'Driving' in Los Angeles is totally different. You dont need all your faculties when driving consists of waiting 2 minutes, let foot off brake for 30 seconds, put foot back on brake, repeat 100x. Otherwise, I completely agree. I've owned manual shift cars my whole life. I find that a number of drivers dont really understand how a car and basic physics works.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I would blow my brains out if I didnt have my smartphone to distract me. When you' re driving, everything can be a distraction depending on the ability of the driver. Billboards, eating, applying makeup, smoking, changing the radio and 100's of other different things all can do that. Why pass a smartphones ban, especially since were moving towards a world where most people would get lost driving to their grocery store without gps? It's just an easy, kneejerk response and doesnt solve the real issue.
We have way too low a threshold for who counts as a licensed driver. People who can't parallel park, never use their signals, people who get caught in intersections at a red light, dont look before merging or changing lanes, changing 4 lanes at once to make the exit, elderly people who get their license auto-renewed, etc. The hard truth is that there are far too many people on the road in 2 ton missiles who shouldn't have a license in the first place. One driving test for 10 minutes is not a sufficient way to license a driver.
Off-topic: I'm also amazed at how many people are clamoring for personal driving to be banned once self-driving cars hit the road. Granted, it does solve a lot of the issues I raised above but, if you want to be alpha testers for a closed source product written by software engineers in the auto industry, go right ahead. This is an industry where a company lied about the emissions of their products for years. Since cars can be on the roads for 20+ years, they had to know eventually they would be caught, but they didnt care. No one is in jail and the threat of a fine wasnt a deterrant. And now people implictly trust them with a new technology?
Im going to wait on owning one until an auto company open sources their code and there has been enough time to examine it thoroughly. In short, bring on the self-driving cars but do not make them mandatory. Just make licensing much more strict.
>Im going to wait on owning one until an auto company open sources their code and there has been enough time to examine it thoroughly. In short, bring on the self-driving cars but do not make them mandatory. Just make licensing much more strict.
At some point, we'll need to hold people to the same standard as the machines, and then.. when most people can't, we make it mandatory.
'make licensing more strict' is basically going to bring the standard up to the level of machines anyway... every time there is an accident, lawmakers will create '<victim name>s law', which tightens the requirements a bit further. Sadly, I also predict that this is the only mechanism by which requirements will be tightened.
> Sadly, I also predict that this is the only mechanism by which requirements will be tightened.
Not going to happen. If this were so, Interlock Ignition Devices (Breathalyzers) would come standard on all new cars and be a requirement on used ones. Also, we already have a law against speed limits, but even a cheap, shitty Toyota Yaris can go faster than the highest posted speed limit. There's a large swath of the population for whom car=freedom.
Not really, because exactly that: car=freedom. That will continue to be true, but it will not be 'drivers license = freedom'. People who lose their license will need to use a self-driving car.
There are already laws covering most accident scenarios and people violate them and get into wrecks. If Sally runs a red light and smashes into Bob and kills him, what exactly do you think "Bob's law" would entail? It's already illegal to run red lights.
For example, the new law could say that getting a ticket for running a red light would result in revocation of your license. As opposed to just a monetary fine / points like typically awarded now.
> This is an industry where a company lied about the emissions of their products for years.
Not only that. The individual computers speaking on a common bus are manufactured by the cheapest bidder, which is rarely the same company for all component. They can be cheap because they build to slightly fudged specifications. So the components on the common bus don't even speak the same protocol.
There was a presentation of some contractor using property testing to eliminate a huge number of integration bugs that had been in production for years. Scary stuff.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I would blow my brains out if I didnt have my smartphone to distract me. When you' re driving, everything can be a distraction depending on the ability of the driver. Billboards, eating, applying makeup, smoking, changing the radio and 100's of other different things all can do that. Why pass a smartphones ban, especially since were moving towards a world where most people would get lost driving to their grocery store without gps? It's just an easy, kneejerk response and doesnt solve the real issue.
We have way too low a threshold for who counts as a licensed driver. People who can't parallel park, never use their signals, people who get caught in intersections at a red light, dont look before merging or changing lanes, changing 4 lanes at once to make the exit, elderly people who get their license auto-renewed, etc. The hard truth is that there are far too many people on the road in 2 ton missiles who shouldn't have a license in the first place. One driving test for 10 minutes is not a sufficient way to license a driver.
Off-topic: I'm also amazed at how many people are clamoring for personal driving to be banned once self-driving cars hit the road. Granted, it does solve a lot of the issues I raised above but, if you want to be alpha testers for a closed source product written by software engineers in the auto industry, go right ahead. This is an industry where a company lied about the emissions of their products for years. Since cars can be on the roads for 20+ years, they had to know eventually they would be caught, but they didnt care. No one is in jail and the threat of a fine wasnt a deterrant. And now people implictly trust them with a new technology?
Im going to wait on owning one until an auto company open sources their code and there has been enough time to examine it thoroughly. In short, bring on the self-driving cars but do not make them mandatory. Just make licensing much more strict.