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Comment by dylan604 | Hacker News Reader

I have often wondered about this, so I do find this interesting. Of all of the info presented, one question I have is how does the AI decide when to go at a 4-way stop? In real life, I'm am constantly amazed at how confusing a 4-way stop is to humans.

Not that I ever had any doubt into how complicated real-time video analysis could be, this just makes my appreciation of the complexity of the problem that much more qualified.

View on HN

The proper rules[1] of a 4 way stop are probably pretty straightforward to encode, and probably easier for a computer to apply than a human, but the real issue is that you can't trust the other drivers (or AIs) to understand/follow them consistently. So the interesting part is how these kinds of systems can almost instantly react when another driver starts to go, and let them go.

In NYC, where I live now, the de facto rule seems to be if you hesitate at all then the other person just goes, rules be damned. In the rural south, where I'm from, there's a lot of "no no, you go first" waving/gesturing/light flashing, which I'm curious if/how a self driving car would handle. (Do we need to give the self driving cars hands to gesture with?!)

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-way_stop#Operation

Wouldn't the data decide what the rule is? I'm guessing if in NYC, a more aggressive driving style is the norm - the models and the pipeline should be capable of adjusting to that.

Adjusted for New York driving the AI evens flings up the doors randomly to smack down cyclists!

> Wouldn't the data decide what the rule is?

Lawyers will define what the rules are for a manufacturers self driving cars. After all, any accident at a 4-way stop will immediately result in blaming and then suing the manufacturer. And what are they gonna have for a defense? "Sorry, your honor, we use machine learning to decide how our car drives--as a result there is no real way to truly understand how our car will react to every situation it encounters".

The car stopping if another car goes before it brings up another issue. If self driving cars start showing up on the road and are recognizable, you'd be able to "bully" the self driving cars since you know it'll always give right away. Imagine being stuck on an on-ramp behind a car that is programmed with infinite patience and extreme risk aversion; you could be sitting there quite a while.

I imagine if enough self-driving cars were on the road, that would be less of a problem, because more regular speeds & distances between cars would allow for more opportunities for merging. Perhaps even between-car negotiations of merging or 4 way stop type of behaviour.

I think we're quite a ways away from that though - hopefully not as far away as the flying car thing :)

That's not the real issue, that's just the initial domino. The real issue is how self-driving companies will combat that. They'll surely want to record film at all times and have a pipeline to law enforcement to curb suspected bullies. It's often the over-correcting solution that becomes the bigger problem. There are analogues in other human-robot interactions.

Waymo resolved this early on by encoding the human resolution into the action. Stopping as required by law, then moving forward slowly until the next action is more clear.

Waymo 'resolved' this by not driving in areas where people intentionally fuck with self-driving cars.

Imagine if cars were given the same authority to generate citations as redlight cameras and schoolbus cameras. They'd be cheap to free and financed by kickbacks from law enforcement.

The human driver can always take over if the car isn't being aggressive enough.

Also the feeling of "how long" is too long to wait changes a lot when you are in more of a passenger mindset.

In a Tesla, yes. But the idea is for these algorithms to work without anyone in the driver seat.

> In NYC, where I live now, the de facto rule seems to be if you hesitate at all then the other person just goes, rules be damned.

This has been my experience pretty much everywhere I've driven, which includes a half dozen or so European countries and about as many U.S. states. Notably though I've never driven in New York, state or city.

My experience is that in larger cities, and cities with a lot of tourists, this "aggressiveness" seems to be the norm. I put that in scare quotes because I'm not sure I'd call it aggressive, I just feel it's the pragmatic way to break the tie.

Maybe that's why this is my experience everywhere – I'm that guy! (My apologies to all my fellow drivers out there!)

There is an interesting and important theorem from control theory that is relevant for this situation. In a paper from 1984, Leslie Lamport has called it Buridan's Principle and phrased it as follows:

“A discrete decision based upon an input having a continuous range of values cannot be made within a bounded length of time.”

The paper is available from:

http://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/buridan.pdf

It shows that under very general assumptions, a decision cannot be made in bounded time, leading to starvation (metaphorically and also literally). An example is a 4-way stop with other cars arriving at various times.

