Should non-autonomous vehicles be banned from motorways?

[Max_Power]

I hate to be a luddite, which I recognize I might be, but I just don't get it. If the goal is to reduce deaths (which increases population, which is an issue of its own) then why not outlaw rock climbing, or parachuting, or bacon? I imagine people who enjoyed riding and caring for horses and sold hay and made horseshoes were against the automobile when it came along. So maybe I am a luddite.

It'll come down to insurance. Once autonomous cars are "safer" by the numbers, manually-driven cars will have sky-high insurance rates.

Having technology do something for us that is so damn easy - will we one day have little machine we carry around to chew our food for us, and then squirt it into our mouths?

Instead of self-driving cars, they should have just mandated on day one that smart phones will not work inside a moving vehicle. The texting and blabbering everyone is doing while driving is helping to make the case for self-driving cars. Most drivers suck because the driving test is way to easy.

[Raudus42]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37711489

It's coming folks...Ford have also said in 20 years they'll only be building self-drivers. All part of the nanny state wanting total control over us, and we're mostly sitting by watching it. How anyone who loves driving can be in favour of autonomous cars is beyond me.

[98elise]

Max_Power said:

I hate to be a luddite, which I recognize I might be, but I just don't get it. If the goal is to reduce deaths (which increases population, which is an issue of its own) then why not outlaw rock climbing, or parachuting, or bacon? I imagine people who enjoyed riding and caring for horses and sold hay and made horseshoes were against the automobile when it came along. So maybe I am a luddite.

I'm buying a Tesla because I have a long boring commute. I don't want to drive 3-4 hours a day on motorways. I will however drive my Elise for fun at the weekends.

[rampageturke]

Raudus42 said:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-37711489

It's coming folks...Ford have also said in 20 years they'll only be building self-drivers. All part of the nanny state wanting total control over us, and we're mostly sitting by watching it. How anyone who loves driving can be in favour of autonomous cars is beyond me.

ah yes, nanny state, thats surely the reason for self driving cars, bang on raudus42 couldnt have done it without you

i like driving, but do I like driving at 50mph in a straight line through the m6 roadworks?

[Mr Snrub]

98elise said:

Max_Power said:

I hate to be a luddite, which I recognize I might be, but I just don't get it. If the goal is to reduce deaths (which increases population, which is an issue of its own) then why not outlaw rock climbing, or parachuting, or bacon? I imagine people who enjoyed riding and caring for horses and sold hay and made horseshoes were against the automobile when it came along. So maybe I am a luddite.

I'm buying a Tesla because I have a long boring commute. I don't want to drive 3-4 hours a day on motorways. I will however drive my Elise for fun at the weekends.

Or at least you will until the Elise gets banned and Lotus go out of business

[otolith]

Interesting approach;

The cars will come stock with a new computer—40 times more powerful than the current offering—running a neural net. Tesla will roll out new autonomous features via software updates. They’ll test the software by running it in the background and comparing its decisions to the driver’s.



http://singularityhub.com/2016/10/21/teslas-are-te...

[paranoid airbag]

Terminator X said:

I have to reboot my laptop a couple of times a day and/or get the blue screen of death and/or it restarts itself due to some problem. This will never happen with a car you say?

TX.

Then you have very poor purchasing or maintenance skills even for basic consumer goods. The free market is not for you.

Luckily, when it comes to cars, self-driving or otherwise, you won't get one. And I say "luckily" only because of the evidence you yourself have provided. Had you demonstrated the ability to purchase/maintain a laptop properly society might consider giving you free rein over purchasing and maintaining a potentially lethal machine used in public. But you didn't.

[Terminator X]

otolith said:

Terminator X said:

otolith said:

I think eventually manually driven cars will disappear from the scene, possibly with the help of legislation, possibly not. I think it will eventually be seen as scarcely believable that we once used to accept thousands of deaths a year on the roads (millions worldwide) and just shrug it off as unavoidable, even resist change that would reduce it. But I don't think that will happen any time soon, we're going to see manually driven cars around for some time to come. We may see them increasingly excluded from some areas, though. I doubt they will be areas you would drive for fun.

Millions of deaths? Apparently the odds of a deadly fall involving bed, chair or other furniture is 1 in 4,238 so 1.76m over the whole planet. When will Google start to deal with that I ask you

Apparently life is a 100% terminal condition, so why battle to eliminate smallpox, control malaria, provide clean water?

Injuries kill about 5 million people a year, of which about 1.3 million are road deaths. WHO doesn't give separate breakdown for furniture related injuries, though I would have thought that were it of a similar order of magnitude it would be mentioned. In any case, if someone came up with an idea for improving furniture so that it didn't kill people, would you be against it?

No idea why you mentioned your first point in relation to my post. My point is that road deaths seem on a par with falling off a bed deaths eg fairly small in number vs the big killers worldwide. Why don't these entrepreneurial companies deal with the latter as surely much cheaper to solve?

TX.

[heebeegeetee]

Interesting...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-394...

[Terminator X]

anonymous said:

[redacted]

Indeed with profit being at the very top. You seem to have completely missed the point of my post, car deaths are NOT A BIG ISSUE in the grand scheme of things.

TX.

[jamieduff1981]

Haven't read the whole thread, but no, human driven cars should not be banned from motorways. Despite the tiny little lives some people on Pistonheads must lead, there is a sound reason to want to take a human driven car from point A to point B quickly and without hassle.

It is not the case that anyone who wants a human driven car must also want to travel from northern Scotland to southern England via stey little backroads for the whole journey, nor is it the case that anyone making a long journey wants to have a robot car at either end.

Usually when people propose something is banned, it's because they haven't really thought something through.

[AH33]

Nope. In fact, autonomous cars should be banned now, to save us all the hassle.

I'd continue driving anyway if human-driven cars were banned, as would loads of people.

[heebeegeetee]

jamieduff1981 said:

Haven't read the whole thread, but no, human driven cars should not be banned from motorways. Despite the tiny little lives some people on Pistonheads must lead, there is a sound reason to want to take a human driven car from point A to point B quickly and without hassle.

Aah, that's just it - take the humans out of the equation and I genuinely think average speeds could go up and we'd certainly be removing one st load of hassle.