If fully self driving is ever going to be fully safer than humans, which I think is almost a given, then this is not a problem as much as it is a great new way to monetize that tech en route to full self driving cars. If it isnt going to be better than self driving tech + a human at the wheel, then oops.
The self driving tech would still be used for driver assist functions, if today would be possible to replace all the cars in the world with new models that include all the safety features and a system to detect a drunk or sleepy driver I think we would get better statistics then Tesla or Google AI(for the same driving conditions)
A human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention is always going to be safer than either separately. It's just that a mostly self-driving system erodes human attentiveness.
And we're not going to get to a system that's so much safer as to render human attention irrelevant without a much more solid and theoretically sound approach to safety engineering.
As assisting systems mature, we will get humans paying less and less attention to driving. Just last night I was watching air crash investigations and there were a series of accidents on a 777 where the pilots where "expecting" the airplane do something because usually the automated system picks up the slack, well except in that particular circumstance when the accident occurred. And these are trained pilots and they understand these systems fairly well (at least when they are told about them). I don't think the general population will ever be trained or have a deep understanding of their car's assistance modes, they will expect it to work. Overall, cars will probably be safer, but we are probably going to witness freak accidents as a combination of driver inexperience and software bugs.
Maybe not a series on that same type. The crash investigation was about a pilot moving from an airbus to boeing, and it was a 777. The plane did what it was supposed to but the captain didn't know what he was doing. It was on an approach to SF and several people died, someone got run over by a fire truck. The series of accidents mentioned was probably attributable to pilots vs automation and not only to that particular plane model.
You are thinking of Asiana Flight 214. Pilot error was the main cause of the accident though there were contributing causes like auto-pilot documentation.
Perhaps in the short-term, but if you listen to Elon Musk compare it to like having elevator operators, it makes sense that computers will eventually do a much better job and humans will only introduce problems.
Depends what you consider short term. Do you expect autonomous cars to get to human level in all conditions in the next 5 years? 10? 25?
Most likely computers will become far better than humans at some point. But it may be far enough in the future that it doesn’t really contradict the point made above. Contrary to popular belief, “640K should be enough” isn’t the kind of statement meant to cover all eternity.
If you look at what APOLLO has cost back in those days maybe then you'd understand why we didn't.
Landing a few people and picking up a few rocks and taking a few selfies cost, inflation-adjusted for 2019, a whopping $288.1 billion [1].
This money was spent to "stick it to the communists" because they were winning at the space race (first man in space, etc...). We just happened to get a bunch of benefits along the way.
The several more hundred billion that would have followed if we decided to build entire colonies - with a multitude of massive problems still not figured out today - would have been a hard sell over the decades it would have taken to construct.
I mean just look at operating cost of MIR and ISS and that's in LEO...
The point is that it’s a matter of cost, and not a technical problem. The Apollo program was a “rush job” done in 10 years. Much of the technology had to be invented.
There an interesting BBC podcast called 13 Minutes to the Moon for anyone interested in finding out more about the Apollo program:
This is not the most money a nation has ever spent on any singular object. I am not saying that. I also firmly believe that it was worth it!
But the difficulty is in
a) allocating this money
b) convincing the public that removing this money from, say education, is a good strategy
A good chunk of people seriously require heat warnings on their hot coffee to realize that their coffee is hot. I don't hold high hopes in making a voting majority of people understand long-term global benefits.
It's insanely optimistic by every single metrics I can come up with. The only way I'd buy it would be to redefine "colonies" and "cities" as "10 guys in a 50 sq meters rigid tent who need constant supplies from earth and are 1 mistake away from death" aka the space station but on the ground.
He's very good at PR moves, but sending a rocket to space and getting it back in one piece, which is very impressive, is nothing compared to actually going to mars, which itself is nothing compared to building a city on a planet where everything is opposed to human life.
"A human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention is always going to be safer than either separately."
No. Stating something as a fact without analyzing it in the slightest is bad.
Example:
(1) Only a computer is "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role. The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second. Within 2/100 of a second of a qualifying event, the vehicle will be in full antilock brake mode.
(2) A human and a computer are "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role (this is a little silly in that the human is already the primary brake operator...). The computer still has 1/100 s reaction time, but the human's reaction time is 25/100 s. What exactly is the human bringing to the table? It is true that the human may detect an actual threat the computer doesn't...however that slow reaction time means it likely won't make a difference in the outcome. On the other hand, the human may "detect" a false alarm, and emergency brake by mistake. That activity often leads to wrecks!
I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer. Further, all of these "human in the loop" systems suffer from a fatal flaw - the inability of people to pay attention unless it's absolutely crucial.
The way people use Tesla Autopilot shows that full autonomy is necessary, and will in fact be safer than any "assisted" system.
Presumably, GP means as a whole, confronted with the entire array of challenges, not for a single simple task at which the computer happens to be unambiguously better.
The human can often predict that some type of avoidance will be needed several seconds earlier in a way that computers can't at the moment and thus avert the need for emergency braking entirely.
"The human can often predict that some type of avoidance will be needed several seconds earlier in a way that computers can't at the moment and thus avert the need for emergency braking entirely.
The two can, and should, be complementary."
What you're saying is true, but doesn't fall under the purview of "assisted emergency braking".
But AEB as a fallback for when humans fail to anticipate the hazard well enough to avoid the need for emergency braking altogether falls very much under the purview of the OP's statement that "a human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention" is the safest option.
Sure, but that isn't the discussion at hand. That's overall autonomous driving, and in that case, the computer would ideally be anticipating hazards like a human would - only better.
You know, not driving tired, drunk, high, angry, or stupid...
> "A human paying attention assisted by a computer paying attention is always going to be safer than either separately."
> No. Stating something as a fact without analyzing it in the slightest is bad.
> Example:
> (1) Only a computer is "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role. The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second. Within 2/100 of a second of a qualifying event, the vehicle will be in full antilock brake mode.
> (2) A human and a computer are "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role (this is a little silly in that the human is already the primary brake operator...). The computer still has 1/100 s reaction time, but the human's reaction time is 25/100 s. What exactly is the human bringing to the table? It is true that the human may detect an actual threat the computer doesn't...however that slow reaction time means it likely won't make a difference in the outcome. On the other hand, the human may "detect" a false alarm, and emergency brake by mistake. That activity often leads to wrecks!
> I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer. Further, all of these "human in the loop" systems suffer from a fatal flaw - the inability of people to pay attention unless it's absolutely crucial.
> The way people use Tesla Autopilot shows that full autonomy is necessary, and will in fact be safer than any "assisted" system.
I think your example is uncharitable because you allow for a human to react to a false alarm in the second but don't account for a computer to react similarly in the first. Personally speaking, I have seen very few occasions of people exercising extreme braking wrongly. I feel computers would be less apt at discerning from a false positive than a human operator with even a little experience behind the wheel.
Given that autonomous cars can be misled by painting roadways certain ways [0], it's clear to me that the number of unknown unknowns that must be handled by a car are large in number, and I have less faith in the skillful handling of those events by a computer than a human.
> What exactly is the human bringing to the table?
He can see the big truck 200 yards in front of him, and recognize that it is indeed a truck, and not an overhead traffic sign. Apparently, Teslas don't bring that to the table.
Alternatively, the human could recognize that the truck is on fire and smoking, and that it would be a good idea to stay away from it.
> I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer
You're choosing to ignore the fact that computers still make mistakes.
My friend's car (an Acura) recently slammed on the brakes @ 70mph because it mistakenly thought a car in an adjacent lane was in his lane. Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident.
This is not an uncommon occurrence, especially with Honda/Acura's system. You can find tons of complaints online about AEB systems reacting to false positives.
"You're choosing to ignore the fact that computers still make mistakes."
No, but I'll unequivocally assert that the human false alarm rate is much higher than that of computers.
"My friend's car (an Acura) recently slammed on the brakes @ 70mph because it mistakenly thought a car in an adjacent lane was in his lane. Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident."
Does it have a readout indicating what it "thought"?
It seems possible that the car in the other lane drifted, and the computer thought it was changing lanes into the Acura. Braking was appropriate in that circumstance.
"This is not an uncommon occurrence, especially with Honda/Acura's system. You can find tons of complaints online about AEB systems reacting to false positives."
That may be, and I suspect a fix will be forthcoming which will address every Honda/Acura on the road (or new models, worst case).
Meanwhile, humans will continue to look down at a text, hamburger, or whatever, and then panic when a few seconds later they look up and think they're in trouble. Not to mention driving tired, drunk, high, angry, or stupid.
"Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident."
And of course the person running into the braking vehicle would have been at fault. In most cases, only assisted emergency braking would help, since most people follow way too close on the freeway - human reaction time isn't fast enough.
> The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second.
.. to objects that it can identify as a hazard. We've already seen incidents where it fails to spot hazards such as cyclists and crash barriers, due to limitations such as having to filter out stationary objects from radar returns.
".. to objects that it can identify as a hazard. We've already seen incidents where it fails to spot hazards such as cyclists and crash barriers, due to limitations such as having to filter out stationary objects from radar returns."
Really? I've seen no such reports with regard to assisted emergency braking systems. Please cite a reference.
Anyway, the point was a general one - the computer hazard identification is very far from perfect at the moment, and benefits from a human spotting hazards that the automated system does not.
Emergency braking is part of autonomous driving, so ...?
Anyways, my VW has assisted emergency braking. I've had opposite issues - water splashes across sensor and the car brakes for no good reason. Generally going through a large shallow puddle and moderate speed. Happened 2 or 3 times and now I disable when driving near the beach after rain.
