Driving at speeds over 250 mph on public roadways raises interesting questions about how AI … [+]
getty
I’m sure that you’ve had cars pass you while you were driving along on a freeway or highway.
Sometimes you shake your head in either amazement or disgust that another car is passing you when you are already admittedly exceeding the speed limit by quite a margin. You silently say to yourself, how does this person get away with this kind of outstretched speeding? In your mind, you are already at the extreme far edge of what might be considered viable, and then to your shock, there is that other driver that passes you as though you are standing still.
Okay, so let’s imagine you are doing 85 miles per hour. You are passing car after car that is doing somewhere around 60 miles per hour. At your clocked speed of twenty-five miles an hour faster than them, you almost seem to zoom past those other “slower” vehicles.
All of a sudden, a car doing 110 mph passes you.
Yikes!
That other car is going twenty-five miles per hour faster than you, and a whopping fifty miles per hour faster than the rest of the traffic (never mind “slowpoke” cars that are doing 45 to 55 mph).
This wildly speeding car is nearly a blur to you and ostensibly head-turning to those going slower than you. Their heads turn so fast that it garners a veritable sense of whiplash. One moment the car was coming up from behind, the next moment it was far off to the distant horizon, leaving all the other vehicles in its dust.
What do you do?
You might just let this startlingly speeding driver proceed and merely hope that if there is a police car anywhere on this roadway, they will go after the nutty speedster rather than coming for you. This would indubitably make sense. Why deal with someone doing 85 miles per hour when law enforcement could instead snag an outrageously speeding driver doing 110 mph. In an odd manner of thinking, the 110 driver is doing you a favor, drawing attention away from you and toward themselves.
Of course, not everyone has that thought in their heads.
Sometimes, a person already exceeding the speed limit figures that if someone else is going even faster, it implies that they can go faster too. Whereas they were worried about sticking out like a sore thumb, now that someone else is going at a higher pace, you can quicken your pace. As a result, perhaps you float your speed toward 100 miles per hour, doing so to stay under the more audacious 110 mph of the other driver.
Other drivers might likewise increase their speeds.
The sad point being made is that when there is one speedster on a public venue, their actions can spur others to do so similarly. A type of crowd mentality can develop. We naturally seem to want to be part of the group, be a member of a gathering, and do as others do. You could in fact argue that speeding is infectious, though it seems doubtful a judge will take that logic into account when you get caught red-handed.
Another qualm is that the speedster can create a racecar mindset among other drivers.
We all likely have some competitive juices inside us. Seeing another driver zipping along is going to create a primal urge to compete with that driver. Yes, you say to yourself, I can go as fast as you. Furthermore, a tiny voice in your head tells you that you can beat that other car, using your own vehicle to go even faster than them. Win, win, win. That’s the driving mantra for some drivers.
Why am I bringing up these speedster stories and allegories?
Because a recently posted point-of-view video went viral on YouTube, showcasing a driver that was on public roadways and going over 250 miles per hour. Reportedly, per the video, the top speed hit about 259 miles per hour or 417 kilometers per hour.
Realize that I said this was on a public roadway.
It is one thing to drive as fast as you like on private roads. For example, there are various racetracks that are normally closed to the public, but you can at times pay a fee to use their track. This allows you to try out your speed demon craving, whether that’s the car that wants to go fast or your rapidly beating heart.
Going at speeds like this 250 miles per hour videotaped event is no laughing matter.
I don’t want to turn gloomy but envision what would happen if such a car went awry at that speed.
Have you ever seen car accidents that were perchance caught on video that involved vehicles doing 100 miles per hour? It can be horrific to watch. I assure you that going twice that speed is going to be equally and even more so horrendous. The momentum is unimaginable. Physics will take over and a car crash at those speeds can be utterly devastating.
Now, if you get into a car crash while on a private racetrack, presumably there aren’t others around you that will get dragged into your crash. Or, the others around you will have known and accepted the risk that you might crash, and they might crash too, for which they overtly understood as part of being on the racetrack.
