Can Autonomous Vehicles Break the Speed Limit?

In the incredible future, robots may be able to drive your car -- but will they be able to speed? Today's self-driving cars can. Learn why in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hey, brain Stuff,
Lauren Vogel bomb here. Imagine a future in which you
climb into the back of your self 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

(00:22):
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 can. 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

(00:43):
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 design end to
go up to ten miles or sixteen kilometers faster than
the speed limit when traffic conditions made it necessary. The

(01:06):
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 plod along at
the legal limit or lower, but so far there aren't

(01:26):
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,

(01:47):
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 few sure in which autonomous
vehicles will most likely be programmed to not exceed the
posted speed limit in an area. Moreover, they're hoping that

(02:07):
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 robot

(02:29):
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 is written

(02:56):
by Patrick J. Keiger and produced by Tristan McNeil. For
more on this and lots of other future tech topics,
visit our home planet howstep works dot com. M