Are driverless cars equipped for accidents?

It’ll cause accidents to plummet and they’ll be equipped

In the six years of our project, we’ve been involved in 16 minor accidents during more than 2 million miles of autonomous and manual driving combined. Not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.

I believed I had heard a driverless car’s response upon an accident on NPR, but I can’t produce evidence.

They don’t exactly have a standard set yet, so at least for the moment, it’s one of those things that varies by manufacturer.

The real question is, will they be equipped to make ethical decisions?
Say a car swerves onto your side of the road, and the only way to prevent a head on collision is to evade to the right, where a group of pedestrians is walking.
Will the car decide to run over the pedestrians to save you, or will the car sacrifice your life to save the pedestrians?

Ethical dilemma.

I don’t know why they aren’t using solar powered variable speed limit signs more. The technology is already out there.
Signs that can physically display a lower the speed limit if there is, say, an 8” snowfall.

@ibstubro Easy; it costs a bit for the signs, and a shitload to have the highway crews install them. The cost of the manpower alone would likely break budgets even if the cost of the signs themselves is manageable.

I live on a busy 2 lane highway and they replaced every sign last year.
I don’t know of one there was any problem with, or any new ones that included updated info.

I know of stretches closer to the city that have those signs. Like anything else, the more that are purchased, the cheaper they become. Seems to me like they’d be invaluable in areas that get snow.

@ibstubro Somewhere like Seattle is different though. And no matter how big a bulk discount you get on the signs, it takes the same number of man-hours to put each one up. Man-hours that are limited and often spent doing other things. We have a fair hunk of road torn up as part of a multi-year highway renovation tying up a lot of guys for a lot of hours, and that doesn’t even get into anything happening more than a mile from my house in the suburbs, like the proposed light rail expansion.

Now, if you’re making an argument that we should increase the budget to expand the relevant departments in order to be able to fix what needs to be fixed, I won’t disagree. However, that would probably involve a combination of tax hikes and spending cuts that makes sign replacement far more complex and contentious than you’re letting on. And since we’re already many years and a few trillion dollars short on maintenance alone already, I just don’t see it happening anytime soon. At least not in/near the metroplex I call home.