Maybe future cars have steering wheel stored away in the same way Spare tire is out of way. If things go totally bonkers in the middle of nowhere, you stop, install small steering wheel and drive manually.
If self-driving cars become the norm, people will have no idea what a steering wheel is or how to use it, any more than people today would know what to do with a horse stored in the trunk for emergencies.
Worst case scenario it'd be a controller of some kind and the car would be limited to 5mph, enough to limp back.
>> Maybe future cars have steering wheel stored away in the same way Spare tire is out of way.
A little off-topic, but an increasingly smaller number of cars are coming with spares (as someone who has experienced sidewall tire damage on the highway, it's an alarming trend).
More and more cars are just coming with tire patch kits, an aerosol tire fixer, or run-flat tires.
That's terrible. I would much rather swap in a spare than try to use some patch kit, then go back on the highway. From what I understand run-flat tires are also less than ideal. Isn't it true that they'll let you stop safely, but continuing driving with them will be problematic?
I live in the North Eastern US, so last fall I bought a second set of wheels for my car and installed some very nice snow tires on them. Now I carry a winter tire as the spare instead of the donut and a in the winter it's a summer tire. Long car trip + blown tire would mean I won't make it to my destination on the donut. Full size spare FTW.
What happens when I'm stuck in a ditch or sand or in a rut and need delicate manoeuvering? Maybe I'm out in a field in the middle of nowhere. No roads, just open field with seasonal hazards.
I still want a way to guide the vehicle manually without having to call someone with a winch.
The scenario described is so rare, that "calling someone with a winch" is likely to become the de-facto scenario. Why the unnecessary redundancy of having every car able to be controlled manually when in the very, very common case it's not needed?
People already keep AAA memberships in their wallets instead of a spare tire, tire wrench, jack, jumper cables, and starter one-shot battery in their trunk.
Rare? Where? Where I live we get a very heavy snowfall in Winter, and even a regular trip to shops ends in me trying to get moving again by rocking the car back and forth to get out of snow. Unless automatic vehicles will drive only on clean, dry roads in pristine condition?
[EDIT] OK you have snow tires. Then what's the deal? I've lived in snowbound places, without snow tires, and rarely had difficulty getting moving again after parking half an hour to shop. Sure, if you leave your car in a bad spot during a snowstorm you'll have problems in the morning, but most robocars will never have that problem, because they will only park in safe secure areas and only during the 2AM-5AM "quiet" period when people don't want to go places.
>> I've lived in snowbound places, without snow tires, and rarely had difficulty getting moving again
That is a YMMV statement.
I live in Canada, and after a major snowfall, I've seen plenty people get stuck --while-- driving on residential streets that hadn't been plowed yet. Starting from a stop and going up hills are often a problem in that situation too.
There are a lot of roads where I live that are one lane, with passing places. Or most of the time both drivers have to aim for a wide-ish part of the road and both bump up the hedge a bit. God knows how Google car will do that, half the tourists have problems figuring it out.
It's common to meet a car, both pause while the drivers try to figure out who has a better chance of reversing 500 wiggly metres to a passing place. If you meet an old lady, man, just stick it in reverse and drive as far as you need, waiting for her to even find reverse is pointless.
Quite a lot of those here in Scotland - and there is a fair amount of etiquette around how to drive properly on them without other people (locals) getting very annoyed with you.
I can't see any reason why self driving cars couldn't manage single track with passing places better than people - especially if they knew where the passing places are and could communicate with other cars.
I might want to back it up just tight at the Ikea dock to pick something up. Don't let "garage" get in the way of thinking of why you might need to take over manual steering. As amply exemplified above, single lane situation with two way traffic.
Ikea already delivers. It's difficult to imagine that they'll deliver less when they won't have to hire drivers to do so. The robo-delivery-van won't only lack a steering wheel, it will lack a seat. I envision doors on the front, and sliding dividers that push the next delivery forward when the van backs out of the driveway of the preceding delivery.
These will not be cars as we have known them. Most people today don't like cars as we have known them, nor the cruft that has built around that. A vocal minority here on HN really likes cars, exactly as they are, and they don't want to hear about these changes. That's OK, people who want to waste money on old-timey cars will be able to do so, for at least a few decades.
If not have a steering wheel blows your mind, hold on: which direction do you think the front seats will face, in the typical robocar?
[EDIT] I'm dreaming of a time when few people buy cars, so we'll no longer be plagued with car commercials.
One positive thing of emasculating ourselves from cars will be the dear of the car chase trope in French, Chinese, American, Australian, Indian and Nigerian cinema.
I'd expect chase scenes to endure, and they'll probably include robocars, but also hacks to get around/take advantage of their inherent chase limitations. E.g.: someone on a bicycle could intentionally ride through a crowd of pedestrians knowing that robocars won't just blast through to follow. Or the police could shut down a robocar remotely, but the fugitive could figure out how to escape the locked car. Etc.
