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Comment by vidarh | Hacker News Reader

If you need to have enough people that someone can intervene "instantly" then there's not likely to be much of a saving anyway.

Instead imagine a system that is "good enough" that at it's most risk averse configuration it will drive itself in normal conditions, but occasionally it will seem to slow down for now good reason, or even stop, while it waits for a human to intervene because its not sure if its correctly reading the environment ahead.

It would need to be good enough to be able to work well enough of the time to be able to reliably come to a safe stop, but it would mean you'd be able to have one person monitor many vehicles.

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This is the supermarket self-service checkout model. Nobody likes them, because most of the time it doesn't work and then you have to stand around waiting for someone to intervene.

Interesting. Here in Norway I have nothing but good experience with self-checkout. It just works. Only thing is if I buy alcohol I have to wait for someone to click that I am over 18. It even has less queue, and queues are the worst!

In the Netherlands they've closed all but one regular check out line, and instead of paying cashiers they pay people to tell you to go to the automatic one. The reliability of the self check out (how often it craps itself and waits for assistance) really depends on the supermarket chain you're at though. At some it never breaks, at some it breaks almost every time (so hardly anyone uses it there).

I use one of these self checkout kiosks every day and I’ve had a problem maybe only one or two times. They’re a huge time saver.

Personally I have few problems with the self-checkout system, but I'm inevitably behind a knot of people who do have problems.

I found them a bit unusual, but they work quiet well.

I now tend to prefer to go to the self service, because it's usually faster than the normal checkout.

The exception is when I know I will trigger an age check.

But to the car comparison: If that happens enough that people won't use them, then they're not good enough unless it drives the cost down enough that people decides it's worth the wait.

I've found it highly depends on the store and how recently the machines were installed. My Walmart that just got renovated with self-checkout lines has snappy machines and a very intelligent weight system (often allows you to take items off the scale without supervisor intervention), while a Kroger that has had the machines for at least 5 years can be super slow and may take ~3 seconds for the scale to detect a new item.

They work well where I live and many people use them.

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