341–350 of 445 posts
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I'm from near Pittsburgh and I'd hardly call this a custom. It's just what you do when you're in a hurry and have pole-position in the turning lane...
Not sure what you mean. "Just what you do" when you're from a specific area is pretty much the textbook definition of a "custom".
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That, and the inattentive safety driver. It's quite infuriating really, letting lose a ton and a half of fast-moving mass without even the decency of looking where it's going. There's really no excuse.
Unfortunately I think it's one of those things that is both inexcusable and guaranteed to happen. It absolutely makes sense to put a human in a car you're testing and don't have full confidence in yet but are sending into real traffic. Not doing so would be ludicrously negligent. However, humans simply don't maintain focus for a long period of time without some sort of extreme, years-long training. The ability of mon…
Then give them a task! Install a HUD drawing a box in real time with the classification of nearest detected object (bike, pedestrian, car, mailbox) and put buttons in the wheel for the driver to confirm/reject the classification. This way:
a) you improve your machine learning
b) driver has wheels on the road
c) driver has hands on the wheel
d) driver is focused on incoming objects
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This is already happening in the trucking industry. Self-driving trucks are being developed to be able to drive 99% of the trip that's on highways and then human drivers take over for the local 1%. To make it easier, transfer hubs are being built near cities off major highways to make everything easier and non-disruptive. The same thing could be done with cars without the need for the transfer hubs and it basically i…
I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway. This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis. Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess. Many of those vehicles wer…
Garbage trucks are big and heavy, so if things go wrong they can go badly wrong, such as the incident in Glasgow that killed six people[1].
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This whole line of reasoning frustrates me somewhat. The story of "Uber Disabled the Safety System" paints Uber out to be negligent for doing so. Outside of consideration of all the other facts (which unlike this one, do indeed suggest that Uber are to blame), this element of the story is not indicative of negligence. Of course they disabled the existing safety system - they were aiming to build a new, safer one that…
They are absolutely negligent for doing so. I wouldn't have made that decision, because in a safety-critical system it's ALWAYS preferable to have a backup system, especially when the system you're working with is unproven software that you don't fully understand. It doesn't matter that the old system would have interfered with the new system, and in fact if the two systems did interfere it would behoove you to under…
But those two points seem distinct from the idea of disabling a system in order to have a better understanding of what's going on. Suppose they had built a car that was safe, conditioned on the presence a black box system that they likely didn't have access to the internals of - would this be satisfactory?
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yes for sure. I wish articles about this crash would continue to hammer on the basics, to keep front¢er this crash was completely avoidable. Even if there were no technical issues, (1) the driver was on her phone before and during the crash. The whole reason for the driver to be present is to intervene in a situation like this. (2) the car was driving too fast for conditions. Nobody should drive this fast in the…
It was 38 mph in a 45.
I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive pas…
> On the contrary, in Tempe, a pedestrian starting to do the exact same thing as above is likely much more a case of them not realizing your car is coming at all, in which case slamming on the brakes is appropriate.
And in many SEA country you're expected to just drive around a pedestrian crossing the road (or a cow lying on it).
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Those deer are killed because thousands of humans aren't smart enough to not overdrive their headlights so they hit obstacles in the dark. Hitting a deer is not a small thing. You will seriously damage your car, and may be severely injured or killed yourself if the deer is tall enough to come through the windshield. In open range country you can also hit a cow. In some areas you can hit a moose. Do we therefore chang…
I've driven in Palo Alto near 280, and from the distance, in broad daylight, I saw a buck run across an entire field at full speed and straight across the road about 3-4 cars in front of me, and get hit by the car. There was no way the driver could see what I saw, and he had no chance to avoid it. The deer was simply acting irrationally. To say that people who hit deer are "driving like idiots" is wrong.
- Was this on 280, or near 280?
- If the car that hit the deer was 3-4 cars ahead and you could see the deer "run across an entire field", why was "there no way the driver could see what you saw"? I'm trying to imagine what sort of obstruction could block the drivers view but not yours.
- How fast was the car going?
- How long did it take the deer to "run across an entire field"?
- Normally deer are active around sunrise and sunset and bed down during the day (source: deer hunting). It seems odd to see a deer in running in "broad daylight".
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That's why you go during the yellow. Cars are stopping at the new red. You then go left before the cars getting the new green start moving.
The oncoming traffic doesn't stop until the light turns red. When the light is yellow, they're actually more likely to _speed up_ in order to "make the light" rather than stop. So when the light inevitably turns red and you're in the middle of the intersection, do you either: a) Just sit there, in the middle of the intersection, blocking traffic. b) Attempt to back up, hoping there are no other cars behind you in the…
Wait, why? No new car should enter the intersection when the lights turn to yellow. The yellow light should last long enough for everyone to be able to safely drive off the intersection, in orderly manner.
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What's illegal? Stopping in an intersection? Or exiting the intersection on red? The light would be red on exiting the intersection unless cars are illegally entering the intersection on yellow when they should be stopping because they weren't speeding and have time to stop.
Entering an intersection on yellow isn’t illegal in Washington, California, Texas, or any state that I am aware of.
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I think there's some room for improvement though. Instead of "just one human in there", they could put them out in teams of two, and have periodic "awareness checks" that you have to respond to by pressing a driving-irrelevant button.
Dead-man switches do not work.