Quote:
Originally Posted by polak
I am curious as to what the plan would be if there was some sort of catastrophic failure with the computer and sensors that drive the car?
Say we replace all of deerfoot traffic with self-driving cars. It only takes one failure in one car to cause a big accident. Are we going to expect people to be paying attention at all times and take over? That's not going to happen. Hell first thing I do with my self driving car is go pub hopping!
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As an individual, sure, there are probably instances where a human is going to be able to react more effectively to a dangerous situation than a computer. But in the near future a group of computer-driven vehicles is going to be far more effective at avoiding dangerous situations. Imagine if there was an accident and a half-mile of cars on Deerfoot all immediately knew about it and immediately adjusted their speed in a controlled way, thus avoiding multi-car pile-ups. Imagine if your car could not only swerve into another lane to avoid a collision, but it could communicate with the cars in that lane even before swerving, so those could take reactionary maneuvers as well. Self-driving cars could also be aware of which cars around them are self-driving and which are manual, thus adapting and allowing extra reaction-time for manuals.
I'd have a hard time adapting to a self-driving car, but crowd-accident avoidance would easily be one of the biggest possible selling features for me.