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Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

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Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#31

Post by vonklaus »

After listening to Avi Rubin's Ted talk[0] and seeing articles like the Hacker's remotely kill jeep on Highway[1], I am less bullish on self-driving cars. Mobile and regular OSs are vulnerable to attack, except here your data as well as your safety is at risk. As well as making these cars orders of magnitude safer (in terms of navigation), they will need to be orders of magnitude harder to hack and take control of.

A few high profile hacks leading to crashes and fatalities will be enough to turn a large swathe of the population off autopilot technology, which they are already skeptical of.

[0]http://www.ted.com/talks/avi_rubin_all_your_devices_can_be_h... [1]http://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-high...

Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#32

Post by stephengillie »

vonmoltke wrote: post #21
stephengillie wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I want an oven I can choose to grill with because I like grilling? Will I have to buy an outdoor grill and grill by hand? (Although to be fair, these electric ovens would probably suck to grill with since they are not designed for charcoal grilling enthusiasts.)

I think you are engaging in a false analogy here. Comparing a grill to an oven is like comparing a passenger car to a panel truck: they are in the same broad class of thing but serve different purposes. A better analogy would be that of a grill that can use gas or charcoal as the fuel; different means to the same purpose.

Yes, I am engaging in a false analogy. My intention was to humorously showcase specialized tools at a much further level of differentiation. And a passenger car is as different from a panel (flatbed) truck as a hand-driven gasoline car is from a solar-powered self-driving car.

I was attempting to highlight that these tools have nearly equivalent purposes, but the educated consumer would have a definite preference for one or the other, depending on plans and situations.

Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#33

Post by gambiting »

fixermark wrote: post #22
mc32 wrote: post #5

That's correct for highway speeds.... What happens when I'm stuck in a ditch or sand or in a rut and need delicate manoeuvering? Maybe I'm out in a field in the middle of nowhere. No roads, just open field with seasonal hazards. I still want a way to guide the vehicle manually without having to call someone with a winch.

The scenario described is so rare, that "calling someone with a winch" is likely to become the de-facto scenario. Why the unnecessary redundancy of having every car able to be controlled manually when in the very, very common case it's not needed? People already keep AAA memberships in their wallets instead of a spare tire, tire wrench, jack, jumper cables, and starter one-shot battery in their trunk.

Rare? Where? Where I live we get a very heavy snowfall in Winter, and even a regular trip to shops ends in me trying to get moving again by rocking the car back and forth to get out of snow. Unless automatic vehicles will drive only on clean, dry roads in pristine condition?

Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#34

Post by IgorPartola »

slantyyz wrote: post #15
nabla9 wrote: post #10

Maybe future cars have steering wheel stored away in the same way Spare tire is out of way. If things go totally bonkers in the middle of nowhere, you stop, install small steering wheel and drive manually.

>> Maybe future cars have steering wheel stored away in the same way Spare tire is out of way. A little off-topic, but an increasingly smaller number of cars are coming with spares (as someone who has experienced sidewall tire damage on the highway, it's an alarming trend). More and more cars are just coming with tire patch kits, an aerosol tire fixer, or run-flat tires. http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2012/1…

That's terrible. I would much rather swap in a spare than try to use some patch kit, then go back on the highway. From what I understand run-flat tires are also less than ideal. Isn't it true that they'll let you stop safely, but continuing driving with them will be problematic?

I live in the North Eastern US, so last fall I bought a second set of wheels for my car and installed some very nice snow tires on them. Now I carry a winter tire as the spare instead of the donut and a in the winter it's a summer tire. Long car trip + blown tire would mean I won't make it to my destination on the donut. Full size spare FTW.

Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#35

Post by alistairSH »

> Research that Stanford has done shows that drivers resuming control from Level 3 vehicles functioning in autonomous mode take 10 seconds just to attain the level of ability that a drunk driver possesses. And to get back to full driving competence takes 60 seconds.

Wouldn't this also hold true for airline pilots? How quickly can they resume control of a plane when something goes amiss?

Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#37

Post by splat »

alistairSH wrote: post #35

> Research that Stanford has done shows that drivers resuming control from Level 3 vehicles functioning in autonomous mode take 10 seconds just to attain the level of ability that a drunk driver possesses. And to get back to full driving competence takes 60 seconds. Wouldn't this also hold true for airline pilots? How quickly can they resume control of a plane when something goes amiss?

My understanding is that airline pilots only use autopilot when at cruising altitude. At those heights they have several minutes to take over and fix a problem before crashing.

Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#38

Post by astrodust »

agumonkey wrote: post #28
astrodust wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If self-driving cars become the norm, people will have no idea what a steering wheel is or how to use it, any more than people today would know what to do with a horse stored in the trunk for emergencies. Worst case scenario it'd be a controller of some kind and the car would be limited to 5mph, enough to limp back.

Cars used to have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiller for direction control. About forgetting how to steer, take a look at that video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MFzDaBzBlL0 discussion here http://www.eevblog.com/forum/chat/riding-an-inverted-bike/

That's a neat video on reversed steering.

Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#39

Post by jessaustin »

gambiting wrote: post #33
fixermark wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The scenario described is so rare, that "calling someone with a winch" is likely to become the de-facto scenario. Why the unnecessary redundancy of having every car able to be controlled manually when in the very, very common case it's not needed? People already keep AAA memberships in their wallets instead of a spare tire, tire wrench, jack, jumper cables, and starter one-shot battery in their trunk.

Rare? Where? Where I live we get a very heavy snowfall in Winter, and even a regular trip to shops ends in me trying to get moving again by rocking the car back and forth to get out of snow. Unless automatic vehicles will drive only on clean, dry roads in pristine condition?

[EDIT] OK you have snow tires. Then what's the deal? I've lived in snowbound places, without snow tires, and rarely had difficulty getting moving again after parking half an hour to shop. Sure, if you leave your car in a bad spot during a snowstorm you'll have problems in the morning, but most robocars will never have that problem, because they will only park in safe secure areas and only during the 2AM-5AM "quiet" period when people don't want to go places.

Re: Why your self-driving car won’t have a steering wheel

#40

Post by avens19 »

vonklaus wrote: post #31

After listening to Avi Rubin's Ted talk[0] and seeing articles like the Hacker's remotely kill jeep on Highway [1], I am less bullish on self-driving cars. Mobile and regular OSs are vulnerable to attack, except here your data as well as your safety is at risk. As well as making these cars orders of magnitude safer (in terms of navigation), they will need to be orders of magnitude harder to hack and take control of.…

Planes run on similar tech, why haven't they been hacked? The odds on this seem long indeed, especially considering how dangerous driving is already
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