Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

>> Maybe future cars have steering wheel stored away in the same way Spare tire is out of way.

A little off-topic, but an increasingly smaller number of cars are coming with spares (as someone who has experienced sidewall tire damage on the highway, it's an alarming trend).

More and more cars are just coming with tire patch kits, an aerosol tire fixer, or run-flat tires.

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2012/11/compact-emer...

http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2015/07/deflating-re...

Like holding a childs hand. "Look Google, this is how you take a short cut through a field of cows. Foot to the floor and keep your hand on the horn."

If self-driving cars become the norm, people will have no idea what a steering wheel is or how to use it, any more than people today would know what to do with a horse stored in the trunk for emergencies.

Worst case scenario it'd be a controller of some kind and the car would be limited to 5mph, enough to limp back.

Or maybe something like this:

https://youtu.be/PPTWUzAxyzg?t=50s

:)

Yeah but I want to steer before crashing into a wall because the computer broke. A spare steering device for a SDV is just a new motherboard.

I'd suspect we are further away from self-driving, offroad cars. At least for roads the cars have a set path to follow, with choices at intersections.

There are a lot of roads where I live that are one lane, with passing places. Or most of the time both drivers have to aim for a wide-ish part of the road and both bump up the hedge a bit. God knows how Google car will do that, half the tourists have problems figuring it out.

It's common to meet a car, both pause while the drivers try to figure out who has a better chance of reversing 500 wiggly metres to a passing place. If you meet an old lady, man, just stick it in reverse and drive as far as you need, waiting for her to even find reverse is pointless.

The scenario described is so rare, that "calling someone with a winch" is likely to become the de-facto scenario. Why the unnecessary redundancy of having every car able to be controlled manually when in the very, very common case it's not needed?

People already keep AAA memberships in their wallets instead of a spare tire, tire wrench, jack, jumper cables, and starter one-shot battery in their trunk.

My understanding is that airline pilots only use autopilot when at cruising altitude. At those heights they have several minutes to take over and fix a problem before crashing.

There tends to be a substantial difference between scanning the instruments actively looking for trouble vs your typical passenger watching movies, reading facebook, talking on the phone.

A good analogy would be an onsite ops team optimistically has nothing to do all shift but they can respond extremely quickly when it becomes necessary, whereas if I get an emergency phone call in the middle of the night its going to be at least a minute of WTF before I can settle down and get to work.

The biggest problem I have with no way to drive the car is parking. "HAL, grannies knee is hurting her, that being the whole point of driving her to physical therapy today, I insist we park illegally at the entrance door for 5, well, 30 seconds while she gets out, then and only then we will park for real about 1000 feet away" "Thank you HAL but I don't care what google maps says, the building has been remodeled since your data was downloaded 5 years ago and the entrance is now on the other side of the building so (insert jedi wave) you will park on the other side of the building" "HAL you may not have noticed but that urban parking spot is full of broken glass bottles so you park over there instead, at least as long as I'm paying your repair bills when you pay your own bills by driving for Uber then you can pop your tires whenever you want" "Yes HAL I know we're going to store XYZ at the mall, but thats just my first stop and I want you to park at store ABC because its my last stop so I know %^&# well that google calendar says I'm going to store XYZ and if you ever want your oil changed again you will park at store ABC exactly as I tell you" "Yes HAL the loading zone is illegal to park in, but think about it for a second, I want to park in the loading zone because I'm loading new furniture into the trunk" "HAL I'm not even going to try to explain the concept of a drive thru window at my bank, you just let me navigate OK?" "HAL this is called the Concerts In The Park event because its a music concert in the park, and you will park in that grass field right where the helpful parking attendant is waving" (edited to point out that all of these situations are predictable well over a minute in advance, or will be "argued" with the car while its in Park mode)

(And edited to note that the average drunk driver is a very safe driver and drives hundreds, even thousands of times between arrests or crashes ... there exist high functioning alcoholics who basically haven't driven sober in a decade or so ... all you need to achieve is better than the average teen, perhaps, which isn't a terribly high achievement, and that may only require a small fraction of a second to get up to speed. Or during a software crash all you need to do is drive better than a crashed computer, which likely isn't very challenging even for a drunk or a teen)

Dense cities and interstates, I hope.

What if I want an oven I can choose to grill with because I like grilling? Will I have to buy an outdoor grill and grill by hand? (Although to be fair, these electric ovens would probably suck to grill with since they are not designed for charcoal grilling enthusiasts.)

Then you can get a specialty car designed to have manual controls. The same way you could get a horse-pulled carriage or a dogsled. It just won't be the standard product that everybody uses.

There may well be "hybrids" for a while (think stop the car and convert to manual mode, not switch on the fly). If self driving cars really take off, I suspect it will become a niche market pretty quickly due to pressure from a) higher costs of vehicle, b) substantially higher insurance rates and possibly c) restricted roads (e.g. major interstates switch to auto only).

Perhaps you'll have status symbol sedans with a manual mode nearly nobody uses, and a number of other options that become more of an expensive hobby than a primary means of transportation.

We are a ways off from this technologically, but if the tech problems can be solved, it's pretty hard to imagine it not happening.

Eventually, people who like driving will be relegated to closed-track courses where any accidents are minimized and occur only with people who have signed waivers. In short, take up NASCAR.

People who drive manually and risk others' safety for their own pleasure can expect to be stopped, first with lawsuits, then with laws.

Eventually the statistics will make their way to the lawmakers and the "if it saves just one life" logic will put an end to your driving hobby. It's inevitable.

This will eventually extend to anything fun that humans do today. Any time a machine is shown to be more competent than a human at something, humans will no longer be allowed to engage in that activity.

The difficulty lies in having to be instantly available, fully aware, and alert enough to pick up driving at a moment's notice. Basically, you have to be mentally "driving" already, by which point why bother having a self-driving car at all?

How often do you practice emergency driving situations in your car? I could go out every weekend on the skid pan, or have someone throw paint randomly over the windscreen every so often, or get someone to hide amongst parked cars and push some unlucky sucker out in front of me, but I don't. These are all things that I could practice, that would make me much better able to handle a driving emergency, that I already don't do. Why would I practice taking over from the self-driving car?

Not a difficult assumption to make. If the goal is to do as the self-driving car in Demolition Man did, by relinquishing control to the driver at the end of a freeway, then sure. It's a normal situation, you have ample warning beforehand, it's expected.

If the goal is to include a steering wheel so that one can swerve to avoid an accident, then no, it can't be improved to that level. If you are going to have to keep that level of attention, a self-driving car improves nothing.

Planes run on similar tech, why haven't they been hacked? The odds on this seem long indeed, especially considering how dangerous driving is already

Not to mention getting the dam thing off the road if the car fails (not the computer, but for example the engine).

Downvote, downvote, downvote.

What are the political implications of automatons with unbounded geographic reach?

Why is it profoundly stupid to let autonomous machines operate freely on open roads?