http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/37...monary-embolism



I can't see a better publicity for Tesla than story like this, specially after that case of the driver who trusted the autopilot too much and ended crashing against a truck.

On the other hand I can see a future where someone programs his car to take in cross country, dies during the journey, and no one notices anything until the car arrives at it's destination.

There are good things and not so good things about robot cars - and like all technologies, it comes down to the right application.

Every time I hear "self driving cars" I think of the boon it could be to the elderly and disabled people.

Hopefully I'll live long enough for some caring jerk to take my driver's license from me. I do not want that to put me under de facto house arrest. I'd rather limp my ancient butt to my robot car and after getting in say "Waffle House," go have some eggs and coffee on my own schedule, limp back into the car and say "Miss Fong's Home For Wayward Girls."*

Likewise, it would be great to rent a self driving car and do a proper pub crawl.

* In my perfect future, that's my nursing home of choice.

The problem with non-self driving cars is they rely upon people to drive them.

People are unreliable and literally tens of thousands die every year. Over 38,000 last year. To think that an all-automated system would be much worse is hard to believe.

However, it's quite possible that a mixed system would be worse until the number of driverless cars reaches a critical mass, say 30 % or 70% or so. People expect other cars to behave the way they drive, so a robot would make different decisions and could lead a driver to hit it.




The Jedi Master

We'll agree right after we disagree!

The theory is that self-driving cars are the way forward in urban environments, but I can't think of anything more disruptive to traffic in Miami than a car doing the speed limit, keeping to a lane, and observing the rules of the road.

In suburbia, however, it's not such a big deal, as traffic is usually fairly light and most people don't drive like it's two minutes until the apocalypse and the liquor stores are about to close.

When one thinks of the number of trips taken in human driven vehicles across the nation on a minute-by-minute basis, driving is improbably safe.

Those 38K deaths per year- I've looked it up myself- are interesting from a social response aspect when you consider that they were almost all inadvertent events.

If there were 38K deaths in the USA per year during commercial domestic airline flights, what would happen?

I find it strange that the public in general gets righteous about *causes* of needless death, as if the cause influences the quality of the loss of life or something, instead of getting worked up about the *fact* of the needless deaths. The dead folks probably would see no difference if they could be asked- the common denominator was needless death. We as a society tolerate some degree of it, as long as we can point at a more shocking cause. I think it helps us manage our own fear of death to be able to say, 'Well yeah at least they didn't die from ______!'. We put conditions on it and it makes us feel in control of something.

Very odd.

Anyway. Self driving cars. Has to be all or nothing. If people drive this badly now, imagine how bad they are when the car they are so bad at driving does 90% of their driving for them, and 10% of the time they are now skill-less, un-practiced idiots driving that car instead of semi-skilled, practiced idiots.

I have said for years that all our gee-whiz electronic safeties have taught us is that overall, we can drive even more carelessly without fear of injury. I say that because most drivers don't get that good, real scare and most do not see or experience a horrible injurious accident. It obviously has not helped us save lives if 38K still die each year.

I've always said that most people don't drive their cars, they ride in it. They can't manage the simplest driving skills, like parking or using a signal and others think that they are Nascar Drivers weaving through traffic and always trying to go 10 mph faster than the flow, these would be the people who would manual drive their cars even when 90% of the cars on the road have become autonomous and not because they are better drivers. Everyday I see scary things like the guy last night in a Prius, on I-75 doing 60 while everyone else is doing 80 wandering side to side in his lane and looking at a tablet as I passed him. SMDH