22 ms·

New reports suggest limits to autonomous vehicle performance

105 points by charlysl 9y ago

frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
Does anyone know how much of the actual driving decisions in these cars are made by machine learning algorithms? I'm aware that ai/ml is heavily used on the vision side but how much of the actual driving component is traditional algorithms vs neural nets/svm/whatever?
- perfmode 9y ago
  What does it matter?
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    I suppose it doesn't really? It's a bit of a side question that I thought maybe someone would have insight into.
- tmh79 9y ago
  it depends on the company. From what I've heard, waymo's controller system has a long set of heuristics, many other competitors use learned algos.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  I can try to speculate. Steering and speed control could be done with simple PID control. You'd have to get more sophisticated for maintaining position, but you could maintain and control position using traditional control systems. When you're using sensors you determine where you are relative to other objects and that's still within this realm. However when certain classes of object can be expected to change position without observable indication it's hard to make a control system accurately predict that. There's no way to predict the future directly from what the car can see in all cases. I would imagine that classifying objects and predicting which objects are likely to start moving is in the realm of ml/ai. I don't think anyone can formalize rules on that aspect of driving.
dasimon 9y ago
Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'." tl;dr of the article: - Autonomous vehicles drove fewer miles in the state of California in 2017, but maybe made up for that in miles driven elsewhere. - The disengagement rate will probably need to improve considerably before AVs are ready for widespread deployment - Waymo's disengagement rate barely improved year over year, but that may have been because they are placing the cars in more difficult scenarios (their blog post suggests that is indeed the case)
- akvadrako 9y ago
  The article does not say "no" or that autonomous cars are still getting better at any meaningful rate. Maybe we're 90% of the way to practical self-driving, but won't reach 99% for the foreseeable future.
- tome 9y ago
  tome's law: In any discussion about an article whose title is a question, Betteridge's law is mentioned with probability 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549
  - ddlatham 9y ago
    Perhaps you should revise the law to just yes/no questions? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16276911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16276911 On the other hand, even those aren't holding up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16277231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16277231
    - tome 9y ago
      Good point and good observation! The statement of Betteridge's Law itself would have to be changed though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines
maxxxxx 9y ago
I think it's pretty common that progress slows down once the simpler problems have been solved. The unsolved problems to get to fully autonomous cars are getting harder and harder once the low hanging fruit is gone.
- glup 9y ago
  I'd love to see an analysis of the sorts of situations that the advanced systems can't handle. Driving in Mexico City last month I was appreciating how intensively interpersonal driving was: it seemed all drivers were constantly computing the risk appetite of all other drivers and acting accordingly; navigation, avoiding pedestrians, and following the law (to the extent possible) was the easy part. Maybe there's a way to avoid issues by providing coordination mechanisms, but I don't see how this would work as long as there are human-driven legacy cars. So will self-driving cars need theory of mind?
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    In addition, humans tend to push the limits so even if we have autonomous cars that can handle current human driver behavior, the humans will adapt and put more pressure on the autonomous cars.
    - Peeda 9y ago
      I'd argue for it to go the other way. Driving has a large cultural component -- people tend to drive how others around them do. Once autonomous cars hit some critical mass lots of human drivers are going to start mimicking how they drive which is probably a fair bit more conservative than most of these people in big cities.
      - maxxxxx 9y ago
        I doubt it. Once you know that can cut off a self driving car without consequences it's very tempting to do that.
hodder 9y ago
"It is possible that Waymo put its technology into more challenging scenarios in 2017" Seems extremely likely.
- beambot 9y ago
  Really? Waymo went from driving exclusively in Mountain View, CA to driving across a number of cities in the US: Atlanta, SF, Detroit, Phoenix, & Kirkland [1]. The diversity in cities would easily add to the challenge! [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16948356/waymo-google-fiat-chrysler-pacfica-minivan-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16948356/waymo-google-fia...
  - lukas099 9y ago
    That is what GP was saying: it is extremely likely that the difficulty level of the scenarios increased. I wonder if the flattened curve of progress in the metric described by the article (disengagement rate) is actually intentional. Maybe a decision was made to increase difficulty of driving scenarios in such a way to keep that approximately constant.
kyrra 9y ago
