G.M. Unveils Its Driverless Cars, Aiming to Lead the Pack
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
However, I totally sympathize with him, living in Pittsburgh and driving in proximity to Uber's and a few other company's cars. There have been times when I've been following an autonomous car and it makes a turn onto a completely clear road, then suddenly slams on the brakes for no observable reason. Yes, I should be ready to handle this situation, but it's certainly not expected.
Knowing that Uber safety drivers intervene an average of about once a mile certainly makes me wary of these cars and not enjoy driving around them.
Humans employ these driving techniques not because they’re stupid, but because they’re confident that they can pull off these moves safely (even though that is sometimes not true). In the future I’d expect the software to also advance to a state where it can confidently speed and pull off risky moves.
Of course, there are other problems (bugs really) still extant that don't have an upside I can see - such as remaining stationary and letting another vehicle back into you from 20 ft away, out of "caution"; which I think is a rough description Las Vegas crash.
I don't doubt that AI that isn't ethical (say causes others to crash sometimes, but saves you ten seconds) could be create and might appeal to many, but I don't look forward to this development.
Haven't found a solution, or have found one and haven't implemented it? For example, I've been recently pondering how to resolve tailgating. How about a system like this:
Vehicles will be mandated to have distance sensors in both front and rear (some already have this for sake of back-up cameras and auto-braking), essentially a car sonar system. If your car is moving, it detects the distance between you and those in front and in back. If you are traveling too closely to the car in front of you (tailgating), your vehicle will be mandated to emit a warning buzz sound in the cabin, which intensifies in strength the smaller the gap. For someone tailgating you, perhaps a visual indication behind.
This way the closer one tailgates, the more audible (and possibly visual) feedback a driver gets. Hopefully the audio is annoying enough that most sensible tailgaters (oxymoron?) would back off.
Strengthen this with a visual indicator on the roof of the vehicle, perhaps, so that if someone is tailgating, a light on the roof turns on indicating such. Would make it trivial for police officers and traffic cams to notice. I think part of bad driving behavior is the anonymity cars today offer: with tinted glass and the feeling like you're in a safe, sound-proof cocoon, so this visual indicator may help shatter that in a good way.
Or veer out of the way of an obstacle you can't see, leaving you to either similarly veer or collide with it. IOW, do not assume you only need to account for your own reaction time; rather assume the vehicle in front of you can instantly stop moving and you must account for both your reaction time and your vehicle's stopping distance.
It takes about a 100 yards -- a full football field -- for a normal passenger car to react and come to a complete stop.
https://www.qld.gov.au/transport/safety/road-safety/driving-...
This is equivalent to 4 full seconds of following distance, which is double the typical 2-second-rule recommended by transportation governing bodies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule
If your suggestion was taken seriously, it would literally halve the carrying capacity of our highways.
Luckily, situations where the vehicle in front of you comes to an instantaneous stop are extraordinarily rare, basically requiring a head-on collision.
> The two-second rule tells a defensive driver the minimum distance needed to reduce the risk of collision under ideal driving conditions. The allotted two-seconds is a safety buffer, to allow the following driver time to respond. [emphasis mine]
> Some authorities regard two seconds as inadequate, and recommend a three-second rule. […] The United States National Safety Council suggests that a three-second rule—with increases of one second per factor of driving difficulty—is more appropriate. Factors that make driving more difficult include poor lighting conditions (dawn and dusk are the most common); inclement weather (ice, rain, snow, fog, etc.), adverse traffic mix (heavy vehicles, slow vehicles, impaired drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.), and personal condition (fatigue, sleepiness, drug-related loss of response time, distracting thoughts, etc.). For example, a fatigued driver piloting a car in rainy weather at dusk would do well to observe a six-second following distance, rather than the basic three-second gap.
I've had to veer to avoid accidents. At least three sitautions I can remember on the interstate: a semi truck tire blowout in front of me leaving large parts of the tire in my lane; a bike rack with several bikes falling off the back of a car in front of me; a truck in front of me veering around a obstacle (it appeared to be a pickup truck bed liner) I was blind to because I couldn't see beyond the truck in front of me.
