Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway
Three cars have successfully driven themselves by automatically following a lorry for 125 miles on a public motorway in the presence of other, normal road users. The real-world trial, conducted in Spain by Volvo and car automation specialist Ricardo, put technology created for Project Sartre (Safe Road Trains for the Environment …
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Self drive is only a small step onwards
From adaptive cruise control. I've had that in my car for a decade and like it a lot - it's a big destresser on the M25 in heavy traffic.
Once assumes if the car is self driving and following other self driving vehicles, it's using a satnav for directions and coordination of diverging/converging tracks is an exercise for the computers.
BTW: It's illegal for lorries to be in the fast lane on motorways. Why not film the bastards and call the cops? It'd give them something useful to do.
Re: "Fast Lane"
There is no lane of a motorway that has any concept of speed associated with it.
It is not permitted for vehicles with trailers or with a maximum weight exceeding 7.5 tonnes to be in the rightmost lane of a motorway with three lanes or more.
I think that's what you meant to say.
Re: "Fast Lane"
I was about to make a smart-assed comment about how could such a vehicle could get to the middle/left lane without passing through the right lane....and then I realized that you drive on the other side of the road.
Re: "Fast Lane" AC 15:37
>rightmost lane of a motorway with three lanes or more
The correct term is offside lane, OTH
Re: "Fast Lane" AC 15:37
Offside lane would be an acceptable term and is infinitely better than "fast lane" but that is not the wording used in the highway code.
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/TravelAndTransport/Highwaycode/DG_069862
Re: "Fast Lane" AC 15:37
Probably because the highway code has been dumbed down.
I understand many traffic police officers use lane 1, 2 and 3
Personally, frequently having to drive on different sides, I find it more convenient when relating traffic horror stories to use offside/nearside to avoid having to turn things round in my head and it's easier for the listener too. Also if this terminology had been used we wouldn't be having this discussion as everything would have been clear from the beginning.
Rubbernecker traffic jams
Easily fixed - higher median barriers, along with tarps around crash scenes.
It works wonders at preventing ghouls stopping traffic - and twats trying to cross the motorway.
Common practice in some areas. less so in others.
Re: Rubbernecker traffic jams
Doesn't stop the twats in Atlanta. Two years ago, I watched an idiot jump down onto I-75, run across 5 lanes of traffic and vault over the 6ft high center divider. The cop chasing him didn't bother make the drop onto the road.
Alright it's a bit more clever but Honda have had a safety system that allows the CR-V to be set in auto-mode and correct it's speed and distance from the car in front, all you have to do is steer it, they put that in the CR-V 5 years ago!
Motorway driving
I see this as a good thing, but a few years too late. Perhaps as an augmentation of the almost driverless cars that Google have been working on. "Want to pay £500 to save fuel, then this patch will give you the ability to be part of a road train"
The only problem is the cars would communicate with one another to find out who is going where and thus build the most efficient road trains, which would mean agreeing to pass your SatNav data over to Google, who will then bombard your HUD with Googletastic marketing about shops near your destination.
Perhaps that's an advertising stream I could patent. Movies or TV programmes from HUDFlix(TM) beamed to your HUD, interspersed with marketing directed at your end desitination...
Re: Motorway driving
Why do you need to find someone going closest to where you are going? You only need to follow someone for as long as your route matches - if they pull off the motorway before you want to, you just latch on to the nearest available car still on the motorway. No need to send your route data anywhere, as long as you are "reasonably attentive" (which will surely be a requirement of this system).
Let's get those Volvos into a circle.
I shouldn't be too difficult to get a computer to manage a rolling road train. All you'd need is a simple set of subroutines to keep those Dodges moving. e.g.
headEmUp(), moveEmOn(), holdEmUp(), cutEmIn(), driveEmOut(), countEmOut(), countEmIn()
arggh
God damn it... "break" vs "brake".
How often are these vehicles expected to break, as opposed to the frequency of their braking.
Should I "loose" or lose control over this?!
Bad practice
I was always told that you should never tailgate.
Also this sort of packet driving whilst being the most efficient is also most likely to end in fatalities in the event of an acident.
