# My Adventures With a Driverless Car 10/23/17 New York Times



## Michael - Cleveland (Jan 1, 2015)

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/opinion/driverless-cars-test-drive.html
*Driverless Cars Made Me Nervous. Then I Tried One.*
New York Times 22 October 2017 by David Leonhardt

On my fourth day in a semi-driverless car, I finally felt comfortable enough to let it stop itself. Before then, I'd allowed the car - a Volvo S90 sedan - to steer around gentle turns, with my hands still on the wheel, and to adjust speed in traffic. By Day 4, I was ready to make a leap into the future.

With the car traveling 40 miles an hour on a busy road in the Washington suburbs, I pushed a button to activate the driverless mode and moved my foot away from the brake and accelerator. The car kept its speed. Soon, a traffic light in the distance turned red, and the cars in front of me slowed. For a split second, I prepared to slam on the brake.

There was no need. The cameras and computers in the Volvo recognized that other cars were slowing and smoothly began applying the brake. My car came to a stop behind the Ford ahead of me. I began laughing, even though no one else was in the car, as my anxiety turned to relief.

If you're anything like most people, you're familiar with this anxiety. Almost 80 percent of Americans fear traveling in a self-driving car, a recent poll found.

*More than 37,000 Americans were killed
last year in crashes involving cars.
That's more than from gun deaths and almost as large as from breast cancer.*​
When a friend saw me in the Volvo last week and I explained that I was test-driving it for work, she asked which roads I'd be using - so she could avoid them. Another friend asked if driverless cars could be hacked. Colleagues said they feared semiautonomous cars lulling people into ignoring the road.









A semi-driverless Volvo S90 sedan, on a recent test drive. CreditFred R. Conrad for The New York Times​
Above all, remember that the status quo is pretty terrible. More than 37,000 Americans were killed last year in crashes involving human-driven cars. That's more than the toll from gun deaths and almost as large as the toll from breast cancer.

You can also read a recent Times editorial arguing for stricter regulation of driverless cars. My take is different: I think that consumer pressure for safe driverless cars will be intense and that government regulation, while necessary, is secondary. But, as I've said before, one goal of this newsletter is to give you different perspectives.

Driverless cars tap deep into the human psyche. We want to be in control, or at least to give control to trained professionals, like doctors. We don't want computers to be in charge.

Researchers at Penn and the University of Chicago have conducted some clever experiments that capture this phenomenon. They asked participants to complete tasks (like predicting which business-school applicants would go on to successful careers) and compare their performance with a computer algorithm's. After the computer made a mistake, people were reluctant to use it again. After the people made mistakes, their self-confidence didn't budge.

They rationalized their own imperfections, while obsessing over the computer's shortcomings. It didn't matter that the human beings made more mistakes - a lot more - than the computer.

So it is with driving. Human driving is a public-health scourge. More than 37,000 Americans died in crashes last year, most from human error. In my community, the heartbreaking toll included a mother, father and their teenage son, killed when a speeding car slammed into their car on one of those busy suburban roads. Their teenage daughter survived.

The death count from cars exceeds that from guns. So if you are outraged by guns and want things to change, you should feel the same about car crashes.

Technology creates an opportunity to save lives. Computers don't get drowsy, drunk or distracted by text messages, and they don't have blind spots. Just look at commercial airlines: Automation has helped all but eliminate fatal crashes among American air carriers. The last one happened in 2009.

The technology for semi-driverless cars still isn't good enough or cheap enough. The $50,000 Volvo I was driving - like a Tesla I've tried - got confused by unpainted lane lines, for instance, and I had to take over. But the technology is improving rapidly. Within a few years, many cars will have sophisticated crash-avoidance systems.

I expect that we will agonize about using them, out of both legitimate caution and irrational fear. Any driverless crashes will be sensationalized, as has already happened, while we ignore tens of thousands of deaths from human crashes. But I still expect that driving will be revolutionized sooner than many people now understand.

Those researchers at Penn and Chicago also studied the circumstances in which people get comfortable with computer control, and found a theme: When the choice isn't all or nothing - when people have "even a slight amount" of control - they are more open to automation.

That's where driving is headed. The shift will be gradual, not sudden, as Google's chief economist, Hal Varian, told me. Cars will handle many tasks, while a human driver will have override power. The combination won't be perfect, but it can be much better than the status quo.

My own experience also leads me to think that attitudes may change quickly. One of the more powerful forces in human psychology is known as the familiarity principle. After people have experience with something, they usually feel more positively about it.

