11 ms·

Let's be honest, actual mass deployed self driving tech is probably 20 years away at minimum. I personally might be able to enjoy it just before I retire.

tzakrajs 8y ago
Sources?
- jeromegv 8y ago
  It's predicting the future, there won't be any sources. Everyone is guessing.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  Logic and reality
- gwbas1c 8y ago
  Every sane software developer who doesn't believe hype
GeekyBear 8y ago
At the 2016 SXSW festival the Waymo project director said that deployment would happen incrementally depending on the local conditions. >Not only might it take much longer to arrive than the company has ever indicated—as long as 30 years, said Urmson—but the early commercial versions might well be limited to certain geographies and weather conditions. Self-driving cars are much easier to engineer for sunny weather and wide-open roads, and Urmson suggested the cars might be sold for those markets first. Urmson put it this way in his speech. "How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both." He went on to say, "this technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more challenging locations." https://web.archive.org/web/20160422140357/https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-for-some-in-decades-for-others https://web.archive.org/web/20160422140357/https://spectrum....
Retric 8y ago
I think these are already fairly close to human fatality rates. Tessa is well over 300,000 cars sold, if the average car has 10k miles that's 3 billion. Edit: actual number well over that https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles-data-self-driving-program/ https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles... Using US fatality rates you would expect ~34 deaths from that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the... Edit, my numbers where low. So, as far as I can tell they are close to human safty though perhaps not up to defensive driver in good conditions safe.
- amelius 8y ago
  That's a lot of guesswork. It is very difficult to believe that an automated system with such a limited concept of its surroundings is equal/superior to a human driver. Therefore, we need better evidence, and this means no pulling of numbers from thin air.
  - Retric 8y ago
    Insurance companies which have hard data will lower your rates if your car has autopilot. I am sure they base that on hard data I don't have. If you have better data than I would love to see it. But, IMO using ballpark numbers is much better than simply having a bad feeling about something. These cars are not going to fail the same way people do. Computers really fuck up in broad daylight, people get drunk and drive down highways in the wrong direction. Right now I would trust this over me driving tired or drunk but not sober. Give it 5-10 years and better hardware and I think it will be a better driver than I am.
    - amelius 8y ago
      > Insurance companies which have hard data will lower your rates if your car has autopilot. That's probably because Tesla is liable. And it could be that at this point they don't mind operating at a loss in this area.
danso 8y ago
Seems like something that will be most enjoyed post-retirement, a godsend for American seniors who don't live in cities with good mass-transit.
- atomical 8y ago
  I'm sure all the seniors love riding public transit.
  - danso 8y ago
    Lots of us younger folk are cool with it too. The point is that having it as an option, rather than being stuck at home unable to drive, is a big quality of life issue.
    - atomical 8y ago
      It was sarcasm.
    - paulie_a 8y ago
      I am still relatively younger and I work in an office literally located in a train station. I still avoid public transit as much as possible. The only exception is Amtrak. Public transportation sucks.
      - mattnewport 8y ago
        That very much depends on where you live. It's generally a lot better in Europe for a variety of reasons: historical, political and geographical. I use public transit quite a bit here in Vancouver but my limited experience of it in SF gives me some appreciation why people might not want to use it there.
        atomical 8y ago
        People smell better in Europe? When people trot out their arguments against public transportation they always refer to the inefficiencies and completely ignore the human element. No one wants to be crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers every day.
kjksf 8y ago
What is definition of "mass"? Waymo almost certainly will launch this year a fully self driving service, accessible to anyone, "within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert" (https://waymo.com/apply/faq/ https://waymo.com/apply/faq/) which is where their pilot program has been running for several months now. See e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/it-sure-looks-like-waymo-is-getting-ready-to-launch-in-phoenix/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/it-sure-looks-like-waym... They already have at least 600 cars in that area and already announced plans to buy 80k cars. So if by "mass" you mean "millions of cars available world wide" then yeah, maybe not 20 years but it'll take a decade to scale this world-wide. But to me "self driving works in practice" will be validated within months of Waymo launching in Arizona and then they'll enter a phase of dazzling scale up to other cities. For comparison it took Uber 7 years to outgrow taxis and I expect self driving to grow a bit faster. Once the technology works it's just a matter of capital expenditure and physical limits of how fast you can scale car manufacturing. It'll take many years to deploy this world-wide but I don't think this is the standard most people use when they determine if self driving technology works or not.
- umanwizard 8y ago
  What makes you think "works in Phoenix" is anywhere near "works in most places" ? I think the difficulty of driving in Phoenix suburbs is maybe 1% of the difficulty of driving in urban areas, anywhere with snow and rain, etc.
