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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.

5 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!

    --
    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?