Should non-autonomous vehicles be banned from motorways?

[forzaminardi]

There's a scientific rationale for what the OP says, but I'd guess the opposite would be true, because the safety lobbyists and Daily Mail would bleat about "uncontrolable 'Terminator' robot cars" would be unsafe and limited to 40mph for the good of the children involved.

[kambites]

forzaminardi said:

There's a scientific rationale for what the OP says, but I'd guess the opposite would be true, because the safety lobbyists and Daily Mail would bleat about "uncontrolable 'Terminator' robot cars" would be unsafe and limited to 40mph for the good of the children involved.

Indeed, it will ultimately come down to public opinion not engineering factors, which in turn will come down how well it's marketed to Daily Mail readers - will the media say "computers are going to drive our cars and kill hundreds of people a year" or "computers are going to drive our cars and cut road deaths by 90%". Of course they're exactly the same thing, but you can imagine how the public will react to each.

[98elise]

Terminator X said:

rich888 said:

Toyota high end range of cars aka the Lexus are already capable of driving along the M1 down to London with little if any intervention from the driver, give it a few more years and they will be more than capable of achieving this without errors.

I have to reboot my laptop a couple of times a day and/or get the blue screen of death and/or it restarts itself due to some problem. This will never happen with a car you say?

TX.

Do you imagine that your current car doesn't have computers, and that they will only appear in cars when they are autonomous?

Computers work perfectly well until people start loading their own crap. It you don't mess with them they will continue to work until the hardware breaks.

[SuperVM]

Possibly worth some people on this thread reading about high integrity systems designed to cope with failure, as one poster mentions these are used in planes, the now retired space shuttle, etc. They need not be vastly expensive, especially as the cost of hardware is now so low.

[kambites]

SuperVM said:

Possibly worth some people on this thread reading about high integrity systems designed to cope with failure, as one poster mentions these are used in planes, the now retired space shuttle, etc. They need not be vastly expensive, especially as the cost of hardware is now so low.

Even the "non-safety-critical" embedded systems used in things like service processors in high-end servers are vastly more reliable than a human driver.

[Fetchez la vache]

kambites said:

Indeed, it will ultimately come down to public opinion not engineering factors, which in turn will come down how well it's marketed to Daily Mail readers - will the media say "computers are going to drive our cars and kill hundreds of people a year" or "computers are going to drive our cars and cut road deaths by 90%". Of course they're exactly the same thing, but you can imagine how the public will react to each.

DailyMail said:

Foreign autonomous cars coming over here, taking our UK autonomous cars jobs, driving on the wrong side of the road and killing hundreds

As per the op's original question, I see something like this as inevitable. maybe not in my lifetime...

[10b0b]

rich888 said:

I've used computers for many years and I rarely see one crash nowadays, and before anyone moans at me, look at aircraft to see just how capable they are of flying tens of thousands of miles without incident.

Thing is, despite the capability of auto pilot systems they still have heavily trained and experienced Captains and First Officers constantly checking over and making fine adjustments to the aircraft systems during the duration of the flight, who are also able to fully take control should things get a bit iffy. They don't just sit there admiring the view.

Its a fair analogy but i would expect cars in 'auto pilot' would have the typical type of person who just wants to get from 'A-to-B' and highly unlikely have the mental capacity to take over in the event of a problem.

[DUMBO100]

I think that this may happen more quickly that we think, with all of the investment now from tech companies, the research and development is moving at a faster pace and there are significant commercial gains to be made for whoever perfects the systems first

[kaiowas]

mac96 said:

The cynic in me says they will invent an excuse for retaining the 70 mph speed limit so removing what is for me the main point of autonomous cars- higher speeds.

Same as with managed motorways- odd really that the maximum variable speed is still 70 mph, a number which you could , maybe, argue is reasonable if it cannot vary according to conditions, but not once the limit can vary.

They don't really need an excuse. It's not going to happen.

We live in a culture of blame, legal cases and compensation. Anyone who signs off on increasing speed limits will have the finger pointed firmly at them for every death and serious injury that subsequently occurs whether it can be attributed directly to the increase in speed or not. As well as the legal implications, for any politician the negative PR would be career suicide which is why you'll never see anyone in power push for it.

[sorin1987]

If you look at sci-fi movies from 30 years ago you will see how they thought that in the year 2020 we will have flying cars and underwater cities and man constructions on Mars.
I think we will not have this by 2030. Maybe the fully electric cars will be the thing then but I don't think that we will have cars that will not require some input from the human driver in our lifetime.

[Maxf]

kaiowas said:

They don't really need an excuse. It's not going to happen.

We live in a culture of blame, legal cases and compensation. Anyone who signs off on increasing speed limits will have the finger pointed firmly at them for every death and serious injury that subsequently occurs whether it can be attributed directly to the increase in speed or not. As well as the legal implications, for any politician the negative PR would be career suicide which is why you'll never see anyone in power push for it.