The paper's history is also very interesting:

https://lamport.azurewebsites.net/pubs/pubs.html#buridan

thanks for sharing this - this is fascinating. Admittedly I have never been exposed to Control Theory before, so I see a rabbit hole in my future.

Essentials of Control Techniques and Theory by John Billingsley is a book with many superb examples.

Note that Lamport admitted that his result was never accepted by the scientific community.

> continuous

(The paper implicitly assumes non-discrete continuity) Differential-equation based hysical models are continuous. Computational systems are discrete, as long as the clock is slower than the . Lamport surely knows this, the transition duration. He waves away the empirical disproof of his claim by arguing that reality is merely a finite approximation where low probabilities runs down to zero.

He even mentions this stuff in the paper, making the paper quite weird.

My only guess is that he fell into the trap of forgetting that infinitesimal objects ate idealized mathematical models not physical realities.

Google had to program their car to stop treating 4 way stops exactly as the law required, and instead pretend to be a little aggressive: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/02/technology/personaltech/g...

Unless you're driving in a place known for courtesy like Canada or Hawaii ಠ_ಠ... People often stop late and won't move until you go first...

My father taught me this trick -- if you're going to arrive simultaneously, just make sure you stop clearly second (especially if the other car is on your right).

I find it is usually pretty efficient and have yet to notice someone doing the same to me at the same time.

Hey I really like that! I often feel awkward at these where it is ambiguous who among 3 people actually stopped first. Not to mention people who roll right through without stopping (when other cars are present.)

I do exactly the same - not with 4-way stops as we don't have those in Germany, but with areas where a two-lane road is intentionally narrowed to one lane for a very short piece of road, which we sometimes have in order to slow down traffic around pedestrian crossings. If I see someone approaching from the other side and we are about to arrive roughly at the same time, I slow down just enough so the other person hopefully realizes she can go first. If I see the other person doing the same I add light flashing, which is typically understood as "You go first". But it is rarely necessary, because if I start going slow early enough, the other person realizes he/she is a tiny bit closer to the narrow part, so they slightly speed up in order to ensure they are first and thus get the right to come through before me, which is exactly the reaction that I want, because my interest usually isn't to get through first, but to be able to roll through the narrow part without coming to a full stop.

When I was road tripping in the US, I also attempted to prevent unclear situations at 4-way stops by intentionally slowing down just a bit so it is clear that I'm not first to drive. Since I couldn't prevent the stop anyway I was usually much more comfortable with letting other people drive first, or at least with having a clear order and knowing about my position in that order.

The algorithm I apply is actually pretty simple: First at the intersection goes first. So you, individually, should let everyone who was there when you arrived go before you, but you should go before everyone who arrived after you.

It gets messy when people try to be polite or don't understand the rules correctly, but otherwise it's pretty easy.

It might depend on your jurisdiction, though.

My algorithm is so much more complicated than yours. In my area you get rear-ended if you were going straight and you didn't go when someone coming from the opposite direction but also going straight went (your algorithm doesn't allow that).

Assuming cars are already at the intersection, I wait until each of them goes and then take my turn, unless it's someone's turn who wouldn't cause a conflict with me and nobody else could go at the same time and would cause a conflict with me.

When I arrive at the intersection at nearly the exact same time as someone else then some more complicated heuristics come into play (I'm not sure how you handle it when the timing is close enough to be in question). The person on a significantly larger road has priority over smaller road. People going straight have priority over right turners, which have priority over left turners, and if all else is equal, the right-most person should go first.

I guess I could sum it up as "if you can go safely, and nobody who was there before you can go safely, then go. Otherwise wait your turn", but with a lot more nuance around tie-breaking.

Yeah, I forgot about the going straight part, but I actually do pretty much the same thing as you.

I guess one additional trick I use is to intentionally avoid conflicts: if it looks like I'm going to arrive at the same time as another car, I slow down a bit before arriving at the stop, then clearly stop AFTER they did, so it's clear that it's their turn to go. It works pretty well.

People in your area get rear ended while stopped at a 4-way stop?

If the person is supposed to go but doesn't, then sometimes.

/shrug

People gunna peep.

Yes, but there's close-to-simultaneous arrival, in which case you yield to the person on your right.

But what's "simultaneous"? If I show up 0.1 seconds before the person on my right, he could think it is simultaneous and go...

