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Driverless Cars Need Emergency Vehicle Detection, It’s An Imperative

Lance Eliot
11 min readApr 28, 2019

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Dr. Lance Eliot, AI Insider

Self-driving driverless autonomous cars need to be watching for emergency vehicles

It used to be that when you heard the sound of a siren coming from a police car or ambulance or fire truck that all nearby drivers would scurry to pull their cars over to the side of the road.

Those times seemed to have passed, unfortunately.

In California (and in most other locales in the United States), it’s the law that you must yield the right-of-way to any emergency vehicle that is using a siren or deploying flashing lights. You used to see drivers pull over religiously and without hesitation, but lament that it seems that today’s drivers are less apt to abide by this law.

Some drivers will speed-up in hopes of somehow racing ahead of the emergency vehicle. Some drivers make a rather feeble attempt to pull over, as though they are quasi-acknowledging the law, but pretty much otherwise are determined to proceed and unwilling to relinquish the road to the emergency vehicle. Whether due to laziness, disdain, confusion, ignorance, or defiance, many drivers aren’t as rigorous as they once were about obeying this law.

Of course, these scofflaws are endangering all potential stakeholders, including endangering themselves, the passengers in their car, other drivers and their passengers, and the…

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Lance Eliot
Lance Eliot

Written by Lance Eliot

Dr. Lance B. Eliot is a renowned global expert on AI, successful startup founder, global CIO/CTO, , was a top exec at a major Venture Capital (VC) firm.

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