I don't think they have been on the highway yet.
Been on the highway since 2008.
5) could it find it's way out of Boston!!!!
I have a hard time finding my way out of Boston, and I’ve driven there many times. That’s why I take the train when ever possible.
Dagosa, I disagree, the technology is not there, and will not be there for a long time to come.
Part of the technology is there. I’m sure it could easily drive from Boston to LA if there weren’t any other vehicles, people for construction in it’s path. The hardest part the technology has to overcome is other moving objects. It probably can handle the vast majority of moving objects…but it’s the fringe cases that scare me. Things the engineers haven’t thought of yet. That’s why the extensive testing with a backup driver. It may take years to get to where the driverless vehicle can handle 99.99% of all situations. Right now I think it can safely handle well over 90%.
I started at a high tech avionics company in 1966, and worked there for over 31 years. When I started the engineering staff said they had the capacity to make automated airplanes which could take off and land without a pilot.
Someone told joke. Passengers get on a plane in New York. In a few minutes, the loud speaker says, “Welcome aboard! You are on the first completely automated flight to London. Sit back and relax; nothing can go wrong… go wrong… go wrong…go wrong…”
In the 70’s I worked on the first microprocessor based unit in my company. It was an Area Navigation computer for small aircraft, which means business jets (and Israeli fighter planes. Seriously.) The government had area nav, but those computers cost over $100,000 over 40 years ago. Our standard cost was around $3000.
Without area nav airplanes had to fly across the country from one aviation radio station (VOR/Tacan/DME) to another one, which meant the air over those stations could get crowded and dangerous, in addition to making trips longer than necessary.
Area Nav used computerized trigonometry to allow you to set the waypoint not at a radio station, but a given distance and direction from the station. Thus you could plot a trip straight across the US and not have to zigzag back and forth.
You could also program it to take you over your sweetie’s house and blip the motors at her. Heh, heh.
Our units were tested every imaginable test. After many months, and one assumes hundreds of thousands of accumulated miles flown, the Field Service Engineer called me and asked me to set up two waypoints on my simulator (test set) and when it got close to the first waypoint flip the switch which told the display to show distance to waypoint, to time to waypoint then back. When I did the computer soon said it had reached waypoint 1, and was switching over to waypoint #2. But, actually while it said it was now going to waypoint #2, it actually flew straight ahead and would have done so forever until it hit something or ran out of fuel.
Need I say there was panic until all pilots were notified not to touch that switch, and we had to send out new program memory cards to everyone at our expense.
That was a programming error. We also once had a computer which failed in the aircraft very rarely. I fought with that sucker for weeks. A programmer came on the project for a while, and discovered that one instruction from the instruction set did not work, and that instruction was very seldom encountered in operation. In fact, that instruction was used only once in the entire program. When it was encountered, the computer crashed. When airplane computers crash, guess what else is subject to crashing? Heh, heh.
Last tale. My company made landing computers for the Space Shuttles. They were designed in the late 60’s, I think. In any case, they used late 60’s electronics, something like SG24 quad nand gates. (You can make almost any imaginable logic circuit if you pop in enough quad nands.) Safety verification such as you address cost a great fortune, literally millions in Sixties dollars. The very last Shuttle flight used the same 60’s technology as the first one did. Those computers could easily have been built in a single chip but it cost too much for safety verification so they were never changed.
When they stopped making those old chips, the government bought a very large quantity of them and put them in storage to have enough for any imaginable needs.
When we got new techs we would show them the computers and they would laugh and laugh.
Alert readers will note this posting is not about cars, yet it is. The program and control concepts are exactly the same. What we went though, the driverless car makers will also need to go through. And, notice with the cost of safety verification, I am theorizing there will not be a lot of updates once the programs are finalized.
I did enjoy some of the examples given which would really mess up an automated car. Good ones!
We’ve been having a big election month here in Calif so last week I drove to Mt View area for a campaign event, and I passed by one of those Google self driving cars. Freaked me out … seriously, I don’t feel safe around them. I used to go to Mt View all the time b/c there’s some good restaurants there, but no rarely, only when I have to, b/c of the self driving cars on the road. I’m probably just too much of an old fogy on the matter, and I should get with the program, but I don’t feel comfortable when the self driving cars are there on the same road as I am. And there’s plenty of restaurants for lunch in other towns.
Surprised no one has mentioned this, but I think what may hold this technology back, perhaps for decades, is the fact there will be a transition period where the driverless vehicles share the road with driver controlled vehicles.
As others have mentioned, on a highway with nothing but the driverless vehicles, they can communicate with each other to avoid collisions, etc but on roads with a mixture of driven and driverless vehicles? Too much unpredictability from the human drivers. . .
Because, especially in a country like the USA, its not like the government can pass a law. . . alright, December 31 will be the last day you can legally DRIVE your car, Jan 1 ONLY driverless cars allowed on the road. I think this is the kind of issue which would unite conservatives and liberals in terms of government overreach, maybe except for the hard-core treehuggers who expect us all to ride the bus anyways.
Here are a couple of other examples, in the 1970’s the government passed laws which were supposed to convert us all to the metric system by the mid- 1980’s, but speedometers still measure in miles, gas is still sold in gallons, and so on.
