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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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
"Open the pod bay doors, Asimo."
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.
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.
Apparently the Prius already does that. I see lots of them 'parked' at 55 MPH in the fast lane of the interstate every day.
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.
Car Drives You!
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."
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.
Sorry. Autonomous taxis aren't going to work until someone figures out a foolproof way of not making them into autonomous public toilets.
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...
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.
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
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.
In an electric car sitting at a light will save fuel, but sitting at a light in an internal combustion vehicle wastes a LOT of fuel. You're getting zero miles per gallon idling.
I have a mileage calculator built into my car, which gives you your current mileage and average since you cleared the counter. Yesterday at lunch I filled it up and reset the calculator and set it to display the average... 0 mpg. As soon as the light turns green and I start moving, .4 mpg, 1.3 mpg... by the next light it's 12 mpg and rising. By the time I reach McDonald's drive through it's reading 22.7. By the time I get my "food" and leave, the mileage is back down to 12 mpg.
Your self-driving car would have much greater gas mileage, especially for the normal idiot who races to the red light so he can waste gasoline sitting there. An intelligently designed program wouldn't do that.
It would be great for me, I only live a few blocks from work, and usually walk when the weather is nice, but there's no parking; I have to park in the street in a two hour zone. I'd just go to work and send the car back home, and call it to get me when I was ready to leave. Far better than having it circle the block for hours.
Free Martian Whores!