Just like seatbelts and backup cameras, autonomous driving systems should be mandatory in vehicles within the next 10 years.
I find adaptive cruise and reversing cameras really useful, whereas I find lane assistance features quite dangerous. It's exactly what you want while going around a corner - the steering wheel jumping under your hands, and making you jump/panic.
Although - on the other hand, there's nothing quite like having to fight the car for control of the steering wheel to solve drowsiness...
Emergency braking is another one that I tend to find is almost entirely false positives. Overtaking a wagon on the motorway, lets trigger the emergency brake! Steep angle in the multi-story car park, lets trigger the emergency brake!
The three-point seatbelt was invented in 1959 and became mandatory in the United States in 1966.
And that was only required as part of the standard equipment. People were not required to use them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_laws_in_the_United_S... says "Seat belt use was voluntary until New York became the first state to require vehicle occupants to wear seat belts, as of December 1, 1984."
Nor were all passengers required to use three-point seat belts. https://www.consumerreports.org/car-safety/anatomy-of-the-mo... says it wasn't until 1989 that "Cars are required to have three-point lap-and-shoulder belts in the outboard rear seats."
From 1959 to 1989 is 30 years.
FWIW, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt notes:
> The first modern three-point seat belt (the so-called CIR-Griswold restraint) commonly used in consumer vehicles was patented in 1955 U.S. patent 2,710,649 by the Americans Roger W. Griswold and Hugh DeHaven.
before later saying:
> The three-point seat belt was developed to its modern form by Swedish inventor Nils Bohlin for Volvo, which introduced it in 1959 as standard equipment.
The 1955 US patent can be seen at https://patents.google.com/patent/US2710649A/en .
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/documents/50774/attachments/2/... [pdf]
The iPhone 6 was released almost ten years ago...
Cars last 25+ years, so ~20% of people will be driving at least 20 years after self driving gets perfected and then standardized.
Insurance companies raise and lower their premiums in response to risk. You might get a discount for self driving car eventually, but people who keep driving will just keep paying the same reasonably affordable rates as they do now.
That's a bit of a leap. If and when FSD becomes sufficiently reliable to enable you to legally relinquish control to it, including have it take you anywhere even when you're intoxicated, without any personal liability, I expect adoption to ramp up very quickly.
Also, depending on what technical solution ends up winning this race, it might be possible to convert existing old cars to FSD.
People get arrested for sleeping in their cars while drunk. It’s going to be a long time before a legal self driving exception exists for drunk people.
People who have 20 year old cars generally can’t afford a new one and installing a self driving kit isn’t going to be cheap or worth it on a car that old.
There's basically zero chance of that. Working people are not going to be buying very expensive new cars just because it has a working FSD feature. A handful (relative to population) rich people will but that's it.
For FSD to be everywhere first it needs to become reliable, then it needs to trickly down into every Toyota Corolla and then it needs to trickle down into the used market of people who won't buy anything newer than 10+ years old.
> take you anywhere even when you're intoxicated, without any personal liability
That probably won't happen in the next 50 years, regardless of technical advances. The law will refuse to catch up.
So we're saying the same thing
Self driving cars can’t impact the risk of a someone bashing the windshield to get stuff out, hail or a tree falling on your car, it getting stolen, an uninsured motorist rear ending you at a stoplight etc. But it will mean replacing your car is more expensive should it get stolen etc.
Further if you assume more ultra self driving cars are on the road the human drivers risks also drop.
In terms of individual drivers, an antique show car driven very limited miles per year the policy’s costs have little to do with the driver’s accident history. Meanwhile someone with multiple DUI’s is paying for the risks associated with their behavior.