Google Unveils Self-Driving Car With No Steering Wheel

cartechboy writes: "We've already discussed and maybe even come to terms with the fact that autonomous cars are coming. In fact, many automakers including Mercedes-Benz and Tesla have committed to self-driving cars by 2017. Apparently that's not ambitious enough. Google has just unveiled an in-house-designed, self-driving car prototype with no steering wheel or pedals. In fact, it doesn't have any traditional controls, not even a stereo. The as-yet-nameless car is a testbed for Google's vision of the computerized future of transportation. Currently the prototype does little more than programmed parking lot rides at a maximum of 25 mph, but Google plans to build about 100 prototypes, with the first examples receiving manual controls (human-operated). Google then plans to roll out the pilot program in California in the next several years. So the technology is now there, but is there really a market for a car that drives you without your input other than the destination?"

Comments

So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[MillerHighLife21]

These this will naturally become shuttles and taxi services almost immediately. Given the protests of Uber and Lyft, what will the outcry be for these?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Freshly Exhumed]

I totally recall when taxi drivers were homicidal psychopaths with mohawk hair cuts. Thankfully we will now have fleets of mannequins named "Johnny Cab" to cheerfully take us around.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[krashnburn200]

These this will naturally become shuttles and taxi services almost immediately. Given the protests of Uber and Lyft, what will the outcry be for these?

Cabbies don't have enough money to have a voice that's heard, The people with the money will just watch until these are cheaper than cabbies and then implement.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[skovnymfe]

They're taking our jobs?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[drolli]

The implications of a technology like this go far beyond taxi drivers.

In the moment when autonoumous cars go mainstream, half of the car manufacturers will go bancrupt and the other half will have a very good time.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Sockatume]

There are going to be trials of self-driving shuttle cars in Milton Keynes next year, so you might want to watch the local news for that area.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[xelah]

Or maybe there are more controlled environments - moving people around certain parts of airports springs to mind - which will be the first targets. Places where pedestrian and other traffic isn't allowed. Public and legal acceptance is far more likely there, and it'd be a better and eventually cheaper service than waiting for one of a handful of buses.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[nospam007]

"These this will naturally become shuttles and taxi services almost immediately. Given the protests of Uber and Lyft, what will the outcry be for these?"

Well, _real_ car companies are able to build cars where a 30 cents ignition switch can kill you.

Since you don't have anything to do in these cars, you can watch ads the whole time and get the car for free.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

Add to this that taxi drivers are generally disliked by other motorists (Along with cyclists, buses, semi trucks, and white work vans), and you have a further reason why they will be ignored.

That depends on your locality. I now happen to be driving a cab on the east end of Long Island NY, for a well liked family owned company here. We take excellent care of our customers here, safety of our fares is paramount, the cars are clean and well maintained, and all our drivers are quality men and women. To get a "hack license" here you must be fingerprinted, then the prints are checked by the local police for any felony arrests, and a doctor must sign off that you are physically fit to drive a taxi.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[tapspace]

These this will naturally become shuttles and taxi services almost immediately. Given the protests of Uber and Lyft, what will the outcry be for these?

Well, given that the protests against those companies are mostly policy-rooted and not technology-rooted, at this point it is almost impossible to tell. Are you suggesting that these shuttles and taxis will defy existing laws and fail to get licenses? Then, I would assume that the outcry will be the same. If these hypotehtical taxis get licensed, probably none.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

(Replying to self) Many times a taxi customer needs to make a train/bus, will a GoogleTaxi know that? I have a perfect record getting people to the stations, sometimes needing to cut off a departing bus, or running up to a train to keep the doors from closing. An autonomous cab cannot do that (yet?).

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[CastrTroy]

Perhaps people would just learn to be on time more often. I'm sure there are cases where something unexpected comes up, but many people I know are late all the time, and when something comes up, they are even later.

Personally I don't care if somebody is late, I don't want taxi's performing dangerous and/or illegal maneuvers. Also, when you hold up a bus or train, you could be making more than one person late.

All that being said, having autonomous cars would probably make things go a lot smoother, and we wouldn't have to worry about being late so much because of traffic jams.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

Probably huge, but cabs are too expensive these days for anyone to care. Cutting labor costs will bring down the fare by a fair bit. Self-service gas stations used to be extremely rare too, but screw tipping some guy for something mundane like pumping gas or driving a car.

Nice attitude toward your fellow human supplying a needed service to you. Do you stiff your waiter/waitress too?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[halltk1983]

It's not really a needed service, if you can do it yourself just as easily, or if it can be done by a computer. Did you pay a local technician to assemble your computer by hand, transistor by transistor?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[malignant_minded]

Plus if the car has a set route and speed you will know if you will be on time before entering the vehicle. I can picture that in the future I "hail" a cab on my phone while at a friends house. I will know how long that cab will take to arrive and a recalculating clock for my arrival time increased by the time it takes me to get in the vehicle. So if I am going to miss a train I might just stay at my friends longer and catch the next one.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[pr0fessor]

That sounds more likely, it would have to be a controlled place or at least mapped.

I was off the google map and gps half the weekend. I was out fishing and the roads to where I was at were very nice paved state roads, there was a marina, boat docks, a resort, all built in the 70s, the place was packed.

I can't imagine a fully driverless car when popular summer spots aren't in gps, when it finds you a restaurant but it's out of business or moved, when it tell me to turn into construction and then tells me to turn around multiple times because it hasn't recalculated the route yet.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[geekoid]

If the lively hood of someone depends solely on the kindness of strangers, then the system is broken.

Frankly,. I would like to see min. wage doubled and tipping ended.

And I am a generous tipper to wait staff.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Agares]

I suppose the taxi drivers could get one of these and have it do the work for them so that they can focus on other things.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Agares]

They might be cheaper already. Do you know what one of these costs? I am curious now. Also it might be worth getting one for the commute to work in the future after they get everything worked out.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Russ1642]

There won't be any. Google is smart enough to get licences.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Osiris Ani]

I have a perfect record getting people to the stations, sometimes needing to cut off a departing bus, or running up to a train to keep the doors from closing. An autonomous cab cannot do that (yet?).

God, I hope not. What the world really needs is less of that, not more.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[canadian_right]

Once all the cars are autonomous, and networked there won't be traffic jams.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[rolfwind]

And all that will be negated by cost. There will be 5 major costs in taxi afaik:

-driver
-fuel
-insurance
-car (initial cost)
-maintenance

I tried to rank them by what I think will be highest to lowest. Self-driving car will eliminate the top cost. It should lower insurance (not guaranteed) and will maximize fuel.

Add in electric vehicles to the mix and fuel will be lowered and maintenance by a whole hell of a lot but of course that can be done with drivered cars as well.

Cost and availability will kill many human cab services. But the good thing is that finally the boondock areas will get taxi service unlike today. Excellent for seniors and disabled. Taxi and rental car services will merge in fact. Nothing more annoying than an idle fleet.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

Some people might be dressed nicely for a night on the town and don't wish to risk spilling gas on themselves. I tip everbody who has a low paying job if they go the extra mile for me.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Daniel Hoffmann]

You talking to me?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

Once all the cars are autonomous, and networked there won't be traffic jams.

What's a realistic time frame for that? 20 or 30 years? There'll always be a need to be human driven cars and trucks. Phase them out completely? I don't see it happening in our lifetime.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[DrXym]

There are far too many scenarios on public roads where a self drive car wouldn't know what to do and would require human intervention. At the very least it requires an unimpaired, conscious, qualified human being with their own set of controls who can take over if the need arises or if the car does something dumb.

If these become shuttles or taxis it would have to be in carefully controlled conditions where it is highly unlikely that some event would occur that leaves the vehicle stuck and unable to move. And even there, it's possible that there would have to be a a human sitting in a booth nearby who could override the system if it became stuck.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

An example: The train you're on is running 30 minutes late, and you need a cab to get you to the day's last ferry, or you will have to wait until morning. That's when you'll really appreciate what a skilled cabdriver can do for you. Not to mention a human driver can avoid potholes, at least until the Google Hover Taxi comes along... ;^)

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[LordLimecat]

AAAAAAAnd out come the luddites. Damn those power looms, taking away our jobs and consigning half the country to starvation!

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[hawkinspeter]

Autonomous cars can hardly be more dangerous than human drivers, so I'd imagine that insurance costs will plummet for them. Once the number of human driven cars declines, I reckon there'll be a lot less traffic jams as traffic flows become more predictable and "laminar", so fuel costs should decrease as well.

The majority of vehicles spend a lot of time being parked and not used, so if the autonomous cars are shared like taxis, they can be used almost 24 hours a day which should reduce the factor of initial cost although the maintenance might increase.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[hawkinspeter]

I don't get the whole tipping business (but then I do live in England). Why do you tip a water/waitress but not the chef? Or the dish-washer or the cleaners? In fact, why not tip the builders who made the establishment as well?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

An example: The train you're on is running 30 minutes late, and you need a cab to get you to the day's last ferry, or you will have to wait until morning. That's when you'll really appreciate what a skilled cabdriver can do for you. Not to mention a human driver can avoid potholes, at least until the Google Hover Taxi comes along... ;^)

Why wouldn't an autonomous car be able to avoid potholes?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Gibgezr]

You talk as if the fact that these autonomous cars won't try and cut off a bus is a BAD thing. I disagree.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[hawkinspeter]

Autonomous cars will be so much safer than human drivers that it's not even funny. I'd welcome having an unimpaired, conscious, qualified human being to take over from most vehicle drivers when the need arises or if the driver does something dumb.

Most vehicle accidents are caused by driver distraction and autonomous cars don't suffer from that.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Osiris Ani]

An example: The train you're on is running 30 minutes late, and you need a cab to get you to the day's last ferry, or you will have to wait until morning. That's when you'll really appreciate what a skilled cabdriver can do for you.

I fully understand what you mean by "skilled cabdriver." I have to walk/drive on the same roads as the aforementioned "skilled cabdrivers," and thus I direct you back to my previous post.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[locofungus]

and we wouldn't have to worry about being late so much because of traffic jams

I'd expect there to be far more traffic jams because no longer is there an incentive not to let your car drive into the city.

Can't find a parking space - just leave your car driving around. Intelligent cars would actually seek out traffic jams so as to minimize fuel use.

Almost at your destination and crawling along. Get out and walk the last bit and let your car get there in its own time.

Stuck in traffic jam, get out, pop to the newsagent catch up with the car and get back in again.

For the more proactive, stick your Brompton in the back and let the car drive most of the way to the city. Once it starts getting snarled up in traffic, hop out, cycle the rest of the way and let the car do the rest of the journey on its own ready for when you want to leave.

Time it right, and the car will arrive just as you're ready to load your shopping (and bike) back into the car. Hopefully, these automatic cars won't block the roads for the drivers trying to leave the city so the route out will be fast, unlike human drivers who block junctions all the time.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

There are far too many scenarios on public roads where a self drive car wouldn't know what to do and would require human intervention. At the very least it requires an unimpaired, conscious, qualified human being with their own set of controls who can take over if the need arises or if the car does something dumb.

If these become shuttles or taxis it would have to be in carefully controlled conditions where it is highly unlikely that some event would occur that leaves the vehicle stuck and unable to move. And even there, it's possible that there would have to be a a human sitting in a booth nearby who could override the system if it became stuck.

And yet Google has clocked over 700,000 autonomous miles on public roads already, in uncontrolled conditions. The pool of unforeseen scenarios is finite and shrinking. I do agree that manual controls should remain in place as the technology matures.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[DrXym]

So their car can interpret hand signals of a traffic cop directing traffic at a set of broken lights? That's amazing! Can it also tell the difference between a cop directing traffic and some random crazy guy doing the same?

There are any number of every day scenarios where a self drive car would stop because it had no idea what to do.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[DrXym]

I could make a self drive car which is extremely safe - every time a leaf obscurs a sensor, or a plastic bag blows across the road, or it senses a guy standing on the road waiting for his lift, or the lane is out, or because it's lost GPS and its stuck in a tunnel. I would hit the brakes and stop or slow right down. See? Very safe. But oops, now we have a car which doesn't make good progress and stops for all kinds of dumb reasons.

So yeah Google or whomever could claim their car is really safe. It doesn't make it necessarily practical. At the very least it requires a human to extricate it from situations like those above and many more. The only way you will see a driverless vehicle with no form of controls any time soon is in controlled conditions and even then it will need some kind of override. e.g. I could imagine a transport system which used a dedicated lane in airports to move people between terminals. I can't imagine such a thing working on a public road.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

The power looms did take away their jobs and make those with jobs into far more dangerous and unhappy ones. Eventually, it worked out so everyone alive at the time it worked out benefited. But the luddites were absolutely correct in that it lowered their individual standard of living.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Altus]

The tips are generally shared amongst some of the staff.... that portion of the staff makes shit wage, minimum wage law doesn't apply to them. Waitstaff gets paid a few dollars an hour and need those tips to get by. Those who don't get a portion of the tip get paid at least minimum wage (and in many cases more than that)

That said, I would be ok with eliminating tipping culture but you can't just stop tipping given the way it is currently built not only into the culture but into the labor laws of this country.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[LordLimecat]

The power loom also opened up far more jobs in the long run.

Shipping crates were also fiercely fought, by longshoremen, over the fear that neat and orderly shipping containers would cut the need for workers to sort out shipments and bring them ashore. But that same development has encouraged a far more global market, and today there are huge numbers of workers employed in (for example) Amazon, Newegg, etc warehouses and in supporting infrastructure, partly due to how cheap it is to ship things and how much the online marketplace as a whole has exploded.

As always, progress in one area-- even if it means a temporary reduction in jobs-- almost always results in the creation of new ones elsewhere. It also generally improves the quality of life of society as a whole, even when individual workers may lose their jobs. It is fine to be concerned for those who may lose their jobs due to progress, and to assist when possible in an exit strategy for an industry. Its absurd to wonder whether we should stifle innovation to protect a dying or obsolete industry.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Altus]

I don't really care about MADD, their opinions would hold no weight if these were commonplace and any attempts to block them would expose their duplicity, they can't afford it.

I'm not sure why you think cops would be against it. Just because they would loose that income. They will find another way, or taxes will go up. Its not that hard to figure. The police will get funded and if their internal methods of funding are cut off they will simply be given more money, the cops will not be starved out by a tech like this.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[hawkinspeter]

Luckily, you aren't making the cars as you'd make a particularly useless one. Google are trying to do this and they don't do things the way you would (because that would be retarded).

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[hawkinspeter]

Sharing tips amongst the staff makes even less sense. Why not just add extra money to the bill and then pay the staff a sensible wage? I thought that one of the reasons behind tipping was to ensure good service, but by sharing out the tips, you lessen the incentive to the waiting staff.

Personally, I'd prefer to tip the chef as they can make all the difference between a mediocre and a superb meal. The person taking the order and carrying the plates doesn't really have that much effect.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Dahan]

The tips are generally shared amongst some of the staff.... that portion of the staff makes shit wage, minimum wage law doesn't apply to them.

No, minimum wage law does apply to them: "If an employee's tips combined with the employer's direct wages of at least $2.13 an hour do not equal the federal minimum hourly wage, the employer must make up the difference."

It's actually most white-collar employees (e.g., software developers such as myself) who are exempt from the minimum wage laws (and overtime too)... see this page for the full list of exempt employees.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[maliqua]

they have enough numbers and comradry to organize large scale grid locks and other disruptive protests.
the large cab companies that most cabbies work under are however owned by very very wealthy individuals and have a lot of money to lose if they let it happen.

I'm not saying either way if i agree or disagree with the implementation of autonomous vehicles just that those in the business of transporting people have more power than you may realize

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[DrXym]

Perhaps you should read what I said. A car has to make good progress as well as be safe. That means dealing with countless situations which are easy for humans to solve and virtually intractable for a computer.

For example, my car is behind a bus. The bus stops to pick up passengers. I can see from the length of queue whether I'll be there for several minutes and determine if its worth pulling out safely into the oncoming lane to pass the bus. Does the self drive car have a special bus queue length algorithm? Is it going to wait forever? Or a minute? Two minutes? Forever? Can it tell a bus from a truck? Can it tell if the bus has even stopped because it is picking up passengers or because it has broken down?

Or perhaps a road is partially flooded. There is a 50m stretch where the road is only passable by one car in each direction by travelling in the centre where the camber is highest. Drivers in each direction take turns according to how many cars there are behind and oncoming. Does the self drive car just plough through the water? Does it even see the water? Or does it nudge to the centre of the road? Does it act like an asshole and just pull out without waiting its turn? How does it know that it's turn is next? How does it signal intent to the other guy and vice versa? What happens if just starts driving when the other guy is half way up? Will it reverse back or just block the increasingly angy other guy?

Or there are two guys standing on either side of a roadworks with Stop/Go signs. Only one direction can pass at a time. Can your car figure out there are roadworks? Can it read that sign? How does it know when it is safe to go?

Or a road has a new road layout. The lanes have moved around. Perhaps a two way street has become a one way street. This is clearly signposted. Can your car read these signs? Will it just dumbly drive up the street the wrong way until someone thinks to update the map?

The answer for all these examples and hundreds of others is that it highly unlikely it will do the right thing. It has to have an override mode and a competent, unimpaired driver to extricate it from these situations. There are plenty of positives about advanced driving modes and even self drive in some situations. But the time when cars will be able to drive themselves outside of very controlled situations with no override is a long way off.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Cabriel]

Minimum wage here is $9/hr. Doubling that and taking away my tips would result in a drastic pay-cut for me.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[DrXym]

Yes and they're going to run in special one way lanes and have overrides for passengers.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

Perhaps people would just learn to be on time more often.

Personally I don't care if somebody is late, I don't want taxi's performing dangerous and/or illegal maneuvers. Also, when you hold up a bus or train, you could be making more than one person late.

In my experience, there can be many reasons for being late. Sometimes it's the passenger's not calling in time, sometimes it's traffic, the cabbie had trouble locating the address, and sometimes the cab company gets so busy that the cab's late. For whatever the reason, lateness happens. I personally do my best to make use of the GPS's ETA function. By going faster than the posted limits you can shave off some minutes, but I know my limitations (been driving for over 40 years), and the safety of my passengers and everyone on the roads (pedestrians, bicyclists, even squirrels and deer) take precedence over making it on time. Sometimes the mass transit is running late anyways, but you try to do the best you can.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[cheater512]

Have you ever used Google Maps at all? Google has a perfect track record for public transport here in Australia.

Oh and they will do one better than you - they will tell you when your bus/train is late. I haven't seen a Taxi driver do that yet! :P

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

You haven't had me as your driver! It's against the law here in the U.S. to use a device while driving, but the customer can check MTA's website enroute. ;^)

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ColdSam]

If we, as a society, are okay with you (taxi drivers) speeding up to shave off a few minutes, then we certainly should also let a self-driving car with a better safety record do so as well. This is not a point in your advantage.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ColdSam]

I suggest you have a backup plan.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[thoromyr]

why does living in England exclude you from understanding tipping? Is this a serious question, or a troll?

According to that bastion of incontrovertible knowledge, 10% tipping is customary in the UK (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tip_%28gratuity%29)

Don't care for wikipedia? How about the arrogant Cecil? http://www.straightdope.com/co...

Yet another link claims the practiced started in English bars. http://www.billshrink.com/blog...

if you don't like any of the above explanations you can always google your own...

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Wraithlyn]

I now happen to be driving a cab on the east end of Long Island NY

You really shouldn't be posting to /. while driving.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

I look forward to the future, autodriving cars, era. I have experience in many careers, and cabdriving is just what I do now because A: Enjoy driving B: I deal with a variety of people, most all of them very nice, and C: I get off on helping people get what they need to do get done, always have. You can have some amazing conversations with perfect strangers, people will really open up to their cabdriver. Like a bartender, part of the job is helping others by giving advice, playing psychologist at times. The hope is that by the time I get them where they need to go, they have had a good cab experience, and just maybe, have a different more positive attitude about things in their life.

All in all it's not a bad gig. I meet some of the nicest people, make an honest living doing it, and sometimes I get to help people out. For 30 years I'd done home improvement work, roofing/ siding / windows/ framing, etc. Hard, physically demanding work. Now I sit on my butt and drive people around, and they smile and thank me as they gladly hand me money. So if my sin in life is occasionally going over the legal speed limit in order to serve my customers better, and no one gets hurt by that..., I'll just have to serve a few extra days in hell for that after I die.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

I posted today between calls, while l'm parked. I use a Bluetooth earpiece while driving, Cool as slashdot can be, it can wait until I have pulled over and have absolutely nothing else to do.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ColdSam]

If people don't get hurt by you violating the traffic laws then that is just luck. It's like shooting a gun into the sky, not a sin, but don't pretend it's 100% safe either.