We don’t sign-up for that same calamity at such high speeds by driving on public roadways. The assumption is that car crashes are going to occur when the nearby vehicles are doing around 65 miles per hour or thereabouts.
That’s still bad, though a far cry from 250 miles per hour.
I’m guessing that some of you are more interested in the car and the driver that went on this speeding spree, rather than being told a tedious and ever so common refrain that we ought to not be going at such speeds while on public roadways. Sorry, I had to stridently mention it, plus you’ll see in a moment that it is an integral part of the overall discussion herein.
Anyway, the driver is a real estate tycoon by the name of Radim Passer. He was driving a Bugatti Chiron. That’s the kind of sportscar that if you have to ask how much it costs, you presumably cannot afford one (well, purportedly, it was at least $3 million or so).
It’s a fast car. Indeed, depending upon how the vehicle has been configured, it could go quite faster than even the already stratospheric 259 miles per hour. Some suggest it can be boosted to perhaps 300 mph or more.
As a quick aside, for my prior postings about sportscars and racecars that can go at extremely high speeds, including discussing how this will work with AI-based self-driving cars, see the link here and the link here. Okay, with that short aside, let’s get back to the matter at hand.
You might be able to guess where the driving act took place.
He took a “leisurely” drive on the A2 Autobahn in Germany, which roughly connects the cities of Berlin and Hannover. I say leisurely in jest. The reality was that he appeared to be relatively on edge, rightfully so, though you can also plainly see or hear that he was relishing the exhilaration and adrenaline rush. One assumes he was mentally somewhere between a prized bucket list accomplishment and being realistically unsure about how far he was willing to press his rabbit’s foot luck.
The reporting on the incident mentioned that he wasn’t wearing a helmet, though he did seem to have on a racing fire suit. He had a passenger next to him that seemed to be lacking in any semblance of the proper attire for the speeding circumstance. Comments by readers ranged from admonishing the two for not being better outfitted, while others simply stated that if they crashed it was goners anyway and no amount of suiting would have helped (that seems to be a conjectured working theory, though probably not sensibly worth testing in real-life).
In case you didn’t know, the German autobahn has no speed limit for about half of the total length of this entire transportation network. There are various speed limits on the rest of the autobahn, sometimes permanently posted and in other cases conditionally posted.
The odds are that the tycoon could afford a speeding ticket were he to be issued one, though in this case he was not technically speeding. You see, he was driving on the portion that had no speed limit. Smart of him to try and remain within legal bounds, despite going outside of reasonableness bounds.
If you think I am being overly harsh about his driving at such top speeds, I’ll merely cite the German Transport Ministry that came out and unequivocally stated that the official governmental agency categorically “rejects any behavior in road traffic that leads or can lead to endangering road users.”
I’ll give you a little bit of a personal test to see how you view such matters.
The traffic laws in Germany require all road users to abide by road traffic regulations and that “anyone participating in traffic must behave in such a way that no other person is harmed, endangered or obstructed or inconvenienced more than is unavoidable under the circumstances.”
Get ready for your test on this.
There were other cars on the autobahn at the time of this speeder trickery. He passed them, usually doing so by moving over as far to the left as he could. He did not hit any other cars. No other cars hit him. The driving stunt was done without anyone getting hurt.
You could argue that there are plenty of cars on the autobahn that proceeds fast on a daily basis. This is par for the course, one might say. As such, anyone on the autobahn in the areas that have no speed limit should be used to seeing cars that pass them at a frenetic pace.
Nothing special here to see or shout about.
On the other hand, all it would have taken was one slip at the steering wheel, or a piece of debris in the roadway, or some other momentary startling facet that could have prompted the tycoon to lose control of the car for a split second. In that split second, the vehicle could have gone careening and wiped out other nearby cars.
You can add to this that his vehicle could have gone uncontrollably off the autobahn and flown over into whatever was beyond the freeway boundaries. Maybe he could have ended up hitting someone not at all on the autobahn.
