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Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

453 points by davidst 11y ago

bliti 11y ago
The elephant in the room is this one: When will highways be upgraded/updated for self driving? I don't mean V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) capabilities, but properly painted and maintained lane lines, reflectors, and signage. The infrastructure is just not there. You can't simply rely on a car's sensing abilities for self driving.
- chiph 11y ago
  That $4bn could go a fair way towards developing a longer-lasting highway paint, then restriping the interstates with it.
  - bliti 11y ago
    I think the current paint is OK, it just needs to be serviced. It might be a good idea to include the V2I sensors in the paint itself due to its thickness (I've measured the lane lines locally and they are about 10mm thick). But the basic maintenance is key. This is a bureaucratic problem due to how infrastructure maintenance is used as a political tool (politicians in power usually advertise how public works generate n jobs). The problem here is not the actual tech, but the politics. The tech will eventually get there. The politics? Good luck with that...
pnut 11y ago
The impending dawn of the autonomous car era is the reason why I am not marching on Washington for rail investment. This is really one time where cynical cheapskate politics may hasten rapid, positive societal change.
- ghaff 11y ago
  Or, alternatively, where hesitating to make enormous infrastructure investments for questionable return ended up to be the sensible approach after all.
- massysett 11y ago
  How does an autonomous car reduce the need for infrastructure investment? A bunch of commuters in self-driving cars will clog the road just as much. Less need for parking, maybe; less need for roads, no. Maybe you could squeeze a bit more capacity out of freeways by running cars at high speed at short following distances. But a lot of congestion occurs at intersections and self-driving does little to solve that.
  - Bud 11y ago
    Not "maybe" less need for parking. Definitely, certainly less need for parking. And remember that a lot of "road" surface is actually reserved for parking and not actually available to drive on. Same thing for having to have massive parking lots EVERYWHERE that people with cars might want to go; that can potentially go away completely. And if you need much much less parking, guess what you also need less of? Parking meters. And parking tickets. Imagine a society without that pernicious bullshit everywhere.
stcredzero 11y ago
In the early 2000's, I was hanging out sometimes in western North Carolina, and there was this young woman who has in the habit of getting together with some friends and driving around the clock to get to Colorado and back on short trips, instead of flying. I'm wondering if this technology isn't going to be used for such purposes.
- resoluteteeth 11y ago
  With self-driving cars it would probably be possible to design the seats so that with only one passenger it would be possible to lie down fully. This could make overnight drives in personal cars quite pleasant relative to buses.
  - ChrisBland 11y ago
    To me this is the most exciting part of fully autonomous cars. Some of the new car designs we are going to see will drastically change automobiles forever when you no longer have the concept of a "driver" or steering wheel. Where should input/control surfaces go? How should the car be built? How can it be built safer?
  - artmageddon 11y ago
    > With self-driving cars it would probably be possible to design the seats so that with only one passenger it would be possible to lie down fully. Is there a way to properly and safely restrain someone who is lying down when a collision occurs? I can only imagine the number of broken necks or spinal compression injuries resulting from hitting another vehicle at 60mph+.
    - BuckRogers 11y ago
      If you're lying down sideways and as you buckle in airbags inflate around you before you take off, in the event of an accident other than a rude awakening you should be in better shape than today. Accidents should be far less brutal anyway once we ban human driven vehicles.
  - 11y ago
TrevorJ 11y ago
The real problem with self-driving cars is the car to human handoff. Over the long term it's incredible unlikely that humans will be any good at all at remaining aware and 'up to speed' on the current situation in the event that the car needs to give control back to the driver due to road conditions, hardware failure, or sudden situation that it cannot contend with.
- adekok 11y ago
  Normal desktop failure modes don't work well here. "Hi, this is your car. I've discovered that the road is icy, and am currently in the middle of a 360. Would you like to (a) take over, (b) call an ambulance, or (c) retry?" Too late! You've crashed.
  - mabbo 11y ago
    Bonus points if it's Clippy, but he's a steering wheel now.
  - mchahn 11y ago
    > and am currently in the middle of a 360. You have no faith in AI. The car will always be better at driving than the human. It would be much better at handling a 360 than a human ever could. Actually humans are very bad at handling 360s unless you are a pro.
    - timClicks 11y ago
      As long as the sensors, networking, compute and actuators are all functional.
    - Alupis 11y ago
      Humans are very, very good at handling unknown complex situations. In order for any AI to handle any situation, it must first be programmed to do so. If that situation was an unknown, you get undefined behavior. Undefined behavior in a car traveling down the road is not a good thing to place a bet on... especially your life. This is why majority of sane driverless vehicle talk has concluded a human driver must always be in the driver seat, ready to take control. There's an impossible volume of failure modes a driverless car must contend with, everything from someone pointing an infrared laser at the distance sensors, to complete power failure, to a sudden rockslide, a bird darting in front of the car, lines missing from a windy and hilly road, etc. In normal, daily mundane driving - driverless cars are expected to excel. Sitting in traffic is mind numbing, and mistakes happen when driver's minds wonder. In "active" driving situations, a human brain will almost always excel.
spike021 11y ago
If it's a much cheaper car than the alternatives, would the self-driving capability be implemented with lower-quality hardware and/or software?
Someone1234 11y ago
Just for comparison, you can get a Subaru Legacy Premium with Eyesight for $25,835 (or a Crosstrek for thereabouts, and an Outback for $2-3K more), since at least summer 2015. So nothing Honda are doing here is revolutionary technologically, they're just bringing the same technology to a new market ($5K cheaper), which is still something. I highly recommend that if you invest in THIS technology that you go all in and get the blind spot detection and rear cross traffic alerts. I have had a Subaru with Eyesight for over six months now, and I don't regret buying it and definitely like the blind spot/cross traffic alerts, they're legitimately useful day to day. I will say one downside of this system is what I call "alert fatigue" particularly lane drift warnings, ice warnings, traffic pulled away warnings, etc. You can disable many of these, but it would be my only whine. I have had automatic braking pre-warn me a handful of times, but not had it activate yet except when I pulled into the garage and the dangling tennis ball confused it and even then it only slowed me slightly. You get a yellow warning then red, then brake, and most of the warnings are legitimate I am just ahead of them. Lane keep assist and distance based cruise control are like crack. It feels like you just get on the freeway, push a few buttons, and the car almost drives itself.
- fluxquanta 11y ago
  My brother purchased a 2016 Subaru Outback with Eyesight and his comments to me have largely been the same. The only complaint I've heard is that if it's snowing or the roads have snow cover many of the features are unreliable. His praise when the roads are clear, however, has convinced me to look into it when my current lease expires at the end of this year.