The point is that you want us to believe you are providing a necessary service by breaking the law and endangering (even if only barely) the lives of others. This may very well be a differentiator for you when competing against self-driving cars that are required to follow the law, but you can't expect society to approve it. If we did then we could just as easily turn off the limits on self-driving cars and let them speed, roll through stop signs etc. and they will be able to do it more safely and more efficiently than you can.

If you are retiring in the next 10 years then you probably have nothing to worry about, but if you think you can continue to earn the same money doing this job in 20 to 30 years I think you'll be unpleasantly surprised.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ColdSam]

The server is the person most responsible for the overall quality and enjoyment of your meal and typically the only person you're going to be interacting with. They, in turn, tip out to the support staff so that they (the server) get what they need (water refilled, drinks poured, food in a timely manner with special orders considered, ...). It's not the only way to do it, but it is rational, for the most part.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ColdSam]

If you are significantly better than the average server then you should command a higher salary from your boss.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Notice nowhere did I say that we ought stifle innovation. I said that the luddites were correct, and that the inevitable increase in the standard of living did not affect them in their lifetime.

It makes sense to claim that the costs can be mitigated by helping those workers displaced, and society can still benefit as a whole. Heck, the displaced weavers could have been paid their salary til retirement, and the increased production still would have resulted in a modest short-term increase in the standard of living, and following their retirement a substantially larger standard of living.

But that wasn't the case you made. You made a mocking, disparaging case towards those concerned about the displaced workers. And then you shifted the goalposts dramatically .

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Richy_T]

It's kinda crazy and it's spreading beyond control (tip jars in a sandwich store?) but when in Rome...

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[DrXym]

The tipping in the UK is a far better model. Restaurants have to pay their staff more and tipping becomes discretionary and merit based. Normally it's okay to slip a few quid on top. For taxis, round the fare up to the next multiple. For bar staff nothing.

In the US if you tip less than 15% you run the risk of comments being passed in front of you. All that friendliness is fake and off-putting. I remember one smiley waitress even asked if me and the wife were from "out of town" and handed us a "it is customary to tip 15% card" to us printed in about 12 languages. So fucking insulting. The absolute nadir of tipping is going to the toilet in some places and having some guy standing there in the toilet waiting to turn the tap on for a tip.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[DrXym]

It's not customary. It's discretionary. Some people do it, some people don't. Most people would have the grace to tip good service with the change from the bill with a few quid extra. Tipping in pubs is virtually non existent although I'm sure there are certain tourist bars which are quite happy to pocket the cash tourists leave for them without correcting them on the point. Same in Ireland. I live not to far away from Killarney which is always full of US tourists. I bet the people serving change their expectations depending on whether they are serving a British/Irish person or one from the US. I doubt the actual service changes in any appreciable way.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[787style]

Seeing as Uber is largely funded by Google and driverless taxi's are, in fact, the end game of Uber - I don't think there will be much.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[LordLimecat]

My initial comment was somewhat meant to be humorous, and not to disparage displaced workers. If anything, it was aimed at the all too common attitude on slashdot that we SHOULD hold back technology to save those jobs.

You are correct that often those displaced workers may get the short end of the stick while society as a whole gets the benefit, and you're not wrong that we could probably do something to ease the ending of an industry-- but I dont think that thats a good objection to a new technology.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[hobarrera]

(Replying to self) Many times a taxi customer needs to make a train/bus, will a GoogleTaxi know that? I have a perfect record getting people to the stations, sometimes needing to cut off a departing bus, or running up to a train to keep the doors from closing. An autonomous cab cannot do that (yet?).

If we had only self-driving cars, there would be no need for this. The cab would know the exact amount of time (because it can be linked to all the other cars and therefore, know the traffic) needed to get to the plane/train, and be there on time.

If the human didn't get onto the cab in time, then tough luck for him.
We'll replace the humans in the long run anyway.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[hobarrera]

On the upside:

Transport companies will benefit.
Transportation cost will drop (though the companies may keep the difference instead of translating it to the ser).
People who travel a lot will benefit from a more pleasant experience.
Products from other regions will have less net cost.
Traffic jams will be reduced greately.

On the downside:
Car manufacturers will adapt and survive.
Insurance companies will suffer a lot of drop in income.
Mechanics will get a drop in amount of work (especially in regions with lots of accidents).
Drivers will need to move on to something else.

However, people move on from certain jobs every time we have a breakthrough - keeping the jobs around is something that we all pay as a society. I'd much rather pay to retrain those people into something else (at their choosing?), than actually have them keep a job which we'll all by paying for, indirectly.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

It isn't luck, ColdSam, it's the skill of driving experience, not at all like shooting a gun into the air. It's knowing your limitations, and knowing the roads you drive. Where you can safely drive faster than the posted limit, and where you certainly need to drive the posted limit, or even slower. Needing to get a passenger to a train/bus/ferry on time is part of the job, happens to me once every couple weeks. If there's another taxi hanging at the depot I'll radio in to them to try to hold the connection. If the customer misses it, they miss it, oh well. Getting my passengers to their destination alive is of course the only important thing. Avoiding potholes to give them the best ride possible is part of the driving skill humans still have overd computers at the moment. Suggesting good local places to stop at is another. I and the drivers in my company are not at all like the movie versions of cabdrivers. We're real people who have roots in our community that we serve. We're not just some random cabdriver that tries to make a fast buck from you.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

Why wouldn't an autonomous car be able to avoid potholes?

I really don't know, can they?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[SternisheFan]

If, as the bus is beginning to pull out, I can get the bus drivers attention by honking as I safely pull ahead of it, that's acceptable. They want to serve their customers also.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Gibgezr]

Yes, that sounds acceptable...but it's an edge case, and stacked up against saving thousands of lives, it is unimportant. Besides, once both the bus and the taxi are autonomous, the obvious next step is some form of communication protocol that facilitates the taxi "telling" the bus "I have a passenger for you", and the bus's AI decides whether to wait or not, and informs the taxi of it's decision. The communication can happen over larger distances than the audible range of a horn, doesn't distract anyone else, and even more people could "make the bus" than do now, all more safely too. Win-win!

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ColdSam]

Driving is inherently dangerous, every time you are on the road, even following every traffic regulation to the letter you are putting lives at risk. When you violate those laws you become even more of a risk (in the vast majority of cases). I will fully grant that you are a far better driver than the majority of drivers (and probably much, much safer than the average cabbie), but that merely means that you are adding less risk, not no risk. You may be shooting a gun off in a remote area, but you're still doing it. You absolutely cannot guarantee me that you will never get into an accident, that's just crazy talk.

I don't know if you're aware of the concept of external costs, but while the things you mention here are a benefit to you and your passenger, they have costs for everyone else, like increased risk or delaying other people on the bus/train. It MAY be that you get enough benefit to outweigh their costs, but you have to grant them the same option. Which means that they also get to speed and/or make you wait for the train AND a self-driving car can make those decisions more fairly and consistently (eventually).

I don't know about the car in this particular video, but some versions can already detect potholes and navigate safely around them. But they also will be able to detect them in the dark or when they are filled with rain water, and they will be able to record and notify other cars so they can avoid them and the city so they can fix them.

Google, Yelp, Chowhound, ... there are already plenty of services that have more knowledge about local restaurants and bars than you do and they are constantly adding more data and getting better at making recommendations. The panel on the self driving taxi will not only find a good restaurant you like it will tell you exactly what time they close, it will make reservations for you, etc.

It may be several years off, but the self driving taxi will also be able to tell the bus to wait for you and if it were me who designed the system I would put in a cost for doing that.

The average NYC cab driver, for example, provides a terrible experience and few if any of the services that you offer. It wouldn't take much for an automated taxi to outdo them in safety and service. Not to mention that it is better for society not having 10s of thousands of taxis driving around looking for fares - automated taxis wouldn't do that.

I have used car services and chauffeurs who offer the same premium service that you advertise. They are much better than the average cabbie in almost every way and, of course, they charge for that. This merely buys you some extra time. Some people will continue to pay extra, including those who distrust technology or just want human contact. Of course, all the other displaced taxi drivers will want to move into your business and at least some of them will be qualified and compete for your premium business.

In the near future I expect a large number of taxis, if not all, to be a hybrid - a self-driving car that includes a driver behind the wheel. This is a decent compromise for everyone until the technology becomes bulletproof. This might also be a job in your distant future, you still get to load bags and chat with the customers who want that, but don't do the actual driving.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[greenzrx]

. ...When you violate those laws you become even more of a risk (in the vast majority of cases)....

vast majority? the vast majority of road users around here break one or more laws every time they get in a car, and a very small percentage of them are having accidents on a regular basis. so, even if they are becoming even more of a risk, it's at best a slightly incremental one.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Ah, yes, sorry, sometimes I miss humor over the pipes.

I tend to think we can easily (in solution, if not in political will) create a solution that takes the pain away from the displaced workers. Sadly, many people oppose something akin to basic income or robust unemployment insurance.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ColdSam]

If violating the traffic laws doesn't cause an increase in risk then they shouldn't be laws. Which laws are you proposing to get rid of, or is it all of them?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[LordLimecat]

Basic income for all would create a whole host of other problems. Employment insurance is somewhat better, but Im sure if I could come up with a bunch of problems with it, too.

The big issue is you absolutely do not want to enable those ousted workers to simply stop caring: if at all possible, they should retrain in another industry, and any "solution" which removes the incentive to do so is a bad one. I do not know how you balance the two, but this is an area where the law of unintended consequences can bite you hard.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Why wouldn't an autonomous car be able to avoid potholes?

I really don't know, can they?

It seems reasonable to me that they easily could, although I don't know if they do already. A lot of the data input for automation comes from cameras, programming pothole detection would be trivial compared to what they've already accomplished.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Actually, I do RTFA]

I'm having trouble understanding why I care if the ousted workers stop caring. Why is incentivizing the workers left behind to retrain to a new industry is a necessary thing?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ShanghaiBill]

What's a realistic time frame for that? 20 or 30 years?

I read a study that if just 10% of cars were autonomous, and programmed to behave optimally, most traffic jams could be prevented. Basically, they would set the pace for other drivers, and could smooth out the accordion effect that prolongs congestion.

There'll always be a need to be human driven cars and trucks.

Why?

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[ShanghaiBill]

Why wouldn't an autonomous car be able to avoid potholes?

They should be much better at it. For starters, they can use a combination of lidar and vision to detect the pothole better than a human would. Then, they could record the exact location (within a cm) of the pothole, so it can be avoided again in the future, and lastly, they could share the pothole data with other autonomous cars, so they can also avoid it.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[Pulzar]

Or a road has a new road layout. The lanes have moved around. Perhaps a two way street has become a one way street. This is clearly signposted. Can your car read these signs? Will it just dumbly drive up the street the wrong way until someone thinks to update the map?

Why do you have the impression that computers these days can still only do the same things they did in the 90s?

Yes, the car can read the signs, easily. It's trivial for it to see the sign that says "one way, do not enter" and to recalculate its route. It's also easy for the first car that spots the sign that doesn't match its map to update other cars and let them know what's going on.

And, why wouldn't it have a special bus queue length algorithm, if that was important to know? How hard of an algorithm would it be? It could even query the average wait time for a particular bus stop and adjust to be even more precise. I bet it could predict the waiting time better than you would.

Re:So when will the taxi drivers start protesting?

[tlambert]

These this will naturally become shuttles and taxi services almost immediately. Given the protests of Uber and Lyft, what will the outcry be for these?

Cabbies don't have enough money to have a voice that's heard, The people with the money will just watch until these are cheaper than cabbies and then implement.

The loud people are the cab companies which own the medallions and lease them to the cabbies for a large cut of their income. Obviously, cabbies with their own medallions are more upset, but less organized into a group.

The cabbies themselves are annoyed with Uber/Lyft because they can't ignore outcalls in favor of the customer in front of them. Dropping outcalls on the floor is what gets people pissed at cabbies enough to go to Uber/Lyft, which in many cases are more expensive than a traditional cab (were one to actually show up). Uber/Lyft is therefore disruptive because it forces them to either honor their promises, or lose business from customers who prefer reliability over price.

Also, if these are implemented as cabs, they will still require medallions per cab, even without the driver (the government wants their cut), and this will reduce the amount of free medallions.

I expect there will be some backlash based on trust, and older customers will still insist on humans, just as newly married couples in NY insist on a Hansom Cab, rather than a Yellow Cab or Checker Cab: reasons other than price sensitivity.

No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

Sorry. While I love technology, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of reliability needed for a car that's completely free of manual control.

Simply put, having seen the arc of technology advance over the last 30+ years, I still don't trust an automated driver system with my safety. PERIOD.

I am ready!

[berchca]

Who else is ready for completely self-driving cars? Time for a Slashdot poll!

Re:I am ready!

[GryMor]

Can't happen soon enough. Also, I like the form factor.

Re:I am ready!

[phantomfive]

Looks like you don't have to wait long. Tesla and Mercedes have committed to one by 2017. You'll be able to buy one soon.

Re:I am ready!

[Michael Woodhams]

Me too - as soon as it is affordable, convenient and drives better than I do. They've got one out of three already.

Re:I am ready!

[epyT-R]

We can't even keep our little text workstation software free of bugs.. You've got to be kidding me.

Re:I am ready!

[Bongo]

It needs something like the FAA to investigate crashes openly and come down hard on companies. I flew in a helicopter the other day, and googling its registration brought up its accident history. There has to be a lot of process and money put into making this stuff, which nobody would spend on normal software. And that might be a good thing for the industry overall, as too many health and safety critical devices are not well tested. Robot killer car crashes on the other hand generate headlines.

Re:I am ready!

[epyT-R]

Just what we need, yet another bureaucracy on top of an overly complex system that will cost the taxpayer millions to operate, when a KISS attitude applied to vehicle design and operation is really the sweet spot between safety and reliability. I have a better and cheaper idea, though the cellphone companies won't like it: Remove the cell towers along the roads, or build faraday cages into cars that block cell service. Less talking, less texting, more driving.

Re:I am ready!

[SpzToid]

Let's hope they ask us cyclists what we think about the technology too. As a native Southern Californian, far, far too often news of another casualty happens, and to me it seems this technology would only be an improvement, from the cyclist's perspective. I am more willing to trust it than the drivers who are prone to texting a lot, fiddling with their doohickeys and everything else but paying attention.

If cyclists had a choice to ride on a road with only these automated units vs. one as used by car drivers now, it might open up newer types of roads that are shared better and more safely; and it would be popular too I think.

Re:I am ready!

[Cro Magnon]

Tesla and Mercedes? Even if they have them by 2017, there's no way most people are going to buy them. Their regular cars cost more than a house!

Re:I am ready!

[Bongo]

Not every department with a desk and a filing cabinet is evil. And what bureaucratic fascism is it to mandate all cell towers be removed from roads?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, just because it's not reliable today but maybe in ten years, let's forget all about it.

No thanks

[renzhi]

No thanks, wouldn't want a car that I can't manually override when shit happens.

Re:No thanks

[schreiend]

You shouldn't want to override anything in this car. Its logic in undeniable.

Re:No thanks

[Neil Boekend]

No thanks. If I have the choice I don't want to share the road with cars who depend on the reaction speed of humans when shit happens. It has been proven over and over again that humans are not good in those situations.

Re:No thanks

[dave420]

Human drivers are the "shit" that happens. Your argument is purely emotional and not based on rational appraisal of the risks and capabilities of human drivers and automated cars.

Re:No thanks

[meerling]

By the time you know that 'shit' is happening, you won't have time to do anything unless you are The Flash right out of the DC universe.

Re:No thanks

[Derekloffin]

While I sympathize with your position, you are setting an unrealistic bar to beat, which is common place problem in this comparison. Human beings are no where near 100% infallible (in fact, you likely F up every day your drive, you just get away with it because we have a lot of sloppy driving allowances). The purpose here is not to be 100% infallible, as nothing is 100% infallible. The purpose here is to beat human fallibility ratings.

Re:No thanks

[YA_Python_dev]

No thanks, wouldn't want a car that I can't manually override when shit happens.

Dude, if you want to drive a car manually you are the shit that will happen to other people on the road.

Re:No thanks

[epyT-R]

or, you know, you could act like a fucking adult and preempt the problem if you plan to be inebriated, instead of expecting the rest of us to give up self-directed control over our mobility for your own personal convenience.

Re:No thanks

[epyT-R]

contextual awareness is more important than reaction time. A lightning fast retard is a lot more dangerous than a reasonably intelligent driver. The issue is the distracted driving, so fix that. These expensive machines will not solve abject laziness and a lack of discipline.

Re:No thanks

[epyT-R]

Too bad reality is loaded with unpredictability that tends to break hard coded assumptions like what's shown in these videos.

Re:No thanks

[gnupun]

Maybe not, but the human driver and/or his insurance company will compensate you for his errors. Will Google do the same?

Re:No thanks

[zAPPzAPP]

An insurance company will compensate you.
The insurance pay will be lower than your usual car insurance, because the automatic cars are statistically safer and insurance companies love statistics.

Re:No thanks

[Andtalath]

Everyones safety and convenience is WAY more important than self-importance and an excess of belief in your own capability.

Re:No thanks

[gnupun]

Whether a human or self-driving car hits a victim or his property does not matter, the payment to the victim will be the same if the driver is at fault. Any payment higher than $25K or $50K will come out of the driver's pocket.

Say the settlement to the victim is $50K. The insurance company pays $25K and the driver pays $25K if a human were driving the car and was at fault. For a self driving car, the insurance company would have to pay the whole $50K since the human driver, who is actually a passenger, is not at fault. He just entered the destination address in the GPS and hit the start/drive button. Since the insurance company has to pay the extra $25K, the driver premiums will be a lot higher (unless Google pays the difference).

An insurance company will compensate you.

Where do you think the insurance company gets its money? From the driver; his premiums will be a lot higher paying for self-driving car's bugs. So why should the driver pay extra premium for Google's bugs? Google should pay some of that premium too. The premium Google pays should be dependent on how many bugs its AI has.

Re:No thanks

[dave420]

Or you could read their papers on the subject and know that your assumptions are woefully incorrect. Or not. I wonder which you'll choose...

Re:No thanks

[dave420]

They won't solve abject laziness and lack of discipline (as those are inherent human qualities), but they will stop them from being fatal to others. The issue is not just distracted driving - humans' sensor packages are woefully inept when it comes to driving, regardless of what your ego tells you. These cars can see further with more accuracy than you can, and in 360 degrees at practically the same time. Unless you have laser-eyes, a computer brain, and a detachable spinning head you can mount on the roof, you won't even come close.

Re:No thanks

[dave420]

As humans crash cars all the time, by your own logic you don't want them on the road either. 700,000 miles without an accident is not bad so far. Or, to put it in perspective - 100% infallibility so far.

Re:No thanks

[martin-boundary]

I'd much prefer a human. He may be a few milliseconds slower to respond, but he has many more options for responding appropriately to the situation, using his judgement and experience, as opposed to a Google machine which must select among two or three automated sequences that are programmed in, making those same three choices in all circumstances.

Re:No thanks

[gman003]

The cars shouldn't have a manual override for emergencies - it should have manual controls for when the computers can't handle the regular driving.

Imagine this: you're driving down a country road. It goes from a 2-lane paved road to a 2-lane dirt road to a 1-lane dirt road. At some point during that progression, the AI no longer has enough information to be able to safely operate. It come to a full stop, plays a prerecorded "Manual assistance required" message, and waits for the human to start driving. Once it's back to a point where it can resume automatic mode, it waits for the driver to hand over control.

Basically, we need a manual mode because, especially in these first generations, automatic mode won't be able to handle everything. But it should only ever force a switch from automatic to manual control when the vehicle is stopped, and the driver can safely take however long he wants to start driving.

Re:No thanks

[slinches]

I missed where the GP said that you (or anyone else) shouldn't be allowed to drive manually. Actually, it looks to me like he's doing exactly what you suggested and preempting the problem by wanting to have a car without manual controls so that he doesn't risk the safety of himself or others (or their property).

Re:No thanks

[bdo19]

Say the settlement to the victim is $50K. The insurance company pays $25K and the driver pays $25K

Where does insurance work like that? Not in the USA...

Re:No thanks

[Chas]

While I sympathize with your position, you are setting an unrealistic bar to beat, which is common place problem in this comparison.

