You do realize that stopping a few inches behind the line is also okay, don't you? You don't have to know the 'exact amount', but if you can't stop before a clearly marked line (or pedestrian or wall or whatever) and often go a few inches past that line (or pedestrian or wall) then you shouldn't be driving. Are you really that out of control with your vehicle?

You yourself admitted the jaywalking laws are stupid at times, so how do you get off criticizing me for it? So yes, we both agree the law, as written, is not useful. The law is certainly not for my convenience because I know how to walk around traffic and while driving how to avoid any pedestrian who doesn't have a death wish. So the law should be that pedestrians can't cross where and when they impede traffic.. Likewise, if it were so hard to stop before a fixed line then the law should be that you have to stop before X inches past the line.

Yes, the reason is that a cars speedometer is not a finely calibrated device and the average driver doesn't really know if they're going 44 or 53 when their speedometer says 50.

See, you answered your own question, so you know your analogy is absurd. Drivers CAN tell that their car is in the intersection and they CAN tell whether their car has a speed of zero (i.e. come to a complete stop). If the law is not going to be enforced then it shouldn't be a law.

Yes they should. Then maybe those poorly written jaywalking laws would be repealed rather than be an opportunity for the police to hassle whoever they sort of feel like shaking down that day. If YOU don't think the law is useful then your solution is to just violate it when it suits you? Why not advocate for a clearer, more useful law instead?

What difference does that make, other than you nitpicking the nitpicker? Failure to completely stop before the intersection, even by inches, is an infraction and can be finable.

I grant that you may indeed have some insight or special knowledge, but it's really a shame because the only thing that you might possibly have an informed opinion on is the one thing you can't talk about. Darn the luck.

Once again you flaunt your victory over your strawman. Good job proving us all wrong that consumer ready self-driving cars are not coming out in the next model year. But apparently YOU still think that the reason for this is that Google can't figure out how to enter an address into a computer and that they will have to wait for perfect speech recognition and a universal translator. You're right, but I hope this kind of lucky guess is not the secret to your VC business.

Nothing you say in your post contains any insight nor is it relevant to what I've posted or anything else any reasonable person has stated in this thread. If you think Google is smart because they are not claiming their cars will be uncrashable then you have an extremely low bar for smart.

BTW, today I can have a car pick me up after just keying something in my phone and I can even have it drop me off where I want to go without ever saying anything to the driver. So your definition of "any time soon" is also way off.

That's not why I think that that and that's probably not why many of your posts have been modded down. It's that your comments are either ill-informed or poorly thought out. In the few cases they have been accurate they have been obvious. You keep trying to sound like a reasonable knowledgeable person, but the only person you're successfully debating is the strawman you've constructed to make yourself sound impressive.

Are you going to tell us one more time that rushing designs is not a good thing? You preach the obvious as if it were insightful and/or relevant. It's neither, so unless you are going to create a compelling argument that these cars are being rushed to market too soon you might consider dropping this redundant argument. Hint: presuming that nobody will solve the problem of how to input an address into a computer within the next 20 years is probably not going to help your position.

Do you have a reference for that? I'm guessing that you are totally misunderstanding or misrepresenting what they've said, as you have in just about every post you've made here.

Yes, the Google engineers working on the project are much, much smarter than the average slashdotter, but once again you have completely misunderstood what's been said to you. This happens so often it seems like it must be willful ignorance on your part. But to be even more abundantly clear, those Google engineers are indeed going to be hard at work solving the problems that you haven't even considered. NOT the ridiculous problems you've pulled out of your butt that hardly deserve mentioning other than indicating that (despite the mysterious inside info you have which requires multiple NDAs) you have zero technical knowledge on self-driving cars work, taxi services, or car sharing services work.

So I'm not shorting Google, I'm shorting your company. Although I will have to consider the possibility that your business model is just to pretend to be incredibly dumb on slashdot so that other slashdotters will give you all their clever ideas for free.

According to the poster you are replying to there are no such things as small accidents - every accident results in a total loss of the vehicle and the maximum liability damage. But let's ignore that for now.

