Road Train Completes First Trials In Sweden 345
Hugh Pickens writes "BBC reports technology that links vehicles into 'road trains' that can travel as a semi-autonomous convoy has undergone its first real world tests with trials held on Volvo's test track in Sweden. Researchers believe platoons of cars could be traveling on Europe's roads within a decade cutting fuel use, boosting safety and may even reducing congestion. SARTRE researchers say that around 80% of accidents on the road are due to human error so using professional lead drivers to take the strain on long journeys could, they say, see road accidents fall. They also predict fuel efficiency could improve by as much as 20% if 'vehicle platooning' takes off, with obvious benefits for the environment. 'An automated system is likely to make it safer as it takes away driver error but it would have to be 100% reliable,' says John Franklin 'This kind of system would also require a complete change in motoring culture for drivers to hand over control.'"
80% due to human error? (Score:4, Interesting)
That figure seems a bit low. Unless an animal runs across the road or similar, other problems are all IMO human error.
If something falls off a truck, that's human error for not securing the load properly. If high winds knock over your truck, that's human error for driving in dangerous conditions. If you skid on an ice patch, that's your error for driving too fast for the conditions, etc.
Re:80% due to human error? (Score:5, Informative)
Tire blowouts, serpentine belt breaks, break cylinders exploding. Sometimes its a maintenance issue, but a lot of the time things just fail. I had the rear cylinder explode on a vehicle I was driving at highway speeds like 10 years ago, I just barely managed to stop myself with the hand-break on the shoulder without running into the stopped traffic ahead of me, but if I had hit then 100% of my accidents ever would have been caused by mechanical failure with no forewarning.
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Okay this is true, but do you really think that failures on well maintained cars is the cause of 1 in 5 accidents, or even 1 in 10? I'd think it was more like 1 in 1000.
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I cant say for sure, but for me its 100%. (or it would be, if I'd had the accident.). For fatal accidents I imagine about 80% are either falling asleep at the wheel, alcohol related, or typical young male dumb shit, the remaining 20% could easily be caused by high speed blowouts and things of that nature.
For overall accidents I'm inclined to agree with you, the vast majority of what I see is caused by young women talking on cell phones, but those are usually very minor. Talking about lives lost I think the
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For high speed accidents then unexpected failures would probably count for more (though I still think that 1 in 5 is giving people too much credit). Even at lower speeds though, there's still serious danger of maiming or killing pedestrians, so even those women on their cell phones are a danger.
I was taught that basically all accidents are human error. This page [smartmotorist.com] claims it's at least 95%. Too many people try to blame external factors when in fact the accident was avoidable. I really don't like to hear that s
Re:80% due to human error? (Score:4, Insightful)
I was taught that basically all accidents are human error. This page claims it's at least 95%. Too many people try to blame external factors when in fact the accident was avoidable. I really don't like to hear that someone crashed "because it was raining/icy/snowy". They crashed because they were driving too fast for the conditions.
Every accident would be avoidable if you drive at 5 km/hr, no matter what the conditions are. The question is what is reasonable and unreasonable to expect, if you hide behind a tree near a high speed road and jump out in front of a trailer you will with 99% probability get splattered even if it's a perfect day and the driver goes no faster than the posted limit. But in retrospect you can always claim it's human error and too fast, even though that's how fast we actually expect people to go. In fact under good conditions they will fine you for being way below the limit.
Even if you're driving at speeds that seem reasonable given that it's snowy and icy you can get caught by surprise. I've been off the road once because I got tricked by a bus pocket. It was heavy snowfall, I was already going something like 50 km/h instead of the limit of 80 km/h and for the briefest of moments I followed the curve into the pocket. The road was quite well trafficked and worn clear, but in the pocket there was nothing but polished ice with light snow on top so nothing could get a grip. I couldn't steer, couldn't brake fast enough and went off the road at the end of the pocket. I checked now in a calculator and I couldn't have stopped on 15 meters of ice with with 30 km/h (20 mph) and one second reaction time.
