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Toyota To Let People Ride In Self-Driving Prius
fergus07 writes "Toyota is to show an autonomous Prius at Tokyo Motor Show. Dubbed the Toyota AVOS (Automatic Vehicle Operation System), the car will be available for members of the public to take 'back seat' rides at the show, demonstrating first hand how the Prius can avoid obstacles, be summoned from a parking garage and park itself."
First self-driving crash - who to blame, or sue?
The developers? The owner? Toyota?
Class action rush hour on Route 66?
With a self driving car, I wouldn't need to worry about parking it. Just have it turn right around a building repeatedly, perhaps go around a block that has a lot of lights, so the vehicle is at idle most of the time, saving fuel and battery until I came back to it.
It'll even accelerate right though the back of the garage for you, just like a real person driving a Toyota.
Yes, it's a cheap shot.
I was reading an ebook called "Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy" which is about the problem of technology eliminating jobs and the role of I.T. in the recession and jobless recovery and there is a section where the authors are talking about the rise of computing power and the advent of driverless vehicles and it struck me that we are probably in the last generation where truck driving is going to be a human job. With the problems in I.T. and the lack of jobs in my hometown (I can't move from here for reasons I won't go into) I was considering becoming one myself, but it is likely that it is another job that is going to exit stage left. I don't know what to feel about that, really. I am sure not many people on Slashdot care about that very much, but truckers are an American fixture and it seems like they pretty soon be another piece of roadkill on the technology highway.
The driver. It is the one that made the wrong choice. Its sentence will be served by forcing it to mine for bitcoins on behalf of the victim until the sentence has been carried out.
I hate to agree with you, but i think its true, no one will tolerate a self driving car crash, even if it is just one. Even trains front crash time to time , something we think should be impossible to happen. Being benevolent, lets assume one of those car crashes , another driver fault, not a clear one, but his fault, what are the makers going to do defend themselves with system logs?
If I could shout into my watch: "KITT I NEED YOU BUDDY!" and have the Prius come racing to pick me up (bonus if it does a bootleg turn and pops the door open), I'd buy it in a heartbeat.
Under current law, the person behind the wheel in the drivers seat is considered the operator, and liable for whatever the vehicle does. The owners liability (assuming they weren't driving) is dependent upon their insurance, and the fact that the vehicle is autonomous is irrelevant. The developers, assuming they had not signed an unprecedented and absolutely retarded employment contract, have no personal liability. Toyota could only be found liable if it was proven that a defect in the vehicle caused the crash.
Simple fact is, before autonomous cars will really become commercially viable, a lot of laws have to change, mainly around liability of the manufacturer since they're taking on more responsibility. Most likely though, the operator will retain the majority of the liability, and we're unlikely to see in our lifetimes a car where you can punch in a destination and take a nap. It'll be more like an advanced cruise control. The operator still has total ability to control, is required to keep hands on the wheel and attention on the road at all times, and is responsible for intervening in the case of an emergency.
With the state of technology now, self-driving cars are possible. I can't wait until self-driving cars become the mainstream. It would be awesome if a car could drive me to work, while I read the news, or do some work. For a long drive, I could even take a nap... And I bet there would be a lot fewer accidents, and less road congestion. I really think this is the future of public transportation. A huge network of self-driving cars could make public transportation a lot more efficient than it is now.
So according to your logic, ride in the passenger seat to avoid liability?
1. Let my neighbor's kids run around the parking garage while I stand outside waiting for it after I've "summoned" it?
2. Fiddle the transmission knob while it's auto-mobiling?
3. Tell it to run through the sand at the beach?
4. Sit in the back instead of the front? Just to freak out everyone else on the freeway.
5. Bring a date?
I was reading an ebook called "Race Against The Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy" which is about the problem of technology eliminating jobs and the role of I.T. in the recession and jobless recovery and there is a section where the authors are talking about the rise of computing power and the advent of driverless vehicles and it struck me that we are probably in the last generation where truck driving is going to be a human job. With the problems in I.T. and the lack of jobs in my hometown (I can't move from here for reasons I won't go into) I was considering becoming one myself, but it is likely that it is another job that is going to exit stage left. I don't know what to feel about that, really. I am sure not many people on Slashdot care about that very much, but truckers are an American fixture and it seems like they pretty soon be another piece of roadkill on the technology highway.
all it will take is 1 death for auto cars to be set back big time. Let's see thing about it 1-2 years just for the courts cases to work though the system.
Now it's a feature that the car accelerates on its own?
My
I don't think this is as big a deal as people always fear. The person operating a machine normally takes responsibility for what it does under their direction. Nobody says, "that backhoe just dug a cellar," they say, "I dug a cellar" (even though 99.99% of the caloric expenditure was by the backhoe). Nobody says, "Excel just computed our monthly budget," they say, "I just worked out our monthly budget" (even if Excel did 99.99% of the calculations). Only when we're thinking into a future we don't yet understand does it seem like the machines will be making all these "intelligent" decisions. Once the machine is in hand and understood, we feel like we are making the decisions (even though the machine is actually making thousands every second, as with an airplane autopilot). Our perception of intelligence on the part of the machine disappears. Once we know what to expect from them we simply laugh at those who don't and assume they are idiots (pertinent example). People even feel this way when working through human subordinates. "George Washington crossed the Delaware River." It doesn't mean he rowed the boat.
Yet no one seems to care. 500 US troops die a year in the middle east and it's a huge deal. These are 35,000 deaths that can easily be avoided. And that's only in the United States Yeah there'll be a few deaths, but probably 99% of the 35,000 will be avoided. Everyone should be forced to own one of these considering how many pedestrians are run over. People have to get over their own greed to drive a car fast though.
Well I have no doubt that will happen. I think there is only one state (Nevada?) that has done any viability studies about it at all (the book I read mentions this) about what the legal framework would be like. It still looks to me like it would happen. As much as governments kowtow to corporations and as much as corporations hate to pay truckers or any other workers I could see it become a governmental priority pretty quickly.
Every car will become a taxi. Every taxi can make 40+ journeys per day.
You only need 1/40th of the number of cars.
Short Toyota, GM, Ford, Honda......
Deleted
More likely than not they would defend themselves with logs like a black box flight recorder. Self-driving automobiles are uniquely capable of handling the problem of determining the other party is at fault. They are loaded down with sensors including gps, proximity, video, and laser rangefinding. With appropriate data capture and logging, it should be very easy to demonstrate fault in many cases (assuming you can disprove tampering). It is a much greater issue when the automatic driver is at fault, but this could be largely mitigated if insurance companies jump on board. An automatic driver is potentially much safer than a person who can be distracted, tired, or drunk and it seems to be in the insurance company's best interest to support such things. It just has to be demonstrated that these cars are safer than human drivers.
If the biggest problem with this technology is who to sue, then I'm not worried about it.
Lawsuits and class-action suits are mainly problems here in the US. The rest of the world is different.
Yes, there is a cost to freedom, even if that cost is life. I would still choose freedom over security, even if it meant I could die from it.
This is actually very easy to deal with. The driver is still liable. The insurers decide, based on the cars, the expected crash rate for autonomous vehicles. They don't really care about individual situations, they care about overall numbers. They can choose how much to charge if it's an automated driver, and how much if it's a physical driver, and pay out if it fails. It's really not a hard system. If autonomous vehicles are safer drivers, they will take over a lot faster due to significantly reduced insurance costs relative to physical drivers.
