Self-driving cars are being made everywhere now. A lot of different car companies are exploring this futuristic technology for driving. It is supposed to lead into a world without accidents but its current researches are producing the opposite results: Vehicles have racked up a crash rate double those of human drivers.
Believe it or not, the main problem is that they obey the law all the time, without exception. This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well.
As more and more mishaps happen, car programmers from different companies are now debating whether or not it is right to teach the cars to commit infractions from time to time to stay away from trouble.
“It’s a constant debate inside our group,” said Raj Rajkumar, co-director of the General Motors-Carnegie Mellon Autonomous Driving Collaborative Research Lab in Pittsburgh. “And we have basically decided to stick to the speed limit. But when you go out and drive the speed limit on the highway, pretty much everybody on the road is just zipping past you. And I would be one of those people.”
There was one incident on a highway with three lanes of traffic where the driver had to take over and maneuver in order to avoid getting into an accident. “We end up being cautious,” Rajkumar said. “We don’t want to get into an accident because that would be front-page news. People expect more of autonomous cars.”
Despite accident rates being higher than those of regular cars, the truth is, it is often not the driver-less cars fault. Driverless vehicles have never been at fault, the study found: They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes by inattentive or aggressive humans unaccustomed to machine motorists that always follow the rules and proceed with caution.
Google is on a fast track. It plans to make its self-driving-cars unit a stand-alone business next year and eventually offer a ride-for-hire service, according to a person briefed on the company’s strategy.
Google cars have been in 17 minor crashes in 2 million miles of testing and account for most of the reported accidents, according to the Michigan study. That’s partly because the company is testing mainly in California, where accidents involving driverless cars must be reported.
There are a still a lot of things to work on these autonomous cars before they could be put out in the market. After all, people are unpredictable when on the road.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment