As mentioned in the previous thread, I'm not pleased with this colour.
For red-green colourblind people (both types), this colour is at the neutral point where both available cones are saturated and the brain can't differentiate it from white light.
In their study paper they used a much more blue turquoise, decided it was confusing, and then moved it to a more green version (thus saturating the non-blue cone for dichromats) but did not reassess the new green-turquoise colour.
The net effect is that for something like 8% of men this light looks exactly the same as the white reversing lights and is placed exactly where reversing lights are.
Do you mean that the daytime running lights for all new cars include both front (white) and rear (red) lights?
If so, that's a good precedent for other jurisdictions. A longstanding gripe of mine has been that, in Canada at least, new cars are only required to have front lights illuminated in daytime, afaik. The practical effect is that it is a regular occurrence to have dangerous situations where cars with no rear lights illuminated are driving in dim / rainy conditions.
to me the placement seems substantially different from the reversing light (which is usually more toward the middle of the back)
of course these pictures probably don't tell much about how it will actually look like in traffic, but some kind of pattern seems to be the way to go (that's recognizable from 2-3 cars afar in a traffic jam, for example if folks are curious WTF that particular car is doing, why is it stopped or going slow)
The alternative is a light in a predictable position or with a standard shape. I really hate that EVs are trying to be all modern about light systems redesigns. Specially in the US, car manufacturers are being very creative with their new designs in ways that are not even legal in Europe. I hope international standards for human-friendly lights can be agreed upon soon.
The point of the light is primarily for specific people like law enforcement to be able to identify that the vehicle has self-driving mode engaged so that they don't pull the operator over erroneously. Is it actually an issue if Joe Colorblind can't tell that the person he's passing has automated driving enabled?
Beat cops shouldn’t be ? It impairs their ability to do their job.
They should identify the color of a car or a person’s apparel fairly accurately .
How would a color blind cop catch say killer escaping in a teal car if they cannot identify that color ?
Most Physical disabilities sadly would be disqualifying in some jobs line first responders or police, such jobs that at times require them to assist the physically challenged
I’ve always had an excellent vision both near and far, except for one flaw that I can’t distinguish some shades between green and blue. All the turquoise colors give me a strange feeling of not knowing if it’s green and blue. When I was younger I used to ask if it was green or blue and would only be satisfied once someone told me which one it is. Over the years, I’ve learned to recognize the feeling and attach turquoise to it, but it’s still slightly annoying for my brain. I know it’s selfish of me, but I hope that driving won’t require the ability to distinguish turquoise well… I never thought that this minor impairment could one day be a problem.
I don't think this should be an issue... At least in the US, only law enforcement is authorized to use blue lights and they don't use them in this way. If you see lights that might be blue solidly lit around all edges of the car, it's self driving. If you see a flashing light that might be blue, it's police. If you see a solid light that might be blue, and is only on one side, or only in the middle, it's most likely police, but might be self driving with a lot of broken lights.
AFAIK Mercedes is the only automaker with the nads to take legal liability for their autopilot.
That's the table stakes: legal liability. I don't want to hear any other automaker, Tesla or otherwise, crow about their "self-driving" tech if they don't take legal liability for it, because it proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that they don't have faith in their system. Kudos to Mercedes.
I think this idea makes some sense, in a mixed-traffic world where some vehicles are autonomous and others are not, some indication that a vehicle is driving autonomously is useful information to everyone around them. Additional situational information, provided it is not overly intrusive or overwhelming is generally beneficial.
As for the colour, clearly Mercedes requested Turquoise for brand reasons.
I wonder if there is a better colour to be adopted as a standard?
External indicator lights of any kind seem like something that needs to be standardised before we end up with a whole mess of different colours on the roads causing confusion.
> some indication that a vehicle is driving autonomously is useful information to everyone around them
I'm genuinely curious - what are you thinking when you say this?
I don't know what I'd do with that information. It shouldn't make me drive differently - e.g. not be aggressive to see if I can invoke reaction(s) in the autonomous system, and I should already be driving w/ due care.
