I can't wait to explain to my grandkids someday that back when I was young we used to let humans drive big hunks of plastic and steel at breakneck speeds, with nothing more than our laughably slow reflexes standing between life and death. They'll rightfully think it was barbaric and tragic that we let thousands of people died each year in accidents caused by distraction, drunkenness, exhaustion, and plain old human error, all at the hands of people granted the right to operate killing machines by way of a test passable by the average teenager.
Just to give a counterpoint (I know this opinion will be extremely unpopular on HN)
I'd explain how there was a time when we were free to drive our own cars, and make our own decisions. And simply hop in a car and drive.
Not like now where you get in the car and it asks you to download the latest software update, then it monitors your every move, sending back data to the car makers/NSA and showing you ads as you drive along at ridiculously slow speeds. It'll probably also drive you past a certain shop if they pay the car maker enough money! Oh no, the car has crashed. Better turn it off and on again and hope for the best. Nothing like putting my life in some low paid software engineers hands! Oh dear, the car maker has gone bust. Now you can't get any software updates, and the software has stopped working as it can't dial home anymore. Oh well, tough luck! You didn't really think you could buy a car to own and do what you want with did you? You can only pay subscription fees for cars now.
Freedom is certainly a double edged sword. With freedom comes responsibility. But taking away freedom isn't the answer. Making people more responsible is.
It's going to be pretty impossible to take away the peoples right to drive cars (Even harder than taking away the right to bear arms in the US!) Stop drinking the kool-aid. It's not going to happen.
I'm rooting for some massive disasters/scandals with self driven cars, to put the idea to bed. And you can be pretty sure there will be some big disasters if they ever get anywhere with it.
The attitude I see from younger generations is that the freedom to drive your car is like the freedom to wash your dishes or balance your checkbook by hand. Driving, specially in overcrowded cities, is increasingly seen as a chore and a hassle. Getting rid of it means freeing up from one to four hours a day to study, play, or talk to their friends.
If you want to keep driving as a hobby, I'm sure there will be some accommodations made. But just as you can't tote a rifle in a downtown mall, there will be some restrictions to make sure you don't endanger anyone.
>The younger generations I know can't wait to drive, and have the freedom to travel where they want to.
I think it's simply the ability to be able to go wherever that lures teenagers to driving. I know that's why I got a job and saved up for my first car. You can still do this when cars are that don't require a driver.
I agree. The first large accident involving a self driving car will pose a real challenge to its adoption.
I also agree with you about trusting my life to a disgruntled software/firmware engineer: I'd rather not. I know people like self driving cars because 'ZOMG! Computers react so much quicker!' but I'm not convinced that they will react better, or at least, that they will react better in critical circumstances. I don't want a software bug, a flaw in an algorithm, or a dust covered sensor to kill me.
Of course, right now, when you get in your car, you are trusting your life to each driver of an oncoming vehicle (and side traffic, and...).
So the better question is whether you trust the median driver more than you trust the process used to approve the self driving system. This is a much different test than your disgruntled engineer.
If I get in a self driving car, I am still trusting my life to each driver on the road, but now I am also trusting the software of the car.
In an ideal world I would not mind self driving vehicles nearly so much if everyone had one. Advocates of self driving too often forget that there is an adoption period for technology and that for a vehicle it will span a decade. During that time, why I should I trust the firmware/software to react appropriately to other people's insane/suicidal driving maneuvers? For that matter, when those people are a minority on the road, I'm not sure that they wouldn't become worse, engaging in ever more stupid maneuvers because they can assume the other car is 'smart enough' to move out of the way.
It's a great idea to remove the human element from driving completely in 99.99% of scenarios. The problem is that its the 00.01% of scenarios that kill you. The other problem is that adoption doesn't happen overnight and during that stage I see no logical reason to put myself in more danger by removing my ability to react to my surroundings and instead trusting that the software of my car can handle the suicidal driving of angry high-way drivers.
