[puzzledobserver]

As do cars. Which is why people need licenses to drive them. The question being asked is whether it is ethical for a company to market auto-pilot low-awareness chainsaws, designed to give the user only a half-second heads-up, and then disclaim responsibility when accidents happen.

Maybe the solution is for licensing authorities to call these auto-manual chimeras unlicenseable.

[dredmorbius]

There are numerous devices for which the typical individual can function well in society without making direct use of them.

Skillsaws, 737-MAX airliners, full Linux server distros, and home flourine refining labs among them.

Automobiles, after a century-plus of integration and mutual reinforcement of the built infrastructure and virtually all aspects of life, commerce, government, employment, recreation, education, etc., are not amongst these.

It is possible, usually within narrow environments and/or with considerable compromise, to survive without owning, using, or access to one. It is exceedingly difficult, and the net household ownership rates within the US and most other Western / Industrialised countries, reveals this.

The standards are different.

Incidentally: I agree with your premise regarding the unacceptability of manufacuters' apparent self-driving cutout behaviours. No, this is not remotely acceptable.

[jfim]

It's definitely possible to survive without owning a car in multiple cities in the US, such as New York City or San Francisco. Other Western cities such as Paris, London, Zurich also can support car free lifestyles.

Looking at Asia, it's definitely possible not to own a car in Japan, and the ridership numbers for the Tokyo trains show this. Even rural areas have some kind of public transportation, either through trains or local buses.

[dredmorbius]

Nearly 90% of the eligible population in the US have a drivers license. That's the bottom line.

It's definitely possible to survive without owning a car in multiple cities in the US...

That is a confirmation of the qualifier I gave: "It is possible, usually within narrow environments and/or with considerable compromise, to survive without owning, using, or access to one. It is exceedingly difficult, and the net household ownership rates within the US and most other Western / Industrialised countries, reveals this."

Note that owning a car is not the same as access to a car, and that in the context of understanding driving principles, car-share, hire, or borrowing a vehicle are included in use.

The Uber/Lift on-demand chauffeur service or traditional taxi/limo or van/paratransit services would not require driving skills by the customer, though I strongly suspect most such customers (possibly outside Manhattan) actually do, or did, drive.

For the US, household car ownership rates range from 98% to 65%: https://www.governing.com/gov-data/car-ownership-numbers-of-...

Even creating car-free zones, streets, or blocks within US cities is problematic:

https://www.governing.com/topics/urban/gov-car-free-cities.h...

The same article correlates car ownership with wealth, or conversely, lack with poverty. Apparently, if a household can own a car, it prefers to.

Eyeballing national data, similar trends appear:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

Note peak ownership rates exceed 1 per person at national scale.

The question of giving up driving is a significant one among senior care and living, with numerous articles easily found:

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2012/10/08/1623925...

https://www.seniorcaring.com/resources/talking-to-elderly-pa...

https://www.dmv.org/how-to-guides/senior-driving.php

From the NPR story:

Bunni Dybnis, a social worker at the Los Angeles-based geriatric care service LivHome, says [family intervention] is typically how older drivers decide to give up the car keys: Their child or grandchild intervenes. "I could probably say it's 99.99 percent not the older adult saying, 'I want to stop driving; help me,' " says Dybnis, because giving up driving feels like giving up one's independence.

I'd like to give the number of licensed drivers by state, as a percentage of population. That doesn't seem immediately available, though raw counts are:

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/hs00/dl22.htm

Note that a licensed driver is one who is certified to drive, whether or not they own a car themselves or live in a household which does. And that rate tends to be high.

It also underlines my initial claim: that interacting in modern industrialised nations, and certainly the US, without any ability to directly use a car, is at best difficult and imposes numerous compromises.

OK, here's a 2017 US overview, in millions:

- Population: 325

- Licensed drivers: 225

- Registered vehicles: 272

https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2017/d...

That's a 67% rate for registered drivers, for all ages. Population under age 18 is 22%, so 11% of otherwise age-qualified adults do not have a drivers license.

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/PST045218

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

You could even make the question more precise. If you market a product where you know it could be safe, but also know X% of the users will accidentally kill themselves (and maybe others), then for what X is it unethical? I think there are probably values on each end where it's clearly either. 100-epsilon is bad. epsilon is fine. Somewhere in between it gets fuzzy.

Another interesting question is that when accidents come up, do you get to blame those X% of users for failing, even though at the design stage you already knew and decided they would fail and be killed.

It's really more of a trolley problem, in that it's interesting to think about, but in reality there's more context and circumstances that make specific cases clearer.