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Smart Cars to Save Stupid Drivers?
bl8n8r writes "Ford spokesman Mike Vaughn said they tested computerized optical scanning and a variety of warnings: a vibrating steering wheel, the sound of a car driving over rumble strips and a visual warning projected on the windshield. Researchers also tested a so-called "active" system in which the vehicle would actually adjust the steering automatically if it veered too far one way or the other."
What if you're driving down a perfectly straight road and suddenly your car starts weaving back and forth because it's trying to correct its path because some dirt's gotten into its sensors and screwed them up? What if you're trying to turn and the car won't let you? What if you're trying to drive and the computer intervenes doing dangerous things? There'd better be a manual override...
It has to be literally 100 percent fool proof before an automaker will use it.
Well, looks like no matter how you build these systems, quantum uncertainty is going to prevent your product from comming to market.
-Colin
shouldn't this post be titled "Walking, Buses, and Trains to Save Stupid Drivers"...?
All well and good, but if you really want to sell the system, you need warnings for more common dangers. For instance, you could add radar and lidar detectors, and enhance the optical scanning to detect police cars. The system could then indicate the location of these dangers on the screen, using the optical scanning to help filter out store security systems and such from real threats, as well as detecting cops using passive techniques. Oh, and you'd not put this in Volvos but rather Mustangs.
I worked on the B-2 Bomber's Flight Control System. We had a "stick shaker" wired to the pilot's controls that would vbrate when a stall condition was detected. This was activated after a warning light and tone were already used to alert the pilot. I have no experience with any other flight control system, but I would suspect that this is not unique to the B-2.
Perhaps another slashdotter can post and let us know.
"Prepare for the worst - hope for the best."
And even cheaper than getting a smart car for every stupid person. Get ready for it. Get ready for it.
...but that's crazy talk.
The bus, the subway, the train, the bike, and walking.
- I don't need to go outside, my CRT tan'll do me just fine.
Others may not be aware that the Roads in Texas have things called 'road tites'. They're reflective markers glued to the road where white and yellow lines would be. At night they light up very bright from headlight reflection and if you're going the wrong way they reflect red. If you 'wander' in your lane and run of them you'll now it - they have various levels. Small medium and large. As you can guess the small ones are for yellow lane change markers. Medium for right medians and turn lanes. Large will blow your hubcaps off and introduce corrective action behavior preventing you from re-doing the act.
I'm surprised the car companies are going for this. This seems to be a huge liablity problem for them. Right now if you plow into a crowd of school children it's your fault. But if this thing malfunctions, or if someone can argue that the auto-steer system has *anything* to do with the accident, wouldn't there be a ton of lawsuits? Car companies have deep pockets.
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That is why we will never see the fabled car that drives itself to your destination. If you and I are in an accident, and both of us were letting the cars drive themselves, who is at fault? The manufacturer(s) of course. The liability of such systems is unbelievably high.
I've often suspected the automated highway project demonstrated in CA was canceled for this reason. I imagine some high level people after the demo finally realizing what it was really about and then realizing what happens when it DOES break down in some way.
Step 1: After five years, your name is added to a pool of people who are eligable for retest.
Step 2: Every year, X percent of that pool are required to be restested. You get one 'grace' rescheduling, but if you miss your test, your license is yanked. Period.
Step 3: If you fail your test, you get sent to a retraining course, at your expense. If you can't afford it, your license is yanked. Period.
Step 4: If you, after taking the retraining, fail your test again, you are reduced to a G1 (for non Canadians: you may only drive with a fully licensed and five-years experienced driver in the passenger seat, only during daytime, and not on major highways, 0.0 BAC, and other minor restrictions) for a period of one year.
Step 5: If you pass your test either time, your name is removed from the pool for five years.
Step 6: If you have demerits/fines/etc, your name is more likely to be chosen from the pool, if it's in the pool. X amount of demerits or fines/traffic offences automatically send you for a restest as normal.
Step 7: NO EXCEPTIONS. No hardship waivers, nothing. If driving is that important to you, you shouldn't have driven like an idiot.
This way, the system isn't too overburdened with retests, idiots get retested more often, and people are encouraged to actually drive properly.
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Not at all.
I have a fairly lengthy commute to work each day.
Honestly... I am surprised there are not MILLIONS of accidents per day, our streets littered with the bodies of the dead and dying. Each morning, it's the same thing.
EVERYONE is on a cell phone. Or worse. Some are reading. Some are trying to write something down, paper pressed against the wheel, pen in hand. Some are on the phone, trying to write something down. Some are apparently trying to find a well-hidden item, perhaps tucked below the passenger seat. The other day, I was being tailgated at 90+ Mph... by a fully-loaded flatbed. He was so furious that he actually got out of his truck at the toll booth, came up to my window, and told me he would "bitch-slap" me if I ever did that again (did what ?). And you wonder why you turn on the traffic report each morning and hear about the overturned tractor trailers and trucks.
I was rear-ended last week, while sitting at a dead stop at a traffic light. His explanation ? "yeah... I hit ya." Thanks. On my way home from the collision center in the rental car, I was bumped again from behind - AGAIN, sitting at a dead stop in traffic. No damage this time.
It's going to take more than a vibrating steering wheel to help these people. While behind the wheel, actually driving is the last thing on their minds.
Despite what Bernie Eccelstone says, F1 cars are practically driving themselves. This year, he threw out launch control and three years ago he banned 2-way telemetry, since cars were dynamically adjusting things like brake bias on every turn.
F1 should embrace this stuff, and eventually go to a driverless format. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. Ferrari, BMW, Mercedes and jaguar, along with Honda and Toyota and Ford, should all be duking it out to create the ultimate race car, minus a pilot.