"Anyways, my VW has assisted emergency braking. I've had opposite issues - water splashes across sensor and the car brakes for no good reason. Generally going through a large shallow puddle and moderate speed. Happened 2 or 3 times and now I disable when driving near the beach after rain."
Your "issue" is essentially the system being extra safe - similar to slowing down when a bunch of water hits your windshield. Seems highly appropriate to me.
Except it's a full-on emergency brake reaction and liable to get me rear-ended. Per the initial discussion, there are places (and this is one) where a human is still MUCH better at assessing the situation and acting appropriately.
"Per the initial discussion, there are places (and this is one) where a human is still MUCH better at assessing the situation and acting appropriately."
You've done nothing to support that assertion. "MUCH better at assessing the situation and acting appropriately" doesn't compensate for 10x slower reaction time. Nor does it account for the high percentage of time that humans are paying attention to something besides driving. Machine systems don't get distracted, at least.
We'll agree to disagree, but anticipate fully autonomous cars sooner rather than later. ;-)
"Emergency braking is part of autonomous driving, so ...?"
So, the Tesla issues involved not identifying objects in the field of regard correctly, and thus not steering appropriately. Brake systems weren't involved in either crash, IIRC.
Assisted emergency braking is much more narrowly focused than full autonomous driving. It doesn't care what the object is, if it's solid, in front of the vehicle, and in it's path, the system will brake. These days it potentially has vision, sonar, lidar and radar to provide sensory input. That's a whole lot more information than a human can access.
I have no idea if the appropriate reaction in these cases would have been braking, steering, or some combination. Regardless, current autonomous vehicle systems (whether they claim to be full auto-pilot or just emergency braking assist or lane-keeping) have some pretty massive blind-spots.
I find, for example, in heavy stop and go traffic my car drives safer on AutoPilot than I do manually. I can get tense or fed up with stupid drivers around me causing me to drive less than ideally, while the AutoPilot just smoothly moves along, perfectly centered in the lane, never caring if the car ahead stays stopped too long, never getting flustered from being cut off.
Switching on the AutoPilot also makes me suddenly care a lot less about optimizing for that 1/10th of a second here and there. When the car’s driving, I get there when I get there. I can just relax and the traffic matters that much less.
I do not know how safe I am in heavy stop-and-go because I completely zone out. Traffic is pretty light where I live now, but in other areas, I've had the subjective sense of falling asleep, only to "wake up" several miles down the road an hour later. That's really scary.
stop-and-go on a freeway during the day (e.g., rush hour) is probably the safest and easiest set of real conditions for self-driving. speed is low on average and the opportunities for surprise are limited, as you likely won't meet other objects unexpectedly going much faster or slower than you.
My favorite expansion of the overloaded motorists' workload is when "firemen" holding "boots" get in traffic lanes during the morning commute in order to gather donations. Is that in the model?
that happens for you? panhandling happens here on the on-/off-ramps, but i don't see panhandlers on the actual freeway.
in any case, i'd guess current algorithms can detect that fairly reliably in the noted conditions, since self-driving cars also trained on urban streets.
The collection happens in the lanes where cars are waiting for a traffic light. The result is that traffic goes through more slowly and backs up through the off ramps and on the slow lane that feeds one of the off ramps.
Exactly why I turn off all assist systems in our vw. I can't tell you how many times it misread the lines and nudged my steering into oncoming traffic. Eventually everyone will realize this stuff is just a bad idea.
human vs human road interaction is mostly based on trust, and it usually works out because most humans are sane and healthy while driving.
the same thing can not work with machines cause they are bad at detecting when humans are not all right and humans are bad at trusting machines.
as soon as we just accept that the save way to operate in close proximity of others, is to do it at way slower speeds. we will have very save roads with humans and robots behind the wheel.
Speed is not the issue, difference in speed is the issue. Road safety actually improves when you raise the speed limit to the speed most drivers are actually driving.
This is only true in a very theoretical sense. Going 180 km/h will 9/10 be more dangerous than going 120 km/h. Reaktion time, brake time, requirements to equipment, everything is tougher at higher speeds.
I’m pretty sure Autobahn fatality numbers disprove your thesis.
The correct conclusion is that the safe speed directly depends on the present conditions, and depending on that, you can be going unsafely fast or unsafely slow (or both, if you’re drunk or inattentive).
If by "theoretical sense" you mean "doesn't fit your personal world view" then sure. The safest speed limit being one that the overwhelming majority of people would naturally follow were it not posted is basically considered fact in the civil engineering world. There is study upon study backing it up.
The desire to minimize the speed at which crashes happen literally costs lives when applied in the real world because reducing the frequency of crashes is the superior option.
> The desire to minimize the speed at which crashes happen literally costs lives when applied in the real world because reducing the frequency of crashes is the superior option.
While I understand that minimizing crashes is important, I'd rather be faced with scenarios where we crash in a manner where people survive more often - any accidents that do happen at the higher speed is going to skyrocket the chances of a fatality.
>The safest speed limit being one that the overwhelming majority of people would naturally follow were it not posted is basically considered fact in the civil engineering world. There is study upon study backing it up.
It's too bad the civil engineers working as traffic engineers absolutely refuse to actually follow the recommendations of these studies. Honestly, I can't think of a more intellectually dishonest profession than civil engineering (specifically, the traffic engineering subset of it; the guys who build buildings and bridges are OK).
This makes a lot of sense intuitively as vehicles moving at the same speed will mean fewer variables for a human driver to worry about. Although it must have its limits.
Look up the "85th percentile rule". Traffic engineers actually generally aim to set the speed limit at the speed 85% of drivers are at or under. Sometimes politicians get in the way. For instance, it was requested to raise the speed limits above 55 mph in Chicagoland area highways, and the change was refused, even though the average driving speed on those roads is about 70 already anyways.
I'm sorry, but no. Yes, important all going same speed, but all else equal slower = safer. more time to react to unexpected events. better traction to road. less energy in a crash.
Weigh all of that against the angry person late for work driving 3ft off of the bumper of the car in front of them because they feel like they can go faster.
the context here was discussion of auto pilot, so irrelevant. but nonetheless, a lack of a speed limit does not imply uniformity of speeds traveled. some will go as fast as traffic and their vehicles allow them. others only as fast as they feel safe. others get adrenalin and dopamine hits from passing and weaving in and around other vehicles. I was driving 90+ moh and still got rear ended by someone going 100+ in Alabama.
Most people do not drive according to the speed limit, they drive according to the overall feel of the road and the safety of traveling on it. Wider roads with high visibility and gentle curves will naturally lead people to drive faster.
Basically, you set the speed limit at the speed most of those drivers are already naturally driving at, so that the people who do mind the speed limit will travel at the same speed of travel as everyone else.
And then, of course, obviously there will be outliers.
"Road safety actually improves when you raise the speed limit to the speed most drivers are actually driving."
Number of accidents drop, but the number of fatalities increase when you raise the speed limit because the accidents that do happen have so much more energy in them (e=mv^2). So "safety" only improves if you have a bad definition of safety.
The industry’s PR team starting to place stories about why self driving cars will take longer than they promised their investors. Tens of billions of dollars invested and it’s still decades away. I guess we blame other drivers now(?)
I thought we blamed human drivers all the time up until now? It's human drivers that make the chaos on the road, if everything was driven by a computer the issue would be much easier.
I must have missed the part of vehicular accident law where people hit while jaywalking at night aren't at fault for the accidents. By your logic, the 1000+ jaywalking fatalities every year must all result in human drivers "getting away with it".
Uber messed up big time in multiple ways, but legally it's pretty clear that the pedestrian was at fault in this case, not Uber.
I predict that an autonomous car will never be sold as a personally-owned vehicle. The entire point of the industry is to get a continuous revenue stream through taxi services.
Here is my proposal for self driving cars: forget trying to make them drive on local roads at first. Add transponders to all interstate tarmac that can be used to detect location and lane position. Then use a much cheaper LIDAR just to map where the other cars are. Boom: you have made long haul driving autonomous. You can then slowly expand this to smaller roads. But why try to recreate human drivers when machines can use much better sensors than us, but can process visual info much slower, and gather it with worse fidelity?
Yes, let's have the Ford highway that only Ford vehicle can drive on because the transponders are proprietary. We don't have privately painted lane markings, why would we have privately installed radio lane markings?
Because yours is a ludicrous proposal. It'd be well more expensive to modify infrastructure than to build a computerized driver. Not only is the modification expensive, you have to convince the local authority to foot the bill, do it right, maintain it, etc. Never going to happen.
Your proposal also lacks reliability. What if one of these "transponders" fails? We can build redundancy into a self-driving car quite easily (a second computer, never relying on just one sensor). Providing redundancy to road infrastructure planet-wide is ... a much larger problem.
The interstate itself is an infrastructure burden that's there forever. Somehow we find a way to pay for it, no? Painting lane markers costs $X/mile, right? This would take the cost to $(X + x)/mile where x is the cost of the transponders. Nobody said self-driving cars would be cheaper, just safer.
at this point I have to ask why are self driving cars needed when we're talking about the tax payer eating up the cost and are we sure we don't have other things in which the money would be better invested.
sure, self-driving cars would be nice and we could even rationalize how this could make sense, but at the end of the day I would rather see everyone get 1) high-speed internet 2) clean water 3) reduce the dependency on fossil fuel 4) ensure access to quality food 5) move towards environmental friendly materials.
