Nope. Someone absolutely downvoted him. Because, just like Reddit, the downvote button here is the 'wow fuck that guy for saying a thing i don't like' button.
Also a "I don't like you/this page/the content and will go out of my way to systematically down vote everything you have done and everything in this particular thread" button.
Because some of us have fat fingers and accidentally downvote when we scroll on mobile.
One of the things I liked about reddit was that, since it saved downvoted posts, I could go through the list every once in a while and undownvote the accidents.
Can't do that here though, and I sometimes notice posts or comments I've accidentally downvoted.
Anyway, people shouldn't care so much, we don't have a karma system or the like here anyways, so why does it matter?
There are people who are pathologically contrarian. I’ve had to end a friendship over it—the endless need to say something negative about literally everything that ever happens and an unwillingness to be charitable to others.
I have the theory that archive.is, waybackmachine and 12ft.io are no secret anymore, and that just posting "paywalled" comes across as too lazy to copy/paste or (a lot easier) to use this addon to reduce the work to a click. i dont mind, but i can understand why others might see it that way
sheesh, you are quite aggressive, i did not want to offend. and as i said, i don't mind it, i even posted the archivelink, for which you thanked me. check your target before firing, mate :-)
(also, theres always firefox mobile. can apple users use it with addons/firefox browser engine now? i don't follow apple development actively)
According to who? Did the NTSB clear this? Are they even allowed to clear this? If this thing fucks up and kills somebody, will the judge let the driver off the hook 'cuz the manufacturer told them everything's cool?
You do realize humans kill hundreds of other humans a day in cars, right? Is it possible that autonomous vehicles may actually be safer than a human driver?
Sure. But no system is 100% effective and all of their questions are legit and important to answer. If I got hit by one of these tomorrow I want to know the process for fault, compensation and pathway to improvement are all already done not something my accident is going to landmark.
But that being said, I was a licensing examiner for 2 years and quit because they kept making it easier to pass and I was forced to pass so many people who should not be on the road.
I think this idea is sound, but that doesn't mean there aren't things to address around it.
Honestly I'm sure there will be a lot of unfortunate mistakes until computers and self driving systems can be relied upon. However there needs to be an entry point for manufacturers and this is it. Technology will get better over time, it always has. Eventually self driving autos will be the norm.
That still doesn't address all the issues surrounding it. I am unsure if you are just young and not aware how these things work or terribly naive. But companies will always cut corners to keep profits. Regulation forces a certain level of quality control (ideally). Just letting them do their thing because "it'll eventually get better" is a gateway to absurd amounts of damage. Also, not all technology always gets better. Plenty just get abandoned.
But to circle back, if I get hit by a car tomorrow and all these thinga you think are unimportant are unanswered does that mean I might mot get legal justice or compensation? If there isn't clearly codified law I might not, and you might be callous enough to say you don't care about me. But what about you? What if you got hit by a unmonitored self driving car tomorrow and then told you'd have to go through a long, expensive court battle to determine fault because no one had done it it. So you're in and out of a hospital recovering and draining all of your money on bills both legal and medical to eventually hopefully get compensated for something that wasn't your fault.
That is why people here are asking these questions. Few people actually oppose progress. They just need to know that reasonable precautions are taken for predictable failures.
But then it's good that the manufacturer states the driver isn't obliged to watch the road. Because it shifts responsibility towards the manufacturer and thus - it's a great incentive to make technology as safe as possible.
To be clear I never said that I didn't care about an individual's safety, you inferred that somehow from my post and quite frankly are quite disrespectful. I simply stated that autonomous vehicles are here to stay and that the technology will improve more with time.
The legal implications of self driving cars are still being determined and as this is literally one of the first approved technologies available. Tesla doesn't count as it's not a SAE level 3 autonomous driving vehicle. There are some references in the liability section of the wiki.
yeah that would be great. Say, you can save on that a little if you put wheel guides on the road since theyre all headed in the same direction, and maybe you can replace the tires with something that fits into that guide pretty well so that you don’t have to replace them as much. Matter of fact, all of these trucks can become electric if they run electricity through the track or above it. This is a revolutionary idea!!
The truck division of Mercedes (Daimler) is already testing the trucks in the US. They plan commercial usage in 2027. MAN is testing in Europe in wants to start commercial usage in 2030.
To me this is less frightening for public safety and more for reasons related to climate change, since this kind of industrial expansion will be less contingent on worker availability.
