the U.S.A. in very short order.
Given the choice for £x a mile for a human driver or (£x * 0.2) for a robot car?
In the meantime, I agree that you can approximate a self-driving car experience pretty closely by ordering an Uber.
I'm amazed that so many people in technology think that these rolling physical software boxes are going to be reliable enough to be better than us. We're pretty good at processing new, ambiguous situations.
We can't even build a secure internet. Which, by the way, these cars will be part of.
I think what will happen is that some accident categories will go down, others involving autonomous cars will go up, and there will be a lot of instances of people who can't get where they need to go because the car can't figure out some ambiguous situation.
Or a car will try to follow a Google route that goes around a block three times before it's (hopefully) finally routed on its way. And there will be rare instances of cars trying to drive to Ireland through the Pacific Ocean.
Yes, it is.
> Road implementation is a contributing factor, for example.
"Road implementation" is done by humans, so, even if it is a contributing factor, that doesn't make it any less humans' fault.
It's silly to assume that a car is going to trust a mapping service over its own sensors saying "there's no road or path here".
That said, I absolutely do expect cases of "I wanted to visit a friend in the next state, fell asleep overnight, and woke up in a different town of the same name eight states away".
Even with MISRA, we had the Toyota unintended acceleration case (not to say the developers were following it though. Grab the court transcripts if you have the time, they're brilliant). Probably dozens of other corner cases we'll never know about either.
Trucks, buses, and taxis going to airports and hotels, don't necessarily have hard route-finding problems. You also say things like "Can't build a secure internet" as though that's ever been tried, or necessary in this case.
And OK, let's say it's never been tried. Those cars are going to be part of that internet.
The accident rate is around 74 per 100 million miles (and fatalities is 1.13).
It's unclear exactly how to turn that into a percentage, but no matter how you do it it's quite high.
Say an accident takes 5 minutes, and people drive 30 miles/hour. Then that works out to 99.999% for humans. If you use the numbers for fatalities then it's 99.99999%.
So the human track record for fatalities is a failure rate of 0.00001% - driverless cars are going to have a VERY hard time beating that.
Would you like to calculate what that works out to for the reliability of each individual computer, or order to have such good results in aggregate?
I suspect that at the end of the day, unless autonomous vehicles are much worse on the fatality rate, they only have to roughly match the human driver-based fatality rate, and commercial interests will push extremely hard for autonomous vehicles. The number of miles driven in the US is tracked by the Federal Reserve among others [2]. Current 12 month moving total is 3,147,579 millions of miles (3.14*10^12).
Latest figure for just crashes (not only those with fatalities) is a 2011 article [3] that asserted 185 per 100 million Vehicle Miles Traveled (VMT). The Insurance Information Institute has a report [4] that cites a $277 billion in 2010 cost of crashes, not including quality of life valuations. Autonomous cars don't have to move the needle that much over the current regime before insurance will put in very strong incentives to use them; there is a ton of room to improve, and the insurance companies stand to gain a huge windfall by not lowering rates commensurately with actual cost savings. The trucking companies must be going bonkers over the possibilities to run diesel trucks 24x7.
[1] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit...
[2] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/M12MTVUSM227NFW...
[3] http://www.caranddriver.com/features/safety-in-numbers-chart...
[4] http://www.iii.org/issue-update/auto-crashes
It's bad enough now with ambulance chasers, but when the "guilty" party is a corporation worth billions, it's going to get a whole lot worse.
Personally I'd love self driving cars - tomorrow, if not sooner. Most driving is boring and pointless and I'm totally happy to let a competent machine do it.
But politically too many people have been conditioned to see driving as an expression of personal freedom, and the whole industry is politically vulnerable in a way that the smartphones and the Internet never were.
Generally there's a whole extra layer of legal, political, social, and psychological confusion around any kind of computing that doesn't live in a box with a screen, but starts being present in and manipulating physical reality.
