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Software Update Adds Autonomous Driving To Tesla's Bag of Tricks (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader writes with the news that Tesla owners today found their cars had been upgraded with the company's new autopilot feature: "That means the next time you see a Model S cruising next to you on the interstate, look closely: It may be driving itself."
Adds the submitter: Well, I guess some of you will be celebrating this; but this submitters' fear, is that if this technology becomes pervasive, the skill of operating a vehicle will be lost, as is any skill that isn't practiced regularly. It is unlikely that 'self-driving cars' will reach a point where they can handle 100% of all driving circumstances without human intervention, emergency circumstances being the first and foremost example of what an automated system could not adequately handle unaided; what will we do then, when injuries that could have been avoided or when lives are lost because people aren't competent to operate a vehicle any longer?
It costs $2,500 to unlock this new software feature.
Better known as 318230.
sue their asses off.
Surely it isn't legal everywhere yet?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
One might argue that many drivers on the roads today already aren't particularly proficient at controlling their vehicles. While it might be that some persons skills would grow worse with disuse, I think there are a goodly number of individuals out there who would be safer 'drivers' if they weren't in direct control over their cars themselves. And I don't mean just those who have poor eyesight or slow reflexes.
... "I read part of it all the way through." -- Movie Mogul Sam Goldwyn (and some slashdot readers)
a lot art .. driving...
People barely have any skill at that *now*.
We already have incompetent people killing others in mundane situations due to carelessness and incompetence
Look at the net result of lives saved due to autonomous driving vs lives lost due to it.
If the first is higher than we are better off.
Who says drivers are competent now? I think statistically it'd be easy to show that self-driving cars will save far more lives than they risk
I told them when GM introduced its new fangled hydramatic transmission, it is going degrade the driver's skill, soon no one would know how to declutch and shift. And I was proven right. I was just bragging about my prediction coming true the other day and my grandpa chimed in. "Son, the slippery slope goes way back. I never liked them self starter anyways ... Nothing like cranking up the old tin lizzy with a cranking rod to fully wake up in the morning" he went.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Honestly, I don't see many that HAVE it...
Tesla owners today found that their cars had been upgraded with the company's new autopilot feature
Can it be programmed to find a charging station and plug itself in all by itself when its battery get low, like a Roomba? And, while they're at it, can it be programmed to vacuum my carpets or mow my lawn?
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Not only that, but:
That is a SINGLE sentence.
How about if the autonomous car just stopped itself as quickly as possible in the case of an incident that it cannot handle? Then a human could take over.
From Wikipedia:
FATAL crashes.
Not just regular crashes. Or crashes with some injuries.
Even if we can only reduce that by 50% it would be worth it. Who cares if people don't learn how to operate a vehicle? As the parent poster noted, they seem to be having problems doing so SAFELY right now.
Bad weather will still require a human driver, and there's plenty of that in most of the US. This article is a bit stupid.
Not all cars driven by humans can handle 100% of all driving circumstances, and that's with a human 'intervening' the entire time.
I predict that rural highway driving will be the first place that autos can operate autonomously. It may be only limited-access highways (freeways with no intersections, no lights, no at-grade crossings) but could probably work on traditional federal highways. Cities and rural undeveloped or underdeveloped roads will have to come later.
I'm not all that worried about atrophying driver skill. It will be a very long time before the bulk of driving can be autonomous, and I expect that until we have cars that don't need human intervention (which will mean developing protocols and procedures for handling exceptional situations) drivers will still have to drive enough to keep their skills.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Give me a call when one of these clever cars can back my boat down a crowded ramp. All ramps have different slope angles and water levels change with the tides so every launch requires a different solution of where to stop.
From what I've seen of self-driving mowers and robot vacuum cleaners in action I'm not enthused about the level of thought that goes into problem solving for these things.