I've driven near Waymo vehicles, which are distinctive. Their behavior is quite a bit from the norm, and I'll make more room for them if they signal a lane change, because they wait for an engraved invitation before coming over. And if behind one, I know they won't use the shoulder to get to an offramp, so I'll need to be more patient, if we're both heading to the same exit on a congested freeway. Etc.
Being able to distinguish between a mercedes driven by a mercedes driver and one driven by a mercedes automation is going to help predict behavior of the car. Of course, one needs to be ready for anything, but when I can predict behavior of other cars, it increases my planning window.
> if you see the teal lights, you know the car is using automated driving, so it’s less likely for other motorists to be shocked and concerned when they see the occupants looking away from the road, plus emergency services have a better understanding of what to do if medical assistance is needed. It will also be super helpful for law enforcement, so cops hopefully won’t pull you over for watching TikToks on your infotainment screen when it’s perfectly allowed by law.
> I'm genuinely curious - what are you thinking when you say this?
As a pedestrian, I always try to make eye contact with drivers before crossing in front of them. It would be nice to know that the car is doing the driving.
It would be nice if autonomous cars could emit a "yielding to pedestrian" light. I suppose it could be an addressable strip around the whole vehicle where only the section closest to the ped actually illuminates, so the ped can know that the car sees them specifically. The equivalent of eye contact with a wave. Otherwise, the ped will be caught in a game of chicken wondering if the apparent yield is for them or for something else that will finish sooner (like a stop sign with no interfering vehicular traffic).
I do this on my bike in the city. I used to have so many scary incidents until I started doing this. It's funny how differently people treat you when they look you in the eyes.
For the same reason they have the signs that say Student Driver. It lets everyone else know that this car might do something totally unexpected as the car is being controlled by a totally inexperienced operator.
I hope that if we do end up with most/many cars recording everything (with several sensors) we will at least get a “report reckless driver” button that will send the recording to highway patrol and be allowed as evidence.
So the new colour would let you know the car will move in entirely predictable ways based on billions of km driven, unlike the cars driven by crazy humans
I assume you would drive differently if you noticed the driver you were overtaking was looking at their phone and their hands were not on the wheel?
Like the article hints at, a true self driving car lets the driver behave in ways that would normally be reckless and illegal. Best to avoid ambiguity.
Human drivers and autonomous systems drive differently. So if you’re trying to predict how the car will behave in order to e.g. anticipate possible hazards (which I think we all do when driving?) then you may wish to take it account whether it’s being autonomously driven or not.
Humans are pretty good at pattern recognition. Any experienced human driver learns to predict the behavior of other drivers using subtle cues. With time I'm sure they'll all learn to use this information in many nuanced ways as well. Self driving cars likely will as well.
Sometimes extremely subtle. There was a highway exit I used to take all the time (and pass nearly as often) to get to where I was living. It has two exit-only lanes, both of which begin as onramps. I developed a very good sense for which drivers were going to realize that they were about to miss their exit (and move right) or be forced to exit (and move left). It didn’t last full-strength for much more than a year or so after I moved elsewhere in the same metro area.
I can’t clearly articulate what it was I was seeing, but doing it two or three times a day, I got very good at it.
It shouldn't make you drive differently, but in the real world human drivers do drive in unsafe ways, so a cue might help. Might also be ignored or not understood, of course.
> It shouldn't make me drive differently - e.g. not be aggressive...
It's quite the opposite... if there's a tiny gap between two cars in the other lane, you usually don't squeeze in between them, becaus the rear driver in that lane could be distracted and wont brake and let you in in time, or might intentionally not widen the gap, to net let you squeeze inbetween. With automated cars, you can slowly swerve into the too-narrow gap, and the safety mechanisms on the self-driving car will automatically make room for you :) There are many dangerous maneuvers that agressive drivers can't do now, because there will be a crash if the other drivers don't notice them and brake in time, and the self-driving cars will always notice and make room for the either bad or intentionally agressive driver.
Having an exocage on your vehicle also allows this. Even just good bullbars and some bush rash that shows you are not as worried about scratching your paint. You can pretty much force your way into lanes because your vehicle is immune to damage from other drivers and they don't want damage to their car so they just let you in lmao.
