The Humans Crashing Into Driverless Cars are Exposing a Key Flaw (bloomberg.com)

schwit1 sends in a story from Bloomberg pointing out that the rigid adherence to traffic laws and overcautious programming have caused self-driving cars to rack up a crash rate twice that of an average human driver. "This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up — all minor scrape-ups for now — the arguments among programmers at places like Google and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?" While the autonomous vehicles aren't at fault in these crashes, their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected.

Comments

Make them all Caddys and Priuses

[AntronArgaiv]

People expect Caddys to drive slow and do weird things, because Uncle Harry is driving. Same for Priuses, because it's either Aunt Marge or some granola-head hippy doing his "hyper-mileing" thing. Problem solved :-)

Either that or put a sticker on the back: "This car rigorously obeys all traffic laws"

Re:Make them all Caddys and Priuses

[Anonymous Coward]

Disguise all self driving cars as police cars... That should keep the drivers in the cars around them from driving as if there are no rules...

Re:Unison

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-...

Confession

[PopeRatzo]

I'll admit it: I drive like an old person. Any day I can piss off a millennial in his BMW, is a good day.

Re:Human drivers are terrible

[sinij]

When you define problem space this way I could only see two solutions:
1. Ban rigidly-abiding robots from the roads
2. Ban idiotic humans from the roads

I hope you can see that 1. is by far more economical and feasible solution, especially considering we have a shortage of rigidly-abiding robots and over-supply of idiotic humans.

Driverless cars are exposing a key flaw

[U2xhc2hkb3QgU3Vja3M]

To summarise the summary: people are a problem.

Re:the new slow dummies in the left lane

[Cederic]

I concentrate far more at 120mph than I do at 60. Making me drive slower merely bores me, and adds distraction.

I agree the answer is autonomous vehicles. I look forward to those being available, even if it increases average journey times because everyone's going 10mph slower. Until then, I'm not going to do 40 in a 70 limit even if it gives me more reaction time because it's just not fucking safe.