Quite happy to see millions of these things in New York and Los Angeles though, and from Youtube footage, around Moscow would be a hoot too.
this is welcome news but it's unlikely the mass majority of cars will be Tesla cars very soon. I would guess that the ratio of pre-occupied drivers(texting, on phone, etc) is nearing 50% from my observations.
Computers:
* See and process information from all directions at once
* React in a millisecond to changing conditions
* Never get bored, tired, or distracted
* Don't drive recklessly for thrills
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me. I expect a computer to react much more competently and predictably, if for no other reason than the computer can analyze and react a thousand times faster. It's humans that are *causing* most of the emergencies in the first place by needlessly driving into each other at high speeds.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
I've always wondered how self driving cars would handle rural areas. In particular rural mountain areas with a foot of snow on the road. In a lot of rural areas there may be a distance of hundreds or thousands of meters between the GPS position of a house and the actual house. I can just envision walking a mile uphill in a foot snow while your car sits at the bottom of your driveway with a blinking, "NO ROAD" error. I just don't see how that problem can be overcome to the point where all vehicles could be 100% self driving without any possibility of direct steering/throttle input from the driver.
"Software will never be able to beat human reactions!" Yet in many cases now, it already has.
Flying is in some respects much simpler than driving; and, auto-pilots can now take off, cruise, and land.
The real test? What the insurance rates are -- self-driving cars will likely be a lower risk, and thus cost less to insure. Perhaps not at the beginning, while the kinks are being worked out. (Around the dial.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
Sure humans might lose some of their proficiency at controlling a vehicle but the self-driving car would make those skills less necessary.
Which would have fewer fatal accidents: automated vehicles with a human with poor skills or a standard car with normal everyday drivers?
I am betting the automated car wins. Sure the automated car may have some accidents that the human might avoid but I'm betting the total goes down.
Now I don't want an automated vehicle but that is because I really enjoy driving but the accident thing is IMO a red herring.
How this works in real life.
People are people... If there's an autopilot then you can bet people will be doing all kinds of things that make taking over in an emergency problematic...
People arguing that some people will get hurt because a human no longer knows how to control the vehicle in an emergency are like anti-vaxxers saying their one child *might* react negatively to the vaccine. Both groups are ignoring the 99.9% of cases where people will NO LONGER BE DYING from STUPID SHIT.
"if this technology becomes pervasive, the skill of operating a vehicle will be lost" Based on my experience this has already happened (or more likely never existed in the first place ;-)
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me.
I think you'll be able to find cases where humans react better and cases where computers work better. I also expect that the cases where humans work better will be heavily correlated with driver skill. I think a well designed system with computers and people working together will probably work better than either independently.
I think the biggest improvement computers will provide is for impaired drivers (read drunk/distracted). A huge percentage of accidents are due to impaired drivers.
Flying is in some respects much simpler than driving; and, auto-pilots can now take off, cruise, and land.
Yes it can but there remain circumstances where a human pilot can outperform the autopilot. Particularly in weird corner cases where something truly unpredictable has happened. There is no computer we have that currently can match the problem solving prowess of a well trained human in many circumstances. I would expect the corner cases to get rarer over time but I doubt they'll go away entirely any time soon.
I can't speak for everyone but I have these type features in my car (adaptive cruise, lane assist, proximity warnings, blind spot detection, etc) and I can say without a doubt for me it surely hasn't made me a better driver. I get into my other car without all of that and find myself making noob driving mistakes (not checking blind spots, not keeping consistent speed, much longer parallel parking, etc). It's actually kind of unnerving at how fast I came to rely on the car to do these tasks for me.
I haven't seen any studies so maybe I'm just a goof but I consciously try not to rely on those things because I don't want to forget how to actually drive.
I thought it takes a lot of hw to have a decent auto-pilot capability (laser rangers, video cameras, radars) .
Apparently, Teslas were already equipped?
