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Comment by xeromal

9 days ago

There's a car company that runs in vegas that does exactly that. You rent the car for a few hours and it will be driven up to you by a remote driver and then when you're done it'll drive off remotely. No AI needed.

Doesn't latency make this dangerous?

At a BAC of 0.08 (legal limit in US) drivers have reaction time delayed by only 60-120ms but crash risk is 10x compared to sober

Lack of depth perception probably compounds this?

  • > At a BAC of 0.08 (legal limit in US) drivers have reaction time delayed by only 60-120ms but crash risk is 10x compared to sober

    I'm not sure that slower reaction times are the only effect of alcohol consumption.

    • Sure, the other effects is that they're much more likely to be driving at night, overextended their waking hours, distracted by friends / a date / a prostitute, and driving a route that they do not normally drive.

      How could you not be 10x more likely to crash than the nurse getting off at 2am who has driven the route a thousand times and knows all the bad blind spots / bad intersections / is still well within her normal waking hours. That is much closer to the normal profile of the sober people who are out driving during prime drinking hours.

  • Have you seen the 'latency' of the average driver on the road these days?

    Most people appear to take about 2 seconds to respond to any change in conditions.

> driven up to you by a remote driver

This is hopefully illegal and not actually what is done, because I have learned from Waymo that it is not permissible or even possible for the CS reps to remotely drive the car. They merely push "suggestion" commands to be considered by the onboard Waymo Driver.

Remote human drivers have too much latency and not enough realtime information available to "drive" a vehicle on public roads.