Slashdot Mirror
Germany Plans Highway Test Track For Self-Driving Cars
An anonymous reader writes with news about a new project to test autonomous vehicles in Germany. "The German government wants to convert part of the A9 Autobahn in Bavaria into a test-field for advanced car technology. The project is key to ensuring the country's 'digital sovereignty,' according to its transport minister. The track, part of the 'Digitales Testfeld Autobahn' project, would be launched this year, Alexander Dobrindt said on Monday in an interview (in German) with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper. The plan involves equipping the road with infrastructure to allow cars to communicate with each other and the road's own sensors to provide necessary data on traffic. 'Cars with assisted driving and later fully-automated cars will be able to drive there,' Dobrindt said. Germany, a major European car producer, wants to have robotic car technology that's not dependent on foreign companies, the minister said. Domestic producers 'won't rely on Google' he stressed."
I'm still reminded of what I've read about the Wright Brother's attempts at powered flight, up against dozens of other teams, some with national support.
I look forward to seeing them, because with efforts taking place in Germany, Japan, and the USA to just name the 'big 3', somebody is probably going to succeed in fairly short order(still years though).
Car accidents cost us enough to more than pay for it.
I don't read AC A human right
what about liability? and maybe even criminal liability?
Just think of a auto drive loosing control and plowing through a school crossing killing a dozen children. Who or what is responsible? The passenger? Or the computer?
The children, obviously. What the hell were they doing playing in the road?
Wir fahren fahren fahren auf der Autobahn!
Und dann
Ober Unter Gamma Gau Gleben Glauben Globen
This is Germany, where people know how to drive and the traffic laws are actually made sanely.
And cars do as they are told, or they will be punished!
LOL.. I can assure you, most places have reasonable traffic laws, Germany is not unique in that regard... What may be different is the understanding of and obedience to the existing laws. If my experiences in Texas are any indicator, there is LOTS of room for improvement in that area around here, but I'm guessing the Germans have their share of less than ideal drivers.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Germans are almost five times more likely to use transit at least weekly according to a NatGeo study. 71% of us commute by foot on a regular basis and the rail system is one of the timeliest and most advanced in europe. Our buses? triple articulation is common, bright panoramic windows mandatory. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
We're known for the autobahn, which is in my opinion a relic from the weimar republic and doesnt serve well in the 21st century. 1 gallon (roughly four litres) in germany also doesnt come cheap. at $6 a gallon im certainly not interested.
After work when im in the car, can I have a Monchshof Kellerbier? of course not. Can I relax and eat a snack? probably not. Selling America on autonymous cars seems like a no brainer; you drive everywhere there. Unless you're a lorry operator or taxi, its hard to justify Fahrschule and its cost in Germany. I'll keep my Sparpreis and my Bahn pass for now.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Huh, actually had to google what Botts' dots are. FTL: rarely used in regions with substantial snowfall, because snow plows damage or dislodge them.
Wouldn't do much good up where I live if they can't take snow plows. Instead of dots to provide 'rumble' we put notches in the pavement.
Now something that you can sink into the pavement, sort of like a concrete screw? That might work.
I don't want someone's car lying about its speed or other characteristics such that it may cause me to crash.
Trust but verify - IE while you trust other cars for providing road condition information, you also don't trust it enough to let it put you into a crash condition. IE it maintains proper following space.
The communications are more for things like 'road obstruction ahead; expect slower speeds and find alternative route if possible', and information that the car can use to figure out that if it slows down 3mph it'll be able to cruise right through a section vs being forced to stop.
I don't read AC A human right
i'd suggest avoiding school children crossings on the autobahn.
As you mention, reduced insurance rates is a reason to buy the new vehicles, and that ties in directly with reduced car accidents. The other stuff is bonus.
Though when I figured it out, valuing people's time at $10/hour NOT spent driving, that was the biggest factor.
15k miles/year average per vehicle, figure an average speed of 30 mph, that's 500 hours/year. Or $5k. Even if you only value your time in the car at $5, perhaps because you get motion sickness if you're not driving* so you can't read/watch TV, that's $2500. Given that I only pay ~$1k/year for full coverage...
