Self Driving Cars

50Twuncle

I see that Nissan reckon that they will have a fleet of autonomous / self driving cars on UK roads by 2020 ?
How will they cope with :
Roadworks
Temporary route changes
Other drivers trying to "take them out"
Pieces of wood in the road - which human drivers instinctively avoid because of the possibility of nails
Broken glass
Potholes
etc etc etc....
I for one - will not trust a driverless car - ever !!

Herzlos

They'll probably cope better than your average human driver. Remember that evolution doesn't have to be perfect, just better than the status quo.

deaston

50Twuncle wrote: »

I see that Nissan reckon that they will have a fleet of autonomous / self driving cars on UK roads by 2020 ?
How will they cope with :
Roadworks
Temporary route changes
Other drivers trying to "take them out"
Pieces of wood in the road - which human drivers instinctively avoid because of the possibility of nails
Broken glass
Potholes
etc etc etc....
I for one - will not trust a driverless car - ever !!

Have you ever travelled on the Docklands Light Railway? That's fully autonomous. Or flown abroad? Modern jumbos are largely autonomous.

Nissan's engineers (along with engineers from a number of other companies) are working to create systems that will know how to avoid all the things you mention.

Roadworks might have to be cordoned with cones that communicate with passing autonomous cars. Perhaps they could communicate a diversion. All these are problems that will ultimately be solved.

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Kti-9qsLpc
The Tesla was in "Autopilot" mode and detects that an accident is about to happen so applies the brakes before the accident. No driver could ever do that.

As technology progresses, there'll be areas that will be "autonomous only". I can see a time where, during peak times, the hard shoulder of the M25/M6 etc. can be used by autonomous cars, or London's congestion zone is scrapped and becomes an autonomous-only zone.

And maybe in the not-too-distant future, all non-autonomous vehicles that use the roads will have to be fitted with a type of black box that is able to communicate its position/speed/indication/braking etc. to surrounding autonomous vehicles.

I don't particularly want self-driving cars, but I think this is a technology that is ultimately going to be forced upon us to improve safety and reduce congestion. We'll look back one day and think how mad we were to sit in traffic jams for hours on end.

No more huge empty buses chugging around towns and cities at great expense to councils. You'd just summon a self-driving car which would take you where you want to go and pay the necessary fee. Got something big from Ikea? Pay extra for a self-driving van.

The problems you mentioned are minor and easily solvable. The benefits of self-driving vehicles are enormous.

Aylesbury_Duck

50Twuncle wrote: »

I see that Nissan reckon that they will have a fleet of autonomous / self driving cars on UK roads by 2020 ?
How will they cope with :
Roadworks
Temporary route changes
Other drivers trying to "take them out"
Pieces of wood in the road - which human drivers instinctively avoid because of the possibility of nails
Broken glass
Potholes
etc etc etc....
I for one - will not trust a driverless car - ever !!

Depends on your age. You might never need to, but I don't think it will be too long until they're the norm. I'm in my forties and I fully expect that my future grandchildren will not learn to drive, rather that they'll learn to monitor an autonomous car's systems in the way modern pilots monitor aircraft systems.

All the things you listed are easily overcome by software programming and learning. A basic satnav can already cope with the first two, so how hard do you think it will be to incorporate them into every new car?

Presumably you would have said you'd never trust the internet with your banking or credit card details not so long ago. The world will move on without you.

50Twuncle

But surely - a robot (that's all they are - designed to react to "planned" changes) could never react as well /correctly /predictably) as an experienced human, to a totally / random / unplanned issue - like a car swerving out of the blue towards you - or (as I have already said) a plank of wood, falling off the back of a lorry in front with nails sticking up through it - or broken glass in the road (can a driverless car, even detect these things ?
Or a common problem - we have DEEP potholes appearing overnight, around here !!
What will happen when a driverless car - hits someone and kills them - who will be responsible ?
The driver / the programmer / the victim ?

50Twuncle

deaston wrote: »

Have you ever travelled on the Docklands Light Railway? That's fully autonomous. Or flown abroad? Modern jumbos are largely autonomous.

But the dockland railway is limited by rails and is never even going to meet another train coming head on towards it, (unless something has gone seriously wrong with the control systems !
I don't trust flying either - only done it twice in my life and didn't enjoy it one bit !!

Aylesbury_Duck

50Twuncle wrote: »

But surely - a robot (that's all they are - designed to react to "planned" changes) could never react as well /correctly /predictably) as an experienced human, to a totally / random / unplanned issue - like a car swerving out of the blue towards you - or (as I have already said) a plank of wood, falling off the back of a lorry in front with nails sticking up through it - or broken glass in the road (can a driverless car, even detect these things ?
Or a common problem - we have DEEP potholes appearing overnight, around here !!
What will happen when a driverless car - hits someone and kills them - who will be responsible ?
The driver / the programmer / the victim ?

I think your last point is the biggest hurdle, and the one that will ultimately determine how soon they become widespread. The earlier problems like your planks, glass and potholes, will be relatively easy to program for. As an earlier poster said, the system doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans in terms of success rates and judging by the posts on here from people who've hit potholes, driven into things and so on, the bar is pretty low!

Getting over the liability, accountability and insurance problems will take time and no doubt there'll be some interesting cases and case law to come, but it will happen. Ultimately, if the overall costs of motoring (including insurance) can be shown to reduce with autonomous vehicles, they'll take over cars as we know them.

The world is full of current technology that wasn't foreseen just a few years ago and for much of it, we would have said it wouldn't be plausible/possible/viable, yet it is.

50Twuncle

Aylesbury_Duck wrote: »

I think your last point is the biggest hurdle, and the one that will ultimately determine how soon they become widespread. The earlier problems like your planks, glass and potholes, will be relatively easy to program for. As an earlier poster said, the system doesn't have to be perfect, it just needs to be better than humans in terms of success rates and judging by the posts on here from people who've hit potholes, driven into things and so on, the bar is pretty low!

Getting over the liability, accountability and insurance problems will take time and no doubt there'll be some interesting cases and case law to come, but it will happen. Ultimately, if the overall costs of motoring (including insurance) can be shown to reduce with autonomous vehicles, they'll take over cars as we know them.

The world is full of current technology that wasn't foreseen just a few years ago and for much of it, we would have said it wouldn't be plausible/possible/viable, yet it is.

Does the technology exist to "look 50 or 100 yards ahead" to check whether a lump in the road / change in road surface is safe to drive over at 70mph - or is it best to swerve across another lane to avoid it ....or perhaps break heavily - causing panic in following vehicles
No - so how can Nissan state "driverless cars will be on the road in 3 years time" ?
Conjecture I fear ......
Havoc will happen if they try.

Aylesbury_Duck

50Twuncle wrote: »

Does the technology exist to "look 50 or 100 yards ahead" to check whether a lump in the road / change in road surface is safe to drive over at 70mph - or is it best to swerve across another lane to avoid it ....or perhaps break heavily - causing panic in following vehicles
No - so how can Nissan state "driverless cars will be on the road in 3 years time" ?
Conjecture I fear ......
Havoc will happen if they try.

Yes it does exist and once it's been thoroughly tested it will be rolled out. Much more complicated feats of AI have been overcome in many different applications. What you're asking the system to do is relatively straightforward.

Cash-Strapped.T32

Hell, once you've got cars networked & communicating with each other regarding the conditions ahead & sharing sensor info, how hard would it be to have a car "look" several miles ahead for such hazards, or for simple routing instructions when things get congested...

Stageshoot

The Nissan Leaf Fully Autonomous already copes well with most situations.

Well Worth a watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfRqNAhAe6c