We’ll now return to the legal language of the traffic laws there in Germany, namely was his driving tantamount to having been able to harm, endanger, obstruct, or inconvenience any others, albeit no more than is unavoidable under the circumstances.
What is your answer to that question?
For those of you that insist he was not harmed and nor was anyone else, the answer seems obvious, he was perfectly fine in his driving behavior. More power to him.
For those of you that see his efforts as endangering others, even though he luckily did not harm anyone per se, you might say he ought to be ashamed and perhaps pursued for some kind of reckless driving ticket. The notion that he got away with this unscathed and averted hitting others is mere hogwash.
I hope you made a choice.
That was your test regarding how you feel about driving and speeding (kind of, in this case at least).
Shifting gears, we’ve so far discussed that human drivers are apt to drive at high speeds on public roadways when they can get away with it. I’d like to introduce a different angle on this topic, namely the advent of AI-based true self-driving cars.
Here’s a noteworthy question that is worth pondering: How will AI-based true self-driving cars contend with those speedsters that zip along on our public roadways at speeds far above the posted speed limit?
Allow me a moment to unpack the question.
First, note that there isn’t a human driver involved in a true self-driving car. Keep in mind that true self-driving cars are driven via an AI driving system. There isn’t a need for a human driver at the wheel, nor is there a provision for a human to drive the vehicle. For my extensive and ongoing coverage of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) and especially self-driving cars, see the link here.
I’d like to further clarify what is meant when I refer to true self-driving cars.
Understanding The Levels Of Self-Driving Cars
As a clarification, true self-driving cars are ones that the AI drives the car entirely on its own and there isn’t any human assistance during the driving task.
These driverless vehicles are considered Level 4 and Level 5 (see my explanation at this link here), while a car that requires a human driver to co-share the driving effort is usually considered at Level 2 or Level 3. The cars that co-share the driving task are described as being semi-autonomous, and typically contain a variety of automated add-on’s that are referred to as ADAS (Advanced Driver-Assistance Systems).
There is not yet a true self-driving car at Level 5, which we don’t yet even know if this will be possible to achieve, and nor how long it will take to get there.
Meanwhile, the Level 4 efforts are gradually trying to get some traction by undergoing very narrow and selective public roadway trials, though there is controversy over whether this testing should be allowed per se (we are all life-or-death guinea pigs in an experiment taking place on our highways and byways, some contend, see my coverage at this link here).
Since semi-autonomous cars require a human driver, the adoption of those types of cars won’t be markedly different than driving conventional vehicles, so there’s not much new per se to cover about them on this topic (though, as you’ll see in a moment, the points next made are generally applicable).
For semi-autonomous cars, it is important that the public needs to be forewarned about a disturbing aspect that’s been arising lately, namely that despite those human drivers that keep posting videos of themselves falling asleep at the wheel of a Level 2 or Level 3 car, we all need to avoid being misled into believing that the driver can take away their attention from the driving task while driving a semi-autonomous car.
You are the responsible party for the driving actions of the vehicle, regardless of how much automation might be tossed into a Level 2 or Level 3.
Self-Driving Cars And The Speeding Vehicles Contentions
For Level 4 and Level 5 true self-driving vehicles, there won’t be a human driver involved in the driving task.
All occupants will be passengers.
The AI is doing the driving.
One aspect to immediately discuss entails the fact that the AI involved in today’s AI driving systems is not sentient. In other words, the AI is altogether a collective of computer-based programming and algorithms, and most assuredly not able to reason in the same manner that humans can.
Why is this added emphasis about the AI not being sentient?
Because I want to underscore that when discussing the role of the AI driving system, I am not ascribing human qualities to the AI. Please be aware that there is an ongoing and dangerous tendency these days to anthropomorphize AI. In essence, people are assigning human-like sentience to today’s AI, despite the undeniable and inarguable fact that no such AI exists as yet.
With that clarification, you can envision that the AI driving system won’t natively somehow “know” about the facets of driving. Driving and all that it entails will need to be programmed as part of the hardware and software of the self-driving car.
