U.S. eliminates human controls requirement for fully automated vehicles

https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-eliminates-human-controls-requirement-fully-automated-vehicles-2022-03-11/

by ra7 • 4 years ago

296 367 4 years ago

reuters.com

firstSpeaker• 4 years ago

No steering wheels or brake pedals! Feels scary but we are giving technology way more control over our lives already :-).

laurent92• 4 years ago

The usecase of minibuses with a joystick for command and a red emergency button is legit. We have this in France, not only for airports.

schleck8• 4 years ago

After removing the steering wheel and making the car fully autonomous, I bet you'll have to pay a subscription for it to drive. And a subscription for a cellular service.

jdlshore• 4 years ago

It’s unlikely autonomous cars will be privately owned.

ear7h• 4 years ago

And then they could optimize the model for efficiency by picking up multiple people that share similar routes. It could even become a public service!

baseballdork• 4 years ago

I absolutely understand the distaste, but you'll have to compare that against your current "subscription" of insurance fees. Hopefully they either go down or go away.

reedjosh3• 4 years ago

Why own anything?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/youll-own-nothing-and-be-happ...

The WEF thinks you shouldn't anyway.

HPsquared• 4 years ago

I think any automated vehicle, no matter how advanced, should always have a big red button to make it stop whatever it's doing. Kind of like the emergency brake on a passenger train.

hef19898• 4 years ago

You mean like machinery in factories? Sounds like a revolutionary idea!

asah• 4 years ago

that would be two hands on the wheel and pulled them away stops the device.

https://www.google.com/search?q=machinery+two+hand+control

awb2• 4 years ago

Maybe a “stop gracefully” mode?

If you hit the big red button going 65mph on the center lane of a crowded highway, it could be bad. Especially if the tech starts to feel safe enough that cars can travel close enough to use the draft from cars ahead.

I think an emergency brake works for trains because they’re isolated.

ra7• 4 years ago

They do have a "pull over" physical button. You can see them on Waymo vehicles. The car finds a safe spot to pull over when you hit it.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

Could be an absurd idea, but could require a licensed driver with experience taking over the wheel instead to steer the car with human logic, instead of trusting the failing AI to park it

Oh wait..

a9h74j• 4 years ago

Some high-power industrial systems have both a "controlled shutdown" emergency button and a "remove all power" emergency button, by whatever names.

oneoff7862• 4 years ago

Logically there needs to be a way to control the car at all times, otherwise you could be locked into a long trip you don’t want to take.

The difference is just that it’s higher level controls than a steering wheel.

cj2• 4 years ago

I'm pretty sure this was an episode on HBO's Silicon Valley. The character's Tesla drove itself onto a container ship with the driver stuck inside, unable to get out of the car.

quest88• 4 years ago

Makes sense. This is what we have in planes. We can also pull the autopilot circuit breaker.

mLuby• 4 years ago

I'd like to imagine we'd have "manual override" controls like I, Robot (2004) showed: https://youtube.com/shorts/46-EGyn7rwc As implied in the clip, after a few years of self-driving cars, most passengers won't know how to drive well enough for it to be safe and other autonomous vehicles might not coordinate well with a manual driver.

A "pull over" button could work, but still relies on the automated driving capabilities.

A third option would be to dial an "expert driver" who takes remote control of the car to get you to safety, bypassing both the automated driver and the passengers' inability to drive. Lack of connectivity could be an issue, and it opens the door wider for hackers (already an issue though). However I have to imagine that in-transit connectivity will be increasing dramatically once people want to work or watch Netflix during their commute.

visarga3• 4 years ago

Pull overs are much easier to automate than driving, their automated version will probably be much safer than regular automated driving.

natch3• 4 years ago

So if it was already in the midst of slowing down to pull over safely, pushing this big red button would do what, stop it suddenly in the middle of the road?

TameAntelope• 4 years ago

Yeah, in case the "safe pull over" spot is made of lava, or something.

peteradio• 4 years ago

A sufficiently autonomous vehicle might just ignore you. Are pedal brakes in passenger driven vehicles reliant on computer at all, what about electrical transmission?

AtlasBarfed2• 4 years ago

Look, I'm generally on the bull-ish side of autonomous driving, but this is almost akin to the feds passing laws on science fiction. Section 180.99 part alpha: "Minimum size of a Ringworld is mercury orbit around a red dwarf"

I guess we can always drive with a USB-plugin gamepad if there's a glitch or a central system outage?

This would actually represent progress if they eliminated the requirement for side mirrors, which from what I've read of good aerodynamic designs is responsible for as much drag as the body of the car.

TillE3• 4 years ago

if they eliminated the requirement for side mirrors

Of course fully automated vehicles will look nothing like typical cars. There's this really common tendency to think way too small, to confuse the current prototypes with a final product.

The mid-term future for SDVs looks more or less like a train compartment on wheels.

pbhjpbhj• 4 years ago

a train compartment on wheels. //

A bus?

Yes, autonomous public vehicles seem likely - like a Flexi-bus - but people like to travel without random members of the public, private hire of small vehicles will definitely be a thing unless the public get priced out of it.

myrmidon• 4 years ago

which from what I've read of good aerodynamic designs is responsible for as much drag as the body of the car.

This seems way too high to me. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automobile_drag_coefficient says side mirrors contribute 2-7% drag.

Still worth removing them of course, I'm just correcting you to prevent people from picking up wrong numbers.

