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.

Comments

Re:what's the plan for moral choice?

[Mr D from 63]

Reliability will become ever more important as full AD becomes standard and humans' driving skills deteriorate (or never develop)

Holy shit ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Baidu, a Chinese internet-search giant, reported a case in which driver had to take over because of a faulty steering maneuver by the robot car; several cases of âoemisclassifiedâ traffic lights; a failure to yield for cross traffic; delayed braking behind a car that cut quickly in front; drifting out of a lane; and delayed perception of a pedestrian walking into the street.

Automotive supplier Delphi noted that its autonomous system âoeencountered difficulty identifying a particular traffic light,â and also said a GPS problem meant a vehicle didnâ(TM)t know where it was. Delphiâ(TM)s system also had issues with unexpected - usually illegal - behavior by other drivers, the company said in its report to the DMV.

Drive.ai - which makes artificial intelligence software for self-driving vehicles - cited reasons for disengagement that included the swerving of a vehicle within a lane and "jerky or uncomfortable braking." The firm also noted a "localization error" that meant a vehicle was uncertain of its location, and a discrepancy in data from different sensors on a vehicle.

Holy shit, they've just described, you know ... driving.

This shit is what happens pretty much daily, and for which the act of driving requires you to have a high degree of situational awareness.

Just this morning as I was driving into work, some clown turning off a street into the road I was driving on ... he hesitated, then apparently said "fuck it" and went anyway. Unfortunately he didn't seem to be aware enough or intelligent enough to have noticed me. The end result was I had to pretty much do a panic stop behind some idiot who unsafely pulled out into oncoming traffic, and was pretty much suddenly in front of me and driving at half my speed (which was the posted limit).

Why the hell are these companies acting like they have self-driving cars when they clearly can't handle driving in the real world.

This shit is never going to work if it can't handle random, illegal, and stupid behaviour from the humans on the road. And if they think the world is going to replace all cars with autonomous vehicles, then clearly they expect the rest of us to pay for that future.

This is just hubris from the tech industry who are pretending they're closer to solutions that work in the real world than they really are. The fact of the matter is, we're not all going to run out and buy new cars to allow this awesome future as envisioned by corporations to actually ever happen.

Sorry, but all of the stuff in the above quote is pretty much mandatory for driving a car.

Moral choice and the free market

[OrangeTide]

A self-driving car's software has the priority to minimize litigation of its creating company.

start with freeway point to points

[smoothnorman]

Seldom (if ever) is there the rather obvious suggestion to limit autonomous vehicles to simple point to point 'highway' trips; but that's exactly where and how it should be done for the foreseeable future, if it happens at all. That is, the (literally) lethal mistake is to introduce autonomous vehicles into the complex and chaotic world of city driving. The next time you drive in the city consider how many of your decisions are predicated on understanding subtleties (some might occasion "stupidities") of human nature: "Is that guy looking at the person as they're talking on the corner? If so, they aren't as likely to start across the street" "Is that a child's toy which just bumped a bit into the road (to be chased by a child) or just a blown leaf?" "OK ...four way stop: it's that guys turn, but, he's got a cell phone in his hand he's consulting" ...etc. So, start out with truck loads from freeway exit 113 to 114, then if that works, exit 117...

Re:But

[OrangeTide]

Humans are unlikely to improve at driving. Software can potentially be improved on. That's not the same as saying today's software is safer than a human though.

Re:what's the plan for moral choice?

[The Grim Reefer]

so if I'm a self driving car with no backup operator, do I prioritize the safety of my passengers? if I have to run down 5 people to keep my rider safe, do I do that?

The car should run over the 5 pedestrians, then the litter of puppies across the street and finally drive off of a bridge. Bonus points if the horn sounds like a maniacal laugh or plays Dixie.

what if I have to do the whole run over your mother / a baby / a nun or run over a bunch of assholes? how are they ever going to solve for this, because whatever it chooses will be wrong

Run over my mother, sideswipe the baby so it goes airborne into a dumpster, and back over the 5 assholes. Preferably spinning the tires on their dismembered corpses. The nun is difficult. I'm not sure if it will piss off more people to hit the nun, or avoid her after all of the other carnage.

You're right, some situations are difficult. Oh wait, avoid the nun and run a bus full of orphans off of a cliff. That will probably piss the nun off to. Problem solved.

Chip off the old block

[Drunkulus]

So the self driving cars act just like an inexperienced millennial who can't drive a stick or read a map, and texts constantly?