- BrandonY 11y ago
  I also really enjoy my Subaru EyeSight. I've only run into one terrible experience, and that is when I went into a automated car wash. As soon as the first big scrubby thing approached, the EyeSight flipped out and slammed on the brake, which was jolting and scary. Kind of obvious looking back on it, of course, and now I remember to turn it off when I wash my car.
  - Someone1234 11y ago
deleted 11y ago
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kazinator 11y ago
Americans could rather use a robot highway driving instructor. "Consider moving over to the right line; you're driving at the speed limit, and a speeding car is approaching; you may confirm this in the rear-view mirror." "I have detected that you came to a full stop at the end of a generous freeway entrance ramp in light traffic. Suggested future action: look over the shoulder as early as possible and match the speed of the traffic." "Suddenly exiting out of the left lane is dangerous. Please know which exit you're supposed to take, watch for its approach early, and change lanes ahead of time. If you miss an exit, do not make a sudden, dangerous action. Look for an alternate route or U-turn starting at the next exit."
- codingdave 11y ago
  "It looks like you're trying to make a left turn! Need some help?" -Clippy
- edc117 11y ago
  I agree completely, but the very first thing they'd do would be figure out how to turn it off or muffle it. Bad drivers are not the type to take feedback well or let things like the rules get in the way.
  - beat 11y ago
    Yeah... the same people who resent seat belt laws, because they're afraid of being trapped in the car after an accident, and feel much safer being thrown through the windshield so they can get up and walk away.
- prostoalex 11y ago
  From personal experience a lot of people would benefit from Blinker Usage 101.
  - DanielBMarkham 11y ago
    Poor blinker usage drives me nuts. Yes, there are some cases where, well, stuff happens. A driver forgets until the last minute. Many times I see them hit the blinker a split second after they've changed lanes. But far more frequently, I see the driver who is drifting between lanes at will, without thinking of the blinker, and seemingly without a care in the world. This is disturbing, especially since if I'm seeing the behavior, I'm behind the driver. That means it's my job to figure out where the winds will blow them next. Too many times I see idiots posting on Facebook or texting as I pass. Many times this is when we're both doing 65mph or more. Insane stuff. This isn't full auto driving, but every little step helps.
collyw 11y ago
Is it legal to let these cars drive themselves?
- ph0rque 11y ago
  Yes: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-autos-selfdriving-exclusive-idUSKCN0VJ00H http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-autos-selfdriving...
  - notJim 11y ago
    That's referring to fully-autonomous cars. With systems like the one in this article, the driver is still the human, not the car.
    - deleted 11y ago
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- notJim 11y ago
  My friend has a Tesla, and he said it's the same as cruise-control. Basically, it's an assistive feature, but you are still 100% totally responsible for anything your car does while you're at the helm. I don't know if you count that as driving itself or not, since you still have to do most of the things you do as a driver (i.e., pay attention, react to situations.)
bliti 11y ago
This is an expansion on cruise control capabilities and not self-driving. Its a step up, of course. But not what the title may make you think.
ben1040 11y ago
This looks like the "Sensing" feature that Honda has implemented on some of their other vehicles. I just bought a 2016 Accord that does the same thing -- there's a camera mounted on the windshield, another camera in the front grille, and a radar sensor on the front bumper. Calling it "self-driving" is kind of a misnomer and I think the article kind of blows it out of proportion. It will track the car in front of you and keep a safe following distance, keeping either the maximum cruise control speed you've set, or whatever speed the vehicle ahead of you is driving, whichever is slower. It will accelerate or brake accordingly. It will also attempt to stay in the lane by using the onboard cameras for tracking the lane markings. The lane keeping assist is not nearly as autonomous as the article makes it out to be. It does not like to work on sharper curves on the freeway, for one -- the system will disengage and tell you to steer manually. It still wants you to keep your hands on the wheel. It must be looking for very very subtle movements on the wheel, because the system will yell at you if you take your hands off the wheel for longer than 10-15 seconds. All in all it's a pretty cool feature for longer road trips (keeping in your lane can just get kind of tiring, even with cruise control) but it's not the sort of autonomous driving that the article here paints it out to be.
- akama 11y ago
  I would guess you are correct about how they make sure your hands are on the wheel. I've done some car hacking and one of the things that surprised me was how sensitive some cars steering wheels are to pressure. It was impossible to keep it in the same position according to the car's internal electronic systems with my hands on it. This is car is 4 years old, so it's probably only gotten more sensitive.
  - osteele 11y ago
    I have a Tesla, that also requires hands on the wheel from time to time. I'd assumed it was capacitive. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be subtle movements, because the wheel is unresponsive until you make a purposeful movement, at which point it starts moving with your hands; and you can just rest your hands against it lightly to let it know they're there. But of course it could be sensing subtle forces, even if it switching modes only on larger forces. Is there a test for whether it's capacitive? Like, does the fact that it works with gloves on mean it's not capacitive? (That's diagnostic for capacitive touch screens, but they're smaller and trying to detect finer motion and from just the fingers.)
mikeash 11y ago
The article really wants to compare with electric vehicles, for some reason. The subheading says "they are being snapped up faster than electrified vehicles." This is repeated in the article, which says the relevant options packages "are being snapped up at a far higher rate than electrified vehicles." Discussing the Q50's technology package and how many buyers opt for it, it says "That’s three times as many people who pay extra to buy a hybrid-electric version." What's the deal? Is this just because Tesla happens to be the one with the best system at the moment? It doesn't make any sense to me, and really distracts from the article's main thrust.
- wmeredith 11y ago
  In the public mind EV = futuristic car. Self driving vehicle = futuristic car. The article author is either making the conflation to appeal to the audience or is similarly myopic.
  - deleted 11y ago
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- hmahncke 11y ago
  I noticed the same thing, and my guess is that the WSJ is generally dismissive of climate change risk, and against government incentives to combat climate change, and wanted to frame this article as what the government should be doing instead of encouraging hybrid/electric vehicles.
  - MattHeard 11y ago
    From the article: > After a decade of spending much of its time and billions focused on boosting fuel-efficiency, Washington is increasing its focus on technology that could save lives. This ignores that one of the justifications for fuel-efficiency regulation is the lives saved from reduced pollution.
    - mikeash 11y ago
jtouri 11y ago
There was a startup that for $10,000 it was a third party option package that was self driving. I wonder how it is doing with all these car companies that create their own options for self-driving.
- mikeash 11y ago
  I think you might be referring to Mobileye. They're actually doing really well, because their technology is what drives most of these first-party systems.
- ph0rque 11y ago
