
The Annoying Thing About Self-Driving Cars: They Obey the Speed Limit - pwg
http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/07/13/eric_schmidt_on_self_driving_cars_biggest_problem_they_obey_speed_limits.html
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w1ntermute
Hopefully within the next 30 years or so, we will gradually phase out driver's
licenses. Much like how smoking was ubiquitous in the 50s & 60s, but as we as
a society came to realize its grave dangers, it gradually became illegal in
many public places.

The idea that we allow almost anyone 16 or older to control several thousand
pounds of metal that can travel at high speeds really is quite absurd when you
think about it. There are more than 30,000 deaths every year due to car
accidents, and hundreds of thousands more injuries.

It's amazing how screwed up our society's priorities are. That's ten 9/11's
worth of deaths every year from car accidents. By the time the wars in
Afghanistan and Iraq have ended, we'll have spent around $4 trillion on them
altogether[0]. If even 1/100th of that had been redirected to research on
self-driving car technology, we might have already saved tens of thousands of
lives.

0: [http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/29/us-usa-war-
idUSTRE...](http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/29/us-usa-war-
idUSTRE75S25320110629)

~~~
bborud
Yes and we will have flying cars.

Except we won't. Because flying cars is called "aviation" and aviation brings
new dimensions of "hard" in addition to a third spatial dimension. And truly
self driving cars that require no dynamic input from humans at any time is
something we'll get asymptotically closer to, but will never quite achieve
except in relatively specialized cases.

This is what I believe. I can't prove it, but it is what my gut feeling tells
me.

And why would you want to? Of course, for typical highways it is obvious that
it would probably be both faster and safer to have some sort of mandatory
cooperative autonomous mode, but even that will be hard to achieve. I've met
some of the people who work on developing and standardizing certain inter-car
protocols to solve these types of problems. Most of the people I've met are
neither brilliant nor capable. For the most part they illustrate to me a) how
hard the problem is at scale (ie. get all manufacturers onboard) b) there will
be a lot of idiots involved in this which means it'll take an _awful_ lot of
time to even come up with even baseline systems for proper crash-avoidance --
nevermind the real-time dynamic systems for controlling masses of fast-moving
vehicles.

~~~
skyhook_mockups
_Yes and we will have flying cars._

The flying cars argument is silly. Yes it was a fanciful 1950s dream that
never made it to reality... however autonomous flight is real.. a good portion
of commercial air flight is done under autopilot (including landings).

We never even got close to flying car tech... but saying that _truly self
driving cars that require no dynamic input from humans at any time is
something we'll get asymptotically closer to, but will never quite achieve_ is
silly, we're already very close to this reality. I'd be very surprised if in
10 years we don't have a completely computer controlled car.

~~~
bborud
Why is it silly? Consider this: we've had autopilots for many, may years. But
even very limited gadgetry such as automatic parking is a very recent
development in cars. And that is an almost trivial scenario.

(The reason the flying car won't be a reality is that all of those (auto-
piloted) air planes do in fact have a crew of 1-3 highly qualified
professionals -- and the flying cars would be piloted by the sort of people
who can't figure out roundabouts. Also, the density of planes is extremely low
compared to what would be the situation if flying cars were commonplace).

Also, planes have maintainance regimes that are vastly different from your
car. I bet that you did not go through a checklist when you got into your car
this morning, nor when you parked it. You probably do not have the faintest
idea how the fluids are doing. You probably don't even know if all the
external lights work. It is highly unlikely that you even performed the most
rudimentary tests of all before getting into your car: walking around it and
kicking the tyres. There was no qualified and certified mechanic (for your
specific model) to go over your car prior to setting off.

~~~
skyhook_mockups
All of this is true.. however you categorically stated that we _"will never
quite achieve"_ totally autonomous cars. To me that sounds like a silly
statement especially when compared to flying cars (a totally different class
of problem).

The fact is that we're very quickly edging towards fully computer controlled
cars. You have to have a truly limited imagination to think we will _never_
get there.