Without erratic stop starts and panic braking, an autonomous car lane or motorway would be hugely quicker that we are currently - even if the speed limit remains at 70mph.

[otolith]

I love the way that people think a computer engineered for a safety critical system will be as unreliable as their laptop or phone. Those devices are unreliable because it doesn't matter if they aren't and nobody is willing to accept the cost and the inconvenient restrictions of them being engineered that way.

[trialsta]

Jim AK said:

We have an A road nearby that regularly sees bad accidents, usually due to speed, so surely if autonomous vehicles were using that type of road it would reduce the likelihood of a serious accident, even if it was autonomous v humanoid.

I would put good money on them usually being due to human errors, not speed, the government's own statistics show that speed usually isn't the cause of accidents. So you're still right that autonomous vehicles would reduce the likelihood of accidents, just for a different reason!

[V8RX7]

Seems like a good idea in principal.

Edited by V8RX7 on Tuesday 11th October 13:28

[Terminator X]

98elise said:

Terminator X said:

rich888 said:

Toyota high end range of cars aka the Lexus are already capable of driving along the M1 down to London with little if any intervention from the driver, give it a few more years and they will be more than capable of achieving this without errors.

I have to reboot my laptop a couple of times a day and/or get the blue screen of death and/or it restarts itself due to some problem. This will never happen with a car you say?

TX.

Do you imagine that your current car doesn't have computers, and that they will only appear in cars when they are autonomous?

Computers work perfectly well until people start loading their own crap. It you don't mess with them they will continue to work until the hardware breaks.

The big difference though is that the ECU is not currently driving the car. If the ECU fks up then I get a message on the screen re a software glitch rather than a potential death spiral.

TX.

[SuperchargedVR6]

Terminator X said:

rich888 said:

Toyota high end range of cars aka the Lexus are already capable of driving along the M1 down to London with little if any intervention from the driver, give it a few more years and they will be more than capable of achieving this without errors.

I have to reboot my laptop a couple of times a day and/or get the blue screen of death and/or it restarts itself due to some problem. This will never happen with a car you say?

TX.

That's a human problem. i.e you're too lazy to get it sorted. No different to having to pump up a punctured tyre twice a day is it?

[DottyMR2]

Pothole said:

rich888 said:

I've used computers for many years and I rarely see one crash nowadays, and before anyone moans at me, look at aircraft to see just how capable they are of flying tens of thousands of miles without incident.

Computers may not crash but programs often do...or hang. Aircraft don't have to contend with many junctions, hills, curves or other vehicles close to them, do they?

I work in IT for a huge company; applications and servers fall over all the time. People break them by doing stupid stuff with them, processes randomly hang and errors happen.

We're a way off having the systems capable of being as reliable as you would need and being able to process as much data as would be required. Would it be a central system which manages all the cars on the road from one central hub to make sure they don't crash into each other? How is this system going to communicate with the cars? What sort of monstrous creation will that be to have the processing power to actively manage so many cars? Are we going to have the cars handling the processing of this data? If so, the communication between cars needs to be perfect or there will be some serious accidents? What happens when the cars have ethical decisions to make in a scenario where there is no option other than someone to die and the car has to choose who?

There are still plenty of mobile phone black spots all over the country, yet a network of 30 million cars all communicating with each other so they can travel 100mph, within 1 inch of each other and not cause a 100 car pile up in only a few decades away?

Sure, I was also promised I'd have a jet pack by 2010 but I'm still walking to work.

[98elise]

Terminator X said:

98elise said:

Terminator X said:

rich888 said:

Toyota high end range of cars aka the Lexus are already capable of driving along the M1 down to London with little if any intervention from the driver, give it a few more years and they will be more than capable of achieving this without errors.

I have to reboot my laptop a couple of times a day and/or get the blue screen of death and/or it restarts itself due to some problem. This will never happen with a car you say?

TX.

Do you imagine that your current car doesn't have computers, and that they will only appear in cars when they are autonomous?

Computers work perfectly well until people start loading their own crap. It you don't mess with them they will continue to work until the hardware breaks.

The big difference though is that the ECU is not currently driving the car. If the ECU fks up then I get a message on the screen re a software glitch rather than a potential death spiral.

TX.

Even with the current basic autonomous systems there are multiple sensors (redundancy), and if an issue is detected the car will slow down and stop. Its really not that hard or expensive to do.

[SturdyHSV]

otolith said:

I love the way that people think a computer engineered for a safety critical system will be as unreliable as their laptop or phone. Those devices are unreliable because people install great swathes of st software they find online for free

That or Windows Updates anyway

[MB 1]

Think I'm at the point where I'd welcome autonomous driving full stop. I get almost no enjoyment from driving in public roads. Motorways are ultra dull and the objective is to get from A-B as quickly as possible, and auto driving solves all the issues with middle lane tossers, accidents etc.

The thought of jumping in a car and pushing a button to get somewhere while lying back and having a sleep sounds great

I' have 2 race cars so as long as there's still an arena for driving enjoyment I'm quite happy.