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California To Join Nevada With Rules For Autonomous Cars
thecarchik writes "As of now, the only state where self-driving cars are legal on public roads is Nevada, thanks to its vast expanses of open space and lightly traveled byways. California, recognizing that autonomous cars are an inevitable progression of technology, is moving to establish its own rules for driverless vehicles. A bill proposed by California Senator Alex Padilla would set guidelines for the testing and operation of self-driving vehicles within the state. As California is home to Google, Stanford and Caltech, all of which have active autonomous vehicle programs, the state is positioned to be a leader in driverless car development. It stands to reason that self-driving cars will be allowed on California's roads, probably in the near future."
This is just too awesome. It looks like we're solving the parking, traffic, and driving death (drunk driving and otherwise) issues in my lifetime. The microchip is the gift that keeps on giving.
...some of the worst drivers in the world.
I've lived in Boston, New York and Chicago. And Northern California easily takes the cake for worst drivers. They hesitate when they should commit, they never use turn signals, roll through stop signs, drive until 7-8pm without their lights on (or just use their parking lights).
So I would welcome driverless cars, because it can't get much worse than this.
Here in Nevada we are are at the forefront of gambling....
http://www.theatlanticcities.com/technology/2012/03/why-driverless-cars-would-be-bad-cities-and-suburbs-alike/1393/
Write Only Memory: Another pointless blog.
What is REALLY needed is a law to mitigate liability risks for automated cars. Here's how a fair law might read :
All operators of automated vehicles are required to buy additional insurance. If someone is harmed by an automated vehicle malfunction, a panel is empowered to compensate the individual with a FIXED amount of money depending on the severity of the injury and or death. This is how vaccine injuries are handled : if a vaccine harms someone, they get a certain amount of injury depending on the risk.
Neutral, third party laboratories would be paid to examine the 'black boxes' from automated cars after a crash and present their findings to the panel.
The panel would be required by law to make a decision within a certain amount of time (~180 days sounds about right)
Advantages :
1. Lawyers eat up a large chunk of the money when litigation is allowed. This way, most of the money goes to the victims.
2. Everyone gets some compensation money instead of most getting nothing and a few hitting the jackpot
3. Faster decisions instead of lawsuits that take 5-10 years.
Disadvantages :
1. Panel can be unfair or biased and little can be done
2. The amounts of money seem low compared to jury awards for successful lawsuits. Lose a hand, it might be 100k not a million, etc.
3. Legislators who are lawyers have to write the legislation for this.
The reason to do this is the same reason we do vaccines, but it would save a LOT more lives. Automobiles kill far more people than the number who would die if we stopped most vaccinations. Automated cars will occasionally malfunction and kill someone. However, on the aggregate, the total deaths per passenger mile caused by automated vehicles will very likely be more than 10 times or more lower. Automated vehicles have short reaction delays, no need to take risks, ability to see in all directions they have sensors pointing at the same time, can predict a crash is about to occur and take mitigating actions (pre-firing the airbags, etc), activates the brakes quickly enough to avoid pileups, etc.
The thing is, an automated car will have software bugs, and will occasionally make mistakes. Maybe a good model will be as good a driver as the average driver on their best day. EXCEPT, an automated car's systems cannot become distracted, board, drunk, or fall asleep. I suspect that this advantage over millions of miles will prove to be huge. Sure, the average human might be smarter, but we don't give our best effort during every minute of the many hours we drive.
"Some bills squeezed through in the session's closing hours. Lawmakers unanimously approved a measure allowing the testing of "autonomous vehicles" to be tested on state roads. The bill was sought by tech giant Google Inc., which is developing a line of driver-less cars." http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/politics/os-legislature-sine-die-20120309,0,3639070.story
I am wholeheartedly for the development of robot cars! I can hardly wait for the day when I can command my car to drive my drunken ass home, or tell it to go to the grocer and pick up my milk and cheese (which the grocer will load into my car for me) while I'm at work. Not to mention the possibilities for car sharing!
However, there will be system failures. The cars will have to develop "reptile brain" like functions that can make the car pull over and stop in the case of byzantine failure of the controller. Think about car-worms and viruses that command cars to crash into each other, or remote car hijacking. It is going to be *very* interesting to watch all this develop. Consider the people who will drive recklessly in their "classic cars" expecting that most other cars are autonomous, which may make the road more dangerous for those who don't have one.
That said, I'm looking forward to the robot-car only lanes on the freeway where we can have fuel-efficient car-trains and the social benefits of being able to hop out of your robot car in front of your destination and have the car valet itself.
so human error can become cpu, sensor, code error?
Let's say a over flow, bad sensor and so on can lead to the car doing odd things just like autopilot can when faced with bad sensor input. But I would hope that the code will be up to the same level of testing and certifications that the autopilot code is.
You can try... Until the onboard video is played in court and shows you staged it, at which point the judge begins to legally sodomize you.
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
and that criminal liability may come down on the coders as well the factory floor even down to the car service center.
