Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Matt3o12_ 3718 days ago
There is something that's called fail safe(ly). In case of any error inside the car, it should sowly decelerate and pull over. Sure, it will cause a lot of traffic problems if say 10% of all cars did that at the same time but the damage would not be as severe as a ghost driver entering the freeway with 140mph.

There are a few instances where some bad tesla batteries (the standard 12 volt batteries ironically) failed, and the cars handled it perfectly. It slowed down so that the driver could do safely pull over. Sure it did not happen to all cars at once, and autonomous cars migh not be able to do that by themselves but we have a log way to go to reach 100% autonomous driving (i.e. Without a steering wheel and a car that drives everywhere humans drive and not only on San Francisco's perfect sunny roads where it's been thoroughly tested on).

1 comments

Google had fail safes which failed. What if a million cars pull over to the left instead of the right as a failed failsafe? Willing to risk your life?
Yes, I'm eager to risk my life on self-driving car failures; it would be a tremendous step up from risking my life on human drivers (including myself!) as I do on a daily basis.

I'm also a biker. In 2013, 4,735 pedestrians and 743 bicyclists were killed in crashes with motor vehicles. http://www.pedbikeinfo.org/data/factsheet_crash.cfm

In the future when self-driving or at least augmented driving is commonplace, I hope that number will be a lot lower.