12 ms·

People are way, way, WAY underestimating how long it will be before "self driving car picks you up, takes you to location". If we don't have self-driving cars e

by seibelj 10y ago

People are way, way, WAY underestimating how long it will be before "self driving car picks you up, takes you to location". If we don't have self-driving cars everywhere on highways moving cargo, then we won't have self-driving taxi cabs for many years after whenever that happens. City driving, where Uber can actually make money with the density of people, is the hardest driving of all, and will be the last place where self-driving cars without any human operator take over.

chubot 10y ago
YES. This is the difference between LEVEL 3 autonomy and LEVEL 4 autonomy, which I didn't know about until this week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification Level 4 still a LONG time coming. That was underscored for me by this interview: http://thisweekinstartups.com/george-hotz-commaai/ http://thisweekinstartups.com/george-hotz-commaai/ George is kind of arrogant and brash... but even he says "I don't know anything about level 4". Everyone thinks level 3 and 4 are the same thing, but now that I've heard him dismiss level 4, that actually gives me more confidence in his startup. Those are two completely different things!!! Google has been working on self-driving cars since 2009, and the DARPA challenges were around 2005-2007. We're not even at level 3. Level 4 might not come for decades after that.
- fastball 10y ago
  Pretty sure we are at level 3 already. Tesla has "good enough" L3 already on the road, and I highly doubt Tesla's Autopilot is anywhere near as sophisticated as what Google is working on in their labs.
- latortuga 10y ago
  Doesn't Tesla's Summon feature qualify as Level 4?
  - dmoy 10y ago
    Not really, no. L4 is talking about the whole trip.
- tim333 10y ago
  "Level 4: The vehicle performs all safety-critical functions for the entire trip, with the driver not expected to control the vehicle at any time." You can get on a bus that does that now in Helsinki. Admittedly they are slow and on set routes but even so they're there. http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/18/technology/self-driving-bus-helsinki-finland/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/18/technology/self-driving-bus-...
  - dilemma 10y ago
    Preprogrammed paths is absolutely not what is meant by self-driving vehicles. Preprogrammed means a human has made all the decisions an actual self-driving vehicle would need to make.
    - tim333 10y ago
      Though whatever you call them there's a lot of potential for that kind of stuff. There are a lot of busses in the world and if they can drive themselves that's a big thing even if it is on set routes. Plus trucks driving themselves on certain prepared interstates with humans to take over for the last 10 miles could be big.
      - dilemma 10y ago
        They're not "driving themselves" in either case. They are executing a program. Problem is, that makes them rigid and unable to handle anything unplanned for.
- tim333 10y ago
  That was an interesting Hotz interview.
fastball 10y ago
I'm curious to know your logic, because in my opinion it doesn't really follow. In a city, not only do you have better/more frequently updated map data, but you also have a large corpus of cars that can share info with each other, which will be a big aspect of driverless cabs. Also the speeds don't get as high, so safety is a bit easier. Also flooding/snowstorms/other things computers can't yet handle well are more of a problem on the open road. Your assertion that moving freight must come first, to me, has no apparent logic behind it. If you think about it, taxi cab drivers barely need any qualifications to drive a cab. Truckers need more, almost as if trucking is a more demanding type of driving. By that alone, I feel like it's fairly apparent which would be easier to replicate on silicon.
- rezashirazian 10y ago
  Your assertion that moving freight must come first, to me, has no apparent logic behind it. Sure it does. It is the easier problem, and it makes sense to assume the easier problem will be solved before the hard one. Self driving cars that move about long stretches of interstate highways with little to no interactions with intersections, pedestrians or complicated traffic patterns is a far easier problem than driving in densely populated urban areas. If you think about it, taxi cab drivers barely need any qualifications to drive a cab. Truckers need more, almost as if trucking is a more demanding type of driving. By that alone, I feel like it's fairly apparent which would be easier to replicate on silicon. Trucking is a far more demanding job than driving a cab, but that is only true for humans. What makes trucking demanding is long, rigorous driving schedules that require high degree of driving stamina. As it turns out computers have very high stamina and are very good at doing long rigorous activities without suffering any fatigue. This is as opposed to driving a cab where the difficulty of the job is not so much in the rigor of the job but more in what humans do better than computers. Which is mainly dealing with other people, understanding patterns and learning from past experiences.
  - fastball 10y ago
    Freight generally needs to be handle all of the problems that a cab does (turning, stoplights, other cars, getting from point A to point B, etc.), mostly because pretty much all freight trucks need to go through a town/city at some point. Additionally, they need to be able to drive at night in areas without much lighting, they need to drive for hours and hours on end, instead of just 5-45minutes, etc. Finally, they are 40+ feet long (instead of being around 15 feet long) and have much less maneuverability and a much longer stopping distance/time. Sounds like a harder problem to me.
