9 ms·

Interesting for two reasons: 1. It is a self driving car, it is so clearly the future, I wish it existed now, it is going to be awesome (in my opinion). 2. De

by scraft 10y ago

Interesting for two reasons: 1. It is a self driving car, it is so clearly the future, I wish it existed now, it is going to be awesome (in my opinion). 2. Despite knowing about and following news about driverless cars for a while, there was something surprisingly (to me) compelling about watching the video. It's like you get a little taste of the full A to B that it can give you (door to door). Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK? I need to know how long I have to save..!

jgrahamc 10y ago
I'd like to see a self-driving car navigate London's narrow streets with cars both sides and the negotiation that goes on between drivers about who goes first. I'm impressed with this self-driving on California's spacious streets in perfect weather. I'll be really impressed when I see a self-driving car go down a London street in pouring rain, realize it needs to allow someone to come from the other direction and reverses and moves to the left to allow them through.
- cscurmudgeon 10y ago
  or any street in India.
- EastLondonCoder 10y ago
  You may be able to see this next year, volvo is planning a trial: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/volvo-test-self-driving-cars-london-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/volvo-tes...
- vadym909 10y ago
  Maybe it will have technology (GPS, Live Traffic, Cameras) to not go on that street until it is good to do so.
  - OJFord 10y ago
    > Maybe it will have technology to not go on that street until it is good to do so. Have you driven in London? (Or other comparably busy and narrow city - even NYC at least has 'American-width' roads.) It's not technology that's required, barring perhaps flying car technology. If every way is busy, you can't just wait eternally, you have to communicate with other drivers as parent commenter said, maybe let a couple of people go, and then realise when you just need to go for it and 'force' someone to wait for you if they're not otherwise going to. It will be really awesome to see a car do that safely and autonomously. There'll come a time, perhaps, when two cars are flashing their headlights at each other to communicate, for no real reason other than "that's how human-driven cars did it in the old days"!
- pyb 10y ago
  I'd also like to see it navigate single track lanes in the English countryside.
  - gambiting 10y ago
    I've been driving on a track like this few weeks ago, where grass and branches were sticking out on the road, any the collision prevention assist on my car was freaking out, because it was sensing an immediate collision from all of its sensors. Not to mention that there was nowhere for two vehicle to pass, if I met someone else either I or him would have to reverse a significant distance.
- georgespencer 10y ago
  These are problems which are actually improved as more cars move to autonomous driving. A sensible government would mandate that manufacturers must upload anonymised data about each car in real time, which would effectively allow for cross-talk between cars. This could enable automatic remedies to the above situations (car X tells car Y "I've got more room behind me, let me reverse), but also prevent them in the first place: car X might pull over because it knows car Y is traversing that street. It would also help to prevent traffic jams which would be a nice orthogonal benefit.)
  - dyarosla 10y ago
    I see this pro cross-talk argument all the time... but wouldn't that leave open a big vulnerability for bad actors to send false data between cars and, if they should choose to, control multiple vehicles and cause collisions?
    - freehunter 10y ago
      Also traffic would grind to a halt if the power went out on that block.
    - robotresearcher 10y ago
      Yes. So should we not do it? Maybe the benefits outweigh the risks. Like almost every engineering decision ever, it's a trade off.
    - leecb 10y ago
      If cars upload their data, as well as data about other cars detected in their environment (e.g. positions of other detected cars), we could detect the suppliers of false or incorrect data by comparing data from multiple cars in each situation. It's not perfect, but could be a step in the right direction.
      - uw_rob 10y ago
        With this plan, couldn't the attacker just fake n cars, and thus your car would be determined to be the one that is uploading false information?
- CountHackulus 10y ago
  I agree, it would be interesting to see. I'd also like to see it handle driving in both a heavy snow winter, like Calgary, and also a muddy brown snow winter, like in Ottawa. I feel like for a long time self driving cars won't be able to handle unplowed streets and will have to get the human to do anything truly difficult.
  - brandon272 10y ago
    One issue with self driving cars in snow climates, at least in the area I live in, is that in addition to the issues that come with snow covered roads in the winter, the painted lines are often mostly or completely faded come spring and are not fully repainted until months after the snow has melted.
- arethuza 10y ago
  The situation I'm keen to see is how self driving cars deal with single track roads with passing spaces (which are pretty common in the wilder parts of the UK, e.g. Scottish Highlands) - if there is a conflict the general rule used by locals is that the car that can most easily reverse back to a parking space does so. NB I'm sure "proper" behaviour can be programmed - I'm just keen to see it! (And who waives if it is a self driving car?)
gtrubetskoy 10y ago
> Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK? And it should be able to automatically detect that it's in the UK and drive on the left side of the road... I'm curious - can you even get a Tesla in the UK (or Japan or Australia, etc), and do they make a right-side driver model?
- jploh 10y ago
  They do make right hand drive cars. I've seen one in Hong Kong.
  - JulianMorrison 10y ago
    One advantage for self driving cars in the future: no "driver's side". The seats are just seats.
- icebraining 10y ago
  http://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/styles/gallery_adv/public/4/18//tesla-model-s-interior-and-touchscreen.jpg?itok=yURUSOII http://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/styl...
- tonylemesmer 10y ago
  yes, they are rather common :)
- mattlondon 10y ago