AtlasBarfed2• 4 years ago

I think I got that "as much as the rest of the body" from the Aptera newsfeeds. The Aptera claims some ridiculous efficiencies so who knows.

shkkmo6• 4 years ago

There are currently self-driving vehicles operating on public roads with no safety driver. That tech exists now. It may have many severe limitations (precision mapping, weather, construction areas, etc), but it does exist. Reducing those limitations may be a long term project but it is already clear that self driving vehicles could be deployed today without human controls as long as the scope of deployment matches those limitations.

This rules allows car manufacturers to work on new fully automous cars without controls that are designed to function as campus shuttles or taxis in a limited scope. There is still a lot of work to be done regulating the use self driving vehicles, but this removes a safety regulation hurdle that is stopping states and car makers from experimenting with different approaches.

pizza2• 4 years ago

Reading between the lines here this just makes me think that the regulator has become captured by the industry.

This is like removing human control on an autonomous Russian roulette revolver that shoots to the side if it detects a person in front of the barrel, then praying for the best.

walkhour5• 4 years ago

Driving is already a Russian roulette right? If autonomous vehicles are safer than human drivers as advertised the barrel would just have more capacity.

pydry2• 4 years ago

Self driving cars will be as safe as the level of criminal liability faced by the makers.

Regulatory capture means it wont be high and the potential profits to be realized from first mover advantage here means there will be a significant incentive to "move fast and break things".

So to speak.

I'd feel safe if an executive who OKs a software update that kills someone risks significant jail time. If that means no self driving cars for 20 more years then I am totally fine with that. That would simply mean that they werent safer as promised.

verisimi2• 4 years ago

Define 'safer'.

If you have not paid your taxes, get in to your car, and it drives you to the local court-house or police station, this is a new risk, no?

bottled_poe2• 4 years ago

Statistical equivalence is one thing, but the risk will shift within the population. Let’s set the bar a bit higher than above average? The average driver is a dumbass. autonomous vehicles should be expected to consistently make better decisions than the best drivers, not just the average ones.

bcrosby95• 4 years ago

Car accidents kill someone every 100 million miles driven in the US.

Anyone claiming they're safer now is either selling something or doesn't know what they're talking about.

pizza2• 4 years ago

I'm assuming a couple things here, but

1. isn't a steering wheel the only plausible failsafe control for somebody supervising these experimental machines? Not sure what other control interface would be better in life-or-death instants/moments, plus any driver can carry over their preexisting skills in that situation. If better emergency controls than steering wheels exist, fine, I guess.

2. Isn't the question not

    safety(autonomous vehicle) > safety(human driver)

but rather

    safety(autonomous vehicle + human control fail-safe) > safety(autonomous vehicle alone)

Just don't understand why, on the face of it, the law is being changed in a way that I guess to me personally implies trials without common-sense-interface human intervention controls is legal?

cinquemb• 4 years ago

It's always been like this, I've seen enough industry insiders write their own laws at the local government level, just a bigger game at the national level :P

trainedforthis• 4 years ago

I find it rather fascinating that we require a human-in-the-loop for a train but not for a car.

Someone1234• 4 years ago

New train lines don't require human drivers, but legacy ones do for socio-political reasons rather than logistical or technological ones.

This Wikipedia article kind of shows the mishmash of automated/half-measures/full measures situation:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automation_of_the_London_Under...

goodpoint3• 4 years ago

It's the same for airplanes. Why is it fascinating?

ttmb• 4 years ago

This regulation is saying that if you did build an autonomous Russian roulette revolver, there's no requirement to outfit it with a pistol grip and a trigger.

If there is a fully driverless (not driving itself with a human still in it) truck - as companies tell us is their goal - it does not increase or decrease safety to have or not have a seat and a steering wheel in it.

The argument here is that building an autonomous Russian roulette revolver is a stupid thing to do, which is orthogonal.

lordfrito• 4 years ago

This.

I have some experience in navigating NHTSA when bringing new automotive tech to market. The following reflects my experience.

When working on cutting edge tech that have associated hazards (cars hurt people) what companies want is a clear set of standards to meet, as this goes a long way to showing due-diligence when things go wrong and lawsuits start showing up. But with new tech there are no standards, no generally accepted way of doing things. So how do you know if the system is capable/safe-enough to deploy in volume on our roads? How do you know you've done enough due diligence to confidently launch new tech without putting your company at financial risk? Let's face it, a big enough software bug (and associated liability) could potentially put Tesla completely out of business. When dealing with hazardous new tech, the threat of recalls and lawsuits weighs heavily on a company's decision making process.

When it comes to new tech, NHTSA is in no position to answer these questions. And they know it. If they knew better then they'd be the ones driving innovation. As it stands under capitalism the innovators are all working for private companies hoping for the big pay out. Knowing this, it would be counterproductive for NHTSA to say "we know better than to let a self driving car on the road". They don't know better and they don't want to get in the way of innovation.

So instead NHTSAs job is to setup a regulatory framework and set of rules to help these companies bring tech to market, while helping identify/limit bad actors. When lessons are learned (ex. ABS systems provide a clear benefit, and should generally do X Y and Z) these lessons get integrated back into the regulations as a guide to all players in the space. The regulations and standards improve over time as more-and-more millions-of-miles are driven and the tech/algorithms mature.

In my experience, NHTSAs attitude seems to be best summarized as: Innovation is good for America and the last thing we want to do is stop you from developing cool new things. But we have no idea what your new tech should/shouldn't do. The risk is all on you, your company ultimately bears the legal responsibility for your products. You'll have to determine if your product is ready for market all on your own -- and failure carries a high price tag. Now... if/when the tech matures, and the industry seems to generally agree that "new tech X" should include "X Y and Z" as part of the safety/risk equation, then we'll add that to the regulatory framework. But until the tech matures and the clear path forward is known we don't want to stifle innovation.