I suppose you could call it human error. But either you assume I would have avoided the situation - which is unlikely - or it would really taken a massive speed reduction to avoid it. Like way, way below what people normally drive, even under those conditions. Either that makes 95% of us reckless or it's jusr acknowledging that driving that car at those speeds under those circumstances is an acceptable but non-zero risk for all the benefits and liberty it gives drivers and their passengers. Not that we shouldn't make roads and cars safer, but until something will literally block me from driving over a pedestrian or off the road we will have accidents.
Re:80% due to human error? (Score:4, Insightful)
Every accident would be avoidable if you drive at 5 km/hr, no matter what the conditions are.
Never dealt with ice have you? ;-)
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so even those women on their cell phones are a danger.
A fact which always surprises people is that some stereotypes are actually true. Women are far, far worse drivers then men. BUT, while women have far more frequent wrecks, they are typically less severe than those created by male drivers. Whereas male drivers have far less frequent accidents but when they do wreck its typically far more serious. This is why young males are more expensive to insure.
So if you say women are bad drivers, its not only a stereotype but statistically accurate. Just the same, a mal
Re:80% due to human error? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems to me, you've universally redefined what a bad driver is so as to have an irrational rant, which adds absolutely nothing to the thread at hand. I don't believe you'll find any reasonable person (which seemingly excludes you) who will argue that a bad driver is not someone who has lots of wrecks. Inversely, you're not going to find a reasonable person (again, excluding you) who will argue the definition of a good driver is one who has frequent wrecks.
Made even worse is the fact that your completely irrational and unique definition means all of the world's top drivers are, according to you, "bad drivers."
I'm sorry, but your post is ignorant to say the least.
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Which driver will have its driving license taken away?
In a sane world, both.
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I cant say for sure, but for me its 100%.
Calculating a percentage value for a single data point is slightly bonkers.
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I cant say for sure, but for me its 100%.
This being slashdot, it's astounding that you think that's relevant. I'd have thought that, even at a low-ranked school, basic stats would be part of CS.
If anything, you've demonstrated that not all moving mechanical failures result in accidents, which weakens your case.
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It happens, but it is the exception, not the rule. In 20 years of driving experience, I have not once experienced a mechanical failure that would've resulted in an accident. I have seen a lot, and I mean several orders of magnitude, more driver errors than car failures. So while switching the human driver for an automated system only exchanges one source of errors for the other, yes, it does exchange one source with a fairly high rate of errors against one with a fairly low rate of errors.
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I've had a back tyre run on of the flange in a sharp turn. The valve was leaking and the low pressure in the tyre combined with the sideways forces due to the sharp turn caused the tyre to run off. This caused me to lose control over the vehicle and swerve over the other lane. I didn't hit anything fortunately, and due to the relatively low speeds involved it probably would not have resulted in a fatal accident if I had hit oncoming traffic.
It was definitely caused by mechanical failure. but at the same tim
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"Brakes" (Score:2)
Cars have brakes to stop them. "Break" is a verb.
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Not always (e.g., "a clean break with the past"). ;)
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First off, serpentine belt failures are usually such that you can still get the car pulled over, albeit requiring more steering force.
Second, how long before that failure did you have the brake fluid flushed. Should be done every 2 years. ;)
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I don't think statistics work the way you think they work...
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I had a head-on collision in 1976 when the left front tire blew out and threw me into oncoming traffic, and they were new tires. Of course, I guess you could say that the faulty tire was human error on the manufacturer's part.
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The person you're replying to is talking about a wheel cylinder - part of the hydraulic braking system.
And, you're still going to have a hydraulic braking system even on an electric car.
Causes vs circumstances (Score:2)
Usually, too much importance is given to the immediate cause of an accident. Most accidents don't happen due to a single cause, there's a number of circumstances that must exist together for an accident to happen.
In modern highways, the usual circumstance for most accidents is crowded lanes. The usual cause for crowded lanes is a few dumbasses of the i-hate-tailgaters-and-i-have-the-right-to-drive-at-any-speed-below-the-limit species.
Make it a severe offense, same penalties as drunken driving, to drive on t
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Usually, too much importance is given to the immediate cause of an accident. Most accidents don't happen due to a single cause, there's a number of circumstances that must exist together for an accident to happen.
