What Will It Take To Make Automated Vehicles Legal In the US? 320
ashshy writes Tesla, Google, and many other companies are working on self-driving cars. When these autopilot systems become perfected and ubiquitous, the roads should be safer by orders of magnitude. So why doesn't Tesla CEO Elon Musk expect to reach that milestone until 2013 or so? Because the legal framework that supports American road rules is incredibly complex, and actually handled on a state-by-state basis. The Motley Fool explains which authorities Musk and his allies will have to convince before autopilot cars can hit the mainstream, and why the process will take another decade.
2013 or so? (Score:5, Funny)
So Elon Musk is planning to revive the DeLorean?
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Where we're going, we don't need a driver.
Re:2013 or so? (Score:5, Funny)
That's the sound of a 1.21 gigawatts joke travelling back in time going over your head.
For Starters (Score:3)
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Why should I pay more for a self driving car ...
Why do you assume they would cost more? The sensors required for a SDC should not cost much when mass produced, and the money saved on insurance will likely more than compensate for that.
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And the more likely reason will be that that's what you'll have to do if you want to travel on the roads and not use public transport once it proves safer than human drivers.
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The sensors required for a SDC should not cost much when mass produced, and the money saved on insurance will likely more than compensate for that.
Thanks for the laugh.
Insurance companies take any technical change whatsoever as an excuse to raise premiums.
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Insurance premium reductions?
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Unless it becomes law, self driving cars* will be a gimmick. Kind of like heated seats, kind of nice, but not necessary for your average joe.
Let me guess: you've never had to start your car and drive home at forty below zero, have you?
Heated seats are, at least in part, a response to the increased fuel economy of modern engines, which don't produce enough waste heat to warm the cabin rapidly. I believe some diesel-engined cars even have electric elements in the heater for cold weather, because the coolant takes so long to warm up.
Back on topic, my guess is:
First we'll see decent 'hands free' cruise control for highway driving.
Then we'll see auto
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Re:For Starters (Score:5, Informative)
$60 billion dollars are spent on truck driver salary's in the US. If automated vehicles achieve a 1% improvement in fuel economy (which is ludicrously conservative) you would save the economy another $45 billion in fuel costs. Not to mention the hundreds of millions of hours of wasted time, tens of thousands of deaths, and hundreds of thousands of injuries that could be possibly be prevented or at least reduced.
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But the jobs? Won't somebody think of the truck stop hookers?
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? Or just use trains to move goods across the continental US (safer, more efficient, etc), instead of the subsidizing the trucking industry.
We already do use trains. We use them when we need to move lots of shit from A to B if A and B are connected by railways.
The problem is that we often have to ship from A, B, and C to D, E, F, G, H, etc. and the most efficient way to do so is not by rail.
If you built out rail to the point that there were enough major lines and stations for transporting shit comparably to roads, you would end up destroying the efficiency advantage.
If you do things the right way, you batch your shipments onto boats, planes, a
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When the warehouse has its own rail siding, all you need is a forklift. There's no reason why big-box stores can't be built near rail lines.
The trucking industry is heavily subsidized [jsonline.com].
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Don't worry, a train can take the load of 280 trucks [uprr.com] off the road.
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The compelling reason is that self-driving cars could free up tens of billions of man-hours a year in the US alone. People could use the time they spend in cars for entertainment or productivity. It would be one of the truly great labor saving inventions.
For that to work though, the car would need to be truly autonomous and that gets into tricky legal issues.
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Controlling a car is an NP-complete problem. We'll save lives by implementing the heuristics better and more consistently than a human mind can. There will be car error, but let's hope we can minimize that to almost zero. I doubt we will get rid of accidents entirely. Hopefully those accidents will be less deadly though.
You're not going to find a magic fix that prevents car accidents, but it's hard to prove that a car can always perform better than a human.
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Easy... get one of these automated cars driving into nascar... if it makes it through a season at least placing in the top 5, and no accidents, it's safe.
How often does a deer run across a NASCAR track? How often are NASCAR races run in a snow storm? How often do NASCAR tracks have randomly placed ice patches?
Racing is easy for a computer to do, compared to driivng through town in a blizzard.
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And how often does a NASCAR car turn right?
Re:For Starters (Score:4, Informative)
And how often does a NASCAR car turn right?