I was lucky to avoid all of these because I had a parallel lane or shoulder I could escape into. When I drive now, if it's congested I leave extra following diatance. If that reduces the road capacity so be it. Compared to drivers who follow much too closely (which itself causes sudden slowdowns since they tend to over brake) or who drive in the wrong lane for their speed, I don't think I'm the person you need to worry about.
FWIW, I haven't been in an accident in over 25 years.
Your strategy to take all possible precautions regardless of large efficiency loss doesn't align with the reasonable tradeoffs that the vast majority of humans make.
On a non-congested road, there's no excuse for putting sufficient distance between you and the car in front.
If you can't see 200 yards ahead, you should not be travelling at a speed which precludes you from stopping within 200 yards.
On a single lane uncongested road, there's no excuse for putting a reasonable (at least 3 second) gap between you and the vehicle in front.
Huh? The whole context of this discussion starting from js2's comment is about exactly how far is should be, and in particular whether 2 seconds or 4 seconds (which at highway speeds is 50 yards vs. 100 yards) is more reasonable as a rule of thumb. As you can see from my link, most government safety organizations recommend 2 or 3 seconds in good weather.
It's an even more brilliant way to defend barely-working robot cars. Program them to err toward the letter of the law rather than road safety, then blame other drivers when they slam on their brakes because they mistake plastic bags for pedestrians.
Of course there are exceptions. There are any number of well-established circumstances that, if proven, place responsibility on the driver in front.
It is not legal to suddenly panic-brake to a stop, for instance, without exigent circumstances which make it necessary to do so. If a driver causes a collision by doing so they bear liability. There are any number of insurance scams that are thwarted by such exceptions.
Social responsibility be damned.
Really, when it's ego vs several tons at highway speeds it's not ego that wins. Further, 'I thought I saw something' is a blanket exception for sudden breaking.
When I'm driving, I'm constantly scanning for bad (i.e. unsafe or unpredictable) drivers in all directions. Once spotted, the choice is either to be well past them or well behind them. Usually the choice is easy.
PS: Tail gaters are creating a highly dangerous situation so slowing down without jamming the breaks is the correct response.
(To be clear, I wasn't intentionally provoking anything: in one case I hit my brakes because the car in front of me panic-stopped, in another I was in a right-turn-yield-into-another lane situation and I checked my blindspot and found that there was a car who had right-of-way, so I hit my brakes to keep from encroaching on them.)
It was a good couple of months before they took responsibility for the accident.
Pitch this line to your insurance company if you ever end up causing a rear ending. It'll be entertaining for the rest of us at least.
Doesn't matter what the car in front of you is up to or not. If you do not leave enough space to be able to handle them stopping, you are at fault. You should be utilizing defensive driving, and not depending on the driver in front of you ever acting responsibly or rationally.
If I think I see a child in the road I'm sure as hell not going to stop and wonder if I'm just imagining it before I brake.
It's not about intent, it's about behavior.
> "For purposes of insurance and policing, the driver of the car that rear-ends the other car is almost always considered to be at fault due to not leaving enough stopping distance or lack of attention." [1]
I'm glad we have drivers on the road that hope for the best in other drivers, but you need to sink this in your head today:
You should treat everyone on the road as an accident waiting to happen, and should practice defensive driving at all times in response.
Then clearly you need to get a car with better proximity detection systems. That's easily the simplest collision to detect and avoid for any automated system.
I know that sounds glib, but you need to recognize that if your ability to drive safely is so dependent on the "expected" behavior of other drivers, that maybe driving the way you are (which is to say, in the state of being a human) is the wrong way to solve the problem.
> I do believe that they likely increase the risk of minor collisions.
Pretty sure to the extent that this has been studied, exactly the opposite is true. For every "annoyance glitch" you posit, these things are saving 6-7 "loss of attention" fender benders.
Then it's a good thing I didn't.
