Mercedes-Benz debuts turquoise exterior lights to indicate the car is self-driving | A visual indicator for other drivers::undefined
If we need warning lights for self driving cars, the technology is not ready.
Eh, it’s probably good to have regardless?
It’s less about being careful around the car and more about how you might interact with it. For example, honking the horn or flashing your beams wouldn’t have the same effect. On that note, it might be nice to have some way of telling a self driving car to temporarily use elevated sensors or something, the same way a horn tells a driver that something is wrong. As long as there’s a way to prevent abuse of the system
I don’t know much about these lights, but we COULD use some new standards in general with how many things have changed with cars in recent years. Brake lights on electric vehicles being another thing to consider.
That “gentle horn” everyone wants being another
“Gentle horn” sounds like a 80s romantic pop song.
Here you go
You’re still the driver in the self-driving car. If someone honks, you have pedals and a wheel in front of you. It always comes down to driver neglect. It’s like blaming the cruise control for speeding, but giving cruise control more responsibilities.
The standard should endure past this stage. It’s not necessary now, but it would be good to start getting used to some kind of a symbol now
Eventually when cars move past this stage, then we’ll need it
To play the devil’s advocate: early cars needed a guy with a flag im front of them because people were used to horses and carriages and not automobiles. After a while that stopped being a thing.
But yeah, self driving cars are not really ready.
Id argue that motorized carriages back then werent ready for the public.
As a Level 3 system, the driver is permitted to take their hands off the wheel, their feet off the pedals, and divert their attention away from the road. […]
The turquoise markers will alert other drivers to the fact that your vehicle is driving itself, so hopefully they won’t be alarmed if they see you doing other things while behind the wheel.
🤦
if we need warning lights for ANYTHING, the humanity is just not ready.
One could argue that brake lights are a warning light 🤔.
Turn signals are literally called warning lights in my language.
Same purpose as warning labels: to keep ding dongs alive so they can spend more money
Well, theirs probably isn’t.
Good idea I think, but these could be mistaken for reversing lights
On that note, can we talk about how shit a lot of reverse lights are? In addition to indicating that you’re backing up, they’re also supposed to function as a sort of rear-facing headlight so you can see what your backing up towards, but their size, placement, and brightness on a lot of cars makes them pretty much useless for that in a lot of cases.
I’m not saying they need to be as bright as your regular headlights, that would be serious overkill, but they should probably be noticeably brighter than a turquoise self-driving indicator light would ever need to be.
Brb, wiring up a set of these so I can blame the car for missing a speed sign
Even if this would be a good idea, you can’t just put some non regulated lights on a car. This would need a law change in Germany to be approved and would probably take years of burocrazy until she get beards figured out the exact hue these lights need to emit. But I guess Mercedes already wrote that law for our government to copy. How convenient.
Since it’s Mercedes-Benz doing it, they’ll just write the new law themselves and tell the German minister of traffic to push it through.
Either way, it’s a useful starting point for the conversation to be had I guess.
Better for some proactivity then nobody ever progressing anything, right?
why would i need to know another car is self driving though?
I would love to have an indicator for adaptive cruise control because the way it only reacts to the car right in front of you rather aggressively means it causes shockwave traffic jams unless the human driver behind you keeps enough distance.
Humans are already experts at causing shockwave traffic jams, so I wouldn’t count on them to reduce them.
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