So many people die from cars being driven by people now it could hardly be worse.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
if this is the same technology google has been using in their self driving Prius fleet cars http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXeUu_Y6WOw
... I was going to post a joke, but for once I'll have some consideration for those who lost their dear ones.
But let me say this:
One thing is having an "engineer mentality" with total disregard for human feelings and marketing; but that has limits.
I guess there's someone very, very misplaced deciding things at Toyota. This is not a good moment to do that -- even if it works well.
Is it a Hit and Run if your car runs over somebody and keeps going while you're asleep?
That's because 500 military personnel deaths would be a death rate of ~1:3000 (~1.5 million active personnel) while the driving deaths are ~1:7000 (about 240 million licensed drivers). So since one rate is more than double the other it's not surprising one gets more outrage.
...unintended acceleration.
Furries make the internet go.
Assuming fail-safes are in place for malfunctioning sensors. As cheap as some things are made these days, I find the promise of sufficient redundancy highly suspect.
It's a Johnny Cab!
In case of fire, do not use elevator. Use water!
You still have to sit behind the wheel ready to take over the moment you spot danger. No reading the paper.
We have already had self-parking cars for a few years. Basically it tells you when to shift into forward or reverse and it moves very slowly so that you can slam on the breaks if some hapless pedestrian steps into the car's path. Same with cruise control that keeps you a set distance from the car in front and collision avoidance. Both these technologies have been around for a few years too.
The liability for any accidents is entirely on you.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Replying to myself as AC to clarify: I know AC was talking about criminal liability, not civil liability. There will have a be a clearly-defined exact payout for different types of collisions, replacing criminal lawsuits, for this to work. Or, maybe, insurance will cover a good lawyer. I have little belief a jury would find someone guilty in a criminal trial for manslaughter if their fully autonomous vehicle killed someone in reasonable driving conditions.
For purposes of preserving the DUI revenue streams, it won't matter if the car's driving or not.
Yet no one seems to care. 500 US troops die a year in the middle east and it's a huge deal. These are 35,000 deaths that can easily be avoided. And that's only in the United States Yeah there'll be a few deaths, but probably 99% of the 35,000 will be avoided.
For the record, 35,000 fatal crashes out of 230,000,000 cars on the road = .014 percent fatality rate. Eating pork has a higher fatality rate; thus, your argument is non-existent.
Everyone should be forced to own one of these considering how many pedestrians are run over. People have to get over their own greed to drive a car fast though.
Lemme guess; cyclist, right?
Get over yourself, Lance Armstrong.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
This seems like a pretty narrow concept of freedom. I'm kind of uncomfortable with self-driving cars myself, I have the control-freak instinct, I currently drive a stick-shift mostly for that reason. But it really is pretty hard to argue against either safety or practicality of self-driving cars.. I'm assuming that the self-driving car really is more like a taxi than a bus, in that if I decide half-way to my destination that I want a different destination, I can just make it so, and that will be that, and furthermore that if I want to take the scenic route down along the creek instead of the freeway, I can get that too.
So, I can still pick my time of departure, my route, and my destination, and change my mind in mid-drive, only my freedom to operate the vehicle has been removed. Yeah, it bugs me a bit, but I don't know if I'm ready to die for it.
And where's the line? In my city, it's hopelessly impractical (and maybe illegal) for me to ride a horse to and from work. Is that an unacceptable infringement on freedom of movement? Should I die for that one too?
2*3*3*3*3*11*251
As cool as self-driving tech is, am I the only who is struck by the absurd decadence of continuing to plough resources into energy-intensive individual transport? Even with the improved efficiencies of a hybrid engine, it doesn't compare in efficiency (or social justice) to a properly funded mass transit system.
you are assuming all licensed drivers drive at least once a year,. But even still. One stat has deaths from a war zone with people actively trying to kill them. Still it only achieves a little over double the death rate of driving
Interesting idea. I wonder how much demand would drop. Technically we could all be renting time on Amazon servers instead of owning our own machines, but instead the thin client never worked and we buy millions of computers.
You can call a taxi in may small cities if you are willing to wait 10 minutes for one to show up. Would automated drivers really speed that up? People own a car so they can be independent.
Spencer Ogden
Who was responsible when Toyotas had the accelerator errors and were crashing? Insurance companies will probably create a separate class of insurance for self-driving cars based on the probability of a crash, and will charge drivers more.
"Open the pod bay doors, Asimo."
Some things are made cheaply these days, yes, but what about your air bags and anti-lock brakes? This hardware and software would have to have the same reliability as those. Malfunctioning sensors can be handled gracefully with the right software--slow down enough that other sensors will do, or just stop and request the human driver to take control. But if one of your stereo cameras dies, you can still get most of the required information from the remaining camera and your radar, for example. Or if the front facing radar fails, just drive backwards :-D
Will trucking companies start using Aussie type road trains but with controllers too? With most of the available fuel being part alcohol, does that mean they will start issuing DUI's to the car's driving computer? That might sound like a silly question but if all cars and trucks were computer driven then governments would lose one of their revenue streams as the control codes would no doubt be forced into following traffic regulations barring hacks. Hacks or older model vehicles would of course be required for get away vehicles. Imagine what this would do to NASCAR, Formula One etc as well. Speaking of hacks and cracks, will be interesting when rush hour traffic somewhere ends up being controlled by a bored 12 year old script kiddie after the cracks propogate on the web. Nationwide GTA could make for a way to protest amongst other things.
That's the rational approach, but it's not how it'll be perceived.
Dilbert RSS feed
Interesting idea. I wonder how much demand would drop. Technically we could all be renting time on Amazon servers instead of owning our own machines, but instead the thin client never worked and we buy millions of computers.
If we didn’t use our computers as gaming machines, thin clients might have had a fighting chance.
Ignore this signature. By order.
That'd give Kyle Busch a chance to drive without wrecking anybody.
Now all we need are transforming vehicles and if I get into trouble I can just shout out "BUMBLEBEE!!!" and my car will not only drive itself up to me on its own, but hopefully blow up other cars in the process.
To all newcomers - people here are very close-minded and can't handle complaints about Linux. Keep this in mind.
+1 if you'd rather they called it the LAVOS. ;)
I wouldn't trust in all that so much. Have you dealt with automated systems much?
If two self-driving cars are involved in an accident, there is a clear failure in the programming or systems of sensors and driving. Depending on the hardware or software fault, it may not be at all clear from the logs where the fault was.
Everything can appear fine from the software perspective, but there are times when the hardware is doing or not doing something the software thinks it is.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
Given the regularity of ABS / air bag failures... I'd rather they WERENT on the same level
You still have to sit behind the wheel ready to take over the moment you spot danger. No reading the paper.
People around here read the paper (amongst other things) while driving *current* cars. I can't see this one making things any better.
Not really, that'd only work if the journeys were perfectly distributed throughout the day. In reality most cars are used at the same time periods and are stationary the rest of the day, so the benefits of sharing aren't really there.
Mass transportation is much more realistic.
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The point is, these deaths easily be avoided. 35,000 a year is a lot. You can take .014 and multiply by 80-100 for each year of your life and it's a 1% chance. There is an easy solution right in front of us.
And people are always going to drive drunk, no matter how much you educate them. And some people are just going to be bad drivers. And sometimes there will just be human error, fog, or other hazards that a computer will avoid.
This freedom argument is garbage when you're endangering other people's lives.
That's the rational approach, but it's not how it'll be perceived.
Americans have their head in the sand about driving deaths for years.
James Bond: You'll kill 60,000 people uselessly.
