New Driving Offences with Autonomous Cars

"1. You will be forced to turn off the auto-assist and drive yourself for 3 months." - that'd be tricky with Google's new effort - no steering wheel or pedals!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-27587558

I guess you could have a couple of bricks on string to drop out the left or right windows for 'differential' steering like a bulldozer .. and add a "Flintstone" hole in the floor to bypass the pedal issue. Don't we engineers try to seek a work around solution?

As for the car bay finder, get junior to stand on the roof and seek out a vacancy ... gainful use of pocket money?

Legitimate users would have to wait for a multitude if statutory approvals before they can go out and buy one. Nefarious elements, on the other hand, will hardly be slowed down by the statutory bodies. The technology is here. It will be used. And misused. The creators of the technology can perhaps see how to build safeguards in...

No need to wait for autonomous cars. Many cars today are hackable to a dangerous degree.

Since when has Microsoft got into the act? Love 'em!

OMG it's worse then we thought!...Based on past experience this looks to be accurate...Thus the collector car market will continue to strengthen.....

In principle, one wouldn't need a Driving Licence to use such a thing.

• The nearest equivalent today would be a taxi with an autromatic driver instead of a human one. One wouldn't expect to incur a fine or prosecution while being conveyed in a taxi, would one (rhetorical question - NNTR)?

Most jurisdictions would require alteration to their laws to enable them to be used.

• It is not lawful, for example, to use a Skegway on a public road or in a public place in the UK for that very reason and yet they are used freely in other jurisdictions.

I doubt that we will ever see driverless cars on our roads, at least in the next hundred years. No one has figured out how driverless cars and driver cars can both share the same roads at the same time. How does a driverless car avoid someone abruptly changing lanes or tailgating and falling asleep? If ALL cars were driverless, yes it could work. I wouldn't want to be in such a car with an 18 wheeler barreling down on me and no place to go. Buck Rogers thought about this a long time ago, but it is still not practical.

Please, watch this less-than-a-minute-long video and tell me if you still think the time is still a long way off, when it might be preferable to have a computer instead of a human making the decisions when facing down an 18 wheeler with seemingly no place to go.

I don't know of any human who can match that level of balance and control. 'No place to go' depends highly on the skill, reaction time, processing speed and environment awareness of the human/computer behind the wheel. It is becoming increasingly cheap to best humans at specific tasks for most of the thing that will dictate 'no place to go'.

It won't be long before a caveat will be required...'no place to go, in manual control', or 'no place to go without computer assistance', or 'no place humanly possible to go'.

I hope you are right, they scare the begeebers out of me. Any bug in a system may prove fatal.

11. Auto-no-mous(e)
Carry a mouse (with ability for personal input) in your car's operation might be an offence?

Autonomous cars are not supposed to get in accidents.

I agree that they will be less likely to be in an accident but the probability and the rate of occurrence will not be zero.

What does 'not supposed to get in accidents' mean, exactly.

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We don't intend to get in accidents in cars that require drivers. There would probably be huge fuel savings if we could ever get the frequency of accidents low enough to ignore the possibility of accidents when designing cars, but I don't really understand what you mean by 'not supposed to'.

Are there groups out there asserting that autonomous vehicles will not be involved in accidents? Telephone poles don't usually have drivers, and even without going anywhere or even being in a normal lane of traffic, they are involved in accidents regularly.

What about tickets? If the city/county changes the speed limit, it may take a while before Google finds out about it. Then who gets the ticket? The car? Can't give it to the driver can they?

I suspect there will be a penalty for overriding safety features. I suspect one such safety feature will be a prohibition on driving above the 'unless otherwise posted' speed when in areas for which a current update has not been received.

i further suspect that it won't be long before there will be requirements to announce pending changed to speed limits noting the time the change is to occur.

If these cars are as smart as they're cracked up to be, they should be able to identify and interpret the road signs correctly.

One of the penalties following an autonomous car infringement could be a severe restriction on availability of input energy .... next will be licencing of solar cell installations, banning power sockets near driveways and maybe the Colorado-state sanctioned sale of batteries in Walmart.

And what do we think of driver-less police cars, ambulances and fire trucks being dispatched and controlled from some central location that is loaded up with CCTV and as previously suggested, subject to intervention by the 'bad guys', and I don't mean sales reps of the insurance companies.

Don't know why there's all this hoo-haw about driverless cars. Disneyland has had them for decades.