Fairly often given that there are 5 Nascar road courses.
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How often does a bison scratch his head with your rear bumper? Happened to me this past week at Land Between the Lakes.
Of course, that particular piece of road is NOT a place for self-driving cars.
On the other hand, might be nice if there was some provision in the software for dealing with someone accidentally triggering self-drive mode when your car is surrounded by a herd of bison....
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There will be car error, but let's hope we can minimize that to almost zero. I doubt we will get rid of accidents entirely. Hopefully those accidents will be less deadly though.
Hope. This is kinda where the argument FOR this sort of thing fall down. We *hope* it'll fix the problem. Realistically, nobody knows if it's possible, or even plausible. But hey! Let's do it anyhow!
So, essentially, you're trying to sell it as a "magic fix".
And you said it yourself. "You're not going to find a magic fix".
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OTOH, driverless trains would be an order of magnitude or two easier and... not there.
Not that I'm against driverless cars. I'd love one.
Driverless Trains are Here (Score:2)
OTOH, driverless trains would be an order of magnitude or two easier and... not there.
Wrong - driverless trains are already here and have been since 1967 [wikipedia.org] which means they have been around longer than most Slashdot readers including myself. However, like driverless cars, the first line which was automated, London's Victoria line, still carried drivers because of the unions i.e. politics. More recent lines, like the Docklands Light Railway (DLR) are driverless and there are plans to upgrade other tube lines to true driverless operation.
Given the politics with driverless trains should we ex
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And these are the very reasons I hope the automated car NEVER makes it in my lifetime.
I've
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Controlling a car is an NP-complete problem.
Sounds like a rather random argument to me. Surely that has never prevented people from using sub-optimal solutions to any similar problem, even before we knew that such a thing existed. Not to mention that I find it non-obvious why not hitting people should qualify as an "NP-complete problem". It's not like "NP-complete" is some magical synonym for "difficult". For example, one trivial solution would be always driving very slowly, but what has that to do with computational complexity?
Re: For Starters (Score:2)
UPS makes millions of dollars a day by implementing approximations to an NP-hard problem. Perhaps they should just stay home and naval-gaze.
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Not to mention that I find it non-obvious why not hitting people should qualify as an "NP-complete problem".
If your idea of "perfected" is "not hitting people", you've set the safe-driving bar very very low. I'd say "not hitting bridge abutments", "not hitting large animals", "not running off the edge of the road", "not hitting a tree", and even "not almost hitting a human and being saved only by fast action on the part of the human" are considerably important parts of the autonomous driving requirements.
If all you want is "not hitting people" as the answer, then simply not allowing people anywhere near the roa
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I'd like to see code that can "not hit people" equally or better than human drivers, but that also manages to hit stationary and larger than human targets worse than human drivers.
Re:For Starters (Score:5, Interesting)
If that is the rationale, then the car needs to be 100% automated, under all circumstances, with all liability going to whoever made the damned thing.
Many of us have been saying for quite some time ... if we're liable for the actions of a robot, or the automated car is suddenly going to transfer control back to you to solve the problem ... these things will continue to be nothing more than novelties.
If you expect me to be driving in an automated car, I shouldn't reasonably need to be even awake, because any failover to human more or less needs to assume it isn't possible to do that safely.
And why the hell would I pay insurance on my car if it's not being operated by me? You think I'd take the liability over for Google? Why would I do that?
So, if it isn't 100% automated 100% of the time ... it's a half-ass solution which is going to have corner cases in which bad things will happen, and whoever made it will act like it was your fault.
Done properly, the auto insurance industry goes out of business with autonomous cars. Done improperly, there's still the illusion that the meat-sock which should essentially be a passenger is responsible.
In which case, the meat-sock might as well drive their own car.
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Uh, no. If you're using adaptive cruise control, you're still in charge of the car, and should be monitoring it at all times. Clearly some people won't, and will crash, and will be responsible.
A true self-driving car won't even have a steering wheel, so how can you possibly be held responsible for what it does?
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Nay, a true self-driving car'll hae a name like Kitt - a true scotsman
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If I'm driving a normal car and my brakes fail to operate properly and causes an accident, am I liable or is the car manufacturer?
If it is a design fault, the manufacturer. However, the application of brakes is vastly simpler both in concept, and their physical implementation, than an entirely automated car. Just consider that the brakes of an automated car responding to an "Apply" command is just a small sub-set of what the whole automation would be.
