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Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 20th, 2017, 7:54 am
by RailBaronYarr
Can't read the article, but are those added insurance costs balanced by the likely drop in crash rates an autonomous car would have?

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 8:03 am
by mplsjaromir
That is one thing about driverless cars that will have to be addressed. If you drive around it doesn't take long to notice the amount of people who have vehicles that clearly need major body work. I do not see how hundreds of sensors on a single vehicle are going to remain in calibration for decades safely.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 8:22 am
by VacantLuxuries
How much body work will be needed if there aren't any fender benders any more?

Sensor calibration will just be the new thing the future version of Valvoline will bug you about when you just want the routine diagnostic on your car's computer.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 9:09 am
by mplsjaromir
Stuff happens to cars while parked. Maybe a some point all cars will autonomous, but in the interim even a cautious computer will still have to deal with a chaotic and unpredictable world.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 9:27 am
by amiller92
How much body work will be needed if there aren't any fender benders any more?
It's going to be a very long while until all cars are autonomous, and in the meantime, there will be older cars that can still bend your fender.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 9:38 am
by VacantLuxuries
I think people are underestimating how quickly insurance companies will make manual driving unaffordable once this technology is available. If there's one thing insurance companies love, it's getting a steady revenue with a significantly reduced chance of having to pay it back. As soon as the technology is there, they have the market tools (and as we've seen with health care, the will to use them) to force a painful and quick adoption of autonomous cars.

But yeah, there probably still will be some incidental damage. But it will not be nearly as rampant as today.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 9:55 am
by mplsjaromir
If autonomous cars make the auto insurance industry similar to the healthcare insurance industry, then the advancement of autonomous cars must be stopped.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 9:56 am
by acs
Good luck with that Comrade

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 10:07 am
by mplsjaromir
Driverless cars are smoke and mirrors anyway. Google and Apple are into because they have billions of overseas' profits that they do not want to repatriate. Uber is living on borrowed time, they cannot make money subsiding every ride, so they need to have an ability not to pay drivers.

The technology is a long way from being commercially viable.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 10:58 am
by amiller92
I think people are underestimating how quickly insurance companies will make manual driving unaffordable once this technology is available. If there's one thing insurance companies love, it's getting a steady revenue with a significantly reduced chance of having to pay it back. As soon as the technology is there, they have the market tools (and as we've seen with health care, the will to use them) to force a painful and quick adoption of autonomous cars.
Huh? They're going to charge increasing premiums while facing declining risks? (Leading me to realize I know next to nothing about how car insurance companies are regulated and whether regulators would even allow that).

Anyway, yeah, I don't think insurers are going to push all the old cars off the road immediately.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:03 am
by amiller92
Driverless cars are smoke and mirrors anyway. Google and Apple are into because they have billions of overseas' profits that they do not want to repatriate.
Not sure they're using OUS cash for it (Google is at least doing a bunch of it's testing in California), but yeah, they're swimming in cash and playing with speculative technology.
The technology is a long way from being commercially viable.
We'll probably get drone trucks, that never have to do more than cruise the interstate and pull off to a terminal on the outskirts, in the not so distant future, but yeah, fully-autonomous cars that can function in urban environments I agree are probably farther away than many seem to think. Much less universal adoption.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:08 am
by acs
We could probably automate the entire rail network right now with current technology and save a bunch of energy but our outdated regulations still require 2 operators in the cab.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:09 am
by kirby96
It'll happen, but I agree that it's a long ways off. The switch to electronic trading vs. open-outcry at the large stock and commodity exchanges comes to mind as an example of eliminating humans for superior machine execution. It was talked about way back in the 80's, and even then the basic technology existed. There were always the 'futurists' saying the switch was right around the corner, and the 'purists' saying machines couldn't fully replicate the human behavior. And then it just kept on not happening until, suddenly, 20 years later, it all happened very quickly. The driverless car scenario is much more complicated, but the technology is improving exponentially. I see the same thing playing out. It'll be 'right around the corner' for year and years. It'll go so long many doubt it will actually happen, then suddenly it will all happen relatively quickly.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:10 am
by VacantLuxuries
They're going to charge increasing premiums while facing declining risks?
They would increase the premiums on those who don't get self driving cars. Non-autonomous cars would not only pose the same risk of payout as they already do, but as mentioned earlier, if one of them knocks a few sensors out of alignment on an autonomous car (which would almost certainly be found not at fault), that would be an even costlier payout. And since insurance companies already come up with arbitrary reasons to charge certain people more than others, they'd probably find some way to justify it (i.e., only drivers who intend to break traffic laws would still drive manually). So it would suddenly get very expensive to ensure a non-autonomous car.