Auric Goldfinger: Hah. American motorists kill that many every two years.
What happens if a bolt breaks loose and the car thinks it's turning one direction but it's moving in another. Did the bolt break before or after the crash? You'd need third party stories, metal analysis... it feels somehow more complicated.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
You still have to sit behind the wheel ready to take over the moment you spot danger. No reading the paper.
Meanwhile, in the real world, people will be reading the paper because their car drives itself. What's the point of a car that drives itself when you have to be continually watching for danger?
Air France 447 is a glaring example of what happens when you tell the driver 'don't worry, the computer is driving' and then the computer can't decide what to do and suddenly drops the driver into an extremely dangerous situation where they're expected to take over.
The point is, these deaths easily be avoided.
No they can't, or we would have avoided them already.
The point is, these deaths easily be avoided. 35,000 a year is a lot. You can take .014 and multiply by 80-100 for each year of your life and it's a 1% chance.
You can also multiple .014 by 80 for the number of years, then 2 for the number of legs, then 10 for the number of fingers to end up with a 22% chance for all the sense that your math makes.
I think most people blame drivers for car accidents and the resulting deaths (ie. if you're own damn fault you got killed even if it wasn't your fault).
Where in the other case the outrage is either over vengeance or because the situation doesn't even need to exist (ie. call the troops back).
That would almost certainly be illegal in and of itself if the laws are sane. Not that they will be sane, but that will probably still be illegal all the same.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Lots and lots of system logs. With GPS/inertial/video/whatever sensor data is available. Recreate in a nice easy to understand demonstration exactly what the car was doing and what it felt when some careless person ran into it. Poor Prius :-(
Exactly, and as you pointed out, the damage from the accident makes it so much harder.
It's easy to troubleshoot an intact system to find the fault, much harder when the relevant pieces have been crushed.
I vote based on politicians' actions, unless contrary to my preconceptions. Often wrong, never uncertain. #iamthe99%
its 35,000 per year! Pretend the average time in the military is 5 years, and the average number of years while driving is 50 years, what's more likely to kill you? Combat overseas during your 5 years of service, or 50 years of driving a car?
That can interestingly be enforced, by disabling the car if nobody is seating on the driving seat (similarly to what it's done with airbag systems) and making it illegal to tamper the sensors.
Hopefully, this would also place the liability on the asshat that is driving on the turnpike and decides to switch seats at 65mph.
If everyone converts to self-driver, all of the funding cities collect from minor traffic violations will plummet. Where will their income come from then? I guess they could charge exorbitant license fees to own a driverless car, and then charge a high price for the public version. Speeding tickets, and more recently stoplight photo infractions are a huge income for local governments.
Ignoring your abject and out of the blue racism, most states at this point have pretty stringent and well tested legal definitions for operator (which is generally the relevant term, some still incorrectly use driver) which already qualify that the operator has to be inside the vehicle.
Get over yourself, Lance Armstrong.
This is an attitude I don't understand. I get some cyclists are irresponsible, but have you seen people driving in Houston? It's just madness! Speed bumps mean nothing to people, medians... mean nothing to people (if they want to get out of a traffic jam, sidewalks and grass don't seem to be any different).
So, would I be happy to see all the cars driving organized one behind another with no "smart ass" trying to pass me on the "exit line"? Yes, I would be very happy, saving lives at whatever rate.
I choose to eat or not pork, but I don't choose to be crushed by an irresponsible idiot driving into me. And why troops' deaths are so meaningful, because of the irrational thinking of sending people armed to fight. But to be honest, if you're carrying a rifle, gun, grenades, etc to enforce your vision of the world, you may as well know that there will be consequences. You don't expect that from driving, because cars are a mean of transportation, not a lethal weapon (in principle).
there are over 80000 fatalities a year and they are too scared to count the ones that are permanently crippled. The only good thing about this form of transportation is that it will go extinct in 20 years when the oil runs out.
Yea, cause they only put one oxygen sensor in car engines these days - RIGHT!?
Multiple sensors have been used in auto manufacturing for three decades.
The point is, these deaths easily be avoided. 35,000 a year is a lot. You can take .014 and multiply by 80-100 for each year of your life and it's a 1% chance.
And my point that the fact you're more likely to die from bad pork than a fatal crash renders your "point" invalid still stands.
And people are always going to drive drunk, no matter how much you educate them. And some people are just going to be bad drivers. And sometimes there will just be human error, fog, or other hazards that a computer will avoid.
Lol, right, because computers, and by extension, programmers, NEVER fuck up, do they?
This freedom argument is garbage when you're endangering other people's lives.
I would claim that idiotic, non sequitur comments from narcissistic asshats endangers my life if it would get you to not be a narcissistic asshat.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
all it will take is 1 death for auto cars to be set back big time
You mean like aircraft autopilots? Or sat navs telling people to drive off cliffs or under too low bridges? Or cruise control?
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Avos' in Russian means "blind trust in sheer luck; counting on a miracle".
Given most of the self-driving systems I've seen depend on radar to keep the car away from obstacles- I'd say it's the idiot who painted his car with stealth paint that is at fault.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Right. I was surprised to learn that driving a car is half as deadly as being in the armed forces at a time when the US is involved in two wars. I had no idea.
If only Toyota was a Russian company a certain famous, oft (over) used joke would have been almost too easy
RGdot.com
I just did the safety recall repair on my drivers-side airbag. The notice included this paragraph:
If the driver's side airbag deploys, metal fragments could pass through the airbag cushion material, possibly causing injury or death to the vehicle occupants.
.
Yeah, I do sure hope them auto-driving pudicators are a sight more reliable than airbags...
Car Drives You!
. One stat has deaths from a war zone with people actively trying to kill them...
...and the other stat is from the middle east!
*rimshot*
Yet no one seems to care. 500 US troops die a year in the middle east and it's a huge deal. These are 35,000 deaths that can easily be avoided. And that's only in the United States Yeah there'll be a few deaths, but probably 99% of the 35,000 will be avoided.
For the record, 35,000 fatal crashes out of 230,000,000 cars on the road = .014 percent fatality rate. Eating pork has a higher fatality rate; thus, your argument is non-existent.
I got .015% when I did the math.
But in any case do you have a reference for this? If half the USA eats pork in a year (150M people), and there's a 0015% fatality rate, then there should be over 20,000 pork related deaths in a year.
I don't know anyone that's been killed from eating pork, but a number of acquaintances and relatives have been killed in car accidents. I do know one person that was injured by a pig, but he was drunk (the guy, not the pig) so I don't think that counts.
Everyone should be forced to own one of these considering how many pedestrians are run over. People have to get over their own greed to drive a car fast though.
Lemme guess; cyclist, right?
Does it matter? Cars hit pedestrians, cyclists, and each other with alarming frequency.
No car I'm aware of has truly redundant o2 sensors.
The sensor(s) in the exhaust manifold (front o2 sensors) are for fuel trim. A failure or insane data in one or both causes the PCM to failover to preset maps and it begins basing injector duty cycle on the value in the maps that correspond to MAF/MAP, throttle angle, engine speed, etc. A failure in both sensors (assuming two banks) doesn't render the car undriveable.
It depends on vehicle manufacturer how a PCM handles a reasonbly responding sensor in one bank and a failed/insane sensor in the other. It may start using the values from the good bank to control how it fuels the failed bank OR simply go to the maps for both banks.