Direct link to DMV reports

[Anonymous Coward]

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/testing

Re:what's the plan for moral choice?

[fluffernutter]

Trust me, the car is perfectly capable of seeing options you as a driver cannot

That's the opposite of what the problem is. The backing up truck in Vegas, the woman cyclist, the concrete barrier... why can they NOT see things that people can clearly see? Don't use the excuse that *sometimes* people don't see them either; because people can be distracted, and these cars aren't supposed to be.

Sounds like they have the same problems I have

[RhettLivingston]

There are times that they can't see the faded lines in the road or the stop lights? Well, yeh. I agree. Same here. And I don't consider that safe either. There are many different inherently unsafe intersections near me. The only difference is that the self-driving vehicle can avoid taking the chance by turning it over to me to take the chance. I honestly don't know if it would be better if it kept control and tried it than handing control to me. But, the buck is passed.

The biggest problem that autonomous vehicles have to overcome is that they expose the faults in a very bad system through extensive data collection. Exposing faults in something people depend on is never an easy road. The messenger often becomes the victim.

Like most who have lived more than half a century, I've been in a number of accidents including:

• During a light drizzling rain, an oncoming vehicle veered into my lane on a sharp turn (cutting the corner). I tried to turn even sharper to run into a yard and avoid the vehicle. My car broke loose and slid semi-sideways into the oncoming vehicle's driver side door. Contact was in my lane. I would not expect an autonomous vehicle to avoid this accident though if the other vehicle with a teenage driver (first year of driving) headed to school had been one of the new self-driving ones, I am confident it would have been avoided.
• I was stopped in a two-lane highway with blinker on awaiting the passage of oncoming traffic before making a left turn. A vehicle rear ended my vehicle at full highway speed. The driver was a railroad engineer driving five hours to his home after having driven his train route. The collision woke him up. I am pretty sure that if he had been in a self-driving vehicle, that accident would have been avoided.
• While driving into the sun through a parking lot, I drove down a lane that was not a "thru" lane. The only reason it wasn't was because eight inch high concrete stops had been placed across the lane to prevent thru traffic. I suspect a self-driving vehicle would have detected the barriers across the road and that single car accident would have been avoided. If it didn't, it would do no worse than what I did.
• While driving through a construction zone at night on a two-lane road with the lanes separated by barrels, a driver from the opposing lanes suddenly attempted an illegal U-turn between the barrels in front of me. I barely had time to even move my foot from the gas to the brake much less stop before swiping across the drivers front end at about 40 mph. Both vehicles were totaled and the mark on my arm from the airbag deployment appears permanent. It is possible that if I had been in a self-driving vehicle that it might have seen her insane turn before I did, but I doubt it. On the other hand, if the distraught grandmother on the way to see her grandchild in the hospital who suddenly realized she had taken the wrong turn off the interstate had been in a self-driving vehicle, she likely would not have even been on that road, much less making an illegal turn.

Driving is dangerous. Four out of four of the accidents above were because of driving while impaired in some fashion - a teenager unprepared to drive in rain, driving while tired, blinded by the sun while driving (should have stopped or greatly slowed), and driving while distraught. And there are numerous other incidents that didn't rise to the level that I would term an accident that would be reported by these self-driving vehicle regulations.

Road maintenance is also atrocious in this country and human drivers die because of it every day. Human drivers are also prone to complain that others shouldn't drive while impaired and then make exceptions for their own needs.

Maybe we should start this conversion by just shining a very bright light on reality - require every new car to be equipped with the sensors to record the reality and disclose every bit of it to the DMV - every solid line crossed, every rolling stop, every time the light is red and we're stil

Re:what's the plan for moral choice?

[fluffernutter]

Well, you can blame the autonomous vehicle company for not using hardware that will give the software enough data to process so that it results in a safe driver. That is the equivalence of allowing grandma to drive after she can no longer see properly from cataracts. You can also blame the company for not correctly interpreting the data from the hardware, which is the equivalent of allowing grandma to drive after she develops serious Alzheimer's.

It would be one thing if these companies didn't already know their cars have certain flaws. But the fact is, they know they have vast weaknesses and put them out on the road anyway.

Re:what's the plan for moral choice?

[mjwx]

I'm sorry but autonomous cars should never need a connection to an Active Directory server.

How else will cars know who is and isn't an authorised user? Are you honestly suggesting we use OpenLDAP instead... what's next, Sendmail to replace the CANBUS?