There's also the direction that is 'claimed'. If there's a dedicated left turn lane or it is obvious that the person across from you is going straight, and you want to go straight, you should go too.

In the end, multiagent arbitration of a shared resource is hard.

I've been driving for 40 years. I still hate 4-way stops.

In the late 70's in Connecticut, I was taught the first person to arrive goes first, followed by the person to their right and so on.

But there are so many holes with that heuristic itself! And putting aside guilt and anxieties of humans that prevent them from being assertive or committing--it's just a cluster fuck.*

However, I have noticed that people are becoming more comfortable with zipper merging in major cities on both coasts, so if we could arrive at some consistent 4-way stop rule that's 1) succinct, and 2) easy to remember, I have hope. :)

[* I'm referring to San Fran and the South Bay... but still better than my experiences driving through Italy and in Bengaluru!]

In California 4-way stops are often never marked "4-way" like in some other places. Whenever you come to a stop sign you have to inspect the crossing road to see whether or not it also has a stop sign. Often you stop and wait several seconds for a crossing car, only to realize that they also have a stop sign.

Sorry for the dumb question but what is a 4-way stop? In the UK we have roundabouts (but many drivers still have no clue which lane to get into, and don't migrate to the lane on the left after passing an exit, like they should).

Yes. In theory, 4 way stops follow some simple rules -- whoever gets there first and makes a full stop goes first, and if more than one party makes a full stop at the same time, the party on the right goes first.

In practice we live in a world of (very illegal) rolling stops, people beckoning at each other to go first, people inching forward, etc.

That's not even considering some very stupidly designed four-way stops here in Illinois with two lanes on each side -- how the heck is one supposed to even figure these things out? It ends up being a game of chicken.

Near where I live we've got two lanes + turn lanes on all 4 sides. It is a nightmare both as a driver and as a pedestrian. I'm not sure how that gets put in place or gets addressed as it inevitably gets busier. Traffic circles perhaps?

Traffic circles work better, but most people in North America have trouble with 2-lane traffic circles. (they're common in most places around the world)

Most people in north america have trouble with 1-lame traffic circles, because they're almost uniformly too small. Traffic engineers like to wedge them in as retrofits, when there's already a lot of stuff built up around an intersection, and it's not feasible to enlarge the intersection to make it work well.

Traffic signals with good sensors are more space efficient, and usually more time efficient when there's congestion, and more pedestrian friendly. Proper sensor design means no or little waiting during low traffic times too. Traffic circles can help with akward intersections though, where there's more than 4 entrances or exits, and some three way intersections work well too.

Even the theory is not that clean cut.

What if two cars arrive simultaneously at opposite sides of the 4-way and are both turning left? This could easily deadlock two self-driving cars if not considered.

Your situation is a bit ambiguous. Do you mean they turn to their respective left (in that case their trajectories should not intersect), or to the same left? Not sure about USA, but where I am from the right of the way belongs to the driver who turns to the same side as the side of the road they are on, i.e. to his right (we drive on the right side).

I've wondered why cars don't have a built-in communication mechanism.

I should be able to broadcast somehow (using a voice message?) to nearby cars that "I'm going now, don't go".

That works if every car has the same communication mechanism and is honest and nobody interferes and everybody's semantic understanding of the messages is the same.

Vehicle-to-X (A generalisation of vehicle-to-vehicle communication) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-everything

As long as it is there just to improve safety. But it should not be relied on.

In other words, if you 'hear' "don't go", you don't go. But if you don't hear anything, it still doesn't mean it's safe to go, so you'll have to rely on something else. And if you are doing that anyway, is the added complexity worth it?

It certainly will be, once the ocean is boiled = as soon as self-driving cars begin to comprise a significant percentage of cars on the road.

This, in the long run, is a selling point that seems to be missing from most discussions in this comment section.

I can't communicate "telepathically" with fellow human drivers.

We tried it, but people kept on using it only to say the most innovative curse words at each other... Hah. :P

The system exists but nobody is buying it. Probably because if your car has it first, there will be no other cars to talk to.

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=car+v2x

As a casual observer of self-driving, I feel like this is a really interesting part of the overall problem space. Until such time as a vehicle fleet is 100% autonomous, human piloted & autonomous vehicles need to co-exist. Humans bend & break driving rules by social interactions which autonomous vehicles don't currently participate in.

