13 ms·

Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driv

by nkoren 10y ago

Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. The latter will be an absolute game-changer; the former can yield some marginal gains in safety and congestion, but does not really shatter any paradigms. This is the former. The latter will certainly happen eventually, but is orders of magnitude more challenging and a number of years away.

agumonkey 10y ago
What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they're skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).
- valarauca1 10y ago
  What you need to understand the auto industry plans their product lines 20 years in advance. Design/testing of components takes a non-trivial amount of time. When they say, A future model will be wheelless. What they're saying is a car in 15-25 years will be wheelless. Which is about on track with the parent poster's time frame. Most the large Semi-Truck manufacturers seem to be progressing along a similar track. Ford's forecasts of 20 years forward actual sees a complete stop of consumer vehicles moving completely over to driver-less fleet vehicles.
- jayjay71 10y ago
  Everybody wants to jump straight to 4, because 3 is actually dangerous and likely to cause deaths as people are lulled into a false sense of safety. The question is how long will it take? Some people say 2 years, some people say 20.
  - puranjay 10y ago
    How much has the recent interest and investment in self-driving cars impacted this estimate? 5 years ago, I would have said that level 4 automation is 20 years away. With all these billions pouring in, I'd cut that projection in less than half. I'm certain that I won't be driving a car ever in 2030
    - jayjay71 10y ago
      I think it actually doesn't make that much difference. The problem, I believe, is that people are used to rapid advances in software. Lots of small iterations can take you a long way, but sometimes you just reach a hurdle which requires a breakthrough. A fully self-driving car would need a huge breakthrough in perception (which most people categorize under AI) in order to work. Computer vision actually started out in the 60's because how hard could it be to classify objects in images? Well, decades later and it's still a hugely unsolved problem. Robotics can be broken into 3 main categories: perception, planning, and controls. Perception is always the weak point. Robots just cannot see and understand their environments like people can. When you put a robot in a dynamic environment, they fail spectacularly. To give some idea of this, look at videos of robots falling down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge - and keep in mind those were made by teams of top roboticists with millions of dollars in a highly constrained environment (it's hard to say that obstacle course was "real"). I really, really doubt it's going to happen in a few years. I would love to be wrong though.
      - deleted 10y ago
        [deleted]
      - adrianN 10y ago
        Last time I checked Google's self driving car was doing pretty well already without major breakthroughs. I suppose there still are problems when the weather conditions are less than ideal, but you can't compare it to /r/shittyrobots.
        fweespeech 10y ago
        Many places have "less than ideal weather conditions" for 100+ days a year.
        fucking_tragedy 10y ago
        The car's performance on a relatively small stretch of road in California is hardly indicative of its potential performance on millions of miles of varied roadways, terrain and climate that make up the rest of the world.
  - Fricken 10y ago
    Both 2 years and 20 years are good estimates, depending on whether you're talking about a robocab that ferries people from their suburban homes to the train station when the weather is nice, or a vehicle that drive empty across the country in a snowstorm.
  - ethbro 10y ago
    I think the bigger question is how you get straight to 4. Ford has resources, but I feel like they're betting against history here w/ regards to ML successes. Practical, reliable ML stems from enormous data sets. And I can't see a way of obtaining the necessary data volume other than sitting in Level 3 for a product cycle...
    - rhino369 10y ago
      I think the evolution will be using self driving features as a pure backup safety feature until they get good enough to go fulltime on their own.
  - Animats 10y ago
    NHTSA Level 3 ("Limited Self-Driving: Vehicles at this level of automation enable the driver to cede full control of all safety-critical functions under certain traffic or environmental conditions and in those conditions to rely heavily on the vehicle to monitor for changes in those conditions requiring transition back to driver control. The driver is expected to be available for occasional control, but with sufficiently comfortable transition time. The Google car is an example of limited self-driving automation.") is OK. That means that the self-driving system can recognize situations it can't handle (snow, potholes, crowds in streets) and come to a safe stop if the driver doesn't take over. It's Level 2 ("adaptive cruise control in combination with lane centering") that's the problem. Therein lies the deadly valley - good enough that the driver can tune out, but not good enough to handle trouble. That's where Tesla is. Level 2 with strongly enforced hands-on-wheel seems to be OK, but don't let the driver take their hands off for long periods.
- dannypgh 10y ago
  Tell me more about these cars with no wheels.
  - Eire_Banshee 10y ago
    steering wheel
- andegre 10y ago
  I believe level 4 is where the car takes over completely. Level 5 is where the no steering wheel is introduced.
davidiach 10y ago
I'm also skeptical that we will reach the point where cars will not need a driver at all in the near future. I might be wrong but it seems to me you need something close to AGI to have a fully autonomous car. And with current approaches to self driving cars you need lots of data, sensors, fast and reliable internet connection, accurate maps and so forth, all of which are not at the level needed to have autonomy on all roads. So even if the algorithms would be good enough you'll need much more than that to get to self driving cars. On the other hand a human only needs one working eye and a way to steer the car to be able do drive pretty much anywhere.
- munificent 10y ago
  > I might be wrong but it seems to me you need something close to AGI to have a fully autonomous car. Consider that we used to let horses do most of the steering and low-level control of our road-based vehicles.
  - nradov 10y ago
    We're still pretty far from being able to produce an AGI that even has the learning ability and self-preservation instincts of a horse.
losteverything 10y ago