In modern highways, the usual circumstance for most accidents is crowded lanes. The usual cause for crowded lanes is a few dumbasses of the i-hate-tailgaters-and-i-have-the-right-to-drive-at-any-speed-below-the-limit species.
Make it a severe offense, same penalties as drunken driving, to drive on the left lane with someone behind you and those "80% accidents" will go away.
Make it a severe offense to tailgate and you get the same solution, plus its the assholes instead of the timid that you would be punishing.
I get it when someone is going 55 in the left lane, that's insanity, but the vast majority of people whom I know that think like this are usually going 15 over the speed limit and riding the ass of the guy going 5 over. The tailgaters and aggressive drivers are the ones who cause fatalities.
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This is true, but it's still frustrating for those of us that are attentive and efficient in our driving, to be stuck behind some guy that is being far, far too cautious. There are times when you need to be cautious, and there are times when it's basically completely safe to be doing 100mph (outside of an "act of God" like an unforeseeable mechanical failure), and so for someone not to even be doing the posted limit is just needlessly frustrating those behind. The driver behind may have too short a temper,
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Make it a severe offense to tailgate and you get the same solution
It would not be the same solution because the road would me more crowded overall.
Assume one person doing 55 starts passing another doing 54. In order to avoid tailgating altogether, everybody in a long stretch would have to slow down. If someone is driving slowly in front of you, you have to drive even slower until the space between your cars increase to a safe distance. The driver behind you would be forced to drive slower than you to get the same safe distance between you and him. And so on, the rest foll
Re:Causes vs circumstances (Score:5, Insightful)
You fail at both driving and physics. To get a safe distance to the car infront of you you only need to slow down for 5 seconds at most then you can match speed with car infront of you, there is no recursive slow down for the entire road.
"It takes two to tailgate, a tailgater and a tailgatee. As I said, accidents usually aren't caused by one single cause, in most cases if just one of a set of circumstances didn't happen there would be no accident."
That's like saying it takes two to punch someone, the puncher and the punchee. It's retarded. There exists none, zero, zip, nada excuse to tailgate. There exists no situation where you're better off tailgating the person infront of you, you don't even get to your destination faster.
And for the record it is already illegal in most of the world to drive slow in the left lane (Usually under some law conserning disrupting traffic ) however that only applies if he's driving slower then the limit, if you think that's to slow then that's your problem. However there's never really any reason to go faster, suppose you drive at 110 on a 100 mph road, now your 30 minute trip takes 27 minutes, who cares? Those 3 minutes are a rounding error of your day.
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...It takes two to tailgate, a tailgater and a tailgatee
...That's like saying it takes two to punch someone, the puncher and the punchee. It's retarded....
Damn, you beat me to it.
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From a legal and moral perspective, though, I really do find it hard to see the outrage. "This vehicle in front of me has the nerve to obey the law and obey posted speed limits! Does he not realize that this lane of the road is, by ancient right, the proper and fitting domain of criminals such as myself? How dare they intrude!!! Curses
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So by your logic it's safer for me to install push-bars and shove the slower drivers off the road into a tailspin.
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By "human error," they likely meant "human driving error," wherein a driver in control of a vehicle takes (or fails to take) an action based on insufficient information or poor judgement that results in an otherwise preventable accident. Accidents resulting from objects falling off trucks, high winds, or ice patches are not always preventable even when the driver is fully alert, following all of the pertinent traffic laws and rules, and is maintaining situational awareness.
But I do agree that 80% seems like
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Freak gusts no, but I've never experienced such things here in the UK. Maybe in other climates that's more likely, but it's still not going to account for a lot of accidents.
My car used to give an ice warning when temperatures reached 4 degrees C (yes, above zero). Presumably that was to account for microclimates in dips in the road, etc. It doesn't make too much difference on straights, but you obviously have to be careful at corners, and if there are cars in front of you. You should at least be driving as
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If I remember correctly, 4C is the point where water is at its densest. Below that temperature, water starts to expand again as the molecules begin to arrange themselves in an ice-like formation. It's due to the fact that the temperature of a substance is never absolutely uniform, with some parts being hotter and others cooler. It's the same reason that you get steam coming off a hot cup of water that is nevertheless below 100C.
