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This is a requirement, because otherwise, a human driver is required, hence the vehicle is not self-driving, but actually human-driven with partial delegation.

Level 3 and 4 autopilots create a new danger for drivers, who are, as a population, not able to retain the level of alertness required for safe driving with those autopilots. The aviation industry overcomes this through means not available to the solo car driver.

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How is a human driver required? If it can’t drive in the snow then it doesn’t drive in the snow. If it snows in Dallas no humans can drive either.

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Aug 16, 2023Edited
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"human, take the wheel?"

Like it does now.

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Exactly. That's not the car self-driving, that's the (now less alert) human.

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Except the people who moved in from out of the state?

Telling car manufacturers "This car can't be sold in half the country" isn't exactly a persuasive argument for including a new feature in their vehicles.

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That makes no sense. A car that can drive you back and forth to you office in Minneapolis 98% of the time is still really handy even if it can’t drive in a blizzard.

GM, Hyundai, BMW, Ford, etc. already sell system that only work on mapped highways and don’t work in the snow.

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This is defining success down. Way back when the claim was that nobody would need to drive ever and that traffic accidents/injuries/fatalities/etc. would vanish.

In addition how is this anything new? Tesla implemented its version of autonomous driving years ago and I suspect that what you see in cars now is a decade old at least.

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How is the fact that my new car can drive itself new? Did cars used to be able to drive themselves?

BlueCruise or SuperCruise can drive you 99.99% of the way from NYC to LA. It will downshift to use engine braking coming out of the Eisenhower Tunnel and everything. Can BlurCruise drive you from the off-ramp to your hotel? No.

But that a regular car can drive itself 99.99 % of the way across the US is impressive and a major advancement.

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Tesla introduced autopilot in 2014. It's almost a decade old now.

If autopilot is an impressive achievement and major advancement why weren't you singing its praises a decade ago? You're like the guy who shows up to a party to tell everybody "Hey, I just discovered this great new show called 'Stranger Things'! Have you guys heard of it?"

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That regular car might have driven 99% of the way (unlikely to be four 9's), but at any moment in the duration, it may have needed human assistance.

Sadly, it's at best a minor improvement on the adaptive cruise control I had in the early 90s. It's worse than my old adaptive cruise control in one respect: because people believe it's better than it is (witness your mention of four 9's, which is nowhere near the case).

What would be impressive is the final 1%, because that's where the hard engineering lies. I believe we'll get there, but likely through the back door of today's low-speed implementations, after a much longer process.

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“ (witness your mention of four 9's, which is nowhere near the case). ”

It’s 2,789 miles SuperCruise is fine on mapped interstates so it’s just the 5 miles from the off-ramp to the hotel. So fine 99.8%.

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SuperCruise mapped roads are far less than 99.8% of the overall road network, and the portion that don't require a human backup anyway remains 0%.

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It’s mapped 100% of the internet system.

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