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When it comes down to differentiation what do I care about if a robot is driving me around? Safety. Period. The equation to get to safety is sensors + computi

• toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > Maybe Musk sneaks in there with his brash approach of using his drivers as test subjects but his position as a competing auto manufacturer seems less compelling than supporting an "Android-like" effort from Google. I'd rather support Musk; this is core to his product. For Google, its just another moonshot. Tesla also has the advantage that Tesla owners drive 40 million miles/month. That's far and beyond what Google's autonomous vehicles are covering (<75K miles/month).
  • ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    A big point in Tesla's favor is that they're putting it out incrementally. Cruise control is a very simple form of 'self-driving' that everyone is comfortable with the existence of. For the population to truly embrace this trend, it's going to be a long road of incremental steps. Lane assists have started to become commonplace, as have tools to automatically brake to prevent collisions. As these technologies become commonplace, people will accept them. Eventually, fully autonomous driving won't be much of a stretch.
    • toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Completely agree. It's not going to happen overnight. It'll happen piece by piece, until one day you wake up and you review your Tesla OTA update release notes and it lists "Level 4 Autonomous Mode" as one of the updated features. And none of us will be overly shocked.
    • haberman 11y ago
      This TED talk from last year makes a pretty convincing case that you can't (from a technical perspective) incrementally improve driver assist to be fully driverless: http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_sees_the_road http://www.ted.com/talks/chris_urmson_how_a_driverless_car_s... Also there is the argument that driver assist can lure drivers into a false sense of security where they don't pay attention when they should be. The worry is that driver assist systems could cause accidents by seeming safer than they actually are. I really like Tesla though and hope for everyone sake that that doesn't happen.
      • ocdtrekkie 11y ago
        I'm not surprised the head of Google self-driving cars thinks Google's approach is the only way to do it.
        • tempestn 11y ago
          Which of his arguments do you specifically disagree with?
          • ocdtrekkie 11y ago
            At the risk of invoking the ire of Google's marketing team further (I just got -6'd on this thread in less than two minutes. It happens actually as predictably as clockwork on any case where I point out Google isn't quite as amazing as it seems.) So, I'm sitting here watching this, and nothing he's saying is particularly a solid logical argument. He's pointing out that a always-running self-driving car has to make more decisions or actions than a driver assistance device, but that's irrelevant: 99% of the time, the car's basically just moving forwards. And arguably, lane assist devices make decisions or corrections just as often as an autonomous car, same for automatic breaking. They constantly need to check the conditions on the road and decide whether or not to adjust. I'm not seeing any real reasoning driver assistance and fully autonomous are so shockingly different... short of the fact that this guy is marketing a Google product. If anything, it seems Urmson is heavily pidgeon-holing what a "driver assistance system" is, so that he can discredit the way all of their competitors are developing the same types of technology. Nothing particularly special about what Google is tracking that couldn't be similarly developed as part of a driver assistance system. In actuality, his final argument is the most ludicrous of them all... that gradually developing the technology through driver assistance is too slow. That this needs to be rushed out the door in the next couple years.
  • imh 11y ago
    What kind of info are the Teslas beaming back to HQ? It can't be the ultra high volume data google's collect, can it? This [0] says google's collect almost 1GB/s. Presumably they keep a good chunk of that. Does anyone know how much Tesla is collecting on it's cars? [0] http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-nearly-1-gbsec?utm_source=datafloq&utm_medium=ref&utm_campaign=datafloq http://www.kurzweilai.net/googles-self-driving-car-gathers-n...
• ocdtrekkie 11y ago
  If everyone's going to accept a single standard (which would be helpful for inter-car telemetry), it can't be controlled by Google. We can't let our cars become another one of Google's monopolies. We should also strongly consider the merits of open source with many vendors contributing and a good governance model. Ideally there'd be some sort of foundation (or government-sponsored group) in charge of such an effort. The last thing we need is to have our screaming metal death traps buzzing around controlled by black box software by a single developer.
• schwap 11y ago
  > So how is the future of this space not just "everybody licenses Google's platform"? Well I certainly can't see that situation going wrong at all. At this rate how long until Google re-brands itself as Omni Consumer Products and turns Mountain View into a nation state?
  • 0xffff2 11y ago
    >At this rate how long until Google re-brands itself as Omni Consumer Products You mean like Alphabet? I only lived in Mountain View for a few months last summer, but I gathered at the time that the city of Mountain View is already fighting tooth and nail to avoid becoming Google City.
    • Shebanator 11y ago
      The mountain view city council is largely controlled by homeowners. As a result, they are against anything that would impact home prices negatively, even if it would be a greater good. And they've also been trying to reduce the influence of google employees on the city, since they fear that too many google employees living in town could change the power structure of the city council itself and cause it to make decisions that don't optimize for home prices. That means they actively fight projects that might actually be good for the city, like building high density housing on the eastern side of 101.
