Driverless Car Technology

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/20/opinion/driverless-car-technology.html

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To the Editor:

Re “Woman’s Death in Arizona Casts a Pall on Driverless Car Testing” (front page, March 20):

Dry weather. Wide roads. Little traffic. An emergency backup driver at the wheel. Even under these optimal conditions, an autonomous vehicle ran down and killed Elaine Herzberg as she walked with her bicycle on Sunday night in Tempe, Ariz.

Autonomous vehicles may be alluring, but we’re not ready for them, and clearly they’re not ready for us. As pointed out in “How Driverless Vehicles See the World” (news article, March 20), the dominant technology — lidar, or light-detection and ranging devices — “works pretty well” at low speeds when the signals of multiple autonomous cars don’t interfere with one another.

Because of lidar’s limitations, other detection technologies — cameras, radar, GPS — are loaded onto driverless cars. Even then, tragedy strikes.

While engineers work out the gaping holes in driverless technology, let’s remind ourselves that ordinary humans are doing better than pretty well at navigating some 3.2 trillion miles of America’s roads every year.

Meanwhile, let’s turn our focus to upgrading sorely neglected mass transit systems that can reduce the traffic hazards on our most crowded roads and highways.

PHILIP WARBURG, NEWTON, MASS.

The writer is a nonresident senior fellow at Boston University’s Institute for Sustainable Energy.