Mercedes becomes the first automaker to sell autonomous cars in the U.S. that don't come with a requirement that drivers watch the road - eviltoast
  • KISSmyOSFeddit@lemmy.world
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    7 months ago

    No you’re guaranteed that the Mercedes that hit you is better insured for paying out your damages than pretty much anyone else on the road that could hit you.

    • melpomenesclevage@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      lol corporations don’t have responsibility though. that’s the whole point of them. they’re machines for avoiding responsibility.

      • explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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        7 months ago

        In this case the responsibility to pay will ultimately fall on everyone, not just on the pedestrian getting hit. Still not good, but you won’t be SOL.

        • Fedizen@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          If these have lidar (unlike teslas) then they might be better at detecting obstructions but I feel like real world road conditions are not kind to cameras and sensors.

          • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
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            7 months ago

            Fixed lidar sensors are not as reliable as it’s made out to be, unfortunately. Dome lidar systems like those found on Waymo vehicles are pretty good, but way more advanced (and expensive) than anything you’d find in consumer vehicles at the moment. The shadows of trees are enough to render basic lidar sensors useless, as they effectively produce an aperiodic square wave of infrared light (from the sun) that is frequently inseparable from the ToF emission signal. Sunsets are also sometimes enough to completely blind lidar sensors.

            None of this is to say that Tesla’s previous camera-only approach was a good idea, like at all. More data is always a good thing, so long as the system doesn’t rely on the data more than the data’s reliability permits. After all, cameras can be blinded by sunlight too. IMO radar is the best economical complementary sensor to cameras at the moment. Despite the comparatively low accuracy, they are very reliable in adverse conditions.

    • Tankton@lemm.ee
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      7 months ago

      The sad part of this is somehow thinking that payment solves any problem. Like, idk what they would pay me, just bring back my dead wife/child/father whatever. You can’t fix everything with money.

      • QuaternionsRock@lemmy.world
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        7 months ago

        It only works on a small handful of freeways (read: no pedestrians) in California/Nevada, and only under 40 MPH. The odds of a crash within those parameters resulting in a fatality are quite low.

      • Llewellyn@lemm.ee
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        7 months ago

        Human drivers are far more dangerous on the road, and you should be applauding assisted driving development.

        • jj4211@lemmy.world
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          7 months ago

          This presumes the options are only:

          • Human and no autonomous system watching
          • Autonomous system, with no meaningful human attention

          Key word is ‘assisted’ driving. ADAS should roughly be a nice add, so long as human attention is policed. Ultimately, the ADAS systems are better able to react to some situations, but may utterly make some stupid calls in exceptional scenarios.

          Here, the bar of ‘no human paying attention at all’ is one I’m not entirely excited about celebrating. Of course the conditions are “daytime traffic jam only”, where risk is pretty small, you might have a fender bender, pedestrians are almost certainly not a possibility, and the conditions are supremely monotonous, which is a great area for ADAS but not a great area for bored humans.