Originally Posted by
RetiredF4
Cars stop on a daily basis in heavy traffic, even with drivers.
No, they don't. I don't remember the last time a car just stopped in the middle of the road in front of me, unless there was a queue of traffic ahead, or some other obstacle that we all had to stop for.
And I didn't say they would be programmed to stop within the second on the driving lane.
If the car doesn't know what to do, it has to stop before the 'I don't know what to do' becomes 'oops, I crashed'. It can't just keep driving
because you just said it doesn't know how!
Get real, highways have emergency parking lanes and exits and streets have parking spaces close by. Nothing compareable to an autonomous aircraft flying anywhere except on a ten mile final.
And highways have lanes of traffic the car has to get through to the side of the road before it runs into the thing it doesn't know how to handle. It has to slow down, because otherwise it will crash, and then it has to get between those other cars that aren't slowing down.
A real autonomous car has to be able to handle all situations by itself, or it's an accident waiting to happen. It can't 'just stop' when it runs into something it's not programmed to handle.
But if you think that soft- and hardware are not able to park an future autonomous car in short time to prevent it from causing accidents, what do you then expect from an autonomous airliner?
When was the last time you saw an airliner swerve to a stop at the side of the sky?
Besides, the airliner would apparently be pilotless, so it has to handle every possible situation, since it has no pilot left to take over.