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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.
There was a study a few years ago about traffic in cities. They found that if all the drivers kept to rules that most cities would halt into complete grid lock.
People need to break rules to clear junctions, to pass cars that are stuck, and even force priority to not starve lanes going into a junction.
I travel by bus to and from work in Amsterdam, it is quite a long trip which includes traffic jams in the inner city. The bus driver needs to often break the rules to be able to pass cars, and force priority on junction because they are often stuck. Cars are backing up, cars are trying to make room.
I've thought this too and I think it'll be a city that does it first. City traffic is the worst affected by the start stop of signalling and a perfected driverless system wouldn't need signalling as they could flow efficiently (assuming the system is aware of every other car's location).
We have a few cities here in the UK that are becoming completely pedestrian/mass, you get to a point on the city boundary where you have to park and a bus takes you in the rest of the way. I think a city might pilot a "auto mode only" area at some point.
The law abiding nature of them reminds me of another dilemma I've wondered about. If the car is about to crash and has become sophisticated enough to know that X maneuver would result in 5 pedestrian deaths but Y maneuver only kills the driver.
Do they make it kill the driver?
How do you sell something that is programmed to kill you if certain circumstances are met?
"Rigid rule based approach" would probably result in many fewer snarl-ups.
Let's imagine 2 extremes: the M6 southbound near Manchester as it is today. Traffic is very heavy, and impatient drivers tend to bunch up. An impatient driver cuts from one lane to the next because the next lane is moving 1mph quicker, forcing their way into the remaining space in lane 3 causing someone to brake, and it causes a chain reaction - all the close following cars with too little distance start braking progressively harder and harder until the entire motorway stops (or worse, someone gets rear-ended). You now have a self-sustaining traffic jam with no discernible reason (from the air you just see a standing wave of stopped traffic with no obvious cause) until the evening when finally fewer vehicles are arriving at the back of the jam than are leaving from the front.
The other extreme is the same entire motorway is populated by rigidly rule following automated cars. They will all be following a safe distance. No one will cut across a lane because the other one is going 1 mph faster. Traffic flows freely all day long despite the density.
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So, you've never been in an accident that was not your fault on the highways?
Sometimes, going at speed and a deer jumps out means hitting the deer and possibly killing the driver, or swerving off the road and killing the driver, or serving into another car and killing others. Often, coming 'to a full and complete stop' isn't possible. Or may be on train tracks.
There are definitely more important questions, but these questions definitely need to be answered as they are literally life & death questions and will have huge financial consequences on the robot car companies if not answered well.
Sorry to interrupt your rant.
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Other articles are usually pretty quick to point out the reason, but this one has an agenda.
The vast majority of accidents involving driverless cars are low speed rear end collisions. Most drivers will not report a 3mph collision with no damage, but google does.
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all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders
Note that, for example, Google's cars are never going faster than 25 mph. So it's a little disingenuous to say they only get into fender benders when a human in the same situation would likely not have anything more than a minor fender bender either, even if they were very bad at driving.
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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...
You have a good point with your funny comment.
Autonomous cars should have a very distinctive indicator light marker.
Slow vehicles have to use an orange rotating beacon here.
Cars operating autonomously should have something similar.
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