[cpprototypes]

Something that annoys me about all this self-driving focus is that they are not targeting the obvious low-hanging fruit:

1) Focus on perfecting low speed bumper-to-bumper traffic fully autonomous driving on freeways.

2) Focus on passing legislation to allow zero driver liability and awareness when using the low speed bumper-to-bumper traffic self-driving mode.

The speeds are low and so the risk factor is reduced by orders of magnitude. Even if an accident happens, it won't be fatal because of the low speeds. And that should also help with the legislation issues. Also, this feature would be very popular. Imagine a commercial with typical bumper-to-bumper traffic. Then the camera zooms in and the driver is sleeping. When the car detects that bumper-to-bumper traffic is going to end soon, it triggers a loud alert which wakes the driver.

And yet all the car companies are ignoring this. I remember reading about early lane keeping and automatic speed cruise control and it would not activate under slow speeds. I was incredulous when I read it. They made this not work for exactly the most useful scenario? I don't care about self-driving for road trips, they don't happen often. And door-to-door self driving is the ultimate goal, but it's going to take a long time to get there. But helping to alleviate the horrible bumper-to-bumper driving by allowing drivers to do something else can be done with current technology. The whole self-driving effort feels like no one has done any market research to see how to make it help with real world situations.

[omonra]

Volvo XC90 has this feature. It's basically lane keeping with automatic cruise control that works between 0 mph and 30. It also requires you to keep hands on the wheel (that's not a problem, imho).

The only drawback to me is that if the car stops completely, the autopilot shuts down and has to be manually restarted (click button) to resume.

[peteretep]

    > It also requires you to keep
    > hands on the wheel (that's
    > not a problem, imho).

That stops you from reclaiming the time, so is probably nowhere near as valuable/desirable as one that allows you to repost cat gifs.

[galdosdi]

This could make traffic worse. The only thing keeping bad traffic from getting worse is that past a certain degree of badness, some people start choosing to cancel or defer driving trips because they are not willing to drive with that degree of delay and/or annoyance. Making traffic easier to put up with, will have the same effect as reducing the price of any good would have -- increase the amount "consumed"

Self driving cars will lead to worse traffic unless tolls go up enough to make up for it