Humans have a hard enough time dealing with them as is, but as it turns out, computers cannot make heads or tails of Melbourne’s fabled inner-city hook turns either, and it’s bringing the burgeoning self-driving car revolutions hopelessly undone.
Mercedes-Benz is in the middle of testing autonomous vehicles across both Sydney and Melbourne, and while the car was reportedly able to mostly handle a drive between the two cities via Canberra, the technology has been utterly rinsed by the one true unique quirk of Melbourne CBD driving.
The hook turns, as you’re all probably aware, is the strange rule that dictates drivers turning right at certain intersections have to do so from the very left lane. They pull up virtually across traffic waiting at the perpendicular red rights, waiting until the lights change, and then peel off to the right across the road.
It’s a rule in place mostly to keep trams from getting caught up in city traffic, and it’s bamboozling the living shit out of computers trying to navigate it.
Mercedes-Benz team leader Jochen Haab said the team arrived back in March to collect data and were almost immediately thrown by the sheer amount of random variables that a hook turn entails.
The thing about the variables in a hook turn from a [computer] coding and sensor standpoint. You need the car to go left and stop at a line, wait for a light, give way to trams, to cars, to bicycles, to pedestrians, and then complete a right turn before oncoming traffic. For a programmer, this is very difficult. There are so many random variables.
Now almost eight months later they’re no closer to solving the riddle, with a spokesperson from Mercedes-Benz Australia admitting that the current autonomous vehicle technology is simply not able to deal with turning right from a left lane, hinting that its default response to the road quirk would be to utterly panic and do exactly what 9/10 real-life human drivers would do: fang it around the block instead.
As it stands today an autonomous vehicle would not be compatible with the complexities of a hook turn. The vehicle would do what most people do who aren’t comfortable with a hook turn, and go around the block.
Nice to know that when the robot revolution inevitably takes over, we’ll be able to buy ourselves some time by taking a wide turn across some tram tracks.
Not so bloody smart now are ya, ya microchippy jerks.
