That’s how you get rear-ended by an idiot human.
Humans glitch up all the time. I don’t want to be in the oncoming lane when the human operating the car glitches.
There is no reason why a driverless car could not be connected to the net for navigation, traffic, and weather conditions. It was explained upthread how this system would be separate from the part that actually drives you car.
In any case, what sensors do you use to detect inclement conditions? Why do you think that an autonomous car would not be able to tell that it is raining, windy, or icy. Sure, it’s not going to be immune from being blown off the road in a tremendous gust, but that’s the case with anything. If nothing else, modern traction control computers don’t need the weather report to do their thing.
As it’s a computer, and not an impatient human, it is actually much more likely that it will slow down to deal with the adverse conditions, as opposed to the humans I see driving over the speed limit in a blizzard.
Once again, not being an impatient human helps here. If the car detects that it can only “see” a certain distance in front of it, it can slow down to ensure that it can react to anything that pops up. And, having use of lidar, sonar, and radar, which are things that out human bodies do not have, would allow them to handle far far worse visibilty conditions than a human can.
If your tires are low on pressure, what do you normally do? Do you just drive until your tires fall off?
Many cars now have self inflating tires. Even without self inflation,. if it needed to stop at a station to fill its tires, you may need to get out, just like you would if your tire was dangerously low on your current vehicle. If it really is that bad, you can ask someone else for help.
Yes, you are probably right. After they are widely implemented, in the first few years, there will probably be hundreds of cases of these cars malfunctioning in unexpected ways, some of which may even cause fatalities. As there are over 100 deaths and 12 thousand injuries a day in the US due to traffic accidents, I would consider that an improvement. Big difference here is that anytime an autonomous car has an accident, everything can be tracked to tell what happened. If there is an oversight in the algorithm, then it can be updated, and all the cars on the road are now safer. This does not happen in accidents involving humans. There is a slight chance that the human involved in the accident will learn something from it and become a better driver, but it is also likely that they will take the wrong lessons from their accident, and become a worse driver. In either case, it is one drier that could be improved in this situation, as opposed to improving the entire fleet.
I can’t wait for my car to be able to taxi me around town. The roads will be much safer and speedy when we finally outlaw monkeys driving cars.
Even the basic tesla autopilot would be wonderful when you’re stuck in a traffic jam. Oh look, the car in front moved 10 feet. Gas, brake. Oh, look, another 10 feet. Gas, brake. And if you don’t constantly do this and try to let the car ahead of you get some distance before you bother closing the gap, some other driver will cut in front.
Currently, that’s a privilege for the well off, but soon…
Not to hijack this, but I wonder how far we are from self-driving cars that can beat professional racecar drivers, and whether that’d be a bit of a convincer: the general public seeing one outperform experienced “reaction time and hand-eye coordination” champs even while moving faster than any car on the highway would.
What happens when an airplane on autopilot crashes?
Liability would largely be determined by the nature of the technology and the nature of the defect that caused the collision.
A couple of points
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If you as a human have enough time to triage and decide what you are going to crash into, I think you have enough time to not crash into anything.
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Your setup seems sort of absurd. Are you driving along a sunken highway and someone tossed a baby off the overpass right in front of your car? Are you involved in one of those movie car chases where something just appears in the road, causeing you to swerve and flip your car?
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You do know they can program decision making into a computer?
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Anything you think you can do before a crash, the computer can do better and faster and probably avoid crashing altogether.
This is actually true and caused some problems with early versions of Google’s (I think) driverless test cars. Not so much causing accidents, but unable to do things like enter a 4-way stop or merge properly because it was waiting for all the other drivers to come to a full stop. So they had to program some flexibility into how closely it follows the rules. But the priority always is “don’t crash”.
The standards for a driverless car would be a lot more rigorous than your buggy, malware infested laptop.
Presumably, a driverless car has a lot more sensors and can “see” a lot more information more quickly than you can with the two gelatinous globs in your head.
Again, these are all engineering problems. Not fundamentally unsolvable. We have cars now that can detect road and weather conditions or range-find objects in front of them.
Well…we have this optional accessory where one end plugs into the “cigarette lighter” power adapter…and the other end…well…
I suspect that at some point, people like you who insist on driving their own cars will become more of a hazard than the driverless ones.