Not really. The first rule of driving a car, is assume that everyone else driving a car is trying to kill you, is blind and is absolutely rubbish at driving.
If you keep that rule in mind at all times, you'll be pretty safe.
I would absolutely trust a random driver far more than a self driving car.
They can react quicker, but can they react correctly.
What if a cow starts ramming the side of the car? Did the programmers account for that eventuality?
>> "It's going to be pretty impossible to take away the peoples right to drive cars"
No, they will simply phase out manual cars. No big deal, it just means it will be almost impossible to crash, and that's a good thing.
It doesn't mean you won't be able to drive, but you'll be driving with a computer keeping watch over the road ahead and obstacles around you.
Put the car in auto mode and sit back... Most people will choose that. Those who prefer to drive themselves can do, but within limits. You couldn't for example deliberately crash into the back of someone. There won't be a setting to turn off to achieve an outcome whereby the car touches any other object. It just won't happen while you're driving on public roads. For example the computer will not let you cross over double lines at certain speeds, or accelerate too fast at busy intersections, and so on. But it may let you accelerate fast if it determines that doing so won't put anyone else at risk, and conditions are suitable etc. The algorithms controlling when the computer takes over will be clever enough to almost be invisible, and that's what will win people over.
Regulations will prevent car manufactures from making fully manual operated vehicles. Every car will be required to have automatic safety overrides for any action deemed to put the car at risk of impact with another object.
Everyone thought it would be people who override the computer, but it will be the computer who has the final say in the direction and speed of travel in a hazardous situation. I think car manufacturers and the public will LOVE the fact that driving is safer.
Any driverless car accidents will be statistically unlikely, and everyone will see this. Even when just one car crashes, it will be headline news each time, like commercial airline crashes are now. People continue to fly because accidents are rare.
So, the "right to drive" won't actually be taken away. Your right to put yourself and others in danger on public roads WILL be taken away. Have a cry, but then you'll need to get over it because 450 billion is significant.
"There won't be a setting to turn off to achieve an outcome whereby the car touches any other object. It just won't happen while you're driving on public roads."
Can you not see the idiotic flaw in your plan.
You're driving along. You're coming to a junction. A bike isn't looking and is going full speed and will hit into the front side of your car. You do not have time to brake. Your only option is to swerve into the next lane, which will mean you crash into a fellow car.
You have crashed into a car, but you have saved the cyclists life.
There is absolutely no way in the world you'll be able to get regulations in place to prevent making fully manually operated vehicles. You're high. It's not going to happen.
There's also no evidence to suggest that driverless cars will make roads any safer. You still have to account for cyclists, pedestrians, animals, and the billions of cars driven by people etc etc.
Are you countering his argument or just grumbling to yourself?
What drive less car can do and the system in the whole can do is to be able to know where and when a car is driving in the vicinity where normal human cannot perceive. So the situation you describe will not happen at all if those systems are in place. Actually, you just describe a scenario where it is preferable to have a system that monitors human error that could prevent accidents like the one you describe to happen.
Also I don't know whether you have been following tech recently, and if you have seen the intro to drive less car, you would probably seen or heard about the infamous laser and radars mounted around the car as shown in the article in the link: http://www.slashgear.com/back-to-basics-how-googles-driverle...
It is virtually impossible for the car to crash into anything because the car can literally "see" everything around it. Also the algorithms is smart enough to anticipate or plan an alternative path to prevent collision with the objects. You sounded like you have never heard or been following tech especially machine learning, so I forgive you, but you should do some research first before posting comments like this...
It's not my plan. It's the inevitable path of innovation and technology. What I described should be obvious.
Eventually, all cars will be driver-less, and the "old style" of car will be rare to see on the road. Like pre-1974 cars are extremely rare to see now. Everyone will want the newer, safer, cooler, energy efficient cars that drive you home safely, even when you're high.
