
Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic - recampbell
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html
======
dandelany
Very cool, but I sometimes worry that the illusion of safety is more dangerous
than the original danger itself.

In Boulder, where I live, several crosswalks were identified as being
particularly dangerous for pedestrians, and pedestrian crossing signs with big
flashing lights were installed at these locations over the past 5 years. This
spring, a report was released[1] that showed accidents at many of these
crosswalks had actually _increased_ since the lights were installed. "Taken
together, the data suggests that approximately eight additional crossing
accidents per year occur at these locations," says the report.

There are lots of theories about why, but I think it boils down to one thing:
when pedestrians can hit a button and light up these big signs which are
supposed to make everyone stop, it makes them feel much safer, to the point
that many people will hit the button and start walking almost immediately,
without taking the time to make sure that all lanes of traffic are aware of
their presence and stopping.

The prospect of automated cars scares me because, obviously, they cannot be
perfect, and they will not be able to identify every dangerous driving
scenario. Of course, there is a manual override, but I fear that the car being
right 99% of the time will lead to such a complacency in "drivers" that, in
the 1% of cases where the car is wrong and about to hit something, we will not
be able to stop in time. The more accurate the car is, the more safe we feel,
and the less likely we are to monitor it as closely and notice when it is
wrong.

Anyway, I rather hope I'm wrong. I'd really like to drink my coffee and read
during my commute as my car drives me to work.

[1] <http://www.dailycamera.com/boulder-county-news/ci_14859190>

~~~
cletus
I walk a lot and the times where I've been nearly hit by a car have ALWAYS
been at crosswalks and traffic lights (where the pedestrian light is green and
cars should be stopping).

Crosswalks are a problem because you can't predict car behaviour: some will
stop. Some will completely ignore them (for reasons unknown). If there were no
crosswalk you know exactly what cars will do. That's much safer for both
parties.

The "illusion of safety" is most dangerous at traffic lights. 2-3 times I've
had cars just sail through, completely oblivious. Note: they're sailing
through on RED lights. Not amber going red. It's not one of those borderline
cases.

Once I had a cop have a chat to me about jaywalking but I've never been fined.
I would be _pissed_ if I ever was. In a fight between a car and a pedestrian
the pedestrian loses (big time) so pedestrians have a higher vested interest
in their own safety. I know what the light changes are at intersections I
cross a lot. Where are these cops when cars sail through red lights or nearly
run over pedestrians when turning when the pedestrians have right of way?

I get the distinct impression these skills will come in handy when I move to
New York next month!

Anyway, back to the self-driving cars: this I believe will be a painful
transition that will take many, many years. It's nice to see Google working on
this.

~~~
scotty79
That <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_turn_on_red> is the source of almost
all dangerous situations I had on the roads as pedestrian. The one single time
when cause was different that I can remember was when somebody drove in one
way street in wrong direction and I was crossing the road assuming that this
was impossible.

~~~
siculars
There is no right turn on red in NYC.

------
DanielBMarkham
This is such good news -- probably some of the best tech news so far this year
-- that I keep looking for problems. It's _too_ good.

So, although I'm hugely supportive of this, and I think it's possible to have
fully autonomous vehicles within a decade, I want to see it. In production.
Then I'll believe. Up until that point it's like one of those science stories
where it works in the lab but nobody has any idea whether or not it will work
with humans. There is a long, long way to go from the mechanics of AI and
auto-driving and the real thing happening. It's not just the technology. There
are about 17 large groups of people and organizations that need to be re-
aligned before this would ever fly, even if it were perfect. This could easily
end up like pot legalization, where it's obvious for years that the current
laws are idiotic but it takes an entire lifetime to get the politicians on the
same page as the public.

I'd love to go all blue-sky on this, going on and on about the massive changes
true auto-drive would entail. But instead I'm opting to be very cautious about
separating press releases from real products and benefits.

(Still, it's awesomely cool)

------
mjfern
The key question is why would Google produce this technology and enter the
autonomous driving market?

I think one of the key issues for Google, from a corporate strategy
standpoint, is "freeing up people's time." Driving is one of last places where
we spend significant time awake without being able to use the Internet and
hence any of Google's services (except if you use a smartphone, which is now
illegal in some states, and in any event isn't an ideal place to be clicking
on ads). There is a safety issue here as well. Although using a smartphone
while driving is illegal in some states, people are driving while using their
smartphones with increasing frequency. We need our Internet "fix."

I am sure this driving technology also taps into several of Google's key
capabilities: e.g., programming expertise, its voice recognition technologies,
search, and its mapping software (Google Maps and Navigation).