Another interesting article popped up with the release of the CA disengagement reports: https://jalopnik.com/californias-autonomous-car-reports-are-the-best-in-the-1822606953 https://jalopnik.com/californias-autonomous-car-reports-are-... TLDR: Cruise had, what some would consider, to be a disengagement incident but didn't report it because it does not fall into the categories defined by California. The core issue here is that the disengagement reports should not be the end-all-be-all of where companies are. As the ieee article calls out, we have no clue what kind of testing the companies are doing (how hard they are pushing their systems). There is also some room for companies to avoid reporting certain types of incidents. Waymo did 2 million miles in 2017, but only 330k were in CA. We are only seeing a slice of their data. If we (the public) want a better picture of where companies are on this, the rules around what is reported need to be changed. They possibly need to also be done at the federal level so no company can hide their public testing in states that don't require reporting.
- deegles 9y ago
  My biggest issue with the "miles driven" metric is that it doesn't account for the software version. Maybe updating from v1.0 to v1.1 won't warrant resetting the counter, but I believe that over time each historical mile driven becomes materially less relevant to currently deployed version.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    I would argue the biggest issue with the "miles driven" metric is that it isn't contiguous. Your test drivers can handle all the rough stuff, and your mile counter ticks up on the straight shot highways. (Arguably, you could be super dishonest and handle every single intersection manually, and still have a massive miles driven statistic since most distance is accumulated on straight-ways.) Disengagements is a useful number, and the disengagement numbers say so much more about the real state of self-driving cars: That they fail as often as a non-synthetic oil change. And if humans had driving system failures that often, we would not be considered good at driving. The longest number a company should be marketing is how many miles they've driven between disengagements. Like the "days since an accident" sign at a workplace: Fail, and you go back to zero. The numbers will be smaller, but they'll be a lot more meaningful.
mtgx 9y ago
I never believed neither Tesla nor Nvidia when they said last year that they would achieve Level 5 within a few short years. I have a rule of thumb for such announcements: subtract at least one level to get the real level and what their systems are actually capable of. How could these cars reach Level 5 when they've only been tested for like a year or two on some roads? And I don't believe there is good enough simulation for them right now either. Even Google's CAPTCHA was asking me recently to pick the "bridge" from the pictures. There was no bridge.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  Most of the public testing seems to be on the West coast and Southwest as well. What happens in environments where you have things like rain and snow? My non-autonomous Honda Odyssey has cameras on the passenger mirror and rear hatch -- both of which were useless within 90 minutes of traveling from Lake Placid back home thanks to road spray and salt. IMO Level 5 is viable for some relatively limited use cases, or with roads that have embedded telemetry. I'll believe it when intercity truck fleets convert for a few years.
  - soperj 9y ago
    Totally. There's no rain in Seattle ever.
    - Spooky23 9y ago
      I forgot about Seattle’s long cold winters full of bitter cold, snow and salt.
  - cesis 9y ago
    On the other hand I don't get the obsession with level 5. There are a lot of use cases for fully autonomous level 4 e.g. - pick me up in the parking lot - drive out of parking garage and meet me there - trip from LA to SF etc
    - Spooky23 9y ago
pfarnsworth 9y ago
We should compare this to having a random human driver drive, and see how often a third party would “take control”. Lord knows that if my dad were driving I would take control a lot more than a self driving car.
- mlinksva 9y ago
  Yet your dad (likely, I'm guessing, but many like him anyway) has a license and can legally drive. I hope one thing that criticism of computer driver outcomes leads to is conclusion that lots of human drivers should not be entitled to drive, and kill >1m people/year worldwide.
jakarta 9y ago
Waymo progress seems to be slowing on critical disengagements (in older CA DMV reports these were called "safe operation disengagements" - they stopped reporting this type in 2017). These disengagements deal with perception issues, the software leading to unwanted maneuvers, inability to react to reckless road users, and incorrect predictions. You can see it reduced rate of improvement when you dig into the numbers: 2015 0.16 disengagements per 1000 miles 2016 0.13 disengagements per 1000 miles 2017 0.12 disengagements per 1000 miles
- Retric 9y ago
  Looking at miles before disengagement shows things a little differently. 2015: ~6250 2016: ~7692 (+1442) 2017: ~8333 (+641) Personally, I think a self driving car with 1 notified disengagement per year as perfectly usable. Not so useful for the blind, but still very helpful. That said, even reporting the same number every year could still represent progress if they keep pushing the car harder. AKA, if 2015 = highway driving in the day with nice weather, 2017 = inner city driving at night in a snowstorm the same number of disengagements would still represent a lot of progress.
  - jschwartzi 9y ago