For one thing, the car/brake manufacturer is not involved in the decision of when to brake, and that is the hardest part to arrange.
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This is true, but I think we still have a couple of decades before we can get there. All we have today are a few cars that can follow preset directions based on highly detailed maps. These current autos aren't even going to be personal autos since they will be unable to take you into your garage or find a parking spot at the local grocery store, they're oriented towards being a shuttle service.
Best bet will be a hybrid, self driving only on freeways or major roads, human driven elsewhere. (but then some
What will it take? (Score:5, Insightful)
Automated vehicles that work?
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Or that any company is actually ready to sell?
I mean, the ones that exist "work" but none of the companies involved are in any hurry to put them out.
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SDC technology is already being released incrementally. You can already buy cars that have automatic lane control, interval control, etc. Automatic collision avoidance will be next, and then automatic braking for stop signs and traffic lights. When full SDCs arrive, people will hardly notice, because most of the technology will already be in existing cars.
Re:What will it take? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Money.
Money to pay the Political Parties.
Money to pay for the governments.
Money to pay for the insurance companies.
Money to pay the local governments.
Money for advertising
Money for paying off special interests groups.
If there is left you can put some money into making the vehicle work better.
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Musk will have to tame (Score:3)
both his biggest existential threat and time itself to make it happen by 2013.
A lot of bribes (Score:5, Insightful)
Q: What Will It Take To Make Automated Vehicles Legal In the US?
A: A lot of bribes for people at various levels of government.
Wait, did I say "bribes"? Sorry, I meant "lobbying and campaign contributions". I have a hard time telling those things apart.
same as always... (Score:2)
An economic incentive that causes many companies to put pressure on their representatives...
or
A major tragedy that could have been avoided with autonomy that gets continual news coverage (not that this worked for gun control) ...otherwise, reason and good sense have no place here
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A major tragedy that could have been avoided with autonomy that gets continual news coverage (not that this worked for gun control)
Yeah, I'm not sure this works in general. For one thing, we have loads of tragedies from car accidents-- I think it's as low as 30,000 deaths per year in the US now, but a few years ago it was more like 40,000. It's possible that many of these could be fixed by self-driving cars, but the American public doesn't care because we love to pretend we're race car drivers.
But also, in general, there can be all kinds of tragedy and scandal, and politicians will go spend their time on damage control, making it se
What will it take? (Score:2)
Let's hope what it takes is: Really good automated vehicles.
I think this is one technology that we don't really want typical google-style beta testing (think gmail) with. Let's wait for things to mature a bit before they go mainstream.
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The problem is that the average driver will be like "yeah, everyone else needs to be replaced with a computer, but I'm fine."
What will it take? Time Travel (Score:2)
But can we hit 88 MPH first?
A working automated vehicle (Score:5, Insightful)
Call me when they can make an automated car that car drive in snowy conditions when no lane landmarks are visible. Or one that can turn into a lane of busy traffic that currently requires you to make eye contact with another driver to get them to slow down and let you in. Then we can worry about legalizing it. Legalization is trivial compared to the technical challenges. Personally, I suspect that there won't be a truly automated cars in my lifetime.
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Or one that can turn into a lane of busy traffic that currently requires you to make eye contact with another driver to get them to slow down and let you in.
This piece, at least, was one of the earliest-solved, easy problems. Wirelessly networked cars still having human drivers have been talked about in theory and experimented with for years - before this totally driverless thing became... a thing.
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A theoretical solution that requires universal adoption (wireless networking in every vehicle on the road) does not count as "solved".
Re:A working automated vehicle (Score:4, Insightful)
Call me when they can make an automated car that car drive in snowy conditions when no lane landmarks are visible.
Should you drive in a snow storm? Either way, with GPS, etc this is not impossible, though I suspect the car would refuse to drive automatically under these circumstances... But keep in mind not all cars on the roads today can be driven under snowy conditions, try driving without a roof :) he he..
Or one that can turn into a lane of busy traffic that currently requires you to make eye contact with another driver to get them to slow down and let you in-
Is this even technically legal to do that? If you're behind a stop or yield sign, you cannot proceed forward if your interfere with ongoing traffic in any way. In practice it can be a bit different as someone should be nice and help you in; in which case an automatic car could move in too... Acting on eye contact or perceived signals like hand weaving does not hold in court and in case of an accident you would be fully liable.