Anyways, a self-driving option is a dead simple choice at $5k, and would still be attractive to many at $15k. Note: This would be for a 'Johnny Cab' level AI that doesn't require you behind a wheel to operate correctly.
*It's a thing, many people who become motion sick if a passenger in a vehicle don't if they're driving. It's probably the control thing. They know that some disruption is happening.
I don't read AC A human right
but I'm guessing the Germans have their share of less than ideal drivers.
Sure, but they're the 1%ers, not the 99%ers, because just getting a license is much harder and the German Police will bust your ass for things like tailgating or not signaling before they will for speeding.
As for the AC's worry about an auto-drive car hitting somebody. I'm sure it will happen, but will be incredibly, incredibly rare.
So rather than 'hit by a drunk driver while crossing the street going to Church Sunday morning', it'd be more along the lines of 'failed to stop in time when pedestrian unexpectedly darted into the road and the car couldn't stop fast enough due to black ice'. Which, like the real world, generally ends up with the pedestrian being considered at fault for darting into traffic, especially during bad weather.
Still, the manufacturer of the auto-drive system will probably end up taking at least some of the liability in that case, but there's an equally good chance they'll be let off the hook because the owner/operator of the vehicle modified it somehow (or grossly failed in maintenance like replacing bald tires). I predict that once the systems are good enough, congress will pass some sort of limited liability law so that those killed by malfunctions only get something like $1M, which helps with predictions so the manufacturers know how much liability to bake into the price of their systems. Remember, it's saving lives on the whole, we don't want to drive them bankrupt.
I don't read AC A human right
To get a driver's license in Germany, you have to take actual classes, drive with instructors, and when is all said and done, the process will cost several thousand dollars. The driving test is much harder.
I can't speak for America, because each state is somewhat different (although often they all try to mirror each other to an extent), but I took spent probably less than $50 and had no classes. My friends had very easy high school classes for a semester and the information expected to memorize was much less stringent.
On the flip side, german licenses are (or were, idk anymore) good for life, US license need to be renewed fairly often.
Yeah, except that I predict that it'd be more along the lines of '340 car traffic jam' because they yanked up the dots and rearranged them.
Seriously, 'avoiding collision' is really the most programmed for condition for auto-drive cars. Combine an ever-vigilant computer that's never distracted with defensive driving that 'only' trusts it's redundant sensor suite* and you should have to work very hard to get it to collide with something.
*And refuses to drive if those don't work.
I don't read AC A human right
There's still a lot of cars in Germany, something doesn't have to apply to 90% of people to still be highly useful.
Also, self-driving cars can also increase fuel economy through a combination of reduced speeds(no rush if you're reading), more fuel efficient driving(let the car figure out the ideal acceleration rates and such), and perhaps even stuff like predicting the next light to avoid having to stop at all.
Oh, and if you want to keep your export economy...
I don't read AC A human right
It is obvious why this is in happening in Bavaria. BMW has been working on self-driving cars since at least the early 90s. I knew someone who worked on that stuff and he described some interesting failures.
I am surprised that there hasn't been government-funded infrastructure support for it until now. I guess BMW started work on self-driving cars before the technology was there to support it
...to das Auto. Then again, that pun already works in English, so nevermind.
Since VW can't even create power windows that are reliable I have little hope for Germany creating a good self driving car.
By me, a decade ago: http://www.pdfernhout.net/on-f...
"Consider again the self-driving cars mentioned earlier which now cruise some streets in small numbers. The software "intelligence" doing the driving was primarily developed by public money given to universities, which generally own the copyrights and patents as the contractors. Obviously there are related scientific publications, but in practice these fail to do justice to the complexity of such systems. The truest physical representation of the knowledge learned by such work is the codebase plus email discussions of it (plus what developers carry in their heads).
We are about to see the emergence of companies licensing that publicly funded software and selling modified versions of such software as proprietary products. There will eventually be hundreds or thousands of paid automotive software engineers working on such software no matter how it is funded, because there will be great value in having such self-driving vehicles given the result of America's horrendous urban planning policies leaving the car as generally the most efficient means of transport in the suburb. The question is, will the results of the work be open for inspection and contribution by the public? Essentially, will those engineers and their employers be "owners" of the software, or will they instead be "stewards" of a larger free and open community development process?