It's all pretty speculative at this point because it's not happening in the next few years. But once it's here, people aren't going to have much choice in how fast it's rolled out IMO, it will be driven by the insurance industry.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:22 am
by amiller92
They would increase the premiums on those who don't get self driving cars.
Yes, I get what you're asserting, I just don't think it's right. But as you say, all speculative at this point.
Non-autonomous cars would not only pose the same risk of payout as they already do
They wouldn't, because an increasing share of the other cars on the road are autonomous and thus less likely to hit them. Thus the declining risk.

I'll grant you maybe the autonomous cars might be more expensive to fix (although that would also be a barrier to adoption).
And since insurance companies already come up with arbitrary reasons to charge certain people more than others
I guess I'm not sure they're arbitrary, but we're back to the regulatory question. IF they can sell it on safety grounds, maybe, but I'd also expect a lot of push back because we're explicitly talking about squeezing poorer drivers who can't/don't have new car (until such point as self-drive becomes primarily a luxury).

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:34 am
by David Greene
I think people are underestimating how quickly insurance companies will make manual driving unaffordable once this technology is available.
And I think you're vastly overestimating the insurance companies' ability to drive the market. No way politicians would allow insurance companies to force everyone to buy a new car. Laws would quickly be passed if it were tried.

If what you speculate were true, we'd all be driving cars with seat belt and breathalyzer interlocks. And retrofitting those is much easier than added a whole sensor array and new computer system.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:43 am
by MNdible
Remember that it's not a binary condition -- that either a car is totally human driven, or totally computer driven. Cars rolling out today already have very significant computer automated safety controls that augment the skills of human drivers, and we'll see much more of that before we see truly autonomous cars.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:46 am
by David Greene
I've always wanted a Model A. Along with some autonomous retrofits, I'd like a suspension system to support my portable Victrola.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 11:51 am
by kirby96
I think people are underestimating how quickly insurance companies will make manual driving unaffordable once this technology is available.
And I think you're vastly overestimating the insurance companies' ability to drive the market. No way politicians would allow insurance companies to force everyone to buy a new car. Laws would quickly be passed if it were tried.

If what you speculate were true, we'd all be driving cars with seat belt and breathalyzer interlocks. And retrofitting those is much easier than added a whole sensor array and new computer system.
I think you are right that the insurance companies won't drive the market, but I think the point may hold. Once a tipping point was reached, it might not take THAT many people to switch over for the true cost of insurance to go up for manual drivers. If older, safer drivers (who generally would have more money for the new cars, and could see it as a means to maintain their independence) switched over there could quickly be a self-selection problem that could inherently make make manual cars much more expensive to insure. Sort of the opposite of the Obamacare critiques: only younger higher risk drivers with older cars would be left in the manual driving pool. Basically the more safety conscious drivers with money may be the earlier adopters. I'm purely speculating of course.

Re: Future cars / Driverless cars

Posted: April 21st, 2017, 9:55 pm
by Korh
Might be a bit late to voice my opinion on driverless cars, in theory I like them but the biggest issue I see them from becoming reality is one very big monkey wrench, human drivers. The test footage I've seen of driverless cars seems like there only operated on close tracks/very quiet streets and to my knowledge, they haven't been really tested on how effective they are with dealing with the unpredictability of certain drivers.