here, try on my authority glasses.
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Meh. This sucks, but - The technology is in its infancy and will get better and better.
Self driving cars wonāt completely get rid of fatal accidents, but will greatly reduce them.
In the article I read, they said the light and glare made it hard to see, so even if the driver was paying attention he may not have seen the hazard. That happens all the time where people donāt see something. Worse, the human mind can tune out dangers that are apparent to a robot. Such as turning at an intersection you turn at ever day, and there is NEVER any other cars. Then one day there is another car, but because your mind didnāt expect one to be there, it āmissedā that important detail.
I think the big manufacturers could (and may) kill Tesla, but only with better/cheaper electric cars. That horse has bolted.
Teslaās vehicles are brilliant (but not perfect). Itās a high standard to reach and I find it astonishing that a boutique manufacturer has been able to produce such world-class vehicles. People will point out the reliability issues here-and-there, but poor reliability hasnāt really hurt Mercedes and BMW brands. If you havenāt yet driven a Tesla, do it. The future is here. Iām cheering for them.
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Maybe, maybe not. In my experience, the people who seek extra training often times feel they are more invincible and more likely to do dangerous and/or asshole maneuvers because of their confidence in their ability.
You have seen that guy, expertly cutting through traffic, whizzing by at 10mph more than the rest of the road. The road is their private track, and the rest of us are just orange cones to avoid.
Most accidents arenāt from bad drivers not knowing how to drive, itās from them not caring, being tired or distracted, or other human failings. Even otherwise good drivers can screw up once in awhile.
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Any system that relies on a human being to pay attention 100% of the time is a system built to fail. This is what air traffic control researchers have figured out in the past few decades. This is why I find driver-shaming threads to be obnoxious. Sometimes the driver is doing something genuinely dangerous, but sometimes the driver is tuning a radio or eating a sandwich or otherwise breaking up the monotony of a daily commute. The assumption seems to be that you can force people to pay attention to boring routines. No you canāt. You canāt make yourself pay attention when you want to. The system is designed to fail, and everything about a carās ergonomics, licensure, and insurance makes that abundantly clear.
Tesla, in at least one sense may have erred in expecting people to actually pay attention while doing nothing. But the technology is vital, and once it exists the number of preventable accidents will rise dramatically, because most accidents may become preventable.
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Iām going to drive my POS Prius straight into the ground, then buy a Tesla 3. In approximately 3 years.
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Your Prius is only going to last 3 years?
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I wouldnāt bank on being able to buy a 3 in 3 years either.
Thus, āapproximatelyā.
@Mister44: Itāll be 10 in 3 years. Itās rattling a helluva lot more now at 80k than my 14 year old Acura is at 120k.
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OH, well 10years is fairly oldā¦ though 80K should be half itās life.
'zactly. Did I not call it a POS?
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The deaths-per-mile stat that the Tesla blogpost mentions as a comparison is pretty misleadingā¦ Since there have only been 130m miles driven, this first death is not an averageā¦ If someone dies tomorrow using the auto pilot, all of a sudden, the stat would be 1 death per 65m miles. Furthermore, the death-per-mile stat for traditional cars (I assume) is for all type of driving, so isnāt an apples-to-apples comparison. I doubt you would drive a Tesla through the snow, especially using auto-pilot, nor do you use auto pilot around town (correct me if Iām wrong). They really should be comparing deaths-per-mile of highway driving and only for high-end luxury sedans.
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You indeed did, and now I know whyā¦
The confusing thing about car culture and auto-drive, is how much satisfaction drivers get (me too) from that sense of freedom, that notion of being in control. Autopilot mode takes away 90% of the appeal of driving a car. Why pay extra for it? Especially when mass transit is cheaper, fewer accidents, lower carbon footprintā¦ itās like theyāre solving a problem thatās the feature, not the bug.
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I donāt see this as being about autonomous driving at all.
In the UK, semi trailers have side bars to prevent just this sort of accident from being fatal.
From what Iāv e seen so far the root causes may have been as follows:
Semi driver making a dangerous turn
White panel trailer hard to see against sky
No anti-dive protection on the trailer.
Iāve written about this elsewhere and had the response that US trailers canāt have side panels because of the risk of grounding on humps. Guess what - we had humps*! And they have either been modified or there are diversion signs around them. It has always struck me as odd that in the US so much effort goes into internal car safety and so little goes into making large vehicles safe for other road users, or even making the roads themselves safer. Some things you do better, but if you look at our artic (semi) rigs with their anti-intrusion bars, forward cabs for visibility, rain catcher brushes on mudguards to reduce spray, and now introducing cyclist detectors, a lot can be done.
*There used to be one not far from us that regularly got trailers stuck in the middle, which has now been fixed because, basically, foreign truck drivers didnāt read the signs and the problem got worse. It was annoying being delayed but always a bit funny to see the back end of a trailer with its wheels off the ground next to the sign saying āDanger: Hump backed bridge.ā
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For an old-fashioned dinosaur juice Toyota, thatās barely broken in.
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I donāt know that I think cars should go completely out the window hereā¦ I do think that the more we shift to everyday use of public transit for things like communting to work or going to a ball game or concert ā things that we all know are part of the problem with traffic, then the less traffic weāll have on the road.
And I agree that I too, LIKE to drive a car. Wouldnāt it be neat if for the most part, we could do it primarily as a leisure activity instead of as a chore? But as someone who is prone to motion sickness in cars when Iām not driving, the autopilot is also less attractive, though I can see why people would find it attractive.
I also donāt think we should fall down the hole of thinking that technologing our problems away is going to help (what was it called in that article @doctorow posted earlier this week? Solutionism?). It can be part of the solution, of course, but just sort of throwing technology at the problem isnāt going to magically solve it. We need good policy too.
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What did you say? Were you mean? 
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You better get cracking on that, I still see first generation Prii rolling around 15+ years later.
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I was about to start off on a rant about infrastructure, and decided I wasnāt in the mood.
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