The other factor is that most people in the UK use summer tyres all year roun
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True. I don't think those count as driver error, but you could still say it's human error for not keeping the roads clean and in good condition! Also it helps to keep a cool head if the conditions go downhill. Sudden control inputs are much more likely to make you skid than smooth ones. That's much easier said than done when you're not expecting it though obviously. I'm gradually improving, so if the car ever skids when I brake these days, I'm getting the confidence to lift off and re-apply since it often a
This is so 1970s (Score:3)
The problem where the UK is concerned is that motorways are actually our safest roads - it's people like the idiot woman this morning in the Range Rover who think that size overrides the Highway Code that present the problem, and this doesn't address it.
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it's people like the idiot woman this morning in the Range Rover who think that size overrides the Highway Code that present the problem, and this doesn't address it.
On motorways it might -- because the idiot woman would join a road train for selfish reasons (reduction in fuel costs; ability to relax rather than drive), and hence would do a couple of hundred miles without the opportunity to drive badly.
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She drives a Range Rover. Fuel costs won't be on her mind. In fact, judging by the average driver, anything to get someone to their destination quicker will be welcomed, not deliberately running in the most fuel-efficient way - I get much more efficiency at 50mph, how many people do that speed on a major motorway?
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I am sure it will be even better if you drive 40mph and even better with 30, 20, ... all the way to zero. So why not drive 30mph? I am sure 2 wheels will be more fuel efficient as well. So take a moped and drive 10mph if fuel efficiency is what is important to you.
No, nearly all cars drop in fuel efficiency below 20mph. I can't find more recent information but it looks like many cars are most fuel efficient at somewhere between 30 and 55 mph [wikipedia.org], have a quite flat consumption in that range, and drop off below this fairly quickly and above this rather more slowly.
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Actually fuel efficiency is worse at lower speeds, but don't let facts get in your way or anything.
Actually, it isn't (Score:2)
However, even for gasoline engines, the power required at low speeds drops more rapidly than the fall off in engine efficiency, for any sane value of engine size. Briefly, if your fuel consumption worsens at speeds below about 40mph, you are probably driving an old US V8 with a
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Apart from the fact that most cars *are* more fuel efficient at about 50mph (some new ones lower, but generally most cars capable of 70mph are more fuel efficient at 50mph than most other speeds) - basically 5th gear, lowest revs - there are millions more ways to make thing fuel efficient which don't affect driving (e.g. use aircon instead of opening a window, remove roof-top boxes, etc.) and most people don't do ANY of them.
My point is - fuel efficiency is NOT a big seller for this idea. Nobody *really* c
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Use your horn. Make sure these people know their driving is crap. If it happens regularly enough eventually they might stop.
I dream of a day (Score:2)
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Perhaps one day we could have automated platoons of Slashdot submissions about the same damn thing, too?
The last submission was about SARTRE before the tests started. This is the results.
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Perhaps one day we could have automated platoons of Slashdot submissions about the same damn thing, too?
The last submission was about SARTRE before the tests started. This is the results.
Ohh? http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/18/0411235/How-Europe-Will-Lower-Emissions-mdash-Self-Driving-Cars [slashdot.org] (2 days old)
The team behind SARTRE has now conducted its first real world test, using a sole Volvo S60 sedan that followed a lead truck around the automaker's test facility near Gothenburg, Sweden. In the video, the driver is free to take his eyes off the road and his hands off the wheel. In fact, he uses neither his hands nor feet during the test.
And yes, it's the same fucking video. DUPE.
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Invalid test if they did not have another car T-bone or sideswipe a car in the "train" to see what happens.
Never going to work in a litigious society (Score:5, Insightful)
One of my engineering professors worked on something like this in the 90s, when I asked him why we never saw anything like this come into use he said that they knew that the first time anyone was killed in an accident involving one of the automated vehicles the entire project would be dead. Regardless of if it was from something like a blowout causing a computer driven car to swerve into the other lane, or some drunk ramming headlong into a "platoon" of cars.
