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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.
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.
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Tesla's autopilot isn't meant to be autonomous, and Uber's technology was laughably far behind. Citing their accidents is almost as irrelevant as citing someone driving into a wall on cruise control. I don't know if self-driving cars are ready or not, but you haven't cited any relevant evidence.
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Also, why doesn't it have to to a vision test? For a self driving car, it should be able to operate on two out of three sensing mechanisms in all conditions.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
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.
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.
I've probably driven as many miles in my life as Uber has with all their cars. Probably much more, and absolutely in many more conditions than these companies would ever think of driving in. I've never driven at full speed into a pedestrian in a well lit street. I'm sure may people here could say the same. This applies to the other car companies as well. The people on Slashdot have probably driven equal to Tesla's 100 million miles in their life and none have killed themselves on a concrete divider. Humans drive 3.22 trillion miles a year. That is a very big number compared to self-driving 'experience' to date, and an important part of understanding how safe humans really are. Three deaths at this point are enough to make self driving very much more dangerous than humans when put into perspective of miles driven. Especially when you add to that perspective that self-driving companies get to pick when and where they drive. Even Autopilot only activates in conditions it deems 'safe'.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I don't think so Tim.
Self-driving is actually safer than a human with less than 5 years of driving experience. However there is a lot of missing context.
Teens who learned on a Standard transmission car, in BFN (eg, any rural area or city under 10,000) often know the roads like the back of their hands and know exactly what to be aware of, and most of their accidents are intoxication related. Not weather, animals, or speed. Most intersections are stop signs and the occasional red light, and little traffic flow. Kids in small towns know every place they can speed and get away with it.
Teens who learned on an Automatic transmission in a major city, have no spatial awareness. There are a dozen different things going on, and you often have to drive into places you've never been that may have been a half mile away from where you were comfortable. Speeding in the city is dangerous as hell.
A self-driving car will be smarter than the latter. As it has full spacial awareness, GPS and rarely has no reason to go faster than the speed limit. It will not be as smart as the rural driver, and is more likely to cause accidents because rural driving requires being aware of wild life and road conditions that city drivers have no experience with as well. Take any driver from east of the rocky mountains, and put them on a road in BC, California, Oregon, or Washington, they will slam the brakes on at every turn, they will skid off the road if there is frost or snow, they will slide into intersections.
The point here is that automated vehicles have more awareness in busy environments, but almost no awareness in rural environments, because rural driving requires skill, where city driving requires spacial awareness to get you from point A to point B. If you transplant the rural and city driver into each others environments, the rural driver will drive like a senior citizen in the city because they don't know where they are and they've never experienced multi-lane roads, freeways, advanced left-turn, etc. Where as the city driver in the rural area will likely hit the first vehicle that doesn't their turn signals.
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.
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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.