[netfire]

Personally, I’d be happy with just automated freeway driving. That seems like an easier problem to solve (no pedestrians, complex traffic controls, cars going the other way or turning across your path, and visibility is usually pretty good). Why not focus on and perfect that first?

[nradov]

While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be ignored.

[ghaff]

You can to at least some degree though once you've imposed the constraint that there needs to be a competent licensed driver in the car because they need to handle the endpoints in any case.

Certainly, the car needs to be able to recognize conditions where it needs to turn over control with, say, one minute warning. And we're not at that point today. But one can imagine things like radio beacons for construction zones for example. It's not easy but it seems much easier than the more general case and it's also possible to get too hung up on truly weird corner cases like traffic going down the freeway in the wrong direction.

[nradov]

You're never going to get a one-minute warning about stupid people doing stupid things. Like when some idiot decides to play Frogger across four lanes of traffic because his car stalled out in the median. I suppose we could just accept some collisions in those cases but it would be a mess.

[Shorel]

> Those edge cases can't just be ignored.

A general enough system would have no edge cases. It is IMO the required solution, and a driver always on the defensive is what we all are, at lease here in South America.

Just following the rules would have killed me years ago. Other drivers are reckless.