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There is zero chance I'd stay awake behind the wheel of a level 2 or 3 vehicle.

You need audiobooks or podcasts. Heck, I love taking a conference call while on my commute (handsfree of course) - 80% of it is in the left lane of an interstate.

The left lane is only for passing, and if you are passing >80% of the cars on the road, you are a reckless driver.

Incorrect, the left lane is only for passing only in certain states, and mainly on roads with only 2 lanes of traffic in each direction.

>The Uniform Vehicle Code states: Upon all roadways any vehicle proceeding at less than the normal speed of traffic at the time and place and under the conditions then existing shall be driven in the right-hand lane then available for traffic ...

>All states allow drivers to use the left lane (when there is more than one in the same direction) to pass. Most states restrict use of the left lane by slow-moving traffic that is not passing. The table below describes the law in effect in each state.

http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

Nope. Not all Interstates are 4+ lanes of traffic. Many states simply require slower traffic to use the right hand lanes.

http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

> if you are passing >80% of the cars on the road, you are a reckless driver.

Or you are driving at the speed limit on a 2x2 highway used as a trucking corridor. (For example: most of I-5.)

Right. In California trucks have a lower speed limit than cars, which results in what feel like pretty dangerous situations.

The right lane is pretty much for trucks going 55.

The left lane is a combination of: * Trucks going 60-65 to pass a truck in the right lane * 'Typical' cars who are going 75ish * Fast cars who are going 80-90

So there is a huge disparity of speed in that lane -- and that disparity seems like it must be a huge factor in many highway accidents.

It always feels really dangerous. I wonder if it is safer than just having the trucks have the same speed limit as the cars.

The speed disparity can be a huge issue. Drive over the Donner Pass sometime or any major Western highway with lots of trucks and mountainous spots (i.e. most Western highways at some points) and the different speed combinations can be pretty nerve wracking to navigate.

I'm in the same boat as you here. Level 2 and 3 are unsafe for me as an individual. When I drive, actively focusing on the road and driving keeps me awake. When I'm a passenger, the lack of mental concentration plus the gentle rocking motion of a moving car knocks me out within ten minutes.

The current Tesla autopilot is obviously working well for many people, but for myself I have to wait until level 4. Anything more hands on than that is inherently unsafe because of my habits.

What kind of "CARTCHA" challenges and games might be fun to play, to prove to your car that you were paying attention to the road and traffic, yet not distract you from being ready to take over driving?

Computer vision and speech recognition could be useful for proving the driver's awake, as well as driving the car itself.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Car_numberplate_game

The challenge of driving the car manually, without any hyped autopilot.

This. There's nothing else because any other task requires diverting mental focus away from the act of constantly assessing the changing environment around your car. That by definition leads to slower reaction times.

It's the reverse for my wife. She starts driving and within minutes gets tired. She'll switch to passenger and be wide awake for hours.

I've done a few thousand miles with Tesla's Autopilot and I find it to be much easier to stay awake with it than without. Constantly making little adjustments is pretty tiring. Paying attention to the the road and other cars is enough to keep my attention. Your experience may, of course, vary.

I don't know how long your durations on the wheel are - but microsleep[1] is notoriously hard to self-diagnose, even for drivers of non-self-driving cars.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsleep

It goes along with overall fatigue, right? I feel a lot less tired after a lot of Autopilot driving than after a similar amount of non-Autopilot driving.

As for durations at the wheel, I did a Virginia to Wisconsin round-trip over the holidays, and have done other trips of similar lengths in the past. Of course, I'm not spending more than about three hours at the wheel at a time, since the car needs to charge and I have various physiological needs.

That's why these level 2 systems are supposed to verify that the driver maintains contact with the wheel. Not that you can't necessarily get around some of those restrictions, but the system is supposed to warn you if it detects you aren't paying attention and eventually it's supposed to pull the vehicle over safely so if you fall asleep it won't be dangerous.

In addition, not having to spend as much energy just keeping the car on the road may help to prevent getting tired. Then again, maybe it won't have any impact.

I avoid using even cruise control because I know I am a worse driver when it's engaged. I firmly believe I'd be a danger to myself and others for the first 30 seconds if a level 2 or 3 car had to hand control back to me.

Modulating my speed keeps me engaged with driving and I use it as the trigger to cycle through my responsibilities. I check ahead / speed, adjust throttle, check rearview mirror, check left mirror, check right mirror, repeat. When the throttle step is gone I find myself losing siutational focus very quickly. I've always thought it was because it was the only action that involved actual physical engagement, all the rest are just eye movement.

