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Philosophical Differences In Autonomous Car Tech
An anonymous reader writes: The Guardian has an in-depth article on the status of self-driving car development at BMW. The technology can handle the autobahn just fine, for the most part. But the article highlights philosophical differences in how various companies are developing self-driving tech. European and Asian car manufacturers are fine working on it piece-by-piece. The car will drive itself when it can, but they expect drivers to always be monitoring the situation and ready to take control. Google's tests have taught it otherwise — even after being told it's a prototype, new drivers immediately place a lot more trust in the car than they should. They turn their attention away and stop looking at the road for much longer than is safe. This makes Google think autonomous cars need an all-or-nothing approach. Conversely, BMW feels that incremental progress is the only way to go. They also expect cars to start carrying "black boxes" that will help crash investigators figure out exactly what caused an accident.
In related news, Google is bringing on John Krafcik as the CEO of its self-driving car project. He has worked in product development for Ford, he was the CEO of Hyundai North America, and most recently he was president of Truecar.
At first, I want autonomous driving for when I'm stuck in traffic. It should be able to handle that situation safely. Let's have that and then move on from there.
Self-driving cars won't happen for quite some time in my estimation. With today's roads there are simply too many factors that the car won't know how to handle.
If roads were retro-fitted with some sort of standardized guide-wire or other tracking/placement beacons then I think it would be more likely to work, but between the many variations in roadways, weird intersections, roundabouts, ramps, etc etc, PLUS factoring in all the out-of-band stuff like pokey drivers, bicyclists, motorcycles, etc etc, I just see too many problematic situations for this to happen anytime soon.
It's possible that freeway driving would be easier to manage since freeways are *somewhat* more uniform, but without some retrofitting of roads I see this as an extremely difficult problem to solve.
But hey, I've been wrong so many times about so many things, my skepticism may actually mean that it's going to happen. :)
Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...
at some point someone will have a heart attack while being driven in an autonomous car
There's a macabre thought.
So I'm driving to see the grandkids. I have a heart attack in route and die. And the car dutifully delivers my dead body to the grandkids.
Eww...
The law about challenging speeding ticket could even be altered to require that a defendant provide a copy of the "black box" data (or the digital camera footage). Then my dad's technique wouldn't work any longer. Or, the police could just do a standard data transfer at the time when the car gets pulled over.
I seriously question whether police departments and local municipalities will even allow self-driving cars on roads. They threaten to completely ruin their source of funding: tickets. Why would someone in a self-driving car get pulled over for speeding? As Google's cars have shown, self-driving cars obey the traffic laws to a fault. There's have to be a way for the driver to force the system to disobey the laws and make the car drive faster.
Once we have self-driving cars that never break the law, what will municipalities do for both revenue, and harassing non-white drivers? These black boxes will reveal that the driver wasn't even controlling the car when pulled over, much less committing any infraction, despite what the cop swears he saw when he decided to pull over a black driver and shoot him.
So how is all this actually going to work? As we've seen over and over, the ones who have real power at the local level are the police and their buddies in local government; not even the Federal government can overrule them, or else we would have seen some measures to reel in this police abuse that's become so blatant.