    This is a serious problem if you have to take over during disengagement. If you spend most of the year not driving you risk falling out of practice, and then the one time you must rely on your own skill is in an unusual situation requiring you to exercise good judgement at speed. I would expect most disengagements to result in accidents because of this.
    - Retric 9y ago
      I don't think people are going to enter their destination for every trip. So, people will still do some driving even with self driving systems. On top of that most situations with disengagement have not resulted in crashes. Really it's failing to pay attention during normal driving that's most often at fault, a 'buzzing you need to pay attention now' system solves most of the problems even if the car is not driving it's self.
d13 9y ago
Yes, it's Xeno's paradox (http://platonicrealms.com/encyclopedia/zenos-paradox-of-the-tortoise-and-achilles http://platonicrealms.com/encyclopedia/zenos-paradox-of-the-...). CGI has exactly that same problem - the first 99% is easy, the final 1% is impossible.
- timr 9y ago
  It continually amazes me how tech people are blindsided by this problem. Every time. It's practically the entire reason that the Gartner hype curve is a thing: 1) New technology X appears. 2) Technology X develops quickly as the first 80% of gains are achieved. 3) Tech "luminaries" incorrectly extrapolate the rate of progress into a distant, glorious future; write breathless commentaries about how Technology X will eat the world in N years! 4) Technology X stagnates at the 81% progress mark, as it becomes clear that the green-field progress rate cannot be sustained. 5) Technology Y appears! Huzzah!
- ttul 9y ago
  Kind of similar situation has developed in crypto currencies. Yes, we can now accumulate vast wealth and transfer it around. But still there are $500M heists. And transaction clearance takes way too long. Fixing these inconveniences will take a long time.
- r00fus 9y ago
  I don't see how Zeno's paradox applies here. The root assumption is that the work is asymptotic with some "goal" - in this case "as good as a human". Perhaps the real goal is actually "level 6 - better than human" or "level 7 futuristic transport". Looking at it that way, maybe that would indeed follow Zeno's paradox (we'll never get futuristic transport) but soon surpass how a human would drive permitting integration with human drivers (being more reliable and cheaper causing disruption). Ultimately, I think the main roadblock to automation in this realm are the vast entrenched interests (big oil, big auto) who'd lose out due to efficiency gains (just like with solar power and EVs).
  - lukas099 9y ago
    Regarding your last point, doesn't 'big auto' comprise some of the largest investors in this technology?
petra 9y ago
If we consider remotely controlled vehicles, they seem like the perfect step for self-driving cars: Assuming self-driving on simple conditions(like the highway), while letting people do the complex driving, and maybe people with lower cost of living and salaries, such service may be cheaper than a taxi. And this could create a large business, doing many miles every day, which would be the perfect means to gradually expand the role of self-driving. Yet,non of the big companies choose this(and i'm sure they're aware of this). Why ?
- 300bps 9y ago
  Wouldn’t remote control cars require a near zero latency network connection at all times in all areas?
  - _wmd 9y ago
    Yup! Even with LTE average-case latency of around 100ms (and easily double that for 4G/3G-only areas), worst case latencies are easily measured in _seconds_. According to Google, driver reaction times are measured in the range 0.7..3.0 seconds. Now add to that the bandwidth requirements for at least high quality front/back video and instrumentation. I doubt anyone is mad enough to think in the general case remotely piloting a vehicle in a safety-critical scenario using these consumer networks is an even remotely sane option
  - Fricken 9y ago
    Phantom Auto, mentioned in the article, demoed their RC cars in CES last month, and they were ferrying journalists around using a driver 500 miles away. Latency isn't as much of an issue as one might think, but to maintain network reliability phantom uses 5 different networks simultaneously. Waymo and Cruise (GM) are both building out call centres with agents that have some sort of remote control over the car. Both Waymo and GM have emergency stop buttons connected to an air gapped computer that can take the vehicle to a minimum viable risk condition (which basically means pulling over to the side of the road) for security.
  - saas_co_de 9y ago
    It would be computer assisted remote control, similar to how a drone works. The remote operator provides general directions but the computer has direct control over the vehicle systems to implement those directions in response to sensor feedback. Human reaction time is very slow so to do better than a human definitely does not require zero latency.
BuffaloBagel 9y ago
No surprise here - the last 20% of project taking 80% of development time.
adrianmonk 9y ago
Not sure I believe the title is justified given what the rest of the article says. I'm no statistician, but I'm not sure if there are enough miles being driven that good conclusions can be drawn about whether self-driving cars are getting better or not. Lots of testing is taking place outside of California due to other states' efforts (like changing regulations) to cater to it. So data from just California very likely doesn't tell the whole story. Also, as has been mentioned here before, once they've solved and tested the easy cases, they might move on to solving and testing the harder ones. So there isn't an apples-to-apples comparison on test failure rates from one year to another because they could be testing different things.
