7 ms·

Autonomous vehicles are just around the corner

39 points by jkuria 9y ago

geezerjay 9y ago
Autonomous vehicles are already here and have arrived a couple of decades ago. They are referred to by the umbrella term "rail transport". There are whole transportation networks all around the world, including the US, that are entirely driverless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
- neals 9y ago
  Autonomous != driverless
  - vadimberman 9y ago
    The link posted above mentions completely driverless trains as well (grade 4).
  - sanxiyn 9y ago
    I live next to U Line in South Korea. It is driverless. Completely.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  Very good point. If the car industry was really aiming for the benefits of transport without the need for a human at the wheel they could invest in rail transport, a technology that we already know works just fine. But of course the car industry makes... cars. So the only thing they really care about is in selling cars. Therefore, they instead invest in developing a new technology that may take years to be as beneficial as rail transport. And that will probably never be as beneficial as rail transport in many important ways, including very notably its impact on the environment and safety.
graycat 9y ago
Yes, and when we get around that corner, we will be told the same again. And when we get around that corner we will find a lot of car wrecks. And the next corner will be some auto insurance companies, lawyers, and politicians saying "Not on public streets". Eventually enough people will figure out and/or admit that some of driving a vehicle on current public streets with current traffic occasionally but too often requires real, actual, full, no compromise, human intelligence complete with ability to read, hear and understand, and speak and be heard, to comprehend situations and plan and execute solutions. That's essentially full AI, no compromises, parlor tricks, claimed grand successes in narrow contexts, driving on roadways defined by electronics, etc.
- GarrisonPrime 9y ago
  You're assuming the driving environment will remain the same. It's possible the convenience and cost savings of autonomous transport would be great enough that society would be willing to change its relationship with roads.
  - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
    But that can't possibly happen overnight. Until every car on every road is an auto-car, we'll have a mix of auto-cars with ordinary, human-driven vehicles. And in that time, what happens?
    - sundaeofshock 9y ago
      We spend trillions of dollars over the course of a couple of decades, with major disruptions of our transportation network, along with the overall economy. Smart roads are not going to happen.
Dowwie 9y ago
As to whether that corner is on this block is another matter. It might be within the postal code. Taking on a great project that hasn't been attempted before presents great challenges along the way that couldn't be anticipated. These forecasters mean well but have no idea.
atroyn 9y ago
We are at the peak of the autonomous driving hype cycle, and the trough of disillusionment is going to wipe out a few players, and see the massive consolidation of others. These start-ups are very capital intensive and once the funding environment shifts, it's going to be a big problem for a lot of them. The initial launches of autonomous taxi services will be underwhelming - relative slow, sometimes frightening (there will be accidents for sure), and with limited deployment areas in limited weather. The novelty will wear off quickly, and then the real work is going to start. There are basically going to be two ways to survive it - be part of a larger organization that can shoulder a long-term R&D burden to go from 'toy' to 'real infrastructure'. I can see Cruise and Waymo making it that way, unless GM gets cold feet. The other survivors will be either super lean like Voyage, who went straight to revenue generating niches like retirement communities and rely on being downstream of the technical innovation being done elsewhere (no in-house vehicle or sensor development to cut down R&D costs and move quickly). Or else they'll be in niches like logistics (e.g. Peloton, Nuro) where the parameters of the game are different, and the structure is more B2B than B2C. One other play is the autonomy-tech licensing structure like Aurora is trying, but that's a hard sell, especially since they're dealing with German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in particular) are clueless about autonomy. This is an incredibly exciting, risky time to be a part of this new, emerging industry. It feels in many ways like the very very early P.C era, where everything is very much still in play. I'm glad I made the career shift to get there.
- danmaz74 9y ago
  > German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in particular) are clueless about autonomy You made me curious, care the elaborate?
  - atroyn 9y ago