  There are a lot of Model Ss to be found in my area of London. All Right-hand drive. There is even a showroom selling them + the X in the local shopping centre (mall) and 3 (I think) super-chargers in the car park. After Model S, most common is the Leaf. (also right-hand drive)
V-2 10y ago
"Common" as in you that you get to see some every day and people don't bat an eyelid anymore? Or "common" as in being the majority of vehicles. My bet on the first one would be like 10-15 years, the other - 30+.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  It's going to be slow until it happens in a rush, I think. There will be a tipping point where enough cars are self driving that it stops being a geeky add-on and starts being seen as a moral necessity. Roughly at the point where government statistics of manual versus self driving motor accident rates gain enough data to be comparable. There will be a huge public to-and-fro about negligence versus freedom, with driving manual being the new driving drunk, but the insurance premiums will settle it.
  - V-2 10y ago
    I think it's going to be a war of lobbies, with "traditional" automotive companies spreading FUD, and insurance companies pressuring for faster adoption. It's worth mentioning - which I already hinted at in another comment - that self-driving cars, awesome as this is, will be yet another area where our privacy gets compromised, same as with mobile phones. This will push governments to favour it in the long run and eventually outlaw "regular" cars altogether as too anarchic (or make using them so expensive and cumbersome that it's going to amount to the same thing).
    - JulianMorrison 10y ago
      I doubt traditional auto companies will spread FUD at first, they are gonna see this as the next shiny new thing. This is their tape -> CD moment, everyone needs to replace their hardware, it's a bonanza. When they truly understand that it's going to turn them all into taxi makers, that owning a car is completely passé, they'll panic. That will be their DVD -> streaming moment, but it will already be too late.
      - petra 10y ago
rsync 10y ago
"It is a self driving car, it is so clearly the future, I wish it existed now, it is going to be awesome (in my opinion)." Even now, several years into the current news/development arc of self-driving cars, I still can't believe this is going to be the future. We're really never going to european (or japanese) style train networks ? We're really going to keep binging on roads ? We, as a nation of fat slobs[1] are really not ever going to return to a culture of walking ? I always thought of car culture (and we absolutely live in a car culture) as some kind of 20th century aberration ... eventually, LA would get their streetcars and subways[2] back ... eventually Minneapolis and Denver would have 20, not 2 light rail lines ... eventually we'd graduate from shitty bus networks operated badly, for poor people. Tesla cars are awesome. Successful self driving car software would be an incredible achievement. I worry that there is an arc of societal and urban development that has gone very badly awry and that this will further keep us from fixing it. [1] That is not hyperbole. [2] Yes, I know there is currently a tiny, minor subway in LA.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  Little bit sad right? I want a nation of walking. But this is much more likely to actually happen. A grid of self driving cars powered by renewable energy. I will take it over the current state.
  - snewk 10y ago
    i will take it over he current state because it makes walking, cycling, and bus transit safer. it will be interesting to find out by what magnitude.
- stevenleeg 10y ago
  This! A million times this! While self driving cars will do great things for people such as yourself (and overall I fully support their development/adoption), I also share the fear that it will prevent American urban centers from a desperately needed shift away from cars dependence in favor of better public transit and urban density. I really don't see the idea of every person in the country having their own personal transportation device (or even shared self-drivings car with something like uber) as a sustainable path for the US to continue down. The technology for good transportation in/among major cities already exists: walking, biking, mass-transit, and high-speed rail. I wish Americans would be more open to these concepts rather than dismissing them in favor of the form of transit that has yielded nothing but horribly designed and polluted cities.
randomdata 10y ago
> Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK? I think we can apply the Pareto principle here. The car seems to work surprisingly well in ideal conditions, but probably doesn't in less than ideal ones (let's see it operating in a snow storm!). So, let's say that 80% of the work is done, leaving 20% to fix all the little edge cases that are bound to pop in the real world. According to Wikipedia, the first truly autonomous cars started to appear in the 1980s. Let us round that off to 30 years of development. According to the principle, that means 30 years represents 20% of the time. Thus, 120 more years before they become available. If the ownership model persists, I'd add another 5 years to let people replace their existing vehicles to reach common status. If the shared fleet model takes hold, as many suggest it will, then that number may be reduced somewhat.
- freehunter 10y ago
  My corollary to the Pareto principle: it's only applicable in 20% of cases, and even then it's only 80% applicable.
  - randomdata 10y ago
    Much like comments on the internet. Only 20% are meant to be taken seriously, and even then, only 80% of the message is serious in nature.
    - freehunter 10y ago
      Very good, I like that. I might have to steal that line.
- gambiting 10y ago
  I'm afraid it will be the same as image recognition technology. It's "easy" to get good image recognition that works in 80-90% of the cases, but it still fails at the easiest edge cases(best image recognition in the world fails at telling a difference between a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print). So I think we will go through a few years of manufacturers making cars which can drive themselves in perfect weather, but we won't see a car that can drive in all conditions for at least a century.
jsingleton 10y ago
The UK is actually being quite progressive in this area. There are tests in Greenwich and Milton Keynes. The legislation is being looked at too. You probably won't need to own one either, just hail one. So it may be very affordable. I wrote a little more about this here: https://unop.uk/more-on-electric-vehicles https://unop.uk/more-on-electric-vehicles