Why does taxpayers paying for it make it an issue for you? I don't really get why that factors into it, especially given that taxpayers already pay for the roads.
All the other things you mention are good, and could probably be a priority, I am not saying they shouldn't be. But if we are talking about a technical solution to the problem, here's the thing:
a. You can either have cheap self-driving cars and an upfront infrastructure cost + additional ongoing cost, or expensive self-driving cars capable of driving on shitty roads. My conjecture is that the latter won't 100% solve the problem anyways, so why bother? Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.
b. Why do roads get lower priority for you than high-speed internet? And why do you prioritize high speed internet above reducing reliance on fossil fuels?
c. Maintaining roads is already a thing we do, it is already done via public funding, and again that makes your existing cars cheaper. You'd need a damn tank to roll through unpaved streets at 40 mph, let alone at 80 mph like everyone currently drives in their little Civics with 15 inch wheels.
Again, I don't know which thing should be a priority, not a problem I set out to discuss here. I am saying that IMO the cheapest and best way to get to self-driving cars is as I described. Let's upgrade the roads so we can all have nice things. This also lets us upgrade the rest of the roads to make them self-driving capable later. Or we could try to make a computer that's as good at driving in Montana blizzards as a human, and not see a single consumer self-driving car for the next 50 years.
not saying roads/infrastructure is not important. I’m saying that I would not want to pay extra for something that maybe is going to guide the cars. we already have something that does that: it’s called a railroad.
my bigger point is that we’ve fallen in love with the idea of having self driving cars. do we need self driving cars? who should shoulder the cost?
the things I gave as examples are not ordered. truly high-speed internet everywhere would be great as i believe can actually enable telecommuting and eliminate traffic. it can also enable access to education and drive us, as a society forward.
Roads are modified and maintained all the freaking time, new lanes, new lights, new cameras, new surfaces, etc. This is in the end the cheapest and most realistic way to automated transport.
Roads are modified and maintained, but only in a completely ad-hoc manner. So some localities have good roads and maintenance, and others have terrible roads and maintenance and even road design. You can't expect any kind of consistency, because roads are mostly handled at the local level in the US, and many localities are completely incompetent, or refuse to spend any money on it. What you're describing would require consistency, and that's a completely impossible expectation in America.
You could easily convert HOV lanes into Automated Driving lanes. And if we have the ability to fund HOV lanes, we could also fund Automated Driving lanes.
Self driving cars are already dependent on standard infrastructure markings such as lane lines, and whenever those markings are confusing or faded it has lead to fatal crashes, such as the fatal Tesla crash on 401.
I predict self driving will not fully succeed until we build infrastructure to support it into the roads.
> Self driving cars are already dependent on standard infrastructure markings such as lane lines, and whenever those markings are confusing or faded it has lead to fatal crashes, such as the fatal Tesla crash on 401.
A Tesla is not a self-driving car and they won't become one with that approach.
Waymo vehicles have virtual maps that include the lines (along with a LOT of other data) so they are not affected by fading lines as they always know where the lines are supposed to be.
Basically Waymo is building the infrastructure you all want, but in a virtual sense instead of the extremely expensive and impossible physical one.
”Providing redundancy to road infrastructure planet-wide is ”
IgorPartola doesn’t talk about “planet-wide.
”Not only is the modification expensive, you have to convince the local authority to foot the bill, do it right, maintain it, etc. Never going to happen.”
Not in the USA, where government solutions are “socialism”, and voters rather pay for individualized solutions (example: not allocating money to maintain roads, but letting individuals bear the cost of repairs caused by potholes (https://www.wired.com/2015/07/heres-much-citys-crappy-roads-...)
Other countries may act differently.
”What if one of these "transponders" fails?”
You use passive transponders that rarely fail, and put them at every x meter, where cars work fine if they’re at every 2x or 5x meters, and maintain your roads.
I don’t see why that would have to be more expensive than the existing practice of adding, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_eye_(road) and various lane markers to roads (cat’s eyes probably could be sufficient for relatively good lane keeping)
Even if it is, it may still be a net win if it means lanes can be made less wide, or distances between cars can go down, or even if it ‘just’ means fewer people getting killed and maimed in road accidents.
And when all the cones' fancy electronics break or aren't charged? Is the cop just supposed to not stop? What about poorer jurisdictions that can't afford it?
And if the officer puts down a regular cone and the driver is texting and doesn't see it? Like, yes this would require changes to how we do things. Police officers will have to be careful to use the new style cones correctly. Is this any different than when they first started having use cones/flares? There is a price for every technology. I mean one of the alternatives is that we rely on the LIDAR being so good as to not hit the car and the officer standing next to it because it recognizes that situation. Which it will. Most of the time. Until it doesn't. Seems to be that having the transceiver and LIDAR backup is better than fancy expensive LIDAR.
I can see the 007 getaway now. With a press of the button, a bunch of tiny transponders are thrown on the road. The bad guy's cars automatically brake because they can't find a way to get around the new obstacles.
The detection of the cones isn't the problem. The software properly identified that there were cones near the roadway, that's why it stopped. The really hard problem is programming decision-making logic that will properly ignore cones that aren't in the roadway, 100 times out of 100.
I used to do QA for the Waymo cars, and boy do they get worked into a tizzy if there's any kind of construction going on. It was the most common situation for remote assistance (read: people sitting in a room sending pathfinding suggestions) to get involved.
Judging from some of these comments, the problem is still very difficult.
This was last year, but I live off of San Antonio Road and the one day that the Los Altos municipal maintenance staff placed the cones on the median instead of in the lane (I think in prep for the workers to trim the plants in the median), a Waymo self driving car in front of me stopped immediately upon encountering the coned region - there were no cars in front of it or pedestrians or workers within sight and we were going probably 35mph. I'm sure they changed the programming/data for that situation but there are several erosion drop offs on highway one along the coast that are coned off in unique ways, and everyone in a car is going by at 55-75 mph.
Yes, because Waymo doesn't require special detectable hardware as proposed by GP. And this is exactly the argument the parent tried to make: Your self driving car needs to react to unpredicted changes in the environment. Sensing/visual information (incl LIDAR) thus seems unavoidable to achieve safe self driving. But getting to that point and not having your tesla drive into a wall or your uber into a pedestrian seems like the hard part and from there it is probably not that hard to reach level 4 / 5. Safety is pretty much all we are complaining about in those threads, after all.
i believe (and someone correct me if wrong) that driving on the interstate (and self driving cars/trucks) is a somewhat [way] easier problem than driving on any road. you’re not going to get a lot of value from
what you’re proposing, but it’s going to be super expensive.
In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, not so much. Sure, we may see prototypes of self-driving cars going on the interstate in California on sunny days. But I have yet to see a self-driving car make it through a blizzard in Montana. You can't see lane markings with a LIDAR if you can't see the road covered in an inch of hard packed snow. But radio signals of correct frequencies have no problem with that.
Think about it this way: the roads themselves are very expensive. But they make each car much cheaper. Most cars don't have to be equipped to drive over rocks and roots (we have tarmac), or lakes/ponds/rivers (we have bridges). We already spend a ton of taxpayer money to make it so that a 15 inch wheel with a mostly smooth tire and 5" of suspension travel is all a car needs. Why not install transceivers to make cars not require to have a super complicated LIDAR system?
LiDAR is just one small sensor fusion component in self-driving cars. There are up to 6 LiDARs, up to 4 radars, many cameras and sonic sensors that provide a stream of data for SLAM. The algorithms we have for perception right now are sufficient for 99.9% situations already, although not in real-time with the current technology. Once we surpass 200Hz, we should be fine. On the other hand, path planning is still in the stone age and there is not much hope it'd get better anytime soon (full of NP-Hard problems).
That has no effect on perception quality, just on economy & production. The problem is "solved" research-wise, it's just about miniaturization, speeding it up etc. in evolutionary way as semiconductors and materials improve. Path planning is on another orbit, not solved even in theory...
Your proposal is exactly how self-driving cars were created:
"Back in 1995 the goals for self-driving cars were more modest than they are today. They weren’t called autonomous, but self-driving. And there was no plan to have cars drive themselves on city streets, just on freeways and highways — on the Interstate. The plan was to bury cables in the pavement over which all the cars would drive and communicate with each other and with the road, itself. The goal was to fill the road with cars driving at the speed limit, spaced precisely one meter apart" [0]
I've been saying this for a couple years now. Naysayers don't fully understand the problem. There is no safe way to do self driving on our current roads in all climates without at least some infrastructure enhancements. Pretty much any of those enhancements you can imagine are orders of magnitude cheaper than building dedicated roads, which is the only other sufficiently safe option. The moment we start trying to take the driver out of the equation for real en masse, this will become obvious to everyone.
I think Elon Musk is basically correct when he made that statement. It probably wouldn't change the way current cars drive.
He was also right because, I believe the LIDAR units on say a waymo car probably cost more than an entire tesla vehicle.
But I couldn't help thinking if one of these LIDAR startups comes out with an "automotive pricing cheap" chip, it would be a great sensor fusion thing to add.
As a private pilot it astounds me how the self-driving car industry has seemingly taken every lesson we've learned from automation in aviation and chucked it out the window in these systems.
There's a "trust but verify" element of airplane automation that is ingrained in you as a pilot. The ML aspect of self-driving cars generally make it a lot less easy to reason about and predict. That's problem 1. Problem 2 is then speed; Even in the airline world, there are published minimums at which pilots need to be absolute certain that the AP is doing the right thing before they commit to land, even in cases where the autopilot is responsible for the entire landing (Autoland is a capability that a lot of airliners have had for many decades).
