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Self-Driving Car: Is it a big deal?
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callmesam
Member
You still don't understand probability, then. There are more injuries and deaths attributable to driving not because everyone drives, but because the likelihood of being injured and dying from driving is higher than everything but alaskan crabber and base jumper.
Human driving is already NOT SAFE.
Until you can address the dangers of human driving in a way that's safer than computers, then you are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
MassModel3
Member
LMAO!!!
But the problem is that no matter how much the designers try to idiot-proof something, the world will always make a better idiot!
InTheShadows
Active Member
My question is how would this apply to distracted driving laws. What about falling asleep behind the wheel.
I could see myself intentionally pulling out my laptop and working for the 3 hour jaunt down the highway. Possibly even unintentionally dozing off on a long road trip.
It's not much different from today in that I can launch from a stop, through a turn, at full accelerator, in the rain, and just know that the car will keep me from spinning out. Need to stop quickly, press the brake through the battery pack. No need to find and do the pump dance on that max braking point where the tires are almost skidding - skidding anymore.
It's just one more step down the automated driving evolution chain that we will all come to accept as the norm 20 years from now.
I could see myself intentionally pulling out my laptop and working for the 3 hour jaunt down the highway. Possibly even unintentionally dozing off on a long road trip.
It's not much different from today in that I can launch from a stop, through a turn, at full accelerator, in the rain, and just know that the car will keep me from spinning out. Need to stop quickly, press the brake through the battery pack. No need to find and do the pump dance on that max braking point where the tires are almost skidding - skidding anymore.
It's just one more step down the automated driving evolution chain that we will all come to accept as the norm 20 years from now.
I was thinking of sitting behind the wheel of a moving vehicle and doing other things instead of what you should be doing.
But riding a bicycle can be dangerous. And riding a motorcycle is statistically much more dangerous (like 9 times or something) than being "trapped" in a car.
I spend 2 hours a day driving. I'm working on a computer about 5-6 hours a day. Somehow, I feel a bit safer while working on the computer. :tongue:
I'm making a joke, but I do understand your point. However, callmesam is right; driving is the most dangerous activity for most, and there have been many many efforts made in the past to make it safer. Driver-assisted options (dynamic radar, ect.) are just additional steps in that direction. 100% automatous driving is still way in the future, but I can see it being the ultimate goal.
On a side note, my wife is all for this. She's one of those rare souls who spent all of her youth studying and never had much of a desire to learn to drive. Now that she's in her late 30's, she's learning, but very nervous about doing it. Right now, she'd rather take a taxi or bus than drive herself, but I'd like to see that change, as it would make her life much easier.
I, on the other hand, am one of those sick individuals who enjoy driving cars (and motorcycles) with non-synchronized transmissions, manual chokes (even spark advance levers), and leaky convertible tops. Of course, the older I get, the more I appreciate luxuries like air conditioning and roll-up windows.
chickensevil
Active Member
Yes, again, that is why I said not many and included "smart"... Thankfully many teenagers grow out of that crazy phase, but not before a lot of them do something that causes permanent loss, but that isn't reason to fear something so awesome. By that notion they shouldn't have made movies that portray crazy car stunts a la Fast and Furious.
If some kid doesn't have enough sense to know that these things are reckless and dumb then it is just Darwinism at work and I am ok with that. We shouldn't stop progress just because some technology *might* be used to do something bad.
The larger fear is using autonomous cars as a form of remote control car bomb... But that doesn't mean we shouldn't have autonomous cars...
Go watch all the stupid things kids have done on youtube already, this isn't going to drive people toward this behaviour, it already exists...
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As opposed to??? I mean many things kids do these days affects other lives around them... look at drunk driving... For as many problems as this technology causes it will fix so many others that the benefits outweighs the risks. When we get really good auto-driving tech you will eliminate most of the accidents on the road. No more drunk drivers, no more distracted drivers, and no more fatigued drivers... Sure you might have a handful of kids find a way to disable safety systems in the car to allow them to jump cars because "it would be cool"... but I will let you in on a secret... kids are already doing this, while someone else drives the car. At least now the kid will just kill himself and the car will keep going until it stops itself, right?
Finally, this is why I love my Tesla, given that if someone else does something stupid and hits me, I know it would take some crazy accident to actually hurt me or one of my passengers. So I say bring it!
callmesam
Member
1. Motorcycle vs. Car - Car wins almost every time. Most accidents on motorcycle are caused by driver inattention.
For all the statistics you could ever want, here is the NHTSA (warning PDF) overview of accident rates, injury rates and trends in auto and motorcycles.