joejerryronnie 9y ago
There is an upper bound to autonomous vehicle performance with our current roadway infrastructure and that is well below the threshold of full self driving cars. Once we retrofit the roads with sensors, remove the reliance on existing physical signage, and add guardrails to prevent unanticipated occurrences as much as possible, we'll see real progress. Once everything (cars, roadway, services, etc) becomes networked and talks to each other, we can get rid of the steering wheels. My guess is we're 10 years away from limited availability and 50 years away from full build out country wide. One question - will a new technology come along before then and render driverless cars as a means of human transport irrelevant? Personally, I'm waiting for human drone delivery ;-)
zone411 9y ago
One thing I haven't seem mentioned is that when you're driving yourself, you anticipate and prepare your body for the changes in direction and acceleration/deceleration, so the car appears to drive smoother. If the disengagement rate is not zero (human becoming just a passenger), you still have to pay attention to the road and people may prefer to drive themselves because of this effect, maybe with exception of the highway. If the road rules stay unchanged, the self-driving car will also usually be slower in getting to the destination, as it will be set to strictly follow the speed limits and yellow lights, and if it's too deferential to other cars.
- ucaetano 9y ago
  > One thing I haven't seem mentioned is that when you're driving yourself, you anticipate changes in direction and acceleration/deceleration, so the car appears to drive smoother. And you're also holding on to the steering wheel, which makes a big difference. Everyone I know who has motion sickness when being in a car on a winding road never experience motion sickness when they are the driver, only the passenger.
- tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
  What about today’s taxis, busses, trains, planes? I don’t see passengers pay attention to the road to prepare for driver initiated braking, lane change or speed adjustment. I would assume passengers not paying attention today in human driven vehicles will continue to not pay attention in autonomous vehicles because nothing changes (as long as these vehicles drive similar to human drivers).
  - sjruckle 9y ago
    Except it's not like today's taxis, busses, trains or planes. It's more like riding with a friend who's never crashed their car, but sometimes will tell you "I can't handle this right now, take the wheel." and you don't have a choice.
gwbas1c 9y ago
Letting a computer drive my car is high-risk: If there is a malfunction at 70mph, I could die! Where's my automatic lawn mower? Where's my robot to unload the dishwasher and put everything away? We need to find other consumer technology to use AI in before we risk our lives with self driving cars.
- JoeAltmaier 9y ago
  Already true, of every system in your car. There are arguable a huge number of things that can go wrong in a car already.
  - InclinedPlane 9y ago
    All of those things have a good chunk of a century worth of development (as well as trillions of dollars in R&D) put into making them more robust, building redundancy, etc. I think the parent comment has a good point in that this automated driving thing is a very enormous change with a lot of risk behind it that doesn't appear to be being well managed.
    - darawk 9y ago
      Yes, but there was a time for all of those things in which they did not have a century of development. Deploying them is how you get that century of development. The risk of this stuff is really quite small and local. If the technology has faults, they'll become apparent relatively quickly and harm a relatively small number of people. I see no reason to be overly cautious here. It's not a massive correlated risk, like say, global warming.
      - sjruckle 9y ago
        We put the new tires and brakes on the the fastest vehicles we could make, then had a professional run them around a track with a dozen other lunatics. Anything that broke was fixed forever, and relatively few lives were lost. The number that died was low because there were fewer participants. The critical technology was well-tested before it was sent to the production line. That's how we got our century of development. Testing, verifying, refinement. It wasn't by pushing out new stuff to a batch of users and seeing if everything worked out allright.
kazinator 9y ago
The postulation of a limitation is basically a negative claim. "This can go only so far and no farther." Very hard to prove, and inherently myopic. Even if the observations are true, it's likely just a lull in the self-driving scene. It's reminiscent of how some people once believed that a machine will never beat the top human players in chess.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
simion314 9y ago
This idea is expensive to implement, but building some tracks, then put only the self driving cars on this tracks, then you could have very large speeds and since only this cars would be on tracks and no other obstacle it would be very safe.
- lolc 9y ago
  You mean trains?
  - simion314 9y ago
    Similar to trains, but high speed, and you have your own cart, you do not need to wait for a scheduled train. It does not need to be using tracks but an exclusive road with specific sensors and electronics so the carts would be able to avoid collisions at intersections.