  You mean the one just recently bought by one of the big car companies for north of $1B? http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-startup-for-more-than-1-billion/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-st...
  - jtouri 11y ago
    Yeah I think that's the one! Wow good for them, I remember reading about them last year, then after that I never really heard about them again.
- deleted 11y ago
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yalogin 11y ago
This looks like the same functionality the Tesla Model S has. One of the big draws for the new Model S cars. So much so that people are getting rid of their older Teslas because they did not have the autopilot. I thought it's only a matter of time before autopilot becomes common place but it looks like its happening sooner than I thought. The good thing is this has nothing to do with the car being electric or not. But the main thing is, if Tesla thought its going to be a differentiator in terms of calling their cars "luxury" its going to be a problem for them. Given that the internals of the Model S itself are not particularly luxorious they need to think about it.
embro 11y ago
Sadly there is no such thing as an electric Civic. I wish my 30K Nissan Leaf had it.
ipsin 11y ago
I'm curious about whether this is going to be a net win or lose for safety. If users treat these automated cruise systems as a "magic self-driving device" when it can potentially make mistakes or hand back control when it's confused, drivers are going to die. If people "really want to look at their cell phones", and they take this as the tool that lets them pay no attention to the road, it better be up to that task.
Animats 11y ago
From the article: "as long as lane markings remain visible and another vehicle is in front of the car." That's more like platooning, which was demoed two decades ago in Demo 97 [1], than self-driving. Are there more details about how this works, especially about autopilot disconnect and user takeover? Tesla's system is known to have trouble with offramps.[2] (Tesla customers are very forgiving. "It's a beta", one says in their forum.) Honda's follow-the-leader system avoids some of Tesla's problems. Radar systems for not rear-ending the car ahead are already pretty good, and many are already on the road. Lane following by lane markings isn't that reliable, but restricting it to following the car ahead handles traffic jams nicely while locking out most of the hard cases. The deployment of self-driving systems which are much dumber than Google's is worrisome. I've written before of the "deadly valley" of automated driving. This is another "deadly valley" system. The deadly valley begins where the driver can take their hands off the wheel and tune out. It ends where the automated system can correctly handle more situations than a human driver. Google is trying hard to get to the far side of the deadly valley. That's good. Look at the problems they're having. Their only known fender-bender in autonomous mode was when the vehicle was trying to deal with a drain blocked with sandbags and very slowly maneuvered around it, to be hit by a bus, while in a wide lane at a right turn, because the AI misjudged the likely behavior of the bus driver. Google's dealing with the hard edge cases. Cruise, on the other hand, ran into a parked car in San Francisco when the autopilot lost lane tracking, veered left, overcorrected right, and the driver took back control too late. That's a more basic failure. It also shows the problem with semi-autonomous systems. Expecting the driver to compensate for failures of the automation will not work. Volvo Car Group President and CEO Håkan Samuelsson says that the company will accept full liability whenever one of its cars is in autonomous mode.[3] He has it right. This needs to be a requirement before the "move fast and break things" crowd gets on the road. nonmarked-ramp [1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/.../pavements/.../publicroads/97july/demo97.cfm http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/.../pavements/... [2] https://forums.teslamotors.com/de_DE/forum/forums/careful-when-using-autopilot- https://forums.teslamotors.com/de_DE/forum/forums/careful-wh... [3] http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-liability-self-driving-cars/ http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-liability-self-driving-c...
- tly 11y ago
encoderer 11y ago
It might take a while before self driving is widely available, but self stopping is here today. It's now standard equipment in all new Mercedes -- including cars selling for about $30k. I have an entry-level Mercedes and it includes blind spot radar, lane tracking, and collision avoidance that will stop your car automatically if you're distracted or incapacitated. These features are available widely from most automakers now.
Negative1 11y ago
The title is a bit misleading. I have a 2016 Civic Touring that has the Sensing Package. It's effectively a sensor package (cameras in the top-middle of the windshield and below passenger-side headlight) with integration with the steering and powertrain systems and very basic logic. When you turn it on the car basically tries to stay in your lane by looking at the lines on the road. It actually tells you when it can and cannot see the lines. When it detects you going outside of the lane (without using your signal) it takes control of steering and corrects for you. You can also set it to stay within some distance of the car in front of you and it will control your speed. Supposedly, it will also auto-brake if you are in danger of collision but I haven't had a chance to test that yet (and hope not to have to). The whole thing is more like a driver assistance system and if you take your hands off the wheel for more than 15 seconds or so a bunch of alerts start going off and the system disengages. After using it for a few months I think this is probably a good idea. There are quite a few places in the SF Bay area that have worn out and faded lines on the road and once the system loses sight of the lane markers it just stops working. Not a great moment to have your hands off the wheel or your eyes closed. ;-) For the price its incredible that Honda offers something like this. Suburu offers something similar but the next best thing is buying a Tesla for much more. I treat it sort of as insurance on long trips. If I start dozing off or am distracted the system keeps me in check but it is not reliable enough to be truly autonomous. So yeah, it can sort of drive autonomously. As a preview of the future it gives me hope and it's possible this may be the last car I actually buy (when cars drive themselves it could very well become a service industry).
winter_blue 11y ago
> The Obama administration has proposed spending $4 billion to accelerate autonomous-car technology during the next decade. Hmm, what are they spending it on? There's a lot of money being spent on developing this technology already by multiple private companies. I assume it's for something else... IMO government research money should go into stuff that private industry is unwilling to fund, like pure math, theoretical physics/CS, and other things that have very long-term yield/results timelines.
johnchristopher 11y ago
Curiously I'd rather pay a premium for a car that can park itself flawlessly. Or drive itself around town while I am busy doing things in said town.
dsmithatx 11y ago
Sounds like these cars are far from self driving. Just some added safety features that resemble self driving but, are dangerous to use without a foot near the break and hands on the wheel. I think this sentence pretty much says it all, "For instance, some owners have posted videos of hands- and foot-free driving on YouTube and the car inevitably makes a mistake.". It sounds like these features are going to end up being abused and probably causing serious fatalities. As we have seen people want to txt and even watch movies while driving. These new features will allow wreck less drivers to pay less attention to driving and more attention to how many Instagram followers they have. I'll be sure to pay more attention to people driving Honda civics when I'm on the highway.
mizchief2 11y ago
