16 ms·

Volvo is reportedly scaling back its self-driving car experiment

148 points by sundaeofshock 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago
> And in some areas, we are finding that there were more issues to dig into and solve than we expected,” Who could've thunk it?! The people who think we're going to have real Level 5 autonomous driving in 2 years (not the "we're bullshitting you with Level 5, but it's really more like Level 3.5" kind) are insane. There's no way we're going to simulate every single condition a car could encounter anywhere on Earth and get the cars to do the "right thing" 100% of the time by 2019-2020. I'll be impressed if they even deliver Level 4 (working perfectly only on some types of roads) by 2020. But I think even then car makers will "encounter the unexpected". It's going to take many years to test these things. And no car makers seem to even mention how they're going to address all the security issues self-driving cars will have.
- JustSomeNobody 9y ago
  Exactly. People allow themselves to be steeped in the hype and don't look at this rationally. Most people who are still in the media saying it can be done have a financial stake in saying those things. This doesn't make it true. They'll get 90% there and never really figure out the other 10%.
  - sgc 9y ago
    Agreed. I don't know what the percentage is, but there will certainly come a point when it will be cheaper to pay out when (a relatively few) people die rather than invest in further R & D. The stagnation in just about every other field of 'mature' technology more or less guarantees it. If it proves to be difficult enough, that level will be when self driving cars are only marginally better than human drivers. That is an unlikely scenario, but it will probably stagnate at a far less perfect level than all but the most pragmatic dreamers envision.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      >>> a point when it will be cheaper to pay out when (a relatively few) people die rather than invest in further R & D. Not before a long time. A death is really expensive, Americans are trained to sue like crazy, a car accident is a simple case to grasp and attribute to the manufacturer who has a lot of money to pay.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        I'm not sure that the EU is known for particularly lax product liability laws either. Whether it makes sense statistically or not, I can pretty much guarantee that automated vehicles causing deaths as a result of stupid decisions (from the perspective of a human driver) will be shut down in a big hurry. At which point, it becomes public that it was known that the software had problems handling X, Y, and Z sort of situations but it was put on the road anyway.
        user5994461 9y ago
        The EU is regulated more by regulators. They will take some time to investigate issues and shut down the perpetrators. The US has this "anyone can sue anyone at anytime for crazy damages" system. I'd expect any issue to quickly be brought to court and make an example out of them. Last but not least, after the first death related to a self driving car, the second death will be on the journalists fighting for the coverage.
        chefkoch 9y ago
        >Last but not least, after the first death related to a self driving car, the second death will be on the journalists fighting for the coverage. The first death already happened with a tesla.
        greglindahl 9y ago
        That was in a level 2 system, in which the driver is required to constantly pay attention. Many companies have shipped level 2 systems, and that one death is not the only one.
  - sytelus 9y ago
    In machine learning cost of going from 90% to 95% is typically same as going from 0% to 90%. This is why every little percent point gets celebrated wildly after you cross 95%.
- icebraining 9y ago
  There's no way we're going to simulate every single condition a car could encounter anywhere on Earth and get the cars to do the "right thing" 100% of the time by 2019-2020. I like how you added "by 2019-2020", as if doing the right thing 100% of the time was ever possible - let alone the goal. Of course, it isn't - Level 5 is just as good as a human. And extremely rare situation won't be handled well by a human either.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > And extremely rare situation won't be handled well by a human either. Why not?
    - icebraining 9y ago
      Sorry, I meant "an extremely rare situation won't always be handled well by a human either."
  - skywhopper 9y ago
