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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I do not consider stopping squarely in the middle of the highway and blocking one of the lanes as the "correct" way to handle this situation. I'd rather expect that the truck at least knows how to stop in a safe manner, i.e. by moving to the shoulder first. A large number of accidents (probably even the majority) here in Europe are caused by drivers crashing into stopped vehicles on highways, so having AI-controlled cars stop in the middle of the road is clearly not acceptable.

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You are absolutely correct. Here's what can happen if you stop in the lane:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-beds-bucks-herts-433085...

It's a little terrifying that they think this is the best way to deal with the situation. And that's without addressing the elephant in the room - a loss of comms was so unimaginable that they had no plan to deal with it?

Worse, if they didn’t account for this rather obvious situation, what is going to happen in the dozens - hundreds - of other corner cases?

Cannot agree more. Another possible improvement should be stopping in the next gas station or resting area, so the truck always keeps enough internal data to move up to the nearest safe place to stop. Sort of a buffer that allows the truck to be minimally operational, maybe also a significant decrease of speed.

Agreed, but I would imagine a meaningful population of people would do the same thing in that situation

Maybe. But the promise of autonomous cars is that they can be safer than human drivers.

“That situation” was loss of contact with a control center. What is the equivalent for people?

fainting. I do believe braking and stopping is better than swerving and crashing...

no, there isn't a person constantly driving on the other end of the connection

Perhaps dense fog, or whiteout blizzard conditions? I’m making the assumption that the server parses the data from the truck to determine what it is seeing.

No, those are sensor failures, not external communications failures.

The human equivalent would be being unable to call someone for directions.

The article says it's a person making decisions with acceptable delays of 15 seconds.

Sure, some small % of the populations will probably do that. Some small % of the population will drive drunk.

Neither are acceptable ways to handle the vast majority of situations one encounters.

The situation in the article. is roughly the same as being lost (or going somewhere in a way GPS won't work) and taking directions over the phone. If the line goes dead nobody (who's behavior we want self driving vehicles to emulate) just stops in the middle of the road.

In my view, stopping in the lane is the safest thing to do if the truck suddenly doesn't trust its own navigation system for any reason. Hopefully those reasons are, and become increasingly, rare. What I gathered from the article is that the truck slowed down gradually and stopped. For better or worse, this is something that everybody else on the road has been trained to handle, even if it could be a monumental inconvenience.

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