What we're talking about here is several seconds heads-up with visual AND instrument confirmation, that the computers are doing what they're supposed to before we allow the plane to land. Not only that, but we bend over backwards ensuring that there is all kinds of redundancy and procedures in place to ensure the accuracy of the system: Multiple instruments using different kinds of technologies confirming one another, greater separation between aircraft to guarantee ILS radio beacon accuracy, etc. Conversely, in the self-driving world, we're having these ML algorithms make split-second decisions with no real way of informing the driver what it is basing it on in an environment that is far less predictable and constantly-changing with someone who is not a professional behind the wheel.
Self driving car approach has to be different because whole idea is different than airplane automation. You want self driving car to be autonomus without need to rely on trained and disciplined human element. End goal is totally different and you cannot make progress to have fully autonomous car if you would come from: "yeah human will be in control all the time, not being stupid or drunk".
It's by no means clear that the end goal and approach should be different. Personally I think that aiming toward level 4-5 autonomous vehicles right now is misguided and unlikely to succeed (outside of a few controlled access roads in limited areas).
A better approach would be to require the human driver to actively control the vehicle at all times, but have the computer step in to brake or steer when it detects a high probability of a dangerous situation. Like how auto GCAS works on modern aircraft.
A few months ago, I lightly rear-ended a vehicle ahead of me when they stopped at a green light while turning.
Legally, I was in the wrong, and it was a stupid mistake. I had looked left to make sure no traffic was coming at the exact moment the person ahead of me stopped. Had either event (my head turning or his breaking) been different by about a second, no accident would have happened.
A simple anti-collision system would have prevented this, and saved me some money (and him from some scratches on his bumper).
As I have an older car - 2012 model - so this feature wasn't prevalent when I bought it. But my next car will have this capability, if for no other reason than I hate stupid mistakes.
This one feature would make my drive to/from work much less stressful (there are a ton of people who will switch lanes in front of you at the last minute and then hit the brakes here in Houston). Add in lane-change warnings, and I think a significant number of accidents could be avoided. They may be small accidents, but a bumper replacement or painting (times 2 - one for each car involved) is easily $1,000, if not more.
If you get used to driving a car that actually does this sort of thing well, then the first time you get in a car where it malfunctions or doesn't have the feature, you will have a bad accident because your reflexes will be missing.
I got a car that automatically closes the door so you don't have to slam it. Now I keep forgetting to close the door on a normal car properly. It's eliminated my muscle memory in just a few months.
Another instance was when I got a car without a clutch interlock. I never would have realized how dependent I was on that until I started it up in gear.
I agree 100%. To me, I think two possible outcomes will prevail:
1 - All cars add this feature either through regulation or other pressure.
2 - Most cars add this feature, and those that don't see higher accident rates, and therefore higher insurance bills. That should result in those cars being less desirable (and therefore less profitable for the car companies), OR the car companies figure it out and add the missing feature to the rest of their cars.
Either way, I think we'll end up there, just not sure of what path we'll go down.
You just removed the biggest reason to invest into autonomous vehicle tech. Now correct me if this is different in the US, but usually safety tech has to be forced up on drivers by regulators. Especially for commercial vehicles.
I'm not sure what you're proposing instead. If you built self-driving cars that required pilot-level skills and training to operate them, who would use them?
Those aren't comparable things though. Our driver training just flat-out isn't robust enough to support a similar system, and there's only one person in control of the car.
He's also leaving out checklist-driven procedure, which is a huge component of airplane safety that is entirely absent from car driving.
A scan where you verify what the computer is telling you and cross checking it with what you're seeing could be. Maybe they have a UI showing the path the computer is taking and bounding boxes of all the potential obstacles overlayed on the screen. If there is a disagreement the human takes over.
Similar to how if on an instrument approach the altitude doesn't agree with the vertical guidance. You can check other systems to see which instrument has failed and whether it's the vertical guidance or altimeter.
Of course, this method of driving and having to pay more attention doesn't jive with the fantasy of getting wasted and having a computer take you home.
>Of course, this method of driving and having to pay more attention doesn't jive with the fantasy of getting wasted and having a computer take you home.
Which is why the system you're describing will never come to cars: American drivers would never use it correctly. If it isn't something that complete morons can jump in and use with zero training, it's just not going to work here. What you're describing requires a competent pilot with training, and that's a completely unrealistic expectation for a car in America.
OP's point wasn't that we should make cars that require trained pilots to monitor the computer, just that the culture of safety is extremely different and concerning.
I don't have a great solution. But to me the contrast in infrastructure/training/redundancy in that system versus what we see in cars is pretty astounding. My only point is that if you applied the same kind of safety mindset that exists for this stuff in aviation, you'd think you were MUCH FURTHER away from full self-driving cars than what all of the marketing and hoopla is like. Just trying to say that the gulf between where we're at with safety in aviation versus cars seems pretty large to me, and larger than most people would care to admit.
Why do you think that autonomous cars will start by replacing the worst drivers, rather than replacing professional drivers, who are much better than the average person? Isn't the biggest potential initial demand for autonomous cars people who don't own cars and currently must choose between bus and taxi?
citation needed. notice how incident per mile statistic where quickly submerged by Tesla around their fourth autopilot death. also note how autopilot are currently d enabled in the less risky part of the journey. also notice how autopilot stat in most articles are compared toward national averages, which include older car with less safety features and bikes.
Or a citation that Tesla's auto-pilot is safer than driving?
I have no idea whether they're safer than driving. My argument was about what's a sufficient goal for self-driving cars and what's needed to reach that goal. Not about whether Tesla had reached that goal.
This is an oft-expressed sentiment that seems totally and obviously wrong to me. If autonomous vehicles are safer than the average texting drunk, but much more dangerous than, say, a bus driven by a sober professional, what is the point? We could just invest in mass transit and incentivize people to use it. I mean, regardless of the drawbacks, if safety is the primary goal...
It's different because the market for (and culture of) pilots is dramatically different from the market for drivers.
I have never met a pilot that didn't religiously follow their checklists. If there is ever any doubt as to whether something is safe, there is no doubt: it is not. Weight limits, weather reports, etc. all are carefully attended to.
Meanwhile, 30% of adults sitting in the back seat of a car forget to buckle their seatbelts. About 5% admitted to driving drunk within the last month. I see people on their cell phones all their time. I've ridden with a young woman who was driving with her knees while doing her hair in the rearview mirror (yes, I was freaked out, and no, I never rode with her again).
Pilots are professionals, and they act professionally, and they respect the possibility of death every time they get into their vehicle. Drivers are not. There's a long history of every safety innovation in cars actually making accident rates go up, because drivers start taking them for granted and then behaving in ways that compensate for the increased safety and maintain the same level of subjective risk (like driving faster, driving more, or becoming more distracted). The only way to break that loop is to take the human out of driver's seat entirely.
Well, you won't have met them then: "The captain of the flight was Captain Gustavo R. Weigel (45) and the co-pilot was Luis Etcheverry (31). The captain had 6,500 hours of flying experience, of which 1,700 had been in a Boeing 737, the type of aircraft that was in the accident. The co-pilot had flown about 600 of his 4,000 hours in the 737. Both pilots died in the accident."
I know. My university is nearby and the bus I used in that years passed by the street the plane crossed before crashing. I took the bus next day and the street was full of debris an the investigation team was still blocking it, so the bus had to take a long detour around the airport.
The part about the checklist is more clear in the Spanish version of the article, but it's not 100% clear, now I'm not sure if it was confirmed or it was only a rumor.
Something like they forget to read the second part of the checklist because they were distracted by someone, so they forget to open the flags. When the alarm sound, they ignore it because they have a similar alarm that always sound due to a malfunction. There were also some logistic problems, like a schedule with less rest time than required. As always, there is more than only one cause.
There's a "trust but verify" element of airplane automation that is ingrained in you as a pilot...
What we're talking about here is several seconds heads-up with visual AND instrument confirmation, that the computers are doing what they're supposed to before we allow the plane to land.
Let's say we never get to full autonomous driving on roads mixing autonomous cars and human drivers. In that case, is it ultimately going to be that different from the way we teach people to look both ways before they cross the street, and teach new drivers how to deal with highway on-ramps and intersections?
It's difficult to see what your main point is, but what I take from it is the idea that aircraft autopilots and self-driving cars are two completely separate problem domains, with very different requirements, resources, and operating regimes.
It would seem to be foolish to have a goal of having "no fatalities per 100 billion miles", or whatever the current spec level for airline travel is, as the minimum operating requirement for automobiles. Likewise requiring two expert-level operators at the controls, with re-certification every six months seems to be out of scope. So why should the AP try to be designed assuming those things are true?
For many years, manually flown aircraft have required radically different safety practices from manually driven cars. I wonder why you think the addition of automation changes that.
1. Addressing (and reducing) major causes of road accidents and fatalities such as impaired and/or distracted driving (alcohol, drugs, sleep deprivation, inattentiveness, fiddling with phones, radios, touch screens, etc.) would make a tremendous difference, and automated driving systems and sensors could potentially intervene in such situations without necessarily being online all the time.
2. Inattentiveness and distraction caused by (over)dependence on automated systems (as in jets with autopilot) could become a major hazard. This is already a problem with road designs that minimise driver engagement by removing obstacles to traffic and designing roadways entirely for cars (compare European style traffic calming to US style widening of lanes and rounding of corners).
