Schneier on Security

AlexS • September 26, 2016 1:10 PM

@James: “Maybe we should be treating these “self driving” cars the same as a commercial passenger plane/jet. It has autopilot, but should only be used during the extended period the vehicle is traveling. If you are traveling in a non congested road/highway and your are going a certain distance, then auto can be engaged. Auto pilot cannot be engaged during rush hour or under a certain amount of miles, near your resident or place of work or etc.”

Actually…that’s not how these systems work. I drive a Mercedes equipped with a more advanced system of what’s installed on the Tesla vehicles. Same vendor (Bosch Mobility Solutions), just more sensors, more cameras, & more advanced processing on mine. So far my car’s driven ~30,000 miles without my assistance. There are “deadman” algorithms in the programming to make sure the driver is still alive, awake, and mainly for liability – ie: the driver is in control of the car, not the manufacturer. I’ve briefly driven a Tesla, and there are differences, so I can only speak on my car. On my car, there are several different algorithms which the car goes between depending on conditions.

Overall, my car PREFERS to be in heavy traffic versus being on the open highway. As traffic picks up, my car is able to detect & “see” the movement of cars around it on medium & long-range radar in addition to its array of cameras. The driver assist computers try to match & verify the data from every sensor as much as possible. If all of the sensors and cameras match, great! If not, the car tries to determine which sensors are believable & which aren’t. In brutal stop & go gridlock, the car is for all purposes capable of being fully autonomous. There’s a ton of good data it’s receiving, even its ultrasonic sensors are sending good data back to the computer. Everything around it is happening slow enough for it to react to any asshattery of other drivers. Trust me, the car’s been cut off many of times in rush hour traffic and handles it fine.

Now, on the open highway with very few cars around, the ultrasonic, medium-range, and long-range radar sensors aren’t getting a whole lot of data. The car becomes dependent solely on its camera arrays and GPS maps. As long as the road markings are in good shape, sure, it works. BUT, most of the road markings in the USA are sub-par at best. Or worse, non-standard. The car does a very commendable job with it, but there are times when it tells you it’s not sure what it’s supposed to be doing, like when DOT put a bunch of construction barricades in the traffic lanes. The car rightfully complained there were foreign objects in the roadway.

So the middle of Midtown Manhattan, this thing is happy as a pig in mud and I have no problem letting it do whatever it wants. On the highway it’s alright, but I wouldn’t trust it implicitly.

I should also point out that twice the car successfully prevented 2 accidents. In both cases, I was about to get rear-ended by another driver. In the first, the car jumped into an adjacent lane and the car behind me slammed into the van that was in front of me. In the second, the car started strobing its taillights like a police lightbar, which got the driver’s attention and he swerved around me at the last minute.