105 points by charlysl 9y ago

Does anyone know how much of the actual driving decisions in these cars are made by machine learning algorithms? I'm aware that ai/ml is heavily used on the vision side but how much of the actual driving component is traditional algorithms vs neural nets/svm/whatever?

perfmode 9y ago
What does it matter?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  I suppose it doesn't really? It's a bit of a side question that I thought maybe someone would have insight into.
tmh79 9y ago
it depends on the company. From what I've heard, waymo's controller system has a long set of heuristics, many other competitors use learned algos.
jschwartzi 9y ago
I can try to speculate. Steering and speed control could be done with simple PID control. You'd have to get more sophisticated for maintaining position, but you could maintain and control position using traditional control systems. When you're using sensors you determine where you are relative to other objects and that's still within this realm. However when certain classes of object can be expected to change position without observable indication it's hard to make a control system accurately predict that. There's no way to predict the future directly from what the car can see in all cases. I would imagine that classifying objects and predicting which objects are likely to start moving is in the realm of ml/ai. I don't think anyone can formalize rules on that aspect of driving.

dasimon 9y ago

Betteridge's law of headlines: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word 'no'." tl;dr of the article: - Autonomous vehicles drove fewer miles in the state of California in 2017, but maybe made up for that in miles driven elsewhere. - The disengagement rate will probably need to improve considerably before AVs are ready for widespread deployment - Waymo's disengagement rate barely improved year over year, but that may have been because they are placing the cars in more difficult scenarios (their blog post suggests that is indeed the case)

akvadrako 9y ago
The article does not say "no" or that autonomous cars are still getting better at any meaningful rate. Maybe we're 90% of the way to practical self-driving, but won't reach 99% for the foreseeable future.
tome 9y ago
tome's law: In any discussion about an article whose title is a question, Betteridge's law is mentioned with probability 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9077549
- ddlatham 9y ago
  Perhaps you should revise the law to just yes/no questions? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16288489 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16276911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16276911 On the other hand, even those aren't holding up. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16277231 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16277231
  - tome 9y ago
    Good point and good observation! The statement of Betteridge's Law itself would have to be changed though https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

maxxxxx 9y ago

I think it's pretty common that progress slows down once the simpler problems have been solved. The unsolved problems to get to fully autonomous cars are getting harder and harder once the low hanging fruit is gone.

glup 9y ago
I'd love to see an analysis of the sorts of situations that the advanced systems can't handle. Driving in Mexico City last month I was appreciating how intensively interpersonal driving was: it seemed all drivers were constantly computing the risk appetite of all other drivers and acting accordingly; navigation, avoiding pedestrians, and following the law (to the extent possible) was the easy part. Maybe there's a way to avoid issues by providing coordination mechanisms, but I don't see how this would work as long as there are human-driven legacy cars. So will self-driving cars need theory of mind?
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  In addition, humans tend to push the limits so even if we have autonomous cars that can handle current human driver behavior, the humans will adapt and put more pressure on the autonomous cars.
  - Peeda 9y ago
    I'd argue for it to go the other way. Driving has a large cultural component -- people tend to drive how others around them do. Once autonomous cars hit some critical mass lots of human drivers are going to start mimicking how they drive which is probably a fair bit more conservative than most of these people in big cities.
    - maxxxxx 9y ago
      I doubt it. Once you know that can cut off a self driving car without consequences it's very tempting to do that.

hodder 9y ago

"It is possible that Waymo put its technology into more challenging scenarios in 2017" Seems extremely likely.

beambot 9y ago
Really? Waymo went from driving exclusively in Mountain View, CA to driving across a number of cities in the US: Atlanta, SF, Detroit, Phoenix, & Kirkland [1]. The diversity in cities would easily add to the challenge! [1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16948356/waymo-google-fiat-chrysler-pacfica-minivan-self-driving https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/30/16948356/waymo-google-fia...
- lukas099 9y ago
  That is what GP was saying: it is extremely likely that the difficulty level of the scenarios increased. I wonder if the flattened curve of progress in the metric described by the article (disengagement rate) is actually intentional. Maybe a decision was made to increase difficulty of driving scenarios in such a way to keep that approximately constant.

