Honestly, I don't understand why the automobile industry doesn't learn from the airline industry. Airplanes have worked out how to balance autopilot capabilities with the need for pilots to remain engaged and attentive for years. Simply implement a Drive-By-Wire, similar to Airbus' Fly-By-Wire systems. A driver's inputs to the controls would still be required, but the autonomous systems could prevent or limit certain actions (such as accelerating into a stopped vehicle or swerving off the road).
Airline pilots are professionals, car drivers are just trying to get somewhere... paying attention isn't their full-time job. Also building autopilot software for a near empty 3-dimensional space is much easier than for complex roads of varying shapes, moving obstacles, country regulations and different road markings...
I talked to a pilot once who asserted that this is far from settled in aviation: he described the Boeing way, and the Airbus way, as two separate schools of thought. Boeing's systems keep the humans in the loop more at the expense of the autonomous systems, Airbus does the opposite. Empirically, it doesn't seem to make a difference with regards to safety outcomes.
Aerospace engineer here, this Airbus / Boeing divide rings true. There's a 99% Invisible episode that talks about some of these differences, more from an Airbus side of things:
Correct. There's also the small detail that while autopilot systems might be a rounding error in the cost of an airplane, it would be a significant financial burden for average joe/jill driver.
Depending on where you set your standards, sure. But we have an expectation in the United States safety technology has to accommodate darn near everyone.
Now sure, a passenger can be different than the driver but it's the same philosophy.
The amount of illegal maneuvers I see every day on my commute is astonishing - not using blinkers, intruding on cross walks, not moving over for emergency vehicles, following too closely, etc. It doesn't help that the only traffic law enforcement is really around speeding / running red lights / DUIs.
The problem with autonomous cars isn't the autonomous cars - it's accommodating non-autonomous actors. It only takes one google car hitting an old lady who's chasing a duck on the street to become CNN breaking news for the next 3 months a la that airliner that disappeared.
Many of the current cars are 100% drive by wire (ECU/power brakes/electric power steering), but that doesn't mean anything.
Probably quite a good part of the $hundred of millions price of a passenger plane is the autopilot (even 1% means $1M). And even at $1M/plane, 99% of a plane's autopilot works because it assumes that the current plane is the only one in a large vicinity of a point in space. This is assured by a centralized third party (control tower) that is not really automated but a very stressful human job (that's why the air traffic controllers are well paid). This is not the case with cars - in this case, most of the work being done is having each of the individual cars detect, with complex but not very good sensors and software, what is around them, in a swarm of other moving objects that do not communicate.
> Many of the current cars are 100% drive by wire (ECU/power brakes/electric power steering), but that doesn't mean anything.
Electric power assisted steering. Few cars on the road currently are correctly termed steer-by-wire. Actually, only the properly-optioned Infiniti Q50 comes to mind.
> Many of the current cars are 100% drive by wire (ECU/power brakes/electric power steering), but that doesn't mean anything.
You can still break when the ECU does something stupid. You can still break if you loose vacuum (engine not running), it's "just" more harder to do so.
What does "drive-by-wire" achieve other than removing a shaft between the steering wheel and steering rack? Cars already have collision avoidance without full self-driving capabilities.
Lane departure warning and collision warning systems are pretty prevalent. And even autobraking collision avoidance systems are getting pretty widespread.