Open source software is typically eventually of much higher quality and reliability because more eyes look over the code for problems and more voices contribute to adding innovative solutions. About 35,000 Americans are killed every year in driving fatalities, and hundreds of thousands more are seriously injured. Should the software that keeps people safe on roads, and which has already been created primarily with public funds, not also be kept under continuous public scrutiny?
Without concerted action, such software will likely be kept proprietary because that will be more profitable sooner to the people who get in early, and will fit into conventional expectations of business as usual. It will likely end up being available for inspection and testing at best to a few government employees under non-disclosure agreements. We are talking about an entire publicly funded infrastructure about to disappear from the public radar screen. There is something deeply wrong here.
And while it is true many planes like the 757 can fly themselves already for most of their journey, and their software is probably mostly proprietary, the software involved in driving is potentially far more complex as it requires visual recognition of cues in a more complex environment full of many more unpredictable agents operating on much faster timescales. Also, automotive intelligence will touch all of our lives on a daily basis, where as aircraft intelligence can be generally avoided in daily life.
Decisions on how this public intellectual property related to automotive intelligence will be handled will affect the health and safety of every American and later everyone in any developed country. Either way, the automotive software engineers and their employers will do well financially (for example, one might still buy a Volvo because their software engineers are better and they do more thorough testing of configurations). But which way will the public be better off:
* totally dependent on proprietary intelligences under the hoods of their cars which they have no way of understanding, or instead
* with ways to verify what those intelligences do, understand how they operate, and make contributions when they can so such automotive intelligences serve humane purposes better?
If, for example, automotive intelligence was developed under some form of copyleft license like the GNU General Public License, then at least car o
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Here in Texas, one could go to a school, take a semester offered in high school, then there would be two phases. A written test for a learner's permit, then the test with an officer sitting in the car for the actual drive.
Licenses here need to be renewed every six years, one renewal allowed via the Internet, one with a visit to the DMV for checking vision.
Test tracks rarely allow for what happens in the real world when snow, rain, and fog combine with small kids and pets playing.
How many billions in lawsuits for their lifetime (a kid lives 100 years, and becomes a CEO that means $40 billion each kid) will these Steel Death Automatons rack up before they are outlawed except in retirement communities without kids or pets?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just think of a auto drive loosing control and plowing through a school crossing killing a dozen children. Who or what is responsible? The passenger? Or the computer?
The school that put its children on the fucking Autobahn, a high-speed road that is by law off-limits to pedestrians, bicycles and anything else that can't reach and maintain the minimum speed of 60 km/h.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
You are very far off from reality.
Most high cost brands/types of cars already have electronic systems to assist the driver. Like lane recognition, sign recognition and pedestrian recognition. As they are based on cameras and the last 30 seconds are stored liability is no problem.
If a pedestrian runs into your lane and the car does an automatic emergency break AND the car following you crashes into you because of that, the liability issues are clear.
First the pedestrian is liable, for forcing the emergency break and secondly the following cars driver is liable for being to close and not paying attention (he should have seen the pedestrian, too!)
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
You are very far off from reality.
Since so much of what you said is the same thing as I said, doesn't that make you far from reality as well?
For example, you said: "If a pedestrian runs into your lane and the car does an automatic emergency break AND the car following you crashes into you because of that, the liability issues are clear."
Which is simply an expansion/different case on my "pedestrian considered at fault for darting into traffic."
You don't address my pointing out that the system maker could be held at fault, but I specified 'possibly' for a reason - that's reaching into politics. We all should know that what is 'right' is not always what happens.
Fact is, I figure auto-drive accidents that are the fault of the car will be extremely rare, but still happen. That's where the limited liability becomes important.
