Forums Forums National News Driverless cars

I see that a woman pedestrian in Arizona was killed by an autonomous Uber vehicle under test and Uber has suspended its autonomous vehicle program there.

That people seem convinced that these things are ever going to be better than human beings baffles me. Even the fact that human drivers are required 'if the car cannot handle a situation' doesn't seem to dent this faith, despite the fact that it is clear evidence that the things are potentially dangerous. As a learner driver, I was taught amongst other things to slow down when passing groups of kids on the pavement and if possible to give them a wide berth.

I very much doubt that there is an algorithm that would reliably detect kids mucking about - or say a drunk - let alone take appropriate action to ensure their safety.

as skeptical as you EX about them. Man is fallible and is the one inputting the data.. They may have there place somewhere

It was an Uber semi-autonomous car, they are NEVER supposed to be autonomous, it is not designed that way, its not supposed to be used that way, they are merely a driver assist, much the same as you would use cruise control.

Of course the media chooses to muddy the waters.

So its ok for SEMI-autonomous cars to kill people? I don't use cruise control. If I can't control the speed of the vehicle without assistance I probably shouldn't be driving it.

The more 'assistance' you build in, the more dangerous they become.

I agree, they are a danger and should be banned, totally ridiculous idea.

Those one pedal does all nissans are ridiculous too, they should also be banned.

don't become a lazy nation people!

I wonder how many accidents would occur if you took Humans totally out of the equation? The most efficient TRAIN I've ever travelled on is the Aerotrain in Kuala Lumpor airport, Malaysia. No driver, no problems.
Autonomous cars are coming, we'll just have to learn to accept them, or should we all go back to horses and carts?

Uber Victim Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Car
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...d-suddenly-in-front-of-self-driving-uber

Meanwhile, earlier this week a driver controlled and operated car went into a river and a child died. 4 people die on average every day in the UK. Should we ban all driver operated cars?

It didn't, the driver did or the pedestrian did, same as a conventional car and which happens far too regularly.

This happened in Arizona where there are jaywalking laws, ie cars have right of way except at specific crossing points.

In this instance the car issued warnings to the driver and he ignored them. If this had been an autonomous car it would not have issued warnings it would have stopped.

There have been no deaths caused by an autonomous car yet.

Quite apart from the safety aspects, it turns out that very few people WANT a self-driving car. Polls reveal that only about 20% want one. I can understand this. I would prefer to drive than to be driven even by people whose driving I completely trust. The time passes quicker.

The idea of sitting there waiting for the car to mistake a parked caravan for the open road, or to be baffled by a wheelie bin blown onto the road so I have to take over is NOT my idea of fun.

I think these self driving cars are just a way of manufacturers foisting more unnecessary and expensive high-tech junk on us. It is their equivalent of the ALDI automatic egg boiler. Totally pointless, it takes up takes up space and probably does a worse job of it than you or I do with a saucepan.

The link I posted said:



As for polls, it depends which one you read. The American ones have low support, but this British one is more favourable:

http://www.ukautodrive.com/survey-finds-uk-public-still-open-minded-about-self-driving-vehicles/

You might feel rather differently about these contraptions had you read:

"Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere (Perspectives)" bt Christian Wohlmar

One thing that is often overlooked in the negative reports on autonomous cars is that you will no longer need a driving licence or driving test, this could considerably reduce the number of pedestrians. It could be an absolute godsend for many elderly people.

Additionally if all cars are autonomous you need less road space and even have the majority of minor roads one way which will make more space for pedestrians and narrower roads to cross.

Furthermore pedestrians can be given absolute priority at specified crossing places (press a button and the cars WILL stop).

I'm not suggesting I agree with all the above but if safety is a priority they are things that should be considered. There are loads of safety solutions that aren't currently in use because they know humans will ignore them - you only have to look at speed limits!

I love driving and rue the day that autonomous will take over BUT I also think our whole transport systems are pretty rubbish. Using buses in areas you don't know is quite a gamble unless you waste quite a bit of time planning and researching, there are many times I'd like to just pop on a train and get near my destination but the nearest stations are miles away from my destinations.

The Governments should be working hard on test systems for autonomous vehicles, in many software systems the test schedule had to be written (and reviewed) before the programs were even started. It concerns me that some of the autonomous designs primarily rely on optics and some of these aren't even roof mounted.

I've seen a lot of dangerous designs (both software and hardware), testing is where the public money should be spent.

@Gibbo The car gave warnings to the driver before this incident, the driver was operating the vehicle unsafely. Being semi-autonomous it wouldn't have the same level of safety built in as a fully autonomous car that would look at pre-empting the pedestrians possible movements.

