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This is pretty damn amazing. HN is a pretty critical place most of the time but sometimes it's valuable to take a step back. The challenges associated with bui

This is pretty damn amazing. HN is a pretty critical place most of the time but sometimes it's valuable to take a step back. The challenges associated with building a car that can drive itself are pretty insanely difficult (even something as straightforward as "how do we get the training data?") and the fact that we're now at a point where there's a possibility of self-driving cars working in snowy conditions is pretty awesome.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
wil421 9y ago
I would be hesitant to consider it a self driving car if it can’t drive in adverse conditions.
- jdashg 9y ago
  I would gladly take it if it only worked on one of the 300 days of clear skies I get a year. 90% of the way to true "self driving" is plenty to revolutionize things.
  - usrusr 9y ago
    Do you intend to drive on those other days, without any fair weather routine? Automation unlearning is a problem with airline pilots, despite all efforts like continuous flight reviews that drivers don't have.
    - mannykannot 9y ago
      That is a reasonable question, though we already have the situation where people are driving in snow with little current, or even previous, experience of those conditions. The biggest problem is going to be with people who have never driven.
      - sobani 9y ago
        > The biggest problem is going to be with people who have never driven. Isn't that basically what @usrusr was refering to? People who rely on the autonomous driving so much that they basically forgot how to drive themselves?
- Arnt 9y ago
  Hypothetical test: You and a Waymo car try to drive to the main road from my parents' house on a random January morning. It's a harsh test, but no harsher on you than on the self-driving car... so if you're hesitant, are you hesitant about yourself as a driver, or just about the car?
- viraptor 9y ago
  It's ok, context matters. There are places were you won't get snow - ever. So it's not something you'd worry about when deciding if the car is self-driving.
  - nsomaru 9y ago
    The skeptic in me looks at the current climate situation and recoils in horror at the thought of cars without the 'snow firmware' trying to deal with unexpected snow in South Africa
    - sobani 9y ago
      Do the current biological 'autonomous drivers' have the necessary 'snow firmware'? AKA do SA people have experience with driving through snow?
      - _Tev 9y ago
        They have experience with driving. And as people, they can adapt more easily than LIDAR that simply doesn't see in snow.
ehsankia 9y ago
A car that can do a single drive is one thing. A drive that reaches a level where millions of people can do millions of drives with no issues, that's an entirely different problem. We've seen many many videos of "single drives" working well.
- the8472 9y ago
  > with no issues Demanding a probability of zero can make anything impossible. And you're not even asking for zero fatalities, you're asking for zero "issues", whatever those may be. That is a wildly unrealistic demand. Human drivers are not that reliable either, especially in bad whether conditions.
  - kahnpro 9y ago
    Yeah, the real ask must be fewer issues, not zero. The cause for concern is that self driving cars increase the chances of systemic failure.
  - ehsankia 9y ago
    I'm not asking for zero, but just saying that scale matters more than most think. Even something like 99% success rate, a video of a single drive would look great, but at scale, it would absolutely fail. 1% is a huge failure rate considering millions of drives happen every single day. That's 10000 failure per day on 1 million drives.
bsaul 9y ago
Your comment made me wonder whether i hadn't miss anything : are car actually able to drive themselves in clear condition at the moment ? I've seen the demos of the start ups in the valley, the local experiments, but i'm still waiting for a single real-world deployment, even limited to local driving, such as city to city taxi driving, or item delivery. On the other hand, i did hear of the trouble with tesla's autopilot "2" not driving properly on regular roads under the sun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg).
- w-m 9y ago
  Except for a bunch of small buses that go at walking speed in a very limited area there are no commercial autonomous cars currently deployed. There are self-driving cars that drive themselves well in clear conditions, but these are the R&D cars with an expensive sensor suite on the roof and a bunch of processing power in the trunk that can't be found in production cars.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - LeifCarrotson 9y ago
    I think you're about 12 months behind. The cost of the (LIDAR) sensor suite is down to $5000 from $50-100k and poised to go lower, and the processing power needed in the trunk is being achived with simple dev boards that cost as much as an enthusiast GPU. You can buy an off-the-shelf Vega GPU and have tens of teraflops on your desk. That's still more money than not having those components in your vehicle, for sure, but that's well within luxury car territory and costs are still coming down rapidly.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

wil421 9y ago

I would be hesitant to consider it a self driving car if it can’t drive in adverse conditions.

