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Ford Disguised a Man As a Car Seat To Research Self-Driving (techcrunch.com)

Posted by BeauHD on from the master-of-disguise dept.

According to TechCrunch, Ford put a man in a car seat disguise so that a Ford Transit could masquerade as a true self-driving vehicle in order to evaluate how passers-by, other drivers on the road and cyclists reacted to sharing the road with an autonomous vehicle. From the report: The trial, conducted with the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute, also made use of a light bar mounted on the top of the windshield to provide communication about what the car was doing, including yielding, driving autonomously or accelerating from a full stop. The Transit Connect van used for the trial would indicate its behavior using signals including a slow white pulse for yielding, a rapid blinking for accelerating from a stop, and staying solid if it's actively in self-driving mode. The bar is positioned roughly where a driver's eye line would be, to try to catch the attention of those around it who would look in its direction.

8 of 84 comments (clear)

  1. That outfit would have made a great viral YT video by JoeyRox · · Score: 3

    Been done before but the Ford setup is much more convincing.

  2. old story about talking cars.... by turkeydance · · Score: 3, Informative

    waaay back in the day, when Ford/Chevy made "talking cars", as in the female (always female) voice "your door is a jar" or ajar or something like that, a new Buick bought by a church-going lady ran off the road after leaving the dealership. she said that "haunts are in my car" (haunts are ghosts). this experiment has a little "haunt" potential, even if it's only distracted drivers calling 911 to report it. and yes, those would be data points.

    1. Re:old story about talking cars.... by Lordpidey · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Female voices tend to come out better after deep compression, that's a big part of the reason why they were used so much in 80s technology, because they were easier to understand.

      --
      Some people encrypt by using rot-13 twice. I prefer the more secure method of using rot-1 a total of twenty six times.
  3. That is nothing! by 140Mandak262Jamuna · · Score: 4, Funny

    Equifax disguised a music major as Chief of Security!

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    sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
  4. Insulting by JThundley · · Score: 3, Funny

    This is so insulting. Didn't we all as a society agree that actors in blackface is racist and offensive? Why is putting a man in carface any different?

  5. Re:No useful data by mikael · · Score: 2

    They tried with drive throughs (with an invisible driver):

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

    --
    Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
  6. Knight Rider by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 2

    I think I saw this trick done in the Knight Rider TV series from the 1980s

    I specifically remember one scene in an early episode where KITT drove itself and came to a park. You can barely make out the hands on the steering wheel before they quickly pulled themselves away - but it wasn't edited out ;)

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    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
  7. Voice Synthesis by JBMcB · · Score: 2

    There was study done by the US Navy or Air Force in the 80's to see what kind of voice would work best for warning fighter pilots of various things. Higher pitched voices cut through cockpit noise and other distractions better than others, so they used women to record the warning signals.

    I think the overall theme is that higher pitched voices cut through noise floor better than lower pitched voices.

    --
    My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.