"As a person within the industry" has there been any talk about the paths driverless will take? New roadways? Attendant-less roadways? Change in existing designation of highways? How to accomodate 10-20 people (vehicles won't look like they do now)? I envision future photos-videos of driver and driver less "vehicles" at a busy intersection just like horses and early cars.
- nkoren 10y ago
  These are the right questions to be asking! Yes, there has been some talk -- but not remotely enough. At present, the vast majority of work in the vehicle-automation space is being done by, well, vehicle people. The assumption is that driverless vehicles will slot into the existing infrastructure with minimal modification. There's a fair amount of consideration being given to vehicle-to-infrastructure communications (so that vehicles can notify traffic signals that they are approaching, for example), but relatively little consideration being given to how the roadways will actually _physically_ evolve. Personally, I expect that this evolution will be roughly as significant as what was catalysed by the horseless carriage.
  - losteverything 10y ago
    Ty. Love to follow this as it progresses Government has to get involved. Sometime and somewhere. Public safety is one aspect I suggested to one town councilman that our town introduces a bill (ordinance) banning driver less vehicles. Just like we can ban oversized vehicles and parking in the winter. Our government should ban then now while it is not yet happening. He thought it would be a good idea not to ban them but to capture a licensing fee. Hopefully this will get introduced at the next meeting
    - tunap 10y ago
      Not supposed to down/up vote to show dis/agreement, but since it is already in play have a vote for tempering new-tech zeal with real world pragmatism. PS: I don't necessarily agree w/ bans or taxes, just don't like the up/down culture of 'popularity'. The sooner the texters & PMGo players are relegated to child seats, the better for all drivers/passengers/riders, IMO.
technofiend 10y ago
>Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. Surely the pay is far less for the passive driver? If not I assume it will be soon.
- oDot 10y ago
  A driver that's there for safety reasons is a good driver and is paid well
  - wavefunction 10y ago
    Sounds like a tautology.
- dilap 10y ago
  Hmm, I'm not so sure. First, Uber drivers are already not making much. Drivers I've talked to here in SF say they are near $15/hour (though they can more in the form of bonuses if they hit certain hours-driven targets). Second, the job of a passive driver will actually be both more boring and harder -- you have to pay attention while doing nothing, but be ready to take over in a second. It's like being a passenger, except you can't distract yourself in anyway. I'd much rather just drive.
  - technofiend 10y ago
    Your example of San Francisco is an outlier - there's too much upward pressure on wages there to let driving compensation fall too low. Let's have the same conversation about Minneapolis, Dallas, St. Paul, Austin, Kansas City, etc. Austin is a great example of a city with a lot of unemployement and underemployment due to the massive student population. Can't you imagine a college student riding around listening to lectures on the radio (assuming they're actually trying to do their job) for $8/hr? I can. And I can see the next student saying "I'll do it for $7.50".
    - 794CD01 10y ago
speleding 10y ago
We don't need to jump to completely driverless right away, there is a convenient intermediate step: The passenger can be the passive driver, and the car would drive to the pickup location empty. As soon as regulation allows, that step already gets you the major benefit of not having to "pay for the other dude in the car".
- bodmd 10y ago
  You'd need to verify that users have a valid driver's license. The problem is, how do you verify that the rider's identity is the same as the user who ordered the ride? Facial recognition?
  - CreRecombinase 10y ago
    Also, more importantly, you have to verify that the user is not at the moment incapable of operating a vehicle, i.e drunk.
  - misingnoglic 10y ago
    I'm not a lawyer but I assume any funny business there would be charged to the person using another person's account, and the person who owns the account. That's how it works with regular cars if you use someone else's ID.
  - daxelrod 10y ago
    How do you do this verification when someone rents a car? I've rented a car before where the only thing they verified is that I presented a credit card with the same name as the one on my driver's license, which they never asked to see because I had already put in the number online. I guess it's possible they were able to look up my photo from DMV records and were matching my face to it, but I'm guessing not.
  - amorphid 10y ago
    You could use an RFID chip, with an understanding that sharing it bad. Not perfect, but not unlike how drivers pick up a ZipCar now.
  - 10y ago
fthssht 10y ago
Agree no paradigms shattered with a driver in the seat from an economic POV. Im not sure safety gains have to be marginal. This thing, scaled over millions of miles, paid uber driver in the seat with a system that chimes to make driver take control could be far safer than distracted uber driver alone dealing with everything driving a taxi and communicating with customers entails.
msoad 10y ago
That's correct. Most of "self-driving" press out there is just press and not something as you said paradigm shattering! But Uber need the press more than ever after losing China and having to have a growth story for their large valuation.
jrussino 10y ago
This is not the former, this a step in the R&D process that is working toward the latter (and can act as PR in the meantime). I expect that "supervised by humans in the driver's seat" here means "the car is fully self-driving, but we're still doing development and testing and we don't trust it enough yet". You can test these things on private roads, but eventually you need to get them out into the real world and collect data, figure out where the failure points are, etc. But for sure they're building a fully-autonomous no-driver-needed car, and it's not ready yet so someone has to be there to take over when it fails.
- Idontagree 10y ago
  It's exactly the former, not sure why you say it isn't since you went on to explain the former and say that's what the car does.
  - jrussino 10y ago
    I guess what I mean is, this is not a finished product that's a regular car with a "hands-free" mode; it's a prototype for a fully-autonomous driver-less car that's still under active development. I.e. the reason that this exists is not to have some mostly-autonomous driver-assistance in place right now; that's useless to Uber. Rather it's part of the process of testing and improving the completely driver-less cars that they're working on.