I began my short time with the Volvo too nervous to use some features. By the end, I was confident that the car made me safer. Now that I'm back to driving a nearly decade-old Toyota, I miss the things that initially made me anxious.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

I love this mantra that these death traps are somehow safer despite having no statistically meaningful sample size to prove such a claim. I feel sorry for the millennial early adopters who will pay with their lives. 



And btw, what kind of moron thinks it's "safer" to have people disengaged from the task of driving as level 2-4 allow? Ask that dead dumbass in his tesla how well watching a movie while on autopilot worked out.


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

Michael - Cleveland said:


> More than 37,000 Americans were killed
> last year in crashes involving cars.
> That's more than from gun deaths and almost as large as from breast cancer.


Let me start with the line you use as your signature - "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." Right? So context is always more important, because the power of knowledge is useless or dangerous in case is not correctly applied.

Now that line I've quoted out of this article is *a monumental intentional manipulation*. Why? Because that number has no context. If you want to add context, like I did here, then you might be able to understand my point.

"*First - The "statistical" fallacy*
In order to make the autonomous cars idea appealing to the general public, Silicon Valley's main argument from the beginning was how those robot cars will save thousands of lives. In order to support that, they used something they are very good at - statistics. They've claimed that if you want to understand the good in the self driving cars you need to understand how _statistically _(and I am going to use this website's info - http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics), 3.287 people die from car crashes every single day. The general public got their punch in the face, because any mentally sane person, looking at those numbers, it will accept self driving cars engineers as angels meant to save human lives with their technology.

Hummmmmm... Let's take a break and listen to Chris Urmson here for a second - _"*So you know in America, somebody dies in a car accident about 1.15 times per 100 million miles. That's like 10,000 years of an average person's driving*. So, let's say the technology is pretty good but not that good. You know, someone dies once every 50 million miles.". _According to Insurance Institute for Highway Safety - Highway Loss data Institute, "There were 32,166 fatal motor vehicle crashes in the United States in 2015 in which 35,092 deaths occurred. This resulted in 10.9 deaths per 100,000 people and 1.13 deaths per 100 million miles traveled", so Chris Urmson is correct, and a person needs to drive for 10.000 years in average to get to the unfortunate point of the possibility of being killed in a car accident. So, the cars and the real people driving them are incredibly safe at this point, and is no reason for anybody to actually panic because "driving is not safe" and needs to be replaced."

If we as a society, will simply focus on a better driver education, there will be no need for the scam of self driving cars technology. Technology as a tool is only a fraction of our education as a whole, and we need to acknowledge and respect that a lot more than we do today.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

If we truly cracked down on drunk and dangerous driving they could prevent way more deaths than a sdc ever could. 

Again, how many fatal accidents has everyone here been involved in?


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## Michael - Cleveland (Jan 1, 2015)

jocker12 said:


> Let me start with the line you use as your signature - "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." Right? So context is always more important, because the power of knowledge is useless or dangerous in case is not correctly applied.
> 
> Now that line I've quoted out of this article is *a monumental intentional manipulation*. Why? Because that number has no context. If you want to add context, like I did here, then you might be able to understand my point.
> 
> ...


First - you do know that what I posted above is an ARTICLE written by a journalist (not me), right? 
Still, I love how you worked in my sig to make your argument. Well done! 

Second, I don't doubt anything you've laid out - just your conclusion. Based on the statistical analysis you describe, the same logic would also dictate that we are wasting a lot of time and effort trying to cure breast cancer - resources that could be put to better use elsewhere. I mean who cares about 30,000 women a year who lose their life to the disease - the way you are looking at it, they are statistically insignificant.


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## Michael - Cleveland (Jan 1, 2015)

heynow321 said:


> If we truly cracked down on drunk and dangerous driving they could prevent way more deaths than a sdc ever could.


That makes you sound like a younger adult, rather than an old guy like me.
We have gotten serious about car safety and drunk driving. Very serious.
Getting stopped for DUI used to mean a cop would either escort you home or take your keys and give you a ride home.
Today, a DUI can cost you $10,000+ _and_ loss of your driving privileges.
50 years ago, no one wore seat-belts (even if their car had 'em), ABS brakes, traction control and air-bag technology didn't exist - and back-up cams, collision avoidance systems, lane monitoring systems, auto-braking systems were purely sci-fi.

