Elon Musk

"I am at a loss as to how customers continue to use the product not as intended. clearly this is just a few bad apples"

"for occasional relief of driving-related duties and obligations"

would be amazing if it was safe to do that, alas

we have that - they're called buses and trains

Driverless cars don't kill people, drivers sleeping in the backseat kill people.

we have that - they're called buses and trains

― Andy the Grasshopper, Wednesday, December 13, 2023 2:29 PM (thirty-six seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

those are good too

buses and trains are socialism, why should my tax dollars pay for a cushy transit system that isn't very affordable and doesn't get you where you need to go quickly. only car drivers are Americans

Amtrak Joe has a spending bill he wants you to peruse

in the future a car will just be a self driving bed you jump into as it drives past

training sessions will be offered to prepare you for the jump

tuition fees may be paid in Ethereum

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/36/Little_Nemo_Japanese_poster.jpg

If you think about it, no one would get hit by cars if there were no people. Driverless cars, pedestrian free world.

Imagine all the people
Not existing today

Anyone who has existed within the same space as motorists should surely just assume that many of them are going to flagrantly disregard the things that they are supposed to do. Estimating conservatively, I'd say I'm nearly run down about three times a week while walking to/from work by people who just absolutely positively must make that left turn at this precise moment, vehicular manslaughter charges be damned.

And that's the debate, right? Are cars without drivers actually any worse than cars *with* drivers?

I lost two very close friends to car accidents. One of them mowed down by a drink driver, the other was an unconscious passenger after the dickhead driver crashed into the side of a house and she was killed by fire as the injured driver crawled out of the wreck. Both responsible drivers had to face legal accountability in a court of law, same should apply to tech billionaires putting out experimental vehicular homicide machines on the streets.

Yes?

(That was an xpost to Josh)

can a car be drunk

wasn't a huge part of the Tesla hype from like 2017-2019 the fact that they would soon drive themselves? in fact isn't that how their stock price got so high? are the driver assist features not called "autopilot"?? like uhhh yeah of course some people are gonna take that literally

i was eventually struck bike commuting fractured skull severe tbi 2 mos in hospital. most drivers are pretty cool and kind if annoyed. but they are careless as FUCK, and sone shit cannot be undone.

i have no trust wrt to robots until they actually FEEL risk and FEAR guilt.

and relentless typos. endless typos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgw8MEwTVwM

i always assume now that every vehicle around me is being driven by someone who will make the worst possible decision w/r/t me and my safety.

huge thread, can't load it, so maybe this was posted already.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/briefing/us-traffic-deaths.html

the Tesla hype from like 2017-2019

Afaict, that's still the hype fans buy into. Full self-driving, any day now. Any ... day ... now ....

And yeah, I didn't mean that self-driving cars were in some way better than human drivers, just that human drivers already suuuuuuuuuck and it's hard for me to believe (as much as I don't want them) that self-driving cars would necessarily be worse, at least statistically. Literally every single day I see something that either enrages me or shake my head or makes me breathe a sigh of relief. People blowing through stop signs and red lights. People driving at night with their headlights off. People making insane u-turns in busy intersections during rush hour. I have friends that have witnessed literal gun fights between speeding cars, like something out of an action movie. There's a hot dog stand here that has been boarded up since October, when a car crashed into it. Needless to say, the hot dog stand is not in the middle of the street.

It does blow my mind that even a relative handful of self-driving cars are out there. I don't even know how the insurance works on that, or how the legality works. Who is at fault if a self-driving car crashes? The car manufacturer? The software maker? The passengers? The owner of the company? All of the above and more, probably. I'm shocked there hasn't been a big multi-pronged lawsuit yet.

someone asked why elon’s mom needs all those dalmatians and now I can’t see her without thinking about it

these fruits never fall far from their poisonous trees
https://globalnews.ca/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/trump8.jpg?w=2048

that's Donald in prosthetics i can't be fooled

That image explains so much about his hairstyling choices, and much more besides

It does blow my mind that even a relative handful of self-driving cars are out there. I don't even know how the insurance works on that, or how the legality works. Who is at fault if a self-driving car crashes? The car manufacturer? The software maker? The passengers? The owner of the company? All of the above and more, probably. I'm shocked there hasn't been a big multi-pronged lawsuit yet.

