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California May Soon Allow Passengers In Driverless Cars (reuters.com)
According to Reuters, California's public utility regulator on Friday signaled it would allow passengers to ride in self-driving cars without a backup driver in the vehicle. It is a big step forward for autonomous car developers, especially as the industry faces heightened scrutiny over safety concerns. From the report: The California Public Utilities Commission, the body that regulates utilities including transportation companies such as ride-hailing apps, issued a proposal that could clear the way for companies such as Alphabet's Waymo and General Motors to give members of the public a ride in a self-driving car without any backup driver present, which has been the practice of most companies so far. The California Department of Motor Vehicles had already issued rules allowing for autonomous vehicle testing without drivers, which took effect this week. The commission said its proposed rules complement the existing DMV rules but provide additional protections for passengers. The proposal, which is set to be voted on at the commission's meeting next month, would clear the way for autonomous vehicle companies to do more testing and get the public more closely acquainted with driverless cars in a state that has closely regulated the industry. It also comes as regulators across the country are taking a harder look at self-driving cars in the aftermath of a crash in Arizona that killed a pedestrian.
Doesn't have to go through a driving test at a randomly assigned DMV to prove it is at least as competent as a teenaged driver at navigating traffic, residential streets, and vocal instructions from a human?
When they can do that I will consider them acceptable to be driving on the same streets as me. In the meantime I will take the kid in the ricer zigzagging between cars and generally acting stupid. At least there I know there is some primal instinct not to die baked into it. These souless machines are just programmed to drive. (And yes I realize the irony of this given some of the crazies with licenses, but it is also true!)
How can you do this after what just happened?
Nothing will happen to the passengers in the cars . . .
. . . it's the pedestrians that will have the problems.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
Proof that a big enough check will influence regulation in spite of what recently happened.
Completely fucking crazy? How can you do this after what just happened? What is wrong with these animals?
Logic and rationality, apparently.
They note an enormous increase in safety when cars are autonomous, want to be on the forefront of a developing technology that has benefits to society, and aren't swayed by the daily panic dished out in the media.
Or in other words, they take a measured, considered approach instead of running around panicky with quick fixes.
Seem to sensationalize the recent pedestrian death and hysterically claim that autonomous cars cannot be safe.
Thing is, that pedestrian in Arizona was crossing in the dark and was not visible until too late. Why would a pedestrian cross in front of a car that they can see (because it has headlights)? How many pedestrians get hit by human-driven cars?
As for the tech - I expect it will increase road safety, provide new levels of autonomy to the elderly/disabled and allow people to do other things while being transported from place to place. These are all positives.
After the fatalities that just happened with Uber and Tesla's malfunctioning autopilots, putting passengers in self-driving cars this soon is just crazy. The tech needs to go through far more tests before that should be allowed.
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Agree. I can't think of a better case of "you don't rely on Revision 1.0 (and certainly not anything earlier!) of any software. You expect it to glitch, lock up, and crash outright.
It is annoying enough to lose a document or some data records. It is a bit beyond annoying to ride a car into a concrete abutment at 60MPH.
Looks like you've bought into the hype.
We can fully be "on the forefront of a developing technology" and not buy into hype and bullshit...both can exist simultaneously.
The tech isn't ready and won't be for awhile...companies are scrambling to be the first on the road and they really don't care about anything else.
Thank you Dave Raggett
Is there any testing and certification done for those cars or do they trust the companies to handle that by themselves?
Passenger-less cars! Just cars driving around all day and night. Like now only nobody in them.
Am I the only one that hopes that Zuckerberg will step into one and then some random cracker will cause the car to lock him in and proceed to drive off the nearest bridge?
Furthermore, you have companies like Tesla that have it worked so that everything the car does is the human's fault. Like somehow a human is supposed to know what an AI brain is thinking when even the software designers don't know what an AI brain is thinking.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
"...It is a big step forward for autonomous car developers, especially as the industry faces heightened scrutiny over safety concerns."
Scrutiny? Don't assume for one fucking second this change has fuck-all with validating how safe driverless cars are, especially with no backup driver. This is Greed N. Corruption pushing forward with legislation that best supports maximizing profits at any cost.
