Lamenting the decline of the car

[MonctonRad]

Do we really want a world where car owners never get any practise driving cars? If we rely on autonomous vehicles 100% of the time, what do we do when the network experiences an outage, or if there is a power failure? Would we just sit in our vehicles helplessly until the outage was corrected? What if the system was down for a couple of days?

This is why airline pilots don't rely on autopilot all the time. They have to actually control the planes occasionally themselves in order to keep there skills up.

Yup, I can see AI existing as an autopilot function, and it would be really useful on long boring drives, but I would still want to maintain my skills by taking the controls myself, just in case.

Plus the fact that car driving is just an enjoyable activity to begin with. I would miss it if some nameless and faceless bureaucracy suddenly issued an edict that from here on in, only autonomous vehicles would be allowed on the roadways.

[esquire]

^ I am the opposite. The sooner I can stop having to drive and can just stare out the window, listen to music, read a book, play games on my phone, nap or whatever, the better. It would be like having a chauffeur at your disposal 24/7. Driving is a waste of time.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by esquire

^ I am the opposite. The sooner I can stop having to drive and can just stare out the window, listen to music, read a book, play games on my phone, nap or whatever, the better. It would be like having a chauffeur at your disposal 24/7. Driving is a waste of time.

To each his own then. If you want to rely on autopilot 100% of the time, I won't rain on your parade. Just don't advocate a system which removes the rights to control your own car (and destiny) from other citizens.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Do we really want a world where car owners never get any practise driving cars?

Yes, absolutely. That is the end point - people suck at driving, so best we don't let them do it. There's no inherent physical law that dictates people must be allowed to drive, we've only had the option for a hundred or so years.

It will a long time before we get there though, if ever.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by milomilo

Yes, absolutely. That is the end point - people suck at driving, so best we don't let them do it. There's no inherent physical law that dictates people must be allowed to drive, we've only had the option for a hundred or so years.

Your ideal world is a sad, sad world as far as I am concerned - a world where people are pampered and pandered to by robots and AI. It kinda reminds me of the movie Wall-E - a world of fat humans slouching in chairs that run around taking them everywhere.

We need to maintain and encourage human initiative and skills. I don't want a Butlerian Jihad, but I want humans to be at least partially in control of their own destiny.

[CityTech]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Do we really want a world where car owners never get any practise driving cars? If we rely on autonomous vehicles 100% of the time, what do we do when the network experiences an outage, or if there is a power failure? Would we just sit in our vehicles helplessly until the outage was corrected? What if the system was down for a couple of days?

This is why airline pilots don't rely on autopilot all the time. They have to actually control the planes occasionally themselves in order to keep there skills up.

Yup, I can see AI existing as an autopilot function, and it would be really useful on long boring drives, but I would still want to maintain my skills by taking the controls myself, just in case.

Plus the fact that car driving is just an enjoyable activity to begin with. I would miss it if some nameless and faceless bureaucracy suddenly issued an edict that from here on in, only autonomous vehicles would be allowed on the roadways.

This is a mentality on the decline. Just look at the rise of utilitarian SUVs and the like, the shift away from manual transmissions, etc. The people who enjoy the act of driving are becoming an increasingly smaller minority.

In any case, I don't think anyone over the age of 50 or so is likely to be around to see the fully autonomous vehicle. It's decades away, IMO.

[ssiguy]

The reason I think autonomous cars are much ado about nothing is because they proceed from a false assumption................people don't like to drive.

As much as these downtown urban policy wonks and professionally paid environmentalists like to espouse, the realty is that most people do like to drive. We have a love-hate relationship with our cars. As much as we bitch about their expense and the horrid traffic and pollution they produce, most of us still love our cars and more importantly, love to drive them. The car is very much a reflection of our own personal values, character, ambitions, status, style, and personality.

Driving gives us a sense of freedom and control and "being in the driver's seat". You show me ANYONE who doesn't speed, do LA stops, run yellows, do illegal U-turns, and a host of other infractions and I will show you a pathological liar. Do any of us actually think these things will save us any significant amount of time, absolutely not but that doesn't change the fact that we do them on a daily basis even when we have all the time in the world to get to our actual destination. Autonomous cars turn our dynamic vehicle of freedom into all the excitement of having tea on an old sofa at Grandma's house.

Just as "we are what we eat" we very much "are what we drive" and how we do it. Just because a TV dinner offers the same nutritional value as a hamburger and fries at a fun quirky restaurant at a more affordable price at a more convenient location doesn't mean we are going to start buying TV dinners.

[milomilo]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Your ideal world is a sad, sad world as far as I am concerned - a world where people are pampered and pandered to by robots and AI. It kinda reminds me of the movie Wall-E - a world of fat humans slouching in chairs that run around taking them everywhere.

