this post was submitted on 20 Dec 2023
754 points (98.0% liked)
Technology
59440 readers
3730 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Even if this would be a good idea, you can't just put some non regulated lights on a car. This would need a law change in Germany to be approved and would probably take years of burocrazy until she get beards figured out the exact hue these lights need to emit. But I guess Mercedes already wrote that law for our government to copy. How convenient.
How dare a company try to work with governments to create a new safety feature!
How is this a safety feature though? Are they saying we have to be extra careful around self-driving cars? If so then the car shouldn't be considered to be self-driving. If not, then what's the use?
I see a lot of people in this thread saying a car that needs any kind of indication of self-driving isn't safe enough to be on the road, but that implies a single answer to questions like "is it safe enough?" In reality, different people will answer that question differently and their answer will change over time. I see it as a good thing to try to accommodate people who view self-driving cars as unsafe even when they are street-legal. So it's not really a safety feature from all perspectives, but it is from the perspective of people who want to be extra cautious around those cars.
Personally I see an argument for self-driving cars that aren't as safe as a average human driver. It's basically the same reason you sometimes see cars with warning signs about student drivers: we wouldn't consider student drivers safe enough to drive except that it's a necessary part of producing safe drivers. Self-driving cars are the same, except that instead of individual drivers, its self-driving technology that we expect to improve and eventually become safer than human drivers.
Another way to to look at it is that there are a lot of drivers who are below-average in their driving safety for a variety of reasons, but we still consider them safe enough to drive. Think of people who are tired, emotional, distracted, ill, etc. It would be nice to have the same warning lights for those drivers, but since that's not practical, having them only for self-driving cars is better than nothing.