~~~
mortenjorck
_Dr. Thrun is known as a passionate promoter of the potential to use robotic
vehicles to make highways safer and lower the nation’s energy costs. It is a
commitment shared by Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, according to several
people familiar with the project._

It sounds like this may be as much an idealistic pet project as it is any kind
of corporate strategy.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Larry's idealistic pet projects _are_ corporate strategy. That's why Google
dominates - they are unpredictable and creative.

Crazy stuff Google did:

* mapped all the world's roads using cameras and a mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers

* Android, groundbreaking in both technology and pushing the envelope on patent law

* launched a satellite

* deep tendrils of fiber optics and community oriented wi-fi projects to connect the world

It doesn't surprise me at all Google is building autonomous cars. Search and
adwords are not even the most intriguing things to me about Google these days.

Imagine a mad scientist who has $12,000,000,000. That is Google's strategy...
also lots of testing.

~~~
rbranson
Small correction: Google didn't "map all the world's roads using cameras and a
mechanical turk, destroying billions in market cap for map data providers."
That is more than a stretch. They mapped SOME of the roads in the US,
augmenting existing TIGER data from the US government, and used it in place of
TeleAtlas. The "new" data is pretty bad, so I use Bing for directions because
of it. They still rely on TeleAtlas (one of the map data providers they
"destroyed") for almost every other country.

------
tbrownaw
_And in the event of an accident, who would be liable — the person behind the
wheel or the maker of the software?_

The insurance company, just like today. Possibly paid for by the manufacturer
and entirely included in the sales price, or possibly paid for by the
driver/owner like today.

~~~
alextgordon
Civil liability is only half the issue. What about criminal liability? If your
autonomous vehicle runs someone down because of a bug, who goes to jail?

~~~
jfager
We deal with that issue today. Who is liable when brakes fail? It's usually
determined on a case-by-case basis. Why would this system be any different?

~~~
ajays
Failure is one aspect. But what if there's a bug?

Suppose there's an extreme edge case where a bicyclists fluorescent jacket
appears as a road to the car; so the car chases down the cyclist and runs him
over. This is not a hardware failure, but an active decision made by the car
to cause injury to a person. So in such a situation, who would be responsible?
I guess it is a question for technolawyers to decide.

~~~
jfager
How is that not a system failure? Because the car has some kind of intent?
Well, we have an analogue for that today, too: who gets punished when a dog
attacks someone?

I'm not saying there are no details to work out. I'm just saying that it's not
some unfathomable chasm we have to cross. We deal with similar questions all
the time right now.

------
gojomo
Finally! A giant step towards 'packet-switched' personal transport, using
dynamically-routed, market-dispatched autonomous cars on standard roads.

Cancel the bullet train, and instead plow all that money into rapidly
deploying this.

~~~
megablast
This is not a solution to much, apart from getting stupid people away from
control of vehicles. We still need to move to mass transportation, to reduce
pollution, decrease traffic, stop our reliance on fossil fuels, increase
productivity, remove noise, free up space in cities, and lots of other
reasons.

~~~
kjksf
While cars that drive themselves are not the final solution they could be a
necessary stepping stone to mass transportation.

Imagine a future where cars are not owned by individuals but are owned by few
companies (or maybe even government, the way public transport is) and
participate in what is essentially a global taxi network.

Instead of using your own car you would just step out of your home, enter
destination address into your phone and press a button. That would be sent to
a server which given your location, position and destination of all existing
cars in route would pick one that is the closest to you that has available
seat and goes in that direction. That car would just pull up and you would be
notified in real time how far it is from you.

If a car is not available, it would be dispatched from the closest holding
area.

Think ZipCar except with cars that come to you, drive themselves and you can
share with other people while it drives itself (or you can have it for
yourself, if you prefer, except at a higher cost).

This kind of a network would drastically reduce number of cars needed to drive
people around and given global knowledge of where people are and where they
want to go, it could plan the absolutely most efficient route.

For popular routes (e.g. if it detects a pattern that a lot of people commute
from San Francisco to Mountain View around 9 AM on Mondays through Fridays) it
could deploy bigger cars (i.e. buses), further reducing traffic.

When you think about it, it's not surprising that car companies will not work
on a technology like that since it would drastically reduce demand for cars
and if this comes anywhere close to reality, expect lots of legislative and
political battles (after all, this will mean that Americans in Detroit will
loose jobs).