"The Obama administration has proposed spending $4 billion to accelerate autonomous-car technology during the next decade" Why are we using public funds to research something the industry is already developing due to market demand?
CoffeeDregs 11y ago
Conversations about self-driving have focused on zero defect rate in-city self-driving vehicles, but a lot of these technologies are reaching Pareto-efficient levels of usefulness. I don't need my car to drive the first and last miles; I'd be perfectly happy if it just drove on the highway. And why do humans drive long haul trucks for anything other than the first and last miles? Trucks should drive themselves between depots at the edges of metros and then humans can drive them into the city. https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/the-long-haul-truck-of-the-future/ https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/th... "Self steering"... How long before that moniker is replaced by "Self driving". And why are humans delivering packages? They might not be for long: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-starship-delivery-robot-idUSKBN0U30ES20151220 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-starship-delivery-robot-id... It's going to shock our economy once industries begin constraining roles to the level at which robots can be "good enough". After figuring out how to manage them, we'll start to see robots deployed in force. As parents, my wife and I are talking about this a lot as we think about how to raise our kids (and we are emphatically hands-off parents)...
- beat 11y ago
  Even fully automated, trucks have much longer response times in dangerous situations. The fatal accidents would be inevitable, and the legal response vicious. Never mind that automated trucks would probably be less likely overall to be in an accident.
nashashmi 11y ago
The conversation on this HN thread makes me wonder about the future generation who will never learn how to drive. And then I feel sorry for the generation in between who will be confused with automatic driving happening only sometimes. Such interruptive learning or even worse, never having learned, has the power to change culture for the worst.
godgod 11y ago
Does anyone else see these self driving car technologies as a bad thing? I don't want some computer in control of my safety.
usrusr 11y ago
How do we as drivers keep up with the rising levels of automation? It's challenging but doable for owners, but imagine jumping from a pain old 1990s car into a flashy new rental with all the bells and whistles... With a bit of exaggeration, one might make a case for individual type rating, like airliner pilots need to have. Before we reach fully autonomous driving, we might see an age of widespread "car illiteracy", with more and more people who have a driver's license, but who have completely lost touch with the state of the art in car UI concepts. With not enough time on automatic transmission, people here in Europe occasionally even struggle with something as simple as park/neutral/reverse/drive (don't ask my where I got that)
raz32dust 11y ago
Am I missing something? Why is this top news? There are several cars out there with adaptive cruise control. In fact, I think most mainstream cars offer it as an option now. It's pretty impressive but calling it "self-driving" is hyperbole. Subaru's eyesight is technically even more impressive considering it does image processing to detect vehicles, whereas most of these systems are based on radar. Although I don't see the point because radar is more reliable IMO. Unless you use some features which only camera can provide (stop at traffic lights?), which Subaru doesn't yet do. From whatever research I did before buying a car, Volvo's system (uses both radar and camera) seems to be one of the best overall, along with Mercedes, and Subaru being a close third.
bengoodger 11y ago
I've owned three cars with automatic cruise control for the past decade. This isn't exactly new technology, perhaps only at this price point. The first car I had with this, an '06 Infiniti, was only able to slow to a crawl, not a full stop. So while it was useful on the highway it was useless in stop and start. The second car, a '11 BMW, added "Stop & Go" to the formula. Great? Not quite. What would happen is that the car would come to a full stop, and then a timer would run, and if the car didn't start moving again within 10 seconds the cruise control would shut off, and to resume you'd have to push the pedal. This was especially maddening when stop & start traffic is inconsistent and the stops last 10.5 seconds. Basically the idea of being able to set & forget was completely undermined by this and driving with the feature on was more stressful than driving with it off and just doing everything manually. A complete bust. I don't know why it does this but I can see it being some combination of the product team needing to ship the feature in the state it was in, and legal requirements. The problem with both of these implementations is that they promised to alleviate some of the issues with past "auto-drive" features (and you should consider Cruise Control to be the very first auto drive feature), but introduce their own. If you want the user experience of set & forget, you need very predictable conditions if you want any of these mass market systems to work for you, and unfortunately that's just not the way the roads are. I think I have the feature in my latest car too, but I've given up and decided to enjoy manually driving, and just wait for fully autonomous vehicles.
ams6110 11y ago
No thanks. Just something else to go wrong.
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sweetbabyjesus 11y ago
Exciting title, disappointing marketing piece for Honda. WSJ has joined the ranks of Forbes promoted content levels.
sandra_saltlake 11y ago
I'm impressed, I'm much more relaxed than before - and that means I'm actually able to just look ahead and think about the road, not about what I'm doing.
ekpyrotic 11y ago
This is a interesting proposition for Honda, but really not that new. Even the price is not /that/ new. In fact, this is technology that has been sold at around the same price point in the industrial transportation sector -- think of logistics and lorries -- for quite a while. This is where the majority of the innovation is taking place. For example, just this week it has been revealed that the UK Govt will likely to announcing tomorrow funding for driverless truck convoys in the North of England. What's the price differential between these intelligent trucks and regular trucks? $0. In fact, so much innovation is taking place in the industrial sector that just last week Toyota announced that it has hired the FULL workforce of Jaybridge Robotics, a firm that specializes in autonomous industrial vehicles, mainly in the agricultural sector. If you want to understand the tailwinds in the sector, follow the b2b and industrial segment of the market. Technologies and trends are already starting to filter down. -- I also want to plug my email newsletter Driverless Weekly (http://driverlessweekly.com http://driverlessweekly.com) while I'm at it. It's a once-weekly summary of the top news stories in the autonomous vehicles sector.
a_imho 11y ago
the self driving car is a concept I have a hard time appreciating. It sounds cool, and offers enormous technological and legislative obstacles to overcome, yet I can't figure out the fundamental problem they will solve - compared to the attention they get. For any use case I can imagine (minus the cool factor) we either have more efficient solutions already, or there are better alternatives to investigate. Plus I figure, most people still like to drive.
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girkyturkey 11y ago
I have yet to drive a "self-driving" or even "self-monitoring" car and the thought of doing so terrifies me. I know technology is good and it can do great things, but helping me drive is something I don't enjoy the idea of. What happens if, however unlikely, someone were to hack my car? They could potentially crash my car and leave without a trace. I think we really need to take a step back and ask if the benefits outweigh the potential costs/risks.

