Does anybody else get mad when this programme on? It's made out as if it's funny that these old people still driving and making terrible mistakes and either kill themselves or worse kill other people , which has happened many times in the past. I agree that they should have to take a test and definitely should not be driving at a 100!! They so defiant when told they really shouldn't be driving but it's not their lives I worry about it's the innocents!!!!!

Its the old dears i especially watch out for when doing school crossing ..had so many either pretend or actually dont see you standing there like a lemon waving a big stop sign. Even had one slow down giving the impression of stopping then deciding to carry on..think their minds struggle a bit to comprehend the situation.

Perhaps self-driving cars will help, fish.

But how would you feel about seeing a car with the occupant fast asleep or reading a newspaper, approaching you?

The statistics show that young drivers cause far more accidents and deaths than old drivers. It would be silly and unfair to "sort out" the old drivers before sorting out the young driver problem.

The stage I'm dreading is when there will be a mix of autonomous and non-autonomous cars on the road. I'm sure that there will be a fair number of idiots using a variety of methods to purposely fool the autonomous cars into making mistakes.

Personally, I think they will have to introduce a cheap compulsory telemetry box on all cars.

The computer will probably keep a record of events, not the least so that the manufacturer can improve the software.

The whole thing seems an ill-informed daft plan to me though. I can't think of a single piece of evidence to support the idea that robots are safer than humans. Rather the reverse is true. Why are even the simple ones used in car manufacturers kept away from human operators when working?

The reason is that their behaviour is not considered predictable enough for it to be safe!

The difference between robots and humans is that the robots obey their limitations, many human drivers haven't got a clue what their limits are and often drive way beyond them.

Tailgating is the simplest form of stupid driving, a human feels safe tailgating because he hasn't crashed and fool themselves in believing they have reactions and control of the vehicle way beyond what is possible.

Every crash is caused by the vehicle being too close to something - by definition.

Like the Scrap Yard?

Well, we are ALL constrained by our limitations - by definition - are we not?

I think you mean robots will reliably follow instructions. Generally they do, until a cosmic ray flips a bit somewhere and it goes crazy! Once a program jumps to the wrong area of memory it can start interpreting data as machine code, and then god knows what it will do!

No, we are not constrained, we operate beyond our limitations on occasions and rely on luck whether the outcome is as we wish. That is because of what you could call "intelligence", we do not understand absolutes ie nothing is absolute in our minds. If something is stated as an absolute, there will be a human somewhere that says "what if .....".




We rely on millions of things not to break all the time - can anyone predict when a brake seal will fail on a car? (noting that most brake seals on cars are not protected by dual circuit brakes).

Road vehicles are possibly the only form of powered transport that have have not been used autonomously for many years. Trains, ships, aeroplanes all have autonomous systems in use.

The cost of adding independent safety systems to check the autonomous system is working correctly is minimal, I doubt if it would add £50 to the cost of the car.