~~~
mortenjorck
You have described my personal vision of a PRT-connected future even better
than I have myself.

What's so beautiful about it is that it takes a massive infrastructural
liability -- a century of building our world around the automobile instead of
around rail or other mass transit systems -- and turns it on its head. We get
out of infrastructure jail free.

Think of the time humans spend behind the wheel of a car today. How many hours
a day? How many solid days of driving a year? How many man-years of humanity
are wasted on fruitless idling in traffic? A society with autonomous personal
transport becomes a measurably more productive one and likely a happier and
more satisfied one as well.

------
rmorrison
Ha, I saw these cars multiple times this past week in San Francisco, including
turning from Broadway onto Columbus in heavy traffic. If that was done
autonomously, then I'd be very impressed since I have trouble navigating
through those intersections without hitting the many bold pedestrians.

~~~
btilly
I'm be willing to bet money that most of the times when you saw them, the car
was autonomous.

------
Ygor
It is clear that one day automated cars will make less mistakes than human
drivers, and that such systems can reduce the amount of traffic accidents.

There is one big problem - convincing some people this is true, and that cars
will make mistakes, but far less mistakes than humans.

The problem is there are many people that fail to see it that way. More than
once I was in a situation of explaining the concept of automated cars to
others, and always the opposing arguments go something like: "But, can you be
absolutely certain that there isn't going to be one single case where a car
makes a mistake and kills someone". No, I cannot, and I will not.

And, of course, once the self-driving cars become a reality, such cases will
happen. And than there will be an article in some scandal-seeking newspaper
how an automated car killed the father of two, and how this is a what happens
when you let science control your life and when you let all those over-
educated people do what they want... Or something along that lines...

Frustrating.

------
fizx
The thing that excites me about this isn't the driving, it's the parking.
Living in SF, it would be __AMAZING __to be able to pull up to whereever you
were going, get out, and tell your car to go find it's own parking spot. Then,
when it's time to leave, click that button on the key fob, and the car is
waiting outside in five minutes.

------
jackowayed
In Google's blog post, they said that they think automated cars will
"significantly reduce car usage". I have no idea what they're basing that
claim on.

Automated cars eliminate many of the costs of driving--lost time, frustration,
etc. When you decrease the cost of an activity, people are going to do it
_more_ , not less.

In fact, if you ask people that can afford cars but commute by train why they
do it, many will say that it's because they can work on the train and not have
to deal with driving in traffic. Those people would definitely consider
switching from the train to automated cars.

~~~
jfager
Because an automated system would be less prone to congestion, and the average
time for travel would go way down. You'd have to do the math to find the
break-even point, but I'd imagine that you could add many more cars into an
optimally flowing traffic system and still end up with less total running
time.

~~~
stcredzero
If that's the case, then people will just end up using the roadways _even
more_.

"Hey, traffic's not as bad as it used to be since the Google auto-drivers
smoothed out the traffic. Let's go to the store at 5:00 today!"

Congestion will again increase to the same point of suckage as before, but
then, only non-human drivers will be qualified to be on freeways.

~~~
jfager
Like I said, you'd have to do the math. It's very possible that's true. But
it's not a certainty. People have a limit on how much they want to drive
regardless of how easy it is. After all, the store itself will still suck when
everyone decides to go at 5.

