*promote

Promoting this video and sending it back into the queue for one more try; last queued Thursday, August 7th, 2014 12:09pm PDT - promote requested by enoch.

That hast be a weird feeling of no one driving the car.

I'm not sure if I like this feature or not, sure, it keeps you between the lines, but it also encourages you to be a little less focused on the road while driving.
At hose speeds, it only takes a millisecond for someone to drift into your lane, or an animal on the road, or maybe, you see it, but because the car was driving itself, you had your hands full and can't grab the wheel fast enough to make the steering correction.

I've had nightmares where I'm driving along, and suddenly the car goes out of control. Mainly because I've suddenly found myself in the back seat, and I'm scrambling to get behind the wheel.

Usually, those videos where the person's car hasn't been properly put in park and takes off without them makes me flash back to those nightmares.

This video gives me the willies.

Time to get the Darwin-Awards ready, there'll be more winners soon.

I think the goal is ultimately to automate all transportation so that such incidents can be handled gracefully. If every vehicle on the road was automated, connected to a network and could track every other vehicle, traffic incidents would be reduced exponentially and traveling would be much safer.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag.(show it anyway)

This is the single feature that would tempt me to buy a new model car.

Traffic accidents would be virtually eliminated. The insurance industry probably has the most to lose when it comes to self driving cars, without a risk to insure against they can't make any money.

Regarding features like this, I've just got a new Golf with adaptive cruise control. This measures the distance between you and the car in front and maintains a pre set gap up to a set speed. They have a lane assist option too, like the video here but I don't have that and I'm really glad. The cruise control is teaching me to not react when a car slows down in front of me or pulls into the lane in front of me because the car is doing it for me.

I've noticed I'm letting my eyes wander for longer when looking at the radio, or flicking through options on the display. It's not intentional, taking my eyes off the road is dangerous. I know that. But I can steer between white lines using my peripheral vision so as long as nothing really bad happens the car will save me, so the temptation to look at something just a little longer creeps in subliminally. I don't want to be doing it, and I try not to. Thing is, if you're driving a long way it's pretty certain you're not going to have the self control to be 100% focussed on the road every millisecond.

I can't wait for driverless cars. I can't help but think that features like this being drip fed us are not really that helpful. It's just teaching us to pay less attention when actually the cars aren't that clever yet.

And to anyone who's going to say 'if you take your eyes off the road you're a bad driver, you should be able to keep concentrating, blah blah blah', you don't understand how the mind works. Your body adapts to the situation you're in. When I drive an auto I don't go for the clutch all the time, my body adjusts. It's not a conscious thing, it's automatic. it's the same with these driver aids, your body learns to take advantage of them.

It's rare, but should be noted there is a brain parasite that affects spatial reasoning and can cause dreams with impaired sense of space, like driving from the backseat or swerving all over the road. In later stages dreams about body parts coming off, teeth in particular has been documented: more can be found here

It's naht a tumah?

People think of self-driving cars as something we'll have in the future. With systems like adaptive driver assist, they are pretty much already here. Hell some cars even steer for you. It'll take a generational shift before people are comfortable in cars they aren't driving but I suspect we'll be seeing automated vehicles in action before long, especially in commercial space. Once people realize just how much more safe they will be, it'll really catch on. Eventually the idea of a vehicular accident will be nearly unheard of.

This is a future that is already becoming a reality, and it will arrive with inexpensive electric vehicles driven by a competitive revolution started already by Elon Musk.

Cars will still have to be insured since accidents can still happen, but there will be many fewer accidents. Insurance companies will make shitloads of money because they won't be paying out nearly as much. It wouldn't surprise me to see them offer significant discounts to anyone with a self driving car.

You will need insurance, but because the risk is so, so much lower the insurance will be almost nothing.

I'm in the UK and for my wife and I to insure our new VW Golf fully comp it costs £118 a year. That's very cheap for the UK. But it costs my apprentice at work about £1700 to insure a piece of shit old banger. The difference clearly isn't the value of the vehicle, mine is worth for than ten times his and his insurance is more than ten times mine.

The difference is that he's only just past his test and is young whereas I'm in my mid thirties and I've been driving for 17 years. The difference is in the likelihood of us having a crash and hurting someone.

Self driving cars will have the ability to react to a situation way, way faster than I ever could, and to be able to react together if there are lots of them on the road, meaning even if there is an accident the consequences will be massively reduced.

A self driving car will never be tired. It will never be distracted by a phone, or a passenger or anything. It will never be drunk.

All of these things mean that the risk from a self driving car will be way less than for a human driver. And by way less I mean a tiny fraction. The more self driving cars there are around the less risk there will be. Humans are an unpredictable element, remove them from the situation and you'll remove the risk massively. So, my risky apprentice is now a lower risk than I am, and as such his insurance will be lower than mine. All of a sudden the insurance company's income is slashed to a fraction of what it was.

Insurance companies make money out of risk. When everyone on the road becomes low risk they will make less money.

They hate us for our insurance-rate-reducing, self-driving cars!!!

I'd love a car that could self drive, then you could sleep on your way to anywhere.

And if they can fit it with a decent traffic accident/traffic problem system and let people bypass then we wouldn't be sitting around doing anything in traffic as often.

There's still going to be shit falling into roadways, animals running out, car tires exploding, etc....but just taking the general stupidity and assholery off the road would be a nice change of pace.