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As someone from Europe it is good to see the EU manufacturers finally showing some serious progress. I always chuckled a bit when (tech) press would say 'Googl

As someone from Europe it is good to see the EU manufacturers finally showing some serious progress. I always chuckled a bit when (tech) press would say 'Google has beaten auto manufacturers' after Google released some PR videoclip of them showing a car driving. European car companies just don't see the need to enlighten the world about what they're up to, how they are progressing, but simply work until it's finished for production and then unveil it. Still haven't seen that 'vastly superiour' super-car from Google and Apple everyone claimed were coming to take over. Tesla does seem to succesfully run their company as a tech start-up: hyping new products that are 1 or 2 year from being in production, personification of the brand via the CEO god-status, continuous deliviry of software updates to cars, public beta testing etc.. I am rooting for Tesla, I hope they find the capability to increase production levels to something that comes near of the existing car giants.

TulliusCicero 9y ago
> There are a couple caveats, obviously. The traffic jam pilot only works on highways with a physical barrier separating oncoming traffic, and the use of the system is subject to the laws of whichever jurisdiction you’re driving through. So bone up on the rules of the road before pressing that button. Being able to self-drive on highways with physical barriers between oncoming traffic is, like, the easiest use case for self-driving cars. This doesn't very advanced to me at all. Urban driving is the actual hard part.
- muro 9y ago
  True. But it's nice to have that usable today :) Driving regularly on highways in Europe, it's a great feature and I'm glad my car supports it (~2yo Volvo). Looking forward to more in my next car. Edit: reading below, my car is ~L2, but I trust it more as L1.
- skgoa 9y ago
  True, but it's still the first time real world customers will be able to let the car take complete control/responsibility in real world traffic. For me as an automotive sw engineer this is truly massive step forward, even though what you see from the outside doesn't seem that impressive at a glance. Also, being stuck in a traffic jam during the daily comute is one of the most annoying and most stressing parts of driving. Not having to deal with this is a significant improvement in the driver's quality of life.
  - mortehu 9y ago
    Is there any reason to believe a present day Model S can't pass all the tests the A8 will go through to be approved for "eyes off" autonomous driving? (Other than changing the parameters for the "hands on wheel" warning)
    - kuschku 9y ago
      Considering people in the past months have died doing exactly that, yes, there is reason to believe that. And just look at http://autoweek.com/article/autonomous-cars/tesla-model-s-autopilot-strikes-again-dallas-crash http://autoweek.com/article/autonomous-cars/tesla-model-s-au...
      - mortehu 9y ago
        The A8 autonomy is only for freeway traffic jams. What you linked does not seem to be an example of that.
        kuschku 9y ago
        The A8’s lane assistant can also handle this stuff, while the Tesla’s lane assistant can not (obviously).
  - Jabbles 9y ago
    From April: https://medium.com/waymo/apply-to-be-part-of-waymos-early-rider-program-5fd996c7a86f https://medium.com/waymo/apply-to-be-part-of-waymos-early-ri...
  - mpweiher 9y ago
    Yes, I think this was an ingenious move: find a situation that is somewhat easier to deal with yet solves a real-world pain-point. Almost an Apple move.
    - dfrey 9y ago
      An Apple move would be building a car without windows and telling me that it's progress.
- Jdam 9y ago
  Urban driving in places that are not sunny California
- ZeroGravitas 9y ago
  I would have thought the sheer speed of highway driving makes it harder to recover from simple errors like not spotting a pothole or a deer crossing the road. In both highway and urban driving I think the "hard" bit is dealing with the unusual, like a line of ducks crossing the road, a civilian directing traffic because and old person has collapsed in the middle of the street, or any situation in which a human being is providing important context via voice e.g. don't drive down there, the road will be blocked until this truck reverses out to avoid a low bridge.
  - metaobject 9y ago
    That's interesting. How will these cars deal with cases where someone is directing traffic? It's not like these folks use some sort of universal gesture to allow traffic to proceed or to tell them to stop. Sometimes you have police directing traffic, sometimes its construction workers, sometimes it might be utility workers. Sometimes they have the stop-sign-on-a-stick sometimes they don't. In order to avoid excessive delays I wonder if they're going to have to consult the human passenger for advice on whether to proceed? I believe a !significant amount of work has been put into gesture recognition in computer vision research, so maybe this is all moot, but training a NN on gestures seems kind of dangerous in cases where someone uses gestures for stopping/proceeding that are misclassified. I wonder whether there will have to be more machine-readable devices installed along the roadway to help autonomous vehicles? In this case, perhaps a portable traffic control device which provides visual signals and perhaps even RF signals which talk to cars to direct traffic? These devices would be used at accident scenes or construction zones, etc.
