People around the world have never stopped imagining self-driving cars, referring to the Audi that can put away the steering wheel in the movie "Mechanical Enemy", the real "self-driving car" seems to really no longer need a driver. However, the advent of the driverless era seems to be earlier than we expected.
Recently, according to foreign media reports, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration of the U.S. Department of Transportation issued the first "Driverless Car Passenger Protection Regulations", which no longer requires automakers to equip autonomous vehicles with manual control devices.
In other words, future fully autonomous vehicles produced in the United States can be free of manual controls, including steering wheels and accelerator brake pedals. But the regulations emphasize that self-driving cars must provide the same level of member protection as human drivers.
Who dares to build it?
In recent years, many manufacturers have successively released the idea of the future of driverless cars. Tesla proposed the concept of driverless cars back in 2019, and GM and its self-driving technology subsidiary Cruise also submitted an application to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration last month to allow it to build and deploy a self-driving car without human controls.
Taking MINI as an example, driverless cars are an important part of the process of MINI electrification, and from the official design drawings, it can be seen that its driving seat can be rotated backwards, and the members of the car sit opposite each other.
You might call it a mobile living room, but it looks like a four-wheeled carriage of the past.
Who dares to sit?
The progress of autonomous driving technology is an accumulation process, even tesla, the "integrator" of automatic driving technology, will cause tragedies for various reasons every year, which can't help but make people doubt the reliability of full automatic driving.
In fact, in recent years, many driverless cars have begun to put into operation, such as Amazon abroad and The Domestic Meituan has Baidu, but these driverless cars that have been put into use are mostly used to carry goods or close road sections, and the driving process is cautious.
The problem faced by fully autonomous vehicles is not only whether the technology can meet the standards, but also the division of responsibility after the accident is also very serious. Referring to the current mainstream L2 driver assistance system, when the system cannot complete the avoidance or misjudge the driving situation, the human driver has the opportunity to make remedial measures to avoid accidents.
Even if accidents are inevitable, current traffic laws have a complete way of determining responsibility. And all of this is useless in the face of fully autonomous vehicles without a steering wheel.
At present, there are not a few companies that can realize L3 and even L4 intelligent driving technology, but due to many restrictions such as technology, environment and policies, the use scenarios are still relatively limited. The popularity of assisted driving does improve the upper limit of driving safety, but it can not guarantee that it is foolproof, the steering wheel and brake pedal are still the most basic safety guarantee for the members of the car, and the driver's driving technology determines the lower limit of driving safety. Therefore, even if manufacturers confidently cancel the steering wheel and pedals, no one may dare to test their own life safety.
Think of the first time you used lane keeping and adaptive cruises, but now you've gone from rejection to dependence on driver assistance systems. Therefore, Jianghujun always believes that with the continuous improvement of automatic driving technology, the driving technology of "machine drivers" will eventually exceed the average level of human drivers.
Until the corresponding laws are introduced, manufacturers have overcome technical problems, users have overcome psychological obstacles, and driverless cars still have a long way to go.
How do you think about "autonomous driving", and if it is really put into use in the future, will you dare to sit? Welcome to discuss in the comments section!