I was watching this video of a tragic crash a few hours ago.
This lead me to wonder if reasonably cheap sensors exist which could detect this ice which could be installed on vehicles.
This lead me to wonder if reasonably cheap sensors exist which could detect this ice which could be installed on vehicles.
They don’t get much cheaper than the human eyeball, which should have detected that just fine.
I was going to say everyone is equipped with a brain.
And sorry for the double snark.
New cars today are pretty capable of judging the traction they have on the road. And they do a pretty good job of adjusting for it.
It is not done by any camera, but by the distance or slip experienced by each wheel.
Sometimes, it is not smart enough BUT in very difficult conditions needs to be turned off so that the human can take over.
I once skidded out on black ice and flipped my car. The problem is that often by the time you see the ice on the road, it’s too late to avoid.
What will a self-driving car do on a road that is so icy that there is no effective traction? Simply refuse to proceed, and leave all traffic at a standstill until the ice melts?
I have driven in such conditions a number of times. You step on the brake and feel no speed reduction at all. You turn the steering wheel and the car keeps going straight. It is possible to creep along slowly in such conditions. Would a self-drive car be engineered to be over-conservative and just refuse to go?
What would a self drive car do if stuck in the snow? Would it know how to rock itself out? Would it refuse to drive into snow? Would it speak Eskimo, and have 38 words for snow (and none for pineapple), and be able to detect each type and evaluate how navigable it is?
My car has a skid warning if the drive wheels start to slip. It’s an icon on the dashboard. But if you really need an icon to know your wheels are slipping then your driving experience is lacking.
The only conditions I’ve seen where humans would not reasonably expect it is patches of “black ice”, and by the time you hit that no technology will save you.
Just this morning there was a 30-car accident on the Capital Beltway and another 67-car pileup on I-95 due to freezing rain leaving the roads quite icy–temps close to 20°F overnight, with rain in the morning. No technology is going to save people who are too stupid to know that weather forecasters have been predicting freezing rain for about two day and telling people not to make unnecessary trips until later in the day (when things warmed up to 50), and that your own driveway has 1/8" of ice on it.
Anecdote: I was driving on I-94 from Dearborn to Ann Arbor in the early 1980s when there was freezing rain that afternoon. It was so bad that drivers were pulling the wheels on one side onto the gravelly shoulder to get traction. Some guy in a sporty sedan went flying past all of us. A mile later he had spun out. You can’t fix stupid.
Public service announcement: If you are driving an SUV you will slide on ice just like anybody else when you try to stop or turn.
Yes.
But you can look down from your lofty perch while you’re spinning around and sliding ass-first towards that tree. The view is so much nicer up there above all the little people in sedans. 
If the certainty of a crash is 100%, then the correct decision is to not go ahead. If there is a way to drive forward safely then it would do so.
Why do you suppose that a self-driving car would not know how to free itself from snow?
I’ve found several companies talking about them, but I don’t know if there is an aftermarket product you can buy right now.
So it was back in September 1970 in the mountains east of Paradise Cal. Air temp is in the high 60s, about say 68. a nice fall day
My buddy and I are bombing up the twisty mountain road at speed.
My buddy casually mentions that there might be black ice on one of shady corners.
My response was black ice but it’s sixty eig…
Right then the car snapped sideways on a patch of black ice. Did I mention we were at speed? We were
Anyway a quick counter steer and we were straight again.
As we proceed at a more reasonable speed (ludicrous speed, instead of plaid) (maybe 5 mph down from the previous extra legal speed)
I look at my buddy and ask so how the fuck did you know that THAT corner had ice on it?
FTR in a 26 mile drive that day and several more on that road that week that was the only ice we encountered.
You can’t always see ice.
Many modern cars have outside temp sensors. On a Volvo at temps below 36F a snowflake illuminates to warn of potential icing. Other cars have similar warnings.
There is a VDC (Vehicle Dynamic Control) system in my car, which activates when it detects motion consistent with icy/slippery roads. Apparently it works to apply selective braking and/or decrease engine power to supposedly maintain stability.
What I’ve found, though, is that it actually hinders driving through snow and slush. With no/less power, you wind up wallowing instead of moving steadily forward. So I turn it off in those conditions and concentrate on driving cautiously.
My Passat beeps at me if it detects icy conditions; I’m not quite sure what criteria is used – seems to be temperature, because it will do this on a completely dry, but cold, road. More annoying than helpful.