"You're high. It's not going to happen."
Yes, I'm high. But it will happen. The bicycle situation you describe is one where the computer could still take action to minimize injury to the cyclist, and reduce the risk of causing a major accident with other vehicles. Most drivers would panic and "swerve into the next lane" as you describe, which is not the best action to take. It's about controlled evasive action, not "holy crap... slam on brakes...over-steer... enter skid... over-compensate over-steering... enter another skid... crash."
If the cyclist collides with your car because of cyclist error, then what you have firstly is an extremely unlikely situation, as cyclists are usually focused on what they are doing. They're not adjusting the air-con, or thinking about sex while riding through traffic - they are concentrating.
"You still have to account for cyclists, pedestrians, animals...".
Come on bolder88, get real. Driver training teaches us to avoid swerving into the path of oncoming vehicles to avoid impact with wildlife. The computer would not allow you to do so, and that's how it should be. However, the computer WOULD allow you to swerve into the other lane if there was no oncoming traffic. Otherwise, the safest option is to run over the animal.
With pedestrians, it's certainly a challenging scenario for the driver-less car, but I still think that the automatic hazard avoidance systems can save the day better than manual intervention. That's because it takes great skill to control a car in an emergency situation. Most drivers don't know how to control a skid, because most drivers don't get any practice with such driving.
Perhaps then, to meet you half way, some drivers can apply for a special license that gives them full control. For the rest of us, the computer is the safer option for controlling the vehicle during an evasive maneuver.
Anyway, your right to drive a car probably won't be taken away. Your ability to afford the insurance necessary to operate on public roads is probably a different matter.
Sorry if it came across as harsh. I believe there's two options...
a) We let our freedom be gradually eroded over a long period of time, so that people don't notice it, and so that any one generation can't really remember how great things were.
b) There's a wake up call event that shows people we should not allow ourselves to go down this road at all.
> I'm rooting for some massive disasters/scandals with self driven cars, to put the idea to bed. And you can be pretty sure there will be some big disasters if they ever get anywhere with it.
During the Vietnam War, more Americans were killed in auto accidents on the DC beltway alone than in the actual war. Auto accidents are one of the leading causes of death, and driver error is the leading cause of auto accidents. No, I think you just want to watch people die.
Auto deaths are almost half what they were in the 60s in the US, despite more cars and more miles driven. And that figure is coming down by a pretty good percentage each year.
* People die from heart attacks: 600,000
* People die from auto accidents: 32,000
Obviously every lost life is a tragedy, and my last comment may seem harsh, but the alternative is that this sort of technology creeps up on us, and we don't understand what we had until it's too late and we've lost it forever.
Heart attacks, in the cases where they are preventable, only end up killing the person who failed to prevent them. People who drive cars poorly end up accidentally killing other people all the time. And it's hardly a "freedom" anymore when people are practically required to either drive everywhere or at least be around constant car traffic in order to get anywhere.
Getting human-operated cars off the road doesn't diminish freedom, it enhances it.
I upvoted you before I read your last paragraph. I am massively in favor of personal freedom, but I am not rooting for massive disasters or scandals with self-driven cars. Nevertheless, it creeps me out in the same way it must creep out Richard Stallman.
I am really excited for the possible future of self-driving electric taxis. All the pieces kind of fit together: you can use an app to dispatch and gauge number of fleet vehicles to put out (Google just bought a huge stake in Uber), self-driving cabs can return themselves for a recharge when low on batter and another vehicle can replace it instantly, the amount of cars on the road can scale with demand fluidly. There'd be no need for a car ever in a metro area.
Until a smart insurance company comes around and wins away the other insurance companies' customers because the risk is 90% less and they can lower premiums substantially and still make a profit.
I don't think that's necessarily true - insurance companies make money out of insuring far safer modes of transport than driving (like air travel). The liability merely shifts from the driver to the software developer. Whoever is providing the self-driving cars will need to have large amounts of indemnity insurance to cover potential losses.
