Robot cars on public roads? California says yes

http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/robot-cars-on-public-roads-california-says-yes/

by vectorbunny • 14 years ago

267 152 14 years ago

eslachance• 14 years ago

I'm very glad to see that this is spreading. It would have been really annoying for Google to perfect their car and then have nowhere to drive it because of silly legislations. It wouldn't be the first time senators were afraid of change...

OstiaAntica• 14 years ago

It isn't "fear" of change, it is that political systems get captured by status quo interest groups that fight against change.

heretohelp• 14 years ago

Where's the anti-robot car lobby? I doubt most cabbies are even aware of this.

Further, I would submit that this is mostly due to the legislators themselves.

vectorbunny2• 14 years ago

See Chris Paine's 2006 documentary 'Who Killed the Electric Car?' for background on the politics of transportation in California. Hopefully Google will be up to task.

kemiller2• 14 years ago

I don't know that it's just that. Car and driver ran a fearmongering editorial about it in their most recent issue. ("We can't trust them with our credit cards and now they want us to trust them to drop little Sally off at the pool?") There will definitely be grassroots backlash.

My guess is that comfort with this as a concept will be generational, as are lots of things. I like the idea a lot, but I also will miss driving. I doubt my daughter will miss driving in the slightest.

tthomas482• 14 years ago

Or that the people who can see the benefits never show up to try to convince anyone.

Mvandenbergh• 14 years ago

Of course Google has a lot more influence in the California legislature than any car manufacturer. I'm not sure you could get this passed in Michigan or Detroit.

ChuckMcM2• 14 years ago

Yes, imagine that you were going to revolutionize the way people get around. And then cities around the country made it illegal to use your revolutionary device on the sidewalk. [1]

I'm still waiting to see what the opposition is going to do when they get organized. If you thought Uber was a threat to cabs, they don't hold a candle to a fleet of self driving cars with an NFC payment option.

[1] Which was of course a challenge for the Segway

jquery• 14 years ago

As someone with bad knees, for whom a bicycle isn't an option, this is enormously frustrating. What a disgrace.

ippisl• 14 years ago

Uber is a small company. Google is big enough to pay politicians. I don't think political opposition will be a big problem.

hnriot2• 14 years ago

Senators want to get re-elected. That's pretty much their only fear. So if robot cars. Ring wealth to their districts they will be all for them, until the first accident that kills someone. Of course human drivers kill people all the time too, but that won't matter.

We should have put the tech into the mars rover.

juiceandjuice• 14 years ago

I've seen google's robotic cars already driven on the 280, specifically the Lexus SUV.

Sharma• 14 years ago

Alright! New field of hacking,security and development will emerge now. People will try to hack, other people will try to make it secure and some of us will work on developing fancy apps for these vehicles.

camiller4• 14 years ago

Mario Kart IRL?

lunchbox• 14 years ago

How is this different from what happened in May?

http://articles.latimes.com/2012/may/21/business/la-fi-autos...

"California Senate passes bill for self-driving cars"

hypersoar• 14 years ago

It has now gone through both houses of the legislature, presumably after the bill from May went through reconciliation. It is on its way to the governor, who, given its apparent lack of controversy, is likely to sign it.

mikeyouse2• 14 years ago

Legislature is an iterative process--

The votes:

Senate Floor (08/29/2012), Assembly Floor (08/28/2012), Assembly Floor (08/24/2012), Assembly Committee (08/16/2012), Assembly Committee (07/02/2012), Senate Floor (05/21/2012), Senate Committee (04/10/2012)

The senate approved a version in May, and sent it to the Assembly. The Assembly added some markup. Only in the last week did the Senate and Assembly vote on the same bill, which is the process needed to send a bill to the governor.

(Full history here: http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/postquery?bill_number=sb_1...)

001sky4• 14 years ago

California legislators have sent a bill to the governor’s desk

- Not yet signed. So not yet law. Still.

tolos• 14 years ago

Have there been any studies on whether people actually want autonomous cars (a quick google search only shows one: http://www.alpineautotrans.com/?p=326)? I think it's a good idea, and I bet most people on HN would agree, but what's the downside? How many people in the general public would trust a robot driver? Can you still speed -- if you're late for work -- if you need emergency medical care? Can you take manual control of the vehicle -- would that raise insurance rates if you did so? How many people in the general public would be ok with that?

mikeyouse2• 14 years ago

If political ads are any clue to sentiment:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/wacky-fl...

