9 ms·

I truly believe that general purpose self driving cars are much farther away than the latest press releases would suggest. Apparently they don't work well at ni

by seibelj 11y ago

I truly believe that general purpose self driving cars are much farther away than the latest press releases would suggest. Apparently they don't work well at night, in the rain, when the road lines aren't perfect, etc[1]. They basically only work in the perfect weather and roads of Mountain View during the day. In Boston, the roads are shit, the drivers are crazy (including me), and everything is permanently under construction. Once people learn how to spot these cars, very quickly the tricks to passing them are going to be learned. Not to mention the jokers using laser pointers and whatnot to mess with them. If you think this won't happen, you are sorely naive. I think self driving cars will work for specialized cases, like long haul trucking on highways, but for the commuter, it's going to be a long ways off. [1] http://gizmodo.com/6-simple-things-googles-self-driving-car-still-cant-han-1628040470 http://gizmodo.com/6-simple-things-googles-self-driving-car-...

magicalist 11y ago
> Once people learn how to spot these cars, very quickly the tricks to passing them are going to be learned Crazy driving is itself often tricks to pass human-driven cars. > Not to mention the jokers using laser pointers and whatnot to mess with them. If you think this won't happen, you are sorely naive. No need to wait; laser pointers are effective at messing up human vision sensors today. But no epidemic yet... Most of the operation of current society depends on the vast vast majority of us not being in a mass-murderous mood.
- seibelj 11y ago
  It's harder to be aggressive when dealing with human-driven cars because people can react. The commuter dozing in his self-driving car is not aggressively driving, and with his car legally mandated to be in super-safe mode, it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic.
  - sneak 11y ago
    > it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic. So read a book or work on something on your laptop or go on Amazon and buy a present for your partner with the health insurance money you'll eventually save by registering your commute as autonomous.
  - magicalist 11y ago
    You're using a first approximation to a self-driving car ("follow all laws to the letter") to extrapolate. There are a large number of reasons you'd notice that won't work the very first time you take a car out for a drive (you give a great one: "it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic"). With no eye contact or hand gestures available it's a harder problem, but aggression and counter-aggression is going to have to be a part of any self-driving model. Even if all cars were self driven you'd still have pedestrians willing to cross the street at any sign of hesitation.
    - pekk 11y ago
      Whose problem is this? If I am in a self-driving car, I don't expect it to use "aggression" to try to compete with other drivers. I just want it to get there safely.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - derefr 11y ago
    The robot equivalent of a "work-to-rule" strike could be a possible response to this kind of behaviour: the driverless cars all around an aggressive driver could go into a slower, more defensive mode and box the aggressive driver in—to ensure the safety of neighbouring traffic, of course.
    - executesorder66 11y ago
      That's a horrible idea. What if the aggressive driver is rushing a bleeding passenger to the hospital?
      - chrisBob 11y ago
        Even in your made up thought experiment that accounts for << 1% of all aggressive driving miles I still think this is the correct approach to take. Speeding to the hospital is only superficially different than speeding and weaving through traffic on your morning commute. The biggest difference is probably that you are flustered, and less likely to make good decisions while in route. The worst accident I have ever seen was someone rushing to the hospital [1]. The threat to those around you, and the chances of an accident slowing you down outweigh the small potential time saved. It would be far better for you to learn first aid and respond appropriately than for you to drive aggressively to the hospital. [1] So there I was[2] driving through Iraq when an Iraqi army convoy approached rapidly from behind us. While swerving past my trucks, that had pulled over for them to pass, one of the vehicles left the road and rolled over multiple times. 2 people died in that accident, I applied tourniquets to 2 additional people who lost limbs, and no, they didn't get the gunshot victim to the hospital any quicker that way. [2] Fun fact. Do you know the difference between a fairy-tale and a war story? War stories start with "So there I was".
        executesorder66 11y ago
        Good point. And what about police/emergency vehicles rushing somewhere?
        11y ago
  - hrehhf 11y ago