That could be solved easily (and probably more accurately) by just having a few nudge buttons or some other UI. Use them for those "Move left a few more inches" or "Back up just a little more" situations. These cars should be able to do fine maneuvering/adjustments much better than a lot of people can.
> The problem with including a steering wheel in a self-driving car is that human drivers can’t be trusted to effectively take over in sticky situations. So the makers of driverless cars can’t responsibly include a steering wheel.
Excellent. The thing that scared me was the idea of sitting in a car with the wheel moving by itself, trying to constantly guess if it was doing the right thing. I want to just sit down and go.
> “A huge fraction of the time, nothing bad will happen because the vehicles really are reliable, hundreds of kilometers at a time before something really terrible happens,”
Hundreds of thousands I hope that means, unless their cars cause a catastrophe every few trips. Or have I completely misunderstood that?
> Research that Stanford has done shows that drivers resuming control from Level 3 vehicles functioning in autonomous mode take 10 seconds just to attain the level of ability that a drunk driver possesses. And to get back to full driving competence takes 60 seconds.
Wouldn't this also hold true for airline pilots? How quickly can they resume control of a plane when something goes amiss?
My understanding is that airline pilots only use autopilot when at cruising altitude. At those heights they have several minutes to take over and fix a problem before crashing.
Automatic landing systems are mandatory for category III ILS approaches. You can search for ILS IIIb on YouTube to find examples of landings where pilots can basically see nothing until they are seconds from the ground.
There tends to be a substantial difference between scanning the instruments actively looking for trouble vs your typical passenger watching movies, reading facebook, talking on the phone.
A good analogy would be an onsite ops team optimistically has nothing to do all shift but they can respond extremely quickly when it becomes necessary, whereas if I get an emergency phone call in the middle of the night its going to be at least a minute of WTF before I can settle down and get to work.
The biggest problem I have with no way to drive the car is parking. "HAL, grannies knee is hurting her, that being the whole point of driving her to physical therapy today, I insist we park illegally at the entrance door for 5, well, 30 seconds while she gets out, then and only then we will park for real about 1000 feet away" "Thank you HAL but I don't care what google maps says, the building has been remodeled since your data was downloaded 5 years ago and the entrance is now on the other side of the building so (insert jedi wave) you will park on the other side of the building" "HAL you may not have noticed but that urban parking spot is full of broken glass bottles so you park over there instead, at least as long as I'm paying your repair bills when you pay your own bills by driving for Uber then you can pop your tires whenever you want" "Yes HAL I know we're going to store XYZ at the mall, but thats just my first stop and I want you to park at store ABC because its my last stop so I know %^&# well that google calendar says I'm going to store XYZ and if you ever want your oil changed again you will park at store ABC exactly as I tell you" "Yes HAL the loading zone is illegal to park in, but think about it for a second, I want to park in the loading zone because I'm loading new furniture into the trunk" "HAL I'm not even going to try to explain the concept of a drive thru window at my bank, you just let me navigate OK?" "HAL this is called the Concerts In The Park event because its a music concert in the park, and you will park in that grass field right where the helpful parking attendant is waving" (edited to point out that all of these situations are predictable well over a minute in advance, or will be "argued" with the car while its in Park mode)
(And edited to note that the average drunk driver is a very safe driver and drives hundreds, even thousands of times between arrests or crashes ... there exist high functioning alcoholics who basically haven't driven sober in a decade or so ... all you need to achieve is better than the average teen, perhaps, which isn't a terribly high achievement, and that may only require a small fraction of a second to get up to speed. Or during a software crash all you need to do is drive better than a crashed computer, which likely isn't very challenging even for a drunk or a teen)
What if I want a car I can choose to drive occasionally because I like driving? Will I have to buy a manual and a self-drive? (Although to be fair, these self-driving cars would probably suck to drive since they are not designed for driver pleasure)
There may well be "hybrids" for a while (think stop the car and convert to manual mode, not switch on the fly). If self driving cars really take off, I suspect it will become a niche market pretty quickly due to pressure from a) higher costs of vehicle, b) substantially higher insurance rates and possibly c) restricted roads (e.g. major interstates switch to auto only).
Perhaps you'll have status symbol sedans with a manual mode nearly nobody uses, and a number of other options that become more of an expensive hobby than a primary means of transportation.
We are a ways off from this technologically, but if the tech problems can be solved, it's pretty hard to imagine it not happening.
Then you can get a specialty car designed to have manual controls. The same way you could get a horse-pulled carriage or a dogsled. It just won't be the standard product that everybody uses.
Eventually, people who like driving will be relegated to closed-track courses where any accidents are minimized and occur only with people who have signed waivers. In short, take up NASCAR.
People who drive manually and risk others' safety for their own pleasure can expect to be stopped, first with lawsuits, then with laws.