There's a research dedicated to ambiguous decision in swarms.

The system isn't AI based... It's currently based on static programming. This is why a development team would have to think of every possible scenario that could happen on roads to make self driving cars really work.

You'd have to ask all kinds of wild questions too like:

"What if kids played a prank and re-painted road lanes on a highway at 50MPH?"

"What if a sand storm happened?"

"What would the car do if a tire blows out at 55MPH?"

"Could the car detect a Tsunami is coming and abandon a trip assignment?"

And that's just a tiny tiny sample of scenarios necessary.

Some AI elements may exist within the network, but I'm pretty sure they are only running on the back end in terms of maps. The computing power to really permit the car to run autonomously, and to "adapt and learn" about driving only comes with experience and it also takes a lot more computing power and storage than your home computer can handle, much less the components in Tesla cars.

Launching Self Driving Cars so close to their infancy is pretty reckless if you ask me. People are being paid off and buried online by paid staff online to keep quiet about all the accidents and issues with them.

To make self riding cars reliable at this point in time, they pretty much need perfect circumstances, and they need to operate on fixed, predictable, and well maintained paths... Kind of like a train. They should really work on this technology in mass transit, shipping, big industry and on planes before pushing out thousands of smaller vehicles with it.

There is plenty of proof that development teams aren't and may never be flawlessness enough to make error free updates, if you don't believe that, then just ask Boeing.

> than your home computer can handle, much less the components in Tesla cars.

Ehm a recent Tesla has very powerful specialized hardware, developed in-house, which is much more powerful than a commodity home PC with expensive GPUs. You might want to do some basic research before you make such claims...

> The system isn't AI based... It's currently based on static programming

A large neural network is used to make many of the decisions, as well as to run the perception of the sensors/cameras. Unclear what you mean by "AI", but neural networks are usually covered in the "AI" term by researchers and engineers in this field.

> may never be flawlessness enough to make error free updates

It seems that you are new in this argument, because this point has been rebutted so many times in the past, but here goes: it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

There is Network Dependent AI... Not independent processing power on board each vehicle to make autonomous decisions.

I was referring to AI that operates independently of a network connection. There are multiple scenarios in which a network connection can become unavailable.

I'm not here to disparage Tesla, I really don't care what company creates self driving cars. Most people are acting like Tesla are the only ones.

Tesla vehicles equipped with the Full Self Driving package do have an onboard computer that runs neutral networks in real time to process sensor data and control the vehicle.

https://ww.electrek.co/2019/04/22/tesla-full-self-driving-co...

A Tesla autopilot works offline without any network connection. (I mean of course the driving itself, not the updates.) So what exactly are you talking about?

>it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

Says who?

The fact that you state this so confidently demonstrates a lack of understanding of both human nature and politics.

> it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

Even though it logically makes sense, there are some nuances to it, most prominent of which is: When human drivers cause accidents, they are held responsible by the legal system. Who's responsible when your car made the decision? Is it Tesla? Is it the driver? Society is probably not going to accept a small improvement over humans while all the legal burden goes up in the air. It may demand a much higher improvement to compensate.

> Who's responsible when your car made the decision? Is it Tesla? Is it the driver?

Any time a Tesla is involved in an accident, it seems like the company is more than happy to throw out reams of log data "proving" that it isn't their fault. But yet at the same time they maintain marketing material claiming their "auto pilot" feature is (or will be) so awesome that the human driver is only there to make the lawyers happy.

That's actually totally non-contradictory. The human is there to make Tesla's lawyers happy, and they are definitely very happy to have an easy scapegoat to blame if their tech fails to live up to the hype.

> It seems that you are new in this argument, because this point has been rebutted so many times in the past, but here goes: it does not have to be flawless, it just has to statistically cause fewer accidents per kilometer/year than what human drivers cause in a similar situation (which is already non-zero, and in some countries actually quite high).

Yes, but they need a process in place to insure that that is true, and a process in place that insures that is true with each new update. They are remarkably cagey with statistics about AutoPilot.

Elon claims that Autopilot is currently much safer than human driving, yet the only statistics released are biased comparisons between Autopilot miles, which are almost exclusively on highways, and general auto statistics (where crashes occur most frequently off highways). If Elon really wanted to show the software effectiveness of current Autopilot, he could release the crash statistics of customers who purchased Autopilot and customers who did not, as many people have requested of him. He has thus far refused to.

