Zero accidents, all of your data – what The Reg learnt at Bosch's autonomous car bash Autonomous cars, what's not to like? According to their proponents, they will herald an accident, traffic and generally hassle-free age of transportation. So much so, in fact, that Bosch – the world's largest supplier of automotive parts – has decided to "evolve into a provider of services for road users". The company used …
"If a user opts out of sharing geolocation data, this will undermine certain safety features such as preventing speeding in speed-limited areas, and will undermine traffic congestion information required to assist traffic management,"
I don't think most people are primarily concerned with the sharing of geolocation data. It's the fact the data invariably gets monetized so they can make money selling advertising that people particularly object to.
The only saving grace is with Bosch being a German company their privacy laws are pretty strict. I don't know that they'd be under any obligation around non-German citizens data, though...
Why would not *sharing* geolocation prevent the car knowing what the speed limit is?
It would only affect the traffic congestion information if everyone turned it off... How many people do you need to be in a place to detect a traffic jam? If even 5-10% of people are willing to share the information then you'll still get 90% of the benefit.
1) My car can read speed signs already. I'm pretty sure it's actually doing it, as it's triggered by physically passing them - and they are sometimes not in sync with what the GPS thinks is the limit. If you're going to cover the car in cameras, you don't need ground control telling you what is in front of you.
2) How would reporting icy road conditions *not* leak geolocation info about your car. You can bet it won't be able to phone it in without the correct car authorisation/identification number.
For these to be useful, they need to be able to drive when the modem breaks/I wrap it in tinfoil/squirrels get in. Yes it needs over the air updates, but those should not be done while it's in motion - and I should be able to choose when (within reason) and where it talks to the mothership. Unless it's been in an accident - piss off and let me get on with my secret midnight snack runs.
"Good point. The car knows the speed limit if it knows where it is. Letting some bugger in Germany know where it is is not an essential part of the operation.
Yep, my 100 quid, 5 year old sat nav (lifetime map updates, so current) is about 99% accurate on "knowing" the current speed limit. Add the self-driving cars road sign recognition and that ought to be 100% accurate. Likewise, the majority of main roads have various methods already in place for counting cars and measuring average speeds, so no data slurping required. As for performance data or accident investigation, many modern cars already store performance data fairly long term and "black box-like" sensor data useful for accident investigation.
> As for performance data or accident investigation, many modern cars already store performance data fairly long term and "black box-like" sensor data useful for accident investigation.
That's _every_ car fitted with airbags in the last 25 years. The black box does double duty as the airbag controller - and yes, that data has been used in prosecutions and by insurance companies who didn't want to pay out (if you make a claim, the car passes into possession of the insurer. At that point the black box is their property and it's virtually impossible to prevent them using the data recovered for claim assessment purposes - this has been tested in court in both the USA and EU)
"At that point the black box is their property and it's virtually impossible to prevent them using the data recovered for claim assessment purposes - this has been tested in court in both the USA and EU)"
Sounds like there could be a nice little business making a box that plugs into those sensors to blow the data out catastrophically. It wouldn't be that hard to come up with something.
> The car knows the speed limit if it knows where it is.
This raises an interesting issue. Speed limits are typically imposed pretty much completely without objective justification. Hordes of self-driving cars might conceivably provide some sort of evidential support for what - if any - speed limit should be set. Of course, there's zero chance that would ever be used to raise the speed limit... perish the thought.
It would stop others knowing if you have broken the limit. Anyone thinking this is only about monetisation, and that state support for CAV is not about control isn't thinking hard enough.
For the 1st time in non-specialist media, I noticed The Mail floating geo-fencing for hired cars/vans re. "terrorist" protection. Edge. Wedge. Thin end of.
Also, re. opt-outs. The last hire car I had booted with "you have OK'd data sharing". We all know how this goes. Disabling buried 8 layers deep in the most un-obvious location in menues. Re-set and moved to a different place on every auto-firmware-update-download.
" How many people do you need to be in a place to detect a traffic jam? If even 5-10% of people are willing to share the information then you'll still get 90% of the benefit"
Those "benefits" frequently have tradeoffs.
The road I live on (1/2 mile long, 30mph speed limit, 3 schools, 2 housing estates and a 70mph dual carriageway bypass road paralleling) had a major problem with night time speeding (80k cars per week, 60% speeding, 95% at night exceeding 40mph, 5k/week over 50mph). On the other hand it got majorly congested for 90 minutes at a time in the morning and evening.
Cue the council ignoring resident complaints about speeds and rolling out changes "to reduce congestion" - including so many parking restrictions that there are now 3 times as many houses as car parks.
We now have 100k cars per week, with even more night time speeding and the daytime snarlups last for 2 hours each morning and afternoon.
The rat runners who use the road outside of peak periods are prone to road rage incidents too. There have been a number of incidents of pedestrians on one of the three pelican crossings on the road being nudged by impatient drivers and I've witnessed a lot of drivers screaming abuse at anyone who dares slow them down (mostly women being aggressive too...).