The second part might be true, but human-driven cars are going to be on the road for a very long time. As long as they are here, accidents will happen, and insurance companies will find a way to charge you for it. Geico et al will never stop existing, so long as there is the possibility of human error.
People will still want and demand car insurance. Stuff still happens, and I want my car and injuries paid for. So they'll still be around. It may be a smaller industry, but it won't kill them.
I don't keep enough cash to go out and replace my daily driver, in kind, today. Even if it was someone else's fault and they're eventually required to remunerate me for the loss, that can take months.
People don't like the cost, but they like the benefits when they need it.
Like airlines. Few own a private plane, but airlines front the capital and operations, just like mobility companies of tomorrow will be the bulk of self-driving car purchasers.
There would never be a need for a car in the suburbs. If i had an app that would just bring me a car and be ready at an exact time right in front of my house, bring me to a store and leave, and when twenty minutes before I'm done shopping I order another taxi to be ready for me outside the store, not need to go to the DMV or any auto shop, that would be a huge win for the suburbs.
Being driverless doesn't mean this kind of thing is necessarily going to be economically viable. You need density to optimize taxi operation and keep it affordable. There would need to be a lot of taxis driving themselves around for them to be so readily available in this kind of setting, and for that you need widespread adoption.
Almost every non-rural area is going to be able to support the density required. I mean, drive through any suburb and count the number of unoccupied cars.
Honestly, the biggest issue (assuming the technology is flawless) is going to be keeping them clean and maintained because of the very high usage rates.
I think tech people are overestimating how much people enjoy having their own car, as well as driving it. We see everything as something to be optimized, and rightly see driving as a huge waste of time and energy. But, I'd venture to say the majority won't give up their own cars in favor of driverless taxis. Just think about how many people underutilize mass transit available to them in favor of driving their own car.
I think it's just a matter of perspective and whether they are used to the tech, but I can see this technology being deployed in 10-20 years time, by that time older people that don't trust tech will still not drive a car or use a computer, those that wants to own a car would still owns a car, but I bet the majority will hop on this new revenue of personal, car sharing system.
I'm in New Jersey which is pretty dense and already has a lot of human-driven taxi companies. It definitely might not work in a sparsely populated suburb.
Also, think of the impact in congested and developing countries: in Beijing, there is nowhere else to build roads, yet the number of cars keeps increasing. Going all self-driving in the entire city would increase road bandwidth substantially. Not to mention the problem of people flaunting traffic rules and etiquette and causing backups as a result.
This is going to be much bigger for the rest of the world than in the roads-a-plenty USA.
Also, you could take a train and a self drive taxi would efficiently handle getting you to and from the train station. This is a huge enabler for public transit that can focus on more efficient high capacity routes.
Go all the way! Tune the traffic signals preferentially for these electric taxis. Configure them to pick up multiple fares going the same direction. To use train tracks for long distance.
They will be a ton cheaper too. Lower fuel costs, maintenance costs, and labor costs. The three most expensive costs associated with operating a taxi will be lowered significantly.
By governments will probably still tax Taxi ownership just like they do now, and just like for the airline industry you'll end up with taxes doubling the price of your trip. I don't believe in a cheap future of transportation as long as government has a say in it...
Yeah, like, because, airports need to see their taxes quadruple in 10 years, with no improvement whatsoever in their infrastructures ? Isn't that very obvious to you that they are just milking the cow and not just paying back for the operational costs ? Same for motorways.
If you are American, your cost of flying and driving is already quite low compared to the rest of the world, what's being "milked?" Since you used motorways and might be from the UK, I don't know what your situation is. Transportation infrastructure is one of those monopolies that the government is the best choice to take care of.
> Transportation infrastructure is one of those monopolies that the government is the best choice to take care of.