If I'm going to entrust MY life to it at 50+mph? I don't feel it's so "unrealistic. And I don't want to be forced into finding out that I was right.

Human beings are no where near 100% infallible (in fact, you likely F up every day your drive, you just get away with it because we have a lot of sloppy driving allowances). The purpose here is not to be 100% infallible, as nothing is 100% infallible. The purpose here is to beat human fallibility ratings.

Again, this is not about human fallibility. This is about being able to intervene in a scenario where one of these vehicles is obviously malfunctioning.

Re:No thanks

[gnupun]

So if you cause $200K damage, your insurance pays everything? Which state is this?

Re:No thanks

[gnupun]

Check out bodily insurance liability (BIL) in this page -- there is only a finite amount your insurance company pays.

Re:No thanks

[StikyPad]

Nice false dichotomy you've got there.

Re:No thanks

[Nemyst]

Chances are that, in an autonomous car, you wouldn't be fast enough to override it when shit happens. Do you honestly believe you'll be ready and aware in a split second when you've been reading or talking or whatever for hours? The wheel is an artifact which doesn't make sense in an autonomous vehicle.

Re:No thanks

[m00sh]

No thanks, wouldn't want a car that I can't manually override when shit happens.

You can buy a USB steering wheel and put it in the car for that.

Re:No thanks

[bdo19]

California. I would pay the deductible, usually a few thousand at most, and insurance would pay the rest up the covered liability amount of the policy. I'm sure there are subtleties in how it works that I don't understand. But if I caused $200k in damage, and I had to pay $100k, then the insurance wouldn't be doing me much good - I couldn't pay either one.

Re:No thanks

[acid_andy]

It doesn't have to just beat the fallibility ratings of most humans though. It really needs to make less mistakes than, say, the top 1% of advanced defensive drivers to be acceptable.

If you believe you are a skilled driver and you make a mistake, I'm willing to bet you'll still come to terms with the mistake (and you can learn from it) much better than if you bought a self driving car and it makes a mistake that you know you wouldn't have.

Any mistakes a self driving car makes will cause media outrage anyway.

Also there are some driving Kobyashi Marus where whichever choice the algorithm takes, the driver is going to think it took the wrong one.

Also driving style is a very personal thing and there are arguably driving ethics. For example it's often taught not to brake or swerve for small animals but I'm sure millions of drivers will be disgusted if the self driving cars are coded to splatter the poor creatures on an empty road with clear visibilty at 30mph. Has this issue ever been addressed by the way? I've not heard it mentioned before.

Re:No thanks

[Keyboard Rage]

So...let's consider a few cases:

A) GoogleCar OS ("ChromeOS for Cars"?) has a little accident and crashes, while your GoogleCar is doing 130 km/h on the highway. No brakes means you plow head first into the human-controlled truck that illegally decides to change lanes ahead of you. Sure, the black box logs will show you kept hitting the "Stop" button all the time, but due to its softwired nature the car just kept on rolling.

A2) The "Stop" button is hardwired and cuts off the drive, but the lack of hardwired or emergency brakes reveals that mere coasting is insufficient to stop the car in time. You smash into the truck. In your last moment you sure wished your GoogleCar had a steering wheel.

B) An unexpected combination of events triggers an emergency stop and you have no way to restart the car despite being stranded right in the middle of the highway because the conditions triggering the emergency stop has not yet disappeared. The car behind you smashes into you.

C) You just bought your new GoogleCar. You program it and take the road. Someone playing with an emergency stopping tool (a cop who's bored) triggers an emergency stopping action in all automatic cars. Oh, now you're stranded on a level crossing, and the train can't stop on time. Oops.

Anyway, this GoogleCar is illegal in my home country because it lacks several essential parts that are mandated to be attached to a car by law (like rear view mirrors).

Re:No thanks

[Chas]

And why, pray tell, is such a stance "insane".

Oh yeah. It ISN'T! You're just a trolling AC!

Re:No thanks

[martin-boundary]

You know, somewhere in there you almost make a point about assisted driving, except it's as convincing as an argument about hammers.

Viz Humans are terrible at sticking nails into the walls with their bare hands, so we've invented hammers to help with the task. In fact, if you think about it, it's really the hammer that does all the hard work (*), and we don't need the human to wield it at all. Let's just build these hammers that magically know what nails need hammering and take the human completely out of the picture.

Oops wait, that's just stupid. The value in assisted driving technologies is that they adapt to the human behaviour but cannot replace it. A hammer without a human just sits on a workbench. It will continue to sit there until next year, if there's no human around to move it. And it certainly won't be nailing anything to anything during that time. A camera that takes pictures of the road and tries to recognize a center lane anomaly is not an AI system that drives people to where they want to go in all kinds of traffic conditions. It's just a camera that fails its task at night when the car doesn't have lights on. Its true value is in assisting a human being, and it only does so within narrow parameters which exist provided the human behaves a certain way. Kind of like when a human decides to hold the hammer properly and swing it against a nail.

(*)pun intended

Re:No thanks

[ColdSam]

That's a terrible analogy. The vast majority of times a metal cylinder is inserted into another object it is done by machines run by computers. Plus, the majority of times a human makes a conscious decision to put a nail into an object, it's done with a nail gun, no swinging, not much skill, the machine doing almost all the work. Only a relatively insignificant percentage are done by a human picking up a nail and hitting it with a hammer, and those cases are becoming fewer all the time. It's not magic.

Re:No thanks

[Ravaldy]

Actually there is far more skill involved in putting a nail in the wall than you give it credit. The nail gun does nothing else than push the nail in the wall. It cannot asses if the nail actually did its job or if it was punched in the correct location. That would require a machine that does not yet exist.

Machines do not do well at evaluating conditions. Just a small example is how computers are still unable to translate one language to another successfully. Companies still spend hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to translate documentation from one language to another via translation companies that actually use humans, ASSISTED by translation software.

Machine/computers can only evaluate yes/no conditions that it was programmed to handle. I'm not saying we won't get there but I strongly believe we are very far from it and many social and political changes will occur between now and then.

Re:No thanks

[ColdSam]

I'm not sure what your point is. It's obviously true that machines and computers have a harder time at some kinds of problems than others. It's also true that they can't do everything a human can do today. Nobody would dispute that. However, everything talked about here, nails, cars, translation are more automated than than they were 100 years ago and various technology improvements and cost efficiencies will keep that trend going.

Specifically, nail guns are just one step on the road to automating construction, although not even the first step. As I alluded to, many things that were assembled with hammers and nails 200 years ago are now done by machine, even many parts of building and home construction (e.g. window frames). When I said there was "not much skill", I was specifically referring to the line "hold the hammer properly and swing it". But I'll go further in that for most construction where to put the nails is not a skill of the guy holding the nail gun, it should be determined by the architect and the building codes. I don't consider myself a skilled carpenter because I can put together an IKEA bookshelf.

There's absolutely no reason why a carpenter bot couldn't slam 24 nails in a 2x4 AND verify that they were done correctly, it's just not cost effective to do, for now. We are not going to completely get rid of carpenters any time soon, but their jobs will slowly go away with more automation. In fifty years you might have a house built by a single foreman who's job is primarily just to oversee the bots.

As for your translation example, yes translation is hard, but the bulk of translation done today is completely automated. It's not terribly good, but it is good enough for most uses; Facebook, website browsing, manuals on cheap chinese electronics, etc.

For nails, words and cars, the ASSISTED part will become smaller and smaller.

Re:No thanks

[funky_vibes]

I'm of the same opinion, I like cars that are easy to muck around with, like jeeps etc. when something fails.
And what's one of the most common modes of failure in modern cars?
You guessed it, broken computer.

And no, I don't want to pay for redundant systems, I'd prefer a compromise where you might have steering separated to simplistic joystick control for when your "big" mcu inevitably fries.

Re:No thanks

[Ravaldy]

Translation technology has not progressed very much in the last 15 years. The main reason is that it requires computers to be programmed to understand context. The sole reason why computers have not been able to come remotely close to replacing manual labor is this exact problem. The point is that at the current time and probably for another 50-100 years, machines will assist.

BTW, there is still skill involved even in using a nail gun. Have you ever used one? Sure, it will only take you half the time to figure out the nail gun over the hammer since there is more agility involved in using a hammer, but it is still a skill to use it properly and effectively. I've seen guys in shipping go through 100 nails in 2 minutes where as I would take 20 to do the same. That's a skill.

Re:No thanks

[ColdSam]

I disagree about the progress, but that is just semantics. The first 90% of the problem was relatively straightforward, but you can't expect the same kind of progress in the last 10% (or it would have been solved long ago). If we got to 90% in the first 50 years, getting to 95% in the last 15 may not seem like progress, but I think if you looked at a passage translated with 1999 technology vs. the best available today you would find a marked difference. Even freely available services like Google do a very good job at translating between western languages, although it will be much longer until they can handle Japanese or Tamarian.

I don't know why you insist on talking about absolutes, e.g. when no human assistance will be required for any particular activity. Machines have been replacing manual labor, and replacing human translators and are starting to replace transportation workers. For the first two we are well on the way (90% or more) and we will likely never get to the point of replacing humans 100% in any of those areas. It's just impossible to argue that the machines are getting better at these jobs faster than we are.

You can become skilled at anything, including nail guns. That is not the point, I'm not saying that most carpenters aren't skilled or that some guys can't wield a nail gun like a maniac - they can. But it doesn't take much skill or training to pick up a nail gun, point it at a wall and pull the trigger. I'll agree that the ability to use a nail gun is a skill, if you agree that frying an egg is a skill, vacuuming a house is a skill, and picking up a box and moving from one place to another is a skill.

Re:No thanks

[Ravaldy]

I get what you are saying but it still comes down to the fact that these machines assist humans. Making a 2 man job a 1 man job is not automation. Automation is street lights changing automatically. Name 10 jobs that have been completely replaced by machines. I bet you for almost every single one of them I can prove machines are only assisting.

Re:No thanks

[ColdSam]

It sounds like you're trying to say that there's no such thing as automation, which is kind of silly (especially when you give a decent example). Listing occupations for you would be fool's errand, because no matter what choice I make you can take your "just assisting" argument to a ridiculous extreme, either by saying that there need to be people to make, program, maintain etc. the machines or that those jobs have not gone away because someone somewhere in the world is still doing them. Traffic signaling police haven't been completely replaced by traffic lights because someone needs to set the timing or change the bulbs. Movable type printing typesetters haven't been completely replaced because authors still need to type into a computer, etc. That's absurd.

Re:No thanks

[Ravaldy]

I would not consider maintenance assistance as while the machine is working it does not require a human hand to help it.

Exciting

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see this as a huge step for free movement for people with disabilities.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[rtb61]

Unless the automated car is on rails, it must retain manual control so that the user will be able to bring it to a guided stop. Even elevators come with an emergency stop button and they have only three states, going up, going down and stationary. A car without manuals controls to guide it to a safe stop in the event of control failure whether purposeful or accidental is really fucking crazy.

Not the right way anyway

[Stormwatch]

Driver or automated, that's beside the point: personal automobiles are the wrong way to go. They take too much room and fuel to transport, usually, only one person at a time. That's a waste. What we need is more and better public transportation: buses, subways, trams, railroads...

Re:Not the right way anyway

[Michael Woodhams]

How about a detachable luggage compartment (boot/trunk)? You don't own the car, but you have your own luggage compartment in which you keep your miscellaneous crud. Call a car, attach your compartment, drive to the mall, detach compartment, shop and fill compartment, call another car, go home, detach, unpack at your leisure while the car goes on its next mission.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[skovnymfe]

If I could get my own private compartment where people don't go when they're sick and cough in my neck and use Apple earplugs, then sure.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[Bongo]

As a bus person, I would agree, but in the end, they are really not a great technology. It is like the train system, eventually, after privatisation was supposed to make it more efficient, and ticket prices kept going up and up, you come to wonder that its problem isn't mismanagement, inefficient government, greedy corporations, nor old tech, it is just that it is a Victorian technology and concept.

The city I'm in used to have a big tram network, and you have to wonder why they got rid of it all those years ago.

Anyway, I imagine a a vast taxi network, cheaper because there is no driver, and like public transport in that you only pay for what you use, no need to buy the machine, and with so many available in a city that there is often one just 5 minutes away from you, and can be used for long and short journeys, door to door, or with a changeover somewhere for intercity routes. Each car is in use like a jet airliner is used to maximise its cost, rather than it sitting parked for most of its life.

When I'm 80, I want an app for that.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[swilver]

Public transportation takes about 50-100% longer to get where you want, unless you are part of the "lucky" few that live next to a major station and works next to another major station. It also often costs about as much as it would cost in fuel costs -- yes, you can factor in the car costs, but those are sunk costs as living without a car is not an option anyway (I'm not gonna bring my shopping in the train for starters).

Public transportation is really an abysmal failure, especially on the cost aspect. Its supposed to achieve economy of scale, but in reality it can't even beat a car with two passengers (and often not even with one passenger). And that's ignoring the time aspect (time is money, especially my free time).

If you really want to solve these kinds of problems, I'd look beyond transportation, but more to the reason we transport ourselves: work. Make it so people can work from home or nearby reuseable offices.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[Darinbob]

Pointless if the mass transit wont' go where you want to go. We're still mired in the idea that everything leads downtown, which is becoming a place most people don't want to go anymore. Instead the commutes tend to be from outlying areas to other outlying areas. Things look more like a mesh than a star. Then the routes people may want to take will cross two or more regions controlled by different transportation authorities, picking you up at an inconvenient place and dropping you off in an inconvenient place. If you need to use these at night, they'll also be dangerous places.

So the reason people use cars is because it can get you to work in 15 minutes whereas mass-transit will take 2 hours. That's the big problem that needs to be solved first.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[mikechant]

It is like the train system, eventually, after privatisation was supposed to make it more efficient, and ticket prices kept going up and up, you come to wonder that its problem isn't mismanagement, inefficient government, greedy corporations, nor old tech, it is just that it is a Victorian technology and concept.

Assuming you are talking about the UK rail system, despite it being "a Victorian technology and concept", and despite the fare increases, usage keeps going up, year after year (with very occasional economy related blips), and when lines/stations are re-opened they are typically getting massively more passengers than expected.

The second graph down on this page shows the trend:
http://www.railway-technical.c...

This page gives the up-to date figures:
http://orr.gov.uk/news-and-med....

New housing in some areas is being planned around new stations, e.g.
http://www.yorkshireeveningpos...

It's becoming increasingly clear that at least some of the Beeching closures should be and will be reversed, and some completely new lines will be built.
East-West rail (including reopening and electrification) is already planned and budgeted, HS2 is progressing, HS1 extension is highly likely, Crossrail will be finished soon, Crossrail 2 is high on the agenda, mass electrification is proceeding rapidly. And apart from the special case of HS2 there is a real political consensus around rail expansion.

Trams have also been re-invented for the 21st century in major UK cities; Manchester especially but also Nottingham and Birmingham are expanding their networks and are very popular.

Tram-trains are coming soon, initially in Sheffield.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[dave420]

So improve your public transport system. The Karlsruhe method, for example, couples local trams with regional trains, which all share street tracks, meaning you can hop on a tram and be taken to other towns and places outside the city. The US method of public transport is an abject joke, but not the only game in town.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[dave420]

Speak for yourself! The public transport in the city in which I live is wonderful, as it frequently is across the country where I live (Germany). You just need to be relatively near to a tram stop (which is the vast, vast majority of people, even those in the styx), and you can get wherever you want quickly, efficiently, and cheap. Great connections to the high-speed rail means you can be anywhere very quickly with minimal fuss, including neighbouring countries. It's awesome to leave your house, walk 20m to the tram stop, take a tram to the train station, then ride at 186mp/h+ to your destination while sat in the diner car drinking awesome beer and eating suspiciously-delicious food. Don't assume all public transport is broken just because your locality can't manage it.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[canadiannomad]

Unfortunately I think this will be hugely delayed by unions...

Re:Not the right way anyway

[Bongo]

Thanks for the links.

I personally would use the train about three or four times as much as I do now, mainly to visit family, but daren't because of the cost. I don't have a car either.

Like housing prices, yeah they are going up and demand is up, but that's not good news.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[Nemyst]

Hint: you're the exception, not the rule. You can't assume people will shift to mass transit because your mass transit is well above the average.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[KingMotley]

As someone who could both use public transportation, or drive (I live in the suburbs, work in the city) -- and have done both, I would be crazy to drive. The train is often faster than I could drive (but not always, depending on the day), but the train doesn't get delayed nearly as often, and doesn't get in nearly as many accidents. Now, I've never been in an accident that was remotely my fault, and even then, I've only been in two while I was driving, the sheer number of close calls from idiots not paying attention is insane. Factor in gas costs and increased maintenance, and the train is by far the cheaper of the two.

On those alone -- safer, faster, more reliable I would take the train. However, I also gain 1.5-2.5 hours of my day back on top of those already compelling reasons.

Re:Not the right way anyway

[dave420]

No, not really. There are millions of us over here who get to share the same system. Other countries also have similar systems. It appears you are confusing your experience with the standard, which is a common problem.

Why specify a destination?

[aberglas]

Surely Google already knows where it is best for you to go. It knows everything else about you...

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[hawguy]

Sorry. While I love technology, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of reliability needed for a car that's completely free of manual control.

Simply put, having seen the arc of technology advance over the last 30+ years, I still don't trust an automated driver system with my safety. PERIOD.

Millions of people fly in airplanes every day that rely on computer controls (since there is no mechanical linkage between the pilot and the control surfaces). And 30,000 people die each year at the hands of human drivers.

While the real time image recognition may not be quite ready for prime time, it will get there and when it does, computer drivers will be safer than human drivers. Google's driverless cars have already racked up 700,000 accident free miles in autonomous mode (albeit with a human ready to take over). Their car has already surpassed my own record, it's only been about 150,000 miles since my last accident (a car changed lanes into me, while the accident was not my fault, if I'd had computer-like reflexes and perfect awareness of my surroundings to know that the lane beside me was open, I may have been able to avoid the accident by sudden braking and/or making a quick lane change)

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry. While I love technology, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of reliability needed for a car that's completely free of manual control.

Simply put, having seen the arc of technology advance over the last 30+ years, I still don't trust an automated driver system with my safety. PERIOD.

Sorry. While I love humans, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of reliability needed for a car that's manual control.

Simply put, having seen the arc of traffic fatalities advance over the last 30+ years, I still don't trust a human driver system with my safety. PERIOD.

Cars are not safe: people will die. I'd rather have shitty AI that we can iterate on and improve every time it kills someone than having to start with fresh teenagers each time. An AI can learn from millions of cars, and not miss the learning opportunity of fatal crashes. Also, people have really bad sensors for driving compared to what an AI can use. Maybe its not better than good drivers yet, but I'd prefer a shitty AI that we can iterate on to people who barley manage to pass a driving test on the third try driving in the dark while distracted, and we let people do that... Compared to a person, such an AI could be a lot better at refusing to drive in unsafe conditions (it won't give into rage or peer pressure and do something stupid). That might be annoying, but having a car that can pick you up by itself might counter that out.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[phantomfive]

If Mercedes really has a self-driving car by 2017, then Google might as well give up. They're behind the curve.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[phantomfive]

Millions of people fly in airplanes every day that rely on computer controls (since there is no mechanical linkage between the pilot and the control surfaces).

If that's what counts as 'computer control,' then we already have computer control today. There are plenty of computer systems in cars, and some won't even start without going through a computer system.

The joke on Reddit was good.

[GoodNewsJimDotCom]

supercouille
This is great news. But this looks too staged for my eyes. All you actually see is an electric car going in straight lines. Great step toward the real thing though! Congrats to google!

r7di43ee85

It doesn't have a steering wheel, what did you expect?

No Stereo!!!

[advocate_one]

what kind of hells is that???

Re:No Stereo!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs a stereo when you have a screen blasting obnoxious ads in your face!

Re:No Stereo!!!

[braindrainbahrain]

The gar costs $9.99, the mobile Google Play license is $5000 a year.

Re:No Stereo!!!

[Xolvix]

You wear ear-buds while driving? Things that have the ability to muffle outside noises such as horns and emergency vehicle sirens?

Your funeral.

Re:No Stereo!!!

[advocate_one]

well considering it's electric, the fuel efficiency is outstanding in that it doesn't use any petrol per mile... however as it's limited to 25 mph, the 0-60 time is infinite... ;)

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Andrewkov]

A quick call to google's helpdesk is all that's needed to stop the car in an emergency.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Michael Woodhams]

If you drive on the same streets that I do, you trust me with your safety. As my driving skills are below median, this should be a lot more worrying to you then the prospect of being in a computer-driven car. (Fortunately for you, surveys show that below-median drivers are rare.)