What if I want an oven I can choose to grill with because I like grilling? Will I have to buy an outdoor grill and grill by hand? (Although to be fair, these electric ovens would probably suck to grill with since they are not designed for charcoal grilling enthusiasts.)
I think you are engaging in a false analogy here. Comparing a grill to an oven is like comparing a passenger car to a panel truck: they are in the same broad class of thing but serve different purposes.
A better analogy would be that of a grill that can use gas or charcoal as the fuel; different means to the same purpose.
Yes, I am engaging in a false analogy. My intention was to humorously showcase specialized tools at a much further level of differentiation. And a passenger car is as different from a panel (flatbed) truck as a hand-driven gasoline car is from a solar-powered self-driving car.
I was attempting to highlight that these tools have nearly equivalent purposes, but the educated consumer would have a definite preference for one or the other, depending on plans and situations.
> And a passenger car is as different from a panel (flatbed) truck as a hand-driven gasoline car is from a solar-powered self-driving car.
I disagree. The function of a panel truck is the transport of bulky and heavy materials. The function of a passenger car is the transport of people with fairly small amounts of materials. Changing the power plant or control system does not change these fundamental functions or fundamental design decisions that go into the system as a whole.
> I was attempting to highlight that these tools have nearly equivalent purposes
They don't, just like a passenger car and panel truck do not have nearly equivalent purposes. Yes, an oven and a grill both cook food. A passenger car and a panel truck both move people and items. Each of these is specialized to cover a certain subset of the problem space within those areas, though. Making one better at covering its problem space does not change what it fundamentally is, and self-driving vehicles are just an improvement in covering the existing problem space.
To be fair; as the OP I didn't find the original comment humourous but dismissive and therefore rather insulting (Hence I never bothered to follow up) as well as many issues with the "Analogy".
Eventually the statistics will make their way to the lawmakers and the "if it saves just one life" logic will put an end to your driving hobby. It's inevitable.
This will eventually extend to anything fun that humans do today. Any time a machine is shown to be more competent than a human at something, humans will no longer be allowed to engage in that activity.
> Research that Stanford has done shows that drivers resuming control from Level 3 vehicles functioning in autonomous mode take 10 seconds just to attain the level of ability that a drunk driver possesses. And to get back to full driving competence takes 60 seconds.
So they're assuming that one cannot improve at this task, taking over control from the self-driving car, with practice? They could even test this ability.
How often do you practice emergency driving situations in your car? I could go out every weekend on the skid pan, or have someone throw paint randomly over the windscreen every so often, or get someone to hide amongst parked cars and push some unlucky sucker out in front of me, but I don't. These are all things that I could practice, that would make me much better able to handle a driving emergency, that I already don't do. Why would I practice taking over from the self-driving car?
Not a difficult assumption to make. If the goal is to do as the self-driving car in Demolition Man did, by relinquishing control to the driver at the end of a freeway, then sure. It's a normal situation, you have ample warning beforehand, it's expected.
If the goal is to include a steering wheel so that one can swerve to avoid an accident, then no, it can't be improved to that level. If you are going to have to keep that level of attention, a self-driving car improves nothing.
The difficulty lies in having to be instantly available, fully aware, and alert enough to pick up driving at a moment's notice. Basically, you have to be mentally "driving" already, by which point why bother having a self-driving car at all?
After listening to Avi Rubin's Ted talk[0] and seeing articles like the Hacker's remotely kill jeep on Highway[1], I am less bullish on self-driving cars. Mobile and regular OSs are vulnerable to attack, except here your data as well as your safety is at risk. As well as making these cars orders of magnitude safer (in terms of navigation), they will need to be orders of magnitude harder to hack and take control of.
A few high profile hacks leading to crashes and fatalities will be enough to turn a large swathe of the population off autopilot technology, which they are already skeptical of.
Well yes, it makes sense that you shouldn't be required to take over whenever the car decides, but I'd still like to be able to start up the car and drive it in manual mode if I so desire. I get a lot of pleasure out of driving, and I don't want to give that up even if I want to let my car pilot itself sometimes.
There's got to be some way to transition to fully autonomous cars that could be implemented.
I'd really like to see something that would put a hard limit of ~15mph/25kmh on city streets for all motor vehicles. Upon entering a high-density zone, the car would automatically be put into a state with limits on speed, acceleration, horse power and adherence to traffic controls.
People would still be behind the wheel but they would be severely restricted in how they operate within the high density zone. Basically this would make horseless carriages be conducted in a manner more similar to horse carriages.
The movie Total Recall has already shown us that if you yank off the torso of the robot driver, there'll be a joystick underneath that can be used to operate the car manually.
Alternate Title: Two sentences explaining why I will never own a self driving car.
Seriously, I'll only trust trains on rails with autonomous operation, and it's profoundly stupid of any country to let autonomous machines operate freely on open roads.
The political implications of autonomous machinery with nigh-unbounded geographic reach are deeply hazardous.
