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.