There are many countries around the world where the government has no money to take care of the infrastructure and you need private ventures to step in.
relationship > You can't expect governments to do everything. And these countries used to be in authoritarian regimes, so don't blame the private sector, it didn't exist there until recently.
I agree, so we can't make any inferences about them at this point. The problem with the libertarian hypothesis is that it lacks any reasonable examples to support it. There are however plenty of examples of governments that do work pretty well; even the USA is not as dysfunctional as many would like to believe.
> even the USA is not as dysfunctional as many would like to believe.
Well, when you have 15 trillions of unpaid debt behind your door, I can hardly call that functional. If it were any private business they would have gone bankrupt 50 years ago. If you cut the money supply, the government stops in the hour.
You have no idea what it means for the USA to be a debtor of last resort and support the world's most popular reserve currency. Only in a libercrazian world, which is necessarily stuck in the stone age, would the USA go "bankrupt." But this is not the forum to discuss this, I suggest you hang out in reddit's /r/economics rather than /r/libertarian for a more realistic discussion about the American and world economies.
China buys treasuries because its the only think they can do with their forex without destroying their economy; they basically lend us money at a negative interest rate after inflation is considered, and are very happy to do it. If we stopped borrowing money, that would be a big problem as we are a debtor of last resort.
I would love to argue more, but my Beijing to Detroit flight is boarding.
Stop pretending you have the universal truth in the matter. Go and read Hayek for a change instead of Reddit, you will get a whiff of fresh air. Explain me who's going to pay the massive debt when China and others refuse to play the role of creditor in the future. And let's not pretend it's never going to happen.
One of the big advantages of completely self-driving cars will be for the elderly. Thing about it, currently our grandparents and great-grandparents who cannot drive anymore rely on family/ public transport and expensive taxis to get around. Once we reach the age of our grandparents we will be much for fortunate to be able to still travel independently wherever we want. This is a massive plus to look forward to.
Linked to this is deliveries. They can be made to your door front at any time (eg the vehicle can require you use a code or scan something to unlock your delivery). The drastically lower delivery costs would reduce the need to have to go to various places.
And perversely, if accidents happened one tenth as often, they'd become news, and people would think they were more common and dangerous than they do now. The question is whether we can get to a point of no return with self-driving cars before that effect takes hold.
> The question is whether we can get to a point of no return with self-driving cars before that effect takes hold.
Insurance companies can take care of that too. Just charge a huge premium to drivers who want to drive by themselves. You'll see even the most confident macho driver submit to the AI overlords.
Unfortunately this is true, much like all the news about the Model S fire. Plus many people have an inherent distrust of technology. I would go so far as to think many people would see an accident caused by an autonomous vehicle to be somehow worse than a "normal" accident.
That said, it does seem inevitable; just a matter of time (perhaps a lot of it).
Finally, I suspect it will be necessary (more for PR than technical reasons) to require a capable driver ready to take over in case the autopilot were to fail, much like with commercial airliners, at least during the initial adoption period. And if so, it also seems inevitable that the majority of crashes ostensibly caused by these vehicles will in fact be due to drivers taking control and making poor decisions at inopportune times. You know when people complain about GPS because it led them astray, but it turns out the real problem was they didn't trust it in the first place, so ignored its directions?
I think most rational people would come to realize that even if the 1/10 of deaths are caused by computer errors then at least the problem can be fixed over time. With human error, there's not much you can do.
This is just it. Most people aren't rational, and they don't think statistics apply when they are causally involved. How many people have you met who think that "don't drink and drive" doesn't apply to them because they "can hold their liquor" or "have had enough practice driving drunk"?
The match up isn't even when you have "random thing happens and you die" on one side and "dangerous situation happens where your personal ability plays a small role" on the other. The only way I can see to spin it is to convince people that they don't want to be on the road with other human drivers.
> if the 1/10 of deaths are caused by computer errors then at least the problem can be fixed over time.
