Speed Bumps on the Road to Driverless Cars "A company called Navya introduced a driverless bus in Las Vegas, and within two hours it was involved in a traffic accident. A semi-truck was backing up and grazed the fender of the driverless bus. All the blame was placed on the truck driver, but you have to wonder if a human driver would have avoided the accident by backing out of the way." Or, more likely, the human driver would have backed into a third vehicle making the situation worse, and creating liability for the bus agency. More below. "Meanwhile, Waymo has been demonstrating its driverless technology, and is even running its cars on public roads without a back-up driver at the wheel (there is a back-up driver in the back seat, but that’s an inconvenient location if they needed to take over). One writer describe’s Waymo’s technology as “so good, it’s boring,” noting that it can deal with pedestrians, cyclists, and even squirrels running in front of the cars."
How many fatality accidents have happened because some Axxhole was trying to hit a squirrel and either ran off the road or hit another vehicle? Some lolly knob nearly hit me doing that once. I am pretty sure that was not a one-off. "But a top Waymo engineer frets that bicycle riders are so unpredictable that they may need electronically connect to driverless cars to protect themselves. While such connections may be nothing more than a smart phone app, some gram-counting cyclists may resist carrying any extra weight." Or we could just let evolution run its course and offer these idiots Darwin Awards! As for the V2V connectivity, let the market sort this out, it will, and it will do a much better job than the government will do mandating something insanely stupid and inefficient. We got along for millennial without governments mandating anything regarding technology and look where that got us. Why would we not allow the least competent group of people ever to run anything the power to define how our technology works? Have we lost our minds?
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