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California Scraps Safety Driver Rules for Self-Driving Cars (nytimes.com)
California regulators have given the green light to truly driverless cars. From a report: The state's Department of Motor Vehicles said Monday that it was eliminating a requirement for autonomous vehicles to have a person in the driver's seat to take over in the event of an emergency. The new rule goes into effect on April 2. California has given 50 companies a license to test self-driving vehicles in the state. The new rules also require companies to be able to operate the vehicle remotely -- a bit like a flying military drone -- and communicate with law enforcement and other drivers when something goes wrong. The changes signal a step toward the wider deployment of autonomous vehicles. One of the main economic benefits praised by proponents of driverless vehicles is that they will not be limited by human boundaries and can do things like operate 24 hours in a row without a drop-off in alertness or attentiveness. Taking the human out of the front seat is an important psychological and logistical step before truly driverless cars can hit the road. "This is a major step forward for autonomous technology in California," said Jean Shiomoto, director of California's D.M.V. "Safety is our top concern and we are ready to begin working with manufacturers that are prepared to test fully driverless vehicles in California."
What could possibly go wrong?
Soon the NSA will be able to drive people away to their secret bases for "interrogation".
video game with no liability farmed out to cheap remote works or just some kid who put $0.25 into a game at some arcade.
When, not if, someone dies then the state department of motor vehicles will be liable. They will be in the "line every possible party up in a row and sue each of them for the maximum amount even if it takes a decade. Lawyers currently own government, they should know this.
The only way this works out well, is if the self-driving cars are so safe that someone trying to commit suicide against one or in one can't succeed. I don't think anyone is at that level yet.
Irony: like petty tyrants of the middle ages our politicians who decide these rules can also make themselves immune to the lawsuits, and us moron-citizens don't realize how much we really are like medieval peasants.
Should the owner of a self-driving car be required to have a driver's license? And if the owner is not required to have a driver's license, and he's not driving the vehicle, should he be required to have insurance? Shouldn't the manufacturer be the one insured against any liability if there is an accident?
You are welcome on my lawn.
and can you get a DUI in driverless car?
what happens when the signal is lost? lags out? someone get's hit with high roaming fees say video at 2.5-5 meg per camera over 5-10+ of them?
When the first Self Driving Car kills someone?
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There simply is no way in hell that the remote monitoring and operating will be fast enough to respond to a real world accident until after it's happened. And there is no way that autonomous cars will be 100% capable of handling all situations.
So, these Johnny Cab death traps better have some seriously jacked up safety features in the passenger compartment, because you WILL need it when this goes wrong.
And I defy these things to survive in a place which has real winter weather ... snow, freezing rain, black ice. They will fail utterly. For now, this is a shiny new toy for warm climates being funded by wealthy corporations, with the other people on the roads taking the risks.
But no matter what these people tell you, we're a long way from believing we have safe self-driving cars. And, no, there will not be a time in the mid term future in which there are only self-driving cars on the road -- that's wishful thinking, and always has been.
There will be deaths. We will say we told you so. Everybody will act surprised. I hope these companies carry some really excellent liability insurance for when those lawsuits happen.
Unless some idiot of a politician basically says the companies who make them aren't liable for their mistakes. And then the fun will really begin.
best hope is an Criminal Case with an hard judge who will jail people on contempt of court when they try any NDA or EULA BS to hide logs / configs / source code / etc.
Also the power to force any subcontractor in to court as well so they can say we are not at fault we framed that out to jay's staffing that holds nothing.
Why wait for April 2, when April 1 would be so much more appropriate?
Fiat Lux.
Oh goodie, now we'll get to hear about the avoidable accidents and senseless deaths! Guess you're all going to have to learn the hard way.
Just wait for a bad crash in a small town that wipes out say a school bus where the local Sheriff is out for justice. otis you can go now I need the cell to hold this CEO till he can see the judge on Monday.
"Safety is our top concern and we are ready to begin working with manufacturers that are prepared to test fully driverless vehicles in California."
With the elimination of the human safety net behind the wheel, safety is about as much of a top concern as security is in the IoT market.
And speaking of IoT, can you say rush-to-market-capitalistic-greed? It's not too fucking hard to paint the picture as to where autonomous solutions are going and how fast.