  - kjksf 8y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona "Phoenix is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With 1,626,078 people (as of 2017), Phoenix is the fifth most populous city nationwide" Explain the criteria you used to classify it as "suburbs". Phoenix is the first metro area to launch the service. Waymo (and others) are testing in other places. From https://waymo.com/ontheroad/ https://waymo.com/ontheroad/: Kirkland (lots of rain), Bay Area (including San Francisco), Detroit (snow during winter), Atlanta, Austin. I don't see how you arrived at the 1% and 1% of what? If it took Waymo 10 years to drive in Phonix, Arizona, it'll take them 1000 years to improve enough to drive in Detroit? Those things are pretty binary: either they can drive autonomously or they can't.
ausvisaissues 8y ago
Perhaps that is true, but some incremental steps have the possibility of making driving infinitely better. Imagine cars that refuse to tailgate, drive at excessive speed, drive with drowsy owners, drive on the right-hand side of the road in non-emergency situations, skip red traffic lights, etc...
makewavesnotwar 8y ago
Unless companies like Tesla stop worrying about being the next "Great American Industry" and start focusing on real world problems and their solutions. If Tesla could develop a network of self driving buses, that would have far greater reach and impact than trying to solve how to make a private network for charging and all case-considered self-driving system for asshole-mobiles. Not that Tesla cars aren't amazing, but they seem like a giant waste of resources for self-centered people. Not to mention in situations like self-driving, buses have completely predictable paths and because of that, it's much easier to optimize for corner cases to work toward a general solution. With the exception of the handicapped, people don't really need cars. Bikes/e-bikes work great for any type of commute <30 miles and hauling cargo <100 lbs with a trailer. Electric skateboards are also great if you have little to carry and <12 miles to go. Beyond that, self-driving delivery fleets in the vain of UPS and buses make sense. There's really no valid reason to use a car unless you're an invalid. But guys like Elon Musk are happy to burn the earth to the ground to terraform Mars instead of working on how to terraform places like Arizona or Pakistan because it looks better to them on paper. Or so it would seem.
- morsch 8y ago
  Divide your miles by 10 and they seem about right.
- Broken_Hippo 8y ago
  Bikes/e-bikes work great for any type of commute... Only when they aren't. Winter means snow, ice, and below zero temperatures and my hands simply can't handle the extra cold from the wind. I'm not handicapped and do walk during the winter, but tend to take the bus on the very rainy and very cold days despite dressing for the weather. let alone the fact that I'm no where near skilled enough with a bicycle to feel safe riding on 2inches of ice - regardless of studded tires. Summers have really strong sun, making folks deceptively warm and sweaty. I dont' know about your job, but most of mine want me to be clean and not smell of sweat when I arrive. I always have the chance of cargo: I walk to the grocery store most times. (I am not legal to drive in my present country). When I lived in Indiana, there were not only problems with actual weather, but then I ran into route problems. The easiest route for commutes was major roads, but unfortunately most of those roads aren't built for people to ride bikes or walk. In some places, doing either activity on those roads meant you got stopped by the cops and told to find another path to take. You were putting cars and yourself at risk using that road. Luckily, there are more paths for such things here. Not only that, but e-bikes have a limited range in most circumstances. Higher-end ones go far enough, but some of the cheaper models risk losing power at the higher ends. By the time most e-bikes has power to spare on those commutes, here they might be legally a scooter. I do agree with having a robust public transportation system, however. That actually soves the issues with the bikes, but bikes alone seem won't work.
ZephyrP 8y ago
Reading this comment (and the many like it) I get the feeling that something essential must be getting left out when we're speaking of the "far-off mass-deployed self-driving tech". Mostly because it directly contradicts my day-to-day experience. I've personally seen a few "self-driving cars" on the streets of SF and I suspect many of you reading this have as well (particularly if you live in the Mission or South Park). Just last year I was talkng with engineers at the self-driving car company "Cruise" which had a free internal app to taxi employees around with a self-driving car. I personally saw the tech demoed. One of the engineers called one up to go drinking the weekend prior (sans drinking buddies - company policy). He claimed his coworkers come to work in them occasionally. The cars and engineers could be a grand charade but it seems like "self-driving cars" are already used by non-daredevils every weekday. I learned to drive on backroads of rural Colorado; It may be these cars are safer than I in the sometimes "adverse" driving conditions of San Francisco. Is this really how a distant technology looks?
- drostie 8y ago
  Yes. That can be how a distant technology looks, if the stakes for failure are that people die. You can get early adopters from one tail of the bell curve, hype, working prototypes, and people dying because prototypes fail. There may be a churn of companies... "We know that AlphaDrive and BetaDrive both killed people but we here at GammaDrive want to reassure you that we're totally committed to your safety!" "But that's what BetaDrive said." "Yeah but we REALLY MEAN it this time." "Wait, what to you mean, 'we'?" "Um, nothing..." "You hired BetaDrive's employees when they went out of business, didn't you?" "Uh... Oh would you look at the time!" With that said I don't know Cruise and maybe they're doing better than Tesla.
- paulie_a 8y ago
  A few sightings in silicon valley is an incredible leap to mass adoption. And looking at cruise, their website is low grade marketing. Mostly concerned about hiring and not about pushing their actual technology. it's amateur hour honestly.