by nkoren 10y ago

agumonkey 10y ago

What do you think about Ford announcement, IIUC they're skipping level 3 (semi auto autos) straight to level 4 (wheel-less).

valarauca1 10y ago
What you need to understand the auto industry plans their product lines 20 years in advance. Design/testing of components takes a non-trivial amount of time. When they say, A future model will be wheelless. What they're saying is a car in 15-25 years will be wheelless. Which is about on track with the parent poster's time frame. Most the large Semi-Truck manufacturers seem to be progressing along a similar track. Ford's forecasts of 20 years forward actual sees a complete stop of consumer vehicles moving completely over to driver-less fleet vehicles.
jayjay71 10y ago
Everybody wants to jump straight to 4, because 3 is actually dangerous and likely to cause deaths as people are lulled into a false sense of safety. The question is how long will it take? Some people say 2 years, some people say 20.
- puranjay 10y ago
  How much has the recent interest and investment in self-driving cars impacted this estimate? 5 years ago, I would have said that level 4 automation is 20 years away. With all these billions pouring in, I'd cut that projection in less than half. I'm certain that I won't be driving a car ever in 2030
  - jayjay71 10y ago
    I think it actually doesn't make that much difference. The problem, I believe, is that people are used to rapid advances in software. Lots of small iterations can take you a long way, but sometimes you just reach a hurdle which requires a breakthrough. A fully self-driving car would need a huge breakthrough in perception (which most people categorize under AI) in order to work. Computer vision actually started out in the 60's because how hard could it be to classify objects in images? Well, decades later and it's still a hugely unsolved problem. Robotics can be broken into 3 main categories: perception, planning, and controls. Perception is always the weak point. Robots just cannot see and understand their environments like people can. When you put a robot in a dynamic environment, they fail spectacularly. To give some idea of this, look at videos of robots falling down at the DARPA Robotics Challenge - and keep in mind those were made by teams of top roboticists with millions of dollars in a highly constrained environment (it's hard to say that obstacle course was "real"). I really, really doubt it's going to happen in a few years. I would love to be wrong though.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - adrianN 10y ago
      Last time I checked Google's self driving car was doing pretty well already without major breakthroughs. I suppose there still are problems when the weather conditions are less than ideal, but you can't compare it to /r/shittyrobots.
      - fweespeech 10y ago
        Many places have "less than ideal weather conditions" for 100+ days a year.
      - fucking_tragedy 10y ago
        The car's performance on a relatively small stretch of road in California is hardly indicative of its potential performance on millions of miles of varied roadways, terrain and climate that make up the rest of the world.
- Fricken 10y ago
  Both 2 years and 20 years are good estimates, depending on whether you're talking about a robocab that ferries people from their suburban homes to the train station when the weather is nice, or a vehicle that drive empty across the country in a snowstorm.
- ethbro 10y ago
  I think the bigger question is how you get straight to 4. Ford has resources, but I feel like they're betting against history here w/ regards to ML successes. Practical, reliable ML stems from enormous data sets. And I can't see a way of obtaining the necessary data volume other than sitting in Level 3 for a product cycle...
  - rhino369 10y ago
    I think the evolution will be using self driving features as a pure backup safety feature until they get good enough to go fulltime on their own.
- Animats 10y ago
