Ford's BlueCruise driving assistant probed by US watchdog after deaths The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is investigating an electric car maker whose self-driving-ish software was involved in a pair of fatal collisions. It's not Tesla this time, instead it's Ford's turn in the hot seat. The carmaker's driver-assistance technology BlueCruise has been named as the subject of an …
Apparently! Speaking entirely for myself: my current SUV, required to tow my 8.5m glider trailer, has cruise control fitted: I've never used it and don't intend to. For my taste, cruise control is more automation than I care to use when driving, though these days I'm happy with automatic windscreen wipers and gearbox.
FYI I have friends who similarly don't use cruise control if its fitted.
This all seems a far cry from the days when a bunch if us did 44,000 miles in 10 months a long wheelbase petrol Series 2 long wheelbase Landrover (London-Kathmandu via Kanyakumari and back by Simla, the Kulu Valley and Srinigar, getting to Afghanistan in time for the first (internal, Soviet-free) Afghan revolution.
Not everything about cruise control is worthless, not having to have you foot on the gas pedal for hours on long highway trips sure helps reducing fatigue.
And the anti collision system once saved my arse (and an oblivious pedestrian's one) when the idiot jumped into the front of my car without any warning - I braked, but the car sensors had already detected the probable collision and started the emergency braking before I did, making it to a full stop (with added idiot on top of the bonnet) in a very short space.
Does it make sure your eyes are looking at the road out in front of you, and not down at a phone or other distraction? It doesn't matter if your hands are on the wheel if you aren't aware of what is happening in front of you, though the worst case is Tesla where it doesn't enforce looking at the road at all and doesn't really do anything to stop people from using various devices to fake having hands on the wheel.
Having used various assistance features I can categorically say that you can be *more* engaged with them doing the bulk of simple tasks.
Because you can be much more aware of what is going on around you if you aren't using half your cognitive ability to do mundane tasks - It's an even more pronounced benefit if you have any sort of disability.
It's performing the mundane tasks which keeps up your level of concentration - the less you have to do the less engaged you are.
BTW: If you really are using half your cognitive ability to maintain speed and stay in lane, you should serious consider giving up driving for your own safety, and those around you.
"BTW: If you really are using half your cognitive ability to maintain speed and stay in lane, you should serious consider giving up driving for your own safety, and those around you."
In my case it was gaze stabilisation which caused an enormous cognitive load... I could drive for a max of two hours in a day, and was good for nothing else that day.
Adding in adaptive cruise control and lane keeping has effectively eliminated that limitation. It's perfectly possible to drive attentively whilst those things are being dealt with by automation.
Agreed. Level 2 and level 3 automation is the worst possible scenario for automated transportation. In most driving scenarios, a human can't be expected to start processing all the necessary inputs quickly enough to take over if the vehicle is no longer capable of handling the situation.
Once we get vehicles (and maybe infrastructure) that can do automated driving within a set of operating conditions that allows for a safe transfer back to human operations (or a fail-safe alternative like stopping in a safe zone), then we'll be in good shape.
Car companies don't want to go there though, because they would have to accept liability. You can't hold the driver responsible for an accident the car gets itself into it is approved for sale as being able to drive unaided until it asks the driver to take back control. Even if the driver's insurance covers that (meaning he's paying as if those accidents are his fault, and his rates will go up as a result of either his accidents or all accidents his model of car gets into) his insurance company is going to go after the automaker to recover the payments made on behalf of their customer for accidents the car's autonomous driving software was legally judged to be at fault for.
Pretty sure it wouldn't be allowed by NHTSA or any other country's regulatory body to sell a car where the automaker says "our car can drive itself without the driver having to pay attention, but will ask the driver to take back over or stop safely if it encounters a situation it is unable to handle" and the regulator approves that usage, but also makes the buyer sign some sort of waiver absolving the automaker of all legal liability for accidents that automated driving system gets into.
"Initial investigation of both incidents confirmed that BlueCruise was engaged in each of the subject vehicles immediately prior to the collision"
This is highly ambiguous. Does this mean that BC had been operational for some time before the collision, or that the driver engaged it at the very last moment in an attempt to avoid it? In the first instance some fault in BC could probably be responsible; in the second, quite possibly not.
I think it's just poor wording. It should probably state "for some time leading up to and during the collision". If they'd left "immediately" out it might have implied it was on, then turned off "prior to the collision". They're trying make it clear it was active during the collision and failing to realise once they started writing the sentence it might be ambiguous and should have started again, not fudged it :-) At least that's how I read it.
Level 4 could be ok as well. If we had a reliable system that could cope with limited access highways, but needed to hand off control on surface streets it would be nice. Hop in, point your navigation system to a destination in another city, and once you merged onto the highway have your car offer to take full control until your exit (and have it pull into a parking lot if you don't take back full control).
America talks a lot about the chinese, the real enemy of America and democracy has always been corporate board members and leaders.
Ho w many people have died or. been injuried because of leaders like this american hero mentioned in the article. When the country is full of leaders like him, the body count becomes very large, thousands upon thousands this year, last year and next year. Thats far more than the evil chinese.
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