Re:Ford CEO says the company 'overestimated' self-driving cars
by AnthonyMouse on Thursday April 11, 2019 @03:09PM
(#19638103)
> There were two main issues that had to do with following distance.
The trouble seems to be that they're being too conservative. Following distance is what it is because of human reaction times. You have to process the input with your brain, decide what to do, move your foot, then the car starts to slow down. In principle a computer can do it faster and so doesn't need as much space.
Moreover, everybody would like following distance to be dictated by safety, but in practice it's dictated by traffic volume. If you have traffic averaging three car lengths between each car and then twice as many cars merge into the highway, either you end up with one car length between each car, or you end up with stopped traffic. There is no third option.
The problem right now is that they're still using the human driver as a backup, so using the safe-for-computers following distance doesn't mesh with that, but using the safe-for-humans distance is a violation of standard behavior. So they're stuck choosing between the unsafe thing everybody does, or the "safe" thing that then becomes unsafe anyway because of how everyone else reacts to it.
The trouble seems to be that they're being too conservative. Following distance is what it is because of human reaction times. You have to process the input with your brain, decide what to do, move your foot, then the car starts to slow down. In principle a computer can do it faster and so doesn't need as much space.
Moreover, everybody would like following distance to be dictated by safety, but in practice it's dictated by traffic volume. If you have traffic averaging three car lengths between each car and then twice as many cars merge into the highway, either you end up with one car length between each car, or you end up with stopped traffic. There is no third option.
The problem right now is that they're still using the human driver as a backup, so using the safe-for-computers following distance doesn't mesh with that, but using the safe-for-humans distance is a violation of standard behavior. So they're stuck choosing between the unsafe thing everybody does, or the "safe" thing that then becomes unsafe anyway because of how everyone else reacts to it.