Cars are just the start, and I think they'll turn out to be one of the more straightforward problems.
Conditioned by some of the very same companies that are going to take away the expression, but the citizens will blame the government for this "restriction of freedom," while those same companies keep making profit regardless.
Those companies have been very good at various reshapings of public demand when it served their interests, I'd be very surprised if, when it suits them for automated cars to be the next thing, they aren't just as good as when they made minivans and then SUVs must-haves through marketing (when the real motivation for each was to exploit regulatory exceptions.)
But for commercial purposes, self-driving cars are inevitable, of course.
When I poke around Google flights at my common trips, it's hard to estimate tightly the cost of a first class ticket, but it seems around $1/mi for most of my routes (some Carribean routes are much cheaper than that). There's no way to operate a jet for that amount. Even if you take a family of four (where the personal airplane cost doesn't go up much, but the first class tickets obviously do), you can't quite cover even the variable costs of the Cirrus SF50 (the cheapest variable cost jet). That doesn't leave anything for maintenance, positioning flights (which require crew), capital costs, insurance, hangaring while not rented, training, or profit for the rental outfit.
I'd love to be proven wrong, because I'm absolutely in the target market for even a $2/mi all-in rental jet (and already have the pilot quals/hours to qualify, except for the type-specific type-rating). I doubt it can be done for under $8/mi to the end user.
If you enjoy wandering around in your city: keep a car and do that.
I've done exactly what you've described but also had the passenger telling me spontaneity saying go left right forward.
There is nothing inherent that says you can't do that with autonomous cars. But also it's likely that there will always be cars you can drive for fun just like you can still ride horses for fun.
"pick a random route"
"pick the least-traveled route over the last three months within 50 miles of my location"
I think you'd very quickly wind up going down an unmaintained dirt road and getting stuck.
But in the end, people went ahead and developed more and more infrastructure for the internet regardless, and now most people couldn't live without it.
I'd just read Kurzweil's book and I remember saying they'll probably have one by 2010-2011 because smart phones will be the free phones by then. I was right for one simple reason: Most people tend to dismiss new tech right up to when it stops becoming a luxury item. As soon as people find value in something and they can afford it, adoption is practically inevitable.
I hope my self driving car has a nice sleeper option so I can take long road trips and wake up at my destination.
People don't know what they want, so we'll make them want it.
Of course this does not confirm that tablets are falling out of favour - they could simply have reached their saturation point. Does anybody know if saturation sales are expected to look like this normalish (gaussianish) graph?
[0] http://www.statista.com/statistics/269915/global-apple-ipad-...
[1] http://www.statista.com/statistics/272070/global-tablet-ship...
1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logistic_function
things changed when a computer appeared that people really liked to carry. The same wait is here - for the iPhone of autonomous cars. What right now drives around in Mountain View seems to be more like HP Treo.
This does not need any shiny packaging to be a no brainer. It's a drop dead delicious invention.
That some even entertain the notion that they don't want one goes to show how clueless people are. They are just saying what they think everyone else thinks, without engaging thier brain.
The enjoyment of driving is not about human warmth, it's about control and adrenaline. I don't think the comparison makes sense. I'd be more excited about autonomous cars if I could turn it off in the country (as some cars today allow) for recreation.
I definitely agree with what you're saying—I know I'm probably in the minority for enjoying driving at all—but I frankly can't imagine anyone enjoying reading their credit card over the phone.
Is Waze for horses patentable?
The US laws are crazy: http://duiwise.com/dui-dwi-answers/can-you-get-a-dui-dwi-on-...
For how many of those 46 minutes do you think they are enjoying control and adrenaline? I would guess approximately zero, and once you tell them that they can spend that time instead surfing the internet, or eating breakfast, or videochatting with their family, they will.
[1] http://newsroom.aaa.com/2015/04/new-study-reveals-much-motor...
Any transit system I've ever used was:
Over crowded.
