> When your stopping distance (including reaction time) exceeds your visibility there's no way to drive safely, but humans do it anyways.
this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't remember the last time I had to avoid a stationary object in my lane.
I'm much more worried by how closely people follow the car in front of them, regardless of visibility. many leave barely enough room to react at all.
They typically leave enough room to stop for their estimate of how long it would take the car in front of them to stop + the distance to that car. That initial estimate does NOT assume the car in front of them will stop instantaneously obviously.
While this usually will be fine, there are definitely issues when something stationary does pop up.
While caravan-ing to Yellowstone with 3 vehicles, all traveling in the center lane of the freeway, we encountered a small car with a passed out passenger in the middle lane. My bro-in-law swerved with some room to spare, immediately behind him I swerved with basically zero room to spare, and my father behind me (luckily for them in a Suburban, but bad for the man in the VW) had no chance- I was immediately looking in my back mirror knowing what I was going to see.
There is a decent likelihood that a machine could have swerved in time, but nearly zero that a typical human could/would have in our typical following patterns.
Humans route around inefficient practices. Just as human driving speeds are typically unaffected by posted traffic speeds, they will optimize for their typical experience over written codes for how they drive.
Step outside of the US and Western Europe and things can become quite interesting pretty damn fast, for example I had to avoid cows nonchalantly walking down the road like in this YT video [1] at least once every year for the last 3 or 4 years (mostly when I visit my brother in the countryside). Horse-driven carts are also still a thing in these parts of Europe, and they’re basically stationary objects (fun thing when you end up behind one just before a blind curb, preferably with a lorry driving up just behind you). Just like other people have mentioned in here, driving is a AI-complete problem.
I've had a similar experience driving around rural Mexico. The laws are far more lax and you run into all kinds of unexpected obstacles, but as a whole it actually works out pretty well because people understand and adapt to the situations.
One example is that there are a number of small towns with two way streets that are parked on but only the width of two cars. That creates bottlenecks where cars can only travel in one direction at a time. This might seem like a disaster and it certainly wouldn't work on a busy city street, but in these locations everyone adjusts and when two cars approach a choke point from opposite directions drivers are really good about being cautious and pulling to the side to allow the other party to pass.
There are probably thousands of these local quirks around the world. Handling all of these situations effectively in a fully self-driving car will take an advanced AGI.
Accident rates in the US on the highway are on the order of one per million miles. And in a million miles of driving you will encounter quite a few stationary or otherwise unexpected objects in the middle of the travel lane.
Object sure, but generally it’s not really an issue. Simply avoiding or driving over broken tire bits etc is generally a non issue.
A object would need to be substantial enough to cause an accident and then roll into or fall onto a highway. That’s far from a 1 per million miles of driving situation. Remember, something falling off a truck would also take a while to slow down.
But human drivers hit deer all the time, and it's often unavoidable. An autonomous driver is probably more likely to miss a deer than a human, due to substantially better reflex time.
And one would think infrared vision that could be useful (except possibly when it's a magic number between 98.6 amf 104 degrees somewhere)
To me, every brown mailbox with a white reflector could be a deer coming to the road, to infrared, with a larger lens, it should be able to tell a lot better.
this is bad, but not quite as bad as it sounds. most of the time, you only need to stop as fast as the car in front of you. it's pretty uncommon to encounter a stationary object in the middle of the travel lane. in fact, outside of driving on surface streets in the city, I can't remember the last time I had to avoid a stationary object in my lane.
I'm much more worried by how closely people follow the car in front of them, regardless of visibility. many leave barely enough room to react at all.