  NHTSA Level 3 ("Limited Self-Driving: Vehicles at this level of automation enable the driver to cede full control of all safety-critical functions under certain traffic or environmental conditions and in those conditions to rely heavily on the vehicle to monitor for changes in those conditions requiring transition back to driver control. The driver is expected to be available for occasional control, but with sufficiently comfortable transition time. The Google car is an example of limited self-driving automation.") is OK. That means that the self-driving system can recognize situations it can't handle (snow, potholes, crowds in streets) and come to a safe stop if the driver doesn't take over. It's Level 2 ("adaptive cruise control in combination with lane centering") that's the problem. Therein lies the deadly valley - good enough that the driver can tune out, but not good enough to handle trouble. That's where Tesla is. Level 2 with strongly enforced hands-on-wheel seems to be OK, but don't let the driver take their hands off for long periods.
dannypgh 10y ago
Tell me more about these cars with no wheels.
- Eire_Banshee 10y ago
  steering wheel
andegre 10y ago
I believe level 4 is where the car takes over completely. Level 5 is where the no steering wheel is introduced.

davidiach 10y ago

I'm also skeptical that we will reach the point where cars will not need a driver at all in the near future. I might be wrong but it seems to me you need something close to AGI to have a fully autonomous car. And with current approaches to self driving cars you need lots of data, sensors, fast and reliable internet connection, accurate maps and so forth, all of which are not at the level needed to have autonomy on all roads. So even if the algorithms would be good enough you'll need much more than that to get to self driving cars. On the other hand a human only needs one working eye and a way to steer the car to be able do drive pretty much anywhere.

munificent 10y ago
> I might be wrong but it seems to me you need something close to AGI to have a fully autonomous car. Consider that we used to let horses do most of the steering and low-level control of our road-based vehicles.
- nradov 10y ago
  We're still pretty far from being able to produce an AGI that even has the learning ability and self-preservation instincts of a horse.

losteverything 10y ago

"As a person within the industry" has there been any talk about the paths driverless will take? New roadways? Attendant-less roadways? Change in existing designation of highways? How to accomodate 10-20 people (vehicles won't look like they do now)? I envision future photos-videos of driver and driver less "vehicles" at a busy intersection just like horses and early cars.

nkoren 10y ago
These are the right questions to be asking! Yes, there has been some talk -- but not remotely enough. At present, the vast majority of work in the vehicle-automation space is being done by, well, vehicle people. The assumption is that driverless vehicles will slot into the existing infrastructure with minimal modification. There's a fair amount of consideration being given to vehicle-to-infrastructure communications (so that vehicles can notify traffic signals that they are approaching, for example), but relatively little consideration being given to how the roadways will actually _physically_ evolve. Personally, I expect that this evolution will be roughly as significant as what was catalysed by the horseless carriage.
- losteverything 10y ago
  Ty. Love to follow this as it progresses Government has to get involved. Sometime and somewhere. Public safety is one aspect I suggested to one town councilman that our town introduces a bill (ordinance) banning driver less vehicles. Just like we can ban oversized vehicles and parking in the winter. Our government should ban then now while it is not yet happening. He thought it would be a good idea not to ban them but to capture a licensing fee. Hopefully this will get introduced at the next meeting
  - tunap 10y ago
    Not supposed to down/up vote to show dis/agreement, but since it is already in play have a vote for tempering new-tech zeal with real world pragmatism. PS: I don't necessarily agree w/ bans or taxes, just don't like the up/down culture of 'popularity'. The sooner the texters & PMGo players are relegated to child seats, the better for all drivers/passengers/riders, IMO.