Padilla's bill is SB 1298 at http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sb_1298&sess=CUR. It has not yet had its first committee hearing.
I was a software test engineer for over 30 years. There is no such thing as a computer system that is completely error-free. While SOME drivers are impaired or simply have poor judgement, other drivers are alert, coordinated, and generally safe. On the other hand, all autonomous cars from the same manufacturer will have the same software errors.
The current leader in developing autonomous cars is Google. I would not drive one of Google's cars unless I knew that Google was not tracking where I went and what route I took to get there. I am concerned that, even if the car does not transmit its location and route in real-time, a mechanic might still be able to download the car's history while servicing the car. That information should be available only to law-enforcement agencies and even then only when a judge issues a warrant after being convinced there is probable cause that the history is relevant to an actual crime.
what about work zones? they come in all sizes and some make it so you have to be on the wrong side of the yellow line to get by.
What about snow I have seen 3 lane each road cut down to as small as 1 lane each way or 2 lane ones cut down to 1.5.
More likely the car will be able to detect the dropping air temperature and reduce speed to adjust. It is shocking how many people blithely drive into dangerous situations unawares. People who don't come from cold places never think to tap their brakes and test traction from time to time. Heck, lots of people who should know better don't do it. And autonomous cars do have the advantage of being able to detect collision vectors and respond far more quickly than any human driver could hope to.
The Robot 500 should be fun to watch too :) Everyone wants to see a crash in a car race, and they'll deliver!
Socialists in California? Theres another person that actually needs to get a passport and travel outside his own back yard.
I'm a big states-rights kind of guy, and I applaud California and Nevada on taking initiative in a technology that will hopefully become widespread sooner than later, but this is one situation where the federal government should be involved (cars often cross state lines, after all) and at least form a committee/study (insert committee uselessness here) to set a ceiling on limitations for these vehicles. States can relax the limitations as they see fit (open-space areas like Nevada, Montana, and Wyoming might allow a higher auto-speed), but if each state is left to set its own devices you'll get a large amount of different standards that each automaker has to adhere to in order to sell the vehicle on a national or even regional level. The fed is going to step in at some point, but better sooner than later; not only will they create a nice standard for all states (/. likes open standards, right?), but it will make a lot of states that are on the fence about the whole thing (or not even caring) have an extra push to allow the vehicles (assuming the feds don't allow them nationally in addition to standards).
I haven't read up on the various rules put in place (or recommended), but I sincerely hope there's a size limitation on the vehicle. No more than T tons, no more than XxYxZ dimensions to be allowed an autopilot. That way in the case of a catastrophic failure (we'll get at least a handful) the risk to other drivers is far less. Also, energy savings. Maybe even create a standard within the auto industry for censors that can be included in an "autopilot only" lane to enhance the cars capability in those environments. (Ooh! How about extra sensors within parking garages so that the car auto-drives itself to the closest available open spot?)
I wonder if the State of Jefferson would authorize autonomous cars?
Does this mean we won't have to pay auto insurance soon? Computers should be able to drive better than humans, right? Imagine how much extra time we would have if computers could drive us to work each day.
I have to wonder how these autonomous vehicles will handle unusual road conditions such as snow patches on the road, black ice, a ball bouncing out into the road, etc. It may be that autonomous vehicles are by far safer than vehicles with drivers -- until the unexpected happens at which point they completely fail.
I can just see it now: You are sleeping as your autonomous car is driving across country and then the horns and bells go off with a voice says: "Quick driver, take over, we are spinning out on black ice at 70mph and you have three seconds to recover or you and this car will die."
Far better than a human who isn't programmed to deal with every possible situation a car can find itself in. The car can calculate up to the millisecond road and atmospheric conditions, as well as scan the road ahead for patches of unexpected alterations in the road that could be ice/snow/water/etc, and of course know local weather through radio transmission (as well as the position, velocity, and condition of every driverless car nearby). You can simulate and test every possible condition for the car, and train the algorithm to handle each situation in the ideal fashion. Humans, on the other hand, can do none of these things.
So, most likely, the car wouldn't wake you up because it would never need to. It wouldn't travel 70mph in conditions that can result in black ice. It would see the ice well in advance and slow down, not overreact if it began the spin, and recover better once it entered it (humans tend to turn against the spin, which just makes it worse.)
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
FYI threatening arson can be a worse criminal charge than threatening murder. People the say they are going to burn your house down should get life in jail I'm sure you are just jesting but typing stupid is stupid.
Automated cars are so not the same thing as autopilot. Planes don't have traffic, pedestrian, cyclists, and other things of this nature that make automated cars a really hard problem.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Are actually rules... that autonomous cars can't be driverless
2 passengers required; the human operator has to be able and ready to override the car; which means the human has to have a license, can't be drunk, etc. And the human operator (rather than the manufacturer) is responsible if there is an accident and the vehicle has fault because of improper decisions/failure.