I'm in NYC, I could hop on the subway any time I want without any hassle at
all, but it's not like I do just because the option's there. Transportation is
a means much more than an end for most people.

~~~
stcredzero
_Like I said, you'd have to do the math._

Uh, maybe you'd have to look at the history of urban planning for the past 50
years? In densely populated urban areas, just about every time people add more
roads, the capacity gets used up by increased development in the outlying
areas served by those roads.

Network bandwidth and CPU capacity are subject to the same phenomenon. Do end-
user desktops really have more functionality than 10 years ago? Besides things
like increased 3D graphics capability and more things to do with a web browser
and an internet connection, not so much. As bandwidth has increased, the
amount of data in a webpage has increased, and it becomes practical to use a
web browser for more.

But don't take my word for it:

[http://www.assmotax.org/Releases/AMCT%20release:%20building%...](http://www.assmotax.org/Releases/AMCT%20release:%20building%20more%20roads%20relieves%20your%20wallet,%20not%20congestion.php)

<http://www.walkablestreets.com/widen2.htm>

[http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-
futility.ht...](http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/roadbuilding-
futility.html)

Basically, there can be a certain amount of pent-up "latent demand" which is
there but which can't manifest until the roads are built and such travel
becomes practical.

~~~
jfager
I'm granting that miles driven or number of cars on the road could go up,
maybe way up. I'm just guessing, subject to actually doing the math, that
increased efficiency and assumptions of reasonable limits on how much latent
demand is actually out there could be sufficient to make time spent in cars,
fuel consumption, emissions, or other metrics better regardless. Since we're
using networking analogies, basically I'm guessing that current uncoordinated
human-driven traffic is copper wire to an automated system's fiber-optic
cable.

But again, it's just a guess, and I'd be the first to accept that I was wrong
if the numbers didn't actually work out.

------
zumbojo
Nova did an excellent (and surprisingly technical) episode [1] on the 2005
race mentioned in this piece, including Thrun's Stanford team. It was
especially impressive as a triumph of Thurn's software-based approach over
several of the other veteran teams that relied heavily on complex hardware
(e.g., those teams used camera gimbals while Thrun's team just compensated for
camera bumps using code).

For those of you on Netflix, it's available as a streaming video [2], and I
highly recommend it.

[1] <http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/> [2]
[http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The-Great-Robot-Race-
Nova/700...](http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The-Great-Robot-Race-
Nova/70050544)

------
gatsby
"The only accident, engineers said, was when one Google car was rear-ended
while stopped at a traffic light."

Google robot > Humans

~~~
gdl
Let us all pray that it doesn't agree with you.

~~~
mortenjorck
I Have No Pedal and I Must Brake

~~~
natrius
Speaking of being impressed by Google, I wouldn't have been able to decipher
that reference a decade or so ago, but today, I can type "i have no * and i
must *" into a text box, and the answer is presented to me. The future is
pretty great.

------
eogas
I wonder if this is legal. I mean, if one of these cars went haywire and mowed
down a bunch of pedestrians before the "driver" was able to take control, I
reckon Google would have some splainin to do. With autonomous vehicles coming
closer and closer to a reality, it's somewhat alarming that there appears to
be no legal body attempting to define some guidelines on this subject. At the
rate our government works, we'll have fully functioning, marketable autonomous
vehicles long before it's legal to use them.

~~~
kijinbear
According to the article, Google's lawyers decided it was OK, because a human
was sitting in the driver's seat ready to override the system at any time. I
guess it's a little bit like student drivers being supervised by experienced
drivers, but who knows what a random cop would think?

~~~
ajju
Actually the article says the legal counsel for the California DMV 'decided'
it was o.k., which is even better!

------
blakeweb
If you're interested in more, Brad Templeton has been singing the praises of a
future with robot cars, and how to get there, for many years, both in all the
futurism un-conferences I've visited in the bay area, and on his very thorough
website:

<http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/>

------
MikeCapone
That's very promising. Living in a pretty safe place (Canada), driving is
probably the most dangerous thing that I regularly do. I'm very happy with the
safety advances of the past decade (more airbags, electronic traction control,
brake force distribution, better crumple zones, more high-strength materials,
etc), but it's not quite "active" enough to make me feel truly safe
(especially because it doesn't address human error).

Truly looking forward to the commercialization of technology.

