My car also has all that safety driver assist crap. Due to how this works - I won't trust driverless cars for a long, long time.

While on interstate going around a curve to right, it thought I was going to run into the car ahead and to left of me - it slammed on the brakes in the middle of a curve. Thank God there was nobody behind me.

The next week while going other direction on interstate and getting off, it thought I was going to keep going straight and hit the exit sign. Again, it slammed on the brakes on the interstate. Again, thankfully there was nobody behind me this time.

Set the cruise control and turn on lane keeper assist on the interstate, EVERY STINKING TIME it thinks I want to get off the interstate at the northbound 72nd street exit. Gotta pull it back every time and now turn it off before I get to that exit location.

I can also go off in rant mode about that stinking German 9-speed transmission. It usually has absolutely no idea as to what gear it should be in.

Still too many bugs in the software.

The key word in your story is “assist”. That car was only designed to assist if it thinks you may have made a mistake and has no actual AI technology. Completely different tech.

Driverless cars.....w.o.f.t.a.m...

The future
No one owns a car, there will be public transportation (self driving taxi like cars) to transport you for the short drives.
The air will be filled with self flying drone like vehicles (that you can own).

At the edge of the city there will be a kind of airport, you get there with public transportation.
There you can rent or step into your private drone.

All electric, no more airplanes, no more normal cars.
And there will be millions of e-bicycles for the lower classes.

Greetings Nostradamus

It makes no difference to LIDAR. If you look at some of their data on their site they explain all of that. They had a 40ish video on their site at some points explaining all of it. It was quite impressive.

The issue with personal flight vehicles are unlike ground vehicles where there are ways to mitigate the fatality factor of accidents and make them safer, when you add flying to the mix, any fender bender is 90% likely to become a fatality.

As always it will take longer than we expect to get real "driverless" cars, but also be here before we really know it. A ford leader was saying ~5 years ago something along the lines of "we will be selling a car without a steering wheel in ~5 years". Yeah right. Even IF you had a full driverless car, why would you make it brick when something like the sensors break?

So it is easy to get hyped up on all the progress made, but who knows, maybe in 10 years there will be cars without steering wheels on the roads?

I bet he didn't run that statement by the Ford Engineering team first.

Pinballers are always slow....to adopt new tech.

Williams put mechanical clangers in the first solid state machines, fearing that players would be terrified of games run by computers

Bally did that with Evel Knievel, Power Play, Eight Ball.

No,not for me in my life time,

Been on Tesla FSD beta for some time. While not perfect it gets better each week. Rather amazing technology. Drove from TN to Chicago and did not need to interact once. Just enter destination and sit back. Crazy stuff.

I’d love it if I got to choose what style of driving. Road racer down to Granny mode.

That’s actually available. You can do sport mode (if you like buying tires often) to do 0-60 launches in 3 seconds or chill mode to be like a normal Ice car. Same for steering, and auto lane changes. Mad Max setting is a bit much for me with it zig zagging around cars. Technology is fun.

Can’t comment on NY travel but with my commute in Chicago rush hour I’m guessing not to far an example lol. Merges without issue and even with stop and go bumper to bumper absolutely no issue. Just sit back and watch. Scary at first letting technology do it’s thing which is not normal in a car but impressive when you get comfortable with it.

Who is at fault in an accident….the car manufacturer or the software designer? Big legal problems coming.

It’s inevitable, but will require sophisticated AI and an interconnected network (6 or 7g with fail over) where at least 90% of the cars are autonomous. Also there has to be a way to adjudicate complex moral decisions when an accident is unavoidable. Does the vehicle drive into a barrier killing the car owner in order to avoid mowing down 10 innocent civilians? A buyer must know and agree to the A.I.’s moral compass.

I've mentioned this before in other threads. I don't see the upside for the manufacturers. Suppose that through large adoption of driverless vehicles, we cut the number of fatal accidents by 80%.

This sounds great, but right now when you hit little Johnny with your car, Ford doesn't get sued...you do. With a driverless vehicle, it's Ford (or GM, Toyota, etc.) that takes the blame. Do they really want to be liable for all the remaining accidents (of which there will still be plenty).

Furthermore, everyone will be happy to sue the (deep-pocket) manufacturer rather than the individual driver.

If I was a lawyer for Ford, I'd be like "There is NO way we are doing this..."