I have an old shitty car, if he scratches my side/door/..., I will get it repainted for free by his insurance, while his insurance gets a lot higer for the next few years.
Don't know why I'm being downvoted, there was an accident recently near where I live where a motorist hit a pedestrian in a roadway. He stopped his car and pulled into the opposite lane and turned on his flashers to prevent traffic from running over the guy who was lying in the road. An autonomous vehicle stopped, seeing the car in its lane, but a driver behind it pulled out and passed the vehicle unaware of the pedestrian, running over the injured guy who subsequently died from his injuries.
My understanding is the actual goal of the indicators is more for police than other drivers.
I.E. If you're watching a TV show on the center screen it could be illegal if you don't have the system (not like that stops anyone today anyways -_-).
Blue lights are banned on cars in lots of places (so that you don't look like a cop car). I'm assuming SAE has thought of this already? It doesn't look too similar to the bright blue lights on cop cars, but still.
Quite a lot of headlights already have a blue tint to them and I don't think there's really any confusion regarding those. The fact that the lights don't flash are already quite different to emergency lights.
You can get LEDs in many wavelengths. Around 500nm is "cyan", 505nm is described as "Verde" or "mint green", 510nm is called "blue green" by LED manufacturers. And those are just single-wavelength examples. You could add a yellow led, say, to move the colour off the locus of pure-wavelength colours.
I'd be pretty surprised if those lights aren't already LEDs.
The idea of preserving night vision is based on rod cells being insensitive to light with a wavelength >640nm (ie red).
Halogen bulbs found in headlights produce a lot of light under that wavelength, and are going to be at a much higher intensity than turquoise indicator lights.
> Halogen bulbs found in headlights produce a lot of light under that wavelength, and are going to be at a much higher intensity than turquoise indicator lights.
Tangential, but holy shit, this is great to know, and explains why I generally feel blinded every time someone with those horrible headlights drives by.
I wonder if there’s anything that can be done (to my windshield? to some glasses?) that can reduce the impact of this at night?
You're going to be disappointed. You'd need to blind yourself. That red wavelength is at the bottom of the visible spectrum. Any light that looks not-read is above this threshold. That includes old kerosene and acetylene lamps from before cars were common as well as all other "white", "yellow", or "amber" lamps.
Also, halogen is an old lamp type that has been in use since the 1960s. Then towards the 1990s, there were changes in optics with "projector" housings for halogens, and then the shift to high-intensity discharge (HID aka xenon) lamps. The latest ones now are LED, of course.
In Germany they’ve been developing headlight arrays that can very specifically track the road. But it wouldn’t fly in the U.S. because people aren’t required to keep their cars to the same level of maintenance as over there.
Surprised to learn it's not tesla or comma with the first level 3 driving system approved for sale in the US. Would never have guessed Mercedes would beat them to it.
This is common knowledge among AV researchers too (who generally wouldn't be considered part of the automotive industry).
Tesla's self driving was always neat, but it made a joke of itself by announcing "fully self driving" capabilities when it was clear nobody had the tech there. (Even when generously assuming their camera-only sensor kit could be sufficient. It would be counterintuitive but not unthinkable.)
Tesla has probably the best level 2 system on the market. It’s just that it’s only level 2.
Which has pros and cons. Because these systems have a wider margin of error, they can operate in more situations. The con is that they make more mistakes so a driver must babysit them.
The problem is they take “fake it till you make it” too far in their marketing, by implying it is more than level 2.
I find this to be such a weird take - I just drove from San Diego -> LA with my Tesla doing 90+% of the freeway driving (I only have the free autosteer, so I have to handle exits, etc.). I have been in multiple rides through SF in friends' Teslas where they did not have to intervene at any point.
Is Tesla FSD ready to replace human drivers? It is not. Is it smoke and mirrors? No - there is a mountain of evidence that it is a very capable product in many situations.
Many cars have autosteer at that level, once my silly minivan is on the freeway it can lane follow and adaptive cruise can go down to zero if necessary, and knows the speed limit and adjusts as necessary.
You have an Odyssey (the best minivan), I take it? I think that's the only one that can properly lane center. Other vans just have lane exit prevention. There are some differences between Honda's and Tesla's implementations that Tesla owners appreciate.