We need to maintain and encourage human initiative and skills. I don't want a Butlerian Jihad, but I want humans to be at least partially in control of their own destiny.

Was all of humanity sad when we didn't have the ability to drive? It's a trope, but it's true to say the same would have been said about horses. Today, who cares we don't all ride horse?

[WarrenC12]

Originally Posted by milomilo

Was all of humanity sad when we didn't have the ability to drive? It's a trope, but it's true to say the same would have been said about horses. Today, who cares we don't all ride horse?

Cue the quote about Henry Ford and people wanting faster horses.

I'm sure there's a small, small segment of people out there who have a blackberry because of the physical keyboard.

My son doesn't appear to be learning cursive in school. OH THE HUMANITY.

[esquire]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Your ideal world is a sad, sad world as far as I am concerned - a world where people are pampered and pandered to by robots and AI. It kinda reminds me of the movie Wall-E - a world of fat humans slouching in chairs that run around taking them everywhere.

We need to maintain and encourage human initiative and skills. I don't want a Butlerian Jihad, but I want humans to be at least partially in control of their own destiny.

Do you wash your own clothes and dishes, or do machines do it for you? I am fine with tedious or menial tasks being performed by machines.

As far as the idea of "loving driving" and using cars to express their identities, that is clearly an idea planted in people's heads by marketing executives tasked with convincing people to pony up big bucks for new cars. If we purchased cars based on actual need, those of us who aren't farmers or tradesmen would probably all be driving 90 hp hatchbacks that cost 10 grand. But the profit margins on that would be pretty lousy for the car makers.

I mean, maybe I could understand "loving driving" if you race cars on a track somewhere. But chugging along to work at 50 km/h is a mundane task that no one would get excited about if we weren't all subjected to a lifetime of commercials telling us that we should.

Obviously that mentality won't change overnight, but I do think it's starting to, beginning with the many under 30s who are indifferent to driving and often don't bother getting licenses... as compared to the boomer and gen X era when turning 16 and getting a license was practically a sacred rite of passage.

[MonctonRad]

Originally Posted by esquire

Obviously that mentality won't change overnight, but I do think it's starting to, beginning with the many under 30s who are indifferent to driving and often don't bother getting licenses... as compared to the boomer and gen X era when turning 16 and getting a license was practically a sacred rite of passage.

Look, I get that in Canada's larger cities, owning a car is actually a pain, with congested roadways, absent parking and no gas stations downtown, and that public transit options such as subways and regional rail make car ownership not entirely necessary, but I think that the 12 million Canadians or so who live in our larger cities forget that the other 99.5% of Canada's land mass is entirely different.

In many places car ownership is a necessity. In most of Canada, including the smaller cities, driving is stress free and enjoyable. This is where I'm from, and this is where I grew up. My paradigm is entirely different from yours.

If I ever chose to live in Toronto in retirement, I would probably choose public transit much more often than not. Anytime I visit Toronto, I routinely take the subway to navigate the city. Even if I owned a car in Toronto, I would probably only use it on the weekends for errands or for adventures in the countryside. This sort of behaviour is specific to the situation though. If I retired in the Okanagan instead, you can be damned sure I would still retain my car, and I would be driving it all through the mountain ranges in order to view and enjoy the spectacular scenery out there. Individual car ownership is not going to go away, and most people would want to retain the option of manual control of their vehicles. It's the freedom of the thing. The ability to be independent and to be the master of your own course in life. I know you may not get this, but it is the truth...…...

[SFUVancouver]

FWIW, Tesla's Q3 2020 safety report data:

In the 3rd quarter, we registered one accident for every 4.59 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.42 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.79 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.

Methodology:
We collect the exact amount of miles traveled by each vehicle with Autopilot active or in manual driving, and do so without identifying specific vehicles to protect privacy. We also receive a crash alert anytime there is a crash that is correlated to the exact vehicle state at the time. This is not from a sampled data set, but rather this is exact summations. To ensure our statistics are conservative, we count any crash in which Autopilot was deactivated within 5 seconds before a crash, and we count all crashes in which the crash alert indicated an airbag or other active restraint deployed. In practice, this correlates to nearly any crash at about 12 mph (20 kph) or above, depending on the crash forces generated. On the other hand, police-reported crashes from government databases are notoriously under-reported, by some estimates as much as 50%, in large part because most fender benders are not investigated. We also do not differentiate based on the type of crash or fault, and in fact, more than 35% of all Autopilot crashes occur when the Tesla vehicle is rear-ended by another vehicle. In this way, we are confident that the statistics we share unquestionably show the benefits of Autopilot.

