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California To License Self-Driving Cars
DevotedSkeptic writes "Californian senators have passed a bill that looks set to make the state the second in the US to approve self-driving cars on its roads. The bill was passed unanimously by state senators, and now hits the desk of governor Jerry Brown, who's expected to sign it into law. It calls on the California Department of Motor Vehicles to start developing standards and licensing procedures for autonomous vehicles. 'This bill would require the department to adopt safety standards and performance requirements to ensure the safe operation and testing of 'autonomous vehicles', as defined, on the public roads in this state,' it reads."
Not safe right now... the difference being is that we can make continually make self driving cars more safe, since driving only requires a set of rules and environmental awareness. Humans will never become more safe, in general, because they are inherently mistake prone due to fatigue, poor judgement, distractions, intoxication, and many other factors.
Just look at the wonders of automated flight. Most airline accidents that aren't due to terrorism or mechanical malfunction are due to pilots overriding the autopilots.
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Oh come on. Both articles you link to are full of nothing but conjecture and opinion, and both are about the same accident. Plus, anecdotal evidence tells us nothing. What I want to know is: how many accidents on average do Google autonomous cars have per mile, and how does that relate to the average for human-driven cars?
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And your driver's license lets you vote in CA, does that mean these cars get to vote? Can they vote themselves "car friendly" politicians? Will we be talking about "vehicle rights" in the next election?
In a panic, will we try and pull the plug?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
There are a lot of interesting legal implications for these self driving cars but all that a side I dream of the day when a drunk can stumble out of the bar and fall into the back of his car and wake up in the drive way of his home the next morning.
Anyone who seriously moves to prevent the self driving car from becoming reality regardless of how safe they are is simply against saving lives. I'm sure most people will wonder how anyone could be flat out against self driving cars but people like that do exist and at some point this will move from a legal issue to a political issue when it starts looking like mass adoption might happen and these people will come out.
Don't put any ethanol in the tank! Or you'll see a lot more DUIs...
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Considering half the drivers there don't seem to be paying attention to their driving, self-driving cars would probably be a huge improvement.
I got a ticket about 10 years ago and had to go to driving school. Maybe 50-60 people packed into a room. First two things the guy asked were questions on how close you could legally follow another car, and who had right of way in a simple merge situation and in a lane change. About 75% of the people, by show of hands on a multiple choice answer set got the wrong answer. Which means 3/4 of people on the road don't understand the simplest of rules regarding driving.
Couple that with being able to get a handful of questions wrong on the driving test, and rarely if ever re-testing, throw in some distraction since driving a two ton killing machine just isn't that interesting after you've done it a couple of months, and you have driving problems and accidents.
The car knows the rules of the road. It isn't distracted. It wont change lanes every 5 seconds when there's heavy traffic and all lane changing does is increase the likelihood of an accident. It wont tailgate. It won't drive drunk. Its not texting continuously. It wont speed 20mph over the speed limit so as to arrive home 1.5 minutes earlier. In short, it won't do any of the 95,000 things that human drivers do, usually at considerable risk and low to no gain.
Maybe if people actually read and retained the rules of the road, and didn't drive like they were playing a video game with no downsides and no risk, along with unlimited lives...we wouldn't need this.
But...we do.
Good on California legislators for reacting quickly to a potential source of licensing revenue. While they may go for years without addressing serious problems and safety issues, or doing complex things like resurfacing roads...they're pretty quick to respond to an increase in the revenue stream that allows them to continue spending billions on pork every year.
Now I just have to figure out how to trick them into thinking its fun to spend money on roads and schools.
With reports of Google's self-driving car crashing left and right how could anyone want to be in one of these vehicles? They just aren't safe. When something happens when you're driving then it's at least your fault and you could do something about it, but not in self-driving cars.
Was this meant to be sarcastic? Both of those posts referred to the same accident. These cars have logged hundreds of thousands of miles, with ONE accident(which may well have been human error). That's far, far safer than the average human driver. If you're in the drivers seat of the self driving car, you CAN take control of it should you feel the need, too.
However, realistically that's not going to be useful. The car will be better at accident avoidance than you are - it's not that big a programming challenge to achieve that. People don't like to admit it - it bruises their delicate little egos - but the car knows *exactly* how fast every car around them is moving, their acceleration, and can put itself exactly where it wants to be every time. No delayed reactions due to inattention, no slight overreaction due to panic.
Yes, self driving cars will be involved in accidents, and will be at fault, from time to time. This does not make them less safe - it's inevitable, particularly when human drivers are involved as well. Human drivers, on the other hand, are extremely unsafe. Everyone wants to think that they are special, and unlike everyone else they're awesome drivers, but the reality remains that human drivers are in accidents extremely regularly.