My pick is that automated driving will reduce vehicle ownership levels and density (which will reduce the number of streets clogged up with parked cars) and remove the problem of 'entitled' types treating the roads like their personal racetracks even in peak periods (which will reduce speeding and congestion issues respectively, given that the vast majority of holdups are caused by drivers who won't be polite causing everyone else to have to stop or slow down to deal with their selfishness). We may even be able to reclaim our residential street as a residential street where it's safe for children to walk, with routing algorithms designed to treat ratrunning as the antisocial behaviour that it is.
"If a user opts out of sharing geolocation data, this will undermine certain safety features such as preventing speeding in speed-limited areas, and will undermine traffic congestion information required to assist traffic management,"
I don't think most people are primarily concerned with the sharing of geolocation data. It's the fact the data invariably gets monetized so they can make money selling advertising that people particularly object to.
I don't mind the car sharing its geo data. I mind it sharing that it involved me.
"If a user opts out of sharing geolocation data, this will undermine certain safety features such as preventing speeding in speed-limited areas... "
Tracking people is illegal in Germany and EU. To put it simply.
And the Bosch weasels *know* it, that's why they use weasel words like "serious debate" (about privacy).
There's no debate at all: Not only it's patentably illegal, the punishment is severe.
Also speed limiting car is a guaranteed way to make a head-on collision while bypassing someone.
Obviously these guys at Bosch don't care at all: Kids with "opportunities" and new toys.
And they get around it by arguing that they are not tracking the "person" they are tracking the performance of the "car'.
How hard would it be for the car to upload data according to where it is in the world? In the US where there are very few (and weak) laws about data slurping, the cars will be uploading everything they can sense. In Germany, the data upload will be truncated to only what they can get away with. If the laws change, an update is pushed out to change what it reports.
One of the first "features" that government's are going to have implemented is the "kill switch". The police will be able to cause a car to slow down and stop with the flick of a switch while being able to leave things such as power steering operational. They might even be able to tell the car to self drive to a designated location and park with the doors locked and the windows up. That functionality might be harder to update when it gets hacked.
> How can data, like traffic information or whether the road is icy, be non-sensitive and sent without concern ?
Such data doesn't need to be associated with a specific vehicle or user - so it doesn't inherently raise privacy concerns.
Of course, given enough data, information can be de-anomynised, but there are mathematical techniques to defeat that (see: Differential Privacy)
@Dave 126
Such data doesn't need to be associated with a specific vehicle or user - so it doesn't inherently raise privacy concerns.I'm not sure how you could prevent such data from being associated to a specific vehicle, and hence at the very least the owner of the vehicle.
Any communication would have to have some sort of authorisation associated with it to do the communication. For example, to establish a wireless connection, the vehicle would need to be identified as having authority to make such a connection, otherwise anyone could just broadcast random crap into the network - ice here, no ice, traffic jam, no traffic jam, etc. Therefore each vehicle would need some sort of key/identification/challenge-response system for the information to be accepted.
Now, they can claim they don't keep this information (this is exactly the sort of thing meant by anonymising data), but they have to get it first then strip it out. And since the data is there, it is open for abuse. There have been recent articles that in the US single warrants have been issued for the collection of millions of phone conversations over a period of time (30 days? I forget) where no arrests have even occurred, let alone charges been laid against the subjects. How hard would it be for the various spying/data collection legislation around the world (UK's snoopers charter, Australia's metadata collection) to order them to keep the data and associations?
I ride a motorcycle. Good luck with making that an autonomous, data slurping, adrenaline free vehicle.
Honda, the makers of soulless machinery, are trying to: http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a32162/honda-just-invented-a-self-balancing-motorcycle-that-never-falls-over/
If traffic congestion is bad enough to justify a motorbike for that reason, then the better solution is vastly improved public transport and a ban on personal transportation.
50 people on 6 wheels and the road space of 3 cars is a lot higher density than you can achieve with bikes and the overall emissions are lower (especially with hybrid tech) even if road damage is higher (roadbed damage is proportional to the 5th power of axle weight coupled with the square of velocity - which is why the really heavy loads go so slowly.)
You'll get even higher density when the self-loading freight is self-propelling - and in congested conditions it's usually faster to walk.
"Honda, the makers of soulless machinery, are trying to: http://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/news/a32162/honda-just-invented-a-self-balancing-motorcycle-that-never-falls-over/"
While, initially, that may seem to reduce by 1 the number of the numerous ways you can die on a motorcycle, I suspect that in fact, it may increase the number of ways to die. If it never falls over, presumably, you can't drop it on purpose when you need to?
Actually, you never "drop it on purpose". That's a dangerous myth. A motorcycle sliding on its side stops slower and farther than one on its wheels using the brakes. "I laid it down to avoid a crash" is wrong, that's low-siding INTO a crash.
