GM Claims Advanced Cruise Control By 2008

pavelvp writes "Economist is reporting that General Motors is working on the prototype of the self-driving car. From the article, "The car uses updated technology combined with several existing innovations and, according to the manufacturer, could be in production by 2008. But, while the technology takes some of the boring bits out of driving, it falls far short of an automatic taxi service and, anyway, various legal, technical and social barriers to its introduction remain.""

Comments

Good idea

[Catamaran]

I look forward to the day when we relinquish all control of our cars once we enter the freeway. Scientific papers have found that traffic throughput could be increased up to 918.49% while reducing fatalities by a factor of 17.5!

Re:Good idea

[ZeroGee]

relinquish all control of our cars once we enter the freeway

Although your numbers are probably a joke, the actual theory merits discussion. Still, it won't happen for quite a while. People enjoy driving far too much. Movies like I, Robot and others involving "manual overrides" are actually fairly close to the truth. You think all the owners who buy sports cars, whether it's a base-model ford mustang or a top-end ferrari, are going to be satisfied "turning over all control" of their car and just reading the newspaper or watching a movie on the way to work? The only way this highway works is if every single car participates, otherwise the stupid human will be bumping into the super-fast computer-driven cars all day. Good luck getting buy-in from 100% of drivers. Not during my lifetime.

Re:Good idea

[william_w_bush]

or computer only lanes/sections ala car-pooling?
they can have a much higher density, along with less braking idiocy, or the "look at that crash" which stops traffic for miles. the govt can make that an incentive to have auto-cars.

No use.

[thermal_noise]

It's 2008. Give me my f*ing flying car instead.

Overall

[Council]

Very good idea, as far as the actual driving goes -- that is, I would use it.

Problem: It will crash when presented with some situations. You can watch for those situations, but since you don't normally /have/ to watch the road anymore, attention will drift for longer and longer, and you won't see something, and it will crash.

The few problems will be directly blamed on the car makers. They will not be able to keep this cruise control on the market.

I've often wished that my car would automatically stay between the lines. The roads are already tilted so that you can drive (with good alignment) quite a ways without touching the wheel. But if I had that option, it's only a matter of time before I fell asleep on a long freeway, and then the computer makes a mistake, and I crash.

The technology is not new. I saw a video on it quite a while ago. But you can't introduce it because some people will die as a viscerally direct result, even if it saves other lives in the process.

They mentioned that it would probably first be introduced as a "you're going off the road" warning system, and verrrry slowly work its way in from there. That's the only feasible option I see.

I really don't feel alarmist about this at all. They're gonna need to be very, very careful in introducing this, because when cars crash -- as they inevitably will at least once -- due to unexpected circumstances that arise quickly -- they will look very bad.