> Take the company’s latest active safety feature, an emergency steering system in the 2017 S90 that senses if the car’s about to leave the road and takes control.
I wonder what happens if I am actually stearing for the ditch?
The source says "light steering inputs if the system senses the vehicle is about to veer off the road." So it sounds like if you're full-on aiming for the ditch it won't really affect you.
I hope no car will ever unexpectedly turn on autopilot in the middle of driving. Either eliminate human control entirely, or let the human control it until they decide not to.
Do you consider automatic braking part of autopilot? Several cars already do this if they think you're going to hit something in front of you at low speed.
If you are actually pressing the throttle the car will chime several warnings but won't stop you - any car that I know of that has the automatic collision avoidance feature only brakes for you if the foot is off the throttle.
I don't think that's accurate, at least on the luxury cars where I've seen it implemented. Take a look at this list [1]. In many cases you could overpower the automatic braking by applying more throttle, but the brakes will definitely apply automatically to some degree if they think you're going to hit something.
Hmmmm yeah, I knew you could definitely do that in Nissans, and wiki offers an explanation:
"it alerts the driver using both a screen display and sound, then generates a force that pushes the accelerator pedal up" - so I guess it's like you said, you can just press the throttle harder and ignore the warning if you really know what you are doing.
This is a great point. Imagine if you're driving manually going 20 on slippery ice, and a child slips and falls off the pavement into the road in front of you. The car, for whatever reason, does not "see" the child. You decide you don't have enough stopping distance, so your response is to steer the car off the road or into another car. But then some "safety feature" decides to stop you from doing that, and hits the child instead.
The fallout would probably result in a multi-decade setback for (semi-)autonomous cars.
Volvo already has this feature in some cars, and from my testing it appears to only work on freeways where there are clear lines to show the lanes, not just any road. As well, it only seems to do adjustments, not full on overtake, so if you're gunning for the ditch I don't think this feature will help much. (Although, for obvious reasons I didn't actually try that.)
It is not the same. This is a full overtake system where the driver are supposed to not pay attention to the driving at all. What you are talking about is a driver assistant system.
Of course, the chances of such a clear-cut moral dilemma are likely worse than the chances of winning the lottery. Besides, if the ice is so slippery that you can't stop, it's likely too slippery to steer off the road.
There are very few legitimate reasons for someone to purposely steer off the road at highway speeds, but many reasons for the car to prevent it.
Well, lottery is won several times per week :) it doesn't have to affect you directly to cause a general population concern, multimillion dollar suits, and a setback in the autonomous driving industry.
Presumably, stepping on the brake or doing manual steering input above some treshold would take the car off autopilot immediately.
The opposite problem that the autopilot would have to drive the car off the road is equally hard, or even harder: if a concious driver would have made that decision (ditch the car over hitting someone) then so would the autopilot have to, or it would be vastly inferior to a human driver.
That means that the autopilot has to make that judgement and make it very well, since it will involve potentially harming the car and its passengers on purpose. Driving the car into a tree because of misidentifying something that isn't a human for a human would be very bad news.
It's the same deal with wildlife: if a moose is on the road you may have to drive off the road if you can't break, but if it's just a deer you'd likely rather hit it than drive off the road. Autopilot would have to do the same.
> but if it's just a deer you'd likely rather hit it than drive off the road.
A deer will seriously screw up your car and might kill you. Deer do kill more people than sharks in the US. In a lot of areas the ditch is a much safer play.
Yeah that was perhaps a bit locally biased: Deer around where I live are of either the Bambi or Rudolf variety and pretty harmless to cars (No risk of being tall enough to enter through the windshield) while our elks are lethally tall and either end up in the lap of the driver or flatten the top of the car.
Obviously if a deer is of a kind that approaches elk/moose size then it's in that category wrt. ditch vs. hit too.
I've only seen one moose on the road. We passed by each other on an icy morning on Hwy 2 west of Lakota, ND. He was just standing on the road on a foggy morning. It did scare the crud out of me.
We've had buffalo. One killed a motorcycle rider and annoyed the buffalo. The other I personally witnessed on a very foggy morning. Seems a very young buffalo escaped the local wildlife reserve. I was standing on the porch of the building where I worked trying to clear my head with a cup of coffee. Out of the fog and down the street ran a small buffalo pursued by a military vehicle. I think they figured they could get it into the back without it hurting them or it[1]. I walked back into the building not having cleared my head.
1) I did learn two things: 1) buffalo do not turn very well going down a hill 2) the door to a Pontiac Firebird does not hold up very well when a small buffalo hits it square after running downhill.
Yeah, its not as rare as many folks would imagine. You can steer a lot better than you can break on suddenly slippery roads. The choice of a ditch versus an accident is pretty straightforward.
I wonder what happens if I am actually stearing for the ditch?