The argument about airplane maintenance also doesn't hold water. Result of a
malfunctioning plane: plunge 30,000ft and hundreds dead. Result of a
malfunctioning car: coast to a gentle stop. See any difference?

~~~
bborud
I was being imprecise. Sorry about that. I don't think that we will see
totally autonomous cars _in_our_lifetime. "Never" is not a useful timescale.

    
    
      You have to have a truly limited imagination to think we
      will never get there.
    

40 years ago people did the same sorts of extrapolations on air-travel and
figured that 15-20 years later all commercial air travel would be supersonic.
And why wouldn't they? Orville Wright was still alive when the first
supersonic flight took place. We went from not being able to fly heavier-than-
air machines to breaking the sound barrier in 43 years. But of course, that
didn't happen.

And in just the past few years we've gone backwards. There is currently no
supersonic passenger jet in service.

A lot of domains appear to exhibit the same asymptotic behavior. Space travel,
medicine, AI etc. Domains where initial speed causes undue optimism and where
we later suffer regressions. (No regressions in medicine you say? Well, how
about the crazy anti-vaccination people and the re-emergence of diseases that
were practically eradicated?)

I build stuff, I program stuff, I occasionally build and race cars. I don't
think my skepticism stems from _lack_ of imagination -- I think it has more to
do with an abundance of imagination.

    
    
      The argument about airplane maintenance also doesn't hold water. Result of a
      malfunctioning plane: plunge 30,000ft and hundreds dead. Result of a
      malfunctioning car: coast to a gentle stop. See any difference?
    

I'm sorry, but that is pure nonsense and many, many, many people pay the
ultimate price to prove you wrong every day.

~~~
skyhook_mockups
_I don't think that we will see totally autonomous cars _in_our_lifetime_

Now you're moving the goalposts to suit your argument.

Supersonic flight was abandoned because it is expensive and prohibitively
noisy. Will some set of obstacles also arise to stymie autonomous vehicles?
Maybe, but we wont know till we try.

The regression in medicine is due to pure stupidity. Will the same or similar
type of stupidity raise its head to block self-driven cars? Again the answer
is maybe. Maybe not. We wont know till we've tried.

 _many, many, many people pay the ultimate price to prove you wrong every day_

You misunderstood what I said. My point was that if a computer controlled
car's computer fails it can be made to fail-safe. Shut down and coast to a
stop. The same cant be said for planes.

Of course we will have scenarios of computers being mis-programmed and causing
death. The point being that once a bug is found and eliminated it wont
reoccur. Not to mention that a human will never drive as well or recover from
trouble (such as a fishtail) as well as a computer. Our interfaces are simply
too slow, clumsy, prone to fatigue, prone to mis judgement due to adrenaline
etc. the list goes on.

I get what you're saying about optimistic extrapolation being a trap... but we
don't have to extrapolate far from where we are today. The google self driven
cars have already driven tens of thousands of miles with the only recorded
accident occurring when the vehicle was under human control.

Not only that but Nevada has already licensed the cars for testing on its
roads. Now you can argue that the testing is not 100% authentic. From what I
understand the routes are pre-programmed and 2 occupants must be in the car at
all times. But to say that this tech wont go anywhere for the next 50-60 years
(however long you intend to live :) ) ... seems to lack imagination.

This isn't everyone using personal jet-packs or interstellar travel we're
talking about here.

~~~
bborud
> You misunderstood what I said. My point was that if a > computer controlled
> car's computer fails it can be made to > fail-safe. Shut down and coast to a
> stop. The same cant be > said for planes.

Just because you are at ground-level you are not safe if you lose control of
the vehicle.

> The point being that once a bug is found and eliminated it > wont reoccur.

We already have a software industry and we know that this doesn't happen: bugs
do not occur only once and then get eliminated forever. There are people
making a living writing books about mistakes that people repeat over and over
in software.

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anusinha
This isn't very smart.

Most delays and jams and other various issues drivers deal with are a result
of human error. Suppose a driver on a highway slows down because {they see
something interesting, their kid acts up, life happens}. This makes the car
immediately behind them slow down. And the car behind that slows down. It's
been shown that this forms a wave that propagates backwards at 12 mph or so.
The fact is, this delay is caused by a human mistake/issue.

In a world in which every car drives "optimally", or at least without many of
the human error mistakes that currently are made, many traffic jams will be a
thing of the past. Many issues will cease to exist any any issues that do
exist will be ameliorated and fixed by a machine that can do it better than
most humans (or at least, the average joe) can. Perhaps one will be able to
drive at the speed limit the entire distance from source to sink if the
traffic grid is integrated into the network.

The transition to the post-driver road, however, will be difficult.