Re: Bad practice
...if the cars remain under the control of humans. And that's the point. The interface will be a computer aided by cameras and IR and radars and other gadgets, not a person on the phone, changing a radio and lighting a cig. Dunno if you'd noticed but technology generally does things quicker than people
Re: Bad practice
If the car in front hits an obstacle that pulls in front of it for example let's see how fast the ones behind react.
Re: Bad practice (Chris W)
Hopefully fast enough and hard enough to prevent the driver of said intruding car from ever driving again (or pedestrian from ever jaywalking again.)
Re: Bad practice (theodore)
So you want the technology to react fast enough to be able to run into the obstacle? What are you taking? Or if you should be taking something and have stopped then please, start taking it again.
The "intruding car" could be anything. Trees have been known to fall down, people have been known to throw things from bridges, doddery old codgers and people following satnav instructions have been known to drive the wrong way down a motorway.
No matter how fast the technology reacts in the event of an accident, I'll repeat that bit because it seems QuinnDexter didn't understand the first time around, the brakes will not be sufficient to prevent a serious pile up.
Re: Bad practice
Standard driving "thinking time" is a reaction time of between 1.0 and 1.5 seconds. I suspect silicon works faster than that.
Perhaps, just perhaps, Volvo put some thought into it when they came up with a figure of 6m for a gap between cars. Or perhaps they just plucked that figure out of the air.
At 80kph, the human "thinking time" equates to travel of 20-30m. With a figure of 6m, they've got a luxurious quarter of a second plus for the silicon to react appropriately. Let's take the arbitrary scenario of a strange catastrophe affecting the road ahead, and the lead vehicle computer/driver feels the need to go for an emergency stop - i.e. hammer the breaks[sic] as hard as they can, with ABS ensuring the most rapid stop possible. To simplify things, assume all vehicles have the same stopping distance at this speed and ignore the fact that some ridiculous cars can stop twice as quickly (if not quicker) as others.
Assuming no inter-vehicle communication, the following cars need to react to the now-rapidly-closing gap. Take the assumption that it takes 0.1s for a car to notice that a car in front has begun to brake at the maximum braking rate and at that point it does the same thing. Also add the assumption that deceleration is linear, then the gap will close to around 3.8m.
Increase the car's reaction time to 0.2s and the gap will close to 1m55. 0.27s reaction time is when cars will start to nudge eachother. Seems quite a lot of time for the computer to make such a decision as in that time the car in front will have decelerated by 1.85m/s.
Re: Bad practice @JetSetJim
It makes no difference how fast silicon reacts if the car in front has an accident the mechanical brakes will not have enough distance to stop in time to avoid a further crash. Accidents do not happen in a nice linear time frame as you seem to think.
Re: Bad practice @ChrisW
But how is a human better than a computer in avoiding these? Or to put it another way, how can you think that a computer taking control would not be. Better? A lot of cars now include this braking tech, ignoring the human interface when the computers notice something amiss, as computers react faster. Computers react faster. The people in the original shunt might be damaged, following car less likely. What part of that do you miss?
The siren chasers are a twitter with glee
There are billions of Euros to be made from lawsuits when the car drives itself into someone else or the driver fails to respond when someone is headed toward smashing them to bits.
Re: The siren chasers are a twitter with glee
Absolutely. Sue the 'driver', the lead vehicle, the programmers, the person who approved it...
Best way to improve Volvo safety?
Remove the drivers? Nice advertising Volvo.
variable speed limit
Thats one hell of a lot of tickets if you hit a 40mph variable speed limit whilst you are doing 56 (with a chain of volvos behind you).
Re: variable speed limit
You're right. There is absolutely NO WAY that the people building this thought of that.
Well, Volvo drivers are already amongst the most inattentive on the road, so there's not much change, in fact.
Sexist?
One has to wonder how the decision was made to feature a female rather than a male reading a newspaper in the driving seat?
I don't think I'd want to spend my time
following a lorry down the highway. It's speed is too inconsistent which reduces fuel efficiency, and they're too slow.
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