Legalization is trivial compared to the technical challenges. Personally, I suspect that there won't be a truly automated cars in my lifetime.
How old are you ? :) Just kidding...
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Call me when they can make an automated car that car drive in snowy conditions when no lane landmarks are visible.
Call me when they can make a driver from the south who can drive in snowy conditions. Hell, call me when they can make a driver in Washington D.C. drive safely in ideal conditions.
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It's purely a political and legal issue.
The technical challenges are nearly completely solved. What remains is infrastructure improvements, standardization, iterative improvements that will come from wide spread rollout of incremental features towards full autonomy.
Litigious Forbearance (Score:2)
If anything is gonna kill/delay the automated vehicle market, it's gonna be people suing the shit out of car manufacturers when anything at all goes wrong. And make no mistake, it's gonna be up to the manufacturer to prove it wasn't their hardware/software that caused it.
And unfortunately, the people that would normally argue in favor of being reasonable with new tech will be suffering from inner turmoil as that idea conflicts with the "big corporations are ruthlessly profitable" belief.
It's gonna be intere
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The manufacturers are going to need panoramic camera views that show the vehicle stayed in its lane, wasn't going too fast, maintained safe distances to other vehicles and also shows a darwin award winner walking into the path of traffic while texting.
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If car manufacturers can show that they autonomous vehicles are on average far safer than the alternative, then I can see courts refusing to awards costs in excess of the costs that would be imposed on human drivers who caused collisions.
In fact, this would be ridiculously easy to legislate for. You can just require that autonomous cars be on average safer than their human driven equivalents before a manufacturer can sell them. At the point you are ten times more likely to be injured in a human driven car t
identify (Score:2)
Re:identify (Score:4, Informative)
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If I see a deer that not moving, but is 20ft from the road, I slow down because I know it might decide to run in front of my car. It might also decide to stand there and not move. Reaction time has nothing to do with this.
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I see you scenario and I raise you the automated car's response.
Car sees deer lurking by the road side. Car blasts deer off the roadside to ensure it doesn't stray into the road.
Kidding aside, there is no reason a car couldn't do exactly what you would in such a scenario. As long as it can recognize that there is a large animal near the road (which it is likely to realise before you would), it can slow down, change lanes etc. It is also able to react long before you would. For example, upon noticing that th
feds should allocate a lane for this. (Score:2)
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agree on dedicated lane...everything else is just PR
They're nuts (Score:2)
Legal:? Last week, I heard a speech by Vint Cerf, and he says the next iteration of google car will NOT HAVE A GAS OR BREAK PEDDLE, OR A STEERING WHEEL AT ALL.
mark
1.21 Gigawatts... (Score:2)
Obligatory Back to the Future reference.
2013 is a typo, sorry 'bout that (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/10/15/tesla-driverless-cars_n_5990136.html [huffingtonpost.com]
I blame the lack of autopilot for these human fingers.
Everyone is waiting for California (Score:5, Informative)
A few months ago, I attended a talk on autonomous vehicles at the Petersen Auto Museum in Los Angeles. The executive from the California Department of Transportation told us that they’ve met with dozens of representatives from different states and countries, and they are all waiting to see what happens here.
California already has laws allowing the testing of autonomous vehicles, and many manufacturers have enrolled. They counted fifteen companies that were working on autonomous cars, including Toyota, Volvo, and most every car company you could name.
They described the five categories of vehicle automation, and explained that the first autonomous (not Musk’s so called “autopilot” which isn’t) vehicles will hit the road in the summer of 2015.
Re:Everyone is waiting for California (Score:5, Informative)
They described the five categories of vehicle automation, and explained that the first autonomous (not Musk’s so called “autopilot” which isn’t) vehicles will hit the road in the summer of 2015.
Here's the levels. Most high-functioning systems on the market, like the Tesla version, are in the Level 1-2 range.
No-Automation (Level 0): The driver is in complete and sole control of the primary vehicle controls – brake, steering, throttle, and motive power – at all times.
Function-specific Automation (Level 1): Automation at this level involves one or more specific control functions. Examples include electronic stability control or pre-charged brakes, where the vehicle automatically assists with braking to enable the driver to regain control of the vehicle or stop faster than possible by acting alone.
