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Comment by cyphunk | Hacker News Reader

Imagine that for a moment: Self driving car companies could promise to pay all accident expenses provided it was on auto drive at the time of accident.

Not only is that a marketing win, potentially reducing accidents and saving costs for owners... if you jump forward many years of Google (or other) defending owners in court you would reach a point even judges would be biased to believe that the auto-driven car could not have caused an accident, further disadvantaging non-auto cars in the market.

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Keep in mind that every autocar will have an extremely accurate recording of the accident that can be analyzed and played back during a hearing. Determining fault will be trivial in almost all cases.

Accidents, when non fatal, are such a waste of anyone's resources. And there are so many way to be cheated. I'm stunned no manufacturer included a logging device. Nowadays you have dash cams though.

Many new cars have black boxes that log what the vehicle was doing, and they can be pulled in case of an accident. It's one of the benefits of having everything be electronically controlled these days.

Happy to hear that. I don't know why it's not advertised more, it's reassuring and enforcing at the same time. Maybe people would flock toward log-free models out of a reflex to drive carelesly.

That's probably why it's not advertised. Because your car will tattle on you. I've often wondered about the black box in my car, if I were in an accident and I was going 71mph in a 70mph and they pulled by black box, would I be given a ticket even though I was not at fault?

Although I'm pretty sure only the manufacturer has access to this data (as part of their copyright on the car), so it would take a warrant for law enforcement to get it. I don't have proof of that, but I would guess that's why you don't hear about it more. It's only used when absolutely necessary.

Agreed. The issue when collecting data is that it's a rabbithole, you need to have a lot of data to avoid shallow judgement, and careful jurors too. Going at 71 (74,75) instead of 70 might turn against you, but if you have enough evidence that the other vehicle would have it you even at 70mph then the system will work.

This can be solved. Have all collected data be encrypted AND the owner of the car be the ONLY one with the decryption key.

This isn't the point, though. Even if people are afraid data may turn against them, they will never take the risk to use it.

Precisely. Widespread knowledge would lead to tampering.

I was reading a recent insurance case where the driver staged and accident, but the black box indicated what really happened, and the driver withdrew the claim when presented with the evidence.

Widespread data logging including dash cams is going to improve driver behaviour. Even some cyclists are wearing 'dashcams' and this will no doubt improve treatment of all cyclists, even if overall penetration is low.

I was also happy that some Police officers were wearing cams. 3rd eye is powerful.

And some countries(Austria!) are actually making them illegal. Utter lunacy.

On privacy grounds ?

Yeah. Austria has them completely banned, and in Germany you can use them,but if you have an accident then whatever is recorded is inadmissible in court. Also if you post the recording to youtube you have to blur out faces and registration numbers to not get in trouble.

Is "autocar" a thing?

The ambiguity between automatic/automobile/autonomous really makes me hope a better word surfaces.

Self-driving car is a bit too long.

"autoautomobile" ;)

I like robocar.

In France a 'car' is a name for non public buses, a diminutive of 'autocar'.

Maybe nowadays car will be demoted to semimobile, or Human Driven Car.

I've always been partial to "robocar". It has a nice tinge of dystopia to it.

autobot

The cool thing being that the official launch will be the "Autobot Rollout"

I rather the marketing message be like "we tested the self-driving car for xx million miles, and we had zero at fault accident."

I think that will be necessary. The selling point is that these cars drive better than people and get into far fewer accidents. As the manufacturer, you have to show you believe in that.

Will be really interesting to see how insurance is priced for these cars.

If the safety records meet goals, it's functionally free money for the insurance company regardless of insurance price. So one could predict a race to the bottom for insuring these machines.

All I hear is "this car gets in accidents." Maybe not the message marketing wants to send... ;)

How do you hear that? It's basically a guarantee, and companies generally don't warrant against things they know will happen. The reason you get a 1 year warranty on things is because they are engineered to not break down within one year. After that, the incidence of failure goes up.

"We will pay for any accidents caused" means "this will not cause accidents". Because no company would do that unless they were sure it wasn't going to happen. Just like when Google gives $100,000 for bugs in Chrome. They wouldn't say that unless they were sure there were no or relatively few bugs.

Another interpretation of the Google bug bounty is that fixing bugs of a certain kind is actually worth $100,000 to them (but you're right that it would be hard to sustain if they expected to make thousands of payouts at that level).

It's already common for automobile manufacturers to explicitly market the collision safety features of their cars. Many car commercials have collision test footage.

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