kyrra 9y ago

Another interesting article popped up with the release of the CA disengagement reports: https://jalopnik.com/californias-autonomous-car-reports-are-the-best-in-the-1822606953 https://jalopnik.com/californias-autonomous-car-reports-are-... TLDR: Cruise had, what some would consider, to be a disengagement incident but didn't report it because it does not fall into the categories defined by California. The core issue here is that the disengagement reports should not be the end-all-be-all of where companies are. As the ieee article calls out, we have no clue what kind of testing the companies are doing (how hard they are pushing their systems). There is also some room for companies to avoid reporting certain types of incidents. Waymo did 2 million miles in 2017, but only 330k were in CA. We are only seeing a slice of their data. If we (the public) want a better picture of where companies are on this, the rules around what is reported need to be changed. They possibly need to also be done at the federal level so no company can hide their public testing in states that don't require reporting.

deegles 9y ago
My biggest issue with the "miles driven" metric is that it doesn't account for the software version. Maybe updating from v1.0 to v1.1 won't warrant resetting the counter, but I believe that over time each historical mile driven becomes materially less relevant to currently deployed version.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I would argue the biggest issue with the "miles driven" metric is that it isn't contiguous. Your test drivers can handle all the rough stuff, and your mile counter ticks up on the straight shot highways. (Arguably, you could be super dishonest and handle every single intersection manually, and still have a massive miles driven statistic since most distance is accumulated on straight-ways.) Disengagements is a useful number, and the disengagement numbers say so much more about the real state of self-driving cars: That they fail as often as a non-synthetic oil change. And if humans had driving system failures that often, we would not be considered good at driving. The longest number a company should be marketing is how many miles they've driven between disengagements. Like the "days since an accident" sign at a workplace: Fail, and you go back to zero. The numbers will be smaller, but they'll be a lot more meaningful.

mtgx 9y ago

I never believed neither Tesla nor Nvidia when they said last year that they would achieve Level 5 within a few short years. I have a rule of thumb for such announcements: subtract at least one level to get the real level and what their systems are actually capable of. How could these cars reach Level 5 when they've only been tested for like a year or two on some roads? And I don't believe there is good enough simulation for them right now either. Even Google's CAPTCHA was asking me recently to pick the "bridge" from the pictures. There was no bridge.

Spooky23 9y ago
Most of the public testing seems to be on the West coast and Southwest as well. What happens in environments where you have things like rain and snow? My non-autonomous Honda Odyssey has cameras on the passenger mirror and rear hatch -- both of which were useless within 90 minutes of traveling from Lake Placid back home thanks to road spray and salt. IMO Level 5 is viable for some relatively limited use cases, or with roads that have embedded telemetry. I'll believe it when intercity truck fleets convert for a few years.
- soperj 9y ago
  Totally. There's no rain in Seattle ever.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    I forgot about Seattle’s long cold winters full of bitter cold, snow and salt.
- cesis 9y ago
  On the other hand I don't get the obsession with level 5. There are a lot of use cases for fully autonomous level 4 e.g. - pick me up in the parking lot - drive out of parking garage and meet me there - trip from LA to SF etc
  - Spooky23 9y ago

pfarnsworth 9y ago

We should compare this to having a random human driver drive, and see how often a third party would “take control”. Lord knows that if my dad were driving I would take control a lot more than a self driving car.

mlinksva 9y ago
Yet your dad (likely, I'm guessing, but many like him anyway) has a license and can legally drive. I hope one thing that criticism of computer driver outcomes leads to is conclusion that lots of human drivers should not be entitled to drive, and kill >1m people/year worldwide.

jakarta 9y ago

Waymo progress seems to be slowing on critical disengagements (in older CA DMV reports these were called "safe operation disengagements" - they stopped reporting this type in 2017). These disengagements deal with perception issues, the software leading to unwanted maneuvers, inability to react to reckless road users, and incorrect predictions. You can see it reduced rate of improvement when you dig into the numbers: 2015 0.16 disengagements per 1000 miles 2016 0.13 disengagements per 1000 miles 2017 0.12 disengagements per 1000 miles

Retric 9y ago
Looking at miles before disengagement shows things a little differently. 2015: ~6250 2016: ~7692 (+1442) 2017: ~8333 (+641) Personally, I think a self driving car with 1 notified disengagement per year as perfectly usable. Not so useful for the blind, but still very helpful. That said, even reporting the same number every year could still represent progress if they keep pushing the car harder. AKA, if 2015 = highway driving in the day with nice weather, 2017 = inner city driving at night in a snowstorm the same number of disengagements would still represent a lot of progress.
- jschwartzi 9y ago
  This is a serious problem if you have to take over during disengagement. If you spend most of the year not driving you risk falling out of practice, and then the one time you must rely on your own skill is in an unusual situation requiring you to exercise good judgement at speed. I would expect most disengagements to result in accidents because of this.
  - Retric 9y ago
    I don't think people are going to enter their destination for every trip. So, people will still do some driving even with self driving systems. On top of that most situations with disengagement have not resulted in crashes. Really it's failing to pay attention during normal driving that's most often at fault, a 'buzzing you need to pay attention now' system solves most of the problems even if the car is not driving it's self.

