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Comment by colechristensen | Hacker News Reader

Or simply decertify all of the vehicles that behave incorrectly from driving on public roads.

This is the kind of issue which will persist, vehicles which fail to recognize a real world situation shouldn’t get the benefit of changing the world to fit them.

An inquiry should be done into how these vehicles came to fail to recognize this road feature and the upstream cause (not just the bug by the systematic issues in the organizations which produced vehicles with this bug) should be fixed before they’re rectified to operate on roads.

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I think a step between what we have now and full human replacement will be roads that are certified for fully automated driving. Those roads would avoid features that confuse the automation, or have some sort of passive or active assistance installed.

> This is the kind of issue which will persist, vehicles which fail to recognize a real world situation shouldn’t get the benefit of changing the world to fit them.

There are already places that regularly confuse human drivers, and those do get fixed (though usually only after someone dies). I don't see why we couldn't do the same for driving robots, especially when they get more common over time.

Actually, we hired a £32K/$43K Nissan Qashquai for a week, and came across numerous idiosyncrasies. The "best" one was when we attempted to park against a low hedge, and the car set off all sorts of warning alarms. It then refused to lock the doors, so we had to move to a different part of the car park.

The refusal to lock was probably that you'd not fully switched off the engine. I've had this on my Qashqai. The fuel-saving system that automatically turns off the engine when you're stopped and out-of-gear can be confusing. This behaviour often happens when parking but it seems you still need to press the stop-start button to "completely" turn it off in order to lock the car.

This is the first car I've owned with "modern" driver aids and it is true that they are somewhat temperamental. For example, the auto full-beam headlights get very confused in fog (which can be dangerous!), whilst I often get a warning noise when approaching sharp bends at a perfectly safe speed.

Ah, that sounds interesting - we only had it for a while so didn't get chance to get to know all the quirks... we found the motorway lane wandering feature handy, but we had great fun when we tried to lock the damn thing and didn't move away from the car quick enough: it sensed the key was nearby and "helpfully" unlocked again. After the hire period we were glad to get rid of it!

> we found the motorway lane wandering feature handy

Honest curiosity, but as someone who drives quite a lot (A, B & C licenses) I don't understand why people need help staying in their lane. Flippantly I'd suggest that piloting the car and looking at the road is the absolute bare minimum of 'due care and attention' when driving, though obviously the prevalence of this feature would suggest otherwise.

Any thoughts gratefully appreciated.

Depending on the implementation, it trains/forces you to actually signal before changing lanes (I see people getting lazy with that). But while that's good for everyone overall, it's not exactly an explanation why people buy cars with these features.

> piloting the car and looking at the road is the absolute bare minimum of 'due care and attention' when driving

I agree! In this case it was novel to see how it worked (because the facility was there and new to us) but I'm more keen on using my eyes and mirrors. I could see how it could be useful in dense fog though, given many drivers don't bother with lights...

I assumed the intention is to alert a driver who really needs to take a break. I don't see what other use it has, other than to annoy me when overtaking a cyclist.

Of course, all of these cars are chock full of computers, speakers and monitors, but none of them ever tell you what's wrong in a more intelligible way than wild screeching.

I spent half an hour outside in the cold at 2am with a borrowed Nissan Leaf. It only made a loud beeping noise when I tried to lock it. Apparently, this noise means that the trunk isn't properly closed and that it therefore won't lock the car for you.

Decertifying a self driving car does nothing considering that today the driver is legally 100% responsible for the driving. Regardless of how manufacturers sell their "fully self driving cars", they are all still a "hotdog/not hotdog" type intelligence and the tech is there just to assist the driver, not replace.

I don't believe we'll solve autonomous driving too soon without adapting the infrastructure to it rather than the other way around. At this rate we'll have truly self driving cars (not "straight line, follow the highway lane self driving") right around the time everyone starts taking most personal cars off the road to replace them with something more efficient that better suits cities of millions. But right now too many people and manufacturers are lying to themselves that self driving cars are right around the corner, and even that they're mostly here.