This only follows through if you don't introduce new technology and innovations to your software (and thus new bugs), which isn't going to happen.
If you look at air travel, the number of fatal accidents occurring each decade since the 1950s has stayed around the same, even though we've significantly improved automated systems and reduced the potential for pilot error.
The number of accidents has perhaps stayed roughly the same but there's a hell of a lot more planes flying every day now. So it's highly likely that the accident rate per flight has dropped dramatically. (Though I don't have the data handy to support either hypothesis).
This will be taken care of by insurance companies. If the data is there to show that automatic cars are involved in a lot less accidents than regular cars, the insurance premium will be prohibitively expensive for non-automatic cars. Only rich folks will be able to drive.
why would premiums be higher than they are now? Premiums for automatic should be lower. No reason for current premiums to go up. With all other automatic cars on the road, even a man driven car is less likely to be in an accident than currently. Premiums all around should go down.
I think a lot of the objections/concerns in this thread would more-or-less melt away when you consider that we already have practically self-flying planes. Crashes? Contingency protocols? Hacking? Bugs? All these have and are continuing to be addressed by the airline industry.
In fact, while I don't know this for a fact, I would highly suspect that the number of airline accidents that are the result of a flaw in the automated systems is dwarfed by the number of accidents caused by humans overriding the automated systems.
(If you want a feel for just how automated flying has become, I particularly like this video of an A380 landing at SFO: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3HKN-FWNq0 . Just look at how much the pilots aren't doing.)
The objections will melt away when my self driving car pulls up to the curb, I roll out of the bed I had installed in place of the back seat and I toss my martini glass into the bin. The person next to me will care fuckall for safety when they see all that comfort and distraction.
I wonder how the cars will deal with inevitable accidents - what does the self driving car prioritise? If there is no choice but to hit one of two different cars does it pick the one with the fewest occupants? Is there calculation of likely injuries (eg bounce off two cars causing less severe injuries to both than hitting one harder). Avoid all other vehicles resulting in more severe injuries to the occupant?
Cars can't stop instantly and the energy has to go somewhere.
This. I am reminded of Isaac Asimov's three robot rules.
I am also led to wonder, who will be implicated if an accident happens? What if the auto-driving car has a bug? Or if it was infected with a virus or hacked? What if the driver deliberately modified a self-driving car to cause injury to a target?
Communication between "smart" cars opens up some good possibilities to increase safety even when the inevitable accident occurs.
Consider: Car #1 suddenly realizes (for whatever reason) it is going to impact car #2 or car #3 at approximately equal energy for either crash, pings both, #3 isn't "smart", no reply. #2 pongs back, car #1 heads for car #2, reports this to #2, car #2 deploys air bags proactively using a lowered-energy inflation mode since there is some advanced warning of the impact and sets its own transmission mode and braking (or lack thereof) to be optimal for safest possible (to inside occupants and other detected cars in the impact area) energy transfer.
It's important to note that that $450bn isn't just ploughed into the ground each year. That's the wages of taxi drivers, truck drivers, mechanics, engineers, and all their associated support. While losing all that will be a net win for the economy, we're talking about millions of people becoming unemployed.
This is not a new problem. Automation has already rendered a very large part of the world's population economically unnecessary.
As far as I understand from the article, they are talking about the estimated benefit from crashes. If in the end we need less ER surgeons and less cars go to junkyards then that is still clearly a good thing, as per classic 'broken window' economic thesis.
Does anyone think that self driving cars will lead to increased traffic? I think they're an amazingly good idea, but a lot of people live close to the city center and take public transportation because a long driving commute is a pain. If you can work or surf the web while commuting, why not have an hour and a half commute both ways? This could actually lead to way more driving and way more petrol burned.
What about self driving bicycles? You just need to peddle, and the integrated road traffic system removed the error prone human element completely from the equation.
