Quote:
Originally Posted by CoolMikey
Will be interesting to see how legal implications of it all play out. Like what if driverless car gets caught speeding for some reason, who pays the ticket? What if the car fails to see a pothole, drives into it causing the suspension to get completely fucked, who pays for repairs? What if stop sign gets partially obstructed by a tree branch, car doesn't see it, doesn't stop, causing an accident, who would be responsible? etc
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Hmm, brings to mind another scenario: a cluster of cars running the same software get confused and all react in the same way, as a group.
In Melbourne Australia they're currently widening freeways, which requires temporary realignment of some of the lanes. Instead of scraping off the old white lines and painting on temporary markings, as they've done in the past, this time they've simply
added yellow lines and a series of signs advising "OBEY YELLOW LINES." So you have a high speed road that has two conflicting sets of lane markings, one of which you're supposed to ignore.
How does a fully autonomous car handle that? Does it detect the conflict and realise it cannot safely resolve the situation, then just give up? Is there some failsafe mode where they beep to alert the occupant, flash their hazards, then pull over to the side of the road and stop? Oops, but Melbourne has
abolished emergency lanes in order to widen freeways, so there's nowhere to stop clear of traffic... what do you do when you're rolling on a freeway in a car that has literally panicked, and you have no manual control?
Even worse, what happens if the car doesn't detect any conflict and just continues along, following the older white line alignment? It creates a situation where surrounding vehicles with human drivers (or smarter versions of software) that follow the new alignment will directly conflict with any confused autonomous vehicles following the old. Imagine you're next to one of these when the yellow lines veer a metre left, but the white lines continue straight.
To be fair, this yellow line system is too advanced for many humans to comprehend...
