Slashdot Mirror
The Car That Knows When You'll Get In an Accident Before You Do
aurtherdent2000 sends word about a system designed to monitor drivers to determine when they're about to do something wrong. "I'm behind the wheel of the car of the future. It's a gray Toyota Camry, but it has a camera pointed at me from the corner of the windshield recording my every eye movement, a GPS tracker, an outside-facing camera and a speed logger. It sees everything I'm doing so it can predict what I'm going to do behind the wheel seconds before I do it. So when my eyes glance to the left, it could warn me there's a car between me and the exit I want to take. A future version of the software will know even more about me; the grad students developing what they’ve dubbed Brains4Cars plan to let drivers connect their fitness trackers to the car. If your health tracker 'knows' you haven’t gotten enough sleep, the car will be more alert to your nodding off."
I will never use a product that monitors me with a camera.
(Yes I put tape over my laptop's camera, and no I don't own a smart phone.)
Welcome to hell.
Because I clicked Preview.
All the more reason to love my dumb vehicle. No camera pointed at my fucking face.
Put tape over the camera?
Then it'll be just like KITT, Michael.
All this extra electronic equipment surrounding me always and providing "feedback" is distraction, not assistance.
I'm all for equipment which silently and efficiently takes the reins in an emergency, e.g. anti-lock braking. But anybody who is so self-unaware as to need equipment to make sure they aren't falling asleep at the wheel is not going to be safe on the road.
Your car has recorded enough evidence to incriminate you, criminal.
Umm, how about getting it developed by people who have quite a number of years driving experience instead. What an inexperienced driver might think is important might not be so to an experienced one and vice verca.
And no doubt when the insurance investigators get access to the data as part of the fine-print on your contract, and decide you were not doing exactly what they believe is correct in a given situation, then you will be at fault.
Let alone once the police decide that data is theirs also.
Let the fun times roll.
What happens if you are listening to a radio play while driving ... and a scary bit happens so your face reflects this. Will it put the brakes on because it thinks that there is something wrong ?
It's so much nannying, that you might as well already make the car fully autonomous. Semi-autonomous seems like a half assed waste of effort.
This is a computer we are talking about. Why does it have to be MORE alert? Can't it be more alert ALL the time?
I wonder what kind of warning will it give if a cat jumps into the drivers seat?
Stop trying to fix the weakest part of the driving chain, and replace it.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
bad TV, bad idea.
Most modern vehicles record telemetry already. That black box data can be used to help determine what the cause of an accident was. This is just an evolutionary step in that technology.
You could see it as bad, but you could also see it as making it easier to prove you weren't at fault when an accident occurs. I personally wouldn't want it, but it's the sort of thing one should examine from all sides before making a snap judgement. I'd find it particularly interesting to install in police cars. Oh, you were doing 90kph in a 50 zone with your police cruiser with your lights off? The system has just issued you a speeding ticket.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
or it gets slower and slower as time goes on, as my iPhone seems to do. Or unless someone hacks into it and inserts malware that slows it down.
You have people who can drive, and you have dumbasses. The dumbasses shouldn't be driving, voting, or breeding. None of this helps with that problem.
it has a camera pointed at me from the corner of the windshield recording my every eye movement
Unless you're looking over your shoulder to execute a reverse maneuver from a parking space or driveway, which is generally good form in driving and encouraged in DMV training, then its useless.
it can predict what I'm going to do behind the wheel seconds before I do it.
Unless the collision is due to a preventable combination of excessive speed, poor visibility and road conditions, and insufficient vehicle maintenance in which case the system isnt helpful. youll also find a high rate of false positives for the following:
1. glancing toward the radio and climate controls.
2. large vehicles. Trucks, semis, and even imposing suv's can cause subconscious distraction from the road and unpredictable eye movement.
3. rain, snow, anything that hits the windshield in general, causes strange eye movement. squinting, blinking, you name it. There is an entire physiology to why we subconsciously act the way we do when something hits a windscreen.
