A lot of motorcycle accidents are caused by human automobile drivers failing to see the motorcycle and, e.g., initiating a left turn. (It’s tough to find statistics on this, actually, except from trial lawyers who say that nearly all motorcycle accidents are caused by someone other than the rider.)
What if the typical car has a Tesla-style superhuman robot at the controls? The robot won’t fail to see a motorcycle, right? Could self-driving cars usher in a new era of motorcycle safety?
Also, while we wait for this glorious era perhaps cars could use their existing cameras and computers to highlight motorcyclists to the slow-minded humans behind the (legacy?) steering wheels. If a car already has a front-facing camera, a computer vision system, and a heads-up display why not project an “M” on the windshield when a motorcycle is noticed? (do this more aggressively when the car is stopped and the driver has activated the left turn signal or if the camera has noticed a left turn lane arrow painted in the lane via the camera)
On the third hand, maybe motorcycling will simply become illegal once most vehicles are self-driving. The residual injury and death will still be high enough that public health bureaucrats will be able to say, truthfully, “Banning motorcycles will save way more lives than we saved via closing schools and forcing people to wear cloth masks.”
Related:
see also… the hunting cap that Tim Walz wore in one of the videos featuring him engaging in manly activities…
… and a rare photo of Doug Emhoff leaving an A-lister event:
Never seen anyone using any of the self driving features in the heart of Tesla land. For people who have to commute for 3 hours/day, it might be a win just for gas money.
What if the typical car has a Tesla-style superhuman robot at the controls? The robot won’t fail to see a motorcycle.
The robot won’t fail to see a motorcycle, right? Right.
Could self-driving cars usher in a new era of motorcycle safety? No.
A quick scan of youtube or facebook reels about the topic will show you a lot of gopro footage that suggests that motorcyclists often contribute substantially to their own misfortune by picking risky speeds and paths (and then complain about it later when bad things happen)
“The robot won’t fail to see a motorcycle, right? Could self-driving cars usher in a new era of motorcycle safety?”
I don’t know if you are being facetious, but one of the classic problems with autonomous vehicles is misinterpreting the nearby single light (headlight / taillight) of a motorcycle as the dual headlights/taillights of a very distant car and thus simply running into/over the motorcycle.
Ouch! I didn’t know that. It seems that I have too much faith in our robot overlords!
And let’s not forgot about bicycles! I have no faith in our robot overlords to figure out that there is a bicycle, especially in Cambridge Maskachu$etts where bicycles are everywhere. And thanks to road redesign, bicycle take over 1/2 of the street with post sticking off the pavement. Head over to YouTube and Google it to see what I mean.
That should be relatively easily solved by using parallax to measure distance. People do that reliably with like 6″ spacing between the eyes. Cameras may have few feet of distance between them.
The only viable way I see this working safely for everyone is to permanently attach a smart-tracker to every moving object, including humans. These smart trackers would continuously communicate, sharing vital data such as movement direction, speed, and other key parameters of the moving object.
An added benefit of these smart-trackers is their potential to detect and relay important information, such as whether a person may have COVIDFear symptoms. This could help direct them away from crowded areas, further enhancing public safety!
George: I wondered that myself starting at least in 2010…
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2010/07/05/why-dont-cars-have-transponders-and-collision-avoidance/
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2016/04/19/why-arent-people-dogs-and-cars-equipped-with-transponders/ (reproduced below)
My suburban neighbors get their panties in a twist periodically over the issue of people speeding along narrow two-lane roads bordered by houses and occasionally used by pedestrians and dogs (we have decided not to invest in sidewalks). There are demands for speed bumps that town officials refuse to meet.
We’re now in about Year 20 of most residents of the U.S. carrying an electronic device most of the time. Cars are stuffed full of electronics and have near-infinite electric power available.
If human lives are important to us, why haven’t we developed an electronic infrastructure for collision-avoidance in situations like this? Cars tell the pedestrians’ phones that they are approaching and phones alert cars and drivers that it is time to slow down for that person in the road just over the hill. This can be tied into the auto-braking systems that manufacturers are now putting into cars.
There would have to be a way for the devices to notice that there were so many cars and pedestrians that it was time to shut down (“Manhattan mode”) but that doesn’t seem too challenging to build.
Self-driving cars seem to be relying on the same senses that had led to accidents for human-driven cars. Why not supplement with the electronics that have successfully prevented nearly all high-altitude mid-air collisions among airplanes?