~~~
SwellJoe
There was a fun blog post several years ago, which has stuck with me ever
since, and I think about it every time I'm stuck in a traffic jam. It was a
one-man experiment in "fixing" traffic jams, by willfully slowing to the point
where he no longer had to stop/start and could maintain a steady speed. He
found that traffic behind him would "unkink", making the drive for everyone
behind him a bit more pleasant/safe/consistent. He also found that many
drivers would become angry at him, because he was going slower than the cars
around him...but the cars around him were speeding up only to have to stop
soon after to wait for traffic. Many people are, frankly, too stupid to be in
control of a couple thousand pounds of rolling death...but, it'll be a
challenge to get people to give up that control.

Hopefully, the ability to read, play games, watch TV, etc. while being driven
to work will be sufficient to make people willing to let their smart cars take
over the roads. As you note, traffic jams will become a thing of the past in
most cases; self-driving cars can also factor in traffic data, weather
information, etc. in ways that a human driver probably can't
easily/effectively do, making them safer and more efficient in a lot of other
regards.

~~~
SlipperySlope
That's right. What you describe has been automated as an adaptive cruise
control.

Almost a decade ago, traffic studies demonstrated that if only 20% of cars
used adaptive cruise control, then traffic jams would be greatly diminished at
then-peak carrying capacity. Or more cars could be carried on a particular
road before traffic jams occurred.

Adaptive Cruise Control is currently a feature on many luxury cars, but will
trickle down to mass market cars during the transition to driverless vehicles.

------
ChuckMcM
While they may obey the speed limit, they will also drive in the right lane so
it's OK. What is annoying are people blocking passing lanes which results in
aggressive drivers making less than good decisions about maneuvering around
the blockage.

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noonespecial
Its not really important what speed driverless cars actually settle on. What
matters is that they are consistent. The most dangerous thing about human
drivers is that they are erratic.

I would not be at all surprised in the coming world of robo-cars to find that
humans who still wanted to drive themselves will need special licensing and
training, much like pilots of today, if nothing more than to learn to be
predictable.

~~~
hyperbovine
Actually it is very important from a fuel economy perspective. Air resistance
is quadratic in velocity, so a car that gets 35mpg at 65mph will get, say,
20mpg going 85. On the other hand, the possibility of convoy driving
(<http://phys.org/news/2011-05-drivers.html>) means you might be able to have
your cake and eat it too: rapid travel with little efficiency loss from wind
resistance.

~~~
mc32
I'm not sure I'd feel safe about convoy driving unless there were some kind of
way to manage emergencies (like a tire blowout, engine problem, deer) which
under normal circumstances isn't very dangerous because you have a second or
two to manoeuver. But in a close convoy system, there is little room for error
and even an automated system may be unable to compensate for the emergency in
a timely fashion thus resulting in a chain reaction crash --the kind we see in
foggy conditions with human drivers.

~~~
niketdesai
One option to reduce convoy risk is have cars attach to one another such that
no single car can cause a failure in the overall system (similar to trains).

We shouldn't think of automated cars as independent as we do. They are in fact
simply compartments.

With that in mind, imagine cars attaching to each other to form trains and
break apart as they begin to reach the desired destination.

This also has impacts on fuel efficiency since drag can be reduced across the
entire system.

