Ed Self-Driving Cars: Pros, Cons, and Predictions

Evaluate Self-Driving Cars on a scale of 1-5 (1 = Terrible, 3 = Meh, 5 = Great)

  • 1

    Votes: 10 6.6%

  • 2

    Votes: 11 7.2%

  • 3

    Votes: 24 15.8%

  • 4

    Votes: 28 18.4%

  • 5

    Votes: 79 52.0%
  • Total voters
    152
  • Poll closed .
wobs said:
Not Just Bikes have opinions on self-driving cars:

54mins, which is very long for NJB.
It comes across as dystopian, but he bases it on current approaches by the tech companies pushing this, and car companies in the US in the past, where they pushed for car infrastructure in cities at the expense of people. So nothing is really far fetched in his predictions.



Is it worth 54 mins of your time? Its NJB, so yes.
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That's very good.
 
The interesting thing is, NJB set out to make a vid about how there were still challenges to self-driving cars, but that they would ultimately be a good thing for cities. Then he went down the rabbit hole of reading articles and talking to experts, and came out on the other side horrified by the prospect of cities ruined by self-driving cars. Glad he's able to look that openly at the topics he researches.
 
Haven't watched it. Someone want to summarize the main points as to why he says SDCs are bad?

Does NJB foresee cities with no space for pedestrians and bikes?
 
Orphia Nay said:
Haven't watched it. Someone want to summarize the main points as to why he says SDCs are bad?

Does NJB foresee cities with no space for pedestrians and bikes?
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  • Self-driving cars aren't smart. Making them smart is harder than people think
  • We're being treated as unwitting or unwilling guinea pigs, and the companies developing this technology do their best to cover up tragic errors
  • You can disable a self-driving car by putting a traffic cone on the hood, lol
  • We won't be able to stop this technology
  • Local regulators are bending over backwards to protect companies from liability
  • The design of American roads sucks, these systems are being developed for those roads, it's unlikely that they'll be redeveloped for European cities, possibly pressuring European cities to adopt American-style urban design
  • Safe roadway design is a much better way of reducing traffic fatalities
  • Robotaxis are just cheaper taxis, and they might not be cheaper once they've eliminated the competition
  • Promises about leasing your private car out to others while you're not using it are unlikely to materialize
  • They won't reduce traffic congestion, due to induced demand and the need to distribute robotaxis around a city
  • A review of unrealized promises made by the automobile industry in the past
  • Robotaxis threaten public transit, which has a much higher throughput
  • Industry propaganda about replacing streets with greenways is unrealistic
  • Proposals for fencing roadways to permit higher speed limits will make city streets hostile to pedestrians and exact a price for retail businesses
  • A review of early hostility to automobiles, and the industry response (lobby government for car-friendly legislation, regulate pedestrian activity)
  • A comparison of Utrecht and London, Ontario (cities that were on similar paths until Utrecht abandoned car-centric urban planning). Utrecht seems to have achieved much of the dream of autonomous vehicles without autonomous vehicles, by having fewer cars
  • We don't want autonomous vehicles clogging up city streets (because it's cheaper than parking), they should be charged per mile driven, with higher prices during times of high congestion
 
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mumblethrax said:
  • Self-driving cars aren't smart. Making them smart is harder than people think
  • We're being treated as unwitting or unwilling guinea pigs, and the companies developing this technology do their best to cover up tragic errors
  • You can disable a self-driving car by putting a traffic cone on the hood, lol
  • We won't be able to stop this technology
  • Local regulators are bending over backwards to protect companies from liability
  • The design of American roads sucks, these systems are being developed for those roads, it's unlikely that they'll be redeveloped for European cities, possibly pressuring European cities to adopt American-style urban design
  • Safe roadway design is a much better way of reducing traffic fatalities
  • Robotaxis are just cheaper taxis, and they might not be cheaper once they've eliminated the competition
  • Promises about leasing your private car out to others while you're not using it are unlikely to materialize
  • They won't reduce traffic congestion, due to induced demand and the need to distribute robotaxis around a city
  • A review of unrealized promises made by the automobile industry in the past
  • Robotaxis threaten public transit, which has a much higher throughput
  • Industry propaganda about replacing streets with greenways is unrealistic
  • Proposals for fencing roadways to permit higher speed limits will make city streets hostile to pedestrians and exact a price for retail businesses
  • A review of early hostility to automobiles, and the industry response (lobby government for car-friendly legislation, regulate pedestrian activity)
  • A comparison of Utrecht and London, Ontario (cities that were on similar paths until Utrecht abandoned car-centric urban planning). Utrecht seems to have achieved much of the dream of autonomous vehicles without autonomous vehicles, by having fewer cars
  • We don't want autonomous vehicles clogging up city streets (because it's cheaper than parking), they should be charged per mile driven, with higher prices during times of high congestion
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Thanks for that. Much food for thought.
 
mumblethrax said:
  • Self-driving cars aren't smart. Making them smart is harder than people think - He mentions one terrible accident in which someone was knocked over in the street and then dragged under a self-drive car, but such unthinking stupidity is not limited to
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I've started watching it but not very impressed at the moment - the first major issue he talks about is how stupid they are and how that will create new classes of accidents. The example he uses as evidence for this is when a car driven by a human person knocked someone over in the lane of a self-drive taxi , the self-drive taxi tried to stop but couldn't stop in time to not also run over the person. He claims this a new class of accidents because the body was then under the taxi so it no longer tried to stop so dragged the person along the street under the car. But this is not a new class of accident, sadly people do this right now - took me one Bing search to surface this example: https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/i-didnt-know-someone-underneath-5084011 . And I found several more. He does not seem to be even doing basic research to check his claims. But I'll watch the rest during today - he may get better.
 