Combined Function Automation (Level 2): This level involves automation of at least two primary control functions designed to work in unison to relieve the driver of control of those functions. An example of combined functions enabling a Level 2 system is adaptive cruise control in combination with lane centering.
Limited Self-Driving Automation (Level 3): Vehicles at this level of automation enable the driver to cede full control of all safety-critical functions under certain traffic or environmental conditions and in those conditions to rely heavily on the vehicle to monitor for changes in those conditions requiring transition back to driver control. The driver is expected to be available for occasional control, but with sufficiently comfortable transition time. The Google car is an example of limited self-driving automation.
Full Self-Driving Automation (Level 4): The vehicle is designed to perform all safety-critical driving functions and monitor roadway conditions for an entire trip. Such a design anticipates that the driver will provide destination or navigation input, but is not expected to be available for control at any time during the trip. This includes both occupied and unoccupied vehicles.
U.S. Department of Transportation Releases Policy on Automated Vehicle Development [nhtsa.gov]
Solar Freakin Roadways! (Score:2)
How about roads that assist? (Score:2)
We probably could have automated Highways since the late 70’s. In the 50’s engineers imagined all the brains and machinery for automating Highways in the highways – and would have been incredibly expensive. Now we want to put all the brains and sensors in the car, again (at least for now) incredibly expensive. There must be a sweet spot of compromise for 90% of driving situations that requires only modest changes to our transportation infrastructure and doesn’t require the cars to
Expect a push from the Insurance Industry (Score:3, Interesting)
On the one hand, the number of claims should bottom out once self-drive cars are in place and the bugs sorted out.
On the other, they'll have to re-calculate how they determine premium rates since the " human driver " factor will be (mostly) removed.
So, while they won't be paying out nearly as much in claims, they won't be taking in nearly as much in premiums either. Should be interesting.
Speed Traps will no longer be the revenue-cow that many towns rely on. Red-light cameras and similar tech will become a waste of time. How WILL Law Enforcement pay for their Soldier-Wanna-Be toys . . .
Hell, these things, once mainstream, will also shift the entire traffic structure around. Stalls, wrecks, weather, and other rubber-neck variables will pretty much go away meaning a much better driving experience. Great for the driver (passenger ?) , but probably not so great for the State / City governments who just LOVE congestion because it pushes the traffic onto their Toll Roads which they seem to be building in greater numbers these days. I would expect to see the Toll Roads become ghost roads ( in those areas where the Toll Roads are a means to bypass highway congestion and not the ONLY means into or out of an area ) as the reasons for utilizing them in the first place will become irrelevant.
Will need to put some more thought into it, but I bet the introduction of the self-drive vehicle will impact quite a bit of modern day revenue-generators which will probably cause a major panic along some lines. lol
Re:Expect a push from the Insurance Industry (Score:4, Insightful)
This assumes that robots are safer drivers than humans (which is an obvious requirement before they legalize it).
The reasons are clear:
1) Car insurances don't want to pay you because someone else hit your car, but they can't prove it. Robot cars decrease this risk.
There is a LOT of money spent by the insurance companies trying to prove fault. It is big business. By reducing the actual risk from other drivers, insurance companies will save billions, even if they never insure a robot car.
Also, insurance companies make money when things become safer - because rate changes are always behind actual risk changes. So more safety always equals insurance profits and less safety always equals insurance losses.
I agree that speed traps and red light cameras will vanish, but I am not so sure about toll roads. In fact, they might grow in power, using the robots to connect tolls. They might simply have a tax charge to drive fast in the state. As in, your robot car will be limited to 50 mph unless you purchase the NJ Fast Lane upgrade from New Jersey Transit.
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The one question I have on the insurance situation is when an autonomous car causes an accident who is fault? The manufacturer or the owner? Since the owner was not in command of the vehicle I would think it would be the manufacturer.
So then take the auto-auto scenario to its end conclusion, no one drivers manually ever anymore and the manufacturer is always the one at fault. It may take 50 years from the intro of the auto/manual version, but it would come eventually. At which point auto insurance would be
*nothing* (Score:3, Insightful)
We will never have truly *autonomous* vehicles driving on the same lanes in the same traffic as regular diver vehicles.