(Cars don't have to be the same model, they just need a formalized attachment
system on the front / rear).

~~~
mc32
Yeah, I think buffers (like in trains) could be an option, maybe magnetic. If
it requires physical contact, though, that would mean a whole train of cars
(maybe cars would be grouped into sets of ten or so?) would have to speed up
and down as cars joined and left the caravan --I know we do this in everyday
driving, but it's "softer".

[edit, just thinking, if we knew destination in advance, the first car would
be the one going furthest and the last car in the group going the shortest so
that the interruption would be inconsequential]

Back to accidents, there will the edge cases. And because it's programmed (and
not a human "accident") people might find more fault in the system than they
would in a human. So even though accidents and deaths would/could be reduced
considerably, those that would occur might be seen as more negligent than
accident. Just thinking out loud.

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Ianworld
I believe Google has publicly said a few things that are slightly contrary to
this. Their vehicles are allowed to exceed the speed limit by 5%-10% in order
to keep pace with a car in front of them. They do this because currently there
are few things as reliable in terms of road information as another car being
driven by a human. So the code makes an exception basically saying that its
better to break the speed limit in order to be able to do the lazy thing and
follow another car.

Having worked on an autonomous car and competed in the Urban Challenge I can
attest to the safety of these vehicles. They truly can navigate obstacles that
are withing 2-3 inches of the car reliably and confidently. The other
interesting thing is that highways are in many ways one of the easiest types
of road to drive on. Highway driving while fast, is very structured. There are
relatively few rules to follow and they are rarely broken. For this reason I
believe highways will be the initial realm of autonomous vehicles and that
they will be allowed to drive at higher speeds(perhaps under the guise of
human control of the speed in order to shift the blame to a human party.)

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SlipperySlope
I for one, welcome law-abiding driverless cars.

Speed limits are set for a public benefit, and its a sort of tragedy of the
commons why speeding by humans is the norm.

~~~
civilian
The major danger on highways is difference in speed between cars ("variable
traffic"), it's much safer to go with the flow of traffic. Absolute speed has
little to do with it.

Additionally, speed limits are set for the benefit of police (increasing
ticket costs) and for the benefit of politicians who can now say they are
"making roads safer".

Case in point: the Autobahn <http://autos.aol.com/article/driving-the-
autobahn/>

(but I am also still welcoming driverless cars! I'm okay getting places slower
if it means I can read or study.)

~~~
MrFoof
Well, there are a lot of other reasons for the speed limits as well.

Lack of sufficient climbing lanes on most of the original interstate system.
Poorly designed junctions, including merges into the high-speed lanes
Inadequate road thickness (autobahn is 55-75cm, US is 28cm), initial quality,
drainage capability and maintenance. Inadequate driver training. Lack of
enforcement for failing to bear right (though the US is doing this more now)
and other minor moving violations that disrupt traffic flow.

The US interstate system would need considerable re-engineering, more funding
to keep up with the required maintenance, and both tougher licensing
requirements and stricter enforcement of minor moving violations that increase
risk. It's a huge cost, that doesn't provide proportionate benefit in all
parts of the country, and a questionable ROI. Trust me, I'd love higher speed
limits, but I realize the giant mountain of money and effort that would be
required to make it happen.

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mediocregopher
Once (begin assumption here) autonomous cars become the norm I don't think
this will be a problem. The reason speed limits exist at all is because we
don't want people who are not physically capable of driving at that speed
(poor eyesight, bad reflexes, etc....) to try, so we set the limit at a level
where we think everyone should be reasonably ok in that situation.

But if all cars are run by computers, we can raise speed limits considerably,
since reaction time, sleeplessness, stupidity, etc... are all non-factors
anymore. The only problem is whether or not your car can actually go as fast
as everyone else, but for that we can set up fast and slow lanes similar to
the somewhat unofficial way things go on the highway now (faster the closer to
the leftmost lane you are).

~~~
grecy
> The reason speed limits exist at all is because we don't want people who are
> not physically capable of driving at that speed to try

Is that the reason we have speed limits?

