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Why self driving cars will eventually be banned

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There is now a whole sub-genre of videos of people all over pulling these sorts of stunts. I could say the obvious things, but you all are probably thinking them for yourselves without any help from me.

 


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I'm not sure I could trust the tech enough let the car drive itself. Then again, I have almost fallen asleep at the wheel of a normal car (lonely motorway, zero dark thirty) ... .I suppose the tech would have at least saved me from impending demise if I had actually dozed off. :blink: I also noted the "hack" - some kind of counterweight strapped around the wheel, almost like bypassing a dead man's switch.. I presume one is supposed to have a hand or at least a finger or two touching the wheel under normal self-drive in a Tesla?

A friend of mine told me he dozed off whilst riding his motorcycle and ended up in a ditch (soft landing and bike was hardly damaged too). I never used to believe him. Asleep? On a bike? Apart from one occasion I was riding home on the motorway after doing a nightshift - minimal traffic as the "rush hour" was travelling in the opposite direction! I was always a bit tired on the 50 mile commute home from where I worked at the time, but this time I could feel my eyes beginning to close whilst doing a steady 75 mph :blink::blink:. I slowed down somewhat, opened my visor a bit and let the cold wind blast me in the face... Thanks to gyroscopic forces present at higher speeds (harder to fall over) I now understood how it can easily happen on two wheels as well as in four...


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No, they will not be banned. I have a tesla and it gets regular software updates. The technology is amazing, and if you ask me i cant imagine going back to a primative car that I HAVE to drive.... No thanks. this is brilliant

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Peter Osborn

 

 

 

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I'm nominating this thread for silliest of the year. Eventually what will be banned is manual operation of motor vehicles on public roads. Then watch crashes drop precipitously.

 

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We are all connected..... To each other, biologically...... To the Earth, chemically...... To the rest of the Universe atomically.
 
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The concept is all very well until you take it into the real world where some roads are really crappy, with blind bends, dodgy road surfaces, things pulling out unexpectedly, people doing stupid stuff, pedestrians, animals, bikes and such all over the place.

It's difficult to conceive of anything more likely to result in a fatal crash than something autonomously driving down some of the roads I have to take my truck down a lot of the time. Some of them are barely what I would call roads, often with unadopted sections which are a complete enigma to a GPS, yet they frequently have national speed limit signs (60 mph for a single carriageway and 70 mph for a dual carriageway). You'd have to be completely insane to go anywhere near that kind of speed on some of them, since they often are not wide enough for vehicles to pass one another at anything other than a crawl, with your car's nearside scraping the hedgerows. I presume an autonomous car would detect that was what the speed limit was and go for it, with predictably disastrous results, or if it had a safety override to prevent this, then its progress would have to be walking pace in order to be sure it wasn't causing such an incident.

Certainly in the UK there are many winding national speed limit roads where an autonomous car simply wouldn't have a prayer of making it safely from A to B if an attempt was made to do so at anything approaching the road's speed limit, or even a sensible percentage of that for the prevailing conditions. So yeah, on lovely arrow-straight autobahns and such with great road surfaces, good camber and drainage and no tractors pulling out on you whilst you are doing 70 mph, where a proximity radar can detect a braking car when it is still 70 feet away, the concept is cool, but as I say, on real roads, it's literally an accident waiting to happen (and not waiting that long either).

What actually would be a good thing technology might be able to do, is inhibit the use of phones inside a vehicle, unless they were set up and presently functioning to be hands free. I bet you that would see the accident figures drop dramatically. I wish I had a quid for every twonk I see updating their Facetube status whilst driving.

Edited by Chock
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Alan Bradbury

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This was "done" with this special car from the 80s.  It was a dream...and still a dream and can't wait for it.  I need you "KITT" I guess my iWatch will call you up.  Pick me up.

 

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Edited by Skywolf
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Yes, I too believe in about in 25 to 30 years or sooner, it may be illegal to manually drive a a passenger vehicle...

No more "Sir, do you know how fast you were going?"