Mind you, the whole push toward driverless vehicles seems insanely redundant as a concept, since driverless tech in the form of high-speed rail has been around for decades in an infinitely more efficient way than could ever be offered by personal vehicles.
You can't have a babysitter following every human to make sure they don't do something dangerous. Except for high risk areas, liability is the most practical option.
So you want to read 50 page regulation about how to boil water in your home because boiling water can hurt people?
And how do you regulate AI when you have no idea how it works or what could go wrong. Not as if politicians are AI experts. Driving itself is already heavily regulated, the AI has to follow traffic rules just like anyone else, if that is what you are thinking.
Why do you believe that judges (or even juries made of lay people) can make sense of the very things that you’re so confident legislators or regulators cannot?
I’m not saying regulation is perfect, and as a result, certainly there is a role for judicial review. But come on, man…lots of non sequiturs and straw dogs in your argument.
Quite often, juries don't have to rule on technical matters. Juries will have available internal communications of the company, testimonies of the engineers working on the project etc. If safety concerns were being ignored, you can usually find enough witnesses and documents proving so.
On the other hand, how do you even begin to regulate something that is only in the process of being invented? What would the regulation look like?
No you're guaranteed that the Mercedes that hit you is better insured for paying out your damages than pretty much anyone else on the road that could hit you.
If these have lidar (unlike teslas) then they might be better at detecting obstructions but I feel like real world road conditions are not kind to cameras and sensors.
Fixed lidar sensors are not as reliable as it’s made out to be, unfortunately. Dome lidar systems like those found on Waymo vehicles are pretty good, but way more advanced (and expensive) than anything you’d find in consumer vehicles at the moment. The shadows of trees are enough to render basic lidar sensors useless, as they effectively produce an aperiodic square wave of infrared light (from the sun) that is frequently inseparable from the ToF emission signal. Sunsets are also sometimes enough to completely blind lidar sensors.
None of this is to say that Tesla’s previous camera-only approach was a good idea, like at all. More data is always a good thing, so long as the system doesn’t rely on the data more than the data’s reliability permits. After all, cameras can be blinded by sunlight too. IMO radar is the best economical complementary sensor to cameras at the moment. Despite the comparatively low accuracy, they are very reliable in adverse conditions.
The sad part of this is somehow thinking that payment solves any problem. Like, idk what they would pay me, just bring back my dead wife/child/father whatever. You can't fix everything with money.
It only works on a small handful of freeways (read: no pedestrians) in California/Nevada, and only under 40 MPH. The odds of a crash within those parameters resulting in a fatality are quite low.
Autonomous system, with no meaningful human attention
Key word is 'assisted' driving. ADAS should roughly be a nice add, so long as human attention is policed. Ultimately, the ADAS systems are better able to react to some situations, but may utterly make some stupid calls in exceptional scenarios.
Here, the bar of 'no human paying attention at all' is one I'm not entirely excited about celebrating. Of course the conditions are "daytime traffic jam only", where risk is pretty small, you might have a fender bender, pedestrians are almost certainly not a possibility, and the conditions are supremely monotonous, which is a great area for ADAS but not a great area for bored humans.
Because it's an extremely narrowly defined set of requirements in order to use it. It's "approved freeways with clear markings and moderate to heavy traffic under 40MPH during daytime hours and clear conditions" meaning it will inch forward for you in bumper to bumper traffic provided you're in an approved area and that's it.
Well, not always hands on wheel. I have spent over an hour straight on an interstate with hands off. Ford's system watches your eyes and lets your hands stay off if it's decent conditions and on a LIDAR-mapped freeway. Note I wouldn't trust it at night (there have been two crashes, both at night with stopped vehicles on freeway), but then I wouldn't really trust myself at night either too much (there are many many more human caused crashes at night, I'm not sure a human at freeway speed could avoid a crash with a surprise stationary vehicle in middle of the road).
How is this different from the capabilities of Tesla's FSD, which is considered level 2? It seems like Mercedes just decided they'll take on liability to classify an equivalent level 2 system as level 3.
No... it means they're confident enough to assume the risk, Tesla is not. They've been using their tech in europe for a while now without issue, Teslas meanwhile still love to hit a variety of new and exciting objects.
And that's a huge difference for consumers. I would never use a self drive feature where I am still responsible, that's pointless and would just create more anxiety for me.