tzakrajs 8y ago

Sources?

jeromegv 8y ago
It's predicting the future, there won't be any sources. Everyone is guessing.
paulie_a 8y ago
Logic and reality
gwbas1c 8y ago
Every sane software developer who doesn't believe hype

GeekyBear 8y ago

At the 2016 SXSW festival the Waymo project director said that deployment would happen incrementally depending on the local conditions. >Not only might it take much longer to arrive than the company has ever indicated—as long as 30 years, said Urmson—but the early commercial versions might well be limited to certain geographies and weather conditions. Self-driving cars are much easier to engineer for sunny weather and wide-open roads, and Urmson suggested the cars might be sold for those markets first. Urmson put it this way in his speech. "How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both." He went on to say, "this technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more challenging locations." https://web.archive.org/web/20160422140357/https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-for-some-in-decades-for-others https://web.archive.org/web/20160422140357/https://spectrum....

Retric 8y ago

I think these are already fairly close to human fatality rates. Tessa is well over 300,000 cars sold, if the average car has 10k miles that's 3 billion. Edit: actual number well over that https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles-data-self-driving-program/ https://electrek.co/2016/11/13/tesla-autopilot-billion-miles... Using US fatality rates you would expect ~34 deaths from that. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_United_States https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the... Edit, my numbers where low. So, as far as I can tell they are close to human safty though perhaps not up to defensive driver in good conditions safe.

amelius 8y ago
That's a lot of guesswork. It is very difficult to believe that an automated system with such a limited concept of its surroundings is equal/superior to a human driver. Therefore, we need better evidence, and this means no pulling of numbers from thin air.
- Retric 8y ago
  Insurance companies which have hard data will lower your rates if your car has autopilot. I am sure they base that on hard data I don't have. If you have better data than I would love to see it. But, IMO using ballpark numbers is much better than simply having a bad feeling about something. These cars are not going to fail the same way people do. Computers really fuck up in broad daylight, people get drunk and drive down highways in the wrong direction. Right now I would trust this over me driving tired or drunk but not sober. Give it 5-10 years and better hardware and I think it will be a better driver than I am.
  - amelius 8y ago
    > Insurance companies which have hard data will lower your rates if your car has autopilot. That's probably because Tesla is liable. And it could be that at this point they don't mind operating at a loss in this area.

