#and take great issue with the testing on public roads with inattentive backup drivers

[mexicangrizzlyappreciation]

Self driving cars are far from inevitable. And its far from certain they will be safer than human drivers. In fact its very likely that they will at most be equivalent to them because of corner cutting and overhyping.

Nazi shithead elon musk brands tesla's fancy lane keep assist as "full self driving" while also cutting out LIDAR and ultrasonic sensors to save a dollar or two per vehicle.

People take him on his word *as he intended to make Tesla stock go up* and then the cars do shit like this. (TW road death)

They also updated the software last year to "drive more like a human" which has made it aggressively violate road laws. One shitty over the air update like that one that killed IT systems globally last year and the cars will fucking forget what brakes are and run over thousands of people at once or brick in the middle of a blizzard so they freeze to death whilst being unable to get out of the car. Or hell have a glitch in how they remember their surroundings and run over people like in the video.

You could even do that on purpose if you're clever. Imagine ten thousand car vs crowd attacks at once.

Because you know these companies have shit cybersecurity. Personal data leaks happen all the fucking time. The assholes currently violating article 1 of the us constitution are using fucking gmail for classified info and personal data they stole from the government.

Automated train control and autopilot for planes have been a thing for decades but they still can't completely eliminate the vehicle operator. And they absolutely would if they could. Roads are a very crowded and complex environment. Making these cars drive themselves and do it safer than a human is a herculean task that probably won't happen because the manufacturer can just slap the self driving name on it and call it a day.

And yes I know I've mentioned conspiracy theorist and fascist musk here a lot. This is because he's the biggest individual player in this space. But, even if he keels over tomorrow while tweeting on the toilet about how much he loved apartheid the situation with self driving cars wont meaningfully change.

A much more effective (and cheaper!) solution to car related deaths is modifying the roads themselves. Ideally you also want to have more buses and bike lanes too. But, just small changes to roads and intersections alone reduce deaths and serious injury by a lot.

In addition. Its not just the crashes that kill people. Its the air and ground pollution too. Tens of thousands of people a year die from that. Many more get sick. Self driving and even electric cars are not a solution to that problem. They still generate particulates and other emissions. The only solution is reducing the number of cars needed.

dead-easy prophecy to make about the future:

self-driving cars are going to get good enough to become legal. at some point. i dunno when; there's been overpromising and hype cycles about it for like a decade now- but at some point it gets there.

they're going to kill someone every single day. every single day, a self-driving car will make a mistake and someone will die as a result. it will be in the news constantly- we're going to call them, like, "slaughter machines", and talk about how the self-driving car business is run by literal blood money.

and this is going to happen even if they're ten times safer than human drivers and actively saving lives.

in just the US, there's 100+ vehicle fatalities per day. if 10% of the cars on the road are self-driving and they're 10x safer than human drivers, there's going to be 1+ fatalities per day. every single one of them is going to make the news. some of them are going to be photogenic children. everyone is going to have a story to tell about a friend of a friend whose friend died in a self-driving crash. it'll be common knowledge! everyone knows that these things are incredibly unsafe, and that getting into one is highly irresponsible.

(we know this will happen because it's already happening! everyone knows that Teslas are shitty cars that spontaneously catch fire all the time, even though there's ~43k annual vehicular fires in the US, and 1% of the cars on the road are Teslas, so you should expect ~430 annual Tesla fires but there's actually like 50-something. 50-something is enough for something new that people already hate to be in the news every single week! they got that nasty musk all over them- and self-driving cars are definitely going to have that nasty musk all over them.)

i don't have any illusions that making a tumblr post about this is going to stop this from happening, but know that once it does start happening i will be shaking my head condescendingly about it every time i see it.