I've always thought it's more like we don't want to deal with the consequences
of something going wrong when there is too much energy involved. i.e. blow a
tire, or hit a patch of gravel at 60mph and see what happens. Now try it at
160mph.

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abruzzi
I'll be fine with that as long as lane splitting is legal on my non-autonomous
motorcycle. Since lane splitting is legal in CA, I wonder how well google's
vehicles deal with other drivers that split lanes?

~~~
dkokelley
I've seen demonstrations where the autonomous car recognizes bicyclists and
adjusts the travel path to avoid the "obstacle". I imagine with a motorcycle
the autonomous car should always see it coming up behind it and could be
programmed to give it some room as it gets close.

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Brajeshwar
This will be an issue as long as we have more human drivers and few self-
driving cars. In future when there are more or all of them are self-driving
ones, there won't be any need for limits - speed or otherwise. The cars can
know the position, speed of each other and figure out how fast they can go to
reach their destinations. Perhaps you can pay a subscription so you can always
drive at a higher speed than most normal people or buy tickets to drive fast
for that day when you need most.

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kayoone
Remember that most of the world hasnt even adopted automatic transmission
because people like to have full control over their cars and that technology
is decades old.

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mc32
Once we get to the point where all cars on highways are automation capable, if
not outright enabled, there should be the option to have speed dictated by
road conditions so that, under optimal conditions, the system could adjust
speed up, and adjust speed down as conditions worsen. That is, allow speed to
be variable and dependent on conditions on the road (at that particular
section). Or, they could rate different lanes at different speeds, or a combo
allowing people to tell the system where to merge into.

There is the complication of less capable cars --so that maybe bunches of cars
(those part of a wave of traffic) would have to submit to the safety levels of
the least safe vehicle. (Let's say a bunch of high performance sports cars and
an economical car which isn't designed for hugging the road nor has grippy
tires; or, throw in a cargo truck).

Maybe the rightmost lane could be reserved for non autonomous vehicles like
classics and holdouts (people afraid of automation/driverlessness).

Given that speeding tickets would be rare, the state could impose fees based
on a combination of emissions and also road wear (tonnage, for example) to
offset lost revenue.

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pasbesoin
Part of the problem is that communities keep lowering the speed limits below
recommendations and even the guidelines of law. My father, who has a
background in urban planning, is fond of, or frustrated enough to point this
out.

A street that, per our state's code and regulation, should be 45 mph, gets
dropped to 40, then to 35. Nothing significant has changed with its facing
development and use. But the community, or of some excess of caution or some
orthogonal desire for control, keeps ratcheting it down.

In other spots, they start putting up stop signs at every block. They aren't
really warranted, but in a variety of "think of the children" attitude,
perhaps combined with a twist on NIMBY (Not In My Back-Yard) attitude, the
through-street needs to "be somewhere else". Until there no longer is a
through-street.

So fine, have these cars obey the speed limits. But then set reasonable
limits, ones that are evidence-based and not politicized.

------
asher_
Road speed limits are based on standards that take in to account the
environmental circumstances of the road - straightness, visibility, etc - as
well as having a huge amount of safety buffer built in to account for human
reaction time.

If self driving cars become ubiquitous, there is no longer a reason to have
this buffer built in. Perhaps the whole idea of posted speed limits will
become obsolete if the software determines the maximum speed in the moment for
a certain risk tolerance.

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someone13
One thing that always worried me about self-driving cars - what about an
emergency? For example, hypothetically, if my wife was giving birth and I
needed to rush to the hospital, would I have to poke along at 50km/h and hope
to get there on time? There are times when it's perfectly justified to break
the speed limit (other examples: outrunning natural disasters, going to visit
a dying relative, and so on).

~~~
miahi
You call an ambulance, that has an overclocked version of the self-driving
chip :).

I don't see the self-driving car as a completely different car than a normal
one - maybe more like an expensive option (with all the sensors, data and
stuff it will be expensive) for a normal car, that can give you back the
control when you want it.

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niketdesai
It's a disappointment this writer is covering this topic.

Self-driving cars can be great because of the shear impact on utility for
vehicles and safety implications.