An upright braking bike may still hit something, but the sliding bike will hit harder. Upright and brakes on FTW.
Dropping a bike will hardly avoid an accident as the bike is going to suffer to some degree anyway (aside from the fact that traffic 'accidents are almost non existent, they are incidents), dropping a bike is to avoid 'being in'the accident/incident.
If it's gonna happen anyway and you can dismount and part company with the bike, why not. I have only seen it once, the rider was an amateur racer and had very good reflexes, most people won't react in time to drop a bike in any kind of useful manner.
"I laid it down to avoid a crash" is wrong, that's low-siding INTO a crash.
Not always. Sometimes it is the correct thing to do (especially when what you are about to crash into is a tractor with a baling rig attached..). Or a choice between hitting a wall sliding at 30mph or going over the wall into a 100m drop.
Like most things in life, absolutes don't apply 100% of the time.
While, initially, that may seem to reduce by 1 the number of the numerous ways you can die on a motorcycle
They certainly increased the likelyhood of having an accident on one of the Honda bikes I've had - the VFR800 I had (replacing a much-missed stolen VFR750) had linked front and rear brakes. The theory was that having a partial activation of the rear brake when the front brake is applied will result in a more stable bike (and it seemed to work on the Pan-European).
However, on the VFR800, under certain conditions (wet road+a corner), it caused the rear tyre to sometimes lose adhesion with the road. Which errr.. 'concentrates' the mind slightly.
I got rid of that bike fairly soon after that (replaced it with a 900cc Fireblade - normally-aspirated, really, really fast bike. A joy to ride if you are doing more than ~50mph, not so much fun under that. And it really, really didn't like riding in the Alps. Having to maintain revs > 6000 RPM on tight alpine corners so that the engine wouldn't die mid-corner wasn't much fun. Especially as all the others were on fuel-injected bikes and didn't have a problem).
...that i could maintain concentration on the road for hour after hour, with nothing else to do and not allowed to look away, just in case the car needs me to take over at a moments notice.
In my view level 3 is worse than useless. You remove all of the effort, concentration, involvement in driving just so you can stare at a road unrolling before you. You can't read, sleep, still have to be sober (if that's a thing for you) and the only option is to die of boredom.
I don't know what 'level' would include automated speed monitoring and lane tracking in case you fell asleep but at least there you would have enough to do stay awake.
I agree. I don't think Level 3 is practical, and no one should try to implement it. If you want to let the driver take their attention away from the road, the car has to be able to handle every possible situation as it comes, or have ample time/room to pull over until a human is ready to take over.
Expecting a person not paying attention to the road to be able to take over at a moment's notice is ridiculous. People will be like that idiot who killed himself with the Tesla autopilot, they aren't going to be paying full attention watching the car do the driving. While that might be kind of interesting to watch the first hour or two you have an autonomous car, it isn't going to hold one's attention for long. Before long you'll be doing other things and go an hour without even looking out the front of the vehicle, and it'll take 3-5 seconds for you to reach a state of alertness, take in your surroundings, and make intelligent decisions. Which will probably be at least 2.5 to 4.5 seconds too long!
Though I have never had any direct dealings with them, it is a company that I have always greatly respected because of their sense of ethics--as it would befit, I suppose, a company that is owned by a charity.
This post has been deleted by its author
> I'm surprised anyone downvoted you.
For the record, one of them is mine. Reason: the comment was neither insightful or informative nor funny or original. In fact, it was simply childish--American B-series teenage film sort of childish. A waste of perfectly good electrons, as it were.
PS: No, I do not own a C**o, I own a car¹
¹ /kɑː/ (noun): a road vehicle, typically with four wheels, able to carry a small number of people and made in Germany.
That's quite funny, coming from someone who has to be rude at length about someone else's post for being "neither insightful or informative nor funny or original." and then has this
/kɑː/ (noun): a road vehicle, typically with four wheels, able to carry a small number of people and made in Germany."
the last part of which falls into exactly the same 4 categories and is just the frequent and tedious "I'm superior because my car is made in Germany".
Did you know if you turn on the camera on your phone and set it to use the front camera, then look at the screen, you'll see a hypocrite?
Hello!
> That's quite funny, coming from someone who has to be rude at length about someone else's post for being "neither insightful or informative nor funny or original."
Erm... it wasn't rude. Someone asked for an explanation, which is entirely fair, and since I had downvoted I gave mine. It is called constructive criticism--it may have been hurtful to the person receiving it or not, but I disagree that it was rude.
> and then has this
Oh, that! Yes, it is a sequitur to your good self's comment about Clio owners, in the spirit that if you are going to make fun of other people for what they own, you should be prepared to understand how it feels from *their* point of view.
