As long as we have to keep hearing people natter on about how we just need to wait around and hold out until self-driving buses and cars save us from our traffic nightmares, we all need to spend some time reading this article in Popular Mechanics by Chuck Tannert.
The long story short: We’re nowhere near having autonomous self-driving cars. And, oh yeah, people suck at being the “safety” feature in what we now consider self-driving cars.
Tannert writes:
Semi-autonomous driving systems don’t possess the instantaneous flexible decision-making skills based on the intuition that humans have. Person and machine must work as a team, so we're ready when they need us.This moment is called the "hand-off"—the instant that a car realizes it isn't sure what to do and asks the human to take over. Many researchers consider the hand-off problem—an inevitability of SAE Levels 1 through 3—to be the extremely difficult if not unsolvable.
“This poses almost insurmountable engineering, design, and safety challenges, simply because humans are horrible backups,” Reimer says. “We are inattentive, easily distracted, and slow to respond in highly vigilant activates such as supervising a test vehicle.”
Why? For one thing, humans can’t react fast enough. A group of scientists at Stanford University recently published research showing that most drivers require more than five seconds to regain control of a vehicle when called to do so. "That is simply not enough time to get the vehicle under control in a safety critical situation,” Reimer says.
Reason 2: Human nature. Back in 2012, when Google was getting serious about testing this vehicle tech, the search engine giant allowed a group of employees to use its self-driving vehicles. The participants were all warned to be attentive and ready to take back control of the car whenever prompted, especially in the event of an emergency. If you watched those videos of people goofing off while Tesla's Autopilot does the driving, then you can guess what happened next. The employees often climbed into the back seat, watched videos, or otherwise didn't pay attention to what was unfolding around them.
So, yes, the future of autonomous vehicles will be cool. I concede that. But that future isn’t 12 months off, maybe not even 12 years off. Whatever your transit vote may be, please don’t make it based on the belief we’re on the verge of having autonomous vehicles that will save us from ourselves.
We are not.