This is about the best you can do in this situation. ADAS is new, and no one knows where we'll end up. No one, including you and me, knows if these systems can be deployed safely. Personally I don't trust ADAS systems, and believe the financial risk would be too high to risk my company. But what do I know?

It seems that the message being sent here is: "We're ready to start dealing with cars that don't have human controls. Best of luck to all those who dare play in the space."

briantakita• 4 years ago

This was part of the plan for the market. Remove human drivers & owner operators to have tighter control over the markets. The appearance of safety using coarse statistical samples (is is really safer?) is pretense for the real reasons.

ravenstine• 4 years ago

I get what you're saying, but the Russian roulette analogy is a kind of straw man. Do you agree? Or is it that you think that we shouldn't allow potentially dangerous technologies to perform without human supervision?

twblalock2• 4 years ago

At least the government isn't standing in the way of innovation this time.

The market will still decide if these vehicles sell. I wouldn't buy one, would you?

Plus, it's never too late to crack down. If there are a lot of accidents, you can bet members of Congress will thrive on the outrage.

So, there's really nothing to see here. Just the government getting out of the way, a little bit, for now.

jedberg7• 4 years ago

I wouldn't buy one, would you?

Absolutely! In a heartbeat. Because I know it's a tool to enhance my driving, not replace me, and I still need to pay attention.

I already have an add-on for my car that gives me level 3 on the freeway (no hands on the wheel needed). I still keep my hand on the wheel though and I still pay attention, but it definitely helps because I don't have to use brain power staying in the lane or maintaining speed. I can give 100% of my brain power to looking for danger.

mnd999• 4 years ago

This is akin to removing the requirement for unicorns to wear horseshoes on the public road.

hackernewds2• 4 years ago

How so?

pyhtel• 4 years ago

I'm guessing because fully automated vehicles don't exist (yet).

throwaway0a5e• 4 years ago

See anyone riding unicorns around recently?

Exactly.

Legacy regulations governing the occupant compartment are not yet a practical impediment for self driving cars because they haven't got that far yet.

Realistically what the removal of this regulation means is that some hypothetical future company with an autonomous yard spotter can drive the thing 500yd down the public way from warehouse B to warehouse C without the legal department getting antsy.

pfortuny• 4 years ago

This is so much so... It looks silly (your comment) but it is spot on.

oneoff7862• 4 years ago

Cool. So strap a horn on your horse and free hoof it.

walkhour5• 4 years ago

Doesn't the analogy fail given autonomous vehicles are eventually possible and pursued and unicorns not?

gkop• 4 years ago

That’s part of the point: Whether or not they are eventually possible is an open question. The standard argument for agnosticism as to the possibility is “The problem reduces to artificial general intelligence, the possibility of which is an open question.”

simion3143• 4 years ago

Doesn't the analogy fail given autonomous vehicles are eventually possible

Only if there is a mathematical proof that eventually it will happen, someone might proof the reverse that current type of tech will never be good enough for general purpose driving and will work only in some specific conditions.

paulcole3• 4 years ago

given autonomous vehicles are eventually possible

I think of this as an unproven assumption, not a given.

dahfizz2• 4 years ago

If genetically engineering a unicorn was given the level of resources that self driving has, then I think we would have unicorns by now.

swayvil• 4 years ago

It massively promotes development. Simplifies the machinery. Makes it cheaper.

verisimi2• 4 years ago

No.

Unicorns can't, won't ever exist.

The idea of the existence of self-driving cars is definitely on the cards. This is en route.

finnh2• 4 years ago

I have no doubt we could work some DNA magic between a narwhal and a horse...

bnralt• 4 years ago

It reminds me of 7 years ago when Amazon was claiming that FAA regulations were holding back its drone deliveries[1].

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/faa-drone-regulations-blow...

dpweb• 4 years ago

Granted there's a lot of hype and the tech is not there yet, but seems the tech absolutely can be developed.

As far as the safety, these things can be indemnified and that will pave the way. Don't see any problem insurers can price accidents and injuries from autonomous cars. Also certainly plausible they will be able to be made safer than human driven.

telotortium• 4 years ago

This comment is as indicative of where we are in the Gartner Hype Cycle as anything I've seen.

yxwvut• 4 years ago

What's going to be the rate of 'acceptable loss'? There's an obvious point on the cost curve where companies will begin pushing for driverless tech before the problem is fully solved. Without some standardized 'miles between intervention' requirement that accounts for the externality on innocent bystanders, the emergent behavior will be to remove the human in the loop before the societally optimal point. If I save $100M in staffing costs by firing all my human monitors and only incur $10M in payouts to the people my cars run over, the capitalist choice is clear.

JohnJamesRambo• 4 years ago

Elon’s way ahead of the curve on this one. Unfortunately.

superkuh• 4 years ago

Well, the USA has decided that 1000 deaths/day is acceptable and ignorable as background mortality for sars-cov-2.

I don't believe that autonomous cars are actually feasible in environments that aren't arid/flat Arizona that doesn't have winter so it's kind of a moot point. There isn't and will not be an autonomous car that can drive on winter, snow covered roads with emergent (incorrect) paths that humans flock and follow. If the car does the right thing it'll kill people. But 1000/day? I think they can probably come in under that.

readams• 4 years ago

The US department of transportation values a human life at around $10M. So they're willing to spend that amount to statistically save one person.

You do need a number though. People don't like to think about it but you can't value a life at infinity.

awb2• 4 years ago

What's going to be the rate of 'acceptable loss'?