chrischen 10y ago
Not to mention even when that happens, a properly invested public mass transit system will still be more efficient.
- akhilcacharya 10y ago
  Not for fast point-to-point travel.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  Why can't self-driving electric cars be government/co-op owned to provide mass transit? It would be orders of magnitude less expensive than light rail in almost all major metros (NY, SF, CHI all have the benefit of being fairly dense, allowing subways or elevated tracks). I'm in Tampa most of my time, and it will be impossible to service that much sprawl with light rail or bus service. And if you don't like sprawl, you're going to need to change public policy to deal with dense real estate costs. There is no free urban planning lunch.
  - chrischen 10y ago
    Areas with sprawl are best suited to car ownership. Dense urban areas are better suited to mass transit. Uber fills a niche of point to point transport that's current overutilized because of VC subsidization. Even if you get rid of the driver, you can't expect everyone in an urban core to do point to point transit, especially with the inefficiencies of pick up and drop off.
    - toomuchtodo 10y ago
      I agree.
    - trestles 10y ago
      I know a LOT of people who prefer Uber to self-driving. Expect that to be an emergent behavior once the cost of the driver is subtracted.
  - shoo 10y ago
BatFastard 10y ago
Next week? http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-cars-haul-people-weeks-41481011 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-c...
- TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
  Exactly. We went to the moon, and back, with a roll of parchment and a pencil strapped to a bunch of explosives. (Ok, a calculator and a rocket). In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. I'm going to say we'll see a lot more of this in the next five years.
  - rimantas 10y ago
    Why not next year? It's only four turns after all. Bus seriously, driving those four turns is several orders of magnitudes more difficult task than going to the moon.
    - jack9 10y ago
      > driving those four turns is several orders of magnitudes more difficult task than going to the moon. You have that scope reversed. That's why multiple organizations have autonomous cars, which have been real world tested, to various success, and are being allowed to roll out (the whole derail of "they don't exist yet" is naysayer noise) without nine nines reliability. While the moon trip was only done ONCE across all of humanity's history and there wasn't a test beforehand. THAT was impressive, to the point of incredulity.
  - tzs 10y ago
    > In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. That's similar to what I've wondered about as a good intermediate step between what we have now and fully autonomous self-driving cars that can go from any given place to any given destination given the address, even if they have never been there before. The idea is that most of us have various trips that we make frequently, such as to/from work, to/from a grocery store, to/from kid's school, etc., and maybe we could simplify the early consumer self-driving systems by limiting them to such trips. Here's how I imagine it would work. When you decide you want to add a route to your car's self-drivable routes, such as your commute to work, you put the car in an observer mode and drive the route manually. The car tries to identify traffic signs, traffic lights, lane markers, and other such things that it needs to understand. The car also records video of the drive. When you tell the car you've reached the destination, it uploads the video of the drive to the vendor that provided your self-driving system. It also uploads what traffic signs, lights, etc., it has identified, and a log of your control inputs. The vendor has a human watch the video of your drive, review the things that the car identified, and identify things that the car missed that are relevant. The human accesses whether or not the car can handle this route as is, or can handle it if some special cases are added, or cannot handle it. In the first two cases, the vendor notifies the car that it is now allowed to drive the route (and downloads any extra information they identified that the car needs), and the car can then drive the route in self-driving mode. Whenever the car drives the route in self-driving mode, it compares what it sees and identifies (traffic signs, lane markings, etc.) with those that were used when it was shown the route. If there are more than trivial changes, it asks the passenger to take over driving, and uploads a report to the vendor for review. Perhaps it also uploads video of the route every time it is driven, and the vendor runs software that automatically compares each to prior videos of that route, and learns what features normally vary over time, and which are more constant. The results can be sent back to the car to adjust its thresholds on a feature by feature basis for when it considers something changed enough to require human intervention.
ryanSrich 10y ago
> If we don't have self-driving cars everywhere on highways moving cargo, then we won't have self-driving taxi cabs for many years after This seems wrong. Wouldn't taxis be first, since cargo still needs to be hauled off and loaded by someone/thing? Many of the those drivers double as laborers.
misiti3780 10y ago
i completely agree. reading HN, people seem under the impression like a year from now all the taxis in the world will be autonomous. in my opinion (not that it means much), we are years away from this happening.
- fastball 10y ago
  Of course it won't be next year. But as we get closer and closer to that inevitability, the value of Lyft and other non-autonomous ride-sharing companies will just get lower and lower.