For those reasons (and more, like lower speed limits on highways), automobile related deaths per 100,000 in the US dropped from 19 in 1984 to 10 in 2004... nearly a 50% drop in 20 years


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

Michael - Cleveland said:


> First - you do know that what I posted above is an ARTICLE written by a journalist (not me), right?


Of course.



Michael - Cleveland said:


> Second, I don't doubt anything you've laid out - just your conclusion.


 In order to understand the problem, you need to accept the reality about it. Breast cancer like guns won't go away anywhere soon. Maybe never. You deal with what you have to the best of your abilities. It is a long and interesting discussion (which I've edited out of my initial comment because it was too long). The comparison with cancer it's not objective and appropriate to this issue, because the vast majority of cancer victims are not technology induced related. Car accidents and shooting victims are, and to minimize the number of victims, in my opinion, you need to educate the people instead of pushing for extreme and unrealistic solutions to alter the existing technology.

The future is not about technology as much as it is about education.

Edit - oh, and by the way...


Michael - Cleveland said:


> Technology creates an opportunity to save lives. Computers don't get drowsy, drunk or distracted by text messages, and they don't have blind spots. Just look at commercial airlines: Automation has helped all but eliminate fatal crashes among American air carriers. The last one happened in 2009


Funny how, in order to fit the argument, the author narrows the statistical data to ONLY American airlines, when commercial planes use relatively the same Autopilot software anywhere in the world, flight transportation having it's universal standards.

For real data available, one can simply go to the Wikipedia page and filter the results by date . So let's look at the system failure (of the technology) and fatalities numbers in accidents and incidents resulting in 50 or more fatalities, that happened after the flight mentioned in the story (Feb 12,2009) - 30 crashes, 3761 fatalities, 256 crew members, 3485 passengers, 34 civilians on the ground and 3 survivors.


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## Oscar Levant (Aug 15, 2014)

Michael - Cleveland said:


> That makes you sound like a younger adult, rather than an old guy like me.
> We have gotten serious about car safety and drunk driving. Very serious.
> Getting stopped for DUI used to mean a cop would either escort you home or take your keys and give you a ride home.
> Today, a DUI can cost you $10,000+ _and_ loss of your driving privileges.
> ...


I'm an old guy and it wasn't 50 years ago in fact I never started getting tickets for driving without my safety belts until the mid-nineties I never used them before then. After my third ticket within a year I decided it was time to start using seat belts, which in the year 2003 saved my life.


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## RamzFanz (Jan 31, 2015)

jocker12 said:


> Let me start with the line you use as your signature - "Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad." Right? So context is always more important, because the power of knowledge is useless or dangerous in case is not correctly applied.
> 
> Now that line I've quoted out of this article is *a monumental intentional manipulation*. Why? Because that number has no context. If you want to add context, like I did here, then you might be able to understand my point.
> 
> ...


Once again you've ignored the reality.

Let's talk about the over 3,000,000 injuries, most of them permanent? Or do amputations, crushed knees, and brain damage not rank as important to you?

We've gotten better at protecting passengers and saving lives. We have not become safe drivers.

My daughter's friend died in a car accident yesterday. She was a new driver. She was a wonderful girl. She is one of the people you're saying doesn't matter.



heynow321 said:


> If we truly cracked down on drunk and dangerous driving they could prevent way more deaths than a sdc ever could.
> 
> Again, how many fatal accidents has everyone here been involved in?


Uh.... Wat?!

If SDCs eliminate drunk and dangerous driving, how could enforcement possibly prevent more deaths?



jocker12 said:


> Funny how, in order to fit the argument, the author narrows the statistical data to ONLY American airlines, when commercial planes use relatively the same Autopilot software anywhere in the world, flight transportation having it's universal standards.
> 
> For real data available, one can simply go to the Wikipedia page and filter the results by date . So let's look at the system failure (of the technology) and fatalities numbers in accidents and incidents resulting in 50 or more fatalities, that happened after the flight mentioned in the story (Feb 12,2009) - 30 crashes, 3761 fatalities, 256 crew members, 3485 passengers, 34 civilians on the ground and 3 survivors.


This is completely disingenuous. First, planes have long long lifespans so the technology in many planes is ancient. Second, your point is meaningless unless you use the number of modern crashes that occurred because of autopilot. The answer, to my knowledge and I am an airplane and airplane crash follower, is zero. Almost every crash I've studied was human error.

In a modern plane today, the pilot flys for about 6 minutes and that's because of regulations, not plane capabilities. A computer is a vastly better pilot than a human. Computers can fly planes, like stealth planes, that a human is completely incapable of flying.

