Self-driving cars: menace or marvel? Share your view for $2

Self driving cars... a menacing marvel ..... ie. I'm split!

I love the idea / concept, however it terrifies me. Cars are dangerous - we sometimes forget that its basically a projectile hurtling often at 70mph or more dependent on localised speed limits. Even 1/10th of that could theoretically kill someone. It worries me.

That said - when i think back to how many times have I been driving back late at night from soemwhere and wished that i was at home already. With self-driving cars, i could just nestle up snooze and get home automatically - sounds like bliss!

Neither…

It's kind of a step in an evolution process. You bring stuff forward either if it has military usage or the first world consumer is wanting it.

And self driving Cars are bad example for this functionality.

Trains, easy level are Cargo Trains with their own track. Advanced is the automated Subway system from France for example And Expert would be if you combine everything in a big city, sprankle some utopia salt over it. And Voila there you have a fuel free green city which all the logistic is underneath in the subway.

Trucks are kind of a step up but if you have a working long range train system you could use these to transport them to the outer village region. From there it gets picked up by humans because these old school medieval villages can have some nasty curves.

But back to the Cars, they are for individual driving.

As already mentioned in other comment above if everybody would have one with a system talking to each other and some of this special salt there maybe would be less accidents.

But in the end is the stand time of each car. If you can just book cars from a fleet anytime for a good price and you wouldn't need a own car then that is the time which we can go full automatic.

If you want to drive a racing car, there will be a special playground for it.

Just not on the Autobahn.

Personally I don't have a problem with the idea of self driving cars, but I feel it needs to be an all or nothing approach.

They may be deemed safe to themselves and other drivers but what they don't account for is general human error and the plague of idiotic driving you see on roads.

Unless you completely remove humans from the equation I don't see how it can truly be considered safe.

The other thing that currently is a bit counter intuitive is that there always has to be someone in the driver's seat...

Of the two choices I go with menace. If a car I buy one day comes with more auto control then I can't see myself ever switching the feature on and using it. I also only want manual, not an automatic.

When you are an experienced driver, you develop a kind of 6th sense to read the road, situation and other drivers around you. Very subtle little signals that mean you can predict what is likely to play out or what danger, safety issue or driver error might occur, then adapt to the situation in advance like leaving more space or to be prepared and ready.

For example you might notice a car just a little in front of you in the lane to your side, you know from experience of the spot, that drivers often choose the wrong lane here and you can see inside the car the driver is moving in their seat in such a way that experience tells you they are likely to cut you up in the next few seconds. If not at the lights then on the roundabout, so you are prepared for it happening or change your positioning in expectation. More often than not you read it correctly and that's exactly what plays out. Driverless cars will never be able to see and read such situations or have the local knowledge and experience to remove the danger before it even happens like we can.

Another example is the unwritten rules and customs of the road. You can't code for these as they go against the "correct" way something should be dealt with. For example flashing someone out at a junction where you know from experience locally, that's the only way they are going to be able to get out or they are stuck there forever, and it is the expected custom locally that is what you are expected to do at that spot.

Roads in the UK are generally in a bad state with worn away road markings, signs covered up with bushes and trees, pot holes and partially collapsed drain cover to avoid. The money will never be there for the infrastructure to be maintained to the standard needed for these to work well and be trusted.

Large amounts of country lanes with tractors coming round blind corners, with the road not big enough for two vehicles, passing points being the entrances to farm fields. Don't see how they would ever be able to handle that either. How far back was the last passing point I need to reverse to? Will the car even drive through that muddy boggy entrance or can the tractor move? O no! Now there is a car with a caravan on tow behind me as well! Good luck coding for that!

So yeah menace, they will never work properly and always need someone sitting there alert ready to spot it's errors or take over when it just gives up completely. At which point you may as well just drive yourself anyway and remove the risk!

People have always resisted development in technology, and I think backlash against self-driving cars is part of this communal thinking. I think, on the whole, they would be safer and more convenient than human-controlled vehicles, but people tend take any malfunction of a self-driving vehicle as more than one of human error.

Obviously, the debate gets philosophical, a computer can not make the informed choices we make in the same way, the removal of sentiment makes it almost impossible for a computer to make a wholly informed decision (such as wether to swerve or not) but you would hope a self-driving car has speedier reaction times, and therefore has no need to make such a decision. This all adds to the debate.

As of right now, self-driving vehicles are unaccessible to the majority, but with development I can see them being a safer way to transport, and as someone who gets extreme driving anxiety, I think they hold extreme potential.