Self-driving Volvos cover 200km of busy Spanish motorway

Slight problem

Who the hell wants to follow a lorry in their car on a motorway??

Now if they can make the lorrys all follow each other and not mess about trying to overtake each other - clogging up the motorway in the process, then I think they'd really be onto something.

I can't see anyone wanting to drive a great distance at 56mph, it'd take forever.

But does it fail safe?

If this "platoon" is dependent on the lead lorry to provide guidance, what happens when LL fails, breaks, or loses its wifi?

I appreciate that this is more of a testbed/demonstrator than a viable option, but the key question isn't so much "can it be made to work?" but should be "what happens when it fails?" Even requiring each vehicle to have a drive who could take over isn't a complete solution. If that driver is busy doing something else: reading the paper, having lunch, getting "cosy" with the passenger, leaning out of the window trying to lick the tyres - or whatever else bored drivers get up to. If the driver can't get back to a position where they can take over quickly, or the car doesn't do something sensible on it's own then the system can't be usable.

Hopefully this particular implementation won't crash and kill everyone involved each time it goes past a roadside cafe offering free WiFi!

Project Sartre

"Hell is other " drivers

What about all the unprogrammed exceptions?

Programmed to follow the car in front. Till someone squeezes in between them and ends up with a convoy on his driveway at home.

Google cars have been driving around for a while without human intervention and plan to go meatbag-free soon. What happens in an accident? Who do you swap insurance details with?

Are they set up to handle someone waving at the side of the road warning that the bridge ahead is out?

Can they handle a policeman standing in the middle of the road directing traffic?

What do they do if shunted on a motorway? Sit waiting till one of their techs come and tell it how to get to the hard shoulder?

What if it has a sensor failure or a sensor disagreement? Does it stop dead where it is or guesses? And with the backlog of cars behind it, its going to be all day till that technician can get to it.

And its going to be a laugh when these bad boys find some roadworks.

I could go on with a list of possible problems, but I'd be here all day.

Guess my point is, I don't think they are ready yet.

Misnomer

They're not really self-driving are they, any more than the carriages of a train are self driving. At least, "following the vehicle in front" is a pretty specific sub-set of "driving".

And same as Lockwood, I'm wondering what happens when the vehicle you're following leaves the route you want to be on. I'm sure they've thought of that, but no details in the article. I think this tech would be best used as an adjunct to proper Google-style self-driving tech, i.e. the self-driving cars automatically platoon to save fuel and improve traffic flow, but are fully capable of navigating autonomously when not platooning, or when the lead vehicleis leaving the desired route.

Wouldn't work on UK motorways

6m gap between cars in "platoon" ... try that in the UK and in no time another car will pull into the gap!

N.b. why did they follow a lorry (presumably limited to lower speed than rest of traffic) is probably precisely because of this ... other drivers will automatically see the lorry as the slowing down the queue of cars and thus overtake them all.

Sounds very very basic to me..

So what happens if a car pulls into that 6m gap? i've seen cars pull into smaller gaps...

What happens in an accident? do they have decent emergency systems that will halt the car in an emergency?

Lots of un-answered questions, and sounds like all it does is follow other cars at a slow speed, you know what? a new VW I brought did that, kept itself in lane and kept a safe distance from the car in front... The wifi seems almost pointless really for this...

Rome wasn't built in a day.

As I saw elsewhere, in 15 years, you'll ring your car and get it to come for you, after you've left the theatre.

Before you went in, you told it to go and park some where, presumably without paying parking fees, and occasionally allowing it to drive about, to avoid paying parking fees.

Then there will be no point to getting your wife pregnant, when your car can take you home on its own.

Everyone is an expert...

To counter that, though, let me say that I'm not an expert on this kind of technology, but I did learn how to drive, and I can do some basic maths. This is an impressive feat, and here's why...

6 m is a very, very short distance to keep at 80km/h (=50mph). 80km/h is approximately 22 metres per second, so if you apply the well-known "2-second rule" for car spacing, it gives you a "safe" distance of 44 m to the car in front (66 m in the wet). So, this system manages to be safe at a seventh of what is considered to be the normal safe distance.

Sure certain [insert name of your least favourite German car brand] drivers manage to get closer to 6 m separation, but: a. it's not safe, because b. they're pricks who think that having a good car makes you a good driver.

