<story><title>Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour</title><url>https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/17/watch-zooxs-autonomous-car-drive-around-san-francisco-for-an-hour/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carapace</author><text>It really &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; bothers me that these folks are using a live city with real, non-volunteer test subjects of all ages (little kids and old folks use public streets) as a test bed for their massive car-shaped robots.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s bad enough that people are driving cars all over the place, car collisions have killed more Americans than all the wars we&amp;#x27;ve fought put together.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m one of those people who say, &amp;quot;Self-driving cars can&amp;#x27;t happen soon enough.&amp;quot;  But I don&amp;#x27;t think that justifies e.g. killing Elaine Herzberg.&lt;p&gt;Ask yourself this, why start with &lt;i&gt;cars?&lt;/i&gt;  Why not make a self-driving golf cart?  Make it out of nerf (soft foam) and program it to never go so fast that it can&amp;#x27;t brake in time to prevent collision.&lt;p&gt;Testing these heavy, fast, buggy robots in crowds of people is extremely irresponsible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>torpfactory</author><text>There is a different perspective that you could use (and I’m not necessarily advocating for it; hear me out):&lt;p&gt;Human driven cars are dangerous to the tune of ~36,000 deaths per year. Every year without the implementation of full self driving we pay some large percentage of that number in lives. Self driving cars won’t make it out of the lab without real driving on real roads in real scenarios. Taking appropriate precautions (a human safety driver, maybe two) and testing in the real world might save more lives overall than keeping the vehicles in a more lab-like setting for longer, and missing some of the complexity of the real thing.</text></comment>
<story><title>Watch Zoox’s autonomous car drive around San Francisco for an hour</title><url>https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/17/watch-zooxs-autonomous-car-drive-around-san-francisco-for-an-hour/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>carapace</author><text>It really &lt;i&gt;really&lt;/i&gt; bothers me that these folks are using a live city with real, non-volunteer test subjects of all ages (little kids and old folks use public streets) as a test bed for their massive car-shaped robots.&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s bad enough that people are driving cars all over the place, car collisions have killed more Americans than all the wars we&amp;#x27;ve fought put together.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m one of those people who say, &amp;quot;Self-driving cars can&amp;#x27;t happen soon enough.&amp;quot;  But I don&amp;#x27;t think that justifies e.g. killing Elaine Herzberg.&lt;p&gt;Ask yourself this, why start with &lt;i&gt;cars?&lt;/i&gt;  Why not make a self-driving golf cart?  Make it out of nerf (soft foam) and program it to never go so fast that it can&amp;#x27;t brake in time to prevent collision.&lt;p&gt;Testing these heavy, fast, buggy robots in crowds of people is extremely irresponsible.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>anigbrowl</author><text>&lt;i&gt;In the video, which was recorded with a safety driver behind the wheel&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I can live with it. Human drivers annoy me so much that throwing the dice on autonomous cars is not a big stressor to me.</text></comment>