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California DMV Told Google Cars Still Need Steering Wheels
cartechboy writes Google showed us what it feels is the car of the future. It drives itself, it doesn't have a gas or brake pedal, and there's no steering wheel. But that last one might be an issue. Back in May California's Department of Motor Vehicles published safety guidelines aimed at manufacturers of self-driving vehicles. After seeing Google's self-driving car vision, the California DMV has told the company it needs to add all those things back to their traditional locations so that occupants can take "immediate physical control" of the vehicle if necessary. Don't for a second think this is a major setback for Google, as the prototypes unveiled weren't even close to production ready. While the DMV may loosen some of these restrictions in the future as well all become more comfortable with the idea of self-driving vehicles, there's no question when it comes down to the safety of those on the road.
Any car that allows the driver to take "immediate physical control" makes the roads unsafer for all. The safest roads will be when ALL cars are autonomous. Having humans in the mix will just ruin all the gains that autonomous cars provide. Can a human wirelessly communicate with a car 5 miles ahead to know of a road condition and adjust it's speed in tandem with all the other cars in between to mitigate any and all danger in advance? Can a human react in sub-millisecond time to avoid obstacles thrown in their way. No and no.
Eventually is a nice word. You can be completely wrong today but adding that one word...
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As Toyota demonstrated to us, that manual break needs to be damn-near hardware-level too, or at least allow for an emergency override that interrupts the computer entirely if the main 'stop the car now' brake fails to work properly.
It would be terrifying to be in a self-driving runaway car without any controls whatsoever.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I agree that an automated car will need a steering wheel in the immediate future. Once their track record has been proven and people are comfortable with them, however, cars will gradually lose manual controls. We'll likely be telling our grandkids with stories of hundreds of non-automated cars screaming down the highway piloted by fallible humans. Of course, they'll just roll their eyes at us, make an "uphill both ways in the snow" comment, and tell their RobotCar to take them to the mall.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
The transition time from the computer giving up to the user having to take control is always going to mean this is impossible.
If you're reading the newspaper, you are not going to be able to transition to operating the vehicle in the event the computer gives up and says it's all up to you.
I've been saying for a while, that a driverless car needs to be 100% hands off for the people in the car, or serves no value at all other than as a gimmick.
I will believe driverless cars are ready for prime time when I can stumble out of a pub, crawl into the back seat and tell the car to take me home. Anything less than that is a giant failure of automation waiting to happen, and a convenient way of dodging liability by pretending that users are expected to be in control of the car even while the AI is driving.
As long as there is a pretense of handing back to the driver in even of an emergency, this is a glorified cruise control, and I'll bloody well drive myself.
If I'm ultimately responsible for the vehicle, I'll stay in control of the vehicle. Because if there's a 10 second lag between when the computer throws up its hands and says "I have no idea" and when the user is actually aware enough and in control, that is the window where Really Bad Things will happen.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Depends on what you call "Safe"
This is merely politically safe.
Realistically, these things are going to be packed to the gills with dozens of sensors covering thousands of metrics and they will be logged every second. I'd be willing to bet that said data will show that the gross majority of accidents happen just after the driver takes control, and are a direct result of driver actions.
What I don't get is why bother with a traditional seating arrangement once you no longer have to drive? Fuck being upright, cramped, and crammed in to the front of a car. I want to lounge back in comfort, read the news, catch up on email, etc.
They may never be removed. Everyone is focused on the split-second decision scenario when talking about this issue, and on that I agree that humans will cause more problems than they solve. But there are many more situations where manual override is needed and beneficial. What happens when the car runs out of gas/charge and you need to push it to the side of the road out of traffic. Or the computer is malfunctioning somehow (software bug, squirrel chewed halfway through a wire, dead battery/alternator). Or when I need to move the car somewhere off-road that the AI refuses to recognize as a valid driving path. There are plenty of not so time critical scenarios where some sort of manual override is needed and those aren't going to go away even when we trust the software to do all the driving. Once we admit that they don't have to be intuitive for split-second reactions, then they don't have to retain the traditional layout, nor be designed for comfortable everyday use, but some sort of steering, brake control, and neutral gear select will always be needed.
Then what's the point; I want to sleep!
"He is so stupid. And now back to the wall!" Moe Szyslak
That is very short term thinking. 15 years after driverless cars are released your going to have a whole generation of people who never learned to drive a car. People who get the license and then forget everything because they haven't touched the wheel in 10 years. There is not going to be anyone quilified to drive a car. You will just have millions of amatuers with a skill level of a 16 year old.
I've been wondering that too.
The point of driverless cars is supposed to be a way to get us to that utopian transportation vision where we can go anywhere automatically by telling our transportation device where we want to go. This has been "possible" for decades but for one problem: all proposed systems required new tracks/roads be built that were separated from the current road system. That's prohibitively expensive. So in walks Google, and a few others, and says "We have all this technology, let's create something that interoperates with existing traffic on existing roads."
And they do some demos, and everyone thinks they've solved the problem.
Only they haven't. Google's cars, for example, have to drive on a "virtual track". There are holes in the track. Some of them are holes in the map, others are temporary detours and or obstacles that means the cars are unable to navigate them because it doesn't have enough information. To make driverless cars "work" as well as they appear to do at all across the whole country, Google is going to have to keep a constant, updated by the minute, map of the entire US road system, not just the official roads, but the private roads, the position of every driveway, etc.
So the DMV's comments aren't actually entirely out of order. Forget emergencies, you will have to take over every few hundred miles, assuming Google can update its databases to some decent compromise between up-to-the-second and "good enough", simply because the cars are going to have problems continuing.
Me? I'd prefer we look at our transportation system again and ask if this is really what we want and need. And if we're going to continue legally mandating suburban development and banning urban development, perhaps we need to look into improving PRT technologies and making them work.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
I like the idea of a self-driving car, but I still don't understand how the self-driving car finds a parking space, or gets eased into place in the garage for maintenance. How does it find it's way around an unexpected hazard, like a downed limb, or washed-out area of the road? How does the self-driving car know that the road is flooded or otherwise undriveable? How does it know that the power is out at an intersection that normally has traffic lights?
Proverbs 21:19
"hen you go on a 2-3 hour drive, maybe to the really boring Illinois highways (just drove north on them, and yea, straight and boring) so you nod off a little or pay less attention mainly because you can,"
That happens to people now.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
How do you know to take sudden control of the car to save your life, or can you even possibly understand and react that fast?
It is best if you do NOT "take sudden control". In an emergency, the computer is going to have faster reaction times and is less likely to over compensate. In fact, I think that instead of requiring steering wheels and brakes, in a few years they will be banned from SDCs, as mounting evidence shows that most accidents occur when the human drivers "take control".