I would definitely want the package that includes trees and telephone poles.

Those luxury little extras are where all the profit margin is.

other cars, not pedestrians. Cars are large chunks of metal that give off and disrupt all sorts of EM fields. At close range, like city driving, there are all sorts of ways to detect them relatively easily. Humans, not so much, we are much smaller, give off a much weaker EM field, and pretty much the only way to accurately "see" us(to a computer), and gauge distance would be through an active radar system and/or binocular cameras. These would greatly increase the cost.

Should this be included in the whole auto-stopping package? I would say yes, but why didn't the owner read what options are available on their car at purchase before setting up this "test"?

We just bought a Prius, and it was only due to meeting other Prius owners that we learned about many aspects of the car.

Like for one thing, our car does not have the underbody metal or plastic sheeting. Some models have it; others don't.

What is the big Whoop? Well, if we had gone to a party that was taking place two miles up an unpaved road, we might well have harmed various components of the car, due to not having that protective sheath.

And in a situation like this one, with the Volvo, where you think your car has this self-parking feature, and you only find out after your car has killed people that more was needed, what then?

Our car sales man had talked endlessly about our need to pay for "replacement insurance" so it is not like he didn't have the time to include a bit about the features. He had the time, but he couldn't be bothered.

Seems to work very well, binocular camera system.

This is like people complaining that a CD player doesn't play mp3s.

Haha I'm kidding.

It's all Netflix, iTunes and Spotify these days.

I KID I KID

an extra. It has to be part of the package. Duh.

Perfect example. Now can we please stop trying to make and sell them?

A. This isn't a self driving car, its self parking
B. It's a bad choice by one manufacturer, not the industry as a whole

And yes, Volvo made a bad choice in not including pedestrian avoidance as a standard feature.
Ironically Volvo used to mean "safe cars." With this one action they have put a huge dent in that reputation.

All of them were determined to not be the car's fault and all of them were minor. Those are a lot better statistics than human driven cars.

I saw a story on this on a cable network (sorry don't remember which but not FOX ) It was rather pro Google cars on whole, and Google cooperated. There was footage of the car driving itself with it's human handler and a reporter in it, and that footage included the handler having to step in once and brake to avoid an accident. It happened when another driver made a really brain dead move to pull into the road suddenly. The explanation that the Google employee gave is that the car isn't fully programmed to anticipate total stupidly maneuvers by other drivers. The implication was that testing is teasing out these loopholes

Also, do they drive in snow, ice, thunderstorms, heavy winds, at night?

Self-driving cars are on their way, and they'll make roads both much safer and much more accessible to the poor and disabled.

A horse is just fine---who needs that Model T?

It's just that holy crap, frigging pedestrian detection shouldn't be a premium package. Geeze, louise!

What a stupid decision on the part of Volvo. Fuck automation and the job killing people behind the movement.

And the use of fossil fuels has created the global warming mess that were now having to deal with.

And your being asked to basically blindly trust the technology to make better decisions than you can do. Well, I don't think there's a technology thats infallible. Even autopilot on airplanes, at least you can override them, and you are generally not having to dodge other airplanes when flying.

I don't understand the objection. What do you think is going to happen? Do you think these driverless cars will be worse than humans?

Never mind the 32,000 people killed in the US every year by human drivers; we don't want safer machines that let the poor access car services more affordably. We must protect obsolete jobs!

The luddite accusation is petty compared to what all our supposed advancement has done to earth. We are lucky if we survive extinction within the next 50 to 100 years.


Also, do you like taking food away from people's plates? Have them starving and being on the streets homeless? Most people depend on a job for money, and there are many people out there that don't have the competency to get highly skilled and advanced degree jobs that are supposedly needed for the jobs of the future, and what are they going to do to put food on the table once automation kills their job?

You have no idea how advanced automation is going to get:

You know, the Capitalists that control our political system. Your talking a total cultural change.

But, given the reality, I'm still not going to play the game that we should squash a technology that would save tens of thousands of lives every year, increase poor and disabled people's mobility, reduce emissions, and allow greener urban development just because there is a group of people who currently make their living using the inferior technology.

Sure improvements have to be made.