The rear o2 sensors ie., behind the catalytic converters, are used to determine if the catalytic converter is functioning properly. Failure or insane values from those sensors will trigger a check engine light and may (sometimes) cause the computer to go into a limp home mode. This is ostensibly to prevent some kind of engine damage, but my guess it's really a deterrent to basic tampering-gutting/removing of the catalytic converter, or to push the owner to repair a damaged/clogged converter.
Their position behind the catalytic converter renders them pretty useless in deciding fuel trim.
Simple fact is, before autonomous cars will really become commercially viable, a lot of laws have to change, mainly around liability of the manufacturer since they're taking on more responsibility. Most likely though, the operator will retain the majority of the liability, and we're unlikely to see in our lifetimes a car where you can punch in a destination and take a nap. It'll be more like an advanced cruise control. The operator still has total ability to control, is required to keep hands on the wheel and attention on the road at all times, and is responsible for intervening in the case of an emergency.
Since we're doing predictions, I'm going to predict a future headline:
"Study shows operator intervention responsible for causing or exacerbating majority of autonomous vehicle accidents."
That's because 500 military personnel deaths would be a death rate of ~1:3000 (~1.5 million active personnel) while the driving deaths are ~1:7000 (about 240 million licensed drivers). So since one rate is more than double the other it's not surprising one gets more outrage.
I think 1.5 million is counting all the reserves... there are more like 600,000 active duty, and of those, only about 60 to 100 thousand are actually combat personnel, and they take the brunt of the casualties, naturally. So the death rate for ground pounders would be more like ~1:200.
This is old news, Toyota already had a self-driving Prius in the news a while back: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/RunawayToyotas/toyota-stuck-accelerator-hits-94-mph-driver-rescued/story?id=10046912#.TsrqnPJkFGM
50K people a year die in car accidents; doesn't look like that stops any of us from getting in the car to drive to the office, the mall, the grocery store, etc.
There is a legal principle... I don't remember the latin, but a rough translation is 'the law is not stupid.' Legal decisions are made by judges, not bureaucrats or computers blindly following the rules. That's the essence of a common law system: the legal system is based on an understanding that reality is too complex to legislate completely, and judges have the authority to interpret how law is applied to reality as necessary. A literal interpretation is best if possible, but judges have leeway. Precedent then exists to ensure that the law, as actually applied, is consistent.
So, I suspect that if you try just sitting in the passenger seat and get into an accident, the judge will determine that:
1. You're still the operator.
2. You're an idiot.
And you'll probably get charged with dangerous driving too.
No, liability is independent of the ability to compensate victims (for the latter, insurance is sometimes a factor).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
DUI who have killed people should automatically be sentenced to death and all their possessions liquidated. That should make people learn responsibility quickly enough.
so what you're saying is, this will never take off, cause driving is too much fun
It's as much stupidity as it is greed.
A drunk in a self driving car, unless you take away the controls and make the car completely impervious to his intervention still has the potential to do something stupid.
A pedestrian can be run over because they jaywalk, dart from behind a large vehicle like a city bus, etc. Unless the cars have more stopping power than they have had, they are still going to strike people. The only difference is that the automatic car might react faster. Ice and other road hazards will of course change the outcomes.
So it may cut down on some of the deaths, but there's just no way in hell to remove stupidity from the equation to get that 99% you speak of.
I will never drive. I'm lacking depth perception and missing enough peripheral vision that I should not be in control of a machine that will collide with other objects at deadly speeds. I am hoping for a (near) future where I am emphatically not in control of the car, so that the car can drive me places without the help of another human to operate it.
Seems kind of spooky, sitting in the passenger seat, flying along at 60mph, nobody in the driver's seat. Oh well, if it works, I'll get used to it.
No longer will we have to put up with all those Prius drivers who don't know how to drive.
So, the first crash of a self-driving car will have a huge impact on the industry. If the computer screwed up, the industry will be set back a few months. (They have good PR, don't think they won't defend themselves). If they can prove it was the other car, insurance companies and legislators will be very interested.
Public opinion will be slow to change, though. People will need to be in a computer-driven car, and see it react to a hazard before they could have. You could (relatively) safely put them in this sort of situation with computer driven go-karts, or similar vehicles - safe, slow, but exciting.
Sorry. Autonomous taxis aren't going to work until someone figures out a foolproof way of not making them into autonomous public toilets.
It's amusing that I was just thinking these thoughts driving home this evening, but slightly differently: I want full data logging of my car, as it currently exists, with me driving it. That way I can defend myself against cops who turn off their video as well as motorists who lie. (Self-driving cars are the next step, surely; but we should all be able to defend ourselves to the best of our abilities, today.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Airplanes have autopilots than can automatically land the plane but human supervision is still required. With your limited vision you wouldn't be able to supervise the car's behavior.
They already make night vision systems for some cars. Maybe a variation of that idea could work well enough to allow visually impaired people to drive safely, or at least to control an automated vehicle.
"Everyone should be forced to own one of these..." This line of thought makes me particularly uncomfortable and I truly hope that we do not make driver automation manditory. There really ought to be another possibility. Perhaps we could avoid accidents by modifying road/pedestrian infrastructure. Should safety of the masses trumph individual choices and personal responsibility? Please, lets be eclectic with our answers to problems like these. I feel sufficated by all the nanny state laws as it is.
Get in John Connor...
the judge will determine that: 1. You're still the operator.
That will not happen if you legally buy a self-driving car that is approved by the government for autonomous use and sold as such. You can't be charged with any sort of driving if you have no legal duty to drive this car. A chaffeur-driven car is a good example. If anything happens, the car + the chaffeur are responsible, not you in the back seat.
The only way, IMO, for you to get into trouble in a self-driving car is by illegally importing it or modifying or building, and using it in such way without the government's approval. This doesn't just apply to self-driving; you can't build a random monster car and drive it; it has to be street-legal.
In reality most cars are used at the same time periods and are stationary the rest of the day, so the benefits of sharing aren't really there.
Mass transportation is much more realistic.
Yeah, because no planning is given to traffic management, so every business than can choose its hours starts at 8-9 and ends at 4:30-5:30.
Instead of "daylight savings" where those times are just shifted an hour, we should be encouraging businesses to spread out their work-times to average the load on the transportation system, reducing waste by reducing traffic and/or allowing designs closer to the average, rather than forcing designs to handle extreme peak loads.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Crashes will happen,
There's a logic reason for humans to call it an 'accident'.... cause accidents happen.
I understand autonomous ships have been possible for some time. The laws of the sea require the crew to keep a lookout, however, and if you are going to do that you might as well steer as well. Of course solo yachties don't stay awake 24 hours, but apparently they regard themselves as a special case while still complaining when they get run down by cargo ships.
Why should the system change? Drivers are required to carry insurance--why change it? Drivers of self-driving cars have to carry insurance for any liability, same as drivers driving themselves. The insurance companies will love this (because self-driving cars will have far fewer accidents). The auto companies won't have to deal with it at all. Leave the companies liable for widespread faults, not individual accidents (exactly as it is now--you can't sue Ford just because your brakes were bad, but it 2,000 cars have bad brakes then Ford gets sued). Again, the insurance companies will be more than happy to cover the liability--which will be lower than will be lower than with driver-operated vehicles. Everybody wins.
Mass transportation is much more realistic.
How would you like your Internet if all packets from all users are bundled into supermegapackets, each 10 Gb long, and then sent to all routers in the world, sequentially, on the odd chance that one byte out of those 10 Gb is addressed to that router? (The supermegapacket, like a bus, doesn't know where its passengers need to go.) You'd insert your packets when the supermegapacket goes by your home router; that'd be something like once per minute, or even more frequently in some special cases. Packets for you would disembark at the same time.