I don't read AC A human right
Isn't the point to test automatic cars under real conditions? Google did this years ago. With hand-picked, pre-mapped roads, but still under real conditions with real human-driven traffic. Remember the euro search engine? The euro book digitizing project? Every time Germany/EU tries to copy what Google does, only years later, by government decree and without Google, the result is the same. Burnt money. Next thing they will try to ban undeutsche autonomous cars from deutsche autobahn.
"Domestic producers 'won't rely on Google' he stressed.""
Makes sense when the main brain behind Google's effort is gone.
That the other autonomous projects, like project Wing has its members leaving or funds being rerouted to other companies, or VPs of the robotic future just disappearing.
Google is obviously demoing these projects as PR to the public and as IP threats to the industry considering it bought a lot of IP recently. Germany's making the right decision--and it will promote competition--which is a good thing.
Do you own a car? If so, do you change it's oil or take it to a place? Why?
Most people don't do it as explicitly as I did, but people still do it. It's one of the major reasons people drive rather than taking the bus. Sure, it's more expensive to drive, but they value their time highly enough that they'd rather spend $5 to get there in 1/3rd the time that the bus would take.
People especially do it when they hire a contractor to fix something in their home, mow their lawn, etc...
I don't read AC A human right
Their buildinbg it right next to my unicorn ranch!
It's called the No-onebergring.
And what about when a human driver does this? I look forward to the day when humans are banned from driving. I've been driving for 10 years and have had people smash their cars into me from so many angles it's not even funny. Got a concussion from one encounter. All of the people behind the wheel were either high or drunk. To the brain-dead idiots who say that computers will never be as good at driving as humans are (which is just a selfish excuse so they can continue to 'enjoy' the 'thrill' of driving), I say this: You should have been aborted. But it's not too late, you can still kill yourself. Oh, and self-driving cars already drive orders of magnitude better than a person who has emptied a bottle of vodka or has smoked 3 joints. Get realistic and pull your head out of your ass.
A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
In Soviet Germany, car drives *you*!
In Germany the car is basically always at fault (at most shared liability except the most extreme cases).
But cars (note the insurance is on the car, not the driver - thus even stolen cars are insured, though the insurance may try to get the money back) in Germany are required to be insured for 1 million EUR property damage and 7.5 million EUR damage to people.
That should be enough to make this a non-issue in most cases.
Also, I've never had a car insurance that didn't cover unlimited damage to people and at least several million in property damage.
I wonder where you get your interpretation from.
> the following cars driver is liable for being to close and not paying attention
Yes.
> First the pedestrian is liable, for forcing the emergency break
Which wouldn't have caused any issue if the following car had kept to the traffic rules. As such liability will be limited if at all. Especially since the pedestrian generally has no insurance.
Btw. a better example would be a wild rabbit, because good luck holding that one liable.
Luckily for the automated car makers in Germany, even if the first driver was breaking to "save" a mouse the German courts already decided that the following driver would be liable.
The simplest way to express it: If you drive into someone from behind, good luck getting any less than 100% responsibility. No matter how stupid the one you drove into was behaving. He would have to be driving backwards at high speeds in a curve or something comparably stupid to change that (in which case you could claim he drove into you).
To the other reply:
> Fact is, I figure auto-drive accidents that are the fault of the car will be extremely rare, but still happen. That's where the limited liability becomes important.
Why? If it's rare, make sure everyone has a sufficient insurance (like for normal cars). The insurance can just pay that high cost when it happens, distributing the cost among all. Limited liability is extremely unfair and unjust and shouldn't be asked for without extremely good reasons with no other solution. Which clearly is not the case here. Besides that, I think in Germany it is already decided that the driver will always be responsible in the end, at least for the medium-term future.
The Netherlands are starting an experiment with self driving cars in december. It's the first country in the world where self driving cars are allowed on public roads. The selected track is about 6 km in length and stretches from the Wageningen University campus to a nearby railway station.
More info: http://nos.nl/artikel/2015674-zelfrijdende-auto-in-december-de-weg-op.html [in Dutch]
The A9 connects Munich to Ingolstadt, which are respectively the main hubs for BMW and Audi, so it makes sense to use that road for testing.
Moreover, both cities are in the state of Bavaria, which makes it easier to get things going on the government level.