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811856.pdf
2. Agree that driver distraction is the most dangerous and avoidable cause of injury (including alcohol and driver exhaustion) but we can either a) tell everyone to stop eating, talking on the phone, texting, drinking, sleeping, and reading OR b) we can invent something that helps us avoid accidents.
I'm just voting with b) and think that we are close to a viable product (close means "soon" per Elon Musk's definition).
Yes but autonomous driving deals with real-time variables. Driving a point on a map is easy. I made a fairly robust line following vehicle in college. The problem lies in the variableness of the surroundings. And GPS and maps don't help a all with this. Sure it helps to know absolute speed. And you can pull some geodata and tag your data collection with xref and make geodata. But it is generally too crude (the mil-spec version might keep you in a lane) to be useful in real time autonomous driving.
Well no not really. How many flats have you had in your entire lifetime due to broken glass? I would guess not many, and probably zero. In principal I'll agree though, because screws are pretty good at puncturing tires. And believe it or not in Atlanta (Gwinnett county on I-85) they had about 3-4 days of horrendous traffic because someone dropped screws all over the interstate, and multiple people were pulled over in the same area every day. They even actively 'cleaned' the road area after the screws were scattered everywhere.
Crash strews screws across I-85 south near Buford | Gwinnett Daily Post
But even screw punctures don't generally disable your vehicle immediately. I've driven weeks with a screw in my tire. And they hardly disable every car that goes by. Whereas some active tampering with RADAR could be much more effective at disabling vehicles rather easily.
I think that lane keeping (maybe even autonomous passing) on the interstate, with ACC could be done now. But there are still some issues, mostly with road hazards (retreads, road kill, mattresses, erratic drivers) and construction zones (poor pavement markings) that are really difficult to do reliably. And forget a city environment with potential pedestrians, cyclists, and all sorts of curbs/signs/signals that increase the amount of sensors and computing that is necessary to drive safely.
But interstates are already highly regulated infrastructure. I think autonomous cars will happen (versus an expanded personal mass transit system) in the USA. But it will require some additional infrastructure (most likely converting existing roads, and providing smaller legacy/pedestrian/cyclist facilities on top)
It's amazing to me that we let any old random person, between the ages of 16 and 100, with very minimal training, drive a 5,000 pound projectile down the road at 75 mph, with practically no protections at all! They could just floor it and drive right into oncoming traffic, or a building, or a sidewalk full of pedestrians!
More seriously, a real eye-opener for me was going to parent night at my son's driver ed program.
More seriously, a real eye-opener for me was going to parent night at my son's driver ed program.
Skotty
2014 S P85 | 2023 F-150L
How are you all liking your flying cars?
I would recommend not getting your hopes up on fully autonomous cars. It's all too much pie in the sky without the practicality. Maybe a limited pilot program in a highly restricted area in a few decades. General availability could be centuries away, if ever. Driving a car on existing infrastructure is far too complex an activity for existing technology.
Driving a car under current circumstances I think involves a lot of what humans are naturally good at but computers are not. People assume if they can do it pretty easy, a computer should be able to as well. But that's not the case. Take speech and facial recognition as examples. It has taken those technologies a long time to develop, and they are still prone to error. But humans do it without even thinking about it. Driving a car is much more difficult, and comes with the risk of killing people if it's done wrong. I just don't see it happening any time soon.
I would recommend not getting your hopes up on fully autonomous cars. It's all too much pie in the sky without the practicality. Maybe a limited pilot program in a highly restricted area in a few decades. General availability could be centuries away, if ever. Driving a car on existing infrastructure is far too complex an activity for existing technology.
Driving a car under current circumstances I think involves a lot of what humans are naturally good at but computers are not. People assume if they can do it pretty easy, a computer should be able to as well. But that's not the case. Take speech and facial recognition as examples. It has taken those technologies a long time to develop, and they are still prone to error. But humans do it without even thinking about it. Driving a car is much more difficult, and comes with the risk of killing people if it's done wrong. I just don't see it happening any time soon.
chickensevil
Active Member
Human beings are amazing creatures that form a sort of pack mentality in which the vast majority of us all are capable of determining and judging risk factors and quickly associating an acceptable level of risk to the given situation. I look at the implications of self-driving cars to the studies conducted on speed limits. A fantastic study which is available (linked below) talks about how they adjusted the speed limits both up and down at study sites by 5, 10, 15, and 20 MPH and wouldn't you know it, it had little to no affect on the majority of drivers (85% of the people just kept going at the pack mentality of the speed that was deemed "safe and reasonable" to the individual person).