jsnathan 10y ago
It seems more like a rush to the finish to me [1], rather than a slow crawl. The goal doesn't seem to be to create a 'perfect' AI driver before deployment, just one that is good enough. And after all, we only really need a statistical improvement over human drivers for it to be worth it, given that the software in these cars can be updated over time. I guess it would be nice though, if we had a really tough standardized test course, involving various common situations with pedestrians, cyclists, etc. On the other hand, we test human drivers on real roads too. [1]: http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384 http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384
mtrimpe 10y ago
And that's for the relative ease of driving in a US city. I just got back from two weeks of driving in Kiev and I'm pretty confident that we're a looong way away from being able to navigate that kind of traffic autonomously.
CPLX 10y ago
> People are way, way, WAY underestimating how long it will be before "self driving car picks you up, takes you to location". Thank you. This is a pet peeve of mine. Self driving cars do not exist, at all, yet, nor does anything that's really all that close but if you point that out on HN you'll be met with breathless disagreement. Even more relevant, there's literally nothing in the historical record to suggest that the real breakthroughs when they come will come from a company like Uber.
- bhups 10y ago
  > Even more relevant, there's literally nothing in the historical record to suggest that the real breakthroughs when they come will come from a company like Uber. Why not? The team at Uber that is working on this is largely comprised of researchers from Carnegie Mellon and former members of Google's driverless car team. Historical record suggests otherwise...
  - CPLX 10y ago
    The fact that Uber has never, once, successfully created a motor vehicle, physical product, or applied artificial intelligence device, ever, of any kind, has to top the list. I mean they are competing against Apple and BMW, among many others, presumably, who have actually made a car, computer, or transportation device that worked. That notwithstanding, the burden of proof is in the other direction.
    - bhups 10y ago
      Sure, but the company is filled with ex-Apple/Google/etc folks that have worked on successfully creating motor vehicles, physical products, and applied artificial intelligence devices. Remember, a company is merely comprised of the people within it. If Uber has people that have joined from the kinds of companies that you mentioned, it becomes more and more indistinguishable from them.
      - CPLX 10y ago
        > Remember, a company is merely comprised of the people within it. Not really. Software companies are like that. They are the exception to the general rule that companies are composed of people plus things like factories, equipment, patents, trade secrets, inventory, real estate, global supply chains, and dealer networks for service and support. Making cars, even regular ones, is hard and Uber has never really done anything like it.
jayjay71 10y ago
Agreed 100%. I'd be amazed if a stage 4 autonomous vehicle existed in less than 5 years, honestly I'd guess closer to 10. I do think highway driving can be fully automated within 2-3 years, so Otto makes a ton of sense. I actually think because the rewards are so great, and the technology is so difficult, that infrastructure will change before the tech. There are things you can do to drastically reduce the complexity, like install smart traffic lights and have cars talk to each other, in addition to special road markings designed for self-driving cars. CMU has been working on self-driving cars since 1984, people seem to think nobody was doing anything before Google (and they also think that Google's cars are far more capable than they are). Yes, money makes a difference, but sometimes reality just disagrees with profit. And if there's something startups are good at, it's hyping themselves up to jack up valuations.
kkotak 10y ago
Ageed. With existing Google, Tesla, Mercedes, BMW, etc. companies' technology you could have cargo hubs off the highways that are entered and exited by self driving trucks. Either human driven trucks can then load/unload those self-driving trucks or humans can then get in and drive the last last mile, so to speak.
Plough_Jogger 10y ago
Google is currently doing this today. They have a fleet of autonomous cars driving around Mountain View / Palo Alto without any assistance on a daily basis.
pfarnsworth 10y ago
I disagree. There are already cities that have shut off much of the traffic downtown, either through high taxes or straight up forcing people off the road, like Mexico City. I can easily see a city saying "No more human driven cars in the downtown core, only self-driving cars" and it instantly becomes useful.
pedalpete 10y ago
You know Uber and Volvo have announced they are trialing self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh this month. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-fir...
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
user5994461 10y ago
Think harder... how to bring self driving cars to the world... Currently, bus/overground/tubes/whatever have only few lines and they can cover a lot of users. Tomorrow, self driving cars could cover only the few main roads of a city. That would be enough to be useful for 80% of people in the city. That ignores the hard 90% roads which are harder to do. We'd still have to walk down the block to reach the uber and that's annoying, but that's a huge progress over the current public transportation systems (whom coverage vary hugely by city and country, to the point there might not be any).