Automated cars are baking VERY STUPID MISTAKES still. Apparently life isn't important enough to just have the stupid mistakes fixed before we ante up human lives. Nice to know our governments care about us.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
You know what? Uber is certainly a steaming pile of turd of a company, but I don't even blame them. We all know companies will do anything to make profit, especially a company like Uber. The problem is no one seems to care what these companies do. Everyone rolls there eyes and says, "Oh there goes Uber again" to a laugh track like on an 80's sitcom. I fault the government for not establishing quantifiable and measurable standards to *ensure* a vehicle is safe enough just to get through the testing it needs to do without killing anyone.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
ALL of the companies that want to roll out autonomous cars as a service are "steaming turds." They'll all be the same -- trips in a database, tied to an identity and bank card number for life. They may think they're doing good by saving lives through safer cars. In reality, they'll be destroying people's lives by robbing their privacy if their product becomes mandatory.
If consenting passengers want to or put their lives in the handsof down technology why shouldn't they be allowed to? My concern is for everyone else out in the general population who has become test subjects without any say in the matter.
Are you completely brain dead? You are concerned about the safety of driverless cars which have killed few enough people to count on the fingers of one hand. Where is your concern for the moronic human drivers who kill dozens every single day? Replacing these idiots with not-quite-perfect autonomous cars will save many many lives. You'd already realize this if you could actually interpret facts rather than being guided by media hysteria like the simple-minded sheep you are.
It seems Tesla has a hidden NASCAR mode where it abruptly only turns left into things like highway barricades.
I agree. It's going to be terrible for freedom. Right now if I want to go to a museum, I pay the admission of the museum. Down the road, you may need to pay a car company to go to the part of the city with the museum and then pay for the museum. Then they know you're at the museum so you get pelted with 'personal' ads while you are there AND in the car.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
No. Youâ(TM)re not the only one wishing people death. Hopefully youâ(TM)re still a small minority of callous jerks.
Humans drive 3.22 trillion miles a year in the US. In those 3.22 trillion miles, 32,000 people die. From what I can gather from the internet, Google has around 1.5 million self driving miles, lets say Uber has 1.5 million like Uber and Tesla's claim of 100 million is true. So if I generously allow all self driving companies to account all their miles to this year, and even ignoring the fact that Uber and Google pick exactly where they drive, there should have only been 1.05 deaths right now to be on par with humans. They are no where close to that.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Actually, I miscalculated. That is actually based on 106 million miles by self-driving and not 103 million. Brain fart.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
California just discovered another source of revenue.
Have gnu, will travel.
The "safety driver" appeared distracted (texting and not looking at the road). And the pedestrian also wasn't looking where she was going. On top of that, the car didn't detect the pedestrian. Three strikes.
Except zuckerberg isnt "people". I'm not even sure he's human. The world would be a better place without his type in it. He provides no value and causes great harm, entirely for his personal benefit. Let him die in a river for all I care.
Remember that side gig you took on to try to make ends meet? IE pay off that onerous student loan, or put a dent in the wife's cancer treatment bills, or buy the kids clothes for school?
It's going away.
How can you do this after what just happened?
What? One person died? There's 325699999 others to contribute to the economy. America has gotten on just fine killing close to 5500 pedestrians every year, one more won't make a difference.
The media should stop saying that this was a death caused by self-driving cars.
And yet it was. You see fundamentally the problem here is that the race to self-driving technology is one that involves keeping your trade secrets and technology close locked away for yourself. Uber may have owned the car that killed a person, but the fact that someone else's technology locked behind patents and IP could have prevented the death is THE problem with self driving cars.
At least Volvo had the decency to patent the seatbelt for the express purpose of opening it up to everyone and preventing any single company from owning life saving technology. That history of motorvehcile safety seems to be lost in this pissing contest.
Well, Tesla never claimed to have a autonomous vehicle, though the marketspeak "autopilot" did/does confuse some people. So take them out of the list. That's more a fancy cruise control with some lane following built in. And a bit of collision avoidance, that often works.
That said, in the recent event where a cop ticketed a autonomous car, the "driver" was charged because that's the way the laws are written. If he'd been a passenger that wouldn't have happened. (I'm not sure *who* would get the ticket in that case.) But that wasn't the car creator's scheming, that's just the way the laws were written back when autonomous cars were TV script gimmicks, or possibly even earlier. A driver was assumed to be responsible.
To me the applicable bit of traditional wisdom seems to be:
"Be not the first by which the new is tried,
Nor yet the last to cast the old aside."
