Google's driverless cars designed to exceed speed limit
bbc.com
bbc.com
It would be stupid not to, especially during the transition phase where driverless cars are the minority.
YMMV depending upon local standards but here in San Diego, CA it is extremely common for the flow the traffic to be going 5-15 miles above posted speed limits and the cops do not care. Having a car going significantly slower than the flow of traffic is much worse than exceeding the speed limit.
Also there are sometimes situations where very temporarily exceeding the limit is the best option (eg. you're at the speed limit and someone cuts into your lane toward the back of your car, potentially shunting you and you have no clearance on the other side, but do have room up front). Driverless cars with full 360 (or close to it) lidar would be ideal for dealing with this situation (as opposed to a human driver that is unlikely to even see the other car in his/her blindspot) but if they are capped at the speed limit their options for resolving the situation safely would be severely curtailed.
I'd be very curious if I could sue those local governments for endangering me if my vehicle is forced to follow their rules and gets in an avoidable accident because of them. It would be an eminent domain defense, in the sense that government can't deny me of my property without a justifiable (public safety) reason for doing so.
And forcing my computer to behave in a certain way that causes it to potentially harm itself is definitely a denial of property.
I'm sure they'll just write me a ticket though - and if no one has gotten out of that by citing statistics on road safety, my autonomous car won't be any better off.
Hopefully, this will all be resolved reasonably with a national law and a nice bug report interface on Google's part.
Same here in the Bay area. It would be unsafe to drive no faster than the speed limits in some conditions of traffic. (Some drivers do this, and you have to change lanes on short notice to remain at the same speed as the rest of traffic.)
Clicking through to the source: "Google's driverless car is programmed to stay within the speed limit, mostly. Research shows that sticking to the speed limit when other cars are going much faster actually can be dangerous, Dolgov says, so its autonomous car can go up to 10 mph (16 kph) above the speed limit when traffic conditions warrant."
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2016721/Slow-drivers...
Going slower? Possible, depends on how much slower.
People complain about bad usage of the left lane but my gripe is people being in the right lanes but are not exiting. On a daily basis it is often the source of almost half the congestion I see on the road.
The rest is from the "me first!" crowd that probably advocate this left lane is only for passing in all cases nonsense.
This is not generally the case.
Don't piss people off unnecessarily for no reason other than to prove a point.
Move to the right.
This is different than "the left lane...is for passing. Unless you are passing you should NOT be in this lane". Under this rule, it would be perfectly acceptable to be in the left lane if you aren't passing and also aren't obstructing faster traffic. However, this rule has traffic management problems similar to those with the left-is-reserved-for-passing-rule (which is probably why its even rarer in law than the left-is-reserved-for-passing-rule, though a couple states do have something like it).
The more common legal rule -- and there are good reasons for this rule to be preferred -- is that you have to use the rightmost lane if you are moving slower than the normal speed on the road (independent of the legal limit); this is different than a reserved for passing rule and also different than a move-right-for-faster traffic rule, and is superior to either for traffic management, since with a simple move-right-for-faster-traffic rule, a very small number of drivers wishing to drive at excessive speed could oblige significantly greater congestion in the other lanes with drivers forced to yield to them (and, of course, a strict reserved-for-passing rule has a similar effect). The move-right-if-slower-than-normal rule is pretty much the best rule for traffic management.
It might be straight-forward and sensible (that, particularly the latter, is particularly subjective), but its very distant conceptually from the rules commonly used elsewhere that form the basis for the categorization and thus is, in context, weird.
They are much more likely to be highly aware of how they interact with traffic than they are a dangerous, oblivious obstruction.
Except when a special designation is made (common on, e.g., two lane highways that have a stretch where a third lane is added to one or the other side expressly for passing), no such thing exists in many US jurisdictions. There are some US jurisdictions where the leftmost lane is by default reserved for passing (or passing and allowing traffic to merge in the other lane), but that is the exception, not the general rule.
No, its not. Except where it is. This varies from place to place -- differences in law represent different decisions about whether or not this is true by different communities.
> If you are one of those people that set the cruise control and doesn't move over when people are behind you
There is a difference between the left lane being reserved for passing and a convention of slower traffic being expected to move right. The reserved for passing rule is much less common -- either as law or social convention -- than some form of slow-traffic-move-right rule.
Even if it's clearly marked HOV, you need to make a left turn, or it's a single lane you'll still somehow be a danger to society.
Speed limits in North America were lowered to save fuel during the oil shortages in the latter half of the 20th century and subsequently were never raised.
Assuming you maintain proper spacing between you and the other cars, driving at 110 km/h is not significantly more dangerous than at 100 or even 90 km/h.
I can't speak to Canada, but they were certainly raised afterwards in much of the U.S. The only exceptions I've come across are roads and highways that are frequently congested (e.g. in DC) or local municipalities doing the speed trap thing. But most states raised to at least 65 mph from 55.
Although, most risk of accident numbers I've seen are based on miles driven. I wonder which is the most important thing for frequency -- time, or miles.
Actually most people drive ~100km/h on the road I have in mind so 80 is annoying to some already, but I try to never tailgate anyone into driving faster. Only when someone does ~72 because they think that's what they are allowed to drive... such a small difference and yet so annoying.
Another random thought: do the cars respond to a police officer trying to pull them over?
My two cents: if the car has the capacity for manual override, the owner (negligence) otherwise the manufacturer.
>do the cars respond to a police officer trying to pull them over?
Legally, humans are supposed to, so why would it be different for self-driving cars (which can at least be programmed to give control over to a third party when requested?)
There are plenty of ways a self-driving car could mess up and cause an accident where you do not have enough time to react to it. Not "you should have been paying more attention". As in "You are not superhuman enough to react in time, period".
Say, swerving on the highway into oncoming traffic. Some (incredibly rough) numbers: if you're going 108km/h and the car suddenly swerves into the other lane of a two-lane highway, if it's 20m between start of swerve and hitting the vehicle in the other lane, that's 2/3 of a second. You can't do that. You (or rather, an average person) are not going to be able to recover in time. The reaction time for an alert driver is something like 0.7s on average. [1]
And that's not the most pessimistic assumptions either.
[1] First link I found: http://www.technology-assoc.com/articles/reaction-time.html
Manufacturer.
However, what's going to eventually fall out is that self-driving cars are going to be SO much safer, that insurance companies eventually won't let YOU drive.
In case of other accidents -- pays insurance (and their pricing will be the best indication of how safe these cars are).
In my experience, even though speedmeter in the instrument panel shows 10mph over, actual GPS speed is around speed limit.
'Vehicle manufacturers usually calibrate speedometers to read high by an amount equal to the average error, to ensure that their speedometers never indicate a lower speed than the actual speed of the vehicle, to ensure they are not liable for drivers violating speed limits.', although no citation is currently provided.
Error is introduced by tire diameter being different than what was assumed for initial calibration... i.e. wear on the tires or tires that are under/over-inflated.
http://www.maps-gps-info.com/gps-accuracy.html http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/
for n, neighbor of neighbors
if neighbor.vel > @vel # TODO: add something like: " and @vel < maxVel"
@vel += 1