Between truck drivers, bus drivers and taxi drivers, that's 3 million people who should look for another line of work when this starts to happen.
The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
221–230 of 455 posts
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#222Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.
I'll back that as soon as a system to force bicyclists to abide by traffic laws is required.
I don't get it. This is not a zero sum game. If a cyclist breaks the law, does that mean you can now pass the next one closer?
You seem to lack the necessary maturity to operate a multi-ton vehicle, getting agitated and trying to portray driving in the street as some tit-for-tat game. Stop and think about what you are doing.
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#223Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll back that as soon as a system to force bicyclists to abide by traffic laws is required.
Really? Ever drive on a public road? What percentage of drivers break the speed limit laws? 95%? 7 nines in California? Cops don't even pull you over until you're driving at least 10-15 over. So obviously speeding is a totally fine law to break, but when I roll through a residential stop sign at 5 mph (that has obviously been installed only to enforce right-of-way) what I'm doing is inexcusable? Until drivers fall al…
The problem is not with breaking the law. Drivers and cyclists do this more-or-less equally I'd imagine.
The problem is in breaking expectations.
If I see 10 cars driving 80mph in a 55mph zone, then it is reasonable for me to expect an 11th, and I'm certainly not shocked when I do see that.
At stop signs and red lights when I'm riding my bike I've seen far too many fellow cyclists seem to take pleasure in their ability to do the unexpected and get away with it.
They weave between stopped traffic, overtake slowing cars on the right, breeze through stop signs without yielding, block pedestrians by entering crosswalks and stopping.
These are legitimate bad behaviors on the part of cyclists, and until we admit that and start working on changing the culture towards one of behaving within expectations we're not going to get much respect from all the drivers on the road who largely do adhere to expectations.
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#224Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.
As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"
For consumer use (as opposed to an experimental vehicle), this is never an option. Even if you assume the person in the car is (present, of-age, licensed, awake, sober), the context switch of promptly having to drive on a busy road after hours/days/months of not having driven would be terrible.
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#225Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, with self-driving cars, it’s likely that those four activity could be handled by different vehicles that you would only rent for the time you need them. If the law allows them to drive empty, they could go to the next user on their own, and reduce both waste parking, and inefficiencies like the ones you describe. Such plans are however more likely to happen in areas where those issues are more dire (concent…
sure, but this why ownership as a concept is actually quite nice - i can decide right now to do something with my car. i don't need to plan ahead. i am not dependent on anybody else. i gladly pay for that luxury.
Isn't buying a car that is able to handle a bunch of different hypothetical future scenarios planning ahead?
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#226Inspirational.
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#227Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes…
Humans have a tendency to focus on the bizarre while dismissing the average. Perhaps a self-driving car will not see this debris, although I would be surprised if that was true. The robot car has far superior sensors, compared to yours, and it never looks at anything else. Probably the consequences of hitting the debris would have been minor anyway. On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of…
this response has nothing to do with my question. my question is how to address the technical challenge of the 'mattress in the middle of the highway' problem, not if we should ignore that challenge because on net we'll have less accidents with robocars.
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#228Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) th…
I agree with your overall vision.
But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question."
Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted.
We absolutely have to tread carefully here.
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#229Earlier quoted context omitted.
Humans have a tendency to focus on the bizarre while dismissing the average. Perhaps a self-driving car will not see this debris, although I would be surprised if that was true. The robot car has far superior sensors, compared to yours, and it never looks at anything else. Probably the consequences of hitting the debris would have been minor anyway. On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of…
Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people. And I would say that mowing down little kids at the local farmer's market would be one of those 'bizarre' incidents, unless there has been a rash of farmer's market mow-downs that I'm not aware of. I've never hit anyone, and I'd rathe…
We let people kill more than a few of us. We let people wreck our cars and endanger our lives in situations that would have been easily avoidable.
Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving
#230Earlier quoted context omitted.
Along the same lines another thing that I think most of us in the US this winter (or least parts of it) had to deal with are potholes. I've gotten quite good at avoiding the potholes around me by preparing for their presence well ahead of where they actually are. In one case there's one right at the top of a hill near me and right under the passenger side tires if you don't move slightly to either side. But because o…
But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.
These cars will almost certainly be sharing what they've learned about the road with each other. The hard part of this is the mobile data network required to share high resolution LIDAR or other sensor data with many cars. The fact that roads are constantly changing makes it even harder.
Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.