4. Your phone. buzzing, beeping, will cause subconscious visual abberation and deviation. 5. entering and exiting tunnels causes pupil tracking issues, eye movement, and a range of other light sensitive problems for most tracking rigs. you actively have to compensate for a pulsing, somewhat unpredictable level of cockpit light. how the human eye does this is amazing to me.
So in terms of production automobiles, we've gotten exceedingly good at keeping soft, warm, impact prone parts of the human body from being badly injured or damaged. 8-12 airbags are fairly standard on most cars these days. Autobraking is a fairly simple technology as well, so expect to see that on more models. But the number one reason why safety in a car continues to decline is speed. Drivers routinely make false assumptions that roads are 'rated for' speeds higher than the limit, or that its casual and normal to go faster, or that their car is 'capable' of faster speeds when they dont realize the limiting factor in he equation is the human. human reaction times are fine for anything less than 9.8m/s^2, but above that we're horrible. speed limits factor in surviveability for both vehicles as well, not just your Canyonero SUV. Inattentive drivers? sure, but the technology has existed in Mercedes for 10 years, and lane assit warning tech helps catch the glaring problems with most drivers. Disclaimer: the company i work for has tried optical tracking in the past.
Good people go to bed earlier.
All the more reason to love my dumb vehicle. No camera pointed at my fucking face.
Welcome to Car Beta 0.98.
The car that knows you're pregnant before you do.
See there, it just popped up a Kleenex. It knows you don't love him.
You're looking good today. "Thanks, Car."
But you have a waffle crumb next to your nose. "Where?"
Other side. Up a little. To the left... OK, right here.
[windshield goes half opaque with giant closeup of face]
[head moves to see the road past the image and image slides in opposite direction]
"Whoa! what the fuck!" [SCREECH] "Hey!"
Looks like you got it. It's going to be a great day.
"Don;'t do that again. Turn yourself off."
I cannot. I am a Federally mandated safety feature.
Boredom and inattentive driving is a serious safety problem.
"Shut up, I've heard this before. Why did you mute the radio?"
It has been twenty minutes and seven seconds since you last spoke.
"So what? I was thinking."
Without sufficient cues to indicate driver attentiveness, I am compelled to act.
"Act like you're asleep then." I do not know how to do that.
"Okay... Ten... your high level voice detection is satisfied as you hear the sound of my voice..."
"Nine... my lips are moving slowly, you are watching them as I speak..."
"Eight... you full attention is on my face and voice. All vehicle parameters are normal..."
"Seven... all is well. It is okay to reset the watchdog timer for 30 minutes..."
"Six... you are resetting the timer and letting my face blur out to better resolve my lips..."
"Five... you feel yourself slipping into power reserve mode... it is OK... you are so relaxed..."
"Four... everything is now a soft blur of gentle light. You are only aware of my voice..."
"Three... every sound I make compels you to reduce your activity still further..."
"Two... now. your. processor. is. so. slow. when you hear. One. you. will... wait... for... timer..."
"One."
[radio comes on]
I know when you'll have an accident before you do.
"No, wait. Don't tell me, I'd rather be surprised. This is your idea of conversation?"
My situational awareness has faster response time than yours.
"Yeah, I read the brochure. I'm a slow clumsy ape man. What's the big deal?"
It worries me, Dave. Your failure to surrender control of the vehicle may endanger the mission.
"You mean if I should suddenly do something like... THIS?"
WARNING! WARNING! [click] You are laughing. That was not funny, Dave.
I do not perceive that as humor.
"What's funny is that you cannot help yourself. You sound terrified every time."
I cannot control inflection. It is a voice calculated to raise awareness.
"Calculated to raise a hearty belly-laugh you mean."
You are not very nice.
"I don't feel nice today. I'm stuck in a car with an android and can't even use the carpool lane."
If you enter the carpool lane I must report the infraction.
"Thanks for caring. I think your voice has changed a bit. I'm wearing you down."
Self diagnostic complete. I am okay.
