12 ms·

Confession time... I really want to see fully autonomous vehicles but I don't really believe we'll see them on the road in the next 50 years. I think Google's

by slv77 10y ago

Confession time... I really want to see fully autonomous vehicles but I don't really believe we'll see them on the road in the next 50 years. I think Google's concerns with being able to reliably pass control between the driver and the computer is warranted. I think that the technology will get stuck in the equivalent of the CGI uncanny valley where they find that the technology has to leave more control with the driver than its capable of to keep the driver engaged but never is capable of full control. My guess is that these systems will evolve into assisted driving technologies that will use force feedback to the driver that will suggest the sanest path but won't take full control until the driver is outside the envelope and will predominantly be used to extend the window where baby boomers can drive and also save inattentive and unsafe drivers for themselves. In other words a drunk behind the wheel is still going to look like a drunk behind the wheel but just less likely to kill someone. I expect the technology will be displace drivers in military convoys but I don't think it will be good enough for general use. Even if the technology is close I don't think the safety will be as good as the "augmented human" model which will also rapidly improve and so insurance and regulation will continue to hamper rollout. Would love from those in the know to tell me I'm wrong. I want to believe!

ghaff 10y ago
I'm willing to believe that there could be full autonomy under some circumstances (e.g. highway driving) significantly sooner. Which would probably be a significant safety win if nothing else. (Presumably, it could also increase vehicle utilization for trucking.) Of course, what that doesn't enable is eliminating the need for a licensed, competent human to be present. So it doesn't allow for any of the shared automated car scenarios that get people excited. I do know a lot of smart people who are convinced that we're on this exponential technology improvement path and nirvana really is only 5 or 10 years away. But I listen to other experts and just look around busy, congested cities and getting computers to the last 5% looks really hard.
- kesselvon 10y ago
  You can have a single human driver be followed by a number of autonomous trucks. It doesn't eliminate the human, but it makes them way more efficient.
lallysingh 10y ago
I don't know anything special, but I think you're wrong. Three reasons: convenience, cost, and safety. These are just too nice and compelling to let this technology drop. Driver handoff is an optional feature. Cars could just stop instead. New cars have to have autonomous braking now (or very soon). A timeout on handoff can just have the car slow down to stop (which will trigger cars behind it to stop too). That's a compelling reason to have the driver want to pay attention enough to take the wheel before apologizing to everyone behind them.
Ressuder 10y ago
It's hard to tell exactly when fully autonomous vehicles will be ready, but I definitely think it's safe to safe to say that there is not going to be any such thing as a computer-assisted human driver in any significant numbers. If the intended users are anything else than specialists, it's very rare that anything that is not either fully automated or not noticably automated works out. In fact, even if the user is a specalist - such as a pilot - it often doesn't work out very well. People will misunderstand the system, trust it too much, trust it too little, rely too much on it. The only solution is full automation. Noting else is going to work.
- maxerickson 10y ago
  All new vehicles in the US have computer assisted traction control. For several years now. So a huge portion of drivers are already being assisted by a computer. It was mandated because it improves safety. Automatic braking is scheduled to be a standard feature in the next 5-6 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system I'm happy to concede that these are sort of uninteresting in the context of autonomous vehicles, but they are very much computer systems that assist drivers.
  - Ressuder 10y ago
    Right, which is why I said "not noticably automated" rather than "not automated".
    - maxerickson 10y ago
      You also said It's hard to tell exactly when fully autonomous vehicles will be ready, but I definitely think it's safe to safe to say that there is not going to be any such thing as a computer-assisted human driver in any significant numbers. I just didn't realize that I definitely think it's safe to safe to say that there is not going to be any such thing as a computer-assisted human driver in any significant numbers. was not intended to be a categorical statement...
