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It kind of reeks of FUD from a cranky old person though. America has an extremely strong car culture. I don't see the constituency supporting measures that outl

It kind of reeks of FUD from a cranky old person though. America has an extremely strong car culture. I don't see the constituency supporting measures that outlaw human-driven vehicles within 20 years. Forcing people to turn in their cars? It's just not gonna happen. It will probably take 40+ years after they've stopped producing vehicles with steering wheels before that even becomes feasible. And then there will be exemptions, the date will get pushed back a few times, etc etc. Another thing that he and a lot of comments about self-driving cars seem to miss is the roughly 20% of the population that live in rural areas. Penetration in these areas will lag far behind city centers, and the large area to cover would make enforcement of a human-driving ban impractical.

Animats 9y ago
Having had an entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, I can say that rural is easier than urban. Most of the really hard problems in self-driving involve other road users. Driving on an empty road isn't that tough. You need full ground profiling, which many of the urban vehicles now don't have. (When we did our vehicle, we had way too much of the wrong stuff. We were worrying about having to navigate a field of boulders. Getting high-centered on rugged roads. Nah. In 2005, all you had to do was stay on the road. The 2004 course was actually harder, and nobody made it past 7 miles. CMU's team tried to do 2004 by manual mapping. They had people with workstations and aerial photographs manually plotting a precise route. The vehicle itself was almost blind. This was the result.[1] "At mile 7.4, on switchbacks in a mountainous section, vehicle went off course, got caught on a berm and rubber on the front wheels caught fire, which was quickly extinguished. Vehicle was command-disabled." -- DARPA" They plowed right into a sheet metal fence, a clearly visible obstacle. Why hadn't the planners, who had paid for custom aerial photos, known about the fence? Because DARPA didn't want a dumb vehicle that ran on a preplanned track. The officer in charge of the event, a USMC Colonel, had some men out the night before the event placing obstacles, just so that trick wouldn't work. Anyway, off-road self-driving on bad roads is a solved problem now. Oskosh sells a system to the military for that. They were thinking that the solution to guerrilla IED attacks on convoys was one armored vehicle controlling a convoy of self-driving soft-skinned vehicles. Works, but too much trouble to set up in a combat zone.) [1] http://overbot.com/grandchallenge/images/race2004/cmucrash.jpg http://overbot.com/grandchallenge/images/race2004/cmucrash.j...

Animats 9y ago

Having had an entry in the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2005, I can say that rural is easier than urban. Most of the really hard problems in self-driving involve other road users. Driving on an empty road isn't that tough. You need full ground profiling, which many of the urban vehicles now don't have. (When we did our vehicle, we had way too much of the wrong stuff. We were worrying about having to navigate a field of boulders. Getting high-centered on rugged roads. Nah. In 2005, all you had to do was stay on the road. The 2004 course was actually harder, and nobody made it past 7 miles. CMU's team tried to do 2004 by manual mapping. They had people with workstations and aerial photographs manually plotting a precise route. The vehicle itself was almost blind. This was the result.[1] "At mile 7.4, on switchbacks in a mountainous section, vehicle went off course, got caught on a berm and rubber on the front wheels caught fire, which was quickly extinguished. Vehicle was command-disabled." -- DARPA" They plowed right into a sheet metal fence, a clearly visible obstacle. Why hadn't the planners, who had paid for custom aerial photos, known about the fence? Because DARPA didn't want a dumb vehicle that ran on a preplanned track. The officer in charge of the event, a USMC Colonel, had some men out the night before the event placing obstacles, just so that trick wouldn't work. Anyway, off-road self-driving on bad roads is a solved problem now. Oskosh sells a system to the military for that. They were thinking that the solution to guerrilla IED attacks on convoys was one armored vehicle controlling a convoy of self-driving soft-skinned vehicles. Works, but too much trouble to set up in a combat zone.) [1] http://overbot.com/grandchallenge/images/race2004/cmucrash.jpg http://overbot.com/grandchallenge/images/race2004/cmucrash.j...