Also, the government has been trying to eliminate the paper dollar and foist these dollar coins on us, without success, since 1979. How many times the American public has rejected these dollar coins, but the gov’t keeps stamping 'em out!
@irlandes "Someone told joke. Passengers get on a plane in New York. In a few minutes, the loud speaker says, "Welcome aboard! You are on the first completely automated flight to London. Sit back and relax; nothing can go wrong... go wrong... go wrong...go wrong..."I've heard that joke, and I notice to this day that all commercial flights still have pilots and in most cases, a co-pilot. I suspect it'll be the same way with commercial truck drivers. The technology will be implemented incrementally, making the truck driving job easier and safer, but the driver won't actually be replaced for a long time. I seriously doubt people are ready to accept all manner of heavy loads going up and down the highways with nobody at the wheel.
What about vehicles coming from Canada and Mexico? When the US goes “driveless” will we force our neighbors to do the same so that visitors in cars can’t cause problems in our driving utopia? Or will we close our borders to vehicles with drivers?
I love technology and I embrace it in my vehicle but even the best technology today struggles in the bad winter weather I live in. While traction control and ABS are generally a boon to winter driving there are specific times that traction control can make the car undriveable and must be defeated, such as climbing out of a steep, snowy driveway. If today’s cars cannot even recognize such a simple condition and turn off traction control then I think we are truly a long way off from cars smart enough to deal with conditions that far exceed dry, clear conditions on well paved roads.
@BillRussell
First, I don’t think automated cars were meant to share the roads with un automated cars.
People in general are too erratic. I prefaced the situation saying that special lanes or roads would have to be the concession made by the rest of the public. We aren’t there yet. The technology IS there or at least is available.
Human drivers seldom handle most situations as well as electronics. IMO, it’'s a matter of acceptance and providing special travel lanes. .
Btw, steering by wire may be common place with a mechanical back up at some point in many cars.
"love technology and I embrace it in my vehicle but even the best technology today struggles in the bad winter weather I live in. "
Often, just the opposite is true. It is the technology that saves the butt of many drivers in inclement weather. IMO, the best units for automated cars in the north will be AWD cars with the best traction tires.
No electronics can make up for stupidity which includes winter driving on poor or inappropriate tires. The failure of winter reaction related accidents is sometimes as much the poor judgement preparing for conditions as it is driving in them.
“have a hard time finding my way out of Boston, and I’ve driven there many times. That’s why I take the train when ever possible.”
Ah, the city where traffic signs are just suggestions and traffic can easily move you into a lane you weren’t prepared for. Don’t drive into Boston without a full tank of gas, just in case.
A few more thoughts…
I don’t think human operated cars will ever be gone. The automated ones will have to share the road with human operated ones.
In my opinion, we will not have fully automated cars until we have full AI (artificial intelligence) in them. The decisions that need to be made correctly are too difficult; some are listed above by me and others.
And AI comes with it’s own mass of problems. Note the terminator movies. On another extreme, PC activists might require that an AI car only operate 8 hours a day and be given rest stops.
First, I don't think automated cars were meant to share the roads with un automated cars.
Sure they will…It has to happen. What - they’re going to build special roads just for the automated cars? Then why are they testing the cars on public streets with other cars?
I think eventually that all driverless cars may actually happen, but there’s going to be a transition period where they MUST be on the roads at the same time.
We've been having a big election month here in Calif so last week I drove to Mt View area for a campaign event, and I passed by one of those Google self driving cars. Freaked me out
Never knew they were allowed on public roads without a backup driver yet.
Wish I could sleep while driving blood to distant hospitals in the middle of the night.
Also middle of the day.
Of course I’m not counting on it.
Wouldn’t drone delivery be wonderful? Would also be so much faster.
If it comes to fruition then you’ll be at home sleeping in bed.
@keith Nope, Takata would hate me on their jury.
If Takata were making airbags, and through no fault of their own airbags just happened to kill 12 people whereas many more than that would have died without airbags, then that would be acceptable.
However, Takata made defective airbags through negligence. That changes the equation.
If self-driving cars get in wrecks because it’s not possible to completely perfect self-driving car systems, that’s acceptable as long as the wreck rate is below that achievable by humans.
If self-driving cars get in wrecks because the factory screwed up and made them wrong, that’s not acceptable.
Yeah, I could see special lanes (or roads) on the interstates where you could put the car on “autopilot” and only cars with the autopilot feature would be allowed into those lanes / roads. Heck, we already have those “hov” lanes around a lot of big cities.
@MikeInNH ; "If it comes to fruition then you’ll be at home sleeping in bed. " Or, in an alley sleeping in a cardboard box. No job, no money to pay the mortgage. Sorry, I couldn’t resist the one-liner. I’m not trying to open up that can of worms again.
@BillRussell makes a good point about the AI having its own set of problems. You’re talking about the singularity aren’t you, as in, what if the computers decide to eliminate all the oxygen in the atmosphere because it corrodes their circuits?
I don’t disagree that jobs will be displaced. As I asked earlier - You want the government to start regulating technological advancements???
Special lanes for driverless cars all over this country would cost TRILLIONS.