technofiend 10y ago

>Ubiquitous comment, as a person within the industry: there's a big difference between cars that have a hands-free driving mode, and cars that do not have a driver. Surely the pay is far less for the passive driver? If not I assume it will be soon.

oDot 10y ago
A driver that's there for safety reasons is a good driver and is paid well
- wavefunction 10y ago
  Sounds like a tautology.
dilap 10y ago
Hmm, I'm not so sure. First, Uber drivers are already not making much. Drivers I've talked to here in SF say they are near $15/hour (though they can more in the form of bonuses if they hit certain hours-driven targets). Second, the job of a passive driver will actually be both more boring and harder -- you have to pay attention while doing nothing, but be ready to take over in a second. It's like being a passenger, except you can't distract yourself in anyway. I'd much rather just drive.
- technofiend 10y ago
  Your example of San Francisco is an outlier - there's too much upward pressure on wages there to let driving compensation fall too low. Let's have the same conversation about Minneapolis, Dallas, St. Paul, Austin, Kansas City, etc. Austin is a great example of a city with a lot of unemployement and underemployment due to the massive student population. Can't you imagine a college student riding around listening to lectures on the radio (assuming they're actually trying to do their job) for $8/hr? I can. And I can see the next student saying "I'll do it for $7.50".
  - 794CD01 10y ago

speleding 10y ago

We don't need to jump to completely driverless right away, there is a convenient intermediate step: The passenger can be the passive driver, and the car would drive to the pickup location empty. As soon as regulation allows, that step already gets you the major benefit of not having to "pay for the other dude in the car".

bodmd 10y ago
You'd need to verify that users have a valid driver's license. The problem is, how do you verify that the rider's identity is the same as the user who ordered the ride? Facial recognition?
- CreRecombinase 10y ago
  Also, more importantly, you have to verify that the user is not at the moment incapable of operating a vehicle, i.e drunk.
- misingnoglic 10y ago
  I'm not a lawyer but I assume any funny business there would be charged to the person using another person's account, and the person who owns the account. That's how it works with regular cars if you use someone else's ID.
- daxelrod 10y ago
  How do you do this verification when someone rents a car? I've rented a car before where the only thing they verified is that I presented a credit card with the same name as the one on my driver's license, which they never asked to see because I had already put in the number online. I guess it's possible they were able to look up my photo from DMV records and were matching my face to it, but I'm guessing not.
- amorphid 10y ago
  You could use an RFID chip, with an understanding that sharing it bad. Not perfect, but not unlike how drivers pick up a ZipCar now.
- 10y ago

fthssht 10y ago

Agree no paradigms shattered with a driver in the seat from an economic POV. Im not sure safety gains have to be marginal. This thing, scaled over millions of miles, paid uber driver in the seat with a system that chimes to make driver take control could be far safer than distracted uber driver alone dealing with everything driving a taxi and communicating with customers entails.

msoad 10y ago

That's correct. Most of "self-driving" press out there is just press and not something as you said paradigm shattering! But Uber need the press more than ever after losing China and having to have a growth story for their large valuation.

jrussino 10y ago

This is not the former, this a step in the R&D process that is working toward the latter (and can act as PR in the meantime). I expect that "supervised by humans in the driver's seat" here means "the car is fully self-driving, but we're still doing development and testing and we don't trust it enough yet". You can test these things on private roads, but eventually you need to get them out into the real world and collect data, figure out where the failure points are, etc. But for sure they're building a fully-autonomous no-driver-needed car, and it's not ready yet so someone has to be there to take over when it fails.

Idontagree 10y ago
It's exactly the former, not sure why you say it isn't since you went on to explain the former and say that's what the car does.
- jrussino 10y ago
  I guess what I mean is, this is not a finished product that's a regular car with a "hands-free" mode; it's a prototype for a fully-autonomous driver-less car that's still under active development. I.e. the reason that this exists is not to have some mostly-autonomous driver-assistance in place right now; that's useless to Uber. Rather it's part of the process of testing and improving the completely driver-less cars that they're working on.