d13 9y ago

Yes, it's Xeno's paradox (http://platonicrealms.com/encyclopedia/zenos-paradox-of-the-tortoise-and-achilles http://platonicrealms.com/encyclopedia/zenos-paradox-of-the-...). CGI has exactly that same problem - the first 99% is easy, the final 1% is impossible.

timr 9y ago
It continually amazes me how tech people are blindsided by this problem. Every time. It's practically the entire reason that the Gartner hype curve is a thing: 1) New technology X appears. 2) Technology X develops quickly as the first 80% of gains are achieved. 3) Tech "luminaries" incorrectly extrapolate the rate of progress into a distant, glorious future; write breathless commentaries about how Technology X will eat the world in N years! 4) Technology X stagnates at the 81% progress mark, as it becomes clear that the green-field progress rate cannot be sustained. 5) Technology Y appears! Huzzah!
ttul 9y ago
Kind of similar situation has developed in crypto currencies. Yes, we can now accumulate vast wealth and transfer it around. But still there are $500M heists. And transaction clearance takes way too long. Fixing these inconveniences will take a long time.
r00fus 9y ago
I don't see how Zeno's paradox applies here. The root assumption is that the work is asymptotic with some "goal" - in this case "as good as a human". Perhaps the real goal is actually "level 6 - better than human" or "level 7 futuristic transport". Looking at it that way, maybe that would indeed follow Zeno's paradox (we'll never get futuristic transport) but soon surpass how a human would drive permitting integration with human drivers (being more reliable and cheaper causing disruption). Ultimately, I think the main roadblock to automation in this realm are the vast entrenched interests (big oil, big auto) who'd lose out due to efficiency gains (just like with solar power and EVs).
- lukas099 9y ago
  Regarding your last point, doesn't 'big auto' comprise some of the largest investors in this technology?

petra 9y ago

If we consider remotely controlled vehicles, they seem like the perfect step for self-driving cars: Assuming self-driving on simple conditions(like the highway), while letting people do the complex driving, and maybe people with lower cost of living and salaries, such service may be cheaper than a taxi. And this could create a large business, doing many miles every day, which would be the perfect means to gradually expand the role of self-driving. Yet,non of the big companies choose this(and i'm sure they're aware of this). Why ?

300bps 9y ago
Wouldn’t remote control cars require a near zero latency network connection at all times in all areas?
- _wmd 9y ago
  Yup! Even with LTE average-case latency of around 100ms (and easily double that for 4G/3G-only areas), worst case latencies are easily measured in _seconds_. According to Google, driver reaction times are measured in the range 0.7..3.0 seconds. Now add to that the bandwidth requirements for at least high quality front/back video and instrumentation. I doubt anyone is mad enough to think in the general case remotely piloting a vehicle in a safety-critical scenario using these consumer networks is an even remotely sane option
- Fricken 9y ago
  Phantom Auto, mentioned in the article, demoed their RC cars in CES last month, and they were ferrying journalists around using a driver 500 miles away. Latency isn't as much of an issue as one might think, but to maintain network reliability phantom uses 5 different networks simultaneously. Waymo and Cruise (GM) are both building out call centres with agents that have some sort of remote control over the car. Both Waymo and GM have emergency stop buttons connected to an air gapped computer that can take the vehicle to a minimum viable risk condition (which basically means pulling over to the side of the road) for security.
- saas_co_de 9y ago
  It would be computer assisted remote control, similar to how a drone works. The remote operator provides general directions but the computer has direct control over the vehicle systems to implement those directions in response to sensor feedback. Human reaction time is very slow so to do better than a human definitely does not require zero latency.

