I think the biggest obstacle to self driving cars will be insurance. Liability for a self driving car will fall on the manufacturer rather than the owner so manufacturers will need to be completely sure that it’s not going to kill anybody before it leaves the factory.
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I already have this exact bet in place with my brother; he thinks SD cars will arrive before the deadline, I think after. The wager between me and him is $50 (rather than tens of thousands of dollars), which I suppose is reflective of our levels of confidence in our positions.
We had a very specific definition for what constitutes a self-driving car, which includes what I mentioned in my previous post (from memory), plus probably some other details. It’s important to note that we were wagering on a self driving car that requires NO input from you other than providing a destination. Tesla’s current offering, for example, requires the driver to keep their hands on the wheel, so it doesn’t count.
Great idea. That way the Kremlin can control every car in the US at the same time.
Wake me up when a ‘self-driving’ car can recognize a cop standing by the side of the road with her hand out, motioning ‘stop’. Then I’ll go back to sleep again until it can tell the difference between that and a cop with his hand out motioning ‘go’. At which point I’ll take another nap, waiting for the technology to get to recognizing the cop motioning ‘go that way’.
I mean, right now the state of the art is building a complete 3-D model of your test track, with every inch of curb, every lampost, every stop sign and traffic light in the model, so the car knows exactly what it should be doing at every single point. That’s not self-driving, that’s self-steering. Sure, you need to self-steer in order to self drive, but it’s only a very early step. After all, six-year-old humans can steer, and we don’t let them drive cars on open roads.
The unpredictability of people on the roads is going to be an ongoing problem for driverless cars.
In a scenario with all driverless cars, the cars can communicate with each other and do an elegant interweaving dance, rarely or never needing to stop at intersections, thereby substantially speeding up traffic.
Mix in some unpredictable humans on the road, be they driving cars, walking, riding bikes or motorcycles, and the driverless cars now must avoid them. Once many of those humans learn that the driverless cars will grant right of way to the unpredictable human, the driverless cars may spend more time stopped than moving.
Why would we want to program that anyway?
Any situation where a cop might want to direct traffic would be far more efficiently handed by sending signals to the cars directly. Or the cars negotiating between themselves for right of way e.g. like a zip.
The generation of people that grow up with self-driving cars will likely find the idea of a cop standing in the road, in possibly bad weather, or at night, waving their arms around amusing. Let alone needing to laboriously place traffic cones.
There’s no guarantee a cop, or flagman, or any person in trouble could connect to the network to cause robocars to stop. Just one of many issues to be resolved. We can’t count on the first such vehicles to be able to drive anywhere and everywhere totally without human control either.
Do you mean this car has to be available for you to purchase? Because there are prototype cars right now that do what you define as self-driving. Curious to know what your deadline is. I’d say 2025 is more than reasonable. The autonomous driving car is coming.
The details are all written down at home, but my recollection is that the car has to be mass-produced and available for retail sale to the general public by 2025 or thereabouts.
No doubt prototypes exist that can do this, but I expect it will be some time before they can do it reliably enough for use by Joe Blow instead of by a technician with one eye on the road and one hand hovering over an E-stop button. It also has to fail gracefully (i.e. if there’s a hardware/software fault, it will gently pull itself over to the side of the road and stop instead of merging at full speed with the nearest oak tree), and handle whatever weather conditions Joe Blow might try to use it in. As mentioned upthread, there are also questions about insurance and who will be assigned liability in the event of a crash. Again, this is for a car that will be designed to operate with no expectation of user intervention, i.e. you can sleep through the entire journey.
In short, there is still a lot of work to be done. We will get there, but I am doubtful about doing so before 2025.
There’s no guarantee a cop will be able to find a high visibility jacket or a set of traffic cones either.
Obviously there will be a transitional period, I don’t think anyone would dispute that.
This is false. Self driving cars sense their surroundings, they don’t move through a predetermined map.
Better get an alignment.
This already works. Google's self-driving cars can read cyclists' hand signals
It recognizes cyclists and their hand signals. A similar algorithm would recognize any human - including a police officer - and it should recognize the hand signals under most situations. There’s a number of computer vision algorithms that they could be using for this, I can explain some of the simpler ones if you are interested.
Presumably, self-driving cars would have a fail-safe mode where the system recognizes an un-anticipated situation, signals ‘human attention needed’, and waits for the human driver to take over. Just like current airline auto-pilot systems do.
Then it would make more sense to have police patrol cars with equipment installed to allow them to send this signal to cars in the immediate vicinity of a such a situation, like the site of a car accident, a bridge failure, etc.
Possibly. The main design goal is avoiding collisions. Worst case scenario, the car would not recognize the officer’s signal authorizing it to go, and it would sit there, unwilling to break the rules and go into the wrong lane or drive off the road. Under no circumstances should there be a chance of the autonomous car running over the officer, no matter what signals are given, or colliding with an oncoming car.
But yeah I could see level 4 autonomy vehicles having a few edge cases like that where they are stuck and unwilling to take the risk of moving.
Seen on FB: With the rise of self driving vehicles, there will be a country song about how his truck left him too.
So then who gets the ticket for disobeying the officer’s instructions?