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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!
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.
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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Goober (Uber) shill spotted -- the car basically didn't react at all, despite the pedestrian being visible. Video may have purposely been darkened. Hope some people go to Arpaio's vacation colony over that incident.
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?
An animal for one thing. Ever had venison through your windshield?
Also children.
Heavy objects falling from trucks.
Autonomous delivery robots... drones on wheels.
An animal for one thing. Ever had venison through your windshield?
No, but the time I saw a truck hit a deer, I totally would have seen the deer coming. He was driving too fast for conditions, because I was behind him in a vehicle which could go that fast in poor weather — he was in a 1970s pickup, I was in a 1990s Subaru — and he was too dumb to pull over and let me go by, and decided to drive too fast instead. So he was watching the road, and not the surroundings.
A car watching the side of the road would have seen it coming, too.
Also children.
That's why it's considered endangerment to let them walk around and/or play in places where there's a lot of cars driving by. I knew enough to stay out of the street before I was three years old, that PSA with the bulldozer and the cardboard cutout of the child scared the playing in the street right out of me. It's called parenting. People don't want to explain mortality to their children, so they don't explain to them that getting run over can kill them. That's the parents' fault.
Heavy objects falling from trucks.
Unless those objects are Wal-Mart shoppers, they usually don't do a lot of walking.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
Even if the video wasn't darkened that doesn't change the fact that operating a self driving car with cameras that have such poor light sensitivity should be considered criminally negligent.
Except the Goober car that hit the pedestrian did not even respond as well as an attentive human driver would have.
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.
Heavy objects falling from trucks.
One day we were driving on the highway and the pickup in front of us didn't secure the mesh ramp they had for the pickup. Went rolling end over end down the highway. My buddy swerved around, but I'm really wondering how many automated cars are ready for something like that. It's not even like the wide face was facing us. To an automated car it would have looked like the thickness of a branch.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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.
Except the Goober car that hit the pedestrian did not even respond as well as an attentive human driver would have.
Sure, that's true. But the question isn't whether it responds as well as an attentive human driver, but the average human driver. If it's at least that good, then it should be allowed — because putting it on the road now is part of the research that will make it better.
It doesn't matter whether you get killed by a human or a robot, you're dead either way and you won't have any feelings about it. But if the robot is less likely to kill you, or if letting the robot drive now makes it less likely to kill you tomorrow and it's no more likely to kill you today, then no harm has been done. I don't know that we're actually there yet, but that's the point I'm trying to make. Not whether we've reached the milestone yet, but what it actually is.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
A human driver would have likely slammed on the brake. Second of all, preservation of human life shouldn't be the only argument. QUALITY of life should also be an argument. If we mandate autonomous cars, there could be other negative consequences -- like loss of privacy due to all trips being via "rented" cars tied to a credit card and trip database.
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.
When grandpa (bless his soul) started doing those things we took him OFF the road, we didn't let him drive MORE.
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.
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.
I really think the "backup driver" who's supposed to take over in an emergency makes things less safe. It's one thing to have someone who should take over when, e.g., leaving the freeway, but taking over in an emergency is a horrible idea.
I've definitely heard of experiments where people can't maintain attention, and where there was a lapse of time before they could effectively take control. I haven't heard of *any* where it was shown to be a good idea.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
3% error is pretty irrelevant.
If we mandate autonomous cars, there could be other negative consequences -- like loss of privacy due to all trips being via "rented" cars tied to a credit card and trip database.
That ship has already sailed. Most rental companies won't rent to you without a credit card, even if you're paying cash for the rental.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
There were 4 independent sensor systems in that car (LiDAR, radar, camera, 'safety driver'). NONE of them registered the appearance of a human sized target walking in a straight line in time to apply the brakes before the collision. OK the safety driver was playing on their phone, but the three automatic systems failed. The obfuscated video supplied by Uber may have hoodwinked the general populace but they have not revealed the LiDAR or radar 'footage', neither of which rely on ambient light.
But not all cars are rental cars at present.
Call me old fashioned (and it wouldn't be the first time) but I prefer to be carless, thank you.
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.
But not all cars are rental cars at present.
No, but people are giving up vehicle ownership voluntarily in many cases, and I'm afraid that mandatory V2V beacons are a foregone conclusion — the only question is how long before they get here, and how much resistance the public actually puts up. My guess is, not very much.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
Nope. Traffic laws invariably define situations in which that is not true, such as pedestrians stepping out in front of a car that is too close to stop. And most states also say that the pedestrian no longer has the right of way after the pedestrian has finished crossing your lane.
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.
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.
I really think the "backup driver" who's supposed to take over in an emergency makes things less safe. It's one thing to have someone who should take over when, e.g., leaving the freeway, but taking over in an emergency is a horrible idea.
I've definitely heard of experiments where people can't maintain attention, and where there was a lapse of time before they could effectively take control. I haven't heard of *any* where it was shown to be a good idea.
Other than those profiting from pushing autonomous solutions to market as fast as greed will possibly allow, I haven't heard of *any* adult armed with common sense showing that this is a good idea.
Deploying it in the most populated state in the nation is merely icing on the Cake of Grand Stupidity.
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
I have no idea whether the driverless car is ready to put on the roads or not. There's some indication that it is, and other indications that it isn't. And they aren't all the same.
That said, the "emergency takeover driver" idea is worse than useless. It's not merely useless, it's even worse. People need several seconds to get up to speed in that kind of activity, and if you have that much time, it's not an emergency. Plan on needing at least 30 seconds for a take-over, or someone won't put down their crossword puzzle in time.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Autocorrect screwed up my comment, so you probably couldn't couldn't understand what I was saying. I do think transportation should be regulated. I was just saying that I am more in favor of self driving cars risking the lives of consenting passengers than I am of self driving cars risking the lives of pedestrians and other people on the road who don't get a choice in the matter.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
Well, I would of taken the 404, but I couldn't find it!
Holy shit, you're dumb. If you run over a kid your trial will be hilarious.
Hilarious? I think you should seek help. You're clearly not screwed down too tight.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I have no idea whether the driverless car is ready to put on the roads or not. There's some indication that it is, and other indications that it isn't. And they aren't all the same.
That said, the "emergency takeover driver" idea is worse than useless. It's not merely useless, it's even worse. People need several seconds to get up to speed in that kind of activity, and if you have that much time, it's not an emergency. Plan on needing at least 30 seconds for a take-over, or someone won't put down their crossword puzzle in time.
If an autonomous solution starts to malfunction causing it to start drifting off the road, it would be nice to have some kind of manual override. Perhaps you can stop assuming that every emergency that happens in an autonomous car is going to require faster-than-human reflexes to do anything to avoid disaster. The next step in driverless cars with no one behind the steering wheel is the removal of said wheel, along with the requirement to license drivers. Greed will ensure to use the excuse of "less deaths than humans" to dismiss the inevitable deaths due to malfunctions, but a loved one being killed by a software glitch caused by premature adoption will be hard to handle, especially when you'll sign any legal right away the moment you step foot into any autonomous vehicle.