    The important calculation then is how many different types of rare situations are encountered, what it means to be a rare situation, how often all rare situations happen in total, and how much better or worse the human or computer does. When I hear about Uber’s cars having issues with the apparently rare situations of, say, street lanes being restriped in a different place, or with delivery vans parked partially in a lane, I realize that much city driving is a bunch of rare unusual situations strung together in a row that requires constant improvisation. Construction, wrecks, emergency vehicles, delivery vehicles, weather, power outages, traffic signals on the fritz, funeral processions, pedestrians, loose debris from other cars, blown tires in the lanes, faded lane lines, parking lots, traffic jams, farm vehicles, moving vans... I think we’re going to find out that an acceptable level of automated safety ends up making automated cars so poor at navigating around the real world that it’s going to be a commercial failure.
  - sytelus 9y ago
    Problem is that self-driving company would get blamed for accidents for all of its cars. So imagine if you had 100,000 cars going around and you got sued for accident on every one of them. This aggregation of blame is core issue which otherwise gets distributed among millions of human drivers. This invariably requires that self-driving car must be many many magnitudes better than regular humans. Even if companies figure out way to not get sued, its only matter of time until some very serious tragedy happens such as pregnant woman wearing same dress as color of sky crossing the road getting killed or car running in to school kids. Then there are obvious malicious usage such as modifying car sensors to fool self-driving system and purposely run in to people (cars as weapon scenario). One such thing and it could likely be the trigger for large public outcry, heavy regulations and finally game over for self-driving cars. I think it might be more desirable to approach self-driving cars in more evolutionary fashion. We can start with self-driving only in less than 25 miles/hr scenarios such as heavy traffic OR sunny days on highways. Then we can start equiping our road networks with dedicated self-driving lanes, supportive beacons on roads and so on. Then gradually move towards make all lanes self-driving.
dboreham 9y ago
Is the Koolaid finally running out?
- dwighttk 9y ago
  looks like it will run out in 5-10 years
reacharavindh 9y ago
I don't understand this approach to get level 5 automation right away. It's too wide a scope to implement. Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation? You drive up to the highway, and then relax until you need to get off - sounds like a great start to me. You can equip that highway with a boat load of sensors and transmitters to understand these fancy brainy machines. After a few years, build more such highways with the lessons learnt from the experiments.
- pedrosorio 9y ago
  > Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation? > You can equip that highway with a boat load of sensors and transmitters to understand these fancy brainy machines. Because car companies are not in the business of building highways is my guess.
  - cma 9y ago
    The "starve the beast" strategy has crippled our government. If this were the early post WWII era we'd have major government projects to do this kind of infrastructure and do it well.
    - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
      I’d say our assumption that the big stuff should be done by the government cripples our thinking and stops us from encouraging more innovative private projects. I’ve lost faith in government in a way that goes beyond candidates and parties - I think the structure is broken. I do not want to wish any more power in to the hands of thieves. That is - Congress and those who buy the congress people.
      - empthought 9y ago
        > those who buy the congress people. You mean the private-project innovators here, right?
thisisit 9y ago
Isn't this how most experiments are supposed to work? You start with a broad assumption and work towards it. Then you find issues and start scaling things down to focus on some finer issues. In the meantime, business executives and media work hand-in-hand to try and hype everything and promising stuff which cannot be delivered in a short amount of time.
- Fricken 9y ago
  The thing is Volvo's experiments haven't been going as well as others. In the race to build a functional autonomous vehicle some companies are getting it done, and others, in spite of big promises, several years of effort, and scaled, well capitalized operations have very little to show for their efforts. Everybody still has a lot of work to do, but the operations that can, at the very least, demonstrate as proof of concept their cars handling just a few miles of of uninterrupted driving in dynamic environments have cleared the biggest hurdle. Following that big hurdle is the validation process, which is tens of thousands of smaller hurdles stretching out as far as the eye can see, but so long as they've cleared the first, biggest hurdles, you can be reasonably confident they'll get to a minimum viable product eventually so long as they keep at it. I have confidence in Waymo, GM, and Zoox. With everyone else it's either too soon to tell, or I don't have enough information, or they're sucking: https://youtu.be/jClxcSBNwcw https://youtu.be/jClxcSBNwcw
