If the car cannot handle all situations automatically then will it need to have driving controls? If so, then the person in that seat will be needing a driving license. What happens if they are a person who wouldn't be capable of getting a license? Wasn't that part of the pitch in favour of AV's in the first place? Give freedom to the blind, the elderly and the infirm.
I believe both models with and without manual controls are being developed. In a taxi there will likely be none, I doubt the taxi company would like the passenger to start driving the cars manually. For privately owned cars there would probably be manual controls.
For the most part you wouldn't need driving controls, just a hint what to do. E.g. the car would say the road is blocked and give the occupants of the car some options on how to solve the problem: reverse to previous intersection, wait for someone to clear the block, pull over and park, call for assistance, switch to manual controls etc.
If the person in the car cannot answer that or the car has no human passengers, it could be handled by an operator at some other location who could see what had happened based on the sensordata and then help choose an action that solves the problem. Then they could tell other cars to avoid that road so other cars didn't get into trouble.
Who will want to be telling your Uber or taxi what to do and how to do it. You may as well have a taxi driver. Where's the progress.
There are many advantages:
* Safer driving. Self driving cars will drive more comfortably and much safer than your average taxi driver.
* No BS. You know the robocars will pick the best route. Not make detours and not charge you extra.
* Safe from crime: You don't have to fear being robbed, or if your a girl, to be raped.
* No driver you have to pay a salary. That is no doubt the highest part of the cost of a taxi journey. Unfortunately that probably won't matter much for the passengers since the companies will keep charging the same rates, but it's a huge incentive for the taxi companies at least.
* 1 extra seat for passengers in every car.
* Probably many other advantages i haven't thought of.
Who will want a remote operator in control? They have no skin in the game like a human driver does. You want someone motivated to live another day.
That is a fair point. The manufacturers and operating companies have a huge economic incentive not to kill their customers though.
As soon as they start killing dogs you'll have PETA and the RSPCA and every unaffiliated animal lover outraged and campaigning for AV's to avoid anything cute and furry on the roads.
In February Waymo had driven over 8 million km (5 million miles) autonomously on public roads without killing neither humans or dogs. I think it's safe to say human drivers kill more animals (humans and others).
And if I could customise the firmware I'd be swerving to flatten Cane Toads. Like I used to do.
Someone will hack the firmware and have them seeing Pokemons.
Yeah, that is a scary thought. You can make hacking prohibitively expensive/difficult but it also means an added cost for the manufacturers/developers, and they might skimp on that. Still a few hacked robocars will be better than the countless number of human idiots that drive today.
And to get back to being serious I recall many years ago following a car at about 60kmh on a road that carried heavy trucks. The trucks had worn the road surface so it had two ruts where the wheels traveled and in the rain that day shallow longitudinal puddles had formed. The car in front of me in a split second was wrapped around a tree. Ever since that day I always avoid such standing water. There are a couple of places in my vicinity where in heavy downpours the road can partially flood and drivers move from the kerbside lane to avoid hitting 20-30cm deep water across part of the lane. Can an AV reliably do that?
Technically it's not a problem for the car to steer around it, it controls the car better than a human and has much better situational awareness. Would the sensors detect it? I believe the LIDAR would see a puddle of water as a flat surface for example, so you would have to rely on the cameras to detect such things. However, since the cars today rely on detailed maps they could have such road features annotated so the car knew in advance it should avoid them.
No one thinks robocars will be perfect, only that they will be a lot safer than human drivers. Even if it can't avoid every single type of danger as well as you would have, it can still prevent far more accidents that you wouldn't/couldn't have. So statistically it will be a much safer bet to ride with a robocar than a human driver (most likely yourself included).
What happens if a box or a plank or a PVC pipe falls from a vehicle ahead? If you can swerve, do you? What will an AV do? I once ran over a mattress that was poorly secured. I did it in a split second deliberately choosing to not swerve from my lane or brake hard. If the mattress was a bookcase I'd have responded differently. Not to say effectively but I wouldn't have just run straight over it by choice.
I'm almost certain no autonomous car today can tell the difference of a mattress and a bookcase so the car would have braked and/or swerved to avoid collision. But again, robocars will never be perfect but a ride with a robocar will still be the safer bet.
The situations that present little challenge to a human need to be programmed. But you cannot cover every imaginable situation.
It doesn't have to be perfect to be useful. As long as they fail safely (e.g. pull over and stop) and it happens very rarely it won't be a showstopper. Don't forget they have many advantages to human drivers. E.g. they don't fall asleep or get a stroke, etc, etc.
There is more than just bicyclists and pedestrians and other vehicles to be avoided. And as soon as the accidents start and people and property are harmed there will need to be legal redress, financial redress and blame apportioned. None of this seems to be anywhere but in the too hard basket.
Well, as I said, Waymo alone has driven over 8 million km autonomously on public roads without any such problems (billions of km in simulator). So doesn't look like there will be a lot of accidents, but time will tell. If one model of robocars did cause more accidents than humans then they shouldn't be allowed to drive on public roads obviously. The standards for robocars can hopefully be set much higher than that of human drivers, but what regulations there will be is ultimately a political decision.
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