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The High-Stakes Race to Rid the World of Human Drivers
- aurizon 11y agowell, first auto-car, then auto-truck, then auto-truck-train. (3-10 trailers with one tractor, and possibly hub motors suitable for long hauls with no turns) Then electric cars pas gas based cars. Then electric trucks with droppable battery packs - full charged in 2 minutes by changing it. Then they will get into local driving and delivery, into large mechanical drop boxes at houses and businesses. Deliveries 24-7. The box can be a wall port with a live floor = lots of space. The beginning of the robot age. The last thing they will invent, before people are gone, will be the robot consumer...
- kobayashi 11y agoThe robot consumer might be the most underrated threat to humanity.
- rconti 11y agoI just bought a 2016 Volkswagen that has laser cruise control and lane assist. I ordered the fully loaded package because the incremental cost was not large, and I figured I might as well have all the toys if I was going to the expense of buying a brand-new car. I consider myself an enthusiast; I have a fair bit of time on the racetrack in lapping days and amateur races, sometimes I volunteer at car control clinics and teen instruction days. All of my cars have manual transmissions and I ride a motorcycle. I definitely did not expect to become dependent on any driving nannies. What I've found is that it's absolutely astounding how fast you come to trust the automated systems. In my car, the laser cruise control will drive the car for you at virtually any speed. It does a great job of keeping up in traffic, has no issues with hills or going around bends, it's always able to track the car in front of me perfectly. It uses the brakes to slow the car. I've got the manual transmission so it only slows the car down to about 15mph and then prompts me to take over and press the brake; if I had the automatic, it would come to a full stop in traffic and only require a tap of the accelerator to resume once traffic ahead started moving. Even though I only have 700 miles on the car and have only used the laser cruise for perhaps 20 or 30 miles in total (mostly just playing with it), I find I still expect the system to brake the car once disengaged. For example, I'll be coming up to a red light, lift off the throttle, start braking, and then think to myself "huh, I wonder why the car didn't start slowing down for me." The lane assist feature will correct the steering once or twice if you start to come too close to the lane marker (within maybe 2 feet) but it's very subtle and you barely feel it while your hands are on the wheel. After a correction or two (and maybe 10 seconds, I'm not sure exactly how it decides), the system tells you "hey, idiot, you're supposed to be steering". I have, on multiple occasions, been surprised that it "allowed" me to get as close as I was to adjacent cars, before realizing that it only is meant to keep me within my lane, it knows nothing about the vehicles around me. But something about the fact that it has lane assist (and, incidentally, ultrasonic parking sensors) fools me into thinking it knows more than it does. I'm not saying I was letting the car drive for me, I was fully in control, I was simply surprised that it didn't override my judgement of how close is too close. It's a brave new world out there. It's surprising how quickly you cede mental control, if not physical control, even to systems that have clearly defined limits and features that you don't even intend on using, let alone relying on. I imagine things will get worse before they'll get better. That said, humans are bad enough drivers that it might not get MUCH worse!
- chiph 11y agoI have mixed opinions on the new assistive technology. Blind-spot monitoring is pretty good - it's not intrusive (just a yellow light in your outside mirror) and can save you from an embarrassing accident. Same with the ultrasonic/radar parking assist. I rarely parallel park (there just aren't that many of that style parking spots any more) so the system really helps me judge where the back corners of the car are. I understand that backup cameras will be required in all new US cars soon. The lane-keeping systems OTOH are just plain annoying. Whether they vibrate the steering wheel or give it a nudge, they have no situational awareness. Like when I'm crowding the inside lane to ensure I clear a cyclist in the bike lane.
- mikeash 11y agoI personally found that lane departure warning made me a much more precise driver. I like that a lot. It goes off in error sometimes too, but it's rare now that I've been trained to properly stay within the lines.
- rconti 11y agoI was actually wondering if assistive techs like this might make people more likely to signal, as there's a slightly negative feedback to departing one's lane without doing so first.
- mikeash 11y agoGod, I hope so. I don't understand why people don't signal. I'm pretty lazy, but I can't understand how anyone can be that lazy.