Don't get me wrong. I'd hate to be in a robotically driven car. Logically, I know I'd be much safer than with a human driver, but I'd be enormously squirrelly about the whole process. And, of course, I love driving - I'd never be comfortable giving that up to a machine. I consider myself a good driver, too (like everyone else), and I've never been in an accident for which I'm at fault, but I can acknowledge that there have definitely been times I've driven with far less than ideal circumstances. Distraction, emotional distress, tiredness, ill health, the list goes on an on. In all those cases, I'm less than 100%.
Meh.
I'm expect a lot of political trouble from trucking unions etc. Driving is many peoples livelihoods.
It's clearly just a matter of time until automomous cars are head and shoulders safer than those driven by people. Once this happens, adoption will be driven by the insurance companies. It will become prohibitively expensive to drive your own car.
I actually look forward to this, and wonder how it will change the interior design of cars. Will we turn the front seat around and go for a more social living room style arrangement? Will we dispense with the view from the front windshield in favour of an immersive large-screen TV? Beds for those long drives? Will we have refrigerators and microwaves so we can get breakfast on the morning commute? The possibilities are awesome.
Your theory isn't holding up in the face of the data. Googles Cars have logged hundreds of thousands of miles and have one accident caused by human error.
Where are you getting that the average human driver has an at least one accident every few hundred thousand miles? I wouldn't call this "far, far safer" yet. It has the potential to be.
Also, most of the tests have been in still fairly controlled environments. Meaning, the car wasn't woken up in the middle of the night to get a pregnant woman to the hospital quickly over dirt roads, past nighttime street-racers, etc... Loads of "special cases" exist in the world of cars. It will be quite a long time before we have a really solid understanding of their viability. Right now, a "typical commute" is probably the safest use, or even for standard-route delivery vehicles without a high time sensitivity. Even better if certain roads / routes / lanes get set aside for autonomous vehicles only, which would make them even safer and more efficient.
Come play Moral Decay!
I would suspect the first waves of cars would be big companies like Google running tests. In that case, they could meet the legal requirements for insurance themselves. After that, we'll probably have enough data to calculate the risks with far greater accuracy than human drivers.
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Even if you were to combine accidents from software bugs, driving the speed limit, or some other factor, I'd absolutely bet that they would total far fewer than accidents by drunk drivers, falling asleep at the wheel, using cell phones, talking to passengers in the car, highway hypnosis, misunderstanding street signs, or lack of knowledge about right-of-way. Pick one.
They don't have to be safe, as nothing, not even laying in bed, is completely safe. They just have to be safer than what exists now. That is a pretty low bar to reach.
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I already have an autopilot in my car which is constantly giving audio prompts and attempting to take control, but enough about the wife. I for one welcome our new autonomous car overlords - as at least I can kick the wife out... heh
Well, 300,000 miles, one non-fatal accident (with, again, a human at the wheel - but we'll ignore that for now).
Now, I pulled these numbers of a set of google searches. There was a fairly wide range of stats, so I took a bit of an average:
Insurance industry assumes one accident CLAIM per 17.9 years (lots of minor accidents go unclaimed, but we'll ignore them too). Average of 15,000 miles per year per driver. Thus, an average of one accident per 268,500 miles per human driver.
Of course, while the human driver stats are numerous (and this is why insurance is expensive!) the self driving car stats are not. Only one accident with new, unrefined technology in 300,000 miles... and that with a human in control of the car.
That said, your example? That's where a self driving car is much, much better than a human. A human driver with a pregnant woman giving birth, woken up in the middle of the night is going to be tired, highly agitated and distracted and definitely not at his best. The self driving car isn't tired. It doesn't care what time it is. The self driving car will be aware of the speeding racers - and know their exact speed, trajectory, and likely path - sooner than the human driver will, as these are very simple computations to make. The self driving car is indifferent to the passenger; which is also important. It's not distracted, worried, or anxious.
Of course, there certainly are cases where that's just not good enough, extreme emergency cases. That's why all these self driving cars can be driven in manual mode. You've always got that option if need be.
Obviously, routes being set aside for autonomous vehicles will be safer, but routes mixed will be safer than pure-human routes, because autonomous cars are simply safer than human driven cars overall.
I've been rearended while stopped at traffic lights six times in the last twenty years; every time due to an inattentive driver. None of those would happen with an autonomous car.
Finally, yes, mechanical/electronic failure can result in crashes. Just like it can with human drivers - sticking accelerators, for example, failing steering linkages, brakes, etc. Software problems? No different than a human driver having a heart attack, stroke, seizure, getting stung by a bee, etc - those all happen all the time. There's no real difference there.
Meh.