  - jamesblonde 9y ago
    I think you are on the right track here. I know some of the people hired by Volvo cars to work on this, and I am not aware of them recruiting top ML researchers to work on this and I suspect they are just not good enough people there. Waymo, on the other hand, will probably get it done, and done really well.
    - im_down_w_otp 9y ago
      That's because Volvo's AV software position is a joint venture w/ Autoliv called Zenuity. https://www.zenuity.com https://www.zenuity.com So if you're looking for CV/ML people working on the perception part of the stack, look there. FWIW, I work in this field now and I have fairly low confidence in the non-ML parts of the software stack across the industry. There's a lot more to this problem than well manicured computer-vision demos, and Volvo is a lot less cavalier about loss of human life than almost anyone else, so it's fairly heartening to see them realign around realistic expectations.
moogly 9y ago
And how about those 24 000 cars that Uber were going to buy from Volvo[1]? Not one mention of that in the article. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber-volvo-suv-self-driving-future-business-ride-hailing-lyft-waymo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber-volv...
- mkempe 9y ago
  Unrelated. Uber's plan is to buy standard Volvo XC90 SUVs and add their own self-driving implements.
todd8 9y ago
I like to drive around thinking about what it is like to be a driving (human) computer. Every time I touch the brake because I see a kid standing a few feet from the curb and a small dog on the other side of the street is running, I wonder when an electronic computer will understand that the child might dart across the street after the dog. Of course, I've learned these things from growing up human, but only one computer needs to conquer a driving challenge, maybe driving on a snow hidden road (watch out for barely noticeable ditches on the sides of the road), and then all self-driving cars can do it. It will be interesting to see how long it will take to achieve level 5.
- user5994461 9y ago
  The computer has 360 vision. It should be easy for it to see the child and notice it jumping onto the road. The situation is super dangerous with human drivers anyway. Children are too small to be noticed and they don't hesitate to jump in front of cars.
  - irq11 9y ago
    360 vision doesn’t change physics, and even the best vision system doesn’t help you when a child darts ten feet in front of your car. If you don’t anticipate the possible movement, you will be too slow. I have very little faith that we are anywhere near systems that can handle this kind of situational awareness, because it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce. The average level of human intelligence is a lot higher than most casual observers realize.
    - trhway 9y ago
      > it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce. i'm pretty sure that during millions of miles of say Waymo's video captured, there has been a lot of people (incl. children) stepping off the sidewalk to cross the road - you don't need that to happen right in front of your car - so their system analyzing the images does recognize the pedestrians and thus their potential for movement.
dwighttk 9y ago
over-promise under-deliver measure once cut twice
Hasz 9y ago
It's a great move. Why waste money racing GM/Tesla when you can wait for the hardware to become a commodity?
- mythrwy 9y ago
  "The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese."
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rospaya 9y ago
Can someone point out what are the major issues for self-driving cars? What are the main things stopping GM/Volvo/Google from deploying a fleet of cars?
- vkou 9y ago
  The tail end. Every successful drive is alike, but every accident occurs in its own way. It's why 'autopilot' Teslas drive into the side of semi-trucks and rear-end delivery vans pulled over on the shoulder. And we're not even talking about snowy conditions.
  - greglindahl 9y ago
    Level 2 systems require the driver to remain alert. I'm not sure how you can generalize from a production level 2 system to a hypothetical level 5 system.
    - vkou 9y ago
      Which makes them nearly useless. If I have to pay attention and take over at a moment's notice... Why am I not driving the car myself?
- runako 9y ago
  > What are the main things stopping GM/Volvo/Google from deploying a fleet of cars? I'm not an expert in the space, but it seems the main issue is the technology is still in (generously) alpha. Basically: the blocker is the technology doesn't work, for any definition of "work" that a layperson would recognize.
- stmfreak 9y ago
  Exception handling. Speed control, lane keeping and basic rules are fairly simple. But recognizing a red light when the sun is behind it? Or the bulb is burnt out? Or power is down? Or your windshield is cover with water from a deluge of rain fall? And so on for every single condition, corner, intersection, etc.
- 9y ago

