Technology

Eh, it's probably good to have regardless?

It's less about being careful around the car and more about how you might interact with it. For example, honking the horn or flashing your beams wouldn't have the same effect. On that note, it might be nice to have some way of telling a self driving car to temporarily use elevated sensors or something, the same way a horn tells a driver that something is wrong. As long as there's a way to prevent abuse of the system

I don't know much about these lights, but we COULD use some new standards in general with how many things have changed with cars in recent years. Brake lights on electric vehicles being another thing to consider.

That "gentle horn" everyone wants being another

As a Level 3 system, the driver is permitted to take their hands off the wheel, their feet off the pedals, and divert their attention away from the road. [...]

The turquoise markers will alert other drivers to the fact that your vehicle is driving itself, so hopefully they won't be alarmed if they see you doing other things while behind the wheel.

warning lights

Lol, this is like calling the turn signals warning lights. Letting others know something about your driving isn't a warning, it's just an indicator.

To play the devil's advocate: early cars needed a guy with a flag im front of them because people were used to horses and carriages and not automobiles. After a while that stopped being a thing.

But yeah, self driving cars are not really ready.

If we need signs saying student driver, the driver is not ready

Aye, credit where it's due; this is a great way to differentiate between human and machine controlled devices. It's detectable by both, and can help in cases where people blame the autodrive, or car companies claim human error.

Eventually the reverse will be equally important. So this will be a good idea for decades at least.

On that note, can we talk about how shit a lot of reverse lights are? In addition to indicating that you're backing up, they're also supposed to function as a sort of rear-facing headlight so you can see what your backing up towards, but their size, placement, and brightness on a lot of cars makes them pretty much useless for that in a lot of cases.

I'm not saying they need to be as bright as your regular headlights, that would be serious overkill, but they should probably be noticeably brighter than a turquoise self-driving indicator light would ever need to be.

Maybe light placement is more important?

Since it's Mercedes-Benz doing it, they'll just write the new law themselves and tell the German minister of traffic to push it through.

But I guess Mercedes already wrote that law for our government to copy. How convenient.

How dare a company try to work with governments to create a new safety feature!

Either way, it's a useful starting point for the conversation to be had I guess.

Better for some proactivity then nobody ever progressing anything, right?

So should companies not try to innovate or invent things until the German government tells them it's ok?

No law change needed, the StZVO is a mere decree. Also EU law takes precedence Mercedes probably isn't even going to bother getting it through German bureaucracy but will go straight to Brussels.

I'm sorry, but I can't actually imagine that happening where I live.
Do people who cut others off care who's driving?

Most FSD cars have that. People just ignore the warnings and popups.

I think it's a pretty good idea, at least for this period of transition towards self-driving vehicles. I think it's useful information for other drivers to know that the vehicle is being controlled by a computer and not a real human.

If only there was some kind of universal communication technology that didn't require line of sight, worked over distances out to say 100m and was reasonably inexpensive to implement...then we wouldn't need to communicate using the modern equivalent of semaphore.