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Toyota Is Uneasy About the Handoff Between Automated Systems and Drivers (caranddriver.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Car and Driver: Toyota has not yet decided whether it will bring a car to market that is capable of automated driving in some situations yet still requires a human driver behind a wheel who can take control if needed -- but the automaker, characteristically, is more cautious than many about moving forward with the technology. Citing safety concerns regarding the handoff between self-driving technology and human driver, Kiyotaka Ise, Toyota's chief safety technology officer, said the biggest issue with these kinds of systems is that "there is a limbo for several seconds between machine and human" in incidents when a car prompts a human to retake control if it cannot handle operations. These kinds of systems, defined as Level 3 autonomy by SAE, have divided automakers and tech companies in their approaches to developing cars for the self-driving future. As opposed to Level 2 systems, like Tesla Motors' Autopilot, in which a human driver is expected to keep his or her eyes and attention on the road while a system conducts most aspects of the driving, Level 3 is characterized by the system's claiming responsibility for the driving task when it is enabled. Although Toyota assures us that its researchers are hard at work figuring out the challenges of Level 3 autonomy, it seems like the company could eventually join others moving directly from its current Level 2 system to a Level 4 system. Given the self-driving race has been on for a while, this could put Toyota at a competitive disadvantage, but it's clear engineers at the company care more about getting things right than they do about being first.
The summary states, "it's clear engineers at the company care more about getting things right than they do about being first."
So, basically what you're saying is, Toyota is the anti-Tesla.
I remember way back when that there was a site that plugged itself as a "Toyota Simulator" (seems to be down now). When you went to the site, it was nothing but a looping video of a car driving way too fast down a road and a person screaming. ;)
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not âEureka!â(TM), but
Slip ups on the road can become fatal in seconds because of the speeds and forces involved. You know people are going to rely on these systems precisely when they should be off the road period or be paying attention. And what happens when a deer decides to bolt out from the woods in front of your vehicle? Are you going to trust that the car can detect a deer?
This seems like a solution to people who hate the idea of mass transit and transporting goods by trains. Self-driving cars and trucks and hyperloops! FFS, just hire Disney's engineers and building a fucking monorail in most cities and connect them to the suburbs. That would be more than sufficient to raise the quality of life on transit.
Someone is actually taking time to think this through. Don't get me wrong. I'm ready for our self driving car overlords. I just want to make sure they are ready for the job first.
I'm a little skeptical of a sudden mass takeover with autonomous driving. As this post implies, the risk is huge. Where are autonomous devices in low-risk situations? Why haven't they taken over? I think we're better off with things like dryers that can sort and fold laundry, or dishwashers that can put the dishes away. The risk of a dropped dish or torn shirt is much more tolerable than a car crash at highway speeds.
No, I will not work for your startup
I hope your loved ones don't get harmed by this newfound laziness hiding behind flashy, imperfect technology.
I remember way back when that there was a site that plugged itself as a "Toyota Simulator" (seems to be down now). When you went to the site, it was nothing but a looping video of a car driving way too fast down a road and a person screaming. ;)
Compared to the Peugeot simulator, which is a car travelling down a stretch of road way too slow with the driver complaining about their prostate, hooligans, being half blind and the Yoofs of today.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
Toyota is not the only one deliberating skipping L3 and go directly to L4. Volvo intends to to the same, as well as some of the German vendors.
The reason is that studies show that hand-overs do not only take "a few seconds" according to the article, but that there is a tail of up to 40 seconds before the "driver-to-be" comprehends the situation.
Since 40 seconds is an eternity in traffic, it poses essentially the same challenges as L4 systems. So why bother with L3?
Expecting the human to take over in a panic situation IS unsafe. The human should only be taking over while parked.
There is exactly one class of people who have the training qualifying them to take over a driving car: Driving instructors. And they are usually limited to stepping on the brake, something the autonomous car could easily do on its own in a panic situation.
However, that's not saying that we have to go straight from level zero to level five. We just have to do it in a different way.
Rather than letting the car drive on the straight road, and expecting the human to take over in case the car overlooks a pedestrian, we should be letting the human drive on the straight road, and let the car take over when the human overlooks a pedestrian.