453 points by davidst 11y ago

bliti 11y ago

The elephant in the room is this one: When will highways be upgraded/updated for self driving? I don't mean V2I (vehicle to infrastructure) capabilities, but properly painted and maintained lane lines, reflectors, and signage. The infrastructure is just not there. You can't simply rely on a car's sensing abilities for self driving.

chiph 11y ago
That $4bn could go a fair way towards developing a longer-lasting highway paint, then restriping the interstates with it.
- bliti 11y ago
  I think the current paint is OK, it just needs to be serviced. It might be a good idea to include the V2I sensors in the paint itself due to its thickness (I've measured the lane lines locally and they are about 10mm thick). But the basic maintenance is key. This is a bureaucratic problem due to how infrastructure maintenance is used as a political tool (politicians in power usually advertise how public works generate n jobs). The problem here is not the actual tech, but the politics. The tech will eventually get there. The politics? Good luck with that...

pnut 11y ago

The impending dawn of the autonomous car era is the reason why I am not marching on Washington for rail investment. This is really one time where cynical cheapskate politics may hasten rapid, positive societal change.

ghaff 11y ago
Or, alternatively, where hesitating to make enormous infrastructure investments for questionable return ended up to be the sensible approach after all.
massysett 11y ago
How does an autonomous car reduce the need for infrastructure investment? A bunch of commuters in self-driving cars will clog the road just as much. Less need for parking, maybe; less need for roads, no. Maybe you could squeeze a bit more capacity out of freeways by running cars at high speed at short following distances. But a lot of congestion occurs at intersections and self-driving does little to solve that.
- Bud 11y ago
  Not "maybe" less need for parking. Definitely, certainly less need for parking. And remember that a lot of "road" surface is actually reserved for parking and not actually available to drive on. Same thing for having to have massive parking lots EVERYWHERE that people with cars might want to go; that can potentially go away completely. And if you need much much less parking, guess what you also need less of? Parking meters. And parking tickets. Imagine a society without that pernicious bullshit everywhere.

stcredzero 11y ago

In the early 2000's, I was hanging out sometimes in western North Carolina, and there was this young woman who has in the habit of getting together with some friends and driving around the clock to get to Colorado and back on short trips, instead of flying. I'm wondering if this technology isn't going to be used for such purposes.

resoluteteeth 11y ago
With self-driving cars it would probably be possible to design the seats so that with only one passenger it would be possible to lie down fully. This could make overnight drives in personal cars quite pleasant relative to buses.
- ChrisBland 11y ago
  To me this is the most exciting part of fully autonomous cars. Some of the new car designs we are going to see will drastically change automobiles forever when you no longer have the concept of a "driver" or steering wheel. Where should input/control surfaces go? How should the car be built? How can it be built safer?
- artmageddon 11y ago
  > With self-driving cars it would probably be possible to design the seats so that with only one passenger it would be possible to lie down fully. Is there a way to properly and safely restrain someone who is lying down when a collision occurs? I can only imagine the number of broken necks or spinal compression injuries resulting from hitting another vehicle at 60mph+.
  - BuckRogers 11y ago
    If you're lying down sideways and as you buckle in airbags inflate around you before you take off, in the event of an accident other than a rude awakening you should be in better shape than today. Accidents should be far less brutal anyway once we ban human driven vehicles.
- 11y ago

TrevorJ 11y ago

The real problem with self-driving cars is the car to human handoff. Over the long term it's incredible unlikely that humans will be any good at all at remaining aware and 'up to speed' on the current situation in the event that the car needs to give control back to the driver due to road conditions, hardware failure, or sudden situation that it cannot contend with.

adekok 11y ago
Normal desktop failure modes don't work well here. "Hi, this is your car. I've discovered that the road is icy, and am currently in the middle of a 360. Would you like to (a) take over, (b) call an ambulance, or (c) retry?" Too late! You've crashed.
- mabbo 11y ago
  Bonus points if it's Clippy, but he's a steering wheel now.
- mchahn 11y ago
  > and am currently in the middle of a 360. You have no faith in AI. The car will always be better at driving than the human. It would be much better at handling a 360 than a human ever could. Actually humans are very bad at handling 360s unless you are a pro.
  - timClicks 11y ago
    As long as the sensors, networking, compute and actuators are all functional.
  - Alupis 11y ago
    Humans are very, very good at handling unknown complex situations. In order for any AI to handle any situation, it must first be programmed to do so. If that situation was an unknown, you get undefined behavior. Undefined behavior in a car traveling down the road is not a good thing to place a bet on... especially your life. This is why majority of sane driverless vehicle talk has concluded a human driver must always be in the driver seat, ready to take control. There's an impossible volume of failure modes a driverless car must contend with, everything from someone pointing an infrared laser at the distance sensors, to complete power failure, to a sudden rockslide, a bird darting in front of the car, lines missing from a windy and hilly road, etc. In normal, daily mundane driving - driverless cars are expected to excel. Sitting in traffic is mind numbing, and mistakes happen when driver's minds wonder. In "active" driving situations, a human brain will almost always excel.

spike021 11y ago

If it's a much cheaper car than the alternatives, would the self-driving capability be implemented with lower-quality hardware and/or software?

Someone1234 11y ago

Just for comparison, you can get a Subaru Legacy Premium with Eyesight for $25,835 (or a Crosstrek for thereabouts, and an Outback for $2-3K more), since at least summer 2015. So nothing Honda are doing here is revolutionary technologically, they're just bringing the same technology to a new market ($5K cheaper), which is still something. I highly recommend that if you invest in THIS technology that you go all in and get the blind spot detection and rear cross traffic alerts. I have had a Subaru with Eyesight for over six months now, and I don't regret buying it and definitely like the blind spot/cross traffic alerts, they're legitimately useful day to day. I will say one downside of this system is what I call "alert fatigue" particularly lane drift warnings, ice warnings, traffic pulled away warnings, etc. You can disable many of these, but it would be my only whine. I have had automatic braking pre-warn me a handful of times, but not had it activate yet except when I pulled into the garage and the dangling tennis ball confused it and even then it only slowed me slightly. You get a yellow warning then red, then brake, and most of the warnings are legitimate I am just ahead of them. Lane keep assist and distance based cruise control are like crack. It feels like you just get on the freeway, push a few buttons, and the car almost drives itself.