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[fractoid]

And this is an excellent argument against the "it will always need manual controls in case of failure" argument. Modern vehicles have fly-by-wire accelerator, brakes, gears, etc.

The driver isn't in direct physical control of the vehicle and hasn't been for some time. Progress towards fully autonomous vehicles is a matter of degree, not of kind.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

Again, I don't give a damn about "10 years from now".

People in the 50's and 60's were predicting flying cars being common by now.

We all know how THAT turned out.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

Sorry, but there's a big difference between flying around in a plane in a pre-planned course that's been cleared of other traffic and driving around on the ground on an expressway or city street.

Yes please.

[Sasayaki]

10/10, would buy.

Automated cars are already better than people. The trains in Canada have been automated for decades and they're fine. The Google fleet drove across the US several times, something most human drivers would probably screw up at some point.

The only thing I dislike is the fact that I love my car and I can't think of a way to convert it economically. Otherwise I would, without hesitation. Including removing the steering wheel and pedals.

I don't want to drive it. I want auto-driving cars and I want them now.

Re:Yes please.

[jklovanc]

The trains in Canada have been automated for decades and they're fine.

On tracks where they are the only ones with minutes between trains and controllers watching every move. This is completely different than vehicles on streets.

The Google fleet drove across the US several times,

Only on roads that have been high resolution scans within hours of the Google vehicle passing and with a driver taking over from time to time when the vehicle gets into trouble.

I don't want to drive it. I want auto-driving cars and I want them now.

Sorry but the technology isn't reliable enough yet.

Re:Yes please.

[Chas]

Again, like planes, trains don't don't have to share a track with other trains. They're controlled from outside by various dispatch personnel and systems.

This is in no way comparable to an open road situation. The fact that you think it is shows that you haven't actually thought about the subject in any sort of depth whatsoever.

Re:Yes please.

[dave420]

You might want to provide links for your second point, and also for your third while you're at it. 700,000 miles without incident is not a bad track record (no pun intended).

Re:Yes please.

[CanHasDIY]

You might want to provide links for your second point, and also for your third while you're at it. 700,000 miles without incident is not a bad track record (no pun intended).

700,000 miles over pleasant, well maintained, unused roads ain't shit.

Wake me when it's survived 2 years of poorly maintained northern Arkansas roads, 'specially in winter time.

In case you've never driven in northern Arkansas during winter, yes, "survived" is the right term to use.

Re:Yes please.

[Immerman]

Well, perhaps not directly relevant but there's another group working on autonomous driving systems in racecars, and they've got one that can handle Nurburgring in the rain with lap times comparable to professional drivers. And I think I recall another group doing something similar for rallycar racing, complete with precisely controlled power-slides around corners that would be directly relevant to driving in the snow.

You've got to remember that these systems can react on timescales that make you look frozen in time - at best there's a 1/8 second delay between when information enters your eyes and your fingers can respond* - and that assumes you're just waiting for a specific trigger signal to execute a pre-determined motion - if you have to consider what you're seeing and formulate a response that inserts even greater lag into the system.

*Fun reaction-time demonstration - have somebody hold a dollar bill vertically in the air with your fingers on either side of the midpoint, ready to pinch the bill the instant they release it. No matter how hard you try you can't catch the bill without moving your hand vertically - in the 1/8th second it takes for the nerve signals to get from your eyes to your brain and on to your fingers the bill will have fallen over half it's length to "safety".

Re:Yes please.

[jklovanc]

I know this is an old article but the technology has not changed. The AI is just not there to differentiate objects yet

Two things seem particularly interesting about Google's approach. First, it relies on very detailed maps of the roads and terrain, something that Urmson said is essential to determine accurately where the car is. Using GPS-based techniques alone, he said, the location could be off by several meters.
The second thing is that, before sending the self-driving car on a road test, Google engineers drive along the route one or more times to gather data about the environment. When it's the autonomous vehicle's turn to drive itself, it compares the data it is acquiring to the previously recorded data, an approach that is useful to differentiate pedestrians from stationary objects like poles and mailboxes.

The AI is just not good enough yet to differentiate objects yet which leads to the third point I posted.

Re:Yes please.

[antdude]

I can't drive due to my disabilities. I want a car like KITT!

Re:Yes please.

[jklovanc]

That is single car on a well marked, closed track going in one direction. Driving is not the problem. Dealing with other things (people, vehicles, animals, potholes, rocks, etc) on the road is the problem.

You've got to remember that these systems can react on timescales that make you look frozen in time

Reaction is not the only factor. Anticipation and prediction are very important as well and computers a crappy at that.

Re:Yes please.

[jklovanc]

They don't have police where you are?

The police are not directly controlling your vehicle. What I was trying to get at is that even the trains in a simplified, controlled environment are occasionally overridden by people.

Where's the data on that as I've seen tons of data that say the car was autonomous 99% of the time.

If there are tons of data then where is it?

they've allowed Nevada and a couple other states to implement driverless vehicles.

Nevada licensed a test vehicle with some very strict conditions;

Nevada's regulations require two people in the test cars at all times. One person is behind the wheel, while the other person monitors a computer screen that shows the car's planned route and keeps tabs on roadway hazards and traffic lights.

Nevada has licensed a test vehicle that must have people in it to take over in case something bad happens. That is far from licensing a driverless vehicle. There is no State in the US that will allow a self driving car without a qualified driver behind the wheel. All the permits are for testing only with a driver behind the wheel. Even the States don't think it is reliable enough yet.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

If you actually trust a computer more than your own judgement in an accident situation, I feel sorry for you.

Great, That's all I need...

[fellip_nectar]

A car which automatically takes me places I don't want to go, based on my browsing history.

Re:Great, That's all I need...

[Chrisq]

A car which automatically takes me places I don't want to go, based on my browsing history.

Seriously a car will take you where you want to go but I wouldn't mind betting you will be given a load of alternatives:

"Take me to the westgate Mall"
Meadowhall has an excellent choice and is only half an hour further
"No, take me to the westgate Mall"
OK. When you are in the Mall, Mcdonalds has a special meal offer, and Marks and Spencer is introducing a new line of ....

Re:Great, That's all I need...

[swillden]

That's funny, but it's based on and reinforces a fundamental misunderstanding of Google as a company.

Most people believe that Google is an advertising company. It's not. Google is a technology company currently operating primarily in a space where advertising is the most effective funding mechanism. Google's founders weren't and I think still aren't really comfortable with advertising, but it's what works, and Google quickly found that it can apply technology to the advertising process to make it more effective and more efficient (in terms of sales leads generated per people annoyed).

Google is not fundamentally tied to advertising, however, and in fact the percentage of Google's revenues which come from advertising are declining as the company branches out. Software as a service (Google Apps, App Engine, Compute Engine, etc.) is Google's second-largest source of revenue today, and it's approaching 10% of total revenue. It seems likely the company is going to be moving into the hardware sales space as well, with Glass and driverless cars. Google Fiber is another profit-generator.

As an employee, I'll tell you that a lot of Google employees are likewise uncomfortable with advertising and are very interested in straightforward fee for service business models. Well, advertising is "fee for service", but the customer is the advertiser, not the user, and Google sees end users as its true customers, so the indirection is unpleasant.

(#include <std_disclaimer>)

Re:Great, That's all I need...

[billy3]

If you're lucky the car will have an alt-tab feature

Just remember check the rear view mirror to make sure no one's following behind you.

Re:Great, That's all I need...

[esperto]

If this get us places based on our browser histories it would go straight to our mothers basements...

Re:Great, That's all I need...

[Zynder]

Is that why the damned car keeps stopping at all the strip clubs? And it always has to do it when the wife and kids are with me!

Re:Great, That's all I need...

[RivenAleem]

OMG, what if my wife sits in my car and presses the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button....

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Ckwop]

Sorry. While I love technology, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of reliability needed for a car that's completely free of manual control.

The Google car has done something like 700,000 miles and crashed twice. Both times this occurred, it was under control of the human occupant.

I drive to work every morning and the number of times I see people not paying attention is extraordinary. Women doing their makeup, people texting, trying to argue with their children etc.

Honestly, in my view, removing the steering wheel is a safety feature.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[phantomfive]

Progress towards fully autonomous vehicles is a matter of degree, not of kind.

This is a true point. It's been true ever since we stopped walking.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

Do you really trust the other people on the road? At least self-driving cars don't get drunk or distracted.

Do I trust other driver?

No. Which is why I'd rather apply my own Mk.1 Eyeball and pattern recognition software than that of a computer.

MAYBE if EVERY car on the road was turned into a self-driver, I'd have a little more trust. But, the reality is that self-driving cars are going to be sharing the roadways with human-driven cars for several generations AT LEAST. And I don't trust the self-driven cars to appropriately identify/deal with erratic/dangerous situations.

"...but is there really a market"

[LifesABeach]

Hell yes, consider equiping a Plug-In version of a Transit Connect Wagon with Solar Cells on the roof.

2 hour commute? Punch in the destination, go to the couch in back, and get some well erned sleep.

Re:Municipalities are wetting their pants

[Paradise Pete]

We might actually seem them outlawed simply because the man can't make a buck off them.

Adoption will be slow enough that ticketing will probably increase at first, as human drivers race around the self-driving ones going "too slow."

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

And if you think your judgement and perception is better than this computer system, you are full of hubris and a menace to other road users. It works both ways.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[fractoid]

In one sense, we've been a fully autonomous vehicle ever since we started walking. ;)

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[fractoid]

Mercedes-Benz is worth $23.5bn. Google is worth $382.5bn. I think Google's in with a fighting chance if they decide to take this seriously.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[jklovanc]

The problem is that you confuse manual controls and manual control inputs. What type of control a person or computer uses is irrelevant. What is relevant is the mind making the decisions about what inputs to make. Computers are yet to be sophisticated to handle many situations as well has humans do.

The driver isn't in direct physical control of the vehicle and hasn't been for some time. Progress towards fully autonomous vehicles is a matter of degree,

Completely false. Whether it is fly by wire or cables the inputs are still made by humans and that is the important part.

The brain is the important part of the machine and not the nerves. Computer brains are not up to the task yet.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Xenna]

Yeah, I agree. The mix of computers and humans is probably a recipe for disaster. I've seen many a software package attempt to figure out what I want or intend to do and they usually get it wrong. Now imagine a computer trying to predict the actions of a mix of human and computer vehicles...

PRT can be useful

[91degrees]

Self driving cars have some applications. A system that used existing roadways would be much cheaper to set up, so there's at least some market, and such a niche would be a good place to start.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

That's not what was meant at all and you know it.

It's that you only trust fulfilled promises. Not predictions.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[epyT-R]

Have you nothing besides ad hominem to hurl at his argument?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[phantomfive]

I hope you get modded up

is it failsafe?

[Khashishi]

What happens if the electronics are disrupted by hacking or EMP?

Re:is it failsafe?

[Beriaru]

Probably the same if the biologics are disrupted by alcohol or drugs.

Re:is it failsafe?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably the same as happens to any modern car: it stops working properly. Many (most?) new cars are at least partially drive-by-wire and have cell modems for various uses. It is known that at least some models have poorly designed internal networks that allow a properly crafted phone call to that cell modem to take control of the car's brakes, for example. Source.

Not that that's not an issue, just pointing out that those attacks are orthogonal to the self-driving capability of the car. If anything, I'd expect Google to be more competent at securing a device against hackers than the average car manufacturer.

Re:is it failsafe?

[Przemo-c]

What happens if humans are disrupted by drugs or Neutron Bomb?

Re:is it failsafe?

[swilver]

You can ask the same for normal cars, as they're basically driving computers these days.

Re:is it failsafe?

[m00sh]

What happens if the electronics are disrupted by hacking or EMP?

Insurance will cover it.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[jxander]

It's not about judgement. It's about abilities.

A self driving car can simultaneously look in every direction around the car and never have to blink. If an object is detected and the car needs to stop, it takes a person time to physically lift their foot from one pedal and press the other(s). Not much time, sure, but in a sudden stop scenario, every little bit helps.

Humans have much better non-linear thinking. We can navigate dirt roads, or unmapped territory. But for day to day commuting on established roads, automation is the way to go. Computers never get sleepy, they don't get distracted and they can be programmed to obey speed limits. Google's test vehicle is already well above the safety record of an average driver, with nearly half a million miles, safe and sound.

And that's just the prototype.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

Right. I'm not saying auto-driver systems are a Bad Thing.
Simply that I don't trust them ENOUGH to completely relinquish every last bit of driver control and become an idle passenger.
If the current designers of auto-driver systems thing their software and hardware are infallible, I think they're nowhere near ready for prime-time. They're still caught in "what a wonderful fantasy" stage.
The driver should always retain an option to override an obviously malfunctioning vehicle.
The inability to do so could get the rider killed.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[meerling]

By the time a human realizes there is a problem if the automated system has failed, they'll be lucky to have enough time to scream.
It's kind of like the people that don't want to wear seatbelts because they are afraid they'll end up in a crash and be hurt so bad they can't undo the seatbelt to get out.
If you haven't figured that out, if you are so messed up you can't undo a seatbelt, there's no way in hell you'd have been able to get out of a car.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Xenna]

There are possibly some hybrid scenario's conceivable in which an auto-automobile (how about calling them a2mobiles?) could serve a very useful intermediary purpose.

Highway driving is much simpler and much more tiring than city driving, so that could be an easy win. Especially with dedicated lanes for a2mobiles, the programming thing could become almost as easy as programming an elevator.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[meerling]

"While the real time image recognition may not be quite ready for prime time"

It doesn't actually need image recognition. We've had systems deployed for decades that can handle identify the existence of possible collisions based on detecting obstacles and their relative vectors. It doesn't need to know that large blob on a collision course is a Ford Taurus, just that it's going to collide in 3.2 seconds on the current vectors.
If you're curious what uses those types of systems in real time now, just look at military hardware, it's in more than just planes.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[allcoolnameswheretak]

I think I would feel much safer driving on the Autobahn at 150 km/h surrounded by self-driving cars that I am feeling right now when driving on the Autobahn.

Also, let your car drive you to and from parties! Wohoo! Party on!

I for one am looking forward to our self-driving overlords. Over 100 years on, the automobile becomes even truer to it's name.

Re:Municipalities are wetting their pants

[antifoidulus]

Um, you seem to assume that most people speed because they made an input error when operating the vehicle(i.e. pressed the accelerator down further than desired). That probably does happen, but I would be shocked if it's more than 1% of cases. Most cases of speeding occur simply because people want to get their destination faster. Are auto-driving cars really going to stop people from leaving their house too late? If given the choice between getting somewhere on time with an automated car or taking over and speeding, what do you think people who were going to speed anyway are going to choose?

Yes...but a qualified yes

[Doghouse13]

Funnily enough, my need for controls in self-driving cars isn't the one you usually hear ("I need to be able to take control in an emergency") - as has already been amply researched, (1) the cars are likely to be much better at not getting into trouble in the first place than their cargo, and (2) suddenly handing over control to a human who's been dozing away watching the scenery, reading a book or whatever, simply is a really BAD idea - by the time they've worked out what's going on, it will be too late anyway, and anything they do is likely to make things radically worse, not better.

No, it's a far more pragmatic, human one: Not every car journey I make is a predictable trip from point A to point B, with no regard to what comes between. Sometimes I don't know what route I'll take, until I take it. Sometimes A and B are the same place. Sometimes I don't even know, when I set off, where B is. Sometimes my plans change in mid-journey, at very short notice. And sometimes, how ever good the traffic updates are, I'm likely to spot reasons why the car's preferred route isn't the one to take just then. So I need a reliable, simple interface that will give me enough control over my "autonomous" car to get it to take a particular route, pull over, slow down, speed up and whatever. Because, say, I want to pop into that little shop we just passed, that I've never seen before. Or I need a comfort break. Or the dog's been sick. Or I simply decide I want time to take in admire the stunning view on that windy little back road. What I don't want, and would think very carefully before buying, is a vehicle that takes away some of the freedoms that come with driving for myself.

I have little doubt that, if the time ever comes when these machines finally overcome the hurdles (not least, understandable human prejudices) and make it onto the market (and, frankly, I hope that's not so far away - it looks to this casual observer as though the technology is reaching a level of maturity wher ethe hurdles are legal rather than technical), such features will be there - because, frankly, they're obvious, and any offering that doesn't have them will lose out to the ones that do. But they're definitely needed. Google's prototype's lack of controls is a publicity grabber, pure and simple.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[FunkSoulBrother]

I don't buy it, with driverless shuttles/cabs all over the place there would be tons of people fucking/doing drugs/pissing/vandalizing in these (expensive) things.

You'll damn well need a user account and probably have 24/7 cameras on you if these things ever get off the ground.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Beck_Neard]

Sorry. While I love humans, my not-so-humble opinion is that we're nowhere near the level of human reliability needed for a car that could be under manual control.

But seriously, if self-driving cars could be demonstrated to be safe, I'd prefer NOT to have humans behind the wheel, with their poor reaction times, willingness to get drunk, and tendency to play with their cellphones. Getting killed in a car accident is one of the leading causes of death (especially in certain age brackets). Everyone accepts this as 'normal', but why the fuck should we?

It's a Small World After All...

[d'baba]

I'll hold out for the Mr. Toad's Wild Ride interior.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[ButchDeLoria]

(Fortunately for you, surveys show that below-median drivers are rare.)

Unless it's an underground tunnel.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[lister king of smeg]

If you actually trust a computer more than your own judgement in an accident situation, I feel sorry for you.

I may not trust it more than my judgement but I trust it more than the other crazies on the road. Equally they trust it more than my ability but less the their own ability's. Logically the best option is for both sides to trust the computer. Now while I want a self driving car I want one with manual controls, not so I can take control mid critical moment but because I occasionally need/want to go off road or poorly maintained logging roads that I doubt the self driving car would handle well.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[epyT-R]

computers are also:
1. hackable.. one bored 16yo with a laptop on an overpass + 20000 wirelessly networked cars on a highway = fun.. oh and state mandated kill switches are only there for the children, right?

2. careless about self preservation. A computer will happily cause an accident due to a programming bug or sensor fail. Was that a rock or a plastic bag? A human can tell, but your computer? doubtful. How about that truck carrying those huge metal pipes? Is that top pipe about to fall off the back and flatten your car? A human can tell, a computer? hell no. A kid decides to step into the road at the last moment, you saw him running down the driveway from behind a line of parked cars on the side of the road. Did the computer? of course not. Did it see that huge pot hole? nope.

3. Only as good as the programmer that programmed it. Yes, a half million carefully selected miles with a person who knows the details of the system being tested in the vehicle..oh and he has an override capability that the rest of us will lack. Speed is 'a' factor, but not always 'the' factor in accidents, although the cops love to say it is (to help justify keeping the limits lower so they can rake in more cash). If that aforementioned truck is about to jackknife, it might actually be more prudent to get out from around it which will probably mean violating the speed limit. It just depends on what your options are at that moment. It would also take a human to see the fact the truck is in trouble. All the computer can do is react by hitting the brakes after it detects the truck blocking the way... gl with that, even if it was following a 'safe' distance.

As chaotic and inconsistent as humans can be, I think we're better off fixing the newfound inattentiveness while driving than trying to shoehorn more complacency and dependence into his life. Owning your mobility is an important distinction between those who are free and those who only go where they are told...and you can't tell me that governments won't want backdoor access to this.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[aethelrick]

ah you must be a Windows user, this mistrust of computers is common with your kind :P

All jokes aside though, will it get my favorite parking spot at the shop? Or stop spontaneously in a lay-bye to admire a spectacular view on a high mountain road? I do trust computers to do a better job than the average human when it comes to driving, but I must admit, a manual control input would be nice for some things.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[vidnet]

What kind of judgement calls are more likely to be useful in an accident situation?

1. Solving hard ethical dilemmas, such as swirving to avoid a baby carriage at the cost of running over an elderly person.

2. Out-of-the-box ingenuity, such as ramping off of the guard rail and balancing on two wheels to avoid the accident.

3. Stomping on the brakes as early as possible.

Human judgement definitely excels at 1 and 2, but in all honesty, I think 3 is the most practical. It also happens to be the one a computer would be best at.

If you exchange the 1 second human reaction time for a 1ms computer reaction time, you will go about 18km/h (11mph) slower when you hit something, dramatically increasing your and their chances of survival.

