So you expect any new system that involves transporting people to be flawless from the start? The reason airline safety is where it is now is because a LOT of people have died in the last 70 years. Watch a few episodes of Mayday to see what I mean. The same goes for the automotive industry.
Incidentally,the same scenario is going to happen when you’re driving, too. You can’t see a goat falling through fog on a mountain road, a car with radar can. Realistically, we’re still a ways away from that but you see my point.
Can we stop tossing goats now, we won’t have any left to introduce to the new members…
70 years ago, there was no such thing as a class-action lawsuit.
Society has changed; today we are much less tolerant of corporations causing people to die.
When the first ,say, one hundred thousand self-driving cars start to share the roads with a half-billion regular cars, there are going to be LOT of problems.
The lawyers will make more money than Google.
My guess is that , in order to save the industry, the government will have to create a new type of law, restricting people from suing car manufacturers.
One problem will be early expectations of perfection. People will freak out when the first accidents are reported. The press will have a field day. But, no vehicle on the road will ever be accident free. The hope is self-driving cars will have significantly lower accident rates.
No. I very explicitly and specifically don’t expect that. It’s sort of my point, in fact.
I can’t see it, but the car can. I have the ability to adapt to the unforeseen scenario, and the car doesn’t. If the car and I are sharing information and control–say, by giving me a radar overlay and an option to manually override, we get the best of both. It doesn’t guarantee that I will escape goat impact, but it gives me a slightly better chance.
It’s never illegal to cross a single solid line, unless your locality doesn’t implement the Uniform Traffic Code for some reason. A solid single line is meant to discourage lane changes, and does not indicate any prohibition. Cite.
This may be true in America, but not in my country. Reprogamming isn’t going to be as simple as,say, adding a few fonts to Windows.
Which shows the next problem with self-driving cars: Ford and GM( and Google)won’t be able to sell them anywhere except in America. So the market is smaller,less profitable.
At the same time, the multiple-car-rules trees are only a fraction of the possible-incidents trees and there’s less variation than it may seem at first sight.
You’ve got your drive on right countries and your drive on left countries, but driving in the middle is a custom in those countries that do it, not the actual rule. Different collections of colored lines, but while there are differences (my own country considers a single solid line “unbreakable”, too, you only see double solids at the sides of roundabouts) there are only so many things you can do with white and yellow paint. Different rules about precedence in a crossing. Different ways to treat parking limits; here you can see a lot of variation within a single town.
A few years ago, several towns in Spain hit upon a similar revenue-sucking scheme at about the same time. Instead of just having your regular parking areas, your no-parking areas and your limited-parking areas (“blue zones”), they came up with a whole rainbow of areas whose parking limits were all different and unposted - and since this had been decided at the local level, the colors meant different things in different places. The wheels of Justice grind slowly but judges don’t like getting parking tickets for something that’s actually not in the driving code: the rainbow zones got struck. With self-driving cars, any township coming up with something like that would need to come up with the updated maps as well; would they be allowed to fine you if your self-driver parked in a zone that was mis-marked in the maps? What kind of time window would have to be provided for the new maps to come into effect? What penalties for purposefully not updating them?
There’s a slew of legislation to keep the lawmakers busy right there, and it’s new - you can’t program for it yet.
I’m not sure what they will do about beginning drivers. It took me several months of driving before I got really comfortable. Maybe a year or more before I could handle interstate highway travel.
A person that depended on a self-driving car never would get enough driving experience to handle a car safely in traffic. They would need to let the car drive. It wouldn’t be problem for experienced drivers. We won’t forget how to drive.
But most of the components for self-driving and user-driving are likely to be common (says the manufacturing engineer working for an American automaker in China). Instead of designing for left-hand drive and right-hand drive, we add a design for no user drive. Laser cut a knockout for the radar the North American models needs. Build 60 kW motors for North America because self-driving cars don’t accelerate fast, and build 180 kW motors for the other markets where people still have a little fun.
Famously Tesla says a software update can make their Model S completely self-driving (I’ve never seen a teardown of a Model S, so I don’t know if this is true, or just press).
Plus, the rest of the world will come around eventually.
I’m not talking about the hardware components…I’m talking about the brains of the car.
The software programming will have to be very,very different in every country, and require millions of hours of beta-testing.
The example I gave above (about the solid stripe on the road having totally different meanings under American law than in other countries) is a very simple example.Other cultural differences will be much harder to program.
The Google cars are programmed for the laid-back, sunny-sky, quiet streets of Mountain View California.
Think of the total chaos on the roads of Bankok or Mumbai: Massive traffic jams, no white lines to mark the lanes, huge numbers of bicycles, rickshaws, pedestrians and animals in the streets, busses with dozens of people riding on the roof and hanging out the windows ,etc, etc.
There are some pretty congested freeways around Mountain View.
Of course, self-driving cars wouldn’t have to be rolled out everywhere at the same time. There’s no reason you couldn’t have them in the US but not in Thailand or India for a while. In fact, I’d be surprised if that didn’t happen.
I don’t think your reading that correctly. It’s not illegal to cross a solid white line. It is prohibited if it’s a solid yellow line (no passing zones)
chappachula – can I ask, do you think that autonomous cars will not be available or ready for many years if ever (like, 40 years or more), or do you think these are just really hard problems that are going to have to be solved over the next decade or two?
The reason I use embedded systems as an example is the lack of accessibility that promotes much higher stability . A typical windows PC has software from hundreds of different sources. The driving control systems are not going to have thousands of hardware and millions of software variations from car to car like a typical PC. You aren’t surfing porn on the driving control system anymore than an airline pilot is doing so on his flight control systems. They run 1 program, that can be tested on an identical car to make sure everything runs right before pushing it out to all cars of that model/control system type. Yes it is a complex task, but it doesn’t have to worry about a billion other variables in hardware and software configuration a normal PC does.
It just pisses me off when everyone cries “what about BSOD’s” when BSOD’s are extremely rare in professionally maintained and policed systems. The day you see people loading 3rd party or home tweaked firmware THEN they will have a point.
They are not ready for self driving cars, having recently experienced traffic in Manila I understand what you are implying however many of these places have a culture of really shitty driving practices. A computer needs some kind of rules and structure to follow, those countries don’t even try.
Those cars are basically just shuttles for around the campus and surrounding areas, those are not “the way things are going”. manual controls will be around for a long time for various “human driver needed” moments.
Nah, at first deployment, it will be insured just like now with the human driver responsible. A few years of consistent problem free handling of real world traffic across tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of Self driving cars and you will start to see attitudes, and insurance rates shifting accordingly.
