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[Zangi]

Can you kill someone at 24 mph?

(Reminds me of that Borat scene: 'How fast do I need to go with this vehicle to reliably kill a Jew?')

If you hit them and roll over them in a car, yes.

If you hit them while going +50 mph with any other car out there, sure.  Something so small probably is not that durable... (At least from my impression of how cars work...)

[BurnedToast]

Can you kill someone at 24 mph?

(Reminds me of that Borat scene: 'How fast do I need to go with this vehicle to reliably kill a Jew?')

If the other person is in a car? probably not, unless they are very unlucky. Crashes under 25 mph are classified as low speed crashes, and while you might get whiplash or various other injuries the chance of a fatality is very low.

If they are on foot? Well there's a nice report by the NHTSA (actually it looks like it was done by some guys in london) here (warning, pdf). TL;DR version, fatalities start to show up in the 30 - 40 kph (18 - 24 mph) range but are uncommon (less then 5%).

So that's why google picked that speed - because it's the fastest they can go and still be unlikely to kill anyone.

[10ebbor10]

Anyway, considering we're talking about the future, I propose that we refrain from using outdated units of measurements.

Anyway, speed is twofold. The faster something goes, the harder the systems job becomes. Testing them at slow speeds let's them notice flaws that would be that much more problematic at higher speeds.

[IronTomato]

Damn robocars took our jobs!

...PTW

[Evil Knievel]

24 mph and a concrete wall

[10ebbor10]

40 kmh and a concrete wall

Fixed that for you.

[Helgoland]

Does that count as cultural imperialism?

[Greiger]

Roughly 107,000 km/h and a concrete wall

Fixed that for you.

Made that relative to the sun for you.

[10ebbor10]

In that case, you forgot to note the speed of the wall, as well as the rotation of the earth around it's own axis.

[Mech#4]

Naw, the walls an immovable object.

[Putnam]

In that case, you forgot to note the speed of the wall, as well as the rotation of the earth around it's own axis.

Both fairly negligible (especially the speed of the wall, which is essentially the same as the speed of the Earth here) compared to the orbital movement of the Earth...

[Neonivek]

Honestly while this SUCKS for such a huge part of the economy.

It is something I recognize as likely... necessary.

Given how dreadful the public transportation issues have been here, as well as how dreadfully expensive taxi can be... (as well as the corrupt Garbage men and bus driver unions... which are pretty bad)

This technology fixes what has been a persistent problem where I live.

[Sheb]

But what is interesting is the speed of the car relative to the wall!

[LordBucket]

Bunch of articles on this topic recently. A few highlights:

The University of Michigan is building a fake city for driverless cars for testing purposes. Supposed to by finished within a couple months.

UK to allow driverless cars on public roads in January

And finally, here are a coulpe Forbes articles with some interesting speculation that google might possibly violently disrupt the established auto industry, because they're apparently not even trying to compete with what google is doing. Audi, Nissan, BMV and a lot of other manufacturers are developing self-driving vehicles, but with exclusively highway use in mind, which considerably limits their scope.

Google has apparently stated that it's targetting a 90% reduction of vehicles on the road. Disruptive, indeed. Which brings us to:

Ripple effects. I commented on this in the OP. When this happens, a lot of things start to become obsolete:

"...a driverless car would slash hundreds of billions of dollars of annual revenue, or even trillions, from all sorts of entities: car makers, parts suppliers, car dealers, auto insurers, auto financiers, body shops, emergency rooms, health insurers, medical practices, personal-injury lawyers, government taxing authorities, road-construction companies, parking-lot operators, oil companies, owners of urban real estate, and on and on and on."

"Add up all the pieces–$450 billion related to crashes, $600 billion of car sales, $200 billion in auto-insurance premiums, the hundreds of billions of dollars of health-insurance that plausibly relate to car accidents, and so on—and you pretty easily get to about $2 trillion in revenue associated with cars each year in the US."

[Frumple]

That sounds kinda' amazing, if accurate. Two trillion freed up to be spent on things besides getting places and not turning into a muddied pile of meat on the side of the road? Glorious. I could buy a lot more food during the year if I could slash vehicle related costs to a fraction of what they are, ha! Or any hundred other things. To hell with the auto industry, imagine what $2tril freed up to ramble around the rest of the economy can do? Medicine, science, entertainment, infrastructure... plenty of nice places for that money to go~