I’m thinking the restrictions on manual driving will be like HOV lanes or truck-free lanes nowadays. There will be a lane or two where only AVs will be allowed. Manual vehicles will be still be able to get around but it will take longer than by AVs.
Or shorter, cuz the idiot drivers will be off the roads.
Yeah, they should put all those semis on a rail or something. Attach them all to one engine.
nothing worse to have on the road than self-proclaimed good drivers. we know who that group consists of.
My driving record is no worse than AV’s at the moment.
In fact, there are AV algorithms that have a higher fatality rate than I do.
Gotta love that 19th century technology.
At least it can get you home w/o endangering anyone else.
I’m thinking that just like horses are illegal on interstates, and allowed but discouraged on most other major roads, and completely fine on small local roads and private property, we will see manual driving shrink to recreational and rural use.
But maybe not in my lifetime. Old cars stay in service for a very long time. I do expect to see them banned from interstates, though.
I don’t think it’ll be quite to this point. Horses are banned because they’re incapable of sustain “highway speeds” and they’re living beings. And there’s no “fender-bender” with horses.
Also, it’ll be near impossible to enforce that sort of law. There’s a reason that one can drive 5-10 mph over the posted speed limit without some law enforcement officer pulling you over.
What I can see happening is that new road ways will be developed (or current road ways converted to) an infrastructure that does support AV and it’ll be these road ways that’ll prohibit non-AV. And the infrastructure will be set up up so that enforcement will be automated (a la photo-tickets).
Yes, this is what I expect, too. But I expect that the vast majority of interstates will be among the roads converted. Maybe not the stretches through cities, but a big chunk of the interstate system.
This is the scenario that gets me excited, since I do long-distance road trips a lot. AV driving becomes available on rural interstates in certain lanes, perhaps only when the weather is good, so that once you’re on the outskirts of the metro area you can switch on AV and scoot along safely at 120 mph. When you approach the next metro area or road conditions get dangerous you get warning that you have take over again and if you don’t respond, the AV parks you safely in the emergency lane. As the system gets more mature, the urban parts of the interstate start to become AVed and then eventually some of lesser roads.
Or just go back in time to when Montana’s daytime speed limit was “reasonable and prudent” which a gas station clerk informed me basically meant “what your car is capable of… don’t bury the needle”.
My cheap car had been in an accident that bent the frame (bend the frame and it’s never the same) and it rattled & vibrated most unpleasantly at speeds around 98 & above, so I cruised through Montana (on I-90) at around 95 mph. Did take it over 100 for a few minutes just to say I’d done it, but the car was clearly not happy about that.
Took about 6.5 hours to go 555 miles. (Had to slow down in the big cities like Billings & Butte, plus a couple of pit stops.)
Wish I’d done that trip in a better car!
Ha Ha Ha… Butte
I also had a “not cheap to me” car that was hit awkwardly, even though it was legally parked. It was never the same as new after that. It shimmied when the brakes were applied above 60mph. But your point, if I take it correctly, is that another hurdle of AVs will be the need to sufficiently repair the systems on any AV after it has been damaged in an accident.
I don’t see speed limits increasing with the advent of AV’s. Although, I really don’t believe the hype that AVs will become commonplace anytime in the next 30 or 40 years.
There is some cross fertilization of ideas in this Self Driving Cars thread and the Electric Vehicles thread, which is actually in the Technology sub forum.
But I proposed that that AVs must obey the 3 laws:
1 Like
what about the trolley problem?
Those are nice laws for a self-aware robot. But they aren’t laws that we expect of most “smart” devices. We expect them to be reasonably safe, but not so much the other two.
You can’t over-ride the electronic fuel injection within your car, nor does it try to “protect itself”. Your smart doorbell can easily be used to harm a person who trespasses your property, by giving you evidence to file charges against them.
I think you are treating self-driving vehicles as having more “self-determination” than they actually have.
I increasingly think there will be a large public opinion related delay ontop of the programming related delays in getting AVs. Every AV-related injury, let alone death, is and will be a big lawsuit with lots of public interest because it’s “robot killing human”. I think we’ll need a solid generation of flawless AVs before we get widespread use.
1 Like
I don’t know if I can really take credit for making that point, but it is certainly a statement that I agree with.
I can see higher speed limits in designated AV-only lanes on highways. But not significantly higher on an “as enforced” basis while there are still a material amount of non-AVs on the road (aka at the next 50 years at a minimum).
The other thing with AVs is that given the sometimes enormous disparities between posted speed limits and enforced speed limits… they may need to reduce those disparities so you don’t have AVs going 55 mph on sections of interstate where cars routinely go 75 mph. And to be fair, a lot of east coast states that stubbornly clung to 55 mph speed limits for decades after 65 mph was permitted by the feds, have subsequently upped their speed limits to 65 mph, at least for the less populated portions of the state.
Depending on how you define “commonplace” I probably agree with this statement.
We overnighted in Butte once on the night before Evil Knievel day and the next morning we checked out the festivities. Soon I noticed that they were already serving hard liquor at 10am and I whispered to my traveling companions “We have to get outta here”.
1 Like
Check in with Susan Calvin.