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Poll #19693 Self-driving cars
Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 62
When self-driving cars become available to the general public for use, my preferred option will be
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To purchase one for my own personal use
10 (16.9%)
To have shared ownership in a fleet of local cars
8 (13.6%)
To be a member of a self-driving car-providing service
17 (28.8%)
To use self-driving taxis
5 (8.5%)
Not to use them
19 (32.2%)
I will miss controlling my own vehicle.
Public transport
I loathe driving. I do it because I have to, mostly to get the kids to nursery and preschool in a timely fashion and still be able to work a full day. And to get the kids to their various activities, playdates and parties. I am going to absolutely love it when self-driving cars become the norm.
I will also probably want to own one myself, because I live in the countryside. I suspect shared use of fleets of self-driving cars will work well in cities, but in the countryside, it will probably be exactly like current taxi services: you have to be willing to wait an hour during busy times for a car to be available, in which case you're going to be late for school/work or miss your train. (This is often true even if you have allegedly booked in advance.) So we'll probably find rural ownership of self-driving cars is more common, just because people want the degree of freedom that affords.
I will miss controlling my own vehicle not at all. I'll feel a tiny pang of regret that a skill I worked very hard to acquire, driving a manual vehicle on English country roads, is rendered useless. But humans are terrible drivers. I will be pleased when our roads are full of silent, efficient, traffic-law-obeying fleets of self-driving vehicles. Bring on the robot revolution.
In closing, have a Dinosaur Comic that accurately sums up my feelings about driving.
Transcription below.
T-rex: I've heard of a cool new game! It's dull and repetitive and uninteresting, and each game can take HOURS to get through! I believe it's called..."DRIVING"??
T-rex: Driving is a cool game to play because it requires you to focus on it LITERALLY EVERY SECOND YOU'RE PLAYING, and even though a tiny mistake can kill you instantly, the game is so incredibly boring it can ACTUALLY LULL YOU INTO SLEEP.
Dromecimomimus: Do I have time to correct my mistakes?
T-rex: Oh sure! SOMETIMES??
Utahraptor: If I die in the game, do I die in real life?
T-rex: Hah! YOU WISH. That's just the start!
T-rex: If you're lucky, only you die in real life. But you can also kill your loved ones, complete strangers, rando dudes: the possibilities are endless!
Utahraptor: I don't want to play your game. It sounds monstrous.
T-rex: TOO LATE WE ALREADY DESIGNED MODERN CITIES AROUND IT
T-rex: You know how in scifi stroies they'll discover sinister time-travelling aliens have been manipulating Earth's events for centuries?
Utahraptor: Yeah?
T-rex: ...I wonder if we'll ever know who we cheesed off in 1886.
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That said, public transport is awesome when it's done right!
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I don't drive in Sweden, so it's a non-starter, but in the US I would miss driving snake-y meandering back roads. I wouldn't miss driving on highways, or at least I'd miss them a lot less. Nor would I be a fan of driving in cities (but I managed to avoid that basically my entire driving life, go me!). Self-driving cars would cut down on DUIs by a tremendous amount, which is good in terms of human life but might represent bad news for local budgets. (I have a sneaking suspicion that for every huge DUI accident that costs the state in terms of repairs or healthcare costs due to injuries, there are dozens of no-damage, no-injury incidents that are just pure $$$$.) Same could be said for speeding tickets: those will essentially dry up with self-driving cars, and so then Americans will be faced with the harsh reality of having to support local police forces primarily through taxes.
I would avoid using them just because Stockholm's public transport is quite good, and if/when we move we'll stay very much within the range of subway transport, so I would have no reason to step into a car (except, I guess, moving house). So less active avoidance and more accident of circumstances.
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They may well have less fatalities under normal operating conditions, but until some regulation is present about /securing/ them, there's no reason people will. There were some great proof-of-concept attacks recently about not only locking the doors so that an occupant can't escape, but even up to the point of full remote control.
I live in a mountainous area with frequent things that will mess with automated cars.