How often do you hear about an airplane’s computers getting “hacked”?
In many ways, it seems self driving cars would do much better under those conditions.
It’s a regular track, there shouldn’t be pedestrians or other impediments, no nuns and welders on hair bend turns on the side of a mountain, the other drivers are all professional drivers that are not going to be texting and driving.
Other than the cars currently programmed to be more defensive, and probably needing to be a bit more aggressive on a track, I would think that they would perform exceptionally. Especially if you have a driverless car team, where the different cars can work in tandem for drafting and blocking.
It would get boring very quickly, once all the racers were robotic, but it would probably be a good PR move for driverless cars.
Time out, k9bfriender. For the magical sensors you speak of, I’m talking about this incident. 100+ cars crash on LA Freeway in thick fog. Is my basic Kia model going to have the top of the line sensors to react to THIS type of fog? The same as a 900S series? If you want me to feel safe for incidents like this, let’s make sure ALL cars in the world, no matter how much they cost, will have the same sensors. That means cars in the US have sensors that will react in conditions anywhere in the world, otherwise rare weather conditions, like that fog was, won’t be properly programmed into cars sold in a particular area.
And no, Lemur, I’m not worried about doing 20 mph in a fog. I’m worried about sitting on a highway and getting rammed by someone who doesn’t have their magical fog sensors set to the proper “lidar”. :rolleyes:.
And low tire pressure is not something you veer into a gas station for. I’m not talking about tires about to go flat, I mean oh my goodness, my dashboard says my left front tire is .05 less than it should be. This is nothing to pull over for immediately. And if said diarrhea is a factor, where are these lovely stations with accessible bathrooms and “help”? I usually only see a guy in the main booth selling cigarettes, gas and Red Bull.
I didn’t read about insurance on this either. If my DC “malfunctions” by avoiding an accident by deciding to veer on the sidewalk, maiming schoolchildren, I take it I’m not at fault, right? “Sorry, kids. Tell your parents to contact Chrysler for medical bills!”
And don’t try to convince me that every DC is programmed to handle this kind of thing. Some might be, but I doubt cars that get recalled for airbags are going to be able to function as driverless cars any time other than a lazy Sunday afternoon, sunny and 70 degrees.
Ok, several misconceptions here. First of all, the reality is, the DC software won’t come from Kia or Ford or whoever. You can almost guarantee it will come from a few credible giants - Google (called Waymo now), Tesla, Ford is funding an external company startup, and so on.
Second, there is going to be a minimum sensor set and quality for a driverless car to even be licensed to hit the road. This probably means distance sensors (ultrasonics, lidar, radar, probably all 3) and enough cameras for full coverage at a bare minimum. The fact is, you probably will not be able to purchase an autonomous car that is licensed and insured* for use from any manufacturer - Kia or anyone else without paying a hefty premium - 10s of thousands of dollars - and paying per month or per mile driven in autonomy mode.
It’s not just the government having a say here. Remember, every time an autonomous car crashes and hurts or kills someone, the onboard event recorders will capture everything. In the cases where the car is at fault, it will be abundantly clear from the data. Nobody will give a shit what witnesses have to say or what the human in the other car claims happened when the truth is available frame by frame. And every time the autonomous car kills someone and they can show these frames to the jury, that’s a 3 to 20 million dollar judgement. Every time.
Right now, GM can be lazy about an ignition switch and basically get away with it because of uncertainty. “Did the switch really kill your daughter? Our experts disagree…”. Autonomous cars, you will be able to see the blood beginning to spray from the victims, one painful frame at a time, in crystal digital clarity, and play this for the jury.
So the manufacturer will have a large incentive (and their insurer) and they will probably add more than the bare minimum in sensors, add redundant electrical systems and redundant computers, and most likely will have an incentive to buy software licenses to the best available autonomy suite.
The other thing you are missing is the car is looking for landmarks like the road surface, road reflectors, scenery, and so on. A fog bank masks all that. If the car is lacking the sensors to see through the fog and can only see clearly 10 feet ahead, it must reduce speed such that it can reach a complete stop, or at least a safe crash speed, within 10 feet if an obstacle suddenly appears.