by seibelj 10y ago

chubot 10y ago

YES. This is the difference between LEVEL 3 autonomy and LEVEL 4 autonomy, which I didn't know about until this week. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification Level 4 still a LONG time coming. That was underscored for me by this interview: http://thisweekinstartups.com/george-hotz-commaai/ http://thisweekinstartups.com/george-hotz-commaai/ George is kind of arrogant and brash... but even he says "I don't know anything about level 4". Everyone thinks level 3 and 4 are the same thing, but now that I've heard him dismiss level 4, that actually gives me more confidence in his startup. Those are two completely different things!!! Google has been working on self-driving cars since 2009, and the DARPA challenges were around 2005-2007. We're not even at level 3. Level 4 might not come for decades after that.

fastball 10y ago
Pretty sure we are at level 3 already. Tesla has "good enough" L3 already on the road, and I highly doubt Tesla's Autopilot is anywhere near as sophisticated as what Google is working on in their labs.
latortuga 10y ago
Doesn't Tesla's Summon feature qualify as Level 4?
- dmoy 10y ago
  Not really, no. L4 is talking about the whole trip.
tim333 10y ago
"Level 4: The vehicle performs all safety-critical functions for the entire trip, with the driver not expected to control the vehicle at any time." You can get on a bus that does that now in Helsinki. Admittedly they are slow and on set routes but even so they're there. http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/18/technology/self-driving-bus-helsinki-finland/ http://money.cnn.com/2016/08/18/technology/self-driving-bus-...
- dilemma 10y ago
  Preprogrammed paths is absolutely not what is meant by self-driving vehicles. Preprogrammed means a human has made all the decisions an actual self-driving vehicle would need to make.
  - tim333 10y ago
    Though whatever you call them there's a lot of potential for that kind of stuff. There are a lot of busses in the world and if they can drive themselves that's a big thing even if it is on set routes. Plus trucks driving themselves on certain prepared interstates with humans to take over for the last 10 miles could be big.
    - dilemma 10y ago
      They're not "driving themselves" in either case. They are executing a program. Problem is, that makes them rigid and unable to handle anything unplanned for.
tim333 10y ago
That was an interesting Hotz interview.