    Traffic police will be looking to make up lost revenue from being unable to ticket autonomous car riders, so those aggressive drivers will be a better target. (Not that I approve of using tickets as revenue, just saying that it will happen.) And those autonomous car passengers now have their hands free to take video of the unsafe human drivers nearby, for later public judgement ;)
    - themartorana 11y ago
      I've been thinking about this and cringing in wait for the lobbying against self-driving cars from police unions. But then I thought, that couldn't happen, because it's too clear that any such lobbying puts police unions squarely at odds with citizen safety. Now, shoot-first cops, civil forfeiture, and highly militarized police forces already point at this, but there's plausible deniability. Opposing self-driving cars could be too direct of a swipe at public safety from public safety officers. I don't know...
      - omegaham 11y ago
        I agree. Law enforcement will definitely have to change, though. Right now, traffic infractions are a way for the police to look for other criminal activity. Pulled over for speeding? Cool - let's run your license to see if you have any warrants. Let's see if I can find something else that you're doing. Self-driving cars will completely remove this avenue of investigation because there will be much fewer infractions. I think that this is a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, you won't get police harassing random innocent people on the off-chance that they're criminals. On the other hand, the police will start doing other things because they don't have to pull people over anymore, and those things might be much more invasive.
        Zigurd 11y ago
        If you're not as white as I am, it's 99% good. Driving while dark-skinned is a big cause of traffic stops.
  - skybrian 11y ago
    Rush hour traffic on a highway is a good example of where aggressive driving doesn't actually work very well. I've seen people try to drive aggressively (switching lanes and tail-gating), and they're still in sight for a very long time. So they're maybe seconds ahead of me? Sometimes I even end up passing them because they chose the wrong lane, or they ended up stopped at a light. You do get idiots saloming around in somewhat heavy traffic, but that doesn't actually slow others down much while they're putting everyone at risk.
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    I'm skeptical of that. I think on average drive time goes down. A few steady drivers drastically reduce stop and go driving, and can eliminate those weird traffic aftershocks where everyone slows down for nothing, just because someone slowed down at that point an hour ago. [1] Furthermore, the total time might be less on a good day, with aggressive driving, but the more aggressive drivers there are, the higher the likelihood of an accident, which takes substantially longer than slow drivers. t1 = aggro drive time t2 = slow drive time t3 = accident drive time small cities, say less that 500k, it's probably not worth it, because p(accident) is pretty low, freeway backups relatively rare, say in the neighborhood of .1 bigger cities though, traffic gets messed up all the time. t2 wins. t2 < p(accident) * t3 + p(1-accident) * t1 http://www.npr.org/2013/11/29/247825768/phantom-traffic-jams-what-causes-mysterious-highway-backups http://www.npr.org/2013/11/29/247825768/phantom-traffic-jams...
  - manicdee 11y ago
    Rush hour traffic is going so slow that non-aggressive driving will only cost you a low single digit percentage of travel time, which will all be made up at the first red light. I routinely drive at 90km/h on the main 100km/h stretch of my 28km commute. 23km at 90km/h, and I pull up next to or immediately behind the person that passed me a few minutes ago: the difference in arrival time between a car doing 120 and another doing 90 on that stretch is 4 minutes, assuming they hit 120km/h as soon as they leave the lights at one end of the road. If they have to overtake slower traffic like busses, cranes and me, they get less of a head start. Eleven minutes versus fifteen on the only stretch where aggression makes a difference. There is no way in the world that this counts as "double" the time. The rest of the trip is the same average speed of about 25km/h, with the more aggressive driver getting to use their brakes more than me. Red lights are the great equaliser. Aggressive driving buys you one or two cycles of the traffic lights, along with a much higher fuel and maintenance bill.
  - copsarebastards 11y ago
    > The commuter dozing in his self-driving car is not aggressively driving, and with his car legally mandated to be in super-safe mode, it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic. That's a common idea based on not-very-careful observation and just isn't factual. There's plenty of data showing that aggressive driving has minimal effect on travel times. In fact, you actually get a bigger speed-up by strategically avoiding left turns: companies with delivery fleets plan their routes with this in mind. [1] Not-super-technical explanation: http://lifehacker.com/does-speeding-really-get-you-there-any-faster-1556767685 http://lifehacker.com/does-speeding-really-get-you-there-any...