4wdloop
To milk out the recent shooting incidents in the US, you could extend this autonomous car thing to autonomous turret device. A helmet with an autonomous hand gun on a moving stand that automatically does emergency shooting when a potential danger is detected. When little Johnny goes to high school, don't forget to put on his safety helmet with autonomous turret sentry!
Also I see autonomous vehicles being staged in their deployment. Self-driving vehicles are a traffic and transport engineers wet dream, they will dramatically increase traffic flows on existing roads. So there will be a significant incentive to municipalities to get sections of their roads "AI" ready.
My prediction is that trunk roads will be the first ones to go autonomous with councils actively contributing to the mapping of the roads. Essentially you will get into your car, drive yourself through the back streets till you get to your main road and at that point the car takes over. Initially you will be mixed in with human driven cars, but then over time priority lanes and pathing will be given to the self driving cars until finally, once self driving cars hit critical mass the trunk roads will be self drive only.
You will still have to be able to drive, in fact a % of every drive will be driven by a human. But the main roads with the bulk traffic will be autonomous.
I get that _you_ may feel safer if something else does things for you but lets be realistic about the numbers and risk. Fear mongering is not how you go about advocating change, but that is what you are attempting to do. The appeal to emotion is way too obvious.
To start, we are moving the numbers to more recent 2013, in which you had a .0088% chance of a fatal car crash.
By comparison, you had a .17% chance of dying do to heart disease, a .02% chance of dying from diabetes. You had a higher chance of death by suicide and influenza than you did from a car wreck. (math done using a sample size of 350,000,000 and numbers from the CDC and here (easier to find than numbers hidden in the bowels of the CDC PDF).
The point is there are lots of risks in life. Breathing in a lung full of air could cause you to catch influenza, or pneumonia. You are way more likely to DIE from those things than by driving a car, even with shitty drivers on the road. Eating poorly, not exercising, and ingesting the wrong substances (carcinogens) are exponentially more deadly than cars.
If you want to push self driving cars I'm fine with that. You can buy one and do as you wish. Current technology does not make them that much better than humans. Come to Mountain View and drive around near one. They can't differentiate between a speed limit sign and a "during school speed limit" sign so we end up having big backups on some main roads because of those cars. They don't accelerate any faster than my grandma, and don't break any better or worse than a person either.
One day I'm sure they will be great, but that day is not today. I would still rather have the option of manual versus no control of the car. Think about tyranny and extortion for a minute, and that can be corporate as well as government.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
I've been driving with antilock breaks for so long, I'm fairly certain I'd die on an icy road without them--but the breaks themselves (combined with traction control and other features) reduce the chances of me ever needing to use them in the first place.
If autonomous cars are better "drivers" than people, I'd expect far fewer emergency situations on the road.
emergency circumstances being the first and foremost example of what an automated system could not adequately handle unaided
I disagree. Emergency circumstances are when I would MOST trust an automated system to choose and execute the best response quickly.
So what if driving skills are lost. How many people can genuinely start a fire without a match, lighter or some other ready to go ignition device? How about those people who can actually remember the composition of gunpowder, and if they can know a way to actually get those ingredients? Ok, now about how to skin an animal, how to hunt, how to build shelter?
If driving a car goes the way of riding horses then skills are lost to the general public and only retained by those with a particular interest in them. And you know what? Nothing of value was lost.
So there will be a significant incentive to municipalities to get sections of their roads "AI" ready.
There will, however, be just as little money to do that as there is to maintain them currently. The cost of getting roads "AI ready" will fall, in any case, on the taxpayer, the vast majority of whom will not be able to afford to own an AV.
Initially you will be mixed in with human driven cars, but then over time priority lanes and pathing will be given to the self driving cars
And the money for creating new lanes just for the few who own AV will come from the general taxpayer, too.
once self driving cars hit critical mass the trunk roads will be self drive only.
It will never happen. There will be too many taxpayers who don't own the cars who have just as much right to use the main roads as anyone else. Forcing those people off the main roads will only cripple the non-main roads as they will be forced to pick up the long-distance travelers and deal with the local users both.