148 points by sundaeofshock 9y ago

mtgx 9y ago

> And in some areas, we are finding that there were more issues to dig into and solve than we expected,” Who could've thunk it?! The people who think we're going to have real Level 5 autonomous driving in 2 years (not the "we're bullshitting you with Level 5, but it's really more like Level 3.5" kind) are insane. There's no way we're going to simulate every single condition a car could encounter anywhere on Earth and get the cars to do the "right thing" 100% of the time by 2019-2020. I'll be impressed if they even deliver Level 4 (working perfectly only on some types of roads) by 2020. But I think even then car makers will "encounter the unexpected". It's going to take many years to test these things. And no car makers seem to even mention how they're going to address all the security issues self-driving cars will have.

JustSomeNobody 9y ago
Exactly. People allow themselves to be steeped in the hype and don't look at this rationally. Most people who are still in the media saying it can be done have a financial stake in saying those things. This doesn't make it true. They'll get 90% there and never really figure out the other 10%.
- sgc 9y ago
  Agreed. I don't know what the percentage is, but there will certainly come a point when it will be cheaper to pay out when (a relatively few) people die rather than invest in further R & D. The stagnation in just about every other field of 'mature' technology more or less guarantees it. If it proves to be difficult enough, that level will be when self driving cars are only marginally better than human drivers. That is an unlikely scenario, but it will probably stagnate at a far less perfect level than all but the most pragmatic dreamers envision.
  - user5994461 9y ago
    >>> a point when it will be cheaper to pay out when (a relatively few) people die rather than invest in further R & D. Not before a long time. A death is really expensive, Americans are trained to sue like crazy, a car accident is a simple case to grasp and attribute to the manufacturer who has a lot of money to pay.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      I'm not sure that the EU is known for particularly lax product liability laws either. Whether it makes sense statistically or not, I can pretty much guarantee that automated vehicles causing deaths as a result of stupid decisions (from the perspective of a human driver) will be shut down in a big hurry. At which point, it becomes public that it was known that the software had problems handling X, Y, and Z sort of situations but it was put on the road anyway.
      - user5994461 9y ago
        The EU is regulated more by regulators. They will take some time to investigate issues and shut down the perpetrators. The US has this "anyone can sue anyone at anytime for crazy damages" system. I'd expect any issue to quickly be brought to court and make an example out of them. Last but not least, after the first death related to a self driving car, the second death will be on the journalists fighting for the coverage.
        chefkoch 9y ago
        >Last but not least, after the first death related to a self driving car, the second death will be on the journalists fighting for the coverage. The first death already happened with a tesla.
        greglindahl 9y ago
        That was in a level 2 system, in which the driver is required to constantly pay attention. Many companies have shipped level 2 systems, and that one death is not the only one.
- sytelus 9y ago
  In machine learning cost of going from 90% to 95% is typically same as going from 0% to 90%. This is why every little percent point gets celebrated wildly after you cross 95%.
icebraining 9y ago
There's no way we're going to simulate every single condition a car could encounter anywhere on Earth and get the cars to do the "right thing" 100% of the time by 2019-2020. I like how you added "by 2019-2020", as if doing the right thing 100% of the time was ever possible - let alone the goal. Of course, it isn't - Level 5 is just as good as a human. And extremely rare situation won't be handled well by a human either.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > And extremely rare situation won't be handled well by a human either. Why not?
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Sorry, I meant "an extremely rare situation won't always be handled well by a human either."
- skywhopper 9y ago
  The important calculation then is how many different types of rare situations are encountered, what it means to be a rare situation, how often all rare situations happen in total, and how much better or worse the human or computer does. When I hear about Uber’s cars having issues with the apparently rare situations of, say, street lanes being restriped in a different place, or with delivery vans parked partially in a lane, I realize that much city driving is a bunch of rare unusual situations strung together in a row that requires constant improvisation. Construction, wrecks, emergency vehicles, delivery vehicles, weather, power outages, traffic signals on the fritz, funeral processions, pedestrians, loose debris from other cars, blown tires in the lanes, faded lane lines, parking lots, traffic jams, farm vehicles, moving vans... I think we’re going to find out that an acceptable level of automated safety ends up making automated cars so poor at navigating around the real world that it’s going to be a commercial failure.
- sytelus 9y ago
  Problem is that self-driving company would get blamed for accidents for all of its cars. So imagine if you had 100,000 cars going around and you got sued for accident on every one of them. This aggregation of blame is core issue which otherwise gets distributed among millions of human drivers. This invariably requires that self-driving car must be many many magnitudes better than regular humans. Even if companies figure out way to not get sued, its only matter of time until some very serious tragedy happens such as pregnant woman wearing same dress as color of sky crossing the road getting killed or car running in to school kids. Then there are obvious malicious usage such as modifying car sensors to fool self-driving system and purposely run in to people (cars as weapon scenario). One such thing and it could likely be the trigger for large public outcry, heavy regulations and finally game over for self-driving cars. I think it might be more desirable to approach self-driving cars in more evolutionary fashion. We can start with self-driving only in less than 25 miles/hr scenarios such as heavy traffic OR sunny days on highways. Then we can start equiping our road networks with dedicated self-driving lanes, supportive beacons on roads and so on. Then gradually move towards make all lanes self-driving.