It's a valid question regarding the different spreads of the amount of damage, but nobody worth listening to will just say that car X is safer than car Y simply because it has fewer accidents per mile. But the 1 in 300,000 stat for Google cars is pure speculation. The current driving record is simply a promising indication of how safe the car currently is (better than people think) and how much better it can be in 5, 10 or 20 years.

It's also speculation that accidents in a self-driving car would be more serious. Certainly some minor accidents like you mentioned will be avoided a self-driving car, but there will certainly be some (at least in the short term) that a human driver would have avoided that a Google car does not. But even more important is that it's quite reasonable to surmise that many accidents that would be considered serious would be far more catastrophic with a human driver at the wheel. A self-driving car will often be able to minimize an accident even when it can't outright avoid it (e.g. it might prevent the car from getting pushed into an intersection in a rear end collision or it might drive into a sign post rather than get t-boned by a previously undetected car).

Only in your head is 20 years off a "rush to production." But yes, many of the problems will take many years to solve, however, not the FUD you're throwing out there. Those "problems" are in some cases actually benefits, others of your "problems" have already been solved and the rest can be solved by half the posters to slashdot if they are not afraid of trying (which obviously you are). What's next, are you going to complain that the animatronic driver is not lifelike enough?

I'm certainly not saying that those setting policy shouldn't factor in every possible variable, nor that they couldn't do a halfway decent job at it (eventually). But I am saying that we (you and I) right here and right now in this discussion can't do so and thus you continue to make assumptions that not only haven't been proven, but are highly questionable, IMO.

Either you didn't understand what you quoted or you are making an impossible statement. If you want to assert that self-driving cars should have their speed limited lowered so that they are much, much safer than humans, I think the burden is on you to come up with at least a compelling argument for why that should be. You make that statement as if it were obvious and I'm once again simply asking what rational (non-emotional) reason do you have for that?

Absolutely, wouldn't you? If I could get a haircut in one minute and it cost 1/4 of the price then I would certainly accept the same risk of nicking as I get from my human barber. Once again, what rational reason would you have for not taking that option? How much extra would I pay and how much longer would I be willing to sit there to reduce the nicks by 100 fold? Very, very little. If I were that concerned about nicks then I would tell my current barber to slow down even further and pay him extra for his time. Exactly as I would a human driver.

But will that scenario (drivers getting bored) be any worse in terms of total number of accidents? I don't think so.

I think a far more likely scenario is that an alert (or semi-alert) driver will overreact to a situation that the self-driving car is safely in control of. No doubt part of the driving algorithm will not just to to make the car drive safe, but to make it always appear safe to the passengers (which might actually sacrifice some safety or speed).

These problems are only solvable if you bother to spend a minute to think about them. Who has time for that? I'll believe self-driving taxis can work the day they're finally able to put a man on the moon.

That is not the point you were trying to make and it it wouldn't be relevant anyway. But everyone else already knows that, so I won't elaborate.

Clearly, whatever you say will be twisted into some unrecognizable distortion by this guy. Everyone else knew what you meant.

Jeez, Joe. How many dumb excuses are you going to manufacture in a feeble attempt to discredit self-driving cars? Just about every circumstance you mention happens today with regular taxis and current drivers. Do you think NYC taxi drivers today get 100% fidelity in understanding the destinations of their passengers? It's far more likely that the driver himself will have an accent, but even then you are not accounting for the millions of passengers who speak little or no English. The reality is that even with real taxi drivers the destination will increasingly be communicated non-verbally. You punch in where you want to go on your smart phone and the car picks you up, drops you off and you get charged automatically. No struggling to understand which Hyatt you mean, or who gets which cab.

For whatever reason, you don't like change, but please try a little harder to come up with some plausible problems that don't exist today. Just about every post you've made on this thread is filled with faulty assumptions and bad math.

Which just goes to show how ridiculous the current DUI laws are (or at least how they are enforced). By this same logic you should not be allowed to drive a drunk home, you never know when they're going to yank on the steering wheel, throw on the emergency brake, ....