Obviously I know that you personally would be able to deftly maneuver to avoid the accident and that you'd react way faster than 1 second because you're always alert and a better than average driver (and it's not illusory superiority, because you'd have to be an idiot to believe you're good when you're average).

However, you're just one incredibly good driver, while there are a hundred million average ones. Statistically, it makes way more sense to opt for the 11mph reduction in impact speed.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Bongo]

But normal cars are so dangerous to self and others and yet we put up with that risk daily. So what if road death rates go up from 3 to 4 or 5 per hundred thousand? Albania's is like, 30. We often choose speed over safety.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[zAPPzAPP]

True, the car is much slower and can just stop moving at any point, without crashing into the ground.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Bongo]

Open the pod bay doors HAL. Yes, that needed an off button. It is difficult though because many malfunctions will kill very quickly. Even without a computer. Mechanical failure in a helicopter? Software means more things can go wrong. But I trust Google ius so highly motivated to track our every move, that they will take safety very seriously. **cough** It'll need some kind of official accident investigation authority to come down hard and fast and demand all logs and investigate openly and with high technical acumen each accident, and laws which say the companies have to turn over all their source code and specs.

With the proper incentives...

[JustDisGuy]

It will be a no-brainer. Low or no insurance costs and in high-traffic areas where commuter lanes are plugged up reserved lanes would make this an instant success.

I'd personally happily cede control of my vehicle for long-distance driving as long as I could choose to override the system and take control in unmapped or incorrectly mapped areas. Sleeping for an hour while the car took me where I need to go without having to worry about the road would be my preferred way to travel.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Bongo]

Indeed, and in one sense it focusses the scrutiny and energy of the law and of the safety bodies, from millions of drivers down to a few companies. I hope this means the authorities can then afford to spend nearly as much time investigating crashes as say, when an airliner goes down.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Bongo]

Over 100 years on, the automobile becomes even truer to it's name.

Nice!

Test drive

[jones_supa]

I got the opportunity to test drive a self-driving car, but the vehicle was hijacked on the route and a weird new direction programmed in. I ended up in a shipping container which was transported to a warehouse in the middle of the ocean, and at the destination the place was populated with automated forklift trucks. Whew.

Re:Test drive

[Zynder]

I took the Amazon headquarters tour too!

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[epyT-R]

how does ad hominem make his statement more or less valid?

It's self-driving...

[zarlino]

...so you don't get distracted while watching ads!

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Darinbob]

So far as I can tell, this seems to be design sort of like a taxi or shuttle. Without any manual controls it becomes nearly useless as a personal vehicle. No way to park one in your garage, or drive it places not on its map or things like that. Someone said it can pick you up at your door, but I think that's a bit exaggerated, maybe it will pick you up at a predesignated place nearby, otherwise it'd have to drive around awhile looking for legal places to park on the street. Likewise once it gets to the destination the most it'll probably do it let you out at a predesignated locale, it won't find a parking space for you, and probably won't even be able to pull up to the curb (won't know if it's legal to do so). Good luck in places like San Francisco or Manhattan, it'll have to stop in the middle of the street and let you out while the cars behind start honking (just like taxis do now). Given that there are no controls as reported, except for start/stop, it's unclear how you tell it where you want to go.

Removing the manual controls seems to greatly limit the usefulness.

All the videos they have so far look like demos. For the ones without controls they start and end at a big empty parking lot, and with manual controls it doesn't become automated until it's on the street.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[shrewdsheep]

Just plug your gamepad into the USB port.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Darinbob]

Airplanes have only a few designated takeoff and landing places for planes large enough to have automated controls. Even then the pilot must still be prepared to take over at any time so they controls are not removed. As well the pilot is required to taxi to and from the runway and during takeoff and landing. While on autopilot the planes are utterly unable to respond to emergencies without manual control.

And automobile is different. They need to go to strange places which are not pre-planned, including places not on Google Maps (like driveways and garages). They need to be able to park, and a parking space needs to be chosen that is legal, and so forth.

Google's cars are basically intended to be shuttles that pick you up from a fixed set of locations and can take you to another fixed set of locations, much like most airplanes. They'll be a bit like shuttles, with a less flexibility when picking you up but with more flexibility for the destination. Probably they will be the most like a 2 person city bus but without all the stops.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Darinbob]

The google car without manual controls doesn't have a way for you to tell it to stop moving at any point. As reported (though perhaps incorrectly) there is only a start and stop button. From videos there is also a display showing you route, but it is unclear if you can use that to set the route or alter it while moving.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Darinbob]

Ow, it just took that speed bump at 25mph, then it pulled over at a no stopping area and I got a ticket.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Darinbob]

Mercedes only makes automobiles. Google makes whatever goofy thing they thought of while drunk, or at least for 6 months before they cancel the project and move onto something cooler.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Sadsfae]

A quick call to google's helpdesk is all that's needed to stop the car in an emergency.

Have you ever tried to actually call Google? I've not been successful finding any sort of phone contact for some of their products, voice for example.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[epyT-R]

The computer would be faster than you at stomping on the brakes, but you'd be far better than the computer at determining situations where that's warranted. A proximity sensor array hooked up to a computer with a list of preprogrammed assumptions (shown in the videos) will not give the computer anything close to the contextual awareness of a human.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[xelah]

And if you think your judgement and perception is better than this computer system, you are full of hubris and a menace to other road users. It works both ways.

Whatever. My driving skills (or lack thereof) are a known quantity to me. I have some grasp of what I can and cannot do in a vehicle.

I think that's unlikely, at least for most drivers. How many times have you experienced an emergency stop from 70mph? Or practiced regaining control from a skid? Or when sliding on ice, or aquaplaning? Most drivers will have no idea how their car behaves in those situations and have no idea how good their skills are because they've never been tested in those circumstances, or have only tested them once or twice. One would expect that a self-driving car's abilities will have been tested much more.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[rioki]

You mean manual controls like the autopilot? Most modern planes are flown autonomous, granted by manual heading inputs by the pilots, because there is no digital link to the air traffic control. Modern airliners are capable of taking of, flying and landing fully autonomously. The current technological hurdle is to get ATC guidance into the airplane's systems.

Just look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (look ma no hands)

Sounds like a horror movie

[cascadingstylesheet]

Doors close, it starts to drive by itself, there is no steering wheel or pedals, aiyeeeeee!

car-sharing

[Tom]

Here's where I see these: As the new city car-sharing service.

In my city, there are several car-sharing agencies where you pick up a car anywhere you find it (Apps exist so you can look on your smartphone for the nearest one), drive to where you want to be, and drop it there for the next one. The system is great.

But even better would be if you could order a car to your location when you're getting ready, get an answer with an arrival time so you can put on your shoes and cloak and go downstairs, hop in and tell it where to go. And when it needs fuel, it drives itself to the nearest fueling station.

These things could easily replace taxis.

Re:car-sharing

[Zynder]

put on your shoes and cloak

Really? I figured a 3 digit like yourself would put on your robe and wizard hat!

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

No - the computer realised it was having issues correctly ascertaining the airspeed, and the pilots incorrectly tried to compensate, causing the crash. So the pilots should not have got the plane into such a dangerous position, and then should not have screwed up trying to get it out. The computer did what it should have done all the way through - it was the people who didn't.

Not new - Previous R&D projects

[adokink]

I just wanted to state that, although Google is making impressive progress in the field, other actors in the R&D arena have already implemented this kind of automated vehicles in the past, and made different pilots and field operational tests. As an example, take a look at the European project CityMobil 2: http://www.citymobil2.eu/en/ This project is already making demonstrations around european cities and there is more to come.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

And we know that the Google cars' safety record is that of an exemplary driver. And no - your driving skills are *not* a known quantity to you - you are assuming they are, but as you are human that is patently not the case. You even admit it yourself - you have "some grasp" - not an entire, thorough understanding of everything you can and can not do (unlike the Google cars). Infinitely more people have driven themselves off cliffs and into lakes than Google cars have - why you'd assume they'd do such a thing is beyond me. Oh, no - wait - arrogance.

So you have it entirely backwards - you are the unknown quantity, and the Google cars are the known quantities. Your hubris seems to have swapped those round for you. Again: you are the problem, and every complaint you raise against being labelled as such, so far, has shown it for the truth it is.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[CrimsonAvenger]

The google car without manual controls doesn't have a way for you to tell it to stop moving at any point. As reported (though perhaps incorrectly) there is only a start and stop button

You don't suppose, do you, that the "Stop button" you mentioned might not be a way to tell the car to, well, "stop moving at any point", do you?

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

This kid can break military-grade encryption? If that's the case we've got far bigger problems on our hands.

So you'd run over a rock in a plastic bag because you thought it was a plastic bag, whereas the radar on the driverless cars would have seen through the plastic bag and seen the rock. The pipe on the back of the truck? Well, the car would keep a safe distance, enough for it to avoid any falling object in front of it. That's what humans should be doing anyway. The cars' LIDAR scans for objects approaching the road, and can do so far better than any human can, so your kid-running-into-the-road situation would work out worse with a human behind the wheel. The LIDAR can see farther, with more accuracy, and in 360-degrees. You can't.

The rest of your post is ill-though-out guesswork ascribing idiocy and incompetence to the development team. They are experts in this field - you are not. You spend a lot of your time on Slashdot, being racist and sexist. I wonder who's more trustworthy when it comes to logical appraisal? You've demonstrated you are a slave to gut instincts and untrusting of data which might change your world-view, so no-one in their right minds should be listening to you.

Google's not stupid

[Quinn_Inuit]

If you take the set of people who might be willing to buy a self-driving car (a set underrepresented on /.), few of them are going to want to do it if they're on the hook for whatever the car does. If that's the case, you might as well drive yourself. Google doesn't want that, either, and just put out a statement to that effect. My guess is that they're going to try to get the relevant laws changed, but, in the meantime, what better way to protect your users from liability than to make it impossible for them to have had any control of the vehicle?

Re:Google's not stupid

[MrL0G1C]

Indeed

http://www.bbc.com/news/techno...

With these cars the insurance would be cheaper and obviously the manufacturer would be liable for any crashes due to 'defects' unless the car was sabotaged. I wonder how long it will be until someone works out how to chip one of these cars. Maybe google should make the AI open-source.

Re:Google's not stupid

[westlake]

If you take the set of people who might be willing to buy a self-driving car (a set underrepresented on /.)

Much more likely to be over-represented on Slashdot, I would think.

in the meantime, what better way to protect your users from liability than to make it impossible for them to have had any control of the vehicle?

In any activity that is inherently dangerous, the owner of a fully automated system of any kind would be held legally responsible for whatever injuries that are likely to follow.

Re:Google's not stupid

[bigpat]

It should be the case that the driver is only responsible for the operation of the vehicle when they are actually driving or if they did something to modify the car to make it unsafe. If it is driving around autonomously then it should be the responsibility of the manufacturer for any defective decision making by the car that leads to a collision and damage. Having a car with no manual override clarifies that.

That to me is the point of this car. Besides being an interesting option, this is basically purpose built to demonstrate to state legislators that there should be room under state law to allow fully autonomous cars on the road without requiring a licensed driver always at the ready to take over and avoid collisions.

Something you could have demonstrated in the previous cars by having someone sitting in the passenger seats, but now there is no difference in which seat you sit in. Having autonomous cars with manual overrides left the driver responsible for the operation of the vehicle and liable for accidents... unrealistically so. A driver couldn't reasonably be expected to decide whether the car would avoid a collision or not. That kind of law turns an autonomous navigation system into a dangerous delay in human decision making rather than a life saving safety device. This hybrid approach to liability which retained driver liability was unrealistic and undermined safety. If the driver is driving they should be licensed and liable for mistakes, if the computer is driving then the car and the manufacturer should be licensed and liable.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[the_other_chewey]

Just look at this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (look ma no hands)

While the A380 is capable of autolands on properly equipped runways (which by the way
takes quite a bit of work by the pilots to set up), this video doesn't show one.

Final approach and landing are in fact flown in full manual mode. It's Lufthansa policy
to land manually whenever possible, as to not lose manual flying proficiency.

Other airlines do have other policies, but I doubt any use autolands routinely -
as I said, they are more work.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

The computer car would not be driving so fast that it couldn't stop should an old person or a baby stroller be in the road - problem solved. It would apply the brakes and come to a controlled stop without hitting the object, even if the old person/baby carriage was somehow coming at the car at a great speed - it would be able to detect this far better than a human and know what to do to avoid hitting anything.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

Your Mk. 1 Eyeball with its built-in blind spot, narrow field of view, poor distance and speed judgement, and easily-fooled pattern recognition. Gotcha. Again: your arrogance is the problem.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[zAPPzAPP]

The important thing is, that there is an easy and safe fall back mechanism for the automation in case of catastrophic failure.
In this case it is:
- cut the engine, apply brakes.
Easy to perform, even if automation completely fails and can be engineered with multiple rendundancy.

For a plane:
- lower altitude, find safe landing spot, try to land the plane, ???
Can not be done with malfunctioning automation -> human has to be there to take over this job (good luck human..)

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe that 700000 miles figure. Definitely not in real traffic situations anyway. Your message in itself even makes it really weird. So a car has driven 700000 miles without a driver controlling it. It has had two crashes during this time. Both under control of the human occupant. Well, gee... I thought it had driven 700000 miles WITHOUT being under the control of the human occupant. How the fuck do you want to have it?

It will take another 50 years until this technology is mature enough. There are not only technical hurdles. Who is responsible when this car runs someone over? Do you want to go to jail for 10 years because of some idiot at Google? Or does the idiot at Google go to jail? Or are we just going to allow people to be run over in this bright new future?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

You honestly think Google can make a car which can drive over 700,000 miles without accident, but can't park in a garage when told to? Or doesn't know how to quickly pull over to let a passenger out? You know when it's legal to pull over because of signage and other visual indications, which the car itself can read and comprehend. It amazes me that people think the Google car team are such incompetent muppets. As for how to tell it where you want to go? Maybe you do just that - tell it where you want to go. With your voice. As you would now with a taxi, for example.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Mr D from 63]

The next article on this car will likely be on how it can be hacked (because everything gets such an article).

Then that manual stop button might come in handy.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

That wasn't an ad hominem. His attack, if you want to call it that, was pertinent to the discussion and so by definition was not an ad hominem. But you're a misogynist racist asshat, so I'd not expect you to know. That's an ad hominem, and a factually correct one at that.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[AmiMoJo]

Computers are yet to be sophisticated to handle many situations as well has humans do.

Do you have evidence of situations Google's cars cope worse with than humans?

I'd like to see a competition between a computer controlled car and a human in various driving and emergency situation tests. Kinda like when Watson played Jeopardy but more exciting. I have a feeling the computer would win.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[rioki]

That is true, the video does not show autoland. But the rest remains, the plane "flys itself" along the programmed heading, speed and altitude. This system could go haywire anytime and basically not return control to the pilot, since it is all software between the pilot and the hardware.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[AmiMoJo]

On my drive home from work there at least one accident a week. It's that bad now. Too many cars, too little road, and the way it merges everyone has to change lanes across each other. Humans really are not up to the task of doing that reliably five days a week it seems.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[martin-boundary]

Sorry, all of this is just waffle. Money talks, and bullshit walks. If Google believes in the reliability of its cars, it should be willing to take the responsibility for accidents. If their cars cause deaths, Google should pay for that. If their cars cause dents in other cars while parking, Google should pay for that, too. There's nothing like having your own money on the line to peel away the veneer of wishful thinking based on greed, and leave a sober assessment of the actual risks. Anything else is just a waste of time.

Next story!

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Ddalex]

Joke ---> Whooosh

You

Snow

[iONiUM]

How many miles were in snow or dense fog or severe rain? I drive in this conditions all the time and its totally different than a sunny day in California.

Re:Snow

[CastrTroy]

Also, how well maintained are the cars, and do they complete a safety checklist before every drive? Because I can pretty much guarantee that if you put these cars out in the general population, that they will not be maintained and not checked before every drive to ensure that things are working properly.

Re:Snow

[geekoid]

Which is no different then now.

Re:Snow

[Stuarticus]

Most modern cars have sensors on everything drivers are supposed to check before they set off because, surprise surprise, people don't do these checks. The computer will probably actually pay attention to the warning light that says front right tyre is completely flat. I've seen two people recently driving on totally flat tyres, what kind of idiot does that?

Re:Snow

[CastrTroy]

The kind of idiot who's has to get to work, who's worried about whether he will get fired for being late. He doesn't have the money to fix it either, so he's going to be driving like that until the end of the month, Of course, it's going to cost him more in the long run as running with a single empty tire can damage the rim as well as the tire, whereas a patch would have worked had he fixed it right away.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[rioki]

Human level AI? I would rather not, most human drivers are bad. Try to use the cruise control on a crowded highway and you know what I mean. Just maintaining uniform speed is an impossible task for most drivers. Oh there is a minor bend in the road, I need to slow down, there is a minor hill, I need to slow down, look an accident on the other side of the road, I need to slow down.

In almost all cases a computer will be able to react way faster and with more precision than a human can. Yes there will be some minor flaws in the first systems, they will be systemic and patched out. With human drivers it is a gamble each time they get on the road.

Re:It's still all about search...

[wjcofkc]

That's not a camera. It's radar\lidar.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[oodaloop]

Do you trust human drivers MORE? To be clear, we're talking about the humans that text, drink, smoke, talk, and everything but look at the road and kill over 30,000 people in the US alone every year. THOSE humans?

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[martin-boundary]

A self driving car can simultaneously look in every direction around the car and never have to blink. If an object is detected and the car needs to stop, it takes a person time to physically lift their foot from one pedal and press the other(s). Not much time, sure, but in a sudden stop scenario, every little bit helps.

Yeah, yeah. A self driving car can look, but it cannot *see*. It cannot interpret and reason, you yourself admit this in your post. We here at slashdot have all written computer programs. We know that they are just recipes full of bugs and special cases that nobody has properly solved. A car that "looks" only sees the narrow special case shapes that were programmed in, and even those it doesn't get right 100% of the time. It can't, no training dataset is exhaustive.

And your stopping scenario is bullshit too. A human can judge the unfolding event and decide if stopping is even appropriate. Maybe there's a kid in the back without a seatbelt on and stopping for the duck that's crossing the road would cause injury to the kid.

There's a simple answer to this whole problem. Google should accept the responsibility as the driver of the vehicle, and pay just like a regular person every time the car causes an accident. It's a simple rule, there's no need to change any laws or anything, and the potential liability on Google will keep them honest. They'll make sure their cars don't get into accidents, because that will ruin them. What more can we ask?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[coofercat]

at a maximum of 25mph, you're not going near an expressway. Any accident you do have will likely be a bit of a bump rather than a crash (unless it's caused by someone else, going much faster, driving into you - but the risk of that is the same if the car you're in is autonomous or not).

Short Video of Google Car

[rtoz]

We can watch Short Duration Video of this Google Car here

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[ColdWetDog]

"I'm sorry Dave, I can't do that."

Technology vs. market

[olau]

So the technology is now there, but is there really a market for a car that drives you without your input other than the destination?

I think the summary has this backwards. Of course there is a market for a vehicle (let's not call it a car for the moment) that drives you around without your input, think of buses, trains, planes, taxis. If the price is right, it will definitely be a success - it doesn't really need to compete with cars to be useful, although it seems likely that many of those who think of their car as an expensive annoyance they have to have to get around would be interested.

But the thing is that this is still a prototype. The technologi is in fact not there yet - it may be in a couple of years, but we don't know yet.

IMHO the prototype makes sense as a statement and as a challenge. With no steering wheel, there's no 99% self-driving non-sense - they have to have a plan for all corner cases, even if that's something like car stops and is remote-controlled around obstacle.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Richard_at_work]

I'm afraid your assertion is quite false - about 90% of all landings done daily by large civil aircraft (737 upward) is done by the autoland system, with the only requirement for a manual landing being to retain certification for the pilot.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chuq]

> "I don't believe..."

That's not really a counter argument.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't believe that 700000 miles figure. Definitely not in real traffic situations anyway. Your message in itself even makes it really weird. So a car has driven 700000 miles without a driver controlling it. It has had two crashes during this time. Both under control of the human occupant. Well, gee... I thought it had driven 700000 miles WITHOUT being under the control of the human occupant. How the fuck do you want to have it?

Those two statements are not as conflicting as you seem to think. Google has announced that their driverless cars have logged 700,000 autonomous miles in real traffic. They have not said anything about how many miles they have logged additionally in manual mode.

Re:Municipalities are wetting their pants

[blackbeak]

...We might actually seem them outlawed....