Even if it is much safer, the lawyers will be salivating while they wait for the first death.
Re:Never going to work in a litigious society (Score:5, Insightful)
The protocol for leaving the platoon and returning manual control to the driver is going to be the most difficult thing to solve I think, particularly where it occurs in a emergency situation. A blowout on the motorway is dangerous enough, but a blowout on the motorway where control of a car is suddenly returned to a driver in the middle of drinking a coffee and reading a newspaper could be disastrous.
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Thinking about it, with our current level of technology, this kind of system would be an ideal way to introduce automation into regular road cars. You probably wouldn't trust the system to do all of your driving for you, so you'd have platoons headed by a human driver, but it's probably sufficient to stop you safely at the side of the road in an emergency such as this.
Then, once greater automation becomes practical, the software in existing cars can be updated to take advantage of it.
Re:Never going to work in a litigious society (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the fear of lawsuits preventing autonomous vehicles is way overblown.
Historically, the auto industry has had several design flaws that have led to huge lawsuits, e.g. exploding gas tanks on the Ford Pinto. Ford's gas tank design led to numerous deaths and injuries, and corporate memos later showed that the company was even aware of the problem, yet Ford was not sued out of business. Even today, with all the fuss and lawsuits concerning Toyota's computer systems, Toyota is doing just fine. Lawsuits are part of the cost of doing business in the auto industry.
The technology being used in autonomous vehicle research was, by modern standards, painfully primitive 20 or 30 years ago. I could see how people would fear legal liability, because those older systems weren't smart enough to deal with every contingency in a roadway environment. Today's research vehicles are much better, and in ten years they'll be even better still.
The question to ask is this: can autonomous vehicles do better than 35,000+ fatalities, 2 million+ injuries, and $200B+ in liability / medical costs per year? That's what the U.S. alone is paying right now with humans behind the wheel. 20 years ago, engineers knew their vehicles weren't robust enough for the roadway. As Google's own experiments have recently shown, things are much different now.
There's no doubt that autonomous vehicles will fail from time to time, and occasionally someone will be injured. But fatalities from a well-engineered system will be rare, and the roadways will be orders of magnitude safer. The fear of autonomous vehicles is basically a classic example of flawed risk perception by human beings - they are uncomfortable with a few hundred possible auto accidents with a computer in control, yet think nothing of millions of accidents with the current system because they all think "I'm in control of the situation".
Re:Never going to work in a litigious society (Score:5, Insightful)
The question to ask is this: can autonomous vehicles do better than 35,000+ fatalities, 2 million+ injuries, and $200B+ in liability / medical costs per year? That's what the U.S. alone is paying right now with humans behind the wheel
That is the sensible question, but in reality it would have to be much safer to be accepted. We see this when there are train crashes. A train is already hundreds of times safer than a car but there are public inquiries, people brought to book and calls for improvement when they happen.
Re:Never going to work in a litigious society (Score:4, Insightful)
Even if it is much safer, the lawyers will be salivating while they wait for the first death.
There is a good reason why this project is sponsored by the EU and not the US.
While not perfect, the legal systems in most of Europe aren't not quite as broken as in the US.
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There is a reason US innovation has begun a slow march backward. You'd have to be out of your gourd to bring anything new to market in the States, these days.
Re:Never going to work in a litigious society (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if it is much safer, the lawyers will be salivating while they wait for the first death.
There is a good reason why this project is sponsored by the EU and not the US.
While not perfect, the legal systems in most of Europe aren't not quite as broken as in the US.
There were tests of this in California in the 1991 timeframe but I don't know if it was the State or the Feds. A train of 5 white cars would assemble at speed on interstate 15 between Palm Springs and San Diego. With only inches in between, the train would travel back and forth on the freeway . Perhaps another can find a record of this as my Google-fu is not adequate.
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Which is probably why this system is being developed in Europe, where the term "ambulance-chasing lawyer" is strongly associated with american lawyers, because we don't have the same kind of liability craze over here.