    Without revealing too much, German automakers have expertise primarily in logistics, with some expertise in automotive design. There is a vast pyramid of Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers that feed into that logistics chain. A lot of those suppliers are promising automakers that they can deliver either components that feed into autonomy, or else autonomy in full. This fragments the effort across literally hundreds of small teams, many of whom have little to no expertise at all in the necessary disciplines. Additionally, every German automaker also has its own in-house autonomy team, and the relationships between in-house, contracting, and supplier teams is chaotic. Many managers see autonomy as another way to build a small empire and make a name for themselves, and it just results in a huge organizational snarl. The fact that this is an area no one knows how to execute on yet since it's brand new, coupled with these gross inefficiencies, will mean autonomy efforts from the automakers will be stillborn. They will eventually learn from it though, acquire the right teams, and get on with putting it into their cars just as they're doing with EV.
Bizarro 9y ago
And in 5 years they will be "just around the corner" again. There's so many hurdles before it becomes something that is commonplace or accepted, that really it's decades around the corner. The technical hurdles to get to level 4 and 5 are just the start. Once you get past that, there's going to be a whole slew of legal and public opinion challenges. The first time an autonomous vehicle is involved in an accident that kills a few kids, you'll have a Challenger level probe to figure out what happened and probably a whole revamp of safety measures. Don't count your chickens yet.
- lxmorj 9y ago
  Maybe. Where's our Challenger level probe for mass shootings?
  - randallsquared 9y ago
    Pending an accidental mass shooting.
  - joejerryronnie 9y ago
    The anology would be an accidental mass shooting by an autonomous security bot.
- glibgil 9y ago
  This transition, for most, is as casual as two people deciding who is going to drive. There’s simply a different driver available and the convenience of that will make the acceptance of autonomous vehicles happen very quickly
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  >> The first time an autonomous vehicle is involved in an accident that kills a few kids, you'll have a Challenger level probe to figure out what happened and probably a whole revamp of safety measures. Although I have serious reservations about the safety of autonomous vehicles, or at least our ability to predict it (see earlier comment referencing a RAND corp study of the subject) I'm afraid that running over kids with an auto-car is not going to be such big news as it perhaps should be. For instance- can you remember the first time in history when an automobile ran over a child, or even several children at once? Rhetorical question- you most likely can't. Because it was never such a big issue to go down in history as the "Minors Motor Massacre" or whatever. And there most likely was no Challenger-level probe into the whys and wheretofores of that first time, either. Besides, remember that, for many, many decades people drove around in cars that had no provision for driver safety. For instance, seat belts were first adopted by big car manufacturers in the early '50s and made compulsory by law for the first time in the '70s. It's clear that most of the world cares a lot more about fast, efficient transport than about safe transport.
meri_dian 9y ago
Unfortunately we're walking around a circular structure
netforay 9y ago
Wow, all 10 first comments are negative about it. I wonder would these people would bet against it? I would love to bet in favor of the article.
- chronic729 9y ago
  MIT PhD grad, former Tesla Autopilot software, currently at Waymo. I will bet against the article. You will not be able to buy a L4 self driving car in the next 5 years, at minimum.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    I doubt you’ll be able to buy a personal level 4 anytime soon, it doesn’t make sense to use them as anything but fleet/taxi vehicles since they can just come to you whenever needed.
  - bobosha 9y ago
    so what's your guesstimate?
    - atroyn 9y ago
      Similar background and profession - putting aside whether an individual would ever want to own one, general purpose passenger autonomy won't happen for probably another decade. Limited domain autonomy will be here in before 5 years, though. It'll just suck. But the first step to getting good at something is sucking at it.
      - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
        Ish. I still can't do a pointe, even though I've been sucking at it for [redacted] years.
  - raldi 9y ago
    I don’t want to buy one; I want to be able to summon one on demand. Same timeline?
bittermang 9y ago
We haven't even begun. Gearheads will refuse to let go of their cars. They love driving and maintaining their vehicle. They'll argue that no robot can drive better than they can, no matter how wrong they are. Imagine a world where police no longer pull you over for speeding, running red lights, or other traffic infractions. The legal fight will be huge, as those easy revenue sources suddenly disappear. There are hundreds of more fights and scenarios like this we haven't even begun to imagine, that will tie up progress in the courts for decades. We're going to need a concentrated force focusing on this tech as the next thing we are going to do, and able to get out in front of these issues. Right now, I see autonomous driving as a thing that a few groups are seriously working on, while everyone else takes a passive stance, or dips their toes into the idea as a passing fancy and not a serious milestone to tackle. We need to move it past a novel toy, and in to a serious undertaking that we all need to be vested in shaping the future of. Because in my opinion, the automobile is the most efficient and prolific human killing machine we have ever invented. I feel autonomous driving is a step toward fixing that issue.