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5 hours ago, Chock said:

The concept is all very well until you take it into the real world where some roads are really crappy, with blind bends, dodgy road surfaces, things pulling out unexpectedly, people doing stupid stuff, pedestrians, animals, bikes and such all over the place.

I have driven home from work in winter storms through deep snow formed into ruts by previous vehicles, clutching the steering wheel with both hands, slipping, sliding and tensely compensating for any tendency to fishtail, even as I pass less fortunate drivers, their cars buried in embankments with some only recognizable as car-shaped mounds of snow.....

Meanwhile, some probably cigar-chomping tractor trailer driver is seemingly right off my rear bumper the entire time, headlights blazing on high, and making me quite aware that at such a close distance he/she will have zero time to slow down if I happen to close control.......

Now I imagine being in some futuristic "autonomous" vehicle in such circumstances, and my hair, already standing straight up, visibly begins to turn white..... 🙀

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We are all connected..... To each other, biologically...... To the Earth, chemically...... To the rest of the Universe atomically.
 
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I can't wait until autonomous vehicles are common place, and definitely would buy one in the future.

I can't see the technology working particularly effectively on our roads in the UK though. Maybe on big wide American highways with slow sweeping turns it works well, but over here with our narrow roads, blind corners, roundabouts and maze of parked cars combined with our generally more aggressive British driving style I think it needs a lot more work. I've only done a bit of driving in the States, but it was far, far less stressful driving over 100 miles over there than my normal 4 mile journey is over here!

Edited by Tom Wright
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Tom Wright

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10 hours ago, jabloomf1230 said:

I'm nominating this thread for silliest of the year. Eventually what will be banned is manual operation of motor vehicles on public roads. Then watch crashes drop precipitously.

 

 

I actually agree. Currently the self driving tech is less than perfection. Especially on UK roads where we find no white lines and all manner of dodgy surfaces. But given that Tesla are updating the technology on a regular basis with simple software updates and considering the advances in technology, I feel it will be just a matter of time before fully autonomous driving is pretty much perfected. When that time comes, I think we could see legislation that bans manual driving on some roads, or in some low visibility weather conditions. 

We do need to find a way to deal with these morons though, that are so stupid that they think the current technology  is autonomy perfection and have a kip in the car while its in autonomous mode. Just requiring a touch of the wheel from time to time clearly isn't enough. 

Something else that occurs to me regarding self driving and AI, is the following... If the AI system controlling the car has a choice, veer into a brick wall and kill the driver, or veer into a crowd of children and kill many children, what does it Do? 

Edited by martin-w
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34 minutes ago, martin-w said:

Something else that occurs to me regarding self driving and AI, is the following... If the AI system controlling the car has a choice, veer into a brick wall and kill the driver, or veer into a crowd of children and kill many children, what does it Do? 

That's a really good point. It gets into a classic AI/morality dilemma which sci-fi has sometimes addressed, touching on wider issues such as autonomous combat drones and all kinds of stuff like that.

It would be kind of interesting to see the placard which would, in these litigious times, inevitably have to be placed on the dashboard similar to the one you find in aeroplanes about potential for fatality when operating it.

Can't imagine it being a big selling point in the showrooms if when the salesperson said 'go ahead, sit in it and try it out..' if the first thing you noticed was a sign which said: 'Please note that in a situation where the personal safety of large numbers of people is concerned, this vehicle may choose the option to maim or kill you, rather than do this to a large group of pedestrians. The vehicle will not start until you click the accept button to acknowledge you have read and understood the potential implications of this warning'

Self-crashing cars is not a great USP feature for the marketing department either 🤣

It's worth bearing in mind however, that sometimes there is rather silly resistance to some safety features. When (I think it might have been Volvo) first introduced seatbelts in cars, there were quite a few people who were claiming it was an infringement on their civil liberties, although I suspect that a lot of those people were of this ilk:

or this:

 

Edited by Chock
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Alan Bradbury

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10 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

 Let me see DUI deaths per year (US) over 10,000 ... distracted driving deaths per year (US) 2,800 (400,000 injuries)

Rob, no denying the facts, but the majority of your roads in the USA (including city streets) are huge and well surfaced, barring the ones the Duke boys played on.:laugh: In comparison to the UK where we have tiny roads with a lot of blind bends and blind hills, sharp 90 degree corners which are not located in city centre junctions. I've no idea how long the tech would take to develop to safely navigate our roads, in a timely fashion, not to mention the huge amount of mini roundabouts we have over here.. :dry: I said in a timely fashion because any current AI tech will manage it at 5-10 mph IMO - not timely at all..