by scraft 10y ago

jgrahamc 10y ago

I'd like to see a self-driving car navigate London's narrow streets with cars both sides and the negotiation that goes on between drivers about who goes first. I'm impressed with this self-driving on California's spacious streets in perfect weather. I'll be really impressed when I see a self-driving car go down a London street in pouring rain, realize it needs to allow someone to come from the other direction and reverses and moves to the left to allow them through.

cscurmudgeon 10y ago
or any street in India.
EastLondonCoder 10y ago
You may be able to see this next year, volvo is planning a trial: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/volvo-test-self-driving-cars-london-2017 https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/27/volvo-tes...
vadym909 10y ago
Maybe it will have technology (GPS, Live Traffic, Cameras) to not go on that street until it is good to do so.
- OJFord 10y ago
  > Maybe it will have technology to not go on that street until it is good to do so. Have you driven in London? (Or other comparably busy and narrow city - even NYC at least has 'American-width' roads.) It's not technology that's required, barring perhaps flying car technology. If every way is busy, you can't just wait eternally, you have to communicate with other drivers as parent commenter said, maybe let a couple of people go, and then realise when you just need to go for it and 'force' someone to wait for you if they're not otherwise going to. It will be really awesome to see a car do that safely and autonomously. There'll come a time, perhaps, when two cars are flashing their headlights at each other to communicate, for no real reason other than "that's how human-driven cars did it in the old days"!
pyb 10y ago
I'd also like to see it navigate single track lanes in the English countryside.
- gambiting 10y ago
  I've been driving on a track like this few weeks ago, where grass and branches were sticking out on the road, any the collision prevention assist on my car was freaking out, because it was sensing an immediate collision from all of its sensors. Not to mention that there was nowhere for two vehicle to pass, if I met someone else either I or him would have to reverse a significant distance.
georgespencer 10y ago
These are problems which are actually improved as more cars move to autonomous driving. A sensible government would mandate that manufacturers must upload anonymised data about each car in real time, which would effectively allow for cross-talk between cars. This could enable automatic remedies to the above situations (car X tells car Y "I've got more room behind me, let me reverse), but also prevent them in the first place: car X might pull over because it knows car Y is traversing that street. It would also help to prevent traffic jams which would be a nice orthogonal benefit.)
- dyarosla 10y ago
  I see this pro cross-talk argument all the time... but wouldn't that leave open a big vulnerability for bad actors to send false data between cars and, if they should choose to, control multiple vehicles and cause collisions?
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Also traffic would grind to a halt if the power went out on that block.
  - robotresearcher 10y ago
    Yes. So should we not do it? Maybe the benefits outweigh the risks. Like almost every engineering decision ever, it's a trade off.
  - leecb 10y ago
    If cars upload their data, as well as data about other cars detected in their environment (e.g. positions of other detected cars), we could detect the suppliers of false or incorrect data by comparing data from multiple cars in each situation. It's not perfect, but could be a step in the right direction.
    - uw_rob 10y ago
      With this plan, couldn't the attacker just fake n cars, and thus your car would be determined to be the one that is uploading false information?
CountHackulus 10y ago
