The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is updating vehicle standards to make it easier and faster for driverless cars to deploy on public roads. It’s currently tweaking eight rules, including those requiring car parts that driverless cars don’t really need: brake pedals, windshield wipers, and rearview mirrors. But for now, years-old standards remain in place.
Beyond private companies using tax dollars to manage their special regulatory environment, privatize and monetize public roads, and test their unfinished and unregulated products on citizens, I expect these to be fully-equipped roving surveillance and oppression machines:
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Each car can be covertly equipped with a suite of LPR or facial recognition cameras, sensors, and signals intelligence equipment.
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Autonomous cars can patrol and surveil large areas to gather intelligence while acting as innocuous taxis.
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Journalists, brown people, or pregnant woman making the mistake of entering one of these could simply be recognized and driven to a “detention” center for arrest.
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Vehicles can autonomously work in tandem to hunt down and assault other vehicles, or serve as transport for domestic military operations, or blockade roads.
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Service can be selectively denied to certain areas or social groups to curtail and manage movement during protests or events.
I mean, just use your imagination as to how an authoritarian federal government could collude with a Fascist tech CEO to leverage a large autonomous robo-taxi fleet set upon the population:
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Shouldn’t they have investigated that before it was allowed to operate?
US allows carmakers to self certify first
That’s what I’m complaining about
The US loves self regulation. It’s a crapshoot. The DOT allows self certification for motorcycle helmets as well. Their admittedly low sample count of random helmet testing still fails at a rate of ~40%.
US, the land that keeps giving.
What the fuck?
Normally, it makes sense to allow companies to certify their compliance with these types of regulations. It would be a waste of resources to have the government inspect every new model ahead of time to make sure they have things like mirrors and steering wheels. It’s not like they can lie on the forms and no one will notice. Nor would a normal car company have any reason to, since they’d just be setting themselves up for lawsuits, fines and costly recalls.
The difference here is that Tesla decided they could issue themselves an exemption from regulations, which is not the same thing. They want to declare the car street legal without including basic items mandated by law. Other companies making self-driving cars that wanted approval for models that lacked required equipment got exemptions before they launched their models. Tesla just said “it’s fine, we gave ourselves an permission” without even consulting NHTSA.
But that’s pretty much the way Tesla operates. They have a long history of ignoring laws, lying to regulators, withholding evidence, and generally acting like they can do whatever the hell they want. It’s been backfiring on them a little in more recent years, but not nearly as much as it should.
Oh awesome. They don’t have steering or pedals so when the cloud service fails in 5 years, the entire car will be complete e-waste.
Okay, look. I’m picking on this comment because it appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Before I pick on it, please know:
- I am a progressive and have been for more than three decades.
- I despise fascism
- I hate Musk, the nazi
- While I’m a technology enthusiast, this autonomous bullshit is not ready for prime time, I don’t think.
So with that in mind:
Oh awesome. They don’t have steering or pedals so when the cloud service fails in 5 years, the entire car will be complete e-waste.
First of all, these cars would not depend on “the cloud”. “The cloud” refers (or at least originally referred) to a method of storing data on servers where you don’t really care about how many servers it takes or where they are or managing them, you just get a blog of space to shove data.
Even if you extend the definition of “the cloud” to include controlling these cars… that’s… really a huge stretch. And if you DO extend the definition, what you are saying at that point is “if the internet stops working” which is not going to happen. I don’t care what anyone thinks about the state of usability of social media or whatever, the internet itself is not just going to disappear.
The vehicles will not magically go bad. Maybe the business might choose to destroy them if they stop the service or something like that, but that would be a stupid business-type decision, not a technical one.
I just get tired of people saying things out of emotion that are just completely off-base. So I’m picking on this one as an example of what I see all day on Lemmy.
And I’m sure I say shit that qualifies as such. I do try to keep an open mind. I have been persueded on subjects before - by facts from sources and such. Or just good ways of thinking about things that I didn’t know before.
There’s plenty to rail against, but when we use boneheadedly wrong information to do so, it’s really much less effective.
And again, I’m just using this comment as one example of things I see day in and day out. And once again I emphasize that I know I’m probably guilty of it myself - and I get called out and sometimes I agree and sometimes I don’t (sometimes someone calling me out is wrong, too - like… MSG, for a completely different topic. It’s been studied. It’s a safe ingredient. Maybe there’s EXTREMELY rare problems, but 99.999% of people who say they’re allergic definitely aren’t. It’s bullshit, and the myth was built on racism.)
Anyway.
All it takes is a software update for these to be bricks. If (and when) Tesla goes under, I doubt they will allow driverless cars that are no longer owned by a company. They will inevitably lock their firmware down as much as possible. It will, for all intents and purposes, just stop working the day the company stops existing.
Or the new model will come out and they’ll just stop supporting them. Or any number of other cynical tactics that Tesla and companies like it have shown time and again that they are totally open to doing.
How are these going to be any different than the e-waste scooters and bikes that have to be Frankensteined (Berm Peak YT link) to barely get working? And these can’t even be used as traditional cars as a fallback. They are made only to be driven by wire.
Now any minor stoppage is a journey ender. Need to go around an accident and an officer is directing but your car is confused? Can’t. Need to interrupt it as it starts approaching an animal or child it doesn’t see? Can’t. Need to pursue in rough weather because someone is injured in the passenger seat? Can’t.
Sure, you might say, “But you wouldn’t hire one of these vehicles in those scenarios.” But now that vehicle is destined for a short life as an upscale taxi that will never be used for anything practical. No second chance to do literally anything practical or useful.
These are all things every single car up to this point has been expected to be able to do. It’s a machine at the end of the day. The new standard is to start taking those things away and finding a ways to make us pay a premium to get them back. Trust me when I say the end goal in these people’s minds is that we all sit in cars that we pay for but never get to drive.
So yes, I am cynical because every one of these companies has given me nothing but reason to be cynical.
Wait wait wait… THATS WHAT THESE ARE??? I’ve seen these on the roads for maybe 4+ months now and always wondered what these ugly fucking Mac Mouse as looking cars are as there’s no branding on them, and it turns out their Teslas??? Fucking of course.
Hey I just saw one of those this morning and didn’t know what it was. Also looked like it was crab walking down the highway.
