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Comment by dabeeeenster | Hacker News Reader

Amazing how Nissan have managed to get their car to emulate 99% of London drivers.

The Dutch rule is basically, that the driver is liable if an accident happens, even if it's the cyclist's fault (unless you can prove that the cyclist deliberately caused the accident).

So there are not a lot of rules on what you should do. And this kind of passing is required often enough on narrow streets, that usually cars don't swerve if there is more space.

So that means that those self driving cars have to have a per country profile on how to behave. So if you have to do that for every country in the EU then that will make developing self-driving cars quite a bit more expensive than the current system where you have a common market.

Self-driving cars should try to avoid collisions regardless of fault and should not adjust that behavior based on who the local liability laws will hold responsible.

As far as traffic regulations specifying behavior go, yes, they differ from country to country and self-driving cars do need to be able to follow them. That doesn't necessarily mean the cars need to learn to follow a bunch of weird rules; it may be more of a lobbying problem. "Standardize your rules so we can offer self-driving cars that are X times safer than human drivers in your country" isn't a terribly hard sell.

>Self-driving cars should try to avoid collisions regardless of fault and should not adjust that behavior based on who the local liability laws will hold responsible.

I would love to watch a show called "Driverless cars in India".

The Russia edition of that show would be quite entertaining as well.

That depends. The goal of local drivers is to go from A to B in reasonable time. If extreme risk deduction interferes that, people will revolt.

Some of the rules in some countries regarding overtaking cyclists would create a complete mess in the Netherlands. Of course, in theory you could have one set of rules self driving cars and another for human drivers.

I'm very curious if you can have a significant percentage of self driving cars in a city center without causing complete gridlock. My guess is that once cyclists and pedestrian realize how careful self driving cars are, they will just take priority and bring all car traffic to a halt.

> Self-driving cars should try to avoid collisions regardless of fault and should not adjust that behavior based on who the local liability laws will hold responsible.

In this specific case the issue was that the car didn't handle what seems like an unremarkable case where the bicycle was moving normally.

That said, driverless technology that can't handle special cases like bicycles doing something unexpected is not ready for prime time. After reading Ghosn's comments it makes me wonder how he would feel about a kid running out into the street after a ball.

well self driving cars will likely be mandated to carry the equivalent of dash cams if not black boxes which record everything over a hopefully short cycle (like last 15 minutes surrounding an incident with space to save a few)

That's really one of the big problems with having AI in general learning from us, isn't it? That it would learn all of our flaws and biases as well.

That would be an almost benign problem to have.

The real real big problem is that AI will learn to exploit all our flaws and biases.

AI will evolve to be supernaturally intelligent and supernaturally psychopathic at the same time.

Like London cyclists are any better they are much worse than cars.

The consequences are far worse for the cyclist if they actually collide though.

Tell that to the pedestrians cyclists constantly hit.

Red light isn't a suggestion, the side walk isn't s bike lane and the cross walk isn't there for you to make a u turn.

> constantly hit

Do you have any references for this?

I took a Boris bike through London once and the cyclists were definitely the scariest things on the road for me. (There was a very nice red bus driver though.)

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