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Comment by chrisfosterelli | Hacker News Reader

> That cautious approach requires that the cars have a steering wheel, and a licensed driver must be ready to take over if the machine fails.

The article takes the tone that this will drastically limit the technology, but honestly at this point a restriction like this seems completely reasonable.

The cars are not good enough to completely drive themselves in all scenarios. At times, they will decide they can't handle a situation and safely ask a driver to take over. This is becoming more and more rare, but it's definitely still the case. Until the technology is proven to basically never need human intervention, it seems reasonable to require a person who can drive to be present.

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For cases such as if the car detects a malfunction, this probably won't be a big deal, but for most extreme situations where a human will need to take over, and that can't be fixed by stopping the car, will a human be able to take over in a timely enough manner to solve the issue? We are often talking split second decisions, and it will involve a human who likely wasn't paying any more attention to the road than a passenger.

Imagine a car where the passenger's side is fully set up to drive, and with the push of a single button, the driver can swap all control to the passenger. I'm having a hard time thinking of situations where this is better than just stopping the car.

Hmm, that's makes me wonder how driving lessons work in US. In Poland it is a legal requirement that the car used for such purpose has a second set of pedals on passenger side, where instructor sits.

When I took a driving lessons my instructor was perfectly capable of pressing the brake or overtaking the wheel on time when I was about to do something stupid. I don't see why manual override of autonomous car should be harder.

I see however, that this can easily defeat purpose of using autonomous car: if the driver must be fully concentrated all the time, be ready to react, then it is even worse than driving normal car.

It works the same way in the US. However, in that case, the instructor is normally paying attention to the road and the student's driving, to grade them if nothing else. Usually, passengers can't be relied on for that level of attention.

When I took driving lessons in the US, the instructor had a brake on the passenger side but no other controls.

That's a great question, and my understanding is that the car simply doesn't ask humans to take over in that case.

The "handoff" technique is primarily useful in situations where the car's confidence in the situation slowly degrades, not for sudden collision avoidance. An example would be a confusing construction area, or navigating with rocks on the road after a landslide. In these areas where road lines and signs aren't as applicable, the car needs a human driver. The human driver is so people aren't abandoning cars at the start of construction zones, not so they can step in to avoid a sudden collision. Google recently did a study and determined it takes over 5 seconds for a human to take over in a scenario, the car won't be able to expect them to handle anything that is happening quicker than that.

One such situation: Car detects malfunction while in an intersection. If it comes to a sudden stop, then at the least it will block the intersection, and you'll have the passengers sitting in a box in the middle of the intersection struggling to get the car going.

Further, a malfunction while in the left lane of the highway would be just as dangerous.

I don't even drive that much, all my commuting is done by bike. These are just a couple things I can think of off the top of my head.

> Imagine a car where the passenger's side is fully set up to drive, and with the push of a single button, the driver can swap all control to the passenger. I'm having a hard time thinking of situations where this is better than just stopping the car.

I don't know about you, but when I'm a passenger in a car, I'm attentive to everything. I guess the fact I often have strong rapport with the driver (usually a family member) means we are in sync; I mean I'll literally do blind spot checks, and carry out many of the driver's visual rituals simultaneously.

I think this is an interesting scenario; machines assisting men in, for example, collision avoidance systems, or in this case all the way up to self driving; and men being required to help self-driving machines in unusual situations.

Drver heart attack aka computer sensor failure.

For a time, why not allow the cars in fully-autonomous mode on a restricted set of roads, even particular lanes on particular roads, at particular max speeds, marked as such so everyone, including the cars, knows what to expect? In the case of unusual construction particular routes could be temporarily disabled. This would severely curtail the number of outlier cases the software has to be ready for, be actually safe, and allow for awesome quality of life improvement for commuters on those routes who can do something else while commuting. And in the meantime, gain huge number of hours driving experience for the software, enabling the fully autonomous routes to be slowly expanded over time.

The large part of the complexity of implementing self-driving cars comes from the fact that the roadway is not a fully protected space. You can find a number of examples of fully unattended automated vehicles that have been around for a while (for example, AGT people-movers that are common at airports), but they are dependent on a fully protected pathway so that they do not require very much intelligence.

So what about roadways? Freeways have a certain degree of protection, but it's still not comparable with an elevated train ROW. It is certainly possible to develop roadways with a sufficient degree of protection for less sophisticated automation to be reliable, but it would be very expensive: they would need much more intensive maintenance, traffic density would have to be quite a bit more limited, they would need careful physical protection with at least fencing. In the end, I don't think that the infrastructure investment would be worth it considering that the period of time for which this infrastructure is needed will probably be quite short (in infrastructure terms).

> The article takes the tone that this will drastically limit the technology, but honestly at this point a restriction like this seems completely reasonable.

This does seem like what the first step to getting self driving cars on the road would look like.

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