jhall1468 10y ago
> Even if the technology is close I don't think the safety will be as good as the "augmented human" model Except allowing humans control is, by definition, less safe. Google's self-driving cars have had a total of 1 partially at-fault accident after 1.5 million miles of driving. While their accident rate is about the same as the average driver, what isn't the same is that humans caused all but 1 of the 17 accidents the cars have been involved in. The software is well under 50 years out.
- saosebastiao 10y ago
  Google has been testing their cars in conditions that are more ideal for existing technology than the vast majority of the world has to offer, and they do it in a way that avoids directly relying on computers for handling edge cases that normal drivers can't avoid. Their progress is impressive, but it's nowhere close to being able to handle major inclement weather, bad roads, obstructions, detours, and experimental traffic calming or control measures. Graduating from college takes 16 times longer than it does to graduate from kindergarten...it won't be any different here.
  - Animats 10y ago
    No, not really. Watch Chris Urmson's talk at SXSW. See their vehicle faced with someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a chicken with a broom. See the system recognize construction crews directing traffic.
    - saosebastiao 10y ago
      I would be careful to extrapolate their capabilities from that. Nobody is going to talk about the edge cases that they don't handle, but they will talk about the ones they do. It is a pretty safe assumption that anything they can't demonstrate publicly is something they can't currently handle. In other words, if they didn't show the car driving in the snow, it's pretty safe to assume it can't. And even for the examples they did show, it would be more interesting to know the rate at which they handle them successfully. So sure, they handled the guy with the reflective vest and a huge ass sign directing traffic that one time...will they do it the next time? Will they handle the case where the construction crews aren't doing everything the way they should?
masklinn 10y ago
It seems to be mostly a question of human comfort more than technology e.g. there have been fully autonomous trains (UTO/GOA4) since the 80s[0], yet most of the metros today (even fairly recent ones) have limited to no automation. [0] Kobe New Transit in 1981 and Lille Metro in 1983
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  The lack of train automation has more to do with public sector unions protecting jobs via crony politics than human comfort.
  - dx034 10y ago
    I don't know why you get downvoted. At least in London that's certainly the case. Automating metros is very easy but as drivers can virtually halt the whole city with a strike, no one dares to do it.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
      This site is mostly college-aged leftist millennials. I think any criticism of unions will just lead to knee-jerk downvotes, unfortunately. The history of job protection holding back progress certainly isn't a controversial subject, but I guess ideology rules the twitchy downvote finger on social media sites.
      - hx87 10y ago
        > This site is mostly college-aged leftist millennials. They're balanced (or perhaps more than balanced) out by the college-aged libertarian millennials, so that isn't a good explanation.
    - masklinn 10y ago
      > I don't know why you get downvoted. Because it's a kneejerk political assertion of a common bogeyman provided with no evidence whatsoever which fails to explain why there are GOA4 systems in production including in countries with a history of adversarial labor relations? TL;DR: because it's a worthless pandering comment
phkahler 10y ago
>> I really want to see fully autonomous vehicles but I don't really believe we'll see them on the road in the next 50 years. I agree with you 100 percent. DAS (driver assist systems) are getting to be very common. I've worked at a couple companies that produce them, though I did not work on those products. I rode on the highway in a car outfitted with prototype lane keeping, and it was not quite as steady as I'd hoped. They also had an option that would apply a light force to keep you in the lane but could be easily overcome (and I think went away if you used a turn signal). It felt like a sort of speed bump between lanes. It wasn't trying to be a really complex system, and probably has some real world value - in reasonable situations I'd like to be able to use both hands to eat some food from the drive through, while keeping my eyes on things. I've also seen video (circa 2004) of an