Don't you hate that crap! I got to drive a BMW 750iL demo. I took it out on a twisty road and it was the most boring thing I have ever driven. My friend who was with me knew how to work the "i drive" and switched all the nanny crap off. Let me tell you, that car felt like it lost half it's weight. I had the tail out in the corners and it just felt so controllable! As much as technology has advanced in the automotive world it's also taken away the thrill of driving! No wonder people want the computer to drive, it's downright boring!
Remember that deer or humans can cross the road in front of you close enough and with a vector that cannot physically be avoided. Period. I've got two deer strikes just like that. One other, I was on the brakes and swerved to the oncoming lane to miss, & the 250 pound 12 point buck reversed course and ran back in front of me. Entire front clip obliterated. '72 Polara with police pursuit package. Hard to find a better handling and braking car in that era.
Mercedes recently was asked if their robot would drive off a cliff to avoid children in the road. Will the robot suicide with the passengers to save others? Mercedes assured it's owners the car would prioritize saving them. Then back tracked when people complained the Mercedes would protect the rich by killing the poor.
There is no P.R. win in these cases. No manufacturer dare announce the protocols written into their robots. It's going to be a darker secret than emissions cheating.
Looked up the victim. She's a homeless drug enthusiast. The person in the driver's seat is allegedly a felon of some sort.
I doubt that anyone driving would have been able to anticipate a random crossing like that.
Years ago, perhaps a decade, in Worcester, MA there was some intoxicated idiot on a bicycle riding on the center divider of I290 in the middle of the night. Here:
Victimless crime? sure until he jumped it right down into a motorcyclist. Both of them killed on impact.
At the time, I traveled that stretch every day and it really cranked up my paranoia hard.
They used to have a fence thing on top so you couldn't get blinded by oncoming headlights.
Knowledge of this and similar crashes have caused me to seek the middle if I am alone on the road.
I have been at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose this week, manning our booth and taking some classes on AI and deep learning. Lots of autonomous cars and trucks. No motorcycles. Yet.
I saw this:
While I think the technology is pretty cool, I just don't see the fun in it. Once the car learns the lines of the track, the computers monitor it's surroundings preventing cars from passing while taking the best lines possible.
I'll keep my analog, three-pedal-manual-transmission toys for fun, thanks. The adaptive cruise in the Grand Cherokee is about as "techie" as I need to get for a vehicle at this point...
That Roborace car is pretty cool from a geeky point of view. It might be interesting to see what will happen with a pack of them going around a race track.
Any idea how big that car is? Hard to tell on their website, not really giving anything to scale it against. I got the feeling it might be about 1/2 of Indy car size.
Back to the original topic... It occurred to me the other day, that if safety feature can be turned off after the car has left the factory, this is going to be an obvious place for tuners to update parameters. Wouldn't you want your auto-drive car to go 5 mph faster than all the others, to save you commute time? Be just slightly more aggressive on when it considers it safe to change lanes to maintain speed? Perhaps a sport mode or an economy mode. All of this will be sold for "Off Road Use Only" of course. I see some interesting legal battles in the future when it all goes wrong.
The only way I'll back a roborace is if they start bolting implements of destruction onto them and have robotwars-race. Might as well watch an AI run a video game.
Here are some creative folks looking to make a fictional series about motorcycles getting banned due to autonomous vehicles. They are some of the same people that made the Sit Stay Ride dogs in sidecars movie.
New video shows Tesla’s autopilot feature failing at the same location where a Tesla driver crashed and died just a couple weeks ago in Mountain View.
quote:
A couple years ago, Tesla CEO Elon Musk told reporters that California needed better lane markings, because it was confusing his cars’ autopilot feature.
That's the beauty of computer bugs. They are capable of doing the wrong thing, far more consistently, and efficiently than a human being ever could.
If I was a Personal injury Lawyer I would be looking on with great anticipation having self driving cars to sue. The deep pockets will insure my kids get to go to a high end collage. The people in the car will probably not be part of the lawsuit after all they were not in control. Auto drive will last till about the 5th mega million dollar settlement then the Insurance companies will say no more.