-PJ
Driverless cars are just a way for the government to get their hands on more data about your travels. Then, they can combine it with the existing tech to shut down vehicles remotely and control your every movement.
There’s only one type of self-driving car that works.
It uses flanged wheels and steel rails.
Here’s what I want to know about self-driving cars:
Will they ever be so safe that they’re allowed to drive faster than regular cars?
I don’t mean that they’ll drive at 100 MPH instead of 65 MPH. I mean whether they’ll be able to ignore red lights, drive 65 MPH down a 40 MPH road, maintain 65 MPH at levels of congestion that force human drivers to drop to 15 MPH.
Think about it: The reason humans have to slow down to 15 MPH in traffic is because we don’t have the reaction time to break when our cars have to be packed so closely together, and it also takes a certain distance to break. But breaking distances drop very quickly as speed drops; the extreme slowdowns come when humans have to respond to people merging, cars ahead of them breaking without warning, etc. If one car knew to break the instant the car in front of it began to break, and how fast it was breaking, it could travel just a few feet behind its bumper. Even if it took 50 feet to stop, it could travel just 20 feet behind the car in front of it, as long as the car in front of it didn’t stop in LESS than 30 feet.
THAT sort of technology doesn’t require simply sensing the affects of what the car ahead is doing. It would require instantaneous, two-way communication between cars.
But the effects of traffic would be reduced far more than the mere reduction in stopping distance; cars react to traffic by SLOWING down, which means fewer cars are going past a certain point in a unit of time. Only because breaking distance decreases exponentially can you EVER slow down enough to allow more traffic past a point in a given timeframe by slowing down. Reducing stopping distance would make slowing down much more effective, so you’d need to slow down much less.
No one drives on ice
Does the self-driving car have a horn that blows “allahu akbar” after it hits a pedestrian?
Self Driving cars rely on complex computer programming. Complex computer programs are imperfect and all have “bugs”. Self Driving cars rely on sensors which will have to be scrupulously maintained. Self Driving cars performance will degrade under less than ideal weather conditions.
Self Driving cars will create social problems. People who drive cars and trucks for a living will be put out of work. Initially Self Driving cars will be expensive and only the rich will be able to afford them. They will create traffic congestion because they will drive slower because they cannot effectively anticipate human behavior. For this same reason they will cause accidents and injuries and fatalities. There will be resisted by the public at large.
Any object weighing more than a ton and traveling at speeds about 30MPH is dangerous. The question is are they more or less dangerous than human drivers. And so far the miles per fatality say less.
How do you face someone in court if you hit or are hit by one?
Maybe self driving cars might work on cross country trips with designated lanes on freeways, but in cities, traffic and in bad weather conditions I wouldn’t trust them
Ban Pedestrians!
Yes they are. Next question.
Yes. The vehicle software can only decide what it’s sensors detect. As a sensor systems engineer, the sensors are not absolute in their ability to detect everything around the vehicle and determine what’s what.
We live in a home that stays in the high 60’s/low 70’s at night and 63 at night with clean air filtered through metal air filters, cleaned on a schedule or if our Nest systems tell us.
Besides the clean and controlled indoor environment, we use Comcast Business Internet which is more reliable than any internet we have ever used.
The modems and wifi enhancers are connected to separate battery backup systems in case there is a power failure.
In spite of the above, it is a rare day when one or more of our smartphones, Chromebooks, Kindle and smart tv works properly without a failure, often unexplained.
Most of these failures are short in time and handle themselves. What happens in a driver less vehicle when these problems happen while driving themselves down the road.
Every once each week, we may to have reboot the entire system or a smart phone, Chromebook, Smart TV or Kindle.
Sometimes after a couple of minutes of not working the systems reboot themselves and are working. The good news, we were not driving a vehicle with these outages.
If these problems happen in controlled environments in our home, what the heck happens in a vehicle exposed 24/7 to outside temps, dust, road grime and other crud on the road or parked in a parking lot or our driveways.
A vehicle dependent on all systems working perfectly to be a safe and driver less vehicle.
We live on a cul de sac with some fairly well off neighbors who buy or lease a new car every couple years. It is a rare week not to see the AAA truck going up the hill to start one of these new computer loaded vehicles or to tow it to a garage.
My wife said that she is not trading in her 14 year old Lexus for a computer driven vehicle. I will keep my Ridge line, with even less years and mileage and less computers.
One of our relatives got an early inheritance of an OJ Simpson Bronco. He will never trade his computer less vehicle. He sees the same thing re AAA trucks on his street and in their corporate parking lots with basically new vehicles not starting.
We already have enough cars around here that are practically self-driving while the operator texts, puts on makeup, eats breakfast, has a dog in their lap, talks on phone, fiddles with gps, takes selfies, etc etc.
Robot driver in crash
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/FC_vmHZw03k/maxresdefault.jpg
I can imagine that a highway full of self-driving cars is very safe.
But however safe they are, no one wants to be in one on the day it wrecks and wishing someone had been at a wheel to avoid the avoidable.