    - j2bax 9y ago
      Until we have both smart cars AND smart highways, true autonomy will be incredibly challenging. Once the highway grid is made smart and the cars can talk with it, construction will just require an engineer to add the updated routing info into the highway for the cars to heed.
- gutnor 9y ago
  Highway is the really the only setting I have ever been at risk of falling asleep behind the wheel. Also, for a human being, those are quite stressful jam: car pick up a lot of speed before stopping abruptly a few tens of meters later. As a pure car safety feature, this gets double thumbs up. That's the culmination of all the tools they have added recently: lane departure warning, adaptative cruise control, blind spot warning, attention detection, ... That said, it does indeed very little for the end-goal of having a fleet of constructor/rental/uber/google cars that drives you from your house to your destination.
- yardie 9y ago
  As a driver with an admittedly short attention span I think this is great! Following the little yellow and white lines for hours on end is something machines are better at than humans. Urban driving requires a skill set machines don't have. You have to be aggressive but not hostile. Else, you'll never get anywhere in rush hour traffic.
Shivetya 9y ago
well there is a lot of behind the scenes work with major suppliers. auto companies tend to be very conservative when introducing new technologies because the liability issue is a major concern and possibly even more important, they cannot afford to tarnish the brand. because of their innate audience they don't need to make spectacular announcements to generate interest. companies without large established bases in the field do. Tesla is special in that they have a CEO who doesn't seem to have an off switch. However this is not always a positive but they still manage to handle it well. The 3 will be an interesting car but still highly limited with regards to what many expect cars to do but EVs are still a very young technology. Autonomous driving is where the real money is, it can be applied easily to many types of vehicles, don't over look the usage of similar tech on the mundane like mobility scooters or similar
deanCommie 9y ago
I agree with you to a point, but Google's target is much more moon-shot. Door-to-door complete self-driving in all circumstances, not just highway under careful conditions. And by all indications they are succeeding - the roadblock is regulations and turning it into a consumer product. The tech is there.
- ebbv 9y ago
  The tech is not there. If it were they'd be making more noise about it. Most of the big players (besides Apple) have demonstrated self driving cars in familiar environments; downtown SF or whatever. The problem is most of the country is not downtown SF. There's a lot of dirt roads out here. There's a lot of snow and heavy rain. Nobody has demonstrated self driving under all conditions. Or even under all non-extreme weather conditions.
  - davewritescode 9y ago
    We'll eventually get there but it might be another 20-30 years before we live in a world where a robot car will come ferry you off to wherever you might want to go. I suspect the near term ~10-20 years will have some form of autonomous public-ish transportation running on certain roads that are routinely re-mapped. Highways and busy city streets are likely candidates for autonomous operation.
    - MR4D 9y ago
      You make a really good point. Given the economic impact to companies, I think it will be much faster. For instance, the Germans flew their first jet in 1941. Only 17 years later, the Boeing 707 was flying, and transportation around the world changed immensely. Given that we had just come out of a war (2 if you count Korea), that's pretty fast. I'd think a comparable timeframe would apply rather than your 30 year estimate. Heck, 30 years ago you didn't even have a cell phone!
  - gasbag 9y ago
    I'd like to see these cars' behavior when they encounter a road work crew with a closed lane and flaggers directing traffic.
Fricken 9y ago
Google hasn't even released a complete PR demo of their cars, just a few sporadic shots of one of their Koala cars driving around with a blind guy in the driver's seat. The only tangible data that's been released from them is last year's California DMV disengagement reports, which Waymo reported 1 unplanned disengagement for every 5000 miles of testing. But they were driving around downtown SF back in 2011, most of what they've been up to in the meantime is validating their software to the safety and reliability standards they need to be at before this technology can be foisted on the public. They were ready to start moving folks around Mountainview, totally driverless, back in 2015 with their Koala cars but DMV regs put the kibosh on that.
thirdsun 9y ago
