According to Wikipedia some laws even require a passenger: "Nevada's regulations require a person behind the wheel and one in the passenger’s seat during tests".
I've seen similar questions arise from the thought of accidents. If a self-driving car causes a crash, who's responsible? The owner or the manufacturer?
Another random thought: do the cars respond to a police officer trying to pull them over?
>If a self-driving car causes a crash, who's responsible? The owner or the manufacturer?
My two cents: if the car has the capacity for manual override, the owner (negligence) otherwise the manufacturer.
>do the cars respond to a police officer trying to pull them over?
Legally, humans are supposed to, so why would it be different for self-driving cars (which can at least be programmed to give control over to a third party when requested?)
> if the car has the capacity for manual override, the owner (negligence)
There are plenty of ways a self-driving car could mess up and cause an accident where you do not have enough time to react to it. Not "you should have been paying more attention". As in "You are not superhuman enough to react in time, period".
Say, swerving on the highway into oncoming traffic. Some (incredibly rough) numbers: if you're going 108km/h and the car suddenly swerves into the other lane of a two-lane highway, if it's 20m between start of swerve and hitting the vehicle in the other lane, that's 2/3 of a second. You can't do that. You (or rather, an average person) are not going to be able to recover in time. The reaction time for an alert driver is something like 0.7s on average. [1]
And that's not the most pessimistic assumptions either.
Maybe. I can imagine that in any other circumstance that the driver would be liable where they would be considered liable in a standard car. But of course if the self-driving car makes it impossible to react then that probably lies on the manufacturer. At that point you might as well blame the passenger of a commercial airliner for the autopilot going wrong.
> If a self-driving car causes a crash, who's responsible? The owner or the manufacturer?
Manufacturer.
However, what's going to eventually fall out is that self-driving cars are going to be SO much safer, that insurance companies eventually won't let YOU drive.
It would be stupid not to, especially during the transition phase where driverless cars are the minority.
YMMV depending upon local standards but here in San Diego, CA it is extremely common for the flow the traffic to be going 5-15 miles above posted speed limits and the cops do not care. Having a car going significantly slower than the flow of traffic is much worse than exceeding the speed limit.
Also there are sometimes situations where very temporarily exceeding the limit is the best option (eg. you're at the speed limit and someone cuts into your lane toward the back of your car, potentially shunting you and you have no clearance on the other side, but do have room up front). Driverless cars with full 360 (or close to it) lidar would be ideal for dealing with this situation (as opposed to a human driver that is unlikely to even see the other car in his/her blindspot) but if they are capped at the speed limit their options for resolving the situation safely would be severely curtailed.
Definitely. I wouldn't want my car driving in an unsafe manner just to follow local ordinances.
I'd be very curious if I could sue those local governments for endangering me if my vehicle is forced to follow their rules and gets in an avoidable accident because of them. It would be an eminent domain defense, in the sense that government can't deny me of my property without a justifiable (public safety) reason for doing so.
And forcing my computer to behave in a certain way that causes it to potentially harm itself is definitely a denial of property.
I'm sure they'll just write me a ticket though - and if no one has gotten out of that by citing statistics on road safety, my autonomous car won't be any better off.
Hopefully, this will all be resolved reasonably with a national law and a nice bug report interface on Google's part.
but here in San Diego, CA it is extremely common for the flow the traffic to be going 5-15 miles above posted speed limits
Same here in the Bay area. It would be unsafe to drive no faster than the speed limits in some conditions of traffic. (Some drivers do this, and you have to change lanes on short notice to remain at the same speed as the rest of traffic.)
Going the speed limit or lower in the passing lane, especially in rush hour is dangerous and probably causes more accidents than just going a bit faster or moving over to the other lanes when someone gets too close.
If a person is obeying the speed limit in the left lane and a crash ensues, it is not the fault of the person obeying the speed limit. They may be guilty of obstructing traffic in some way depending on the situation and the local laws dictating the proper usage of the left lane, but not the accident.
Going slower? Possible, depends on how much slower.
The left most lane (excluding HOV lanes) is for /passing/. Unless you are passing you should NOT be in this lane. Remaining in this lane, even doing the speed limit, while someone is behind you clearly wanting to go faster (that's their problem, not your's) is failure to yield.
The law is not always in touch with reality. Regardless of where you drive, if there are people behind you in the left lane, you should move over to let them pass.
Don't piss people off unnecessarily for no reason other than to prove a point.
> Regardless of where you drive, if there are people behind you in the left lane, you should move over to let them pass.