- tyingq 9y ago
  "Imagine a world where police no longer pull you over for speeding, running red lights, or other traffic infractions" That's an interesting point I hadn't heard before. Are there stats for what kind of revenue various little cities, counties, etc, in the US are generating with speed traps, red light cameras, and similar tactics? Those tactics obviously lose to self driving cars.
  - bittermang 9y ago
    That's an interesting point I hadn't heard before. Exactly. Because why would they? Why would we even need speed limits, if the computer it in control and proven safe at X speed, because it has a Y reaction time vs a human's Z reaction time.
    - yur83838 9y ago
      people still need to cross roads
joejerryronnie 9y ago
I'm sure people are thinking/working on this but it seems that nobody is talking about the infrastructure improvements that would likely be necessary to support fully autonomous vehicles (smart roadways, etc). To me, this should really be a two-pronged approach; the vehicle and the environment. Trying to engineer a vehicle to successfully navigate an environment soley designed for human cognition seems like a losing battle. But, if roadways were fitted with a myriad of sensors and communication networks which couldn't be thwarted by a can of spray paint, I think the success rate of the actual autonomous vehicle would be much better.
- atroyn 9y ago
  Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is a legitimate take. My thinking is this is two-pronged. It won't make sense to make the infrastructure investment until there are sufficient proof points that this is 1.) something people want and 2.) something that's economically viable. It's likely that the early geofenced version of passenger autonomy will demonstrate what further infrastructure is needed and how much it would cost. One interesting side point; dedicated lanes for autonomous traffic are already being proposed on some roadways, particularly interstates in the U.S and highways in Europe. The economic benefits from autonomous logistics (e.g. trucking) are more readily capturable, so the infrastructure investment might make more sense there up front.
  - trevyn 9y ago
    He’s getting downvoted because not many people talk about “smart roadways” since it became clear that sensor-based machine learning autonomous vehicles were commercially feasible, and dare I say inevitable. Good autonomous vehicles don’t work primarily by sensing and detecting the roadway, they work by sensing the environment and having a complete, detailed 3D map of drivable areas, matching their environment to the map as they go along. This only requires annotation of the terrain, not clear road markings or anything like that. The 3D detail of the environment is the smart roadway. With always-on GPS and an incredibly detailed map of the environment stored on a honking hard drive in the trunk, there’s never a question where you are in the world. In fact, now that I think about it, this makes reduced infrastructure possible, since you don’t even need things like signs or streetlights in an all-autonomous world, and can even get by with narrower lanes.
jt2190 9y ago
This isn't a stand-alone article. It's the introduction to The Economist's "Reinventing wheels" special report issue. There's no timeline given for "around the corner" in the headline. Instead: > This special report will assume that the technological hurdles to full autonomy can be overcome. It will consider the implications of autonomous vehicles (AVs) for personal mobility, car ownership and carmaking, but will also look at the wider economic, social and cultural knock-on effects. How will everyday activities be transformed? How could AVs reshape cities? And what lessons does the rise of the car in the 20th century hold for driverless vehicles in the 21st?
kgilpin 9y ago
Autonomous vehicles will make it much safer to be a cyclist, a pedestrian, or a child near a road. These are some positive changes I am really looking forward to. Imagine knowing that if your child runs in the road, the cars will stop? Safety is a great feeling.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> BCG, a consultancy, reckons that by 2030 a quarter of passenger-miles travelled on America’s roads will be in shared, self-driving electric vehicles, reducing the number of cars on city streets by 60%, emissions by 80% and road accidents by 90%. Besides the fact that it's obvious how these nice, tidy, exact-multiple-of-ten values are unlikely to be accurate, that last 90% in particular was totally pulled out of thin air and without any experimental, theoretical, or other justification whatsoever. That's according to a study on the safety of self-driving cars, by the RAND corporation, Driving to Safety; How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1478/RAND_RR1478.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/... Quoting from that (bullet points, sidebar on first page): Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles—an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use. Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety In other words, forget about knowing with any degree of certainty how much safer autonomous vehicles are than humans (or even if they are safer at all) before they actually hit the road. And let's all admit that if we're eager to see self-driving cars in mass use, it's because we think the tech is cool and not because of any justified belief in their safety.

