Inventors are optimistically ignorant of the real world. I’ve two examples, one envisioned and one experienced today.
First the envisioned one: I saw an advert where a popular shipping company used a cute little wheeled robot delivering a package. The robot was rolling along on a brightly-lit day on a beautiful sidewalk. Hehehe we all know the reality of rain, cracked streets and vandals.
Secondly the experienced one: I’m driving a rental car this week. The car has a fancy cruise control feature that borders on self-driving. It will cruise at the requested speed until it senses an obstacle ahead of it (another vehicle, for example). Now I know cruise control isn’t meant for heavy traffic, but I’m testing the waters here and seeing how self-driving cars would fare in our world.
Sadly they will fail. Not because of technology. Because they will follow rules and people will not.
Case in point: I set my cruise speed at slightly higher than the crowd I was driving with. Since the machine was being correct, it left a safe stopping distance between me and the vehicle ahead of me. When the person ahead sped up, I did as well. When he or she left my lane and left a gap, my vehicle sped up until it reached my requested speed, and slowed down to match the new vehicle ahead of me.
All this in the rain, no less. I was impressed with the technology.
But I had to take over eventually.
Not because the machine stopped working. It was working perfectly.
I stopped using it because the people around me were not working perfectly. My vehicle was actually causing an unsafe condition due to others’ horrible driving habits.
The issue was the nice safe spot between me and the vehicle ahead of me. After a few minutes in a crowd, I noticed that EVERYONE wanted to climb into that spot. Even the fellas behind me. They’d weave around behind me to fill that gap… meaning my vehicle would politely slow down to open another gap, and another jumpy jackrabbit would hop into THAT gap. And so on.
It was like watching ducks at a pond at feeding time. I didn’t want to cause a wreck, so I fell in line and left the 3/4-car length gap between me and the vehicle ahead of me to calm everyone down.
My lessons learned for today? Technology will never work as seen on the tv adverts until people are no longer allowed to use it, haha
(update)
Ah hey, well good news here. I figured out how to change the safety gap from 3 car lengths (the default) to 1 car length (apparently the smallest allowable in Houston traffic).
This was very nice and usable on the way home. I’ll give it a go with the morning crowd to see the reaction.
Now I’m wondering how to retrofit this on my older truck, haha