Well, of course if you think that one "delivery route" for the whole world is not enough then at certain routers (very few!) the supermegapacket can be taken apart, and its components can be repackaged into other supermegapackets that go to other routes. This only takes another minute per transfer - plenty fast, if you ask me.
Since that is also stupid, you will be reducing the size of supermegapackets more and more, and you will be increasing the number of routes until you arrive at the status quo.
Personal cars are popular because they offer 100% availability and because they offer point to point connection, at the shortest (or fastest) route that you control. They are also pretty cheap; bus tickets can be very expensive and you are typically charged per ride, not per day. So one day of shopping can result in spending more on the bus than on the goods.
Perhaps the manufacturers could man up and offer insurance on all of their vehicles, provided they were running autonomously at the time?
If their self-driving concept is sound, the number of times they're at fault will be small, and they can offer that insurance without going bankrupt. If their self-driving concept is not sound, they have a vested interest in getting those cars off the road until they find a fix, so that they don't lose every cent they have paying for every incident they caused. And when it comes to maintenance, well, it's an autonomous car. I'm sure it can phone home if you haven't kept it up to date.
Unless there is some other part of auto insurance that I don't get, it makes sense to me...
Something like this was already done, on Knight Rider. A sheriff was half-asleep at a speed trap, when a car sped by. It was, of course, Kitt, and the driver was fast asleep with his FEET UP ON THE WHEEL. Perfectly safe, but no way for almost anyone in the fictional character's world to know that...
The sheiff did a double-take and immediately turned on the flashing lights ...
I don't believe machines can ever replace humans for judgment.
Allow me to place your minds eye on a straight rural road (Speed limit around 45 MPH). On either side of most this are cornfields, limiting greatly your field of view. A head of you is a small cement bridge, crossing a stream, with walls 4 feet tall. In the oncoming lane, there is a large tractor trailer, clearly placarded for flammability (Carrying gasoline or similar). You speeds are equal and distances are such that just you enter the short bridge, the truck will be 20 feet away from it. Half way over the bridge, 3 juveniles run out from the corn to the bridge's far edge. The walls of the bridge prevent you from being able to leave your lane to the right, (You could twist the wheel all the way, but inertia is still going to pull your car towards the teens. The car's side would just be badly damaged from scraping the cement.) Given only about 15 feet of play before hitting one of the obstacles, (The pedestrians, or the gas ball on wheels), the car will have less than a second to choose your life, and the trucker's life, over the three careless pedestrians, or to kill you, and cause massive environmental and proprietorial damage for the lives of the three.
wow, you really suck!
Of course there are never any accidents when humans are behind the wheel.
Sarcasm aside; having automated cars that will end up being mandatory. There are two reasons:
A cashed up baby boomer generation used to independance going blind are funding (and will continue to do so) any research required. They will force our hand into accepting automated vehicles.
Once cars are shown to be significantly statistically safer (no speeding, no snoozing, no drinking/drugs, no fighting with the kids in the back seat, no makeup or coffee drinking), then you will need an 'exemption' to be allowed to manually drive.
The biggest impediment is governments missing out on speeding & red light camera fines
Failures will happen (tyre blowouts, kids running in front of vehicles, computer 'crashes'). While I trust myself to handle these issues better than a computer; I trust the computer over Joe Average. Mind you, Joe Average feels the same way about me.
I am not pretending that the current baby boomers will see the enforcement of automated vehicles, but their grandkids will.
This would apply if and only if the car was designated for fully autonomous use. Probably, such certification is some distance off. Might not even happen until all cars (or close to all) are self-driven. This will, IMO, be a very cool day. Imagine no stop signs or lights: cars automatically avoid each other and interlace without stopping. It's a ways off, but still. More likely, we will see a slow trend towards computer-assisted human driving. Actually, we already are well on that trend. But they aren't likely to be called "self-driving", at least not commercially, for quite some time yet.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
In many states, vicarious liability which extends to the owner of the vehicle is already the law. Your brother gets into an accident driving your car, you can get sued as well. It seems rather straightforward to me that the owner of the autonomous vehicle will be in the first instance liable for an accident involving the car, although if it can be proven that the product is defective, then the manufacturer will be on the hook as well.
Aside from that, I disagree with your conclusion. Eventually, the autocar's CPU will far outpace human reaction times, and a human with hands on the wheel will be superfluous at best, but more likely a detriment. Operator insurance rates will continue to rise while the purely automatic insurance rate will drop as the autocar's programming is further improved. After that there will be no steering wheel -- it will be considered too dangerous to allow the human passenger any control over the machine.
People will of course remain resistant for a while to the concept of surrendering control to the vehicle. Until they realize that they can get stone drunk without having to worry about breaking DUI laws, and jabber away, perfectly safely, on their mobile phones.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
The problem is when it fails while traveling 90 on the freeway next to hundreds of other cars. Sure, the other automatic cars will be able avoid you and everyone else normally, but you'll suddenly have to take control of the car to avoid hitting that non-automatic car that's starting to cut you off. Would you be paying enough attention to the road since the car is so good at driving? Would you be too busy trying to figure out why switched to manual mode?
A car can't just stop (without killing the driver) and if the right sensors fail (they all don't have their own batteries do they?) at the right time will you be paying enough attention to avert an accident that the software was just about to detect? Don't forget about the software warnings distracting you too.
that's a fucking cool idea.
better than a goon that drives off GPS to the point they mount the curb and head into oncoming traffic because the right turn looked different on the map than it did in real life.
yes, that's happened to me. mr driverface did not get paid.
The Good..
And 1/400th of the need for parking in busy areas.
The Bad..
People tend to mistreat and neglect property that is not theirs.
More likely, we will see a slow trend towards computer-assisted human driving.
That would be ten times as hard as overnight switching to automatic driving. Computers in cars can talk to each other, report their speed, position and intention. There would be no surprises, short of hardware failures.
However a self-driving car that drives among human drivers has to posess an AI that is comparable to human mind. I pick up clues to other driver's intentions all the time. For example, if a car shifts to the left side of the lane and the driver looks over his left shoulder he probably going to change lane. A robot car that doesn't understand what it sees will be left without those clues - even if its crude rangefinders and such can detect such minute movements.
Besides, who wants to let the computer drive if the driver is ultimately responsible? If I'm responsible then I'm driving; or if the computer is responsible then I'm not touching anything.
One possible migration strategy is lanes or roads that allow only automated driving. This promotes the technology but leaves some road space for older cars (of which we have too many to just discard and replace overnight.)
and I thought it was bad enough that we have cars that can parallel park themselves...
I've always though that at the very least, a split in the work times for general commerce and public retail would make a huge difference.
General commerce can be 8-9 until 4-5. Retail could be 10-11 until 6-7. I mean, seriously, who goes shopping first thing in trhe morning, and how many of us would really like to get to the shops after work!
You must be near death then, because I will definitely see this in my life time.
The inertial sensor for the navigation (drift prevention by GPS, detailed position by inertial sensor) would indicate something is wrong.
Well, I might have a way, but it only works on a semi spherical planet in a vacuum.
Step one is a mobile DVR. One camera can be had for about two hundred bucks. If you go balls out you can get a MiniPCI 4xMPEG encoder for under $100 and use four USB cameras of your choice and get multiple views in a very small package.