This would apply in a damaged plane also. A computer could fly a plane a human simply could not.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

Oh...so the software on planes can't be updated or retrofitted? Got it!


Do you see the (small) caliber of a person you're dealing with when it comes to ramz and tomato?


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

RamzFanz said:


> Once again you've ignored the reality.
> 
> Let's talk about the over 3,000,000 injuries, most of them permanent? Or do amputations, crushed knees, and brain damage not rank as important to you?
> 
> ...


First - Knowing a car accident victim makes you an expert on transportation as much as a person knowing a sick individual could be an expert on healthcare.

Second - I am not saying she was a person that doesn't matter at all, but why do you think her death matters more than these childrens deaths - _About 29,000 children under the age of five - *21 each minute* - die every day, mainly from preventable causes. _More than 70 per cent of almost 11 million child deaths every year are attributable to six causes: diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth."? But you probably don't like this context.

Then let's use a different context for your situation. 
If this information provided by US Department of Transportation - National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is correct, then










your daughters friend was the only person that died that day out of other 3,3 million people that *100% safely* covered 30 miles in average for those 24 hours. (100.000.000 miles for 1.2 fatalities means 3.333.333 people drove 100% safe on a 30 miles average per day that day).

What I am saying here is, despite her unfortunate loss of life, it is not significant enough to justify a drastic change in technology as self driving cars is. Why? Because on this thread, 1 hour and 23 minutes after you posted the comment I am replying to here, you posted this comment "Zero cost, all profit. Cleaning will be a profit center from fees, not an expense. *People will quickly learn*" #11 in the thread.

Well, if you agree on people learning quickly, why not educate them better about driving, instead of pushing for self driving cars? Why not teaching them about dangers, about defensive driving, about speeding, about brake distances, about red lights and stop signs, about speed limits and yielding to pedestrians? *They will quickly learn, right? 
*


RamzFanz said:


> Second, your point is meaningless unless you use the number of modern crashes that occurred because of autopilot. The answer, to my knowledge and I am an airplane and airplane crash follower, is zero. Almost every crash I've studied was human error.


The author implies how "Automation has helped all but eliminate fatal crashes among American air carriers" and that is disingenuous because you cannot consider Automation as solely reason for eliminating flight crashes in the US. This is ignorance and Chesley Sullenberger will be happy to explain the author how wrong his statement is. *It was the pilot that saved the entire plane and all 155 people on board, not the Automation.* "In fact, flight control computers actually hindered the landing, said Sullenberger, who's now a CBS News aviation and safety consultant. *Flight software prevented him from keeping the plane's nose a little higher during the last four seconds before he ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the icy Hudson River*.
"*So we hit harder than we would have*, had we been able to keep the nose up," he said. "That was a little-known part of the software that no airline operators or pilots knew about."

If you go on each crash linked wikipedia page and research the reasons the plane crashed, you'll see many of them crashed because components failures. I'll give one example here.

Anyway, my point was about the authors intentional statistical misinterpretation, conveniently using only data about US airlines to try to manipulate the reader. 



RamzFanz said:


> In a modern plane today, the pilot flys for about 6 minutes and that's because of regulations, not plane capabilities. A computer is a vastly better pilot than a human. Computers can fly planes, like stealth planes, that a human is completely incapable of flying.


I beg to differ - "There are millions of people out there who are under the impression that the airplane is flying itself and the pilots are only there in case something goes wrong," says Patrick Smith, a 22-year veteran commercial pilot who blogs about airline issues.
*This, says Smith, is the big lie." *

I don't want to be disrespectful, but when I'll need accurate information about sprinklers, you'll be the one to ask, but flights and cars, maybe not so much.


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

So messes will be a profit center but people will learn...implying they won't make (intentional) messes anymore. But the cars will still need to be cleaned and vacuumed even if nobody pukes or leaves garbage behind, leaves and mud and such. So, bc people will learn, those "profits" will dry up and turn into costs.


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

heynow321 said:


> So messes will be a profit center but people will learn...implying they won't make (intentional) messes anymore. But the cars will still need to be cleaned and vacuumed even if nobody pukes or leaves garbage behind, leaves and mud and such. So, bc people will learn, those "profits" will dry up and turn into costs.


I always say people without a driver/the owner in the car, will behave like they do in a movie theater, and all of us know how a movie theater looks like at the end of the movie. My point is, the cars need to be checked after every single ride, because people could spread body fluids inside the car, mothers could throw full diapers on the floor while the doors are locked during the ride or pets could simply pee or poop on the floor in the most natural manner.

