Ahh, if you think this is a new problem, you're too young to remember the fun of calling a cab by pay phone to some obscure address, then alternating between going inside and calling the dispatcher and then running out to the street to try to flag down the cab.

At least with a driverless car I can pinpoint my location on a map when I call it.

Person winds up being in an unsafe environment and needs immediate assistance.

Existing car-share (and cab) drivers are also willing to drop you off in an unsafe environment if that's where you told him you want to go. While sometimes they'll stick around to make sure you make it to your door (if you're female), that's by no means guaranteed.

Edit: I don't mean to sound like I'm singling out ride sharing/hailing companies, it's an across the board thing with human drivers.

I feel that people are latching onto their opinions about driverless car tech and not talking about the wider implications. That is the point, I am poorly, making, apparently....

I just think that not all the questions have been asked about what it means to be a "driverless car" and that we need to run through all the risks -- and thats the one thing I find really lacking in any of these conversations at all.

My mention of “we” though are the consumers who will be paying these companies for rides and presuming they have already thought about these safety issues, yet “we” have no privvy to an understanding about who has approached the issues nor who has the best approach and neither a standard to refer to that “we” can expect the companies to uphold.

That’s the whole point of “us” starting to ask questions.

“So, uh, you want me to fly in your plane, to what standards are these planes built to?”

Oh look, “we” have an FAA who manages all that, regardless of who made the damn plane.

Danish society hasn't yet collapsed. I think you're overstating the issues.

Your comment is bullshit comparison if youre talking about comparing freaking rails with vehicles whos routes are 100% random per rider.

> So now we have driverless cars effectively classified as emergency ambulances - so assuming the CARNOC is paying attention, they then drive the car to the hospital - and have to have a mechanism to contact said hospital

> Imagine the healthcare implications where if someone hasa seizure, ODs, cardiac, etc... what is the response time from the CARNOC, and getting them to a hospital ==> then what types of lawsuits will these companies see? what type of insurance will they require?

The comparison is useful because all of the above scenarios are possible in the Danish rail system.

Just like a random onlooker could see you from the platform, someone in another car could see you in your driverless one and call emergency services. The two scenarios are very similar in the end. It's just that the train car has a higher (but far from 100%) chance that you will be noticed more quickly.

The scenario certainly also works for trains in general -- perhaps even more so, since an older, manually driven train is less likely to be filled with CCTV cameras linked to a control room. (The metro has this, but it seems they're only monitored once someone presses the emergency button.)

But thank you for clarifying.

That's quite a huge leap you made there. Care to back up and explain how a drunk person calling an uber magically turns the uber into an emergency ambulance?

What then? So the uber now has to either get a person or take that car to a hospital - how do they know to do such?

So is uber running a massive call center that watches every driverless ride and monitors the situation?

Are they monitoring if people get into a fight in the car?

That actually happened to me, where I took an uber pool, and the two other riders got into a physical fist fight in the car and the driver had to pull into a gas station and kick them out.

How to monitor a potential rape? How to monitor unless your watching literally every ride.

It does? Why? What if the person passed out in their own, manually driven car? Would you expect that car to automatically call an ambulance?

Just because you theoretically could have some kind of elaborate system that detects when the user falls unconscious and carries them to the hospital, doesn't mean that's _required_.

> Are they monitoring if people get into a fight in the car?

No. Why would they be? What makes you think that's necessary?

If the passenger doesn't exit the vehicle after a set time, start a video call to a support central (perhaps the person is unable to get out because the doors won't unlock? or they fell asleep?) The attendant could then instruct the vehicle to go to a pre-specified location nearby where a human can intervene, call another vehicle or notify the competent authorities.

But I agree with the overall point, while occasional incapacitated passengers or manual intervention may occur, these are not insurmountable problems.

Ride is avg $10, vehicle is ~$30,000 satellite uplink is ~1200 per year. BOFH guy watching is ~$65k per year... insurance is ~$2400/ year...

so if we take that, we have an annual cost of (assuming life of care is 3 years) 10000+65000+1200+2400 - so ~80K per year per car... and / BOFH among his volume to monitor N cars....

but we extract the BOFH from the car model.

so we have a per car cost of 15K per year

and we have an avg rider value of 10 per ride, and a ride volume of 1,500 rides per month / BOFHs required / insurance claim / lawsuits

and we can suss out the model pretty well... but there are a lot more inputs.

and if this is going to be a service to public from multi-parties, we'd better understand this model....

and they'd better be standard on the CARNOC

This is literally the stupidest response on this thread. Why? Because presume I am paying Ajedi32 to drive me home. So the presumption is that Ajedi32 is responsible for my well being to arrive Home.

So I don’t arrive home. I get dumped on the side of the road or I die in the presumed care of Ajedi32.

Don’t mess around with Your reputation, Ajedi32 because you want to defend stupid ai driving cars, have some self awareness and vision.

If you were paying me to drive you home you might reasonably expect that I would also do those things, since I'm a human and am therefore capable of performing tasks completely unrelated to the one you're paying me for. But the car isn't a human, and there's no reason you should expect it to behave like one in all respects. (For example, I am also capable of engaging in small talk with you. Would you expect the self driving car to be capable of performing that task, just because I can?)

Basically, if you OD and pass out in the back of a autonomous car, there's no reason to expect the outcome to be any different from if you ODd and passed out in a public restroom. And you wouldn't be justified in blaming the car for that anymore than you'd be justified in blaming the restroom.

Non responsive passenger->follow protocol that emergency services prefers (or even legally requires).

Fist fight->stop car, inform passengers that car won't transport them further.

Rape->turn over recordings of vehicle interior to police.

I suppose for the last one you have to take it as a given that they are making such recordings (probably on a rolling basis), but there you go.

It's not like these situations are any thornier because an automated system is involved. Passed out person is better off with monitoring (at least in health terms), fist fight without car, same difference, rape without monitoring, no video evidence.

Well, Uber may have some difficulty complying, but I'm sure their competitors will be fine.

So, then the idea for a unicorn is that we need a "fitbit for health monitoring while riding in a self driving car" as an app on the apple watch.

For emergencies where the passenger is more responsive, an "onstar"-like emergency button that calls emergency support staff would probably suffice.

How to monitor a potential rape? That thing probably has 15 cameras on the outside and might already be saving the footage for law enforcement review. And you actually removed one potential rapist from the scene by not having a driver - sadly this is a real (though thankfully infrequent) issue.

How many lawsuits come from that?

They don't necessarily need to drive the person to the hospital. They could just call a real ambulance and wait in place for it.

There are few better test beds for driverless cars than Phoenix metro, from technical, legal, and customer-concern viewpoints.

At the very least, there will be a panic button that will get human support very quickly.

I think people are not jazzed about your questions because this answer seems like common sense. And nobody, engineer or not, owes you an answer.