I was replying (with a bit of humor) to the upthread posters notion that because these cars behave in a way that s/he personally finds confusing they are more dangerous (they aren't) and by extension shouldn't be on the road. And that's ridiculous. And the proof to the contrary is that exactly the kind of unsafe situation the poster was complaining about is something that automated systems can almost completely eliminate.
Legal != Safe.
That's a $22 backup camera.
I haven't seen it yet, but I don't know why somebody couldn't develop a similar kit to put on the front bumper that could warn about traffic ahead, lane drifting, etc.
A <$100 kit that can retrofit my old beater with some modern features would be money very well spent to protect a multi-thousand dollar asset, personal injury, and liability.
I believe that all manufacturers are required to build in backup cameras now. Why not require all registered vehicles to be retrofitted?
Next up, auto-braking.
>Then clearly you need to get a car with better proximity detection systems.
As it was nearly a rear-end collision but not actually a read-end collision doesn't that mean that sithadmin's current collision detection system (whatever that may be) is adequate and functioning properly?
Back then it might have been perfectly acceptable to throw a bunch of horses and cars together and risk them crashing into each other.
Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.
Your comment is cheeky and annoyingly inapplicable.
There's a tipping point where only people who want to drive will still do so which will likely make the insurance costs for those drivers very expensive because they're driving among automated vehicles which increases consequences of bad driving. (Fully automated, machines can talk to each other to avoid collisions).
This increased cost of insurance will encourage more people to switch to automated which will further encourage switching.
That tipping point is probably a relatively small percentage before it starts snowballing. All it takes is to get to a point where automated drivers are safer enough than driver-based that they can be insured significantly cheaper.
It won't take long after 95%+ of people are automated with the remaining 5% causing 90%+ of accidents for manual driving to be banned or shunned as a socially unacceptable risk like smoking.
I predict this will happen within 30 years.
Or very cheap because the people who self select to drive will be the people who care enough about driving to not do things like text and drive and when they do slip up the machines around them will prevent it from causing problems.
>shunned as a socially unacceptable risk like smoking.
Among the middle and upper class in Bubble Valley maybe. Everywhere else it's more of a "you do you" thing.
That is wildly overstating the complexity here. A teenager can learn to drive and pass their test with zero prior experience and maybe 10 hours of practice. "Altering" that intuition to account for the quite a bit simpler behavior of automated cars isn't going to be any harder.
This is just ludditism. The simple truth is that automated cars drive more safely, with fewer mistakes and much less velocity changing (i.e. lane switches, passing attempts, "oops" late braking, missed exit swerves...). They are easier to predict and understand, not harder.
Simple behavior is often more predictable, but not always. And it's predictability that matters.
> The simple truth is that automated cars drive more safely, with fewer mistakes and much less velocity changing (i.e. lane switches, passing attempts, "oops" late braking, missed exit swerves...).
> "oops" late braking
I'm not 100% sure what you mean here, so I'll split apart "oops" and "late".
A self-driving car might be less likely to brake late.
But everything I've heard says that a self-driving car is far more likely to "oops" in the form of sudden hard braking. Are you disagreeing? Can you back it up?
> Today it should be unacceptable to throw automated cars in with human drivers and put the onus on the humans to alter their innate understanding of 100 years of traffic flow.
No one who drove a car in 1917 is still driving today, and horse behavior had far more than 100 years to become innately understood.
But I think that it's wrong to assume that our modern attitude towards risk is 'advanced'. It's different, for sure. Thousands of people were likely killed or suffered as a result of automobiles mixing with horses. Today, 1.25 million people die annually as a result of automobile accidents - that's more than one person every 30 seconds. And many people also died as a result of taking risks while developing air travel, which is now one of the safest ways to travel. An attitude towards risk which suggests that equivalent risks are unacceptable would not have resulted in the billions of lives that have been improved by and saved by advancements in transportation. The modern economy is completely dependent on automotive transportation, and the world is unimaginably improved because we have cars instead of horses.
If equivalent progress would be made 100 years from now at the cost of thousands of lives lost due to adding automated cars to our existing roads and traffic flows, how could you possibly argue that we should not take this risk?
https://www.autoevolution.com/news/road-traffic-history-befo...
