Saturday, April 2, 2011

Cars that help the driver... or not.

Some time ago, car maker Mercedes Benz was proudly introducing a system that would brake for the driver in low visibility conditions if an obstacle presented itself in front of the car. It used radar to see through the mist, and it was an excellent idea.
So they gathered a bunch of journalists, explained what was going to happen, and then created artificial mist to obscure the drivers vision. Then, on with the demonstration:


What was the problem here? Apparently the driver forgot to turn the system on.


Last night I watched a video on the TED talks channel (recommended, a lot of interesting things in there) where Google presented a "self driving car". Here's the video in question:

While the guy speaks of a worthy cause - saving a million drivers a year, saving fuel, better highway flow - and the car seems to work quite well, I have a concern which is... I wouldn't get into a car without a driver.
Airplanes have autopilots that are able to pretty much take off, fly and navigate the aircraft and then land it, but I wouldn't get into an airplane with no pilots, would you?

In the case of the proposed car it's a bit different, it seems that, while it drives itself, the driver has to be present and in the driver's seat for it to work. But this leads to other problems, like, who wouldn't fall asleep if the car was doing everything itself and you just have to relax and monitor things? Specially on a long drive... who would enjoy "watching over" to check if the car is making mistakes or doing something wrong for 2 hours? Extremely boring, you're going to fall asleep
What happens when an eventuality does occur? When these robotic cars are circulating very accurately close to each other, as proposed by mr. Inventor there,  and one of them does have a mechanical failure (cos they occur), let's say a blown tyre... it'd just skid to one of the sides slamming all the neatly packed cars and the pile up would be worse than human driven cars.

Another thing is that if future drivers are so removed from actually driving the car, then if they need to go into "manual mode", and they will eventually, they're going to be extremely shitty drivers. If you don't get practice, you're going to hit everything trying to make that car of yours fit into a garage that the robotic car is too dumb to get itself in to.

I am for driver aids such as Mercedes' failed system (when it works), giving the driver more information by means of radar, or other technologies such as infrared, to see further in the dark, or to detect a man walking in the middle of the street in a foggy morning, alerting the driver to the danger or even braking in his stead. But not robot cars that take over the whole business of driving, that's too much, and it can be dangerous.

36 comments:

  1. I still think that those little social issues will work themselves out. The widespread benefit is simply too much. People are awful drivers and cannot be completely aware of the car as if it were their own body. Computers fix this problem.

    ReplyDelete
  2. my personal favourite is the gps stories you hear of people turning left into train tracks/brick walls

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hm well I understand the risks that exist if a robot controlled car comes into daily life and also you made a smart point about not feeling safe if the aeroplane has no pilots and is merely on auto-pilot. My views on this are somewhere in between, the best option in my opinion is bridging the gap between human and machine (though I have no idea how that would be possible but I think that would cover most of the fallibilities of both) ;)

    ReplyDelete
  4. Thats pretty insane. I heard about the new cars and was a bit skeptical about them. I don't know if I'd want my car breaking for me by itself.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Lol @ the driver forgetting to turn the system on. Good post nonetheless.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Wow this proves the future is now

    ReplyDelete
  7. I just don't think that I could get used to a car doing things that I'm not making it do. It might cause more accidents with people trying to override the car.

    ReplyDelete
  8. I don't like the idea of self-driving cars.
    Some help with braking and stuff is good though.

    ReplyDelete
  9. I agree. Robot cars are still so far away in the future that people need to drive themselves for quite some time.

    ReplyDelete
  10. technology is getting to advanced lol, its good for features but if the car was fully self driving that wouldnt be very good.

    ReplyDelete
  11. The idea behind it is nice. Especially when i see someone struggle with parking in their small fucking european car.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Yeah, you definitely still need a human behind the wheel. As helpful as these automatic brake systems are, we're nowhere near the level of technology that would safely allow for automated driving.

    ReplyDelete
  13. i predict lots of people dying in horrific car crashes while the product is in its testing stages.

    ReplyDelete
  14. I can't say I'm a big fan of automatic cars PERIOD, so I'm not really for this.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I love that TED talk. I personally have a friend who died in an accident too.

    ReplyDelete
  16. Great post dude, love cars - thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  17. hahahah i saw another video like this were the car's computer failed and it crashed into the back of a semi

    ReplyDelete
  18. automatic vehicles would be nuts!

    ReplyDelete
  19. I would absolutely get into a pilotless plane and a driverless car. No question about it. I think maybe you are suffering from unintentional conditioning via garbage cheap electronics with planned obsolescence built in. Your cell phone can malfunction after a year. They expect you to buy a new one. Cars and planes take into account lives. The engineering is required to be extremely safe.

    I started majoring in Mechanical Engineering (and switched to Chemical), and one of the things they taught us was how to calculate the requirements for a product to say, sustain a certain amount of mass. Then the engineers would multiply the needed amount by 10 just to be safe.

    That car they showed has done many hours on the road with 0 problems, as he said. That is with other human drivers! Imagine if all cars were driverless. Let's say your car fails somehow. Other cars can react perfectly to your car failing and not hit it! Would you rather have a tire blown while you were driving on the highway with humans, or while a computer was driving it along with many other computer controlled cars?

    The answer is clear for me.

    ReplyDelete
  20. Xuian, it's not about mechanical failure but about improvisational skills. I trust a human more to think creatively and to judge and evaluate situations much more than I do any artificial intelligence I have seen to date. Pilots are faced with unusual situations all the time for which they train for years and years. A pilotless airplane would not move away from the pre-planned path if it saw a huge hot air balloon right in front of the plane, at least not at the current degree of automation. The car they showed may have done hours on the road but there was always a guy behind the wheel ready to take over in case something failed, and it's exactly why you need a pilot even if the airplane can, in theory, do everything itself.

    ReplyDelete
  21. Despite all this innovation, I still wouldn't trust a robotically-driven car. i would want to have some kind of control, just because of the other people on the road who are driving themselves. If all cars were driven robotically, however, with some huge network of communication between cars, then it might be nice, but until then, I'd like to drive myself, thank you very much :)

    ReplyDelete
  22. Interesting stuff, no doubt this is the future but I wouldn't be all that keen on getting in one for a few years.

    ReplyDelete
  23. Let's just cut out cars all together. Transporter from Star Trek please.

    ReplyDelete
  24. Yeah no cars would mean much less pollution..

    ReplyDelete
  25. I'll just stick with the yoda voiced gps :D

    ReplyDelete
  26. ive seen that google car before. Very dangerous. and i wouldnt trust a robot with my life.

    ReplyDelete
  27. omg, that toyota car driving itself is pretty neat! nice

    ReplyDelete
  28. I heard somewhere that whilst computers are excellent at making decisions in a split second, they never have the same gut instinct that humans do.
    That said, I wouldn't EVER trust a robot to drive my vehicle unless I was guaranteed an uninterrupted travel path.

    ReplyDelete
  29. Automated cars would be nice, but only if we had a traffic system that is as efficient as the aviation industry... I don't see it coming to reality anytime soon.

    ReplyDelete