Quote:
Originally Posted by STK
GM has a petition with the US Department of Transportation to roll out an AV fleet of 2,500 cars in 2019. They would be used in a ride service with SF or Scottsdale as the first city. The NY Times highlighted it in today's front page. Now we'll see how this plays out. It might not work as planned. But maybe this announcement will temper your skepticism.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/12/b...T.nav=top-news |
The FAA can't even figure out how to deal with UAVs and it's been over five years since I've been involved with it. But the DOT will let UGV (un-manned ground vehicles) drive around with real humans in close proximity 2 years from now. Okay, good plan. GM better hope 83-year old Ralph Nader is dead by 2019. He tried to put GM out of business just for making the Corvair...
37,000 people in the US are killed in vehicle accidents. Break that down and about 60% involve alcohol. 5,000 are motorcyclists. So maybe 25,000 people are killed otherwise. Take out cell-phone distracted driving and another 5,000 deaths drop off (my guess). So, we're going to spend trillions of dollars to make personal travel more expensive and less convenient because of behavioral problems and vehicle types.
I'd rather see more required and better driver education and stricter driving penalties to weed out the people who decide not to take the responsibility to drive properly to solve such problems. If you want to text and travel, or don't want/can't learn to drive correctly, then just take public transportation. Today you can get to almost any place in the world via public transportation and can text your but off the entire time.
I have no doubt that AV can be technically accomplished. But at what cost and is it significantly going to reduce traffic deaths?