In addition to the fact that we shouldn't be testing this stuff on public roads, it's baffling to me that anyone wants to use this in it's current state. To me this seems so much more stressful than driving the car myself. Having to maintain constant vigilance of what's going on around me as with normal driving, but with the additional complexity of having to keep second guessing what that car is going to do about it as well seems so much worse to me than just driving the car.
It's really strange to me, that we allow this sort of beta testing on public roads. The car is doing multiple things in this video that is problematic with the driver being slow to react in order to see what it ends up doing.
This should not be something that is allowed on public roads by end-users, but rather on closed tracks by specialists. If they want to test it out on public roads, run the analysis and look at whenever it diverges from the drivers decisionmaking instead.
I'm not sure that really jives with the statement in the article and really just boils down to "people can test what they want just don't drive then" and I don't think that is workable.
This was my first thought when I read the article. There ought to be some test track qualification before allowing a new system to be tested on the public road.
The real problem here is not that the tech is imperfect, I'd actually expect it to be imperfect given it's not been even a decade for this tech. The real problem is that this imperfect tech is on public roads. How do they even get the permission to test drive on public roads?
Weird, unexpected things happen on the road every day. Are we seriously going to potentially risk gridlocking a city (not to mention our personal safety) for the gains of a small handful of private corporation as they test this black-box tech out against us?
With a disabled emergency braking system and an inability to handle a rather common situations like people jaywalking, these cars really shouldn't have been driving in public. That is the kind of stuff that I'd expect to be tested and implemented on private grounds.
Additionally, reducing the number of people in the car to one when the car is pretty much by design not capable of handling emergency situations by itself is quite reckless.
Seems like you are pointing out one obvious challenge to any company that wants to develope such technology.
Maybe it is my european upbringing, but this is not my problem, but the problem of said company. I don't see why they should be allowed to test on public streets.
This does not excite me. Honestly, it amounts to another dummy I have to look out for while driving.
I appreciate the tech and do look forward to a day when it's widely implemented but I'm not near convinced it's ready and lives are on the line here. "Insurance" can't fix that problem.
But... I don't live in California anymore so I can still easily avoid them :D
I would want to see more than a couple of independent tests verifying this is actually safer before it were allowed on roads. I can see the potential benefits but there are enough terrible drivers already without introducing more distractions.
Still not sure how they get away with beta testing safety features on public roads. Or, how drivers who choose to participate get to decide for the rest of us that we must participate too.
The idea that you're going to give a vehicle complete control, but constantly monitor for errors and make a split second decision to manually correct is flawed. As long as this is required, the feature shouldn't be allowed on public roads.
I think it is great that they are starting to think about this, but I find the approach profoundly disappointing. While it is a bit silly in form at the moment, this test is starting in a much more useful direction, IMO:
We all know that there are car accidents every year, and it is no secret that driver inattention is the root cause for a very large percentage of them.
But what can be done about them? The NTSB is focusing almost exclusively on driver monitoring while the driver assistance is turned on.
But what about when its turned off? And more generally, how do these systems compare against driving without such systems at all? Its clear that the current state is far from perfect, but an overly heavy focus only on failure cases will lead to misleading conclusions.
In theory that's a huge problem. In practice we have 1.X billion miles of data and it does not seem to be such a huge deal. Either the systems are already fairly good, or people mostly pay attention.
Granted, I am approaching this from the perspective of a more relaxing driving experience not necessarily from a pure safety standpoint. People spend 20,000+ hours driving in a lifetime making that less stressful is a huge benefit even if they are still stuck in their cars and can't get work done.
The tech is interesting, granted. And I find the overall idea of it quite beguiling from an outlaw/risky/renegade POV. But I can't help but feel it's still massively irresponsible from both a public safety and environmental perspective.
It's one thing to drive your car into a tree in the middle of nowhere at 120mph, quite another if you drive it into someone else obeying the speed limit and going about their day.
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