Will Driverless Cars cost more that they're worth?

[Voyager]

@Kenm

The army of black-hat hackers would be scary.

The penalty for hacking a car would have to be a multiple death sentence — strangulation, revival, strangulation, revival, strangulation, revival, ending with the hacker’s head on a pike after he’s fed alive up to his neck through a slow wood chipper with dull blades.

We’re going to see this long before we see self-driving cars. Given the amount of code in a car, it getting hacked while you are driving it is not going to be a lot better than it getting hacked when it drives itself.

[Voyager]

@drewder

Writing a general purpose operating system which works on hardware that hasn’t even been invented yet is a much different challenge than writing a single purpose control program. You ever noticed how car companies brag about the number of computers in the vehicle? That’s because each one has a single function because writing an operating system that supports one function is infinitely earlier and driverless cars will be similar. With each function being supported by it’s own operating system and then use APIs to communicate with the central control unit which will have its own operating system operating similarly to the osi model where each unit only speaks to one thing.

I’d suspect that they all have the same OS but different control programs. A good reason for this is that the failure of one chip or program will screw up only one piece of hardware, not everything.

[dlthewave]

@Kenm

Driving home this evening on a two-lane road (four lanes altogether), I came around a curve and saw a semi-trailer with a pup trailer stopped at a traffic light. So I changed lanes (no one beside or behind me). When the light turned green, I was off again, and switched to the original lane after passing the truck.

Would or could a self-driver do that? I doubt it would now.

But knowing nothing about self-driving vehicles, I’ll state for the helluvit that a self-driver probably would stop behind the dual-trailer truck, then crawl along behind it until the truck turned off. If it didn’t turn, all the occupants of the self-driver would be dead from old age before they got home. Being a passenger in a self-driving car would be like having Looney Tunes’ Granny as a cab driver. Especially in winter.

I’d like to see a story about self-drivers coping with snow and ice, or better yet, a video. Let’s see a self-driver in a blizzard. Or on ice and snow on a highway exit. Or simply stopping on ice and snow, and to see whether the car has enough brains to steer onto the snow to stop. Or to know it isn’t snow but a child in a white snow suit lying on the road.

All the videos I’ve seen are of self-driving cars and semis on freeways in summer or in locations where summer is 12 months long (as is the case with electric cars).

Self-driving cars may be as much about the future as flying cars were.

They’re not going to release an entirely self-driving car until flaws like these are worked out. It will be a series of incremental advances, some of which have happened already. You can already buy a car with adaptive cruise control that maintains a set following distance and warns you if you’re drifting out of your lane. The next step would be a car that automatically follows curves in the road but requires driver input to switch lanes or turn onto another road. Someday, when all cars are autonomous and can communicate with each other or with a centralized network, the stuck-behind-a-truck scenario will be irrelevant because all of the traffic in the area will be synchronized for maximum efficiency. Imagine a street where cars form themselves into groups, leaving gaps large enough for cars coming from a side street to cross or merge without stopping, eliminating the need for traffic lights. Your car might switch lanes several blocks ahead and maintain the optimal speed to allow everyone to pass a slow truck with minimal slowing.