The more likely scenario would be that as soon as autonomous cars are shown to be even .05% less likely to be involved in accidents, then self driving will begin to be stigmatized as "a dangerous risk", and soon after that outlawed completely. Particularly likely as Google can afford to create and push new legislation on us that serve Google's interests. It won't be long before driving a car will be considered a reckless act the way driving without seat belts is now.

I've been driving for over 35 years and have never been in an accident (when I wasn't in a sanctioned race!). Driving is one of the most enjoyable activities we have. I, for one, do not look forward to losing the freedom to pilot my own vehicle as I please.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[bytestorm]

Even for domain experts, we're talking about hard problems; problems hard enough that we've only recently been able to apply them reliably in the field. This is definitely a nascent technology, and while I think it will be a societal net positive (decreased accident rate, increased fuel economy), there's still a lot of room to grow and improve. I know I personally won't be getting one until the cost is near parity with manual vehicles, whether that be through insurance incentives or vehicle time sharing; or I become a bit too old to drive myself around reliably.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[the_other_chewey]

That is true, the video does not show autoland. But the rest remains, the plane "flys itself" along the programmed heading, speed and altitude.

The pilots fly the plane by programming heading, speed, and altitude.

This system could go haywire anytime and basically not return control to the pilot, since it is all software between the pilot and the hardware.

This is untrue. First, there is no "this system", there are several completely independent systems
that can be individually disabled if something misbehaves. Also, great care is taken to allow the
pilots to easily assume full control: In most cases, it's as simple as "touch the sidestick or throttle
levers".

And then, as the very last fallback, even Airbus aircraft have a "Mechanical Back Up" flight mode.
It is exactly that: No flight control computer involvement at all. No fun to fly either, mind you (can't
use the sidestick), but it is there, and controlling and landing the aircraft in this mode is trained for.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[nblender]

A human can see a train approaching a level crossing far sooner than a self-driving car... If the lights at the level crossing aren't working; will the human be sitting there wondering if the car will notice the train in time?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't say the same for a driverless car."

Why? After the hit the mainstream you can say how good they are. Then make an informed decision of either letting the car take you somewhere or driving yourself, if that is still allowed on public roads. I'd wager after the AI cars come the human drivers will be out fast, because they will be the most dangerous things on roads, and completely unnecessary). I'm also almost certain these cars will have emergency stops, and emergency exits, just like every other machine has. There won't be manual controls besides the emergency stop button, as those are expensive.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[CastrTroy]

I would say that driving in the city is way more complicated than flying in the air. There are a lot more unexpected problems that can happen in the city than in the air. A child isn't likely to run into the path of an aircraft. The aircraft in the sky tend to stay quite far apart from each other as well. Cars tend to be quite close together, as while you still have humans driving some of the cars, and other traffic like cyclist and pedestrians to deal with, there will be unpredictable movements made by them.

Re: So when will the taxi drivers start protesting

[nxtr]

Pumping gas is not a needed service. Anything can be made to appear like it needs to be done by a trained professional.

COAAS? No thanks!

[sinij]

Car Ownership as a Service (COAAS)? No thanks, not interested.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[halltk1983]

Oh, well, if you don't trust it, I suppose we should can the whole project. I'll let Mercedes know that their automated controls for slowing down a vehicle to match the speed of the one in front of it, and their lane assist keeping distracted drivers from creaming minivans aren't effective enough, even though they haven't caused any issues yet.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[FictionPimp]

I called google support for my nexus 4. The result was a very kind lady who solved my problem quickly.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[swillden]

There's a simple answer to this whole problem. Google should accept the responsibility as the driver of the vehicle, and pay just like a regular person every time the car causes an accident.

I believe this is actually Google's position on the question, that the manufacturer of the self-driving car should be liable for accidents, and that they're having a hard time convincing legislators.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[swillden]

Add to this that autonomous cars would be able to drive much closer to each other on the roads

Possibly close enough to draft off of one another and thereby increase fuel efficiency. Given the right technology we could see our long-distance highways populated primarily by massive trains of vehicles inches apart and moving at very high speeds. The front and rear vehicles would still have to fight wind resistance, but the vehicles in between would largely get a free ride.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[swillden]

A human can see a train approaching a level crossing far sooner than a self-driving car.

Why do you say that? LIDAR is quite good at detecting large moving objects.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Google car has done something like 700,000 miles and crashed twice. Both times this occurred, it was under control of the human occupant.

On well-known paved roads around their campus in that nice California weather. Call us back when they've done the same in snow, freezing rain, on dirt roads, etc.

Hell, my car's traction control computer had to be turned off several times last winter because it'd get so paranoid at the slightest wheelspin that it'd leave me stuck at an intersection if there was a bit of slush on the ground.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[CastrTroy]

Google's ultimate goal isn't to build self-driving cars. Their goal is to get the technology off the ground and convince other auto manufacturers that it is possible so that people can browse the web on their way to work, and look at ads on the Google search engine. They didn't build a phone operating system because they thought they could do a better job than Apple or because Apple was doing a bad job. They did it to built up market share and mind share around their search engine. Google wants us to have self driving cars so that we have more leisure time in order to see more ads, or possibly to buy apps, games, books, and movies off their app store. This is where the real money is. Not in selling physical objects that take money to produce, but in generating revenue from a product that costs nothing to produce, and can generate obscene amounts of money.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

1. That goes for manually driven cars too. If it has a kill switch your hacker could just as easily kill the power at a "fun" time, say when you've just pulled round to overtake a truck with what you thought was enough time to pull back in in time to avoid the oncoming. And what kind of idiot would expose the AI to the internet, least of all via wireless? Designed properly it would be a little black box receiving carefully filtered inputs from the sensors, providing carefully filtered outputs to the actuators.

2. Citation needed. People get squashed by falling loads which suggests that they aren't good at spotting them reliably. An AI? Don't know. But they would spot the child you referred to, and be tracking its movement and capable of stopping in time. (The radar is located higher up than your eyes, has all-round coverage and is specifically feeding algorithms looking for child- (or person-)sized moving objects, among other things. And while I don't know for sure about the pothole if the radar is any good it ought to detect an anomaly - which it can be trained to avoid. Best of all it has a better idea of where its wheels are running than most drivers I've seen, so the avoiding action could be less drastic (ride over the pothole not around it into the oncoming traffic).

3. Citation needed. The whole point of machine learning is that it can improve on itself. The codebase can be relatively small and very rugged, the learned behaviour can be more complex. Also, with the kind of high resolution radar google is using there should be no problem detecting pre-jackknife behaviour in your hypothetical truck.

Pretty much all of your post is unsubstantiated rhetoric. If Google turned up at my house with a prototype driverless car and a legal indemnity would I get in, let it drive me to work and have a snooze as it did so? Probably not today. But it's not like they're offering the public these today. It's another step along the testing roadmap. My guess, having followed developments in this area since working at a company doing early lane guidance and collision avoidance work in the mid 90s, is we'll see these cars, or their successors, on general sale in around 2020, in high end vehicle lines initially (think executive class motors like Merc E class, BMW 7 series, Jag XJ) and then in the consumer market around 5 years later, with the technology becoming pretty much universal in new cars by around 2030. It's not a question of "no steering wheel, no deal" - if you don't make the deal, others will so you'll still be relying on the safety of these computer controlled vehicles for your safety on the roads, just like you rely on the skill of other drivers at the moment.

To be provocative, I wouldn't be surprised if human driving of cars on public roads was outlawed by 2050, with old manual vehicles either requiring an AI / servocontrol retrofit or being restricted to track use. So eventually, if you live that long, you'll be required to make the deal or stay off the roads.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Jason Levine]

I've called Google more than once due to errors with listed phone numbers. (The phone number listed when you searched for one of my company's departments was a different department. You can imagine how annoying the flood of wrong "I looked it up online" numbers was.) The people I spoke with were very helpful and knowledgeable. I'll admit that finding a support number for Google isn't easy, but it can be done.

no stereo???

[Joe_Dragon]

At least put in a CD / CD changer.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless it was hacked, and now acts as an accelerator.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[MrL0G1C]

When's the last time you were in an airplane that had to dodge to avoid hitting a deer/dog/cat etc? /Not comparable

Google's driverless cars have already racked up 700,000 accident free miles in autonomous mode (albeit with a human ready to take over).

That 700,000 miles is on some very specific quiet roads, their latest literature says they will now test the cars on 'busy' roads.

I'm not against autonomous cars, I think they would be great for car pooling and (hopefully electric) taxi-cabs that cost > 50% less.

What will this do for traffic congestion

[AttillaTheNun]

I theorize that if you remove ego and ignorance from the equation, the flow of traffic would improve exponentially.

well we better have welfare 2.0 aka basic income

[Joe_Dragon]

well we better have welfare 2.0 aka basic income to cover the people automated out of jobs also need single player healthcare as well.

Choosing my route

[Cro Magnon]

One thing I like about driving is that I can choose my route. Go new places. Will the self-driving car give me any choice of route, or will it always take the same boring route to a given destination?

Re:Choosing my route

[Anonymous Psychopath]

One thing I like about driving is that I can choose my route. Go new places. Will the self-driving car give me any choice of route, or will it always take the same boring route to a given destination?

I've seen this question a lot on this story. I can't imagine it would be in Google's (or anyone else's) interest to not provide the driver with complete control over every aspect of the journey. Many of the assertions I've seen today are just silly. Of course the car will allow you to stop and pee, or change the route, or cancel it and go somewhere else, or avoid your ex-girlfriend's street, or whatever. They're still hauling bags of meat around and the entire point is to service their transportation needs.

That said, Google/Waze + autonomous car = commute nirvana.

Radical Disruption to our Economy and Society

[StonyGrunow]

I'm surprised people are talking about whether this should or shouldn't happen. It will. It's a given. It's only a matter of years.

US Politics is often driven by the reliable senior vote, and legal self-driving cars will quickly become legally available in Florida and other states with large retirement populations, and eventually in all states. Google knows this and is already working that angle, which is why the video featured the elderly and the blind.

Entire job categories will soon be wiped out. Taxi drivers will go first, followed by truckers. Other industries are less obvious, but will be impacted - some positively, some negatively. This will affect suburban moms driving their kids everywhere, pharmacies (prescription delivery), grocery stores (more delivery options), and even Home Depot (contractors spend hours driving to and from Home Depot and waiting in line).

Restaurants will be changed. More will offer delivery, and those that don't will let you send your car for pickup. When people do go to bars and restaurants, they will drink more alcohol than before, and may head out more, because they no longer have to worry about driving drunk.

The average Joe will have the transportation resources of what used to be available only to someone so rich as to have a pool of chauffeurs working 24/7.

Police forces will lose speeding ticket revenue, towns and cities will lose parking revenue. Parking garages in medium size towns will empty, and be replaced with other real estate. Commutes to work may lengthen, as people are more willing to endure a long commute if they can work in their car, or sleep.

Every car maker is going to start losing market share to Google unless they offer this. Google's head start combined with their better engineers means that Google might become the dominant software provider to cars. Unless car manufacturers come up with software that is equally safe, Google will soon start making more money per car sale than the manufacturers.

Security and policing will change. Suicide bombers can be replaced by software hackers. Drug smuggling within countries will change. Security guards will be replaced, in part, by cars with video cameras. Warfare will change, with drone cars becoming as ubiquitous as drone planes.

It might take 5 years for these cars to be road legal for non-licensed adults (like the elderly who can't drive). But once that happens, within 10 years all new cars sold will have this ability.

Re:Radical Disruption to our Economy and Society

[gnupun]

Entire job categories will soon be wiped out. Taxi drivers will go first, followed by truckers.

Don't forget car manufacturers. People buy cars and use them for only 1 to 2 hours a day, typically. We don't share cars right now because other drivers may abuse it. With driverless cars, you can't abuse the engine easily, so sharing cars makes sense economically. Almost anyone would be able to afford a 2 hours/day timeshare from a shared pool of thousands of cars for $500/year.

Re:Radical Disruption to our Economy and Society

[Anonymous Psychopath]

Every car maker is going to start losing market share to Google unless they offer this. Google's head start combined with their better engineers means that Google might become the dominant software provider to cars. Unless car manufacturers come up with software that is equally safe, Google will soon start making more money per car sale than the manufacturers.

Google isn't interested in manufacturing cars. Google is interested in licensing their technology to other companies that already do. This is how it works today. Most of the Japanese companies use Denso. Ford used to use Microsoft but will be using Blackberry/QNX going forward. Google wants to compete with those guys, not with the auto manufacturers themselves.

Re:Radical Disruption to our Economy and Society

[m00sh]

Entire job categories will soon be wiped out. Taxi drivers will go first, followed by truckers.

Don't forget car manufacturers. People buy cars and use them for only 1 to 2 hours a day, typically. We don't share cars right now because other drivers may abuse it. With driverless cars, you can't abuse the engine easily, so sharing cars makes sense economically. Almost anyone would be able to afford a 2 hours/day timeshare from a shared pool of thousands of cars for $500/year.

Don't forget insurance. And the billions they spend on advertising.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[bdo19]

Do you have a source for this? This is contrary to everything I have ever read. Only a limited number of runways at a limited number of airports even have full auto land capability!

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[InvalidError]

How do autopilots in airplanes work? They work on the assumption that they have a clear path along their assigned course based on the flight plan and when that assumption is incorrect (assuming the potential obstruction has TCAS), alarms start going off to prompt pilots to do something to avoid the probable crash. As long as the pilots and ATC do their jobs right, most collision avoidance is taken care of before the plane even lifts off.

This is very different from driving on the streets where there are no "flight plans", no authority managing space reservations along streets, tons of other cars, cyclists, pedestrians, intersections, etc. all over the place that require continuous on-the-spot adjustments to immediate surroundings instead of only worrying about probable obstacles 50km or 2-3mins ahead. Driving a car is a lot more involved than just setting a speed, direction and altitude to the next way-point and let the computer worry about maintaining those parameters between way-points.

Autopilots on planes are basically cruise-control on steroids: about equivalent to slapping lane-sensing cameras and front/rear radar/sonar to measure distances on a car and letting cruise-control handle speed, holding lane position and maintaining safe distances within that lane; basically, take most of the mundane part of flights or highway driving off the pilots' or drivers' hands - if they choose to.

Designing a car autopilot to handle staying in a lane for 300km of highway is a much simpler challenge than designing a car autopilot that can cope with urban and downtown neighborhoods where obstacles can pop out from anywhere with little to no warning.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[the_other_chewey]

I'm afraid your assertion is quite false - about 90% of all landings done daily by large civil aircraft (737 upward) is done by the autoland system, with the only requirement for a manual landing being to retain certification for the pilot.

Using ILS, I totally believe. Full autoland, i.e. flare, touchdown, rollout: I'd like to see a very good source.

Considering that autoland requires that the runway be equipped with ILS CAT III(b), this seems unlikely: China has one FAA approved CAT III runway, Hong Kong 25R.

There are none in Singapore, none in Thailand, there's one in Australia (Melbourne 16), three in India (all the same airport though, Delhi).

Of the 1369 ILS-equipped runways in the US (Excel warning), just 113 have CAT III (no idea whether those are level a or b).

Sure, most of them are at the biggest an busiest airports, but considering that an autolanding
plane severely limits a runway's capacity due to increased spacing requirements, I doubt ATC
would be too happy to accomodate lots of autolands especially on those.

They just don't have the timeslots.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[slimjim8094]

[citation needed]

IAAPilot, though not of the big ones. My understanding is that this is totally false. Autoland (ILS CATIII) requires a specially equipped runway, airplane, and crew (training) and each of these must be kept certified to do it as well. By no means all runways, airports, and crews are certified to do this - in the case of runways, most are not, even of those that the commercial operators fly to.

It's true that many approaches are done automatically, but an approach is most definitely NOT a landing. A dinky little Cessna may have an autopilot sophisticated enough to follow a glideslope down, but it'll disconnect at the DH just like a 787 will (without a CATIII ILS). The last several hundred feet (of altitude) are almost always flown manually, and to be frank, that's the hard part.

Where did this meme come from? Airline pilots most definitely do still fly...

Fine in Urban and Suburban...

[tekrat]

Fine in Urban and Suburban, but what about Rural? I live near Newark NJ, and yet, with a 30-minute drive west and north, I can find dirt roads that aren't on any map or GPS.

Outside of the USA, I've driven in Curacao -- once you're off the main road, it's nothing but a dusty trail that leads to communities of poor living in shacks. There are roads in the USA that are inaccessible to anything other than a lifted, 4-wheel drive vehicle.

And I've driven places where there's no road, you're essentially making your own path, and hoping you don't tear anything critical off the vehicle as you crush vegetation beneath you.

In the USA southwest, there's no actual road, you're just tooling around in a buggy as you climb rocks and hop over sand dunes in the desert.

Fine, you've got an autonomous car -- but it's incapable of going everywhere some other vehicles do.

elevators also manual controls for maintenance

[Joe_Dragon]

elevators also have manual controls for maintenance as well.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[MrL0G1C]

Google's test vehicles have done 700,000+ miles on cherry-picked quiet roads that have been 3d digitally mapped extensively. They say they are about to test their cars on 'busy' roads now. So reset that "nearly half a million mile" counter to near zero.

You seem to be more confident than Google - they will be trialling their cars at 25mph, so much for the quick reaction times everyone is going on about.

It seems to me that a lot of people have jumped to the fallacious conclusion that hi-quality imaging and fast computer processing = good quality recognition and response time, it doesn't - as shown by the fact that the drivers have had to take control of the cars on occasion. I'd love to hear why the drivers had to take control and how often... and what would have happened if they didn't take control?

Hi! You must be new here.

[Weaselmancer]

Welcome to Slashdot.

Icey Mountain Driving

[BisuDagger]

Does anyone trust an automated car to navigate a narrow mountain road during an ice over? And without a steering wheel how the hell do you save yourself when that goes wrong.

Where to go?

[Topwiz]

An automated car won't be much help if you don't know where you are going. People often drive to a general area and then drive around until they see the place they are looking for. I often go for rides on back roads through the woods without a map, turning at intersections in a random direction just to see where it goes. It wouldn't be much fun if I had to plan it out in advance.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

Yes. And if the pattern recognition of the software in your steering-wheel-free misinterprets said "other guy" and dumps you into a ravine?

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[dj245]

Human level AI? I would rather not, most human drivers are bad. Try to use the cruise control on a crowded highway and you know what I mean. Just maintaining uniform speed is an impossible task for most drivers. Oh there is a minor bend in the road, I need to slow down, there is a minor hill, I need to slow down, look an accident on the other side of the road, I need to slow down.

In almost all cases a computer will be able to react way faster and with more precision than a human can. Yes there will be some minor flaws in the first systems, they will be systemic and patched out. With human drivers it is a gamble each time they get on the road.

Don't forget that absolute consistency is inefficient. I could make a cruise controller that kept the speed to within 0.01miles/hour, but that wouldn't be the best controller I could make. Cruise controllers should not be so strict- it is more efficient to let speed increase a couple of mph when going down hills, and let it to drop slightly when going up hills. The best cruise controller would be aware of the upcoming terrain and calculate the most fuel-efficient throttle position to take, considering the characteristics of the engine, vehicle drag, etc.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

I'm sorry, why should I have to wait for something that completely strips a driver of control to become mainstream before commenting on possible safety issues?

And YOU may wish to wager on something like this.

Personally, I don't. Hence my distrust of a car that would bar any and all driver intervention in case of a malfunction.

Needs Manual Backup

[docwatson223]

All you need is a hacker to drive these cars into each other and with no manual backup disengagement there's no way to mitigate a tragedy.

Greaaaat...

[thevirtualcat]

Sounds wonderful until it decides that the fastest route is through the bad area of town.
Or it decides that an address is about two miles away from where it actually is.
Or the road washed out and the car can work out that it can't go that way but can't route around it since the map says it should work.
Or it takes me to the foot of a two mile long driveway and stops.

All things that have happened to me with GPS navigation. Not saying we need pedals and a steering wheels to solve those problems, but they are a really good solution to those problems.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[geekoid]

" It's Lufthansa policy
to land manually whenever possible, as to not lose manual flying proficiency."

And by possible they mean when it's clear.
Once visibility degrades to a certain degree, it's all autopilot.

Think about that.

OK, but what about cup holders?

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

No steering wheel means cup holders everywhere, right? Next to the bar.

Re:OK, but what about cup holders?

[canadiannomad]

Driverless party bus!!!!

Re:OK, but what about cup holders?

