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.'"

Comments

Never going to work in a litigious society

[orphiuchus]

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.

Re:Never going to work in a litigious society

[teh kurisu]

The protocol for leaving the platoon and returning manual control to the driver is going to be the most difficult thing to solve I think, particularly where it occurs in a emergency situation. A blowout on the motorway is dangerous enough, but a blowout on the motorway where control of a car is suddenly returned to a driver in the middle of drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper could be disastrous.

Re:Never going to work in a litigious society

[timholman]

Even if it is much safer, the lawyers will be salivating while they wait for the first death.

I think the fear of lawsuits preventing autonomous vehicles is way overblown.

Historically, the auto industry has had several design flaws that have led to huge lawsuits, e.g. exploding gas tanks on the Ford Pinto. Ford's gas tank design led to numerous deaths and injuries, and corporate memos later showed that the company was even aware of the problem, yet Ford was not sued out of business. Even today, with all the fuss and lawsuits concerning Toyota's computer systems, Toyota is doing just fine. Lawsuits are part of the cost of doing business in the auto industry.

The technology being used in autonomous vehicle research was, by modern standards, painfully primitive 20 or 30 years ago. I could see how people would fear legal liability, because those older systems weren't smart enough to deal with every contingency in a roadway environment. Today's research vehicles are much better, and in ten years they'll be even better still.

The question to ask is this: can autonomous vehicles do better than 35,000+ fatalities, 2 million+ injuries, and $200B+ in liability / medical costs per year? That's what the U.S. alone is paying right now with humans behind the wheel. 20 years ago, engineers knew their vehicles weren't robust enough for the roadway. As Google's own experiments have recently shown, things are much different now.

There's no doubt that autonomous vehicles will fail from time to time, and occasionally someone will be injured. But fatalities from a well-engineered system will be rare, and the roadways will be orders of magnitude safer. The fear of autonomous vehicles is basically a classic example of flawed risk perception by human beings - they are uncomfortable with a few hundred possible auto accidents with a computer in control, yet think nothing of millions of accidents with the current system because they all think "I'm in control of the situation".

Re:Never going to work in a litigious society

[Chrisq]

The question to ask is this: can autonomous vehicles do better than 35,000+ fatalities, 2 million+ injuries, and $200B+ in liability / medical costs per year? That's what the U.S. alone is paying right now with humans behind the wheel

That is the sensible question, but in reality it would have to be much safer to be accepted. We see this when there are train crashes. A train is already hundreds of times safer than a car but there are public inquiries, people brought to book and calls for improvement when they happen.

Re:Never going to work in a litigious society

[hypertex]

Even if it is much safer, the lawyers will be salivating while they wait for the first death.

There is a good reason why this project is sponsored by the EU and not the US.

While not perfect, the legal systems in most of Europe aren't not quite as broken as in the US.

There were tests of this in California in the 1991 timeframe but I don't know if it was the State or the Feds. A train of 5 white cars would assemble at speed on interstate 15 between Palm Springs and San Diego. With only inches in between, the train would travel back and forth on the freeway . Perhaps another can find a record of this as my Google-fu is not adequate.

Re:80% due to human error?

[orphiuchus]

Tire blowouts, serpentine belt breaks, break cylinders exploding. Sometimes its a maintenance issue, but a lot of the time things just fail. I had the rear cylinder explode on a vehicle I was driving at highway speeds like 10 years ago, I just barely managed to stop myself with the hand-break on the shoulder without running into the stopped traffic ahead of me, but if I had hit then 100% of my accidents ever would have been caused by mechanical failure with no forewarning.

Re:Causes vs circumstances

[Zironic]

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.