Indeed it could DD.That is exactly what I am worried about!

Just like a passenger in a car, bus, train, aeroplane or ship doesn't need a licence or test.

thing that worries me, many a time I've been in Wales or Scotland and my phone loses gps same with some tunnels, and if run by computer how long before someone hack it, then it's just a big remote control car, as for driveless trains they are on rails so not much can go wrong.

I can't think of any reason why your phone would lose GPS in Wales or Scotland over England though it might lose GPRS etc. The cars don't run solely on GPS in fact some of them don't use GPS at all for the autonomous stuff. The GPS system does go down sometimes and has planned outages

Even hardware goes wrong sometimes.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/03/21/nvidia_titan_v_reproducibility/

Years ago I got (at work) a very expensive Hewlett Packard scientific calculator. It worked just fine and made my life a lot easier. One day, I did a simple multiplication of two three or four digit numbers and got an answer that was wildly wrong. I phoned them and they admitted that it was a hardware fault. I was the third person in the UK to have stumbled on it. They knew the reason and it would malfunction ONLY on those numbers. In due course we received a letter warning us of the malfunction. It had taken some years for this fault to be found. You can imagine the result had it been a computer controlling the steering of a car.

Add to this the FACT that with millions of lines of code, there WILL be software faults that cannot in practice be either found or rectified, and they can also cause crazy behaviour.

As Mr Wolmar observes in his book, there are huge problems with supervised automated systems - in this context, cars that may require driver supervision under certain circumstances.The supervisors tend to go to sleep! You can't really blame them. Sitting there with nothing to do for ages, it happens. When the car runs into problems it can happen with very little warning and the supervisors do not react fast enough or properly. The problem has emerged in the pilots of aircraft, railway engine drivers, and automated collision avoidance in ships. It will emerge in cars too.

I cannot for the life of me find anything to support the claim that these cars will be safer than humans, and my experience of real-time software over a number of projects suggests the opposite. I think the enthusiasts for these things are naive.

It depends on how the regulations change over time and whether the car will have a self-drive mode.

At present you must be sober and qualified to drive - even if you're letting the car drive, just in case you have to take over. Pretty much like with an instructor with a learner driver.

Whether in future cars with self-drive modes have a competency test before it lets the human drive is a possibility.

Computers are surely only as good as their hardware and programmers . I hope to God no-one who has ever had anything to do with setting up the Governments Inland Revenue system is ever let near computers for autonomous vehicles. Massive KNOWN glitches that accountants constantly point out to them , yet they just allow staff to plod on using the wrong figures that are being churned out, and STILL argue the toss when you quote their own rules to them which show without doubt youre right!

All that kind of stuff doesnt inspire me with confidence that I could trust a car operated by a computer - Id be sat beside it on the edge of my seat , and a nervous wreck by the time I got to my destination.

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...death-woman-failure-fatal-crash-arizona. ( Vid of the collision)

You know when you look at a laptop screen, it depends exactly on the angle its opened at, as to how light or dark the 'picture' is ---
Looking at the video , theyre saying the woman just stepped out with her bike, and with or without technology assisted driving, (the tech they agree was faulty), nothing could have stopped a collision.
However, does that mean then that just because this video shows the scenes as being too dark for the human driver to have seen the woman in time to react , that that was actually the case? The report says the technology failed in a big way, but how can they be sure that the actual drivers view at the time , wasnt lighter and that had they been concentrating and not bored, they might just have had a couple of seconds longer to swerve or brake? Probably was too close anyway, but just wondering in principle if camera view playback is defo going to be identical to a drivers original view ? Also, it would depend on the quality of the dashcam in the first place -- apparently according to AutoExpress, some have had problems with adjusting to light and dark - although youd hope that absolutely top notch ones were used for autonomous cars

From what I can see She stepped out from the crown of the road after I presume crossing half the road. The auto side should pick up in any kind of light as in parking sensors, no picture or light required infra red measurement I think.The human eye should see her way off in the head lights. Human error and not just the dozy driver.

The driver wasn't looking at the road, it looks like she was playing with her phone.

I've got to admit I don't like semi-autonomous vehicles, drivers will be blasé and treat them as autonomous vehicles when they aren't. The car hasn't currently got an "autonomous mode" that the media keep on stating. Also the driver is the "driver" not the "safety driver" like they are stating.

In this instance the pedestrian would probably fall foul of the jaywalking laws.

Multiple failures by the driver and the pedestrian, the semi-autonomous car was in testing and while it may not have performed as expected, that is the reason it is in testing and has a driver.