It’s not like manufacturers are waiting on the government to let them sell limited cars
There are literally millions of situations where a Tesla might do the wrong thing, and some of them have been caught on camera.
If we can't put speed limiters on cars, we definitely shouldn't be putting highly complicated computers in charge with no humans at the wheel.
This argument makes no sense.
How do obvious edgecases invalidating a simple solution have any bearing on the feasibility of a complex solution being able to handle as many edgecases as a human driver?
But AI is not magic, its just more rules.
You'll have people passing you on the left and behind you at +30mph. The cars behind you in your lane will form a queue of waiting to pass you, and they'll be getting into the right lane needing to accelerate from 55mph to 80mph (hard for a lot of cars). This is going to cause the cars in the fast lane to brake, which will cascade through the lane and cause a traffic slowdown. If someone isn't paying attention, it's going to result in a rear end collision and an hours-long traffic jam for hundreds of people.
This is one of my worries with self driving cars: They'll follow the letter of the law even when it's not practically safe.
Surely it's the ones doing 80mph that are the hazzard
Look at traffic as a fluid: A stream is calm when the water flows at the same speed and direction, when there is nothing to get in the way. Put a rock into the stream and now water has to move around it, causing flow patterns that collide. Traffic can be looked at as a fluid in the same way. If you want it to flow without friction, it all needs to go the same speed in one direction. Accidents and traffic slow-downs are caused when people merge and people have to slow down unexpectedly, which is going to happen when you're going 30mph under the prevailing traffic speed.
Yes, the person going 55 is following the law, but the law was written in a faraway room, a long time ago, by people not driving on the road in that instant. Sometimes in the instant, following the law is not the safe thing to do. It's the same reason it's not safe to go 25 in a 55, and that trucks are required to put their flashers on if they're going under a certain speed. Because they hare a hazard if they are going too slow.
This is not correct. Many states in the US do not allow the use of hazard lights while moving.
A stopped car won't crash. A moving car will.
How did you determine cause and effect here? There have been a LOT of changes to trucks, roads, signage etc.
The best part is the same ignorant people develop the driverless cars, so we get Google cars that turn right across the bike lane instead of merging into it.
Unless you are driving in the state of WA:
You adapt and do less takeovers and only when it is absolutely safe.
Eh I have a speed limiter I use quite often just to make driving through average speed areas more chill, and it doesn’t stop me pushing the throttle and getting up to full speed if I need to.
It’s a bit smarter than “never go over the speed” - if you push the accelerator in a definite way the car will still respond, while if you hold your foot fairly still and only accelerate gently it will cap out at the max.
This is the crux of the argument. However, it falls flat when you consider that many other simple "can reduce that number" measures have not been adopted – like fitting speed governors to cars limiting them to some speed limit, putting tracking beacons in cars to making them automatically stop at red lights, or putting in devices in cars to limit drunk driving.
I don't see a reason why a much more complicated technology should leapfrog these simpler ones and be put into production so quickly, potentially risking innocent lives in the process. In fact, I believe the reason why it is being rushed so quickly is arguments like yours coupled with a low understanding of the technology involved. People are viscerally more willing to accept the idea that an "artificial intelligence" is going to drive the car, rather than the idea that their car is a multi-ton hunk of metal that needs to be limited and monitored carefully.
> I honestly think the biggest issue is probably the legal a s regulatory overhead of responding to the technology rather than the technology itself, but since it’s so hard to quantify I don’t often bring this up. But the biggest passion I have seen if from those same engineering minds, who truly understand the complexity, but also want to see it happen. Their timeframes are just long. I’ve heard 2045 and 2050.
Those timeframes seem normal to me. Rollout dates should not be decided by the whims of corporate shareholders. Let's put simple speed limiters on cars first, everyone can understand that technology – and see how that goes!