It will cost a lot more to repair.
Regulatory agencies are being dismantled.
Not as satisfying.
But mostly, it will take a lot of proof to make me trust it is feasible let alone really safe.
Maybe if the infrastructure was designed more in line with them. But even then, why don’t we have driverless trains and subways where accidents should theoretically be virtually impossible?
Then add real road conditions, detours, potholes, missing signs, tire blowouts, tricky intersections…
I mean it would be nice to have as a novelty and emergency backup and perhaps as a more versatile cruise control, but it will take a lot for me to trust it or use it regularly.
Actually this is the sort of thing that only happens with careless human drivers. You are never supposed to drive fast enough that you can’t see any potential obstacle in time to stop for it.
Even for those rare obstacles which leap out from hiding, I doubt the cars will be programmed with much swerving algorithms.
If you’ve been to a hospital in the past few years, you have trusted a computer with your life. Health informatics isn’t perfect, but it significantly reduces errors vs doing things by hand. Medication barcode systems have saved countless lives by preventing medication mixups.
Plus think what a nightmare being on the road filled with hundreds of cars being driven like grandma.
Issues for me are what the current systems still can’t do well without the option of taking over manual control.
- My elderly parents live in a condo development that as of a few years ago still had map data that included a street that didn’t exist. this was despite the development being close to 30 years old. Google has that right today but still doesn’t show the alley that is the access to their garage. My dad is over 80, with a knee replacement at 70 and frequently uses a walker. The route out the front door to a car in the street is much longer and has less stable footing. Without someway to get the car to a place that maps say doesn’t exist he effectively can’t leave the house for things like physical therapy.
- Even if you get to the garage (and it really needs to be the garage since the driveway slopes in an unsafe manner for him) you need to pull in in a way that makes it easy for him to get in and out. That is off centered and preferably cocked a little to one side.
- I like to drive at times. It’s probably the former tanker in me but I enjoy the focus, working time distance calculations in my head as I adjust the plan about the next stop on long drive, etc. A twisting road, with the windows down and the music turned up is one of my real joys. Sure that’s only be a chunk of my driving time. Giving up the enjoyment and relaxation I find from it is a real opportunity cost for me.
- I vary my routes regularly for variety. Literally sometimes , when there’s no time pressure I will just take a road I know goes generally the right way and then navigate. Needless to say my favorite part of GPS apps is just the map with the second being the ability to use it as a “well that didn’t work” backup.
I lose both the enjoyment of that and also lose the joy of stumbling over new things. (Hey I didn’t know there was a new restaurant about to open…have to check it out.) - Late in my military career and now that I am retired, with time in the field mostly non-existent, I started camping to get away from it all. My idea of camping is not an organized campground. It’s heading to state land or a national forest that allows wilderness camping , parking, and wandering into the woods. I know a couple parking places edge the national forest that aren’t much more than a culvert to cross the ditch and short dirt trail to a flat patch of dirt. There’s no signage. There’s no address. You go “about 2.4 miles from the turn off state route X onto state route Y” and then you look for a spot to cross the ditch. I literally couldn’t get there in any of the fully autonomous cars right now. A car that is mine, as opposed to a shared ride fleet, also lets me cache extra stuff just in case I need. It’s only a couple days a year but they are important days to me.
- I keep emergency stuff in my car constantly - a robust first aid kit, stuff to survive if stuck in the middle of a snow storm in the middle of nowhere, backup clothes, etc. There’s no way I am heading out to a shared car with all the things having my own provides to me on my back every day.
Fully autonomous vehicles, especially fleets that are shared, may be a great fit for most of what I want to do. It leaves out things that are important to me though. As much as they would help certain aspects for my parents, since Mom wouldn’t need to drive, they also don’t meet their needs. They aren’t a fit for everything I want to do.
One learning strategy to deal with this problem is essentially trails - the first DC cars are obviously going to have manual control as a backup, and probably will for a decade or more. So as human drivers go to destinations, the autonomy software watches what they do, and uploads the routing to the web, expanding the network of endpoints and possible routes. Similar in concept to how ants leave trails of pheromones wherever they go somewhere, so an ant following the pathfinder ant can just walk on exactly the same path and will get to the same destination.
