Yup, these are the reasons I'm not interested in those "hands-free but still assisted" autodriving deals. I'd love cruise control assist and lane assist in my car, but that's about all I want until I can be 100% sure cars can handle the situations by themselves.
I believe driver assist technology will get more and more advanced to the point where the car is essentially driving and you are giving suggested feedback. In other words -- the bad situations will be handled themselves. Following distance might be enforced and come with a warning, unless you really want to get dangerously close -- the car will "help".
Your viewpoint is how self-driving cars will come to be accepted into the mainstream. It will essentially sneak up on the average driver.
I would be extremely nervous to let a fully autonomous vehicle drive me given the current state of the art.
Either the human or the computer has to drive. Throwing control back to the human on an automation failure and expecting a correct response from the human takes too long. This has been well-studied. It takes at least 3 seconds for the driver to take control at all, and 15-40 seconds before human control has stabilized. I linked to some studies in an earlier post.
The aviation people hit this problem in the 1990s, as autopilots got more comprehensive. Watch "Children of the magenta", a talk by American Airlines' chief pilot on this.[1]
Right. The driver would be in control in the scenario I'm describing, just like they are with lane assist, cruise control, or closest to stealth self-driving, auto braking and swerve. I guess it would be better described as the driver would always have the illusion of control.
The automated parts would kick in when necessary and they would be increasingly intrusive in their warnings and modification of driving until the human is only needed for identifying source and destination.
