Cadillac SRX Converted Into Self-Driving Car 149
fergus07 writes "There's been much talk about self-driving cars in recent times and the latest glimpse into this autonomous future comes from Carnegie Mellon University where researchers have loaded a Cadillac SRX with an array of sensors that allow it to manage highway traffic, congested roadways, and even merging on and off ramps."
communications system? (Score:2, Insightful)
So what happens when a light has a communication error and the car ends up in a bad crash? who is at fault and what happens to the victims who have bills that are pillaging up while the courts are working out who will have to pay them.
Legal problems are the easy ones (Score:5, Insightful)
At which point, WTF is the point of the self driving car?
To get to the point where they actually are safer than one being actively piloted by a human. Furthermore even if they never become completely self-driving there will be a lot of very useful spin off technology that is going to come from this research. The legal framework for these cars can be updated when appropriate. That is the easiest problem with the technology since we already know how to do that.
I just don't see people actually wanting this technology, and since we'll never convert all of the cars on the road to this system
Yes people do actually want this technology. In fact I'd go so far as to say people who don't even think they want it actually do even if they don't know it yet. There already are self-parking cars, cars with automatic speed control/braking, stability control, ABS, traction control, navigation aids, drive by wire steering/braking, cruise control, and more. All those things are portions of a driverless vehicle. It's by no means a solved problem but we already rely on a host of technologies to make us better at driving than we could be unassisted.
I would dearly love to be able to get to/from work (~30 minute each way commute) without having to waste an hour every day with the non-productive task of driving. It is a huge waste of my time. It potentially solves other problems as well like helping handicapped people, reducing drunk driving, freeing up huge amounts of non-productive time and more.
We don't actually have to convert all the cars to driverless. It would potentially only take a fraction of them to be self piloting to improve road safety. I assure you that you do not really want my 94 year old grandmother behind the wheel of a car. I would welcome a self driving car to take her around. Any driverless solution will have to be robust enough to deal with unpredictable events at least as well as a human. A well designed system could have better situational awareness than any driver. My field of vision is only about 160 degrees even when I'm not distracted. A computer would have 360 vision day or night, be able to communicate with other vehicles regarding position and speed and direction, be able to react faster than any human, be far less prone to distraction, and actually obey the rules of the road. The engineering obstacles are large but so are the potential benefits.