I can stop on an interstate because I won’t go so fast that I can’t stop before hitting something I can’t see. This has nothing to do with pedestrians jumping out in front of cars. Stopped cars don’t jump in front of you. If you over drive your headlights and hit a deer you deserve the damage to your vehicle. If you hit a person you should go to jail. Also, I’d appreciate it if you stopped driving and being a danger to everyone else.
People and deer aren’t always just standing there. Sometimes they come darting into your path, well within the range of your headlights and well short of any reasonable human reaction time. Sometimes the deer is standing by the side of the road, panics when the approaching vehicle gets too close, jumps into the road instead of away from it. Sometimes a kid, being stupid as kids often are, jumps out from behind a parked car in chase of a runaway soccer ball.
What ultimately would be better is computerized cars with faster-than-human reflexes, of course.
That’s right. And drivers aren’t obligated to drive slow enough avoid such unpredictable behavior. They are obligated to drive slow enough that they can stop before they hit something standing there that they can’t see. It is absolutely predictable that there may be a person, a deer, a vehicle stopped in the road around a curve or over the crest of a hill and you have to drive slowly enough that you can stop before hitting them.
Okay, on reread, I see what you’re going for. Yes, I’m sure many many people drive at speeds such that by the time they recognize a potential hazard, they’d can’t react fast enough to avoid it. I suppose as a prelude to automated cars, we could make dashcams and black-boxes for cars mandatory, so at least there’d be an independent record of the conditions before a collision.
Great OP username/thread title combo!
And all witnesses
This is a very good point. Given that liability for any problems will likely fall entirely on the manufacturer, I just don’t see any way that the autonomous car’s first rule won’t be ‘Don’t ever go fast enough to kill anyone, ever’.
My personal prediction is that trips made in autonomous cars will be considerably slower (like a 3-5x slower) than human piloted ones. The current autonomous cars stop dead if a plastic bag blows across the street or if there’s anything that obscures any of the road markings (leaves, trash, snow, doesn’t matter). Just wait til they try to drive in real traffic where they will be bullied mercilessly by human drivers. People simply won’t tolerate being driven around in an unbelievably slow, stop-and-go manner.
Computerized road rage will be efficient and devastating.
The Prime Directive of early automated cars will be to get along with the majority of human-driven cars. So they’ll drive like we do. Safer because they’re smarter & quicker, but no slower.
The idea that they’ll haltingly feel their way to the destination in total compliance with all traffic laws is ludicrous. The Prime Directive, just as is it for each of us is “Go along to get along”.
Once we have dedicated automated-cart only lanes then they can A) program the cars to strictly obey the law, and B) set the law at the actual safe value (e.g. speed), rather than the safe value minus 20% to allow for universal overdriving by 20%.
So you routinely crest hills or overpasses on the interstate at 40 mph? I don’t believe that for a minute.
The reality is that normally there are cars some distance ahead of you. Who can see farther over the hill than you can. With the result that you react to their brake lights and slow down when you see everybody else ahead doing it.
Every now and again traffic is light. So each person is in effect the leader of a pack of one. Driving at or slightly above the posted 65 or 70 or 75 mph speed limit.
If you crest the hill and it happens that
A) there’s been a major all-lanes-stopped accident ahead AND
B) the back of the pack of stopped cars is just short of the crest AND
C) you’re the first car of the next pack over the crest
THEN
You hit the back of the pack doing 30-50 mph. And the guy behind you hits you doing 20 to 30 mph.
Eventually the back of the pack of wrecked cars extend over the hill so folks have a full sight line to it. Those folks avoid the accident you didn’t. But meanwhile we have the makings of a significant chain reaction accident.
This happens once every few days across the US. Week in and week out it keeps happening. Which is all the proof we need that folks drive faster over crests than is stoppable in the *worst case *scenario. It’s plenty safe in the typical case scenario.
Bottom line: The reason ordinary drivers’ caution works day to day is that these worst-case events are still one in 1,000 versus ordinary traffic backups on hills. Demanding that all drivers (human or computer) be able to stop in the distance they can see clearly would be a revolutionary change in current reality. With wide ranging and mostly insane results.
The answer is the car should always save me.
I, Salvor of the most sacred house Hardin, am the single greatest treasure of humanity. Hundreds of thousands of years of human civilization and proto civilization has never produced this scale of greatness until now, and it cannot be allowed to be snuffed out.
I say this with no ego, but my existence is more important than that of a thousand others.
I have no idea what you are talking about. I don’t overdrive my line of sight. I was young and stupid once and did things like that but I don’t do it now and I don’t recall any interstate where I’d have to slow down to 40MPH to avoid that situation. I have seen accidents in front of me where people have done that and the chain reaction occurred and I wasn’t in it because I make sure I can stop within the range I can see. I speed regularly, at times way over the limit but I would not trust the cars in front of me to know what’s going on ahead of where I can see. If I can’t see it then there’s a huge rock in the road as far as I’m concerned.
Agree on this. We do use other cars’ behaviour as clues as to the road ahead, whether consciously or otherwise.
No, I do not.
Once again, if it’s really a blind hill such that all I see is road and sky, and the hill is so sharp that my view is going to flip from looking upward to looking downward in an instant (instead of a normal gradual change of view) then I slow the hell down, especially if I’m the lead car.
Right now I drive a motorbike for my daily commute. You would not see posts from Mijin on this site for very long if I regularly went around bends or over hills at a speed where I’d have no time to react if something unexpected came into view.
I’m talking an ordinary crest of an ordinary hill on an ordinary freeway in ordinary terrain or in an ordinary town. Per the Federal DOT US interstate standards for curvature.
I don’t know what more to say to folks who have such confused ideas of their actual stopping distances versus their actual sightlines in routine freeway driving at routine freeway speeds.
I’m out at this point lest it get too contentious.
And in that case you can see a lot of the road ahead of you as you go over the hill (if not before that). Hills on the freeway are generally so shallow that it’s not actually very different from driving on a flat piece of road.
You are confused. As I say, I ride a motorbike. Plenty of times I find something unexpected on or around a corner; just litter in the road can be perilous for a bike. But it’s no problem because I took the corner at a speed where I could comfortably react to such things.
There is no act of faith in turning a corner or cresting a hill.
In case there’s confusion, I was responding to the earlier point about blind bends and hills with my motorbike comment.
In terms of freeways, blind hills etc are basically not a thing. A hill so sharp that you abruptly go from ascent to descent, placed on a freeway, would essentially be a ramp.
No it won’t.
A mature driverless traffic management system would allow the cars in front to send a message to the cars behind, so that they can slow down before getting into trouble. I don’t expect to see that for a while yet.
Why would the car be programmed to send a family of 4 over a cliff rather than brake hard in the hopes that injuries to the 1 child could be survivable/minimized? This rash of media articles about autonomous vehicle moral dilemmas is a bit overboard IMO.
I drive slower than you, and you somehow manage to deal with (except for that one time you got pissed off and cut in front of me as close as you possibly could, just so you could throw spray on my windshield). There is no valid reason that autonomous cars should be just like every other asshole out there.
There we run into a bit of a sticky wicket. Programming a car to violate traffic laws from time to time seems profoundly risky.
Thing is, when you are in a self-driving car, you are not driving. You can use that time to your best advantage – reading, eating, fixing your eye-liner, texting, whatever. You do not need to pay attention to the road, so going a tad slower will not aggravate you, especially when it means that going slower will get you there sooner. If autonomous cars start to catch on, it will be the hands-on drivers who will be forced to adapt to the new environment.