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Imagine a world where theres no self-driving cars and that same drunk guy on that some night hops in to the car and tries to drive home.

Edit: I would gladly accept more failure in uncommon edge cases if it means reduced failure in normal operation (ie: drunk guy slams in to a house at 1 AM on a clear calm night)

Imagine a world where the breathalyzer tech we have had for a couple of decades now was installed into cars and simply prevented drunk people from driving.

This is coming; I've seen mentions of a system with passive alcohol detection (just from the air inside the car) plus active "blow in tube" test if the passive test triggers that will start rolling out to cars soon.

But it seems if stopping drunk drivers was really a major concern, we would have done this years ago.

That will just spurn a small industry with hobos camping near bars, ready to blow for ten bucks (no pun intended).

Hobos aren't generally someone you'd want to rely on for their sobriety.

They wait for a couple of ten buck payoffs before retiring for the day. Or the union has a designated blower for the day.

I wonder how unique the chemical makeup of an individual's breath is

Cars already have sensors that can tell if you're sitting in your seat or not. So avoiding this is just a matter of putting the tube you blow into in such a position that it's almost impossible for someone not sitting in the driver's seat to blow into it; also you could require that the passenger seat is empty and both front doors are closed.

Remember, the breathalyzer is only a backup in the situation where the car has detected alcohol vapors in the air, and is wanting to confirm that the driver is not the one who has been drinking. So it's not something you do every day, ergo it can be a bit of a hassle.

Until cars are reliably at the highest level of replacing humans along the entire way of any drive (I.e cars don't have drivers seats) then obviously it must be a criminal offense to be the "driver" while drunk, even if the driver was hoping to sleep all the way home. What has happened here is really better: the drunk guy is asleep in a stopped car, rather than asleep in a car that just hit another car.

Interestingly, he can still be arrested for DWI. This would be an interesting case, though, because the mens rea is clearly not present; the human intended to be conveyed by a capable transportation system, and didn't intend or attempt to control a vehicle while in motion. I look forward to the result of this case for legal precedent reasons.

For what it's worth DWI and its variations are usually strict liability statutes.

You can get arrested for sleeping in a car while drunk, even if you clearly intended to sleep it off overnight instead of driving home drunk. No mens rea needed.

In some states, it makes a difference if your keys are in ignition or not. Which makes me wonder how they treat push-button start cars?

Otherwise, what happens if someone (sober) is giving a ride to a passed out friend, can't wake that friend up, and ends up leaving the car (with the drunk friend still in it)? In that case, everyone involved was being responsible (no drunk driving was involved at all, actual or potential).

Simple answer from a lawyer friend of mine: don't sleep in the driver's seat.

Simpler than that; Nissan's been working on it, and it's finally been announced:

http://www.autoblog.com/2017/01/10/nissan-self-driving-cars-...

> For example, Sierhuis described a situation where a temporary construction site, something like a crew repairing a traffic light, would confuse the car. Not only would the traffic signal be missing for the AI to process, but we would also have a worker waving cars through the intersection. It's a prime, real-world example of a challenge that is basically impossible to program into software. With SAM, when a self-driving Nissan approaches a situation like this, it stops and sends a signal to a human operator. This operator, called a Mobility Manager, checks the camera feeds from the car, high-definition maps, and whatever else he can, and then plots a new route for the car to take. This information is then sent to all the other Nissan AI machines in the area so that they don't have a problem when they approach the same intersection.

Drone cars! Why isn't remote control driving progressing apace with self-driving cars?

Outsource Uber driving to lowest-wage drivers in India, Bangladesh, or Nigeria.

Latency

12 hours latency doesn't stop outsourcing the software projects, so it should be fine too.

Except that Google was able to handle construction sites, traffic cones, and people directing traffic last year. Watch Urmson's video from SXSW.[1] Google has put a lot of effort into handling unusual situations. Those cars driving on residential streets in Mountain View and Austin have accumulated data on the hard cases.

The California DMV continues to publish autonomous vehicle crash reports. The last one was in October.[2] A Google vehicle was rear-ended at 3mph when it was entering an intersection with poor visibility, detected cross-traffic, and stopped.

I'm looking forward to the 2016 self-driving disengagement reports appearing on on the California DMV site.[3] Those were due January 1, covering the year ending 1 December 2016. Then we'll have comparative info on how all the players are doing.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uj-rK8V-rik [2] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton... [3] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/disen...

I'm curious: when do you think a stage 3, 4, and 5 vehicle will be readily available on the market (specifically the United States)?

Level 3 on major freeways in about two years. (Like Tesla claimed to have, but without the "slams into cars parked at the left edge of the road" bug.) Level 4, in the form of self-driving low-speed vans in campus-type areas, has already been deployed in a few locations.

Volvo loaned a family a Level 3 car yesterday.[1]

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2017/01/09/volvo-tests-self-driving...

My personal expectation is that Level 3 could be relatively soon given that companies like Volvo are doing legitimate pilots. Maybe 10 years? But the question would be how many places they would (legally) be allowed to drive without an attentive driver and under what conditions.