3. As mentioned above, infrastructure and urban planning practices are major issues, both in terms of maintenance and design. Automating passenger cars may improve safety in some respects, but perpetuating the dominance of individual motor vehicles (and the vast infrastructure outlay they require) as the dominant mode of transport is probably the wrong approach. Gradually transforming urban planning and design to promote mass transit, reduce commuting, and accommodate bicycle and pedestrian traffic would generally reduce the need to use cars in the first place. One difference between traffic death statistics in countries like Germany and the US is that virtually everybody has to drive long distances on a daily basis in much of the US, with few if any alternatives, and urban sprawl encourages lengthy detours to travel trivial distances between fully separated residential/commercial/industrial zones, whereas e.g. in urban Germany, there are many alternatives, and driving is not a necessity (compare death rates per capita vs. per km driven). In Germany and much of Europe, driving is and has always been a privilege, and one that requires a degree of skill to earn, whereas in the US driving is viewed more or less as a right, something everyone does and has to do on a daily basis, i.e. it's easy to get a license and you only lose it for serious infractions, and even then penalties for driving without a license (as many people do!) are comparatively minor.
What I am getting at is that the best way to tackle road safety and environmental problems is to gradually abandon the passenger car as the dominant mode of transportation. Hybrid automated/human-operated vehicles could be a great improvement in the short term, but using bikes would be better in the long term. Freight transport might be another matter though.
This is an odd way of looking at it. Far from being a problem for self-driving cars, the development of ever-more capable assistance and warning technologies is the rational way to go about refining the technologies that will be needed for fully self-driving cars.
This situation is only a problem for those manufacturers who want to pass off partial autonomy as the real thing.
I basically agree with you, but after some head scratching, I think I follow their argument, which seems to be this:
1. Lack of higher reasoning is a disadvantage that self-driving cars won't escape any time soon.
2. But SDCs can more than make up for that by making fewer dumb mistakes, giving them a better overall safety.
3. However, if you use machines to take away the dumb mistakes from humans, you change that equation, and the overall stats could go the other direction.
In reality, I don't think it's that simple. When ABS was newer, they studied it (https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...) and found that ABS improved overall safety, but safety paradoxically got worse in slick conditions (rain, snow, ice). The effects of safety improvements aren't always what you'd expect, so theorizing doesn't tell you much.
Automatic emergency breaking and other "safer human-driven" cars is not making the human-driven aspect any safer, but rather putting the working and stable parts of autonomous vehicles as a tool for unsafe human-driven vehicles. That said, it will obviously fare better than fully autonomous vehicles, but it is still just a part of autonomous vehicles in general. In this sense, these cars are not "a problem self-driving cars have" as the title implies, they are actually a stepping stone for self-driving cars.
I suggest everyone take a look at the most recent available NHTSA data to help create informed opinions on the topic of car safety with respect to fatal accident causes:
1) The sum of speeding + alcohol is 55% of the total number of fatalities. Self driving cars won't get drunk (we hope) and speeding is something which could certainly be limited in software. Lots of reasons to believe self driving will make a significant impact here, whenever it finally arrives.
On the other hand, you don't really need self driving to prevent these. You could force all vehicles to have a breathalizer interlock before driving (assuming these devices could be made to be very accurate and not spoofable, I believe these are both technically feasible goals). Or just enforce the living daylights out of it - driving drunk, lose your license for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year. Speeding is a similar story. Why not put a GPS device in every car (I think this may already be the case) and geo-fence speed limits? Technically very feasible. Some people will claim you need to speed sometimes but I believe these arguments to be total bullshit. Ambulances may need to speed sometimes. Or again just enforce the living daylights out of it. Speeding over 5MPH above the speed limit, license gone for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year.
We probably won't do any of the non-self driving things I mentioned above because they are politically untenable in America. Death on the roads is such a normalized facet of modern life that most people don't really consider the alternative: limited loss of freedom with many fewer deaths and injuries.
2) The wearing of seat-belts seems to still be a big problem for some people. 44% of motor vehicle occupants who died were not wearing one. No self driving needed here. In fact, this problem is somewhat orthogonal to self-driving. You would still want to be restrained in a self driving car. It would be easy enough to create an occupant sensor and seat belt interlock to operate the car. The car already beeps at you if you're not wearing it. Why not take the beeping a step further.
3) Running into cyclists (both motorized and human-powered) is also a reasonably large problem. Self driving will almost certainly help here (uber's incident not withstanding) but there are non technological solutions to consider. What about increasing the liability for drivers who injure or kill cyclists? What about steep criminal penalties for hitting a cyclist?
4) There isn't even a category for "mechanical failure". Cars don't really crash due to problems with the car per-se. Or at least not a rates that matter compared to the others.
5) Rural driving seems pretty dangerous - 50% of fatalities but only 19% of the population lives there. I don't think they dig into the details here but I'd be interested to see the cause breakdown for rural users. Growing up in Wisconsin, driving home drunk from rural bars was basically ubiquitous. I always advise to stay off the roads around bar time if possible.
It is important to consider that our roads are unsafe mostly because of the system of policies we have set up governing them. We still aren't serious enough about drunk driving. The debate around safety and speeding is hardly even happening. Hitting and killing non-automobile road users is often just a traffic citation. The licensing system is a joke. In what other safety-critical certification system can you take one exam at age 16 and then renew your certification for the rest of your life without any kind of additional training or examination? There is a ton we _could_ be doing outside of self-driving technology to make the roa...
A major problem with your idea about self-limiting vehicle speeds is that speed limits are usually safe driving speeds under ideal conditions only. Speed itself isn't really the problem, but rather poor judgement and unsafe driving habits (often including speeding).
Speed is also an interesting topic in that speed limits are often kept artificially low in order to generate revenue. Any automated system to force cars to respect limits would likely meet resistance from municipalities that are dependent on traffic fines for revenue.
High speeds are allowed on highways in Germany, but only in certain areas, and German drivers are extremely disciplined with regards to lane changing and the 'hierarchy' of the road. However, traffic deaths are lower than the US, even when adjusted to reflect deaths per km traveled. Driver discipline and skill undoubtedly play a role here, but infrastructure quality and maintenance (and urban planning!) is also a big issue. US roads are comparatively poorly designed and maintained, and outdated engineering and planning practices are still widespread (widening streets and removing barriers instead of using traffic calming--perhaps counter-intuitively, the former causes more serious accidents by encouraging speeding and disengaged driving).
I tend to think that at least in urban areas of the US, ditching zoning and onerous anti-alcohol laws (i.e. putting pubs within easy walking distance of where people live) would drastically cut down on drunk driving. Rural areas are of course different.
Nice stats. From my personal experience, most crashes/very dangerous situations I've seen were because of someone going over speed limit or doing hazardous stuff (eg. driving on red, drunk, opposite lane). One was old person not knowing driving rules. Others were attention problems usually from non drivers (cyclist, walking person).
At least in my country we have rules that going 2x speed limit is loss of driving license.
There's also interesting traffic light system on entrances to cities, that if someone goes over speed limit - light is turning red for a short while. This is very nice, as lights are more respected than speed limits.
What I think gets overlooked in this conversation is, human drivers routinely break the law in "innocent" ways. If self-driving cars follow the rules in ways that human drivers fail to, the self-driving cars are already safer in numerous ways.
>> Initially, all fully self-driving vehicles will be Level 4—that is, they have to be in geographically constrained areas, and will only operate in good weather, as does Waymo’s fleet of self-driving vans that it is testing in Phoenix. Truly autonomous, aka Level 5, cars are still science fiction.
Nobody has actually created a level 4 system yet, not even a prototype, let alone one ready for production. So level 4, too, is still science fiction. The same goes for level 3, actually. It's science fiction. And so are claims like the following:
>> Researchers at Cleveland State University estimate that only 10 to 30 percent of all vehicles will be fully self driving by 2030.
2030 is in ten years from now. In ten years from now, we'll reach "full self-driving"? Waymo was founded ten years ago and its cars are still in level 2 (allegedly, trying to "jump over" level 3 and go straight to level 4). How are we going to be suddendly, magickally transported from level 2 to level 5 in the next ten years, when we haven't budged from level 2 in the last ten?
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[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 249 ms ] threadAnd we're not going to get to a system that's so much safer as to render human attention irrelevant without a much more solid and theoretically sound approach to safety engineering.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_777#Accidents_and_incid...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
Perhaps in the short-term, but if you listen to Elon Musk compare it to like having elevator operators, it makes sense that computers will eventually do a much better job and humans will only introduce problems.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/elon-musk-on-teslas-autopilot-...
Most likely computers will become far better than humans at some point. But it may be far enough in the future that it doesn’t really contradict the point made above. Contrary to popular belief, “640K should be enough” isn’t the kind of statement meant to cover all eternity.
If you listen to Elon Musk we have fully autonomous cars every 2 years since 2015 and we'll have Mars cities in 2050.
Landing a few people and picking up a few rocks and taking a few selfies cost, inflation-adjusted for 2019, a whopping $288.1 billion [1].
This money was spent to "stick it to the communists" because they were winning at the space race (first man in space, etc...). We just happened to get a bunch of benefits along the way.
The several more hundred billion that would have followed if we decided to build entire colonies - with a multitude of massive problems still not figured out today - would have been a hard sell over the decades it would have taken to construct.
I mean just look at operating cost of MIR and ISS and that's in LEO...
[1] http://www.planetary.org/blogs/casey-dreier/2019/reconstruct...
Because there are many different numbers:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/1579/1
https://www.quora.com/How-much-did-the-Moon-Mission-cost
The point is that it’s a matter of cost, and not a technical problem. The Apollo program was a “rush job” done in 10 years. Much of the technology had to be invented.