The system is absolutely AI based today. There is no hardcoding like this. Hardware 3 in Tesla cars is an ASIC meant to run neural nets (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_3). Why are you so confidently stating things you don't know about?

I'm not really sure what the hardware link you provided has to do with anything but plenty of rule-based heuristics are used in state of the art autonomous driving systems. Machine learning systems have taken over the image processing and classification parts, semantic segmentation, object recognition and so on but traffic rules or emergency behaviour or hard speed limits are not learned.

the OP is wrong though in somehow classifying this as 'not AI'. Just because ML has become an important part of the equation doesn't mean we have thrown control theory and logical constraints out of the window.

The current AI is running rudimentary calculations based on what is truly required for flawless operation... The type of processing that is necessary to operate like a GOOD human driver is nowhere near what currently exists... Sure there are bad drivers out there, and that's why autonomous vehicles would need to be EXCEPTIONALLY good... Not just good enough for a few demos on youtube.

If a company's test cycles were good enough to warrant reliability and safety promises, the window on the CyberTruck would have never broken.... This is how companies work, they over promise and under-deliver, this time it affects everyone's safety, including safety of those who don't buy them.

I'm not saying the strides aren't impressive, I'm saying I wouldn't feel safe having this experimental technology forced upon me knowing the potential for historically complex human factors.

From your own cited source:

At this level, the car can act autonomously but requires the driver to be prepared to take control at a moment's notice.[103][104] HW1 is suitable only on limited-access highways, and sometimes will fail to detect lane markings and disengage itself. In urban driving the system will not read traffic signals or obey stop signs. This system also does not detect pedestrians or cyclists,[105] and while AP1 detects motorcycles,[106] there has been two instances of AP rear-ending motorcycles.[107]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Hardware_3

What does hardware 1 and AP1 have to do with the latest hardware and autopilot?

Because each individual car is not truly autonomous when it comes to learning and improving diving based on it's specific geo location. I am not talking specifically about Tesla, this goes for all automated cars...

We have to be able to admit that we aren't ready to launch thousands of these cars out on streets at this point. They have NOT been perfect.

There are tons of issues beyond just the quality of the AI. Software development and updates, vehicle maintenance, planned obsolescence of models, Legality, ethics, ownership... tons of other issues not hashed out. The combination of all of those issues makes autonomous vehicles near impossible any time soon, unless we ALL want to give up our right to own personal property and submit our safety to being test subjects. I'm not willing to do that at this point as a development manager myself.

This is much less true than it used to be with the current rewrite of the autopilot software:

https://cleantechnica.com/2020/01/31/timestamped-guide-to-pa...

> The system isn't AI based... It's currently based on static programming. This is why a development team would have to think of every possible scenario that could happen on roads to make self driving cars really work.

I'm not really sure what this dichotomy is that you're describing. It certainly looks like they're using computer vision to detect the bounding boxes of cars, and the field of computer vision is widely described as being either a subset of artificial intelligence or a cross-disciplinary approach combining artificial intelligence with a handful of other fields.

> You'd have to ask all kinds of wild questions too like:

> "What if kids played a prank and re-painted road lanes on a highway at 50MPH?"

This sort of thing actually happens with real humans, and the legal system has to (and does) handle it. In the 1990s three people removed a stop sign as a prank and were sentenced to 15 years in prison after a human driver drove into the intersection and hit another vehicle, killing three teenagers. https://www.nytimes.com/1997/06/21/us/3-are-sentenced-to-15-.... The fact that it's possible for humans to illegally modify road markings and end up killing people is a challenge and a tragedy, but it's not anything new or particularly game-changing for self-driving cars.

> "What if a sand storm happened?"

That sounds like one of the easiest possible problems. What do humans do when they suddenly have nearly zero visibility on a road? In most places I assume they are supposed to (and do) pull over to the side of the road and stop. I've been in rain that is so heavy that all the nearby cars on the highway had to pull over.

> "What would the car do if a tire blows out at 55MPH?"

Again, that's another thing that happens a lot, and probably causes a lot of injuries and deaths. Again, I'm not minimizing that loss, but it's not some huge "gotcha" for self-driving cars. In this particular example, I would expect self-driving cars to be vastly better than most human drivers in this situation at maintaining control while pulling over and stopping.