[ThatsDrDangerToYou]

.. with hot tub. What could possibly go wrong?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

No they weren't. A few futurist talked about flying cars in a magazine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[MightyYar]

I don't think you are paying attention. Things are moving fast - Infinity already sells a car (Q50) which will do a limited amount of self-driving on the highway. It is sneaking up on us, your skepticism notwithstanding.

But the real change won't occur until some of these things get out there on the road and the actuaries find out whether they should cost more or less to insure. I'm betting that they gradually become cheaper to insure and that will be the real driver to adoption. I'm no better at predicting the future than you, but I'd be willing to bet that my children will be faced with self-driving vs non-self-driving as a real option.

No steering wheel, but there is...

[jpellino]

... and "I'm Feeling Lucky" button on the dash. It's not this car per se I have issues with, it's the ability of large numbers of them to cope with all the casual drivers out there and by "casual" I mean the ones who eat cereal from a bowl with a spoon while in heavy traffic, the ones who make that split second last ditch decision to get off that exit and the person in front of you who finally panic-brakes when the other 10 cars ahead of them were paying attention to the obvious, gradual slowdown.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Chas]

No, my problem is a bunch of fanboys who are heedless of safety issues trying to push something ahead of its time attempting to troll me.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Joe_Dragon]

The important thing is, that there is an easy and safe fall back mechanism for the automation in case of catastrophic failure.
In this case it is:
- cut the engine, apply brakes.
Easy to perform, even if automation completely fails and can be engineered with multiple rendundancy.

and stop on railroad tracks? death valley with no cell covage? in front of crack house? on drawbridge? on one lane ramp blocking it?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[geekoid]

CAT III landing require autopilot, as per guidelines.

CAT III weather minima do not provide sufficient visual references to allow a manual landing to be made. CAT III minima depend on roll-out control and redundancy of the autopilot. because they give only enough time for the pilot to decide whether the aircraft will land in the touchdown zone (basically CAT IIIa) and to ensure safety during rollout (basically CAT IIIb). Therefore an automatic landing system is mandatory to perform Category III operations.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[CanHasDIY]

His attack, if you want to call it that, was pertinent to the discussion and so by definition was not an ad hominem.

I, for one, would love to hear your explanation of how accusing someone of being a cave-dweller because they do not believe a certain technology has yet developed to the point where it is feasible is "pertinent to the discussion."

Or any discussion, for that matter.

Get this sucker

[jpellino]

from Nashua NH to Plymouth MA on surface streets only thru Boston and I'll bite.

Prototype

[fivepan]

Everyone seems to be missing the point that Google built this as a prototype to show off its technology. It has no plans to actually build these things commercially and get into the auto business. They want real auto manufacturers to adapt Google's tech into their cars. So forget about the lack of a steering wheel, brakes, or a stereo. Google is just trying to show that it isn't necessary. It would be up to the car manufacturers and law makers to decide whether manual steering wheels and brakes will be included.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[geekoid]

Correct. This is why when you start to factor in density and miles flown, the safety difference(when you use death toll) is not better then cars.
Imagines if you only look at auto fatalities that happened while alone on a straight highway, or while pulling into the drive way.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[MightyYar]

Efficiency has to take a bow to traffic flow and safety (or at least the illusion of safety), though. Slowing on the uphill will cause havoc upstream, especially if the highway is near capacity. This is why jams start at curves, hills, and "gapers". And like it or not, we have a hard upper limit to speed unless you want to get a ticket - and you can't just accelerate down the hill at will anyway since there are people in front of you who have finished descending the hill and now have slowed back down.

dealer only for any service work even light blubs

[Joe_Dragon]

So no more jiffy lube and maybe even you can't even change your lights on your own any more.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Grizzley9]

The Google car has done something like 700,000 miles and crashed twice. Both times this occurred, it was under control of the human occupant.

This is quoted all the time, but how do you prove it? The car always has a driver behind the wheel. What's to say that any accidents are blamed on the driver as a way of Google PR protecting their pet project while they fix the bugs (actually that's a smart move for them).

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[CanHasDIY]

at a maximum of 25mph, you're not going near an expressway.

Which leads one to wonder, why did they put that limit on the vehicles? Is Google not confident that their product is ready for highway-speed testing?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Ozymandias_KoK]

One would hope so. It'd suck to have to go to your original destination without being able to change your mind, stop along the way, etc.! I can't imagine that sort of design being a beneficial feature.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[CanHasDIY]

Man, that sure makes me glad that computers are built and programmed by infallible gods, and not dumb humans!

Not that a computer wouldn't probably react better than a human in most situations, but rather, pointing out that "have a computer do it" is not a magical panacea for eliminating the possibility of human error.

speed limits will need to go up or they will kill

[Joe_Dragon]

speed limits will need to go up or they will kill the use of the cars.

I drive on a few major roads where the posted speed limit is 55 but the real / enforced one is 70

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[NotDrWho]

Even WITH steering wheels, these "self-driving" cars are fucking dangerous. Too many dumb assholes will trust them too much and just take a nap instead of keeping an eye on what the car is actually doing. And smarter assholes like me will have to share the road with said dumb assholes. I don't like the idea of having a car crash into me because of a buffer overflow in the car's computer and an idiot who thought it would be fine to lay down in the backseat and read while his car did all the driving.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[the_other_chewey]

CAT III landing require autopilot, as per guidelines.

Correct.

CAT III weather minima do not provide sufficient visual references to allow a manual landing to be made. CAT III minima depend on roll-out control and redundancy of the autopilot. because they give only enough time for the pilot to decide whether the aircraft will land in the touchdown zone (basically CAT IIIa) and to ensure safety during rollout (basically CAT IIIb). Therefore an automatic landing system is mandatory to perform Category III operations.

Yeah. What's your point? Nothing prevents you from performing a CAT III landing
under cloudless skies in bright sunshine. You wouldn't normally do that though, because
it's a lot of work to set up and monitor, and just visually landing your aircraft is much easier.

The grandparent however claims CAT III autolands to be happening most of the time,
regardless of weather conditions.

I doubt that.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Cro Magnon]

Yeah, it wouldn't work too well if I couldn't pull over to the QT to get rid of the coke I drank on my ride.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[GlennC]

You could also text HELP to **WOOSH!

Too cute

[StikyPad]

I'm a proponent of self-driving cars, at least in theory, but I'll be damned if I'm going to voluntarily buy something that looks like a super-sized version of the car my three year-old plays with. Can we get someone from Tesla to work with Google on styling, please? Thanks.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[geekoid]

Even better, you go to work in your car, and then while working the car becomes a taxi and makes money for you.

early cars lacked steering wheel

[peter303]

They used a "tiller" the first couple decades, like a rudder on a boat.

Re:early cars lacked steering wheel

[Zynder]

Indeed you're correct. My great grandfather also told us kids stories about how his model A could only do about 25mph no matter how hard he beat the hood with his whip. He said was pretty sure the salesmen were lying to him though cause he couldn't figure out how they fit 40 horses under there.

heavy traffic

[green is the enemy]

I'm curious how automated cars will handle heavy traffic. It's often hard to find an opening to merge into a busy lane, or make a left turn through heavy traffic. Would the automated car wait 10 minutes for an opening? Would it be able to drive aggressively to avoid wasting time like this?

Re:heavy traffic

[Gibgezr]

If enough of the other cars are automated as well, it will actually make merging smoother and easier; no need to "drive aggressively", it will simply pull out and merge in the ample space allowed, and the cars behind it will smoothly adjust. In an autonomous car world there are few traffic jams.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[kheldan]

Millions of people fly in airplanes every day that rely on computer controls

An 'autopilot', however sophisticated, is NOT a 'self-flying airplane'. There is a PILOT, and a CO-PILOT on board, and they're fully trained, tested, and qualified, and experienced to handle the aircraft themselves. The same should go for ground vehicles on public roads. I would NEVER get in a car that had no manual controls whatsoever.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[bigpat]

Honestly, in my view, removing the steering wheel is a safety feature.

This car could provide a very important option in the marketplace for those with no ability or desire to drive a car but still need a car for transportation. And by removing manual control completely it clarifies many of the legal issues that our citizen legislator's in most states are grappling with for allowing autonomous cars on the roads. Brilliant move by Google.

And an interesting way to settle the issue of legal liability. If a car without driver controls crashes it is either the fault of the other driver or the manufacturer, unless the owner or driver of the car modifies the vehicle in a way that contributed to the crash. Licensing shouldn't be an issue either since you press a button and tell it where to go. And drunk driving wouldn't be applicable since everyone in the vehicle is a passenger.

The role of fully autonomous cars in preventing drunk driving alone has the potential to save over 10,000 lives per year in the US.

Re:well we better have welfare 2.0 aka basic incom

[LordLimecat]

Because, as we know, every advance in the last 200 years that has ended an industry has caused an increase in starvation, a decrease in education, and generally poorer quality of life.

Whats that you say, its the exact opposite? Oh, well then.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[LordLimecat]

A quick post on google's support group is all that's needed to stop the car in an emergency.

FTFY

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[LordLimecat]

Not much time,

Probably 0.5-1 second. Given thats 25-50% of the recommended follow distance, thats quite a lot.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[LordLimecat]

computers are also:
1. hackable

Only if they do something exceptionally dumb, like expose the internal controls to a wireless network.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[westlake]

about 90% of all landings done daily by large civil aircraft (737 upward) is done by the autoland system

but an autodrive system with no manual override must be 100% fail-safe.

One Button

[hexavalent]

The final production version will feature a single "I'm Feeling Lucky" button.

Re:So will the autonomous driver get a ticket

[canadiannomad]

Not to mention when they breathalyze it and detect that it has been ingesting large quantities of 10% ethanol beverages....

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[xaxa]

There are probably fewer legal requirements -- the car might count as a four-wheeled low-powered motorcycle, for example. (This could be the case in the UK.)

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Jeremi]

By the time a human realizes there is a problem if the automated system has failed, they'll be lucky to have enough time to scream.

That said, a big red "OMG stop" button wouldn't go amiss, particularly on the Toyota models...

Re:no stereo???

[Anonymous Psychopath]

At least put in a CD / CD changer.

People still use CDs?

UI issues

[mean revision]

Even assuming they solve the problem of driving in rain, fog or snow I would have a few concerns about usability if there wasn't a steering wheel and pedals.

Is there a way to go to some general area and hunt for street parking or a parking lot?
How would I tell it to use the secured underground parking lot behind a shop or business? How would I tell it to use stall #123?
How do I quickly pull over, perhaps because there's a shop or bank I see that I remembered I needed to visit?

I'm skeptical that a GPS nav-style interface could allow for these sorts of fine-grained requests, yet these are things that occur regularly.

That said, as a concept it's pretty wild. I love the space it frees up. It is thought provoking even if it doesn't become a reality.

Re:UI issues

[Altus]

The car will find parking on its own, it might even link into a network of other cars to locate the spot, it will likley do this on its own after you have been dropped off.

Why woudl you care what stall it uses to park, it will come pick you up when you need it. If it has a set of known parking spots to use you would program the location in, it might even home in on a beacon.

GPS already has allowances for finding banks and stores. Also I doubt that we would be entirely stuck with a GPS interface and not be able to say, simply ask it vocally to pull over at the store.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[CanHasDIY]

the car might count as a four-wheeled low-powered motorcycle, for example. (This could be the case in the UK.)

For some reason, that sentence invokes the mental image of Jeremy Clarkson trying to drive one through an office building.

Re:no stereo???

[Joe_Dragon]

well do you want to pay $10 GB in data and $15-$20 roaming?

it better have XM as well.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[RavenLrD20k]

Dave, are you a programmer?

If you are, what steps would you take to ensure that an automated vehicle would not allow itself to get caught in The Rolling Box? Let me go over the scenario with you.

You are cruising inside of a truck's slip stream at about 65 mph (automated vehicle, it's going to ride closer to the truck than recommended for humans by default and thus can take better economic advantage of the slipstream.) You have heavy bumper-bumper traffic moving to your left at about 75-80mph with less than a car length between them and a jersey barrier on your right, half a foot from the shoulder line so no room for your vehicle to go there. A Tractor trailer is coming up on you from behind and matches speed with you about a truck length behind the truck in front of you. Now they're starting a convoy shift so the truck that was in the tail for the last 10-20 miles will move to the front to start giving the front truck an economy boost through slip streaming. The truck performing the shift gets to be right beside you in his passing maneuver, and now you are in the kill box. Most likely, the truck will continue on and take his place at the front of the convoy, but at this critical moment when he is right beside you there's countless things that can go wrong, and every single one of those things WILL KILL you (especially in that little POS frame).

1. The truck directly ahead has a blow out. Congratulations, you now have a rubber alligator coming at you and no where to move. Hit the alligator (potentially causing a fatal flip on its own), get run over by the truck behind you. There is no option of moving left or right.
2. Traffic suddenly stops ahead due to an accident, congratulations your computer controlled vehicle was able to stop at the same rate or faster than the truck in front of you. You'll still have a closed coffin service because the truck behind you didn't get the message and will slam into you, and push your little toy UNDER the back of the trailer in front of you. Congratulations, you just lost your head.
3. Trucker to your left sees something that makes him decide to pull into your lane before he completes the full maneuver. He doesn't see you, and doesn't wait for the ok from the trucker behind. And...another closed coffin service for you.

Another way to end up in the same box is to have a truck pull up beside you first, then a third truck will pull in behind you and complete the box... though this one tends to be deliberate and happens more when a driver pisses off a trucker... such as when a driver slipstreams a trucker without getting permission.

So, Dave. What does your car do? How does it recognize that it's getting boxed in, especially in the latter case when it looks every bit like the truck is just going to pass you and the truck in front of you...but decides to build the box instead?

Re:no stereo???

[Anonymous Psychopath]

well do you want to pay $10 GB in data and $15-$20 roaming?

it better have XM as well.

I just plug in a memory stick to a USB port. I think this is becoming fairly standard these days?

Didn't we just agree yesterday

[Altus]

That these cars wouldn't exists and that all self driving cars would ever be was an autopilot to supplement a human driver?

No levers to control all small parts in motor.

[DrYak]

How about that truck carrying those huge metal pipes?

You, your robot car and anyone else is required to always stay at a safe breaking distance for anything in front. Legally, you should be keeping a safe distance *even in the absence* of metal pipes, so if anyone in front needs to break due to a sudden apparition of a kid, you won't rear-end them.
The robot car is less likely to be tail-gating than the average asshole.

kid decides to step into the road at the last moment, you saw him running down the driveway from behind a line of parked cars on the side of the road. Did the computer? of course not.

you'd be surprised, but that technology is *already* in production at several constructor (Volvo is equipping it as a standard).
Cars currently on the street are able to spot the kid and apply emergency breaking if needed. (If you ask: yes, that can currently be overridden simply by forcing otherwise on the car's gas pedal). In the next following year, such technology and other similar collision avoidance system are going to be mandatory for new cars in EU.
Now the small killer detail? You can extend the system by putting more cameras. Said volvo has also camera under the side mirror *constantly* monitoring blind sport all the while you drive.
Human driver? No way to graft extra heads/extra pairs of eyes, so only possible to concentrate and whatch one single target. Either whatch in front of the car *OR* whatch either of the side for blid sport *OR* get distracted while fumbling with audio/phone/whatever. Consumer level cars currently on the street are able to monitor all this *continuously, without ever interrupting*.

Did it see that huge pot hole?

Actually google's car have managed to total 700'000km without any pot hole-related problems, so one could decude that their solid-state lidars work as intended.

Speed is 'a' factor, but not always 'the' factor in accidents, although the cops love to say it is (to help justify keeping the limits lower so they can rake in more cash)

Speed *is* the dominant factor simply due to physical laws like E = 0.5mv^2 each increase of speed squares the amount of energy involved in case of crash, or kinetic energy that you must dump during an avoidance manoeuvre. (See comment above about never tail-gating to avoid rear-ending).

A computer can compute and keep a safe distance from anything in front to be able to break in case of emergencies. And unlike a driver who might get distracted (and hence needs reminders), a computer keep continuously keep an "eye" on that too in addition to watch for everything else. (Some simpler forms of this are already in production in automatic cruise controls on cars currently on the street. The only difference is that these car can only keep safe speeds regarding other cars [= They will slow down not to rear end a car]. They currently can't anticipate safe speeds for upcoming turns on the road, without having signs hinting a top speed that the camera can read [= they aren't able to slow down before a sharp turn]. Whereas google cars have repeatedly demonstrated to successfully adapt speed to road ahead)

If that aforementioned truck is about to jackknife

...which by it self would *NOT* be a problem if you kept a safe distance from the truck in front of you *AS REQUIRED BY DRIVING LAWS*.
(If you were stupid enough to tail gate a truck, you deserve anything that happens to you next)
(And the aforementioned collision-avoidance system could actually save you under some circumstance - simply due to having much faster reflexes than you and being able to apply emergency breaking before you even start to realise that you're on a collision course)

it might actually be more prudent to get out from around it which will probably mean violating the speed limit.

...again at which point you were probably already violati

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[jklovanc]

The main issue is that a computer can not tell the difference between a child standing at the side of the road and a mailbox at the side of the road. Google does this by driving another vehicle along the road before the diverless car. If the object was not there the first time it must be movable. Computers do not yet have the cognitive ability to differentiate objects and predict what they will do.

it is time

[akrhodey]

This is progress. In our world of tele-commute always on cell phone checking suburbs we need this. The traffic in every major city is proff that something needs to be done. This could lead the way to better things. I for one am excited to see what this ushers in.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[jklovanc]

Autolanding is not a complex task. It entails beam following, speed maintenance, and a simple maneuver called flaring before landing. Another issue is that the aircraft is separated from others by large distances. This is far different than vehicles driving feet apart at high speeds changing lanes with traffic signals, crossing traffic, road obstructions, animals darting into traffic, etc. Landing on a calm day is easy. Landing in rough weather is much different and we still use pilots for that. Comparing aircraft autopilot to autonomous vehicles is like comparing tiddlywinks to chess.

The current technological hurdle is to get ATC guidance into the airplane's systems.

That has already been solved as shown by military drones. The thing stopping it is that pilots are still required when autopilot can not handle the difficult situations.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[geekoid]

" They work on the assumption that they have a clear path"
nope.

Truckers, too

[Slashdot Parent]

Truckers should assume that they will be obsolete within 10 years. A truck that doesn't need a human driver can be utilized 24/7 since the driver wouldn't need to sleep.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[geekoid]

"My driving skills (or lack thereof) are a known quantity to me."
unless you have a way to extract you ego out of the question, no, it is not. You believe you know them based on self delusion and awareness of self.
This applies to every person, not just you.
Any given moment, there are areas you think you are perceiving, but they are just best guess assembly of what's there from your brain.

" Simply that I want the option to take control in an accident situation where the car may be malfunctioning."
as long as you are willing to be sued when you make the wrong decision, or you decision impacts someone else, so be it.

The current autonomous systems are more reliable then you are.

"As opposed to letting it drive me off a cliff or into a lake or something..."
If you manual swerve into oncoming traffic to avoid and accident, the the declension become hit me in head on crash or go over a cliff, I sure as hell hope you go over a cliff.
Because if you hit me, I will sue the fuck out of you... or my surviving relatives will.
See, an autonomous car can evaluate all those out comes in milliseconds. You wouldn't even be aware of anything outside you immediate focus.
Welcome to being a human.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[geekoid]

"Software means more things can go wrong."
software means different things can go wrong.
Which is why you have multiple systems with redundancy. Something humans do not have.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[geekoid]

Only as good as the programmer that programmed it.

You don't know how these systems work or are built, so you?

Whetever, you clearly stopped thinking about this past FUD.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[AmiMoJo]

It certainly can tell the difference between a child and a mailbox. It simply looks for things like a face and limbs, movement (when does a child ever stay still?), infra-red signature and so forth. There are in fact manual cars that already do this as a driver warning aid.

Re:no stereo???

[m00sh]

At least put in a CD / CD changer.

Use headphones

Special occasions

[dkman]

I imagine Google has thought about these, but I want to list a few special occasions that need to be thought of:

1. School bus stops - If the bus is stopped in the right lane and the auto pilot car is in the left lane, does it know to stop?

2. Police man/construction crew/crossing guard directing traffic - does it know to follow hand gestures / hand held stop signs
If it's following hand gestures, how does it ignore false input? You can try to go off of position - if he's in the middle of the road he might be directing traffic, on the sidewalk no so much

3. If it's approaching a stoplight that is out, does it know to treat it as a 4 way stop?

4. Gas stations - If I just tell it "take me to work" and "take me home" it's going to have to know to stop at a gas station at some point, unless we're all electric and just charge at home. But even then if I take a long trip it would need to know to stop at a super charger.