As for vehicle logging, if you have a 1996+ car you can take advantage of one of the many cheap OBD-II solutions. Just pair it with a GPS for a combination of loose position data, and very very good timestamps.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Failure or insane values from those sensors will trigger a check engine light and may (sometimes) cause the computer to go into a limp home mode. This is ostensibly to prevent some kind of engine damage, but my guess it's really a deterrent to basic tampering-gutting/removing of the catalytic converter, or to push the owner to repair a damaged/clogged converter.
The OBD-II MIL ("malfunction indicator lamp") lights when one of the OBD-II monitors has detected that the vehicle is producing excessive emissions. Under the OBD-II specification a CEL or "check engine lamp" is an entirely separate and optional item that tells you that there is something wrong with your vehicle and it requires service. So the HO2S (heated O2 sensor) aft of the catalytic converter is there to help the OBD-II system do its job, to tell you if you are violating the FTP (federal test procedure.) A "monitor" is a set of driving conditions which, when met, results in a pass or fail. There are a handful of required monitors like the comprehensive monitor which is always running and which sets a fault code and thus lights the MIL any time any wildly out-of-range sensor value is detected, and then you can also implement your own monitors designed to detect emissions-related faults.
Their position behind the catalytic converter renders them pretty useless in deciding fuel trim.
Well, yes and no. The vehicle will adjust its fuel trim to compensate for a failing converter, but it can only do so much of this before it goes out of range on one of the monitors and sets a code.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Given most of the self-driving systems I've seen depend on radar to keep the car away from obstacles- I'd say it's the idiot who painted his car with stealth paint that is at fault.
While that guy IS an idiot (since unless he covers his license plate it will make a dandy radar reflector) it's still not his responsibility to make it easy for self-driving cars to find him. Personally, I would want a mix of radar and lidar backed up by visual processing with an IR camera before I would even think about trusting a self-driving system. Each system should cross-check the others.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Sorry. Autonomous taxis aren't going to work until someone figures out a foolproof way of not making them into autonomous public toilets.
That's fairly trivial to solve with some government collusion. You give them the legal right to watch people remotely, and to lock them in if they abuse the vehicle, which then drives itself to a cop shop.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Mod parent up!
This can simply be solved with insurance, if you just make the person in the car responsible then on the off chance that they are worse than a person (they won't be) then the premiums for having this luxury in your car will be skyhigh but as long as it is legal then people will purchase it.
Alternatively they are much safer (or easier to prove the meatbag in the other car was at fault) and your insurance premiums go down, probably even a bonus if you provide logs reporting a percentage of kilometers under machine control. Or excess reduction if autopilot was enabled at the time of crash!
We already have a market based mechanism to sort this out in place, it just needs to be added to the actuarial tables which will take a couple of years of early adopters paying higher premiums.
We will have autonomous vehicles long before we can convince people to stop texting behind the wheel.
The precedent is reasonably solid. First you'd determine which vehicle is in the wrong, the same as you would now. The at-fault-car's owner will need to foot the bill as per the current set up (most likely via their insurance company). If the driver believes they were only at fault because someone else is also at fault (the car's manufacturer, the highways agency, etc.), they can launch a law suit against them.
It's no different really to if you crash because your steering malfunctions. You're "at fault", as the driver of the car that crashed, but you could sue your manufacturer or mechanic for selling you a duff car in the first place.
On a modern car American-style car, you don't operate the gear box directly (automatic), and you don't control the throttle directly (it's digitally managed), and the breaks are assisted (ABS), and the steering might (in a luxury model) have tracking sensors, and there might be cruise control of varying levels of sophistication. You're still the operator though- you just have to do less to operate the vehicle.
If you drive an automatic car, you'll still be the operator- it's just you'll be doing far less actual things to operate it. Seeing as the automatic cars I've seen demoed are all built for instantaneous manual override by the driver, I'd say that the vehicle's actions are still the responsibility of the driver.
Basically, I'm going to give you a [citation needed] on the statement:
You can't be charged with any sort of driving if you have no legal duty to drive this car.
You're legally obliged to do whatever the law obliges you to do. Unless there's a law somewhere that say that you can't be charged with driving felonies if the car is sufficiently automatic, then I don't buy it.
Exactly, what will happen is that cars will still need a basic insurance of the car, and when 2 automatic cars have an accident, both insurance companies will have to take on the cost of repairing "their" car.
The benefits will almost conclusively be worth it as this will be a lessening of accidents across the board.
You're speaking only from the perspective of the commuter or the average person for whom driving is a chore.
But for a lot of us, driving is fun and enjoyable.
When driverless cars are everywhere (perhaps even legally required if you want to use any road larger than a dirt track), where will I drive just for the fun of it? Where will I ride my motorcycle?
Only on closed tracks with aggressive noise ordinances and strict time tables? Hell no.
Eat the rich.
Why go trough all the trouble with cops, why not just have batons on robotic arms inside the car? Or just have the car administer electric shocks.
FRA: STFU GTFO
While I trust myself to handle these issues better than a computer
I'm sure "Joe Average" thinks the same thing...
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
"This is actually very easy to deal with. The driver is still liable."
Let's see how many cars you sell under this premise.
It's funny because it's true. Trains are dirtier than buses are dirtier than cabs are dirtier than (most) personal vehicles. But driver-less buses I can see happening. Passengers would keep each other in line, mostly. Guards could be posted on "problem" lines and they'd be cheaper than drivers.
You could repeat your entire argument with horses, and argue that you should be allowed to ride horses in the traffic. Or whatever weird means of transportation you would prefer.
Somehow I really can't see why the fact that you think driving a potential killer machine is "fun and enjoyable", should stop the rest of the world from eagerly choose a safer, more flexible alternative (Yes, *more* flexible as in: "I am pissed and needs to go home", or "Gotta send the car to pick up the kids from sport").
If you want fun and enjoyment, get out of the traffic and onto some dedicated area/track/whatever. Sorry, that is just what it is. The public roads are for the vehicles that have a useful purpose and are deemed safe enough. When person-driven vehicles no longer stand for that criteria, that must go somewhere else, like horses, racercars motorcrosscycles, etc.
Here's how it could work: you give your credit card number when you order the taxi by smartphone. When the cab shows up, you swipe your cc in the slot on the door. If the card matches, the door unlocks. Once you've entered the cab and closed and locked the door, the touchscreen lets you type in your destination. There are video cameras surveying the interior of the cab at all times. The video is being continuously stored in a black box, and the dispatching center can request and get a live stream at any time. In dangerous neighborhoods, perhaps the dispatching center would request a live stream for the first minutes of each fare to look for anything suspicious. After you exit the cab, your cc gets charged for the actual fare.
While you do make a good point, your math is off -- 35000 out of 230000 is .015 percent.
There are already car sharing systems which don't require that the car is checked by an employee after each use.
I'm not sure of the details since I've never used that system myself, but as I understand it, in order to have access to the car, you have to give the company your details and credit card number.
I suppose that if you try renting a car which someone used as a toilet, you can report the car as damaged and the previous owner will have some explaining to do.
The point is that this is already a solved problem. The hurdle is really the development of a reliable self-driving car.
Yep. And you will get a preferential rate if you agree to watch advertisements while the car drive for you.
I'm not sure retail is the problem. Retail hours tend to be all over the map, from starting way before 8, to ending way after 9pm. Many places are, in fact, already on the schedule you mention. But retail can only ever represent a fraction of the economic activity in most regions - you gotta make the stuff if you want to sell the stuff...
Also, where are you that retail isn't mostly from 11 to 8-9?