- rconti 11y agoThis is my first car with the ultrasonic parking sensors; they're nice to have for sure. I won't know the corners of the car as well, but, frankly, today's cars are getting harder than ever to see out of anyway, so likely I never would have been as comfortable in a new car. Also, part of "knowing the corners" of your car implies at least some gentle contact at some point in time, which it's best to avoid entirely. One of my favorite features so far is rear assist, which is able to detect oncoming cars as I'm backing out of a parking spot. The bigger the car the more useful this is. It doesn't tell you when you're 6" from a vehicle, it tells you when there's a vehicle traveling at speed further away that you're about to back towards.
- beachstartup 11y agoanyone work on artificial intelligence technologies here? i have some lay questions - is anyone testing driverless cars in an environment where most cars are driverless? does that make a difference? are there any weird effects / properties that can emerge? does it have the potential to solve the persistent traffic jam issue?
- caseysoftware 11y agoI believe so. As driverless cars take over more and more, the weird (aka dangerous) behaviors should become less common. Many forms of distracted driving will simply vanish, not even considering the obvious issues like drunk driving. Once you start automating dispatch, I think it simplifies and improves things further. For one, you're going to be less likely to be late.. which means less stress/anxiety and less distractions which should mean less accidents and near-accidents that cause traffic issues. IF you can eliminate many - but unlikely all - of the little issues, problems, etc that compound to cause big problems, why would there be traffic jams? (And that's not considering traffic updates to re-route around existing problems.) My post on the topic: http://caseysoftware.com/blog/future-transportation-today http://caseysoftware.com/blog/future-transportation-today
- euyyn 11y agoOn top of that, the cars can communicate more and faster than the drivers, and can be programmed to collaborate with the other vehicles. So you can have stuff like the cars in a packed highway opening up a diagonal for a car in the left lane to take an exit on the right.
- grogenaut 11y agoI feel that will work only okay even if there is one car manufacturer, but get tthe differences between a lot of them, then throw in porsche and others programming in "advantages" and "agressive" as options and where do you end up?
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- nostromo 11y agoOne thing I haven't heard much about is how humans and AI drivers will interact. If we all assume that AI cars are going to be very conservative and very competent drivers, will people take advantage of that? Will human drivers become even bigger assholes that cut off AI drivers at every possibility, knowing that an AI will not hit them? Why wait in a big line for an exit, when you know an AI car will always let you in. The AI driver won't even mind, as it has no emotional state, so why not? Pedestrians and cyclists may also learn that they can freely cut off an AI car at anytime they please. Why wait for a walk signal? Why walk all the way to the intersection? Just saunter across anywhere you like, so long as you cross in front of an AI car.
- jjoonathan 11y agoYes, people will take advantage of AI drivers, but everything will be recorded and I'm sure the autonomous car companies can figure out how to put those recordings to use. Name&shame, sell the info to insurance companies, push to make it an automatic ticket, etc. After a shakedown period a more or less reasonable compromise will surely emerge.
- woofyman 11y agoI don't want to live in a society where every car becomes a tool of law enforcement.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoThere's a crazy claim / instance of the Chinese Soda Fallacy in the middle of the article. Why would the first-mover developer of automatic driving software be able to reap 10 cents per mile driven?
- chromaton 11y ago>Chinese Soda Fallcy I've never heard of this particular logical fallacy and search engines are no help. Can you explain?
- thrownaway2424 11y agoHrmm, I did find exactly one instance of the phrase on Google. I'm surprised, too. As it was explained to me, a Chinese Soda Fallacy is a business plan wherein you stand to make a dollar selling a Coke to everybody in China. You will make a billion dollars! Except that the market-clearing price for Coke in China isn't a dollar, and not everybody wants one, and so on and so forth. The idea that you will make a dime every time anyone drives a mile strikes me as perfectly congruent with that fallacy. Edit: This article seems to address the topic without using the phrase. http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970204830304574133501980701202 http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240529702048303045741335... A COKE FOR EVERY KID IN CHINA This gambit rests its case on a plethora of secondary data to show how large and fast-growing a market is. The plan then makes a heroic leap and assumes that the new venture will grab X percent of that market it could be 1%, 10%, 30% or whatever. "Surely," the plan argues, "with the large number of customers in our market, we'll easily get enough. We only need a small fraction to have a very nice business."
