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Driverless cars are not going anywhere until they can prove themselves 20% superior than the average driver in ALL the following conditions: Dealing with Rain

by maeon3 16y ago

Driverless cars are not going anywhere until they can prove themselves 20% superior than the average driver in ALL the following conditions: Dealing with Rain (visibility and deep water on the road), Hard to see tire eating potholes causing damage, Ice and snow (on road and caking on instruments), Snow accumulation ruts, causing car to move unexpectedly, Evasive driving - cutting across a lawn, (avoiding the pool and coming to rest over the garden gnomes), hurricane winds, hailstorms, ambiguous and contradictory road signs, unmarked roads, interstate highway pileups, white-out snow conditions. I'm pretty sure your going to need pretty strong AI for all this to happen. By then we shouldn't be needing to go to work because everyone on earth can go on vacation and the machines will do everything that needs to be done. AND all this equipment has to be less expensive then hiring someone to drive around on your behalf. Naysaying aside, self driving cars will cause a revolution in how cars are used, the concept of "owning a car" will disappear and then single passenger cars will fill the roads instead of 4 door seudans/SUV's.

michaelbuckbee 16y ago
I think your 20% figure might be low, but that doesn't mean that we won't see specific applications for autonomous cars earlier. Autonomy is going to creep into autos slowly, things like: anti-lock brakes, adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance are all small pieces of an "autonomous" automobile.
- zachrose 16y ago
  A car dealer at the Ford dealership told me Ford is demoing cars that parallel park themselves.
  - nzmsv 16y ago
    Lexus has had automatic parallel parking for a few years now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Parking_Assist_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Parking_Assist_Syst...
sorbus 16y ago
Interestingly enough, a car which simply refuses to drive in hurricanes, hailstorms, white-out snow, and so forth would be rather more than 20% superior to the average driver. So that's easily dealt with - if insufficient sensory data is available, either hand control over to the driver or, if possible, pull to the side of the road. The average driver likely does really horrible in large crashes and pileups, so merely the lowered reaction time might allow a huge improvement there (humans take a really long time to react, compared to computers). The average driver doesn't need to do evasive driving (as well as likely being horrible at it), so that's an unnecessary criteria. Similarly with tire eating potholes; even a tiny improvement would meet the 20% requirement you propose. Ambiguous/contradictory road signs and unmarked roads are a navigation problem; given a sufficiently accurate database, as is likely to be present in most cities, they would be irrelevant (I expect that initial roll-out of driverless cars would occur in cities, where most traffic would be low-speed and highly structured. I may be wrong). Unexpected car movements (due to snow, mud, or whatever else) I would agree to be fair things that need to be targeted, but I very much disagree with strong AI being needed for all of this. However, it's probably going to be quite a long while until the equipment is less expensive than hiring someone else to drive (which is a barrier for some group behaviors and sharing of data between cars). On the other hand, that's not necessarily a consideration which people factor in when buying extremely expensive cars.
- joe_the_user 16y ago
  car which simply refuses to drive in hurricanes, hailstorms, white-out snow... While admitted these conditions can sometime be anticipated, I think the point is that sometimes these conditions cannot be anticipated. You experience a sudden white-out a minute after a snow storm starts. What do you do? Breaking immediately is not the answer! (thus, the cars will need to drive...)
  - SoftwareMaven 16y ago
    White-out conditions are much easier to see through with radar than with visible light. I think the computer will easily top us on that one.
  - 16y ago
orangecat 16y ago
For most of those conditions, safely pulling off the road and telling the human to take over would be satisfactory.
frazerb 16y ago
There will doubtless be lots of peripheral benefits from this piece of research. But private vehicles being automatically driven on the road ? Is Ford/Audi/Chrysler going to swallow the liability implications ? Look how much they get burnt by questionable brake cables....
HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago
Not really; to be useful it doesn't have to do everything all at once. I'm not in the market for a new car, but if I were, and there was one available that could drive itself in good weather only, on an expressway in reasonably good condition, then it would be worth a small premium. Most of my driving is on the interstate or other expressway in relatively little traffic. A car that could handle this would make the daily commute, or weekend visits to friends that live 3 hours away a lot more pleasant. On the other hand, I could care less about automatically driving in the city, since I don't live there and go very rarely.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
Gormo 16y ago
An automated driving system also has a lot more potential sensory inputs than eyes and ears. 360-by-360-degree cameras, radar, IR, etc, which might be able to see through rain, snow, hail, etc. just fine. Unmarked roads, bad traffic patterns, and routing problems are things we already rely on maps/GPS data for anyway. This system can look at these and get real-time updates without taking its 'eyes' off the road.