― Josh in Chicago, Wednesday, 13 December 2023 21:53 (yesterday) link

it makes no sense to me at all

it was already a fraught proposition to force me onto the road with the average driver, now I might get killed because a car didn't see me or mistook me for a traffic light

the self-driving thing is dumb and nearly every other automaker has lane detection, emergency braking, and some version of adaptive cruise control now, and most work better than tesla

if you want something that approaches self-driving, I think the comma.ai openpilot kits outperform tesla’s offering and they work in a bunch of vehicles

recall tesla decided to go with some cheaper version of self driving tech that the entire rest of the industry thought was dumb and bad

tesla self driving tech: why is it so bad and hated?

xpost Iirc the standard is Lidar but Tesla went with something else.

Here's another question I have. Do you need a driver's license to be driven by a self-driving car? Isn't the presumption that if something went wrong, the passenger could take over?

The self-driving taxis, do you still sit in the back? Do you have access to the wheel/radio/A/C? Can you control those things with your voice?

https://web.archive.org/web/20231211123948/https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/11/briefing/us-traffic-deaths.html very distressing

the answer is for no one to leave their dwelling

older teslas did have lidar. apparently elon’s bluster about how they didn’t need it was because he stopped paying the lidar vendor and

The bar set for my young Aussie relatives is sooooo much higher than it is here. In Australia there are all these license levels that limit where and how you can drive until you're, like, 20. (ILX Aussies can correct me.) My sister in the UK, it took her at least a couple of tries to pass her license test, something she assured me was quite common there. But here in the US, states like Iowa let you get a permit at 14. 14! Iirc, one time my wife went in to take a test to renew her license and somehow forgot to do an entire page, but still passed.

i passed my test in the uk and new york state. the NYS test is a joke.

luckily all the drivers i see in new york are excellent, the best in the world, so i guess the test doesn't matter.

PBKR's Dad: Did you pass?
PBKR, Age 16: Yes!
PBKR's Dad: You got lucky.

Florida's driving test doesn't include parallel parking (I learned how to via Youtube). in fact, my test didn't even leave the parking lot.

keep these things in mind if you ever plan to visit here and wish to bring your own vehicle

Montana roads have weird quirks (a center lane that's just for turns, the fact that you can make a turn directly from a 25 mph road onto a 70 mph highway) but I passed the road test on my second try and now have a driver's license for the first time in 30 years. (I originally got my license at 19 in NJ but was a terrible driver, so I literally surrendered it — mailed it back to Trenton — in the early 90s because car insurance was ruinously expensive after multiple accidents. But there's no public transportation where I live now, so just letting my wife drive me around was untenable.)

I never took a driving test because you could do well enough in a drivers education course and skip it, unless you ended up getting randomly selected

I probably could have used a little more instruction. I think I’d rate my driving as average now, although the number of absolutely bizarre moves I’ve seen people make lately make me think that maybe the average is slipping

All you bad drivers confessing your road sins explains so much of what I see out there. Have you considered self-driving cars?

xxp I took several amazing drives across Montana in the summer of 91. IIRC, at least back then, the speed limit was more of a suggestion.

In the absence of stringent licensing standards, I keep hoping that the specter of a vehicular manslaughter trial is at least occasionally enough to encourage motorists to pay some modicum of attention to the world around them. Even though I'm sure we all can agree that concerning ourselves with the well-being of others and the actions we can take to avoid actively compromising that well-being is soooo dumb and boring, gah.

half of all drivers are worse than average! I’m just realistic

I am an excellent driver.

My eldest is a tow truck driver. She regularly extracts cars from situations that are truly mystifying. You might be surprised at the number of cars that end up in trees.

half of all drivers are worse than average! I’m just realistic

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Thursday, December 14, 2023 2:27 PM (twenty-one minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

has this country ever considered raising the skills of the average driver via education and testing? something to think about.