Whoever owns the algorithm. Or at-least in whoever's name the license/permission was issued. If its an organization, the top management signing off on this has to take the blame.
There are several states is USA that are more progressive than others (CA namely). But with many working groups in and around the legal side - it hopefully will be a thing of the past.
In Australia, they are mandating by some year soon (don't have it on hand) that to achieve a Safety Rating of 5 star, some level of automation needs to exist. Such as lane departure or ABS will become as standard as aircon.
>> It's physically impossible for a human to intervene on the timescales involved in motor accidents.
That remains true even without any automatic driving tech - you are responsible even for accidents which happen too quickly for anyone to intervene. Obviously if you have some evidence(dashcam) showing that you couldn't avoid the accident you should be found not guilty, but the person going to court will be you - not the maker of your car's cruise control/radar system/whatever.
The assists are certainly helping more than anything, so I feel that the Mazda is much safer to drive in heavy traffic than the older Outback.
The cruise has autonomy over controlling the speed only, and applying brakes, but it is still autonomy. Of course since my hands never leave the wheel it may not fit with what you have in mind.
Having said that, Mazda (or Bosch?) really nailed their radar, having never failed to pick up motorbike riders even though the manual warns us to not expect it to work.
I feel more confident in a system where the ambition is smaller, yet execution more solid.
Fwiw I also tested the AEB against cardboard boxes driving through them at 30km/h not moving accelerator at all, and came away very impressed by the system. It intervened so last second I felt for sure it wasn't going to work, but it did - first time was a very slight impact, next two were complete stops with small margins.
This stuff is guaranteed to save lives and prevent costly crashes (I generally refuse to use the word "accident") on a grander scale.
I do love that even though they have a ton of driver alerting features, hands have to be on the wheel at all times.
Either you have full autonomy without hands or you don’t. There is no middle ground, it’s a recipe for a disaster.
Let me put it this way - my Mercedes has an emergency stop feature when it detects pedestrians in front of the car. If I'm on cruise control and the car hits someone, could I possibly blame it on Mercedes? Of course not. I'm still the driver behind the wheel and those systems are meant to help - not replace my attention.
What we have now in these semi-autonomous vehicles is nothing more than a glorified cruise control - and I don't think the law treats it any differently(at least yet.).
Now, if Uber(or anyone else) builds cars with no driver at all - sure, we can start talking about shifting the responsibility to the corporation. But for now, the driver is behind the wheel for a reason.
The San Francisco Chronicle late Monday reported that Tempe Police Chief Sylvia Moir said that from viewing videos taken from the vehicle “it’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode (autonomous or human-driven) based on how she came from the shadows right into the roadway." (bit.ly/2IADRUF)
Moir told the Chronicle, “I suspect preliminarily it appears that the Uber would likely not be at fault in this accident,” but she did not rule out that charges could be filed against the operator in the Uber vehicle, the paper reported.
On top of the speedometer it has the GPS speed to compare as well, I can't see how there is any excuse for being over the limit.
The quoted stats from UK advertising were that at 40mph 80% of pedestrians will die from the crash, at 30mph 20% will die.
Had the car been doing just under the limt e.g. 33mph then there's a much better chance that the woman would have survived.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5332443/Police-chief... [30 January 2018]
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/01/31/motorists-should...
Can you explain why you think this rule changed a decade ago?
Because sometimes that 10% is argued as a margin of error for humans supposedly not paying attention how fast they're going, but if that's the case then there's really no reason why the robot shouldn't drive strictly under the speed limit.
If you explicitly programmed a fleet of robots to deliberately break the law, then I think it's not enough consequences if you just fine for the first robot that gets caught breaking that law, while the programmers adjust the code of the fleet to not get caught again.
Consequences should be more severe if there's a whole fleet of robots programmed to break the law, even if the law catches the first robot right away and the rest of the fleet is paused immediately.