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autonomous cars - the future of motoring is driverless

From the video it does seem likely the car did not have adequate forward vision because the woman was right in the middle of the road and yet the systems did not see her at all. The lidar etc should be able to see a lot further ahead than the headlights illumination which didn't see her until it was too late, but apparently not.
 
People are going on about how autonomous cars will mean freeing up streets and the end of car parks and all this nonsense. It won’t be like that at all. If anything there will be more cars on the road.

Instead of leaving at 730 and driving Freddie to prep school, then dropping Samantha off at high school, and then going on to the office, mummy will simply plonk each of them in a self driver at 8am, and then get another self-driver to work. The family get an extra half-hour together but three cars are needed during the rush hour instead of one. No one will want to use these cars during the day as they’ll all be at school/work, so they’ll have to be parked up somewhere, just as they will at night time.
 
Mrs D said:
People are going on about how autonomous cars will mean freeing up streets and the end of car parks and all this nonsense. It won’t be like that at all. If anything there will be more cars on the road.

Instead of leaving at 730 and driving Freddie to prep school, then dropping Samantha off at high school, and then going on to the office, mummy will simply plonk each of them in a self driver at 8am, and then get another self-driver to work. The family get an extra half-hour together but three cars are needed during the rush hour instead of one. No one will want to use these cars during the day as they’ll all be at school/work, so they’ll have to be parked up somewhere, just as they will at night time.
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But you won’t own those cars. Uber or whoever will. They won’t be parked outside your house or work. You you want a car you’ll send for it from your phone. You’ll have options of picking up people on the way to be cheaper. Or a better class of car/on your own.

I doubt kids will be allowed to travel on their own under a certain age.
 
cybershot said:
But you won’t own those cars. Uber or whoever will. They won’t be parked outside your house or work. You you want a car you’ll send for it from your phone. You’ll have options of picking up people on the way to be cheaper. Or a better class of car/on your own.

I doubt kids will be allowed to travel on their own under a certain age.
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So a self-driving Uber then. They might as well put a talking doll at the wheel :cool:

JohnnyCab.jpg
 
Haven't read the entire thread yet.

A new BIG billboard ad has recently gone up in Lisbon for Renaults latest development. Every time I think about autonomous cars I think about suicide jumpers.

:)
 
The story doesn't discuss what the legal status would have been if the man in question had been spotted in the driver's seat but with his hands visibly away from the steering wheel and seemly having surrendered control of the car to its computer.

I was under the impression that autonomous driving is still illegal in this country but can't help thinking there is a surprisingly lax attitude from the authorities about autonomous vehicles. I would have expected a statement from the authorities on them a long time ago, seeing as such vehicles are now operated on British roads. I couldn't blame their owners for genuinely thinking they are allowed to engage the autonomous driving feature.

For a country that legislates against the most ludicrous things (such as not being allowed to touch your smartphone's screen when being used as a sat nav and mounted on the dashboard, exactly as you would with a sat nav device), I really don't get the lack of concern about sel-driving cars.
 
T & P said:
The story doesn't discuss what the legal status would have been if the man in question had been spotted in the driver's seat but with his hands visibly away from the steering wheel and seemly having surrendered control of the car to its computer.

I was under the impression that autonomous driving is still illegal in this country but can't help thinking there is a surprisingly lax attitude from the authorities about autonomous vehicles. I would have expected a statement from the authorities on them a long time ago, seeing as such vehicles are now operated on British roads. I couldn't blame their owners for genuinely thinking they are allowed to engage the autonomous driving feature.

For a country that legislates against the most ludicrous things (such as not being allowed to touch your smartphone's screen when being used as a sat nav and mounted on the dashboard, exactly as you would with a sat nav device), I really don't get the lack of concern about sel-driving cars.
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Tesla’s aren’t autonomous self driving cars, they are level two on a five level scale

“Level 2: Partial automation options available. Tesla Autopilot, Volvo Pilot Assist, Mercedes-Benz Drive Pilot, Cadillac Super Cruise—these are all Level 2 systems. They will manage both your speed and your steering under certain conditions, such as highway driving. They will match your speed to the speed of traffic ahead of you and follow the curves in the road in ideal conditions. But the driver must still pay attention to driving conditions at all times and take over immediately if the conditions exceed the system's limitations, of which there are many. Don't buy the hype that these are fully self-driving cars. They can only drive themselves at certain times under certain conditions.”

There are no level 4 or 5 autonomous vehicles ( level 5 being actually what we think about as a car which drives itself ), and even if there are there is nowhere in Europe it could be used on public roads. Apparently there is one manufacturer with a level 3 - Audi, but it still requires a fully “engaged” driver.

The guy in the Tesla was being a dick.

Before we have genuinely self driving cars there is going to have to be loads of legislative change - drink driving and insurance for starters.

Alex
 
T & P said:
The story doesn't discuss what the legal status would have been if the man in question had been spotted in the driver's seat but with his hands visibly away from the steering wheel and seemly having surrendered control of the car to its computer.

I was under the impression that autonomous driving is still illegal in this country but can't help thinking there is a surprisingly lax attitude from the authorities about autonomous vehicles. I would have expected a statement from the authorities on them a long time ago, seeing as such vehicles are now operated on British roads. I couldn't blame their owners for genuinely thinking they are allowed to engage the autonomous driving feature.