fluxquanta 11y ago
My brother purchased a 2016 Subaru Outback with Eyesight and his comments to me have largely been the same. The only complaint I've heard is that if it's snowing or the roads have snow cover many of the features are unreliable. His praise when the roads are clear, however, has convinced me to look into it when my current lease expires at the end of this year.
BrandonY 11y ago
I also really enjoy my Subaru EyeSight. I've only run into one terrible experience, and that is when I went into a automated car wash. As soon as the first big scrubby thing approached, the EyeSight flipped out and slammed on the brake, which was jolting and scary. Kind of obvious looking back on it, of course, and now I remember to turn it off when I wash my car.
- Someone1234 11y ago

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kazinator 11y ago

Americans could rather use a robot highway driving instructor. "Consider moving over to the right line; you're driving at the speed limit, and a speeding car is approaching; you may confirm this in the rear-view mirror." "I have detected that you came to a full stop at the end of a generous freeway entrance ramp in light traffic. Suggested future action: look over the shoulder as early as possible and match the speed of the traffic." "Suddenly exiting out of the left lane is dangerous. Please know which exit you're supposed to take, watch for its approach early, and change lanes ahead of time. If you miss an exit, do not make a sudden, dangerous action. Look for an alternate route or U-turn starting at the next exit."

codingdave 11y ago
"It looks like you're trying to make a left turn! Need some help?" -Clippy
edc117 11y ago
I agree completely, but the very first thing they'd do would be figure out how to turn it off or muffle it. Bad drivers are not the type to take feedback well or let things like the rules get in the way.
- beat 11y ago
  Yeah... the same people who resent seat belt laws, because they're afraid of being trapped in the car after an accident, and feel much safer being thrown through the windshield so they can get up and walk away.
prostoalex 11y ago
From personal experience a lot of people would benefit from Blinker Usage 101.
- DanielBMarkham 11y ago
  Poor blinker usage drives me nuts. Yes, there are some cases where, well, stuff happens. A driver forgets until the last minute. Many times I see them hit the blinker a split second after they've changed lanes. But far more frequently, I see the driver who is drifting between lanes at will, without thinking of the blinker, and seemingly without a care in the world. This is disturbing, especially since if I'm seeing the behavior, I'm behind the driver. That means it's my job to figure out where the winds will blow them next. Too many times I see idiots posting on Facebook or texting as I pass. Many times this is when we're both doing 65mph or more. Insane stuff. This isn't full auto driving, but every little step helps.

collyw 11y ago

Is it legal to let these cars drive themselves?

ph0rque 11y ago
Yes: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-autos-selfdriving-exclusive-idUSKCN0VJ00H http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-autos-selfdriving...
- notJim 11y ago
  That's referring to fully-autonomous cars. With systems like the one in this article, the driver is still the human, not the car.
  - deleted 11y ago
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notJim 11y ago
My friend has a Tesla, and he said it's the same as cruise-control. Basically, it's an assistive feature, but you are still 100% totally responsible for anything your car does while you're at the helm. I don't know if you count that as driving itself or not, since you still have to do most of the things you do as a driver (i.e., pay attention, react to situations.)

bliti 11y ago

This is an expansion on cruise control capabilities and not self-driving. Its a step up, of course. But not what the title may make you think.

ben1040 11y ago

This looks like the "Sensing" feature that Honda has implemented on some of their other vehicles. I just bought a 2016 Accord that does the same thing -- there's a camera mounted on the windshield, another camera in the front grille, and a radar sensor on the front bumper. Calling it "self-driving" is kind of a misnomer and I think the article kind of blows it out of proportion. It will track the car in front of you and keep a safe following distance, keeping either the maximum cruise control speed you've set, or whatever speed the vehicle ahead of you is driving, whichever is slower. It will accelerate or brake accordingly. It will also attempt to stay in the lane by using the onboard cameras for tracking the lane markings. The lane keeping assist is not nearly as autonomous as the article makes it out to be. It does not like to work on sharper curves on the freeway, for one -- the system will disengage and tell you to steer manually. It still wants you to keep your hands on the wheel. It must be looking for very very subtle movements on the wheel, because the system will yell at you if you take your hands off the wheel for longer than 10-15 seconds. All in all it's a pretty cool feature for longer road trips (keeping in your lane can just get kind of tiring, even with cruise control) but it's not the sort of autonomous driving that the article here paints it out to be.

akama 11y ago
I would guess you are correct about how they make sure your hands are on the wheel. I've done some car hacking and one of the things that surprised me was how sensitive some cars steering wheels are to pressure. It was impossible to keep it in the same position according to the car's internal electronic systems with my hands on it. This is car is 4 years old, so it's probably only gotten more sensitive.
- osteele 11y ago
  I have a Tesla, that also requires hands on the wheel from time to time. I'd assumed it was capacitive. It hadn't occurred to me that it might be subtle movements, because the wheel is unresponsive until you make a purposeful movement, at which point it starts moving with your hands; and you can just rest your hands against it lightly to let it know they're there. But of course it could be sensing subtle forces, even if it switching modes only on larger forces. Is there a test for whether it's capacitive? Like, does the fact that it works with gloves on mean it's not capacitive? (That's diagnostic for capacitive touch screens, but they're smaller and trying to detect finer motion and from just the fingers.)

mikeash 11y ago

The article really wants to compare with electric vehicles, for some reason. The subheading says "they are being snapped up faster than electrified vehicles." This is repeated in the article, which says the relevant options packages "are being snapped up at a far higher rate than electrified vehicles." Discussing the Q50's technology package and how many buyers opt for it, it says "That’s three times as many people who pay extra to buy a hybrid-electric version." What's the deal? Is this just because Tesla happens to be the one with the best system at the moment? It doesn't make any sense to me, and really distracts from the article's main thrust.

wmeredith 11y ago
In the public mind EV = futuristic car. Self driving vehicle = futuristic car. The article author is either making the conflation to appeal to the audience or is similarly myopic.
- deleted 11y ago
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hmahncke 11y ago
I noticed the same thing, and my guess is that the WSJ is generally dismissive of climate change risk, and against government incentives to combat climate change, and wanted to frame this article as what the government should be doing instead of encouraging hybrid/electric vehicles.
- MattHeard 11y ago
  From the article: > After a decade of spending much of its time and billions focused on boosting fuel-efficiency, Washington is increasing its focus on technology that could save lives. This ignores that one of the justifications for fuel-efficiency regulation is the lives saved from reduced pollution.
  - mikeash 11y ago

jtouri 11y ago

There was a startup that for $10,000 it was a third party option package that was self driving. I wonder how it is doing with all these car companies that create their own options for self-driving.

