patrick.net

I've been looking forward to selling my car on my 70th birthday - this after witnessing my older relatives' laughable driving skills past that age.

Now it looks like we will no longer be burdened by the denial-coated ineptitude of the elderly driver. Hooray!

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I agree. Reagan said this, so it's scripture to me.

To be clear, it drives itself under the wary eye of at least a couple of engineers at all times, who are watching the car's autonomous-driving operation and carefully recording errors so that they can dial in software fixes back at the lab.

A fully autonomous vehicle is at least more than a decade away. That’s one way to look at it. The other is, Holy Cow! Robot cars in a decade? Where do I sign up? Dan takes a ride in Mercedes-Benz’s autonomous research vehicle, and looks at the robo-cars of today and tomorrow. Photo: Getty Images

Eberhard Kaus, sitting in the driver's seat, is also there to grab the wheel in case the car becomes baffled by one of the route's many intersections, roundabouts, parked cars or random pedestrians crossing the street in Bruchsal's Imperial district.
...
A fully autonomous vehicle, something you'd put your mom in, is "maybe more than a decade" away, said Dr. Herrtwich, with a touch of regret.

Um, doesn't sound like driverless cars are a "reality". If you have to be at the wheel ready to take over when it screws up, then it's not driverless.

just imagine what your maintenance bill be like... yep above and beyond

what your paying today... if your driverless system fails.. your on the hook

and in CA the other party will go after everthing you own...

and there goes your Insurance premium... Way Way too expensive to have..

egads101 says

As usual, if thomaswrong thinks it, the opposite is true. 30,000 people die a year in cars, it isn't a hard bar to jump over, for computer driven cars to be better than humans.

You first...

thomaswong.1986 says

just imagine what your maintenance bill be like... yep above and beyond

what your paying today... if your driverless system fails.. your on the hook

and in CA the other party will go after everthing you own...

and there goes your Insurance premium... Way Way too expensive to have..

Idiot.

Software comes with bugs. With cars, bugs have the potential to be killers.
Who's gonna test this stuff...and where??

Hausmeister T says

Planes have used "autopilot" for quiet a while now and I haven't heard of many accidents caused by the autopilots computer bugs...

Apparently you don't read the newspaper much:

http://www.latimes.com/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-ups-jet-crash-20130817,0,5306167.story

The UPS cargo jet that crashed in Alabama on Wednesday, killing two crew members, was operating on autopilot until moments before impact

It's not "computer bugs" that's the difficulty with automation. It's the fact that computers lack intuition. They only do what they are programmed to do. They do not react well to unexpected situations. That is why airplanes still require pilots, even if they have autopilot controls. As much as some people want to believe it, we do not have fully autonomous vehicles at this point in time.

http://www.flyingmag.com/blogs/going-direct/why-planes-are-crashing-autopilot

Over the past few weeks, months and years, we’ve witnessed a few extremely disturbing accidents of very capable highly automated airliners in which much of the evidence seems to suggest that pilots’ overreliance on automation was a major factor.

Homeboy says

They do not react well to unexpected situations.

Most people aren't much better

Ugh, tovbot strikes again. The actual article says:

"Driverless Cars for the Road Ahead
Dan Neil says computer-controlled cars will be a reality. The question isn't "if" but "how" can technology allow humans to take a back seat to the computer"

Driverless cars might in future be a reality, but meanwhile is there anything we can do about mindless twit feeds?

Hausmeister T says

Planes have used "autopilot" for quiet a while

Autopilot compares more closely to cruise control than driverless cars. I believe on the late '50s Imperial they actually referred to their cruise control as "Auto Pilot"

New Renter says

Most people aren't much better

Well, I can only quote the article again:

Eberhard Kaus, sitting in the driver's seat, is also there to grab the wheel in case the car becomes baffled by one of the route's many intersections, roundabouts, parked cars or random pedestrians crossing the street in Bruchsal's Imperial district.

If the computer were better at reacting to unexpected situations, then it wouldn't be necessary to have a human in the driver's seat ready to take control, would it?

The human mind is much better at improvising and reacting to situations that it hasn't experienced before. Would a computer recognize the difference between a police officer directing traffic and a mentally ill transient who wandered into the middle of an intersection and began wildly gesticulating? I doubt it. It's true that humans make mistakes, but we do have the ability to make complex decisions very quickly, in a way that defies simple computer algorithms. I can see this technology operating as a sort of enhanced cruise control, but I don't think we're at the point where you can take a nap while your car gets you from point A to point B and successfully parks itself in an appropriate space, and I'm not convinced we ever will be. We've had autopilot for quite awhile now, but we certainly don't have airplanes that complete an entire trip including takeoff and landing without any need for a human pilot - not in real world conditions.

the difference being, given the same unexpected situation where the computer program reacts incorrectly, it will do so every time until a software update is applied, while people will act correctly at least some of the time.
With people there is hope.

New Renter says

Homeboy says

They do not react well to unexpected situations.

Most people aren't much better

John Bailo says

Google should buy an abandoned suburb, and add like 200 completely driverless cars...

It would be more difficult, and more realistic, to put live drivers in some of the cars, since in routine situations, with few surprises and no cop directing traffic - or mentally ill transient? - people drive less predictably and worse than driverless cars.

Google has already run 300,000 miles worth of testing on real streets, with a live driver in the seat in case of a mishap, but that's too little real-world testing, particularly since there have certainly been software version upgrades during that testing.