When roads are fully automatic and electric, children will be able to play outside again; roads and cities will become quiet places in which to think and breathe
I am closely following the development of self driving cars specially at google and i can assure everyone of its sophistication that it's the best driver you can get for your car. I know you all would be aware of the fact but i want to take this opportunity to state that is has covered thousands of miles without a single accident isn't that an extraordinary achievement for a car without a driver(but a computer instead) I will start to use the car the first it launches if it fits my budget but i must say these are one of the best developments of 21st century.
Google self-driving cars have caused accidents, although Google claims the self-driving feature was off at the time.
I'm more concerned of what these cars will do to highway capacity and therefore traffic congestion due to the excessive lag/follow distance their algorithms impose. While they should be following at < 1sec lag due their super-human reflexes, what you actually see (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRIOE1IZrq4) is sub-human follow times and it's apparently the only car on the road that's frequently pumping on the breaks (which consequently makes following cars increase their lag time as well).
I've also read that they won't exceed the speed limit, which is significantly more dangerous than driving with the flow of traffic. I hope it knows enough to move over when being overtaken from behind. If you're driving 65mph on I-280 between San Fran and San Jose with no traffic, you are the slowest car on the road by between 20-40mph. The road has long straightaways, often 1+ miles of visibility, well paved, and I'm often overtaken while going 90mph.
I expect that the experience of having to share the road with these devices, as they start to become more common, will transition from, "Gee that's cool" to something more like "Geez, get off the road Goorama!"
> I've also read that they won't exceed the speed limit
I don't see any way they can exceed the speed limit right now - the legal liability alone would be huge. The best solution to the problems you're posing would be to adopt an German autobahn-like system.
What if it had a dial that I can set to (at least) +10mph on the highway
It seems simple to give the user control of a 'speed adjustment factor', and hence transfer liability to the user. Should be no different from adaptive cruise control letting me pick a speed. Cruise control doesn't stop working at 100mph.
Personal liability for operation of your automobile, regardless of the level of digital augmentation, must be very hard to relinquish.
I mean, they are willing to take over steering the car, but oh no, they can't break the speed limit while doing it?
More realistically, they don't break the speed limit because their error tolerances fall too much when they do.
"Google self-driving cars have caused accidents" - can you elaborate on that? I have only seen news reports a single minor (rear-end) accident, not plural.
But that was some time ago - were there other accidents, they've probably driven much more miles now?
And regarding speed-limits - I think that it's a great thing; speed limits need to be set to an honest number where I cannot get ticketed, ever, for simply driving at the appropriate speed, but apparantly the only thing that can force the bureaucrats to update those limits will be an army of robots that actually try to obey the law.
You straightaway want it to overtake lemans and lamborghini's did i not mention that it is still in the development phase?? all i can say is be patient and hope for a better product.
Quoth Wikpeida:
"In August 2011, a human-controlled Google driverless car was involved in a crash near Google headquarters in Mountain View, CA. Google has stated that the car was being driven manually at the time of the accident. A previous incident involved a Google driverless car being rear-ended while stopped at a traffic light."
It's still in the testing phase sir... and i am not sure what you expect when you question no has rear ended the cars??? you want a mile by mile report from google isn't it too much to ask for from a company which is just testing its new product focusing on making it a more safe car to use. you want them to maintain a driving book for this i don't wanna go on with this... let hope they manage to make a really nice and safe car in the end.
As someone who just had occipital nerve decompression surgery due to a whiplash injury, I can say I am very excited for self-driving cars. The amount of scar tissue the surgeon removed from those nerves was horrifying, and it was a relatively minor accident.
one thing: I do NOT like the idea of riding in a self-driven car when the majority of other cars are driven by humans. That doesn't seem ideal to me. I worry about a self-driving car driving exactly the speed limit and not being able to speed up whenever you need to, to either keep up with the traffic, or when someone is tailgating you. Especially at night, when you are driving and tired people drive straight up to you and don't slow down until the last second. I want to speed up in those instances.