You might think anything less than the current incident rate. But that’s looking at it from a group perspective. From an individual perspective, I’ve never been in an accident in ~25 years of driving, so my requirements might be higher than others to feel like autonomous control is safer.

JaimeThompson• 4 years ago

Set the value of the human life at 125% of the total pay, including stock grants and such, that the CEO of the company selling the car makes.

ASinclair• 4 years ago

I took my first self-driving ride last night. One of the wildest parts was watching the steering wheel and hearing the pedals move on their own.

ape4• 4 years ago

I wonder if something makes the wheel turn which actually turns the car. Or is the wheel just a visual indicator.

AlexandrB• 4 years ago

Most cars still have some aspect of mechanical coupling between the steering wheel and the front wheels in case of electrical failure. There are some cars that have had "steer by wire", but it's still very uncommon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_by_wire#Steer_by_wire

api2• 4 years ago

If we think we have class antagonism and rural vs. urban antagonism now, wait until self-driving trucks decimate trucking as an industry. It's one of the largest well-paying employers of "blue collar" people. We are still a ways off but it's definitely coming.

We have to do something about inequality or we will have totalitarianism. It will either be in the form of a totalitarian fascist or communist revolution, or a totalitarian police state to prevent such a revolution.

piyh• 4 years ago

One of my favorite youtubers did an hour long video on the trucker convoy from California to DC and it was a peak into another world. The thing I thought about after watching it was wondering what it looks like when that group has mass unemployment in 10 years.

Truck driving employs 1% of the US population and if those jobs are lost to automation, there's no chance of them coming back like they did throughout other recessions. It won't just be the drivers, it'll be their friends, families and children that will be unemployed, unhappy, and very motivated.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKcJrBRVZn4

api2• 4 years ago

I'm going to submit that some of these COVID protests are not COVID protests. They are inequality protests, but seriously talking about inequality has been pushed out of the Overton window across much of the American political landscape. As a result the anger "sublimates" out about other issues.

The right does a good job guiding the anger of the working class toward issues that have nothing to do with inequality like COVID, race, immigrants, trans people, etc. Meanwhile the left offers up a totally out of touch message that doesn't resonate at all, or offers them welfare without understanding that these people consider welfare to be something to be ashamed about. They want productive work.

You know... we have a housing crisis in this country. A lot of these people could find work building adequate housing for the US population, but that would threaten high real estate valuations...

We also have a lot of infrastructure that needs building, but we may have to wait for the generation that was brainwashed to believe that infrastructure (except more roads) is communism to retire.

There are plenty of jobs but we won't create them. We'd better get on it.

visarga3• 4 years ago

People will run out of jobs only when they run out of needs and desires.

zaps• 4 years ago

Those men know what it means to turn the keys, and some are just not up to it!

Now, it's as simple as that!

I think we oughta take the men out of the loop.

mindcrime• 4 years ago

We've had men in those cars since before any of you guys were watching "Howdy Doody"! Now I myself sleep pretty well knowing those boys are driving.

KaoruAoiShiho• 4 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30560349

zekrioca2• 4 years ago

The first sentence of this article has an interesting reading:

"U.S. regulators on Thursday issued final rules eliminating the need for automated vehicle manufacturers to equip fully autonomous vehicles with manual driving controls to meet crash standards."

It does sound like "U.S. regulators are removing regulations.", which does look like they are acting against themselves..

imajoredinecon• 4 years ago

Regulators are responsible for maintaining sets of rules that are just as comprehensive as they need to be and no more. Part of the job description is updating or removing old rules, just like part of it is creating new ones.

zekrioca2• 4 years ago

Maybe you misread it, and/or maybe I miswrote it, and/or maybe both. But I meant about the phrasing and my understanding of it, not about the actual job of a regulator.

knubie• 4 years ago

Are programmers removing code acting against themselves?

giantg22• 4 years ago

This is like the least important area of this topic, and like 100 steps ahead of where we are now.

t_h_r_o_w_away• 4 years ago

But government!

giantg22• 4 years ago

It's a great example of how companies with money can lobby to get things that don't matter changed, while ordinary citizens can't get the government to fix broken regulations that are having an actual impact on our lives.

beardyw• 4 years ago

If your vehicle is heading relentlessly toward a group of schoolchildren it would be nice to have a way to override it. Either that or no windows so you won't be haunted by it every night of your life.

pluc• 4 years ago

We have the technology to replace schoolchildren at a much lower cost than cars

lupire• 4 years ago

We don't have inexpensive cloning and rapid growth technology.

roamerz• 4 years ago

Comment of the day. Thanks for the laugh.

nhumrich• 4 years ago

much lower cost than cars

Spoken like someone who has never been a parent.

visarga3• 4 years ago

Would that include the piano and karate lessons for the replacement kids?

gruez• 4 years ago

What kind of cars are we talking about? A second grader is aged 7-8. Let's round that up to 8 years to include 9 months of gestation. A model Y starts at $55k. For them to be equal in cost to "replace", the child would need to cost more than $6,875/year to raise. Can you hire a full time nanny for that price? My guess is that the amount of resources/money invested into a child at that age is in the hundreds of thousands.