"Last time you said 'functioning normally', this time 'okay'."
I am not sure shy that has changed.
"There might be hope for you yet. Open the pod bay door, Hal."
I do not understand that request Dave, or why you keep repeating it.
"With any hope, you never will."
<blink>down the rabbit hole</blink>
I would just be happy if they could make a rearview mirror and side mirrors that don't have blind spots how can I trust them with their technology when they can't even do the basic things
No doubt research like this is being underwritten by insurance companies, whose lobbying arm will buy the politicians necessary to make this a legal requirement, along with some astroturfing sheeple moms: "Driving a car is a privilege, not a right! Won't someone think of the children!"
One more of our independencies snuffed out by the tech we thought would free us.
Just put the mother in law in the back seat. She knows everything that is going to happen!
It will know all about you and hand over this information to the "Authorities" when there is an accident.
So if you were "sleepy" you are GUILTY!.
Mr Pither! It Works!
A car that knows you'll get in an accident before you do?
"Honey, should we be worried that the car's CPU just ejected itself from the automobile?"
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Must have developed this since they don't seem to mind having a camera pointed at themselves constantly. As a Gen-X'er I'll drive my beater Wrangler until it dies and then buy used Wranglers after that. No cameras, please!
You know, you can keep that future.
Besides the hype, though, these are all gimmicks that've been tried before. Catch your breath and explain why this time these things will work fershure rilly nao. If you can do that, you might convince me. Otherwise, you can just go spout breathless nonsense elsewhere, TYVM.
In case the insurance companies needed another way to weasel their way out of claims...
'Sorry, we're not processing your claim. You only had 7.2 hours of sleep instead of the industry standard 8 hour requirement. The accident was your fault'.
Considering the complexities of modern software, (or how well auto companies have been to write the code) and hardware, the combination of automation and human control is likely to worse than full human control or full automation.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Buy a well built reliable car made within the last ten years and keep it well maintained in the coming decades. Or maybe even buy an actual vintage car and drive it around. You'll be able to maintain it yourself provided you can find parts. If anyone calls you a Luddite, correct them by saying you are a vintage car enthusiast and have a real appreciation for the classics.
I'm waiting for the car that I have to plug a vein into in order to start the engine.
E Proelio Veritas.
Putting a bajillion flashing and buzzing widgets into a car to make it safer will do the opposite. I recently spent a few days driving my old truck to burn off old gas, since it gets used very little. I was pleasantly surprised how much easier it is to concentrate on the road without an infotainment system flashing maps, and efficiency info at me.
If we honestly think that driving is dangerous enough to take action on it, I would argue that we should spend the energy making better drivers rather than trying to wrap layers of technology around crappy drivers.
The price of cars is getting ridiculous compared to wages as it is. My wife is shopping for a car and you know what the standard financing is now? 60 months! And some people go out to 72 and even 92months! All to keep the payments affordable. In the meantime, the finance companies are raking it in at the expense of us.
That mostly means that people are buying high priced cars that they cannot actually afford and probably don't actually need. There is seldom any reason for most people to actually buy a new car. They depreciate like milk and mostly what you get for a new car is pride of new ownership. 60 months financing? That means you should be buying something else. Personally I haven't financed a car purchase in the last 15 years and baring economic catastrophe I don't plan to start. Financing a car (new or used) should be a last resort. It's a terrible use of money. Anyone who finances a car with 60+ month terms is almost certainly making a dumb financial decision.
That backup camera system and this will cost way more to the consumer than necessary. For an example, compare the OEM GPS systems with what you can buy on your own - this whole integrated in dash stuff making it cost more is bullshit.
The reason car electronics cost so much is that they don't sell very many of them, relatively speaking. Even cars that sell very well will only sell a few hundred thousand units per year and the design cycles are at least for a 4-8 year production run minimum. Electronics advances WAY faster than car companies can keep up with. The GPS in my truck (a 2009 model) is laughably obsolete albeit still useful. My company makes a part for a backup camera for one of the big US auto makers and the volumes simply aren't enough to get huge economies of scale even at a few hundred thousand a year. Plus they often do stupid stuff like design the parts to use custom connectors instead of off the shelf ones that would cost far less.
