[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by darcane

That will double your fuel use and increase traffic congestion.

Sure, but when fuel is electricity, it will be cheap. The traffic congestion caused by people looping around the block looking for a non-existent parking spot will be eliminated.

I live 10 miles from downtown Portland, so unless fuel costs more than the parking fee, I'm sending the car home.

How would automated car fix that? Where I live now, all the traffic lights are triggered off sensors in the street.

Meshing through traffic at intersections will eliminate traffic lights altogether. There will be no stopping. This will save tons of energy and reduce the cost of traffic infrastructure.

I actually enjoy driving and a car is more to me than an appliance to get from point A to point B.

Me too. Fortunately, there will be plenty of opportunities to drive a car manually. Or, while the car is driving you somewhere, you could be playing the latest car driving simulation. Driving is fun, but racing is more fun.

Originally Posted by cbaber

If you look at major polls and surveys on the issue, about half of drivers are skeptical about an autonomous system. In one poll I found, 75% of respondents said they do not trust an autonomous system to take their kids to school. 60% said that a computer system doesn't have better decision making ability than humans. In another major poll 42% of respondents said autonomous cars were a bad idea, with 33% saying it was a good idea. Furthermore, people see a clear privacy risk, with over 70% believing private companies and the government could collect and abuse driving data with an autonomous system.

Can I get the source for your survey results? The thing is, the majority of people always oppose anything that is new. Once it's demonstrated to work for a while, people will change their minds. I can just imagine the distrust people had when automated traffic signals were first put in use. "What if the light turns green for everyone and causes an accident".

We're already ok with autopilot being used extensively in commercial flight. It's a very small increment in bravery to apply this to driving on the ground.

An autonomous system would collect location data and would be stored on a network, vulnerable to abuse by the government, private companies, and hackers. Just like Google collects your search data to deliver advertisements to you on the internet, there is a real possibility marketers and even automakers would take advantage of the data being collected by the car. And a large autonomous system would be a good target for hackers

And yet, people still sign up in droves to forfeit their anonymity and privacy on Facebook. There are certainly concerns that need to be addressed, but I doubt many will protest if data collection were to take place.

I like driving. I would not want to lose the ability to drive older cars. And there are a lot of people who feel this way. I think everyone should have a say, it's not a one-size-fits-all approach that should be used.

Agreed.