39 points by jkuria 9y ago

Autonomous vehicles are already here and have arrived a couple of decades ago. They are referred to by the umbrella term "rail transport". There are whole transportation networks all around the world, including the US, that are entirely driverless. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...

neals 9y ago
Autonomous != driverless
- vadimberman 9y ago
  The link posted above mentions completely driverless trains as well (grade 4).
- sanxiyn 9y ago
  I live next to U Line in South Korea. It is driverless. Completely.
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
Very good point. If the car industry was really aiming for the benefits of transport without the need for a human at the wheel they could invest in rail transport, a technology that we already know works just fine. But of course the car industry makes... cars. So the only thing they really care about is in selling cars. Therefore, they instead invest in developing a new technology that may take years to be as beneficial as rail transport. And that will probably never be as beneficial as rail transport in many important ways, including very notably its impact on the environment and safety.

graycat 9y ago

Yes, and when we get around that corner, we will be told the same again. And when we get around that corner we will find a lot of car wrecks. And the next corner will be some auto insurance companies, lawyers, and politicians saying "Not on public streets". Eventually enough people will figure out and/or admit that some of driving a vehicle on current public streets with current traffic occasionally but too often requires real, actual, full, no compromise, human intelligence complete with ability to read, hear and understand, and speak and be heard, to comprehend situations and plan and execute solutions. That's essentially full AI, no compromises, parlor tricks, claimed grand successes in narrow contexts, driving on roadways defined by electronics, etc.

GarrisonPrime 9y ago
You're assuming the driving environment will remain the same. It's possible the convenience and cost savings of autonomous transport would be great enough that society would be willing to change its relationship with roads.
- YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
  But that can't possibly happen overnight. Until every car on every road is an auto-car, we'll have a mix of auto-cars with ordinary, human-driven vehicles. And in that time, what happens?
  - sundaeofshock 9y ago
    We spend trillions of dollars over the course of a couple of decades, with major disruptions of our transportation network, along with the overall economy. Smart roads are not going to happen.

Dowwie 9y ago

As to whether that corner is on this block is another matter. It might be within the postal code. Taking on a great project that hasn't been attempted before presents great challenges along the way that couldn't be anticipated. These forecasters mean well but have no idea.

atroyn 9y ago

We are at the peak of the autonomous driving hype cycle, and the trough of disillusionment is going to wipe out a few players, and see the massive consolidation of others. These start-ups are very capital intensive and once the funding environment shifts, it's going to be a big problem for a lot of them. The initial launches of autonomous taxi services will be underwhelming - relative slow, sometimes frightening (there will be accidents for sure), and with limited deployment areas in limited weather. The novelty will wear off quickly, and then the real work is going to start. There are basically going to be two ways to survive it - be part of a larger organization that can shoulder a long-term R&D burden to go from 'toy' to 'real infrastructure'. I can see Cruise and Waymo making it that way, unless GM gets cold feet. The other survivors will be either super lean like Voyage, who went straight to revenue generating niches like retirement communities and rely on being downstream of the technical innovation being done elsewhere (no in-house vehicle or sensor development to cut down R&D costs and move quickly). Or else they'll be in niches like logistics (e.g. Peloton, Nuro) where the parameters of the game are different, and the structure is more B2B than B2C. One other play is the autonomy-tech licensing structure like Aurora is trying, but that's a hard sell, especially since they're dealing with German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in particular) are clueless about autonomy. This is an incredibly exciting, risky time to be a part of this new, emerging industry. It feels in many ways like the very very early P.C era, where everything is very much still in play. I'm glad I made the career shift to get there.

danmaz74 9y ago
> German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in particular) are clueless about autonomy You made me curious, care the elaborate?
- atroyn 9y ago
  Without revealing too much, German automakers have expertise primarily in logistics, with some expertise in automotive design. There is a vast pyramid of Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers that feed into that logistics chain. A lot of those suppliers are promising automakers that they can deliver either components that feed into autonomy, or else autonomy in full. This fragments the effort across literally hundreds of small teams, many of whom have little to no expertise at all in the necessary disciplines. Additionally, every German automaker also has its own in-house autonomy team, and the relationships between in-house, contracting, and supplier teams is chaotic. Many managers see autonomy as another way to build a small empire and make a name for themselves, and it just results in a huge organizational snarl. The fact that this is an area no one knows how to execute on yet since it's brand new, coupled with these gross inefficiencies, will mean autonomy efforts from the automakers will be stillborn. They will eventually learn from it though, acquire the right teams, and get on with putting it into their cars just as they're doing with EV.