I think a solution for this would be to have the "self driving" speed limit be 10-15mph faster then the normal limit on highways. Since driverless cars can react faster this wouldn't cause more accidents and it would allow driverless cars to keep up with traffic. Plus, if traffic slows there's nothing stopping the driverless car from slowing down as well.
Or even better, just set speed limits at realistic levels (around the 85th percentile of natural traffic flow) for everyone. That said, I assume the driverless vehicles would at least be programmed to exceed the speed limit if necessary for an emergency maneuver.
Why speeding up when being tailgated? I usually just lift my foot from the gas pedal. If you think I'm too slow, then fucking pass, don't try to bully me into driving faster.
When you're driving at like 3 am and there's someone that's approaching you, it's usually not because they're bullying you. It's that they're driving around 70mph and they're tired and their reflexes are slow when they're tired.
On the contrary, this is the kind of situation a self-driving car can (eventually) handle quite smoothly, by closely monitoring the speed of all the vehicles approaching from behind, estimate how likely each driver is paying attention (by drawing a graph of speed/position in, say, 15 seconds), and if collision is likely, either accelerate away or flash break light rapidly to warn the driver behind.
All these things are near impossible to an average human driver, but there's no reason why an AI would have more trouble looking behind than forward.
* If there are enough self-driving cars, it will also (hopefully) teach those drivers who feel entitled to go 90mph at 3am that tailgating is no longer a working strategy.
There's no reason for a self-driving car to prioritise adhering to the speed limit over avoiding a collision though.
Any sufficiently advanced self-driving AI will try to avoid being rear-ended like that. Even better, when a collision is unavoidable, an AI has a much better chance at making the 'right' decision as to how to crash.
"The central zones of $CITY are self-driving only". You could still use your normal car to get to parking lot near the city and switch to public transport but if you want to get INSIDE the zone then you need to be self-driving.
(On sidenote, you could have self-driving electric taxis that ONLY serve inside the zone as well as zone-only buses)
It'll probably take at least 40-50 years before autonomous vehicles become the norm. The interesting thing will be what happens in the meantime, when there's a mix of autonomous and human driven vehicles.
Will the laws change to have 'autonomous only' lanes? Will they replace HOV lanes? Will autonomous vehicles be allowed to make maneuvers that human driven cars cannot in order to improve traffic flow, such as driving through red lights if determined safe?
It was only 60 years between the Wright brothers and the moon landing. And considering the rate of technological advance is increasing, I think autonomous vehicles will take much less time. I can't even imagine what things will be like in 50 years.
The tech can make it possible in just 5-7 years what matters is how much time govt will take to formalize a law.. which probably you rightly said 40/50 years.
Also, getting people to buy them. There are still many, many cars from the mid 80's on the road, chugging along. The used car market is nothing to shake a stick at.
I'm really, really hoping the manual drive cars abandoned for autonomous cars are maximally recycled and not just left to rot in myriad junk yards.
I also imagine that some sort of centralized routing could significantly improve traffic and avoid major traffic jams. Networking protocols, but in the real world :P.
We can't even implement NFC payments because carriers are interested in the percentage of the revenue.
Sadly judging from this, there's no way self-driving are going to be in mainstream reality. With all the insurance, oil and other companies in the way....
I hope I'm proven wrong.
I have a question that is possibly very simply answered: How do multiple LIDAR systems interact when they are in a very close vicinity? Say bumper to bumper traffic in NYC at rush hour?
With this there would be huge possibilities of new age designer automatic-cars as you will have all the place to yourself. Don't assume it to look anything like regular cars. Infact some designs will enable people to live in it. It would probably be auto-driven homes.
It has some great cost advantages especially for those who run the business with multiple taxi. You can grow your fleet without worrying about the human resource.
Sadly technologies like these have not even point percentage acceptance. Trains and planes are capable of auto driven since ages but we don't actually see them put to use.