There an interesting BBC podcast called 13 Minutes to the Moon for anyone interested in finding out more about the Apollo program:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w13xttx2
When I was reading that, I was expecting a much higher number than the one I ended up reading.
That's < the cash Apple has on hand, approximately as much revenue as they make a year.
That's 1/2 of the annual U.S. military budget.
It's 1/3 of a small portion of the 2008 bailout.
===
If you annualize that by the 10 years it was spent in, the only discretionary funding significantly less than that is Food and Agriculture.
But the difficulty is in
a) allocating this money b) convincing the public that removing this money from, say education, is a good strategy
A good chunk of people seriously require heat warnings on their hot coffee to realize that their coffee is hot. I don't hold high hopes in making a voting majority of people understand long-term global benefits.
He's very good at PR moves, but sending a rocket to space and getting it back in one piece, which is very impressive, is nothing compared to actually going to mars, which itself is nothing compared to building a city on a planet where everything is opposed to human life.
Tesla and Space X have a very high "hype factor", and sure they're probably the best at what they're doing, but he is insanely overselling it. Look at that timeline: https://www.inverse.com/article/51291-spacex-here-s-the-time...
Now back to a real discussion...
Americans, for example, have about 6 millions accidents per year.
Do you think humans improve the situation once computers become proficient at self-driving?
No. Stating something as a fact without analyzing it in the slightest is bad.
Example:
(1) Only a computer is "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role. The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second. Within 2/100 of a second of a qualifying event, the vehicle will be in full antilock brake mode.
(2) A human and a computer are "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role (this is a little silly in that the human is already the primary brake operator...). The computer still has 1/100 s reaction time, but the human's reaction time is 25/100 s. What exactly is the human bringing to the table? It is true that the human may detect an actual threat the computer doesn't...however that slow reaction time means it likely won't make a difference in the outcome. On the other hand, the human may "detect" a false alarm, and emergency brake by mistake. That activity often leads to wrecks!
I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer. Further, all of these "human in the loop" systems suffer from a fatal flaw - the inability of people to pay attention unless it's absolutely crucial.
The way people use Tesla Autopilot shows that full autonomy is necessary, and will in fact be safer than any "assisted" system.
The two can, and should, be complementary.
The two can, and should, be complementary."
What you're saying is true, but doesn't fall under the purview of "assisted emergency braking".
You know, not driving tired, drunk, high, angry, or stupid...
> No. Stating something as a fact without analyzing it in the slightest is bad.
> Example:
> (1) Only a computer is "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role. The computer has an effective reaction time of 1/100 of a second. Within 2/100 of a second of a qualifying event, the vehicle will be in full antilock brake mode.
> (2) A human and a computer are "paying attention" performing the "assisted emergency breaking" role (this is a little silly in that the human is already the primary brake operator...). The computer still has 1/100 s reaction time, but the human's reaction time is 25/100 s. What exactly is the human bringing to the table? It is true that the human may detect an actual threat the computer doesn't...however that slow reaction time means it likely won't make a difference in the outcome. On the other hand, the human may "detect" a false alarm, and emergency brake by mistake. That activity often leads to wrecks!
> I submit that the computer-only emergency brake assist is safer than the combination of human and computer. Further, all of these "human in the loop" systems suffer from a fatal flaw - the inability of people to pay attention unless it's absolutely crucial.
> The way people use Tesla Autopilot shows that full autonomy is necessary, and will in fact be safer than any "assisted" system.
I think your example is uncharitable because you allow for a human to react to a false alarm in the second but don't account for a computer to react similarly in the first. Personally speaking, I have seen very few occasions of people exercising extreme braking wrongly. I feel computers would be less apt at discerning from a false positive than a human operator with even a little experience behind the wheel.
Given that autonomous cars can be misled by painting roadways certain ways [0], it's clear to me that the number of unknown unknowns that must be handled by a car are large in number, and I have less faith in the skillful handling of those events by a computer than a human.
[0]: https://nerdist.com/article/trap-a-self-driving-car/
He can see the big truck 200 yards in front of him, and recognize that it is indeed a truck, and not an overhead traffic sign. Apparently, Teslas don't bring that to the table.
Alternatively, the human could recognize that the truck is on fire and smoking, and that it would be a good idea to stay away from it.
You're choosing to ignore the fact that computers still make mistakes.
My friend's car (an Acura) recently slammed on the brakes @ 70mph because it mistakenly thought a car in an adjacent lane was in his lane. Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident.
This is not an uncommon occurrence, especially with Honda/Acura's system. You can find tons of complaints online about AEB systems reacting to false positives.
No, but I'll unequivocally assert that the human false alarm rate is much higher than that of computers.
"My friend's car (an Acura) recently slammed on the brakes @ 70mph because it mistakenly thought a car in an adjacent lane was in his lane. Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident."
Does it have a readout indicating what it "thought"?
It seems possible that the car in the other lane drifted, and the computer thought it was changing lanes into the Acura. Braking was appropriate in that circumstance.
"This is not an uncommon occurrence, especially with Honda/Acura's system. You can find tons of complaints online about AEB systems reacting to false positives."
That may be, and I suspect a fix will be forthcoming which will address every Honda/Acura on the road (or new models, worst case).
Meanwhile, humans will continue to look down at a text, hamburger, or whatever, and then panic when a few seconds later they look up and think they're in trouble. Not to mention driving tired, drunk, high, angry, or stupid.
"Had there been someone following close behind him, it probably would've caused an accident."
And of course the person running into the braking vehicle would have been at fault. In most cases, only assisted emergency braking would help, since most people follow way too close on the freeway - human reaction time isn't fast enough.
.. to objects that it can identify as a hazard. We've already seen incidents where it fails to spot hazards such as cyclists and crash barriers, due to limitations such as having to filter out stationary objects from radar returns.
Really? I've seen no such reports with regard to assisted emergency braking systems. Please cite a reference.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19802284
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17257239 "These vehicles will run into stationary obstacles at full speed with no warning or emergency braking at all."
Anyway, the point was a general one - the computer hazard identification is very far from perfect at the moment, and benefits from a human spotting hazards that the automated system does not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergency_brake_assist
I see no mention of problems on the Wikipedia page. Do you know of any?
Anyways, my VW has assisted emergency braking. I've had opposite issues - water splashes across sensor and the car brakes for no good reason. Generally going through a large shallow puddle and moderate speed. Happened 2 or 3 times and now I disable when driving near the beach after rain.
Your "issue" is essentially the system being extra safe - similar to slowing down when a bunch of water hits your windshield. Seems highly appropriate to me.
You've done nothing to support that assertion. "MUCH better at assessing the situation and acting appropriately" doesn't compensate for 10x slower reaction time. Nor does it account for the high percentage of time that humans are paying attention to something besides driving. Machine systems don't get distracted, at least.
We'll agree to disagree, but anticipate fully autonomous cars sooner rather than later. ;-)
So, the Tesla issues involved not identifying objects in the field of regard correctly, and thus not steering appropriately. Brake systems weren't involved in either crash, IIRC.
Assisted emergency braking is much more narrowly focused than full autonomous driving. It doesn't care what the object is, if it's solid, in front of the vehicle, and in it's path, the system will brake. These days it potentially has vision, sonar, lidar and radar to provide sensory input. That's a whole lot more information than a human can access.
Switching on the AutoPilot also makes me suddenly care a lot less about optimizing for that 1/10th of a second here and there. When the car’s driving, I get there when I get there. I can just relax and the traffic matters that much less.
My favorite expansion of the overloaded motorists' workload is when "firemen" holding "boots" get in traffic lanes during the morning commute in order to gather donations. Is that in the model?
in any case, i'd guess current algorithms can detect that fairly reliably in the noted conditions, since self-driving cars also trained on urban streets.
But sometimes it would be nice to have a 0 below the 1-7 following distance setting. (sort of like going to 11)
the same thing can not work with machines cause they are bad at detecting when humans are not all right and humans are bad at trusting machines.
as soon as we just accept that the save way to operate in close proximity of others, is to do it at way slower speeds. we will have very save roads with humans and robots behind the wheel.
The correct conclusion is that the safe speed directly depends on the present conditions, and depending on that, you can be going unsafely fast or unsafely slow (or both, if you’re drunk or inattentive).
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.thelocal.de/20190201/are-ge...
The desire to minimize the speed at which crashes happen literally costs lives when applied in the real world because reducing the frequency of crashes is the superior option.
While I understand that minimizing crashes is important, I'd rather be faced with scenarios where we crash in a manner where people survive more often - any accidents that do happen at the higher speed is going to skyrocket the chances of a fatality.
It's too bad the civil engineers working as traffic engineers absolutely refuse to actually follow the recommendations of these studies. Honestly, I can't think of a more intellectually dishonest profession than civil engineering (specifically, the traffic engineering subset of it; the guys who build buildings and bridges are OK).
Do you remember where you saw the data on this?
Here's a good explanation: http://www.mikeontraffic.com/85th-percentile-speed-explained...
Basically, you set the speed limit at the speed most of those drivers are already naturally driving at, so that the people who do mind the speed limit will travel at the same speed of travel as everyone else.
And then, of course, obviously there will be outliers.
Number of accidents drop, but the number of fatalities increase when you raise the speed limit because the accidents that do happen have so much more energy in them (e=mv^2). So "safety" only improves if you have a bad definition of safety.
"Decades away"? LOL
Fully autonomous vehicles are already on the road in large numbers. See Waymo in AZ and Voyage in Florida...