sneak 11y ago
> Once people learn how to spot these cars, very quickly the tricks to passing them are going to be learned. You say that as if arriving at your destination one car-length in front of a self-driving car somehow renders autonomous vehicles worthless. Who cares if they stop or slow down when you cut them off? It's only idiot humans who think that the reward pathway signal of "woohoo I'm in front" means that you've won something. You haven't.
- UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
  Reminds me of that Mythbusters. The junior team split in two, one drove aggressively over-taking, switching lanes constantly, while the other stayed in a single lane, didn't overtake, and just arrived as traffic allowed. They arrived within a minute of another another, and the aggressive driver (who was Grant I believe) reported that it totally wasn't worth all the stress to arrive so close. People who stress, get upset, and try to maximum their arrival time down to a second are only hurting themselves. Aside from dangerous driving I try to keep as calm driving as possible, and like to just get a safe distance (4 sec rule) behind a semi on the freeway, and sit on cruise control until I arrive. Even if the space I give isn't massive, a lot of people utilise the space between me and the semi to transition from the fast lane[s] down to the slow lanes/exit, which I think is a legit public service, nothing worse than getting stuck on the freeway because you cannot transition.
joosters 11y ago
As well as those points, it also seems that the on-board sensors for the car are not good enough, as Google has spent a great deal of time scanning the roadways and constructing high resolution models of the environment. The cars apparently use this pre-prepared data to help them drive well. This strongly suggests that the cars, in their current form, are not as autonomous and self-reliant as people assume. It also implies that the cars are not going to cope well if they encounter sudden changes in the environment.
- jfoster 11y ago
  Does it matter if they rely on some pre-processed data, as long as they have some form of fallback that allows for manoeuvring when a change in environment is found? Human drivers also face immense difficulty when there is a giant tree fallen across the road. Luckily, such changes in environment are relatively infrequent.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    Google Maps’ data about my city are from 2005. Half of my district is not even existing – and with Google Mapmaker not available in my region (northern Germany), I don’t think it will be added anytime soon. While currently I end up with dozens of human drivers every day stopping in front of a retractable fence (and some try to trick it), do I have to expect Google’s cars soon just driving right through it, or refusing to use alternative routes? Especially because we have shit weather with lots of wind and rain and snow and fog and below 10m vision often during winter. How’s the Google car supposed to drive in that situation?
    - manicdee 11y ago
      Slowly, just like a human?
      - kuschku 11y ago
        The issue is that the reason the fence is retractable is because of the busses that speed through there every 7 minutes. If you drive there slowly, you might cause a crash. Cars shouldn’t drive there at all, but Google Maps still suggests to drive right through it as the fastest route. And it’s just one example, we have hundreds of them all over the city. If they can’t even provide reliable maps, how can we expect reliable self-driving cars?
grecy 11y ago
The first time an airplane flew it only went 120 feet (37 m). 11 years later the world had it's first regularly-scheduled commercial airline. [2] A lot can happen in 10 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights [2] http://www.space.com/16657-worlds-first-commercial-airline-the-greatest-moments-in-flight.html http://www.space.com/16657-worlds-first-commercial-airline-t...
- jfoutz 11y ago
  I think it's more amazing we went from 0.02 miles one way, to 477800 round trip to the moon in just 66 years. I vaguely recall the google director saying their autonomous cars already drive better than his parents. Even if it's only daytime clear weather driving, super cruise control would be insanely useful for commuters, truck drivers, and city busses. It's easy to fall into the trap of perfect or nothing. Even partial solutions create a lot of value. Complete autonomous driving will be here real soon, but there might be a few intermediate steps along the way.
  - kuschku 11y ago
    > super cruise control would be insanely useful for commuters, truck drivers, and city busses. There’s something that does exactly that, is cheaper and safer: It’s called rail.