But the main roads with the bulk traffic will be autonomous.
I remember when we were being told that every car would be a flying car. I remember when AT&T was telling us that video phone calls would be the normal way of communicating -- using wired phone lines.
Every new technology has acolytes who make stupendous claims in the face of reality, and the vast majority of those claims never come true.
circa 1440: What will happen when the scribe is totally replaced with a printing press? What if there's a character the printing press can't handle? What will we do??? We're screwed!!!!
circa 1970: What will happen when the elevator operator is totally replaced by a machine? If there's an emergency and the self-operating elevator can't handle it what will we do? We're totally screwed!!!!
The same thing will happen with cars - the car goes into a safe mode, like pulling over to the side of the road (the elevator stops) and calls for help (the elevator repair man comes). Or something else will be figured out. But it is pretty safe to assume that the way we use and interact with technology in the future will be different than the way we do today.
"Houston, we've got a problem."
OMG, people don't know how to drive or fix an engine or use a slide rule, the world is coming to an end.
We'll do the same thing we do when current software fails. We'll fix bugs.
celebrate that our final solution to global warming worked as designed
How about if the autonomous car just stopped itself as quickly as possible in the case of an incident that it cannot handle?
What could possibly go wrong?
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me.
I was thinking that cars might struggle at first with strange scenarios, not ones where it needs to react swiftly. Something like if a police officer is directing your vehicle around an accident at a five way intersection, in a construction zone during a rainstorm at dawn, or some such thing.
Blah blah horse and buggy are way better blah blah what's gonna happen with all the blacksmiths blah blah horses are smarter blah blah.
Get with the program.
Cut global warming.
Drive clean.
No more chemicals or explosion based propulsion.
SPOCK: Yes. Yes.
MCCOY: What is it, Spock?
SPOCK; An invention, Doctor. First potassium nitrate, and now if he can find some sulphur and a charcoal deposit or ordinary coal.
(Kirk is at the outcrop of sharp diamonds, and putting them into the bamboo too.)
Several decades from now, the number of people that will still need to operate their vehicle manually will be a much smaller number.
* Never get bored, tired, or distracted
I'd add to that list:
* Never drive preoccupied or in emotional imbalance
* Never drive intoxicated or on drugs
Let's face it, we don't leave the rest of our lives behind when we get behind the wheel. If things are troubling or exciting at home or at work or in your love life or with your friends or relatives the mind is churning on it. And while I don't know many who will blatantly drive drunk, I think quite a few have pushed it with hangovers and such. It certainly doesn't take much to drive better than humans at their worst...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well where I live they are always building new roads and tunnels to keep traffic moving. So there is a budget there. And they also seem quite keen on making lanes transit lanes where you have to have a minimum of 2 or 3 people in the car to use them. They don't build extra lanes to do this. They re-purpose existing lanes. And mapping a road way in high resolution is significantly cheaper than digging a big ass tunnel.
And you are right, the funding will come from the general tax payer. The same tax payer who may not even own a car at all. This is how government works so I'm not sure what your point is... I pay taxes for buses I never use....
Lets say self drive cars came out today, fully working. They will be hugely expensive and most people wont have them. Then in 5 years time a large number of new luxury models will have self drive. 10 years after that it will be most mainstream cars will have it. 10 years after that it will simply be standard in all cars. Give it another 10 and there will be almost no cars without self drive on the road.
Once AV becomes a developed system the costs will become negligible. Think about it. How many old PCs do you have lying around that even though they are perfectly functional you can't even give away? Electronics are cheap once they become mass produced. When you are talking about 90 million units per year your cost per item will be low.
How about if the autonomous car just stopped itself as quickly as possible in the case of an incident that it cannot handle?
What could possibly go wrong?
Normal driver: rear collision.
Automated driver: stops safely because it had maintained a safe distance from the car in front, but may have been hit by a human driver behind.
