The more you know about self-driving cars the less safe you will feel

I've been saying this for quite some time, and every so often something else comes out about how the self-driving systems are designed.  It all just reinforces how bad these are.  Another of these revelations is out and it's a doozie.

It seems that testing shows that self-driving cars are running into stopped cars, at least during test trials.  They don't have any trouble avoiding moving cars, just cars that have pulled over partly onto the shoulder.  The reason will blow your mind:

Radar has low angular resolution, so it had only a crude idea of the environment around the vehicle. What radar is quite good at, however, is figuring out how fast objects are moving. And so a key strategy for making the technology work was to ignore anything that wasn't moving. A car's radar will detect a lot of stationary objects located somewhere ahead of the car: these might be trees, parked cars, bridges, overhead signs, and so forth.

These systems were designed to work on controlled-access freeways, and, in the vast majority of cases, stationary objects near a freeway would be on the side of the road (or suspended above it) rather than directly in the car's path. Early adaptive cruise control systems simply didn't have the capability to distinguish the vast majority of objects that were near the road from the tiny minority that were on the road.

So cars were programmed to focus on maintaining a safe distance from other moving objects—cars—and to ignore stationary objects. Designers assumed it would still be the job of the human driver to pay attention to the road and intervene if there was an obstacle directly in the roadway. [emphasis added by me - Borepatch]

This is exactly why I have been saying that I don't trust these systems.  I don't know what design assumptions went into them, or into the components that make up the system.  It may even be that the system designers don't know all the assumptions, at least those in the components they use.

And the assumptions can kill you.

This article describes a test done by the American Automobile Association - well done, AAA.  There's a lot of ass covering by the auto manufacturers saying that drivers are ultimately in charge, yadda yadda.  Here's the problem with that:

This may be a fundamental problem with this approach to driver assistance technology. The ADAS is supposed to do most of the driving, but the human driver is supposed to still monitor the system and make sure it doesn't make mistakes. But our brains aren't wired for this level of monotony. Monitoring a system that works correctly 99 percent of the time is in some ways harder—not easier—than just driving the car yourself. And monitoring a system that works correctly 99.9 percent of the time is even harder, because it's that much easier for our brains to get distracted by something else.

Not to mention that this isn't what marketeers are selling, or what people want to buy.  People want "Drive me to the supermarket", not "do some of the driving to the supermarket while I do some of it, too."  That's a hard sell for a system that must add thousands of dollars to the vehicle's purchase price.

Me, I want to know how to disable these damned things.