I agree, it would be interesting to see. I'd also like to see it handle driving in both a heavy snow winter, like Calgary, and also a muddy brown snow winter, like in Ottawa. I feel like for a long time self driving cars won't be able to handle unplowed streets and will have to get the human to do anything truly difficult.
- brandon272 10y ago
  One issue with self driving cars in snow climates, at least in the area I live in, is that in addition to the issues that come with snow covered roads in the winter, the painted lines are often mostly or completely faded come spring and are not fully repainted until months after the snow has melted.
arethuza 10y ago
The situation I'm keen to see is how self driving cars deal with single track roads with passing spaces (which are pretty common in the wilder parts of the UK, e.g. Scottish Highlands) - if there is a conflict the general rule used by locals is that the car that can most easily reverse back to a parking space does so. NB I'm sure "proper" behaviour can be programmed - I'm just keen to see it! (And who waives if it is a self driving car?)

gtrubetskoy 10y ago

> Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK? And it should be able to automatically detect that it's in the UK and drive on the left side of the road... I'm curious - can you even get a Tesla in the UK (or Japan or Australia, etc), and do they make a right-side driver model?

jploh 10y ago
They do make right hand drive cars. I've seen one in Hong Kong.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  One advantage for self driving cars in the future: no "driver's side". The seats are just seats.
icebraining 10y ago
http://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/styles/gallery_adv/public/4/18//tesla-model-s-interior-and-touchscreen.jpg?itok=yURUSOII http://cdn2.autoexpress.co.uk/sites/autoexpressuk/files/styl...
tonylemesmer 10y ago
yes, they are rather common :)
mattlondon 10y ago
There are a lot of Model Ss to be found in my area of London. All Right-hand drive. There is even a showroom selling them + the X in the local shopping centre (mall) and 3 (I think) super-chargers in the car park. After Model S, most common is the Leaf. (also right-hand drive)

V-2 10y ago

"Common" as in you that you get to see some every day and people don't bat an eyelid anymore? Or "common" as in being the majority of vehicles. My bet on the first one would be like 10-15 years, the other - 30+.

JulianMorrison 10y ago
It's going to be slow until it happens in a rush, I think. There will be a tipping point where enough cars are self driving that it stops being a geeky add-on and starts being seen as a moral necessity. Roughly at the point where government statistics of manual versus self driving motor accident rates gain enough data to be comparable. There will be a huge public to-and-fro about negligence versus freedom, with driving manual being the new driving drunk, but the insurance premiums will settle it.
- V-2 10y ago
  I think it's going to be a war of lobbies, with "traditional" automotive companies spreading FUD, and insurance companies pressuring for faster adoption. It's worth mentioning - which I already hinted at in another comment - that self-driving cars, awesome as this is, will be yet another area where our privacy gets compromised, same as with mobile phones. This will push governments to favour it in the long run and eventually outlaw "regular" cars altogether as too anarchic (or make using them so expensive and cumbersome that it's going to amount to the same thing).
  - JulianMorrison 10y ago
    I doubt traditional auto companies will spread FUD at first, they are gonna see this as the next shiny new thing. This is their tape -> CD moment, everyone needs to replace their hardware, it's a bonanza. When they truly understand that it's going to turn them all into taxi makers, that owning a car is completely passé, they'll panic. That will be their DVD -> streaming moment, but it will already be too late.
    - petra 10y ago

