Fully automated vehicles - 'not in our lifetime'?

GreatApe

BobQ wrote: »

You may also be missing the point. The saving in "driver costs" cannot be viewed in isolation. It will be accompanied by increased legal and regulatory costs.

The cost of a highly automated plane is more than the pilot, in includes training and pilot assessment, the testing of the technology that enables a plane to fly with such limited pilot intervention and a host of regulatory requirements.

A driven car undergoes a safety check once in a year and the driver once in a lifetime, but how many regulatory checks will a driverless vehicle need to undergo? Will the insurance costs be the same? Will maintenance costs be higher? Who will refuel the vehicles? What happens if the vehicle fails to comply with its specification?

These problems will be solved but there is more to any transport solution than the hourly rate of the driver.

The public accept honest mistakes by car drivers even if they do involve some penalties. But the reliability of driverless cars will take years to achieve and it will only take a few accidents for the public to demand more regulatory checks.

while regulators get a bad reputation they are not idiots

it would only take one city in the whole world to go driverless and show the death and destruction rate is down for the rest to accept it. Yes there will be regulation but not to the point where cities and countries make themselves noncompetitive with the rest of the world

GreatApe

MoneyMoney wrote: »

I heard a car exec talking about this and one of his main concerns was bullying. If you pull out in front of an AI car it will stop 100% of the time, it won't shout or drive behind you, it will politely let you go every time. Human drivers will simply bully the hell out of AI cars, you will be sitting in the back of your AI taxi waiting to be let go all day..

Dangrous driving is a criminal offense so the AI bot sends the footage to the regulators who fine you and give you points on your licence. That will stop the human idiots

GreatApe

BobQ wrote: »

AI can indeed learn from humans and get better, but the training required to reach an optimal performance is far from certain and the notion of getting exponentially better is very doubtful.

When the AI exceeds the human capability how will it get twice the capability? By learning from other machines? The real test of AI is whether the trained capability can deal with the unexpected. So for example you can probably train AI to deal with a slow puncture, but can it get the passengers to a place of safety if the tyre blows at speed? Or a drone landing in front of it? Sounds like a fascinating business to be working in!

These AI cars do not need to be perfect, even if they kill 1 million people per year...that is still 300,000 less than human drivers kill so it would still be very worthwhile having

You are also assuming that in extreme cases humans act rationally which is completely wrong. A human will panic if a cat runs into the road the human has no real time to understand what has just happened or how to deal with it they just manically swing right or left and may hit someone else or hurt themselves in the process. Not only will the AI car avoid these situations much more frequently and break faster but it would be able to respond better. Does that mean it will be perfect all the time? No of course not but will it be better than humans? Sure

sevenhills

HAMISH_MCTAVISH wrote: »

He said that no matter how good the technology, and no matter how good the programming, during the multiple decades where automated cars share the roads with non-automated vehicles or people - at some point an automated car will be forced to make a decision that has no good outcomes.

:eek:

If a driver has a car acident, its human error and the drivers car insurance pays out, if its an automated car - then the fault lies with the manufactuer. So would a vehicle manufactuer be saddled with millions of acident claims?