[1] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/distracted_driving/in...
The car will escalate to an operator, the operator will call the police.
If people in the US want to go down that road, it can become standard here too.
Uhh, remind me not to be on a sidewalk near you...
We should not pretend robots are people under any circumstances. If the robot needs me to move for it to continue on, then it better decide to wait.
Maybe you think it should call in a robo cop;)
This should be obvious, but I'll be more verbose, my original comment was in ref to robots with wheels, possessing possibly >MJ of KE, recording their surroundings and uploading it in real time to whatever the skynet equiv is at the time. It's an awful idea, and you are living in a bubble if you think the general population will accept it in the US. Sure, it will happen in more tightly controlled societies.
And there's no need for it to be constantly uploading video to report a lane blockage. Heck, it doesn't need to upload any video to report a lane blockage.
As far as you being in the way: roads are not specifically for humans. A robo car has plenty of right to be there. If you wouldn't stand in the way of a taxi, you shouldn't stand in the way of a robo car.
And there is is. Robots having rights too. As if they are sentient. Next those that don't anthropomorphize machines will be labeled roboist.
Machines are tools. _For_ humans. Nothing more. It's like saying a hammer has rights because I use it.
Making it a autonomous hammer does not change that, in fact it makes it much more important to not pretend it's sentient.
The robo car has no rights, but the person that owns the robo car has roughly the same right to make use of the road whether or not they happen to be seated inside.
Is that wording satisfactory?
Edit: And I mean, it's not because I'm giving robots special treatment. It's colloquial english. I'd say a potted plant has "the right" to be somewhere too.
If you don't mean "right" than don't use that word. As is you have redefined it to be practically meaningless.
I'm not convinced you did re-define it. Your edit makes it more clear:
"it's not because I'm giving robots special treatment"
Yes, you really are. You are arguing that since it's owned by someone it has "plenty of right" to use the road. That's wrong. Par with humans is as special as treatment gets.
F(r) = -F(h)
ma(r) = -ma(h)
a(r) = -a(h)
I mean... oops. Sorry for the hammer malfunction. We sent out a patch and fired someone though.
Admit it, the end solution is to just remove humans from having direct control over their KE and direction? Right? Programmers are always smarter aren't we?
I often wonder if the pre-programmed car proponents realize what side they are on in the war on general purpose computing.
If you so desire, I won't use it, sure.
> A person wielding a hammer is fundamentally different than a pre-programmed hammer some human unleashed on it's own. I consider the latter a serious threat.
> Which a is more important? Should we treat them even remotely the same when one a ends a life and the other a causes a financial loss?
It's more complicated than that. You can drive a car remotely, and you can have a robocar with a human in it.
A car with a human in it deserves more protection, but there's no reason it has to have priority toward getting to use lanes. A car en route to pick up a human might as well have the same priority as one delivering a human.
Whether a car is being controlled by computer or human being shouldn't matter at all. Whether it's carrying a human should matter in some ways but not in others. One case where it shouldn't matter is blocking it; neither should be blocked.
There is human-equivalent software? That's astonishing. Where can I find it? Does it run on ARM?
Edit: Bummer. I called Denso, they were adamant that their human-level code v3.11 is a trade secret.
"A car with a human in it deserves more protection"
We agree. _please_ explain how to accomplish that.
Remember, KE is relative, therefore velocity and mass limits for the pre-programmed machine are not relevant.
Clearly my empty pre-programmed human carrying drone should enjoy the same lanes as a loaded 777. Lets set aside the distraction about remote control which totally ignores the "skin in the physics game" which transportation of life requires.
Did I imply that? I don't see how that's relevant.
> We agree. _please_ explain how to accomplish that.
If you agree with me then why do I have to explain anything?
You're being confusing with all your talk of kinetic energy. Are you trying to imply that robocars inherently make the roads more dangerous? I don't think that's true at all. As an extreme example, even with today's tech you could flood the roads with 20mph robocars and make things safer overall.