Purposefully designed so no-one could sleep. Also, I really wouldn't want to sleep on an artificially created publicly shared surface.
Frowned upon to talk on your cell phone, or eat a meal.
I definitely couldn't get any work done, even if I tried.
(hi; I live in a city run by "fiscal conservatives")
This is exactly what makes autonomous vehicles so great - they eliminate the public transportation problem.
The bus is not a great place to do any of the things mentioned above.
But this is a great illustration of self-driving cars: it's public transit for the upper-middle class. (The middle class can't afford a reliable car for the whole household; the rich have chauffeurs.)
When autonomous cars are ubiquitous, the price of insuring your thrill ride will be roughly equivalent to the hourly price of an amusement park.
Long before "automonous cars are ubiquitous" something else is going to happen - automatic collision detection and prevention will become ubiquitous, long before all cars are fully automatic. So even if I drive the car myself, it will be very difficult to crash, therefore the insurance will have no reason to increase.
Either way, I am sure fully automatic cars won't become ubiquitous in our lifetimes no matter what manufacturers say, so I'm not too worried.
Why assume that you won't be able to? Even the most elaborately "uncarlike" self-driving car concepts have a steering wheel hidden somewhere, for the simple reason that there's always the chance of some extreme conditions that a self-driving car can't navigate.
1. For minor uncertainty, the car could ask what to do. For example, the user might confirm that an object blocking the road is harmless and can be run over or bumped out of the way. This is not real-time; the car only asks after it comes to a stop.
2. The above can be done by remote humans.
3. When the car is really confused, you should get power assistance while you stand outside and push. It should be possible to push the car up any San Francisco hill with just one person. Put your hands on the bumper, press hard, and the car responds to the pressure. Unlike traditional car pushing, the steering should respond. You should be able to parallel park, park on grass, force the car up onto the sidewalk a bit, go the wrong direction, and so on.
Because the attractive argument for driverless cars that makes sense (to me) is that they're safer than human drivers. Presumably at some point humans will not be allowed to drive anymore.
That was before they turned calling up a company into an audio version of the 90's internet.
In my own opinion, being a passenger in a self-driving vehicle wouldn't be riskier than being a passenger in a normal vehicle. On the contrary, I think it's safer. But there's the issue of how human drivers might behave or be forced to behave once self-driving cars become widespread.
What if human drivers' become more trusting of other cars' behavior and start paying less attention? Human drivers might become involved in worse crashes between themselves.
What if there's an adverse selection effect? If the public is convinced that self-driving cars are safer for individual passengers, then the most risk-averse drivers might be more likely to join in, leaving less risk-averse (and prone to accident) drivers on the road.
How would human drivers interact with platoons? What if a human driver is stuck in a suddenly decelerating platoon? Would he panic and swerve? Would he crash?
My point is that there might be all kinds of unforeseen consequences. Maybe good, maybe bad. That's reason why I'm not particularly enthusiastic about self-driving cars (or anything else for that matter): we'll only know whether it's good or bad in hindsight.
This stopped happening because humans are expensive, not because typing numbers into a 2 inch touchscreen keyboard is actually a better experience.
If I can do something myself, in 5 mins, inconveniently, for free.
Or spend 5 mins on a phone call, waiting for a human to do the same thing, for $10.
I would call the latter a poor user experience.
That's what we mean by "calling someone to book a flight" i.e. an agent who will take your request and do the legwork. Not simply talking to someone at a call center and dictating everything you'd otherwise be typing into an online form.
The actual article presents evidence that Americans are getting more comfortable with self-driving cars, and points out that peoples' concerns aren't very valid.
Honestly, I almost didn't read the article because of the title. Fortunately there was a tiny fit of rage in me that clicked to see what the author actually was saying.
Edit: for posterity, the original HN title was identical to the article's title: "Billions Are Being Invested in a Robot That Americans Don't Want".
