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Transportation Government United States

Ford, GM and Toyota Collaborate For Self-Driving Safety Rules (detroitnews.com) 67

Ford, General Motors, and Toyota have formed a new consortium called the Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium (AVSC) to develop safety standards for self-driving cars. "The newly formed Automated Vehicle Safety Consortium in conjunction with the auto engineering association SAE International says it will fill a critical need by providing a safety framework around which autonomous technology can responsibly evolve before self-driving vehicles are put into widespread use," reports The Detroit News. From the report: Being able to advance the safe deployment of fully self-driving cars represents a new step toward the benefits the technology will bring, said Edward Straub, director of automation for SAE and executive director of the new consortium. Straub said the automakers in the new consortium would turn information discovered through their self-driving testing over to SAE committees every three to six months, and the information would be discussed in public SAE sessions as a set of guidelines are being developed.

Straub said other automakers and technology companies would be welcome to join the consortium, provided they have experience testing fully autonomous cars. The announcement of the new partnership may be a reaction to the inability of Congress to pass legislation that would allow car manufacturers to sell thousands of self-driving vehicles in the near future, said Michelle Krebs, senior analyst for Autotrader. "GM, Ford and Toyota clearly saw a need to set standards that eventually may become regulations because the proposed regulations, which had been moving quickly, have now stalled," she said. Straub said the automakers in the new consortium are operating independently of the efforts to pass legislation in Congress.

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Ford, GM and Toyota Collaborate For Self-Driving Safety Rules

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  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Wednesday April 03, 2019 @11:05PM (#58381962)

    Each car can electronically compare purchase price with each other, most expensive car gets right of way, least expensive car gets the ditch.

  • Will they take criminal liability? or do an uber where that safety driver may face criminal changes even when they need to look off the road at the cars systems.

  • The right to repair guarantees that it's the *customer* who is the backstop of ethical behaviour of their vehicle, which is exactly where it should be. I do not want the decision of who my car is going to kill going to be made by some company that owes it's existence on sucking on the government bailout tit.
  • It's a good start but we need communication protocols so cars can talk to one another and so traffic control devices can talk to them. We need uniform standards for road sensors, lane markers and broadcast obstruction warnings.

    Maybe this is the incentive we need to finally fix our broken infrastructure.

    • Re:That's not enough (Score:4, Interesting)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @01:43AM (#58382258) Homepage Journal

      It's a good start but we need communication protocols so cars can talk to one another and so traffic control devices can talk to them.

      Actually, no, we really don't, despite the old guard car companies' near-constant insistence that it is somehow critical. There's no plausible design for an inter-car communication protocol that can't be forged, and if you can't trust the data coming in, you can't really do much useful with it, so what's the point of even sending it? It's not as if the difference between the few milliseconds it takes for a computer to recognize what's happening visually and the few nanoseconds it takes to decode the signal electronically is going to make any real difference anyway, in practice.

      Also, traffic control devices had better be visually obvious enough that humans can recognize them, or else they won't work, and if they are, then computers don't need any additional electronic communication. It just introduces more opportunities for bugs and hacking.

      We need uniform standards for road sensors, lane markers and broadcast obstruction warnings.

      This, I agree with. Of course, making that happen around the world is about as likely as Tesla reaching level 5 autonomy in 2019. :-)

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        I'm pretty sure that if traffic was all cars we'd have self-driving cars by now, for the simple reason that cars are bound by traffic rules. If it's an intersection and you're running a red light there's not much doubt who's at fault. If the rules are too ambiguous we can always make them clearer until say a lane merger is properly described and you can put a car's behavior into "at fault" or "not at fault". Right now we're trying to work backwards from "do not crash" into behavior that won't ever cause a c

        • If the rules are too ambiguous we can always make them clearer until say a lane merger is properly described and you can put a car's behavior into "at fault" or "not at fault".

          Properly describing a lane merger is already impossible. If you put all the responsibility for safety on the merging car, it becomes impossible to merge in busy traffic. The only solution is to become more aggressive in merging, and force traffic to brake for you.