This is different than "the left lane...is for passing. Unless you are passing you should NOT be in this lane". Under this rule, it would be perfectly acceptable to be in the left lane if you aren't passing and also aren't obstructing faster traffic. However, this rule has traffic management problems similar to those with the left-is-reserved-for-passing-rule (which is probably why its even rarer in law than the left-is-reserved-for-passing-rule, though a couple states do have something like it).
The more common legal rule -- and there are good reasons for this rule to be preferred -- is that you have to use the rightmost lane if you are moving slower than the normal speed on the road (independent of the legal limit); this is different than a reserved for passing rule and also different than a move-right-for-faster traffic rule, and is superior to either for traffic management, since with a simple move-right-for-faster-traffic rule, a very small number of drivers wishing to drive at excessive speed could oblige significantly greater congestion in the other lanes with drivers forced to yield to them (and, of course, a strict reserved-for-passing rule has a similar effect). The move-right-if-slower-than-normal rule is pretty much the best rule for traffic management.
If you click through to the actual law, its weird in terms of the categorization since it doesn't use any of the standard rubrics. The rule applicable to roads with more than two lanes in the same direction is neither a "left lane for passing" rule, or a "yield left lane to faster moving traffic" rule or a "must keep up with normal speed for the road except in the rightmost lane" rule. Its a "you must always drive exclusively in the rightmost lane no matter how many are available, unless there is 'substantially continuous' traffic in the lane, or you are using the left lane for turning."
It might be straight-forward and sensible (that, particularly the latter, is particularly subjective), but its very distant conceptually from the rules commonly used elsewhere that form the basis for the categorization and thus is, in context, weird.
This was actually passed as a law in Georgia recently. They put billboards up telling slow people to get out of the left lane and gave out tickets en masse during the first week it was a law.
In every single thread about traffic I've seen, someone posts this. This is just not true at all in congested roads, and means that there is less traffic throughput since one lane can't be used. On a 5-lane (per direction) 65mph freeway road, if the right 4 lanes are going 20mph, then you are passing in the left lane. When it congests to 20mph in the leftmost lane, is everyone required to get out of it?
My thought on 5-lane road as you describe, which I drive on twice day in my commute, the left lane should not be for passing. It should be that the further the distance to your exit the more to the left you should be to avoid congesting the entry and exit ramps.
People complain about bad usage of the left lane but my gripe is people being in the right lanes but are not exiting. On a daily basis it is often the source of almost half the congestion I see on the road.
The rest is from the "me first!" crowd that probably advocate this left lane is only for passing in all cases nonsense.
As others have stated, the left most lane is most certainly not always the "passing" lane. Which, for some people, the "passing" lane means "drive as fast as I want get out of my way" lane.
According to the Mail, wi-fi (in schools, no less. Just think of the poor tumorous children) causes cancer - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-456534/The-classroom... - so I would take their advice on danger with a pinch of salt, although according to the Mail, that will also give you cancer, so be careful.
> Going the speed limit or lower in the passing lane
Except when a special designation is made (common on, e.g., two lane highways that have a stretch where a third lane is added to one or the other side expressly for passing), no such thing exists in many US jurisdictions. There are some US jurisdictions where the leftmost lane is by default reserved for passing (or passing and allowing traffic to merge in the other lane), but that is the exception, not the general rule.
The left lane is supposed to be a passing lane. If you are one of those people that set the cruise control and doesn't move over when people are behind you, then you are an asshole- jurisdiction or not.
No, its not. Except where it is. This varies from place to place -- differences in law represent different decisions about whether or not this is true by different communities.
> If you are one of those people that set the cruise control and doesn't move over when people are behind you
There is a difference between the left lane being reserved for passing and a convention of slower traffic being expected to move right. The reserved for passing rule is much less common -- either as law or social convention -- than some form of slow-traffic-move-right rule.
The speed limit is an arbitrary number that has little basis in safety. It is not a magic number under which you are "safe" and over which you are "in danger".
Speed limits in North America were lowered to save fuel during the oil shortages in the latter half of the 20th century and subsequently were never raised.
Assuming you maintain proper spacing between you and the other cars, driving at 110 km/h is not significantly more dangerous than at 100 or even 90 km/h.
> Speed limits in North America were lowered to save fuel during the oil shortages in the latter half of the 20th century and subsequently were never raised.
I can't speak to Canada, but they were certainly raised afterwards in much of the U.S. The only exceptions I've come across are roads and highways that are frequently congested (e.g. in DC) or local municipalities doing the speed trap thing. But most states raised to at least 65 mph from 55.