For a country that legislates against the most ludicrous things (such as not being allowed to touch your smartphone's screen when being used as a sat nav and mounted on the dashboard, exactly as you would with a sat nav device), I really don't get the lack of concern about sel-driving cars.
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The country didn't legislate against such things, it's simply that the law - against using any communication devices, introduced decades ago - hasn't kept pace with technological realities. You might think that pedantry but it's quite important.

For similar reasons, semi-autonomous cars are probably not a legal problem. The offence, if any, would be DWDCA, and the nature of that will never have been defined in a relevant way, so if you comply with the car's instructions in terms of oversight, it's probably fair to say due care is being applied. I'm not a lawyer though.

The man in the news abjectly failed to do so and has rightly been banned.
 
alex_ said:
There are no level 4 or 5 autonomous vehicles ( level 5 being actually what we think about as a car which drives itself ), and even if there are there is nowhere in Europe it could be used on public roads.
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Not technically true. I've seen level 4 vehicles out on public roads, mixed with conventional traffic (vehicles, pedestrians, etc). They are however not available to the public - they are R&D test beds being run by research groups which are being 'babysat' whilst they collect data.
 
Interesting article on the tesla incident, it seems increasingly that the feature isn't ready for public release. At least to me.
 
magneze said:
Semi-autonomous seems like a really stupid idea. Either it is or isn't, a grey area is stupid.
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I am not sure I agree. Innovation in automotive could be argued to be typically incremental, so for example we had ABS and ASR slowly creeping in across ranges, Airbags in top end cars first, cruise control, bit by bit. And these are arguably steps towards self driving cars, small steps. Sat nav.

And more recently some are getting automatic braking, lane assist. I don't think I would trust a carmaker that suddenly claimed full auto, I would prefer bits to be introduced slowly.
 
magneze said:
Semi-autonomous seems like a really stupid idea. Either it is or isn't, a grey area is stupid.
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Where we are at the moment is certainly a ridiculous place. We have cars that steer and cruise themselves ... sometimes ... maybe. They require oversight by a competent driver 100% of the time who has to notice when the system limits are reached and take over. Most reasonable drivers would likely find that properly and attentively monitoring a “self driving” car and constantly having to be ready to step in, is more stressful than driving the fucking thing. If a driver can’t confidently and legally go to sleep on a journey, how much use are these systems?

The stage they’re at now simply encourages false confidence or outright fuckwittery, as from that tool in the Tesla. All that tech in the cars but they omit a £100 dickhead detector to disable the vehicle when there's nobody sat in the driver's seat.
 
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Level 4 automation can increase the capacity of motorways three or more times and reduce costs by a similar factor. When provided in twin-deck, light-vehicle-only, tunnels (like that under Versailles) tunnel capacities are increased nine times and costs on a user basis reduced to about half those of a conventional urban surface motorway. And this with virtually no disruption to the surface city. All personal motorised trips to the CBDs of cities having travel requirements like those of London or Paris, could be provided in seven tunnels not much larger than a conventional two lane tunnel. Those like New York's would require ten. Shared autonomous vehicles (Level 5 automation) will facilitate such possibilities by greatly reducing the need for parking, even if desired, negating the need in inner city areas. Costs will be significantly lower than conventional public transport and should be met by users (no subsidies). These are powerful possibilities, yet the extent they will be realised will depend on the particulars of particular cities and the distance of a particular time.

This is a slightly modified version of a paper put up on https://freedominu.co.au/learningzone/intelligentvehicles.php
 
Great long read from the Graun here on human supervision of semi-autonomous systems and mode conversion issues. It focusses on aeroplane auto-pilots as this is the most widespread current example.
This problem has a name: the paradox of automation. It applies in a wide variety of contexts, from the operators of nuclear power stations to the crew of cruise ships, from the simple fact that we can no longer remember phone numbers because we have them all stored in our mobile phones, to the way we now struggle with mental arithmetic because we are surrounded by electronic calculators. The better the automatic systems, the more out-of-practice human operators will be, and the more extreme the situations they will have to face. The psychologist James Reason, author of Human Error, wrote: “Manual control is a highly skilled activity, and skills need to be practised continuously in order to maintain them. Yet an automatic control system that fails only rarely denies operators the opportunity for practising these basic control skills … when manual takeover is necessary something has usually gone wrong; this means that operators need to be more rather than less skilled in order to cope with these atypical conditions.”

The paradox of automation, then, has three strands to it. First, automatic systems accommodate incompetence by being easy to operate and by automatically correcting mistakes. Because of this, an inexpert operator can function for a long time before his lack of skill becomes apparent – his incompetence is a hidden weakness that can persist almost indefinitely. Second, even if operators are expert, automatic systems erode their skills by removing the need for practice. Third, automatic systems tend to fail either in unusual situations or in ways that produce unusual situations, requiring a particularly skilful response. A more capable and reliable automatic system makes the situation worse.
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Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster | Tim Harford
 
Bloomberg - Are you a robot?

Waymo moves out of beta in Phoenix this December. So far, only 400 people have been able to use it, under NDA. They've done 10 million autonomous miles now, and only need to hand over to a human on average once every 6,000 miles (would love to see the distribution on that though). If that handover can be done remotely, then just a handful of "drivers" could oversee thousands of cars.

EDIT: Lol at the automatic title on that link. Should read "Waymo to Start First Driverless Car Service Next Month"
 
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