If the questions were "How safe a driver is your 75yo mother?" or "Do you think autonomous cars will increase or decrease deaths caused by drunk driving?" the survey might have shown different results.
Get the user experience right. The youtube videos of tesla drivers drinking coffee and reading the paper at high speeds looked like great fun to me.
The history of people being scared and unprepared for technological change is pretty thorough:
http://www.techradar.com/us/news/world-of-tech/12-technologi...
My grandfather grew up in a rural part of Ireland that had no electricity until the late 1920s. One of his earliest memories was when a man came to town in a car with a battery powered lantern. It was the first most people had ever seen if either, and everyone around went to the pub to see the car and light.
The car was an obvious improvement over a horse, in terms of speed, cost and versatility. Very few people voyages more than 10-15 miles from their place of birth pre automobile.
Autonomous cars are not that. They will clearly be expensive, and being a service with complex liability problems will most likely be an Über-style, pay by the drink model. As amazing as Uber is, riding them is a lot more expensive than leasing a Honda Accord.
They also make occasional distance trips prohibitively expensive. I do a 1,000 mile road trip every year -- which costs about $500. What would a robot Uber cost?
IMO, they are a solution looking for a problem. Negative effects will include undermining public transit, and making suburban sprawl worse.
Or I drive for 20 hours and get another week in a 5 star hotel.
It will actually be insurance companies that force the change at the consumer level. Charging crazy premiums for irrational holdouts that insist that their love of driving is better than safer transportation will force the hands of many from "no thanks" to "well, if I can save $500/month..."
However, regardless of consumer uptake it's the long-haul trucking companies that stand the most to gain from autonomous vehicles. I don't have a stat handy but robot long-haul would be 25% the price and 4x faster. Something like 20% of highway accidents involve big rigs.
One thing I'd love to see is a safe racing mode where the computer allows people to drive like maniacs, but intervenes before the situation actually becomes dangerous. I suspect at some point automatic drivers will become so precise they will truly be able to scare the shit out of passengers safely.
You can pretty much get that already on closed test tracks, with self-driving cars that do 'speed runs'.
An example (though without passengers): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ol3g7i64RAI
As such, I see no reason why insurance companies would have an agenda against human drivers. Insurance companies will charge rational premiums that make them competitive against other insurance companies. It may very well be that insurance premiums for human drivers go down because AI drivers improve road safety.
> "The probability of having an accident is 50 per cent lower if you have Autopilot on," said Musk, speaking at an energy conference in Oslo, Norway. "Even with our first version, it's almost twice as good as a person."
The people who choose to do something because they are personally motivated to do it tend to become much better than the people who do something because they have to... a phenomenon which is clearly observable in most high-school math classes.
Monthly costs,
Cost reduction of 37%Insurance companies will force the change. Starting, as you pointed out, with trucking.
The trucking industry will be forced to automate. As soon as it is demonstrable that automated trucks are far safer - and faster, as they need no breaks - then trucking companies will be forced to automate or die.
Passenger cars will follow thereafter. People will maintain the right to drive their own cars, but only at prohibitively high insurance rates.
When humans are no longer responsible for piloting the vehicle, it no longer makes sense to sell the vehicle to them, as there is no need to assign the risk to one individual. Instead, rented / leased vehicles will be much cheaper, and timesharing / ridesharing will be much more feasible.
That group has already been obsoleted by Tesla. It's embarrassing to the gas car guys that Tesla's family sedan has a better 0-60 time than everything except a few supercars. Supercars that are not only insanely expensive, but unusable for ordinary driving. (Top Gear had a funny video in which they're trying to get a Veyron out of a driveway without scraping the undercarriage.)
If you're really into that stuff, you have to get into electric supercars.[1] A friend of mine who grew up in a rural town fixing cars now works for the company that makes those. Zoom is not dead, but it now sounds like "chunk-whine", instead of "vroom".
