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House Passes Bill To Speed Deployment of Self-driving Cars (go.com)
The House voted Wednesday to speed the introduction of self-driving cars by giving the federal government authority to exempt automakers from safety standards not applicable to the technology, and to permit deployment of up to 100,000 of the vehicles annually over the next several years. From a report: The bill was passed by a voice vote. State and local officials have said it usurps their authority by giving to the federal government sole authority to regulate the vehicles' design and performance. States would still decide whether to permit self-driving cars on their roads. Automakers have complained that a patchwork of laws states have passed in recent years would hamper deployment of the vehicles, which they see as the future of the industry. Self-driving cars are forecast to dramatically lower traffic fatalities once they are on roads in significant numbers, among other benefits. Early estimates indicate there were more than 40,000 traffic fatalities last year. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration says 94 percent of crashes involve human error.
To what level????
I want see some CEO hulled in front of small town hard ass judge after a bad crash where they get into the local jail after they try to pull the NDA / EULA / 3rd party BS to get out of talking about the code. In a very bad car accident it can be an criminal trial.
And a sizeable fraction of the remainder would be eliminated by automatic monitoring of car performance. (brake failure due to neglect say).
Then there are those accidents that are 'unavoidable' (debris falling on road say).
But become not-unavoidable if you have an AI with reflexes beyond a trained stunt/rally driver who has a week to prepare.
dealer only service with oil changes each 3000 miles will drive profits up.
I look forward to a day where 94% of crashes involve computer error instead. That will make dying hurt less right?
So, slightly on topic story. I got a new car a little over three years ago. When it got to 3000 or so miles on the odometer, I took it to a service station to get the oil changed. They told me that it really only needs it every 4000-5000 miles depending on the car. That the old "every three months or 3000 miles" adage really doesn't apply any more.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
If you read the article (heresy, I know), you'd see that some of the safety standards that would be "relaxed" are things like brake pedals, steering wheels and the like. Which, if it's a self-driving car that is not intended to have a human driver ever (as is, it's not an option at all), that makes sense.
I tend to think that's going to be a harder sell to the typical American, though.
I mean, it's one thing for a car to have the options for both human driving AND autopilot. Some people will be leery of that, but then they just won't use the autopilot. But a car that only has a self-driving option? A lot of people won't buy cars like that, for a variety of reasons.
Mr. Hu is not a ninja.
....self driving cars, we shall see this idiocy repealed. Trust me; you won't see me getting in a car that drives itself any time soon. Any machine can be corrupted by a hack. I still remember watching what almost happened to Will Smith's character in iRobot and that was enough for me to realize, there's no way you can safeguard the controls to my liking since what can be thought up will happen. Maybe over decades, I might change my opinion, but so far I'm not impressed. :)
I've heard the same, even longer periods for some cars. Lots of the old rules for cars are obsolete. I use the hard break-in technique for my vehicles. Used on 3 new vehicles no problems.
I swear to God...I swear to God! That is NOT how you treat your human!
My VW tells me to take it to service every 10K miles or once a year. All hail synth lube.
Automobile design and performance standards are pretty much set at the federal level anyway. A few states (California, for example) have stricter emissions standards. But it's time to put a stop to that B.S.
I can take practically any vehicle legally operable in one state and drive it across the border into another anyway. So state by state laws really don't accomplish much other than to protect local market channels.
Have gnu, will travel.
I guess a self-driving taxi and freight truck would go without driver airbags, driver steering wheel, and driver pedal, since the idea is to not pay a driver--you still have to pay a driver for lounging around in your car all day when he could be at home lounging around in front of the TV or digging in the garden.
As for "speed deployment", that's not quite it.
If we lose a few thousand or tens of thousands of jobs a month to new technologies, that's just business as usual: the .01% nudge in unemployment is felt by the unemployed (hence why we need stronger protections for people's economic security), and the rest of the economy goes on to shift around buying power and draw new labor elsewhere. All in all, this is what causes progress, increased standards of living, and wealth, and is just what happens constantly and continuously.
If we hold that back, mature the technology, then have a breakthrough with low-cost, highly-effective, well-tested technology coming to replace 3 million jobs at once, we get a sudden 2% bump in unemployment. We also get a loss in the jobs supporting those employed, and supporting the parts of their function that replace the robots. That kind of hammer coming over the span of a couple months--everyone rushing at once to fire all of you and replace you with a small shell script--doesn't speak of unemployment insurance and negligible economic effects; it looks like the dot-com bust.
You don't want technical revolutions. You want to bleed slowly over a long period of time, giving each wound a chance to heal. A quick stab through the heart and you just die as half your blood pumps out onto the floor. Get the regulations out of the way before the businesses are all begging to go live; give them the green light when none of them are ready to move yet, when nothing's ready for them yet, and when the whole process is going to drag out as slowly as it possibly can.
