Talk Morgan Forums Community Vehicle Talk (non-Morgan) Mandatory speed limiters coming soon?

. They will have a boxing glove on telescopeic rods and there will be a punch up.

These will remain a pipe dream in rural areas like mine with mostly single track roads.

In theory, the problem shouldn't occur, an autonomous car should be able to transmit its position to other cars in the area, and also be aware of the position of other similarly-equipped vehicles. So they'd be able to negotiate the most effective strategy to avoid getting stuck, like pulling into a passing place and waiting for a few seconds.

Like Richard, I live in an area which has many single-track roads, and I am heartily sick of people's unwillingness or inability to reverse to the nearest passing spot. At least an autonomous vehicle should be able to do so quickly and efficiently.

Personally I'm a fan of autonomous technology, if only for intensely selfish reasons. We have no children and live in an area with no bus services. Autonomous vehicles offer us a lifeline for continued independence in our old age.

Tim. I think it will be a long time before that degree of autonomous vehicles will be available. You only have to do a Google search for "Tesla autopilot crashes" to see that the technology is far from perfected.

No worries mate, hopefully I won't need it for another 15 years.

The starting point is that none of this is being introduced to stop people having fun by going very fast in cars. It is being introduced to save lives. Whether you agree with it of not, if slowing down vehicular traffic results in less deaths then its a wise thing to do. And I think the authorities understand that it’s not speed that kills but what happens when things go wrong at speed. The technology has a long way to go but when it reaches the point where the accident rate in autonomous vehicles (there will be accidents) is significantly below that of non-autonomous vehicles there will be a moral imperative to legislate in favour of autonomy.

However, I don’t think they’ll ever be able to develop an autonomous vehicle that can keep up with Tim on the narrow roads around where he lives!

I can't really see how an autonomous vehicle can detect the soft edges of roads and lanes of variable widths and conditions without some continuous detectable device being built into the safe parameters of a road edge. I have driven down many 'highways' recently that have had severe drops from the road surface into adjacent ruts caused by large vehicles running wide of the surface and have also come across roads where intermittent raised kerbs have been installed next to gulleys. These potential hazards would surely need to be readily detected by any autonomous vehicle?
Narrow country lanes of the sort mentioned in previous posts are also prone to the ingress of vegetation.
I don't think that I am a 'stick in the mud' (unlike an autonomous car on a country lane perhaps?!) as I am intrigued by the technology and can see its use in town centres with regular road configurations but I struggle to see how it can be universally adopted across the entire network.

This thread has made me start to experiment a bit with my autonomous cruise control which is one of the elements that would make up the system of an autonomous vehicle.
I do use it on the motorway a lot particularly though the 50mph road work sections (most of the M4, M5 and M6) where it will lock on to the car in front and maintain a predetermined gap (which you can adjust) without requiring any input of brakes or accelerator. This works well.
However I have been trying it on smaller B roads with bends and lamp posts. This does not work well as when you are going round a bend with a lamp post in the appropriate spot it will sense this as a stationary vehicle and will brake sharply only then to accelerate sharply once the lamp post is no longer in line of sight of the sensors.
I think the development of autonomous systems for use on motorways will be a lot easier than smaller B roads.

In Salisbury there are multiple urban and rural locations where the Mercedes' camera doesn't read a speed limit sign, or reads the wrong one. I only get a flashing speed limit sign, but if the camera was linked to the cruise control it would frequently leave me at the wrong speed, some times too fast, others too slow.
In the New Forest the 40 mph signs are painted on the roads. There are no post mounted signs. The camera does not see the road surface signs.

The solution is careful management of all the speed limit signs, replacing damaged ones, moving others and cutting back vegetation. I don't see the County Council doing that. They don't have the resources.

The roads managed by Highways England (the A36) are better.

A few years ago someone nicked a lot of the metal road signs in our area. I don't know if the replacements are now plastic but there is still the possibility of signs being knocked down by errant drivers or vandalised so absolute reliance on them would be questionable.