Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogel bomb here. Imagine a future in which you
Speaker 1: climb into the back of your self driving autonomous vehicle
Speaker 1: and instructed to take you on a late night fast
Speaker 1: food run. Imagine also that you're particularly famished that night.
Speaker 1: Would you be able to tell the computer to exceed
Speaker 1: the posted speed limit and get you to your chicken
Speaker 1: nuggets a little more quickly? Or will the system remind
Speaker 1: you in a polite but firm, synthesized voice that you
Speaker 1: have can. That's a hard question to answer, since level
Speaker 1: five autonomous vehicles, the hypothetical ones equipped to be able
Speaker 1: to drive in any sort of environment with no human intervention,
Speaker 1: are still somewhere away off in the future. But it
Speaker 1: seems likely that when robotic cars hit the market, they'll
Speaker 1: be designed to stick to speed limits, except perhaps when
Speaker 1: safety requires speeding up. A few years back, when experimental
Speaker 1: autonomous vehicles first began appearing on American roads, Reuters reported
Speaker 1: that Google's self driving cars actually were design end to
Speaker 1: go up to ten miles or sixteen kilometers faster than
Speaker 1: the speed limit when traffic conditions made it necessary. The
Speaker 1: problem wasn't that the robots got unpatient, but rather that
Speaker 1: human drivers routinely exceed posted speed limits and tend to
Speaker 1: go as fast as they think they can get away
Speaker 1: with without getting a ticket. Researchers worried that with all
Speaker 1: those humans out there careening around as fast as possible,
Speaker 1: it might be dangerous for robots to plod along at
Speaker 1: the legal limit or lower, but so far there aren't
Speaker 1: any signs that autonomous cars are prone to speeding. In California,
Speaker 1: the only state that keeps track of accidents involving autonomous vehicles,
Speaker 1: there have been nearly fifty mishaps reported since, and many
Speaker 1: of them it was a human driven vehicle that rear
Speaker 1: ended an autonomous one, often when the robot cautiously slowed
Speaker 1: tield to another car or a pedestrian. In other instances,
Speaker 1: human drivers got frustrated with slow poke autonomous vehicles and
Speaker 1: clipped them as they tried to pass. According to report
Speaker 1: on Speed limits by the National Conference of State Legislatures,
Speaker 1: government traffic planners envision a few sure in which autonomous
Speaker 1: vehicles will most likely be programmed to not exceed the
Speaker 1: posted speed limit in an area. Moreover, they're hoping that
Speaker 1: regimentation will make the road safer because it will reduce
Speaker 1: the danger that develops when the roads are filled with
Speaker 1: vehicles traveling at varying rates of speed. On the downside,
Speaker 1: the author's note, a proliferation of law abiding robots will
Speaker 1: mean a reduction in the revenue that state and local
Speaker 1: governments have been getting from ticketing speeders. But if we
Speaker 1: ever get to the point where we have enough self
Speaker 1: driving cars on the road that we could have robot
Speaker 1: only highway routes, networked vehicles might be able to travel
Speaker 1: safely at higher speeds than human drivers, and University of
Speaker 1: Illinois researchers say that because autonomous vehicles are designed to
Speaker 1: adjust to and accommodate human drivers maneuvers, even a small
Speaker 1: proportion of robots driving out a highway as few as
Speaker 1: five percent of total cars could eliminate the stop and
Speaker 1: go waves that lead to congestion. Today's episode is written
Speaker 1: by Patrick J. Keiger and produced by Tristan McNeil. For
Speaker 1: more on this and lots of other future tech topics,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet howstep works dot com. M