He'll probably fashion a sport-ute first. Right after he constructs his Interstate highway system.

This video is as bad as the sponsored studies it complains about. Adam obviously has never exerted himself a day in his life. When I'm on the 4th hour riding my bike up mountain highways, I know that if I haven't been drinking a liter of water per hour for the past 4 hours(including some form of electrolyte) I'm about to have horrendous hamstring cramps. I know because of experience trying many combinations, not Gatorade studies.

Gridlock isn't on the highway, Gridlock is in the city. It's cars being "locked into the grid" of streets and cross streets. Where you can't cross an intersection on the green because the block in front of you is solid cars. Usually from people who just turned off the side street.

Except you cant compare this to (car) accidents. You could compare this to occurrences of ambulance drivers driving through packed pedestrian crossings or firemen setting fire to buildings, soldiers driving tanks over cars on the highway etc. If that kind of thing happened once a week someone would notice. Someone would be responsible. Something would be done.

I only get involved with cops when speeding or parking and over here in central Europe it is a friendly affair of getting a fine or a reprimand. If I go to visit Germany or Austria I fear the police for the fines are heftier and a stern talking to in german is nothing to look forward to, in the east or south of Europe a small bribe and more extensive language difficulties are the norm. Visiting the US somehow always involves warnings about how to behave so as not to get killed by cops. Go figure.

My Facebook feed is filled to the brim from right wing nuts about cops, "pray for cops", "cop lives matter" and the like. Not a single one of them posted anything about the two recent killings that sparked the demonstrations.

And it's like newtboy said, nobody is saying cop lives don't matter, or that black lives matter more than others. What they don't seem to understand is they rush to find an excuse for a cop killing a black man, "oh look at his prior records" and don't care that he was doing nothing in the situation that caused the fatal shooting. They focus on the report that says the one guy didn't raise his hands and say "don't shoot me" and ignore the other report by the same people, released the same day that there was "systemic" racism in Ferguson, and similar reports have said the same about Cleveland and far too many others. When Brock Turner got 6 months for rape, they evoke his swimming records, and deny that if he was black and poor they would have searched for priors instead of his outstanding swimming records, and if he had no priors these same people would have been outraged had a black judge given him only 6 months in jail. They deny such things, but it's evident from their actions every time something like this happens. They lack any real empathy... which is especially funny since many of these people post things like the reason Christians suffer depression so much is they have so much empathy, and I'm thinking I don't see it, and I'm sure those in the LGBT don't see it when you deny them equal rights under the law, or deny them access to the bathroom of their gender identity, and I doubt blacks don't see it when you ignore their plight and instead post about how cop lives matter, or white lives matter.

If they do so out of ignorance, it is purposeful.

I used to be a evangelical, far right wing nut. Then I started vetting the information and news. Learned what sources are trustable and not. There started to be a pattern. I started educating myself further and changed positions. I became a liberal Christian, and eventually lost the faith due to the far right's overly big influence. So if I, who's not overly intelligent (perhaps more than the average person, but not nearly as intelligent as many family think I am), with no skills or real worth can get out via self education, they can to, but they prefer the comfort of their ignorance, and that I can't abide. You can point things out until you are blue in the face and they will just dig in harder to hold on to that ignorance and their limited world view.

I think we can trace a lot of this back to the rise of right wing radio and eventual rise of Fox News which convinced the Christian right that the regular, responsible news outlets were "liberal" when pretty much all news is controlled by a very select few, and none of them have an interest in making people aware of the truth... just because you can watch perhaps 12 hours of CNN before they point out something in the Obama administration that is bad, where Fox does it several times an hour doesn't make CNN liberal... it makes Fox an ass that is singly focused on making people angry at the Democrats and what they deem as liberals, and then they shift the goal post and make old Reagan era style political beliefs the new liberal... and they work to build the division. It's not longer acceptable to work with Democrats on finding a reasonable middle ground, that's being weak, and they want to dig their heals in and have it their way or the highway (basically they want a dictatorship but under the guise of a democracy). Then the rise of social media is perhaps the thing that really pushed the schism further as they further surround themselves in an echo chamber. So when people say "black lives matter" their echo chamber fills up with "well so do white lives and cop lives" and their echo chamber fills up with the idea that those on the left don't care about cops and that we think most of them are corrupt and don't care about their lives.

...aborts rant early as I'm already a million miles off topic...

Ha. That's Pacific Coast Highway at Newport Blvd in Newport Beach, CA. Just drove past there earlier today.

Not surprising.

That's BS.

With a 5 round maximum capacity you're going to be reloading a lot and there's no reasonable argument why anyone needs more for hunting (and home defence is a red herring).