I guess the restrictions "sound good", but they eliminate some of the selling points for the concept of an autonomous vehicle. Probably without making it safer.
You can't be relaxing, chatting on your cell phone, watching TV, or eating while the car drives you.
Makes more sense to require that driverless cars be safe enough and have enough failsafes and instrumentation that a human operator will not ever be required to override; e.g. by ensuring that the safest reasonable response is always what the autonomous car will execute, and facilitated by multiple redundant highly robust systems.
Such that the greatest remaining danger would be that the human erroneously overrides the computer and makes bad choices.
Why would a computer handle things worse than a human? It has far better reaction time, more information to make a decision from (sensors, infrared, etc), more control. I drive a Subaru and i see its current - rather modest - computer straighten up the car on ice before i could even start to make corrective actions. I would like to see a human break one spinning wheel out of four in in kess than a second for less than a second. While powering the orher three.
Yes they do. There's certainly traffic, why else would you need an ATC? There are smaller planes that don't have TCAS systems and fly at a quarter the cruising speed of a large jet, that's pretty similar to a cyclist. Then you have all the nature that has brought down planes, autopilots or not. Birds, hurricanes, microbursts. Automated cars are actually a fair bit simpler in many ways since you don't have to worry about altitude, you get to take a dimension out of the picture.
I wonder if I can get an "auto car jammer" from the same place that sold me a cell phone jammer
It is refreshing to see that lawmakersmare actually thinking ahead for once.
However the true problems are not technical, as with any engineering where there is a well known problem there will be some sort of solution. The real problem is human.
It happens everyday: we see bad drivers and we blame thmem on the traffic, on the damage to the cars, etc. but who to blame if you automatic car runs into something? The programmer ? The one who turned it on? The sleeping passenger?
These are the real problems to be solved: where to put the blame when something goes wrong. Getting the car to drive itself is nothing in comparison to this. Human beings haven't been too successful in this problem for a long time, though perhaps new tech can bring these quetions more to the forefront.
The protocol for ambiguous stationary right of way situations is pretty simple. If you think without 100% certainty you're being yielded to, you creep forward and watch the other car. You never go fast enough to cause a collision if you're wrong, and the faster you get the less ambiguity there is. This happens all the time with all-human participants when the kindly old lady isn't in fact waving like crazy. The difference with self-driving cars is that the truly correct solution is to get the little old lady off the road and into a safer vehicle as soon as possible.
If there is a bug in the car software of or sensor design it could cause systematic problems. You would want to review whether similarly equipped cars have elevated risk of certain kinds of accidents and make the manufactures liable for the elevated risk cases. The consumer and his unsurprisingly shouldn't pay because they don't have control.
Is that why they have the death penalty?
But if you follow the logic of mandatory seatbelts and motorcycle helmets, red-light cameras and anti-texting laws to their natural conclusion, it’s easy to imagine that some bureaucrats will want to co-author your car’s software. And then what? Will you ever be allowed to go over the speed limit again? Police are already drooling to see our GPS data. Will that become automatic too? Will the cops have the power to tell your car to stop whether you want it to or not? Will authorities be able to tell your car to take a detour to alleviate traffic? Make it turn around when it gets too close to certain off-limit areas?
From: http://www.aei.org/article/society-anda-culture/take-the-wheel-somebody/
Is mandate that the driverless car must have a driver and that it will of course require several hundred dollars more in fees and taxes. And to say nothing of the necessity of doubling the cost of all moving violation tickets - one for the required 'driver' and one for the owner.
Something I've never understood about articles like this is why they would claim that driverless cars are illegal.
They're not. Not in my state, and not in any state that I'm aware of.
Under the standard legal premise of "that which is not prohibited is permitted" that operates in the vast majority of the world, there are no laws which ban driverless cars. Automotive laws specify quite a few things, but most of those apply to:
1. The car. A car has quite a few things that it's required to have. Things like headlights, turn signals, windshields, tail lights, air bags, seat belts, etc. A driverless car could have all these things, and likely would have them. If they're all there as required, the car is legal.
There are also things a car is not allowed to do. For example, it's not allowed to be in certain places, and it's not allowed to be in other places for more than a certain amount of time. It's not allowed to go through a red light when there's a scamera at that light. It's not allowed to go above a certain speed when there's a scamera. Tickets for these things aren't given to the driver, they're given to the car or sent by mail to the car's owner. An automated car could certainly handle those rules, probably better than most humans. Because until now cars weren't capable of traveling without human supervision, there was no need to write laws that would apply to the car doing that. And if there's no law prohibiting it, it's legal.
2. The driver. There are lots of laws that apply to a driver. They specify what a driver can and can't do, what he must wear, what he must possess, and how he should behave in various situations on the road. These laws apply to a person. They are written to be completely inapplicable to a car, as there was no need to make them apply to the car. And if they don't apply to the car, they're simply irrelevant to a driverless car.
So I would say that no new enabling laws actually need to be passed at all. The existing legal structure is sufficient in most places for driverless cars to be on the streets today.