Ready For Driverless Cars?

Dan, I'm from Illinois so your statement 'Our politicians need to become better stewards of our money' has no chance of happening. The majority of our politicians only seem motivated to stuffing their pockets with our money.

I forget where I read it, but an article discussed one problem with driverless cars that I hadn't thought of. What if the car detects a person in its path unexpectedly and there is not time to stop? The choices the car can make are A) hit the person, or B) turn into a brick wall and kill you instead. Would you buy a car that was programmed to do (B)? I certainly wouldn't.

Now imagine may different permutations of this: what if there are 10 people in the road ahead? Kill 10 people, or you? What if the 10 people are children? What if YOUR children are in the car? (Assume, for argument's sake, that the car DOES know the difference between adults and children in the road, DOES know who is riding in it, and can and will make the decision about who lives and who dies in a split second.)

A lot to think about, isn't it?

You missed the biggest potential impact of this technology: The impact on jobs.
For a quick example, take autonomous trucks. It's easier to make a point-to-point truck autonomous than a car. Tomorrow's long haul truck drivers will become the train engineers of today; e.g., either obsolete or mere caretakers of the equipment used to replace them.
As CGP Grey notes in 'Humans Need Not Apply' autonomous vehicles don't have to be perfect, just better than humans. And they are that now. The US transportation industry employs about 3 million people; by census numbers, Transportation jobs are the largest category of all jobs in the US. 1/3 of the transportation business cost is for the people.
What would it take to automate a truck moving from a truck depot next to an interstate to another truck depot next to an interstate hundreds of miles away? Not much, and that can be done right now. Plus there is no need to feed, house, or rest the robot - all of which saves money for the transportation company.
Humans will lose their jobs at no fault of their own, just like horses lost their jobs at no fault of their own.

Quote: "Let’s answer the easy question first. Yes, there is a fully driverless car."
I agree with Tom W. It's been snowing off & on for three days here, with more to come. A plow just went through & I can only see little bits of road here & there.
Bring that driverless beauty here & let's see how it does!
And how about patches of ice? That should be fun for the whole family!

It'll never happen. I am 88 years on this Orb and have lived through Several of these "Future Wonders". The most little thought out pipe dream was the one that predicted an auto-airplane in every garage, with detachable wings or folded wings you name it. Some were built and actually flew and drove. The reality was that the sky would be full of the same batch of "NO brainers" that exist to this day.
The negatives then are more pronounced today than were evident at the end of my hitch after WW2. We have a better chance of landing a human on Mars than filling our roadways with "Driverless cars".
It would be Much better that we go back to before the biggest con job perpetrated upon the American people. The destruction of the electric rail (Called "street Cars") transportation that worked so well, and kept multiple air polluting conveyances , including automobiles, from clogging our infrastructure. I could go on.

A driverless car is going to need two things. One is human override so that the car can be rescued from punks and hackers. Two is an infrastructure of driverless car signaling so that the car will stop at stop signs and for cops.

EDITOR'S NOTE: Road sign detection, emergency vehicle detection, and human override are already there.

Nope. I don't even want to be on the same road! If they have totally separate roads, maybe. With the way computers crash, satellite TV goes out when it rains, just way to many deadly possibilities.

Will driverless cars become the norm? This is a technological imperative: If it can be done, it will be done!

1) Bob - thanks for the post, had NO idea there were so many different folks trying the concept.

2) I kind of chuckled when I was reading about states permitting (or not) these cars. It read exactly like states accepting Medical mari or not - So the spectrum goes from virtually free use with guidelines (i.e. testing, not in cities etc.), to "Over my dead body". I just caution folks to not become 'Luddite's' when thinking about the inevitable.

3) The 'who do you hit?' question is simply just another form of the "Fat Mans Dilemma" (AKA The Trolly Dilemma [or Problem]. Folks can check it out on Wiki. It IS worth the 5 minutes.

Who will buy these cars? It won't be the young guys with the need to speed.

I believe the introduction would happen in stages.
Certain routes will be opened to driverless vehicles. Over time, the routes will be expanded and more will be developed.
As far as the comment about an instant roadblock killing either 10 innocents, or it's own occupants... the article stated that google cars had 3D sensors of various types. I would (like to) think that some of those sensors would detect those 10 ten people and be cautious before they all jumped out in front.

All mechanical and electronic devices have a finite life and will eventually malfunction or fail completely. Does the car then immediately stop, tying up traffic? Or, does the drive need to be as alert and not distracted as if driving so he can take over control, if reaction times are quick enough? how do the sensors cope with fag or blizzard conditions?

Hopefully not riding along at 70mph on the freeway when a BSOD pops up.

Bob, thanks for the flashback to 1969 with Roadhouse Blues. After dropping out again, I'm gonna need a driverless car!

I don't trust anyone (or ANYTHING)but myself when it comes to driving. The day they pry my hands off of my steering wheel will be the same day that the NRA freely gives up all their guns!

Hmmmmmm gives a whole new meaning to the blue screen of death!

Thank you for a very interesting article. I, too, had no idea that so many companies were working on producing a driver-less car.

Please don't think I'm being negative when I say that I don't think a driver-less car would be successful on Sri Lankan roads in my lifetime. For instance, three-wheeler taxis are a law unto themselves and are incorrigible as regards observing lane discipline and so on. (A driver-less motor boat or barge for traveling on a canal may be an interesting option.)

All the critics - including Bob Rankin - are busy inventing reasons the driverless car is not ready or will never be ready. But that's all just nitpicking of a clearly achievable technology. The important question is what's driving the driverless car?

There are 3 really big drivers that make the technology inevitable - and very, very soon.

1. The 32,000 US citizens (millions worldwide) who die each year from the inept human driver errors. (Plus millions of injuries and 500 billion in damage.)

2. The ability - combined with Uber type aps and electric vehicles - to radically improve public transportation efficiency and comfort.

3. The massive financial rewards available to those who provide these new transportation systems.

In other words, all those car companies and big tech companies are going to make it happen as soon as they can because they are already counting the profits.

The on of the many problem with driver-less cars would be sharing the roads with people driven cars. The software of the driver-less cars is designed for the vehicle to strictly follow the laws of the road. Most of the humans,as I see every day, eider do not know the rules or ignore them deliberately.
Probably the best early use of driver-less cars would be long distant transport truck driven in dedicated lanes on the Interstate Highways, with a driver in the vehicle to take controls outside of the highway and deliver the load to the destination

I am in full agreement with Darrell H Leacock - I too saw what was going to be the cars of the future, back in the 1950's. I am 72 and none of it has come true.

I wish some of you could have seen what these cars looked like. Talk about futuristic Sci-Fi, that was what they were. We were also, suppose to be on Mars by now, colonizing. The Moon would have already been colonized, for a jumping spot to the rest of outer space and other planets.

I do believe these things will come to pass, but, not now. First of all, the roadways need major reconstruction and methods of "controlling" the driverless cars. Some kind of magnetic or monorail types of control. It was also, predicted that driverless cars would be all over the world, by 2000. Didn't happen, did it?