An interconnected system might help, but still won't solve the problem of Johnny unexpectedly running out into the street.

I would never be in a car that has a driverless option. To me the whole idea is a stupid concept. Why? I enjoy the feel of driving a car. I have 14 cars and love to drive on PCH here in Cali. I like to speed thru the corners etc. My favorite car in my collection my 14 Viper. Hands on the wheel at all times. No way would a driverless option work for me.

Driverless cars are going to be built for companies like Uber to scale and finally profit, its the main reason they need to exist.

Another thought, the pandemic and remote work has really put a damper on the potential demand for driverless cars. Fewer people with mind numbing commutes.

I would think all liability will passed onto the driver. It will always be required that the driver will be behind the wheel, paying attention, and make corrections if needed. Even with that, you can see the lawsuits coming. Remember Toyota settled for $1.2 billion back when they were sued for unintended acceleration issues a decade or so ago.

Any party with potential blame can be sued: the driver, the owner, the manufacturer, the software provider, even the jurisdiction where the accident took place. Which get sued depend on how likely it is blame can be proved, how much money they can cough up if found liable and how mad the victims or their relatives are with each party, among other things. Software "fault" will be both acts of commission and omission; both will evolve over time. Manufacturer claims can involve thousands of vehicles; software could easily get into multi-millions.

Doesn't work that way for the gun manufactures. Sorry, not trying derail this into a gun debate. More about lawyers using the same strategy to go after the car manufactures. Ditto on a lot of things, ladders come to mind too - with what seems to be numerous warning labels all over them.

But back on topic: I rented a Honda Insight using the Tura app a couple of weeks ago. I was seriously impressed with all the 'smart' safety features that car had. Keeps you in lane, adaptive cruse, can recognize speed limit signs, the center display shows the right side of the car when turning right (very handy), etc. Really neat features. Granted not driverless, but impressive nonetheless.

The problem with this is that the value proposition is seriously handicapped.

Babysitting a beta software may be attractive for the technophile geek demographic but good luck getting all that sweet robotaxi revenue (which is where the real money is) from a driver assist toy.

I personally have a Tesla and their semi-autonomous driving product (I won’t call it their grossly misleading marketing name) is a total joke.

For a driver-less car insurance policy, who gets listed as drivers?

Here in NSW, Australia, police have to prove, driver, motor vehicle, public street and the offence committed. The first proof is out the window with driverless cars. The only winners here will be the lawyers.

The lawyers always win…can’t speak for Australia but in the US that’s who really runs the country…..

Great question….I am sure the answer by the insurance company is going to be whoever owns the car. That’s their out.

https://www.benzinga.com/trading-ideas/long-ideas/22/08/28641260/bat-s-crazy-elon-musk-targets-tesla-safety-groups-child-dummy-test-in-obscenity-laced-ra

'Bat S*%# Crazy': Elon Musk Targets Tesla Safety Group's 'Child Dummy' Test In Tweet
By Benzinga
— 6:34 PM ET 08/25/22

Tesla Inc (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk took to Twitter Thursday to respond to a screenshot posted by Whole Mars Catalog (@WholeMarsBlog) of a blog post from The Dawn Project's website written by the safety group's CEO and founder Dan O'Dowd.

"Bat s**t crazy," Musk replied using emojis.

crazy
-- Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 25, 2022

Musk's response is the latest punch thrown in an ongoing scrap between Musk and Tesla with the safety advocacy group. This latest dispute appears to have kicked off on Aug. 9 when The Dawn Project released a national TV campaign showing a white Tesla EV, operating on full self-driving (FSD) software, run over a child-sized mannequin in the middle of a street multiple times.

See Also: Looking To Trade Tesla Stock Following 3-1 Split? Here's An Updated Chart

The Back Drop: In response to the Dawn Projects blog post, on Aug. 11 Tesla sent the group a cease and desist letter, asking that, among other things, the videos and other "defamatory information" be removed.

"To be clear, FSD Beta incorporates safety by design and does recognize pedestrians, including children, and when utilized properly, the system reacts to prevent or mitigate a collision," explained the letter, which was signed by Dinna Eskin, senior director and deputy general counsel for Tesla.

O'Dowd's group has shown no signs of being deterred. On Aug. 15, O'Dowd took to Twitter to poke the bear by posting another version of the video to Musk's personal account with the caption: "New video of Master Scammer Musk's Full Self-Driving Tesla ruthlessly mowing down a child mannequin wearing a safety vest in a real school crosswalk. No cones. Room to swerve. Video of pedals. Everything is real except the child, bc you know what would happen to a real child!"