Bizarro 9y ago

And in 5 years they will be "just around the corner" again. There's so many hurdles before it becomes something that is commonplace or accepted, that really it's decades around the corner. The technical hurdles to get to level 4 and 5 are just the start. Once you get past that, there's going to be a whole slew of legal and public opinion challenges. The first time an autonomous vehicle is involved in an accident that kills a few kids, you'll have a Challenger level probe to figure out what happened and probably a whole revamp of safety measures. Don't count your chickens yet.

lxmorj 9y ago
Maybe. Where's our Challenger level probe for mass shootings?
- randallsquared 9y ago
  Pending an accidental mass shooting.
- joejerryronnie 9y ago
  The anology would be an accidental mass shooting by an autonomous security bot.
glibgil 9y ago
This transition, for most, is as casual as two people deciding who is going to drive. There’s simply a different driver available and the convenience of that will make the acceptance of autonomous vehicles happen very quickly
YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
>> The first time an autonomous vehicle is involved in an accident that kills a few kids, you'll have a Challenger level probe to figure out what happened and probably a whole revamp of safety measures. Although I have serious reservations about the safety of autonomous vehicles, or at least our ability to predict it (see earlier comment referencing a RAND corp study of the subject) I'm afraid that running over kids with an auto-car is not going to be such big news as it perhaps should be. For instance- can you remember the first time in history when an automobile ran over a child, or even several children at once? Rhetorical question- you most likely can't. Because it was never such a big issue to go down in history as the "Minors Motor Massacre" or whatever. And there most likely was no Challenger-level probe into the whys and wheretofores of that first time, either. Besides, remember that, for many, many decades people drove around in cars that had no provision for driver safety. For instance, seat belts were first adopted by big car manufacturers in the early '50s and made compulsory by law for the first time in the '70s. It's clear that most of the world cares a lot more about fast, efficient transport than about safe transport.

meri_dian 9y ago

Unfortunately we're walking around a circular structure

netforay 9y ago

Wow, all 10 first comments are negative about it. I wonder would these people would bet against it? I would love to bet in favor of the article.

chronic729 9y ago
MIT PhD grad, former Tesla Autopilot software, currently at Waymo. I will bet against the article. You will not be able to buy a L4 self driving car in the next 5 years, at minimum.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  I doubt you’ll be able to buy a personal level 4 anytime soon, it doesn’t make sense to use them as anything but fleet/taxi vehicles since they can just come to you whenever needed.
- bobosha 9y ago
  so what's your guesstimate?
  - atroyn 9y ago
    Similar background and profession - putting aside whether an individual would ever want to own one, general purpose passenger autonomy won't happen for probably another decade. Limited domain autonomy will be here in before 5 years, though. It'll just suck. But the first step to getting good at something is sucking at it.
    - YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago
      Ish. I still can't do a pointe, even though I've been sucking at it for [redacted] years.
- raldi 9y ago
  I don’t want to buy one; I want to be able to summon one on demand. Same timeline?

bittermang 9y ago

We haven't even begun. Gearheads will refuse to let go of their cars. They love driving and maintaining their vehicle. They'll argue that no robot can drive better than they can, no matter how wrong they are. Imagine a world where police no longer pull you over for speeding, running red lights, or other traffic infractions. The legal fight will be huge, as those easy revenue sources suddenly disappear. There are hundreds of more fights and scenarios like this we haven't even begun to imagine, that will tie up progress in the courts for decades. We're going to need a concentrated force focusing on this tech as the next thing we are going to do, and able to get out in front of these issues. Right now, I see autonomous driving as a thing that a few groups are seriously working on, while everyone else takes a passive stance, or dips their toes into the idea as a passing fancy and not a serious milestone to tackle. We need to move it past a novel toy, and in to a serious undertaking that we all need to be vested in shaping the future of. Because in my opinion, the automobile is the most efficient and prolific human killing machine we have ever invented. I feel autonomous driving is a step toward fixing that issue.

