Friday, August 10, 2018

How Will They Deal With Crashes?

A lot of the optimism about self-driving cars (and trucks) has been about highway driving which is, in many places, "easier" in some sense, though I think the "traveling at 65 mph" is more of a problem than people recognize given how well these things can actually "see," but what happens when something goes wrong? If I get in a little crash with another car on America's worst highway, the Schuylkill Expressway, unless the cars are totalled and we're dying, the other driver and I can likely find a way to pull our cars off to the side of the road within some reasonable timeframe so that 5,000 other drivers don't have to discover the joys of free parking. This type of thing is not an easy problem for the robot driver to deal with.