I'm quite excited about the advent of self-driving cars and the underling
operating systems that will make them amazing for humans.

I do believe there is room for both types of driving. It's possible our
freeways will be segmented such that automated cars can go in certain lanes
(perhaps even barrier protected) while the remaining traffic stays in other
lanes / roads.

Traffic, or more specifically congestion, is primarily caused by excess cars
on any edge (road) in which it simply takes N+1 cars to cause. Inconsistent
driving patterns cause effective waves of inconsistency down the pipe
exacerbating the situation (stop and go traffic actually makes congestion even
worse).

Thinking about the overall network at a higher level makes all of this even
more exciting. Consider the scenario in which N cars are on an edge with
capacity N. If your car was about to enter the road you would basically
contribute to traffic. This cost, C, is then felt across N+1 (don't forget to
include yourself!) people at a minimum which is C*(N+1) minutes of human time
that is lost.

If our cars, and ourselves, were better informed you might take an alternate
and sub-optimal route that taxes you an extra T minutes but the overall
network of time is optimized. Perhaps you'll even get a reward for it. And
perhaps the reward is simply allowing all the people currently on the road a
faster commute home so they can be with their loved ones.

Beyond that, as people have mentioned here already, the faster we can go and
caravanning (which can be done safely by allowing cars to attach to one
another in train format) improves overall throughput (and make traffic less
likely).

Finally if we think about traffic, it's really just load and it needs to be
distributed better across all possible routes and time. We have commute hours,
but one thing to think about is that with a self-driving car I can leave to LA
at 12AM and get there at 6AM while sleeping in the back of the car.

Self-driving cars will increase utility on vehicles, but also on time for
travel routes ideally. This will spread the load (since humans generally have
some biological clock they operate by) to utilize the 24 hours a day we have a
little bit better.

And if your car can't speed I guess we should invest in really good alarm
clocks and reminders :)

------
ivankirigin
But you won't notice the speed because you'll be working in your car, not
minding the road.

~~~
dllthomas
Not when you can't yet afford an autonomous car and are cursing at the guy
cruising along at 50 ahead of you, getting work done comfortably while you're
gripping the wheel in frustration...

~~~
ivankirigin
But you'll be in a driverless uber :)

------
latimer
If self-driving cars keep their much safer track record when they start being
actually used by the public, maybe they can adapt the carpool lane to be a
self-driving car lane which has a higher speed limit?

------
stewie2
I think the first usage of self-driving cars is for public transportation.
With this technologies, crowed areas could have more self-driving buses. or
use it to replace long distance truck drivers.

------
z92
> and honking does no good, because robots do not care if you honk at them.

That sounds like a larger problem and even harder to solve. How do you teach a
robot to react to honking, like how humans can?

~~~
georgemcbay
Why should the robot care about the honking? It should already have way more
data via sensor input than the human doing the honking has long before the
honk ever occurs.

Even ignoring that, I don't think I've ever seen a situation in which I think
a horn actually helped in a near-accident situation. It tends to just be the
thing someone honks in anger after the immediate danger is already avoided.
IME (as someone who has never been in an accident but has seen quite a few
near misses and accidents on SoCal freeways) usually once the horn comes into
play it is either too late and the accident occurs anyway or the horn is
honked after the fact as a "fuck you" to the other person.

~~~
viraptor
Actually it should care about signals. Maybe not honking, but there are cases
like emergency vehicles that you react to. I'm not sure what's the standard
reaction in other parts, but in the UK when you hear / see an ambulance or a
police car behind you, you stop on the side of the road. Sometimes partly on
the pedestrian area. Would the self driving car do the same to let the
emergency vehicle pass it? Unfortunately that's unlikely.

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rocky1138
This will no longer be a problem if all cars are self-driving. Then, they can
just up the limit incrementally. Possibly even to something much faster than a
human could do manually.

------
danmaz74
If streets will prove themselves much safer with self-driving cars, speed
limits could be safely increased.

------
ricardobeat
Stupidest story title of the week.