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
You AF447 example is stupid - the computer makes decisions based on known values. When those known values become unknown values, the computer rightly decides it cannot make decisions. In the case of autonomous vehicles, the car would simply stop - you dont have that option in an aircraft.
In AF447s case, the plane was not in a dangerous situation when the autopilot disconnected - it was the pilot flying which put the aircraft into the position which caused the crash. If the PF had followed the basic procedures for flying in an instrument disagree situation, that plane would have landed as normal a few hours later - he didn't, and instead did something which shocked most other experienced pilots.
With the recent trend of sacrificing efficiency of the transport arteries (low speed limits, giving roads to cyclists) for the sake of safety I am more concerned about too many restrictions of the new vehicles so they will slow down anything to the standstill. They will be driving speed limit, they will have way larger cushion zones, etc. all because of the fear of "self-driving crash".
IMHO, self-driving don't make sense unless they can become highly cooperative units on highways (like transient trains with dynamic attachment and detachment of cars)
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
what's your point? that this situation has ever happened? or that people somehow would make the "right" decision?
I've seen many drivers swerve to avoid a dog or other small animal and end up in a wreck. I figure if we keep those people from making any snap decision, the computer can't do any worse. and there are far worse drivers.
of course, your problem is you seem to think a computer's processing power is somehow limited or that it couldn't be programmed with that type of judgement. worse, you seem to think that an oncoming gas tanker would be obviously recognized as one by a driver from quite a distance away, which is far from unlikely, and forget a computer could see all these things well ahead of time because it's vision isn't nearly as limited as our eyes.
your questions are ones of computational power and judgement. the first can easily be addressed, the second we can't end up worse off, and given traffic laws, it will be quite obvious how to program the car to be in line with relevant laws.
An automatically driving googlecar did crash.
When the owner took control for 5 minutes.
Even if all the cars are self driving, a self driving car still has other things to worry about that aren't cars. There's pedestrians and bikes to name a couple. The highway might be a little easier, but there's still things like deer and moose, not to mention broken down cars. However having all automated cars can lead to huge reductions in congestion, for the simple fact that all cars can start moving at exactly the same time, instead of the way its done now.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
We tolerate 35,000 auto-related deaths a year because cars are a vital part of our transportation infrastructure. We're not going to tolerate them if the only excuse is "driving is fun."
The owner's insurance company. You are required to have auto insurance. Whichever car is deemed to be at fault, its owner's insurance company will pay.
Of course, the insurance company ay sue the car manufacturer, but it seems to me that they would have to prove that there was a defect. It my not be a problem at all.
Free Martian Whores!
Your analogy is weak. Most mass transportation systems offer the ability to go from one specific point to another specific point, economizing on stops that are close to the path between. In a major city, there's not just one bus route that goes to every stop. There are many. They are timed. You even have routing algorithms via phone apps that help you get from any arbitrary point to another point the fastest way or with fewest stops or with shortest walking distance.
I would like to see this concept scaled up to a national level. What I mean is, you have a personal vehicle that takes you from arbitrary points to transportation hubs. Then, you board a train or bus or plane (or combination due to changeover points) to get you to another transportation hub, and then you have a personal vehicle waiting for you on the other side that can take you to your arbitrary destination. For large cities this can basically be done now since you can walk to a bus stop, but for everywhere else we need a vehicle on each end to move us to the nearest mass transportation hub.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
A cashed up baby boomer generation used to independance going blind are funding (and will continue to do so) any research required.
Damned right we will! Although these days it usually isn't eyesight. In middle age your near vision goes away (the eye's fiocusing lens hardens) but your distance vision stays ok, except for floaters and cataracts. Cataract surgery is common now, and can leave you with better vision than you've had all your life. The number with macular deneration is pretty small, those with diabetic retinopathy becoming more common as people get so damned fat, but most geezer's eyes are fine. It's the reflexes, muscle strength, and memory (and the drugs the doctors push on us) that are usually the problem with old drivers.
While I trust myself to handle these issues better than a computer
That's normal and understandable, but ignorant. It takes a couple of second to move your foot to the brake, a couple of seconds to respond before you even move your foot. The computer has no such limitations.
ABS is a good example. As a driver in the Air Force I was trained in the proper emergency braking procedures, so ABS was a little hard getting used to, but the computer can get the car stopped a LOT faster than I can.
Most likely what will come about won't be that manual driving is illegal, but I'll bet if there's an automated car that crashes with a human driven car, the human driver will alwasy be deemed at fault no matter what, unless mechanical failure can be proven.
Free Martian Whores!
or just stop and request the human driver to take control.
The thing is when traveling at speed you can't "just stop", you have to maintain control and avoid obstacles for long enough to bring the car to a halt.Road vehicles are worse than airplanes in this regard. Airplanes have a lot of space arround them. Even with airplanes we require the pilots to be in the cockpit at all times and limit what non-flying activities are allowable (afaict the pilots are all).
So if the system is going to require a human driver to take control in unexpected situations then that human driver needs to be sitting in the drivers seat and ready to take over at a moments notice (which means they must be paying attention to the car's surroundings BEFORE they are requested to take over) at all times when the vehicle is operating.
I think enforcing that drivers continue to pay attention (even to the limited extent they do now) could make a "give-up" function a non-starter for automated driving systems.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
You most certainly can sue Ford if just your brakes were bad, it just doesn't usually get any publicity.
If there is any merit to your claims they will quickly and quietly settle. Ford settled many individual suits over the tire/rollover issue, sometimes paying out before a suit was even filed. Toyota settled the suit over the Lexus floormat incident.
...did you just make an inverse car analogy on Slashdot?
Bravo, sir.
"The biggest impediment is governments missing out on speeding & red light camera fines"
Which will be more than made up by the reduced need for police/fire/ems and road repair due to vehicle accidents, and the economic benefit from increased transportation network efficiency.
you will have to take my flashy italian coupe from my dead cold hands, I won't ever ever let the joy of driving in the hand of computer, not because it is or isn't safer, but because driving is so much fun.
Americans have their head in the sand about driving deaths for years.
Blame the media, they're the ones who terrify people about airplanes and terrorism, while nobody is afraid to ride in a car. people talk about how dangerous a cop's job is (it isn't, not even in the top ten), but a cop is far more likely to die in his squad car than from a bullet.
You can't come to rational conclusions without accurate data, and you get little accurate data from corporate media. Their job is to enrich stockholders, not inform the public.
Free Martian Whores!
I've never heard of anyone getting into a wreck because of cruise control, and can't imagine how a cruise control could cause a crash. Do you have a link?
Free Martian Whores!
Car design:
Cars will become less powerful as they are vastly overpowered for most needs now, and they will become fancy living rooms on wheels. The seats may all face each other, entertainment systems will become a major focus of design, built in beds, etc. You get in a car, tell it were to drop you off, it then self parks somewhere and you use your cell phone to tell it where to pick you up.
Trucks will become driverless vans, the same as all delivery type vehicles although some may still have passenger space for workers to help load and unload cargo. Pizza delivery vehicles won't even be cars, but little heated boxes on wheels.
Road design:
No traffic signs, guard rails, lines on the roads, probably many other changes would be possible as well.
In areas with pedestrian traffic the walker has to push a crosswalk button, which would then broadcast a signal to nearby cars to stop or be aware of the pedestrian in the street and the walker could cross with very little delay. Run into the street and get hit - it's probably your fault.
Cyclists would carry little transmitters which would let nearby cars know it's location and velocity, allowing the cars to give the appropriate allowance to them. This is if they are sharing road space.