fastball 10y ago

I'm curious to know your logic, because in my opinion it doesn't really follow. In a city, not only do you have better/more frequently updated map data, but you also have a large corpus of cars that can share info with each other, which will be a big aspect of driverless cabs. Also the speeds don't get as high, so safety is a bit easier. Also flooding/snowstorms/other things computers can't yet handle well are more of a problem on the open road. Your assertion that moving freight must come first, to me, has no apparent logic behind it. If you think about it, taxi cab drivers barely need any qualifications to drive a cab. Truckers need more, almost as if trucking is a more demanding type of driving. By that alone, I feel like it's fairly apparent which would be easier to replicate on silicon.

rezashirazian 10y ago
Your assertion that moving freight must come first, to me, has no apparent logic behind it. Sure it does. It is the easier problem, and it makes sense to assume the easier problem will be solved before the hard one. Self driving cars that move about long stretches of interstate highways with little to no interactions with intersections, pedestrians or complicated traffic patterns is a far easier problem than driving in densely populated urban areas. If you think about it, taxi cab drivers barely need any qualifications to drive a cab. Truckers need more, almost as if trucking is a more demanding type of driving. By that alone, I feel like it's fairly apparent which would be easier to replicate on silicon. Trucking is a far more demanding job than driving a cab, but that is only true for humans. What makes trucking demanding is long, rigorous driving schedules that require high degree of driving stamina. As it turns out computers have very high stamina and are very good at doing long rigorous activities without suffering any fatigue. This is as opposed to driving a cab where the difficulty of the job is not so much in the rigor of the job but more in what humans do better than computers. Which is mainly dealing with other people, understanding patterns and learning from past experiences.
- fastball 10y ago
  Freight generally needs to be handle all of the problems that a cab does (turning, stoplights, other cars, getting from point A to point B, etc.), mostly because pretty much all freight trucks need to go through a town/city at some point. Additionally, they need to be able to drive at night in areas without much lighting, they need to drive for hours and hours on end, instead of just 5-45minutes, etc. Finally, they are 40+ feet long (instead of being around 15 feet long) and have much less maneuverability and a much longer stopping distance/time. Sounds like a harder problem to me.

chrischen 10y ago

Not to mention even when that happens, a properly invested public mass transit system will still be more efficient.

akhilcacharya 10y ago
Not for fast point-to-point travel.
toomuchtodo 10y ago
Why can't self-driving electric cars be government/co-op owned to provide mass transit? It would be orders of magnitude less expensive than light rail in almost all major metros (NY, SF, CHI all have the benefit of being fairly dense, allowing subways or elevated tracks). I'm in Tampa most of my time, and it will be impossible to service that much sprawl with light rail or bus service. And if you don't like sprawl, you're going to need to change public policy to deal with dense real estate costs. There is no free urban planning lunch.
- chrischen 10y ago
  Areas with sprawl are best suited to car ownership. Dense urban areas are better suited to mass transit. Uber fills a niche of point to point transport that's current overutilized because of VC subsidization. Even if you get rid of the driver, you can't expect everyone in an urban core to do point to point transit, especially with the inefficiencies of pick up and drop off.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    I agree.
  - trestles 10y ago
    I know a LOT of people who prefer Uber to self-driving. Expect that to be an emergent behavior once the cost of the driver is subtracted.
- shoo 10y ago

BatFastard 10y ago

Next week? http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-cars-haul-people-weeks-41481011 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/uber-autonomous-c...