    - jfoutz 11y ago
      And people often use that, the NYC subway is a great example. But it's not so effective in lower density, or less established rail systems. You'll often see east/west travel relatively accessible, but north/south hard, for example. Rail only really serves those along the line. I'm sure phoenix could build a ring and spoke system to connect up all of those low density developments. The thing that sucks though, it's a big upfront cost. super cruise control is an incremental cost that takes advantage of existing infrastructure. Rail isn't so great at getting food to grocery stores. (cities, sure, but not actual transportation endpoints.) Such a system could be built, but trucks are so obviously effective, and they work with the existing infrastructure. Rail is cool but a big upfront cost for something that's not obviously superior to the current system seems wasteful. Maybe fill train stations with self driving taxis to cover those last few miles to home, or work, or wherever.
schooner80 11y ago
I use "driver assist" in my car every day, for about 50 miles. It keeps my car in the a lane, follows traffic, and lets me concentrate on my podcast. It's not perfect, I sometimes have to step in; but it works at night, it works in all but the heaviest rain, it works in snow... and this isn't some crazy future product, it's a thing I already own. Self-Driving cars are coming faster than the naysayers expect.
- collyw 11y ago
  "I sometimes have to step in" Yes, those are exactly the difficult edge cases that are going to make the reality harder than it may seem.
branchless 11y ago
> "when the road lines aren't perfect" Ok these aren't coming to Montreal for a long time!
dperfect 11y ago
I feel very much the same way. A significant portion of drivers also deal with winter/icy conditions for at least part of the year, and I have a really hard time believing that self-driving cars will be able to handle those conditions well, at least not for a long time. You have snow falling, snow covering many/most of the lines on the road, varying degrees of traction - added to the uncertainties of pedestrians, construction, other crazy drivers, etc. Heck, the sensors alone are going to have an inch of snow and ice on them after being outdoors for a couple of hours. Winter driving is hard enough for highly-focused human drivers, making decisions that are often based on factors that don't easily translate into algorithms and computer models. Google speaks of a need to leapfrog the driver assistance systems and instead focus on fully-automated driving systems because the driver assistance technologies won't incrementally improve to the level we need for full driver-less cars[1]. I think that's a fair point, but I'd go one step further: self-driving cars thrown into a mix of human-operated vehicles and roads that aren't specifically designed for self-driving cars is (in my opinion) a similar mistake. I believe we'll reach a point very soon where great technical advances in the vehicle alone will have diminishing returns in terms of safety on the road. If we are going to solve this problem once and for all, I'd be much more enthusiastic about a self-driving system that operates only on distinct roads/lanes/tracks that are designed only for self-driving vehicles. Perhaps that's an unreasonable expectation, but trying to design systems that anticipate and make decisions based on the (often irrational) behaviors of other human drivers seems no different than designing a full human-level artificial intelligence - and even then, it'll still be prone to mistakes because other humans are involved. Either we get to the point where all vehicles on public roads are networked and cooperating through software to self-drive, or we're just making guesses about other people's behaviors. As Chris Urmson puts it, "just making the cars [and I'll add, roads] incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need." [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...
MarkMc 11y ago
Google doesn't need to fix all those problems in order for self-driving cars to be in widespread use. Even a self-driving car that works only during daytime would be very successful.
prawn 11y ago
Remember though that we're coming from a position where humans sometimes don't drive very well while sober and in daylight, not to mention night, rain, while drunk, tired, etc. We're often selfish or distracted. An automated or augmented car with cameras can see virtually instantly in all directions. When I'm driving, my rear view is somewhat obstructed by a toddler's car seat in the middle of the back row, my blindspot is further obstructed by a sunblocking mesh on the infant's side. When I check my mirrors or especially the blindspot, I am taking my eyes off the road in front of me. I think I'd rather a superior robotic driver that stalls in tricky situations than all of us crazy humans making panicked decisions when facing pressure.

