Autonomous Vehicles
I see from a BBC News web page that a trial has been approved for use on UK motorways. Proviso is that manual resumption of control must be possible within 10 seconds. Constrained to a single lane and max speed of 37mph. Even at that speed a vehicle could travel over 16 metres in 10 seconds. Stopping distance at that speed is 42 metres.
Add in a smart motorway ( does one exist?) and a bevy of frustrated lorry drivers/motorists. It will be as popular as a bacon butty at a bar mitzvah.
Comments
-
37mph on any motorway is an accident waiting to happen, this is the most ridiculous decision since they stopped having the bloke walking in front with a red flag! My Mazda has a lane-discipline system which when I fail to indicate will (if I allow it) steer the car back to the lane I'm in. It also has cruise control which I can set a safe distance from the car in front. With all these systems the handbook warns DO NOT RELY ON THIS SYSTEM but I fear some owners will think they have an autonomus car and switch on the auto-pilot - all very frightening!!!
0 -
Here is the link to the BBC story.
Will they actually happen? I ask that because there was much hoo har about driverless pods operating in MK from the Station to CMK a few years ago but they have never appeared as working units. They would travel at 15mph and use off road routes but as far as I know beyond a few trials they have not appeared!
David
0 -
Like yours, my car has the lane departure feature and the adaptive cruise control, also if you take both hands off the steering wheel after a few seconds it emits a visual and audible warning and shortly after that, if you have not replaced your hands on the wheel the car automatically slows down on comes to a stop.
1 -
My car was purchased mid 2013 and has a load of driver aids.
Blind spot indicators, Adaptive cruise control, Lane drift warning and correction, Auto emergency braking, and a host of other toys but the driver is still responsible.
Much of the technology has been around for a long time now and is quite reliable but on a very few occasion in very bad weather the system has disengaged and handed back full control to me. I keep an eye on it all of the time and would not consider texting or doing anything else distracting. I love it but don't trust it that much, even at 37 mph or less on a motorway
.I've just had a thought. Are they now planning to reduce motorway speed limits to something like 35 mph?
. That should be fun. 0 -
If people drove on the left except when overtaking as directed by the Highway Code, we probably would not have needed the "fourth lane" instead of the hard shoulder. My apologies for relocating the decimal point BTW.
0
