Why? They don’t need it.
Eventually the electronic pathways might be there anyway, as inductive charging loops for the autonomous EV. 
Heh heh heh. I’m old enough to remember when email was supposed to eliminate paper. Well our paper budget went way up because all the extra emails were also printed, in addition to everything else. Had a gas cost projection chart on my bulletin board. Never even came close. What do we base these predictions on? Can you imagine 100 self drivers arriving at an intersection and making decisions on who goes next without stop lights. I just think some of this stuff is pure fantasy. I for one though always thought the Dick Tracy wrist watch communicators would someday become a reality so its not like I don’t believe in technology. It’s just that some seem to have to take it to unreasonable extremes. Then of course you have to look at what companies are actually pushing the whole issue as a way to capture more market share. Yeah humans may be limited in driving skill but it will be a long time before I get in the back seat and let a self driver take me home in a snow storm or on glare ice.
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+1
Yesterday–only by the grace of God–I narrowly avoided being T-boned by an oblivious jerk in a Honda Odyssey. I was driving–at the 35 mph speed limit–on the county road adjacent to my house.
As I approached the intersection with a narrow rural lane, the aforementioned Odyssey ran the stop sign on that rural lane, and finally came to a stop in the middle of the intersection. The driver VERY narrowly missed hitting two vehicles in the opposing lane of the county road, and if I had been driving…perhaps…1 mph faster, he would have T-boned my vehicle.
I have a hard time believing that a self-driving car would be more hazardous than the jerk who was piloting that Honda Oddity.
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I just read that millions of miles are being driven daily in virtual reality to develop the logic for self driving cars and it occurs to me that the Sheldon Coopers of the world whose lives are involved with technology will welcome the advent of autonomous cars while those whose lives are hands on, nitty gritty work will be skeptical.
When an airliner drops several miles in a stall and crashes despite the finest technology and oversight by several international governments
I will find it difficult to turn over driving to a little black box.
I will not have a problem once it is perfected, meanwhile I think I can sleep and drive, lane correction, cruise speed sensor, auto stop, and this is just a car off the lot.
That’s my feeling too. The problem becomes at what point it becomes “perfected”.
I think one element is that it’ll need to be looked at as a larger system, not just an individual car. Eventually I believe the technology will advance to where cars are actually interacting with one another in addition to sensing their environment and current condition (speed, weather, traffic, etc.). When that technology becomes commonplace, at that point I’d consider them able to self-drive, and Johnny-cabs will be reality. But that’ll take decades. I doubt if I’ll live to see it. You younger guys just might, however.
The obvious problem there is that those systems are far from perfect, and require constant supervision lest they cause a crash. (remember the Tesla one where the system drove the car through a truck) Yet drivers will tend to become distracted and even doze while the electronics is in control.
Actually, I can imagine that. I had some discussions with a robotics company that developed autonomous robots for a tire maker. The 'bots would deliver a tire carcass to the next station for tread. All 'bots communicated with a master controller and with each other through WiFi. There were virtual “lanes” established for travel, like cars, but there were intersections where 'bots would randomly meet.
The 'bots decided who had the right of way in these random meetings based on their serial number. Built First, Goes First. Brilliantly simple!
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I was riding my bicycle to a few distant locations using the Google Bike Maps Beta version on my mobile phone. I had a few instances of strange instructions so I either ignored the instructions and waited for it to catch up or pulled off to the side and reset the phone.
I try to set aside some time for adventures and looked upon the bike trip as an adventure and as a way to add to the knowledge base (and I used to work in systems assurance.)
I can imagine some bored young computer geek watching an old Busby Berkley movie and cranking out the malware to make Chicago’s Loop into a ‘Dancing with the Cars’ extravaganza.
It’s good that you exercised sound judgment in regard to…questionable…directions from that Sat-Nav system. This trucker blindly followed the route that his GPS system provided to him, and the result is surely some significant damage to a roadway that wasn’t actually a roadway:
My second post further explained what I meant. I did not at any time say that safety laws are bad, as you seem to imply I did.