The other means of handling this is that when you are elderly and in the middle of nowhere, and you push the button on your phone to summon the car, it would get as close as it can, and then request someone in a call center somewhere to remotely tell it what to do. (probably not quite take direct control, but give a kick, basically, and tell it where to drive off the road to reach you)
Once a car has gotten to you before, same story - the next time you use the summon button, it’s going to remember the manually hinted routing it took last time, and leave your gravel driveway and drive on the grass to pull up to the front or whatever.
Also, right now, google maps doesn’t know about your house because some human didn’t feel like driving there, and they only have a small number of mapping vehicles, relatively speaking. Obviously every Waymo branded autonomous car would do double duty as a mapping vehicle, and you would expect for google street view to become far more complete, with images from everywhere any autonomous vehicle has been, and far more up to date.
Don’t forget, if you break any traffic law, they could be programmed to rat you out. If they detect you speeding or you fail to signal or you aren’t between the lines, they could give the authorities your location, license plate number, and observed offence. This isn’t legally enough proof for a ticket (though it should be), but patrol officers could sit in their car and see a visual representation of every lawbreaker manual car close to them, and then they just pick who to ticket today.
It could get to where you are being pulled over for a violation every time you leave the house - after all, most manual drivers do something wrong.
The ultimate game changing selling point would be the self-driving-car-that-automatically-rats-out-all-other-cars-on-the-road.
Drivers hate pedestrians, bikers, cyclists, truckers, but above all else…other asshole drivers. SUaTMM.
Yes. If you have to opt in to “report em”, or even mash the “report” button every time an asshole breaks the law in front of you and nearly hits you…yeah, most people are going to mash “report” as fast as they can, or set their car to always report.
There are certainly options. My resistance is to the state of the tech currently and near term unless I can take control to fill the voids. There certainly are those less involved who are already seeing the near term end of manual control, possibly even legally, because their needs are close to being met.
Fortunately, remote is not an issue for my parents. Remote areas and fully external controlled run into issues with our current communications infrastructure. There are plenty of areas where bandwidth for that level of remote control can be an issue. In some of them just getting the relatively simple message from the button push can be a challenge. It’s another tech and economic problem to fix for fully autonomous cars to be viable for the people who spend time in those locations.
It’s is fixable and you aren’t one of those over promising. It will take fixes or a change in my life, before I become non-resistant to a personal implemenation. That’s of course different than being resistant to them on the road for those the partial capability works for.
If every driverless car has a black box that shows conclusively what went wrong, we can make them shove that black box into every manual car too.
Thing is though, in almost all cases there’s nothing to discover about a crash. Nobody cares who made the wrong decision, and it’s not a crime to make the wrong decision in the middle of a crash, even if it kills somebody.
As for “how can a driverless car handle fog!?!?!”, how do you think humans handle fog? The point about fog is that it’s opaque to the human eyeball. It won’t be necessarily be opaque to the sensors on the sensors on the car. And even if the cameras on the self-driving car can’t see through the fog, they can drive slow enough that they won’t rear-end the guy in front of them.
And if you’re worried that means they’re driving at 20 mph which means you’re going to get rear-ended by the maniac behind you, if you were driving a manual car would you be going at 30 if the conditions were such that you couldn’t safely stop in time, just to avoid getting rear-ended? That means you’re the maniac who’s going to plow into someone going slowly.
It is a simple principle of driving safety that you should always be able to stop in time if you detect an obstacle in the road ahead of you. That’s a function of your speed and reaction time. In thick fog your effective reaction time is much much lower because you can’t see past a certain distance. If you’re driving so fast that you rear-end the guy in front of you who was going slowly, guess what? You’re the guy at fault. Arguing that you have to drive unsafely because of all the other unsafe drivers is crazy town.
I imagine self-driving cars will be fine and dandy around towns, but outside will be a different matter. How will a self-driving car cope with a herd of cows? How about a flock of geese? How about when a field is turned into a car park? How will the car know when it’s safe to proceed on a flooded road? That muddy water might be 2 inches deep or it might be 2 feet deep.