- mikeash 11y agoSounds like the more generalized equivalent of the typical software fallacy that goes like, "There are umpty million iPhone users, if just 1% of them buys our app...."
- jacquesm 11y agoI think you're looking for the term 'Chinese Math': http://www.fastcompany.com/1710460/chinese-math-or-1-mistake-cripples-100-entrepreneurs http://www.fastcompany.com/1710460/chinese-math-or-1-mistake...
- larrymcp 11y agoWell if this is a "race" as the headline says, it sure is gonna be a long race, folks. These cars haven't yet been programmed to handle things like snow-covered roads where you can't see the lines, or construction zones that have you driving on the opposite side of the road at the direction of flaggers, etc... there's just a ton of work remaining to be done if your goal is truly to "rid the world of human drivers".
- pool 11y agoI wonder what the various dreams even are for what to do about snow -- embedding something in the lane marker paint or who knows what. I rather hope that individual vehicles for everyone just turns out no longer to make sense eventually and goes away.
- TheEzEzz 11y agoIf those high targets are the only things remaining then I'd say the race is pretty close to finishing. I'd be more pessimistic if features on the todo list still included 'identifying stop signs', 'recognizing people', 'not killing people', and 'driving more smoothly than a teenager'.
- Swizec 11y agoYou do realize there are countries that have a significant chance of snow for 4+ months per year, right? And that there are many places with stop signs that are almost completely obscured by foliage, or simply by the angle of roads on the crossroads. Not everything is California. And not every city has a grid. When autonomous cars can survive in a place like Rome or Paris[1], or even downtown Manhattan. Then we can talk about fully replacing humans. [1] Rome and Paris are notorious for people having special city cars because they get banged up so much in the course of normal life Here's an example of traffic in a modern European city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfJ-VokP3EQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HfJ-VokP3EQ And another: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lay8aZlsbB0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lay8aZlsbB0 How long until autonomous cars can do that? Hell, I'd shit my pants trying to do that. PS: in the real world there are also many roads that flat out don't have lanes drawn on them.
- grogenaut 11y agoSorry for typos, eating fried chicken... I cant wait to see what happens once the modders and criminals get a hold of self driving cars. My awesome car would pretend to be an emergency vehicle. Pretend to be a truck and that it can't stop easily, pretend emergencies so people move, claim that it's chaging lanes to mess with people. Without a centralized authority it's just negotiation. With a CA then humans and remote locations will have issues. It's going to be a great dystopian future.
- bglazer 11y agoAll of these things are already possible. Hell I see an example of most of these behaviors pretty frequently. It's not like normal people are going to suddenly become psychopaths when they get self driving cars.
- vectorjohn 11y agoIt's going to be a great stay in prison. Enjoy.
- jmspring 11y agoI don't have a commute. I just recently downsized from a VW gross polluter TDI (jetta sportwagen) to a Toyota off-road tacoma. 1/2 the gas milage. This will probably be the last vehicle I personally buy for years. It will be mostly road trips and off road camping. The wife plans on a Tesla Model 3 as her car. For my uses, even my 2016 Tacoma TRD OR screams over technical for a lot of back country camping / jeep trail stuff.
- pc86 11y ago> gross polluter TDI > Toyota Tacoma for road trips The cognitive dissonance is impressive.
- vectorjohn 11y agoThe comments on here are funny. People lose their mind when it comes to autonomous anything. ZOMG everyone's going to shoot down autonomous delivery drones! People will walk out into traffic! People will hack their cars and do crimes! Come on. All this is illegal now. It will still be illegal, and easily enforceable. Which is what keeps crimes from happening. That and human decency which most people have.
- kagamine 11y agoI think it's the other way, people on here are funny and lose their minds if you try to pose a problem that we can find a solution for. They're all "omg it's not a problem Google are already perfecting it!" There are a lot of issues that remain unresolved (snow does cover parts of N.America and Europe for months at a time). What's wrong with raising these issues and discussing them without resorting to "you so dumb, it gonna be fine, doomsayer!"?