autonomous car driving 100kph down a winding dirt road, staying on its side of the road and automatically stopping. But again, the engineers wanted to do so much more with it, but the rational guys in safety would not allow it. I also competed in the AUVS autonomous ground vehicle competition in 1994. I wrote a lane follower by taking 20-30 lines of pixels off an NTSC frame grabber on an Intel 486. The core algorithm was on the order of 100 LoC, and we took second place. Super simple algorithm, hardly intelligent. There is a huge difference between a PID controller maintaining position in the lane with radar assisted cruise control, and being a fully autonomous vehicle fit of unaided driving on public roads. There is a whole range of system capabilities, and the public has no idea what's in any given car. Comparing highway fatalities/mile to national statistics covering all roads and conditions is bullshit and a certain company that's recently killed some people knows it. But hey, we all want to be able to read a book on the road or have truckers take a nap on long hauls, so let's keep deluding ourselves that this stuff will be ready for prime time in the next couple years.
- pedrosorio 10y ago
  "I wrote a lane follower by taking 20-30 lines of pixels off an NTSC frame grabber on an Intel 486. The core algorithm was on the order of 100 LoC, and we took second place. Super simple algorithm, hardly intelligent." How is this relevant to self driving cars in 2016 and the following decades?
  - seibelj 10y ago
drzaiusapelord 10y ago
This is my thinking as well. As a Chicago driver I have to admit there's a great deal of fuzzy logic in driving. Considering the last high profile crash was Tesla saying "Whoops, I guess we never tested blue trucks driving against a blue sky!" If they can't handle simple cases like this, how can they handle pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists doing dangerous end runs around your car, black ice, inches of snow, etc. I have little faith that this is a simple computer science problem that will be solved "any day now." Hell, looking at what passes for production code generally is scary. I really don't want to have as many real life crashes as software crashes on my PC. I think the typical low information futurist brigade is driving this narrative and they haven't critically looked at what fully autonomous really means. The hype will wear off soon as we keep seeing crashes and other issues. I think the idea that cars will go from dumb to autonmous overnight is foolish. We'll have years/decades of smarter driver assist and maybe someday allow autonomous after a very long process of working out the kinks, certification, regulation, etc. Even then it'll probably only be highway driving or in low congestion areas far from pedestrians, strollers, and cyclists. There are probably other use cases that'll be approved sooner than later like slow moving garbage trucks with autonomous robot arms picking up trash cans. Or autonomous street cleaning cars. That's assuming the crony public sector unions allow them.
DigitalJack 10y ago
I agree with you, but I think the bridge will be drone drivers as the assisted driver, not an in car driver. I think there will be warehouses full of drone drivers, ready and alert, to jump in at a moments notice to a car that raises an alert to being in a less than ideal situation. For all those "truck driving simulator" games, maybe there would be a market for "drone driver simulator" where you are dropped into random bad situations and have to successfully navigate out of them.
- ianai 10y ago
  I love that idea for the simple fact it generates jobs.
  - eru 10y ago
    It won't generate jobs. One 'drone driver' will be able to replace several in-car drivers.
rayiner 10y ago
It surprised me to learn how reliant self-driving cars are on GPS. That makes me wonder how they'll perform in places like D.C., where roads will randomly be shut down or turn into one-ways (going in different directions in different times of day), lefts are legal or not legal depending on time of day, etc. Are we really going to have to count on that all being entered correctly into some database? Accuracy also seems like a problem: the GPS often has no idea, e.g., that I'm on an access road versus the main road, or precisely where the next turn is.
- protomyth 10y ago
  ... or in rural areas where the GPS position of roads is just plain wrong. Hwy 3 north of Steele, ND was off by about 100 yards on the GPS for a couple of miles. Nothing like a GPS yelling at you to get back on the road. I get the feeling we are going to have to add some "beacons" to the current roads to deal with local conditions and just provide a decent verification.
  - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