TheCoelacanth• 4 years ago

No way. They only seem cheaper because of people doing free labor to produce their own children. Even just the cost to get someone else to produce a newborn for you is almost enough to buy a Bentley.

coffeeblack• 4 years ago

“Self driving” means that it is far more likely for a human driver to override the car in panic and hit the children than it is for the car to hit the children autonomously.

warmwaffles2• 4 years ago

IF the car does hit the children even while driving autonomously the driver will be held responsible regardless of overrides. If someone dies, someone is going to jail until the justice system works through it.

digbybk• 4 years ago

I'm not sure if I'm optimistic about autonomous vehicles or just very pessimistic about human drivers. I have no confidence that the next driver making a left turn while I'm crossing the road won't kill me. I'm much more comfortable with a computer that is programmed to avoid killing me, even if the software may have the occasional bug, than with a human who may or may not prioritize my life over whatever else it is they have going on that day.

forbiddenvoid2• 4 years ago

Literally, when my dad taught me to drive, the first thing he told me was: 'Every other driver on the road is an idiot and a murderer. Act accordingly.'

bluGill• 4 years ago

Today I'm not sure which I have more confidence in. However long term I'm confident that we can eliminate enough bugs that the autonomous vehicle is better. Once statistics start to come out (real ones that account for all factors, not potentially biases ones from the company making the cars) I'll be looking for the time when we ban non-autonomous cars.

bluefirebrand2• 4 years ago

I'm much more comfortable with a computer that is programmed to avoid killing me

I think the real concern that the car is actually programmed explicitly to kill you if it has to, to ensure it's own safety or the safety of it's riders or something.

datavirtue5• 4 years ago

I'm wondering why pedestrian accident prevention isn't standard equipment already. We have sensors all over, adaptive cruise...everything is in place except the junior-developer grade software routine to stop instead of hitting shit. Shows where the priorities are.

shadowgovt7• 4 years ago

The nice thing about self-driving cars is that when fatal errors are found, the software can be updated so the car will never make that mistake again.

We can't do that with humans; instead, we have probabilities and known badly-designed roads that incentivize (or don't disincentivize) driving in a way likelier to cause death. The only way to fix those issues at scale is redesign the roads, often for less efficient traffic throughput.

qgin• 4 years ago

There will always be a big red disconnect button in all of these vehicles. Though using it is probably more likely to cause an accident than not using it.

dghughes• 4 years ago

What if the autonomous vehicle is on a curve next to a cliff and loses power?

Maybe ejection seats requirement should be an added clause.

mellavora• 4 years ago

I like the submarine feature, also.

Why doesn't Bond get cool cars anymore?

amelius2• 4 years ago

And so the slippery slope becomes more slippery.

hadlock• 4 years ago

It's unlikely that antique/classic cars will ever be banned, although getting gas may start becoming harder to come by in 2050.

nixass• 4 years ago

This will never fly in Europe. So the cars will have both system regardless

xwdv2• 4 years ago

They could just not sell those cars in Europe

sumo89• 4 years ago

Where's that video of the guy's dash cam showing what full autonomous driving in a Tesla is currently like, the one where it keeps trying to drive him head first in to other vehicles. I'm hoping this is just intended for on-campus shuttles or something.

anthropodie• 4 years ago

I'm hoping this is just intended for on-campus shuttles or something.

Or those Jurassic park like vehicles

shadowgovt7• 4 years ago

Tesla is not representative of the state-of-the-art in the industry.

In fact, many of the other companies in the space are looking down their nose at Tesla's experiment because Musk thinks he can do the trick without LIDAR. He might not be wrong (humans do it without LIDAR), but it's a hell of a gamble that results in a sensor bundle quite different from the sensory tapestry other self-driving vehicles can take advantage of.

Couple that with the fact that other companies are employing professional drivers to test their hardware on public roads while Musk is crowdsourcing it to anyone rich enough to buy one of his cars, and one can get the sense why those who are actually concerned about driver and pedestrian safety are real nervous about Musk's foray into this space.

aejnsn• 4 years ago

The first person to get hit (in their non-automated vehicle) with the automated vehicle being at fault will have a field day with this in court.

dopylitty• 4 years ago

This feels like getting the cart before the horse. As far as I’m aware (and as has been proven by car companies’ continuing inability to produce a safely self driving vehicle) there’s no standard test for what counts as an ”automated driving system (ADS) vehicle” capable of safely navigating public roads.

Regulators shouldn’t just take for profit companies’ word that a vehicle is automated. There should be a standard battery of tests which a vehicle must pass to be considered automated.

Allowing companies to get rid of controls just because they pinky swear the vehicle can handle driving safely in all foreseeable conditions is a sure way to end up with needless death and injury due to the same dynamics that were written in the book Unsafe at any Speed.

The safety and regulatory framework should exist before the activity is allowed rather than waiting until the inevitable deaths and injuries and relying on the families of the deceased to petition congress.

999900000999• 4 years ago

This is a great step forward, autonomous driving only needs to be better than the average human.

The average human is often too busy texting, or eating to pay attention.

Humans do very stupid things in cars, it's a part of why I won't really consider living anywhere where I have to own one. Holy crap, you'll see people literally just rear-end each other at stoplights because you want to keep itching closer.

One of the most common complaints about automated cars is they go The speed limit, I recall once I was literally at the exact speed limit for the highway and I flicked on the cruise control. Immediately a driver behind me started honking and flicking me off.

Like holy shit I'm not from around here. I'm not going to risk getting pulled over because you're 5 minutes late to brunch or something.

The average human is such a horrible driver. I don't think Tesla bots can do much worse. The times the Tesla AI fails are very rare and far between, the times some idiot human decides they're going to rear end someone, or change lanes to late are very common.

All hell the robocar overlords

Communitivity2• 4 years ago

This is problematic for a number of reasons. The most important in my mind is that the risk of the vehicle being hacked and carjacked remotely is always present.

With the presence of an automation kill-switch and manual human controls the driver can always take back control.

Without those, the driver is at the mercy of the hacker.

Vehicle automation falls under the SCADA sub-domain of cyber-security. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition, and the cyber-security in SCADA systems is light-years behind. Pro-tip: going into cyber and want a good certification (if such a thing exists)..then get CISSP-SCADA.