> I always chuckled a bit when (tech) press would say 'Google has beaten auto manufacturers' after Google released some PR videoclip of them showing a car driving. While I also want to see european car makers tackling these challenges, how is the posted report different from a fluff piece about Google's experiments? Other than the lack of a video demonstration. At this point Audi's announcement sounds like a bunch of over-promised, ambitious claims with a high potential of turning into vaporware. I might be wrong and all of it is very real and working, but you can't come to that conclusion by reading that article alone.
- skgoa 9y ago
  It's different because Audi is actually building and selling a product.
criley2 9y ago
"Google shows video of real-world performance and extensively details real-world issues, logs millions of autonomous miles" Lame! Vaporware! "Audi releases a press-release, no video, no demonstration, no real-world evidence" European manufacturers sure are capable and know what they're doing! What a refreshing change!
- stouset 9y ago
  No kidding. As a developer and infosec person, having seen countless non-tech company forays into software (take Toyota for example), I'm extraordinarily skeptical of automotive companies rolling out something of this difficulty. I just don't see it as plausible that a company with little to no roots in software managed to bring on a large enough team from scratch, that understands software engineering well enough to build something like this to a high level of reliability. Does anyone here really think that the same or similar teams responsible for the god-awful, un-updateable, UI disaster that is the center console nav in any car ever have somehow elegantly conquered autonomous driving?
  - andmarios 9y ago
    It is common for people who write UIs and APIs to call themselves software engineers, but real engineering is what AUDI and other automakers do for a living. Demonstrating a “god-awful” UI as evidence that they can't do autonomous driving is silly imo. We talk about people who design cars that can safely travel at 150+ kph. The tiniest bug or design failure can kill their clients in a spectacular way. We trust these guys with our lives. Autonomous driving isn't about the UI, it is about math, systems, modeling, safety valves, rigorous testing. This is engineering and isn't taught in CS but in ECE classes. It is easier for an engineer to learn git than for a developer to learn differential equations. Airplanes, cars etc are controlled by microprocessors for the couple last decades. Sure, writing a polished website in angular is cool but engineers write the software that runs pacemakers. How can they not understand reliability?
    - stouset 9y ago
      The god-awful UI was not central to my point. Your talk about their hardware engineering chops completely ignores the very real evidence we have that their software engineering efforts are utterly horrifying. Have you seen the reports about Toyota's software development practices? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643551 By all accounts, while Toyota is a particularly bad offender, these kinds of problems are not unique to them. Software engineering is not something that historically-hardware manufacturing companies tend to have the culture to perform well.
justin66 9y ago
> European car companies just don't see the need to enlighten the world about what they're up to I certainly appreciate Volvo letting the world know what they're doing to test autonomous cars. I'm glad European carmakers don't work the way you're saying they do.
mxschumacher 9y ago
Daimler drove an autonomous S-Class around Paris in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project
saturdaysaint 9y ago
FWIW, comparison testing showed that Tesla's autopilot was far superior to BMW's and Mercedes', at least as of last year: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-compared-tesla-vs-bmw-mercedes-and-infiniti-feature http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co... I agree that there's some genuinely impressive and underrated stuff hitting the market from many manufacturers (even in sub-luxury brands), but Tesla has a real and formidable advantage in the amount of data they're collecting.
- skgoa 9y ago
  That "test" has two massive issues: 1) They only pitted older models against the latest update of Tesla's system. E.g. the 3 year old S-class was tested instead of the new E-class, which had just started to be delivered at the time. (And had been tested by car journalists for months.) At the time that S-class entered production, Tesla had not had any "autopilot" at all. 2) They tested only lane keeping. Unsurprisingly the Tesla was better at that. They did not however test automatic emergency braking, autoparking etc. - features that Tesla either simply doesn't have or isn't as good in. tl;dr: Cherry-picked test.
  - saturdaysaint 9y ago
    I'm all for more comparisons with better methods, but isn't demonstrably superior lane-keeping enough to seriously question the GP's assertion that European car makers are quietly far ahead in AV capability? By all appearances, the A8 can't even change lanes like last year's Model S - I can imagine scenarios where Audi could do better at other tests, but I'd sure bet on Tesla to do braking/parking/etc better.