Yes, Kia, Hyundai, and Genesis all share a lot of common tech.
This is especially true for their EVs built on the E-GMP platform [1]. You'd never guess it by looking at them, but the Hyundai IONIQ 5, Kia EV6, and Genesis GV60 are all built on that same platform, with different bodies and interiors, along with some different suspension tuning.
The driving assistance features do vary with the trim level. In the EV6, the Wind trim has a more basic system, the Wind with Technology Package has more, and the GT-Line gives you the works.
I think the high-performance GT has the same assistance features as the GT-Line, but the GT-Line has a nicer and more comfortable interior than the GT.
My AWD EV6 GT-Line with the optional fake vegan suede seats (instead of the standard fake vegan leather) is by far the best car I've ever had.
(These trim level names are for the US models; they vary a bit in other markets.)
The only complaint about its driver assistance is that it can be a bit twitchy compared with how smoothly I can drive manually when I'm paying 100% attention. But it is great to have in case I get distracted for a moment!
Putting aside the fact that you ignored the second half of what I said, that doesn't really change the point - the post I was responding to said Tesla's tech is smoke and mirrors. Smoke and mirrors means fakery. It means it's a thing that fundamentally does not work, and tricks are used to make it appear as though it does.
My response was simply to point out that it is wrong to say it is smoke and mirrors (or I would be dead in a high speed car crash instead of writing this).
It's smoke and mirrors to call it anything close (or a path to) Full Self Driving. If Tesla called their tech Pretty Decent Autosteer no one would accuse them of lying. But they don't. And I suspect that's why you're getting downvoted as well.
You're moving the goalposts substantially from the original claim, which was "Tesla's tech is all smoke and mirrors for years now."
It is certainly misleading to call it Full Self Driving - no argument there at all. It's also wrong to call all of Tesla's tech for the last however many years fakery.
That’s a fair point. Maybe a more true statement would have been that any perception of Tesla having a technical advantage over other manufacturers towards Level 5 autonomous vehicles is just smoke and mirrors.
I've made a lot of long freeway drives, and for me, even though I have to keep my eyes on the road, it's much more relaxing when the car does it. I arrive to my destination feeling much less exhausted from the drive.
Anyway, that doesn't really have anything to do with the original post - all I was saying was that it is a functional product and that it's just incorrect to call it smoke and mirrors.
I have several times been a passenger in a car where I wished the human driver would enable autosteer. It is disconcerting to have the lane warning alarm go off five times in a 30 minute span.
I don't think most people realize how erraticly they drive.
But five warnings in 30 minutes could just be 15 or 20 seconds of inattention. So more than 99% full attention. A driver assist that just smooths things out only 0.1% of the time could save the day a lot.
> It is disconcerting to have the lane warning alarm go off five times in a 30 minute span.
These lane departure systems are trash, in my experience. They can’t distinguish between real lane markings, cracks filled with sealant, old lane markings that have been painted over, etc.
The worst thing is when they take over your steering wheel for these phantom departures. I hate it, and always disable these systems in rental cars.
I agree with this guy. Tesla FSD isn't smoke and mirrors! It's made of sensors and computers n stuff! Making this out of mirrors would be impractical, let alone smoke.
Mercedes has a long history of innovation in driver assistance tech. For example: “ 1999: Mercedes introduced "Distronic", the first radar-assisted ACC,[8] on the Mercedes-Benz S-Class (W220)[9][10] and the CL-Class.[11]” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_cruise_control#:~:t....
It was not as well marketed/hyped has the Tesla of today, but you could buy an S-class that would do much of the work for you in traffic well before you could buy a model S.
I know almost nothing about cars and so assumed LiDAR sensors are just prohibitively expensive for Tesla to install in every car. But then years later I learned that every modern iPhone has a LiDAR camera.
Still don't know how to think about this - how is it possible for a phone to have LiDAR (barely utilized) but it's too expensive to have them in such a critical setup as an autonomous vehicle.
Just like you can have a 50MP camera sensor in the phone: it works? Sure. Is it sufficient to capture the Moon (heh) or something 50-100 meters from you? Not at the quality and performance of professional equipment.
