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Self-Driving Cars Should Be Legal Because They Pass Safety Tests, Argues Google (theverge.com)

Posted by msmash on from the self-driving-future dept.

An anonymous reader quotes an article on The Verge: Chris Urmson, director of Google's self-driving car project, has sent a letter to US Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx today with a plan for selling autonomous vehicles that have no steering wheels or pedals. The plan appears to be pretty straightforward: Urmson argues that if a self-driving car can pass standardized federal safety tests, they should be road-legal. Urmson adds that regulators could 'set conditions that limit use based on safety concerns.'

2 of 265 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Lots of products pass safety tests by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This shows what a horrible idea it was for Google to remove the standard driver controls from their car design.

    First, it gives absolutely no backup when the inevitable failure occurs and the car doesn't know WTF to do. For example how exactly are you supposed to direct the car to a specific parking spot inside a garage?

    Second, it was stupid simply from a regulatory point of view. Yeah, no kidding regulators are not going to be thrilled about letting version 1.0 of an autonomous vehicle on the road without any manual controls. That feels like common sense to me.

    While I'm confident that engineers will eventually create extremely robust and reliable systems, I can't imagine what leads Google to think they can actually solve EVERY problem an autonomous car will run into with the very first version. Where exactly does that extraordinary self-confidence (hubris?) come from? It feels like part of this is form over function, an annoyingly prevalent trend in the software world recently. That is, designers felt the damn thing didn't look futuristic enough if it still had a steering wheel and petals. Traditional car companies know that they can only get away with this on their concept cars - not their production models.

    My bet is that Google is going to have to backpedal on this and add manual driver controls to their design before all is said and done, but I guess we'll see.

    --
    Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
  2. I still don't understand how this will work by HuskyDog · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now, I can just about grasp that a self driving car can be constructed that will navigate on the road, but that is not all that a car has to do. Let's look at a couple of examples:

    1) Suppose I live on a small farm or ranch and you are coming to visit me in your car. I might say "When you get here, come up the drive, turn left at the old tractor and park behind the barn next to the chickens". With a conventional car this should be easy, but what if you have one of these Google cars with no controls. Presumably it will find my address and arrive at the end of the drive. Given that there are no manual controls, how would you tell it the bit about the tractor and chickens? Will you just be able to type that in and it will be clever enough to follow those instructions?

    2) What about parking at work? I work on a big site with several car parks. How will I describe to the car which one I want to park in. They don't have separate Zip codes.