I’ve found that it hinders my ability to fishtail around corners when I want to play rally car in my neighborhood.
I am not so sure. In this part of the country, we have these things called “studded tires” that tend to help quite a bit in icy conditions. And I think the Canadians have a special winter tire that has a spongy layer that grips quite well. Of course, studded tires are basically shit for (and hard on) dry pavement and not much better than regular tires on snow, and the sponge-grip tires wear out quickly on dry pavement. But, to say that there is no technology that can save you is patently wrong.
If you step on the brakes and nothing happens, then what the fuck are you driving for? Why didn’t you stay where you were? What’s so important that you’ve got to risk your life to make this trip? And even if you’re a super-driver who knows how to handle zero traction, what do you think the other drivers on the road are like?
Complaining that self-driving cars won’t be able to handle zero traction conditions is ludicrous, because 99% of human drivers can’t handle those conditions either.
And yes, if a self-driving car determines that weather is too severe to attempt to make a trip, it should refuse to make the trip. If you think the trip is worth risking your life over, go ahead and switch to manual control, or keep driving your 57 Chevy that doesn’t have these new-fangled gadgets and gizmos.
So its March of 1971 and my roommate and I are driving east of Amarillo. On the way out of town a bank thermometer says it’s 42 degrees, and that feels about right. So we’re on this long overpass, not far out of town, when I feel the wheels start sliding. I overcorrected, slid the other way, re-corrected, slid the first way again, made a 180 and landed against the guardrail. A Texas Ranger happened to be proceeding the opposite direction and saw all this happen, and he came right over.
I said I did not expect this stretch of road to be slippery, it being 10 degrees above freezing. He said…actually, he drawled, “Hasn’t anybody ever told you that an overpass is a lot more likely to have ice on it? On account of the wind currents underneath.”
Well, I knew that wind chill made it feel colder, but this was the first I’d heard that wind made it actually, factually colder. But obviously I’ve remembered that ever since.
One of only two wrecks I’ve had in my life, both due to slick roads.
It had been raining lightly in Amarillo, but that overpass didn’t even look wet. And I did not get a ticket.
Not “wind chill”, and he’s only sorta right, wind helps the road reach, and stay at, the air temperature faster than on a windless day,
CMC fnord!
Around here, bridges all have signs before them that say “Warning: Bridge ices over before road”, or the like.
And if we’re talking about computer-driven cars, you’d have at most one car that didn’t know about the ice, because as soon as one car slipped (which is something even current cars can sense happening), it’d warn all of the other cars about that spot.
If even that. Yeah, people talk all the time about black ice, but black ice is not invisible, even to human eyes. The problem isn’t undetectable ice; it’s humans who just don’t know how to recognize it. And it gets even easier to recognize with the broad spectrum (literally) of instruments a self-driving car would be equipped with.
Because you can freeze to death in the duration of storm if you just sit there and wait until it stops and the plows come and sand or clear the roads. Or you cam lose your job if you keep calling your boss and saying I’m afraid it’s going to be slippery and “what the fuck am I driving for?”. The weather along the entire course of a trip is not always exactly what it was at your point of departure, nor can it always be predicted.
Sorry to disillusion you, but in Canada, a great majority of drivers are quite proficient at operating a car in the kind of conditions that call for increased prudence and driving skill to navigate. In Newfoundland, where I lived, there is measurable snowfall on 80% of all days during the winter months. Do you think people just go to work one day a week, because 99% of all humans can’t handle driving in winter conditions? I drove to work there every day for eight years, without a single scary skid, much less so much as a fender bender. And that means the other 99% didnt skid into me, either.
And my point was that it wouldn’t do any good for a driver in 2036 to switch to manual control, because they would have negligible experience driving with manual control. So drivers would be faced with the prospect of both car and driver who have no acquired nor designed capability of navigating in adverse conditions that are, today, routine. And even worse, would have no prior learning that would enable them to get out of an “Oh-oh, now what do I do?” situation.
But again, why do you assume that a self-driving car won’t be able to handle this? If it can be handled by a human, it will someday be able to be handled by a self-driving car.
You seem to be assuming that self-driving cars will always be inferior drivers to humans and therefore will simply cease to function. Certainly current self-driving cars cannot handle adverse conditions but there’s no reason to assume that will always be the case.