They're not confident enough to assume the risk if you look at the requirements you have to meet to use it. Under 40MPH on approved freeways in heavy traffic during daylight hours with clear skies and clear markers painted on the ground. This is essentially useless for a majority of people as it's just going to inch ahead for you in gridlock traffic provided the road meets all the other requirements.
Yeah I don't really understand either. Under those conditions any comparable level 2 system would operate without ever requiring the driver to take over.
According to the mercedes website the cars have radar and lidar sensors. FSD has radar only, but apparently decided to move away from them and towards optical only, I'm not sure if they currently have any role in FSD.
That's important because FSD relies on optical sensors only to tell not only where an object is, but that it exists. Based on videos I've seen of FSD, I suspect that if it hasn't ingested the data to recognize, say, a plastic bucket, it won't know that it's not just part of the road (or at best can recognize that the road looks a little weird). If there's a radar or lidar sensor though, those directly measure distance and can have 3-D data about the world without the ability to recognize objects. Which means they can say "hey, there's something there I don't recognize, time to hit the brakes and alert the driver about what to do next".
Of course this still leaves a number of problems, like understanding at a higher level what happened after an accident for example. My guess is there will still be problems.
Please tell me how software will be able to detect objects in low/no-light conditions if they say, have cameras with poor dynamic range and no low-light sensitivity?
You've inadvertently pointed out how Tesla deliberately skirts the law. Teslas are way more capable than what level 2 describes, but they choose to stay as level 2 so they wouldn't have to take responsibility for their public testing
Yeah it's pretty much an insurance product. They came up with a set of boundary conditions someone would underwrite for their "stay between the lines" tech.
I think most German cars have had a bad generation.
Mercedes: recent designs have been divisive, sometimes I see one and think they look ok and other times they elicit a yikes. More importantly, Mercedes don't have a single car in their lineup right now that outshines their rivals. Usually there'd be at least one. There is no reason to have a Mercedes right now.
BMW: does it even need to be said? BMW has designs and recognisability that others would kill to have, yet they destroy that design language and pump out absolutely hideous cars. This is not a Chris Bangle moment. People aren't initially reeling at these designs but coming around to them and seeing them as being amazing and ahead of the curve like those of the late 90s and into the 2000s. BMWs are ugly now. I've even seen car reviewers such as Johnny Smith literally censor the grilles in their videos lol.
VW: the drivetrains are still completely fine, but my god the cabin quality has suffered. The penny-pinching is insane. Touch controls galore, with no backlight for night time driving? Two window controls and a touch toggle to switch between controlling the front/rear windows? Are you fucking serious, VW? VW used to be the king of affordable priced car with an interior that was closer to the likes of Audi/BMW/Mercedes/Volvo than it was to Renault/Citroen/Honda/Toyota/etc. but they've thrown that away to save pennies.
Audi: ok their general design still holds up well. But their interior is being cheapened just like VW's. No doubt a decision from the top. Also the e-Tron's camera mirrors are unbelievably shit. The Honda e (fuck you Honda for discontinueing, btw) had a much better implementation. And it was fucking dumb to sell the e-Tron GT for £2k less than its Porsche equivalent. Who would buy an Audi when for £2k more you can buy a Porsche?
Porsche: ok Porsche is still mostly excellent, but the first gen Taycan has a little more screen than I'd like. The 2nd generation Taycan is genuinely an engineering masterpiece, though. It feels like the car has finally had as much love poured into it as they do their 911s. People should watch Engineering Explained's technical overview of it, it's staggering how much they've improved it. But Porsche is somewhat niche anyway, they're not enough to make the overall German car market look better.
The most frustrating one is VW. They're supposed to be the mass-market, default, bread-and-butter European brand. And of all times to fuck up, doing it in a time when people are still forming their opinions on EVs is such a massive fuck up. People will look at the ID.3, then look at the likes of the MG4 or upcoming Renault 5 and think "oh, so VW can't make good EVs", and that will stick to them for a long time. Look at how long people thought Skoda was a crappy brand for! It was only around 2010 when "huhu crappy communist 80s car" meme truly died. Perceptions last and they're choosing to trash theirs to recoup some money lost to dieselgate.
Rant over. I'm pretty fed up with the car market right now. I'm gonna keep my MX-5 until the rust claims it.
German brands right now are engaging in stupid "premium theatre", by which they make their cars seem premium by using stuff like fancy headlights or doors that sound good, but are completely cheaping out on other stuff to an extent that's gotten ridiculous. They're being lazy and just resting on their built-up brand image. And that image will collapse if they don't pull their finger out.