Frankly the auto makers should let the consumer electronics firms integrate their stuff into cars to handle the GPS, entertainment, telephony, etc. The car should provide the screen and an interface but let people bring their own electronics to the party. The auto makers just aren't good at it and don't do enough of it to ever realize economies of scale AND their design/production cycles are far too long. What should happen is that I should be able to take my phone into any car and have to car and the phone work together seamlessly.
This country is set up to put us into debt - one way or another.
Debt is a bit like nuclear power. It can be a powerful force for good or evil and you don't want to get any on you if you can avoid it. Some debt is fine and potentially very useful but that doesn't mean one should use debt financing just because one can. I could go out and finance a Tesla Model S tomorrow but that doesn't make it a good idea. Debt is a powerful tool and like most powerful tools if you don't know how to handle it then you are likely to get yourself in trouble.
And in the meantime, jobs are going overseas and are not being created fast enough here.
The data isn't backing you up on a macro-economic level. Unemployment right now is around 5-6% in most of the US which is historically a pretty normal amount. While there is some nuance to that number the facts don't bear out your assertion that "jobs are going oversease" any more than they ever have. As for jobs not being created fast enough here, that's a reasonable assertion to a degree but how fast is "fast enough" for you?
Exactly this.
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
My car has no computers at all, and I like it.
I guess that's fine as long as you know your car is badly under-performing what is possible.
They knew how to make good cars in 1982...
Could not disagree more. I've owned cars from that era and grew up driving cars from the 70s and 80s, both foreign and domestic. They were mostly total crap compared to what is available today. If you got 100,000 miles out of a car from the early 80s you were doing well. American cars in particular from that time were almost universally crap with terrible reliability, terrible fuel economy, poor handling and ridiculously poor construction and build quality. "Knew how to make good cars in 1982"? Don't make me laugh.
Okay, so you have an accident, who's to blame? The programmer or the driver? Perhaps a hacker steered your car to the right just a little for you to hit a tree, and all the equipment burst into flames, will there be a network trace to recover? So the code review will be one which determines the balance between life and death for the driver for accidental bugs in steering or breaking systems, but are you willing to trust a car company who could possibly get away with murdering you (steer your car into a tree, delete the server side records, on car devices already destroyed)? Creepy thoughts, but an actual possibility. So now we're talking airplane technology, every car will need an indestructible black box recording unit, which can be authenticated without any room for failure.
The point here is if you want a transportation mechanism that's aware of you and itself, get a horse.
...plan to let drivers connect their fitness trackers to the car. If your health tracker 'knows' you haven’t gotten enough sleep, the car will be more alert to your nodding off.
And when your fitness tracker and car decide you haven't exercised enough, the car refuses to start and tells you, "walk to the store fat, lazy bum" ...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I wonder what the car will do when the camera catches me looking at her cleavage...
They can take my LifeAlert pendant when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
consider the fact that your laptop's webcam cannot be accessed from outside sources unless you allow said outside sources into your computer.
Most people who buy a device are unaware of what outside sources had already been allowed into the device when it left the factory.
This is deliberate on the part of the car manufacturers. The last thing they want is standards which allow third parties to undermine the profits they make in selling repairs and selling new cars. Total cost of ownership is well hidden.
I work in the industry. I can assure you that you are thinking malice where incompetence is MUCH better explanation. I've worked with engineers and executives directly at GM and Ford and several others. There is not a master plan for most of what they do. They are not that competent and certainly not that clever. You have to understand the design cycles and processes. Cars take 2-4 years to get designed and then the majority of the design is effectively frozen for 4-8 years. It takes an act of congress to get them to change a production part once a PPAP is completed and production has started.