Driving is fun. You have an algorithm for that?
This is the most awesome thing ever. All you morons riding in your self driving cars will be forced to pull over because those of us with manual drive cars will figure out real quick your cars will do everything in its power to prevent a crash. All we have to do is act like we are going to run into your car and it will get out of our way. I will never be stuck in traffic again.
We live in an age where computers with excellent programming have extreme trouble and can't deal with reading some squiggly letters yet we expect them to flawlessly navigate in the real world equivalent of a captcha phrase?
Adaptive cruse, proximity warning and even lane following on the freeway seem to be achievable today with a reasonable level of safety. But it's simply not going to be fully autonomous until we have as creative algorithms as living things employ. I mean its a sad state of affairs when it takes multiple cameras, lidar, sonar, radar and more, with world class programming, to fail at besting a half attentive human basically using a stereo camera setup alone. You have to manually enter the entire map on the route to even compare and that simply isn't scalable or even the same thing.
If we rewrite the rules of the road to favor self driving vehicles, there's no reason they couldn't surpass the safety of a human driver. And if most or all vehicles are self driving, they can be networked together to share data like location and speed, or even the condition of the road.
And hell, if we're going to do some imagining, how about wireless transmission of electricity from road to car? Power is generated more efficiently in a city power plant than in the small engine of a car or semi.
"Driving is fun. You have an algorithm for that?"
Oh, but they also took that into account: driving is less fun each day it passes.
It doesn't have to be 100%, it just has to be better than the average driver. This is a classic Nirvanna fallacy.
* Never get bored, tired, or distracted
I'd add to that list: * Never drive preoccupied or in emotional imbalance * Never drive intoxicated or on drugs
When I have sex, there is a chance I could get a disease, or a stalker girlfriend, but regardless of risk, there are some pleasures in life I'll never outsource to a machine. Driving is similar and I'm sure I'm not the only one with this opinion.
So much human-hyping in that.
Firstly, which skills, exactly, do you keep sharp through a monotonous, repetitive activity like highway driving? Especially in the US with its turtle-speed speed limits? With the Tesla and other car makers approach to autonomous driving, the car is not even trying to manage all possible situations, only the ones that are so fucking boring, humans actually fall asleep doing them.
Secondly, what makes you think humans are better in emergency situations? For starters, we have this literally fatal flaw called reaction time.
No, humans are terrible in car emergencies. 99% or so of them require one of two very simple things that a computer is much better at: Bring the vehicle to a controlled stop, fast. - or - Steer to avoid the obstacle, do it right now.
What computers can't handle well are exceptional situations. But in 20+ years of driving, I've not had one of those that was an emergency. This is stuff like road construction where the lane markers are completely missing. Or some situation where police is directing traffic, telling you to do something that the road signs and markers clearly forbid - do the self-driving cars understand police gestures and that they overrule road signs?
In an emergency, fast is better than smart, especially when a crash is unavoidable. Every km/h you can get slower before crashing matters to the injuries you will suffer.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
This is true, for now... but consider what happens over time: every time a computer does something sufficiently poorly (i.e. badly enough to cause an accident), there will be a full black-box recording and log of the conditions and operations that led up to the accident. The car company's programmers will go over the situation with a fine-toothed comb to understand what happened, and update the software to handle that situation better in the future.
They've been doing that for decades in aviation and yet we still require humans in the cockpit. We've been able to automate most flights for some time now but there is a demonstrable benefit to having a human pilot involved in many cases. You are quite correct that over time it will get better but I think the time where a computer only system outperforms a computer/human system will be a long way off.
(Meanwhile, human beings will continue to drive at more or less their present skill level, since they don't learn much from each others' mistakes)
That does not have to be the case. The reason people don't become better drivers is because there is no requirement for them to be better. Getting a driver's license is ludicrously easy when in reality it should be much harder to get and maintain like a pilot's license. People get better when you train them to be better. But we just give a few classes to a teenager, a perfunctory test and then proclaim them ready to drive safely until the time they die. And because of that many of them die much sooner than they might otherwise. There are a lot of people on the road who have NO business driving a motor vehicle. I've got a few in my family.