TheSpiceIsLife 10y ago
Exactly. We went to the moon, and back, with a roll of parchment and a pencil strapped to a bunch of explosives. (Ok, a calculator and a rocket). In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. I'm going to say we'll see a lot more of this in the next five years.
- rimantas 10y ago
  Why not next year? It's only four turns after all. Bus seriously, driving those four turns is several orders of magnitudes more difficult task than going to the moon.
  - jack9 10y ago
    > driving those four turns is several orders of magnitudes more difficult task than going to the moon. You have that scope reversed. That's why multiple organizations have autonomous cars, which have been real world tested, to various success, and are being allowed to roll out (the whole derail of "they don't exist yet" is naysayer noise) without nine nines reliability. While the moon trip was only done ONCE across all of humanity's history and there wasn't a test beforehand. THAT was impressive, to the point of incredulity.
- tzs 10y ago
  > In my opinion, self driving cars are closer than the naysayers think. The cars don't have to be able to handle every situation initially. Driving from my house to the local shopping centre is only 4 turns, this could be a preprogrammed route to a designated autonomous-vehicle drop off point. That's similar to what I've wondered about as a good intermediate step between what we have now and fully autonomous self-driving cars that can go from any given place to any given destination given the address, even if they have never been there before. The idea is that most of us have various trips that we make frequently, such as to/from work, to/from a grocery store, to/from kid's school, etc., and maybe we could simplify the early consumer self-driving systems by limiting them to such trips. Here's how I imagine it would work. When you decide you want to add a route to your car's self-drivable routes, such as your commute to work, you put the car in an observer mode and drive the route manually. The car tries to identify traffic signs, traffic lights, lane markers, and other such things that it needs to understand. The car also records video of the drive. When you tell the car you've reached the destination, it uploads the video of the drive to the vendor that provided your self-driving system. It also uploads what traffic signs, lights, etc., it has identified, and a log of your control inputs. The vendor has a human watch the video of your drive, review the things that the car identified, and identify things that the car missed that are relevant. The human accesses whether or not the car can handle this route as is, or can handle it if some special cases are added, or cannot handle it. In the first two cases, the vendor notifies the car that it is now allowed to drive the route (and downloads any extra information they identified that the car needs), and the car can then drive the route in self-driving mode. Whenever the car drives the route in self-driving mode, it compares what it sees and identifies (traffic signs, lane markings, etc.) with those that were used when it was shown the route. If there are more than trivial changes, it asks the passenger to take over driving, and uploads a report to the vendor for review. Perhaps it also uploads video of the route every time it is driven, and the vendor runs software that automatically compares each to prior videos of that route, and learns what features normally vary over time, and which are more constant. The results can be sent back to the car to adjust its thresholds on a feature by feature basis for when it considers something changed enough to require human intervention.

ryanSrich 10y ago

> If we don't have self-driving cars everywhere on highways moving cargo, then we won't have self-driving taxi cabs for many years after This seems wrong. Wouldn't taxis be first, since cargo still needs to be hauled off and loaded by someone/thing? Many of the those drivers double as laborers.

misiti3780 10y ago

i completely agree. reading HN, people seem under the impression like a year from now all the taxis in the world will be autonomous. in my opinion (not that it means much), we are years away from this happening.

fastball 10y ago
Of course it won't be next year. But as we get closer and closer to that inevitability, the value of Lyft and other non-autonomous ride-sharing companies will just get lower and lower.

jsnathan 10y ago

It seems more like a rush to the finish to me [1], rather than a slow crawl. The goal doesn't seem to be to create a 'perfect' AI driver before deployment, just one that is good enough. And after all, we only really need a statistical improvement over human drivers for it to be worth it, given that the software in these cars can be updated over time. I guess it would be nice though, if we had a really tough standardized test course, involving various common situations with pedestrians, cyclists, etc. On the other hand, we test human drivers on real roads too. [1]: http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384 http://www.driverless-future.com/?page_id=384

mtrimpe 10y ago

And that's for the relative ease of driving in a US city. I just got back from two weeks of driving in Kiev and I'm pretty confident that we're a looong way away from being able to navigate that kind of traffic autonomously.

