Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff. I'm Lauren vogel Bomb, and this is a classic brain Stuff episode. This one originally aired a few years back, and unfortunately, we're not very much closer to having autonomous vehicles capable of driving us around. I say unfortunately because it could be a lot safer than human drivers managed to be, because they would follow the rules of the road better, Which brings us to an interesting question.
Why can today's autonomous vehicles exceed the speed limit? Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vogel Bomb. Here, imagine a future in which you climb into the back of yourself driving autonomous vehicle and instructed to take you on a late night fast food run. Imagine also that you're particularly famished that night. Would you be able to tell the computer to exceed the posted speed limit and get you to your chicken
nuggets a little more quickly? Or will the system remind you in a polite but firm, synthesized voice that you have to That's a hard question to answer, since level five autonomous vehicles, the hypothetical ones equipped to be able to drive in any sort of environment with no human intervention, are still somewhere away off in the future, but it seems likely that when robotic cars hit the market, they'll be designed to stick to speed limits, except perhaps when
safety requires speeding up. A few years back, when experimental autonomous vehicles first began appearing on American roads, Reuters reported that Google's self driving cars actually were designed to go up to ten miles or sixteen kilometers faster than the speed limit when traffic conditions made it necessary. The problem wasn't that the robots got unpatient, but rather that human drivers routinely exceed posted speed limits and tend to go as fast as they think they can get away with
without getting a ticket. Researchers worried that with all those humans out there careening around as fast as possible, it might be dangerous for robots to plot along at the legal limit or lower, but so far, there aren't any
signs that autonomous cars are prone to speeding. In California, the only state that keeps track of accidents involving autonomous vehicles, there have been nearly fifty mishaps reported since, and many of them it was a human driven vehicle that rear ended an autonomous one, often when the robot cautiously slowed tield to another car or a pedestrian. In other instances, human drivers got frustrated with slow poke autonomous vehicles and
clipped them as they tried to pass. According to report on Speed Limits by the National Conference of State Legislatures, government traffic planners envision a future in which autonomous vehicles will most likely be programmed to not exceed the posted speed limit in an area. Moreover, they're hoping that regimentation will make the road safer because it will reduce the danger that develops when the roads are filled with vehicles
traveling at varying rates of speed. On the downside, the author's note, a proliferation of law abiding robots will mean a reduction in the revenue that state and local governments have been getting from ticketing speeders. But if we ever get to the point where we have enough self driving cars on the road that we could have row bought only highway routes, networked vehicles might be able to travel
safely at higher speeds than human drivers. And University of Illinois researchers say that because autonomous vehicles are designed to adjust to and accommodate human drivers, maneuvers even a small proportion of robots driving out a highway as few as five percent of total cars could eliminate the stop and go waves that lead to congestion. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Kiger and produced by Tristan McNeil and
Tyler Clang. For more on this lots of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com, the brain stuff It's production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows