I'd rather have one in the back seat with me! ;)

This is why we won't see fully autonomous cars for a long time, if ever. You will see increased aid and different modes, for instance a "traffic jam mode" that keeps your car creeping along at a preset distance from the car in front. Fully autonomous removes the liability from the driver and puts it on the manufacturer, the first serious accident will end with a lawsuit from the driver, passengers, and everyone in the other car(s).

That's not entirely true. In ideal conditions, yes, but reality is rarely ideal conditions. You are correct that most accidents are attributable to human error.

That is what I am talking about.
Why are not intentional crashes "prohibited" by the machine. That is an easy task.

Wasn't the Air France crash party caused by a plugged pitot that made the autopilot disengage?
So if a software/hardware issue causes a crash does that mean the manufacturer is solely and fully liable?

Even if you have controls, but you are working on your laptop, banging the Gf, sleeping, etc., if it was to pop out of autopilot will the driver have time to react?
Again who's liable?

That applies to the USA...but there are lots of other countries where the software and cars can be developed at lower risk. Some countries are actually encouraging it.

Even a car with a 25 mph upper limit would be very useful. Old people are in no hurry...

Air France 447 was a combination of an iced up pitot tube giving erroneous indications of airspeed and the pilots ignoring many other forms of indication, riding a deep stall at full thrust all the way down from 40,000 ft. Had the pilots reacted correctly it would not of happened, but it's also one of millions of variables that would have to be pre-programmed into a computer to fully automate flight. It's the fundamental issue with all forms of automation, as long as we are defining actions via if/then statements, how do you prepare for every possible combination of variable?

Ok... but AF 447 at 2:10:05 the autopilot disengaged, 3 seconds later auto thrust also disengaged, that part was not pilot error.

Now lets move it over at this exact point in time to an AC.
You are now in 75mph traffic between several transports, on a mountain pass, fully reclined and asleap with the blankets on.....and you hear "Warning auto drive disengaged".

Now in the air you have a lot of room and time to correct mistakes. They failed.
How much time will you have to correct that error in the AC?


Exactly ;)

I think those anonymous cars are cool, with all the badging and stuff removed you can't tell a Mercedes from a kia!


Wait what?

The autopilot disengaged because it encountered an anomaly that it did not know how to deal with. There are a number of other instruments that were fully operable. That accident was pilot error and there was more than enough time to correct it. The airplane was in stable level flight when the icing event occurred and the autopilot kicked off, it took 3:30 minutes to fall from 38,000 ft.

So you didn't read my question, as I was only talking about the first 3 seconds of the event.
Could be AC is not a good acronym for Autonomous Car, sorry.


How much time will you have to correct that error example in the above?
Even simpler question is will you live?

Do you really believe there will be no failures in autonomous vehicles?
I mean they can't make a washing machine, that has a CPU, that lasts longer than a year out of warranty.

The better question - when that happens, who gets sued?

Oh, c'mon now... you know the answer to that - EVERYONE! The manufacturer, the component vendors, the component distributors, the programmers, the guy that paved the road, EVERYONE. If you've never been involved in a personal injury lawsuit let me tell you from personal experience that these guys throw crap at EVERYONE'S wall to see what sticks. It costs you money to just get your name off of the lawsuit when it's obvious that you had absolutely ZERO to do with it and were in no way negligent, liable or had any possible way of having contributed to it.

Our legal system is so wonderful. Tort attorneys are such wonderful human beings...

Meh.... I already asked that question... on page one.
Frankly this might work for cities and highways, but I doubt it for rural areas.

How about a new question...
What's to stop people in older cars to just keep constantly cutting in front of autonomous cars? Like it's not going to hit you, so why not just cut them off?
Human nature historically points that if there is flaw like this, then people will take advantage of it.

For example I can see highways come to a stand still, while a whole line of regular cars stream out of an on-ramp.
Want to change lanes but there's an autonomous car beside you, just give your car a little swerve.

Thats brilliant!

There will be an entire cottage industry that will springg up around self help books videos, apps etc on traffic hacks!

Hey, did you know that if you do THIS they will do THAT?;)

Maybe even easter eggs. If you do donuts around a self driving car it will take the passenger hostage while it heads to an automated car wash :D

^^^^^Some people will do this just for ships and giggles.

I can see kids testing these things, like tossing big foil packs of homemade chaff out rear windows to see what happens.
Hacker/thieves will be seeing if they can gain control of commercial trucks.

The answer is to eliminate the variables on at least major roads. The single biggest variable that would be the easiest to eliminate? Cars driven by people.

Think about it for a minute, if you had an entire highway of networked autonomous vehicles that all obeyed the same laws, you would have a uniform traffic pattern with every vehicle travelling at the same speed and reacting the same way. If a car needs to change lanes it would communicate to the adjacent car which would slow, causing the cars behind to slow accordingly, allowing your car to easily change lanes. The gap in traffic would be efficiently filled at a proper following distance and uniform speed. Essentially you could have a highway full of cars acting like a school of fish. But that will never happen if you have people in the mix.

professional driver in the truck

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So you simply tell the people that all their cars are now illegal and must delivered to the nearest material reassignment center.
How smoothly do you thinK that will go over?

Oh...and BTW your '93 RX-7 and '70 Mustang serve absolutely no purpose and must be delivered to the nearest Material Reassignment Center, no later than 5:00PM today.
Thank you for supporting the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Directive.


;)

Don't kid yourself if you think something like the scenario above isn't possible. Though I suspect that step one would be certain key high traffic urban roads. So I can still drive my RX7 in the countryside between the hours of 6 pm and 6 am. Because it's all about safety!