At this point, F1 is only really about the tech anyhow, and Montoya has been saying for a couple years now that F1 cars could break the one minute threshold at Indy, except that the human body can't stand that much force, esp. in braking. Baaaaah, toss em! Let's see cars that absolutely FLY. It needs 4 wheels, and it has a weight and dimension minimum, and then, it's all on from there! THe advances those guys would make would be gigantic in just a few years.
You have a point, which I could counter by asking how someone driving into a large empty parking lot could possibly avoid seeing a vehicle in the middle of it laying down rubber and doing 360's and fail to excercise the appropriate caution.
We can then discuss where one person's rights end and another person's rights begin, but the real point I'm trying to get across is that I don't know of, say, a public skidpad I can drive down to this afternoon and test out how my truck behaves in a slide and how I need to react to counter it.
It is completely ludicrous to me that we expect people to learn how to control a vehicle in a dangerous situation by giving them free reign to go out and get into that situation on public highways without any prior knowledge or training.
Like anything else, some people will have a natural affinity for car control and not have many accidents. Others will find it difficult to grasp the concepts involved and may have several wrecks a year. Both people could benefit from training before they hit the road at 75mph. The motoring public at large benefits as well.
When my stepdad taught me how to drive in the snow, we came to a long bridge with nobody else around. He told me to take it up to about 40mph, and then said abruptly, "Now jam the brakes." I did, and we slid for about a third of the length of the bridge before stopping. I still recall his next words to this day: "Remember how long it took to stop."
I'm not arguing for preventing anybody from driving. In my opinion, in much of the US today driving should be a right rather than a privilege. What I am arguing against is underskilled and unprepared people driving.
I have to take NRA safety classes before I get a hunting license to go out into the public (or other) woodlands to hunt game with a firearm.
I don't feel that car control training before a driver's license is issued to go out on the public roads with a three-ton SUV is any different. Don't even get me started on the parents that buy 16-year-old Johnny a 300HP Mustang and fail to enroll him in classes on how to keep it pointed straight.
Some accidents aren't preventable. Most are. Speed itself is less of a problem than driver error. Most driver error could be prevented with training.
OK, I'm done now.
"your current auto is no less safe tomorrow as it is today because of this technology"
Actually, you're safer. Less likely to be rammed by a sleepy rich person. Not every traffic fatality is the fault of the person who dies.
I once almost hit a trailer (i.e. mobile home) because I fell asleep for a second, woke up, thought I missed my turn, and turned hard right...a hundred feet early. Of course, this system might not have helped with that much as the first two (falling asleep and waking immediately) still could have happened...with buzzing, etc. to further distract me (which might have made the situation worse).
Maybe while the rich road test this for the rest of us, they will find out that it's like air bags. Marginal help when it works, but fatal when something goes wrong (e.g. air bag decapitation).
Btw, did anyone post a "I only travel by foot, you insenstive clod!" yet? Despite their ubiquity in the US, etc., most people in the world still don't own cars.
> your current auto is no less safe tomorrow as it is today because of this technology
EXACTLY. There is one thing they could do, albeit the front-end investment is high. Stop using asphalt. Seriously how old is this material? When was the last time we saw a serious innovation in road surfacing? What about that hard rubbery stuff they make indoor tennis courts out of? Make a smoother version and lay the stuff down! Think of the added traction, flexibility of the road, lack of potholes, better heat retention so a little less ice-prone, etc etc etc.
I'm sure materials science folks could come up with something. Something far superior to asphalt and the tennis court stuff.
Here in PA they spend millions a year fixing the roads. We have one of the worst combinations of terrain and weather for asphalt integrity. Look at the weather radar sometime and see how often multiple contrasting weather systems swirl together right over PA. It's not just the weather but the wildly fluctuating temperature changes, -10 to +45 and then back again with rain-freezing rain-snow, then rain again all in 8-12 hours is NORMAL here much of year.
Sure it would cost the same as a dozen years of asphalt repair. But COME ON, how many times are we going to keep perpetuating the same problem?
Another thought, we have power cables and copper wires running _next to_ most roads. How about running 2 fat copper wires under the road near the common tire-contact areas. hook them up to those nifty solar panels and traffic signal power. In the winter that could heat the asphalt to just 33.x degrees. Whoala, no ice.
Somebody's going to tell me spreading and cleaning up mega-tons of salt and cinders, plus all the accidents is somehow cheaper?
100 years of driving and our roads are still only one step above dirt.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
Evolution is short-sighted. Natural selection has no goal, but the product (living organism) is something that "works" for the environment. And works means able to reproduce life.
If being fundamentalist causes more children (which it seems today) and they spread their genes, then in terms of natural selection, it's a better gene (though obviously, there is a great interdependence between nature and nurture, single genes affecting multiple characteristics and multiple genes combining to influence one).
"Better" is a loaded term and your understanding is inappropriate with evolution. I hate the phrase "survival of the fittest" because so many have failed to understand that actually you're defining "fittest" as those who survive. And since natural selection is short-sighted, there are cases where you reach a local optima and need something radical to occur to put "evolution on the right path". And that phrase there is biased upon your values and expectations of what should occur (assuming intelligence is good and to be always desired versus maybe limited intelligence and following with society).
Also, evolution could be reactionary to the environment. As diseases spread, those resistent to some forms will likely survive. HIV is tearing apart parts of Africa and it's likely that there will be some that are resistent to various strands of HIV. They're only "better" humans because of the conditions of today, though it's likely that by gaining immunity, they could be losing some other characteristic. That's life.
In times like these, it is helpful to remember that there have always been times like these. - Paul Harvey