Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff. I'm Lauren vogel Bomb, and this is a
Speaker 1: classic brain Stuff episode. This one originally aired a few
Speaker 1: years back, and unfortunately, we're not very much closer to
Speaker 1: having autonomous vehicles capable of driving us around. I say
Speaker 1: unfortunately because it could be a lot safer than human
Speaker 1: drivers managed to be, because they would follow the rules
Speaker 1: of the road better, Which brings us to an interesting question.
Speaker 1: Why can today's autonomous vehicles exceed the speed limit? Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren vogel Bomb. Here, imagine a future in
Speaker 1: which you climb into the back of yourself driving autonomous
Speaker 1: vehicle and instructed to take you on a late night
Speaker 1: fast 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 to 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 designed to go
Speaker 1: up to ten miles or sixteen kilometers faster than the
Speaker 1: speed limit when traffic conditions made it necessary. The problem
Speaker 1: wasn't that the robots got unpatient, but rather that human
Speaker 1: drivers routinely exceed posted speed limits and tend to go
Speaker 1: as fast as they think they can get away with
Speaker 1: without getting a ticket. Researchers worried that with all those
Speaker 1: humans out there careening around as fast as possible, it
Speaker 1: might be dangerous for robots to plot along at the
Speaker 1: legal limit or lower, but so far, there aren't any
Speaker 1: 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 future in which autonomous vehicles
Speaker 1: will most likely be programmed to not exceed the posted
Speaker 1: speed limit in an area. Moreover, they're hoping that regimentation
Speaker 1: will make the road safer because it will reduce the
Speaker 1: danger that develops when the roads are filled with vehicles
Speaker 1: traveling at varying rates of speed. On the downside, the
Speaker 1: author's note, a proliferation of law abiding robots will mean
Speaker 1: a reduction in the revenue that state and local governments
Speaker 1: have been getting from ticketing speeders. But if we ever
Speaker 1: get to the point where we have enough self driving
Speaker 1: cars on the road that we could have row bought
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 was written
Speaker 1: by Patrick J. Kiger and produced by Tristan McNeil and
Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. For more on this lots of other topics,
Speaker 1: visit how stuff works dot com, the brain stuff It's
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