Shakespeare put the words in the mouth of a pompous windbag, but they're still generally good advice.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Where's the NTSB?
What are the penalties for any failures?
* $100K for a scratch (vehicle or person) + 6 months down-time
* $1M for a law violation + 1 yr down-time
* $1M per person for any broken bones $10M/ea for serious injuries and 5 yrs down-time.
There need to be real penalties for any failures to hold the companies accountable. The down-time mandate will cost some companies more than the fines.
Because rule makers in CA are greedy, narcissistic, and megalomaniacal in the extreme, and they honestly don't give a shit about others. Trust me, in their minds, every misstep has been someone else's fault.
3% error is pretty irrelevant.
All more or less true. Self-driving cars really haven't put in enough km of testing or gone through enough rounds of refinement to be at the level where they can be trusted by the general public, or really even by a community of experts who's motives are unbiased.
But self-driving technology is observing a ratchet effect. It's not getting worse or regressing to a mean, it's always getting better, and at a pretty good rate. It seems that a competent company with deep pockets, like Alphabet/Waymo, will choose to delay the extra 5-10 years beyond when they "think" it's good enough tech, to the time at which it's just so provably better than humans that it can overcome any political or perceived obstacles (especially with the profit incentives behind it). And to the time at which they think the expected returns exceed the liability exposure. But then, it will happen.
But the tech is getting better, constantly, and it's not limited in the ways that humans are, just more limited in some other ways. Faster and more perceptive, but stupider about how it quickly responds to its perceptions. Hard to say exactly when it reaches the point of expected "cha-ching, let's cash in", but it will happen and it seems to be moving forward pretty fast.
I don't trust atoms -- they make up stuff.
Call me old fashioned (and it wouldn't be the first time) but I prefer to be carless, thank you.
"No selfdriving car! You should take the 401 to Longshore Blvd!"
Self driving cars have an abundance of caution, and are generally going slower than normal traffic. The people INSIDE a self driving car are plenty safe.
I maintain the ones outside are as well, as self-driving cars are already safer by far than the average driver. However I can seer why some people might still not understand that... not the case for the safety of passengers, which are obviously safe.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
You are concerned about the safety of driverless cars which have killed few enough people to count on the fingers of one hand. Where is your concern for the moronic human drivers who kill dozens every single day?
Those moronic drivers are easily identifiable. I'd ban them.
There have been no "driverless" cars on public roads so far. They have all had humans present ready (in theory) to intervene when the SD software did not cope; I don't know what the statistics are for interventions but I suspect that many if not most go un-reported. The accidents that SD cars have had are the result of double failures (software and supervisor). An analogy is a twin-engined aircraft having both engines fail at the same time. Looked at that way, the statistics are pretty unimpressive considering the relatively low mileage these vehicles have covered.
You'd already realize this if you could actually interpret facts rather than being guided by media hysteria like the simple-minded sheep you are.
I must be another sheep except I can't say I have seen anything in particular in the media about it - but I am in the UK so perhaps it's different.
As the other AC said, Zuckerberg isn't just a person, he's a horrible human being that made huge sums of money off the exploitation of others. Both in terms of the users as well as the actual workers. FB is currently being used to coordinate genocide.
So yes, if he were to die, that would probably for the best. It's not like the site isn't already causing huge numbers of people to be exterminated.
That's not really true. If you compare apples to apples the AI cars aren't really that impressive. Just keeping people from driving drunk and mandate autobrakes would likely give you better figures for the human drivers than for the AI cars.
Remember that the bulk of those auto fatalities are the result of intoxication or driving in bad conditions. AI cars aren't driving in storms and they aren't getting drunk. Including the worst case drivers in the statistics is misleading to the point of being pointless.
Rewriting history. Elon said the problem was easy to solve in 2015, and that he would let his car drive him coast to coast before the end of 2017.
Basically he was saying Tesla had an autonomous vehicle technology that was just around the corner.
I'm with you that they never said that this technology was implemented in their current cars.
There have been no "driverless" cars on public roads so far. They have all had humans present ready (in theory) to intervene when the SD software did not cope; I don't know what the statistics are for interventions but I suspect that many if not most go un-reported.
Waymo seems to be operating driverless cars in Arizona right now. The public launch is supposed to be "real soon now", but news articles have claimed that they have been running in a private test for a few months. No issues so far.
