"Because the Cruise cars were still pondering their next move when the driver took over, these incidents apparently do not constitute failures that must be reported to the DMV. Though a neat piece of legalism, this logic can't help but make one wonder how long a vehicle can remain motionless on public roads without it constituting a failure of the autonomous technology."<p>I know! We'll just add a program that checks whether or not the AI would ever stop and come to a decision.
If nothing else, this article provided a link to the California vehicle code that covers autonomous vehicles. That is an interesting read.<p>Back to the article, they point out impatient overrides by the test driver are apparently not being counted as disengagements and do not appear on the reports to the DMV. The author tries to make this into a safety concern, but it just isn't. Maybe it is against the intent of the code as written, but maybe not, since it seems to be concerned with true safety violations.<p>The code: <a href="https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/d48f347b-8815-458e-9df2-5ded9f208e9e/adopted_txt.pdf?MOD=AJPERES" rel="nofollow">https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/d48f347b-8815-458e...</a>
There is definitely something that doesn't add up between the recent surge in pessimism about the progress on self driving cars and the fact that Waymo is about to start taking passengers without backup drivers. Either they are recklessly competitive or confident that the cars can handle any situations they might run into in the area they're releasing them. If it were some independent startup with less to lose I'd lean more to the former, but theyre not.
One thing I find healthy, is that many companies beyond Tesla are trying to build this technology. Even though the story thinks the data may be suspect at this point, the competition from a variety of sources gives us good chances for some breakthroughs occurring.
Do you think self-driving car[0] manufacturers should be allowed to compete on safety, in the sense that if one comes up with some sort of software "seatbelt" of some kind should that company be allowed to prevent others from using it? I should go look up how actual seatbelts and airbags became standard in (almost) all cars...<p>[0] Can we <i>please</i> call them "auto-autos"?