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Comment by _ea1k | Hacker News Reader

That year of Model X didn't have a driver facing camera. If he managed to sleep while putting a little bit of pressure on the wheel it might have just kept going.

TBH, the whole "what to do when the driver is unresponsive" problem is being solved in a lot of different ways right now. A Tesla will usually (eventually) recognize it and stop in the middle of the road.

Some other systems turn off lane centering completely when they realize this.

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Those sound like terrible way of solving it. I would rather the car attempt to keep driving to my destination than stop in the middle of a busy road or stop holding the wheel mid turn and send the car to the guardrail/sidewalk

Yeah, stopping on a highway sounds like a terrible idea.

Having the car make more and more insistent annoying noises when there’s no response, and then signal the police sounds like a better one.

"How to bail out of any situation" should really be self-driving step 0. If your car can't figure out how to pull off onto the shoulder it shouldn't be driving down the highway.

Now, how that applies to cruise control or lane centering, damned if I know.

It absolutely could do that, but that would likely transfer legal liability once it deviated from operator inputs. The lawsuits around automatic braking and traction control are still about how the operators commands were interpreted, and they were bad enough. This would be explicitly deviating from operator commands. These are silly problems from an engineering standpoint, but there are other constraints.

Stopping on the highway (and alerting the passenger and engaging the warning lights) sounds way better than whatever would've happened if the car wasn't able to act at all.

Highways are the least accident prone exactly because everyone is behaving mostly the same: driving at the maximum speed (left lane), near maximum speed (right lane) or on/off-ramping.

Self-driving cars should either off-ramp and find parking space, or at the very worst park in an emergency lane with hazard lights on. Stopping in the middle of the highway is insanity.

I'm not saying what self-driving cars should do I'm just saying that a dumbed-down self driving system is safer than not having one.

What??? No! Driving straight is much safer. A potential collision of two cars at roughly the same speed is much less dangerous than a nearly guaranteed collision of a stopped car and a car at 120 km/h (75 mph). BTW Sweden has a low speed limit - it's 140 km/h (85 mph) where I live, but people regularly drive 160-180 km/h (~110 mph).

It must go behind the highway border line if it's going to stop (and keep going if it's not possible!), but it'd be much better to pull out of the highway at the first opportunity. Definitely never just stop in the middle of a highway.

Not sure if this is some kind of a US thing but here in Europe people don't expect you will stop in the middle of a highway. That's really extremely dangerous.

It's also dangerous to drive on the shoulder. Perhaps the safest thing is to keep going while it's obviusly just highway, perhaps a bit under the speed limit (low enough to get the attention of other drivers but high enough to not cause collisions). It could navigate to the slowest possible road and just park. Maybe drive with one wheel on the shoulder at 80km/h road on a 90km/h road, with warning lights and headlights blinking, car horn sounding etc. Worst case if the car approaches the end of the highway and there is a shoulder maybe it could stop there. After all, it's what any driver would have to do with a flat tire anyway (the self driving car can't run out and place a warning triangle 100m behind the car though).

What are you even comparing (and what are you even implying that my point is)? Sounds like you're comparing an automatic stop system to an ideal autonomous driving system. I was comparing stopping in a controlled way to what would happen if you don't have a system that control the car when you fall asleep at all. Obviously driving the vehicle like a human being would be the best option...

The car is evidently fully capable of just going straight, so that's what it should do, never ever should it just stop in the middle of a highway lane.

It would be great if it tried to pull to a gas station/rest point or, after a long time of very loud sound and vibration of the driver seat etc, and only if no other option is available, turn to the emergency stop lane and slowly come to stop there - but if these are not an option (the emergency lane is not wide enough, for example), it should just keep driving straight ahead at 80 km/h (minimal allowed highway speed in EU).

If my car doesn't have autopilot and can't keep driving straight, I'd prefer a light crash to the right side to just stopping in the middle of a highway lane which is a nearly sure death sentence - and not just for myself.

> stop in the middle of the road

I hope that means safely pull over to the side of the road and stop.

Thanks for the clarification. I was wondering about that driver facing camera. Didn’t know that the 2019 model didn’t have it. Other OEMs use infrared sensors for that. A camera is a bit spooky to me from a privacy standpoint. Nevertheless Teslas newer models should be able to prevent this situation with it.

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