dboreham 9y ago

Is the Koolaid finally running out?

dwighttk 9y ago
looks like it will run out in 5-10 years

reacharavindh 9y ago

I don't understand this approach to get level 5 automation right away. It's too wide a scope to implement. Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation? You drive up to the highway, and then relax until you need to get off - sounds like a great start to me. You can equip that highway with a boat load of sensors and transmitters to understand these fancy brainy machines. After a few years, build more such highways with the lessons learnt from the experiments.

pedrosorio 9y ago
> Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation? > You can equip that highway with a boat load of sensors and transmitters to understand these fancy brainy machines. Because car companies are not in the business of building highways is my guess.
- cma 9y ago
  The "starve the beast" strategy has crippled our government. If this were the early post WWII era we'd have major government projects to do this kind of infrastructure and do it well.
  - TaylorAlexander 9y ago
    I’d say our assumption that the big stuff should be done by the government cripples our thinking and stops us from encouraging more innovative private projects. I’ve lost faith in government in a way that goes beyond candidates and parties - I think the structure is broken. I do not want to wish any more power in to the hands of thieves. That is - Congress and those who buy the congress people.
    - empthought 9y ago
      > those who buy the congress people. You mean the private-project innovators here, right?

thisisit 9y ago

Isn't this how most experiments are supposed to work? You start with a broad assumption and work towards it. Then you find issues and start scaling things down to focus on some finer issues. In the meantime, business executives and media work hand-in-hand to try and hype everything and promising stuff which cannot be delivered in a short amount of time.

Fricken 9y ago
The thing is Volvo's experiments haven't been going as well as others. In the race to build a functional autonomous vehicle some companies are getting it done, and others, in spite of big promises, several years of effort, and scaled, well capitalized operations have very little to show for their efforts. Everybody still has a lot of work to do, but the operations that can, at the very least, demonstrate as proof of concept their cars handling just a few miles of of uninterrupted driving in dynamic environments have cleared the biggest hurdle. Following that big hurdle is the validation process, which is tens of thousands of smaller hurdles stretching out as far as the eye can see, but so long as they've cleared the first, biggest hurdles, you can be reasonably confident they'll get to a minimum viable product eventually so long as they keep at it. I have confidence in Waymo, GM, and Zoox. With everyone else it's either too soon to tell, or I don't have enough information, or they're sucking: https://youtu.be/jClxcSBNwcw https://youtu.be/jClxcSBNwcw
- jamesblonde 9y ago
  I think you are on the right track here. I know some of the people hired by Volvo cars to work on this, and I am not aware of them recruiting top ML researchers to work on this and I suspect they are just not good enough people there. Waymo, on the other hand, will probably get it done, and done really well.
  - im_down_w_otp 9y ago
    That's because Volvo's AV software position is a joint venture w/ Autoliv called Zenuity. https://www.zenuity.com https://www.zenuity.com So if you're looking for CV/ML people working on the perception part of the stack, look there. FWIW, I work in this field now and I have fairly low confidence in the non-ML parts of the software stack across the industry. There's a lot more to this problem than well manicured computer-vision demos, and Volvo is a lot less cavalier about loss of human life than almost anyone else, so it's fairly heartening to see them realign around realistic expectations.