> What do humans do when they suddenly have nearly zero visibility on a road?

They cause gigantic pile-ups, because humans are unbelievably bad at driving.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/50-people-injured-69-vehicle-pileu...

You replied to the 4 scenarios I posted, but forgot the thousands of others left while you missed my point. They were rhetorical to illustrate that nothing yet can replace a trained, experienced, and attentive driver effectively yet.

There are no simple answers to the above questions, but if a driver causes the accident, they are accountable. Companies want to launch this tech but not own accountability for accidents when it could well be faulty logic and or code that contributes to deadly incidents. In a ship... less of a risk... In a car, surrounded by 4-10 other cars, the risk is much higher.

Profit making should not drive this blatant hubris... We forget how history reminds us of an over-reliance on technology and intelligent design.

> You replied to the 4 scenarios I posted, but forgot the thousands of others left while you missed my point.

    try
    {
      while (true)
      {
         if (IsScenarioOutsideOfUnderstanding())
         {
            throw NotUnderstoodException()
         }
      }
    }
    catch (NotUnderstoodException)
    {
        SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
    }

    Patch for car stopping way too often:
        catch (NotUnderstoodException)
        {  
    -        SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
    +        // FIXME TODO let the safety driver handle it for now
    +        // SlowDownAndStopLikeAnyoneElseWould();
        }

Go watch Elon's presentation Autonomy Day. He pointedly addresses it.

Specifically, he shows an orders-of-magnitude chart, each point accompanied by a picture of a car presented at that magnitude of occurrence. At one extreme is "car" as they appear with most common frequency (in front of you, rear visible). At other extreme is "car" in an extremely unlikely occurrence (airborne, bottom view prominent). The system Tesla implements addresses such a broad range of information & occurrences.

Tesla has upwards of a million "full self driving" vehicles on the road now, all gathering video, all processing that data, all feeding what they learn & experience back to Tesla. The computers, even if not actually driving, are constantly observing situations, categorizing, and comparing to what humans do as a response. Extreme situations (crashes etc) are flagged and routed to Tesla for incident analysis; the AI is corrected & taught to handle the situations, and all vehicles updated accordingly in short order.

Upshot: Tesla DOES have a system for addressing, learning, encoding, and improving the "thousands of other" scenarios. By the time "full self driving" is unleashed, the Tesla AI system will already be trained to extremes by a million "trained, experienced, and attentive drivers"; insofar as some cases may be insufficiently covered, they will be statistically less common & dangerous than the baseline error rate of human drivers (distracted, drunk, debilitated, dumb).

As far as accountability, Tesla is working hard to build a decisive system & case that if bad happens, it is a statistical anomaly which is still better than the alternative of not using self-driving tech. There is a legal principle whereby one may violate the law when obeying it would cause greater harm; autonomous vehicles are close to crossing that line for the better.

And yes, great profit is due those who improve humanity via technology.

> Tesla has upwards of a million "full self driving" vehicles on the road now, all gathering video, all processing that data, all feeding what they learn & experience back to Tesla.

I'm curious how you square this with the fact that humans learn to drive with intermittent sensory input from only two cameras plus some auxiliary sensors. Clearly, humans can extrapolate from very limited input. Why can't Tesla demonstrate object permanence after years of development?

Takes 16 years to train a human to learn driving, and badly at that. We have a vastly larger & superior neutral net, specialized training support, swivel mounted cameras, and probably a lot more than we yet realize.

> In this particular example, I would expect self-driving cars to be vastly better than most human drivers in this situation at maintaining control while pulling over and stopping.

Cars today are vastly better at maintaining control in this situation even without self-driving. If the car has traction control, as long as the driver doesn't panic they will have a much greater chance of keeping control of their vehicle, compared to cars without a computer assisting them.

This is an area which I am interested in.

While most interest/discussion in self-driving surrounds the interpretation of the environment viz other road users, road markings and signage, I am following the (too slowly developing) Roborace, Stanford's MARTY and similar efforts to automate expert car control including handling the loss of control.

I look forward to the day when passengers can be confident that they are safer than with even the best human driver. And not just statistically safer, but demonstrably so.

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