I've been watching a lot of car reviews lately and yeah, I think you're right on all points. I watched a review of the new BMW 7 series and even the air control vents are capacitive sensors refer than little levers and it just seems unnecessary. What was hilarious was that the door release is right by the air vent control, so the review I watched saw the reviewer accidentally open the door when they were trying to control the air vent.
There's way way way too much reliance on touch screens in cars. I'm not even sure if you'd legally be allowed to use them in some countries, I feel like you'd have to pull over to just change the HVAC settings! You'd swear it was designed by someone that's never driven a car. They're decisions that are probably coming right from the top and the actual interior designers are pulling their hair out.
There's also a common theme across manufacturers where settings for features are lost when the car is switched off. So you have to go into the settings and change them back every single time you get into the car.
If I were in the market for a car (specifically electric), I'd probably go for Kia. The ev6 and ev9 look really nice. I've seen a couple of EV9s on the road recently and I was surprised at how much smaller they actually seem than on videos.
Like you though we're going to keep our car (Nissan Quashqai) as long as possible. There's no bullshit and it's practical and comfortable.
If I were in the market for a car (specifically electric), I'd probably go for Kia. The ev6 and ev9 look really nice. I've seen a couple of EV9s on the road recently and I was surprised at how much smaller they actually seem than on videos.
Yeah the Koreans seem to have done well with EVs. It's old now but the Kona was very well received with its EV variant. Someone a couple of doors down has an EV6 and loves it.
Personally I really love the design of the Hyundai Ioniq 5, it's got that retro-futuristic vibe that I like and it's based on the same drivetrain platform as the EV6 and EV9 (sidenote, that Hyundai-KIA EV platform is called E-GMP, and pronounced "E-gimp", which I find hilarious)
Those grills are going to be modder meme material, they are basically ai designed grills anyway. Think cartoonesque, Roger rabbit ultra-exaggerated grills with detail highlighted.
I’ve just got a Landrover Defender 2023 (75th) and was so glad is just had buttons for everything. I had a touch screen but other than navigation no need to touch it.
Even optional analog dials instead of digital.
Was looking at the van equivalent of the new mercedes (v-class) but same ipad horror on the inside. Glad some brand are reversing this silly phase.
And was long time BMW driver before that but I quit 5 series before electric and the hideous grills. Such a shame.
Lul, yeah. (And with a dash of subjective beauty standards + stuff like how the design is gonna & then actually does age - like I can tell which good looking new Alfa Romeo will age horribly as a design, and which not ... or like when manufactures keep too many old-gen equipment/parts though new designs, like how Mercedes milked their models in the previous decade.)
And then there are some brands that produced like one good looking model, just to prove they could, but then immediately continue with only ugly ones & refuse to elaborate on the matter.
It feels like the car has finally had as much love poured into it as they do their 911s. People should watch Engineering Explained’s technical overview of it, it’s staggering how much they’ve improved it.
But Porsche is somewhat niche anyway, they’re not enough to make the overall German car market look better.
I wouldn't mind the dominant VAG-internal top-down trickle moving from Audi->VW to Porsche->VW.
Also for the record Porsches are about as common in Germany as Teslas. More common than Mazda or Mitsubishi. Granted, about 50% of those are Cayennes and Macans so that Bildungsbürger mums can drive Anne-Luisa to the farmer's market.
Look at how long people thought Skoda was a crappy brand for!
Because it was, until the Czech moved from "VW but with less fuss, a proper Slav doesn't need no fancy stuff but a workhorse" to "Eh the Wolfsburg guys are getting too crappy let's get Bohemian". It's all VAG in the end but the brands do have their pride and independence.
Wonder how this works with car insurance. Os there a future where the driver doesn't need to be insured? Can the vehicle software still be "at fault" and how will the actuaries deal with assessing this new risk.
And this is how they will push everyone into driverless. Through insurance costs. Who would insure 1 human driver vs 100 bots, (once the systems have a few billion miles on them)
It'll be interesting to see how it pans out, with local city traffic being essentially reduced to all taxis and only the countryside 4x4 and farm vehicles being the last hold out of human control because of hilly terrain. Once the lorries go fully self-controlled (note: modern lorries have a lot of driver support aids as it is.) it'll only be a matter of time.
Totally agree that car incidents will go down dramatically, some police forces will see their entire income disappear. Soo many changes that we can't even imagine coming.
I did think about that whilst I included farm vehicles but meant support rather than harvesters.