The economic and safety incentives are huge. I predict by 2030 over half of new vehicles sold will have L5 autonomy.
Uber messed up big time in multiple ways, but legally it's pretty clear that the pedestrian was at fault in this case, not Uber.
Your proposal also lacks reliability. What if one of these "transponders" fails? We can build redundancy into a self-driving car quite easily (a second computer, never relying on just one sensor). Providing redundancy to road infrastructure planet-wide is ... a much larger problem.
sure, self-driving cars would be nice and we could even rationalize how this could make sense, but at the end of the day I would rather see everyone get 1) high-speed internet 2) clean water 3) reduce the dependency on fossil fuel 4) ensure access to quality food 5) move towards environmental friendly materials.
All the other things you mention are good, and could probably be a priority, I am not saying they shouldn't be. But if we are talking about a technical solution to the problem, here's the thing:
a. You can either have cheap self-driving cars and an upfront infrastructure cost + additional ongoing cost, or expensive self-driving cars capable of driving on shitty roads. My conjecture is that the latter won't 100% solve the problem anyways, so why bother? Let's not let perfect be the enemy of good.
b. Why do roads get lower priority for you than high-speed internet? And why do you prioritize high speed internet above reducing reliance on fossil fuels?
c. Maintaining roads is already a thing we do, it is already done via public funding, and again that makes your existing cars cheaper. You'd need a damn tank to roll through unpaved streets at 40 mph, let alone at 80 mph like everyone currently drives in their little Civics with 15 inch wheels.
Again, I don't know which thing should be a priority, not a problem I set out to discuss here. I am saying that IMO the cheapest and best way to get to self-driving cars is as I described. Let's upgrade the roads so we can all have nice things. This also lets us upgrade the rest of the roads to make them self-driving capable later. Or we could try to make a computer that's as good at driving in Montana blizzards as a human, and not see a single consumer self-driving car for the next 50 years.
my bigger point is that we’ve fallen in love with the idea of having self driving cars. do we need self driving cars? who should shoulder the cost?
the things I gave as examples are not ordered. truly high-speed internet everywhere would be great as i believe can actually enable telecommuting and eliminate traffic. it can also enable access to education and drive us, as a society forward.
Self driving cars are already dependent on standard infrastructure markings such as lane lines, and whenever those markings are confusing or faded it has lead to fatal crashes, such as the fatal Tesla crash on 401.
I predict self driving will not fully succeed until we build infrastructure to support it into the roads.
A Tesla is not a self-driving car and they won't become one with that approach.
Waymo vehicles have virtual maps that include the lines (along with a LOT of other data) so they are not affected by fading lines as they always know where the lines are supposed to be.
Basically Waymo is building the infrastructure you all want, but in a virtual sense instead of the extremely expensive and impossible physical one.
You only need one reality <-> virtual desync to cause a crash.
IgorPartola doesn’t talk about “planet-wide.
”Not only is the modification expensive, you have to convince the local authority to foot the bill, do it right, maintain it, etc. Never going to happen.”
Not in the USA, where government solutions are “socialism”, and voters rather pay for individualized solutions (example: not allocating money to maintain roads, but letting individuals bear the cost of repairs caused by potholes (https://www.wired.com/2015/07/heres-much-citys-crappy-roads-...)
Other countries may act differently.
”What if one of these "transponders" fails?”
You use passive transponders that rarely fail, and put them at every x meter, where cars work fine if they’re at every 2x or 5x meters, and maintain your roads.
I don’t see why that would have to be more expensive than the existing practice of adding, e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cat%27s_eye_(road) and various lane markers to roads (cat’s eyes probably could be sufficient for relatively good lane keeping)
Even if it is, it may still be a net win if it means lanes can be made less wide, or distances between cars can go down, or even if it ‘just’ means fewer people getting killed and maimed in road accidents.
(Seriously, cones really ought to be dealt with by image recognition? Easiest possible case, an object specifically designed to be seen?)
Another press of the button dispenses a martini.
I used to do QA for the Waymo cars, and boy do they get worked into a tizzy if there's any kind of construction going on. It was the most common situation for remote assistance (read: people sitting in a room sending pathfinding suggestions) to get involved.
Judging from some of these comments, the problem is still very difficult.
Think about it this way: the roads themselves are very expensive. But they make each car much cheaper. Most cars don't have to be equipped to drive over rocks and roots (we have tarmac), or lakes/ponds/rivers (we have bridges). We already spend a ton of taxpayer money to make it so that a 15 inch wheel with a mostly smooth tire and 5" of suspension travel is all a car needs. Why not install transceivers to make cars not require to have a super complicated LIDAR system?
"Back in 1995 the goals for self-driving cars were more modest than they are today. They weren’t called autonomous, but self-driving. And there was no plan to have cars drive themselves on city streets, just on freeways and highways — on the Interstate. The plan was to bury cables in the pavement over which all the cars would drive and communicate with each other and with the road, itself. The goal was to fill the road with cars driving at the speed limit, spaced precisely one meter apart" [0]
[0] https://www.cringely.com/2016/08/25/self-driving-car-old-eno...
Given sufficient energy we can create anything because E = mc^2, but we have yet to actually produce enough energy to create whatever matter we want.
Edit: Downvoters, please explain yourselves. If you have evidence that ice and snow have been solved for level 5 I’d love to see it.
He was also right because, I believe the LIDAR units on say a waymo car probably cost more than an entire tesla vehicle.
But I couldn't help thinking if one of these LIDAR startups comes out with an "automotive pricing cheap" chip, it would be a great sensor fusion thing to add.
Basically, "update all roads on the planet".
There's a "trust but verify" element of airplane automation that is ingrained in you as a pilot. The ML aspect of self-driving cars generally make it a lot less easy to reason about and predict. That's problem 1. Problem 2 is then speed; Even in the airline world, there are published minimums at which pilots need to be absolute certain that the AP is doing the right thing before they commit to land, even in cases where the autopilot is responsible for the entire landing (Autoland is a capability that a lot of airliners have had for many decades).
What we're talking about here is several seconds heads-up with visual AND instrument confirmation, that the computers are doing what they're supposed to before we allow the plane to land. Not only that, but we bend over backwards ensuring that there is all kinds of redundancy and procedures in place to ensure the accuracy of the system: Multiple instruments using different kinds of technologies confirming one another, greater separation between aircraft to guarantee ILS radio beacon accuracy, etc. Conversely, in the self-driving world, we're having these ML algorithms make split-second decisions with no real way of informing the driver what it is basing it on in an environment that is far less predictable and constantly-changing with someone who is not a professional behind the wheel.
A better approach would be to require the human driver to actively control the vehicle at all times, but have the computer step in to brake or steer when it detects a high probability of a dangerous situation. Like how auto GCAS works on modern aircraft.
A few months ago, I lightly rear-ended a vehicle ahead of me when they stopped at a green light while turning.
Legally, I was in the wrong, and it was a stupid mistake. I had looked left to make sure no traffic was coming at the exact moment the person ahead of me stopped. Had either event (my head turning or his breaking) been different by about a second, no accident would have happened.
A simple anti-collision system would have prevented this, and saved me some money (and him from some scratches on his bumper).
As I have an older car - 2012 model - so this feature wasn't prevalent when I bought it. But my next car will have this capability, if for no other reason than I hate stupid mistakes.
This one feature would make my drive to/from work much less stressful (there are a ton of people who will switch lanes in front of you at the last minute and then hit the brakes here in Houston). Add in lane-change warnings, and I think a significant number of accidents could be avoided. They may be small accidents, but a bumper replacement or painting (times 2 - one for each car involved) is easily $1,000, if not more.
I got a car that automatically closes the door so you don't have to slam it. Now I keep forgetting to close the door on a normal car properly. It's eliminated my muscle memory in just a few months.
Another instance was when I got a car without a clutch interlock. I never would have realized how dependent I was on that until I started it up in gear.
1 - All cars add this feature either through regulation or other pressure.
2 - Most cars add this feature, and those that don't see higher accident rates, and therefore higher insurance bills. That should result in those cars being less desirable (and therefore less profitable for the car companies), OR the car companies figure it out and add the missing feature to the rest of their cars.
Either way, I think we'll end up there, just not sure of what path we'll go down.
If you own a car, you will get used to it, so it won't be more dangerous.
With self driving cars we use some fancy ML/AI where we don’t exactly know why the machine chose to do what it did.
He's also leaving out checklist-driven procedure, which is a huge component of airplane safety that is entirely absent from car driving.
Similar to how if on an instrument approach the altitude doesn't agree with the vertical guidance. You can check other systems to see which instrument has failed and whether it's the vertical guidance or altimeter.
Of course, this method of driving and having to pay more attention doesn't jive with the fantasy of getting wasted and having a computer take you home.
Which is why the system you're describing will never come to cars: American drivers would never use it correctly. If it isn't something that complete morons can jump in and use with zero training, it's just not going to work here. What you're describing requires a competent pilot with training, and that's a completely unrealistic expectation for a car in America.
Anything that moves the needle noticeably closer to "plane levels" is a solid improvement in terms of reducing unnecessary deaths.
Or a citation that Tesla's auto-pilot is safer than driving? I have no idea whether they're safer than driving. My argument was about what's a sufficient goal for self-driving cars and what's needed to reach that goal. Not about whether Tesla had reached that goal.
I have never met a pilot that didn't religiously follow their checklists. If there is ever any doubt as to whether something is safe, there is no doubt: it is not. Weight limits, weather reports, etc. all are carefully attended to.