- to3m 11y agoDidn't you hear? You won't be permitted to purchase an autonomous vehicle unless you can provide documentary evidence of your having been in favour of the technology even before it was proven.
- to3m 11y agoPeople walking out into traffic is not illegal everywhere!
- Animats 11y agoFor a sense of how this is going, you can read the California DMV's collection of autonomous vehicle accident reports.[1] 9 from Google, one from Delphi. Almost all the Google ones are a Google vehicle being rear-ended by another car at slow speed. Typical situation: Google AV turning right on red after a full stop. AV advances enough to get a good sensor view of cross traffic, detects cross traffic, and stops. Following vehicle rear-ends Google AV. Not AV's fault. If manually driven cars had radar-controlled braking (now a common option, and one which may become as standard as ABS in a few years), that's enough to stop most rear-end collisions. That may be all that's necessary for AVs and human-driven cars to play well together. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316 https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...
- kagamine 11y agoDriving behavior and patterns are important for safety too, when you assume that it's not the google AV's fault that it gets rear-ended you may be wrong. If a human driver sees more than the AV (has a bigger brain, more experience) and is able to better asses a situation, the human might not see why the AV is stopping, having assessed correctly that the way is clear. It is the AV's fault for not being smart enough, and thus acting erratically by normal driving standards and patterns. I knew several people in the UK when we were learning to drive who failed their test because the tester thought them too cautious and therefore not confident enough to avoid an accident. Reading on the subject of self driving cars, one gets the impression that there is a auto-assumption that human drivers must all be idiots who should never, ever have been allowed behind the wheel, but that probably isn't the case. I'm not saying the roads will be any less safe with AVs, but let's not believe all the Utopian propaganda of the businesses selling us this product.
- revelation 11y agoNo, if you rear-end someone driving safely, you are at fault and reckless. This I can control the situation thinking are the famous last words of every idiot ever wrecking his car, or, sadly, killing others.
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- WalterBright 11y agoI'm going to miss shifting gears and double clutching.
- pzone 11y agoHow about comparing it to reading HN on the road?
- pnut 11y agoDouble clutching, seriously? That is some niche hardware you are driving - all manual transmissions are synchromeshed nowadays, unless you're driving a racecar maybe.
- WalterBright 11y agoDouble clutching makes downshifting at high revs much smoother, and reduces wear&tear on the clutch & transmission. (I have a pretty grabby clutch, yes, it's aftermarket.)
- gadders 11y agoFor people looking for an investment opportunity, once self-driving cars are a reality, buy shares in British Pub chains. Being able to have a drink and not worry about how to get home will make them a lot more accessible.
- shanehoban 11y agoPerhaps a better solution would be something totally void of automobiles? In terms of efficiency, is using the same technology (cars) in a different way - removing the driver - really going to have long term affects? My guess is that cars themselves will be out of production before we reach 100% adoption of driverless cars.
- TeMPOraL 11y agoElectric cars seem to be a pretty good solution, though the cars of the future will probably be much smaller - right now we pad them a lot with extra metal and plastic so that the passengers can survive a collision. With self-driving cars you won't need that anymore. I imagine the future of cars is a PRT[0] system - it's a perfect thing for a city. As for travel between cities, that's what trains are for. [0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
- isaaaaah 11y agoIn the city of Nuremburg, Germany in the year 2006 Siemens started to introduce automated trains. Until this day, they have to be operated under supervision. So how exactly do all these tech companies want to get the fact out of the way, that there is an actual AI needed before they can dive into autonomous cars driving the streets? The wet dream of big biz for sure, if only it could meet up with reality. Sorry for not thinking big enough, im just confused how those companies, that not even manage to get their own available products to be working flawless want to step into a market where things will cost lives.
- mafribe 11y agoget their own available products to be working flawless Self-driving cars don't have to be flawless. They just have to be better than human drivers. This is probably feasible within the next 20 years or so.
- jpatokal 11y agoThere are dozens and dozens of fully automated train lines in fully automated operation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
- MrBuddyCasino 11y agoThats just Siemens being Siemens. Driverless trains are in no way trivial, but it has been done successfully.
- ourmandave 11y agoWhen my grandfather died back in the '80s my grandmother had to learn to drive because she'd been a passenger her whole life.