I see this happen especially here in the NOVA area where we are still suffering from the speed limits having been dropped in the 70s due to the oil crisis when they dropped everything to 55MPH in order to force people to save fuel (driving slower gives better gas mileage). However if you are on the DC Beltway and you are not going 65MPH+ you will get run over. Even locked in at 65MPH there are many times I feel on the verge of getting ran over when I might be in either the 2nd or 3rd lane and people fly past me on the left and right side. Given low traffic volumes that road should be reasonably set to 65MPH or 70MPH... things naturally slow down as it gets congested. The arbitrary 55MPH is just not followed at all, despite efforts by police to ticket drivers who are "speeding".
Anyway, all this goes into self-driving and the debate about what is safe and unsafe and what people will reasonably put up with. I think as people come to trust the ability of the car to drive itself, we will see it take the form of people not paying attention to the road (falling asleep, reading a book, doing work, etc) because they will be willing to accept the risk of an accident and the car's ability to handle itself in that situation.
Those outlier situations where you might run over [insert random road debris example here] and how will it handle that... and the debate about if you might have been able to avoid it versus the computer actually hitting it, and I would argue that even if you did swerve to avoid something, you are putting yourself (and others) at risk by doing so in many situations since most times this causes people to lose control even worse than had they just hit the object.
This is why they tell you to just suck it up and hit that deer or other animal in the road, because most times in those situations you cause more harm by trying to avoid it.
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
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The reason we don't have flying cars is not because it is "hard to implement" but because it is really expensive and requires a high skill level (although the skill barrier is quickly falling thanks to further advances in technology).
The reason we don't have autonomous cars is because it is really expensive... that's it. As the price drops the barrier to entry will fall and we will see it happen. Part of the driving force toward automation is safety. There are tons of car deaths and injuries each year which costs a ton of money to the economy.
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_cause_of_nonfatal_injury_2012-a.pdf
This wonderful PDF shows unintentional motor vehicle injury as the number 4 cause of non-fatal injury in the US... One single thing we do encompasses such a large amount of damage, and then factor in all the property damage and the deaths and you have a pretty large bill that is hurting the economy every time there is an accident. There were almost 5.5 million accidents in 2010 with only 30,000 of them being fatal. That is a lot of accidents and injury. Because of these factors alone, assisted driving and eventually autonomous driving will become a reality.
Flying cars were not economically viable to really see them take off. That is totally different with cars.
I see this happen especially here in the NOVA area where we are still suffering from the speed limits having been dropped in the 70s due to the oil crisis when they dropped everything to 55MPH in order to force people to save fuel (driving slower gives better gas mileage). However if you are on the DC Beltway and you are not going 65MPH+ you will get run over. Even locked in at 65MPH there are many times I feel on the verge of getting ran over when I might be in either the 2nd or 3rd lane and people fly past me on the left and right side. Given low traffic volumes that road should be reasonably set to 65MPH or 70MPH... things naturally slow down as it gets congested. The arbitrary 55MPH is just not followed at all, despite efforts by police to ticket drivers who are "speeding".
Anyway, all this goes into self-driving and the debate about what is safe and unsafe and what people will reasonably put up with. I think as people come to trust the ability of the car to drive itself, we will see it take the form of people not paying attention to the road (falling asleep, reading a book, doing work, etc) because they will be willing to accept the risk of an accident and the car's ability to handle itself in that situation.
Those outlier situations where you might run over [insert random road debris example here] and how will it handle that... and the debate about if you might have been able to avoid it versus the computer actually hitting it, and I would argue that even if you did swerve to avoid something, you are putting yourself (and others) at risk by doing so in many situations since most times this causes people to lose control even worse than had they just hit the object.
This is why they tell you to just suck it up and hit that deer or other animal in the road, because most times in those situations you cause more harm by trying to avoid it.
http://www.ibiblio.org/rdu/sl-irrel.html
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The reason we don't have flying cars is not because it is "hard to implement" but because it is really expensive and requires a high skill level (although the skill barrier is quickly falling thanks to further advances in technology).