"Garfield was based on me" might tentatively begin to illustrate the extent of my laziness and innate hatred of anything that lacks comfort, so there's basically no force that could make me give up the use of my car for other alternatives. A car with a mandatory cloud connection might just see me return to a motorbike or even bicycle though - thankfully, by the time it gets to that level it'll be a problem for another generation.
> a mandatory cloud connection
A "mandatory" cloud connection is not a problem. The problem is to know, and have full control over, who has access to what data of yours and what for. Another problem is to disabuse manufacturers of the idea that they can force you to enter a contract with a third party in order to use your car. For example, it's all very well to be able to control your car from your mobile phone, but not if that is going to involve downloading the relevant application from say Gargle Pay, or have Gargle Clout Services installed on your phone.
Surely must have been marketing bods making those statements.
The engineers would be able to reel off at least half a dozen scenarios where things could still go wrong and at least a couple of those wouldn't even have a theory for mitigation.
And unless you can guarantee that you won't require the user to constantly monitor & possibly intervene then the whole exercise is pretty pointless as it's really just good old adaptive cruise/lane keeping/active braking/auto park. Safe & hands off is what they're trying to sell & they're not even vaguely close to that.
Yes, that's kind of the problem behind the whole self driving car "bubble". It is impossible to achieve whilst guaranteeing that there will be no accidents.
The only way to achieve it with technology we have now or at any point in the next 100 years is to turn all the roads into closed access, no bikes, no motorbikes, no pedestrians, no horses, no human driven cars, fenced off zones with standardised carriage widths, zero potholes, no fog, no snow, no heavy rain, no flooding, no fords, no ice, no deer running across the road, etc. We already have those, they're called railways (e.g. Docklands Light Railway in London). Except there we use steel tracks and wheels instead of tarmac and rubber and they don't mind fog or rain or deer so much, they don't have potholes, but admittedly do seem flummoxed by the wrong sort of snow, leaves, etc.
In short, a certifiable self driving autonomous anything needs to have an artificially controlled environment kept clear of any hazard or risk that cannot be controlled by the system designers.
There's a serious amount of money being put into this bubble by a lot of badly advised investors. For companies like Bosch it's slightly different - it gives their engineers something to do when they might otherwise be twiddling their thumbs.
I think that at best the thing that will come out of this whole thing is a super-advanced cruise control that still needs a sober licensed driver paying attention sat behind the steering wheel. Trouble is that that is of very little appeal in the car market. For example, who'd genuinely pay £10k (guessing the premium here) extra for a system that still can't drive you home pissed after a decent night in the pub? That's a lot of taxis. And for a long time to come the price of all this equipment is going to outweigh the total cost of most cars anyway. Doesn't bode well for the mass marketing of these things.
This bubble will eventually get burst. The ones who are first to do their systems engineering and certification engineering properly, and some decent market research to see the true sales potential of a partial solution, will get out and sell their project to one of the other big players.
As a customer, paying thousands more for a veehickle that, at best, offers advanced cruise control that keeps speed at or below the posted limit and keeps the car within the lane does not seem like a bargain.
However, my insurance company might see such a system as a way to reduce its payouts (if I'm always within my lane and at or below speed limit, my guilt factor in a collision is reduced and lower speed generally means less damage than what is done at high speed) and might give me a break if I have such a system. I say "might" because as was correctly noted above, insurance companies are generally not inclined to pass on the savings.
Agree the AV bubble will burst. But you then have a lot of tech., geolocation, auto-computer actuation of handbrake , stop/start, lane control etc. Put this with MaaS, surge-pricing road useage. Whatever. The investment will be got back, and not in ways that are necessarily good for car owners.
BTW - Guardian just reported that RAC found only 5% of motorists want AVs. This isn;t being done on the basis of motorist's demands.
"This isn;t being done on the basis of motorist's demands."
Of course: The idea is to create a totalitarian surveillance state where everything spies on you, constantly. EU _and_ member states want that, it's obvious.
First cell phones with real time geolocation and cars are next.
"It is impossible to achieve whilst guaranteeing that there will be no accidents."
The number of true "accidents" on the road can be counted on one hand each year.
Crashes due to mechanical failures are rare (and usually well signposted by the vehicle long before the crash happens).
Crashes are almost always caused by drivers being inattentive, reckless, impaired, or faced with dangers and continuing regardless (the number of crashes where more than one person has contributry fault is extremely high).
Eliminating the human is likely to reduce crash and injury rates by at least 95% and I'd be highly surprised if 80% is achieved immediately. Insurance companies will react by making manual driving an extremely expensive pastime, so unless you're very wealthy, you won't be driving that vintage 2002 Clio into the side of an auto-wagen. (surprisingly, margins in the insurance industry aren't that high. Modern cars are ridiculously expensive to repair and injury claims cost a fortune. Insurers could increase their profits whilst reducing premiums if the crash rate goes down and there will still need to be cover for fire/theft/vandalism/"tree fell on my car" type events.)