TulliusCicero 9y ago

> There are a couple caveats, obviously. The traffic jam pilot only works on highways with a physical barrier separating oncoming traffic, and the use of the system is subject to the laws of whichever jurisdiction you’re driving through. So bone up on the rules of the road before pressing that button. Being able to self-drive on highways with physical barriers between oncoming traffic is, like, the easiest use case for self-driving cars. This doesn't very advanced to me at all. Urban driving is the actual hard part.

muro 9y ago
True. But it's nice to have that usable today :) Driving regularly on highways in Europe, it's a great feature and I'm glad my car supports it (~2yo Volvo). Looking forward to more in my next car. Edit: reading below, my car is ~L2, but I trust it more as L1.
skgoa 9y ago
True, but it's still the first time real world customers will be able to let the car take complete control/responsibility in real world traffic. For me as an automotive sw engineer this is truly massive step forward, even though what you see from the outside doesn't seem that impressive at a glance. Also, being stuck in a traffic jam during the daily comute is one of the most annoying and most stressing parts of driving. Not having to deal with this is a significant improvement in the driver's quality of life.
- mortehu 9y ago
  Is there any reason to believe a present day Model S can't pass all the tests the A8 will go through to be approved for "eyes off" autonomous driving? (Other than changing the parameters for the "hands on wheel" warning)
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Considering people in the past months have died doing exactly that, yes, there is reason to believe that. And just look at http://autoweek.com/article/autonomous-cars/tesla-model-s-autopilot-strikes-again-dallas-crash http://autoweek.com/article/autonomous-cars/tesla-model-s-au...
    - mortehu 9y ago
      The A8 autonomy is only for freeway traffic jams. What you linked does not seem to be an example of that.
      - kuschku 9y ago
        The A8’s lane assistant can also handle this stuff, while the Tesla’s lane assistant can not (obviously).
- Jabbles 9y ago
  From April: https://medium.com/waymo/apply-to-be-part-of-waymos-early-rider-program-5fd996c7a86f https://medium.com/waymo/apply-to-be-part-of-waymos-early-ri...
- mpweiher 9y ago
  Yes, I think this was an ingenious move: find a situation that is somewhat easier to deal with yet solves a real-world pain-point. Almost an Apple move.
  - dfrey 9y ago
    An Apple move would be building a car without windows and telling me that it's progress.
Jdam 9y ago
Urban driving in places that are not sunny California
ZeroGravitas 9y ago
I would have thought the sheer speed of highway driving makes it harder to recover from simple errors like not spotting a pothole or a deer crossing the road. In both highway and urban driving I think the "hard" bit is dealing with the unusual, like a line of ducks crossing the road, a civilian directing traffic because and old person has collapsed in the middle of the street, or any situation in which a human being is providing important context via voice e.g. don't drive down there, the road will be blocked until this truck reverses out to avoid a low bridge.
- metaobject 9y ago
  That's interesting. How will these cars deal with cases where someone is directing traffic? It's not like these folks use some sort of universal gesture to allow traffic to proceed or to tell them to stop. Sometimes you have police directing traffic, sometimes its construction workers, sometimes it might be utility workers. Sometimes they have the stop-sign-on-a-stick sometimes they don't. In order to avoid excessive delays I wonder if they're going to have to consult the human passenger for advice on whether to proceed? I believe a !significant amount of work has been put into gesture recognition in computer vision research, so maybe this is all moot, but training a NN on gestures seems kind of dangerous in cases where someone uses gestures for stopping/proceeding that are misclassified. I wonder whether there will have to be more machine-readable devices installed along the roadway to help autonomous vehicles? In this case, perhaps a portable traffic control device which provides visual signals and perhaps even RF signals which talk to cars to direct traffic? These devices would be used at accident scenes or construction zones, etc.
  - j2bax 9y ago
    Until we have both smart cars AND smart highways, true autonomy will be incredibly challenging. Once the highway grid is made smart and the cars can talk with it, construction will just require an engineer to add the updated routing info into the highway for the cars to heed.
gutnor 9y ago
Highway is the really the only setting I have ever been at risk of falling asleep behind the wheel. Also, for a human being, those are quite stressful jam: car pick up a lot of speed before stopping abruptly a few tens of meters later. As a pure car safety feature, this gets double thumbs up. That's the culmination of all the tools they have added recently: lane departure warning, adaptative cruise control, blind spot warning, attention detection, ... That said, it does indeed very little for the end-goal of having a fleet of constructor/rental/uber/google cars that drives you from your house to your destination.
yardie 9y ago
As a driver with an admittedly short attention span I think this is great! Following the little yellow and white lines for hours on end is something machines are better at than humans. Urban driving requires a skill set machines don't have. You have to be aggressive but not hostile. Else, you'll never get anywhere in rush hour traffic.