jdashg 9y ago
I would gladly take it if it only worked on one of the 300 days of clear skies I get a year. 90% of the way to true "self driving" is plenty to revolutionize things.
- usrusr 9y ago
  Do you intend to drive on those other days, without any fair weather routine? Automation unlearning is a problem with airline pilots, despite all efforts like continuous flight reviews that drivers don't have.
  - mannykannot 9y ago
    That is a reasonable question, though we already have the situation where people are driving in snow with little current, or even previous, experience of those conditions. The biggest problem is going to be with people who have never driven.
    - sobani 9y ago
      > The biggest problem is going to be with people who have never driven. Isn't that basically what @usrusr was refering to? People who rely on the autonomous driving so much that they basically forgot how to drive themselves?
Arnt 9y ago
Hypothetical test: You and a Waymo car try to drive to the main road from my parents' house on a random January morning. It's a harsh test, but no harsher on you than on the self-driving car... so if you're hesitant, are you hesitant about yourself as a driver, or just about the car?
viraptor 9y ago
It's ok, context matters. There are places were you won't get snow - ever. So it's not something you'd worry about when deciding if the car is self-driving.
- nsomaru 9y ago
  The skeptic in me looks at the current climate situation and recoils in horror at the thought of cars without the 'snow firmware' trying to deal with unexpected snow in South Africa
  - sobani 9y ago
    Do the current biological 'autonomous drivers' have the necessary 'snow firmware'? AKA do SA people have experience with driving through snow?
    - _Tev 9y ago
      They have experience with driving. And as people, they can adapt more easily than LIDAR that simply doesn't see in snow.

ehsankia 9y ago

A car that can do a single drive is one thing. A drive that reaches a level where millions of people can do millions of drives with no issues, that's an entirely different problem. We've seen many many videos of "single drives" working well.

the8472 9y ago
> with no issues Demanding a probability of zero can make anything impossible. And you're not even asking for zero fatalities, you're asking for zero "issues", whatever those may be. That is a wildly unrealistic demand. Human drivers are not that reliable either, especially in bad whether conditions.
- kahnpro 9y ago
  Yeah, the real ask must be fewer issues, not zero. The cause for concern is that self driving cars increase the chances of systemic failure.
- ehsankia 9y ago
  I'm not asking for zero, but just saying that scale matters more than most think. Even something like 99% success rate, a video of a single drive would look great, but at scale, it would absolutely fail. 1% is a huge failure rate considering millions of drives happen every single day. That's 10000 failure per day on 1 million drives.

bsaul 9y ago

Your comment made me wonder whether i hadn't miss anything : are car actually able to drive themselves in clear condition at the moment ? I've seen the demos of the start ups in the valley, the local experiments, but i'm still waiting for a single real-world deployment, even limited to local driving, such as city to city taxi driving, or item delivery. On the other hand, i did hear of the trouble with tesla's autopilot "2" not driving properly on regular roads under the sun (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZ1XLqc5IUg).

w-m 9y ago
Except for a bunch of small buses that go at walking speed in a very limited area there are no commercial autonomous cars currently deployed. There are self-driving cars that drive themselves well in clear conditions, but these are the R&D cars with an expensive sensor suite on the roof and a bunch of processing power in the trunk that can't be found in production cars.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 9y ago
  I think you're about 12 months behind. The cost of the (LIDAR) sensor suite is down to $5000 from $50-100k and poised to go lower, and the processing power needed in the trunk is being achived with simple dev boards that cost as much as an enthusiast GPU. You can buy an off-the-shelf Vega GPU and have tens of teraflops on your desk. That's still more money than not having those components in your vehicle, for sure, but that's well within luxury car territory and costs are still coming down rapidly.