• dperfect 11y ago
  > The equation to get to safety is sensors + computing + map / map geometry. The equation to get to safety is actually what you mentioned + roads where 100% of vehicles are tied in to a common network orchestrating each vehicle's movement in relation to the others and the environment. Without that, differentiation in software is likely to lead to unanticipated dangerous scenarios, just as the HFT market is susceptible to flash crashes... except on the road, they will be real crashes with the potential to be more destructive than human-caused accidents. Hopefully when that network becomes a reality, we can build it on top of some kind of open, distributed platform (perhaps related to blockchain technology) that no single entity can abuse.
  • eric_the_read 11y ago
    How does a single network 100% of vehicles are tied into avoid the problem of an attacker only having to subvert one node on that network to compromise everybody? (Not to mention the difficulty/impossibility of getting to 100% in a reasonable timeframe.) Seems like that's been shown time and again to be practically impossible.
  • jessaustin 11y ago
    That seems really brittle. The baseline for every vehicle should be safety in every situation. (Sometimes that might mean: pull over to the side of the road and stop.) Only once every vehicle is proved safe, can certain combinations of vehicles negotiate compromises to safety in pursuit of other goals like speed.
    • dperfect 11y ago
      (responding to your comment and the other comment about a possibility of attackers) I agree that the baseline should be independent, autonomous, safe operation of each vehicle without any network/cooperation, but in time it's going to go beyond that. I have no doubt that it will happen. Once independent operation is proven to be reasonably safe and dependable for everyday use, it will have achieved a certain degree of safety and efficiency - significantly better (at least in safety) than humans, but still prone to occasional accidents (regardless of who/what is at fault), especially when human drivers are still allowed to drive on the same roads. At that point, people will demand even higher levels of safety (similar to the nines of high availability), and greater efficiency (i.e., speed). Unfortunately, with human drivers sharing the same road, those two demands are at odds with each other; greater efficiency inherently reduces safety. At some point though, the demand will be great enough that we'll have to adopt something better - something with a higher level of coordination between vehicles, and where only computer-controlled vehicles can participate. It certainly won't be pushed or adopted universally in one step, and it'll likely never cover all road infrastructure. It will be adopted first on high throughput routes, much like you have private toll roads today. Instead of paying a toll (or perhaps in addition), your car will enter the roadway by joining the network. Without network compatibility, you'll be unable to use the road. Once you've joined the network, however, your vehicle can literally drive at breakneck speeds, avoiding other traffic by incredibly small margins, and all with significantly higher safety than non-networked roads. Of course having a single network controlling vehicles opens up a possibility for attacks, just as modern commercial aircraft can be vulnerable to attack. It will be an issue, but not one without reasonable mitigation strategies and best practices. The "network" in question may not even be centralized in nature, but rather a decentralized, local mesh network with safeguards in place for each vehicle to detect and respond appropriately to situations where the network seems to be guiding vehicles outside safe bounds. There are a lot of ways that it could be implemented, but it'll be important (at least to me) that it's not all controlled by one government/corporation/entity, but instead rolled out as a set of interoperable industry standards.
• jameshart 11y ago
  "Android-like?" You mean allowing manufacturers to ship crapware-infested versions; having manufacturers handle deployment of critical updates, meaning they simply don't; having core features overridable via aftermarket appstore downloads that provide a vector for malware?
  • dragonwriter 11y ago
    > having manufacturers handle deployment of critical updates, meaning they simply don't; The consequences for a manufacturer of failing to deploy a critical update for self-driving cars is substantially different than failing to deploy a critical update to a mobile handset. So even with a similar set of formal, contractual requirements, there are reasons to expect that the resulting behavior could be quite different.
    • millstone 11y ago
      The Jeep remote hack exploit puts the lie to the idea that old-world automotive companies are serious about software security.
• wsetchell 11y ago
  I can see this market playing out to be an oligopoly not a monopoly. - Very high barrier to entry. You need $X of development costs, and $Y on traffic/mapping data. Anyone with money can get those. - Self driving cars have limited economies of scale. * Self driving taxis get better (less wait time) as their density goes up, to a point. Today Uber and Lyft are both dense enough in SF for me to not care which one I use. * Self driving cars get safer as you collect more driving data. Safer self driving cars are better up to a point. Safety matters a lot now, since cars are unsafe. On the other hand I don't care if Boeings are 2x as safe as Airbuses, both are safe enough for me. If you can make your self driving car safe enough, I'll buy it. To make your self driving car safe enough, you need to spend $X on developement and testing and $Y on really good maps.
• magicalist 11y ago
  > So how is the future of this space not just "everybody licenses Google's platform"? I feel like what we've already seen in the DARPA grand challenge and in the self driving car research world will be what happens in the future: trailblazing is really hard work, but once others can see it can be done, even without a lot of details of how it was done, doing the same thing is usually much easier, or at least more obviously viable and so worth the investment. Not to mention all the published research, suppliers with established manufacturing, and experienced engineers looking for other jobs that would now be out there. Starting a self driving car company ten years from now, say, still would not be remotely easy, but you won't need anywhere near twenty years to catch up.