DVLA Over 70 Eye Tests

[Sparks]

Driverless cars are not like TV! Bad accidents have already started with driverless cars, and the more there are of them, the more accidents there will be, and the more people will lose confidence in them! And a lot of folk (I am not one of them) enjoy driving for the pleasure of it! If the sat nav on driverless vehicles fail, they all either stop, or crash - unsatisfactory either way. Satellites can and do fail. I have experienced it myself on a number of occasions.
Wait and see, and you will find that I am correct!
Bob

[Valvebloke]

Did you tell the government this Bob ? If so it sounds like they just decided to go ahead anyway https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-m...technology.

VB

[Sparks]

What would they know?      They say they are going to fix "Climate Change" as well, but they can't even stop the Trade Winds blowing over their £250m airport recently completed on the island of St. Helena and causing so much wind shear it is not safe to use!
All "pie in the sky!"
Here is what I think of their "driverless car" schemehttps://youtu.be/hI1nPd7hezM?list=RDhI1nPd7hezM
Bob

[Sparks]

They (the Government) do place some value on me though!
Foreign & Commonwealth Office, 2007.    Third from the right in blue shirt
Bob

[Geordie McBoyne]

Well I spent this evening driving though the streets of Newcastle to find the trade access area of the Eldon Gardens shopping complex. I Just can't believe a driverless vehicle could do that.
Can you imagine a driverless Mitsubishi L200 pick-up truck?

Geordie McBoyne.

[Valvebloke]

Well I spent this evening driving though the streets of Newcastle to find the trade access area of the Eldon Gardens shopping complex. I Just can't believe a driverless vehicle could do that ...

I think they either know or they don't. If they don't then they'll never find it. If they do then they'll be straight there. Practically nothing's impossible if someone wants it enough (we managed to put a driverless lander down through the atmosphere of Titan).

VB

[Sparks]

The driveless landers to Titan and Mars do not have any traffic to contend with.    They also creep along at a very slow rate.       Lets assume your driveless vehicles are all proceeding along the motorway at a steady 70mph, separated from each other by 25 feet.     Everything is fine and dandy, then one has a blow out.       In the twinkling of an eye, you have hundreds of vehicles smashing together at 70 mph!       What may be obvious to Geordie and myself is not necessarily obvious to those in power who, as good as they may be at their own jobs (governing), seldom seem to have much practical knowledge in anything.       Example the St. Helena airport.      Apparently no in-depth checks were made into the prevailing winds before blowing £250m building it!        Same with the DVLA, they just dismiss out of hand the professional reports from highly qualified eye consultants, and send the over 70s to Specsavers to get checked out
Bob

[pwdrive]

Looking at the way some old grumps drive, the cars might as well be driverless

Lawrence.

[Valvebloke]

The driveless landers to Titan and Mars do not have any traffic to contend with.    They also creep along at a very slow rate.       Lets assume your driveless vehicles are all proceeding along the motorway at a steady 70mph, separated from each other by 25 feet.     Everything is fine and dandy, then one has a blow out.       In the twinkling of an eye, you have hundreds of vehicles smashing together at 70 mph! .

Once the bulk of the traffic is under driverless control it won't need to be 'contended with'. I'm afraid that regarding the roads as a place to practice contention is part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Absolute speed is immaterial, it's relative speed that matters (although if you want to get into the details Cassini/Huygens reached speeds of tens of thousands of miles per hour - if that's 'a very slow rate' then you and I are driving at very different speeds  ).

Your argument about wheel failure is proof that trains will never work. But they do. I once collected my aged parents from Heathrow and was driving home at the same speed as everyone else on the M4 (more than 70, I have to admit) when just east of J6 the front offside tyre of my Renault 25 suddenly deflated. The ride became unusually bumpy and a noise like a low-flying helicopter made me look up into the sky for a moment before I realised what had happened. I checked my mirrors, signalled left, pulled onto the hard shoulder, changed the wheel and continued home. The people who've looked at the stats reckon that if we could eliminate all of the accidents caused by driver error at the cost of accepting more accidents arising from acts of God (suspension collapses, deer running into the traffic, meteorite impact etc) we'd have fewer dead people, not more.

We have an ageing population. I'm afraid our faculties (mine included) deteriorate as we get older. Plenty of us eventually have to hand our licences back. Rather than tying folks down to public transport or to just not travelling, giving them the option of a driverless vehicle seems like a no-brainer. Not to mention the over-tired, the drunk, the inattentive, those hooked to their phones, all of whom are sharing the road with us at the moment.

It'll take a while, and there will be issues requiring changes to vehicle design, vehicle usage, road layout etc but if I was 20 years younger I'd wager a tidy sum that by 2050 almost all of the vehicles on Britain's trunk roads will be driverless.

VB

[radioman]

My new car has a radar sensor plus cameras and issues false warnings because it can't tell the difference between a genuine obstacle and a roadside sign !
(it's been back to the dealer but was found to be working correctly...)
The single-track roads around here have no white lines to follow either so driverless cars will never work on these roads.
Also, how good will they be at avoiding pot-holes ?

Andy