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Forum: General Talk
08-05-2018, 04:59 PM
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You are the exception rather than the rule. We have a minimum level of driving knowledge necessary for a person to drive in the US and once you have a license, you have to do something pretty bad to lose it. My grandmother was basically blind and 98 years old and still was able to renew her license in Florida. Fortunately, my mom was able to get her car keys away from her and she is grounded. But from a human standpoint, you have people who are unsafe for a number of reasons -- inexperience, distracted reasons (kids in the back seat, cell phone, messing with their make up, whatever), and overly aggressive driving patterns. Would autonomous vehicles fix these things? Yes, but only if they were the only type of vehicles on the road.
I don't see autonomous vehicles becoming dominant any time soon, but I am more nervous about other drivers than about a sudden flat tire, weird weather pattern, or something like that.
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Forum: General Talk
08-01-2018, 09:06 AM
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I think it is a tough situation. Any construction zone causes slow downs, any vehicle by the side of the road (regardless of the presence of police officers) and it does feel to me as though having autonomous vehicles would help avoid some of those silly slowdowns. Traffic really only moves as fast as the slowest vehicles on the road.
At the same time, the idea of most of the vehicles on the road being autonomous is unlikely to happen for the foreseeable future. Most of the vehicles are older and the cost of these systems will be a lot. Odds are that there will be a lot more driver helps added in that help avoid blind spot accidents, help slow vehicle down if there is stopped traffic ahead, etc.
As to the amount of accidents and traffic deaths, maybe they aren't high percentage wise, but they do cost society quite a bit and they are reducible, whereas fixing a big cause of death, like heart disease, may actually may be more difficult to take care of.
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Forum: General Talk
07-23-2018, 05:05 AM
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Of course. Put the car in neutral. Take your foot off the pedal and try again. Pull/push the emergency brake. There are all sorts of things you can and should do in such a situation, but when people are under stress they just don't do those things. They have their foot on the pedal they think is the brake (but is actually the accelerator) and when the car doesn't slow down, they just push it harder till they crash.
I don't know that autonomous vehicles are a solution (although they may be partly), but what I do know is that most of us actually tense up and perform very poorly under pressure.
To use a sports analogy, quarterbacks often will have very high completion percentages when they have good protection, but when they are "under pressure," this often drops significantly. This performance hit is true for all of us, if we are honest.
As I think about it, one of the negative effects of autonomous vehicles would be that we actually have less experience in driving, both normal and difficult conditions, but would only be called on to pilot our vehicles in difficult situations where systems were failing. That could be problematic.
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Forum: General Talk
07-22-2018, 02:41 AM
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It isn't as though having a human at the helm of an airplane is a recipe to fix all ills. Reading the story of what happened with Air France Flight 447 is scary in the sense that the first thing they teach you in flight school is to point the nose down when you go into a stall, but somehow when humans are under stress and the plane is stalling they try to pull the nose up.
I think too of the whole Toyota stuck accelerator fiasco. Clearly there was some defect in these Toyota vehicles, but if you just hold the brake pedal down, the car would still stop, even if the accelerator is also pegged to the floor. Malcolm Gladwell did a whole podcast on this a couple of years ago and came to the conclusion that the drivers tensed up, thought they were pushing on the brake and in reality were actually pushing on the accelerator and the faster they went the harder they pushed the gas pedal down, thinking that it was the brake.
Humans really have an overly inflated sense of how good they are under stress, but few of us perform all that well and in fact machines (lacking emotions and fear) are probably better at dealing with those situations, assuming adequate programming ahead of time.
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Forum: General Talk
07-06-2018, 04:51 AM
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I doubt it. You underestimate how low the population density is in major portions of the United States. I have three neighbors that live on my km stretch of road. I work 20 miles away in a town of 2500 people. The odds that someone is going to invest in some type of commuter vehicle that will transport me from rural Gladys to the metropolis of Brookneal seems small. I don't drive by myself because I'm antisocial, but because my neighbors don't work at the same place I do.
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Forum: General Talk
07-06-2018, 02:26 AM
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I think the question isn't whether having autonomous vehicles will prevent all accidents (clearly they won't), but whether it is possible they could reduce accidents. I think they probably could reduce accidents pretty significantly. A lot would depend on how much humans are allowed to over ride the vehicle control. Can a human go above the speed limit and if so, by how much? Can a human attempt a dangerous merge into another lane of traffic? My guess is that the best situation (once these systems are fully developed) is not to allow much human intervention in the vehicle operation. A two headed control system is much more likely to break down.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 12:02 PM
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My insurance company offered me a discount (5 percent, I think) if I let them install a box on my vehicles that will watch my driving and upload details to them. This would include number of miles traveled, my driving patterns, and obviously any accidents or near misses.
I suppose this isn't surprising, but I think it is probably where things are headed, much more than government control. For the most part, the government steps in when something goes wrong -- if there is an accident or something like that, then they will get a download from your car's computer to see what happened.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 05:38 AM
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I suppose. I don't see vehicles in the US being under "web control" any time soon, at least not on the road. In my area of the country there is no web signal or cell signal for that matter, for broad swaths of the country side. And it has low enough population density that cell companies don't seem particularly interested in fixing that.
To me, self driving vehicles are still a very long way away for the average consumer who can't afford a top end car. I drive a ten year old pickup and there are a lot more people like me than those driving the newest Tesla and will be for a very long time. At the same time, I do hope that there are defensive helps that are put into vehicles to keep them from merging into an occupied lane or accelerating towards a stopped vehicle.
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Forum: General Talk
07-05-2018, 03:11 AM
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I know there is a lot of fear out there about government control and hackers and things like that. Also fear of how these sort of systems will react to unforeseen conditions.
The one thing I would say is that my biggest fear when I get behind the wheel is from other drivers. People drive overly aggressively, or completely distracted and cause significant higher numbers of accidents and traffic fatalities than do bad conditions. And situations like road construction where the road narrows by a lane or two could be handled significantly better in situations where vehicles were able to maintain speed and still merge together (which definitely seldom happens with humans at the helm).
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