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Road Train Completes First Trials In Sweden
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports technology that links vehicles into 'road trains' that can travel as a semi-autonomous convoy has undergone its first real world tests with trials held on Volvo's test track in Sweden. Researchers believe platoons of cars could be traveling on Europe's roads within a decade cutting fuel use, boosting safety and may even reducing congestion. SARTRE researchers say that around 80% of accidents on the road are due to human error so using professional lead drivers to take the strain on long journeys could, they say, see road accidents fall. They also predict fuel efficiency could improve by as much as 20% if 'vehicle platooning' takes off, with obvious benefits for the environment. 'An automated system is likely to make it safer as it takes away driver error but it would have to be 100% reliable,' says John Franklin 'This kind of system would also require a complete change in motoring culture for drivers to hand over control.'"
That figure seems a bit low. Unless an animal runs across the road or similar, other problems are all IMO human error.
If something falls off a truck, that's human error for not securing the load properly. If high winds knock over your truck, that's human error for driving in dangerous conditions. If you skid on an ice patch, that's your error for driving too fast for the conditions, etc.
which is totally what she said
The problem where the UK is concerned is that motorways are actually our safest roads - it's people like the idiot woman this morning in the Range Rover who think that size overrides the Highway Code that present the problem, and this doesn't address it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
One of my engineering professors worked on something like this in the 90s, when I asked him why we never saw anything like this come into use he said that they knew that the first time anyone was killed in an accident involving one of the automated vehicles the entire project would be dead. Regardless of if it was from something like a blowout causing a computer driven car to swerve into the other lane, or some drunk ramming headlong into a "platoon" of cars.
Even if it is much safer, the lawyers will be salivating while they wait for the first death.
You can trust the system, but the system doesn't know what's happening to your car. It knows what's happening to the leading truck. Suppose that a car in the convoy has a failure, a blown tire, anything that makes it slow down or change trajectory (maybe some bump or hole in the road). How do following cars avoid it if their drivers are sleeping, reading a book, having lunch? I know that people start car accidents while they are driving (texting, playing with music controls, having lunch) but I wonder if road trains are really safer than an equivalent number of cars each with its own driver. I think that this is the only safe road train.
Perhaps one day we could have automated platoons of Slashdot submissions about the same damn thing, too?
The last submission was about SARTRE before the tests started. This is the results.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
Usually, too much importance is given to the immediate cause of an accident. Most accidents don't happen due to a single cause, there's a number of circumstances that must exist together for an accident to happen.
In modern highways, the usual circumstance for most accidents is crowded lanes. The usual cause for crowded lanes is a few dumbasses of the i-hate-tailgaters-and-i-have-the-right-to-drive-at-any-speed-below-the-limit species.
Make it a severe offense, same penalties as drunken driving, to drive on the left lane with someone behind you and those "80% accidents" will go away.
Make it a severe offense to tailgate and you get the same solution, plus its the assholes instead of the timid that you would be punishing.
I get it when someone is going 55 in the left lane, that's insanity, but the vast majority of people whom I know that think like this are usually going 15 over the speed limit and riding the ass of the guy going 5 over. The tailgaters and aggressive drivers are the ones who cause fatalities.
Perhaps one day we could have automated platoons of Slashdot submissions about the same damn thing, too?
The last submission was about SARTRE before the tests started. This is the results.
Ohh? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/18/0411235/How-Europe-Will-Lower-Emissions-mdash-Self-Driving-Cars (2 days old)
The team behind SARTRE has now conducted its first real world test, using a sole Volvo S60 sedan that followed a lead truck around the automaker's test facility near Gothenburg, Sweden. In the video, the driver is free to take his eyes off the road and his hands off the wheel. In fact, he uses neither his hands nor feet during the test.
And yes, it's the same fucking video. DUPE.
Fandroids hate facts.
Good luck selling this to anyone from the Washington, DC area. The Metro is, rightly or wrongly, notorious in the DC area for being dangerous. The WMATA is notorious for everything from ignoring safety recommendations, running old cars, and skipping maintenance, to promoting a culture of hostility within its workforce. Metro employees are underpaid, overworked, and, to put it delicately, benefit from a somewhat lenient hiring process. Now, who would you propose will be driving the lead car around the Capital Beltway? Unless you pick this one segment of public transportation to be contracted out to a private company, it's gonna be the WMATA in the DC area. If I wanted some surly bastard with no professional training who hates his job and hasn't slept in a day to drive, I'd do it myself, thanks.
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You fail at both driving and physics. To get a safe distance to the car infront of you you only need to slow down for 5 seconds at most then you can match speed with car infront of you, there is no recursive slow down for the entire road.
"It takes two to tailgate, a tailgater and a tailgatee. As I said, accidents usually aren't caused by one single cause, in most cases if just one of a set of circumstances didn't happen there would be no accident."
That's like saying it takes two to punch someone, the puncher and the punchee. It's retarded. There exists none, zero, zip, nada excuse to tailgate. There exists no situation where you're better off tailgating the person infront of you, you don't even get to your destination faster.
And for the record it is already illegal in most of the world to drive slow in the left lane (Usually under some law conserning disrupting traffic ) however that only applies if he's driving slower then the limit, if you think that's to slow then that's your problem. However there's never really any reason to go faster, suppose you drive at 110 on a 100 mph road, now your 30 minute trip takes 27 minutes, who cares? Those 3 minutes are a rounding error of your day.
Of course, and if the lead driver gets killed in an accident and some of the passangers in other cars survive the crash, they will be automatically shot to follow the lead as closely as possible. Also, everbody who works in automotive research is stupid and not able to see this obvious problem.
What if we built a single rail that mimics the interstate system, but made to hurdle small cars that meet a standard specification for size, weight, and aerodynamic profile. Perhaps the track is a single electromagnetic pipe cars hung from? You could then purchase a car with a built in connector to operate on this track, and a dash panel to choose destination and cost. You can drive local, and hop on the rail to travel longer distances. The rail control computer could slow and speed individual cars to group them for aerodynamic efficiency.
I think, given the disagreement on your claim, it would be best if you gave an actual cite that people could actually look up. Not just "it's in this other book", but actually something like "it's in section blah, subsection blahblah of California general law blahblahblah". That would clearly silence your critics if it confirms what you assert, and it would stop all this speculative back and forth.