tyingq 9y ago
"Imagine a world where police no longer pull you over for speeding, running red lights, or other traffic infractions" That's an interesting point I hadn't heard before. Are there stats for what kind of revenue various little cities, counties, etc, in the US are generating with speed traps, red light cameras, and similar tactics? Those tactics obviously lose to self driving cars.
- bittermang 9y ago
  That's an interesting point I hadn't heard before. Exactly. Because why would they? Why would we even need speed limits, if the computer it in control and proven safe at X speed, because it has a Y reaction time vs a human's Z reaction time.
  - yur83838 9y ago
    people still need to cross roads

joejerryronnie 9y ago

I'm sure people are thinking/working on this but it seems that nobody is talking about the infrastructure improvements that would likely be necessary to support fully autonomous vehicles (smart roadways, etc). To me, this should really be a two-pronged approach; the vehicle and the environment. Trying to engineer a vehicle to successfully navigate an environment soley designed for human cognition seems like a losing battle. But, if roadways were fitted with a myriad of sensors and communication networks which couldn't be thwarted by a can of spray paint, I think the success rate of the actual autonomous vehicle would be much better.

atroyn 9y ago
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this is a legitimate take. My thinking is this is two-pronged. It won't make sense to make the infrastructure investment until there are sufficient proof points that this is 1.) something people want and 2.) something that's economically viable. It's likely that the early geofenced version of passenger autonomy will demonstrate what further infrastructure is needed and how much it would cost. One interesting side point; dedicated lanes for autonomous traffic are already being proposed on some roadways, particularly interstates in the U.S and highways in Europe. The economic benefits from autonomous logistics (e.g. trucking) are more readily capturable, so the infrastructure investment might make more sense there up front.
- trevyn 9y ago
  He’s getting downvoted because not many people talk about “smart roadways” since it became clear that sensor-based machine learning autonomous vehicles were commercially feasible, and dare I say inevitable. Good autonomous vehicles don’t work primarily by sensing and detecting the roadway, they work by sensing the environment and having a complete, detailed 3D map of drivable areas, matching their environment to the map as they go along. This only requires annotation of the terrain, not clear road markings or anything like that. The 3D detail of the environment is the smart roadway. With always-on GPS and an incredibly detailed map of the environment stored on a honking hard drive in the trunk, there’s never a question where you are in the world. In fact, now that I think about it, this makes reduced infrastructure possible, since you don’t even need things like signs or streetlights in an all-autonomous world, and can even get by with narrower lanes.

jt2190 9y ago

This isn't a stand-alone article. It's the introduction to The Economist's "Reinventing wheels" special report issue. There's no timeline given for "around the corner" in the headline. Instead: > This special report will assume that the technological hurdles to full autonomy can be overcome. It will consider the implications of autonomous vehicles (AVs) for personal mobility, car ownership and carmaking, but will also look at the wider economic, social and cultural knock-on effects. How will everyday activities be transformed? How could AVs reshape cities? And what lessons does the rise of the car in the 20th century hold for driverless vehicles in the 21st?

kgilpin 9y ago

Autonomous vehicles will make it much safer to be a cyclist, a pedestrian, or a child near a road. These are some positive changes I am really looking forward to. Imagine knowing that if your child runs in the road, the cars will stop? Safety is a great feeling.

YeGoblynQueenne 9y ago

>> BCG, a consultancy, reckons that by 2030 a quarter of passenger-miles travelled on America’s roads will be in shared, self-driving electric vehicles, reducing the number of cars on city streets by 60%, emissions by 80% and road accidents by 90%. Besides the fact that it's obvious how these nice, tidy, exact-multiple-of-ten values are unlikely to be accurate, that last 90% in particular was totally pulled out of thin air and without any experimental, theoretical, or other justification whatsoever. That's according to a study on the safety of self-driving cars, by the RAND corporation, Driving to Safety; How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability: https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/RR1400/RR1478/RAND_RR1478.pdf https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/... Quoting from that (bullet points, sidebar on first page): Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles—an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing them on the roads for consumer use. Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating autonomous vehicle safety In other words, forget about knowing with any degree of certainty how much safer autonomous vehicles are than humans (or even if they are safer at all) before they actually hit the road. And let's all admit that if we're eager to see self-driving cars in mass use, it's because we think the tech is cool and not because of any justified belief in their safety.