Source

[ssiguy]

We are "driven" by our wants, not our needs.

Autonomous vehicles offer practicality and efficiency but people are not, in most ways of their life, practical or efficient and more importantly don't want to be. We don't want to live our lives in a functional manner and all the sterility that goes with it. If that was the case we would never go to restaurants, bars, nightclubs, theatre, vacations, day trips, interesting neighbourhoods, buy bigger houses than we need, buy the latest fashions and gadgets, or even go to Timmys when we can much more affordably make our own coffee and bring a thurmos.

Such illogical things make life life worth living like driving for stupid reasons when you can just as easily and more affordable take public transit. We like "being in the driver's seat" and doing things on our own and automation will never change that. We accept machines doing our laundry because that is something we DON'T want to do and will never accept automated cars because driving is something we DO want to do.

[jamincan]

Originally Posted by ssiguy

driving is something we DO want to do.

I think you're definitely speaking for the minority. There are few situations I can conceive of where I'd rather experience it from behind the steering wheel. I feel pretty confident I speak for the majority as well.

[esquire]

Originally Posted by jamincan

I think you're definitely speaking for the minority. There are few situations I can conceive of where I'd rather experience it from behind the steering wheel. I feel pretty confident I speak for the majority as well.

I would agree. I think right now hesitation mostly stems from the lack of confidence that people have in automated systems which isn't surprising given a) their newness and b) the high stakes involved if something goes wrong.

But once it reaches a certain level of refinement where people feel assured of their safety, I think most people will be happy to let the computer drive.

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by MonctonRad

Look, I get that in Canada's larger cities, owning a car is actually a pain, with congested roadways, absent parking and no gas stations downtown, and that public transit options such as subways and regional rail make car ownership not entirely necessary, but I think that the 12 million Canadians or so who live in our larger cities forget that the other 99.5% of Canada's land mass is entirely different.

In many places car ownership is a necessity. In most of Canada, including the smaller cities, driving is stress free and enjoyable. This is where I'm from, and this is where I grew up. My paradigm is entirely different from yours.

If I ever chose to live in Toronto in retirement, I would probably choose public transit much more often than not. Anytime I visit Toronto, I routinely take the subway to navigate the city. Even if I owned a car in Toronto, I would probably only use it on the weekends for errands or for adventures in the countryside. This sort of behaviour is specific to the situation though. If I retired in the Okanagan instead, you can be damned sure I would still retain my car, and I would be driving it all through the mountain ranges in order to view and enjoy the spectacular scenery out there. Individual car ownership is not going to go away, and most people would want to retain the option of manual control of their vehicles. It's the freedom of the thing. The ability to be independent and to be the master of your own course in life. I know you may not get this, but it is the truth...…...

I live in Vancouver and drive downtown all the time. It's not really inconvenient or expensive. The inconvenience largely comes from virtue-signalling politicians and their airheaded city staff who go out of their way to make it more difficult than it has to be.

Vancouver is wet half the year making biking less appealing. Plus a lot of trips are with one or two others, so it make sense to drive rather than pay more to take the bus, with the added bonus of sitting beside some crackhead at night.

[Proof Sheet]

[QUOTE=CityTech;9085900Just look at the rise of utilitarian SUVs and the like, the shift away from manual transmissions, etc. [/QUOTE]

Utilitarian SUV's

Manual transmission cars There is an alternative

I did read somewhere that only 18% of Americans can drive a manual. Depressing stat. I would imagine Canada is close. I taught my son in about 2 hours of practicing on quiet streets and parking lots and now he has mastered it in my car.

[Architype]

City of Vancouver proposes tolls for cars entering downtown and Central Broadway

City staff want to charge vehicles entering the region’s Metro Core — the geographical area that contains downtown Vancouver peninsula and Central Broadway — with a user fee to reduce carbon emissions, reduce traffic congestion, and improve the use of public space.

https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/city...tolls-proposal

[whatnext]

Originally Posted by Architype

City of Vancouver proposes tolls for cars entering downtown and Central Broadway



https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/city...tolls-proposal

Or “How to Commit Electoral Suicide”.

[Me&You]

Originally Posted by jamincan

I think you're definitely speaking for the minority. There are few situations I can conceive of where I'd rather experience it from behind the steering wheel. I feel pretty confident I speak for the majority as well.

It's interesting to hear other perspectives.

I can honestly say that there are few situations I can conceive of where I'd rather not be behind the steering wheel... I mean, sure, I guess being stuck in gridlock traffic, I might rather be in the passenger seat or utilize an autonomous driving function. But other than avoiding the absolute worst traffic, I can confidently say that, given a choice, I'd almost always be driving.