One thing I noticed about the various self-driving efforts is that they seem to lack redundancy. I flew airliners with actual autopilots and we had redundancy built into just about every system.
Autopilots have been in aircraft for decades and the components are thoroughly engineered and tested. The Air Force modified an aircraft to where it would operate itself fully from takeoff to landing in 1947. The ability has been around for decades.
Still, the FAA sees fit to require two pilots and two sets of controls in all passenger jet and big cargo operations. The equipment can and does still have failures although it works like it should 95% of the time. Outright hard failures are easy to deal with. You just take over. What gets you is when it is operating but in a degraded condition and you've become complacent because it works 95% of the time.
What we're seeing in the self driving cars is that complacency where people trust the system too much and quit monitoring it. When the system fails or gets into something it can't handle and turns it over to the human, the distracted human is already behind the curve and it takes several seconds to asess the situation and decide what to do. Being that cars operate in close proximity to a number of immovable objects make for a deadly recipe. At 50 mph you're moving at 73 feet per second. 73 feet is more than enough distance to cross into oncoming traffic or tangle with a bridge pier, culvert or telephone pole.
Ironically, the more people are just riding in their cars, the worse their driving skills will get. Especially younger new drivers without much experience. So in the bad situations the driving computer is going to hand control over to the rusty human driver.
I find it disturbing that it took a tanker full of water to put the fire out. In that neighborhood they had fire hydrants. Not good news for rural VFD's. Not any talk of what type of haz-mat problems such as residual chemical contamination and inhalation hazards.
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Today's Featured Article - Talk of the Town: How to Remove a Broken Bolt - by Staff. Another neat discussion from the Tractor Talk Discussion Forum. The discussion started out with the following post: "I have an aluminum steering gear housing with a bolt broken off in it. The bolt is about a 3/8" x 1 1/2" bolt. I've already drilled the center of the bolt out with about 7/64" drill bit the entire length of the bolt. Only one end of the bolt is visible. I tried to use an easy out but it wasn't budging and I didn't want t
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