GM Cruise to delay commercial launch of self-driving cars to beyond 2019

Re:GM Cruise to delay commercial launch of self-driving cars... by MegaButts on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @12:55PM (#20517117)

I agree with you that people should be ticketed for reckless driving, but I believe you're missing the point. If adding these cars to the road causes more accidents, regardless of who is at fault, they are making the roads more dangerous.

Just like enforcing drug laws doesn't seem to increase public safety (I welcome data one way or the other, but my understanding is it actually is a significant contributor to decreasing public safety), maybe we should be honest with ourselves about human behavior and write our laws to actually cater to that.

If humans reject self-driving cars, making laws protecting them isn't going to make people accept them. Make the self-driving cars actually acceptable to humans and then you don't even have a problem you try to solve with regulation.

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Re:GM Cruise to delay commercial launch of self-driving cars... by jfoster on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @02:33PM (#20518177)

Wouldn't it depend on the type of accident? From what I understand the most common case is that an autonomous vehicle will not proceed when a human thought it would (eg. at an intersection), resulting in the human hitting the back of the autonomous vehicle at low speed. That type of accident is preventable through patience and not very severe. It seems fine to me to have more of those if it results in any decrease in more severe accidents.

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Re:GM Cruise to delay commercial launch of self-driving cars... by MegaButts on Wednesday July 24, 2019 @03:11PM (#20518602)

It was a hypothetical - it has nothing to do with the data because nobody is sharing the data. You can reinterpret it to mean "more dangerous" or however you like. The main point is culpability is irrelevant if the goal is safety.

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