Insurance:
Rates would drop by a huge amount and after a time of vetting they might even go away or become a small part of the purchase price of the car.
This is just a start, the changes to society would be huge, the number of deaths would probably be in the 10s or 100s per year in the US if all vehicles are automatic instead of the 10s of thousands. I know several people who have been killed or seriously injured by vehicle accidents and would be very exited if/when this technology comes to bear.
The reason people call it an accident is to absolve themselves of blame. There are very few true accidents.
Did you do any form of test to be able to drive? Surly that is impinging on your freedom to do whatever you wish, for the sake of security? I wonder where in the world we would be if such things were totally unregulated.
You also assume that licensed drivers are the only people killed in traffic accidents. I suspect that helps your case, since just about anyone could be hit by an out of control car.
One stat is also from people actively trying hard to stay alive. The other is by people who are constantly distracted by many other things going on, like mobile phone ringing, that accident that happened in the other lane, the noisy kids in the back.
If only there was some system that allowed a car to get from A to B, focusing 100% on getting there safely, w/o being so distracted...
Have you ever ridden in a high-use taxi? The garbage, the smells, the seats worn past the point of comfort -- no, people who can afford one will buy their own auto, just as they do now, and for much the same reason -- it's *theirs,* they can set it up as they like it, keep it as clean or cluttered as they like, and it's always there, ready to transport them when they're ready, not after half an hour or waiting for the car to show up. Big cities and similar scenarios will have Zipcar-like auto clubs, but just like today, they'll probably be in the minority.
What I meant was cars that, for instance, match speed with cars in front when switched to cruise control and automatically brake if the car slows (and this technology already exists and works in real, commercially available cars). The human is still technically in full control, but the car can do much of the micro-management. This could be scaled up so the car stops at red lights and stop signs, will stay between lanes on cruise control, and before you know it you have a nearly self-driving car for 90% of situations. Humans still take over for more complex operations and always are in nominal control, but don't need a to do a lot of input.
Automated driving lanes are a good idea, but technically rather challenging, since you either repurpose existing lanes (annoying other drivers) or build new lanes (expensive).
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Which is exactly what he said after that sentence.
Most of the waste in cars can be solved by autonomous driving.
1) Cars could drift each other and drive much closer than currently possible. This has been proven in several test in closed tracks.
2) The need for personal ownership would be seriously diminished. Much of the cost of a Taxi is in paying the driver. The cost of a Taxi would decrease to the cost of renting a zipcar or less when the zipcar can come pick you up instead of you having to find one in a remote parking lot. You simply request a car, the closest available car comes pick you up. You drive or let it drive you to your destination. You continue to rent it if you want it to wait, or you let it leave when you arrive at your destination. For longer trips one could easily take a car to the train station, take the train to the longer destination city, then take a new car to the exact location.
I know. I somehow managed to miss that part. But, of course, I saw it right after I posted the comment...
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
Perhaps your transportation infrastructure needs to change then, and not in the direction of automated cars.
Have you ever been to London, Paris or Copenhagen? Public transportation and bicycles WORK, trains, busses and taxis are the perfect solution to congestion. By cutting down on the total number of cars, you free up the roads and make them safer for the people in rural areas where public transportation is hard to implement effectively. This also makes the roads safer for the needed delivery drivers who will deliver heavy goods that cannot easily be transported by public transport or bicycle.
Eat the rich.
Horses are allowed in traffic here, apart from motorways. They're regarded as pedestrians and subject to the same laws and regulations.
But hold on a moment, "potential killer machine" is an insane term. Do you use knives in your kitchen? Potential deadly weapon! How about drain cleaner? Publicly available deadly poison! Or even water? Potential drowning hazard!
Automated cars is just another step in the direction of a completely disregard for personal responsibility.
"Safe enough", my ass. Have some fun, live a little and stop expecting technology to cure societal problems.
Eat the rich.
For some people, driving is indeed fun. However, commuting is most definitely not fun. So I expect it to take off quite well, though at first the adoption will be fairly slow. I also expect it to move cars a bit more towards public transportation and leave cab drivers out of job.
Ignore this signature. By order.
Self driving taxis will eventually bring down the cost of getting a taxi to the point where they'll be cheaper for most people than owning their own car. And yes it could bring the waiting time down because these cars can be kept on standby effectively for free when a taxi driver needs to be making money, although waiting time might be higher in busy periods.
But of course some people will want to own their own car anyway, maybe as a status symbol, or maybe because they want to personalise it.
I think getting hit by an electric car would kill you just as dead.
Awesome! Thanks to the two who modded my sibling post down; it had the desired effect, parent no longer has a whiny signature. (In fact, at the current moment, parent has no signature.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
You even have routing algorithms via phone apps that help you get from any arbitrary point to another point the fastest way or with fewest stops or with shortest walking distance.
In other words, you have routing algorithms that help you arrange your life around the convenience of the machine. Not the other way around. What a nice idea :-)
It's even worse when you consider that the driving deaths aren't just among licensed drivers... there are no licenses to be a passenger...
Have you ever been to London, Paris or Copenhagen?
Have you ever been to the UK outside of the very center of a major city?
Yes there are places in the UK where public transport is quick and convinient, I'm pretty sure there are such places in america. However if you think that is the norm over here you have no idea what you are talking about.
I live near manchester in the UK and don't own a car. I take the train to uni (i'm a PHD student) every day. This works well for me but only because I chose a place to live right next to a rail station. If I want to pop out to the DIY store I have to catch a bus into town then walk out to the diy store (a fairly considerable walk) and if I want to buy anything big and heavy I have to arrange with my family to transport it, take time off from uni so I can get it delivered or pay extortionate prices (if the service is lost at all) to have it delivered out of hours. If I had a car I could just drive to the DIY shop and come back with some bits of wood to fix whatever it is that needs fixing.
Even in the london conurbation things aren't all that rosy for public transport once you start trying to do anything other than go to/from the city center. Try going from say watford to hertford. Either you take a slow bus or you go into london and back out again on the train/tube. Most of the east/west railway lines in the area north of were closed decades ago.
Sccording to transport-direct it takes more than twice as long to go from watford junction rail station to hertford north rail station (I also tried hertford east and that was even worse) by public transport as it takes by car add in some time for counting getting to/from the station at the end and waiting for the first train and you are looking at arround triple the time to do it by public transport as to do it by car.
In a car I see the freedom to go where I want when I want. Not where the public transport happens to go when the public transport happens to be running (public transport reduces considerablly in the evening and almost completely shuts down at night). I just can't justify the cost of learning to drive and getting a car right now.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Risking your own life for your freedoms is noble. Risking others' lives for your own personal benefit, without their knowing consent?
Not so much.
Have you ever been to the UK outside of the very center of a major city?
No, but I've lived on Funen and in West Jutland for a total of 22 years before I moved to Copenhagen. Most of that time I used public transport. It wasn't ideal, but it was there. And I saw plenty of opportunities for improvement that would greatly benefit people living outside major cities. Some places have even implemented telebusses, which work absolutely brilliantly. They run a normal route, but you can call and request a deviation within the service area, it's the perfect mix of bus and taxi services.
I'm not arguing that cars should be abolished at all, I love cars. But I hate the idea of automated driverless cars.
More people on good, solid public transportation equals less single-occupant cars on the road equals more space for everyone.
Eat the rich.
I thought all Toyota's were self driving a few years back, they certainly did not respond to the drivers instructions.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.