I wonder if any lessons have been used and applied from the farm industries automation which is great when applied to a specific area as opposed to general driving.
It's very GPS driven from what I'm aware with the accurate measuring GPS units being thousands of pounds which obviously restricts it for use in the consumer market.
You're probably right. Another decade or two and human driver controlled cars might be prohibitively expensive to insure for some or even not allowed in certain areas.
I can imagine an awesome world where that's a great thing but also imagine a dystopian world like wall-e as well. I guess we'll know then which one we chose.
I feel you’re misapplying the advantage. Right now people hit other people in cars and insurance is what it is. It would be more appropriate to say that humans will pay normal rates, while autonomous car companies will charge you an insurance subscription, and work out much lower rates with the insurer.
As long as there is free competition, the cost will be around 10% over the operating cost. After that point it becomes worthwhile for another competitor to step in.
If memory serves, that's not an intentional feature, but more a coincidence, since if the driver thinks the cruise control is about to crash the car, they'll pop the brakes. Touching the brakes disengages the cruise control by design, so you end up with it shutting down before a crash happens.
That makes perfect sense. If the driver looks up to notice that he's in a dangerous, unfixable situation, slams the breaks, disconnecting the autopilot (which have been responaible for letting the situation develop) hopefully the automaker can't entirely say "not our fault, the system wasn't even engaged at the time of the collision"
No. I don't think this is a good solution. Companies will put a price on your life and focus on monetary damage reduction. If you're about to cause more property damage than your life is worth (to Mercedes) they'll be incentivized to crash the car and kill you rather than crash into the expensive structure.
Your car should be you property, you should be liable for the damage it causes. The car should prioritise your life over monetary damage. If there is some software problem causing the cars to crash, you need to be able to sue Mercedes through a class action lawsuit to recover your losses.
Oh, there are a lot of Tesla/self driving cars fanboys out here. They're caught up in the idea that these corporations will save us from traffic congestion/paying taxes for public transit/car accidents/climate change/car ownership/ you name it and self driving cars will solve it. They don't tend to like it when you try to bring reality to their fantasy.
Self driving cars are a really cool technology. Electric cars as well. However, they don't solve the fundamental problem of transporting a 200lb person using a 3000lb vehicle. So they're at best a partial solution. I also don't really want a future where corporations own more of our stuff and force into monthly payments for heated car seats and "prioritise human life" premium options.
Berkshire Hathaway owns Geico the car insurance company. In one of his annual letters Buffett said that autonomous cars are going to be great for humanity and bad for insurance companies.
“If [self-driving cars] prove successful and reduce accidents dramatically, it will be very good for society and very bad for auto insurers.”
Actuaries are by definition bad at assessing new risk. But as data get collected they quickly adjust to it. There are a lot of cars so if driverless cars become even a few percent of cars on the road they will quickly be able to build good actuarial tables.
He understands there is enough competition in the market that as payouts and accidents go down premiums will have to. There is enough competition they can't just keep rates high they would be undercut and lose customers.
For BH it's doubly bad as the large cash reserves GEICO has to maintain are used to borrow against at very low rates. If those reserves drop he has less to borrow against for investing.
When you're clients are a handful of companies who will more aggressively change insurers than consumers to save a penny and have their own legal teams, it becomes harder to price gouge or illegally deny claims.
If I wanted to be cynical, it's also that it's a bit different when it's not Average Joe asking for a payout, but Mercedes, for example. It may shift the legal playing field with the insured parties not being consumers, but car manufacturers. Even worse for insurers, car manufacturers would be more successful in negotiating as well.
Well it went from not working at all to a completely self driving car in certain situations. That's great. It's the future. We are living in the future
When the train can park next to my house so that my grandma on a wheelchair can get in, or get me to a KFC in the middle of the night, or move a random piece of furniture, I'm in.
A nice bike lane infrastructure would be a blast too, for when you don't need to move a cargo.
Both are must for large cities, but unrealistic pretty much everywhere else.
Good job that most trips don't involve moving a grandma or furniture. Most people rent something if they want to move furniture anyway so that seems like a non issue.
As for KFC deliveries. That doesn't involve your own personal car so that doesn't make any sense. No one is complaining about delivery vehicles.
Cycle lanes are good. Last mile is the real problem. Cargo bike are a thing.
So we need cycle lanes, we need trains, both of those are policy issues. Once they have self driving cars, or they invent taxis, that you can use to pick your grandma up for 1% of human trips. What's the excuse then?
