Most street legal vehicles utilize a combination of three colored lights: white for headlights and reverse lights, red for tail and brake lights, and orange for blinkers....
Mercedes-Benz debuts turquoise exterior lights to indicate the car is self-driving | A visual indicator for other drivers::undefined
It's less about being careful around the car and more about how you might interact with it. For example, honking the horn or flashing your beams wouldn't have the same effect. On that note, it might be nice to have some way of telling a self driving car to temporarily use elevated sensors or something, the same way a horn tells a driver that something is wrong. As long as there's a way to prevent abuse of the system
I don't know much about these lights, but we COULD use some new standards in general with how many things have changed with cars in recent years. Brake lights on electric vehicles being another thing to consider.
You're still the driver in the self-driving car. If someone honks, you have pedals and a wheel in front of you. It always comes down to driver neglect. It's like blaming the cruise control for speeding, but giving cruise control more responsibilities.
Today, sure.
But in 20-50 years, switching to manual driving may be a whole process. It may even be illegal in a full self driving car. In an environment of mixed automated and manual driving, having indicator lights for the autos makes a lot of sense.
As a Level 3 system, the driver is permitted to take their hands off the wheel, their feet off the pedals, and divert their attention away from the road. [...]
The turquoise markers will alert other drivers to the fact that your vehicle is driving itself, so hopefully they won't be alarmed if they see you doing other things while behind the wheel.
To play the devil's advocate: early cars needed a guy with a flag im front of them because people were used to horses and carriages and not automobiles. After a while that stopped being a thing.
No, they literally are warning lights, warning you the car is slowing down. It has no other purpose than to provide information (warning) to others about what you are doing.
The technology will never be ready if you don't test it.
And I would argue we DON'T need warning lights since, while imperfect, most self-driving tech is already vastly better than your average driver. We should have warning lights for cars that DON'T have self-driving.
This is ultimately why we will NEVER have self-driving cars en masse, because society isn't willing to take the necessary risks to improve the safety of everyone on the road.
Don't let random customers test it and instead use heavily trained, specialized test drivers
Require permitting and, e.g., an obstacle course before letting a company's software be randomly updated and thrown on the road?
Why is there this constant false dichotomy implying that the only way to test self driving cars is a wild west of no regulation?
And also who said that self driving cars are safer than humans? Tesla's numbers are all statistical lies (in fact Teslas were recently shown to have the most accidents), Cruise just shutdown in SF because they were a liability, and Waymo is heavily limited in its time/weather/areas for driving.
Tesla's numbers are all statistical lies (in fact Teslas were recently shown to have the most accidents)
[Citation needed]
Cruise just shutdown in SF because they were a liability
This is actually a great example of exactly what I'm talking about: GM will shut down Cruise permanently because they've discovered what I just said: society has zero tolerance for literally anyone getting hurt by autonomous vehicles, whereas the tens of thousands of people who are killed on our roads every year by individuals is considered acceptable.
The teslas having the most crashes I did see pass by on my news feed too. It doesn't mean that because teslas have self driving and teslas crash the most that this means the self driving tech is the reason for it though. Correlation does not imply causation.
Sure. But we're jumping into the deep end by legally allowing the driver to be exempt from distracted driving laws. There's a big difference between testing the technology and relying on the technology.