by seibelj 11y ago

magicalist 11y ago

> Once people learn how to spot these cars, very quickly the tricks to passing them are going to be learned Crazy driving is itself often tricks to pass human-driven cars. > Not to mention the jokers using laser pointers and whatnot to mess with them. If you think this won't happen, you are sorely naive. No need to wait; laser pointers are effective at messing up human vision sensors today. But no epidemic yet... Most of the operation of current society depends on the vast vast majority of us not being in a mass-murderous mood.

seibelj 11y ago
It's harder to be aggressive when dealing with human-driven cars because people can react. The commuter dozing in his self-driving car is not aggressively driving, and with his car legally mandated to be in super-safe mode, it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic.
- sneak 11y ago
  > it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic. So read a book or work on something on your laptop or go on Amazon and buy a present for your partner with the health insurance money you'll eventually save by registering your commute as autonomous.
- magicalist 11y ago
  You're using a first approximation to a self-driving car ("follow all laws to the letter") to extrapolate. There are a large number of reasons you'd notice that won't work the very first time you take a car out for a drive (you give a great one: "it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic"). With no eye contact or hand gestures available it's a harder problem, but aggression and counter-aggression is going to have to be a part of any self-driving model. Even if all cars were self driven you'd still have pedestrians willing to cross the street at any sign of hesitation.
  - pekk 11y ago
    Whose problem is this? If I am in a self-driving car, I don't expect it to use "aggression" to try to compete with other drivers. I just want it to get there safely.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- derefr 11y ago
  The robot equivalent of a "work-to-rule" strike could be a possible response to this kind of behaviour: the driverless cars all around an aggressive driver could go into a slower, more defensive mode and box the aggressive driver in—to ensure the safety of neighbouring traffic, of course.
  - executesorder66 11y ago
    That's a horrible idea. What if the aggressive driver is rushing a bleeding passenger to the hospital?
    - chrisBob 11y ago
      Even in your made up thought experiment that accounts for << 1% of all aggressive driving miles I still think this is the correct approach to take. Speeding to the hospital is only superficially different than speeding and weaving through traffic on your morning commute. The biggest difference is probably that you are flustered, and less likely to make good decisions while in route. The worst accident I have ever seen was someone rushing to the hospital [1]. The threat to those around you, and the chances of an accident slowing you down outweigh the small potential time saved. It would be far better for you to learn first aid and respond appropriately than for you to drive aggressively to the hospital. [1] So there I was[2] driving through Iraq when an Iraqi army convoy approached rapidly from behind us. While swerving past my trucks, that had pulled over for them to pass, one of the vehicles left the road and rolled over multiple times. 2 people died in that accident, I applied tourniquets to 2 additional people who lost limbs, and no, they didn't get the gunshot victim to the hospital any quicker that way. [2] Fun fact. Do you know the difference between a fairy-tale and a war story? War stories start with "So there I was".
      - executesorder66 11y ago
        Good point. And what about police/emergency vehicles rushing somewhere?
        11y ago
- hrehhf 11y ago
  Traffic police will be looking to make up lost revenue from being unable to ticket autonomous car riders, so those aggressive drivers will be a better target. (Not that I approve of using tickets as revenue, just saying that it will happen.) And those autonomous car passengers now have their hands free to take video of the unsafe human drivers nearby, for later public judgement ;)
  - themartorana 11y ago
    I've been thinking about this and cringing in wait for the lobbying against self-driving cars from police unions. But then I thought, that couldn't happen, because it's too clear that any such lobbying puts police unions squarely at odds with citizen safety. Now, shoot-first cops, civil forfeiture, and highly militarized police forces already point at this, but there's plausible deniability. Opposing self-driving cars could be too direct of a swipe at public safety from public safety officers. I don't know...
