Tesla Autopilot danger from “passive vigilance” effect
NTSB warns that Tesla Autopilot induces passive vigilance effect that can distract drivers away from driving their car
Category Archives: Transportation
Pandemics, like Coronavirus, and our RoboTaxi-driven autonomous future
The big news right now is the Coronavirus outbreak that began in China last fall. CoVID-19 as it is more formally known is a relatively highly infectious disease, that the human population has no immunity against, and a relatively high (2%) mortality rate. Given those figures, governments around the world…
San Francisco mulls congestion pricing, seeking safety and climate change solutions
Major cities like San Francisco often have traffic congestion problems. During heavy traffic times, cars are typically gridlocked with slowly moving traffic, and the number of vehicles means a concentration of toxic exhaust fumes. Many cities around the world have implemented congestion pricing to limit the number of vehicles and…
An inexpensive AI computer kit for understanding autonomous self-driving cars
You might have heard that artificial intelligence a.k.a. machine learning is a big thing in the tech industry. Look for a computer programming job and it seems all the openings are either in machine learning or blockchain (which is a story for another day). Anyone interested in the future of…
Digital redlining with scooter and car sharing services
Most or all the automakers are exploring self-driving car technology, and have plans to launch Transportation-As-A-Service services. Under such a service, we would not own cars any longer, but instead use a smart phone app to request a self-driving car to bring itself to us. It would be like Uber…
Timisoara RO, curiously plans to buy light rail cars with batteries
A few days ago Timisoara, a city in Western Romania, announced a plan to buy new “tramvaie” cars (light rail cars) that will carry battery packs giving 64 kilometers of autonomy in case of a power outage. While it is commendable that Timisoara hopes to keep their light rail system…
Expensive taxi rides brought us Uber/Lyft, but should we be driven by amateur drivers?
I am back in the USA, and my first experience coming home made be want to turn around and head right back to Romania. The taxi driver while driving me home from the airport said “Welcome Home”, and I’m sure he was trying to be friendly, but the taxi fare…
Uber test driver in self-driving car in fatality accident was streaming Hulu
Last March an Uber self-driving car undergoing testing in Tempe Arizona struck and killed a pedestrian. Previously we had been told the “test driver” in the Uber autonomous car was monitoring output from the on-board monitoring system. Video of the driver, Rafaela Vasquez, shows that she was inattentive, spending most of…
Misplaced trust in driver assist (Tesla Autopilot) systems can cause huge problems
Tesla may be rushing too quickly with the autopilot feature, or else not doing a good-enough job of educating Tesla car owners on safe use of Tesla’s autopilot. In light of several crashes while autopilot was engaged, and reports by Tesla car owners of several modes where autopilot clearly does…
Uber self-driving car fatality: Everyone is to blame
March’s pedestrian fatality from an Uber self-driving car can be blamed on Uber’s faulty software, an inattentive operator, and an inattentive pedestrian, according to an initial NTSB report into the fatality. There’s blame to go around, and perhaps it is Uber’s software that is most to blame? I don’t understand…
Uber self-driving car fatality blamed on faulty software
Uber seems to have determined their own software was, unsurprisingly, the primary cause of last months fatal self-driving car accident. In that accident a pedestrian crossing a street was struck by an experimental Uber self-driving car, and died of injuries shortly thereafter. According to sources within Uber cited by “The…
Self-driving vehicles need to crawl before they walk, and walk before they run
A few days ago I wrote about a pair of crashes, one involving an autonomous Uber vehicle that struck and killed a pedestrian, and another involving a Tesla Model X that apparently swerved into a lane divider killing the driver. Yesterday an SF Bay Area TV station, ABC 7 news,…
Rapid adoption of self-driving cars considered harmful, a plea for caution
Clearly folks are eager to have self-driving cars TODAY if not sooner. I’m seeing a constant chatter online of folks excited about the prospect of letting their car take over the driving chores. A few weeks ago, a new Tesla Model 3 owner giving a presentation about his newly-purchased car…
Uber, Lyft, reduce car ownership and car travel
Traffic congestion is one of the negative sides of the car-dominated transportation system. The road system wasn’t built to handle the amount of traffic currently on the roads. Building more roads is not the solution since traveling in that direction simply leads to more sprawl because of geometrical requirements placed…
Uber transparency report raises Big Brother concerns in future Robotaxi services
As we move towards fully autonomous cars, many entrepreneurial types are chomping at the bit anxiously hoping to offer robotaxi services. The plans are wrapped in this “car sharing” ideology that we won’t have to own cars, that instead we’ll pay a monthly fee for access to cars. That could…
