I watched a pbs program (Nova) that spent some time on autonomous driving cars.
I find PBS programs fairly strongly biased (to the left, which is ok by me). This one was fairly neutral about the topic, and I especially liked that they called out some thing that scare me about the new tech.
(1) you'll be asked to take back control primarily in emergency situations where you need fast reflexes and quick judgement. Hard to do if you've been just woken up from a nice nap.
(2) The times the system won't work and will need manual intervention will tend to be the most difficult driving conditions (blizzards, etc. ) Because people will manually drive so much less often, they'll be much less well equipped to handle those challenging situations. Essentially, it'll reduce driver experience and aptitude and then only ask us to drive when the conditions require the highest ability. While overall crashes will go down, the crash rate for manual-driving situations will shoot up dramatically.
At the 31min mark, the story mentions that some drivers prefer a more engaging driving experience (e.g. see less value in autonomous drive). They featured a 10sec clip of a car with a roundel. I had to rewind to check but alas it wasn't an E9 . . . just a pedestrian Inka orange pre-74 BMW 2002 with 4 speed manual shift gearbox and kiddies in the back seat. Too bad.
John
I find PBS programs fairly strongly biased (to the left, which is ok by me). This one was fairly neutral about the topic, and I especially liked that they called out some thing that scare me about the new tech.
(1) you'll be asked to take back control primarily in emergency situations where you need fast reflexes and quick judgement. Hard to do if you've been just woken up from a nice nap.
(2) The times the system won't work and will need manual intervention will tend to be the most difficult driving conditions (blizzards, etc. ) Because people will manually drive so much less often, they'll be much less well equipped to handle those challenging situations. Essentially, it'll reduce driver experience and aptitude and then only ask us to drive when the conditions require the highest ability. While overall crashes will go down, the crash rate for manual-driving situations will shoot up dramatically.
At the 31min mark, the story mentions that some drivers prefer a more engaging driving experience (e.g. see less value in autonomous drive). They featured a 10sec clip of a car with a roundel. I had to rewind to check but alas it wasn't an E9 . . . just a pedestrian Inka orange pre-74 BMW 2002 with 4 speed manual shift gearbox and kiddies in the back seat. Too bad.
John