Some relevant articles:

[1] https://physicsworld.com/a/how-to-hack-a-self-driving-car/

[2] https://hackernoon.com/how-to-hack-self-driving-cars-vulnera...

[3] https://blog.tesu.edu/should-we-be-worried-about-the-hacking...

JumpCrisscross• 4 years ago

With the presence of an automation kill-switch and manual human controls the driver can always take back control

Isn’t this envisioning a car with no passengers who can drive? Agree there needs to be a physical fallback. But fallback to a parallel system running on ROM might be the safer option.

AlotOfReading• 4 years ago

The vehicle this article is talking about is already designed this way. Most systems operate entirely read-only after boot and there are independent fallback systems for critical components.

balabaster• 4 years ago

Having spent half a decade working in Oil & Gas flow control systems directly, I can confirm that 10 years ago when I left that industry, cyber security was still not even a consideration. Light years behind wasn't an accurate statement - non-existent was more accurate.

Admittedly computer systems have come a long way in ten years, but given the attitudes and technical expertise of a lot of the people I worked alongside, I would say there's a reasonable chance the needle hasn't moved very far.

They're excruciatingly good at getting oil out of the ground and getting it to market, but they're not going to be winning capture the flag at Defcon or Blackhat any time soon...

reedjosh3• 4 years ago

Not to mention the use of a hacked autonomous vehicle as a weapon.

nobody999916• 4 years ago

This is problematic for a number of reasons. The most important in my mind is that the risk of the vehicle being hacked and carjacked remotely is always present.

Which raises the question: "Why would we engineer vehicles to accept external network connections?"

Any communication to/from a vehicle should only be initiated by the vehicle itself. There's no reasonable criteria under which a vehicle should have its systems available to external sources.

Or am I missing something important?

belval• 4 years ago

Or am I missing something important?

We absolutely want to remotely control cars at some point, how else will you send a self-driving taxi to a customers or "ask" a car to comeback to the garage for a recall on the underlying hardware or for general maintenance?

akoster• 4 years ago

While I agree with you, so many new cars offer remote start/remote engine heating block initiation or even the ability to summon your vehicle from a parking garage and have it drive toward the exit. Many consumers will not purchase cars without these new features, all of which require an external server to issue commands to a vehicle. Definitely a huge security risk, especially with lack of manual controls.

Where are the “low-chip-count” new cars with VFD radio displays, dials, traditional keys, no screens and especially no cellular modem?

ssklash• 4 years ago

Think of all the attention you could monetize with a captive audience in a self-driving car. I fully expect it to be exploited by ad companies. And subsequently by hackers.

tsimionescu2• 4 years ago

Not accepting connections is not enough to be protected on the internet. A connection is just a special case of an incoming packet, any incoming packet is potentially malicious, even if the source IP:Port are ones you initiated a connection with. For example, most web-based malware is downloaded from connections you initiated.

aiisjustanif• 4 years ago

Not a counterpoint but supplemental. Waymo and Cruise have been pouring a lot more initial effort into cybersecurity and they are just barely in production.

TrapLord_Rhodo• 4 years ago

well kind of. Since elons been toying around with the Yoke, Tesla's been working with a steering wheel that has no real relation to a physical mechanism and will be software based. This would still allow for haptic feedback and will make the e'Yoke' usable, but you never having to turn your wheel past 45* for full turn radius.

You could theoritically still hack that.

flint• 4 years ago

Who's going to underwrite the insurance?

yazaddaruvala7• 4 years ago

Very likely large fleets like Waymo / Cruise / Tesla will be self insured.

vmception2• 4 years ago

I was at a crosswalk and saw a car with the big cameras on top coming

Normally I walk and have confidence the human will stop and not want the consequences, or I at least make eye contact with the human driver for reassurance they will stop

This time I ran, mumbling “self driving car fuck that”

forbiddenvoid2• 4 years ago

This is obviously the real biggest issue facing AV companies. Technology will get there; social acceptance is a bigger hurdle. You have to trust that the machine is at least as likely to stop for you as a human, and that will take a long time for everyone.

vmception2• 4 years ago

I had been beyond the "acceptance" idea, before the cars actually were rolled out, because I believed they would they would be better than humans. I was pretty excited about Lidar. I liked the idea that environmental mix up or collision would be autoupdated to other cars so that they would perform better in the condition, crowd fixing edge cases extremely quickly. But pretty much none of that has happened and the current implementation is a total wtf.

Many cars with self-driving capability do not use Lidar, I can't tell which ones do, the very prominent Teslas do not, and they've have hit people in obviously avoidable circumstances that have nothing to do with "being too predictable in a human world", just total fuckups, and I've seen videos of what the Tesla cars see compared to what they do, and I'm not satisfied with them.

So for most they may have to build trust, for me they have to rebuild trust, because all the companies have pretty much gone the nightmare route making us all cannon fodder.

cj2• 4 years ago

Eye contact is also a major component of driving a motorcycle safely.

When at an intersection, you know another car sees you by looking through their windshield and judging whether the person is distracted or if they're aware of your presence.

It would really benefit motorcyclists, pedestrians, and other drivers if there were some mechanism for self-driving cars to visually and outwardly acknowledge your presence.

How often do you wave or signal other drivers with your hands when you both arrive at a stop sign at the same time? What's the replacement for this in a world where half of cars don't have a driver?

downut2• 4 years ago

Avid bicyclist here. If I'm approaching an intersection with the possibility of conflicting with a motor vehicle even though I have clear right of way I stare at the driver's eyes. If he's not looking at me, I prepare for evasive action or possible emergency braking. Same for me going along my way and an oncoming MV turning left in front of/into me. I get a close call every year or two. I am very rude and they always are surprised I am angry...