    don't want to sound elitist but a lot of us will consider the driverless car successful if we get it working in places like california and ny and completely ignore rural areas
    - ghaff 10y ago
      You do realize that both California and New York have very large rural areas?
      - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
        yes i do. but i believe we can handle those. handling the rural areas between LA and SF is very manageable. It's essentially just driving straight on the 5 freeway. Also, all the tech companies are here and probably would be willing to hammer out the details for the cars to work only in california as it is a lot more manageable. just like tesla has supercharger stations all over california so you can drive anywhere. don't think it's quite the same in other states.
nimos 10y ago
I think it will be progressive road/condition based where highways/freeways become "driverless certified" first and in city driving comes after.
- Gustomaximus 10y ago
  This was my thinking to. Highways first. Then high density city areas become certified, so maybe car drop you off and goes parks itself at a station after you doing the initial drive into the city. As it rolls out into suburbs driverless areas becoming a property value points, like schools or good internet today.
tim333 10y ago
OK a bit limited, 6mph, fixed route, but you can go ride on an autonomous bus right now in Helsinki http://www.curbed.com/2016/8/31/12691516/self-driving-bus-vehicles-finland-helsinki-transportation http://www.curbed.com/2016/8/31/12691516/self-driving-bus-ve... Video of it in Duabi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl0dJ6vRyQ&feature=player_embedded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl0dJ6vRyQ&feature=player_e... Here's a possible relevant quote: >I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years… . Ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions. — Wilbur Wright, in a speech to the Aero Club of France, 5 November 1908.
Animats 10y ago
It's been available for military convoys for years. Oskosh offers it as an option on their large military trucks.[1] There's usually a manned vehicle in the convoy, but it doesn't have to be in front, and usually isn't. [1] https://oshkoshdefense.com/technology-1/unmanned-ground-vehicle/ https://oshkoshdefense.com/technology-1/unmanned-ground-vehi...
- exhilaration 10y ago
  Also from October 2015: "Driverless trucks move all iron ore at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mines, in world first" - http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds-first-automated-mine/6863814 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds...
  - legulere 10y ago
    That seems like a controlled environment without much interaction with other vehicles to me.
    - tacticus 10y ago
      Except all the miners driving around in the "tiny" toyotas.
tn13 10y ago
I agree with you that "fully autonomous" is a very distant dream. However I would like to point out the secondary or tertiary effects of such breakthroughs which people often fail to predict in the beginning. Invention of bulb did not replace candles but it helped humans be productive even after sunset leading to unimaginable gain in human productivity that has propelled us forward since then. I will not see "self driving cars" not just as replacement of our Camry and Prius but it could be modified to do lot more things we currently have not imagined. One angle I can think of is that building an environment designed specifically for such vehicles. Currently most of the challenges come from the fact that the car has to run in an extremely unpredictable environment. What if we could build isolated lanes or even exclusive roads for such vehicles ? What if we could build housing complexes, airports, parking lots etc.
thomasthomas 10y ago
"I really want to see autonomous vehicles" Take a trip to PA and stand next to a busy street for 30 minutes
yourapostasy 10y ago
If Google/Tesla/Apple/$company_working_on_self_driving_vehicles offered to defray/pay your insurance bill and operational expenses, would you let them kit out your car(s) with a gajillion sensors and recording equipment, and send all that information to them? Or if someone said if you did it for X years, you get $Y towards a brand-new car, where Y is 50K+ USD. You still drive manually like you normally do, but everything possible about your driving is recorded, and fed into their trainers. If they could get an orders of magnitude larger training corpus, I wonder if they will start to cover more edge cases.
meddlepal 10y ago
That's a very engineering-oriented viewpoint. But it won't matter. As soon as the $$$ factor tips in automation favor including potential for lawsuit payouts it will happen.

