Nevada Looking To Proactively Legalize Autonomous Cars
from the paving-the-road-to-the-future dept
There's been a lot of advancement lately in the field of autonomous cars. The DARPA Grand Challenge a few years ago convinced many people that autonomous vehicles were possible and since then we've been seeing more and more work on concepts around such vehicles, including Google's secret testing of its own autonomous cars and some other researchers doing an autonomous drive from Italy to China. However, with Google, it needed to get special permission to take the car out on the roads, and apparently some politicians in Nevada are working hard to court autonomous vehicle manufacturers to its state. They've put together a bill that would make it easier to get autonomous vehicles on the road in the state, by setting up a process to "authorize" such vehicles, and allow them to operate on Nevada highways.As Ryan Calo notes in his post (the one linked above) about this, it's great that Nevada is taking a proactive approach, however, he does worry about some of the broad language:
The bill's definition of autonomous vehicles is unclear, even circular. Autonomous driving exists on a spectrum. Many vehicles available today have autonomous features, while falling short of complete computer control. Surely the bill's authors do not intend to require that, for instance, today's self-parking Lexus LS 460L be tested and certified.Either way, it's exciting to think that such vehicles are getting closer to being available to the public.
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Filed Under: autonomous vehicles, cars, nevada
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Naive
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Naive
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Re: Naive
This generally isn't needed in technological advancements, but since everything that goes on the public road system is subject to existing laws this is something that needs to be addressed.
Go Nevada!
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Palms are being greased
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Re: Naive
Nor did we say it did. Did you read a different post? Just pointing out that it's good to see Nevada take away hurdles.
Even when politicians throw billions at technologies they fail.
They're not throwing billions. They're taking away hurdles. That's good.
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An out for Google?
Who gets a ticket for an autonomous cars? Microsoft?
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Re: An out for Google?
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Although some dilettantes may scoff at my apprehension, I don't see how more electronics in cars is a good thing.
My 58 year old mother's Ford Focus burst into flames while she was driving it just the other day due to the wonderfully modrun electronic control unit shorting out. I can't imagine what could happen if something similar occurred in a car with the accelerator, brake, and steering controlled by electronics.
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Wait, what?
But now they want more cars on the road WITH NOBODY IN THEM?
Ahahahahahahahaha!
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Autonomous cars would be much easier to design if all roads, driveways and parking lots had some type of markers buried in them that the cars could detect. Like an invisible track.
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People will simply call their cars to come pick them up sufficiently before the airplane lands so that by the time they get their luggage and are ready, the car will be waiting for them in the parking lot. As I'm getting my luggage and leaving the airport I'll use my phone to instruct my car to leave its parking spot at the airport and to come and to meet me outside. I won't have to walk to its parking spot and won't really care so much how far it needed to go to find a parking spot because I'll take that into consideration to determine about when I need to tell it to meet me outside. Autonomous cars will drive more safely than humans (ie: at one time people to beat chess computers but now we hardly can) so people who drink won't need a taxi cab anymore. and if I go visit a friend in another state and no one can pick me up during my arrival time, no one needs to have to, my friend can instruct his car to pick me up while at work and can give his car my cell phone number so that my car knows who to pick up and who to allow in the car. My friend can leave his/her house keys or whatever in the car and instruct the car to drop me off at my friends house and to go back to my friends work where my friend can then later take it home. The future will be so different with this sort of technology and if the taxi cab industry knows whats best for it it would start lobbying hard because the future will seek to make its government imposed monopolies of no benefit to them.
Parked cars could become a scarcity because families won't need nearly as many cars, they can simply have the same car pick members up and drop them off at various places as desired. While one person is at work, their car doesn't have to be parked, it can be picking up that persons child from school and dropping them off home and then returning back to work. This will create all sorts of efficiencies.
(I've already discussed, in a previous techdirt comment, how this sort of technology will likely revolutionize things like drug trafficking in the future).
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(that is, the application on my phone will tell me about how far my car parked and about how long it needs to get to me from its current parking spot, kinda like how Google already tells you about how long it will take you to get from point A to point B).
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Autonomous Cars
Is there anything that Google do not have a share in? As for autonomous cars - the idea of it actually fills me with dread - what happens if one of these cars knocks down a pedestrian - do we shift all the blame onto the manufacturer blaming faulty software and let the driver go scott free? Until alot more testing is done on these cars Im very skeptical that this will become mainstream
I have my own blog and would very much like to open a new topic on this very subject. Keep up the great work guys.
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Autonomous Cars
Is there anything that Google do not have a share in? As for autonomous cars - the idea of it actually fills me with dread - what happens if one of these cars knocks down a pedestrian - do we shift all the blame onto the manufacturer blaming faulty software and let the driver go scott free? Until alot more testing is done on these cars Im very skeptical that this will become mainstream
I have my own blog and would very much like to open a new topic on this very subject. Keep up the great work guys.
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