We also aren't very harsh on punishing drivers who do things that are known to be dangerous. If I'm flying a plane and I'm observed doing something stupid the FAA will come down on me (rightly) like a ton of bricks. We're generally much softer on drivers and I think to our detriment.
Well, it is lost already, after way too much automation. People had to adjust ignition timing while driving. Then came an automated system based on centrifugal force & vacuum hoses and did it for them. (And decades later, computers.) This art was lost - who can drive an 1890 car these days?
Modern cars don't have a choke knob anymore. So the art of using that is getting lost. Lots of people can't drive a stick shift - and even if they can, they don't know to shift with an unsynchronized gearbox. So many lost arts.
Somehow, I can't worry about this.
If you're on the public highways, you should not be operating the car in "most skilled" mode anyway (track mode, full traction at every step), because you aren't guaranteed "clean, consistent pavement" or "non-signalling dude just entered my lane".
I see the point, but even cruise-control reduces your skill (depending on engine size anyway).
While many drivers may THINK they are "skilled", the mere fact that there is no "Are you a retard?" test when buying a car or getting a driver's license and the physical test is mostly concerned with "Are you blind?" and NOT with one's hand-eye coordination or reflexes - indicate that the level of "skill" among the general population is mostly imaginary.
Traffic needs to be rigorously coordinated with special roadside signals and marks, special laws and regulations are created to manage traffic, even special roads are there because most people suck at driving and pedestrian walkways on the side of the road are elevated ABOVE the level of the road so it would be harder for drivers to drive on them - almost all infrastructure BUILT FOR DRIVING is built with intention to LIMIT driver's ability to drive wherever and however he/she likes.
Driving infrastructure is engineered with an assumption that MOST PEOPLE SUCK AT DRIVING.
Hint: Half of all the drivers are below average - because Gauss.
Only the upper 16% or so have "skill", and a rather significant number of those are professional drivers working in human and cargo transport and having actual driving skills and experience required to hold that position.
Everyone else is either slightly better than average (with only about a quarter of population being better enough for it to count), an "average driver" or among the wast armies of below average drivers.
And when it doesn't matter how skilled you are if the guys in front and back of you and on all sides are below average (well... the guy on your left might be an "average or better" driver) - you're far better off if everyone is being piloted around by a computer.
And nothing of skills will be lost.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
If the auto-pilot outperforms most human drivers, then switching to it is a win.
What I really want though, is to trade off auto pilot for higher speed. A robot can drive at 180 MPH just about as easily as it can drive at 55. I want to see real high-speed lanes on our highways. They could go a long way to reducing congestion.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
It's fine to use Tesla's new software release of (what it calls) autopilot features as a basis for discussion of future possibilities, but this release is far from providing autonomous driving or a self-driving car. This is beta software of certain limited features; it requires constant vigilant attention to the road and surrounding conditions by the driver and is intended for use only on divided limited-access multi-lane highways. Indeed, it could be said -- as some users have -- that it requires *more* vigilance than conventional driving because the user is a beta tester.
Somewhat separately, at low speeds it will find and maneuver into parallel parking spaces.
I am curious how these automated systems will handle speed limits. As it is now the posted limits on most highways are basically a notion and generally ignored by most drivers, and you can even be ticketed for obstructing traffic for driving the limit when everyone around you is doing 15 over it.
It would only take a small percentage of automated vehicles obeying the speed limit to turn rush hour into even more of a nightmare than it already is.
Amusingly enough, they make the fallacious argument that the human is always better in "emergency situations" than the car. That begs the question: why would a human be capable of recognizing and reacting to an emergency situation more quickly and correctly than a computer? If the human can recognize the situation so much better, won't the human avoid the situation entirely in the first place?
