Is it this?
I can’t wait for people to come in here and say how it’s not going to work. Every time someone posts an article about how it’s already happening the naysayers come in like clockwork. :P
Love this forum anyways.
It’s almost a straight way. If they’re just doing like the straight way from one hub to another and then human trucks for the more complicated deliveries, like the not straightways, that makes a lot more sense.
And there is this.
I’ll step in then. This is PR fluff for Uber’s stock price. The “autonomous” trucks have a driver (he is even in the video), and the driver has to take over operation of the truck whenever the self-driving unit encounters something it can’t handle; even in long-haul highway driving this happens many times a day. No truck will be able to go driverless for the forseeable future; the process Uber describes is both slower and more expensive than just having a human do all the driving.
And not to be outdone:
I wonder if all this sensor equipment has any detrimental effect on wildlife or pets?
Good question. They tell you not to point lasers at pets, the small kind we carry around. I can’t imagine these are like those otherwise other drivers could get blinded too. The ability to see around things though, well that’s an advantage for sure.
It would be interesting to see if a driverless car is more or less likely to hit a pet or small animal. I could see it going either way. A driver that sees a dog might make a calculation that they’d rather avoid hitting it, even if that means doing something potentially dangerous like veering into another lane, suddenly slamming on the brakes, or going on to the shoulder. On the other hand, a driverless car is probably more likely to actually notice a small animal darting into the lane.
You have greater faith in these sensors being able to distinguish in real time between “small animal” and other small, moving obstacles that aren’t as soft than I do.
That Uber story should be front page news today. I can’t see this not affecting self driving car rollouts.
The article headline mentions a pedestrian; the article text mentions someone “not in a crosswalk”, but the chevron and the video clearly show a struck bicyclist. I wonder if “safely passing a bicyclist” is one of those corner-cases they haven’t covered yet in the autonomous system, expecting the human driver to take over, and the human driver wasn’t paying close attention because his intervention is rarely required.
As long as the autonomous systems depend on a human driver taking over in certain circumstances (and all of them do now) they will be less safe than a human driver alone.
Pretty much. A driver has to always pay attention. A driver who only takes over in emergencies will never be paying attention.
I get the arguments that an all-self-driving car fleet would be safer than today, but we’re a long way from that. These things are not fully autonomous yet, and all sorts of random shit can happen on the road.
I wonder if it’s simply a case a case of too small a sample size? I’m reminded when the Concorde crashed back in 2000, and how all the media was saying it was the first crash for the plane since its introduction decades earlier. But the thing was that they only built 20 of them in the first place, and they only made 1 or 2 flights per day. Meanwhile, there were thousands of 737s built, and each of those make four or five flights per day. The Concorde fleet in its lifetime only made the same number of flights that the 737 fleet did in a week.
I was just saying the same thing to myself. I cannot WAIT to see the case for Uber, with its entire string of albatrosses around its neck, be the first to be taken to court over a driverless vehicle caused fatality.
The article says:
Tempe Police says the vehicle was in autonomous mode at the time of the crash and a vehicle operator was also behind the wheel. No passengers were in the vehicle at the time.
Is there yet an expectation that this is an autonomous level 4 vehicle that can be driven without an operator? I bet this ultimately gets blamed on the operator that was supposed to take control.
Safely passing a bicyclist doesn’t exactly seem like a corner case to me. It’s something that happens millions of times every day. That said, cyclists are killed by human drivers all the time.