~~~
nighthacker
Me too. I bet this could bring accident rates down substantially and maybe we
will also get rid of those insidious traffic jams. But the best part: I'll
have a ton of free time on my hands during transit!

------
ScottBurson
From TFA:

 _“The technology is ahead of the law in many areas,” said Bernard Lu, senior
staff counsel for the California Department of Motor Vehicles. “If you look at
the vehicle code, there are dozens of laws pertaining to the driver of a
vehicle, and they all presume to have a human being operating the vehicle.”

The Google researchers said they had carefully examined California’s motor
vehicle regulations and determined that because a human driver can override
any error, the experimental cars are legal. Mr. Lu agreed. _

~~~
ScottBurson
Gack -- that was supposed to go under eogas' item.

------
zacharypinter
In the short term, I could easily see the value in a souped up cruise control
for driving on interstates. combined with infrared/night vision, this could
easily make nighttime driving safer.

Also, this has great potential (though would probably generate a lot of
controversy) for drunk driving. Imagine if your car had a safety mode that
could watch out for potential accidents and prevent them even with a human
driver.

Amazing possibilities ahead.

~~~
124816
> Imagine if your car had a safety mode that could watch out for potential
> accidents and prevent them even with a human driver.

Well, if my car would do that I'd certainly drive to the bar more often. I'd
want the fully autonomous "drive me home, Jeeves" system though.

~~~
kijinbear
If these systems can be trained to learn your habits, you might be surprised
to find your car driving you to that spot where you used to see the other
girl...

------
Eliezer
"Google is an AI company, they just don't advertise the fact."

~~~
8ren
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=324640> \- the only hit for that quote. I
totally agree, BTW.

~~~
Eliezer
I know I'm not the one who said that.

------
jacquesm
Timely, I wrote about some German research project that has a car doing a trip
in normal traffic in a big city:

[http://jacquesmattheij.com/Autonomous+driving+cars+one+big+s...](http://jacquesmattheij.com/Autonomous+driving+cars+one+big+step+closer+to+reality)

The google car seems very much reliant on its gps data, in the article there
is this passage: "He did [interrupt auto mode] so twice, once when a bicyclist
ran a red light and again when a car in front stopped and began to back into a
parking space. But the car seemed likely to have prevented an accident
itself."

Seemed likely is not really good enough though, you have to be sure enough not
to interrupt the auto-driving at all for this to be usable.

The biggest problem with auto-driving cars that have a human supervisor is
that there is nothing more dangerous than having to be alert for a long time
when nothing happens. Invariably you will be distracted when something does
over the course of tens of thousands of miles.

Regular traffic is one thing on mapped streets is one thing, but that 100's of
thousands of emergency situations that a normal career on the road throws at
you over a lifetime contains quite a few where I really wonder how a 'robot'
driver would deal with them.

I'm all for 'automated drivers', but I'd like the researchers to be sitting in
the passenger seat and to have their kids playing around the car (or come out
on their tri-cycle from between two parked cars) while they drive it to prove
that it is safe. Overrode but the car would have probably done it is not good
enough yet, even though the achievement is very impressive this is not as
close as it seems.

Computer programs are great at dealing with everything that you can think of
beforehand, it's the exceptions and the response to those exceptions that
matters in an application like this.

I also wonder how they'd deal with liability issues if their driver was not
actually paying attention to traffic and the software made a mistake and
caused an accident.

------
msg
Where they'll get their foot in the door is closed campuses. I bet the
military could run this on the base and keep the liability issues in the
family. Similarly, perhaps a large corporation would license it. Or even
better, airports.

------
Udo
Yes, they are coming: [http://jalopnik.com/5572978/driverless-audi-tts-gets-
new-col...](http://jalopnik.com/5572978/driverless-audi-tts-gets-new-colors-
plans-for-pikes-peak)

Seems like quite a few people are working on projects such as these. I heard
some hairdo on TV the other day musing that they will reach general
availability "as early as 2022". How do they even come up with those numbers?

~~~
Groxx
> _Rather than cameras and lasers providing situational awareness and plotting
> course, the TTS uses high-resolution comparative GPS to follow a pre-plotted
> course at an accuracy up to 1 cm of deviation._

Don't think I like the sound of that...

