Cars that drive themselves

If they can get it to do freeway driving, imagine the roadtrips where you could basically sleep while the car drives itself to your destination. Have some kind of alarm for the owner(driver) to wake up and fill up the gas tank every so often.
I imagine that radar technology would need to be improved so it could detect an animal approaching the road half a mile, or more, up the road so it could determine if it should slow down or stop to avoid the animal.

Weren’t we all supposed to be driving flying cars powered by atomic energy by now?

I predict in ten years, we will still be driving cars that would be recognizable today.

Mercedes Benz uses radar to scan ahead and automatically brake if the car senses that an accident is likely. Their cars can,onitor up to 70 parameters in the first 5 minutes behind the wheel, then evaluate your driving patterns and determine if you are losing attention. If it thinks you are drowsy, it will warn you. The MB also monitors blind spots with radar and alerts you if it senses that the lane change you just started will cause an accident. If you start to drift out of the lane, the steering wheel will vibrate to alert you to stay in your lane. MB also uses IR and visible light sensors to monitor the road ahead. At this time, they are used to Chang e headlight intensity (visible sensors) and uses the IR sensors to provide real time views of the road ahead, highlighting people or other animals in the road. It’s like wearing night vision goggles.

This is all quite impressive, and provides many of the building blocks for autonomous operation. All these systems are available today. I am leery of autonomous operation and I doubt that I would buy a Benz just to have them. But “autopilot” might be closer than you think. Fortunately for us, if $100,000+ cars drive themselves, it will take a long time until a $30,000 car will. What bothers me the most is that if the insurance companies believe that if 30,000 lives in the USA Canberra save annually, they might lobby hard to get these systems implemented on all cars. (BTW, I think the million lives lost per year must be world-wide)

Will the effort in that direction possibly result in cars that are driven on city streets but once on expressways they buckle up bumper to bumper to run long distances in the HOV lane at high speed?

As often as my home computer crashes, I wouldn’t even consider a car that drives itself without options for me to completely override the system.

As the law stands now, I can get a DWI sleeping in my car, if I’m in the driver’s seat or I’m idling the car to run the heater. By this standard, “letting the car drive the drunks home” has to fall under the “better than the alternative” credo of “harm reduction”…it’s still an instance of DWI per law.

The real test of the tech isn’t Google cherry-picking the most favorable conditions to operate their wonder…the acid test is how well does it do in a 15-y.o. beater, subject to “breakdown maintenance,” with an owber that buys his inspection sticker with a discreet $50 to his buddy.

Automated or autopilot cars are definitely on the horizon, as jtsanders is discussing about the M-B systems above. At first this is coming about as a luxury for busy people in traffic jams so they can make calls or work on emails. The new S class Benz has the ability to track the car ahead, steering, accelerating, and braking all the way to a complete stop up to a maximum speed of 62 mph. See this article: http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/frankfurt-motor-show-mercedes-benz-flexes-its-s-class-muscles/?_r=0

The longer term thing driving this is accident avoidance. Ironically, automating the automobile will allow for more distractions to be added to the “infotainment” systems in cars. How do you think Google makes most of it’s money - ads - think about if they could drive the car for you while you browse gossip and get ads from company XYZ. Another factor is China. They have very high accident rates compared to other countries due to inexperienced drivers. Automated cars eliminate those risks. This is the market that Google, and others, are spending the R&D $ on.

I imagine that radar technology would need to be improved so it could detect an animal approaching the road half a mile

Radar no!! Optical sensors - Yes!!!

Radar avoidance, it maybe OK for the occasional MB out there, but how well will it work if every car has one, all those signals interfering with each other. I am fully aware of frequency division and digitizing the signals so that each is unique, but at some point, there are only so many frequency channels and the digitized signals overlap on the same channel, there is the risk of “pulse spreading” which makes both radars useless, or causes both cars to put on their brakes for no reason at all.

The FAA has just issued an alert to all pilots to start polishing their manual flying skills. Pilots have been relying on autopilots so much that they are losing their ability to fly the airplane. Its frightening to think the at the pilot up in the cockpit can’t fly the plane any better than the passengers behind him/her.

As the world we live in becomes more and more technologically advanced we become accustomed to and dependent on the conveniences, even to the point of becoming helpless without them. When the Y2K crash was a hot subject an older couple that I knew laughed off the threat. Although they had a newer home their land was the farm they owned in the 30s and they felt sure they could easily put a few hens in the coop, a couple of hogs in the pen and plant enough corn and vegetables to feed themselves with enough extra to sell for coffee and sugar and gasoline. They had lived without electricity on the farm until the late 40s and felt sure they could enjoy returning to the “good ole days.”

Automatic brakes? What could go wrong??

they can have my steering wheel when they pry it from my…

If cars drive themselves, probably fewer accidents. My gps shows road speed limit, will you be able to speed? what if you see someone in your rear view mirror obviously not going to stop at a sign, will you be able to run the sign if safe to do so? You see a missing manhole cover that I doubt any system could detect, can you avoid it by changing lanes quickly without a turn signal?

I would hope that one would be able to override autopilot as you can with cruise control.

The steering wheel will be replaced with an iPad holder and driver inputs to the car will be through the iPad.

Read this:

If Elon Musk says 3 years, assume it is done. His success record is phenomenal. When he says that he is going to do something, it happens, and on the time schedule he releases. This isn’t nearly as complicated as the Falcon launchers at SpaceX (ooh! Rocket Science!). And Nissan is brining it to the masses soon, too. The Google engineer didn’t say that his group would do it, but that it would happen. I think the important thing is to stay up to date and let your elected representatives know what you think. You can be sure that someone will, and they may have a completely different take onit than you and I do.

Look at what you could buy 5 years ago, compared to today. Now we have

  • Self parking
  • In-lane correction
  • Automated cruise control down to 0 mph
  • Automated braking in case of an obstacle in the road, no intervention required

Combine all that with a nav-enabled route guide, and you’re just about there.

One (of several) thing missing: interaction with street signals (stop lights).

Yet, even with all that high tech, I would never, never, ever, trust it to the point of attempting to nap while the computer did the driving.

“Yet, even with all that high tech, I would never, never, ever, trust it to the point of attempting to nap while the computer did the driving.”

Certainly not yet, but in 20 years we might change our minds. And I can see an application for it right now. My FIL can’t drive anywhere he hasn’t been before, and long drives to familiar places are also out of the question. He just doesn’t have the mental capability for it anymore; he’ll be 87 in a month. His first great grandchild was born a couple of weeks ago, an the happy great grandparents would like to see him. I suppose they want to see Mom and Dad, too. It won’t happen until next weekend because we can’t go until then. If he had a car that could drive him places, they could have been there right away. My MIL could handle the drive if she had a license, but she doesn’t. He’s a senior that recognizes his limitations and respects the safety of others. Others that drive when they aren’t capable anymore should have self driving cars too. It is coming too lat for my parents in law, but it might be good for us when we shouldn’t drive anymore.

As a software engineer manager who’s worked in the computer and software engineering field for over 30 years…this type of system better have MULTIPLE backup systems. I’m leery about trusting my life and the life of my family with something like this. Most commercial planes are on auto pilot these days…but a car driving in traffic is several magnitudes more complicated.

And not just hardware backup, but different algorithms to evaluate the continually changing situation and an arbitrator application to decide what to do.