I didn't even argue for the existence of speed limits, only that it's the law. However lower speeds do decrease the severity of accidents, and as you mention, significantly reduce fuel consumption.
Also, less time on road means less cost for society of being stuck in traffic.
Although, most risk of accident numbers I've seen are based on miles driven. I wonder which is the most important thing for frequency -- time, or miles.
Are you going the actual limit, or do you drive on the gauge? Because there is quite a big difference in many cars. Many new ones here seem to indicate 8km/h more than you're going, and with all the people that don't have cruise control this means you're doing 70 when you could be going ~85 before any traffic camera would pick it up.
Actually most people drive ~100km/h on the road I have in mind so 80 is annoying to some already, but I try to never tailgate anyone into driving faster. Only when someone does ~72 because they think that's what they are allowed to drive... such a small difference and yet so annoying.
According to the Wikipedia page on speedometers, under the Error heading...
'Vehicle manufacturers usually calibrate speedometers to read high by an amount equal to the average error, to ensure that their speedometers never indicate a lower speed than the actual speed of the vehicle, to ensure they are not liable for drivers violating speed limits.', although no citation is currently provided.
Error is introduced by tire diameter being different than what was assumed for initial calibration... i.e. wear on the tires or tires that are under/over-inflated.
Would these cars overtake others, for example if there is a car towing an other on a one lane (each way) road going significantly under the speed limit?
"Google's self-driving cars are programmed to exceed speed limits by up to 10mph (16km/h), according to the project's lead software engineer. Dmitri Dolgov told Reuters that when surrounding vehicles were breaking the speed limit, going more slowly could actually present a danger, and the Google car would accelerate to keep up."
Clicking through to the source:
"Google's driverless car is programmed to stay within the speed limit, mostly. Research shows that sticking to the speed limit when other cars are going much faster actually can be dangerous, Dolgov says, so its autonomous car can go up to 10 mph (16 kph) above the speed limit when traffic conditions warrant."
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[ 0.27 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadAnother random thought: do the cars respond to a police officer trying to pull them over?
My two cents: if the car has the capacity for manual override, the owner (negligence) otherwise the manufacturer.
>do the cars respond to a police officer trying to pull them over?
Legally, humans are supposed to, so why would it be different for self-driving cars (which can at least be programmed to give control over to a third party when requested?)
There are plenty of ways a self-driving car could mess up and cause an accident where you do not have enough time to react to it. Not "you should have been paying more attention". As in "You are not superhuman enough to react in time, period".
Say, swerving on the highway into oncoming traffic. Some (incredibly rough) numbers: if you're going 108km/h and the car suddenly swerves into the other lane of a two-lane highway, if it's 20m between start of swerve and hitting the vehicle in the other lane, that's 2/3 of a second. You can't do that. You (or rather, an average person) are not going to be able to recover in time. The reaction time for an alert driver is something like 0.7s on average. [1]
And that's not the most pessimistic assumptions either.
[1] First link I found: http://www.technology-assoc.com/articles/reaction-time.html
Manufacturer.
However, what's going to eventually fall out is that self-driving cars are going to be SO much safer, that insurance companies eventually won't let YOU drive.
In case of other accidents -- pays insurance (and their pricing will be the best indication of how safe these cars are).
It would be stupid not to, especially during the transition phase where driverless cars are the minority.
YMMV depending upon local standards but here in San Diego, CA it is extremely common for the flow the traffic to be going 5-15 miles above posted speed limits and the cops do not care. Having a car going significantly slower than the flow of traffic is much worse than exceeding the speed limit.
Also there are sometimes situations where very temporarily exceeding the limit is the best option (eg. you're at the speed limit and someone cuts into your lane toward the back of your car, potentially shunting you and you have no clearance on the other side, but do have room up front). Driverless cars with full 360 (or close to it) lidar would be ideal for dealing with this situation (as opposed to a human driver that is unlikely to even see the other car in his/her blindspot) but if they are capped at the speed limit their options for resolving the situation safely would be severely curtailed.
I'd be very curious if I could sue those local governments for endangering me if my vehicle is forced to follow their rules and gets in an avoidable accident because of them. It would be an eminent domain defense, in the sense that government can't deny me of my property without a justifiable (public safety) reason for doing so.
And forcing my computer to behave in a certain way that causes it to potentially harm itself is definitely a denial of property.
I'm sure they'll just write me a ticket though - and if no one has gotten out of that by citing statistics on road safety, my autonomous car won't be any better off.
Hopefully, this will all be resolved reasonably with a national law and a nice bug report interface on Google's part.