It's not clear to me how much L4 buys you as a consumer product. "No driver during defined use case." If you can't go door to door in a wide range of weather conditions, what's the difference between having a non-attentive driver and no driver?

ADDED: Yes, as was written elsewhere, low-speed campus use cases make sense. But that's not what most people consider self-driving.

Level 5. Many decades.

Today, more and more, cars are slowed down and delayed in traffic due to their owner's inattention to traffic and to focus on their phones. It is as these drivers are passed out drunk and relying on all other drivers to take care of traffic.

>I'll bet that in the near future (next decade or so), there will be rising incidents of traffic being blocked due to a stopped automated car who's driver is not responsive, but the computer couldn't handle some construction or weather, and went into fail-safe mode, simply slowing down and stopping (but not pulling over due to lack of space).

Obviously "do not stop in the middle on the road" will be high on the priorities of self driving algorithms...

yeah, just tell the autonomous 4000 pound missile that stopping is a low priority.

i fear much of the enthusiasm behind self-driving cars is from people who understand neither driving, nor computer software, very well.

That feels like you're intentionally misinterpreting the suggestion. The implied solution is that a car would preferentially stop off to the side of the road, rather than the middle.

If there _is_ a valid and safe "side of the road"

There are places where it takes some skill just to comply with an officer's request for you to pull over. Not everywhere is a bunch of standardized interstates.

That's what we are saying.

Have the car GO and find a suitable area. Driving for a few more km perhaps slower and with the alarm lights flashing to find a spot to stop, will surely be safer than stopping right then and there just because you can't find a convenient place to pull out.

>yeah, just tell the autonomous 4000 pound missile that stopping is a low priority.

Lower priority than stopping then and there in the middle of the road/interstate (as suggested by parent) as opposed to a service/rest-area/shoulder/side of the road/etc...

Why would that be? Self-driving cars should want to stay on the road in all cases.

The edge of the road is soft, not well marked, contains rocks and nails and housepets. The road proper is hard, well-marked, and vehicles should want to stay there always.

Of course this will occasionally result in inconvenience for other drivers as vehicle 1 has been stationary for 25 minutes now as it applies a mandatory software service pack. But, oh well. That is THEIR problem. It's obviously maximal for MY vehicle to stay on the road at all times.

>Why would that be? Self-driving cars should want to stay on the road in all cases.

Self driving cars already know how to park and get out of the road.

The rest of the argument goes into bizarro land. Can't tell if trolling...

First, a stop vehicle in the middle on the road is a surefire way to a multi-car collision at worse, and traffic fines at best. Both of which would be avoided by any self driving algorithm not written (or approved if it's something like a neural network) by Harpo Marx.

Second, "It's obviously maximal for MY vehicle to stay on the road at all times" is not an argument, since self driving algorithms are not written and optimized for the car owners sole convenience but also for overall traffic, traffic regulations, and several other considerations besides...

It would be interesting to allow tele operations in this kind of scenario so the drunk, sleeping, underage, and disabled can benefit from self driving cars.

Our wireless communications infrastructure lacks the reliability and latency guarantees that would be necessary for remote operation.

The idea is that when there is an unexpected situation that car stops and the teleoperator would indicate the best path forward. The human would not drive like an RC car but more like a rally car navigator. This is for example mentioned in http://spectrum.ieee.org/transportation/self-driving/after-m... "Eventually, nuTonomy will transition to full autonomy with the option for teleoperation."

There's plenty of places that have no cell phone reception. I go through one on my commute, and it's not even all that rural.

That is a problem. But I do think that teleoperation will be a thing despite that.

This puts a positive spin on the culture in busier urban areas of expecting drivers in front to start very quickly at a green or else get a friendly reminder honk.

If you're going to look at your phone at a red, know the light timings or look at the transverse pedestrian crossing signal or transverse yellow light so you know how long you have.

>This puts a positive spin on the culture in busier urban areas of expecting drivers in front to start very quickly at a green or else get a friendly reminder honk

I think it puts a positive spin on itself. Traffic lights work best when the green duration is utilized to the fullest extent.

In my experience, the best use of the first second of green is to allow cross traffic to clear so that I don't get hit by someone running the red.

Let's save everybody lots of risk and just all agree not to look at our phones while we drive, even at red lights.

NVIDIA actually talks about this in their last series of talks. The car when planning the drive makes a determination of whether or not it expects driver assist and how much. Of course a drunk person could just check off the sure, I can drive for those sections and then pass out anyway.

Without a steering wheel where all user actions are made on a touch screen or by voice, would it matter that you were drunk?

If the car came to a situation that it needed human input then that human could be drunkenly slurring advice.

But I am failing to see a situation that the car wouldn't be able to figure out, but the human inside could figure out... I've been in situations where I didn't know what to do and had to wait for the emergency services to come and help.

When self driving cars are that smart the emergency services AI will just fire 30 or 40 drones towards the emergency and those will coordinate with the cars below to fix the situation.

You wouldn't even need drones, the aggregate of all the cars' sensors would be enough.

If a car has trouble, it pull over to the shoulder or right lane. This is what people (should) do, and what cars will do. Yes, it can be annoying, the question is, is it orders of magnitude MORE or LESS likely to happen in an automated car.