danso 8y ago

Seems like something that will be most enjoyed post-retirement, a godsend for American seniors who don't live in cities with good mass-transit.

atomical 8y ago
I'm sure all the seniors love riding public transit.
- danso 8y ago
  Lots of us younger folk are cool with it too. The point is that having it as an option, rather than being stuck at home unable to drive, is a big quality of life issue.
  - atomical 8y ago
    It was sarcasm.
  - paulie_a 8y ago
    I am still relatively younger and I work in an office literally located in a train station. I still avoid public transit as much as possible. The only exception is Amtrak. Public transportation sucks.
    - mattnewport 8y ago
      That very much depends on where you live. It's generally a lot better in Europe for a variety of reasons: historical, political and geographical. I use public transit quite a bit here in Vancouver but my limited experience of it in SF gives me some appreciation why people might not want to use it there.
      - atomical 8y ago
        People smell better in Europe? When people trot out their arguments against public transportation they always refer to the inefficiencies and completely ignore the human element. No one wants to be crammed in a small space with a bunch of strangers every day.

kjksf 8y ago

What is definition of "mass"? Waymo almost certainly will launch this year a fully self driving service, accessible to anyone, "within parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area, including Chandler, Tempe, Mesa and Gilbert" (https://waymo.com/apply/faq/ https://waymo.com/apply/faq/) which is where their pilot program has been running for several months now. See e.g. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/it-sure-looks-like-waymo-is-getting-ready-to-launch-in-phoenix/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/10/it-sure-looks-like-waym... They already have at least 600 cars in that area and already announced plans to buy 80k cars. So if by "mass" you mean "millions of cars available world wide" then yeah, maybe not 20 years but it'll take a decade to scale this world-wide. But to me "self driving works in practice" will be validated within months of Waymo launching in Arizona and then they'll enter a phase of dazzling scale up to other cities. For comparison it took Uber 7 years to outgrow taxis and I expect self driving to grow a bit faster. Once the technology works it's just a matter of capital expenditure and physical limits of how fast you can scale car manufacturing. It'll take many years to deploy this world-wide but I don't think this is the standard most people use when they determine if self driving technology works or not.

umanwizard 8y ago
What makes you think "works in Phoenix" is anywhere near "works in most places" ? I think the difficulty of driving in Phoenix suburbs is maybe 1% of the difficulty of driving in urban areas, anywhere with snow and rain, etc.
- kjksf 8y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenix,_Arizona "Phoenix is the capital and most populous city of the U.S. state of Arizona. With 1,626,078 people (as of 2017), Phoenix is the fifth most populous city nationwide" Explain the criteria you used to classify it as "suburbs". Phoenix is the first metro area to launch the service. Waymo (and others) are testing in other places. From https://waymo.com/ontheroad/ https://waymo.com/ontheroad/: Kirkland (lots of rain), Bay Area (including San Francisco), Detroit (snow during winter), Atlanta, Austin. I don't see how you arrived at the 1% and 1% of what? If it took Waymo 10 years to drive in Phonix, Arizona, it'll take them 1000 years to improve enough to drive in Detroit? Those things are pretty binary: either they can drive autonomously or they can't.

ausvisaissues 8y ago

Perhaps that is true, but some incremental steps have the possibility of making driving infinitely better. Imagine cars that refuse to tailgate, drive at excessive speed, drive with drowsy owners, drive on the right-hand side of the road in non-emergency situations, skip red traffic lights, etc...