BuffaloBagel 9y ago

No surprise here - the last 20% of project taking 80% of development time.

adrianmonk 9y ago

Not sure I believe the title is justified given what the rest of the article says. I'm no statistician, but I'm not sure if there are enough miles being driven that good conclusions can be drawn about whether self-driving cars are getting better or not. Lots of testing is taking place outside of California due to other states' efforts (like changing regulations) to cater to it. So data from just California very likely doesn't tell the whole story. Also, as has been mentioned here before, once they've solved and tested the easy cases, they might move on to solving and testing the harder ones. So there isn't an apples-to-apples comparison on test failure rates from one year to another because they could be testing different things.

joejerryronnie 9y ago

There is an upper bound to autonomous vehicle performance with our current roadway infrastructure and that is well below the threshold of full self driving cars. Once we retrofit the roads with sensors, remove the reliance on existing physical signage, and add guardrails to prevent unanticipated occurrences as much as possible, we'll see real progress. Once everything (cars, roadway, services, etc) becomes networked and talks to each other, we can get rid of the steering wheels. My guess is we're 10 years away from limited availability and 50 years away from full build out country wide. One question - will a new technology come along before then and render driverless cars as a means of human transport irrelevant? Personally, I'm waiting for human drone delivery ;-)

zone411 9y ago

One thing I haven't seem mentioned is that when you're driving yourself, you anticipate and prepare your body for the changes in direction and acceleration/deceleration, so the car appears to drive smoother. If the disengagement rate is not zero (human becoming just a passenger), you still have to pay attention to the road and people may prefer to drive themselves because of this effect, maybe with exception of the highway. If the road rules stay unchanged, the self-driving car will also usually be slower in getting to the destination, as it will be set to strictly follow the speed limits and yellow lights, and if it's too deferential to other cars.

ucaetano 9y ago
> One thing I haven't seem mentioned is that when you're driving yourself, you anticipate changes in direction and acceleration/deceleration, so the car appears to drive smoother. And you're also holding on to the steering wheel, which makes a big difference. Everyone I know who has motion sickness when being in a car on a winding road never experience motion sickness when they are the driver, only the passenger.
tqkxzugoaupvwqr 9y ago
What about today’s taxis, busses, trains, planes? I don’t see passengers pay attention to the road to prepare for driver initiated braking, lane change or speed adjustment. I would assume passengers not paying attention today in human driven vehicles will continue to not pay attention in autonomous vehicles because nothing changes (as long as these vehicles drive similar to human drivers).
- sjruckle 9y ago
  Except it's not like today's taxis, busses, trains or planes. It's more like riding with a friend who's never crashed their car, but sometimes will tell you "I can't handle this right now, take the wheel." and you don't have a choice.

gwbas1c 9y ago

Letting a computer drive my car is high-risk: If there is a malfunction at 70mph, I could die! Where's my automatic lawn mower? Where's my robot to unload the dishwasher and put everything away? We need to find other consumer technology to use AI in before we risk our lives with self driving cars.

JoeAltmaier 9y ago
Already true, of every system in your car. There are arguable a huge number of things that can go wrong in a car already.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  All of those things have a good chunk of a century worth of development (as well as trillions of dollars in R&D) put into making them more robust, building redundancy, etc. I think the parent comment has a good point in that this automated driving thing is a very enormous change with a lot of risk behind it that doesn't appear to be being well managed.
  - darawk 9y ago
    Yes, but there was a time for all of those things in which they did not have a century of development. Deploying them is how you get that century of development. The risk of this stuff is really quite small and local. If the technology has faults, they'll become apparent relatively quickly and harm a relatively small number of people. I see no reason to be overly cautious here. It's not a massive correlated risk, like say, global warming.
    - sjruckle 9y ago
      We put the new tires and brakes on the the fastest vehicles we could make, then had a professional run them around a track with a dozen other lunatics. Anything that broke was fixed forever, and relatively few lives were lost. The number that died was low because there were fewer participants. The critical technology was well-tested before it was sent to the production line. That's how we got our century of development. Testing, verifying, refinement. It wasn't by pushing out new stuff to a batch of users and seeing if everything worked out allright.

kazinator 9y ago

The postulation of a limitation is basically a negative claim. "This can go only so far and no farther." Very hard to prove, and inherently myopic. Even if the observations are true, it's likely just a lull in the self-driving scene. It's reminiscent of how some people once believed that a machine will never beat the top human players in chess.

deleted 9y ago
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simion314 9y ago

This idea is expensive to implement, but building some tracks, then put only the self driving cars on this tracks, then you could have very large speeds and since only this cars would be on tracks and no other obstacle it would be very safe.

lolc 9y ago
You mean trains?
- simion314 9y ago
  Similar to trains, but high speed, and you have your own cart, you do not need to wait for a scheduled train. It does not need to be using tracks but an exclusive road with specific sensors and electronics so the carts would be able to avoid collisions at intersections.