I just bought a new car that alerts when it's below 4 degrees C about the possible icy conditions, but it only does so after the car has been running for several minutes. By the time it goes off I'm already driving and I mistake it for an engine warning or other catastrophic failure. Every time. I live in Canada, of course it's icy in the winter. Toddlers could have told you that. This is an absurdly dangerous thing to have the car do, because when the beep goes off all my attention is on processing the alert, not about the pedestrian I'm about to run over. I have the same basic fear about getting control of a level 2 or 3 car. All my focus will be on why the car is handing me control, not on the actual task of driving.

The only level 3 cars that I think about to hit the road are Volvos and they are supposed to pull over and park if you're asleep when things are tricky. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asKvI8ybJ5U&feature=youtu.be...

Does Level 3 require instant attention?

I thought it allowed the car to require some parameters (such as road type or weather). If my car can handle the hours-long uninterrupted highway sections of a road trip, yet still require manual driving on city streets, that is still a huge value proposition for time & safety.

It doesn't require instant attention, no. But it's hard envision a scenario where the car needs attention at some point in the future, not particularly soon, but can't drive itself. Maybe I'm drawing the line at the wrong point, though. If a car can drive itself but may occasionally need to pull over and ask the driver to tell it which way to go, at the driver's leisure, is that level 3 or level 4? I thought 4, but I'm having trouble finding a clear answer.

Level 4: "Such a design anticipates that the driver will provide destination or navigation input, but is not expected to be available for control at any time during the trip. This includes both occupied and unoccupied vehicles." (emphasis added)

In my mind, if a level 4 vehicle is unable to reach a given valid destination without assistance, that would be considered a failure.

In reality, macro-scale rerouting around obstacles that the self-driving system does not know how to overcome is not a particular challenge, GPS systems do this easily. The definition doesn't say it has to take the most efficient route. ;)

>In reality, macro-scale rerouting around obstacles that the self-driving system does not know how to overcome is not a particular challenge, GPS systems do this easily. The definition doesn't say it has to take the most efficient route. ;)

Oh, that's going to go over really well. Say you're drunk, and want to go home in your self-driving car. However, there's a blind left turn that your car knows it can't safely navigate, so it happily routes you a 15-minute drive through back roads for a trip that should take 5. People are going to love that.

(I've heard that UPS does route planning with a system that discourages left turns, even sometimes doing three rights to avoid some dangerous lefts.)

I've heard the same thing about UPS, but the way I heard it, it's only because left turns can be so much slower. A route that leans more heavily on right turns will usually be faster overall.

my (completely uninformed) understanding was that level 3 was more like "level 4 in perfect conditions". So it would need to pull over, or warn the driver to take over if it starts raining or snowing or the road (or it's lines) is uneven or ill-defined. Or perhaps that it's 100% self driving in all conditions on a highway, but still needs manual driving for "surface roads".

Many of those scenarios would allow some time for the driver to take over, and would most likely be able to pull over if the driver can't or won't for some reason.

Let's say that the car is entering a fog or other weather condition, which it realizes is beginning to obstruct its visibility or control (e.g. snow, heavy rain, wind). After visibility or control impairment has crossed a warning threshold, but before putting safety at risk, the car can alert the driver and begin the process of handing over manual control.

I think the idea is that at Level 4, the car can drive the way humans drive. If it's unsafe for the car to drive autonomously, it's unsafe for humans, too.

The original NHTSA levels had this very clearly at level 3, but the SAE's levels seem kind of ambiguous as to whether that case would be level 3 or 4. I feel like it's more in the spirit of level 4 than level 3, though, as level 3 requires "prompt response" from the user to a request for intervention, while level 4 has the car still doing something sensible even if the user doesn't respond.

Right, it's that "prompt" which seems critical here. If there is no constraint on how long the driver can take to respond then there isn't an issue, but if there's any requirement for how quickly they need to get back in the game, it seems doomed to failure.

The politics will hopefully be solved soon. A few red states, that are anti government and pro innovation (like Arizona or something) , will make them legal, and then we will start collecting irrefutable data that they are 10 times safer.

I think you are missing a /s there ...

However, Arizona would be a beautiful place to have fully autonomous cars.

The snow bunnies make driving there a nightmare.

Maintaining safety is easier than navigation when you need to deal with all situations. Consider parking in an open field or responding to a traffic cop redirecting traffic. A car may simply stop and require a driver to respond in such situations with any real safety risks.

Wouldn't Level 3 be like Otto? (Automated, No human attention required on Highways; Human driving otherwise)

The truck would know well in advance which exit it would take and could give the driver a heads-up some minutes before they need to take the wheel.

As I understand it, level 3 could still require human intervention at unforeseen times (e.x. weather, etc).