    - omegaham 11y ago
      I agree. Law enforcement will definitely have to change, though. Right now, traffic infractions are a way for the police to look for other criminal activity. Pulled over for speeding? Cool - let's run your license to see if you have any warrants. Let's see if I can find something else that you're doing. Self-driving cars will completely remove this avenue of investigation because there will be much fewer infractions. I think that this is a good thing and a bad thing. On the one hand, you won't get police harassing random innocent people on the off-chance that they're criminals. On the other hand, the police will start doing other things because they don't have to pull people over anymore, and those things might be much more invasive.
      - Zigurd 11y ago
        If you're not as white as I am, it's 99% good. Driving while dark-skinned is a big cause of traffic stops.
- skybrian 11y ago
  Rush hour traffic on a highway is a good example of where aggressive driving doesn't actually work very well. I've seen people try to drive aggressively (switching lanes and tail-gating), and they're still in sight for a very long time. So they're maybe seconds ahead of me? Sometimes I even end up passing them because they chose the wrong lane, or they ended up stopped at a light. You do get idiots saloming around in somewhat heavy traffic, but that doesn't actually slow others down much while they're putting everyone at risk.
- jfoutz 11y ago
  I'm skeptical of that. I think on average drive time goes down. A few steady drivers drastically reduce stop and go driving, and can eliminate those weird traffic aftershocks where everyone slows down for nothing, just because someone slowed down at that point an hour ago. [1] Furthermore, the total time might be less on a good day, with aggressive driving, but the more aggressive drivers there are, the higher the likelihood of an accident, which takes substantially longer than slow drivers. t1 = aggro drive time t2 = slow drive time t3 = accident drive time small cities, say less that 500k, it's probably not worth it, because p(accident) is pretty low, freeway backups relatively rare, say in the neighborhood of .1 bigger cities though, traffic gets messed up all the time. t2 wins. t2 < p(accident) * t3 + p(1-accident) * t1 http://www.npr.org/2013/11/29/247825768/phantom-traffic-jams-what-causes-mysterious-highway-backups http://www.npr.org/2013/11/29/247825768/phantom-traffic-jams...
- manicdee 11y ago
  Rush hour traffic is going so slow that non-aggressive driving will only cost you a low single digit percentage of travel time, which will all be made up at the first red light. I routinely drive at 90km/h on the main 100km/h stretch of my 28km commute. 23km at 90km/h, and I pull up next to or immediately behind the person that passed me a few minutes ago: the difference in arrival time between a car doing 120 and another doing 90 on that stretch is 4 minutes, assuming they hit 120km/h as soon as they leave the lights at one end of the road. If they have to overtake slower traffic like busses, cranes and me, they get less of a head start. Eleven minutes versus fifteen on the only stretch where aggression makes a difference. There is no way in the world that this counts as "double" the time. The rest of the trip is the same average speed of about 25km/h, with the more aggressive driver getting to use their brakes more than me. Red lights are the great equaliser. Aggressive driving buys you one or two cycles of the traffic lights, along with a much higher fuel and maintenance bill.
- copsarebastards 11y ago
  > The commuter dozing in his self-driving car is not aggressively driving, and with his car legally mandated to be in super-safe mode, it's going to take twice as long for it to make it through rush hour traffic. That's a common idea based on not-very-careful observation and just isn't factual. There's plenty of data showing that aggressive driving has minimal effect on travel times. In fact, you actually get a bigger speed-up by strategically avoiding left turns: companies with delivery fleets plan their routes with this in mind. [1] Not-super-technical explanation: http://lifehacker.com/does-speeding-really-get-you-there-any-faster-1556767685 http://lifehacker.com/does-speeding-really-get-you-there-any...

sneak 11y ago

> Once people learn how to spot these cars, very quickly the tricks to passing them are going to be learned. You say that as if arriving at your destination one car-length in front of a self-driving car somehow renders autonomous vehicles worthless. Who cares if they stop or slow down when you cut them off? It's only idiot humans who think that the reward pathway signal of "woohoo I'm in front" means that you've won something. You haven't.

