Robocars - Autonomous Drive, Self-driving, Driver-less cars

God, read about this yesterday.

Obv early days but the thing that I'm interested in is, yeah it can see a person crossing the road casually and slow down accordingly but does it have enough awareness to 'read the road'. Like when you can tell someone is going to walk into the road before they do, or that a dodgy cyclist is going to ball across two lanes of traffic.

Car traffic tends to be pretty predictable, ( and unfortunately) mostly through stereotyping. It's the ped and cycle traffic that I worry about.

You do realise that it only has to be better at this than the average human, driving with their average attention.

Which these days is pretty a pretty low standard..

Who is going to pay extra to be late?

They already have the biggest excuse ever to just go "oh it was on auto".

I'm not sure what you're responding to. What do you mean pay to be late?

The main issue, said Larsson, is that it appears that the people who bought this Volvo did not pay for the “Pedestrian detection functionality,”

So without it your car can drive itself only looking out for the big stuff.

The point is, they were trying to demonstrate a safety feature that the car didn't have.

Like me aiming a gun at my head and pulling the trigger... witnesses later realising it didn't have a 'Safety catch' and that was why they were covered in my brain matter.

"The pedestrian detection would likely have been inactivated due to the driver inactivating it by intentionally and actively accelerating,"
So, don't worry, drivers can still kill us with their cars - safety features or not.

Robocars and insurance.

For those that like boring reading.

How significant is the backlash gong to be from those who consider it their 'right' to be able to drive on the roads? If Google gets their way and human-controlled cars are banned within a couple decades that is

Unlikely to be banned but much more likely they will be taxed or insured out of the price bracket of most.

The whole point indeed of self-driving cars is to finally get rid of individual cars over the span of a few decades--- even Elon Musk agrees that it would take no less than 20 years to replace the installed base with self-driving vehicles given production capacity. The first step in this direction is todays "car sharing". Since self-driving motorcars don't need parking lots and are ideally suited to "car sharing" it is really a short way towards redefining urban mass transit away towards swarms of self-driving cabins--- really a reinvention of the "people movers" proposed back in the 1960s--- maintained as part of public infrastructure.
The first semi self-driving driver cars should be on the market by late year. I've seen the NVIDEA boards and they are nice. Google perhaps has the most tagging but there are a number of new approaches I've seen that should be able to equalize the field quite quickly. Visual navigation is not fully solved but the results are still pretty darn impressive. Insufficient for automonous driving but a big leap towards that goal.
Right now the biggest problem is a moral one: utility decisions.
There is also a dystopian side to things as the technology is already being applied to things like UAVs.

I don't think it's unlikely that they're banned in inner cities at all, maybe it's a bit of a stretch for rural driving in the shorter term.
I'm also intrigued as to whether the 'roads are just for transportation' argument will come back to bite cyclists in the arse...

I don't think it's unlikely that they're banned in inner cities at all,

In the intermediate term it'll be effectively banned by:

1. higher insurrance rates and liability
   
2. lack of parking
   
3. cost to maintain old motorcars
   
   

Given the impact on infrastructure I think we'll see a lot of wide ranging changes--- just as we saw in the wake of the individual motorcar. Roads too will change. While the highway system might have started off for use by bicycles they clearly developed in the last century for automobiles. Once the critical mass in replacing the installed base is reached it should be a short way to banning them-- similar to the manner with which many places have banned horse driven cars. Self-driving cars will redefine road design in ways that preempt driving.

http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/26/google-delphi-two-self-driving-cars-near-miss

"forced to abort its lane change"

sounds a lot better than "caused multi-lane pileup and the deaths of 14 people" that the evil human drivers would've caused. :)

Sounds like the software worked?

The stats are pretty impressive so far. They keep trying to make an issue about the 11 or so reported incidents but that's a small number given the stage of development. And the other factors (humans) involved.

I wonder what people will do when autonomous cars are the norm? How will we show our status and show off to others?

How will we show our status and show off to others?

Bikes :)

I thought the 11 were all humans crashing into the robo-cars?

Most were but not all.

EDIT: Actually "12 minor accidents since 2009, not including one that happened just this week. “Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident,” claims Google."

There was one, but it was in manual mode:
"The only reported crash that appears to have been Google’s fault: “A Google Prius model AV operating in manual mode was involved in an accident on Charleston Road in Mountain View, CA. An employee operating the Google AV to run an errand (i.e., he was not using the vehicle to test our autonomous technology) rear-ended a vehicle that was stopped in traffic. No injuries were reported at the scene. The Google AV sustained some damage.”

http://gizmodo.com/google-will-tell-you-when-its-driverless-cars-crash-1709345808

You can download monthly crash reports:
http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/

audi and lexus drivers in bad driving shocker ^^^^^^^

Indeed...
Could this be quite significant in that they work on a real test? Could lead to a step change ...

Reuters are standing by our story, FWIW. I just got the Guardian to amend their article to reflect that :)

And we did an update on the original article:
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/06/27/us-autos-selfdriving-delphi-idUSKBN0P700F20150627

Apparently track standing can confuse Google cars.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2015/08/26/how-fixed-gear-bikes-can-confuse-googles-self-driving-cars/

"generally done only by riders on fixed-gear bikes"

brodouevenroadbiketrackstand