Every single time, the cars will need to show to a pick up location paper strapped like a toilet in a hotel room.









And that is because when the driver or the owner of the vehicle is present, as a customer, you can be sure nothing nasty was done or left in that car during the very previous ride, or, in case something was done or left, you have somebody that could immediately be held responsible for not cleaning the mess, with many possible unpleasant consequences.

Question is, why spend a fortune to build cleaning centers all over the place, hire cleaning people and pay them to clean the cars, as long as you can keep the drivers in the cars and have everything run smoothly every day?


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## heynow321 (Sep 3, 2015)

The other factor is how incredibly simple it would be to thwart any system boober tries to use to prevent messes. Do a chargeback to avoid the cleaning fee then boober deactivates your account. Tell your card issuer that the card was stolen and now you have a new card and new number (and new boober account). Let's pretend they go so far as to try to use facial recognition software. Ok I'll just put on my shades and pull a scarf over my face. 

Plus, I don't know about other cities but seattle has absolutely no (cheap) warehouse space for big cleaning centers. I assume these centers will have to be large to capture economies of scale and they'll have to be near urban centers to reduce deadmiles and gas/electricity. And if people "learn" as ramz has indicated, they won't be paying for themselves via cleaning fees.


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

RamzFanz said:


> Let's talk about the over 3,000,000 injuries, most of them permanent? Or do amputations, crushed knees, and brain damage not rank as important to yo


I was about to forget this point you make. Let me remind you how this is not the self diving cars technology experts pitch. Not at all. Every single time they open their mouths, the first words you hear are - THINK ABOUT HOW SELF DRIVING CARS WILL SAVE LIVES!

The moment they will switch the message, I will ask why did they do that?

In order to make people listen to their stories about this bright, robot dominated future, self driving cars experts need to push with the absolute scare tactic. They will try to push the fatalities numbers (without any context) and offer the immediate solution to keep those unfortunate people alive - their product. hahahahahaha....



heynow321 said:


> Ok I'll just put on my shades and pull a scarf over my face.


No, you Google "people faces", take a picture with your phone to any of those faces, and attach it to your new account.


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## RamzFanz (Jan 31, 2015)

jocker12 said:


> First - Knowing a car accident victim makes you an expert on transportation as much as a person knowing a sick individual could be an expert on healthcare.
> 
> Second - I am not saying she was a person that doesn't matter at all, but why do you think her death matters more than these childrens deaths - _About 29,000 children under the age of five - *21 each minute* - die every day, mainly from preventable causes. _More than 70 per cent of almost 11 million child deaths every year are attributable to six causes: diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth."? But you probably don't like this context.
> 
> ...


I stopped reading at 100% safely. You've once again ignored the tragic cost of permanent injuries.


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## tohunt4me (Nov 23, 2015)

Michael - Cleveland said:


> https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/22/opinion/driverless-cars-test-drive.html
> *Driverless Cars Made Me Nervous. Then I Tried One.*
> New York Times 22 October 2017 by David Leonhardt
> 
> ...


HOW ABOUT A SELF CLEANING CAR FIRST !



heynow321 said:


> So messes will be a profit center but people will learn...implying they won't make (intentional) messes anymore. But the cars will still need to be cleaned and vacuumed even if nobody pukes or leaves garbage behind, leaves and mud and such. So, bc people will learn, those "profits" will dry up and turn into costs.


Ever see the amount of graffiti on a train ?


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## The Gift of Fish (Mar 17, 2017)

SDC will never work as is. They're going to be offering generic little boxes like the little white Waymo car. Who's going to want one of those? The reason Apple sells so many phones is because they know that the products have to look and feel right as well as work.

The one-size-fits-all feel of these things seems to ignore all established marketing theory/knowledge/practice. How is the little Waymo car going to attract the "Ultimate Driving Tool" BMW driver for example? Will it have a switchable Moron/100mph Mode for when the car is on a freeway? Then there are all the other types of driver who don't select cars based only on safety or automation.

And besides all that, I haven't seen a single market research study that demonstrates that SDC are what consumers actually want to buy.


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

RamzFanz said:


> I stopped reading at 100% safely. You've once again ignored the tragic cost of permanent injuries.


Unfortunately for you, that is the metric NHTSA uses, and self driving cars manufacturers know, if they want to be heard by the general public, how they need to deliver better than that. The funny thing is, even if they deliver better, looking at those numbers, nobody cares.


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