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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,

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Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. Imagine a future in which you

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Speaker 1: climb into the back of your self driving autonomous vehicle

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Speaker 1: and instructed to take you on a late night fast

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Speaker 1: food run. Imagine also that you're particularly famished that night.

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Speaker 1: Would you be able to tell the computer to exceed

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Speaker 1: the posted speed limit and get you to your chicken

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Speaker 1: nuggets a little more quickly? Or will the system remind

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Speaker 1: you in a polite but firm, synthesized voice that you

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Speaker 1: have can. That's a hard question to answer, since level

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Speaker 1: five autonomous vehicles, the hypothetical ones equipped to be able

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Speaker 1: to drive in any sort of environment with no human intervention,

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Speaker 1: are still somewhere away off in the future. But it

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Speaker 1: seems likely that when robotic cars hit the market, they'll

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Speaker 1: be designed to stick to speed limits, except perhaps when

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Speaker 1: safety requires speeding up. A few years back, when experimental

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Speaker 1: autonomous vehicles first began appearing on American roads, Reuters reported

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Speaker 1: that Google's self driving cars actually were design end to

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Speaker 1: go up to ten miles or sixteen kilometers faster than

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Speaker 1: the speed limit when traffic conditions made it necessary. The

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Speaker 1: problem wasn't that the robots got unpatient, but rather that

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Speaker 1: human drivers routinely exceed posted speed limits and tend to

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Speaker 1: go as fast as they think they can get away

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Speaker 1: with without getting a ticket. Researchers worried that with all

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Speaker 1: those humans out there careening around as fast as possible,

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Speaker 1: it might be dangerous for robots to plod along at

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Speaker 1: the legal limit or lower, but so far there aren't

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Speaker 1: any signs that autonomous cars are prone to speeding. In California,

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Speaker 1: the only state that keeps track of accidents involving autonomous vehicles,

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Speaker 1: there have been nearly fifty mishaps reported since, and many

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Speaker 1: of them it was a human driven vehicle that rear

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Speaker 1: ended an autonomous one, often when the robot cautiously slowed

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Speaker 1: tield to another car or a pedestrian. In other instances,

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Speaker 1: human drivers got frustrated with slow poke autonomous vehicles and

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Speaker 1: clipped them as they tried to pass. According to report

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Speaker 1: on Speed limits by the National Conference of State Legislatures,

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Speaker 1: government traffic planners envision a few sure in which autonomous

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Speaker 1: vehicles will most likely be programmed to not exceed the

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Speaker 1: posted speed limit in an area. Moreover, they're hoping that

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Speaker 1: regimentation will make the road safer because it will reduce

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Speaker 1: the danger that develops when the roads are filled with

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Speaker 1: vehicles traveling at varying rates of speed. On the downside,

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Speaker 1: the author's note, a proliferation of law abiding robots will

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Speaker 1: mean a reduction in the revenue that state and local

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Speaker 1: governments have been getting from ticketing speeders. But if we

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Speaker 1: ever get to the point where we have enough self

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Speaker 1: driving cars on the road that we could have robot

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Speaker 1: only highway routes, networked vehicles might be able to travel

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Speaker 1: safely at higher speeds than human drivers, and University of

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Speaker 1: Illinois researchers say that because autonomous vehicles are designed to

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Speaker 1: adjust to and accommodate human drivers maneuvers, even a small

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Speaker 1: proportion of robots driving out a highway as few as

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Speaker 1: five percent of total cars could eliminate the stop and

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Speaker 1: go waves that lead to congestion. Today's episode is written

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Speaker 1: by Patrick J. Keiger and produced by Tristan McNeil. For

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Speaker 1: more on this and lots of other future tech topics,

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Speaker 1: visit our home planet howstep works dot com. M