mikeash 11y ago
I think you might be referring to Mobileye. They're actually doing really well, because their technology is what drives most of these first-party systems.
ph0rque 11y ago
You mean the one just recently bought by one of the big car companies for north of $1B? http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-startup-for-more-than-1-billion/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/11/gm-buying-self-driving-tech-st...
- jtouri 11y ago
  Yeah I think that's the one! Wow good for them, I remember reading about them last year, then after that I never really heard about them again.
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yalogin 11y ago

This looks like the same functionality the Tesla Model S has. One of the big draws for the new Model S cars. So much so that people are getting rid of their older Teslas because they did not have the autopilot. I thought it's only a matter of time before autopilot becomes common place but it looks like its happening sooner than I thought. The good thing is this has nothing to do with the car being electric or not. But the main thing is, if Tesla thought its going to be a differentiator in terms of calling their cars "luxury" its going to be a problem for them. Given that the internals of the Model S itself are not particularly luxorious they need to think about it.

embro 11y ago

Sadly there is no such thing as an electric Civic. I wish my 30K Nissan Leaf had it.

ipsin 11y ago

I'm curious about whether this is going to be a net win or lose for safety. If users treat these automated cruise systems as a "magic self-driving device" when it can potentially make mistakes or hand back control when it's confused, drivers are going to die. If people "really want to look at their cell phones", and they take this as the tool that lets them pay no attention to the road, it better be up to that task.

Animats 11y ago

From the article: "as long as lane markings remain visible and another vehicle is in front of the car." That's more like platooning, which was demoed two decades ago in Demo 97 [1], than self-driving. Are there more details about how this works, especially about autopilot disconnect and user takeover? Tesla's system is known to have trouble with offramps.[2] (Tesla customers are very forgiving. "It's a beta", one says in their forum.) Honda's follow-the-leader system avoids some of Tesla's problems. Radar systems for not rear-ending the car ahead are already pretty good, and many are already on the road. Lane following by lane markings isn't that reliable, but restricting it to following the car ahead handles traffic jams nicely while locking out most of the hard cases. The deployment of self-driving systems which are much dumber than Google's is worrisome. I've written before of the "deadly valley" of automated driving. This is another "deadly valley" system. The deadly valley begins where the driver can take their hands off the wheel and tune out. It ends where the automated system can correctly handle more situations than a human driver. Google is trying hard to get to the far side of the deadly valley. That's good. Look at the problems they're having. Their only known fender-bender in autonomous mode was when the vehicle was trying to deal with a drain blocked with sandbags and very slowly maneuvered around it, to be hit by a bus, while in a wide lane at a right turn, because the AI misjudged the likely behavior of the bus driver. Google's dealing with the hard edge cases. Cruise, on the other hand, ran into a parked car in San Francisco when the autopilot lost lane tracking, veered left, overcorrected right, and the driver took back control too late. That's a more basic failure. It also shows the problem with semi-autonomous systems. Expecting the driver to compensate for failures of the automation will not work. Volvo Car Group President and CEO Håkan Samuelsson says that the company will accept full liability whenever one of its cars is in autonomous mode.[3] He has it right. This needs to be a requirement before the "move fast and break things" crowd gets on the road. nonmarked-ramp [1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/.../pavements/.../publicroads/97july/demo97.cfm http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/.../pavements/... [2] https://forums.teslamotors.com/de_DE/forum/forums/careful-when-using-autopilot- https://forums.teslamotors.com/de_DE/forum/forums/careful-wh... [3] http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-liability-self-driving-cars/ http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-liability-self-driving-c...

tly 11y ago

encoderer 11y ago

It might take a while before self driving is widely available, but self stopping is here today. It's now standard equipment in all new Mercedes -- including cars selling for about $30k. I have an entry-level Mercedes and it includes blind spot radar, lane tracking, and collision avoidance that will stop your car automatically if you're distracted or incapacitated. These features are available widely from most automakers now.

Negative1 11y ago

The title is a bit misleading. I have a 2016 Civic Touring that has the Sensing Package. It's effectively a sensor package (cameras in the top-middle of the windshield and below passenger-side headlight) with integration with the steering and powertrain systems and very basic logic. When you turn it on the car basically tries to stay in your lane by looking at the lines on the road. It actually tells you when it can and cannot see the lines. When it detects you going outside of the lane (without using your signal) it takes control of steering and corrects for you. You can also set it to stay within some distance of the car in front of you and it will control your speed. Supposedly, it will also auto-brake if you are in danger of collision but I haven't had a chance to test that yet (and hope not to have to). The whole thing is more like a driver assistance system and if you take your hands off the wheel for more than 15 seconds or so a bunch of alerts start going off and the system disengages. After using it for a few months I think this is probably a good idea. There are quite a few places in the SF Bay area that have worn out and faded lines on the road and once the system loses sight of the lane markers it just stops working. Not a great moment to have your hands off the wheel or your eyes closed. ;-) For the price its incredible that Honda offers something like this. Suburu offers something similar but the next best thing is buying a Tesla for much more. I treat it sort of as insurance on long trips. If I start dozing off or am distracted the system keeps me in check but it is not reliable enough to be truly autonomous. So yeah, it can sort of drive autonomously. As a preview of the future it gives me hope and it's possible this may be the last car I actually buy (when cars drive themselves it could very well become a service industry).

winter_blue 11y ago

> The Obama administration has proposed spending $4 billion to accelerate autonomous-car technology during the next decade. Hmm, what are they spending it on? There's a lot of money being spent on developing this technology already by multiple private companies. I assume it's for something else... IMO government research money should go into stuff that private industry is unwilling to fund, like pure math, theoretical physics/CS, and other things that have very long-term yield/results timelines.

johnchristopher 11y ago

Curiously I'd rather pay a premium for a car that can park itself flawlessly. Or drive itself around town while I am busy doing things in said town.

dsmithatx 11y ago

Sounds like these cars are far from self driving. Just some added safety features that resemble self driving but, are dangerous to use without a foot near the break and hands on the wheel. I think this sentence pretty much says it all, "For instance, some owners have posted videos of hands- and foot-free driving on YouTube and the car inevitably makes a mistake.". It sounds like these features are going to end up being abused and probably causing serious fatalities. As we have seen people want to txt and even watch movies while driving. These new features will allow wreck less drivers to pay less attention to driving and more attention to how many Instagram followers they have. I'll be sure to pay more attention to people driving Honda civics when I'm on the highway.

mizchief2 11y ago

"The Obama administration has proposed spending $4 billion to accelerate autonomous-car technology during the next decade" Why are we using public funds to research something the industry is already developing due to market demand?

