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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?
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.
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.
Can they put this tech on golf carts?
Table-ized A.I.
Have there been many cases where a state's failure to regulate an industry opened it to serious litigation? There are states with roads that have a very high posted speed limit, but I don't recall hearing a case where it is held liable for a crash where speed was a factor.
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.
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.
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.
True. But I suspect there are other reasons for remote monitoring and control. Autonomous cars already will not evade or outrun law enforcement. That has to be a primary function in their control system: Pull over to the right and stop. And there has to be a failsafe in the event of an onboard problem. Again, pull over to the right and stop.
I suspect that the remote monitoring and operation regulations are for population control. This is California, after all. You will be confined to I-5. The coast highway is for rich people only.
Have gnu, will travel.
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
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!!!
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 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. . . .
The idea that a human can drive better than a computer with the correct types of sensors in snow, rain, ice ,etc. is purely human hubris.
You know there was just an article about how they can't even drive with water spots on the lenses, right? At this point snow, rain (hard enough to blur camera vision) and ice is not possible.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
This doesn't mean killing humans by self driving should be excused, ever. Maybe you are prepared to give self driving a 'pass' if they only kill 1.1 million a year, but I have a problem with technology killing anyone.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
You know you don't have to drive at the speed limit, right? There is nothing wrong with driving slower than it.
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
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.