无人驾驶汽车离我们有多远？

    如今奥迪和其他很多品牌可能都搭载了自适应巡航控制系统这类配置，能让汽车与前车保持安全距离，同时维持匀速行驶。还有几个品牌采用了动态车道辅助系统，车辆无意中偏离车道时能发出预警，同时轻轻地让车回到正确的车道上。

    在大量传感器、各种天气条件、路况变化、各种行人和其他车辆并存的情况下——机器人逻辑必须能安全及时地做出转弯、加速和刹车的决定。而相关的软硬件，以及处理所有这些信息的算法现在都日益便宜、小型化并且运算速度更快。去年奥迪试验车辆的后备箱里还塞满了控制系统；而今年，作为车辆大脑、位于仪表板上的定制芯片只有一本书那么大。

    现在，美国各州和联邦政府的监管者还是得决定在什么情况下可以允许采用这些所谓的自动系统。或者说，如果这些系统确实被认为可使汽车更安全的话，是否应要求厂商都标配自适应巡航控制或车道辅助系统。

    如今的汽车保险流程非常简单。但是，如果自动驾驶汽车撞了行人怎么办？或者说，如果卡车撞了自动驾驶汽车又怎么办？一旦自动驾驶汽车变得日益普及，实际情况就会告诉我们到底会发生多少事故。保险精算师手里有统计工具，能算出这些事故会造成多大损失，也能算出每个人要付多少保险费。

    至于说法律责任，奥迪新闻发布会的一个问题是这么概括的：“如果一辆没有驾驶者的车出了事故，到底该谁负责：司机？车主？还是奥迪？”没人有确切答案。但可以肯定的是，无人驾驶汽车出事的概率会比传统汽车要低——否则干嘛要研发它们呢？（财富中文网）

    译者：清远   

    Today's Audis and many other brands already may be equipped with features like adaptive cruise control that keeps a car a safe distance and constant speed behind cars ahead. Several have dynamic lane assist, which warn when a car is leaving a lane inadvertently -- and can gently steer the car back.

    Given a multitude of sensors, weather conditions, road changes, pedestrians, and other vehicles -- robotic logic must be able to decide safely and instantaneously whether to turn, accelerate, or brake. The software, hardware, and algorithms that sift all this information are getting cheaper, smaller, and faster. Last year, the control systems filled the trunk of an Audi vehicle; this year, custom chips that function as the brain sit on a board about the size of a book.

    State and federal regulators still must decide under what circumstances to permit so-called autonomous systems or, perhaps, whether to mandate features like adaptive cruise control or lane assist, if they are deemed to make automobile travel more safe.

    Auto insurance today is a very straightforward process. But what about when a piloted car hits a pedestrian? Or when a truck hits a piloted car? Once piloted driving becomes more common, real-world experience will show how many accidents happen. Actuaries have statistical tools for assessing how much accidents will cost and, therefore, how much everyone will pay in insurance premiums.

    As for legal responsibility, a question at an Audi press conference summed it up this way: "If a car without a driver has an accident, who is responsible: the driver? The owner of the car? Audi?" No one has answered the questions definitively, but it's a good bet that driverless cars will be involved in far fewer accidents than ones with -- otherwise, why have them?