The reason we don't have autonomous cars is because it is really expensive... that's it. As the price drops the barrier to entry will fall and we will see it happen. Part of the driving force toward automation is safety. There are tons of car deaths and injuries each year which costs a ton of money to the economy.
http://www.cdc.gov/injury/wisqars/pdf/leading_cause_of_nonfatal_injury_2012-a.pdf
This wonderful PDF shows unintentional motor vehicle injury as the number 4 cause of non-fatal injury in the US... One single thing we do encompasses such a large amount of damage, and then factor in all the property damage and the deaths and you have a pretty large bill that is hurting the economy every time there is an accident. There were almost 5.5 million accidents in 2010 with only 30,000 of them being fatal. That is a lot of accidents and injury. Because of these factors alone, assisted driving and eventually autonomous driving will become a reality.
Flying cars were not economically viable to really see them take off. That is totally different with cars.
^This. Especially in countries/cities where the public transport infrastructure is lacking (hello, much of America) or not suited to accommodating the needs of the disabled.
But I don't think the driving technology is the real issue, is it not the more fundamental critical-decision logic processing? i.e. what happens when your autonomous car meets a school bus on a single lane road, with a steep drop-off on one side? The computer deduces that someone is going to have a serious wreck. Does the car decide it's you, on the 'Spock logic' of the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or is it programmed, a la Robocop, to protect it's owner above all others? It's an extreme example, but this is surely stuff that has to be decided by a governing body at a very high level (Federal, global, even?). Situations like this will very likely happen all the time with motor bikes and so on, which makes me think that the technology to complete basic maneuvering is trivial compared to the life/death logic that would also need to be part of a fully autonomous vehicle. If manufacturers are left to figure it out, then it could be the wild-west for a long time.
HankLloydRight
No Roads
Wow.. nice. Good to see that at least one person here agrees with me.
Everyone else is like "Where's the kool-aid???!"
callmesam
Member
Wow.. nice. Good to see that at least one person here agrees with me.
Everyone else is like "Where's the kool-aid???!"
You'll drink the kool-aid whether you like it or not. Eventually.
But you certainly don't have to like it. Or even believe that it's coming until you feel the cup against your lips. :scared:
chickensevil
Active Member
Your example leaves out the obvious choice of "avoid an accident altogether by having both vehicles stop to avoid a collision. Second, what kind of crazy road is this that doesn't have guardrails and is only single lane... I would complain to whoever manages that road that it should be closed in the name of public safety since someone else would have already driven on that road BEFORE the invention of autonomous technology and likely had a similar situation and killed one or more people. Dealing with unmarked roads is likely to be the last hurdle of autonomous driving anyway and you would likely be forced to drive that road manually avoiding such a situation. And if you are going to suggest that this is somehow a "new" road, then again, this was terrible road design and should have been complained about during the building out of the road.
As someone who has slammed into a guardrail going about 60MPH, I can tell you first hand how resilient those things are, and I was very thankful for it, since I would have dropped over the side and not likely lived to tell about it. Safe road design should be a critical part of this, just as much as autonomous cars. After that I would think the technology would be implemented in such a way to 1: avoid any accident that is possibly avoidable 2: if no avoidance is possible, limit the amount of damage to the occupant.
There's plenty of roads like that, in Europe and Asia at least (developed countries), some have guard rails, but many do not. It's not the norm, obviously, but if you have Google inventing cars within steering wheels, then that's a fairly significant limitation. And plenty of them have blind bends where each party stopping would not be an option. Back in the UK my drive to the office involved a very long and windy single lane road (60mph limit) before I got to the motor way. There were no real drop-offs, but there were plenty of spots where the decision, in the scenario above, would be to either hit the bus, or drive through someones front wall/house. You're right, in that situation the car would like decide to throw the anchor, and hopefully the bus, which may or may not be autonomous, would do the same, but my point is, there's a lot of fundamental survival logic to be factored in before fully-autonomous driving can be a reality.
chickensevil
Active Member
That's when I feel like there will be limitations with it, where it says not to use on unmarked roads or some such... That is also the 90% of driving that Elon talked about where getting the last 10% would take more time. But those roads just don't sound safe in the first place and should be up for consideration of being properly built out. I would also assume that if it did work on those roads, the car's speed limit would be as such that it could stop quickly enough to avoid a serious incident. But really, I think those roads will either just be left out, or will be forced to not drive autonomously.
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