UnoriginalGuy 11y ago
Reminds me of that Mythbusters. The junior team split in two, one drove aggressively over-taking, switching lanes constantly, while the other stayed in a single lane, didn't overtake, and just arrived as traffic allowed. They arrived within a minute of another another, and the aggressive driver (who was Grant I believe) reported that it totally wasn't worth all the stress to arrive so close. People who stress, get upset, and try to maximum their arrival time down to a second are only hurting themselves. Aside from dangerous driving I try to keep as calm driving as possible, and like to just get a safe distance (4 sec rule) behind a semi on the freeway, and sit on cruise control until I arrive. Even if the space I give isn't massive, a lot of people utilise the space between me and the semi to transition from the fast lane[s] down to the slow lanes/exit, which I think is a legit public service, nothing worse than getting stuck on the freeway because you cannot transition.

joosters 11y ago

As well as those points, it also seems that the on-board sensors for the car are not good enough, as Google has spent a great deal of time scanning the roadways and constructing high resolution models of the environment. The cars apparently use this pre-prepared data to help them drive well. This strongly suggests that the cars, in their current form, are not as autonomous and self-reliant as people assume. It also implies that the cars are not going to cope well if they encounter sudden changes in the environment.

jfoster 11y ago
Does it matter if they rely on some pre-processed data, as long as they have some form of fallback that allows for manoeuvring when a change in environment is found? Human drivers also face immense difficulty when there is a giant tree fallen across the road. Luckily, such changes in environment are relatively infrequent.
- kuschku 11y ago
  Google Maps’ data about my city are from 2005. Half of my district is not even existing – and with Google Mapmaker not available in my region (northern Germany), I don’t think it will be added anytime soon. While currently I end up with dozens of human drivers every day stopping in front of a retractable fence (and some try to trick it), do I have to expect Google’s cars soon just driving right through it, or refusing to use alternative routes? Especially because we have shit weather with lots of wind and rain and snow and fog and below 10m vision often during winter. How’s the Google car supposed to drive in that situation?
  - manicdee 11y ago
    Slowly, just like a human?
    - kuschku 11y ago
      The issue is that the reason the fence is retractable is because of the busses that speed through there every 7 minutes. If you drive there slowly, you might cause a crash. Cars shouldn’t drive there at all, but Google Maps still suggests to drive right through it as the fastest route. And it’s just one example, we have hundreds of them all over the city. If they can’t even provide reliable maps, how can we expect reliable self-driving cars?

grecy 11y ago

The first time an airplane flew it only went 120 feet (37 m). 11 years later the world had it's first regularly-scheduled commercial airline. [2] A lot can happen in 10 years. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wright_brothers#Flights [2] http://www.space.com/16657-worlds-first-commercial-airline-the-greatest-moments-in-flight.html http://www.space.com/16657-worlds-first-commercial-airline-t...