5. Crowd events - If I say "take me to the [stadium]" or "take me to the [mall]" it has to find parking, then it has to navigate the crowd on exit.
a) Is it going to know to stop so I can pay the parking attendant? b) I really don't care how long it takes to navigate the crowd coming out when I don't need to pay attention to it, but the guy stuck behind me might go insane.

6. Parking garages - Does it know to stop and get a ticket? I assume it would stop at the bar, but does it even approach the bar assuming that the bar means "I can't go that way?"
Does it know how to find the exit when I want to leave? Or am I stuck in parking garage hell? 7. Gated community - Does it know to approach the box on the left hand side so I can enter the number to open the gate?

8. On the long trip mentioned above how do I ask it to stop at the next exit/rest area so I can pee?

I want automated cars as bad as the next guy. I just want it to be well thought out enough that it "just works" out of the box.

Re: So when will the taxi drivers start protesting

[AvitarX]

Many support jobs are tipped out of the waiters take.

Re: So when will the taxi drivers start protesting

[AvitarX]

I'd bet very big money it can detect the cop, as to the crazy guy, it'd probably treat them like a cop, using other clues as to the safe course of action (is another car ignoring the crazy guy / cop, are the signals one etc)

At worse, I'd think a crazy guy would be like a traffic cop others ignored, it's already needs to be prepared for that.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Actually, I do RTFA]

Millions of people fly in airplanes every day that rely on computer controls (since there is no mechanical linkage between the pilot and the control surfaces). And 30,000 people die each year at the hands of human drivers.

You mean the airplanes that have people with a clear view of every vehicle for 100+ miles literally telling each one of them where to be? Where there are three dimensions of freedom, so two planes on a similar course can still be 1000 feet way from each other (and in fact it is considered dangerous to keep them in the same altitude), Where the vehicle density is at least four orders of magnitude less than cars?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[jklovanc]

It certainly can tell the difference between a child and a mailbox.

References please

infra-red signature

Google car does not have IR sensors.

There are in fact manual cars that already do this as a driver warning aid.

They detect movement but rely on the human to identify the object, predict movement and compensate. Movement detection is simple. The rest is much more difficult.

Been there, done that.

[Animats]

DARPA Grand Challenge vehicles did that ten years ago. (I ran one of the teams.)

All this is fine until some kid dies

[WillAffleckUW]

And the resulting firestorm of protests, lawsuits, outraged elected representatives, and people who hate machines will result int all automatic cars being banned.

Human behavior is fairly predictable.

The fact the Google engineers are unaware of it, is also fairly predictable.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Darinbob]

Like dodging other planes on autopilot?

I'll buy one when...

[Kazoo the Clown]

I don't care that it's only 25 MPH. I'll likely be buying one as soon as you don't need to have a drivers license, or soon after. My last DMV renewal I had to take the eye test again and I just barely passed. The next time I might not. The only reason I need a driverless car is when I no longer qualify for a license. Otherwise I can just drive myself.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Darinbob]

Their current demo car does not do any of this. Maybe it can do this in the future but today with their big press release it doesn't do it. I didn't start off here as a skeptic, I started by honestly asking how it did this hard stuff only to be told that it doesn't.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Noxal]

It's Lufthansa policy to land manually whenever possible, as to not lose manual flying proficiency.

Nice! Respect gained for Lufthansa.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Noxal]

but an autodrive system with no manual override must be 100% fail-safe.

Why? If human drivers are (for example) 80% fail-safe, why is 85% fail-safe not good enough for the first driverless cars? It's still a real improvement that will still save real lives.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Darinbob]

Stop the car. You and friend get out of the car. Pick up the car and turn it around. Get back in. Press "go".
So, no need for steering either.

re: problems with computerized drivers

[King_TJ]

I think you raise a few valid concerns (unlike some of the people who replied to you already).

For starters, who cares about all the "military grade encryption!" and "practically unhackable!" propaganda? If there's anything we should have learned by now, it's that just about everything out there that's computerized has been or is subject to being hacked into. If Google or anyone else wants to pretend a network connecting driver-less cars together is at no risk of a hack, just because of the level of encryption used? Then I'd have to ask why just about every credit card out there has been downloaded by hackers at least once in the last couple years? Are you say nobody else ever though to use military grade encryption and all along, that's been the whole issue?!

There's going to be a lot of motivation to hack such a network, too. (Think of all the people who'd love to have a secret "mode" rigged up on their personal vehicle so if they press a button, their car suddenly takes priority over everyone else on the road and forces them to yield to it!)

I will say, though -- I'm far less swayed by your argument about "owning your mobility". I think anyone buying or leasing a vehicle is already doing that, regardless of how the driving is accomplished. You're expressing your freedom by telling your car where to go and when, just like you are when you get behind the wheel and drive it there. If you're referring more to wanting to drive off-road? Well, I think there's going to continue to be a demand for manually driven vehicles for off-road use (like Jeeps) -- where they'll probably operate in a driver-less mode OR manual control. But statistically., the majority of people who buy an off-road vehicle never even use it off of the public streets ..... so it's truthfully only a niche market who cares about that capability.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[david_thornley]

There's nothing wrong with my judgment, except its speed. A computer can evaluate the situation and make decisions a whole lot faster than I am.

There's situations where my judgment works very well (I've identified people who were going to jaywalk right in front of me at times) and better than a computer. When an accident is happening isn't one of those times.

The perfect designated driver

[terrywirth5]

NT

Doxed

[hoboroadie]

AC is George Babbit from Zenith, Winnemac.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[ColdSam]

It's not that they don't know how to do this kind of thing, it's just that they can't do it perfectly yet. They are not going to claim such features, let alone let them out in the wild until they can do much, much better than the average driver. Self-parking technology, for example, already exists on the streets and works pretty well, but still requires at least a minimum of driver interaction (e.g. you have to tell it where to park and line it up). But even with current technology there are plenty of workarounds that will extend the usefulness of these cars, e.g. when it takes you to any number of known lots it doesn't even have to navigate a complex garage to find an open spot, it can just drop you and then go wait in a designated area with all the other driverless cars (just as chauffeurs commonly do).

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[slimjim8094]

No it's not, because that's what "minimums" means. Read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I.... The ILS only gets you so far, below that you have to fly the airplane the last 2-100ft (for CAT1/2 systems respectively) since the localizer/glideslope isn't precise enough at such a low altitude. Remember, the localizer/glideslope array isn't on the runway, and you'd really rather not fly into it... Keep in mind that a plane will be many thousands of feet away from the runway threshold at 100 feet (1908 feet, for a standard 3 degree glideslope) - in the plane I fly at the airport I fly from, 100ft has you over a building - you still have a parking lot, road, fence, and ~400ft of grass and maneuvering area before the threshold. Radar altimeter doesn't help you with your touchdown point.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Michael Woodhams]

Whoosh

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[phantomfive]

Um, apparently you really like Ubuntu?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Starker_Kull]

I'm afraid your assertion is quite false - about 90% of all landings done daily by large civil aircraft (737 upward) is done by the autoland system, with the only requirement for a manual landing being to retain certification for the pilot.

You're dead wrong. I fly a 737 800 hours a year for a major airline in the U.S., and you know how many autolands I've done this year? ZERO. You know how many my last Captain did? ZERO. You know where we do autolands the most frequently? In our annual cont qual simulator rides. You know why we don't do autolands? Aside from the fact that practicing takeoffs and landings so that when the conditions exceed the autoland limits (which on a 737 are a mere 20 kts. headwind comp, 15 x-wind, or 10 tail) we can still safely do it? Because about half the commercial airports in the US don't HAVE suitable faculties for an autoland. Forget other countries. And the ones that do? They generally don't have the time to waste blocking out the ILS clear zones, allowing us to lock on to the ILS early and at book speed vs. what they need for separation unless the conditions actually demand it.

You know, some day, they may have all airplanes autoland. The technology certainly exists. But one thing people like you seem to fail to realize is that not everything scales like IT, and the consequences in many other realms are far more severe. The number of practical, dirty, boring, expensive, bureaucratic details that have to be taken care of, all the things you hand wave away, not even mentioning failure modes and security analysis, will cost in the hundreds of billions of dollars before this can happen.

And, people like you blithely pronouncing something that is factually wrong and something that you have obviously no practical experience with like it's the truth - i.e. bullshitting - is really fucking annoying. Learn something about what you speak of.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[Stuarticus]

I'm not sure it's any more effiicient to go slower down hills, in fact it is probably more efficient to go faster to collect that potential energy while supplying no fuel to the engine then go back down to cruising speed when it levels out.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[RavenLrD20k]

That's the correct procedure to follow and answers the question of what does the car do in the situation, but you completely missed the mark of "How does it recognize that it's getting boxed in?" It's actually a special case problem that requires intuition and human reasoning. Not only that, but to maneuver out of the situation is going to generate a lot of conflicting sensor trips that human intuition and aggression would ignore to get out of the situation.

1. Drop your speed, rear proximity warning, the code to maintain clear distance behind kicks in and can't slow down anymore.
2. Distance closing, right lane not clear, left lane, no space for vehicle in traffic flow, signal left
3. adequate space identified in left lane traffic flow, vehicle power band inadequate to merge into identified available space
4. identified space slows, expands, and matches speed ahead of vehicle, accelerate.
5. proximity warning front, proximity warning rear, space is now smaller than vehicle, match speed with forward vehicle
6. Large mass on left, wall on right, proximity warning front, proximity warning rear, available room closing
7. game over

The question wasn't so much posed as "what should the car do?" but more as how does the car recognize and react? What sort of If-Then-Else logic does the car need to perform to override what some of its sensors are telling it? There are rare times when throwing caution to the wind will save a person, and if you find yourself in positions where you need to throw caution to the wind to get out of a bad predicament too often you probably need to check and evaluate yourself, but how do you program a machine to throw caution to the wind when it's necessary? What happens when the chaos of the world puts its full will to bare against the perfect order of mechanical procedure?

Finally, there's your point of automate everything on the roadway. Yes, that would be ideal, and for the truckers that would complain about the loss of freight jobs I say change is inevitable; but you can't argue that at least for a while you're going to have automated vehicles sharing the road with traditionally controlled vehicles. For this, a solution needs to be made. Personally, on the Interstates I would prefer to see automation only lanes with their own entrances and exits that travel parallel to the non-automated lanes. This would eliminate the chaos processing the cars would have to perform at high speed.

What I'd miss most when diving into automated travel is the decompression that comes with my daily commute to and from work. That's an hour each way when there's nothing to think about but me, the road, and the performance of my bike while taking in the scenery with the four cylinders humming nicely at 2800 RPM, 5th gear pushing me along at 45MPH.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[fisted]

I don't care much about ubuntu, it just annoys me when people say GNU/Linux would be unix. Hint, it's not, it's insulting unix (and additionally it's in the damn name ;))

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[hobarrera]

The problem is that you confuse manual controls and manual control inputs. What type of control a person or computer uses is irrelevant. What is relevant is the mind making the decisions about what inputs to make. Computers are yet to be sophisticated to handle many situations as well has humans do.

Some humans. A huge proportion of mankind don't know how to drive. I don't. Most of my friends don't. Kids and handicaped people can't, legally speaking.

I'd rather have automated cars that can move untrained people, children and handicaped around, than have error-prone stragers do it (eg: buses).

Would you rather trust a stranger than a machine?

And then, let's not forget the traffic factor. I live in an area of my city (Buenos Aires), where it's faster to walk 20 blocks than take a bus or cab (about twice as fast, btw). On one hand, because there's a stupid amount of peolpe moving around here, but on second hand, it's because they're awfully disorganized and inefficient. They each want the shortest route, and end up clogging everything instead of coordinating for greater overall efficiency. Humans simply can't do that. And generally, wouldn't if they could either.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[hobarrera]

Simply put, having seen the arc of technology advance over the last 30+ years, I still don't trust an automated driver system with my safety. PERIOD.

Why? How many plane accidents have been computer error and how many human error, in those 30 years?
Remember, plane pilots are well trained professinals. Car drivers, just about any random person you can find. So the ratio would be even more inclined towards human-error in car accidents.

Finally, would you rather trust a stranger than a specialized machine?

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[Reziac]

However, the failure mode needs to be something any random driver can recognise and cope with at need. Everyone who drives today knows about steering wheels and brake pedals. Changing the failure mode to some non-car-like interface is probably not a good idea.

No, we're not in direct physical control anymore, but when we step on the brakes or turn the wheel, that still works even if the whole rest of the control system is kaput.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[phantomfive]

ok, I don't really care if you insult me then

Great, That's all I need...

[RH434]

Don't forget all the ads you'll be forced to watch on the way...

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[ColdSam]

I have to say that I think your scenario is far fetched to the point of being absurd.

The very FIRST thing an automated car (or the programmer) would do would be to NOT put yourself in risky situations. IF the rolling box situation is common enough to worry about then the car would never get into the slipstream to begin with. Your entire hypothesis is flawed: you assume the car will slipstream because it can do so safely, yet then you go on to demonstrate it's NOT safe.

Ignoring that contradiction, the automated car can still do any number of things when it gets into that situation to minimize danger. IF they decided to put in special code allowing the car to slipstream they would certainly have a number of parameters for when it is safe, as AC pointed out. If the risk is too high when a vehicle is behind you, the car would back off and get out of the slipstream. If it were boxed in, it would see even higher risk and be sure to back off. This is not that hard. In fact, you don't need special "slipstream" code to do this, an automated car should ALWAYS increase the distance to the car in front of it when it is being tailgated and it will ALWAYS avoid being boxed in (slowing down so that it has an empty area next to it).

Even ignoring all of that, the automated car will handle the rare, rare situation of having an accident in the "rolling box" safely the vast majority of the time, it might be alerted to the accident up ahead well in advance and it will detect it on it's own far sooner than a human would. It will react to what all the trucks around it are doing and pick the safest option.

However, let's assume that in this rare, rare case the car logic goes haywire and explodes the car incinerating all passengers. The number of lives saved by all the common accidents that are avoided are well worth the occasional spontaneous combustion (especially when it's only people who knowingly take that risk to save a few bucks on fuel).

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[jxander]

I admitted it my post because it's true. Computers are stronger in some areas, humans are stronger in others. My point is simply that the vast majority of day-to-day driving falls into the areas where computers are stronger. And the more computer-driven cars that join in, the more heavily computers are favored. And your possible problem of ducks and unbuckled children is actually a problem of HUMAN error, not computer. Put a seatbelt on the kid (as is required by law) and the issue is resolved.

As for liability, Google has already proposed exactly what you suggested. And all the current test vehicles are this way. Google is fully liable for any incident caused by their tech. The problem is all the other car companies. Ford, Chevy, etc don't want to take on that risk. Even if they're not making automated cars yet, they're desperately trying to prevent the car company from being liable in case they ever do. And those big car companies have purchased a lot of congress-critters, so there's a LOT of push back.

P.S. Buckle up your freaking kid.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[ColdSam]

It's a lost cause using logic and math to convince some people that automated cars will be safer. They will always come up with one obscure scenario that computers just can't handle, but this is the first time I've heard of one with a duck and unbelted kid - that's original. However, if it turns out that there's a rash of duck/kid accidents it would be pretty easy for Google to require all passengers be belted while the car is in motion.

Shocked noone posted this yet...

[gmyuriy]

... Sorry Dave, I can't let you do that...

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[dave420]

I don't disagree with you - I simply think the problems perceived by the racist/sexist muppet I replied to either don't exist or are easily surmountable in the near future (as the evidence seems to suggest). It is a nascent field full of interest and difficult problems, but so far they've done an amazing job of overcoming them, and show no sign of failing to continue along that path.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[RavenLrD20k]

Congratulations... you have more faith in human programmers than I do, part of which comes from my consistently having to fix system bugs that are introduced both by colleagues and occasionally errors that I missed in my own code. Also, as a former professional driver, I used to see the rolling box scenario quite often, sometimes several times in a day (note that I'm not saying I was in the box all those times, though it has happened a couple times when I wasn't paying attention to their pattern). The "victims" of such did not necessarily have to be right up on the tailgate of the truck to be slipstreaming either. 9 times out of 10, the truckers in these incidents weren't trying to perform the box intentionally as it was just how the convoy formation was moving, and often times a quick warning on the CB was all it took to make the guy on the left realize he needed to make an opening for the car. The 1 in ten case I would usually hear one of the members of the team call out "Make the box" or something similar over the CB before the formation started. This usually happened when the driver was following too close.

And actually, one can be in the slipstream even if you're 500-1000 feet back from the truck. Pro-Tip: If you feel your vehicle doing a slight side to side shimmy while you're behind the truck, and you know your front end is in good repair and proper alignment, you're in his stream and sucking his fuel. The Shimmy is even worse on the motorcycle. You could be cruising down the roadway and suddenly feel the bike wobbling side to side on a windless day. Look a mile down the road, and there's the Semi that's disturbing your corridor. Get within a half to three quarter mile of his tail, and the bike is inside his stream and getting mixed up like a bird in a hurricane. Close to less than one quarter mile away from him, and the bike is now stable in the stream.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[ColdSam]

Actually, I just have less faith in human drivers than you do. All your examples show that humans are horrible at this kind of thing and commonly make mistakes that no production level self-driving car would even get close to. Your slipstream scenario is a perfect example of why we need to move to self-driving cars as quickly as we can.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[RavenLrD20k]

Fine. You can have your automated commute, as long as there's still roads available where I can take my bike down and be in direct control of all 100 horses. As a matter of fact, all the better. The people who would prefer to be doing something else other than commuting can have their distractions while the car drives them down their roadway. It will open up the roadways for those of us who enjoy the forced focus of travelling down the open road, where we can leave behind the distractions of the rat-race for an hour or two.

Awesome!

[mtthwbrnd]

I can't wait until I truly cannot go *anywhere* without it being recorded in a government database, or a private database which the government has full access to... ready for my persecution 20 years from now! Hooray for Freedom! Oh, wait a minute, goodbye freedom. Hello Stalin!

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[SourceFrog]

I've been on a commercial flight that auto-landed due to a low but dense ground cloud cover that resulted in literally ZERO visibility of not the runway (actually zero visibility of basically the entire city we were landing in). The pilot announced after the landing that it had been an automated landing. My understanding is that the norm is human landing unless there is some good reason to use the automated landing. FTR, it was the smoothest, most perfect landing I've experienced, and I've done a lot of flying.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[SourceFrog]

Lol .. sometimes you just have to wonder at what people write.

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[SourceFrog]

Simply put, having seen the arc of technology advance over the last 30+ years, I still don't trust an automated driver system with my safety. PERIOD.

Yeah, I'm with you, in fact I still don't trust them dang new 'automamobile' deathtraps, that's why I live here amongst the Amish, ain't never had a high-speed freeway accimadent with our trusty old horse carriages.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[SourceFrog]

'Are you living in a cave' is not actually ad hominem. Chas was overtly expressing an anti-technology viewpoint, based on no substantiation other than a claim that he is afraid of technology. In that context, 'are you living in a cave' is obviously just a pointed question intended to demonstrate a point: If he is fearful of technology, why not take that to its logical conclusion? (And that, given he has not taken it to its logical conclusion, there is a contradiction in his worldview.) Sounds like an honest question to me. If it sounded like ad hominem it's only because the shoe fits.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[SourceFrog]

To be fair Chas didn't really say 'the technology has not yet developed to the appropriate level of reliability' ... he just said he's scared of this new technology and left it at that. If the technology is not trustworthy, well that's a claim that should be backed by something - e.g. pointing to the large number of accidents Google's experimental driverless cars have had for example (hint: it's 'zero').

Re:No steering wheel? No deal.

[SourceFrog]

It's not me I'm worried about. It's other drivers. Think about the average driver you encounter on the road ... sitting texting, or driving drunk, or driving recklessly, or putting on makeup ... I think, would I rather THEY be driving automated cars? Hell yeah. Over 50% of accidents involve alcohol - driverless cars can't get drunk, to start with.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[badkarmadayaccount]

Regenerative brakes.

Re: No steering wheel? No deal.

[MightyYar]

Yeah, that's pretty much the secret sauce of hybrids. Might not work on a long grade, though.

Willing to adopt Google's self-driving car?

[Kobaleva]

Given the fact that Google's self-driving car is heavily debated here, you will now have the chance to state as to whether Google's self-driving car would probably have the chance to become your next vehicle?? Please feel free to follow this link. Within the scope of my master thesis, I submit a survey studying consumer willingness to adopt Google's self-driving car. https://docs.google.com/forms/...