> _The only trouble with this set up is the car will be incapable of reacting
> to unexpected obstacles, say a boulder rolling onto the road or a spectator
> jumping out to get a picture. Careful spectators._

Seems they agree.

------
mike-cardwell
I'd expect a situation to arise where cars are allowed to go into automatic
driving mode on motorways/freeways but not in cities. Gradually more and more
roads would become available for automatic driving as more and more cars get
the automatic driving capability. I don't think people will ever be ready for
an instant complete switch over. I'd expect it to be a gradual switchover
which takes years.

------
8ren
I think we all see where Google is headed with this: free self-driving cars in
return for advertising, like <http://www.kahdo.com.au/kahdo.htm>

_Driver, there's items you like on sale at that store. Driver, I think we
should stop and check it out. Driver, we are stopping._

 _Dear, I don't feel safe having Lisa drive with that new Mark boy. You can
just tell he dials aggressive._

But seriously, from a marketing perspective, I think the low-hanging fruit
here is highway driving. It's a small, logical and therefore adoptable step up
from _cruise control_ , just with a little auto-steering (they already have
auto-braking IIRC), and perhaps some networking for predicting lights,
congestion and co-ordinating with other (online) cars.

Start with an "online-only" lane.

------
adammichaelc
Single page:
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=1...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/10/science/10google.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all)

------
reader5000
I had no idea the technology was this advanced. Last I heard was the DARPA
challenge where they were still struggling to navigate traffic-free dirtroads.
Google blows mind once again.

~~~
equark
It's gone way beyond that. The Stanford team is now trying to race up Pike's
Peak in an autonomous Audi, drifting around corners at full speed. They
already are doing trials at 130mph, drifting, in the Nevada salt flats.

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exdUD02JryI&feature=chann...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exdUD02JryI&feature=channel)

------
palish
I'm surprised nobody has mentioned one of the biggest issues with general
acceptance of this system:

Police will be able to force anyone to pull over anywhere, at any time, and
for any or no reason.

Even though they can do that now, people still _decide_ to pull over. They are
not _forced_ to.

And what if there becomes a database that police forces compile, showing the
history of movements of everyone? That database could potentially be leaked.

I think the privacy implications of this should get at least some thought.

~~~
Cushman
Doubt it. When this system becomes commonplace, the most common traffic
violation will be operating a vehicle in manual-only mode.

------
sliverstorm
I am very happy to be an engineer. I would be very uncomfortable turning the
world over to robots if I was some other kind of job, but as I am an engineer
I will hopefully be the one MAKING those robots, which is the only end of the
stick I want to be on when robots reach the critical point in taking care of
us.

------
K3G
It will take a decrease in sensor costs for this to become commercially
viable. The "device" on top of the car is a Velodyne LIDAR system, which if I
recall correctly, costs around $75k. Using a sensor that costs more than the
vehicle it controls makes selling this difficult, to say the least.

~~~
bruceboughton
You could say this about any new technology. Mass demand will solve this
problem.

~~~
akgerber
Aren't car companies essentially all about wringing huge efficiencies out of
mass production? Compare an automotive product to something requiring a
similar manufacturing technique with more niche demand and there's usually a
huge price difference.

------
mcantor
Have they tested it in the rain?

Have they tested it in the snow?

Have they tested it driving on ice?

Does it know when its fuel gets low?

Can it tell when a head gasket blows and the engine is overheating?

Have they driven it on the highway?

Have they driven it on the countryside?

How does it treat cyclists?

How does it treat pedestrians?

How does it treat deer, squirrels, birds and other fauna on the road?

How does it respond to aggressive drivers?

Can it park?

Can it parallel park?

Does it know not to block the box?

Does it know what to do when a traffic light is out?

Does it know to pull over when emergency vehicles need to pass by?

Does it know how to merge?

Does it know how to avoid hanging out in other cars' blind spots?

Does it know that eighteen-wheelers have large blind spots ("If you can't see
me, I can't see you")?

Does it know what to do when four cars come to a four-way stop intersection
simultaneously? (Does anyone?)

Can it find parking?

Can it pick a parking spot that's far enough away from driveways and fire
hydrants?