Tl;Dr

Politician creates attack ad based on his opponent's support for autonomous cars.

tomsaffell2• 14 years ago

A robot-driven version of my personal car (and how I use it today), is moderately appealing. But as a stepping stone to a future where an autonomous robot-driven (flying?) cab pulls up curbside, picks me up, and smoothly, safely speeds me through a city where the absence of any manually driven vehicles allows for safer more efficient use of road-space, well, that's very exciting to me.

gnaritas4• 14 years ago

> A robot-driven version of my personal car (and how I use it today), is moderately appealing.

Really... you wouldn't find never having to park again very appealing? Having your car pick you up somewhere, or go get serviced while you're shopping?

randomdata• 14 years ago

Good questions, but overcoming consumer resistance is not a new science. The autonomous car will be just another in a long line of products that were initially dismissed by consumers.

Many cars you can buy today are practically autonomous anyway. You may still feel like you are in control, but the computer systems will take over in many cases. Going fully autonomous is the natural leap. The trick is only one of marketing to get the people comfortable with the idea. These frequent announcements is one way to build that comfort level before the first production units are ready to be sold.

ThePherocity3• 14 years ago

You won't have much of a choice after 5 years, all new cars will be semi-autonomous. A few year after that, people will enjoy the benefits so much that, that there won't be much demand for driveable cars. It's the same story as the horse to car, letter to telegram, paper to radio, radio to tv, tv to flatscrren, flatscreen to 3dtv... Okay, maybe not the last one.

farinasa• 14 years ago

I personally can't wait to read a book on the way to work.

jarek• 14 years ago

> I personally can't wait to read a book on the way to work.

Yes, what wondrous technology it must be that enables this!

yonran• 14 years ago

Previous discussions of earlier versions of the bill: in March: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3688267, and in May: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4010297

Current bill text: http://leginfo.ca.gov/pub/11-12/bill/sen/sb_1251-1300/sb_129...

What seems to have changed since May:

- The California DMV will set safety rules before 2015 instead of waiting for NHTSA to allow production use,

- The manufacturer must apply to the DMV before production use.

- Cars must record sensor data for 30s before every collision.

What I don’t like about the bill is that it requires an operator to be able to take manual control of the vehicle at any time. I’d imagine that as autonomous vehicles develop in the coming years, this restriction will have to be removed.

columbo• 14 years ago

> What I don’t like about the bill is that it requires an operator to be able to take manual control of the vehicle at any time.

I'd feel very strange being in a car without a manual override of some sort. Maybe in 10 years and only if the vast majority of cars are self driven it will be a different story. I can't imagine trying to drive through Chicago hoping that my little robot driver is aware of the two tow-trucks weaving through traffic behind me at 90mph.

abruzzi3• 14 years ago

10 years seems optimistic to me. If autonomous vehicles take off, I doubt they'll hit majority in less than 30 years, 50 more likely. These probably won't even be purchasable for 10 years.

tommi• 14 years ago

The manual control at any time is actually a feature I want to have. It doesn't have to be the current style steering wheel, stick and pedals but maybe something else like a joystick.

cm127• 14 years ago

I think I understand your complaint. If people can take control, i.e. take responsibility, then it's imperative to show evidence they were in control if something were to go wrong.

This will always be tricky because even Toyota a couple of years ago had trouble defending against alleged bugs that turned out to be completely untrue.

nitrogen2• 14 years ago

This will always be tricky because even Toyota a couple of years ago had trouble defending against alleged bugs that turned out to be completely untrue.

The silly conspiracy theorist in me wonders if the excessive media focus on Toyota had anything to do with the government's Detroit bailout. Probably not, but if I were writing a conspiracy novel, it'd be an easy plot point to add.

GFischer• 14 years ago

When horseless carriages first became legal, the legal requirement called for "a man with a red flag to walk in front of any self-propelled vehicle on a public road at no more than 4mph".

http://www.datchethistory.org.uk/Link%20Articles/Ellis/evely...

In the future, if manual override becomes undesirable or unneeded, it will probably be repealed. Actually, I'm surprised by this many steps forward so soon (I was a bit cynical of them ever being approved)

sslayer• 14 years ago

I'm surprised we haven't heard from Hoffa.

Jun8• 14 years ago

This is fantastic! The adoption could be very fast, e.g. if insurance companies give benefits if you drive a self-driving car.

One current roadblock is the price of the system: the LIDAR (the thing on the top of the car in the picture) retails for ~$75K currently. There should be significant volume to drive the price down. But a lot of people would buy them for prestige, too (e.g. many early Prius adopters), so if the cost of the system can be reduced to perhaps $4K-$5K levels people will seriously think about this.

sv1232• 14 years ago

If everybody had a self-driving car, would insurance be obsolete?

cygwin98• 14 years ago

Not so fast. What if a moose or a deer hits the car?

emiliobumachar2• 14 years ago

Theft would still be an issue. Also, the bots may be less than perfect.

majormajor• 14 years ago

Not entirely. There's three main parts: liability, comprehensive, and collision.

