Autonomous Vehicles

Caporegime
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I will eat my hat if we have electric autonomous lorries before at least 20 years. Lorries go all over Europe even to different continents. Anyone who has done proper long distance driving will know that the rest of the world is vastly different to here. Much of the infrastructure is decades behind what we have here.
 
Man of Honour
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I will eat my hat if we have electric autonomous lorries before at least 20 years. Lorries go all over Europe even to different continents. Anyone who has done proper long distance driving will know that the rest of the world is vastly different to here. Much of the infrastructure is decades behind what we have here.
Why does that stop autonomous lorries here or USA, not all lorries go multiple countries. I would have thought the majority would have set routes.
 
Caporegime
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Why does that stop autonomous lorries here or USA, not all lorries go multiple countries. I would have thought the majority would have set routes.

I never said it did but lorry companies want their trucks to be flexible. Haulage is not as simple as buy a lorry and go to Scotland and back for ten years. That Lorry could go all over the place.
 
Caporegime
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I never said it did but lorry companies want their trucks to be flexible. Haulage is not as simple as buy a lorry and go to Scotland and back for ten years. That Lorry could go all over the place.

No one is suggesting autonomous HGVs are going to be driving everywhere in the next 10 years. Just because a vehicle can drive fully autonomously for one trip doesn’t mean it can’t be driven when needed. For the trips involving hauling from hub to hub along main road networks (be that up and down the UK motorways, or from Poland to Spain) the tractor could be set to auto mode. If that tractor then needs to be used for more complex trips a driver is used.

It’s not either/or, it’s like most things, best tool/technique for the job.
 
Soldato
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Yes they are. But you need to prove to me that a driver is inherently more safe than a computer. It’s already been shown that cars are safer driven by computer than people, so you’re on a difficult mission there.

As an aside Phoenix (IIRC) has just got a fully autonomous taxi service. There is a “driver” currently, but they are sat in the back seat with no immediate access to controls.

I think you need to prove to me that a machine can better a person 100% of the time and do so without error or malfunction.
 
Caporegime
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I think you need to prove to me that a machine can better a person 100% of the time and do so without error or malfunction.

That’s an impossible task.

How about 90% of the time, and leading to a reduction of accidents/deaths on the road by say 90%.

Presumably you are one of those people that believes that even one accident by a computer driven machine is not acceptable, even if the accident rate is significantly lower than human driven vehicles?

That’s the situation at the moment. Per KM an automated car is less likely to have an accident. Yes, some will have accidents, but the accident rate is significantly lower.

So I’ve provided a statement that can be backed up by data. Can you now refute that with your own data (which is what I asked in my previous post)?

And that’s the issue with public perception and the general public’s misunderstanding of data and risk.

Edit: Here’s a real world example of a lorry driving itself, from over a year ago.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.the...f-driving-truck-budweiser-first-shipment-uber

The lorry drove for two hours delivering cargo with a driver sat in the sleeper cab monitoring. The driver then took over when it hit town. The route has already been mapped (as discussed earlier). The tech is available now for driverless lorries on certain routes (such as major roads). The challenge now is to refine it and build it into a properly saleable product that the public will allow on public roads without a driver.

My bet is in/by 2023 there will be testing with no drivers in the cab at all (so the 5 years mentioned before) and in/by 2027 (10 years) there will be a few commercial vehicles available and a few routes they can drive on fully autonomously.

And if you want you can also go to Phoenix and get yourself self driving taxi ride.

https://www.google.ca/amp/s/www.wir...zona-phoenix-driverless-self-driving-cars/amp

There is a Waymo employee sat in he back but that’s not expected to continue for long.
 
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Caporegime
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I can just see the dangers a self driving thing brings. I'd rather have a person in charge and control that brings.

Even if that person is more likely to crash?

Edit: Loblaws, the largest canadan Supermarket has preordered 25 semis, which is apparently around 10% of their fleet.

So maybe those trips to Murmansk will be fine after all. ;)
 
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Soldato
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I can just see the dangers a self driving thing brings. I'd rather have a person in charge and control that brings.

You mean control like this:

Truck driver kills two pedestrians while playing Pokemon Go

Lorry driver kills four while on the phone


Romanian lorry driver who called two people was distracted by sat nav


Lorry driver kills van driver while checking how much time he had left

My commute down the M1 is often affected by accidents - the vast majority involve one truck or more.

I'm a firm believer that motorways need some form of automation.
 
Soldato
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You mean control like this:

Truck driver kills two pedestrians while playing Pokemon Go

Lorry driver kills four while on the phone


Romanian lorry driver who called two people was distracted by sat nav


Lorry driver kills van driver while checking how much time he had left

My commute down the M1 is often affected by accidents - the vast majority involve one truck or more.

I'm a firm believer that motorways need some form of automation.

How many times have of those drivers saved people from accidents and avoided near misses?

People can make choices like ditch or bus full of people. The auto bot brigade sometimes forget this.
 
Don
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So can this AI choose which person to kill?
The AI driver will have the ability to minimise casualties if it ends up in an incident far better than a human driver. Even if that means it can give preference to a child over a pensioner they will be able to do that.

I think you're completely over estimating human drivers driving ability here by the way.
 
Soldato
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The AI driver will have the ability to minimise casualties if it ends up in an incident far better than a human driver. Even if that means it can give preference to a child over a pensioner they will be able to do that.

And you would be happy for those things to be driving around? And driving with 40,000 litres of solvents or toxic waste say.
 
Don
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And you would be happy for those things to be driving around? And driving with 40,000 litres of solvents or toxic waste say.
Yes. Why not? We put up with humans driving them (approximately 90% of crashes are due to human driving by the way), so anything that makes our roads safer should be encouraged.

When Tesla added Autosteering into their range, there was a ~40% drop in the Tesla crash rate.
 
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