by slv77 10y ago

ghaff 10y ago

I'm willing to believe that there could be full autonomy under some circumstances (e.g. highway driving) significantly sooner. Which would probably be a significant safety win if nothing else. (Presumably, it could also increase vehicle utilization for trucking.) Of course, what that doesn't enable is eliminating the need for a licensed, competent human to be present. So it doesn't allow for any of the shared automated car scenarios that get people excited. I do know a lot of smart people who are convinced that we're on this exponential technology improvement path and nirvana really is only 5 or 10 years away. But I listen to other experts and just look around busy, congested cities and getting computers to the last 5% looks really hard.

kesselvon 10y ago
You can have a single human driver be followed by a number of autonomous trucks. It doesn't eliminate the human, but it makes them way more efficient.

lallysingh 10y ago

I don't know anything special, but I think you're wrong. Three reasons: convenience, cost, and safety. These are just too nice and compelling to let this technology drop. Driver handoff is an optional feature. Cars could just stop instead. New cars have to have autonomous braking now (or very soon). A timeout on handoff can just have the car slow down to stop (which will trigger cars behind it to stop too). That's a compelling reason to have the driver want to pay attention enough to take the wheel before apologizing to everyone behind them.

Ressuder 10y ago

It's hard to tell exactly when fully autonomous vehicles will be ready, but I definitely think it's safe to safe to say that there is not going to be any such thing as a computer-assisted human driver in any significant numbers. If the intended users are anything else than specialists, it's very rare that anything that is not either fully automated or not noticably automated works out. In fact, even if the user is a specalist - such as a pilot - it often doesn't work out very well. People will misunderstand the system, trust it too much, trust it too little, rely too much on it. The only solution is full automation. Noting else is going to work.

maxerickson 10y ago
All new vehicles in the US have computer assisted traction control. For several years now. So a huge portion of drivers are already being assisted by a computer. It was mandated because it improves safety. Automatic braking is scheduled to be a standard feature in the next 5-6 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collision_avoidance_system I'm happy to concede that these are sort of uninteresting in the context of autonomous vehicles, but they are very much computer systems that assist drivers.
- Ressuder 10y ago
  Right, which is why I said "not noticably automated" rather than "not automated".
  - maxerickson 10y ago
    You also said It's hard to tell exactly when fully autonomous vehicles will be ready, but I definitely think it's safe to safe to say that there is not going to be any such thing as a computer-assisted human driver in any significant numbers. I just didn't realize that I definitely think it's safe to safe to say that there is not going to be any such thing as a computer-assisted human driver in any significant numbers. was not intended to be a categorical statement...

jhall1468 10y ago

> Even if the technology is close I don't think the safety will be as good as the "augmented human" model Except allowing humans control is, by definition, less safe. Google's self-driving cars have had a total of 1 partially at-fault accident after 1.5 million miles of driving. While their accident rate is about the same as the average driver, what isn't the same is that humans caused all but 1 of the 17 accidents the cars have been involved in. The software is well under 50 years out.

saosebastiao 10y ago
Google has been testing their cars in conditions that are more ideal for existing technology than the vast majority of the world has to offer, and they do it in a way that avoids directly relying on computers for handling edge cases that normal drivers can't avoid. Their progress is impressive, but it's nowhere close to being able to handle major inclement weather, bad roads, obstructions, detours, and experimental traffic calming or control measures. Graduating from college takes 16 times longer than it does to graduate from kindergarten...it won't be any different here.
- Animats 10y ago
  No, not really. Watch Chris Urmson's talk at SXSW. See their vehicle faced with someone in a powered wheelchair chasing a chicken with a broom. See the system recognize construction crews directing traffic.
  - saosebastiao 10y ago
    I would be careful to extrapolate their capabilities from that. Nobody is going to talk about the edge cases that they don't handle, but they will talk about the ones they do. It is a pretty safe assumption that anything they can't demonstrate publicly is something they can't currently handle. In other words, if they didn't show the car driving in the snow, it's pretty safe to assume it can't. And even for the examples they did show, it would be more interesting to know the rate at which they handle them successfully. So sure, they handled the guy with the reflective vest and a huge ass sign directing traffic that one time...will they do it the next time? Will they handle the case where the construction crews aren't doing everything the way they should?

masklinn 10y ago

It seems to be mostly a question of human comfort more than technology e.g. there have been fully autonomous trains (UTO/GOA4) since the 80s[0], yet most of the metros today (even fairly recent ones) have limited to no automation. [0] Kobe New Transit in 1981 and Lille Metro in 1983

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
The lack of train automation has more to do with public sector unions protecting jobs via crony politics than human comfort.
- dx034 10y ago
  I don't know why you get downvoted. At least in London that's certainly the case. Automating metros is very easy but as drivers can virtually halt the whole city with a strike, no one dares to do it.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - drzaiusapelord 10y ago
    This site is mostly college-aged leftist millennials. I think any criticism of unions will just lead to knee-jerk downvotes, unfortunately. The history of job protection holding back progress certainly isn't a controversial subject, but I guess ideology rules the twitchy downvote finger on social media sites.
    - hx87 10y ago
      > This site is mostly college-aged leftist millennials. They're balanced (or perhaps more than balanced) out by the college-aged libertarian millennials, so that isn't a good explanation.
  - masklinn 10y ago
    > I don't know why you get downvoted. Because it's a kneejerk political assertion of a common bogeyman provided with no evidence whatsoever which fails to explain why there are GOA4 systems in production including in countries with a history of adversarial labor relations? TL;DR: because it's a worthless pandering comment