Liability is the part that's legally required in the US. If the numbers showed that self-driving cars were much less likely to cause an accident, it would be considerably cheaper for them (a much more dramatic version of how anti-lock brakes can make your liability coverage cheaper).

Comprehensive (mainly stuff that happens while you're not in the vehicle) would remain unchanged. But it's also the cheapest part.

Collision is what covers repairs to your own vehicle if you're at fault or if someone at fault isn't insured themselves (you can also skip the first part and just get uninsured motorist coverage). The uninsured at-fault driver case doesn't change until there are enough self-driving cars on the road that accidents as a whole go way down, but the first case (damage to your own vehicle that was your own fault) should be much less likely and thus cheaper to insure.

jonlarson• 14 years ago

If you had a self-driving car, would a malfunction in the car causing a crash be your fault?

brc5• 14 years ago

This question keeps coming up. The answer is no.

Insurance covers much more than drivers running into other things - theft of vehicle, parts of vehicle, or damage to vehicle and theft of contents - fire + natural disasters (flood etc) - damage to the vehicle by other drivers, both moving and parked - personal liability for damage while using the car - damage to the car from accidents

Note that in multiple vehicle accidents sometimes 'blame' is shared out between insurance companies as a way of sharing costs.

As to the fiction that accidents will never happen with autonomous cars, this is simply false. Of course there will still be accidents. The accident rate should decrease but this will take a long, long time to happen.

Take this example : workers have a self-driving pickup, but don't secure a ladder on the roof properly. While driving along the freeway, the ladder comes off and smashes into self-driving car behind. Neither self-driving car can prevent this. Same goes for self-driving cars failing to detect black ice on the road and skidding into railings/trees/other traffic.

Liability for accidents with self-drive vehicles will fall on the owner of the vehicle, possibly with insurers pooling 'fault' when one or more self-driving vehicles are involved.

mturmon• 14 years ago

Yes, the lidars are expensive. It is believed that the Ibeo will come down to the sub-$1K range in volume production.

http://www.autonomoustuff.com/ibeo-lux-standard.html

bradgessler• 14 years ago

I could also see increased adoption if HOV lanes were set aside only for automated cars.

dllthomas2• 14 years ago

I would object. If you want to use the HOV lane, have multiple people in your car. I understand the rationale for extending it to things that are sufficiently fuel efficient. I don't see it here.

Daniel_Newby5• 14 years ago

I think the LIDAR approach will have to go. Laser systems are inherently susceptible to jamming with a cheap laser diode. We cannot afford to have mass adoption of cars where somebody can create weeks of citywide gridlock with a few thousand dollars of lasers.

zitterbewegung• 14 years ago

The degradation mode is that you have to drive your car. Not, everyone not being able to drive.

agildehaus• 14 years ago

Thrun said in a talk I saw posted on HN earlier today that this wasn't being considered a problem. I'm not certain if targeted LIDAR jamming was on his mind, his comment was specifically in reference to operating with many other autonomous cars on the road.

He was concerned about GPS jamming though, but thankfully these cars have been designed from the ground up to not rely on GPS (as a signal from a satellite is not reliable). I believe as long as the area has been 3D mapped by Google, the car is capable of driving and navigating without GPS assistance.

paulsutter3• 14 years ago

You can jam the human eye with a cheap laser diode. Does that stop you from driving?

Besides, using the right modulation would make LIDAR as hard to jam as would be needed.

Reltair• 14 years ago

Yes! Driving in traffic is mind-numbing.

It also doesn't help that traffic seems to be getting worse in the bay area.

rayiner• 14 years ago

But think about how convenient your self-driving car will be when you're sitting in traffic!

tocomment• 14 years ago

Does anyone know how a self driving car would potentially handle scenarios like:

1. A traffic light being out and cop is directing traffic? (Would it have to learn hand gestures?)

2. Stopping at a guard booth.

3. Crossing a solid yellow line to pass a stopped car or a garbage truck?

Anm• 14 years ago

The last time I read the legislation (sorry, didn't have the time now), it still requires a licensed driver to be at the wheel and at the ready to take over. I presume this sort of intermediate step will help the developers gradually transition to these type of exceptional real-world scenarios.

noblethrasher• 14 years ago

Also, autonomous cars will eventually obviate the need for a traffic cop in the aforementioned scenario.