It's one thing promising perfect performance on "business as usual" activities. The problem with that is, accidents aren't business as usual. They're edge cases and that's just what software has always had trouble in handling. And these are not just simple edge cases such as off-by-one that can be tested for. They're going to be "we never saw that coming" events. They're going to be events that require much more processing than normal to deal with an unexpected set of circumstances.
If a designer reckons there might be enough processing power to cope then maybe the "run down the lone pedestrian" option gets hard-coded as a would-be damage limitation short cut. And then that gets triggered by some freak set of circumstances when an accident wasn't threatened and the car goes out of its way to run one down.
Another issue is certification. That's going to be a difficult one to test. Will there be a temptation to code to the test? Remind me, who was it who wrote the code for the VW emission control?
Surely must have been marketing bods making those statements.
The engineers would be able to reel off at least half a dozen scenarios where things could still go wrong
Indeed. Lets start with:
Acute road subsidence caused by leaking water mains (happened when I was a kid - the 107 bus in Station Road in Barnet. The bus ended up nose-down in the pit.
Tyre blows in the car just ahead of you and in a lane to one side. Car veers catastrophically into the side of your car.
And that's just two that I could think of..
What's that supposed to mean? CAN is just a data bus; replace CAN with TCP/IP and see how strange it is.
What they might be getting at is that if there are separate busses between the cameras and the image recognition stuff, and the image recognition and the main ECU, they are only sending the attributes of the recognised objects, not the whole raw image.
"(There's already a black market for pirate tractor software that allows farmers to circumvent John Deere's proprietary systems.)"
That's an inaccurate description of what's going on. The "proprietary" systems are designed to prevent farmers from making their own repairs, or from going to a non-Deere-authorized repair center. And those rules are starting to be overridden by state "Right to Repair" laws. These will affect virtually ALL high-tech companies that try to limit competition in the repair business.
The question is, if I buy a car - or a cell phone, or a computer, or any other tech - do I OWN what I paid for, or do I merely have a non-transferable license to USE my car in accordance with the car's EULA?
"The question is, if I buy a car ... do I OWN what I paid for, or do I merely have a non-transferable license to USE my car in accordance with the car's EULA?"
The legal department will sort that out. You won't be allowed to buy a car, just lease it. The car will own you.
"You won't be allowed to buy a car, just lease it. The car will own you."
Most people will choose to lease it for individual journeys on an as-needed basis.
Hellooooo Johnnycab.(*)
(*) The single most expensive and unreliable part of a taxi is the driver. Eliminating them is a good thing.
"The question is, if I buy a car - or a cell phone, or a computer, or any other tech - do I OWN what I paid for, or do I merely have a non-transferable license to USE my car in accordance with the car's EULA?"
The question on my mind is, how do you handle the second hand car market? Currently cars don't record an entire history of what happened in them, nor do you pay a monthly contract for the data connection.
What if it turns out to be like software? "Oh, you didn't buy the car, you bought a licence to use it", with all the restrictions, extra payments and general "fuck the customer" attitude that comes with software already.
Would you even be allowed to resell the car? What if they decide to change the licence terms, and you don't agree to the changes? Can they remotely disable the car until you agree? They can say you have 14 days to cancel your contract like with a phone, but do they just take the car away? Do you get a refund on your purchase price? Plus then you end up having to get another car with those terms already in the licence anyway, so you are screwed one way or another.
Bad enough having licensing restrictions and having monthly payments with software and mobile phones. Last thing I want to do is have a monthly payment and a EULA for my car as well.
The whole "connected automated car" thing sounds like a disaster in the making to me. Very dystopian, especially the whole "having cameras and microphones in the cabin" that are on all the time and tracking your eye movements and recording conversations.
Do normal people actually want this? I mean, as a geek I can think of all the ways this will go wrong, including the privacy and software security headache this would be, but even the "normal" people I know would not want a computer driving for them. I get the feeling this is more just being forced down our throats in the sense of "this is how the future will be, screw you if you don't like it" mantra that seems to have become quite pervasive in the last 10 years.
The only way I see these connected autonomous cars working is if you don't actually own them. You use them like you would a cab, bus, or public transport. Hail a pod from your phone/google brain implant, and it arrives to take you to any of the pre-vetted destinations (no driving around to areas the powers that be don't want you to see, citizen), ideally tailored to your preferences by AI as gleaned from all the data they collected on you. I guess you can sit in the pod and watch adverts inter spaced with a bit of entertainment to relieve the boredom until you reach your destination, then the pod leaves you there and goes to pick someone else up.
"Can they remotely disable the car until you agree? "
Yes, of course. Bosch has already advertised that as "security feature" which can be used by anyone who has access to it to stop "your" car at will: Anytime, anywhere.
It's obvious that not agreeing with EULA bricks the car, as it's not _your car_, it's company car, you just may(*) drive it.
(*) Terms and conditions apply.