Same here in the Bay area. It would be unsafe to drive no faster than the speed limits in some conditions of traffic. (Some drivers do this, and you have to change lanes on short notice to remain at the same speed as the rest of traffic.)
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2016721/Slow-drivers...
They are much more likely to be highly aware of how they interact with traffic than they are a dangerous, oblivious obstruction.
Going slower? Possible, depends on how much slower.
This is not generally the case.
http://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html
Don't piss people off unnecessarily for no reason other than to prove a point.
Move to the right.
This is different than "the left lane...is for passing. Unless you are passing you should NOT be in this lane". Under this rule, it would be perfectly acceptable to be in the left lane if you aren't passing and also aren't obstructing faster traffic. However, this rule has traffic management problems similar to those with the left-is-reserved-for-passing-rule (which is probably why its even rarer in law than the left-is-reserved-for-passing-rule, though a couple states do have something like it).
The more common legal rule -- and there are good reasons for this rule to be preferred -- is that you have to use the rightmost lane if you are moving slower than the normal speed on the road (independent of the legal limit); this is different than a reserved for passing rule and also different than a move-right-for-faster traffic rule, and is superior to either for traffic management, since with a simple move-right-for-faster-traffic rule, a very small number of drivers wishing to drive at excessive speed could oblige significantly greater congestion in the other lanes with drivers forced to yield to them (and, of course, a strict reserved-for-passing rule has a similar effect). The move-right-if-slower-than-normal rule is pretty much the best rule for traffic management.
It might be straight-forward and sensible (that, particularly the latter, is particularly subjective), but its very distant conceptually from the rules commonly used elsewhere that form the basis for the categorization and thus is, in context, weird.
People complain about bad usage of the left lane but my gripe is people being in the right lanes but are not exiting. On a daily basis it is often the source of almost half the congestion I see on the road.
The rest is from the "me first!" crowd that probably advocate this left lane is only for passing in all cases nonsense.
Except when a special designation is made (common on, e.g., two lane highways that have a stretch where a third lane is added to one or the other side expressly for passing), no such thing exists in many US jurisdictions. There are some US jurisdictions where the leftmost lane is by default reserved for passing (or passing and allowing traffic to merge in the other lane), but that is the exception, not the general rule.
No, its not. Except where it is. This varies from place to place -- differences in law represent different decisions about whether or not this is true by different communities.
> If you are one of those people that set the cruise control and doesn't move over when people are behind you
There is a difference between the left lane being reserved for passing and a convention of slower traffic being expected to move right. The reserved for passing rule is much less common -- either as law or social convention -- than some form of slow-traffic-move-right rule.
Even if it's clearly marked HOV, you need to make a left turn, or it's a single lane you'll still somehow be a danger to society.
Speed limits in North America were lowered to save fuel during the oil shortages in the latter half of the 20th century and subsequently were never raised.
Assuming you maintain proper spacing between you and the other cars, driving at 110 km/h is not significantly more dangerous than at 100 or even 90 km/h.
I can't speak to Canada, but they were certainly raised afterwards in much of the U.S. The only exceptions I've come across are roads and highways that are frequently congested (e.g. in DC) or local municipalities doing the speed trap thing. But most states raised to at least 65 mph from 55.
Although, most risk of accident numbers I've seen are based on miles driven. I wonder which is the most important thing for frequency -- time, or miles.
Actually most people drive ~100km/h on the road I have in mind so 80 is annoying to some already, but I try to never tailgate anyone into driving faster. Only when someone does ~72 because they think that's what they are allowed to drive... such a small difference and yet so annoying.
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2384102,00.asp
In my experience, even though speedmeter in the instrument panel shows 10mph over, actual GPS speed is around speed limit.
'Vehicle manufacturers usually calibrate speedometers to read high by an amount equal to the average error, to ensure that their speedometers never indicate a lower speed than the actual speed of the vehicle, to ensure they are not liable for drivers violating speed limits.', although no citation is currently provided.
Error is introduced by tire diameter being different than what was assumed for initial calibration... i.e. wear on the tires or tires that are under/over-inflated.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speedometer
http://www.maps-gps-info.com/gps-accuracy.html http://www.gps.gov/systems/gps/performance/accuracy/
Clicking through to the source: "Google's driverless car is programmed to stay within the speed limit, mostly. Research shows that sticking to the speed limit when other cars are going much faster actually can be dangerous, Dolgov says, so its autonomous car can go up to 10 mph (16 kph) above the speed limit when traffic conditions warrant."