moogly 9y ago

And how about those 24 000 cars that Uber were going to buy from Volvo[1]? Not one mention of that in the article. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber-volvo-suv-self-driving-future-business-ride-hailing-lyft-waymo https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/20/uber-volv...

mkempe 9y ago
Unrelated. Uber's plan is to buy standard Volvo XC90 SUVs and add their own self-driving implements.

todd8 9y ago

I like to drive around thinking about what it is like to be a driving (human) computer. Every time I touch the brake because I see a kid standing a few feet from the curb and a small dog on the other side of the street is running, I wonder when an electronic computer will understand that the child might dart across the street after the dog. Of course, I've learned these things from growing up human, but only one computer needs to conquer a driving challenge, maybe driving on a snow hidden road (watch out for barely noticeable ditches on the sides of the road), and then all self-driving cars can do it. It will be interesting to see how long it will take to achieve level 5.

user5994461 9y ago
The computer has 360 vision. It should be easy for it to see the child and notice it jumping onto the road. The situation is super dangerous with human drivers anyway. Children are too small to be noticed and they don't hesitate to jump in front of cars.
- irq11 9y ago
  360 vision doesn’t change physics, and even the best vision system doesn’t help you when a child darts ten feet in front of your car. If you don’t anticipate the possible movement, you will be too slow. I have very little faith that we are anywhere near systems that can handle this kind of situational awareness, because it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce. The average level of human intelligence is a lot higher than most casual observers realize.
  - trhway 9y ago
    > it requires classification systems and object models of the world that modern AI has yet to reproduce. i'm pretty sure that during millions of miles of say Waymo's video captured, there has been a lot of people (incl. children) stepping off the sidewalk to cross the road - you don't need that to happen right in front of your car - so their system analyzing the images does recognize the pedestrians and thus their potential for movement.

dwighttk 9y ago

over-promise under-deliver measure once cut twice

Hasz 9y ago

It's a great move. Why waste money racing GM/Tesla when you can wait for the hardware to become a commodity?

mythrwy 9y ago
"The early bird may get the worm but the second mouse gets the cheese."

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

rospaya 9y ago

Can someone point out what are the major issues for self-driving cars? What are the main things stopping GM/Volvo/Google from deploying a fleet of cars?

vkou 9y ago
The tail end. Every successful drive is alike, but every accident occurs in its own way. It's why 'autopilot' Teslas drive into the side of semi-trucks and rear-end delivery vans pulled over on the shoulder. And we're not even talking about snowy conditions.
- greglindahl 9y ago
  Level 2 systems require the driver to remain alert. I'm not sure how you can generalize from a production level 2 system to a hypothetical level 5 system.
  - vkou 9y ago
    Which makes them nearly useless. If I have to pay attention and take over at a moment's notice... Why am I not driving the car myself?
runako 9y ago
> What are the main things stopping GM/Volvo/Google from deploying a fleet of cars? I'm not an expert in the space, but it seems the main issue is the technology is still in (generously) alpha. Basically: the blocker is the technology doesn't work, for any definition of "work" that a layperson would recognize.
stmfreak 9y ago
Exception handling. Speed control, lane keeping and basic rules are fairly simple. But recognizing a red light when the sun is behind it? Or the bulb is burnt out? Or power is down? Or your windshield is cover with water from a deluge of rain fall? And so on for every single condition, corner, intersection, etc.
9y ago