Some of the things I have come across in the last 30 years:

- flying wheelbarrow

- unaccompanied wheel

- numerous deer

- toddler on a tricycle from in between two cars

- tourist stepping backwards of a curb

- oncoming traffic on a one way highway (Romania, fairly normal apparently)

- people driving backwards on a highway

- pedestrians in a vehicle tunnel

- tourbus wheel exploding

- truck wheel delaminating

- all manner of debris, from boards to clothing and large chunks of metal

I will take your floating plastic bag over any of those. And yes, I drive too much.

I agree with you. The one silver lining is that the autonomous car will (hopefully) have super human reflexes and will be able to brake in time for some of those...hopefully...

One of the deer encounters led to an accident (worse for the deer), another one not listed also led to an accident (Volvo skidding down a slope hit traffic divider which got launched through the top of my car, instant convertible).

Human reflexes are actually quite good when you are in your twenties or so. The good news about self driving cars is that there will be less variance in reaction speed, as well as communications capabilities warning cars behind of obstacles and danger. Right now all we have to go on in this respect is brakelights but I think it is very well possible that at some point cars will purposefully communicate in some open format (broadcast) with other vehicles on the road.

Humans all having similar reflexes can be advantageous in a line of braking cars. Following a vehicle that can stop much faster than you requires a larger following distance.

I wasn't trying to make a positional statement. Just noting that vehicle wraps are just one of many corner cases where multiple sensor types might be useful.

> Well, is one of many reasons why. I assume there are lots of edge cases. Floating plastic bags, for example.

A friend once almost swerved dangerously to avoid some scary-looking pipe pieces on the middle of the freeway. While contemplating making his move he saw a few more pieces fall off the back of a truck further ahead and bounce - PVC. He correctly calculated that swerving at high speed in traffic was more dangerous than just hitting a lightweight piece of PVC pipe.

My Volvo slammed on the autonomous brake yesterday for no discernible reason. Best guess was a leaf blew across the sensor.

"Avoid highway braking" was drilled into us as 15 year olds in drivers ed. That still is one sacred rule i swear by.

Chain reaction braking, unnecessarily has caused many accidents (witnessed by me). Driving on I-95 in Florida you have (upgrades) where bridges are were built (limiting sight). Heavy congestion causes unnecessary braking. Several rear ends were witnessed on a trip north from the keys.

Never highway brake.

Im glad you posted this because it is good to know what cars may not respond the way a human was trained.

Try braking on the Merritt parkway and see what happens

But when an accident due to highway braking occurs, the person in the following vehicle will always be considered at fault -- the person in front of you may brake hard for any reason good or bad, and if you collide into the back of that vehicle, you were following too closely, driving too fast, and/or not paying attention.

The person in front may also be partially considered at fault if they didn't have a good reason, but the person following will always be considered at fault.

Who is at fault matters... but it still sucks to be involved in a collision. Not being responsible is cold comfort, especially if it results in injury to passengers in your car.

My drivers ed class was taught by a lunatic (aren't they all?) that was ALL about safety. Especially defensive driving. Predicting possible outcomes, having an "out", seeing through cars, avoiding driving behind box trucks and much more

Predicting what a driver will do is a large part of defensive driving.

This is my biggest worry with the current features, actually. A lot of people seem overly concerned about distracted drivers overlooking things and getting into rear end collisions that the car overlooks.

I'm more worried about false positives causing unexpected hard braking and leading to an increase in high-speed rear-end collisions on the highways. These are really uncommon now, but could increase if false positives are common.

Even if that does happen I think we would see corresponding decrease in head-on, T-bone and other more devastating collisions.

Its like non-corrupt red light cameras, they do reduce red light running and do increase the number of accidents. They reduce fatal accidents but increase nearly harmless rear-end collisions. So property damage and loss of life are reduce, but speeders and tailergaters get the majority in my town because there are no pedestrians and no one thinks they will be the ones to cause an accident.

Happy nobody behind you slammed into you. Brake test without a valid reason is a liability.

Can you turn "off" that feature easily when you desire?

Turning off safety features sounds like a bad idea. You can turn off the fusebox or circuit breaker in your house with a penny per circuit, but should you?

Specific reasoning for this, but there is some precedent for safety features that can be turned off by the end user. http://www.golfmk7.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=19...

The 2nd airbag can be disabled in the event small children are riding in rear facing car seats. This prevents the airbag from opening and killing the child by smashing him/her into the passenger seat.

Children that small should be in the back. It is the workaround for a bad situation (perhaps you have to transport 1 more kid than you back seat can handle and you don't like this one so much). This is also well understood and studied already.

There are commonalities between this and that. But in this situation wouldn't turning off assisted driving in its entirety be better.

Having a car be able to suddenly and unexpectedly brake hard to a full stop is not always safe. As op said s/he didnt know why

Commuter and congested driving conditions by regular drivers assume a pattern of high speed. I do not want my car to have unconditional ability to brake when a computer thinks it should. Period.

Yet... We are now in phases of non-human controlled vehicles and it is a safety requirement to know what outcomes a computer can place on a car going at high speeds.

I would like to be able to create actions that cause my safety to increase against a computer assisted car. If decals (or any actions) make me safer because it makes a computer controlled car behave a certain way, then i will do it.

(my next book: how to defensively drive against self driving cars...hmm. )

To torture my analogy, If a circuit breaker keeps breaking for unknown reasons the solution is not to use a penny (the equivalent of disabling the brakes). But rather to get professional to look at and fix the system.

If the self driving feature can be completely disabled, that would be much better than just disabling the brakes. Then drive it to someone to fix the assistive driving tech instead of trying to use jerry rigged assistive driving tech.

If a blown fuse means that you have a significant chance of dying a rather gruesome death, then yeah, probably.

Houses do burn down on occasion pennies are used as fuses.