Driverless cars

chaparral said:
Sounds scary when you think there may come a time when your going have 30ton 18 wheel lorries driving behind you with no driver...
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To be honest,With the sort of hours truck drivers do these days..i wouldn't mind a computer been in charge instead.

Half of the truck drivers that come to our place look absolutely knackered,One fell asleep in his cab the other day and didn't wake up,i had to go and knock the window to wake the poor chap up.

I know they get set breaks and all,But regardless 15 hour shifts with small breaks inbetween,Must be hard.
 
asim18 said:
We should aiming to create some sort of actual driving license which actually distinguishes between people who are able and unable to drive. Because as it stands, 60-70% of currently licensed road users are actually incapable of operating and/or controlling a motor vehicle.
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So that's young males aged between 17 to 30, good riddance.
 
I'm sure we went through all this when cars were introduced and some people wanted to keep everyone riding horses because they didn't trust those new-fangled machines.
 
Nevakonaza said:
Google self-driving car gets pulled over for driving too slowly
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Navigation is one thing even collision avoidance, etc. but its gonna need quite an incredibly leap in learning ability to be able to handle things like unexpectedly required to stop by law enforcement* or even just someone random flagging them down due to an issue up ahead, etc.


* Sure you could contrive in remote access by police, etc. but that is another matter.
 
Just some things to consider. Most people can't afford brand new cars. If you start throwing in the electronics and actuators you need for this along with the research amd development and testing that will be necessary then the already quite expensive cars are going to get even more costly.

The idea of having back up and redundancy systems becomes more unlikely due to the costs. When comparing to planes don't forget that they cost millions, so having 1 or 2 back up systems is a small cost in the grand scale of things.

Another area that I see being a problem is the notion that "if you don't use it, you lose it". If people become more reliant on driverless cars there ability to drive will also decrease. If people are already this " bad" at driving then I would hate to see how much worst they can be without their " daily practise"
 
Honestly, I wouldn't mind a car that could drive itself on the motorway, for when I'm just not in the mood, a motorway seems like a fairly safe set of conditions for self driving.
That said there are a lot of modern tech pieces that help with this anyway, such as adaptive cruise and lane guidance so I suppose we are practically there in that regard anyway.
I wouldn't trust self driving around a town or a country road though seems like too many variables. Anyway I enjoy country road driving too much to relinquish control anyway.
 
chaparral said:
How many planes fly around with no human pilot in them ?
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There are plenty of planes that can't fly without computer aid.

The reality is you have multiple redundancy, and as i mentioned before the benefit with cars is if the computer crashes it can just stop and cause no major issues.

Heck I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't mandated that all driverless cars had a manual emergency stop button, just in case the of a computer glitch that didn't just cause the car to come to a halt.
 
adolf hamster said:
Its going to be fine once all vehicles are driverless, but that transition period when people still have "manual" cars is going to be tricky, i mean is it going to be taken as given that any accident between a driverless and manual car that the driverless car is not at fault?
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Well currently it appears thats generally the case, so it'll probably be up to you to prove it was the fault of the driverless car rather than you. That said the current at fault system is probably adequate.

That said, rear ending a driverless car or swiping it while going through a red light is probably fairly cut and dry.

It's likely the first truly driverless vehicles are going to be lorries and public/private transport like taxis anyway.
 
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Amp34 said:
Well currently it appears thats generally the case,.
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no it doesn't.

the Tesla car drove into a bloody lorry because i thought it was the sky because of the colour.

It's likely the first truly driverless vehicles are going to be lorries and public/private transport like taxis anyway.
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no way in hell, they are the highest liability vehicles and so will cling to a driver.
 
Aside from the fact that wasn't a true driverless car, and the lorry itself was entirely in the wrong at that time (crossing a major road, apparently without checking it was clear)? Yes it was a tragic accident, but the driver of the car wasn't in the wrong for the actual incident, although he should have been paying due care and attention.

Googles actual driverless cars are also a good representation.

There have been 14 crashes involving their vehicles, with only one being a google car fault.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_self-driving_car

The majority are either shunts from behind or being swiped from the side, either due to red lights or drivers going through stop signs.
 
SexyGreyFox said:
Several of Google’s self-driving cars have been involved in traffic collisions, although none have been found to be to blame for the incidents. Of the 14 accidents, 11 have been rear-end shunts where the Google vehicles have been shunted by following cars, according to the company.

And this is the problem, it doesn't matter how safe these cars will be because they will have to share the roads with motorists.
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But those accidents happen anyway - what's the problem with them happening in driverless cars versus cars being drive by humans?

Safer until they go wrong, which they will. When has there ever been a 100% stable computer system?
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When has there ever been a 100% safe human driver?

chaparral said:
But computers also have a bad habit of freezing/crashing/rebooting/locking up etc

so what happens if the car computer does one of these things while the car traveling at 70mph down a motorway ?
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That's why they don't have a single point of failure. They have backups with the backup systems checking the status of the primary system and the primary system checking the status of the back up system.

esoteric said:
My opinion of driverless cars is where's the fun in that?
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Most people don't drive for fun, as amply illustrated by the vast amount of BMW 316d's on the road!

Personally, I can't wait until I can have a driverless car. I love driving, but only when I don't need to - there's nothing better than taking the Westfield out for a blat on a nice sunny evening or crisp winters morning but if I can pass over the monotonous commute or the long holiday drive to the car to handle itself while I read a book or watch a movie - well, beam me up Scotty!
 
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Nasher said:
Safer until they go wrong, which they will. When has there ever been a 100% stable computer system?
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You're missing the point. Driverless cars may not be perfect, but they will be vastly better than most drivers, and they will strive to be better, which is something you cannot say about many drivers, especially as they age. The Google cars shared all their development data, so they've accumulated hundreds of years of driving experience into their programs.

It's like the joke about not having to out-run a bear, just out-run the person you are with. The driverless car doesn't have to be perfect all the time, it just has to be better than a human driver, and it's pretty much already there unless you are on a race track comparing to the fastest racing car drivers.

In another 10 years, we'll be wondering what the fuss was all about.
 
Nasher said:
Safer until they go wrong, which they will. When has there ever been a 100% stable computer system?
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When has there ever been a 100% faultless driver? People make mistakes daily, even ones so minor they might not realize.

Writing the whole idea off because a system might glitch is silly.
 
Yes but people can correct themselves and avoid an incident, because they can think for themselves and can adapt. A computer cant. Once it goes wrong your definitely going off the cliff. Another scary thing is they can be remotely hacked because they are not closed systems :P

The one thing still lacking is AI.
 
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Nasher said:
Yes but people can correct themselves and avoid an incident, because they can think for themselves and can adapt. A computer cant. Once it goes wrong your definitely going off the cliff. Another scary thing is they can be remotely hacked (because most of the ones being worked on are not closed systems) :P

The one thing still lacking is AI.
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Who says? Why couldn't a driverless car recover from an unanticipated situation? Like oil on the road for example?

Humans definitely don't react to situations in the right way all the time either. How many accidents have you read about where someone pressed the accelerator instead of the brake in an auto and pressed the accelerator harder to try to stop because their brain wasn't quick enough to realise what was going on. Don't think you'll see a driver less car make that mistake.
 
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