        • I'm pretty sure that if traffic was all cars we'd have self-driving cars by now, for the simple reason that cars are bound by traffic rules.

          No. Those are laws and regulations, not rules. Rules are things like "don't crash" or "follow laws and regulations". The laws and regulations are complex in and of themselves, but actually following the rules of driving is orders of magnitude more complicated.

          If traffic were all trains, we'd have self-driving transport by now. But since cars have to operate on tarmac (etc.) roads with pneumatic rubber tires, even if you had only passenger cars and they didn't have to mix with anything else, driving would st

    • We don't need an incentive to fix infrastructure; those holding the wealth do.

      Talk to them.

    • It's a good start but we need communication protocols so cars can talk to one another

      You mean like these [wikipedia.org]? Noob. You should at least give yourself a basic education in a subject before spouting.

      and so traffic control devices can talk to them. We need uniform standards for road sensors, lane markers and broadcast obstruction warnings.

      An AV which depends on V2X is untrustworthy. AVs have to work even when the communications network is completely down in order to be useful, because otherwise people will learn to depend on them in situations in which they are not dependable.

      You have no idea what you are on about. Go away.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday April 04, 2019 @03:15AM (#58382386)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by mjwx ( 966435 )

      Sounds like a way to make rules that will see that others are always at fault. The reason O think that us because it is two US and a japanese company.

      It is telling if the company that gave up the patent for 3 ppint safety belts is not part of it.

      Sounds like a health research group from the tobacco industry.

      Actually it's more of a free ad for Toyota, GM and Ford.

      The road rules (known as the Highway Code) here in the UK are very clear about what vehicles should be doing and when, when to go, when to stop, when to give way, what distance to maintain, when to indicate, how long to indicate for, so on and so forth up until who is at fault in a collision. Very little is ambiguous.

      For self driving cars, the highway code simply needs to be turned into computer code. The problem is the highway code assumes the v

      • For self driving cars, the highway code simply needs to be turned into computer code.

        That's far from simple, as you explain in your next sentence. A common set of safety standards would help to make sure they all do this correctly.

  • China will start selling dangerous self-driving cars and the whole thing will collapse.
  • If so they're in for a bit of a surprise when they discover that their adverts ubiquitous portrayal of empty roads, driving wherever, at whatever speed and it's all just tickety-boo is one big lie that'd make even the Marlboro Man's death stick purveyors blush.

    Seriously though, I think we're at a juncture were we need to understand very quickly what they're being lined up for with self-driving cars by the car/auto lobby. For while it's likely that the number of accidents will go down. It's also true, all el

    • while it's likely that the number of accidents will go down. It's also true, all else being equal, that the number of car journey will increase. Is there anyone outside of the auto lobby that thinks, yep, what we need is more car journeys. That'll help with the obesity crisis, pollution and global warming. Really?

      This is why we need to promote rail. Here in the USA, Trump is attacking national rail, probably on behalf of the oil and car companies. It's happened before [wikipedia.org] that auto companies destroyed profitable public transportation lines to increase demand for their product (with the aid of oil and tire companies, who wanted the same for their products.)

      The future of ride hailing is the use of a single app to manage an entire journey. A trip could involve an autonomous car showing up to take you to a train station, wh

      • Rail is very expensive. An autonomous bus in a dedicated lane would be a much cheaper alternative.

        • Rail costs more, but it also carries much more, and costs less to maintain. It's also much more efficient to use steel wheels on smooth rails than to use pneumatic rubber tires even on smooth pavement, let alone the roads we actually wind up with. Trains are also more compatible with mobile charging. They just make more sense for long-distance travel, and often for medium-range trips. Cars are still better for short ones. Buses on tarmac are a problem because heavy axles put high PSI loads on pavement. Trai

  • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday April 04, 2019 @02:14PM (#58384924)

    A car may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

    A car must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

    A car must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

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