45 minutes ago, Chock said:

...(I think it might have been Volvo) first introduced seatbelts in cars...

Even Volvo, sensible people that they are, still admit to a 4 point harness being better:

https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/18398

Quote

The four-point belt has obvious advantages. For instance, it restrains the occupant more effectively if the car rolls over (one reason why rally cars are fitted with four-point safety harnesses or belts with even more attachment points). It also reduces the small risk of the seat occupant sliding out from under the three-point belt.

 

However, the four-point belt also has disadvantages. It should preferably be designed as a cross, forming an X pattern across the body. It is across the ribcage that the human body is strongest and has the best chance of absorbing incoming collision force. The challenge therefore is how best to effectively attach the upper point of the belt to the car where there is no natural attachment point in the bodywork.

Yet if I were to install a roll cage in my car to facilitate a SAFER 4-point or even 5 point restraint harness then my insurance would go up... Can't have me surviving a crash which kills the other driver in their plastic wonder cereal box... admittedly we have developed better ways of smaller car construction which effectively dissipates some of that impact energy, but I still feel safer if there's more metal to absorb the impact before it gets to me.

Another thing is will the AI manage to counteract jaywalking pedestrians? Reaction time? It should be way faster than a human. Prediction? That "gut feeling" someone gets when they've been driving for many years: They instinctively know that the fool wearing those massive headphones is just going to step into the road to cross.. RIGHT NOW.. Hard to describe, but many of you experienced drivers of long standing will know what I mean. Apparently peds have the right of way at all times, but some just don't give us much of a chance to facilitate that! Some are just utter cnuts too.

If we are to have driverless AI controlled road transport then we should ramp up the policing of jaywalkers and fines imposed. Govt.s got to levy taxes somehow..

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28 minutes ago, HighBypass said:

Hard to describe, but many of you experienced drivers of long standing will know what I mean.

I actually demonstrated this to an ex-girlfriend's son when I was teaching him how to drive. We were out on a long drive from Manchester to Harrogate, and I recall telling him that, with experience, he would gain that ability to, if not exactly know what other drivers were going to do, then at least quite often have a fairly good idea of what they would do. This being from the many almost imperceptible observations of clues one makes.

To prove it, I got him to pick various cars ahead of us and then I'd predict what they were most likely to do, including which lanes they'd go for, when they'd change lanes, whether they would signal, which junction they were likely to leave at and so on, and it is remarkable how accurate you can be with that stuff based on observing the car type, the driving style and so on for a few minutes. 

Most of us have done this thing, for example, you stop at a traffic light controlled junction behind a car and briefly see the reversing light come on as they change gear with the clutch down and then see the vehicle dip a bit as the parking brake goes on then off, so you know they're going to faff a bit when the lights change because they're probably not great on the gears in that car and perhaps are more used to driving an automatic. Or you see a white/black Audi saloon signal to go in the right hand lane on the M62 and know that he's a sales rep, who is going to start doing 85 mph despite the fact that it is lagging it down with rain, getting up anyone's @rse with his main beams on whilst sitting five feet off their rear bumper if they don't either, get out of his way, or speed up to 87 mph in the vain hope of opening up a safe gap so 'mister I own the road' has a braking distance which could actually be measured by something other than a micrometer or a Rizzla paper. 🤣

Edited by Chock
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Alan Bradbury

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Chock is a driver I would welcome in my neighbourhood. He understands you can't see round blind corners and I have absolutely no doubt he understands the concept of giving way to oncoming traffic (do they teach that nowadays?)

On a daily basis I encounter people who obviously can see round blind corners. I'd like to be able to do it.

As for self driving cars, I have a sneaking feeling that it would be akin to being driven by my wife! I wear that imaginary brake pedal out.


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