Most humans respond to emergency situations by panic braking and trying to steer out of the way, which usually spins the car. Without rigorous driver training in advanced city and highway driving classes provided by Summit Racing or Skip Barber's Racing School--training which ranges $1000-ish for 3 days of 8 hour training blocks--drivers in the US never receive any instruction on threshold braking, steering in emergency situations (with or without anti-lock brakes), skid recovery, suspension system limits (how well your car handles), and defensive driving techniques including active awareness and lane toss exercises (steering instead of panic braking when you can avoid an obstacle you can't brake fast enough to avoid hitting).
Most people just don't have these skills; and many crash into shit while putting on make-up or eating an egg mcmuffin in the car.
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I was going to post similar. People are already 'cushioned' from the laws of physics in modern vehicles. They push their vehicles beyond what they can actually control, because the ride still feels smooth... Everyone tailgates these days because brakes are so much better than they used to be, but that doesn't make it safe or mean they have control @ 70 MPH @ 0.5 seconds behind the vehicle in front of them.
99% of the time driving is a chore. If you enjoy stop lights, rush hour traffic, and dealing with other inconsiderate distracted and bad drivers then you are truly blessed. For myself, the less I have to drive the better.
"If you are in the right lane of a highway and cars are merging at slower speeds, most drivers want to move over a lane and go around them. But the Tesla does not know that. It will instead automatically slow to match the slower speeds of the merging cars."
So how many people will just sit in the right lane coming up on a merge, slow down, causing all the other cars behind, autonomous or otherwise, to slow down too, not knowing why, and you have either a crash (from unexpected slowdowns or abrupt lane changes) or a bottleneck.
This might not drive you from point A to point B, but it will further erode people's awareness and driving abilities.
Actually, around 90% of aviation accidents are caused by pilot error.
Your statistics are wrong. Pilot error accounts for 38% of major airline crashes, 75% of commuter/air-taxi crashes and 85% of general aviation crashes. So the least experienced pilots crash the most which is not at all surprising. This strongly supports my need-better-training thesis. Among the most experienced pilots with (presumably) the best quality and best maintained equipment, pilot error accounts for a minority of crashes. I stand by my thesis that a well designed human/computer system can be more robust than either part independently. The data largely seems to back me up on this though I will concede that future technology advances may shift things in favor of computer only someday.
Humans are really poor troubleshooters.
Untrained humans are poor troubleshooters though I agree that people in general have faults. And computers have different limitations, not the least of which is their inability to deal with unexpected circumstances.
Do you mean to tell me you think a human would react better to such conditions? I honestly don't see why a computer would have trouble with that. The only part that really seems like a potential problem is the rainstorm part.
We'll lose skills that we don't need anymore??? Who would have ever guessed? /sarcasm
Your opinion won't matter once the bottom falls out of insurance rates of self-driving cars. The insurance companies will have to make up for the loss on the backs of those who obstinately insist on driving and therefore are a much more likely cause of accidents.
Your monthly insurance payments will be more than your car payments. Probably closer to your mortgage.
The notion that humans will actually react better than an automated system in an emergency seems backwards to me.
This gets far worse when you introduce systems which have the side effect of reducing human attentiveness and reduce the need for a human to rely on a skill in the first place.
I have a story from a refinery I once worked at. One of the large compressors had an almost monthly hiccup which severely knocked about the process unit and typically caused some anger and panic in the control room. We found and fixed the compressor problem. 5 years later I was talking to some guys from that refinery and I asked them how it went. Apparently the compressor ran perfectly for 4 years after which it had a very minor hiccup by comparison to the previous ones. The entire refinery was down for a week because none of the operators remembered how to identify or rectify the problem and the safety system shut the entire hunk of metal down.
If you think humans are bad at emergency management now, just imagine how bad they will be when they don't actually have to deal with emergency or don't pay enough attention to know an emergency is actually happening.