Would you buy a self driving car?

U skird?

 

rl skird, bro

 

You can sleep at my place tonight. I will keep u warm

 

u so sweat!

 

It's just because you have soft ear lobes. I am a sucker for soft ear lobes.

 

Thanks, but they actually aren't real... I got lobe enhancements put in years ago.

 

I'm pretty sure the automated cars are all self sufficient. Now if you could get some kind of virus into them all, that might be a problem.

 

Or a bug shared by most or all of the systems, or a failure in some shared navigational resource, etc...

But crucial, carefully-engineered systems like that NEVER have those kinds of critical flaws, amirite?

 

Correct, the first wave of automated cars will most likely not be all networked together. Mostly because only a share of the cars on the road will be automated, not all. Also, with everything based on a camera system, not GPS, there is no need for any car2car communication.

Now down the road a ways, I assume that networking would come into play, but by that time the reasons would be the ubiquitous nature of automated cars and networking in that environment could lead to a near accident free environment.

 

Read what I wrote.

 

Can you imagine how many hackers would be drawn to shutting down this system?

 

Answer: all of them.

 

Not if it was powered by apple

 

Dude... their entire developer center is shut down because someone tried something and now Apple's freaking their shit out. Apple is *not* who I'd want protecting a net-based anything.

 

I'm not saying I would be an early adopter, but I don't think I'd be a late adopter or a rejecter either. Once there is plenty data, the safety should be quite obvious. Right now for example, there are a out 10 traffic related deaths per 100,000 drivers per year. Lets say the number of automated deaths is down from 10/100,000 to 1/100,000. At that point the safety excuse would go out the window.

 

What TripTango is saying that all past data becomes meaningless when you create a system that can have correlated failures. So we could go 20 years with 1 accident per 1M drivers, but since it is now a correlated system, a single hacker/bug/failure could create a long-tail event that outweighs all the benefits of the last 20 years.

 

Automated cars..... making the governments job so much easier when they want to "accidentally" kill someone

 

Exactly. And furthermore, public opinion tends to be disproportionately swayed by low-frequency, high profile disasters (see nuclear power).

I just don't see it catching on, technically or socially, in our lifetimes.

 

I see it being an incremental technology. Just like cruise control now, at first divers will just use the tech on long drives, not in traffic, and will start out very alert and ready to take over control. But as time marches forward, and people become familiar and comfortable with the tech, they will start switching it on more and more, freeing up time to surf the web, read, talk on the phone or whatever. I fully expect this tech to be ubiquitous in 25 years.

 

great point

I was still thinking along the lines of the reliability aspect....and you have to bring up geek fun...