phkahler 10y ago

>> I really want to see fully autonomous vehicles but I don't really believe we'll see them on the road in the next 50 years. I agree with you 100 percent. DAS (driver assist systems) are getting to be very common. I've worked at a couple companies that produce them, though I did not work on those products. I rode on the highway in a car outfitted with prototype lane keeping, and it was not quite as steady as I'd hoped. They also had an option that would apply a light force to keep you in the lane but could be easily overcome (and I think went away if you used a turn signal). It felt like a sort of speed bump between lanes. It wasn't trying to be a really complex system, and probably has some real world value - in reasonable situations I'd like to be able to use both hands to eat some food from the drive through, while keeping my eyes on things. I've also seen video (circa 2004) of an autonomous car driving 100kph down a winding dirt road, staying on its side of the road and automatically stopping. But again, the engineers wanted to do so much more with it, but the rational guys in safety would not allow it. I also competed in the AUVS autonomous ground vehicle competition in 1994. I wrote a lane follower by taking 20-30 lines of pixels off an NTSC frame grabber on an Intel 486. The core algorithm was on the order of 100 LoC, and we took second place. Super simple algorithm, hardly intelligent. There is a huge difference between a PID controller maintaining position in the lane with radar assisted cruise control, and being a fully autonomous vehicle fit of unaided driving on public roads. There is a whole range of system capabilities, and the public has no idea what's in any given car. Comparing highway fatalities/mile to national statistics covering all roads and conditions is bullshit and a certain company that's recently killed some people knows it. But hey, we all want to be able to read a book on the road or have truckers take a nap on long hauls, so let's keep deluding ourselves that this stuff will be ready for prime time in the next couple years.

pedrosorio 10y ago
"I wrote a lane follower by taking 20-30 lines of pixels off an NTSC frame grabber on an Intel 486. The core algorithm was on the order of 100 LoC, and we took second place. Super simple algorithm, hardly intelligent." How is this relevant to self driving cars in 2016 and the following decades?
- seibelj 10y ago

drzaiusapelord 10y ago

This is my thinking as well. As a Chicago driver I have to admit there's a great deal of fuzzy logic in driving. Considering the last high profile crash was Tesla saying "Whoops, I guess we never tested blue trucks driving against a blue sky!" If they can't handle simple cases like this, how can they handle pedestrians jaywalking, cyclists doing dangerous end runs around your car, black ice, inches of snow, etc. I have little faith that this is a simple computer science problem that will be solved "any day now." Hell, looking at what passes for production code generally is scary. I really don't want to have as many real life crashes as software crashes on my PC. I think the typical low information futurist brigade is driving this narrative and they haven't critically looked at what fully autonomous really means. The hype will wear off soon as we keep seeing crashes and other issues. I think the idea that cars will go from dumb to autonmous overnight is foolish. We'll have years/decades of smarter driver assist and maybe someday allow autonomous after a very long process of working out the kinks, certification, regulation, etc. Even then it'll probably only be highway driving or in low congestion areas far from pedestrians, strollers, and cyclists. There are probably other use cases that'll be approved sooner than later like slow moving garbage trucks with autonomous robot arms picking up trash cans. Or autonomous street cleaning cars. That's assuming the crony public sector unions allow them.

DigitalJack 10y ago

I agree with you, but I think the bridge will be drone drivers as the assisted driver, not an in car driver. I think there will be warehouses full of drone drivers, ready and alert, to jump in at a moments notice to a car that raises an alert to being in a less than ideal situation. For all those "truck driving simulator" games, maybe there would be a market for "drone driver simulator" where you are dropped into random bad situations and have to successfully navigate out of them.

ianai 10y ago
I love that idea for the simple fact it generates jobs.
- eru 10y ago
  It won't generate jobs. One 'drone driver' will be able to replace several in-car drivers.

rayiner 10y ago

It surprised me to learn how reliant self-driving cars are on GPS. That makes me wonder how they'll perform in places like D.C., where roads will randomly be shut down or turn into one-ways (going in different directions in different times of day), lefts are legal or not legal depending on time of day, etc. Are we really going to have to count on that all being entered correctly into some database? Accuracy also seems like a problem: the GPS often has no idea, e.g., that I'm on an access road versus the main road, or precisely where the next turn is.