Sure, you can have a matrix of iPhone LIDARs but whould they works at sufficient speed, accuracy, at +40C, at -35?
I can't speak to any production systems, but the ideal is to use a "sensor fusion" approach which can safely degrade or alert the driver when a sensor is lost.
Lidar, cameras, wireless communication with other vehicles and infrastructure, and with the internal sensors in the car.
More concerning would be adversarially-crafted signals. (Think a Wil-E-Coyote style fake-tunnel, but for lidar and and whatnot too.)
I would bet still better than how teslas fail to recognize cyclists or motorcycles still, even in 2023
And most systems use an array of sensors like radar, laser, and vision too. It’s only musk who is hell bent on lying to his customers about machine vision and also lying about his intentions where the goal is cost savings and not because machine vision is better.
I think the reference is to ALP systems which are used to defeat law enforcement speed guns? Not sure if those operate on the same frequencies as the DrivePilot LiDAR. It seems unlikely they do otherwise LE would have difficulty prosecuting speeders in these new vehicles?
I did a search for the phrase because I was also curious what it meant and hadn’t heard it before, but found your original question on the first page of the search results.
Interested to see how it performs in Nevada, Botts' dots can be confusing to self-driving AI models learned on normal highway stripes/lane markings. The Vegas strip notably has very limited lane markings.
The requirement to have a car in front of you is also very interesting.
that covers like 90% of commute and bulk of my weekly driving time and miles for me and I would say it is true lot of Bay Area driving commuters who take something like the 101 or 880 to work . I would expect 405 say in LA etc have similar conditions .
It is not solving a pain point for you and others I understand but for the BMW sedan target demographic I think has a good overlap to these conditions to their typical usage
Level 3 means that the driver is not at fault if something happens when the system is on.
Tesla could conceivably launch a level 3 system without approval by taking full responsibility for any accident that happens when the system is running even when the driver is inattentive. Even Tesla is not crazy enough to do that.
No. That doesn't make sense. Turquoise lights are the new standard to identify self driving cars. That means in the near future there will be more models with self driving capabilities than the average person will be able to keep track of. If I put turquoise lights on my newer Subaru, it isn't unreasonable to think that other drivers will think that I have a self driving car. I can't imagine there will ever be a Subaru Impreza used to help fight fires.
How about "If you put blue lights everyone will think it's an unmarked police car" then? The argument works the other way around too, if you put turquoise lights on a 1999 Subaru nobody will think it's self driving.
I forsee an increase in the number of accidents involving these cars as the asshats among us will see the lights as a signal to take additional risks when driving dangerously around these vehicles.
Mercedes will cover accidents where DrivePilot is at fault; your insurance will cover your faults. Would expect DrivePilot equipped vehicles to store insane amounts of telemetry from all their sensors, which will make it far easier for Mercedes to prove that you’re at fault than you to do the opposite.
Probably 99% of accidents between two parties where insurance has to decide who’s at fault (and therefore who pays) don’t go to court so “show up in discovery” probably doesn’t apply?
Insurance companies typically view litigation as additional cost over and above paying out the policy coverage, and to be avoided whenever possible.
And is the drivers' insurance company just going to accept a "just trust us bro" from Mercedes? Even absent litigation I'd expect voluntary disclosure, otherwise the drivers' insurance companies are going to be on the hook for much more of the payout.
That’s fair and yes I’d expect in the event of a claim, short of litigation, you’re going to see telemetry data shared to support determining who’s at fault. It would be interesting to see how that’s handled in the agreements you have to enter into to activate this system in these vehicles…
But back to the original comment - this won’t be a lottery ticket for anyone because the Mercedes probably has millimeter-accuracy data on proximity of it to other vehicles from LiDAR, its movement, their movement, so outside of ADAS failure (which you’d expect to be rare in these conditions - known highways and under 40mph; why else would Mercedes take on liability?) it really will mostly be “the other party was at fault and must pay”, and repairs on 2024+ Mercedes with all this technology won’t be cheap either.
