

Mapping the Road Ahead for Autonomous Cars - ryandvm
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2012/02/autonomous-vehicles-q-and-a/

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krschultz
I'm a big proponent of autonomous cars (did a lot of work on it in college,
follow it closely now). I don't think all cars need to be autonomous, but I
think overall it will make the roads a lot safer once the thing is worked out.
The car will never get sleepy. It will never get drunk. It will never be
talking on a cell phone. It will never be road raging.

The road block I see the most is the weather. In my experience designing cars,
the cameras are falliable but the lasers are not. We trusted the lasers
absolutely but the cameras were a lot less certain. That's fine for object
avoidance on dry roads (or even wet roads with consistent slip), but on snow
you really want to be driving based on the road surface itself. Is it loose
snow? Ice? Packed snow? Slush? Is there a hump of slush between lanes? Is that
a pothole or a bit of black ice? Can I get some pavement under me or not? I
find it hard to believe that a camera will be able to distinguish all that
perfectly (texture, snow depth, snow type, etc). I think they will punt and
make the car just drive 15mph, but that is unacceptable for me. I have AWD &
snow tires and routinely do 45-50 mph in snow. But there are other times in
the exact same car that anything over 20 is unsafe. It is entirely dependent
on the judgement of the snow surface that I don't think a computer will be
able to do for a long time.

That's just my nit pick, but it is part of the larger problem. It is going to
be super difficult to convince people to actually allow it. Most people are
afraid of computers and don't trust them.

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dmm
What's the point of autonomous driving if someone still has to pay attention?
So it's expected that a driver pay full attention to the road while
simultaneously doing nothing? That sounds unrealistic. I would think a
person's attention would drift after ten minutes or so.

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ryandvm
Because they only ostensibly have to be paying attention. The reality is that
they'll probably be eating, texting, fumbling with CDs, rubber-necking, etc.
This is where partially-autonomous cars really pay off.

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vibrunazo
I would guess less "CDs" and more "consuming web content" :-) But other than
that I agree. Moreover, partially-autonomous cars will be a stepping stone to
adapt people's culture to accept fully autonomous cars easier. Just as we have
"park assist" today, that will evolve into more driving assistance before
autonomy.

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bh42222
Autonomous cars don't drink, or text, or sleep, or get distracted, etc.

Any politician against autonomous cars should be attacked for being for more
death on the roads thanks to alcohol, texting, sleep deprivation, old age,
etc. Call them pro-murder in an attack ad during an election and we'll have
legal autonomous cars everywhere in no time.

Speaking of autonomous cars don't drink and drive, why isn't MAD lobbying for
autonomous cars as hard as they can? And where are the insurance companies on
this? Don't the see dollar signs when the think of just how much mass
autonomous car use could reduce accidents and injuries?

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dualogy
Dang, this will be the end for _plausible_ car-based games, from NFS to GTA.
:/

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bh42222
Yep, actually driving the car yourself becomes a purely vanity activity.

Except when you build shelves in your garage rather than buying cheap ones at
the store, you could actually build better shelves than reasonable money can
buy. But it's hard to imagine even the most talented and dedicated hobby
driver outracing a computer.

Future car games will have to be set either in the past (horses are very
important if cars have not been invented yet) or in some kind of special human
drivers only scenario.

We still have equestrian events in the Olympics, so F1 as a human drivers only
future equivalent of antiquated transportation based competition?

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zmj
This is not a good article. The panelists discuss problems that Google has
already solved - pedestrians, literal interpretations of traffic laws, etc.

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lotu
Last I heard these were still issues. Do you have a source about what Google
has done because I'm rather interested to know more.

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maeon3
Autonomous cars will cause traffic jams to worsen as the burden of driving
becomes much less. More people will be playing xbox gladly sitting in traffic
in a town with 50 million other people in a 50 mile radius. if we could get
rid of traffic lights, that would be another story.