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Strange how accidents didn't kill autopilots in aircraft, electronic lift control, electronically controlled boilers, fly-by-wire, drive-by-wire in cars etc. Toyota's electronics have caused fatal accidents but no-one is suggesting that they should go back to the old mechanically linked accelerator pedals.
You might as well argue that once people discovered that metal can fatigue or that pitons can freeze over it will kill air travel. People are intelligent enough to understand that a small number of acciden
Heads I win, tails you lose (Score:2)
A system like this will indeed have to achieve a phenomenal level of safety, at least in the USA, because of how liability for accidents is assigned. Even if it saved 10,000 lives for every death it caused, on trial for causing that one death the manufacturers and system operators would get precisely zero credit for the lives saved, and would be vilified for causing the one death.
We have already seen this problem with vaccines, and it required special legislation to enable vaccine manufacturers to stay i
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> Even if it is much safer, the lawyers will be salivating while they wait for the first death.
Sound like this will work fine in Europe, and will never make it to the US
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I don't think so, the project worked fairly well as I understand it (remember that video from the 90s in California or Nevada where they were testing the things? It must have been on a nova or something, but I cant find it on youtube), but they knew all along that there was just no way to take it to market because of the liability.
If the thing hadn't worked then maybe, but the fear of lawsuits(and I should reiterate, it was the early 90s so the chances of a system failure killing someone wasn't insignifican
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They were doing automated road trains on the autobahn in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Was covered in a program called Beyond 2000. Like yourself, though, I haven't been able to find a video on it.
I'm going to agree with GP, though... in a society where people think it's ok to sue the pants off of somebody because they ran out of chicken mcnuggets, no sane manufacturer is going to start mass producing self-driving vehicles of any form.
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"80% Human error" are usually the same humans that won't want this system. Someone who drives while tired or drunk or willingly goes over the speed limit or takes stupid chances aren't really concerned about their safety or of anyone else on the road.
Want to make roads safer? Take away their licence, throw them in jail. It's cheaper, faster and safer that way. After a decade, you'll have a fresh crop of drivers far more careful about their driving.
Isn't that a little extreme? Plus, throwing 80% of the drivers involved in accidents in jail for life probably isn't cheaper than, say, just fining them and making them go to bad driver's school like we do now.
Less driver attention == lower safety? (Score:3, Insightful)
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Exactly. Or maybe it's not a failure, per se, but something as simple as running out of gas? Is the system going to communicate all t
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You are being ridiculous. There is no reason for the probability of someone driving in a road train running out of gas being any higher than the same for someone driving normally. With the system in place as described in the video, this would result in one car slowing down, those behind if following suit (distance sensors!) until the link to the lead car gets lost. At which point you are in the common situation of dissolving/leaving the road train, which there will have to be a solution for anyways.
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Except that if the driver is reading the paper or watching TV instead of paying attention to the car, they are less likely to notice their level of gas.
Do you disagree that letting drivers become more passive could introduce more situations like this?
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I'd bet all those cars have to be equipped with active ACC (adaptive cruise control) systems. Those use radar or lidar, and sometimes other optical systems, to determine speed of and distance to other cars, and can actively control the speed of your car accordingly. Those are commercially available since over 10 years, so sudden deceleration of idividal members of such a train would not have any serious consequences.
I'd guess if somebody has to fuel up, the driver has to manually pull his car out of the tra
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Suppose that a car in the convoy has a failure, a blown tire, anything that makes it slow down or change trajectory (maybe some bump or hole in the road). How do following cars avoid it if their drivers are sleeping, reading a book, having lunch?
RTFA. It's even embedded. They do say that they have a system in place monitoring the road, the distance to the car in front, etc. They are not just blindly sending instructions from the lead car and executing them.
but I wonder if road trains are really safer than an equivalent number of cars each with its own driver.
Statistically speaking, if the average chance of a driver having an accident is 1% (it isn't, but it's easier to calculate with simple numbers), then 10 individual cars will have a total probability of 9.562% of at least one car having an accident. The road train will have a probability of 1%. Th
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Systems that match your speed to the car in front of you, including breaking to a full stop, are commercially available for over 10 years. I've personally driven in such a car, and the driving experience is (IMHO) fantastic.