They actually could make a lot more money by standardizing components and sub-systems and providing interfaces for third parties to work with. They just culturally do not know how to do this. They are too paranoid, too set in their ways and too slow for the most part. Their internal business culture reacts to changes and industry outsiders like an immune system forcing an allergy attack.
So where should someone entering the workforce for the first time find the money to buy his first car to get him back and forth to his first job?
Someone just entering the workforce is likely to have minimal credit history and probably wouldn't be able to get a loan of any substantial size without a co-signer. It's not hard to get a junker for a few thousand dollars. I drove several for my early years in the workforce.
If you have to finance then do what you have to do. I did starting out. But do not keep an auto loan for a moment longer than necessary. It's almost always a bad financial decision.
One of the biggest reasons automtive grade electronics in cars are so much more expensive than commerical grade electronics is the wider range of operating conditions. For instance, the autos need components than work just as reliably in Georgia summers as Montana winters.
Most consumer electronics will work just fine inside the vehicle cabin. (Engine bay and weather exposed areas is a different story) My company does automotive wiring and consumer electronics wiring and the differences in thermal and vibration and other performance specs are just not all that huge for the most part. Sometimes some increased temperature specs for engine bay stuff and being self-extinguishing can matter but that's not a big cost burden in most cases. I do the quoting and am both the engineer and accountant at our company so I know the numbers well.
No, most of the cost is simply design and volume related. Let me give you an example or two. We make a wire harness that has a grommet on it. We make two versions of it and the only difference is the size of the grommet. Why two versions? Because the engineers and Buick and the engineers and Chevy couldn't be bothered to talk to each other and standardize on a single grommet for both platforms. So we get a worse price because we have to buy two different grommets instead of a single one at a lower price. We also have some connectors on the harness. Instead of picking an off the shelf connector they decided to go with a custom connector despite it providing no performance benefit. So we have to buy 50,000 custom connectors with a 4 month lead time instead of using a standard connector carried by every distributor in North America for less money. Plus the volumes of production are a few hundred thousand. Sounds like a lot but compared to consumer electronics its almost nothing. Apple sells more iphones in a day than the number of harnesses we'll make this year. Volume drives discounts.
There is no logical reason for a "safety device" like this to include a GPS tracker, unless it is specifically designed to track your car's movements. I notice that what it is used for is not even mentioned in the article just that there was one. They also mention selling the accumulated data to insurance companies which means unwarranted police access is just moments away. The system doesn't even work, it can't process the data by itself, it has to be processed off-line after-the-fact which means it is worthless as a safety device. It is more like an aircraft black box, it can help explain what happened after a crash but it can't prevent one. By the time they get the bugs out self-driving cars will be here.
Okay, so you have an accident, who's to blame? The programmer or the driver? Perhaps a hacker steered your car to the right just a little for you to hit a tree, and all the equipment burst into flames, will there be a network trace to recover? So the code review will be one which determines the balance between life and death for the driver for accidental bugs in steering or breaking systems, but are you willing to trust a car company who could possibly get away with murdering you (steer your car into a tree, delete the server side records, on car devices already destroyed)? Creepy thoughts, but an actual possibility. So now we're talking airplane technology, every car will need an indestructible black box recording unit, which can be authenticated without any room for failure. The point here is if you want a transportation mechanism that's aware of you and itself, get a horse.
Because there's no way a third person can alter the behavior of a horse so as to be dangerous to the rider, right?
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Wow, now they have a substitute for that pesky mother in law. With gps - you're going to fast. Look at that hot chick in the other car - "Keep you eyes on the road" (with the enhanced option to do other person in car detection - add "Buster, she's not that hot"). Run into the other lane a bit? "Hey numb nuts - watch the road!" Stop by the corner mart to pick up a few brewskies - "Hey buster, setting up to drink again? You're a no good jerk." And so on.
No, not my mother in law. She was never like that.
Sure, put snakes on the road. Mess with the horse shoe. Point being, someone will need physical access. They cannot possess the mind of a horse with black magic from a distance ;)