Shivetya 9y ago

well there is a lot of behind the scenes work with major suppliers. auto companies tend to be very conservative when introducing new technologies because the liability issue is a major concern and possibly even more important, they cannot afford to tarnish the brand. because of their innate audience they don't need to make spectacular announcements to generate interest. companies without large established bases in the field do. Tesla is special in that they have a CEO who doesn't seem to have an off switch. However this is not always a positive but they still manage to handle it well. The 3 will be an interesting car but still highly limited with regards to what many expect cars to do but EVs are still a very young technology. Autonomous driving is where the real money is, it can be applied easily to many types of vehicles, don't over look the usage of similar tech on the mundane like mobility scooters or similar

deanCommie 9y ago

I agree with you to a point, but Google's target is much more moon-shot. Door-to-door complete self-driving in all circumstances, not just highway under careful conditions. And by all indications they are succeeding - the roadblock is regulations and turning it into a consumer product. The tech is there.

ebbv 9y ago
The tech is not there. If it were they'd be making more noise about it. Most of the big players (besides Apple) have demonstrated self driving cars in familiar environments; downtown SF or whatever. The problem is most of the country is not downtown SF. There's a lot of dirt roads out here. There's a lot of snow and heavy rain. Nobody has demonstrated self driving under all conditions. Or even under all non-extreme weather conditions.
- davewritescode 9y ago
  We'll eventually get there but it might be another 20-30 years before we live in a world where a robot car will come ferry you off to wherever you might want to go. I suspect the near term ~10-20 years will have some form of autonomous public-ish transportation running on certain roads that are routinely re-mapped. Highways and busy city streets are likely candidates for autonomous operation.
  - MR4D 9y ago
    You make a really good point. Given the economic impact to companies, I think it will be much faster. For instance, the Germans flew their first jet in 1941. Only 17 years later, the Boeing 707 was flying, and transportation around the world changed immensely. Given that we had just come out of a war (2 if you count Korea), that's pretty fast. I'd think a comparable timeframe would apply rather than your 30 year estimate. Heck, 30 years ago you didn't even have a cell phone!
- gasbag 9y ago
  I'd like to see these cars' behavior when they encounter a road work crew with a closed lane and flaggers directing traffic.

Fricken 9y ago

Google hasn't even released a complete PR demo of their cars, just a few sporadic shots of one of their Koala cars driving around with a blind guy in the driver's seat. The only tangible data that's been released from them is last year's California DMV disengagement reports, which Waymo reported 1 unplanned disengagement for every 5000 miles of testing. But they were driving around downtown SF back in 2011, most of what they've been up to in the meantime is validating their software to the safety and reliability standards they need to be at before this technology can be foisted on the public. They were ready to start moving folks around Mountainview, totally driverless, back in 2015 with their Koala cars but DMV regs put the kibosh on that.

