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Cadillac SRX Converted Into Self-Driving Car
fergus07 writes "There's been much talk about self-driving cars in recent times and the latest glimpse into this autonomous future comes from Carnegie Mellon University where researchers have loaded a Cadillac SRX with an array of sensors that allow it to manage highway traffic, congested roadways, and even merging on and off ramps."
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
allow it to manage highway traffic, congested roadways, and even merging on and off ramps.
This is how you know self-driving car tech is not quite ready, when they are bragging about being able to manage an off-ramp.
Seriously folks, we are not going to have a fully autonomous car by 2020.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
You assume that people could trust the technology. My personal experience is the rest of the drivers on the road will still do stupid and random shit, which has a good chance of negating any of the benefits of a car on auto-pilot.
What you're describing is better served with public transit or something.
When you have a huge fraction of your cars still being older and not using this technology, a lot of the assumptions about how this safe will be goes out the window.
I'd love to see these systems handle someone in the right turn lane with their signal on swooping over 3 lanes and turning left. And the cost involved in changing every car over to this would be so high as to make it a pipe dream.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
At which point, WTF is the point of the self driving car?
To get to the point where they actually are safer than one being actively piloted by a human. Furthermore even if they never become completely self-driving there will be a lot of very useful spin off technology that is going to come from this research. The legal framework for these cars can be updated when appropriate. That is the easiest problem with the technology since we already know how to do that.
I just don't see people actually wanting this technology, and since we'll never convert all of the cars on the road to this system
Yes people do actually want this technology. In fact I'd go so far as to say people who don't even think they want it actually do even if they don't know it yet. There already are self-parking cars, cars with automatic speed control/braking, stability control, ABS, traction control, navigation aids, drive by wire steering/braking, cruise control, and more. All those things are portions of a driverless vehicle. It's by no means a solved problem but we already rely on a host of technologies to make us better at driving than we could be unassisted.
I would dearly love to be able to get to/from work (~30 minute each way commute) without having to waste an hour every day with the non-productive task of driving. It is a huge waste of my time. It potentially solves other problems as well like helping handicapped people, reducing drunk driving, freeing up huge amounts of non-productive time and more.
We don't actually have to convert all the cars to driverless. It would potentially only take a fraction of them to be self piloting to improve road safety. I assure you that you do not really want my 94 year old grandmother behind the wheel of a car. I would welcome a self driving car to take her around. Any driverless solution will have to be robust enough to deal with unpredictable events at least as well as a human. A well designed system could have better situational awareness than any driver. My field of vision is only about 160 degrees even when I'm not distracted. A computer would have 360 vision day or night, be able to communicate with other vehicles regarding position and speed and direction, be able to react faster than any human, be far less prone to distraction, and actually obey the rules of the road. The engineering obstacles are large but so are the potential benefits.
No one who listens to that has ever bought a Cadillac.
Rap music or whatever was popular in the 1890s are likely the only options on a Cadillacs radio.