This is already happening in the trucking industry. Self-driving trucks are being developed to be able to drive 99% of the trip that's on highways and then human drivers take over for the local 1%. To make it easier, transfer hubs are being built near cities off major highways to make everything easier and non-disruptive. The same thing could be done with cars without the need for the transfer hubs and it basically is already done.
I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway.
This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks.
Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night.
Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis.
Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess.
Many of those vehicles were industrial usage, not consumer.
>This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis.
No, you've got it backwards. The point of all of the above comments is that driving in cities and densely populated areas is a much more difficult challenge than driving down a straight open highway in the middle of nowhere. That's the easy part, the hard part comes when there are humans and all sorts of obstructions and road/land features to deal with.
But as this accident shows, that's still an easier problem: if there an object in your lane on the freeway, you should pretty much always avoid it. On a city street, it's more difficult to decide which objects should or shouldn't be ignored.
Autonomous cars have an advantage here compared to even the best human drivers - a persistent 360 degree awareness of the surrounding.
If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.
> Autonomous cars have an advantage here compared to even the best human drivers - a persistent 360 degree awareness of the surrounding.
Autonomous cars don't have an advantage because they don't exist. They may have an advantage one day when they are finally ready (but that may always be 5 years away)
> If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.
Even with a 360 degree view, it still has to recognize the object, classify it correctly and make a decision. All tasks which are difficult for a computer to perform reliably enough to be allowed on a public road.
The Uber car had a 360 degree view but it still ran over Elaine Hertzberg, and as far as we know didn't even stop after it hit her. The Tesla Autopilot has 360 degree view but still tends to crash into barriers, tractor trailers, street sweeping trucks and fire trucks.
> I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway.
Fast driving necessitates predictability. Unrestricted stretches of the autobahn are not killzones because the speed breeds discipline: lanes are changed with indicators on more often than without (barely, but still..), passing lane rules are followed almost religiously, compared to what you see in America (even though drivers constantly complain about imperfections) and so on. The fastest roads of any jurisdiction would its easiest for a robot car or truck. Slow environments on the other hand are full of ad-hoc improvisation and weird traffic participants like the occasional flock of sheep, horse team or a biathlon squad on rollers.
> This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks.
Honestly I would think that automating a slow moving vehicle in the city would be a much harder engineering challenge. City driving can be a lot messier than driving on the freeway.
The stakes are much lower though. A standard car drifting into the oncoming lane is basically death. If it can't handle city driving, the methods are probably too immature to put people's lives against.
Hitting a barrier in highway speeds is quite dangerous, even without hitting a car in the oncoming lane.
As the recent Tesla crash showed, even on a divided highway there are plenty of opportunities to cause death and mayhem to the autonomous car and the surrounding vehicles.
