Am I the only one who is looking forward to autonomous cars?
- Thread starter Ricochet J
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Caporegime
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- 8 Jan 2004
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A bit like the proposed system by Elon Musk. You load your normal car onto an electrically powered sled and then are transported into a high speed underground tunnel network and get dropped off near your destination to complete your journey the old fashioned way.
Would take all the driverless dangers out of situation and you can still issue fines at both ends. I think the nation could get behind such a system.
It seems to be working and more importantly is simply an early test (also showing that manufacturers have indeed thought about such things). We didn't go from early aeroplanes to jet airliners overnight either. Autonomous cars will take time to perfect as I said before but it will happen.
Bring back the carburetor!
Ford has Cross Traffic Alert with Braking....(My focus ST only has the Cross Traffic Alert with beeping)
It still has some way to go, my friend's Ford decided to brake when a car in front but to the left was stationary and turning left at a junction.
But it also saved him from an accident when he was changing the stereo and the car in front braked heavily...
seriously wtf is up with this post
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Yeah they seem to be working on it. Let's see how they get on over the Kirkstone pass or Shap in winter.
It would probably have a more progressive right ankle and steering?
Exactly, why do you need to "slide" on snow? If you drive properly and aren't a rally driver then...?
And that's ignoring the fact that Tesla is a US companies, where it snows a lot more than in the UK.
Edit: the biggest issue with snow is not going to be traction, it is/going to be lack of visibility of road markings. That will likely be solved by having more accurate satellite positioning (Galileo rather than GPS for example) and using memory of the road from previous drives to position the vehicle correctly.
If you're slipping and sliding all over the place get better tyres
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But also auto pilots do fail sometimes and if the pilot wasn't there...
But there are still single points of failure and the biggest one is the software itself. If the programming is faulty on one, it's going to be faulty on all of them so they will all make the same mistake when the situation arises. With millions of automated cars on the road, that could be a lot of deaths.
Remember, this isn't REAL AI, it can't think for itself or learn from it's mistakes. Or improve it's skills.
So far they have only had proper testing on US roads, which are big and mostly a grid layout. Even then the drivers had to take over quite a lot.
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There's multiple single points of failure in current cars. The main and most dangerous one is the human driver.
As a passenger at least you know an automated car is a known quantity, whereas you're putting your life into the hands of a completely unknown quantity if you ever take a bus or taxi.
If the power or electrical connectors go down then the vehicle stops. It's not suddenly going to career into a tree or ravine, just like a hydrocarbon engine. If there's a bug in the code then after that one crash caused by it it's going to be fixed pretty quickly!
Remember the current system "allows" for a couple of thousand deaths and tens of thousands of serious injuries a year, in the UK alone. That's a lot of lines of code to go wrong before autonomous driving will be considered more dangerous than a human.
As a passenger at least you know an automated car is a known quantity, whereas you're putting your life into the hands of a completely unknown quantity if you ever take a bus or taxi.
If the power or electrical connectors go down then the vehicle stops. It's not suddenly going to career into a tree or ravine, just like a hydrocarbon engine. If there's a bug in the code then after that one crash caused by it it's going to be fixed pretty quickly!
Remember the current system "allows" for a couple of thousand deaths and tens of thousands of serious injuries a year, in the UK alone. That's a lot of lines of code to go wrong before autonomous driving will be considered more dangerous than a human.
Just fine with time no doubt
In theory it can do better - It can learn from the mistakes of millions of other cars.
No you only need one line of code to go wrong
Or tampered with by hackers. Which is even worse if they are reliant on a "cloud" system. That could cause total havok.
No you only need one line of code to go wrong
Or tampered with by hackers. Which is even worse if they are reliant on a "cloud" system. That could cause total havok.
As I already said if that happened and caused a crash then it would be fixed pretty quickly.
In the US alone youd need 35,000 lines of code to be wrong and cause deaths for it to be anywhere near as bad as human drivers.
As for the havoc caused by hacking, our banking, much of our infrastructure systems and a whole lot more are "connected" and in the "cloud". Yes sometimes things happen, but very rarely and infrequently. Companies need to be aware, but as a consumer it's a very minor issue. Do you only use cash for example?
Yes, but people don't die when banks get hacked.
I think you have to teach the car to learn the road. May take some time.Just fine with time no doubt
I'll take autonomous cars any day over sharing the road with drunk drivers, people going over the speed limit, drivers who think they can drive better than they actually do, people who ignore traffic law, people with road rage, tired drivers falling asleep, and every other driver who gets distracted by their phone, stereo, kids, smoking, eating, putting on make-up etc etc. Hopefully autonomous cars will eventually become good enough to restore independence to people who can't drive any more due to age or medical conditions. So much to be gained and naysayers' biggest concern is that it'll take their fun away.