"That's an inaccurate description of what's going on. The "proprietary" systems are designed to prevent farmers from making their own repairs, or from going to a non-Deere-authorized repair center. And those rules are starting to be overridden by state "Right to Repair" laws."
There's another angle here with heavy construction vehicles. A lot of these are leased or rented out on short term jobs and the leasing/rental company wants the location (so that expensive kit doesn't simply disappear) and working hours (to organise servicing).
The manufacturer also has a leasing division, so there's competitive data involved. The first thing a leasing company wants to do is to disable the manufacturer's feedback and install their own.
"Zero accidents" --> BS meter redlining like a Geiger counter in the engine compartment of a Cold War era Soviet nuclear submarine.
Large gobs of data p**sed out to "The Cloud." As for "anonymized" data see paragraph 1.
F**k right off.
BTW RB may be 92% owned by a charitable foundation, but what about every other automotive electronics company on the planet?
"the camera that detects which way your eyes are looking so the car can tell when you're not paying attention to the road"
Can we get that implemented immediately? And set it up to disable the accelerator if not?
I've had enough of soccer sluts either applying makeup and/or turned around yelling at their kids, "mista biznezzman" doing his latest important deal on the phone, and people reading the god damned newspaper spread across their steering wheel, for god's sake!
"And sitting in their swanky demo car, using a touchscreen to control the shutters on "your house" and check the contents of "your fridge" definitely feels – let's be honest – pretty damn cool."
Yes, pretty cool. But not cool enough to get me to buy. To do that, the car will have to be able to tell me the angle of my drainpipes, the mood of my cat, whether squirrels are back on my bird feeder, if my neighbor has a cold, and what time - to the nanosecond - my mail was delivered. Can't wait. I'm super excited.
"we were assured this wouldn't happen when the cars were owned by regular Joes."
Debugging code never ever gets left in production systems does it?
"
Should read "tracking code" and it will be in place in every car ever sold to regular Joes, on purpose.
There's money in tracking data, therefore it will be collected and Bosch will lie anything to hide that. So either they encrypt all of the communication to mother ship or the first guy proves they are lying.
Very, very fishy either way.
Endless dystopian slurp may have been actually worth it then. This makes me not want to buy a car again ever! They're a really shitty investment versus property, and it itself is a shitty investment if the market turns against you...
So much for the "crash free future" meme.
"Oh I know. Let's put a beacon on every object on the road so every other object can see it and avoid it."
I sit there thinking "If you could force every object on the road to carry one that just might work, as long as they were all in working order"
But it will probably come out as "f**kwit."
"I sit there thinking "If you could force every object on the road to carry one that just might work, as long as they were all in working order"
Here in North we have about 150 000 mooses (moosen? meese? argh!). Good luck on tagging those.
Also: You don't drive over moose, the moose runs over you and your car: It's a big and heavy animal.
Basic rule is that if you survive a collision with a moose, you are lucky. And I can see none of the Bosch engineers have ever seen a moose when they are talking about "no crashes".
Just concentrated stupidity.
See earlier posts:
If you're driving and you collide with a moose, then you were either driving too fast for conditions or weren't paying attention, or both.
The fact that the car will take care of the moose manouvre even in the case of "one materialised in front of me" means the crash rate should be even lower.
Likewise for "the kid just appeared from nowhere" - which I've seen drivers use when _I_ (4 cars back) could see that the kid was about to walk out in front of traffic (moving feet visible under the parked car obscuring the kid's body) and was already braking.
The _one_ time I hit a deer, I was travelling at less than 15mph and it actually ran into the side of the car. This is despite seeing a dozen a week on the roads I drive to/from work. If you know the hazard exists, you're ready for it. Most drivers aren't. An "auto" will be, and reaction times of 25ms instead of 700-1500ms will help.
As I understand it a lawyer persuaded a jury that had a bit flipped in the software, in effect, the throttle could have malfunctioned. But I'm not aware that it was ever proven that it had done so. The burden of proof in civil cases is merely balance of probability, and when there is no actual evidence that is always a guess.
WRT the Toyota ECU, it was teardowns and disassembly subsequent to the cases which showed the entire system had suffered major league code bloat and quality rot over the years. (Early systems were coded in assembler, newer ones in high level language - and badly, etc.). The failure mode claimed was shown to be repeatable and not just some random bitflip.
There's a lot to be said for opensourced ECUs (which do exist as development projects), given they have more eyes on them and these days more brains trying to make them crash (unlike OEMs, who have limited teams developing for a purpose and even more limited teams trying to break them but who have a conflicting vested interest in getting them shipped as quickly as possible)
Anything safety-related or traffic-congestion-related or road-condition-related does not require vehicle identification beyond the vehicle type (I am a motorcycle, a family sedan, a van, an ambulance, a lorry, a double-decker bus, or an 18-wheeler). Anything that requires identification of the vehicle and/or driver and/or passenger is about surveillance, for some purpose. The purpose may be "national security", "war on terror", "law enforcement", "adjusting insurance premia", "targeted advertising", or anything in between, but whatever it is it will not benefit the driver/road user.