How much of the logic is dependent on the car it's installed for?

How much work is involved in installing it to a new car?

What does it do if it gets boxed in by FBI agents on the highway?

What does it do if debris knocks out the camera?

What does it do the if car in front of it starts fish-tailing on ice?

~~~
sliverstorm
> Can it tell when a head gasket blows and the engine is overheating?

Sorry, how do YOU know when your head gasket has blown and the car is
overheating? What's that, your first indicator is the _electronic temperature
sensor on your dashboard_!? My, there certainly is no way a computer could
detect that.

If you are about to say, you detect it through loss of power, steam from the
engine bay, coolant in the oil... I got news for you, you just detected it
slower than a computer would have. A properly designed automatic driving
system would monitor the vitals of the engine, and pull over in the event
something goes critical, much the same way your PC shuts off when the CPU hits
some predetermined temperature. Even better, if all cars were automatically
driven, it would communicate this abnormality with the other cars on the road.
It would be able to determine that this is unusual (it's not just a hot day),
and it would also be able to co-operate with the other cars on the road to
pull over safely as fast as possible.

The things you list are not "this is why automatic driving is impossible".
They are just "here's special cases we have to make sure to catch". In the
case engineers miss a case, good feedback control systems can often cope for
the unexpected event, and in the event they can't, there's always manual
control. Hell, let's be honest here- most drivers would not detect a blown
head gasket until the car simply stopped functioning, and the engine was
completely destroyed anyway. There's tons of case where humans perform
terribly, including some on your list. Accidents are caused all the time by
people braking for squirrels when they shouldn't.

~~~
mcantor
> _The things you list are not "this is why automatic driving is impossible".
> They are just "here's special cases we have to make sure to catch"._

You are exactly correct; this is actually all I meant to express in my post. I
suppose I should not be surprised that my comment was taken to be espousing
one of the prevailing extremes! Sorry about that--I should have been a little
less terse.

> _most drivers would not detect a blown head gasket until the car simply
> stopped functioning, and the engine was completely destroyed anyway._

Ironically, this exact thing happened to me at the end of last year. That's
actually why I included it in my list... not because I think it's un-doable,
but because I really really hope it's an edge case they cover! :-)

------
akadien
This will never take off because Google or carmakers can not assume more
liability for accidents than hundreds of millions of drivers can. Technically,
cool. From a practical legal perspective, a non-starter.

------
swah
It is impressive how Google just goes to new areas with success all the time.

~~~
barrkel
Actually, most of the time we hear about their failures (Wave, Buzz, etc.);
but this is to be expected if they are as fearful of opportunity costs as
they're reputed to be.

------
epochwolf
I really hope that cars can become safely automated in my life time but I'm
worried that people will start "jailbreaking" their cars so they can exceed
the speed limit.

~~~
dennisgorelik
If you are surfing Internet while riding your car -- you likely would not care
much about exceeding speed limit.

~~~
alex_c
People will always push boundaries.

------
points
Personally I _love_ driving. I hate being a passenger. I can see this being
useful for some people, but not useful for me.

~~~
points
WTF Downmodded? Jeez whatever

------
27182818284
a novel solution to ending drunk driving

------
diegob
Think of the millions of hours spent behind the wheel today, which could be
spent on Google instead. Maybe this is what they're "driving at."

------
exit
can anyone see this completely eliminating human taxi drivers within the next
10-15 years?

~~~
gcb
only if they throw in a chat bot :)

~~~
gfodor
And they spray the inside of the car with that authentic cabbie "scent."

------
rdzah
Code + howto on github, anyone?

------
tectonic
Has anyone else read Daemon?

------
eli_s
It will take only a few of these:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNi17YLnZpg> (volvo crash avoidance failure)

to shake people's confidence in these systems.

------
gcb
So, why is google driving cars?

what about if GM announced a search engine? Everyone would have their opinion
then.

------
olalonde
Great news for terrorists. Now all they have to do is bomb Google's data
centers and kill everyone on the roads :)

~~~
ajju
I am pretty sure the default response to a lack of connection is going to be
revert to manual mode with loud siren, not zig-zag like crazy in traffic.

