Self-driving cars are here!

NewScientist.com.

People overestimate their driving skill, so any manual control 'for' the best would have to be incredibly stringent if they were allowed to interact on the roads with self driving cars. It would obviously be easier to have a manual override if needed, with everyone primarily relying on the technology.

Good riddance.

I know I drive better than average cause I manage to use my turn signals, even when changing lanes.

Most of the point of a taxi is having someone else drive you to your destination in their car. Get rid of taxi drivers and pay a few bucks to hop into the local autocar - perfect.

My mother was in a crash ten years ago. The temperature was an early-morning 50 degrees by then, but there was still leftover black ice from overnight that hadn't melted yet. She was already going slower than the speed limit, expecting the road would still be icy. It gave her permanent spinal damage. If she was even going as fast as she was supposed to, much less in an automated car exploiting higher speed limits because the temperature was more than reasonably acceptable and would have fooled the sensors, she'd be dead.

Every database will have fatal holes in it.

edited 1st Jun '11 11:16:53 AM by Pykrete

What did she crash into?

All of this is reminding me of this commercial:

edited 1st Jun '11 10:23:37 AM by Exploder

A roadside rock face.

edited 1st Jun '11 10:33:35 AM by Pykrete

Absolute perfection is a rather high standard to attain.

Besides, road condition sensors would also be a part of this.

This whole thing seems awfully expensive.

Given how much is spent on transportation already, is it really that much?

Barkey: Glad you noticed my attempt at humour.

I'm all for automated cars. I think an automated car would be wonderful for dense urban traffic. The benefit of an automated car would be for taxis. You flag one down, get in, and it takes you where you want to go (within city limits or something so you don't end up stealing it). You'd pay at the start of the trip based off of the planned travel distance, but if the cab had to deviate due to emergent circumstances, it would eat the cost. Should the trip be completed in less distance than planned, the passenger would get a refund based off of the distance not travelled.

Paying at the start of the trip (think the self-checkout line at Wal-mart) would reduce the risk of freeloading. The cab would refuse to move until you've paid. I can also see networking the cabs so that a human dispatcher in an office somewhere can check in on any particular cab in the case where problems or issues crop up, like, language problems with a foreign tourist.

I think that automated cars are eventually going to be a reality. Maybe when I'm old and feeble I'll simply give up and let my car drive me around, but until then, I'd like to drive it myself.

Cost: It all depends on how much money we deem to be an acceptable amount to reduce the loss of lives, property and a reduced injury rate. Some safety features are really cheap, like center high mount stop lamps (CHMSL). Others cost more - airbags, ABS, traction control. Would this be sold as a safety feature?

Some industry standardization agreements woudl have to be made to ensure that the auto-drive system in a Ford is compatible (car networking for increased awareness?) with that of a Chevy or a Toyota.

edited 1st Jun '11 10:59:40 AM by pvtnum11

@131: That has got to be one of the dumbest commercials I've seen yet.

^

Exactly, I'll drive myself until I can't do it myself, and indulge in the automation mode when I'm on a long car ride, coming home from the bar, getting sleepy, or have a cell phone call.

Needless to say, all of the above make up about 20 percent of the time I spend driving. I enjoy the 80 percent that I spend cruising in my V6 Grand Prix off the Pacific Coast Highway.

I've owned two Grand Prix's myself. An '89 and a '96. I still want an '89 or '90 TGP, barring that, one of the 3.4 GTP ones.

edited 1st Jun '11 11:03:14 AM by pvtnum11

@126 Wow! Only 74%?

One study I read about said that over 96% drivers considered themselves above average.

All the more reason for annual or semi-annnual tests; to prove who really is average or not.

But don't you realize, every American has a God-given right to drive however the fuck they want -- drunk, talking on the cell phone, 40 MPH over the limit, from the time they can reach the pedals to the moment they drop over from dementia -- if you don't like it, get out of their way!

edited 1st Jun '11 11:49:58 AM by Fighteer

No, I'm more of a Type I Eagle-lander. The Type II's that would wholeheartedly agree with that statement can screw off and die.

Provided that you can meet or exceed the requirements for testing and licensing, you can have a license to operate a car. This won't be very popular, but if we have problems with people not being fit to operate a vehicle, they need to be removed from the driving population. One way to do that is to disqualify them.

Good luck with that. People don't want to make the elderly come in for re-testing.

Incidentally, the "50 degree black ice->driving into a rockface" anecdote is one of those edge cases where a crash is simply going to happen for some people at some times. Demanding 100% perfection is a strawman. A more reasonable counterargument would be to demonstrate a situation in which an expert system controlling the car would get into a crash that a human operator wouldn't.

The "must be perfect or no go" argument reminds me of the flap that happened over the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, when some foreign (Dutch if I recall?) oil cleanup vessels were refused for not meeting a standard of cleaning 99.99% of the oil out of the water — they only cleaned 99.9%, or some such. The sheer misguided bureaucratic idiocy that gave rise to that decision was a big black eye for the administration, even though it was corrected later.

This illustrates a point that it's idiotic to block new technologies on the theory that they're not 100% reliable when they are still orders of magnitude better than the situation they're designed to address.

I knoe people who fall into that trap. Better is the enemy of good enough, but good enough sure beats nothing at all.

Sometimes you have to roll out the 80-percent solution and wait for it to get better.

edited 1st Jun '11 12:12:11 PM by pvtnum11

The difference being with a human driver taking precautions, that edge case resulted in permanent injury — with an automated one, it would have been death.

edited 1st Jun '11 12:22:00 PM by Pykrete

Why?

Because the automated sensor would have been fooled by ambient temperature and gone faster. Mom was driving a good deal under the speed limit because she suspected ice was still there even though it was almost 20 degrees over freezing.

Unless you want to say automated cars should go under the speed limit anytime the temperature is under 50 degrees just in case. Which is a lot of the year around here despite how rarely we get ice.

edited 1st Jun '11 12:29:41 PM by Pykrete

Alternatively, the sensor might have reacted faster to the loss of traction and stabilized the car, preventing the crash entirely. You can't know the outcome ahead of time.