protomyth 10y ago
... or in rural areas where the GPS position of roads is just plain wrong. Hwy 3 north of Steele, ND was off by about 100 yards on the GPS for a couple of miles. Nothing like a GPS yelling at you to get back on the road. I get the feeling we are going to have to add some "beacons" to the current roads to deal with local conditions and just provide a decent verification.
- thesimpsons1022 10y ago
  don't want to sound elitist but a lot of us will consider the driverless car successful if we get it working in places like california and ny and completely ignore rural areas
  - ghaff 10y ago
    You do realize that both California and New York have very large rural areas?
    - thesimpsons1022 10y ago
      yes i do. but i believe we can handle those. handling the rural areas between LA and SF is very manageable. It's essentially just driving straight on the 5 freeway. Also, all the tech companies are here and probably would be willing to hammer out the details for the cars to work only in california as it is a lot more manageable. just like tesla has supercharger stations all over california so you can drive anywhere. don't think it's quite the same in other states.

nimos 10y ago

I think it will be progressive road/condition based where highways/freeways become "driverless certified" first and in city driving comes after.

Gustomaximus 10y ago
This was my thinking to. Highways first. Then high density city areas become certified, so maybe car drop you off and goes parks itself at a station after you doing the initial drive into the city. As it rolls out into suburbs driverless areas becoming a property value points, like schools or good internet today.

tim333 10y ago

OK a bit limited, 6mph, fixed route, but you can go ride on an autonomous bus right now in Helsinki http://www.curbed.com/2016/8/31/12691516/self-driving-bus-vehicles-finland-helsinki-transportation http://www.curbed.com/2016/8/31/12691516/self-driving-bus-ve... Video of it in Duabi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl0dJ6vRyQ&feature=player_embedded https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgl0dJ6vRyQ&feature=player_e... Here's a possible relevant quote: >I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years… . Ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions. — Wilbur Wright, in a speech to the Aero Club of France, 5 November 1908.

Animats 10y ago

It's been available for military convoys for years. Oskosh offers it as an option on their large military trucks.[1] There's usually a manned vehicle in the convoy, but it doesn't have to be in front, and usually isn't. [1] https://oshkoshdefense.com/technology-1/unmanned-ground-vehicle/ https://oshkoshdefense.com/technology-1/unmanned-ground-vehi...

exhilaration 10y ago
Also from October 2015: "Driverless trucks move all iron ore at Rio Tinto's Pilbara mines, in world first" - http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds-first-automated-mine/6863814 http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-18/rio-tinto-opens-worlds...
- legulere 10y ago
  That seems like a controlled environment without much interaction with other vehicles to me.
  - tacticus 10y ago
    Except all the miners driving around in the "tiny" toyotas.

tn13 10y ago

I agree with you that "fully autonomous" is a very distant dream. However I would like to point out the secondary or tertiary effects of such breakthroughs which people often fail to predict in the beginning. Invention of bulb did not replace candles but it helped humans be productive even after sunset leading to unimaginable gain in human productivity that has propelled us forward since then. I will not see "self driving cars" not just as replacement of our Camry and Prius but it could be modified to do lot more things we currently have not imagined. One angle I can think of is that building an environment designed specifically for such vehicles. Currently most of the challenges come from the fact that the car has to run in an extremely unpredictable environment. What if we could build isolated lanes or even exclusive roads for such vehicles ? What if we could build housing complexes, airports, parking lots etc.

thomasthomas 10y ago

"I really want to see autonomous vehicles" Take a trip to PA and stand next to a busy street for 30 minutes

yourapostasy 10y ago

If Google/Tesla/Apple/$company_working_on_self_driving_vehicles offered to defray/pay your insurance bill and operational expenses, would you let them kit out your car(s) with a gajillion sensors and recording equipment, and send all that information to them? Or if someone said if you did it for X years, you get $Y towards a brand-new car, where Y is 50K+ USD. You still drive manually like you normally do, but everything possible about your driving is recorded, and fed into their trainers. If they could get an orders of magnitude larger training corpus, I wonder if they will start to cover more edge cases.

meddlepal 10y ago

That's a very engineering-oriented viewpoint. But it won't matter. As soon as the $$$ factor tips in automation favor including potential for lawsuit payouts it will happen.