Self driving cars will never be perfect, but they dont need to be. They just have to be safer than humans

I can certainly say this will not be flawless by any sense of the imagination. There can be endless permutations and combinations when driving. I do question all of the extrapolations being consistently accurate under all conditions. I also question consistent reliability and the total elimination of single point failure modes under all conditions.

doesn't making “pedestrian detection functionality” a "special feature" that's optional and comes at an extra charge kind of make a "self-driving car" a worthless piece of junk regardless of whatever else it could do? I mean, shouldn't that be......like.......the FIRST bit of logic they'd put into it?

And, anyways, this is a "self-parking" car, which means you've been driving all the way to the parking spot and you just want it to take over then. That technology has been around for years.

I experienced it on my first test drive when I shifted into reverse in the dealership lot and it detected someone approaching from the passenger side behind me and sounded a warning. That caused my built-in pedestrian detection system, a.k.a my eyes and brain, to take over and send the message for me to continue to keep my foot on the brake until he had passed.

But my car isn't touted to be self-driving or self-anything-else. And the fact that the car in the video was supposed to be "self-parking" when it stopped and then accelerated forward without warning and without anything to tell it to stop tells me that I don't think we're as close as people would like to think to being able to put "self-driving" cars on the public roads safely.

If a person happens to be standing in the parking spot that this car is supposed to be "self-parking" into, a pedestrian detection system might just come in handy in that situation, too, don't you think? It's not as if it couldn't happen.

Bottom line is that I there is a "judgment" component in any driving situation that the machine simply can't provide.

To help me not back into pedestrians, shopping carts, lamp posts, buildings, and other vehicles.

A self-parking car should be able to not run into things. Not even reporters.

I don't know why they chose the trust the car. I don't trust cars with drivers. I don't know why people would trust these Terminators.

Of course an actual self-driving car is going to have pedestrian detection...but this is merely a car that parks itself with an operator presumably behind the wheel and smart enough to do their own pedestrian detection. As a result, automated non-operator pedestrian-detection is an added feature.

Now, can we please get the self-driving cars on the market faster? There are some of us who are disabled in ways that will prevent us from ever having a goddamned driver's license and who have been waiting for a completed technology to go retail for more than half a decade. I mean...the f**king things drive better than 99.999% of Americans...and the other 0.001% is the likes of Jeff Gordon and Dale Earnhardt Jr.

... but "parking" was one of the elements of "driving" on which I was tested.

Safety should not be an option. I don't want to pay extra for the "avoids pedestrians" auto driving err, parking feature

1.) As a person who can drive a car, are you capable of parking said car without hitting pedestrians?

2.) If the car could park itself and all you had to do was tap the brake to stop the car from hitting pedestrians when necessary, could you manage that?

3.) In light of #1 and #2, would you be slightly put out if your car was $2500 more expensive because of a standard feature which is completely unnecessary because you're not an idiot who would sit behind the wheel of your car idly while it ran down pedestrians at 3MPH?

In terms of #3, I would be put out because even I can manage to not hit pedestrians while parking...and I'm not allowed to have a DL.

It's a self parking car! Um...no wait, someone has to be behind the wheel to park it.

That was an extra package that the owner failed to buy.

Fuck people, they are never around when you park a car...sounds like a wonderful PR campaign for Volvo!

that's my vote.

From the article:

“The pedestrian detection would likely have been inactivated due to the driver inactivating it by intentionally and actively accelerating,” Larsson said. “Hence, the auto braking function is overrided by the driver and deactivated.”

I wouldn't want to drive a car where I didn't have the option to manually override auto-braking. However, it is a problem if too many people don't realize these auto-braking systems can be overridden.

Just before the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in the San Francisco Bay Area opened, the BART system was being planned to be run entirely automated, without human operators. Well, that flied out the door, literally. A BART train in 1972 literally flew off the tracks, and BART put in human operators after that (though the system is largely computer controlled.)

It was nicknamed the "Fremont Flyer"

Great comment... Thanks!

Last edited Thu May 28, 2015, 01:13 PM - Edit history (1)

Previously illogical interpretation of OP led to failed attempt at silliness in a somber working environment.

Thank you for your feedback.

Pressing the accelerator resumes manual control.

It's meant to help celebrities deal with paparazzi.

I had a Vulva once but now I have a hybrid

How smart are these cars anyway?

The stupid it burns!

we have stupid people driving stupid cars! Oh, the land of Idiocracy marches forward.