by maeon3 16y ago

michaelbuckbee 16y ago

I think your 20% figure might be low, but that doesn't mean that we won't see specific applications for autonomous cars earlier. Autonomy is going to creep into autos slowly, things like: anti-lock brakes, adaptive cruise control and collision avoidance are all small pieces of an "autonomous" automobile.

zachrose 16y ago
A car dealer at the Ford dealership told me Ford is demoing cars that parallel park themselves.
- nzmsv 16y ago
  Lexus has had automatic parallel parking for a few years now. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Parking_Assist_System http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_Parking_Assist_Syst...

sorbus 16y ago

Interestingly enough, a car which simply refuses to drive in hurricanes, hailstorms, white-out snow, and so forth would be rather more than 20% superior to the average driver. So that's easily dealt with - if insufficient sensory data is available, either hand control over to the driver or, if possible, pull to the side of the road. The average driver likely does really horrible in large crashes and pileups, so merely the lowered reaction time might allow a huge improvement there (humans take a really long time to react, compared to computers). The average driver doesn't need to do evasive driving (as well as likely being horrible at it), so that's an unnecessary criteria. Similarly with tire eating potholes; even a tiny improvement would meet the 20% requirement you propose. Ambiguous/contradictory road signs and unmarked roads are a navigation problem; given a sufficiently accurate database, as is likely to be present in most cities, they would be irrelevant (I expect that initial roll-out of driverless cars would occur in cities, where most traffic would be low-speed and highly structured. I may be wrong). Unexpected car movements (due to snow, mud, or whatever else) I would agree to be fair things that need to be targeted, but I very much disagree with strong AI being needed for all of this. However, it's probably going to be quite a long while until the equipment is less expensive than hiring someone else to drive (which is a barrier for some group behaviors and sharing of data between cars). On the other hand, that's not necessarily a consideration which people factor in when buying extremely expensive cars.

joe_the_user 16y ago
car which simply refuses to drive in hurricanes, hailstorms, white-out snow... While admitted these conditions can sometime be anticipated, I think the point is that sometimes these conditions cannot be anticipated. You experience a sudden white-out a minute after a snow storm starts. What do you do? Breaking immediately is not the answer! (thus, the cars will need to drive...)
- SoftwareMaven 16y ago
  White-out conditions are much easier to see through with radar than with visible light. I think the computer will easily top us on that one.
- 16y ago

orangecat 16y ago

For most of those conditions, safely pulling off the road and telling the human to take over would be satisfactory.

frazerb 16y ago

There will doubtless be lots of peripheral benefits from this piece of research. But private vehicles being automatically driven on the road ? Is Ford/Audi/Chrysler going to swallow the liability implications ? Look how much they get burnt by questionable brake cables....

HeyLaughingBoy 16y ago

Not really; to be useful it doesn't have to do everything all at once. I'm not in the market for a new car, but if I were, and there was one available that could drive itself in good weather only, on an expressway in reasonably good condition, then it would be worth a small premium. Most of my driving is on the interstate or other expressway in relatively little traffic. A car that could handle this would make the daily commute, or weekend visits to friends that live 3 hours away a lot more pleasant. On the other hand, I could care less about automatically driving in the city, since I don't live there and go very rarely.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

Gormo 16y ago

An automated driving system also has a lot more potential sensory inputs than eyes and ears. 360-by-360-degree cameras, radar, IR, etc, which might be able to see through rain, snow, hail, etc. just fine. Unmarked roads, bad traffic patterns, and routing problems are things we already rely on maps/GPS data for anyway. This system can look at these and get real-time updates without taking its 'eyes' off the road.