California Requires Steering Wheel For Google Cars

Autonomous Cars




Dmitri Dolgov, one of the leading software engineers on the Google autonomous car project, told Reuters earlier this week that the cars had been reprogrammed to allow them to exceed the posted speed limit by up to 10 miles per hour. The change was made to allow the car to keep up with the driver operated cars around them, which are normally driven about 10 miles an hour above the posted limit. He said it was a matter of safety.


Ask any traffic engineer and you will find that speed is not the biggest factor in car accidents. It is the difference in speed that is dangerous. In other words, a car going 10 mph too slow is just as dangerous as one going 10 mph too fast.


But the State of California has reacted immediately, with new rules requiring any autonomous car operated within its borders to have a steering wheel, a brake pedal and an accelerator, reports the Wall Street Journal. The Google Car has none of these old fashioned devices, but will now be retrofitted with them to comply with the new rules.


On one hand, you can understand the concern of California officials. How would it look if a Google Car suddenly ran amok, like Hal in the movie '2001 - A Space Odyssey,' mowing down innocent women and children? Oh, the humanity!


On the other hand, a few years from now people will think of this as an example of techno-phobia. It reminds me that at the dawn of the motorcar, many cities required a person to walk in front of any horseless carriage ringing a bell to warn the populace of danger.


The bureaucratic mind is almost as scary as self driving cars. Maybe more so.



About the Author


Steve Hanley I have been a car nut since the days when articles by John R. Bond and Henry N. Manney, III graced the pages of Road & Track. I know every nut, bolt and bullet connector on an MGB from 20 years of ownership. I now drive a 94 Miata for fun and the occasional HPDE track day. If it moves on wheels, I am interested in it. Please follow me on Google + and Twitter.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Eset nod32 ativirus 6 free usernames and passwords

Image
                              Hi friends,after little long time I'm going to write again about eset nod 32 antivirus.As I told in previous post if you are user on windows 8 Eset nod 32 is the best antivirus for your personal computer.the latest product eset nod 32 antivirus 6 has special features with 100% really working.Not need to purchase full version from buying it.Download the eset nod 32 trial version and activate your est antivirus from below updated usernames and passwords. Firstly I would like to tell something about est nod32 antivirus 6. The latest product having: Eset smarter scan  Scan while downloading something Anti-Theft Idle-state scanning Clean and safe E-mail Removable media security system tools         Download Eset nod32 antivirus 6 Trial version Here     After downloading Eset nod32 Antivirus activate it using below usernames and passwords. Username: EAV-...
Read more

5 Reasons iPhone 6 Won't Be Popular

Image
The majority of users are waiting for the next smartphone from Apple - iPhone 6 – this year. Unfortunately, the hype around iPhone began to gradually subside with each passing year after the 4th model launched. Therefore, it is possible that the sixth iPhone model of  will not be nearly as popular as it was in the beginning. Global audience perceived iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 much cooler than its early models New iPhones will not cause that “wow”-effect, which was in the beginning, when Steve Jobs' presentations caused a delight and admiration of every new Apple gadget. Some leaked photos of iPhone 5S prototype show that it does not differ from its predecessor at all. Therefore, all hopes for something radically new in design and features are laid on iPhone 6. And if Apple is no longer holds its standards, that seem to be a little bit old-fashioned already, it is unlikely that iPhone 6 will be interesting for people next year. 5 main reasons can be found to think like ...
Read more

Tips: Optimize your blog loading times

A slow loading blog can prevent you from getting new readers and it can also adversely affect your Google rankings.  If you notice your blog loading too slowly, or just want to optimize the speed there are a few things you can do. 1. Use a free web analyzer to determine where your bottlenecks are.  A couple good sites for this are Pingdom and GTMetrix .  These will test your site speed and list out all your elements so you can see which ones are taking the longest to load.  From there you can decide how to improve your speed. 2. Move JavaScript to the bottom of your template. This doesn't actually make your blog load any faster, but it gives the illusion of it because browsers cannot load any other elements such as images at the same time as a script.  So moving them to the bottom allows your other elements to load and render on screen first making the user think your site is faster. To do this, go to Design > Edit HTML and place your scripts just before th...
Read more