Driverless cars :- who to save first?

[Juicy Box]

Some cities will be banning all diesels in a few years, even if some are very clean now. The same could happen to SUVs.

It seems London will not be exempting hybrid cars from congestion charge anymore, so that means there will be basically no SUVs driving there for free, as Uber and minicabs would also be charged.

A lot of things could happen, doesn't mean it will happen, or it should happen.=

More on topic with the thread, I think over the next two decades, autonomous cars will become more mainstream. After the honeymoon phase, there will be a rise of accidents involving autonomous cars, which will lead to calls of banning them, which probably won't happen.

Overtime, people, roads, and road conditions will adapt to fit autonomous driving, they will become the norm, and overall accidents will decrease. As more autonomous vehicles replace traditional ones, accidents will further decrease. This would include pedestrian related ones.

So, maybe by the time cities get around to banning SUVs, there will be no need to.

 

[cube]

A lot of things could happen, doesn't mean it will happen, or it should happen.=

The Greens already want to ban SUVs in Munich's city center (BMW's home).

 

[BorderingOn]

It is the height, design, and mass of SUVs that makes these accidents less survivable.

In the EU, there're design rules to mitigate the problem a bit.

Just the other day I watched an American review of a German station wagon (not even an SUV) that found the explosive bolts under the hood to be weird.

A study would certainly have looked at what type of vehicle was involved in each accident.

So, we have SUV danger deniers now?

https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/812493

Page 6. Passenger cars vs SUVs.

Of course they are a danger but your statement about the wagon agrees with my point. My personal preference is we stop making cars taller.

 

[NightGeometry]

I think the onus on an autonomous vehicle should be to not harm people outside the vehicle if it is at all possible. Thus in a situation where it's a pedestrian or me in an autonomous vehicle I would expect the vehicle to 'value' the pedestrian above me. That doesn't make me happy, but I think it is 'the right thing' to do.

I think it'll pretty much be a moot point though, certainly as far as fatalities are concerned. By the time a car is fully autonomous I would expect sensors to be at the point where it's reaction and planning times are effectively instantaneous, so a calculated best path should always be on hand. Brutal emergency breaking could cause injury to an occupant, but save a life. A fair trade, surely.

The other assumption I have is that at some point vehicles will share telemetry (and let's ignore hacking for now, assuming it is an innately secure system). If this is the case then not only does a vehicle 'see' everything any vehicle (or road side sensor) sees, but it can telegraph what it's about to do. My car could swerve in to another lane, but the car travelling towards mine in that lane would also know to swerve to it's inside lane, which has been cleared because the slower moving vehicle has braked fairly hard (but not hard enough to cause injury). And hence the child chasing it's ball in to the road isn't even aware it's life was just saved.

That sounds pretty sci-fi, but if we assume full autonomy is 10 years off, then the processing power doesn't seem unreasonable. Spare an entire subsystem for co-ordinated emergency procedures, and if anything enters the road then the safety dance is pretty instant, because it has already been calculated.

(Hacking the network in that scenario is truly terrifying, why plough your own truck in to a crowd of pedestrians if you can trick a whole stream of vehicles to do that for you )