Why Level-3 Autonomy is a major milestone in self-driving cars
There is no such thing as Level-3 Autonomy, the car can either drive itself safely or not.<p>A slow moving lane of cars is a dangerous environment where things can turn catastrophic in an instant, with zero time to react for a human driver reading their news. Bikes and motorcycles come out of nowhere and pass you between the lanes. Pedestrians and children will attempt to cross the road, encouraged by the apparent slow speed. You will not see them since your view is blocked by close large vehicles.  The same for essential signs and signaling.  Slow moving can turn to fast moving intermittently and frustrated drivers will unexpectedly go full throttle to cut in front of you. You might find yourself suddenly stranded in the middle of an intersection with lateral trafic. Trafic is slow because your lane is blocked by construction, which requires carefully observing the human readable cues of the drivers in the other lanes, which might yield to you or not. All manner of bad things can and will happen with a scary probability.<p>If an automated car can handle all that safely without reverting to human assistance, what exactly can&#x27;t it handle, and why is it not full self driving?<p>The 3 and 4 SAE levels were always a dangerous fiction, they imply you can bring to market uncomplete products that take some part of the human effort. This is simply not how the minds of human drivers works: if drivers lose focus to the road they can&#x27;t regain it instantly in a fraction of a second when prompted by the failing AI algorithm. A half- self driving car is a defective product that is bound to kill someone, regulators should reject any products short of real self driving.