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Google to Make Driverless Cars an Alphabet Company in 2016
- james33 11y agoC is for Car?
- zeristor 11y agoand D is for Driverless
- billybilly1920 11y agoAnd E is for Elon... woops, wrong driver-less car company.
- ant6n 11y agoI'd say E is for Electric
- ocdtrekkie 11y agoF is for Fantasy
- ant6n 11y agoG is for ... on wait, we already Got that one.
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- msoad 11y agoMore precisely, Alphabet wants to make Google Car an Alphabet company
- yqxpv1zhvj 11y agoNot sure if the connotation was intentional, but "an Alphabet company" conjures up ties with alphabet agencies for me more than it does big colorful Sesame Street letters. Not sure that's a good parallel for PR, after the Snowden leaks.
- hellbanner 11y agoYou're suggesting there's a difference between big business and government?
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- vonmoltke 11y ago> like Tesla, which loses ~$4K on every Model S they sell Could we please stop parroting this blatant falsehood? Their net loss for a particular operating period, when amortized over all the vehicles they sold in that period, came out to ~$4,000 per vehicle. That is not, in any way, shape, or form, the same as losing that money on each vehicle sold.
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- danhak 11y agoNobody disputes that Tesla currently operates at a net loss. They sell only one product at the moment but incur R&D expenses on several products that are not yet shipping in significant volume (Model X, Model 3, PowerPack/PowerWall). They're ramping SG&A in anticipation of those offerings as well. That is a separate issue than the deliberately misleading meme that the company "loses ~$4K on every Model S they sell" It's just wrong and completely disingenuous. If Tesla sells an incremental Model S this quarter, the impact on their cash flow is +28K not -4K.
- nivla 11y agoThat is not a sound logic. If Apple invests X in R&D where X is greater than revenue, it does not mean every Iphone/Ipad/Mac was sold on a loss. It just means they spend more than they made.
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- stuaxo 11y agoLooking forward to a few years time when they rename the company Google again.
- dlsx 11y agoSeriously, it is so damn confusing from a trader standpoint. AND I also thought BMW had a service called alphabet related to cars. I really don't get who had this idea and why they thought it was something to waste everyones time with.
- Mahn 11y agoI honestly think this will happen. Products like Chrome or Android just wouldn't have survived as standalone companies, so why is it a good idea now to detach projects?
- nugget 11y agoI don't understand the pessimism in this thread. Google owns two of the most important pieces of the puzzle: maps and the mobile OS/app store in 80% of people's pockets. Not to mention lots of software and hardware IP related to autonomous vehicles. There are plenty of car companies in the world who can provide car frames, windows, leather seats, four wheels, and yes even an electric engine. I see Uber, Google, Apple, and others going head to head in this market, ultimately to the great benefit of consumers as transportation prices plummet. Imagine an airport run from 3rd and Market to SFO costing $15 (technically only $13 after 20% discount for paying with the UberRewards Capital One Visa Card), or a 4 hour trip (time to watch a long movie and send some email) from Santa Monica Pier to the Las Vegas Strip for $50 (or for a limited time, $55 if you stop at the selected partner gas/charging station for pre-paid lunch and bathroom break) - it will happen and sooner than most think.
- adventured 11y agoOr put another way, electric + autonomous = inexpensive, intelligent, on-demand transportation. It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars - every decade - in wasted costs on buying cars and then hardly ever utilizing them. While likely saving a quarter of a million lives every decade, and further sparing consumers a large percentage of the vast associated medical, insurance and lost-asset costs that go with those injuries and deaths. The 'dumb pipe' of the Internet is going to eat the dumb car - as it'll try to do with everything it can touch - sucking out the complexity and inefficiencies with smart, hyper-available software. A few decades from now, people will consider buying a 'dumb' $30,000 gasoline engine car to stick in your driveway and rarely use, to be comically absurd.
- ams6110 11y agoI disagree, but we'll have to wait and see I guess. I work in software and as a result I don't trust computers. I see every day how rollouts of "minor" changes or small oversights bring major production systems to a screeching halt. Google and Apple do not have a culture of the type of careful software engineering that I would trust my life with. The notion that they would bring cars back nightly for "updates" is positively hair-raising.
- return0 11y agoHow will driverless cars deal with crime? How is a passenger going to get away from a car chasing to rob him? How will a self-driving car truck run away from thieves in the highway?
- gburt 11y agoAlmost every one of these criticisms I have seen of "self-driving cars" posit world situations that don't happen under the current regime despite nothing limiting them. Why is this a problem unique to self-driving cars? Is it that it "won't" runover the counterparty? Have you ever even considered the idea of running over a thief? I suspect our legal infrastructure would not look kindly upon you in most jurisdictions.