RedwoodCity• 14 years ago

Perhaps in the future a group of people will have the job of moving cars that have gone into failsafe mode, and no one else will have to drive.

Take the case of elevators, originally they had manual operators who needed to make sure that they leveled out on a given floor so people could safely get on and off. Today elevators function on their own with users simply requesting their desired location. Every now and then they do get stuck, which requires calling in a certified technician to move the elevator, help trapped passengers, diagnose and repair problems before returning the elevator to service.

A well designed control system will have a good fail safe, but having to wait two hours for the closest technician to arrive because a branch has fallen accross the road would be annoying.

bfrs• 14 years ago

Looks like you are forgetting manual override.

natrius• 14 years ago

Google employees pay attention to the road as the cars drive because that's their job. Consumers will read the paper and go to sleep while the cars drive. Manual override is not a solution to this problem. A panic mode that alerts the driver to take over in uncertain situations could help.

brc5• 14 years ago

Which is precisely why the 'hey we won't need insurance' call is completely wrong.

As long as people can override the function, people will make mistakes and cause damage. And this will always be the case, nobody wants to be stuck on an isolated road, unable to proceed because their lane is partially blocked, but it is safe to cross the lane and proceed.

tkahn6• 14 years ago

Maybe the cop could have a device that lets the cars know when it's ok to turn or continue.

jpiasetz• 14 years ago

Long term I think self driving cars fix the traffic light problem without a cop. All the cars can just work it out over a network and go like it's a stop sign or just continue as if the light is there (if the city is on-board).

mhb• 14 years ago

Or the trolley problem:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2012/06/the...

lobster_johnson• 14 years ago

I wonder how it handles merging in tight traffic, such as when the current lane is closed ahead and you need to merge into the other lane. If the car doesn't have rerouting information in its database, does it go all the way up to the "closed ahead" sign blocking the road before it considers switching lanes?

Or when coming onto something like a highway where traffic has slowed down to a crawl. Normally you have to be a bit pushy and squeeze into the traffic, otherwise drivers in the other lane will never yield. Will the self-driving car know to do this, or will it wait forever for an opening in the traffic?

russell• 14 years ago

I've been rear-ended 7 times in the past 5 years. I'll be glad when everyone else has self-driving cars.

(My GF says I drive too fast and stop too quickly. She's probably right, although 3 of those times I was moving at less than walking speed.)

aphyr• 14 years ago

7 times sounds atypical; perhaps by changing your driving behavior you could reduce your risk. You might try decelerating slowly, keeping 2-4 seconds of following distance, checking your rear-view while braking, and leaving extra space in front of your vehicle at a stop--moving forward as cars come in behind.

mparlane• 14 years ago

Don't be so logical. You sound like my defensive driving instructor! Killjoy! :(

sarcasm intended

baq• 14 years ago

you should try racing (real-race-track variety racing) with something expendable, you'll learn to remember there might be people behind you very quickly.

raldi• 14 years ago

7 different roads?

chintan• 14 years ago

I'm pretty sure you'll have to sign a 'terms & waiver' document similar to the one before Sky Diving.

sigzero• 14 years ago

I love to drive in any kind of traffic. No thanks on the robot car. I want to remain in control.

base698• 14 years ago

Audi, Cadillac, and Mercedes all have semi autonomous features on the horizon.

http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/20/cadillac-super-cruise/

http://www.insideline.com/audi/audi-previews-traffic-jam-ass...

http://www.itnews.com.au/News/296907,rio-tinto-prepares-mine...

Devilboy2• 14 years ago

Autonomous trucks are already used in mines in Australia. They are apparently more reliable than humans, because they never drive too fast, they never drive too close to the edges, and of course they never get tired or distracted.

bsbechtel• 14 years ago

What the hell happens when hackers manage to hijack control of these thing going down the highway?

andreer• 14 years ago

I'm all for this, but I'm a bit miffed about the terminology: autonomous/robot/self-driving cars. "Autopilot" is shorter, simpler and well-established - and IMHO more accurate, as long asa human driver ready to take over at any time is still required.

beedogs• 14 years ago

Good. The first thing they should do is force anyone over 75 years of age to use them.

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2012/08/fourteen-injur...

AndrewKemendo• 14 years ago

I can see it now: a Lidar and autonomous system integrated on my Tesla S.

olalonde• 14 years ago

On a related note, does anyone have an idea on how Google plans to commercialize their technology?

rynes• 14 years ago

From the view of some consumers (I might be one,) a car may be considered to be a black box that is used to transport someone/something(s) from point A to point B. I do not automatically assume that it is always better to instrument a machine to control such a box rather than having a qualified person control it.

Robot cars on public roads? California says yes

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