When did applying the terms left, right, liberal or conservative become fighting words? I still think the author presented a liberal, or left, attitude especially considering it was presented in the Post. I’ve lived near D.C. for over 60 years and the Post has always been known as a liberal newspaper. Note that I didn’t say bad or good, just liberal.
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I am going to make a comment not directed at anyone specifically just an observation. No one ideology nor political party can lay exclusive claim to the moral high ground. None! We ALL want to help people. We ALL want the best outcomes for all. Claims from any individual to the contrary, i.e. “I believe this way because I CARE about people” is an insult to those that care equally but believe in an alternate path. THIS attitude is the root of angry discourse on this forum and in society in general. Contrary to popular meme, we ALL care about each other, we just disagree on the methods.
I’ll give one example, Car safety regulations; YES, some save lives but ALL of them increase the price of automobiles. And that cost doesn’t come out of profits that benefit the investors. It raises the costs of new AND used cars out of reach of those with limited means. So “No Car” may mean “No Job.” Or it might mean the car that person buys is a literal death trap because they cannot afford anything better. If it does come from the investors, some of those investors are pension or mutual funds that provide retiree income. That is the flip side of the argument. Who do you wish to help? Who do you wish to hurt?
We can, will and should disagree. That’s OK. Answers come from rational, thoughtful, discussion of all the points.
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Unless you are suggesting that common sense is the sole domain of the liberal, I don’t see how common sense legislation which basically says “try not to kill people” would be opposed by anyone, left or right, who’s there to represent what they swore to represent, which is the people they’re passing laws against intentionally killing.
I understand what you’re trying to say but reject the idea that you seem to be putting forth, which is that all laws are left-wing. After all, if “don’t kill people” is “left wing…” Well, that’s such a basic idea that there isn’t much room below it to legislate “conservatively.”
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One has to judge by actions, not words, @Mustangman I think your altruistic belief of
is not in line with the reality of what I see in current news of what is being offered up for bills on capitol hill. I see I do not want to waste my money on the poor, and giving them the right to vote is like giving a robber a gun.
Bipartisan action in the past has led to many advances in pollution reduction, emissions reduction, safety standards even for cars. What I see now is a forget the environment and save corporate profit.
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And THAT’s the attitude I was pointing out in my post. If you first accept that we ALL want to help people, then think about both sides of any argument. Not just the single side expressed by the press, as they are biased, nor your own biases.
Consider your very own statement…
Consider another context… I want my money spent on the deserving poor, those that actually need it, rather than those too lazy to do for themselves. See the difference?
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We’re getting off topic here but to me it is the difference between giving a person a fish and teaching them to fish. One fosters dependency and the other fosters independence. If you run a large government program, you probably don’t want a lot of independent customers.
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The difference between giving a person a fish & teaching them to fish is giving them a fish they will eat for one day teaching them to fish they will learn to sit in a boat all day & call in sick.
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Asiana Airlines Flight 214 was a scheduled transpacific passenger flight from Incheon International Airport near Seoul, South Korea, to San Francisco International Airport (SFO) in the United States. On the morning of Saturday, July 6, 2013 they were supposedly making a Visual Flight Rules (VFR) landing approach because the Instrument Landing System (ILS) was OuT of Service (OTS). They came in far to low, Struck the sea wall at the end of the runway and crashed. Three passengers died. The accident investigators faced the ‘Mother of all Puzzlers’. Weather was clear and calm. No problems with the aircraft, and experienced pilots with excellent records. In most situations when this “problem” occurred nearly all commercial airline pilot’s reaction would be “Cool. We actually get to fly the airplane”! I’m relying on my not so reliable memory of Smithsonian channel’s Air Disasters episode. Pilot interviews indicated it was an aircraft navigation systems failure. That didn’t “fly”. They were supposed to be visual with manual control. The investigation discovered the navigation receiver was tuned to the OTS INS and autopilot was engaged. The pilots had no doubt made multiple VFR landings when they were learning to fly but none in a commercial jumbo airliner. They should have diverted to an alternate airport. A fully self driving motor vehicle with no back-up manual controls will hopefully be past my lifetime. Just because it could be done doesn’t mean it should be.
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