Meanwhile, 30% of adults sitting in the back seat of a car forget to buckle their seatbelts. About 5% admitted to driving drunk within the last month. I see people on their cell phones all their time. I've ridden with a young woman who was driving with her knees while doing her hair in the rearview mirror (yes, I was freaked out, and no, I never rode with her again).
Pilots are professionals, and they act professionally, and they respect the possibility of death every time they get into their vehicle. Drivers are not. There's a long history of every safety innovation in cars actually making accident rates go up, because drivers start taking them for granted and then behaving in ways that compensate for the increased safety and maintain the same level of subjective risk (like driving faster, driving more, or becoming more distracted). The only way to break that loop is to take the human out of driver's seat entirely.
Someone forgot to follow the second page of the checklist of a 737 in Argentina in 1999 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAPA_Flight_3142
The part about the checklist is more clear in the Spanish version of the article, but it's not 100% clear, now I'm not sure if it was confirmed or it was only a rumor.
Something like they forget to read the second part of the checklist because they were distracted by someone, so they forget to open the flags. When the alarm sound, they ignore it because they have a similar alarm that always sound due to a malfunction. There were also some logistic problems, like a schedule with less rest time than required. As always, there is more than only one cause.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta_Air_Lines_Flight_1141
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanair_Flight_5022
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwest_Airlines_Flight_255
What we're talking about here is several seconds heads-up with visual AND instrument confirmation, that the computers are doing what they're supposed to before we allow the plane to land.
Let's say we never get to full autonomous driving on roads mixing autonomous cars and human drivers. In that case, is it ultimately going to be that different from the way we teach people to look both ways before they cross the street, and teach new drivers how to deal with highway on-ramps and intersections?
It would seem to be foolish to have a goal of having "no fatalities per 100 billion miles", or whatever the current spec level for airline travel is, as the minimum operating requirement for automobiles. Likewise requiring two expert-level operators at the controls, with re-certification every six months seems to be out of scope. So why should the AP try to be designed assuming those things are true?
1. Addressing (and reducing) major causes of road accidents and fatalities such as impaired and/or distracted driving (alcohol, drugs, sleep deprivation, inattentiveness, fiddling with phones, radios, touch screens, etc.) would make a tremendous difference, and automated driving systems and sensors could potentially intervene in such situations without necessarily being online all the time.
2. Inattentiveness and distraction caused by (over)dependence on automated systems (as in jets with autopilot) could become a major hazard. This is already a problem with road designs that minimise driver engagement by removing obstacles to traffic and designing roadways entirely for cars (compare European style traffic calming to US style widening of lanes and rounding of corners).
3. As mentioned above, infrastructure and urban planning practices are major issues, both in terms of maintenance and design. Automating passenger cars may improve safety in some respects, but perpetuating the dominance of individual motor vehicles (and the vast infrastructure outlay they require) as the dominant mode of transport is probably the wrong approach. Gradually transforming urban planning and design to promote mass transit, reduce commuting, and accommodate bicycle and pedestrian traffic would generally reduce the need to use cars in the first place. One difference between traffic death statistics in countries like Germany and the US is that virtually everybody has to drive long distances on a daily basis in much of the US, with few if any alternatives, and urban sprawl encourages lengthy detours to travel trivial distances between fully separated residential/commercial/industrial zones, whereas e.g. in urban Germany, there are many alternatives, and driving is not a necessity (compare death rates per capita vs. per km driven). In Germany and much of Europe, driving is and has always been a privilege, and one that requires a degree of skill to earn, whereas in the US driving is viewed more or less as a right, something everyone does and has to do on a daily basis, i.e. it's easy to get a license and you only lose it for serious infractions, and even then penalties for driving without a license (as many people do!) are comparatively minor.
What I am getting at is that the best way to tackle road safety and environmental problems is to gradually abandon the passenger car as the dominant mode of transportation. Hybrid automated/human-operated vehicles could be a great improvement in the short term, but using bikes would be better in the long term. Freight transport might be another matter though.
This situation is only a problem for those manufacturers who want to pass off partial autonomy as the real thing.
1. Lack of higher reasoning is a disadvantage that self-driving cars won't escape any time soon.
2. But SDCs can more than make up for that by making fewer dumb mistakes, giving them a better overall safety.
3. However, if you use machines to take away the dumb mistakes from humans, you change that equation, and the overall stats could go the other direction.
In reality, I don't think it's that simple. When ABS was newer, they studied it (https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...) and found that ABS improved overall safety, but safety paradoxically got worse in slick conditions (rain, snow, ice). The effects of safety improvements aren't always what you'd expect, so theorizing doesn't tell you much.
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
My personal takeaways:
1) The sum of speeding + alcohol is 55% of the total number of fatalities. Self driving cars won't get drunk (we hope) and speeding is something which could certainly be limited in software. Lots of reasons to believe self driving will make a significant impact here, whenever it finally arrives.
On the other hand, you don't really need self driving to prevent these. You could force all vehicles to have a breathalizer interlock before driving (assuming these devices could be made to be very accurate and not spoofable, I believe these are both technically feasible goals). Or just enforce the living daylights out of it - driving drunk, lose your license for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year. Speeding is a similar story. Why not put a GPS device in every car (I think this may already be the case) and geo-fence speed limits? Technically very feasible. Some people will claim you need to speed sometimes but I believe these arguments to be total bullshit. Ambulances may need to speed sometimes. Or again just enforce the living daylights out of it. Speeding over 5MPH above the speed limit, license gone for the rest of your life. Not nice I suppose but neither are ten thousand deaths per year.
We probably won't do any of the non-self driving things I mentioned above because they are politically untenable in America. Death on the roads is such a normalized facet of modern life that most people don't really consider the alternative: limited loss of freedom with many fewer deaths and injuries.
2) The wearing of seat-belts seems to still be a big problem for some people. 44% of motor vehicle occupants who died were not wearing one. No self driving needed here. In fact, this problem is somewhat orthogonal to self-driving. You would still want to be restrained in a self driving car. It would be easy enough to create an occupant sensor and seat belt interlock to operate the car. The car already beeps at you if you're not wearing it. Why not take the beeping a step further.
3) Running into cyclists (both motorized and human-powered) is also a reasonably large problem. Self driving will almost certainly help here (uber's incident not withstanding) but there are non technological solutions to consider. What about increasing the liability for drivers who injure or kill cyclists? What about steep criminal penalties for hitting a cyclist?
4) There isn't even a category for "mechanical failure". Cars don't really crash due to problems with the car per-se. Or at least not a rates that matter compared to the others.
5) Rural driving seems pretty dangerous - 50% of fatalities but only 19% of the population lives there. I don't think they dig into the details here but I'd be interested to see the cause breakdown for rural users. Growing up in Wisconsin, driving home drunk from rural bars was basically ubiquitous. I always advise to stay off the roads around bar time if possible.
It is important to consider that our roads are unsafe mostly because of the system of policies we have set up governing them. We still aren't serious enough about drunk driving. The debate around safety and speeding is hardly even happening. Hitting and killing non-automobile road users is often just a traffic citation. The licensing system is a joke. In what other safety-critical certification system can you take one exam at age 16 and then renew your certification for the rest of your life without any kind of additional training or examination? There is a ton we _could_ be doing outside of self-driving technology to make the roa...
Speed is also an interesting topic in that speed limits are often kept artificially low in order to generate revenue. Any automated system to force cars to respect limits would likely meet resistance from municipalities that are dependent on traffic fines for revenue.
High speeds are allowed on highways in Germany, but only in certain areas, and German drivers are extremely disciplined with regards to lane changing and the 'hierarchy' of the road. However, traffic deaths are lower than the US, even when adjusted to reflect deaths per km traveled. Driver discipline and skill undoubtedly play a role here, but infrastructure quality and maintenance (and urban planning!) is also a big issue. US roads are comparatively poorly designed and maintained, and outdated engineering and planning practices are still widespread (widening streets and removing barriers instead of using traffic calming--perhaps counter-intuitively, the former causes more serious accidents by encouraging speeding and disengaged driving).
I tend to think that at least in urban areas of the US, ditching zoning and onerous anti-alcohol laws (i.e. putting pubs within easy walking distance of where people live) would drastically cut down on drunk driving. Rural areas are of course different.
Just my two cents
At least in my country we have rules that going 2x speed limit is loss of driving license.
There's also interesting traffic light system on entrances to cities, that if someone goes over speed limit - light is turning red for a short while. This is very nice, as lights are more respected than speed limits.
What I think gets overlooked in this conversation is, human drivers routinely break the law in "innocent" ways. If self-driving cars follow the rules in ways that human drivers fail to, the self-driving cars are already safer in numerous ways.
It is simple: highway speeds + opposing traffic. e.g., 55mph -> <- 55mph = bad accident
Is this a joke? The roads aren't centimeter-accurate from day to day.
Nobody has actually created a level 4 system yet, not even a prototype, let alone one ready for production. So level 4, too, is still science fiction. The same goes for level 3, actually. It's science fiction. And so are claims like the following:
>> Researchers at Cleveland State University estimate that only 10 to 30 percent of all vehicles will be fully self driving by 2030.
2030 is in ten years from now. In ten years from now, we'll reach "full self-driving"? Waymo was founded ten years ago and its cars are still in level 2 (allegedly, trying to "jump over" level 3 and go straight to level 4). How are we going to be suddendly, magickally transported from level 2 to level 5 in the next ten years, when we haven't budged from level 2 in the last ten?