jfoutz 11y ago
I think it's more amazing we went from 0.02 miles one way, to 477800 round trip to the moon in just 66 years. I vaguely recall the google director saying their autonomous cars already drive better than his parents. Even if it's only daytime clear weather driving, super cruise control would be insanely useful for commuters, truck drivers, and city busses. It's easy to fall into the trap of perfect or nothing. Even partial solutions create a lot of value. Complete autonomous driving will be here real soon, but there might be a few intermediate steps along the way.
- kuschku 11y ago
  > super cruise control would be insanely useful for commuters, truck drivers, and city busses. There’s something that does exactly that, is cheaper and safer: It’s called rail.
  - jfoutz 11y ago
    And people often use that, the NYC subway is a great example. But it's not so effective in lower density, or less established rail systems. You'll often see east/west travel relatively accessible, but north/south hard, for example. Rail only really serves those along the line. I'm sure phoenix could build a ring and spoke system to connect up all of those low density developments. The thing that sucks though, it's a big upfront cost. super cruise control is an incremental cost that takes advantage of existing infrastructure. Rail isn't so great at getting food to grocery stores. (cities, sure, but not actual transportation endpoints.) Such a system could be built, but trucks are so obviously effective, and they work with the existing infrastructure. Rail is cool but a big upfront cost for something that's not obviously superior to the current system seems wasteful. Maybe fill train stations with self driving taxis to cover those last few miles to home, or work, or wherever.

schooner80 11y ago

I use "driver assist" in my car every day, for about 50 miles. It keeps my car in the a lane, follows traffic, and lets me concentrate on my podcast. It's not perfect, I sometimes have to step in; but it works at night, it works in all but the heaviest rain, it works in snow... and this isn't some crazy future product, it's a thing I already own. Self-Driving cars are coming faster than the naysayers expect.

collyw 11y ago
"I sometimes have to step in" Yes, those are exactly the difficult edge cases that are going to make the reality harder than it may seem.

branchless 11y ago

> "when the road lines aren't perfect" Ok these aren't coming to Montreal for a long time!

dperfect 11y ago

I feel very much the same way. A significant portion of drivers also deal with winter/icy conditions for at least part of the year, and I have a really hard time believing that self-driving cars will be able to handle those conditions well, at least not for a long time. You have snow falling, snow covering many/most of the lines on the road, varying degrees of traction - added to the uncertainties of pedestrians, construction, other crazy drivers, etc. Heck, the sensors alone are going to have an inch of snow and ice on them after being outdoors for a couple of hours. Winter driving is hard enough for highly-focused human drivers, making decisions that are often based on factors that don't easily translate into algorithms and computer models. Google speaks of a need to leapfrog the driver assistance systems and instead focus on fully-automated driving systems because the driver assistance technologies won't incrementally improve to the level we need for full driver-less cars[1]. I think that's a fair point, but I'd go one step further: self-driving cars thrown into a mix of human-operated vehicles and roads that aren't specifically designed for self-driving cars is (in my opinion) a similar mistake. I believe we'll reach a point very soon where great technical advances in the vehicle alone will have diminishing returns in terms of safety on the road. If we are going to solve this problem once and for all, I'd be much more enthusiastic about a self-driving system that operates only on distinct roads/lanes/tracks that are designed only for self-driving vehicles. Perhaps that's an unreasonable expectation, but trying to design systems that anticipate and make decisions based on the (often irrational) behaviors of other human drivers seems no different than designing a full human-level artificial intelligence - and even then, it'll still be prone to mistakes because other humans are involved. Either we get to the point where all vehicles on public roads are networked and cooperating through software to self-drive, or we're just making guesses about other people's behaviors. As Chris Urmson puts it, "just making the cars [and I'll add, roads] incrementally smarter, we're probably not going to see the wins we really need." [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road/transcript?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_...

MarkMc 11y ago

Google doesn't need to fix all those problems in order for self-driving cars to be in widespread use. Even a self-driving car that works only during daytime would be very successful.

prawn 11y ago

Remember though that we're coming from a position where humans sometimes don't drive very well while sober and in daylight, not to mention night, rain, while drunk, tired, etc. We're often selfish or distracted. An automated or augmented car with cameras can see virtually instantly in all directions. When I'm driving, my rear view is somewhat obstructed by a toddler's car seat in the middle of the back row, my blindspot is further obstructed by a sunblocking mesh on the infant's side. When I check my mirrors or especially the blindspot, I am taking my eyes off the road in front of me. I think I'd rather a superior robotic driver that stalls in tricky situations than all of us crazy humans making panicked decisions when facing pressure.