> Clearly my empty pre-programmed human carrying drone should enjoy the same lanes as a loaded 777. Lets set aside the distraction about remote control which totally ignores the "skin in the physics game" which transportation of life requires.
If you want to pay the same airport fees, go for it. Seems fair to me.
If you're worried about congestion and road funding when it comes to cars then limit priority to one robocar per person. But when I have exactly one car, my ability to use the roads to drive it to the store shouldn't depend on whether my butt is inside of it.
Why would "skin in the game" be necessary? A taxi with a driver inside can act exactly the same as a taxi without a driver inside.
"A taxi with a driver inside can act exactly the same as a taxi without a driver inside."
Again, where is this software that enables the pre-programmed taxi to "act exactly the same"?
I assume you are making an actual argument, not "it can drive in a line and stop at a stop sign".
Tightly restricted societies that put "safety" over "freedom" will just end up banning non-elite direct human control of KE>nJ. The repercussions of that mistake have ugly ends.
And you could remote control a car today if you wanted to. Nobody inside in that case.
Well, they'll need something to do when speed traps become useless and there are far fewer motor vehicle accidents.
How is this possible? I think you may be driving too close to cars.
The interesting thing for me at various demos has been the car/pedestrian relationship thing. Many humans won't slow for pedestrians unless they are clearly coming off the sidewalk and into the traffic lane, and even then some of them won't slow if they feel like they will be past them before the pedestrian would intersect with their car. Robo cars on the other hand immediately slow down when their algorithms suggest that the human might be about to cross the street.
Because of this, another human driver won't expect the car ahead to slow suddenly because of the loitering pedestrian (expected behavior of another human driver) and so will be "surprised" by the braking of the car in front of them. There will be a moment of cognitive dissonance while the human is trying to normalize their perception that slowing down is not 'normal' and the fact that the car ahead is now rapidly approaching their front bumper. At which point the impending collision overrides the dissonance with a self preservation reaction to brake hard and stop.
Have driven plenty in big cities and small towns. You should always leave enough space in front of you in case somebody suddenly stops.How much space you leave in front of you depends on how fast you are going. At least that was drilled to me by more experienced drivers. I think it was even part of the DMV exam. I have not driven in San Francisco. How bad is it? Do they drive bumper to bumper?
Fortunately, when I was in San Francisco, I was on vacation and therefore content to simply get to my destination a little later, taking back roads and continuously rebuilding the space in front of me, avoiding rush hour like the plague - but wow, those automated cars are getting a stress test. I just hope they're not programmed to drive like the Californians building them!
In city traffic of any appreciable density the type of following distance that you can discuss on the internet without getting flak from the holier than thou types will quickly fill itself with cars pulling off of side streets or merging in front of you.
"Your safe following distance is my opportunity." -Jeff Bezos
People who think - I"m more important than you, I don't care if I kill you, as long as you don't inconvenience you.
The law (and insurance companies) are pretty clear on this (at least in Australia) - if you rear end somebody, it's nearly always your fault, for being silly enough and not leaving enough gap.
They have educational campaigns on leaving enough gap (it's meant to be 3 seconds). Things happen, and people have to emergency stop.
It's taught to every driver.
I think eventually you'll get into a steady state solution where you'll be limited to 20mph on a 65mph freeway because that's all the room you'll be given - if you follow the rule of law exactly.
Instead, most bay area drivers keep about 40-70ft between cars when going 70mph. Juuuust enough to react in time to an emergency stop. It's a little silly but it's the only way you won't get cut off constantly. Only other way to not get cut off is to go quite slow and be behind traffic speeds.
So based on this you give us your throw-away "3 second gap" comment, helpfully telling us that this is the law and something something emergency stop etc drive safe?
With an average speed of less than 10mph, and a very dense city, your normal traffic "rules" don't apply here. Don't even pretend you can understand how things are here without experiencing them.
This is trivially true! Otherwise cars would not be allowed on public roads.
When it comes to cars, it's always about tradeoffs and acceptable risk.