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/9/7517291/renovo-coupe-electr...
Fast in a line is not the same as fast overall. One of the best parts of Spec Miata is the frustrated point-bys by Ferrari drivers.
A properly equipped supercar will still eat a tesla in turns and handling etc. The Renovo is actually a supercar and has more going for it than just the power train. (I have been driven in one by the founders)
I am all for autonomous vehicles ruling the road. People shouldn't be driving like idiots there anyway. And I believe they are interesting on the track too: http://selfracingcars.com/
You are just redefining things without proving your point. I do not think you know much about this stuff, just have a bunch of opinions without experience.
Sorry to be blunt.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=631_1309377564&comments=1
when autonomous cars dominate the roads, there will still be lots and lots of people driving around in their sports cars or classics or canyon carvers, for fun.
there's a difference between letting/forcing people to adopt new technology in new purchases, and forcing people to give up their expensive cars. pretty much all automotive legislation tries to avoid this scenario.
I think the term "embarrassing" may be a little excessive here since you are singling out only a single aspect of a car's performance (0-60 time in this case).
Sure, the Tesla beats many (family) cars of a similar price range at short-burst/short-term acceleration, but it falls really short when you need that kind of power over longer periods of time [1], such as around an actual race track with turns. For example, a GTR is known to be a few 10th's slower in terms of 0-60 times, but would destroy any Tesla in nearly all other forms of racing. The GTR is also a 4 seater Nissan, which can arguably be considered just as practical as an electric car of today.
When you compare overall performance to other sport oriented family cars (such as the M3 or M4), the Tesla isn't embarassing anyone.
That being said, I realize the Tesla isn't a purpose built track car, and for what it is, it's one hell of a performer, but I constantly see people bringing up the 0-60 time, saying how it destroys so many gas cars, but it's really more complicated than that.
EDIT: Just to add (in reference to your "you have to get into electric cars" comment), a CTS-V with under $10,000 of modifications will beat the Tesla P90D in a drag race, and still be ~$10,000 cheaper all said and done. I don't think it's possible to add performance modifications to the Tesla at all, so this is another area where gas cars have the advantage.
[1] http://insideevs.com/expected-tesla-model-s-fails-lap-nurbur...
"[If the Tesla didn't go into] reduced power output mode, a B-T-G lap under nine minutes is possible. According to the Bridge To Gantry site, that would put it in the company of some really quick hot hatches."
So if the Tesla didn't have insufficient cooling for going around a race track, it would be about as fast as a Honda Civic Type R. I.e. supercars are way out of its league.
Plus, the Type R is about $40 000. How much is the Model S again?
1) https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/249958
I'm living in Europe, in a city, and looking forward to being driven to and from social engagements this weekend, because drinking. There is going to be a human behind the wheel of that taxi but that's incidental. I don't own a car because the costs greatly outweigh the benefits and there are always alternatives.
Interestingly, everyone I know in a city in the US has a car. All they do is complain about traffic, but they own one nonetheless.
For everyone owning a car today, I think tomorrow they'll want a car with self-drive feature.
Its not strange that a survey conducted by car interest groups find their readers uninterested in self-driving cars, as their readers are car enthusiasts. The kind of people who aspire to owning sports cars. The kind of customer who probably doesn't want an automatic either, nor cruise control etc? ;)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I personally like to drive, especially on road trips, but I like the idea of a car that has much better reaction time that can correct if I do something stupid, or it sees something I can't (via vehicle to vehicle reporting).
Speaking of which, there will be many many opportunities to reduce impact severity. Example: a vehicle pulls out in front of you unexpectedly. If the car can react instantly where you'd take a fraction of a second, it can shed enough speed to reduce the severity of impact significantly (if not avoid it altogether). Reducing speed by 25%, will reduce the impact energy by almost half, so even small improvements will result in big differences in injuries and fatalities.
Means that there's a market of ~60 million people that would buy an autonomous car.