The problem is *not* technical in nature ultimately (now, the tech is not near sufficient, but assuming it could improve), the problem is *liability* for when something goes wrong.
What will happen: Dedicated lanes on interstates
Like HOV lanes, basically.
The only way it will actually be implemented is in controlled zones where there are much fewer variables...
To think anything else is magical thinking and not connected to reality
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Would they approve this? (Score:2)
Suppose you tell the current politicians:
"Hey, I got this great invention, it will improve our transportation 10x, but it will require highly toxic and flammable chemicals to be stored in underground tanks every other block in highly populated areas. It will also cause around 1.3 million deaths per year worldwide, and become the #9 leading cause of death".
How many current politicians would approve this?
That is right, if it was for the current politicians, the car would not exist. We would all be st
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think of the insurance companies... (Score:2)
You ignore the gargantuan influence insurance companies wield over politicians.
Who do you think got these types of laws passed?
Those were the doing of an entity who could see that modifying these behaviors would reduce the payouts they make each year. This entity lives and breaths statistics and charges its c
It won't happen that way (Score:2)
The oncoming of fully automated vehicles won't happen the way that being discussed in geekish circles. Governments tend to move with all the speed of a glacier, and insurance companies will go out of business if the number of traffic accidents plummet. (Yes, they will. Water conservation sounded great until a lot of people started actually conserving water, now the water companies are having to jack up rates to stay solvent.)
What will happen is that "safety features" will be added to top end vehicles and
It's very simple (Score:2)
If the laws allow open containers (alcohol) in automated vehicles, all downsides will be ignored and the population will demand them.
My Blind Spot Indicator still isn't perfect (Score:2)
My blind spot indicator on my car still isn't perfect and I still have to check.
Just today I noticed a black hatchback in my right blind spot that the indicator didn't pick up. I don't know if it was dirt on the sensor, the color of the car vs the blacktop, etc.
So... I don't know how much I want to trust a car that fully relies on that.
Because if I have to babysit the car the entire time, I might as well drive.
Eventually maybe, and hopefully within my lifetime. But I won't be using one any time soon.
Avoiding Squirrels... (Score:2)
How about no-fault (Score:2)
It is naturally a legal question of who can be held liable should an accident happen.
People want to assign blame to the car manufacturer, to the driver...
There are valid cases that can be discussed on an individual level for each one. If a manufacturer has a bug in the code that results in a crash and did not do due diligence, that is one thing.
But there is another solution that many people don't consider.
NO FAULT INSURNACE
This is how it is in Ontario, Canada. It has it's flaws, but the concept is really go
Blue Collar VS White Collar (Score:2)
On the one hand we have internet providors effectivly stopping community internet.
On the other hand we have a lot of blue collar people who are going to be put out work.
While I cannot believe that the Teamsters and the Cab driver unsions are just laying down on this issue, in the end, the might not be able to stop driverless cars, because that's what Darpa wants for for their war machines.
Who is going to be the first unlucky person to die for driverless car research?
Who is going to be the furst unlucky pers
As someone who has driven before, (Score:2)
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Free Will may or may not be a myth, but in either case you really didn't 'have' to type something there.
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Unless the self-driving car is a Delorean. Then the first self-driving car will hit the road in 1955.
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Very little of the technology we have today was developed due to emergency needs.
The only thing that matters is that someone develops the technology, and it is good enough.
However, on the subject of automated cars, the real difficulties is how to introduce them on roads where you still have "manual" drivers around (I don't mean stick here).
Computer driven cars can be totally predictable. Manual cars, less so - people forget to use their signals, people make late lane changes, fall asleep and drift into othe
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Cash for clunkers removed about 700,000 cars from the road. There are about 250,000,0000 vehicles in the US.
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One of the biggest issues is going to be insurance and who will pay when one of these cars causes an accident.
I doubt this will be a big problem. Insurers will sooner or later offer policies for self-driving cars, and if the statistics are good, they will eventually be reasonably priced; you can only price fix for so long. What will take longer is for governments to relax the criminal liability of the driver.
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#2: They don't need to be as good as humans are in the general case. Only in the specific domain case of: Hit the brake before you collide.
So it's OK if they go straight through red lights that aren't in the database and drive along the sidewalk because the database is wrong, so long as they stop before they hit anything?