The solution would be to fix the disinformation surrounding self driving tech and fining the hell out of any manufacturer that doesn't make it painfully clear on every channel that the tech is very limited, mentioning also the limits of the system (e.g. types of traffic it was tested on, how many road signs it can recognize out of the total, how much of the regular driving experience do those conditions cover, how well did it do compared to an average human driver). All in "human" language.

Some blame lies with technologists, many a time I have been downvoted right here for suggesting autonomous driving is not round the corner.

As someone who only sells products using ML, I find the discussion here inorganic.

agree - some blame lies with technologists.

Maybe most of the blame.

But consider this: If a human had the same problem, who would be blamed? If several humans, then the road would be changed, just like this. The process seems sound, but maybe the changes that make it more human-friendly make it more machine-hostile.

New thinking is needed on how we retrain machines after the change, as it necessitates uniformity - the machine would benefit with fewer variations in cattle grids for example. I reckon a simple change to the road markings for all cattle grids would be enough to make them logically identical - be it paint or signs or some other physical indicator.

New infra will be a positive, we will be able replan roads and usage keep pollution in mind.

Though I don't think fully autonomous driving will be possible in near future. There are too many edge cases.

> Decertifying a self driving car does nothing considering that today the driver is legally 100% responsible for the driving.

I don't know that this is true in this case. It seems like the problem here is the auto-braking feature kicking on, perhaps disorienting the driver or causing a following car to need to panic brake+swerve. This isn't an instance of a driver becoming inattentive because they expect the computer to act for them. Rather it's an ever-present system erroneously deciding to take control of the car - analagous to a mechanical failure. What could a driver do to avoid this behavior, besides knowing to disable that system ahead of the hazard?

Decertifying a self driving car does nothing considering that today the driver is legally 100% responsible for the driving

The owner of the vehicle is also 100% responsible for making sure the vehicle is road-worthy. Decertifying the autonomous-driving feature should probably trigger a manufacturer recall, so the features can be disabled permanently (not just a via software update).

Or alternatively, most countries have a periodic vehicle check (like the MOT test in the UK), and having non-certified features enabled could be a reason for failing the test.

I like the idea of a warning that particular models of cars are not permitted past this point for safety reasons. That by itself is enough for some frustrated driver to see the sign, take a photo and upload it to social media where those car manufacturers can be suitably laughed at and ridiculed.

The good ones would then sort out why their braking system is faulty. Perhaps it gets confused about other things in other serious ways.

I can't tell from the article whether the automatic braking happens when a sudden incline, decline or both is detected in front of the car. It was one of those three, though, that much is clear.

Do you really regard braking in front of a sudden incline/decline as ridiculous?

It seems like there was a steep hill, but the cattle gate was level, and the sudden, extreme difference in gradient is what caused the sudden braking. Although from the photos, it all looks fairly flat to me.

Yes, that's my impression too, and braking seems sensible.

From uphill: "There's something weird in front of the car, best drive very slowly". From downhill: "WTF I can't see the road any more, best drive very slowly." Both seem quite sensible to me, I don't understand why so many people on the thread seem to disagree.

"Cars have come off the road trying to cross a cattle grid after sensors mistook it for a wall and slammed on the brakes."

These grids usually lie flat on the ground and in some areas are commonplace. Seems to me these sensors are still needing work. Perhaps they see horizontal lines and panic?

Cars running off the road for no good reason is ridiculous. It is indefensible to assert this is OK. Denying it or otherwise covering it up is definiteky ridiculous.

>Or simply decertify all of the vehicles that behave incorrectly from driving on public roads.

At least in the US we try to grandfather in old tech because the poors have enough problems without the government telling them they can no longer use their junk.

If a box was checked, a standard was met or a capacity was stated when the vehicle shipped the box remains checked more or less in perpetuity. This makes for some great internet arguments when the pearl clutching crowd tries to appeal to the authority of manufacturer statements with regard to older vehicles.

A way to do this would be to create a class of forced manufacturer recalls to disable the broken feature which if not completed would block yearly registration renewal, like the emissions checks some places require.

Indeed recently while going through the California smog check and registration process, the dealership told me I had open recalls which might block my registration. They didn’t, but clearly something like that mechanism exists.

This doesn’t unfairly harm people who already own vehicles.

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