rjstractor wrote:
Grit dog wrote:
Don't sell the stupidity of the general population short.
True statement. The transition to autonomous cars might be pretty messy and if not handled well it won't happen at all. As cars allow drivers to pay less attention at the wheel, they will pay less attention, regardless of what the manufacturers recommend. The aforementioned Tesla crash is a prime example where if the driver had been paying attention like he should have been he would have at least had a chance of surviving.
The public as a whole thinks in a funny way, we will tolerate thousands of highway deaths per year due to human error, but it will take just a few high-profile deaths caused by technology errors to sour the public on the idea of driverless cars.
Many deaths caused by human error are not tolerated. I hope the Google car can do better than an impaired driver or a texting teenager. When you remove all the accidents that should never have happened I wonder how many fatalities would be left each year?