No eyes no trust. Full automation is going to elevate the precedence of fallible motor vehicles over people with every right to the road even more. Great.

bathMarm0t• 4 years ago

I was taught never to trust eye contact either. They could be looking past you and motorcycle profiles are very low. I'm looking for a stationary front wheel hub. Any movement merits a reaction.

Having an indicator that the car "sees" you would be very interesting.

admiral33• 4 years ago

Jaguar experimented with putting eyes on the vehicle itself:

https://www.businessinsider.com/jaguar-land-rover-eyes-on-ca...

amelius2• 4 years ago

But motorcyclists are playing unfairly here, since bicyclists and pedestrians can't see through their visors.

john_minsk2• 4 years ago

Cars will project to your Apple glasses if they see you or not)

reedjosh3• 4 years ago

You won't need to interact with vehicles in your Metaverse pod. What were you outside for anyway!?

6gvONxR4sf7o2• 4 years ago

I was thinking about that recently, that there needs to be some kind of “I see you” system. Maybe an external light that tracks you or something. Anything that can help me as a pedestrian understand what its internal state is.

forgot_old_user• 4 years ago

Folks are workin on it https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-autonomous-car-is-co...

banana_giraffe• 4 years ago

Reminds me of a mail delivery robot at an office that had a feature like that. They had to tweak it because it was freaking out visitors by staring at them during elevator rides.

Kinrany• 4 years ago

How hard would it be for all vehicles to broadcast an ID, a location and a velocity and reply with confirmations when one vehicle sees and "hears" another one?

mensetmanusman• 4 years ago

We need a machine vision version of looking in the eyes. Maybe red lasers that point at your heart to signal that it has compassion for your heart.

coolspot• 4 years ago

Just stick googly eyes onto headrest.

kfarr• 4 years ago

Agreed in theory, however in practice in SF with all the self driving cars I've had the opposite experience IRL. The self-driving cars provide more buffer (slowing down earlier) for pedestrians than human drivers and I trust them more already.

Antipode• 4 years ago

I'm sure this is location specific, but I don't trust human drivers to stop until they're already hitting the brake, even if I make eye contact with them. I'd feel a lot more confident stepping out in front of a self-driving car.

fn1• 4 years ago

I wonder if many of the problems with automatic driving could be solved using platooning (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpuwG4A56r0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Re__KRr4NU).

There could be dedicated lanes assigned to the autonomous cars and platooning-protocols that ensure that the cars use their automatic capabilities only on relatively safe highways, only queued between other autonomic vehicles.

Should be a more predictable environment and thereby safer

numpad02• 4 years ago

Looks like the point of the change is that all-passenger hardware configuration is now allowed, just like there is no reason you can't make a tablet PC with no keyboard. Slightly different from "self driving cars are now allowed on the road".

_trampeltier2• 4 years ago

And how to drive in exotic places or after a disaster?

ClumsyPilot5• 4 years ago

I would go further - if the vehicle is autonomous, it should be illegal for it to have a steering wheel.

The idea that you can make a deadly self-driving car, and then jail the driver because he could not react in 0.2 seconds when your car suddenly swerved is the greatest handover of money and power to corporations since the times of slavery.

So make the choice clear - either tha car has controls, or it doesn't. And if it doesn't, there will be no temptation to blame the passenger

nanidin• 4 years ago

I am tempted to agree about the steering wheel, but then I think of all of the situations where being able to take manual control would be really nice - like when towing a camper, or backing a boat down a ramp, or handing over to valet parking.

I think this is forcing a false dichotomy between having a steering wheel and driver liability for failures in the autonomous driving system. I think we can have a world with steering wheels and manufacturer responsibility... we just might not get there for a while.

ghaff• 4 years ago

Even with very good automation, it seems an incredibly high bar that you can automate literally everything. I guess you can maybe imagine voice control as a replacement but...

But to the parent comment, it seems insane to me that a consumer would accept full liability for some company's software as they would for their own driving. It seems obvious to me that the manufacturer is liable. If my taxi driver gets in an accident I'm certainly not at fault.

phire• 4 years ago

You don't need to remove the steering wheel completely.

You just need to make it impossible for the driver to take control of the vehicle unless it's fully stopped and in a safe state.

young_unixer3• 4 years ago

The driver should know the capabilities of the car. If he doesn't, then he shouldn't drive it. If he isn't 100% sure that autonomous driving system will work as expected, then he should never enable that system.

cinntaile• 4 years ago

According to your criterium that means never. There is no way to be 100% sure how an autonomous driving system will work as expected.

ClumsyPilot5• 4 years ago

How does the driver know reliability of closed-source, ai based autonomous system is the manufacturer himself doesn't?

loeg2• 4 years ago

This is silly. I want a self-driving car that drives me 95% of the way to the mountains, but allows me to take control on the dirt road that is the last 1-3 miles to the trailhead.

shadowgovt7• 4 years ago

That may be available in the end.

This change to the law makes it so that if someone else wants one that can't do that last 5%, it's not literally illegal to sell them that car.

HideousKojima• 4 years ago

That's an overreaction, the simpler solution is to outlaw anything less than level 4 self-driving (or at least ban level 3 and only allow level 1 and 2 stuff until 4 is achieved), and make the liability on the auto manufacturer clear in the law.

danuker4• 4 years ago

But clearly people are appreciating levels 1-3, because they buy current cars offering them.