Let’s dive into the myriad of aspects that come to play on this topic.
First, it is important to realize that not all AI self-driving cars are the same. Each automaker and self-driving tech firm is taking its approach to devising self-driving cars. As such, it is difficult to make sweeping statements about what AI driving systems will do or not do.
Furthermore, whenever stating that an AI driving system doesn’t do some particular thing, this can, later on, be overtaken by developers that in fact program the computer to do that very thing. Step by step, AI driving systems are being gradually improved and extended. An existing limitation today might no longer exist in a future iteration or version of the system.
I trust that provides a sufficient litany of caveats to underlie what I am about to relate.
We are primed now to do a deep dive into how self-driving cars might cope with speeding nearby vehicles.
I’ll start with one of my favorite pet peeves about self-driving cars and what some pundits keep wrongfully exhorting. There are those that claim we will never have self-driving cars get into car crashes. In essence, all self-driving cars will be entirely and always crash-free or crashless.
I would say hogwash, but I already used that earlier, so I’ll switch over to calling such claims as hooey, claptrap, baloney, and all-around being completely incorrect. Full stop, period.
Let’s take a look at the autobahn situation and the speedster tycoon.
We’ll imagine that there were AI self-driving cars on that same autobahn when he did his stunt. It is reasonable to assume that the self-driving cars would likely have detected his vehicle. Using the sensor suite of the self-driving car, such as video cameras, LIDAR, radar, and so on, the AI driving system would have received data from the sensors about the object underway on the autobahn.
The odds are that data could be analyzed by the Machine Learning (ML) or Deep Learning (DL) embedded into the AI driving system and as such ascertain that this was a car on the autobahn and moving at a rather fast clip.
I would speculate that the ML/DL might even have been trained on a wide variety of car brands and models, thus the AI might label the car as being a Bugatti Chiron. It doesn’t really matter though if the car is specifically identified by brand and model, other than maybe the driving characteristics would also be retrieved and ergo the capability of heightened speed could be anticipated.
All told, it seems plausible that any nearby self-driving cars would detect the speedster and calculate that the vehicle was going very fast.
What would the AI do?
By and large, the AI driving system or computational algorithms would calculate that it is best to stay clear of the speeding car.
This might entail moving over to the rightmost lanes of traffic, especially if the speeding car is principally in the left lanes. Of course, you never know which way human drivers might go, therefore at any moment, the speeding car could divert into the right lanes, in which case the AI would need to ascertain whether to remain in the right lanes or seek to maneuver over into the left lanes.
On a related topic, we are expecting that AI self-driving cars will be outfitted with V2V (vehicle-to-vehicle) electronic communications. This allows an AI self-driving car to send out electronic broadcasts to nearby vehicles. If an AI self-driving car detected the speeding sportscar, the AI could send out a broadcast to alert other nearby self-driving cars that the speedster is coming up behind them.
One open question that has yet to be resolved is whether the AI should inform the passengers inside a self-driving car of any nearby detected dangers. See my discussion at this link here.
For example, if you were inside a self-driving car that was on the autobahn and the AI detected this speeding car, would you want to know?
Some say that the AI ought to be required to dutifully inform riders. Others worry that this will unnecessarily frighten riders and might lead to people deciding not to ride in driverless cars. I suppose it is akin to going for a ride with a newbie teenage driver that keeps telling you about every potential scrape and endangerment. This is bound to get on your nerves. There need to be some means of calibrating when the AI ought to let riders know and when it makes less sense to alert them.
Okay, so we have the AI self-driving car attempting to remain away from the speeding sportscar. We can pretty much assume that the human-driven cars on the autobahn during the stunt were doing likewise.
Suppose though that a human driver on the autobahn was blissfully unaware of the speeding sports car?
That could have led to dreadful results. The human driver could have innocently made a lane change and not realized they were now directly in the path of the 250 miles per hour speeding bullet. The sports car driver might not have had sufficient time to react and could have crashed by an avoidance reaction or crashed immediately into the other car.