CoffeeDregs 11y ago

Conversations about self-driving have focused on zero defect rate in-city self-driving vehicles, but a lot of these technologies are reaching Pareto-efficient levels of usefulness. I don't need my car to drive the first and last miles; I'd be perfectly happy if it just drove on the highway. And why do humans drive long haul trucks for anything other than the first and last miles? Trucks should drive themselves between depots at the edges of metros and then humans can drive them into the city. https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/the-long-haul-truck-of-the-future/ https://www.mercedes-benz.com/en/mercedes-benz/innovation/th... "Self steering"... How long before that moniker is replaced by "Self driving". And why are humans delivering packages? They might not be for long: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-starship-delivery-robot-idUSKBN0U30ES20151220 http://www.reuters.com/article/us-starship-delivery-robot-id... It's going to shock our economy once industries begin constraining roles to the level at which robots can be "good enough". After figuring out how to manage them, we'll start to see robots deployed in force. As parents, my wife and I are talking about this a lot as we think about how to raise our kids (and we are emphatically hands-off parents)...

beat 11y ago
Even fully automated, trucks have much longer response times in dangerous situations. The fatal accidents would be inevitable, and the legal response vicious. Never mind that automated trucks would probably be less likely overall to be in an accident.

nashashmi 11y ago

The conversation on this HN thread makes me wonder about the future generation who will never learn how to drive. And then I feel sorry for the generation in between who will be confused with automatic driving happening only sometimes. Such interruptive learning or even worse, never having learned, has the power to change culture for the worst.

godgod 11y ago

Does anyone else see these self driving car technologies as a bad thing? I don't want some computer in control of my safety.

usrusr 11y ago

How do we as drivers keep up with the rising levels of automation? It's challenging but doable for owners, but imagine jumping from a pain old 1990s car into a flashy new rental with all the bells and whistles... With a bit of exaggeration, one might make a case for individual type rating, like airliner pilots need to have. Before we reach fully autonomous driving, we might see an age of widespread "car illiteracy", with more and more people who have a driver's license, but who have completely lost touch with the state of the art in car UI concepts. With not enough time on automatic transmission, people here in Europe occasionally even struggle with something as simple as park/neutral/reverse/drive (don't ask my where I got that)

raz32dust 11y ago

Am I missing something? Why is this top news? There are several cars out there with adaptive cruise control. In fact, I think most mainstream cars offer it as an option now. It's pretty impressive but calling it "self-driving" is hyperbole. Subaru's eyesight is technically even more impressive considering it does image processing to detect vehicles, whereas most of these systems are based on radar. Although I don't see the point because radar is more reliable IMO. Unless you use some features which only camera can provide (stop at traffic lights?), which Subaru doesn't yet do. From whatever research I did before buying a car, Volvo's system (uses both radar and camera) seems to be one of the best overall, along with Mercedes, and Subaru being a close third.

bengoodger 11y ago

I've owned three cars with automatic cruise control for the past decade. This isn't exactly new technology, perhaps only at this price point. The first car I had with this, an '06 Infiniti, was only able to slow to a crawl, not a full stop. So while it was useful on the highway it was useless in stop and start. The second car, a '11 BMW, added "Stop & Go" to the formula. Great? Not quite. What would happen is that the car would come to a full stop, and then a timer would run, and if the car didn't start moving again within 10 seconds the cruise control would shut off, and to resume you'd have to push the pedal. This was especially maddening when stop & start traffic is inconsistent and the stops last 10.5 seconds. Basically the idea of being able to set & forget was completely undermined by this and driving with the feature on was more stressful than driving with it off and just doing everything manually. A complete bust. I don't know why it does this but I can see it being some combination of the product team needing to ship the feature in the state it was in, and legal requirements. The problem with both of these implementations is that they promised to alleviate some of the issues with past "auto-drive" features (and you should consider Cruise Control to be the very first auto drive feature), but introduce their own. If you want the user experience of set & forget, you need very predictable conditions if you want any of these mass market systems to work for you, and unfortunately that's just not the way the roads are. I think I have the feature in my latest car too, but I've given up and decided to enjoy manually driving, and just wait for fully autonomous vehicles.

ams6110 11y ago

No thanks. Just something else to go wrong.

deleted 11y ago

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sweetbabyjesus 11y ago

Exciting title, disappointing marketing piece for Honda. WSJ has joined the ranks of Forbes promoted content levels.

sandra_saltlake 11y ago

I'm impressed, I'm much more relaxed than before - and that means I'm actually able to just look ahead and think about the road, not about what I'm doing.

ekpyrotic 11y ago

This is a interesting proposition for Honda, but really not that new. Even the price is not /that/ new. In fact, this is technology that has been sold at around the same price point in the industrial transportation sector -- think of logistics and lorries -- for quite a while. This is where the majority of the innovation is taking place. For example, just this week it has been revealed that the UK Govt will likely to announcing tomorrow funding for driverless truck convoys in the North of England. What's the price differential between these intelligent trucks and regular trucks? $0. In fact, so much innovation is taking place in the industrial sector that just last week Toyota announced that it has hired the FULL workforce of Jaybridge Robotics, a firm that specializes in autonomous industrial vehicles, mainly in the agricultural sector. If you want to understand the tailwinds in the sector, follow the b2b and industrial segment of the market. Technologies and trends are already starting to filter down. -- I also want to plug my email newsletter Driverless Weekly (http://driverlessweekly.com http://driverlessweekly.com) while I'm at it. It's a once-weekly summary of the top news stories in the autonomous vehicles sector.

a_imho 11y ago

the self driving car is a concept I have a hard time appreciating. It sounds cool, and offers enormous technological and legislative obstacles to overcome, yet I can't figure out the fundamental problem they will solve - compared to the attention they get. For any use case I can imagine (minus the cool factor) we either have more efficient solutions already, or there are better alternatives to investigate. Plus I figure, most people still like to drive.

deleted 11y ago

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girkyturkey 11y ago

I have yet to drive a "self-driving" or even "self-monitoring" car and the thought of doing so terrifies me. I know technology is good and it can do great things, but helping me drive is something I don't enjoy the idea of. What happens if, however unlikely, someone were to hack my car? They could potentially crash my car and leave without a trace. I think we really need to take a step back and ask if the benefits outweigh the potential costs/risks.