I think the whole law/culture issue addressed above is actually linked. Take the example of the Autobahn which is very much a parallel. Germans made a law saying you can drive as fast as you want on certain stretches of highway, a culture of high-speed driving developed, people die. The majority in Germany wants to do away with them, but the 10% who want to drive recklessly in their BMWs and Mercedes along with the manufacturers fight new legislation every time.

The law created the culture, and now the culture is preventing the laws from being changed. Just as in the US, the cycle has to break somewhere. Government can't legislate the culture, but they can change the laws and if the US ever gets to a point where guns aren't in the hands of whoever wants one then the argument for needing a 'home security' weapon drops. People feel safer, there are fewer shootings and the whole situation de-escalates.

I'm not saying barring suspected terrorists from owning firearms will accomplish that, but it would be a (very) modest start in the right direction.

http://videosift.com/video/1959-Bel-Air-vs-2009-Malibu-crash-test

Crumple-zones (and other safety engineering) can be the difference between life and death.

And most crash tests (and star ratings) aren't for highway speeds.
http://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/frontal-crash-tests
so 40 mph and 35 mph. If you go up to 55,65,75 mph the difference in kinetic energy is exponentially higher (K=0.5mv^2)

there might have been a mythbusters episode about this...can't remember the result though.

Your video, Mining Platinum From a Highway, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Woah, woah, you're way overstating it. The tech is nowhere near ready for full hands-off driving in non-ideal driving scenarios. For basic navigation Google relies on maps and GPS, but the crux of autonomous navigation is machine learning algorithms. Through many hours of data logged driving, the algorithm will associate more and more accurately certain sensor inputs to certain hazards via equation selection and coefficients. The assumption is that at some point the algorithm would be able to accurately and reliably identify and react to pedestrians, pot holes, construction areas, temporary traffic lights police stops among an almost endless litany of possible hazards.

They're nowhere near there though and there's simply no guarantee that it will ever be sufficiently reliable to be truly hands-off. As mentioned, the algorithm is just an equation with certain coefficients. Our brains don't work that way when we drive. An algorithm may never have the necessary complexity or flexibility to capture the possibility of novel and unexpected events in all driving scenarios. The numbers Google quotes on reliability from its test driving are on well mapped, simple to navigate roads like highways with few of these types of challenges but real life is not like that. In practice, the algorithm may be safer than humans for something like 99% of scenarios (which I agree could in itself make driving safer) but those exceptional 1% of scenarios that our brains are uniquely able to process will still require us to be ready to take over.

As for Tesla, all it has is basically auto-cruise, auto-steer and lane changing on request. The first two is just the car keeping in lane based on lane marker input from sensors, and slowing down & speeding up based on the car follow length you give it. The most advanced part of it is the changing lanes if you indicate it to, which will effectively avoid other cars and merge. It doesn't navigate, it's basically just for highways, and even on those it won't make your exit for you (and apparently will sometimes dive into exits you didn't want based on lane marker confusion from what I've read). So basically this is either staged or this guy is an idiot.

Probably fake, but the technology is absolutely mature enough.

Self-driving cars are a solved problem. It's a matter of regulation, not research at this point.

In fact, once they reach critical mass, the problem actually becomes a lot easier from a technological standpoint. If all the cars on the road are AI, their behaviour becomes much more predictable, and a highway full of self-driving cars could easily communicate with each other, allowing increased traffic flow and reducing accidents.

Think about a simple scenario right now. You're driving in the fast lane on a multilane highway and your exit is coming up in a km or two. You need to cross 3 lanes, so you indicate and wait for a safe gap. You're completely dependent on the drivers in the other lane to let you in. But human nature being what it is, they might not want to let you in. Even if the first lane lets you through, the outer lanes have no idea what you want until they see you, so you have to repeat this manoeuvre a few times.

But with a highway of self-driving cars? Your car broadcasts its intentions on a localised network, and the other cars create a gap all the way to the exit. You move through and traffic resumes.

If you pause the video @9s in, you'll see a footnote, that says this car is only valid for the Indian market. It also says that this model is made in India (the law in India makes importing cars super-expensive, so any car maker that wants to sell there has to put a factory there). Renault has much higher EU safety regulations for the cars that it builds in France and Romania.
There are some cars sold in India (Tata Nano for example) where the seatbelts are even optional.
I think the reasoning is that it's marginally safer than transporting your family on a motorcycle, which is common.
Also, random cattle crossing the street have the right-of-way, even on highways.

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I was looking at around 1:05 where it looked to be about 5 highway lines away, less than that if you count the metallic flying debris as the edge (and I do).
EDIT: Also at 1:11 (incredibly hard to pause at the right frame, but it's there), they are well under 50 ft from the piece of sheet metal that was flying across the road. You can see it flying in at 1:08.

You know I am one who hates rubberneckers on the highway.

But for this I am just a rubbernecker I can't stop watching.