The higher traffic density wouldn't be the only benefit - the other is that it would average out the traffic speeds. When roads operate at or beyond their design capacity, they start to exhibit chaotic effects - one ill-judged lane change can set up a "braking cascade" where the car immediately behind slows slightly, causing the car behind that to slow more, and so on, and then cars further behind change lanes to avoid the slower traffic, causing their own cascades. Within a couple of minutes, this can bring an entire multi-lane road can come to a complete stop, for no reason. (Which can bring the opposite carriageway to a stop as drivers slow down to see if there's an accident, and set off the whole damn thing again on their side).

Current solutions to this include the much-maligned variable speed limits on roads like London's M25 (drop the speed limit to suit the traffic density, give drivers more time to react properly, and minimise the chance of cascades), but there is also an idea to use systems like this one: traffic that can operate autonomously could be given its own segregated lane, with slower peak speed, but faster journey time overall.

For the record, I love driving, and I love cars, but motorways filled with commuter traffic aren't the place for heavy right feet - all you're doing is slowing yourself, slowing others, and getting angrier. The way I see it, the more people we can fit on the motorways, the less traffic there'll be on the more fun-to-drive roads..

All these questions about following the wrong lorry

Chaps, the idea isn't that you follow J. Random lorry. It's that you follow the right vehicle. The vehicle that's there to be followed.

Hey Eric!

Nice one!

(We worked together for a bit, but he's a lot smarter than me. Which is why he's running self-driving car studies, and I'm surfing El Reg...)

Here's a thought...

To all those posing strawman objections -

Perhaps a sensible application of this is that your car 'discovers' a car in front that is being driven but has this 'follow me' tech, and digitally couples itself to that car like a train, so you can kick back and relax for a while. Then, when your sat nav tells you it's time to take a different route to that of the car you're following, you take hold of the wheel and resume control...

Just a thought. I'd be quite happy with that sort of 'ultimate cruise control' on the motorway...

All Greek taxi drivers are mine

.. and now for a realistic test: Athens

god, you lot are depressing

SO MANY comments on this story about "Oh well it's all fine until this or that or the other happens, and what about this and how will it handle that and and and....".

Look - people are actually DOING THIS. This isn't some pie-in-the-sky concept animation - this actually happened. Real people are spending real money on developing the real version of stuff we've been watching in sci-fi movies for decades. I'd have thought people on this site would be far more positive about this sort of thing, instead most of you are just "It'll never work, and get off my lawn".

Face it - computers CANNOT be any worse at driving than humans. At least a computer won't be driving along trying to put on make-up with one hand and holding a hot Starbucks* in the other.

I say "Well done, chaps" to the Volvo/Sartre team. Well done indeed. As for the rest of you - you make Scrooge look good.

*Not that kind of hot Starbuck, Galactica fanboy.

You lot obviously missed the bit in the article whereby it said Volvo had tested it when it broke.....

"the lead vehicle tells each car when to accelerate, ****break**** and turn, all in real-world traffic conditions"

;-)

Why not Italy?

Their two lane black-tops are perfect for this sort of thing.

Oh silly me. You have not considered the fact that many Italian men drive on public roads as if they are on the racetrack. Everyone and I mean everyone has to get out of their way. LH Indicator on away they go. I've even seen them flash a Polic Car near Genoa.

I'll also second the post about the 6m gap being too big. make it 6cm and it might be just about large enough to stop a White Van, Audi 'reps car' or BMW'junior manager' from pulling into it.

Just look at the vehicle spacing on the M3 on a Monday morning.

Great tech...but...

I'm not going to say but what happens if...'cos at some point in the future these will kill a pedestrian (just like a normal car does). BUT....who is liable?

the 'driver', the programmer? If it is the driver then they need to be alert to the same level as if they are driving (and NOT reading maps). If it is the programmer then they will add a caveat 'warning, this system is not to be used unattended, etc' and so we revert back to having an 'attentive' driver.

It's not the 'cruise control' equivalent I'm worried about - it's the driverless vehicles that concern me.

the first death will make for an interesting court case methinks.

new services...

just wait and see companies running a fleet of "towing" vehicles which you can hook up to, all offering "up to 900% savings on fuel consumption", and you, having to sign an agreement that you don't break off and switch to another "provider" during your trip. And rogue providers, and spoofing, etc. etc.Aren't we resourceful :(

Break time !

It tells them when to break? Can it tell them how to break? That would be useful if the manufacturer has an over stock of a particular spare part I guess, but doesn't sound good for the owner.

Does it also control braking ?

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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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).

Well, Volvo drivers are already amongst the most inattentive on the road, so there's not much change, in fact.