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Re:Driverless cars may already be safer than human drivers by grecy on Thursday August 31, 2023 @11:09PM (#37346348)
> I'm still waiting for one that advertises that it can drive a rural road in the Midwest after sunset in the winter with poor cell reception as it goes through valleys.

When the automobile was first introduced it couldn't drive far from gas stations, it needed oil changes at garages that didn't exist yet and you couldn't drive to a far away town that didn't have a gas station. It got better.

I could tell that same story about laptops, or airplanes or boats or washing machines or even the electrical and water supply to your house.

All products get better over time, but even now there are hundreds of millions of people that live in places that simply don't need all the stuff you mentioned, so for them a self-driving vehicle is already extremely useful.

It's even possible the product will be "finished" and your use case will never be satisfied, because it isn't deemed important enough to include. For example, I recently drove a vehicle 1,050 miles on the world's most remote road [1]. 99.99999% of all vehicles sold in the entire world can't make that drive because they can't carry enough fuel. Just because I wanted to do it with a vehicle, that doesn't mean auto manufactures are going to suddenly add duel fuel tanks to all vehicles.

(FWIW, the Land Cruiser 70 series comes from the factory with dual 90 liter diesel tanks, and can drive the road end to end no problem directly form the factory. So ONE manufacturer decided it was worth satisfying that hyper specific use case, but obviously the others do not)

Yes, you have a use case that the product doesn't do yet.

Yes, it likely will in the future.

Yes, you will have to wait.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UR6agkRbT4

Re:Driverless cars may already be safer than human drivers by eesmith on Friday September 01, 2023 @01:21AM (#37347117)
Minor points:

> it couldn't drive far from gas stations

You could buy gasoline at a pharmacist.

> it needed oil changes at garages that didn't exist yet

You were expected to to it yourself. This 1909 manual describes how for a Model T: https://archive.org/details/ford-price-list-model-t-1909/pag...

I suspect local bike mechanics and blacksmiths could also do this work.

Given your recent drive, you might like to read about the first drive across the US, in 1903 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horatio_Nelson_Jackson .