Autonomous Vehicles

Hi,

I am not so good on my feet at present but I could travel over 16m in 10 seconds, never mind a vehicle doing 37mph, I think you mean 1 second.

37mph on any motorway is an accident waiting to happen, this is the most ridiculous decision since they stopped having the bloke walking in front with a red flag! My Mazda has a lane-discipline system which when I fail to indicate will (if I allow it) steer the car back to the lane I'm in. It also has cruise control which I can set a safe distance from the car in front. With all these systems the handbook warns DO NOT RELY ON THIS SYSTEM but I fear some owners will think they have an autonomus car and switch on the auto-pilot - all very frightening!!!

When I heard the presenter asking if she could send a text I knew the technology was going to by pass the average driver.....

Here is the link to the BBC story.

Will they actually happen? I ask that because there was much hoo har about driverless pods operating in MK from the Station to CMK  a few years ago but they have never appeared as working units. They would travel at 15mph and use off road routes but as far as I know beyond a few trials they have not appeared!

David

Like yours, my car has the lane departure feature and the adaptive cruise control, also if you take both hands off the steering wheel after a few seconds it emits a visual and audible warning and shortly after that, if you have not replaced your hands on the wheel the car automatically slows down on comes to a stop.

My car was purchased mid 2013 and has a load of driver aids.

Blind spot indicators, Adaptive cruise control, Lane drift warning and correction, Auto emergency braking, and a host of other toys but the driver is still responsible. 

Much of the technology has been around for a long time now and is quite reliable but on a very few occasion in very bad weather the system has disengaged and handed back full control to me.  I keep an eye on it all of the time and would not consider texting or doing anything else distracting.  I love it but don't trust it that much, even at 37 mph or less on a motorway .

I've just had a thought.  Are they now planning to reduce motorway speed limits to something like 35 mph?  .  That should be fun. 

There`s enough of them already usually found driving in the middle lane for the entire journey!

If people drove on the left except when overtaking as directed by the Highway Code, we probably would not have needed the "fourth lane" instead of the hard shoulder. My apologies for relocating the decimal point BTW.

That would work also if as on some roads in Europe HGVs were not allowed to as in this country to take miles to overtake one doing half mph slower on the cruise control