>yeah but worth paying for is the question... The total costs of vehicle ownership is a pet subject of mine, and I think that a system that makes a serious contribution to avoiding major mishaps could be an important contributor to lowering the costs, as it is integrated into the mainstream. To illustrate, a little:
My car was destroyed 9 days ago by a Ford pickup, as it sat parked legally at the side of the road. The young woman driving the truck was momentarily distracted by her little dog, she was a young less-experienced driver, and when she looked up she was already ploughing into my car @ around 45 mph or more. There have been numerous costs associated with this for me, some of which will be partly compensated, some of which won't, and some of which cannot be. One of the many topics I've had cause to think about is that, if the insurance system was better integrated with costs and more responsive and communicative, it would compensate me more for my car (the fair market value was low, but the miles were unbelievably low, as I had prioritized that to keep my TCO low when I bought it), better communicate to states that improved young-driver education would be helpful, and, in this case, get it through to the city that if a half-dozen or so such incidents have occurred near that stretch (I learn afterward), then maybe it would be less costly to redesign the stretch than to just keep paying out half-compensations to people. [An aside: like I've said before, someone somewhere needs to start a page called something like www.accidentswaitingtohappen.com to chronicle and allow folks worldwide to post precise locations of all stretches where they know there are such bad-design problems, because we all know the powers that be can take their sweet time waiting for one or more deaths and costly accidents before they do something about such problems.] I will never be fully compensated for the lost time and stress that I've had in dealing with this issue (where there wasn't even a medical issue to deal with thank goodness). What I want to say though is that I think it would be worthwhile to pursue various types of automation for vehicle steering and powering, beyond what we have already done. I do not suggest that this be implemented with a heavy-hand, but that gradually, going forward, we continue to seek this out and not pooh-pooh it as though it is never worthwhile to try to improve our vehicle technology with something new and futuristic. As computers and controlls improve and as the auto industry continues to have some competitiveness, I'm hoping that at some point one can enter a vehicle and read a paper as it does the driving even more safely than oneself. That probably will not happen in my lifetime, except perhaps in a special-designed community isolated for that entire purpose, but I don't think you can reach these sort of things unless you spell out why you think it might be worthwhile. Driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do in our normal daily lives and while I agree with asking if it would be worth the cost to develop car-self-driving-mechanisms, and other associated useful aids to conventional driver-steered systems, in the end I do think it would be financially worthwhile, particularly in light of the reduction in medical and property and other costs to our lives and the lives of our associates (such as when we miss work or have to deal with auto or paperwork hassles) of auto collisions. ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor ---------------------~--> Make Money Online Auctions! Make $500.00 or We Will Give You Thirty Dollars for Trying! http://us.click.yahoo.com/yMx78A/fNtFAA/i5gGAA/FGYolB/TM ---------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Biofuel at Journey to Forever: http://journeytoforever.org/biofuel.html Biofuels list archives: http://archive.nnytech.net/ Please do NOT send Unsubscribe messages to the list address. To unsubscribe, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