The human "supervisor" will never be reliable. If you expect people to take over in time to save a life, you'll be disappointed. Humans are good at many things, but paying attention during long watches of boring inactivity is something we are terrible at. If the car cannot drive without the human, it is not safe in general use.
No, it really isn't. Self-driving tech doesn't have to be better than the best drivers to be useful. It just has to be better than the worst drivers before requiring people to use it when drunk or fatigued will save lives.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The only safe autonomous car is a parked autonomous car.
Sorry, couldn't resist a trolling.
Depending on whose numbers you believe, the National Safety Council says that the U.S. average is 1.25 deaths per 100 million miles. So that number is in the ballpark.
However, your estimate of the number of autopilot miles is probably about an order of magnitude low. There are news articles from late 2016 claiming over 300 million miles traveled with autopilot/autosteer active. If it's not at least half a billion by now, I'd be surprised, and I wouldn't be shocked if it hit a solid billion already.
So if you ignore Waymo (too small a sample size) and Uber (trying to deploy FSD before their tech was ready), and concentrate only on Tesla, that's a pretty sizable drop in fatalities — around a factor of 5–10.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I've never really understood the notion that being "pelted with ads" was a major problem. Possibly because I'm quite capable of tuning ads out, and don't necessarily feel an incredible urge to buy something (or vote for someone) based on any ads I might pay attention to.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
They will get to a point where they reap huge profits from zone charges, tracking and reciprocal advertising, far before they will get to a point of saving lives. I doubt they will feel any need to continue advancing after that happens. The vehicles might come back with a new dent and some blood on them occasionally, but as long as they can make money at it they'll do it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I never understood, turds, like you!
Those "worst drivers" lose their licenses sooner or later. Same should happen with such lousy "self-driving cars", until they prove they can do better in all conditions. Not thinking average 50% here either, but at least 95 percentile and better!
My partner is from California and friends have already sent her footage of them sitting in the driver seat of a self driving vehicle which took someone home.
I believe it was an uber and I think they needed to sign up in order to do this, but it's definitely occurring. The person who was in the driver seat is a simple friend of my girl, not uber staff or any kind of technician, trainer, vehicle monitor, just a regular passenger. This was about 3 or 4 weeks ago.
In the case of Tesla "autopilot" miles (which isn't "self driving"), one needs to consider the driver and vehicle demographics.
The cost of a Tesla eliminates a huge number of the riskiest drivers - such as young males and old folks. Mostly drivers of Teslas are middle age wealthy folks -- and many of them are tech oriented (telling since some insurance companies give a discount to engineers since they seem to be safer drivers). Few of them are in the "Here, hold my beer while I show you how to do a four wheel drift around the corner of 1st and Main St" demographics.
As well, fatality numbers for autopilot miles need to be adjusted to take into account the safety and survivablity features of the base car independent of autopilot. Teslas have the modern crash prevention features (such as ESC) and crash survival capabilities (such as side air bags) that many older cars on the road don't have. As well, Teslas seem have good crash surviablity.
And, of course, "autopilot" isn't widely used in some of the more dangerous scenarios (black ice, snow, roads with poor lane markings, etc).
Why is there an "insightful" mod and why isn't it "-1"? If I wanted insight, I wouldn't be reading
Maybe the government should just order all cars on the road to be stopped every time there's a death in a car accident.
Oh wait, that'll make cars completely useless since no one can drive them.
On the flip side, a decent percentage of people drive them because they like powerful cars. Some like powerful cars for safety reasons, but others like powerful cars because they like to drive like a bat out of you-know-where. So you shouldn't necessarily assume that the cost of the car makes people better drivers. :-)
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Ha! You Fell Victim to one of the Classic Blunders, the most famous of which is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," but only sightly less well known is this: "Never assume that the worst drivers are the same people from one day to the next!"
To be fair, the drunk drivers tend to be consistent night after night, but taking away their licenses doesn't usually keep them from driving drunk, from what I've seen, making that a fairly ineffectual approach at improving road safety.