FTFY
I see this all the time. I'd like to point out that this is illegal driver behavior. You can be ticked for it. It is also very dangerous for pedestrians, since it encourages people to cut the tolerances closer and closer. I've had people nearly run over my feet doing this.
Good thing is, humans are good at the adaptation bit.
I have never come close to rear-ending anyone... But that may be because I keep a reasonable following distance from the car in front of me.
Tailgating is what adds danger to our roadways.
https://www.wired.com/story/ride-general-motors-self-driving...
https://i.imgur.com/TFBOnG1.png
Hopefully we can move to 100% autonomous cars, and then crank up the speed because they are safer, have better reaction times, and are predictable.
Edit: oh it's for pedestrians, not drivers.
Sounds good to me!
That's the half-lie you trot out at the beginning of a rand that ends with "think of the children"
The generalized version is "don't go too much faster or slower than the majority of drivers around you"
The one person doing 55 in a 60 (or ever 60) where everyone goes 80 may reduce their own legal liability if things go bad but they're also greatly increasing the likelihood that things go bad.
I really hope there was an implied /s that I missed.
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2013/02/20/the-origins-of-hollan...
People as a group might not make great decisions the first time around but speaking society figures it out eventually. Usually the group that's promoting education and telling people to draw their own conclusions is the one that's right in the long term.
Your argument is an excuse irresponsible drivers use to justify being reckless and endangering others.
Safety aside, you couldn't expect people to consistently drive over the speed limit due to the constant speeding fines and licence loss alone. Speed cameras don't care if you were "going with the traffic".
I'm not sure why it's always pushed as a near unattainable problem to have cars react in a human-ish way in situations as these.
All it needs is machine learning of thousands of situations of purely human drivers or watching other cars around driverless ones, and adapting the models to be able to apply them in particular situations. Such as a 4-way stop or someone rolling through a stop-sign.
It seems this obsession with defaulting to what the idealistic but unrealistic safety-first situation is (as say, designed by idealistic traffic engineering and law enforcement) vs focusing on learning to drive like humans with the least amount of errors, where rules are more flexible and risk is evaluated without much loss of safety.
We live in a very tightly controlled rules based society on paper, which seems like a major roadblock these systems have to confront, as they seem to pretend real safety is following these existing rules exactly. Yet it sounds like it would be far better if it broke the rules about 10-20% of the time... like most humans do for the sake of efficiency and merely adapting to the situation rationally.
We should be giving the machines as much, or more, leway as humans, much like how we hardly give jay-walking or going 10km/hr over the speed limit a second thought - but applied to a much larger group of compromises.
This may be a bit of my own libertarian bias that I have, a worldview where chaos is okay, and encouraged, as long as no one gets hurt (to a reasonable degree). But the actual problem sounds to me that the traffic rules aren't well adapted to machines yet, which tend to take them far more literally than humans, rather this idea being pushed that the machines are navigating the rules poorly.
So they are never going to launch?
Also, when such a service launches more widely, most of the miles will probably be driven on highways, which will probably be far less prone to surprises like jaywalking pedestrians.
The article appeared to imply that they have not done actual urban driving yet:
""" The company plans to begin tests in Manhattan early next year.
Mr. Vogt is keen to prove that self-driving models can navigate complex urban environments such as downtown San Francisco, rather than just highways and suburban streets. """
Curious if anyone got a different reading from the article... (or perhaps if the journalism was just sloppy? idk)
http://money.cnn.com/2015/12/10/news/companies/gm-recall-ign...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...
the issue we face now is, who is leading and or taking charge of this space, how are they actually doing it, and which solution is the best.
with more players we might get lucky to see Level5 within a decade or two. AV is perceived by many in the same category as any safety equipment, be that as simple as a seat belt, or an airbag, or complex like ABS and traction control. As such it has to meet a much higher standard.
GM has recently shown they can move in any direction they want and very quickly. The managed to launch a relatively affordable 200 mile range EV in short order with no availability issues other than an on purpose staggered release.
why would any of the existing automakers cede any innovative technologies and why would we not celebrate all of them trying
Grandparent, to child, riding in an automated vehicle, "Can you believe, once upon a time people steered these?"