>which will make it far easier for Mercedes to prove that you’re at fault than you to do the opposite.
which implied the telemetry collected had some sort of asymmetry in the evidence (ie. it helps prove Mercedes was at fault more than it helps prove the other driver was at fault)
Yes, and what I meant is if you drive a clunker into a new Mercedes, you are very much in an asymmetric situation in terms of "What happened?". Your clunker has extraordinarily little, in comparison to the Mercedes, and the sensors it requires to make Level 3 work (and which, presumably, log everything for collision situations and to determine who is at fault).
Or perhaps people will understand that this is a car with an abundance of sensors, and all sorts of data about what it "sees" (including actual camera footage) will be stored and used in this sort of litigation. At which point you're taking on a multi-billion company with a hugely vested interest in winning any legal challenges.
I'd say it's a far more like buying a lottery ticket. Good luck!
In addition to what other people said that obviously it won't work like this I just want to say that purposefully crashing I would guess would be multiple different felonies so social media companies would take it down and only true idiots would be posting about it openly.
It would certainly change the dynamic of the "chicken" game at 4 way stop sign intersections. I remember previously reading that Tesla tried to add the "roll forward slowly to assert your turn" function but was snubbed by NHTSA. Now one could know they can just cut off the Mercedes and it will stop?
This is inevitable. With human drivers, I check to see if they are looking at me, or at least in my direction, before turning across them. There will need to be some way for autonomous vehicles to signal to other drivers, pedestrians, etc. that the vehicle know they’re there.
Good point. A robot head then. Sticking up from the hood. With a bunch of arms and making pistol signs at all the pedestrians around him.
See Johnny Cab except of course one inside to chat the passengers (turned toward the passengers then in chat mode, and deflated in privacy mode), and one on the hood to make pedestrians feel safe.
You're right, especially because a vehicle has to engage with a number of drivers simultaneously. I can tell where a driver is looking, and I can see that he's looking at me. While a vehicle could have some sort of indicator that say "I see you", it's somewhat harder to imagine how this would work when there are many other cars around (including a mix of AVs and human-driven vehicles).
I would guess that at some point cars will communicate directly with each other, and a light might appear on the dash to indicate that a vehicle is aware of your presence/intention. That way human drivers would know that it's safe to maneuver around the AVs whose paths he might cross. But it will probably be a decade before this sort of stuff is worked out, at the earliest.
Is a color named by the gemstone called turquoise. A particular shade of blue-green provided by copper. Can vary from light blue with a hint of green to jade green mixed with blue. Easily recognizable once you see it.
In this context it means basically light cyan. A much less marketable name.
An autonomous driving system is either good enough to drive on our roads without supervision — or it's not. If it is good enough, it shouldn't matter whether others know if the driver isn't human. Any unsupervised driving system is likely to be around two orders of magnitude safer than a human driver.[0] So effectively they're special lights to tell others that a car is extremely safe.
This will backfire horribly. While there is some residual benefit to law enforcement, these lights will signal to human drivers and pedestrians that this vehicle can be bullied with impunity, and with no risk of angry retaliation. Human drivers will cut in front of them mercilessly. Pedestrians will step onto the road in front of them. Maybe not in classy affluent suburbs, but definitely in rough neighborhoods.
--
[0] I think it's obvious that anything less than two orders of magnitude (100X safer) is socially unsustainable. Think about it. 40 thousand people die on roads in the USA each year. Replace all drivers with an AI that's "only" 100X safer and we'll initially marvel at the 39k lives saved every year. But that will quickly be forgotten. What's left is the brutal carnage of 400 people mercilessly killed by robot cars annually...
> these lights will signal to human drivers and pedestrians that this vehicle can be bullied with impunity, and with no risk of angry retaliation. Human drivers will cut in front of them mercilessly. Pedestrians will step onto the road in front of them.
The risk of angry retaliation is identical to what we have already. The driver of this car can just take manual control at any time and react as they would in a non-AV.
If what you're claiming is true, the behaviors you're describing would already be common with traditional cars.
This is precisely why L3 is dangerous and unworkable and should be banned. Playing high speed tag-team with vehicular responsibility is insane and I can't believe anyone takes it seriously.