thirdsun 9y ago

> I always chuckled a bit when (tech) press would say 'Google has beaten auto manufacturers' after Google released some PR videoclip of them showing a car driving. While I also want to see european car makers tackling these challenges, how is the posted report different from a fluff piece about Google's experiments? Other than the lack of a video demonstration. At this point Audi's announcement sounds like a bunch of over-promised, ambitious claims with a high potential of turning into vaporware. I might be wrong and all of it is very real and working, but you can't come to that conclusion by reading that article alone.

skgoa 9y ago
It's different because Audi is actually building and selling a product.

criley2 9y ago

"Google shows video of real-world performance and extensively details real-world issues, logs millions of autonomous miles" Lame! Vaporware! "Audi releases a press-release, no video, no demonstration, no real-world evidence" European manufacturers sure are capable and know what they're doing! What a refreshing change!

stouset 9y ago
No kidding. As a developer and infosec person, having seen countless non-tech company forays into software (take Toyota for example), I'm extraordinarily skeptical of automotive companies rolling out something of this difficulty. I just don't see it as plausible that a company with little to no roots in software managed to bring on a large enough team from scratch, that understands software engineering well enough to build something like this to a high level of reliability. Does anyone here really think that the same or similar teams responsible for the god-awful, un-updateable, UI disaster that is the center console nav in any car ever have somehow elegantly conquered autonomous driving?
- andmarios 9y ago
  It is common for people who write UIs and APIs to call themselves software engineers, but real engineering is what AUDI and other automakers do for a living. Demonstrating a “god-awful” UI as evidence that they can't do autonomous driving is silly imo. We talk about people who design cars that can safely travel at 150+ kph. The tiniest bug or design failure can kill their clients in a spectacular way. We trust these guys with our lives. Autonomous driving isn't about the UI, it is about math, systems, modeling, safety valves, rigorous testing. This is engineering and isn't taught in CS but in ECE classes. It is easier for an engineer to learn git than for a developer to learn differential equations. Airplanes, cars etc are controlled by microprocessors for the couple last decades. Sure, writing a polished website in angular is cool but engineers write the software that runs pacemakers. How can they not understand reliability?
  - stouset 9y ago
    The god-awful UI was not central to my point. Your talk about their hardware engineering chops completely ignores the very real evidence we have that their software engineering efforts are utterly horrifying. Have you seen the reports about Toyota's software development practices? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9643551 By all accounts, while Toyota is a particularly bad offender, these kinds of problems are not unique to them. Software engineering is not something that historically-hardware manufacturing companies tend to have the culture to perform well.

justin66 9y ago

> European car companies just don't see the need to enlighten the world about what they're up to I certainly appreciate Volvo letting the world know what they're doing to test autonomous cars. I'm glad European carmakers don't work the way you're saying they do.

mxschumacher 9y ago

Daimler drove an autonomous S-Class around Paris in 1994: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project

saturdaysaint 9y ago

FWIW, comparison testing showed that Tesla's autopilot was far superior to BMW's and Mercedes', at least as of last year: http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-compared-tesla-vs-bmw-mercedes-and-infiniti-feature http://www.caranddriver.com/features/semi-autonomous-cars-co... I agree that there's some genuinely impressive and underrated stuff hitting the market from many manufacturers (even in sub-luxury brands), but Tesla has a real and formidable advantage in the amount of data they're collecting.

skgoa 9y ago
That "test" has two massive issues: 1) They only pitted older models against the latest update of Tesla's system. E.g. the 3 year old S-class was tested instead of the new E-class, which had just started to be delivered at the time. (And had been tested by car journalists for months.) At the time that S-class entered production, Tesla had not had any "autopilot" at all. 2) They tested only lane keeping. Unsurprisingly the Tesla was better at that. They did not however test automatic emergency braking, autoparking etc. - features that Tesla either simply doesn't have or isn't as good in. tl;dr: Cherry-picked test.
- saturdaysaint 9y ago
  I'm all for more comparisons with better methods, but isn't demonstrably superior lane-keeping enough to seriously question the GP's assertion that European car makers are quietly far ahead in AV capability? By all appearances, the A8 can't even change lanes like last year's Model S - I can imagine scenarios where Audi could do better at other tests, but I'd sure bet on Tesla to do braking/parking/etc better.