You do you, California. Good luck with your beta testing. Hope it doesn't get too bloody.
At the end of the XIX century, motor vehicles were initially allowed on the road only if preceded by a person (on foot) waving a red flag to warn pedestrians. I bet we already have rules in place, concerning autonomous vehicles, that will elicit condescending, amused smiles from our descendants in a few decades.
satellite in motion link will have high pings
Autonomous cars so safe, nobody wants to be driving with them. Right on.
I don't think the owner's going to get out of insurance in the current scheme of things. Suing the manufacture is just too hard, folks will want to go after an owner/insurance company.
Now, what I'd _like_ to see is the main reason for mandatory car insurance go away: the absurd high cost of medical treatment following an accident. If we could get the US on single payer healthcare then the only thing left would be pain & suffering and car repair. p&s payouts can be huge but only in pretty rare cases (modern cars are crazy safe, you'd be amazed what you can walk away from). You'd see new players in the insurance biz as the risk dropped and lower prices as a result.
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I'm amazed she could even keep a straight face when she said that.
She immediately followed up with:
"One of the main economic benefits praised by proponents of driverless vehicles..."
ah ha. NOW we're getting to why this legislation passed.
When they're removing an active driver as a failsafe?
Just rename these fucking things to "Suicide Booths".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
assassination by car. Drone car bomb attacks. As much as I like technology, leftist California is one impracticable bad idea after another. Like a leach on a dead body.
That's a nice emotional outburst you have there, but it doesn't match the facts. Facts are that there is no "human safety net behind the wheel" most of the time.
If you look at fatalities per mile driven, automatic cars are safer.
If you look at the occurance of accidents due to distracted driving, they are going up rather than down.
As much as it makes you uncomfortable and unhappy, this is not a net negative in terms of safety.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
The linked article requires subscription, so I am not sure about the details, but wouldn't it be better to lift the human driver requirement only for vehicles, which showed some reliability first, not to any driver-less car?
Just wait regulation-California will regulate the hell out of it.
Just list California regulates parking garages, and power cords.
where are the rants about "money over people"?
because I guarantee you, this is California leadership getting large amounts of cash and/or promises of campaign aid from large Califoria companies that have a lot of skin in the auto driving game.
The idea of having central "off switches" and granular personal level denials of travel capability doesn't stop "leadership" from salivating either. For our Own Good, of course!
now where's my purple sash?
Just wait for a bad crash in a small town that wipes out say a school bus where the local Sheriff is out for justice.
Or the self-driving car drives through a school and the local Sheriff is too afraid to go in after it. [What, too soon?] :-)
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
I'm worried more about the other drivers that expect a car on the road to do a certain thing, but then it does a totally different thing because the AI isn't flexible enough to think like a human. In the case of the truck backing up in Las Vegas incident. Yes, it was the truck driver's fault, but most truck drivers probably do the same thing all the time, but because you have an AI behind you that is basically an idiot, now all of a sudden it's a problem and it's you're fault too. I really have to feel for people that end up in that situation.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I'm really conflicted about this. On the one hand, it seems likely that for 80% of road conditions encountered, an autonomous car might do a better job than humans, though from a utility perspective, I have serious doubts that I could use my automated car to take me up a BLM dirt road, or drive in Montana white-outs. Testing's happening mostly in the Bay Area and Phoenix, both of which have, not no weather, but little severe weather except a few seasonal rainstorms (duststorms?).
On the other hand, I do believe there's a certain cult fetish building around autonomous cars and a bit too much emphasis on the infallibility of technology. Technology fails around us all the time (voice recognition in particular sucks), and I don't think there's nearly enough skepticism being paid to the issues of reliability, hardening against gaming, or dealing with human malice (road rage, dealing with non-autonomous vehicles and their drivers, etc.)
It's a future I don't want, that seems inevitable.
I'm pretty sure I had heard about a 20 something who was crushed under a semi roughly a year ago. Obviously the self driving cars are not entirely there yet, they have made amazing strides but there is still a distance to go and pretending they are there is only going to result in people getting hurt.
You compare self driving cars only operating in ideal situations to humans operating in all conditions. From what I've seen, when you compare both operating in the same situations, humans come out FAR ahead in overall accident count. Yes, most autonomous vehicles have fewer deaths, but that's because they don't operate them at speeds which can be fatal.
