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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 hi
by 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 agoThe "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 agoI’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?
- croon 9y agoSpot on. I can't for the life of me understand why people would think that the sponsors/"corruptors" would act better without a government, even when parts of that government is corrupted by the private entities.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoAlso: if you want to see real corruption, just take a closer look at how regular small businesses operate. Befriend an employee of a grocery store. Or at a company selling lightbulbs, furniture, etc. I guarantee you from personal experience, your moral compass will go haywire from the stories you'll hear. (Also, you'll unfortunately discover that a subset of customers are total assholes. These days I believe that working in a customer service, or other field that has you interact with a wide variety of people on a daily basis, is the best way to ultimately lose faith in humanity.)
- pythonboi 9y agoI can confirm this. I used to work at a gas station and my bosses would regularly steal gas and write it off as a "business expense" when going to and from home. Also, customers were the worst. Either from wanting free stuff because they came in so often to wanting preferential treatment because they were older, the vast majority of customers seem to want everything handed to them on a silver platter.
- jacob019 9y agoNah, my company sells lightbulbs and many other things. Yeah some people are unbelievable, and the fraud... but most people are decent. We work hard to be ethical and I think everyone who works here would agree that we have a working moral compass.
- hvs 9y agoThe idea that our government is starving is amusing.
- ekianjo 9y agoWell in a way it's starving because it's become so greedy that it can't get enough food to feed itself anymore. Most governments create more debt than they can ever manage.
- Spooky23 9y agoSpend some time around it. Anything discretionary is funded below sustainable levels, even if that costs more. There’s a reason why most government offices are full of 1970s olive tile and orange cubicles.
- Larrikin 9y agoWithout a major political shift, the US will not be leading the way. This kind of major project seems impossible from both parties currently.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt's not only the US; this disease seems to be affecting all western nations. I feel that we'll have to wait for China to successfully deploy such a project, which will finally provide enough political coordination (read: envy) to convince some western nations to just copy it.
- barry-cotter 9y agoNah, Singapore will just invest in the infrastructure necessary to make it possible when it’s not good enough for California yet and pass the laws and regulations to make it happen. Probably ban non self-driving cars at the same time.
- criddell 9y ago> Why don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation? Go ahead and do it. FWIW, there are lots of constrained environments with fully autonomous vehicles. Volvo themselves have autonomous trucks operating in mines: http://www.volvogroup.com/en-en/news/2016/sep/news-2297091.html http://www.volvogroup.com/en-en/news/2016/sep/news-2297091.h...
- cpach 9y agoThat’s not the same Volvo that the article is about. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_Cars https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo_Cars vs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volvo
- criddell 9y agoWell I learned something new today. I had no idea that Volvo cars are now a part of a large Chinese company.
- kwhitefoot 9y agoVolvo cars and Volvo trucks are separate companies. Volvo Group sold Volvo Cars to Ford in 1999 and now Volvo cars are owned by Geely.
- Someone 9y agoThis approach? Quote from this article: ”The cars would be able to run in fully "unsupervised" autonomous mode on certain, pre-approved and pre-mapped freeways in their respective communities”. Volvo said that drivers would be able to fully disengage from the driving process, instead spending time reading a book or watching a video.
- fourthark 9y agoExcept that it didn't happen.
- ghaff 9y agoBy and large, there's no particular reason to think purpose-built highway infrastructure is needed for autonomous vehicles. Maybe to alert for construction zones but we're pretty close to having autonomy on limited access, well-mapped highways today. The problem is that, while this would be a really nice car feature (and probably great for safety), it does nothing for the people who don't want to own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call. Unfortunately for these folks, the autonomous highway driving is relatively near-term while door-to-door autonomy is probably decades away.
- comstock 9y agoI wish people would wake up and realize this. My hope is that all the hype around self driving cars will result in some momentum around more limited applications. But it might be another of those the perfect is the enemy of the good type situations.
- leemcalilly 9y agoit does nothing for the people who don't want to own a car and just want a car and computer driver at their beck and call. Classic disruption (not in the sense that it is often used) would be to start with a niche so limited that it doesn't seem useful to almost anyone, and then expand from that use case. If you could make a Tesla owner's commute from SF to Sand Hill Road a much better experience (via autonomous-only toll road), I'd say that's one hell of a start.
- Shivetya 9y agoI remember seeing this done in the series Tek War, driving locally you drove yourself then entered a limit access highway and the car was able to take over. the pros for all is that it is limited access, we already have many areas with HOV and Toll lanes that can be adapted, very simple driving conditions, easy to visually mark and electronically mark as well. Heck you could initially finance it by making them all toll lanes until widespread adoption / etc
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago> initially finance it by making them all toll lanes until widespread adoption / etc That's what they said about I90 in MA and that was how many decades ago. The government doesn't get rid of revenue sources.
- udaciousmark 9y agoI like this idea too, along with also adding a network so that the cars could all communicate to each other. I have always found horns and turn-signals to be lacking in the amount that can be communicated to other drivers. The problem with an inter-city highway is that you would have to require every car driving on it to be able to recognize and interact with those sensors. That would be decidedly unfair to those who cannot afford to upgrade their car to go on that road. So that does bring up an interesting question though, when and where are we going to have roads where only autonomous vehicles are allowed?
- xocyabencl 9y agoMultiple manufacturers are already selling cars that can self-drive on the highway, to varying degrees.
- qwertox 9y agoInstead of letting cars drive by themselves, they should first learn to park by themselves. Eventually emitting standardized sound, so that bypassers know that the car is in an autonomous parking mode, so extra care should be taken. The sampling rate of the sensors should be diminished, maybe halved or even more, in order to make it harder for the car to park. The car should observe, also with a low sampling rate, how the driver drives the car, make it's own prognostics on how it would drive, and compare them with what the driver chose to do, in order to learn. In that case the driver should be able to indicate the car that a certain action he/she performed, should be forgotten by the car, flagged as an illegal or dangerous maneuver. When a car can do that well, park and project, then the sample rate should get upped in order to feed the car with more reliable data. If it handles that data without hiccups, and increased reliability, then a next stage can begin.
- leemcalilly 9y agoWhy don't we start with an experimental inter-city highway where cars could run with full automation? This seems perfect for an ICO: Use an ICO to build an autonomous vehicle-only highway stacked with sensors etc. SF to Oakland for instance. Token value increases as more people use the road. Token has inherent value because it’s the only way to access the road.
- an_account 9y agoWhat advantage does that give over a more traditional toll road approach? I.e. Raise money, built road, charge toll.
- leemcalilly 9y agoJust a more efficient way of raising money and giving liquidity to the investors that believe in the project early-on. Except, unlike bitcoin the coin has inherent value because it is the only way to access the road.
- bufferoverflow 9y agoBecause self-driving on a highway is a solved problem. It's the edge cases that are hard.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- adrianN 9y agoBecause if your self-driving cars need special infrastructure to work you just have very inefficient trains. Autonomous driving is difficult because of rare situations. We already have solutions that work well in good conditions. To figure out what's missing it seems crucial to me to test them in real traffic on normal roads that they have to share with unpredictable humans.
- georgeecollins 9y agoI would love to have a car that became an inefficient train on the highway. I believe tens of thousands of people in Los Angeles would pay a lot of money for one. It isn't the ideal for the future, but it would still be a very desirable product.
- lodi 9y agoI don't think he means constructing new highways for autonomous cars; just making sure the tech works flawlessly with a few existing, high-traffic, morning/evening rush routes. Would save a lot of stress from the daily commute and allow for a gradual ramp up in supported routes.
- wellboy 9y agoIsn't that what Tesla does already?