- prawn 11y agoAn override or panic mode. Live broadcast of vision of attackers might discourage them, plus immediate reporting to police. It will be cheaper in many cases to replace contents through insurance than perfectly cover for rare events like highway robberies.
- edias 11y agoIs this a problem most people face? Not to mention a truck isn't gonna be able to run away from anyone, driverless or not. Kinda sounds like you're inventing problems here and pretending human solutions exist (again, how will any truck run away in the first place?) I'd imagine a car will hundreds of cameras and sensors in it would be better equipped to deal with crime anyways.
- IanCal 11y agoThis kind of thing comes up in driverless car threads all the time, it's quite odd. People trying to come up with complex situations that humans are likely to be terrible at themselves. I've seen plenty around constructing some trolley-problem style moral argument about deciding who to kill in a crash. I don't know why it's expected that they'd have to solve, in a fraction of a second, a problem that people have been arguing over for years. The human reaction will probably be at the level of "jerk wheel quickly".
- jhulla 11y agoCan someone with knowledge answer questions about the current state of autonomous cars: 1) What do these cars do in ambiguous driving environments: construction zones, poorly/under relined lanes, freshly paved roads, hazards, dark/rainy roads where camera images are useless, etc. 2) How do these cars handle system failure while driving? Blown tire, engine failure, etc. 3) Is there "Moral Decision Engine" code in current generation cars? E.g. person runs out in front of an autonomous car, the car chooses to spare the person by veering off and hitting some inanimate object. I can imagine a class of accidents in traditional hands-on cars where a driver hurts himself in order to avoid harming a pedestrian. Is such moral logic hard wired into autonomous cars?
- jzwinck 11y ago1) Some of the extant cars cede control to the human driver if things get too difficult. This is a problem because people will context switch away from driving and there is no way to get them back in the game in 100ms when the car needs help. 2) Engine failure is not a big deal, it just means coast to a stop on the side of the road with hazard lights on. Blowouts are a little trickier. But what about unusual stuff like hitting a deer? A wheel falling off? Or another car drifting into the side of our car on the expressway? Those are tricky but not truly rare. This is an area where implementors will need to compete yet purchasers will have a very incomplete view of the relative performance of cars on the market (it's not a single number like HP). 3) Hitting a pole instead of a person is an easy choice. Yet one that many humans would not be able to make quickly enough. I think autonomous cars will outperform human drivers in "moral" decision making quite early on.
- jhulla 11y agoThanks. 1) Expecting a human to be on deck within some fraction of a second in challenging times will not fly. 2) Perhaps software in cars can be independently safety tested. Just like cars are collision tested today. 3) Understand about human reaction times. My question is about making moral choices: hit a pedestrian or sacrifice the driver?
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- 77ko 11y agoAs Alphabet moves out projects from Google, does that make Google a less interesting place to work at? And introduce more bureaucracy as now Google Car has to negotiate with Google for access to AI tech, computers, maps etc instead of just using whatever they can?
- tokenadult 11y agoThe Associated Press article about the California Department of Motor Vehicles proposed new rules for cars with autonomous driving features[1] suggests one reason to be pessimistic about the vision of rentable self-driving cars becoming a reality as soon as Google would like. (I would like it to be a reality soon, too, but I have to wait for what the technologists and regulators involved can do together to make that a reality for me.) A company that rents out rides to paying riders has to have a market to operate in, and any state could (and, if California is an example, maybe would) regulate that company in ways that might not make it a feasible business. A follow-up article on this news[2] says that Google is "disappointed" by the newly announced California rules. [1] "California: Self-driving cars must have driver behind wheel under DMV proposed rules" (16 December 2015) http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_29262037/california-self-driving-cars-must-have-driver-behind http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_29262037/california-s... [2] "Google 'disappointed' by proposed restrictions on driverless cars" (16 December 2015) http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2015/12/16/google-disappointed-by-proposed-rules-from-california-dmv/77447672/ http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2015/12/16/google-di...
- minwcnt5 11y agoI've never viewed these sorts of regulative barriers as anything more than a headache for Google. There's going to be some government somewhere on earth that will be gung ho about self-driving cars. Americans will not stand for the US not being #1, so regulators will be forced to do a rather quick 180 on this.
- glesica 11y agoMeh, Americans also don't like dying horribly and will freakout if they think something makes that more likely. The FDA is relatively conservative compared to many other countries and, especially after Thalidomide, most people probably appreciate that.
- visarga 11y agoIt's been years since the Google car has been in research. I've seen a video of it, perfectly driving a blind man in 2012. It was amazing, but now it's almost 2016 and I know nothing new. What have they been doing over the last 3 years? I even tried reading their blog, but they only report on building more prototypes or driving more miles. It's a blackout of actual information about their challenges and achievements. When will they be confident enough to launch it, or at least talk about it?
- toomuchtodo 11y agohttps://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/ https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/