CPLX 10y ago

> People are way, way, WAY underestimating how long it will be before "self driving car picks you up, takes you to location". Thank you. This is a pet peeve of mine. Self driving cars do not exist, at all, yet, nor does anything that's really all that close but if you point that out on HN you'll be met with breathless disagreement. Even more relevant, there's literally nothing in the historical record to suggest that the real breakthroughs when they come will come from a company like Uber.

bhups 10y ago
> Even more relevant, there's literally nothing in the historical record to suggest that the real breakthroughs when they come will come from a company like Uber. Why not? The team at Uber that is working on this is largely comprised of researchers from Carnegie Mellon and former members of Google's driverless car team. Historical record suggests otherwise...
- CPLX 10y ago
  The fact that Uber has never, once, successfully created a motor vehicle, physical product, or applied artificial intelligence device, ever, of any kind, has to top the list. I mean they are competing against Apple and BMW, among many others, presumably, who have actually made a car, computer, or transportation device that worked. That notwithstanding, the burden of proof is in the other direction.
  - bhups 10y ago
    Sure, but the company is filled with ex-Apple/Google/etc folks that have worked on successfully creating motor vehicles, physical products, and applied artificial intelligence devices. Remember, a company is merely comprised of the people within it. If Uber has people that have joined from the kinds of companies that you mentioned, it becomes more and more indistinguishable from them.
    - CPLX 10y ago
      > Remember, a company is merely comprised of the people within it. Not really. Software companies are like that. They are the exception to the general rule that companies are composed of people plus things like factories, equipment, patents, trade secrets, inventory, real estate, global supply chains, and dealer networks for service and support. Making cars, even regular ones, is hard and Uber has never really done anything like it.

jayjay71 10y ago

Agreed 100%. I'd be amazed if a stage 4 autonomous vehicle existed in less than 5 years, honestly I'd guess closer to 10. I do think highway driving can be fully automated within 2-3 years, so Otto makes a ton of sense. I actually think because the rewards are so great, and the technology is so difficult, that infrastructure will change before the tech. There are things you can do to drastically reduce the complexity, like install smart traffic lights and have cars talk to each other, in addition to special road markings designed for self-driving cars. CMU has been working on self-driving cars since 1984, people seem to think nobody was doing anything before Google (and they also think that Google's cars are far more capable than they are). Yes, money makes a difference, but sometimes reality just disagrees with profit. And if there's something startups are good at, it's hyping themselves up to jack up valuations.

kkotak 10y ago

Ageed. With existing Google, Tesla, Mercedes, BMW, etc. companies' technology you could have cargo hubs off the highways that are entered and exited by self driving trucks. Either human driven trucks can then load/unload those self-driving trucks or humans can then get in and drive the last last mile, so to speak.

Plough_Jogger 10y ago

Google is currently doing this today. They have a fleet of autonomous cars driving around Mountain View / Palo Alto without any assistance on a daily basis.

pfarnsworth 10y ago

I disagree. There are already cities that have shut off much of the traffic downtown, either through high taxes or straight up forcing people off the road, like Mexico City. I can easily see a city saying "No more human driven cars in the downtown core, only self-driving cars" and it instantly becomes useful.

pedalpete 10y ago

You know Uber and Volvo have announced they are trialing self-driving vehicles in Pittsburgh this month. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-first-self-driving-fleet-arrives-in-pittsburgh-this-month-is06r7on http://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-08-18/uber-s-fir...

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

user5994461 10y ago

Think harder... how to bring self driving cars to the world... Currently, bus/overground/tubes/whatever have only few lines and they can cover a lot of users. Tomorrow, self driving cars could cover only the few main roads of a city. That would be enough to be useful for 80% of people in the city. That ignores the hard 90% roads which are harder to do. We'd still have to walk down the block to reach the uber and that's annoying, but that's a huge progress over the current public transportation systems (whom coverage vary hugely by city and country, to the point there might not be any).