- dust and ice storms
- snow concealing road markings and signs
- icy roads making normal braking choices a bad, BAD idea
- large herd animals
- dirt roads without markings
When an automated car can handle all of those /and/ have a reasonable probability of not being turned into the newest node of someone's botnet, I will be comfortable using them, and not before.
...and I'll probably still miss controlling my car, because learning to drive has made me into a terrible passenger. /s
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You can probably extrapolate my feelings on self-driving cars. I'll use them, probably as taxis, because that's the direction the world is headed. But I won't be an early adopter.
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If, in addition to self-driving cars, we had a nationwide high-speed rail system between major cities in the States, I would be very happy, indeed. Car to rail, rail to metropolis, car to destination. Easy.
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But those concerns also apply to a self-drive vehicles, and I don't see a lot of signs of disability access being a priority. (The prototype self-driving air-taxi that flew this week showed precisely zero thought to disabled access).
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I tend to agree with you that, in a rural setting, it'll be a car assigned to a particular home. But I wonder if ownership won't be a thing at all - perhaps the contract with the owner will involve it being stationed at your house.
This could just be wishful thinking on my part: that the burden of vehicular maintenance will be shifted to the car companies or capital management organisations, as they have the best infrastructure to manage that sort of thing already. It further shifts liability for mechanical/electronic failure away from the private citizen, which is in my opinion a Very Good Thing.
I guess in my utopia, there's a place for ownership, but it would become more of a fashion thing, for instance.
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I'd like to use public transit, but that would more than double the time of my commute and is subject to the whole "two minutes late to the bus = 45 minutes late to the destination" problem, and also assumes that Spouse can always do the school runs and is always available to pick up a sick kid mid-day.
And I love the theory of self-driving cars and think they'd be excellent for city use, but agree that they need a helluva lot more regulation before going generally live.
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I prefer to be a non-driver and have organised my life around living and working close to public transport hubs.
Consequently, I will probably avoid self driving cars until they are completely ubiquitous and unavoidable.
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I like driving, but I don't think I would miss the "controlling my own vehicle" experience terribly if the opportunity came to give it up while retaining the other kinds of control that using a single-occupancy vehicle gives me.
But, I don't think self-driving cars are going to become viable in my remaining lifetime.
I love public transportation, especially subways. But almost all public transportation is really hard to use with my disabilities.
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For that reason, when I drive it's a pleasure - it's part of my day out and it's part of the out-of-ordinary element of the activity.
Although, when I was growing up a car = freedom because of crap public transport in the country and when I visit my parents now I have use of the car because otherwise it would be hideous. And I still realy enjoy just driving - ideally I suppose self driving cars would be standard but you could disable the self-driving thing in order to drive yourself if you fancied it?
My worry about self driving cars is road capacity - why bother with public transport when a self driving car (especially one from a fleet you can use as and when) will get you there faster, more directly, and without having to interact with other humans? I don't think they solve any of the core problems of transportation we have now and is likely to worsen them.
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Public transport is awesome, which I voted but....it depends where you are. I lose a lot of time to traveling to and from work due to bus times and I used to spend nearly 4x as much time commuting when I did it on buses than coworkers in cars. There is an advantage to having time to sit in a bus and read a book or just chill but it can grind you down too.
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In my late twenties / early thirties I realised that I really don't enjoy driving any more. My spouse never learned to drive (he lived in boarding schools, Cambridge, London, San Francisco and Cambridge again throughout the time he could have done so), and so our driving "range" is limited by my stamina and willingness to drive. The tipping point was a particularly tiring weekend trip early in my last pregnancy, after which we started actively choosing to take the train for long-distance journeys even if it was a bit more expensive.
I didn't drive for nearly two years after getting cancer, and although I have kept up my zipcar membership and driven a couple of times since, I will *gladly* hand off to the self-driving cars. The particular bugbear is one-way to/from the rail station, as helpfully covered by
I have started sometimes using the new bike-sharing option for one-way trips. 50p for half an hour cycling gets me most places in Cambridge. Yes we already have two adult bikes, but sometimes I don't want to have to worry about where I'm going to lock them up.
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The only reason for cars for me is to get to the place you want when you want to. If I can do that without driving (or costing as much as taxis), that's a win.