rsync 10y ago

"It is a self driving car, it is so clearly the future, I wish it existed now, it is going to be awesome (in my opinion)." Even now, several years into the current news/development arc of self-driving cars, I still can't believe this is going to be the future. We're really never going to european (or japanese) style train networks ? We're really going to keep binging on roads ? We, as a nation of fat slobs[1] are really not ever going to return to a culture of walking ? I always thought of car culture (and we absolutely live in a car culture) as some kind of 20th century aberration ... eventually, LA would get their streetcars and subways[2] back ... eventually Minneapolis and Denver would have 20, not 2 light rail lines ... eventually we'd graduate from shitty bus networks operated badly, for poor people. Tesla cars are awesome. Successful self driving car software would be an incredible achievement. I worry that there is an arc of societal and urban development that has gone very badly awry and that this will further keep us from fixing it. [1] That is not hyperbole. [2] Yes, I know there is currently a tiny, minor subway in LA.

brianwawok 10y ago
Little bit sad right? I want a nation of walking. But this is much more likely to actually happen. A grid of self driving cars powered by renewable energy. I will take it over the current state.
- snewk 10y ago
  i will take it over he current state because it makes walking, cycling, and bus transit safer. it will be interesting to find out by what magnitude.
stevenleeg 10y ago
This! A million times this! While self driving cars will do great things for people such as yourself (and overall I fully support their development/adoption), I also share the fear that it will prevent American urban centers from a desperately needed shift away from cars dependence in favor of better public transit and urban density. I really don't see the idea of every person in the country having their own personal transportation device (or even shared self-drivings car with something like uber) as a sustainable path for the US to continue down. The technology for good transportation in/among major cities already exists: walking, biking, mass-transit, and high-speed rail. I wish Americans would be more open to these concepts rather than dismissing them in favor of the form of transit that has yielded nothing but horribly designed and polluted cities.

randomdata 10y ago

> Who wants to speculate how long it will be until self-driving cars are common place in the UK? I think we can apply the Pareto principle here. The car seems to work surprisingly well in ideal conditions, but probably doesn't in less than ideal ones (let's see it operating in a snow storm!). So, let's say that 80% of the work is done, leaving 20% to fix all the little edge cases that are bound to pop in the real world. According to Wikipedia, the first truly autonomous cars started to appear in the 1980s. Let us round that off to 30 years of development. According to the principle, that means 30 years represents 20% of the time. Thus, 120 more years before they become available. If the ownership model persists, I'd add another 5 years to let people replace their existing vehicles to reach common status. If the shared fleet model takes hold, as many suggest it will, then that number may be reduced somewhat.

freehunter 10y ago
My corollary to the Pareto principle: it's only applicable in 20% of cases, and even then it's only 80% applicable.
- randomdata 10y ago
  Much like comments on the internet. Only 20% are meant to be taken seriously, and even then, only 80% of the message is serious in nature.
  - freehunter 10y ago
    Very good, I like that. I might have to steal that line.
gambiting 10y ago
I'm afraid it will be the same as image recognition technology. It's "easy" to get good image recognition that works in 80-90% of the cases, but it still fails at the easiest edge cases(best image recognition in the world fails at telling a difference between a zebra and a sofa in a zebra print). So I think we will go through a few years of manufacturers making cars which can drive themselves in perfect weather, but we won't see a car that can drive in all conditions for at least a century.

jsingleton 10y ago

The UK is actually being quite progressive in this area. There are tests in Greenwich and Milton Keynes. The legislation is being looked at too. You probably won't need to own one either, just hail one. So it may be very affordable. I wrote a little more about this here: https://unop.uk/more-on-electric-vehicles https://unop.uk/more-on-electric-vehicles