Which brings up another point. I sure hope these things are mandated to keep speeds with humans. One slow vehicle in a busy freeway would be dangerous enough.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Maybe they can turn this into a captcha? "Prove you are not a robot: check all images of cars that are about to crash horribly"
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
I was surprised that there are 50 companies vying for the chance to test these robot cars.
So, maybe automated cars aren't going to work for BLM dirt roads or blizzards. It doesn't mean they don't have a place, and can't replace a lot of the cars on the road.
We really are new at the self-driving thing at this point. And it's already better than a lot of drivers in a lot of situations. I think we're on the exponential upswing in self-driving tech, and not at any sort of plateau. The amount of money and engineering that's being poured into it now is already rapidly producing results, and will continue to produce results in the future.
I don't expect that this will be solved in one day, but I also expect that we're going to see some radical shifts in our commuting. Maybe an automated commute around Billings won't be in the cards in the next five years, but I'd be surprised if a commute around Houston or LA wasn't. I'm in the upper midwest, and the commutes for my wife and I would be largely doable at this point, except for a week or two every year when the road conditions would likely be too bad for the current tech to handle. But then again, those two weeks are bad enough that the current humans can't really do it either, drifting around because they can't see the lines, sliding off the road, sliding through stops, etc.
I do agree with your skepticism, but only in part. Most of those issues are issues today, and there aren't large-scale issues with them. Yes, OnStar can be hacked, and does get hacked once in awhile. Keyless entry gets hacked. Humans are shitheads. None of that changes with autonomous cars. The same laws still apply. If you're dangerously interfering with a driverless car, you're going to get arrested same as if you were doing that with a regular car.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
That's a nice emotional outburst you have there, but it doesn't match the facts. Facts are that there is no "human safety net behind the wheel" most of the time.
If you look at fatalities per mile driven, automatic cars are safer.
If you look at the occurance of accidents due to distracted driving, they are going up rather than down.
As much as it makes you uncomfortable and unhappy, this is not a net negative in terms of safety.
Let me clarify my concerns, in priority order:
#1: The security of the autonomous network that all vehicles will likely use.
#2: The amount of damage one can incite if the equivalent of a DDoS attack was ever done on an autonomous network.
#3: The ability to paralyze an entire economy with such an attack in a future that is completely dependent on autonomous transport. (Consider this in the future; one good attack that kills 10,000 people would likely be enough to incite mass fear across a society that doesn't even know how to drive a car anymore)
#4: The autonomous technology and car itself (Yup, waaaay down on the list)
Hackers murdering 20,000 people per year in the future due to insecurities in autonomous solutions isn't going to make people somehow feel better about burying loved ones because it's still a "net benefit" on the 40,000 lives lost today.
Soon the NSA will be able to drive people away to their secret bases for "interrogation".
Soon the terrorists will be able to simultaneously turn THOUSANDS of cars, all over the country, into drive-through-the-crowd projectiles - without requiring thousands of suicidal drivers to operate them.
AND without even having to pay for a rental.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Wow, you have a really dystopian world-view. So because bad things could theoretically happen in the future, you're against....everything? All technological progress?
Because all of these things are equally applicable to the stock market, banking system, online commerce, IOT, cell network, etc.
While I don't disagree about the problems that could happen, I fail to see a situation where "Hackers murdering 20,000 people per year in the future" is a real possibility. That's not how any company stays in business.
Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
> The new rules also require companies to be able to operate the vehicle remotely -- a bit like a flying military drone
Did this remind anyone else of that episode of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex where they assassinated a police whistleblower by hacking his eyes while driving?
I am glad to see all that bribe money eventually found its way into the right hands.
Now preparing from the inevitable highway tragedy.
I think they should install heavy armor in the rear and configure them, not only to treat the speed limit as a non-negotiable absolute, but also to gradually slow down to a crawl when you people tailgate them. Oh, and they ought to take video and file formal complaints against you (so that, if nothing else, you'd at least get hit with higher insurance rates).
It's always interesting to talk about these driver-less cars. I have just read an article that discuss a little about its regulations at https://www.lemberglaw.com/sel.... I think the government and also automakers should really think about this before publicly releasing these cars.