If the vehicle has a driver's seat and you're sitting in it, you should be considered responsible for the car's actions. If you want to watch a movie, that's fine, don't sit in the driver's seat. If you want your car to drive your drunk ass home, that's fine, don't sit in the driver's seat.
The legality of a pilot watching a movie is irrelevant to the discussion. It's legal for the person in the driver's seat to watch a movie with Mercedes' level 3 "Drive Pilot" active (in certain locations). A cop pulling you over is only wasting the time of everyone involved.
A car at even 20 MPH has a tremendous amount of kinetic energy, and we are all well aware of the destructive consequences of rapid deceleration when large amounts of energy are involved, particularly when fleshy human bodies are involved. There exists no other system with anything close to a comparable level of risk where we do not require or at least expect a human to be actively monitoring the system and ready to take action in the event of a problem.
I'm not saying we should ban Level whatever auto magic AI driving. All I'm saying is that we should use the same standards of responsible operation that we apply to literally every other area of human activity. Why does driving get a free pass?
California and Nevada. From the first sentence of the article:
> Mercedes-Benz is the first automaker to gain approval to sell a Level 3 automated driving system in the United States; the first customer-owned S-Class and EQS sedans in California and Nevada equipped with the Drive Pilot system hit dealer lots this month.
what does this fear come from? the logic doesn’t hold up with any automated mass transit i’ve seen. why aren’t people standing on the train lines at airports? why aren’t people trying to hit the distribution robots in Japans airports?
do you really think there’s a future where people in ‘rough neighborhoods’ (this is very poorly hidden classism/racism) where they are jumping out in front of cars? there’s very little evidence that people in a mentally sane state, read not incapacitated, will self harm to spite technology.
i know living in the bay i’d mess with the self driving cars, but never by getting in the right of way and risking my damn life, only by signaling a left and forcing them to slow down behind me. i never once tried to get infront of the car at the last moment to see if i could be menaingfully maimed. i strongly suspect the desire to not be hurt will trump your concept of how ‘poors’ live
For starters, dash cam footage of how drivers and pedestrians are willing to interact with vehicles with human drivers. If that's what they're willing to do when it's an unpredictable human in control, I can only imagine what they'll do when it's an extremely predictable computer in control.
> people in ‘rough neighborhoods’ (this is very poorly hidden classism/racism)
I think it's racist to assume that rough areas implicitly means a different racial demographics. That might be the case in your country, but it isn't in mine.
In cases where there are different racial demographics in rough areas, the fact of this disparity is a fact. Your dispute is with reality, not the person who might dare to point at reality. It's my opinion that systemic improvement is made harder when we cloak reality in double-speak.
> i strongly suspect the desire to not be hurt
I'm not necessarily talking about jumping into the path of an autonomous car so that it's forced to perform an emergency brake. I'm talking about jaywalking without concern for the car having to slow down well ahead of you to maintain a safe distance.
historically, i get what you mean about ‘ghetto’ or ‘rough area’. i see your point about not intending to be racist, and that’s fair. words have history, and ‘ghetto’ has long been linked with minority groups in a negative light. i’ll be more conscious about the terms i use.
about the dashcam footage, i think we’re seeing different things. it’s true, some of the behavior in the footage is similar to what’s normal in parts of asia. cultural habits can clash, and it’s rough to see. but i agree, it’s probably not deliberate, just different habits.
and you’re right, some drivers are just inconsiderate. but an autonomous car, with its 360-degree awareness, might handle things like unexpected merges better than we think. it’s a good point, technology might adapt to these situations more efficiently than we anticipate.
‘jaywalking’ is racist in origin, a term used to denote ‘jays’ who didn’t understand the rules of the road because the rules where so new culturally. it’s a fitting term, but poor narative, for the clashes you’ve identified in social expectations
For red-green colourblind people (both types), this colour is at the neutral point where both available cones are saturated and the brain can't differentiate it from white light.
In their study paper they used a much more blue turquoise, decided it was confusing, and then moved it to a more green version (thus saturating the non-blue cone for dichromats) but did not reassess the new green-turquoise colour.
The net effect is that for something like 8% of men this light looks exactly the same as the white reversing lights and is placed exactly where reversing lights are.