Because computers are really good at two things: Monitoring without getting bored, and making split-second decisions. Two things that humans are quite bad at.
If we started there, we could expand the number of situations where the computer can take over until it can do the entire driving by itself. The current plan is to reduce the number of situations where the human must to exactly what humans are bad at until the car can handle everything on its own.
underground tunnels cost way more then truckers
"Humans are on average really bad drivers"
No, we're not. We're actually bloody good at it considering we never evolved to drive something weighing 1.5 tons at anything up to 10 times our maximum running speed alongside other vehicles doing similar speeds.
People cite accident statistics as if they're significant. When you consider the TRILLIONS of miles driven every year by the worlds drivers and the number of potential accidents that DIDN'T happen because drivers reacted properly, the actual number of accidents is a statistical blip.
If you think computers are so much better at these sorts of tasks than humans then you might like to consider why Airbus computers will hand over control to the pilot if they're unable to handle the situation. And these are computers in a $200,000,000 aircraft, not a $20,000 car!
Whenever you have to hand control of the vehicle back to the human, there is going to be a delay. This is absolutely unavoidable and potentially very dangerous.
The driver, who was presumably inattentive during the fully-automated drive, will have to assess the surroundings and respond. This makes existence of a SAE Level 3 car inherently unsafe---there is little empirical support for idea that we can have a safe sometimes-automated system that fails into manual control.
Human attention change, perception times, and decision-making times are all fairly well understood now. Individuals fall into a reasonably large range, but even the best-performing humans will have trouble asserting control in a timely fashion---especially if the automated system is standing down due to an ambiguous and potentially dangerous condition. Snap judgements and muscle memory are barely enough
While I applaud the progress, I believe that Level 3 autonomous cars should never be sold as such to the public. The manufacturer can test these systems and gather all the data they want, but the driver should be required to maintain situational awareness at all times.
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According to the latest ruleset, this post should be modded as Vorpal Flamebait +5.
underground tunnels cost way more then truckers
I think you would have to qualify this a little better. Sure, the up front cost is substantial. However, being that a logistics company would not have to pay for drivers at CDL hourly rates anymore, eventually it would pay for itself and then pay dividends.
We'll make great pets
Considering Toyota couldn't write software for brakes I'm not surprised they're uneasy about writing autonomous driving software.
So, after a while with cars driving themselves, what exactly will the turnover to the now rusty human do but insure a crash? Also, there is not instantaneous human situational awareness. What...wait...oh, THAT is happening, so I must.....crash. Driving is a never ending story. You must pay attention until you turn the key to off. Also, the system is perfect, or it is not. Everything degrades and eventually needs repair. And how dangerous is a degrading self-driving-car system? And, since they cannot legally program their cars to do the complex conspiratorial law-breaking we all do to maintain the traffic flow, life itself will slow down. Commerce will slow down. That will not be acceptable to individuals or businesses. Thus, either cars will be allowed to break the traffic laws, or the traffic laws will be rewritten to accommodate them. But if they break the traffic laws as they exist willfully, car companies are open to massive insurance hits. And even criminal conspiracy charges are possible. If they massively rewrite the traffic laws of the nation, how long will that take? And how, exactly would they do that across all the States? The whole autonomous cars thing is a deadly dog's breakfast waiting to be served up to a helpless public by a greedy industrial base and a corrupt and incompetent government.
E Proelio Veritas.
Until we have REAL AI, self-aware, capable of actual thought and real interaction with humans, and not the current dead-end approach ('learning algorithms', 'expert systems', etc) we will not have truly safe, effective self-driving cars -- and having these half-assed systems fully in control of a vehicle, with no possibility of humans taking control, we will have death and disaster. At best we'll have totally frustrating vehicles that stop for apparently no reason, while it 'phones home' so a human operator can remotely control it, which is also totally unacceptable. You can keep your so-called 'self driving cars', because I don't want to die. Furthermore we won't have REAL AI for a long time to come yet, if ever, because we have no idea how an actual brain is conscious, self-aware, and capable of true ability to think. It's all marketing hype and nonsense perpetuated by people who have no clue what's really going on, and they can keep it, I'd sooner WALK everywhere.