New video of Master Scammer Musk's Full Self-Driving Tesla ruthlessly mowing down a child mannequin wearing a safety vest in a real school crosswalk. No cones. Room to swerve. Video of pedals.

Everything is real except the child, bc you know what would happen to a real child! pic.twitter.com/a3ut9bpSqG
-- Dan O'Dowd (@RealDanODowd) August 15, 2022

The Latest: On Thursday, O'Dowd published a blog post on his website, hitting back at Elon Musk and his lawyers over the cease and desist letter. In the post, O'Dowd counters much of Tesla's letter line-by-line while periodically adding verbiage in the form of personal attacks: O'Dowd refers to the Tesla CEO as a crybaby, to Musk's stockholders as fanboys and added Musk's lawyers made him look like a doofus.

"The rest of the letter is boring standard legal boilerplate," O'Dowd added before finishing the post off with a threat: "Tesla Full Self-Driving software has no future. It is the most incompetently designed, implemented, and tested commercial software I have ever seen. All it does is take a perfectly good Tesla car and make it occasionally try to kill the driver, the passengers, and innocent bystanders. I dare you to come out and defend this technology."

So the Dawn project was using a White tezla... would a red or blue one do better? asking for a friend

Until laws are in place that hold the manufacturer of a driverless car accountable for ANYTHING that happens if that feature is enabled I am completely against it. It’s their logic/programming that chooses the action/outcome of who gets injured or dies. Who gives them that right to decide. You are buying a product and relying on their service….so they should be accountable and their insurance should cover anything accident related…but at the end of the day they will just charge more so you will pay for it anyway. It’s a bunch of BS.

Currently if you drive and cause an accident you are held accountable and that is how it should be IF you are driving…..but if you are not the one driving you are just a passenger at that point.

I beta tested Tesla FSD and no one is saying it is anywhere near ready to drive on it’s own. They put a dummy in the road and had a human being run it over. What exactly does that prove. There are countless valid reasons to be critical of FSD and it needs some oversight but that commercial is nonsense. The reality is Tesla requires a human operator at all times and that person is responsible for the car.

I wish they could perfect it, for rush hour in the mornings.

No more worrying about people driving while reading the newspaper, eating breakfast, putting on makeup, shaving, etc. etc.

That would save lives and get people to work in one piece.

LTG : )

Until there are laws governing accountability I am against it. We can all agree the technology has a way to go for it to be proven safe.

There are some people that are just bad drivers that shouldn’t drive so there is a a practical need for self driving. No more drunk driving, get bad drivers from behind the wheel, etc. So I am all for technology to advance to make things better. We have long way to go before we are there.

With you on all of that…and most importantly get rid of drunk driving. Of all the reasons to not have an accident that one is so easy to avoid but people still get behind the wheel….get an Uber. It’s so simple.

Personally I think it's the dumbest thing ever and it will only cause serious problems and deaths the longer it's allowed to keep happening. People can't pay attention to what there doing in a car now, let alone if the car was driving itself. The goverment needs to shut it down before it gets worse and start making people RESPONSIBLE for causing accidents instead of a slap on the wrist like most other serious crimes as well.

John

self (resized).jpg

Would love to just pin a destination, crawl into to the back seat to sleep and let the car do it’s thing. Orlando to Jacksonville. What are the chances today of that car making it’s destination? Zero!

I think that's possible, AND there would be "new" deaths (less of them) caused by the logic of the FSD cars.

It gets into sticky ethical debates that I'm not sure we'll ever get over. Is "the greater good" enough?

I don't think it's realistic to have zero deaths caused by FSD. And for reasons already said in this thread, I don't know if I want algorithms deciding my fate, even if that means less deaths overall.

I'm getting tired of convenience quickly. I realize the companies have our best interest in mind, but I don't like seeing technology pushed (forced) upon us.

It's evident there will be a higher price to drive a gasoline car within the decade - either through fuel, insurance, or both. I can imagine quite easily the same for autonomous vehicles. You won't "have" to use one, but you will get the stick if you don't.

How's that carrot taste?

Old man rant over.

Let's not forget Christine's boyfriend.

The Car (resized).jpg

Can't wait for the all AI Formula One!