Driverless Vehicle Hits Pedestrian (Minor injuries) - Paralympic Village

[Galant]

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58390290

"Services of the e-Palette pods were halted after a vehicle hit a visually impaired athlete last week. The athlete was not seriously injured, but he had to pull out of an event because of cuts and bruises. The vehicles will now have more operator control and extra staff to ensure they do not hit any more people...

...In a statement late on Monday, Toyota said: "The vehicle's sensor detected the pedestrian crossing and activated the automatic brake, and the operator also activated the emergency brake. The vehicle and pedestrians, however, came into contact before it came to a complete halt."...

..."It shows that autonomous vehicles are not yet realistic for normal roads," he added."

What's going to be the tolerance level for injuries with these systems, how many injuries are going to be acceptable? Also, who will be liable?

Is it valid to say that, under general circumstances, this is actually unnecessary technology? Do we really need to remove drivers from vehicles?

Perhaps the answer is here:

"The e-Palette was unveiled at the CES technology show in Las Vegas in 2018, with the company touting it as "a symbol of mobility that goes beyond cars to provide customers services and new values."

At that time, Mr Toyoda declared that Toyota was going to transform itself from a car company to a "mobility company"."

Driving as a service. Reduce car ownership. Offer various pick up and drop off services - perhaps by subscription?

[kalniel]

Walking is obviously far too dangerous, we should all be in these pods

[Saracen999]

....

Driving as a service. Reduce car ownership. Offer various pick up and drop off services - perhaps by subscription?

There are groups of people for who taht makes sense. Obviously, that includes those that never learned to drive, It also includes those that couldn't, because of physical infirmity, or who as a result of illness or accident, no longer can. Finally, there is a group, probably including myself nd the wife, for who he argument is sheer economics. When I add up the cost of car ownership, servicing, repairs, running costs (tyres, etc), petrol and insurance, and look at our typical mileage, it would be way, WAY cheaper to just get a cab everywhere. Which is precisely what my mother-in-law did.

The major disadvantage is having to wait around for a cab to arrivebut if there were a network,of uber-type vehicles floating around and that waiting could be minimised, then an 'on-call' driverless service would start to look very attractive to us.

Subscription, though? Not really. We don't really have an even enough usage for that. I would much prefer just on-demand.

Sooner or later driverless will arrive, though the biggest problem is probably mixing it with human-driven vehicles on the same road network. It may be some way off yet but IMHO, the clock is definitely ticking on that.

Who will be liable? It has to be the vehicle operating company, though no doubt the per-mile fare will include an element of insurance for that .... just like it does now with human drivers of cabs.