Darat said:
I've started watching it but not very impressed at the moment - the first major issue he talks about is how stupid they are and how that will create new classes of accidents. The example he uses as evidence for this is when a car driven by a human person knocked someone over in the lane of a self-drive taxi , the self-drive taxi tried to stop but couldn't stop in time to not also run over the person. He claims this a new class of accidents because the body was then under the taxi so it no longer tried to stop so dragged the person along the street under the car. But this is not a new class of accident, sadly people do this right now - took me one Bing search to surface this example: https://www.examinerlive.co.uk/news/west-yorkshire-news/i-didnt-know-someone-underneath-5084011 . And I found several more. He does not seem to be even doing basic research to check his claims. But I'll watch the rest during today - he may get better.
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Seems debateable to me. Yes, it's possible for a human driver to knock someone over without realizing it and then drag them under the car without realizing it, but that's not what happened with the Cruise vehicle. It did "realize" that it was going to hit someone (that's why it braked)...and then simply "forgot" she was there (because it could no longer sense her). That's why he mentioned that they don't even have the object permanence you would expect from a toddler. That does seem like an error that no human being would make.
 
The system being discussed in that video seems fundamentally different from the one being developed by Tesla.

There are some excellent general points, I think. That the idea seems to be to transfer public transport passengers into what are, fundamentally, taxis. Cheaper taxis, but will even the cheap price last? And what does it mean for cities when all or most current bus or tram passengers each have their own personal car? Even the point about mother dropping off two children to different schools then driving on to work being replaced by three separate vehicles doing three separate journeys.

I'm not sure what to make of his point about the noise of EVs being no better than that of ICE cars. Out cycling recently on a rural road I did notice that the EVs that passed me didn't seem to sound much different from the ICE cars because it was all tyre noise, but on the other hand reports from Chinese cities that have gone almost all EV say that it's much quieter.
 
I follow him on Patreon and he did say this video required extensive research, talking to experts, etc. Excerpt:
I know that other video essayists make marathon-length videos, but they also use mostly "talking head" shots where they talk to the camera. Making a video this long and complicated in the style of Not Just Bikes was ridiculous. I spoke with several advocates in cities that have self-driving cars and contracted researchers, animators, and multiple videographers in different cities to make this happen, in addition to my usual video and audio editors.
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I would like to know what experts he spoke to, though. Which makes me wish he would cite his sources when making videos, come to think of it.

But yes, the video is definitely a worst-case scenario, and coloured by his cynisism after years of new urbanism advocacy. Also I find the reactions to that intersection with the cars that don't need to stop (both in his vid and in CGP Grey's vid from years back) to be a bit... unwarranted? The way I see it, what's pictured is a motorway intersection, where pedestrians wouldn't be in the first place. No one's saying the cars won't stop for pedestrians in regular intersections, like in towns and cities. The reactions are a bit like looking at a highway interchange and going "but how are people supposed to cross the street?". They're not, highways aren't for pedestrians or cyclists in the first place.

That said, though... He does raise some good points, like that 'safer than regular cars' isn't as good an argument as people imagine it to be. Cars are incredibly dangerous, so that's kind of like saying 'safer than smoking cigarettes', isn't it? Something can be 'safer than normal cars' and still be really dangerous. And I can definitely see self-driving car manufacturers and drivers lobbying for cities to be planned around self-driving cars, the way cities were originally shaped to fit the automobile back in the day.

Roger Ramjets said:
The title is 'self driving hell' so no, it isn't worth my time. Not even just to give it a down vote.
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Maybe not the right attitude for a skeptics forum ;) ?
 
Many good points there. It is likely true that overall, self driving cars, at least in urban environments, will, at least initially, be safer statistically than cars are now, but it seems like a half-assed solution to the problem. We need fewer cars more than we need autonomous ones.

Of course as a rural person much of the issue is inapplicable anyway. I can imagine a self driving vehicle being useful in a predictable, high traffic city - if I had a self-driving or even partially self-driving, mode I could turn on when negotiating high-speed multi-lane urban ring roads, I'd happily turn it on. But I think a far greater percentage of unusual situations in country driving are unpredictable and novel. Cabs are basically a non-issue. Consistent connectivity a big issue. Even trying to get a self driving car to understand one's destination could be hard to implement. Some of the more common issues with self driving cars, such as unscheduled stopping for imagined problems, will have different outcomes depending on whether it occurs in traffic on a city street, or in the middle of a country road on a blind curve.

And so on. Of course the drive toward autonomous cars benefits the car industry above all, and though it's also true that any industry will promote its wares, when the result has far reaching social consequences, it's a good idea to keep the motives in mind.

e.t.a. by the way, though I know the term "Luddite" has evolved in its sense, I think it's useful to remember that Lud and his fellows were not just irrationally afraid of new technology, but feared, and perhaps rightly so, its social effects, especially to their own traditional trades. And though one can argue against their methods and the breadth of their long term vision, Blake's dark satanic mills and Melville's Tartarus of maids were not mere fictional figures of speech either. They were afraid, not of the machines themselves, but of how well they would work, not only to do their jobs but to change the beneficiaries. We can be Luddites still, and wrong still, and even obnoxious still, but to give serious thought to the social consequence of a successful new technology is not inherently a sin.
 
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