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Have Self-Driving Cars Arrived Yet?

• tuatoru 5y ago
  > Safety and convenience are both the top priorities of an autonomous vehicle’s design. By drastically reducing or eliminating human error on the road, the chances of accidents and crashes are significantly reduced. The safety argument for autonomous vehicles is a crock. Safety is at bottom about stopping without harming people. There exist lots of ADASes ("advanced driver assistance systems") that can be and are being fitted to cars that are not self driving that do this job of stopping without harm, and keeping vehicles stable so there isn't an "uncontrolled sudden stop" event. > Fatigue and getting distracted are some things machines and algorithms won’t have to deal with. With less-than-total ability to control vehicles in all situations, making it easier for fatigued or otherwise hampered people to be nominally in control of a vehicle also decreases overall safety. Self driving that likes to hand control back to a human[1] when events get difficult, is less safe than a vehicle that requires the human-in-nominal-control be engaged all the time, even if she isn't fatigued or distracted. This was discovered with passenger planes when "autoland" systems were brought in in the 1990s. They were fairly quickly pulled out and replaced with head-up displays of key information to the pilots.[2] Honest advocates of self driving would admit that they want it for its convenience. 1. Whether or not that human is in the vehicle. 2. source: Our Robots, Ourselves, David Mindell. Mindell was (is?) a practising engineer involved with underwater autonomous vehicle design and operation.