Here is how it works. Week one. Boy Genius makes kludge successfully perform some stunt. Boy Genius claimed to be "upstart" pioneering new technology better than corporations. Week two. Stunt car has latent bug in commercial operating system crash while car is driving by elementary school and two kids are run over at 15 miles per hour. I make my living designing flight control electronics. First you design, simulate and test the hell out of the safety protocols. Second you design, simulate, and test the hell out of the reliability protocols. Third you test the hell out of the full system with test pilots in controlled airspace. Then you do wider scale testing on a experimental basis for some months or years. In all cases you set up the infrastructure to support finding, isolating, and fixing any issue not matching exactly what is expected. At every stage of this, you ensure the design is reviewed and analyzed by experts. What this clown is doing is how people get killed. Musk is much too kind in his response.
Nightly Business Report had brief coverage on Uber launching self-driving test cars in Pittsburgh. Supposedly, you can order an Uber and ride for free if it's a self-driving one. There's a driver in the front to take over, just in case and engineer on board. - skip to 15:00. The story's under 2.5 minutes long.
Thanks to Lexus SUV Being Used for Apple's Self-Driving Software Test Spotted on the Road - Mac Rumors, I found a link from there to Request Rejected. From the above I didn't realize the reports were publicly and easily accessible. At least you can see some stats for such tests conducted on public roads in CA. Request Rejected has some more info and reports.
Big news yesterday out of the PNW: New legislation allowing companies to test AV's without anyone in the car at all.
