Slashdot Mirror
Self-Driving Cars' Shortcomings Revealed in DMV Reports (mercurynews.com)
A demand from the California DMV of eight companies testing self-driving cars has highlighted a number of areas where the technology falls short of being safe to operate with no human backup. From a report: All companies testing autonomous vehicles on the state's public roads must provide annual reports to the DMV about "disengagements" that occur when a human backup driver has to take over from the robotic system. The DMV told eight companies with testing permits to provide clarification about their reports. More than 50 companies have permits to test autonomous vehicles with backup drivers on California roads but not all of them have deployed vehicles.
It turns out that a number of the issues reported are shared across technology from different companies. Some of the problems had to do with the way the cars sense the environment around them. Others had to do with how the vehicles maneuver on the road. And some had to do with what you might expect from systems made up of networked gadgets: hardware and software failures. The disengagement reports themselves identify other problems some self-driving vehicles struggle with, for example heavy pedestrian traffic or poorly marked lanes.
It turns out that a number of the issues reported are shared across technology from different companies. Some of the problems had to do with the way the cars sense the environment around them. Others had to do with how the vehicles maneuver on the road. And some had to do with what you might expect from systems made up of networked gadgets: hardware and software failures. The disengagement reports themselves identify other problems some self-driving vehicles struggle with, for example heavy pedestrian traffic or poorly marked lanes.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testing
Humans are unlikely to improve at driving.
Which human drivers, though?
Looking at road death statistics would seem to suggest that German drivers are a lot better than American drivers, while for instance Russian drivers are a lot worse. Now it's not all due to quality of driving (but also quality of roads, law enforcement, car safety standards, etc.) and the quality of driving itself is impacted by many factors, but we can safely say for instance that drunk driving is a huge problem in Russia that contributes a lot to their death rate being higher than America's, while the far more stringent process of driver training and driver certification in Germany contributes a lot to their death rate being lower.
The companies developing self-driving cars, being either American or doing most of their testing in America, seem to take American drivers as the baseline. However, looking around the world one can conclude that American drivers could indeed improve quite a bit. Not to mention that historically, drivers have improved...most places in North America, any moron can easily get a driver's license. Even that's an improvement based on the situation several decades ago, surely it can be improved still.