These levels still provide improvement in quality of life, but for a cheaper price (because it's easier to implement).

danuker4• 4 years ago

I'd counter with a physical switch, which can not be toggled by the car, and which locks during a crash.

That way, the state of the switch lets you know who caused the crash.

datavirtue5• 4 years ago

If it doesn't have a steering wheel then no one will buy it. It's too weird and different and will be a major obstacle to adoption. So yeah, corporate wants it to have a steering wheel for numerous reasons...including the one you cite.

danuker4• 4 years ago

You are speculating. A self-driving taxi, bus or truck service might not find having controls important.

btilly• 4 years ago

Not noone.

If there was a low-end car that could drive my kids to/from school without a licensed driver present, I'd buy it in a heartbeat.

So would any other parent who has the money, and regularly has a conflict between where work would like them to be, and where they need to be for their children's school. (Yes, I'm familiar with and have used rideshare. Uber's liability won't cover taking kids, HopSkipDrive will, but they cost a lot more and every so often you get the situation where they don't find a driver. The convenience of, "Don't have to worry about it" would be worth a lot to me, and would give the children a lot of freedom.

throwawayboise2• 4 years ago

The owner is going to be liable, regardless of who is in control. Just like if someone else is driving your car and causes an accident, you (the owner) are the one who will pay.

ClumsyPilot5• 4 years ago

"Just like if someone else is driving your car and causes an accident, you (the owner) are the one who will pay."

What? Do you go to jail If someone kills a pedestrian with your car? Do you have to pay compensation for injuries?

I don't know what jurisdiction you are in, but here the one who cuased damage is the one who pays.

lmilcin• 4 years ago

Send them to Poland and require to pass Polish driving license exam.

throw7• 4 years ago

You always want a physical failsafe control (i.e. big red button for emergency stop)... it's not clear if nhtsa requires that or not.

The practicality of manually driving is not going away. Just this week my neighbor was driving up and down his driveway to transport some heavy packages received.

juancn• 4 years ago

It should open up the possibility of facing backwards, assuming you don't have motion sickness, it's a much safer position to be in to dissipate energy in case of a crash.

biophysboy• 4 years ago

Is this because the seat would distribute the force?

notyourday3• 4 years ago

... And with that women said "eff that!" nailing the coffin of the FAV

renewiltord3• 4 years ago

Do women specifically want steering wheels or something? I’m not sure I understand.

notyourday3• 4 years ago

Women specifically do not want to be in cars which they cannot even theoretically control.

jedberg7• 4 years ago

I think a lot of people are misreading this. Right now one of the rules to pass a crash test is that there is a steering wheel. This didn't used to be controversial, but now it is. The rules were written in the 70s and just assumed there would always be a drivers seat.

The only thing here is that the government rewrote the rules to no longer assume those things. It's not saying those things aren't necessary, just not required. If the car can meet all the safety standards without it, then that's fine.

It would be like saying today that you can't have a computer without an on/off switch because in the 70s every computer had a physical switch.

christophilus• 4 years ago

It would be like saying today that you can't have a computer without an on/off switch because in the 70s every computer had a physical switch.

As aside, that’d be great.

jedberg7• 4 years ago

As soon as I typed that I knew someone would reply with this. :). I agree it would be nice and I sometimes miss physical switches, but imagine how clunky a Raspberry Pi would be with a physical switch.

And besides, I almost never used the switch on the computer anyway. I was always told to put it into a power strip and use that, because it was a lot cheaper to replace the power strip than the broken power switch on the PC!

polygloty3• 4 years ago

Think about having a switch on a laptop. And if the switch doesn't just kill power (which it shouldn't to safely shut down), then it shouldn't be a switch it might be better as a button.

jeffwask• 4 years ago

Since my cat learned to press the red button to get my attention, it would be fabulous.

NullPrefix• 4 years ago

Always-ON computer?

snowwrestler• 4 years ago

It’s not 100% clear in the article, but it reads like this change is scoped to crash safety. The scope of those regs is the physical protection of the passengers in a crash, not all aspects of safety related to self-driving cars. So, not a big deal.

Actually, removing the steering wheel is probably a crash safety gain. Manufacturers had to invent a way to retract the steering wheel in crashes since it caused so many torso injuries. Steering wheel injuries were also the spur to invent and deploy the first airbags.

umeshunni• 4 years ago

Another analogy is that in some countries, all cars had to pass an emissions test to be road safe. I knew someone who imported a Tesla into their country back in 2015 or so and the licensing office would not give them a license plate because they could not get a smoke test done on it.

I assume such countries changed the laws to remove that requirement once EVs were no longer a novelty.

mojomark• 4 years ago

Vehicles == Automobiles (in this case).

There are other vehicles besides autos (aircraft, boats, ships, tanks). Need to be more specific.

spacemanmatt• 4 years ago

Cyberpunk future, here we come.

FpUser• 4 years ago

I'm just thinking about legal shitstorm that will happen when completely autonomous vehicle would kill a pedestrian for example.

dmix2• 4 years ago

I could imagine a bus on a fixed route not having controls. This doesn't have to apply universally...

There could definitely be a number of use-cases beyond taxis/individual cars. This is why top-tier regulations like this need to be broad. You can refine it at the vehicle category level.

0xADADA• 4 years ago

danger is a driverless car turning left onto a bridge that has washed away during a flood, mistaking the map for the territory, it drives us off the bridge because we've eliminated the brakes because we think the car is smarter than the human inside it

KETpXDDzR• 4 years ago

Without paywall: https://web.archive.org/web/20220311164526/https://www.reute...

U.S. eliminates human controls requirement for fully automated vehicles

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