New Honda Accord Drives Itself 398
pmenefee writes "Japanese car manufacturer Honda has launched a new self-driven car. Dubbed Honda Accord ADAS, the vehicle can change gears and steer itself around bends. While the auto-pilot function will currently only operate on motorways and dual carriageways, officials at Honda believe that future ADAS models will tackle all roads."
beep beep beep (Score:2, Insightful)
You've got to be kidding. Who is going to drive (and I use the term loosely per the subject) a car that beeps at them every ten seconds?
Re:What's a dual-carriagway? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've often heard that the first step to wisdom is calling things by their correct name; if this bloke needs some clarification and isn't too proud to admit it should he be marked a troll? He's a hell of a lot better off than the idiots who think they know what it means when they don't.
Re:Sweet! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:beep beep beep (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What's a dual-carriagway? (Score:3, Insightful)
As a cyclist, I'm pretty worried about how safe these auto driving vehicles are; how optimised they are for things in the road. Its one thing to have a car that brakes if you are about to hit something, another to have the thing make steering decisions too. Also, what is your excuse if caught speeding "it wasn't me, the car did it".
Re:*SMASH* (Score:3, Insightful)
Scary Scary World (Score:3, Insightful)
While science fiction, and apparently car companies, suggest that this is a possibility, here are two reasons why this will never happen:
1) All or Nothing. Either ALL cars on the road are self driven, or none are. The moment you get a human interacting with computer driven cars, all chaos will result. No computer system, radar system, and automated response system can anticipate a drunk human driver swerving across 6 lanes of traffic at 100 mph in order to make an exit.
2) Too many degrees of freedom. The car has too many degrees of freedom that affect safety. Tire wear, engine wear, body wear, road conditions, weather conditions and unexpected obstacles like rocks, tree branches, other debris, animals, or other people act against the safe driving of a vehicle. A computer can't take all these degrees of freedom into account. An auto driven car with lousy tires, paired with poor weather and icy roads won't be able to swerve in time to avoid a deer that suddenly dashes out on the road. A human might see the deer emerging from the woods long before it dashes out on the road, a human knows what to do when seeing a deer approach the road. A computer might interpret the deer as a stationary obstacle on the side of the road and take no precautions like slowing down to avoid hitting it if it suddenly moves.
Auto driven cars only work in a few carefully controlled conditions, not in real life. Perhaps an automated highway system is the only application for automated cars, one that prevents external influence like weather and animals and other humans, but it would require billions in infrastructure changes to make highways safe and usable as automated freeways.
The concept just isn't practical. I for one will stop driving if I had to use or contend with computer driven vehicles. While humans are infinitely capable of bad driving, knowing I can react to whatever some brain dead human driver can throw at me makes me feel safe as opposed to allowing a computer to decide how to react to unexpected (and unprogrammed for) conditions.
so can it... (Score:3, Insightful)
Can it read signs? Judge weather conditions and drive appropriately? Respond appropriately if the vehicle gets out of control (say, crosses a patch of ice?), or if something unexpected happens?
Well, neither can most of the people on the road today.
Here's a shocker: let's give people a better education in how to drive, than spend billions on cars that "drive themselves".
Amazingly, it pays off in the long run, because parents have to teach their children how to drive (in many cases). The overall work needed to "educate" society in how to drive, drops over time. Eventually, we become less of a danger to ourselves on the roads, so that having 9 airbags instead of 2 doesn't become quite an issue.
Of course, it'd also be nice if highschools spent a few days in physics class on how physics affects cars (ie, basic vehicle dynamics.) Then again, that'd acknowledge a need to teach students real-world, useful information in school, instead of theoretical skills. When was the last time you saw "how to figure out if you're getting ripped a new one on your home mortgage" on a math teacher's curriculum?
Re:Scary Scary World (Score:3, Insightful)
I can think of at least one more: liability.
Re:Yellow Lines & Snow (Score:1, Insightful)
Which leads into the snow and rain... I would think it would be pretty useless in snowy conditions where the lines were obscured. Personally I wouldn't be using cruise control anyway on a snow-covered road.
Re:Sweet! (Score:5, Insightful)
Staying in lane is easy. Realizing that the truck in the junction ahead hasn't made eye contact and is about to pull out in front of you is harder.. and you can't automate that.
Re:What's a dual-carriagway? (Score:3, Insightful)
Maybe among the 50 million native speakers of modern English in the UK but not among the several hundred million in the US.
The term "Interstate", "Freeway", "Highway" are common amongst native speakers of modern English, how many people in the UK do you think would know what they refer to?
Re:Do I have to say it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I agree that a computer doesn't get distracted or tired. It does require proper maintenance, but then so do your brakes.
We are in the unfortunate time right now, where the systems are only useful under limited real-world conditions, basically in good weather on highways with no construction. That's still a big chunk of driving miles, and I'd love to be able to use something like this while I'm doing highway driving in good weather on interstates with no construction. (There must be a couple of miles of interstate not under construction somewhere near here... right?) And this system, due to using radar for speed control, is probably safe for night driving too. That's really cool.
But right now, the systems are good for "closed track" driving with other well-behaved cars. It doesn't know street signs, so handling the 4-way Stop intersection would be a bit of a problem. Ditto with traffic lights. Give it another 10 years, and those will become solved problems too.
Then you have to be able to handle kids running into the road in front of you when the ball rolls down the driveway. That's harder.
I'm not bashing these things. I like them. I want them. Really... I drive a Ford F-150, and when Ford did a recall on the old-tech cruise control, I found just how much I use the cruise control as a crutch. They disabled my cruise control for 4 months, while they worked on fixing the problem and distributing parts to the service centers. Try driving 400 miles without cruise control sometime, it's amazing how tired my leg got, just keeping steady pressure on the gas pedal for 7 hours. Ouch.
But these things are still at a point that they require an alert attentive driver watching things. Just like... regular cruise control. Wow. When a car on normal cruise control plows into another vehicle, that is the driver's fault, not the car maker's (assuming that the cruise control did not refuse to disengage). If one of these new-tech cruise controls does the same thing... that is still the driver's fault, and not the car maker's.
But I'm sure a jury would still be happy to award a "Oh, we feel bad for you" award of a few tens of millions of dollars to the family of the first person killed by one of these.
Are you crazy? (Score:3, Insightful)
I read things like this here occasionally and the only way I can make sense of it is by figuring the writer has read too many science fiction books.
There's simply no evidence that computers are capable of handling the number of variables in play when driving on busy roads with people, and I don't see how they ever will on their current development path. Driving involves way way more than just piloting the thing down the lane and not hitting things in front of you. To really drive safely you need to be monitoring the environment and anticipating what every person near you is going to do. This requires basically running multiple people simulators simultaneously and monitoring for emerging solutions that represent a threat.
Your brain automates this in the background; building these simulations is part of the 18+ year process of becoming a functioning adult. To get a computer to the same level it would have to start with the processing power of the human brain, then interact with humans 16 hours a day for nearly 2 decades.
In addition computers and robots have absolutely no sense of self-preservation. If you give a computer a wrong instruction it will follow it, to its own destruction even, without hesitation. There's no billion-year-old base programming that checks every single action for self-danger.
Really, one HUGE problem in this country is that nobody understands risk assessment.
The irony of this statement just kills me. (/pun)