makewavesnotwar 8y ago

Unless companies like Tesla stop worrying about being the next "Great American Industry" and start focusing on real world problems and their solutions. If Tesla could develop a network of self driving buses, that would have far greater reach and impact than trying to solve how to make a private network for charging and all case-considered self-driving system for asshole-mobiles. Not that Tesla cars aren't amazing, but they seem like a giant waste of resources for self-centered people. Not to mention in situations like self-driving, buses have completely predictable paths and because of that, it's much easier to optimize for corner cases to work toward a general solution. With the exception of the handicapped, people don't really need cars. Bikes/e-bikes work great for any type of commute <30 miles and hauling cargo <100 lbs with a trailer. Electric skateboards are also great if you have little to carry and <12 miles to go. Beyond that, self-driving delivery fleets in the vain of UPS and buses make sense. There's really no valid reason to use a car unless you're an invalid. But guys like Elon Musk are happy to burn the earth to the ground to terraform Mars instead of working on how to terraform places like Arizona or Pakistan because it looks better to them on paper. Or so it would seem.

morsch 8y ago
Divide your miles by 10 and they seem about right.
Broken_Hippo 8y ago
Bikes/e-bikes work great for any type of commute... Only when they aren't. Winter means snow, ice, and below zero temperatures and my hands simply can't handle the extra cold from the wind. I'm not handicapped and do walk during the winter, but tend to take the bus on the very rainy and very cold days despite dressing for the weather. let alone the fact that I'm no where near skilled enough with a bicycle to feel safe riding on 2inches of ice - regardless of studded tires. Summers have really strong sun, making folks deceptively warm and sweaty. I dont' know about your job, but most of mine want me to be clean and not smell of sweat when I arrive. I always have the chance of cargo: I walk to the grocery store most times. (I am not legal to drive in my present country). When I lived in Indiana, there were not only problems with actual weather, but then I ran into route problems. The easiest route for commutes was major roads, but unfortunately most of those roads aren't built for people to ride bikes or walk. In some places, doing either activity on those roads meant you got stopped by the cops and told to find another path to take. You were putting cars and yourself at risk using that road. Luckily, there are more paths for such things here. Not only that, but e-bikes have a limited range in most circumstances. Higher-end ones go far enough, but some of the cheaper models risk losing power at the higher ends. By the time most e-bikes has power to spare on those commutes, here they might be legally a scooter. I do agree with having a robust public transportation system, however. That actually soves the issues with the bikes, but bikes alone seem won't work.

ZephyrP 8y ago

Reading this comment (and the many like it) I get the feeling that something essential must be getting left out when we're speaking of the "far-off mass-deployed self-driving tech". Mostly because it directly contradicts my day-to-day experience. I've personally seen a few "self-driving cars" on the streets of SF and I suspect many of you reading this have as well (particularly if you live in the Mission or South Park). Just last year I was talkng with engineers at the self-driving car company "Cruise" which had a free internal app to taxi employees around with a self-driving car. I personally saw the tech demoed. One of the engineers called one up to go drinking the weekend prior (sans drinking buddies - company policy). He claimed his coworkers come to work in them occasionally. The cars and engineers could be a grand charade but it seems like "self-driving cars" are already used by non-daredevils every weekday. I learned to drive on backroads of rural Colorado; It may be these cars are safer than I in the sometimes "adverse" driving conditions of San Francisco. Is this really how a distant technology looks?

drostie 8y ago
Yes. That can be how a distant technology looks, if the stakes for failure are that people die. You can get early adopters from one tail of the bell curve, hype, working prototypes, and people dying because prototypes fail. There may be a churn of companies... "We know that AlphaDrive and BetaDrive both killed people but we here at GammaDrive want to reassure you that we're totally committed to your safety!" "But that's what BetaDrive said." "Yeah but we REALLY MEAN it this time." "Wait, what to you mean, 'we'?" "Um, nothing..." "You hired BetaDrive's employees when they went out of business, didn't you?" "Uh... Oh would you look at the time!" With that said I don't know Cruise and maybe they're doing better than Tesla.
paulie_a 8y ago
A few sightings in silicon valley is an incredible leap to mass adoption. And looking at cruise, their website is low grade marketing. Mostly concerned about hiring and not about pushing their actual technology. it's amateur hour honestly.