However, those systems don't take over steering, so you still have to operate the wheel and thus keep attention on the road. They return full control to the driver in case the surroundings get "dangerous", i.e. outside of the parameters, e.g. if you get cut by somebody. In that case, you
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I know the system's still in early trials, but I can't see anything about safety testing in their own site (or any article about them). They've tested in snow, so I assume they've seen a bit of ice, but there's nothing about them deliberately trying to find the system's fail points.
And that seems a little too common in these automated systems. Remember Volvo's infamous lolfail video? An anti-collision system that happily drove into a truck. Or Top Gear's experience with a production auto-park system, which
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Think it will be more like a Swam (or flying "V" of geese)
The Lead sends out speed & direction signals to cars behind it.
The cars behind send the lead vehicle info on their location in the swam.
As most cars have been filled with all sorts of sensors it would not be hard to send that as telemetry to a lead vehicle to give it an exact picture of the state of each vehicle.
If one reports a problem (blow out, fuel, engine problems accident) the lead then can either tell other cars to slow down, change lane o
There's no such thing as 100% (Score:2)
Professional human drivers do make errors too. Not to mention what really makes a driver "professional", a fresh taxi driver has less experience than many "amateurs". Computers may not be distracted or sleepy or drunk but sensors certainly can by rain and snow and low sun. They too can miss that there's an oil spill on the road and go flying off it, or an elk about to cross the road. And while the theory says you're never supposed to go faster than that you can stop on what road is visible to you, that rule
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Ideally, yes. But try telling someone that the computer they're entrusting their lives to is almost 100% perfect, killing only 7 people per 1B miles driven*.
Also, people can only relate to human mistakes. If you hit an elk because it jumped into the road and you didn't react fast enough, people understand - even if a computer would have handled it easily.
If the elk was quite obviously standing in the road under a tree,
100% reliable? (Score:2)
Not scaremonger all of us (Score:2)
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For about a week, yes.
If you want to take 10-20 others with you, there are easier ways to do that, today. Becoming a road train conductor, which will probably be accompanied by some training and a test or two, would certainly be a very long-winded way. Like joining the NRA and becoming an experienced game hunter just so you can shoot yourself.
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Becoming a road train conductor, which will probably be accompanied by some training and a test or two, would certainly be a very long-winded way.
Keep in mind we're geeks and that we try and solve our luxury problems through knowledge and by employing technologically interesting methods. It is a mere coincidence -a very luck coincidence in this hypothetical example- that we generally get bored shortly before having mastered the skill and that we simply move on and forget about our original purpose.
In any case, you're always better of with knowledge -however useless it may be- than without in two identical situations.
Right now, for instance, I'm s
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I'd bet that every car will be equipped with safety systems of its own, so if the leading car runs amok, the rest will simply initiate an emergency break.
DC Metro, anyone? (Score:3)
Good luck selling this to anyone from the Washington, DC area. The Metro is, rightly or wrongly, notorious in the DC area for being dangerous. The WMATA is notorious for everything from ignoring safety recommendations, running old cars, and skipping maintenance, to promoting a culture of hostility within its workforce. Metro employees are underpaid, overworked, and, to put it delicately, benefit from a somewhat lenient hiring process. Now, who would you propose will be driving the lead car around the Capital Beltway? Unless you pick this one segment of public transportation to be contracted out to a private company, it's gonna be the WMATA in the DC area. If I wanted some surly bastard with no professional training who hates his job and hasn't slept in a day to drive, I'd do it myself, thanks.
Hmm... (Score:2)
Somebody should've told them that the term "road train" is already widely used for a related phenomenon.
Serial pile-up? (Score:2)
Currently, if the lead truck in a convoy does something stupid, unexpected, or dangerous, the following trucks with their human drivers are able to instantly make the decision to stop following the first truck's lead and instead perform a much safer action, such as slowing down, changing lane, taking a different route, pulling over etc, regardless of location, road condition, weather, catastrophic damage to the route (landslide, bridge out etc). They are also able to reform the convoy and deliver their own
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Of course, and if the lead driver gets killed in an accident and some of the passangers in other cars survive the crash, they will be automatically shot to follow the lead as closely as possible. Also, everbody who works in automotive research is stupid and not able to see this obvious problem.
