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Nissan's Autonomous Car Now Road Legal In Japan
Daniel_Stuckey writes "The current test vehicle uses what Nissan calls its 'Advanced Driver Assist System,' which isn't fully autonomous, but rather can be thought of as a really advanced cruise control system. According to the company, the system can keep a car in its own lane, while automatically changing lanes to pass slower vehicles or prepare to exit a freeway, which it can also do automatically. Along with that, the car automatically slows for congestion, and — most impressively in my opinion — can automatically stop at red lights. In other words, the car isn't fully automatic in that you can't simply type in a destination and have it do all the work, but the bulk of driving load is taken care of. Curiously, Nissan's goal appears to be to take sloppy human drivers out of the equation to eliminate road fatalities."
Most state laws (I'm assuming you're in the United States) allow for a DUI conviction if you are in "actual control" of a vehicle. That means if you're asleep drunk in the car and the keys are also in the car, you can be found guilty. If you're parked on private land and drunk, you can be found guilty. If you're in the driver's seat in an automated car and the car could be switched to manual control, you could be convicted of DUI if you're drunk.
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
As far as general availability of self-driving cars, I see it as a good step. The technology needs to mature much more before we should consider total automation. Keeping a responsible human in the loop is not bad too. Kudos Nissan.
Tomorrow is another day...
Is that drivers will stop paying attention and/or take their hands off the controls. Then when something bad happens that the automatic system can't handle they will be in a much worse position to deal with it than if they had been driving the car manually.
The same is true to an extent of autopilots in planes but with a plane you usually have much more time to respond to problems than in a car. Still at least one plane has crashed because the pilots accidentally disabled the autopilot and failed to notice.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Or may be they have a real problem with aging population there.
So helping the drivers as much as possible and gradually going to autonomous isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Your example about how this might cause a crash is incorrect, since the car doesn't just follow rules (such as red lights) in the hopes everybody else will also follow them perfectly. They do what you do - they also watch for and avoid other cars, pedestrians, and other obstacles (regardless of why the other car is doing whatever it's doing).
Still I do worry about how they will accurately see stoplights and stop for the intersection even if no other cars are in view. There are bad lighting conditions where it's extremely difficult to do. (I guess as a backup it could know the GPS location of stoplights and stop if it doesn't see the light and confirm that it is green). But I am sure we will end up with some level of instrumentation on the road such as stoplights that emit at a frequency not obfuscated by sunlight, snow, etc, like visible light is.