While I am sympathetic to this being a massive echo chamber, with pretty much every stakeholder being incredibly wrong, it would be nice if the reporters in this industry could escape the echo chamber and do some real investigative journalism.
This article, like that echo chamber, assumes public shadow and safety driving is a tenable practice that will actually create L4 systems and the deaths it causes are necessary and for the greater good. None of that is remotely true.
The approaches being used by most AV makers to develop these systems, public shadow/safety driving and deep learning, are untenable, have killed seven people for no reason and will kill thousands more when accident scenarios are learned. It is impossible to drive the trillion miles or spend $300B to stumble and restumble on all the scenarios necessary to complete the effort. In addition the process harms people for no reason. The first issue is handover. The process cannot be made safe for most complex scenarios because the time to regain proper situational awareness and do the right thing, especially in time critical scenarios. cannot be provided. Another dangerous area is learning accident scenarios. AV makers will have to run thousands of accident scenarios thousands of times to accomplish this.That will cause thousands of injuries and deaths.The final issue is Deep Learning which is often fooled by patterns and shadows. The solution is to switch 99.9% of this to use DoD simulation technology and Dynamic Sense and Avoid with Dynamic Collision Avoidance with targeted Deep Learning.
Proposal for Successfully Creating an Autonomous Ground or Air Vehicle