Obviously, different vehicles in the same area may need to be distinguished, lest someone or something mixes up 2 different lorries. This, however, can be achieved with temporary IDs that can be generated on the fly and cannot be tied to license plates, ownership, mobile phone numbers, etc.
Now, can we make "A robotic car shall not divulge its identity" one of the basic "laws of automotive robotics"?
"using a touchscreen to control the shutters on "your house" and check the contents of "your fridge" definitely feels – let's be honest – pretty damn cool."
Why do these control systems always assume that people are sad, lonely people with no family? Closing the shutters on the house remotely from in the car is likely to piss off any of my family who are at home. Likewise me monkeying around with the heating controls or lights.
Is this something normal people want or is this something the ultra geeky, ultra nerdy engineers and marketing people who can't get a girlfriend want? (NB, deliberate stereotyping!)
That will kill people
99.99% of the time, you're going along happy and cheerful, you've started off, joined a main route and now you've stopped at your destination without ever really having to be anything than an alert passenger
That 00.01% of the time, your pilot side pitot tube has had tape left on it and the aircraft software cant decide how fast you are going, never thinks to check the input from the co-pilot's side and your spiffy airbus does a nose plunge into the sea as the pilots cant decide what the hell the flight software is on about.
If aircraft flight control software can throw up that sort of glitch WITH all the testing that goes on, you've got f all chance of getting me inside one of those cars.
The edge cases include all the things that go wrong with human beings, like the jerk the other day who was too busy talking on her phone to bother to stop for a roundabout (thank you assistive braking), the two of them this year who have come off a bend near our house in broad daylight with a dry road, and the couple of thousand a year that manage to kill someone. Alcohol, cocaine, psychopathy, inattention, overconfidence, stroke, heart attacks, anger management issues are all edge cases that require no computer and are relatively common in people.
When it comes to cars, the biggest single risk is the you (or me) getting in them to drive them. Once the technology is properly developed, I would far rather trust it than the typical human driver. As I approach the age of 70 I think it can't come too soon for me.
The vehicles near me that love parking on blind bends so you have to go into the oncoming traffic lane to get past them, hoping no other vehicle hits you (white van parked so cannot make use of "reduced image" looking through the vehicle windows approach as its only window is windscreen)
I have to use the low tech method of windows down so I can listen out for other vehicles, horses etc., if no noise* then nervouslyy overtake parked vehicle in blind bend area.
Would like to see how "AI" cars deal with that - presumably they just stay behind the parked van hoping it eventually moves?
*Obvious problem issue is something not heard e.g. an electric car going at low speed (so cannot hear tyre noise until really close) so not 100% safe method but only way to drive that bit of road
Self driving car is of no use to me until I can be a 100% passenger - no point if I need to take over at short notice (as by time I have snapped back into focus it will probably be too late to deal with the unexpected incident): If I need to be concentrating all the time, "in case of manual taleover required, I may as well drive it myself.
As article said:
which means the driver can turn their attention away from the drive but needs to be ready to respond immediately. "They can't drink or take drugs,"
Contradictory really.
"When it comes to cars, the biggest single risk is the you (or me) getting in them to drive them. Once the technology is properly developed, I would far rather trust it than the typical human driver."
I wouldn't. A person very rarely is knowingly trying to run over you _and_ tries to avoid an accident.
Software has no concept of either: it happily drives over you as any other automation would: Software _does not care at all_: It's an automation and that's that: It's your job to avoid automation gone haywire as it has no control anymore.
Possibly because the code was there for legitimate development purposes and was then misused by VW. It's very difficult to do development and test work on things like engines unless there are ways to turn things off selectively.
Your argument is a bit like blaming Sabatier for stabbings.
"Your argument is a bit like blaming Sabatier for stabbings."Really? Sabatier implies a high-quality knife produced by any one of a number of manufacturers in the Thiers region of France, but more than likely it's a cheap piece of shite from China. Sabatier is not a registered brand unlike Henckel, Wusthof, or Messermeister for example who make the knives chefs use.
There was a time when aviation (which is very similar to the automated car bussiness in many ways) when zero accidents was the goal. There was stiff punishment for those found guilty and lots of deep detailed investigation into whatever accident was reported. It didn't really work. Many accidents found deep rooted problems in the organisation of all kinds of companies and bureaucracies that should have come to light sooner but weren't because people didn't dare report them. Because reporting an accident could lead the reporting into hot water himself.