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I have no doubt based on the behavior I see on the road every day in the large American metropolitan area I live and work in that once self driving cars become ubiquitous, somebody is going to figure out how to hack the AI to make it more aggressive. I see people all the time who take crazy chances on the road to get in front of other drivers. Human beings are really good at being jerks and ruining a good thing for everybody else by exploiting it first. So I expect somebody to figure out how to make the AI make the car its controlling go as fast as possible after a light goes green and do other perhaps risky behaviors under the assumption that the others cars will have AI that will let them. Once that happens, it probably will get very unsafe with large numbers of hacked cards jockeying for position all the time on the road under the assumption that the other guy will obey the rules so they don't have to.
electric vehicles will go mainstream long before self driving cars do.
besides, self driving cars will be a *service* not something mere mortals can buy. these companies, both legacy and new, are chomping at the bit to get a cut per-mile|km|ride|passenger out of *every* trip *everybody* takes, anywhere and everywhere they go. no fucking way would they let people get around that by 'allowing' private ownership of 'their' vehicles...
and *THIS* administration? if self driving cars were just a little closer to actually being ready for mainstream, these fuckers would outlaw private ownership altogether, then cash those big 'contribution' checks received from the autonomous car companies.
dealer only service with oil changes each 3000 miles will drive profits up.
So far most SDCs are electrics. There is no oil to change.
It might be that a properly working self driving car is magnitudes safer than a human driven car.
Still, this centralizes certain failure modes. When $BLACKHAT finds a remote exploit for all models from a certain manufacture, and can hack them all at once and cause 50000 fatalities or severe injuries in a single morning, maybe that also should be considered as a risk factor. Any sufficiently complex automated system is going to have security flaws, and the more network connectivity these vehicles have, the more chances there will be for remote exploits of security critical systems.
Well, I don't think there is any question about it. It can only be attributable to human error. This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error. - HAL9000
Damn synths.
When all cars are automated, all crashes will be 100% computer error.
Seems like people still have the statistical edge.
What is it Samuel Clemens never said about statistics?
Damn! Will wonders never cease? Look, all of you self-driving car Luddites can just stay the hell away from them. For the rest of us, though, it makes PERFECT sense to have National standards for these cars in the same way that we currently have National standards for all current vehicles. Otherwise, you'd have an amalgam of incompatible state-based standards that would severely hinder development and deployment. (California's stricter emissions standards being the only exception I'm aware of.) What's wrong with that?
electric vehicles will go mainstream long before self driving cars do.
Wow! That long? You know EV's are NOT going to be mainstream until fossil fuels become too expensive to use and THAT's not happening in my lifetime. All Hail Hydraulic FRACKING!
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Whoa! STOP Congress!
FIFY
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
What are you guys driving?
It's 20000 miles between oil changes on my current car. And the car tells me when that's coming up!
Oil is a lubricant, not a fuel.
Yes, Virginia, even electrics need lubricated.
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese
and go the under posted speed limit?
trying to 55 when others are doing 70-80+ is unsafe. Yet this what I-294 is out of side of peek times day to day.
No more oil changes with electric motors.
I'm always curious when self-driving discussions appear. I'm "somewhat" informed on this topic, and am relatively neutral; but, I can't help but believe that tech folks are a bit too optimistic about the benefits of "eliminating human error." For example, I see in these types of discussions the example of debris on the road. Theoretically, most human drivers have the ability to see such debris and determine a course of action, and most of the time they choose correctly and avoid disaster.
On the other hand, it would only take a single bug in an AI "debris subroutine" running in a whole bunch of self-driving cars to choose the wrong course of action 100% of the time. Such a bug would *probably* only be identified after enough failures were accurately recorded to piece together a pattern that could point to it (i.e., an incomplete test plan didn't catch it, a code review didn't catch it, differences between virtual test worlds vs. the real world hid the defect, etc.).
I guess if someone could convince me that it is possible to write 100% bug-free code, I would feel better about this. However, what I perceive as the somewhat naive optimism of technical folks is somewhat terrifying in this context.
No Virginia. There is no motor oil in an electric motor. Maybe some grease in sealed bearings, but motor oil in an internal combustion engine needs to be changed because it gets contaminated with byproducts of combustion.
The problem with the modern world is that most people form their beliefs from the experience of watching things happen in movies, instead of the experience of reality.
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civil case can be stopped by eula's and nda's not so much in an criminal prosecution.
If a self-driving car crashes into me, it really doesn't matter if the owner of the SDC has agreed to a EULA, as long as I haven't..
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
No Virginia. There is no motor oil in an electric motor. Maybe some grease in sealed bearings, but motor oil in an internal combustion engine needs to be changed because it gets contaminated with byproducts of friction.
FTFY. In a properly sealed ICE, you shouldn't be getting significant amounts of combustion contaminates in your oil galley.
FWIW, I never said "motor oil," I specifically said "lubricant."
An enigma, wrapped in a riddle, shrouded in bacon and cheese