Damn (Score:2)
If Sweden had sunshine, I'd move there in a second.
Oh, and at least one NFL and one NBA franchise.
"Bartender, I'll have another, please" (Score:2)
"Don't worry, the 'road train' is driving me home."
Duplicate (Score:2)
How is this different from http://tech.slashdot.org/story/11/01/18/0411235/How-Europe-Will-Lower-Emissions-mdash-Self-Driving-Cars [slashdot.org] posted two days ago? It is a slightly different angle but the same technology.
lane change? (Score:2)
How does the convoy agree to change lanes? Is there a discussion between all the vehicles' sensors or will some poor bastard get sideswiped into the guard rail? What happens when two convoys are side by side and roadworks narrow the road to a single lane? Imagine the chaos as a hundred 'drivers' have to be awakened/climb back into the front seat/ put down their spaghetti/ find their driving glasses etc.
And so i don't look out of place, I hope nobody will 'loose' their life when the 'breaks' fail.
They've re-Invented Trains (Score:2)
Good luck with that. Railway trains are highly automated and the rails even take guidance out of the driver's hands, but trains still crash due to human error.
Which makes me think that all the Swedish system needs now are some rails to do the guidance. Wow, I'll patent that! Oh wait
Perceived as unsafe (Score:2)
Auto Rail (Score:2)
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But I want to talk about it now!
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I don't remember it saying anywhere that road trains would become mandatory.
I've driven the whole of Germany several times. Some of the times, arriving is my goal and I take the Autobahn, and if there were road trains available, I would have gladly taken them. Especially driving at night (which I prefer for the long trips because the roads are less crowded) is extremely boring.
Other times, you are right that the trip is more important than arriving at the destination. I've driven through Germany from south
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My guess is it will never happen.
Regarding your engine power vs speed limit comment: it's not just about maximum speed, acceleration matters also.
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The adaption will be slow, but I'd say it's not impossible. Adaptive cruise control is commercially available, and that teaches drivers to simply follow the speed of other cars. The next step would prpbably to evolve systems that warn on leaving your lane to systems that actively keep your lane. From there, you are almost at "road trains". If will take a couple of years, but I wouldn't consider it to be impossible at all.
Fuel economy is an important topic in countries with high gas prices. Fuel prices in Ge
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Thank God it's doomed to failure! Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of "plugging in" to a freeway and doing a steady 65 mph (faster than you'd be going in rush-hour traffic, and without the headache), but I also want the option to drive myself, however I want to. I like the feeling of driving a car. I like shifting. I like the visceral feeling of becoming in tune with a machine, and knowing all of its funny little quirks. I like knowing exactly how far I can push a car, and then getting right up to the ed
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Thank God it's doomed to failure! Don't get me wrong, I like the idea of "plugging in" to a freeway and doing a steady 65 mph (faster than you'd be going in rush-hour traffic, and without the headache), but I also want the option to drive myself, however I want to. I like the feeling of driving a car. I like shifting. I like the visceral feeling of becoming in tune with a machine, and knowing all of its funny little quirks. I like knowing exactly how far I can push a car, and then getting right up to the edge.
So become a professional driver and let the rest of us take a nap while driving between Frankfurt and Vienna.
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Nobody suggests thouse would be made mandatory. I like to drive fast as well, and here, driving 200 km/h is even legal. But most of the times, I only care about arriving save and as relaxed as possible at my destinations, and then I'd really like to be able to join a road train.
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More like City to city.
Probably would be scheduled stops (humans still need toilet / food breaks) in major cities to let cars leave and to pick up new ones...
in future they might have options to join and leave at will.
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So who says this system will be going where you are on your time-table?
Some of us like to be self reliant enough to get where we want to go in our own time by our own means and actually ENJOY the journey.
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Nothing? 12% is nothing?
Also, if you managed 110km/h you would save 24 minutes, almost a quarter of the journey time.