Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars

Re:Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars by aetherson on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @11:57AM (#13366316)

This is a well-reasoned answer, but probably not the same trade-off that most people would make. For example, if a car was twice as bad as the average driver (2 fatalities per 100 million miles), then you'd say 29.6 seconds per mile -- maybe something you wouldn't do at freeway speeds, but you would do at city street speeds.

But I don't think that most people would get into a car that was twice as likely to crash as an average human driver (including drunks and so forth). Which suggests that most people have a different approach to this question.

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Re:Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars by antisthenes on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @12:56PM (#13367052)

The average movement speed of a car over a trip is ~22 mph anyway.

The gains from coordinated robotic driving could very well be enough to actually reduce speed limits by a significant value, which not only reduces overall fatalities (due to laws of physics), but also makes the equation better for the robotic cars, which might convince more people to switch, leading to a positive feedback loop.

That's an optimistic scenario, though.

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Re:Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars by JamesBarney on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @06:12PM (#13370157)

I think lots of people make this decision all the time without realizing it because it's not as intuitively scary to them as robo-driving. I would wager that the majority of people on hacker news have driven on 5-6 hours of sleep at some point and a sizable portion make this a habit.

[0]http://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2016/12/06/50444863...

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Re:Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars by khedoros1 on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @05:40PM (#13369890)

> But I don't think that most people would get into a car that was twice as likely to crash as an average human driver

I grew up driving with my grandparents who were over 70, and my friends/random people with a car who were under 20. I think that the decision would realistically be made mostly on how the question is framed.

"Will you get in the car that's twice as likely to crash?"

"Will you get in the car with grandma to go to the zoo?"

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Re:Let’s Talk About Self-Driving Cars by hx87 on Tuesday January 10, 2017 @01:13PM (#13367250)

I would if the drive were limited to city streets, since a crash there has a much lower probability of injury and death compared to a highway.

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