California Legalizes Self Driving Cars 508
Hugh Pickens writes writes "The Seattle PI reports that California has become the third state to explicitly legalize driverless vehicles, setting the stage for computers to take the wheel along the state's highways and roads ... 'Today we're looking at science fiction becoming tomorrow's reality,' said Gov. Brown. 'This self-driving car is another step forward in this long, march of California pioneering the future and leading not just the country, but the whole world.' The law immediately allows for testing of the vehicles on public roadways, so long as properly licensed drivers are seated at the wheel and able to take over. It also lays out a roadmap for manufacturers to seek permits from the DMV to build and sell driverless cars to consumers. Bryant Walker Smith, a fellow at Stanford's Center for Automotive Research points to a statistical basis for safety that the DMV might consider as it begins to develop standards: 'Google's cars would need to drive themselves (by themselves) more than 725,000 representative miles without incident for us to say with 99 percent confidence that they crash less frequently than conventional cars. If we look only at fatal crashes, this minimum skyrockets to 300 million miles. To my knowledge, Google has yet to reach these milestones.'"
Re:Numbers, The Law, Reality of Attention (Score:5, Informative)
Heck, modern planes even try to fix the problems itself. In the famous case of Colgan Air 3407(crashed near Buffalo NY) after shaking the yoke to alert the pilot the autopilot attempted to trade altitude for speed to get out of a stall. The human pilot overrode this safety feature and killed everyone on board by attempting to gain altitude and thus turned a recoverable stall into a crash.
Re:I wanna "Ask Slashdot" on this (Score:4, Informative)
* Temporary speed limits posted during road works
* School zones
* Really bad weather where you can't even see 20 feet ahead of you
Given that speed limit signs are fairly standardized and well-defined, having the system recognize them and act appropriately shouldn't be an insurmountable problem.
As for the weather, self-driving cars will have much more flexible sensing than the Mk1 eyeball. Fog, etc. is considerably more transparent to IR and radar than it is to visible light.
Re:if that's the question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Must past this test (Score:2, Informative)
'Why did you turn off the computer when you know it is proven to be safer?'
I was using the Force, what else?