Nowadays the safety culture is not focused on zero accidents, but on mitigating and diminishing the impact of the incidents that lead up to an accident so that as many edge cases leading up to an accident are excluded. But this means for instance that those reporting incidents should be protected from all consequences of reporting them. It also means not prosecuting those involved in accidents when they do happen so that all information possible can be gained from those involved to get a detailed root cause from all levels without fear of reprisals. Especially this last one is something that SHOULD be implemented when it comes to autonomous vehicles but is probably never going to happen because of the "someone has to be made responsible and punished for their mistakes" attitude many people have. Unless it's criminal negligence a programmer or designer working on autonomous vehicle hardware/software should never be held responsible for accidents that happen due to flaws in the software or hardware. And if they didn't use best practice due to cost cutting it should be the managers and beancounters on the chopping block. Not the scapegoat designers.
Recent incidents like the Tesla crashing under the side of a truck show the "off with their heads" attitude reigns unfortunately.
"but is probably never going to happen because of the "someone has to be made responsible and punished for their mistakes" attitude many people have"
Basically you are saying that Bosch shouldn't ever be held responsible for any accident their cars cause. Nor any payments for the victims of said accidents, i.e. free ride for the corporation, not their problem at all.
In aviation you can lose your license to fly and that's serious motivator, but nothing even near exists on the road. Won't happen either, every manufacturer will oppose it with tooth and nail.
I live out in a rural area of the USA where God lost his sandals. Cellular phones are hit-or-miss, load up your software travel map route BEFORE you start from somewhere that does have coverage, and don't expect the turn-by-turn directions to arrive before the turn. Self-driving cars may work fine on freeways, in the city or suburbs, but good luck out by me, even before you factor in the deer and other wildlife.
(side topic) How big or dense does an object have to be before the car registers it? Friend showed me a picture of her half-ton pickup. Looked like a shotgun blast to the front grill. Nope, a tom turkey that was low-flying across the road, his skull took out her radiator.
"Cellular phones are hit-or-miss, load up your software travel map route BEFORE you start from somewhere that does have coverage, and don't expect the turn-by-turn directions to arrive before the turn"
Look up. Way up.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX_satellite_constellation
Ok, it won't work in tunnels but between terrestrial 4G and the 3 competing satellite internet systems being rolled out, being "out of touch" is going to be difficult-to-impossible in coming years.
""Well, when we have autonomous cars, there won't be any accidents," one Bosch employee said"
And that tells to the world that what is the level of expertise in this company: They are morons.
Autonomous car will crash, every one (model, not necessarily every car) of them.
Partially to "unseen environment", i.e. snow, gravel, flood, what ever. Or they just stop when there's 20cm of snow on the ground as they've no idea what to do.
Partially to programming errors: There're tens of millions of lines of code: There's no way there aren't any major bugs, causing accidents.
Then there are _mechanical failures_: Autonomous cars are still cars and _cars always fail_: Nothing in the world can stop that.
And finally: _Other_ autonomous cars by different manufacturers which react differently and cause accidents.
Most simple example: A British car in France would try to drive on right.
Ergo: Anyone claiming that there won't be accidents, is a patentable idiot.
""If a user opts out of sharing geolocation data, this will undermine certain safety features such as preventing speeding in speed-limited areas, and will undermine traffic congestion information required to assist traffic management,"
And this is Bullshit on highest degree. There's no need to contact mothership to know what the local speed limit is as it is in the map. Only reason to do that is to spy on you and sell the data.
It's also a serious intrusion of privacy but these Bosch-morons see only money in it: Your privacy is wrothless to Bosch (as a company).
I have to say that all of that collected stupidity they say, this one takes the cake:
"If your car is hacked, he said, information on the attack will go back to a Bosch security centre for the code to be analysed line by line, and a patch pushed out to the fleet as well as the car in question."
Yea, right. When the car is hacked, you _have no control over it_ and it doesn't send anything to Bosch: It has new masters now.
These morons are totally disconnected from _any reality_: Hacked car _is hacked_.
There's nothing you can do to remotely, anymore: That's the end of the story, finis.
And these, so called experts, spew bullshit like this as truth? WTF?
Collective and concentrated stupidity is so thick you can cut it with a knife and sell by cubic meter.
"Perhaps most unnerving was the camera that detects which way your eyes are looking so the car can tell when you're not paying attention to the road."
It uses the face regonition to name the driver and you bet that data is always sent to Bosch.
There's no technical reason to spy on driver in a car which is driving itself so the reasons are commercial, i.e. sellable data.
In a world with interconnected autonomous cars that are "shared", any interruption to the network means that the cars do not operate. Tsunami, earthquake, fire, flood, hurricane or terrorist attack on infrastructure and personal transport grinds to a halt. The system has no way to verify your ID when you hop in a shared vehicle and if it's autonomous, it won't have a way to circumvent debris in the road by moving into the opposing lane on up on a sidewalk or even a detour through a shopping center parking lot. Just when it might be very important to have transport, the system could utterly fail. Only those with grandpa's red Barchetta squired away in the garage will be able to get anywhere.
After an earthquake, the only roads will be the ones that are the easiest for a bulldozer to plow.
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