It is certainly possible that the AI self-driving car could make a lane change and do so without having detected the speeding sportster. The result would be akin to what might happen if a human driver did such a lane change as mentioned above.
In the specific instance of this video recorded speeding instance on the autobahn, the weather was fine and the roadway seems relatively straight ahead. Those factors aided the other human drivers. The same could be said of the sensors being used by the self-driving car. When the weather is good and the road is flat and straight, detection of other traffic is a lot more probable.
That being said, there is absolutely no magic wand that will make self-driving cars impervious to not detecting other traffic. There are abundantly many driving scenarios that could confound or hide other traffic. Bad weather can do this. Bending roadway curves can do this. A roadway that rises on a hill or has other such shapes can impair detections. Etc.
In short, there is no question that a self-driving car might make a lane change and get caught off-guard by a speeding car that perchance comes up upon the autonomous vehicle.
At that juncture, the sports car could readily ram into the self-driving car.
Boom, bam, we just had an AI self-driving car get into a car crash.
A smarmy pundit might exclaim that this was the fault of the speeding human driver, and not the fault per se of the AI self-driving car.
Do not fall for that distracting argument.
The pundits that are alleging that self-driving cars won’t get into car crashes are usually making the assertion that no matter what happens, self-driving cars won’t be immersed in car crashes. This has nothing to do with who or what is at fault. Those pundits seem to believe that the AI driving system is so darned good that it will never allow the self-driving car to get into a compromised situation whereby the driverless car gets struck by anything.
Yes, self-driving cars are seemingly going to avoid other cars, trucks, motorcycles, mopeds, motorized skateboards, low flying planes, meteors, and anything else that moves. That is quite an amazing feat.
And sadly, not true and sets entirely false expectations.
Conclusion
All in all, an AI self-driving car has a sizable chance of not getting entangled with a speeding car, though there is always a solid probability that it could happen.
The good news is that the AI won’t be driving while drunk, won’t be watching cat videos, and will generally be computationally attentive to the entirety of the driving task. This can help in reducing the chances of getting in the way of a speeding car, whereas human drivers might do so by the happenstance of driving while intoxicated, or while distracted, and so on.
Also, the speeding driver can generally bet that the AI self-driving car will attempt to stay out of the path of the speeding car. This is not necessarily the case for other human drivers. We all accept the idea that other human drivers might do dumb things and get in the path of a speeding car.
In fact, you probably know some human drivers that purposely position their cars in front of speeding cars. These irate humans are thinking that it is wrong for the other driver to be speeding. In that manner of thinking, they believe that by blocking the speeding driver, they are saving lives. This might be a nice idea, but the police would tell you that it is unworkable and dangerous.
Some human drivers get in the way of speeding drivers out of spite. This goes back to my earlier points. Rather than speeding up to be at the same speed, this kind of human driver figures they ought to block the speeding driver. No real altruism in this case. Just spite.
Let me cover one more quick remark and then we’ll conclude the story of the speeding sportster.
One aspect about AI self-driving cars that is another open question entails the capability of the driverless car to tattle on speeding cars. Keep in mind that the sensors are collecting all this data about the driving scene. Recorded on the video, radar, LIDAR, and so on, would be the speeding car.
This could easily be uploaded to the police department.
Do we want self-driving cars to be reporting on us all?
You might say that of course, those speedsters ought to be nabbed, and if those AI self-driving cars can help, so be it. Thank you, self-driving cars.
The problem arises as to how far do we let this proceed. Perhaps self-driving cars report all their data, from all their trips, across all parts of town, at all times of the day. The next thing you know, we are feeding this into a Big Brother system that will track our every movement and daily activity. For more about the privacy intrusion and concerns of what I refer to as the “roving eye” — see my discussion at the link here.
That about covers things for the moment. As a final thought, imagine what the world will be like when those sports cars such as the Bugatti Chiron are being driven by AI.
Whatever you do, don’t get in the way of a maniac tycoon AI driving system, you won’t like the results.
