So, silly question - why are these technologies not being made broadly available as driver assist tools while we work our way up to L4 driving automation?
If we're really concerned about making driving safer, this seems like a good compromise until we get to broadly available (and affordable) L4.
> So, silly question - why are these technologies not being made broadly available as driver assist tools while we work our way up to L4 driving automation?
Well, they are. Lane departure warnings, auto braking, self parking are all incremental automation/assistive technologies that have been rolling out slowly and will continue to.
Advertising stuff now is a kind of marketing aimed at hiring and in building enthusiasm for a company like GM that as seen as a has been (not picking on GM, they are simply the topic of this article!).
I think your real question is, "why aren't I seeing these features on current model year cars?" It's about the structure of the car industry. For example, when I worked with <car company X> on brake-by-wire in 1996 it was for the 2004 model year. They had a team with functional steer by wire -- I still haven't seen it in production! This is a combination of historical industry practice, a focus on safety, and regulatory constraints. A mixture of good and bad.
> I think your real question is, "why aren't I seeing these features on current model year cars?"
Or as 3rd party modules which can be installed by a moderately competent mechanic.
And while yes, some of these are being offered, they are far from freely available and affordable - two things which would seem to me to be important for full blown automation.
I think having partially self driving cars that require active driver engagement are a huge safety problem, because if drivers are able to just sit there and not doing anything 90% of the time, they just aren't going to pay attention ever. Some driver aids like automatic braking are probably fine, but 'getting from a to b' is probably something that shouldn't be available until it's as reliable as a human driver.
I'm thinking less "90% automation" and more "Jeeves from Ironman's Suit". Something to help make the driver aware of anomalies from when they're normally under highway hypnosis or futzing around with the radio.
After driving around in Montana today, I'd love for something to be able to tell me with a high degree of confidence if that's really water or ice on the road. Or what speed that car in front of me is going - have they decided it's ice and are driving 30mph slower than I am? Or is that car disappearing into my blind spot going to merge right into me?
The answers were, mostly water (thankfully, see 2 and 3), yes they do think its ice, and yes, he is going to.
The problem is that such drastic differences in speed create accidents. Someone going 40 on roads where everyone else is going 75 is going to create emergency braking, panic merges, and a bunch of other potential problems.
Jarvis telling me to slow down when the surrounding traffic is going 75 would not be useful, and would (if followed) make me more prone to be hit or cause other accidents.
Instead, what I want Jarvis to tell me is "this car <highlighted in a HUD> is going 30mph slower than you." This is useful, actionable data that a vision or radar system could provide.
This is also an issue for other autonomous systems where there's a human in the loop. The solution for that is well known: dial down the automation every once in a while and ask the human to do something, so that they stay aware of their surroundings and don't doze off.
Unfortunately, a car that turns off the cruise control, asks you to recenter the car in the lane or increase the distance with the car ahead wouldn't sell that well, as people would consider it defective.
Isn't this sort of the Tesla approach where they slowly increment improvements in certain settings?
Years back when Google started testing its cars it gave their employees the chance to use their very preliminary technology during their commute. They made it explicitly clear that the driver still had to be ready to take absolute control of the car at any moment but what they found was that their employees were doing the absolutely the opposite: playing on their phones, reaching into the back seat, etc. That's why Waymo has been adamant that they'll only release their tech when it's 100% ready.
> Misconception 1: Driver assistance systems will evolve gradually into fully autonomous cars
> [...]People often argue that such assistance systems need to be supervised by the driver. This makes sense for assistance systems that operate for a few seconds or minutes (such as a parking assistant) but it can not work for systems that drive continuously. Humans are not capable to maintain the state of alert for hours and hours which would be required to immediately counteract possible deficiencies of a driver-assistance system or to take over from it in a split-second.
> We can only entrust the driving task to a driver assistance system when we are sure that this system can handle all situations which arise suddenly and require immediate reaction. This means that driver assistance systems operating continuously on a highway need to be able to cope with rare situations including pedestrians and bicyclists on the highway (they do appear sometimes on highways), accidents unfolding, animals, sudden rainfall etc. Gradual evolution of such systems is impossible; they need to be extremely capable from the first day on which they are put into operation.
I'm not expecting them to evolve - I'm wanting those technologies that exist today to be used to help drivers today - not when "we are sure that this system can handle all situations which arise".
We have the basic optical and radar lane assists and similar on current models, but as long as I have to keep my hands on the wheel I'm not going to want to have (or pay for) spinning lidars and other expensive tech that I assume this requires.
I assume there's a cost issue? This stuff was expensive to develop, and kind of a luxury, so they probably want to charge as much as possible, which then delays adoption.
If we're really concerned about making driving safer, this seems like a good compromise until we get to broadly available (and affordable) L4.