"What? How did that work? Was that safe?"
"Oh, no, 30,000 people died every year!"
Edit: I take back the Vega. While that was an awful car, I was actually thinking of the Ford Pinto.
Turns out a lot of cars from that era had the same problem, and in general subcompact cars of the time were rather dangerous.
The famous cost benefit analysis memo was also misquoted, and taken out of context.
Economy sub-compact cars always have, and always will, meet exactly the minimum safety requirements put forth by the government. That is the entire point of an economy car, to make the cheapest car legally possible.
Want safety without regard for price? Drive a Volvo.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/8/16626224/las-vegas-self-d...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-drivi...
Every major city has construction zones. Right now this is a no-go for self-driving cars.
And lots of this stuff is reactive or generated on the spot and the city will have no knowledge of it.
OTOH, even if it becomes a safety non-issue, advance knowledge of construction, 911 responses in progress, and other events on the potential routes can be useful to route planning in computer navigation systems whether or not they are used in self-driving vehicles.
As with detailed maps, other types of information would probably improve the overall safety and reliability of an autonomous vehicle. But, at some level, it needs to be able to drive on its own based on the environment it can directly sense.
Bureaucracy and public safety are mis-aligned to the point where a service relying on bureaucracy with a direct impact on public safety is going to be an uphill battle.
It also comes with some very interesting liability issues, such as: if the input data to that service is faulty and you then broadcast it to a bunch of AVs which react to it leading to an accident where would you assign blame?
If your are talking about a lower level of AV then I would expect some cool stuff in 5 years.
And even when there are true AVs available, adoption won't come without some pains and legal changes. If my AV runs over a pedestrian, who is at fault?
I hope we see AVs available for limited uses in the 5 year time-frame. Possibly limited to restricted areas and designated roadways. Or, maybe faster adoption in the commercial space, as there are potentially huge cost savings for shipping/transport companies.
They will be remote monitored and remote controllable.
Instead of having a driver per car you will have a team in some control center that monitors all the driverless cars and can take over if any get into trouble.
Full autonomous is a pipe-dream, but cars are a symbol of freedom in America, and just the idea of giving up control to a computer is enough to put off most people.
If people knew that autonomous cars will require giving full remote control to a corporation or government agency the idea would be dead in the water, so this part is kept in the fine print.
Yes, people will be skeptical of shared self driving cars, but to suggest the problem is the self driving aspect seems a bit off.
Not necessarily. Part of the freedom is that you don't have to have a destination in mind. You can simply drive to wherever you want, whenever; you can explore. This also does not mention issues about surveillance, corporate control, privacy, etc.
Driving provides a very real sense of freedom and power to people that they may not find in many other aspects of their life.
Most people will also remember being teenagers and having their parents controlling the keys.
Autonomous cars are like going back to being a teenager except now the government or some corporation owns the keys and tells you what is allowed.
Tech people don't always think about these things but they will have a major impact on how the technology is adopted or not adopted.
Additionally, I just think we'll have to see about that later part. For me the freedom is freedom of transport, the cars are just an expression of that.
So, -1 months?
And if we are counting test vehicles, they have been rolling around American cities for decades.
How?
Well, Apple don't license their software and would sue into oblivion anybody who tried copying them. It's not hard to find start-ups building Android phones, however.
If I were at GM, I'd worry about that line from Palm CEO Ed Colligan: “We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone. PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
Didn't Uber get kicked out of SF for its driverless program and have to relocate to AZ?
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/14/technology/uber-self-driv...
Rules? Who needs rules? -- Uber's motto
[1] https://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14049070/uber-san-franci...
The issues are far more complicated. These companies, including AirBnB et al, are not simply pushing the idea that "all regulations are bad" or "we're above regulations". It's about pushing back in an effort for better regulations appropriate for a modern industry. Typically they are designed for a previous era or inefficiently pigeonholed onto entirely new concepts.
Fwiw as a human driver I find driving in San Francisco to be pretty challenging/stressful.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...
Waymo invests in self-driving tech. We'll see which one wins out.