The bigger problem problem with your assumption, though, is that anybody can drive while fatigued, and probably every driver does so once in a while. Fatigued drivers represent a continually shifting subset of the driving population. The people who are tired one day probably won't be tired on their next trip. Instead, it will be someone entirely different.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Cars can do that*
*With the following assumptions: someone handles filling up the gas, all lane markers are properly painted, road is clear of obstacles, weather is perfect, GPS tracking is never lost, no construction zones, no emergency vehicles need to pass, etc...
We created line following lego robots which were smart enough to not run into each other in one of my into to programming classes in college. Not intro the AI or robotics 101, but into to programming. Getting to a 70% effective autonomous car is near trivially easy. Everything else is extremely difficult. Current companies have only shown themselves to be around 72% of the way there (60% if you include Uber and Tesla driving directly into things they should be seeing).
When will they allow drivers in passengerless cars?
True, but what's stopping another company to rush another poorly developed prototype onto public roads? Even more, how do you differentiate between a poorly developed prototype and a working production-grade system? Where do you draw the line?
The Arizona crash should be a call for authorities to create metrics of maturity for a self driving car program. They can be millions of miles driven on urban roads, number of incidents, or time between safety-related disconnects of the system. Build upon what Waymo and Cruise has discovered. Maybe Waymo doesn't need them anymore, its systems are mature enough, but other wannabe companies should pass the same gates.
Let this be our mantra: as the average amount of miles driven by human drivers decreases, the total number of people killed by autonomous vehicles will continue to increase. At some point all of these arguments about the quality of autonomous cars will start to become an argument for acceptable casualties, and we will throw up our arms in powerless compliance. Nobody expects a perfect robot car, do they?
In just a few generations that will have solved itself. We will have pedestrians that will have such alertness that they 'feel' the silent cars coming and the fast reflexes to jump aside while crossing the road.
Give it 50 to 60 generations and it has solved itself.
W00t Darwinism!
(The explanation for the creationists is even easier. God wanted them to die, because they had impure thoughts.)
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
The Waymo cars don't crash. It's only the Uber cars.
What hasn't been identified but will affect you is not "ads" but the pricing mechanisms. All this data will allow companies to price trips not based on cost but based on ability to pay, the ability to manipulate you, and various other factors.
In the far future you may have to pay more because you are NOT susceptible to ads and now the ad community can track that. The car company can't sell you the taco bell on the way to the museum and so your fare needs to be higher to make up for that. It will be hard for small payers to offer competition in this space like they can now.
Humans drive 3.22 trillion miles a year in the US. In those 3.22 trillion miles, 32,000 people die.
Yes, only 32,000 people per year die in automobile accidents, if you cherry pick the year (2011) with the lowest death toll since 1949, and round down. The numbers would still be better if you had used the 37,461 deaths in 2016 or even the (estimated) 40,100 for 2017. So why make it look like you're trying to shade the truth? Especially when the NHTSA number for miles driven in 2011 was 2.95 trillion miles. 3.22 was the estimate for 2016 or 2017?
Why is it that Automated Vehicle proponents tell us that Tesla's Autopilot isn't automated driving when the topic is its failures, yet they count its miles in "Automated miles" when the topic is how good automated driving is?
..the UTTER HORROR, of haivng the vehicle you're a 'passenger' in, as it mows down a pedestrian, and you have no way whatsoever to MAKE IT STOP.
DO NOT WANT!!!
The media should stop saying that this was a death caused by self-driving cars.
You're CLEARLY and OBJECTIVELY wrong, and I'm sick and fucking tired of you 'autonomous car' fanbois turning a blind eye to shitty 'technology' that will NEVER be up to the task. How many have to DIE HORRIBLY before you get your head out of the sand? Self-driving cars MUST HAVE human-level AI, be self-aware, because otherwise they can't be 'aware' of human beings in any meaningful way; why can't you see that!? 'Pseudo-intelligence' will NEVER be any good at this human-level activity. EVER.
"California Police Ticket Autonomous Car, Containing No Passengers, No Driver, No Monitor, No People, No Pets, No Groceries, and Having No Reason To Be On the Road. Also It Was In the Priority Lane And the Left Turn Signal Was Blinking For At Least 50 Miles."
Yes, that will be the /. title, because why not?
I've driven in CA, it doesn't seem like anyone's behind the wheel anyways...
In the UK we have the highway code. It'd serve as a good test to test the cars response to every bit of the highway code, it certainly wouldn't be a short test and it'd need to have a detailed test track and multiple participants, but I don't think anything less would suffice.
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