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I don't understand why Google/Uber are live testing with lethal SUVs instead of polystyrene golf-carts that could only hurt someone if they tried to eat it. We

I don't understand why Google/Uber are live testing with lethal SUVs instead of polystyrene golf-carts that could only hurt someone if they tried to eat it. We could be getting acclimatised to near disposable pizza delivery carts earning the algorithm enough trust for 2 tons of metal and a passenger.

sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
I can think of half a dozen likely reasons. I'm not sure which one it is, or if all of them could alone be fatal to your idea. - Such vehicles would not be street legal. - They would not be safe for passengers. - They would be unable to carry the necessary payloads. - Most of the weight of a car is in the chassis anyway, not the body. Edit: at any rate, Google did do something like what you described at an earlier stage of testing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnjuhBIhwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnjuhBIhwc They seem to be past that point, though.
- ams6110 8y ago
  In a modern car, the chassis and body are one and the same (unibody construction). Some cars do use plastic panels for non-structural parts. I would think another big reason though is that the handling and response of such a car would be very different from a real car. Stopping distances, acceleration, cornering, wind behavior, would all be different.
  - jerf 8y ago
    I can easily believe in code that adjusts to the underlying vehicle's differences. It seems to me the real problem would be that A: You need the car to be on the real streets, so at a minimum, it must be street legal. B: You need it to be on all the streets, including highways and such, so we're at least up to a Smart car level of body. From there it really isn't that great a leap to a full sedan chassis. Would one of those little cars even have room for all the requisite sensors? Even if they did, sedans are just so much more useful. So it seems like the minimum practical car to test with is a sedan, and that's enough to kill people. Even the little Smart cars are plenty enough to kill people.
    - cimmanom 8y ago
      At least a smart car would be less likely to kill than an SUV.
- alehul 8y ago
  > Such vehicles would not be street legal. On slow roads, I've often seen them driven around summer communities. It would be silly for the government to not allow this. > They would not be safe for passengers. The above commenter pointed out "enough trust for 2 tons of metal and a passenger," so I'm assuming the idea is that they don't have a passenger in them at this stage. Additionally, regardless of whether an SUV is safer for the individual behind the wheel, shouldn't it be that individual accepting the risk and not a random pedestrian who didn't consent to this experiment? > They would be unable to carry the necessary payloads. Do they really carry payloads at this stage? Isn't the focus on building a safe autonomous system? > Most of the weight of a car is in the chassis anyway, not the body. The golf carts are 1/8th to 1/4th the weight of a crossover, for example. The substantial issue I'd guess would be the differences in all aspects of performance between a real car and a golf cart, but at this stage companies like Uber should clearly just be testing detection of pedestrians et al.
  - sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
    At any rate, Google did do something like what that person described for a few years. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnjuhBIhwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnjuhBIhwc That stage of testing is past, though.
    - alehul 8y ago
      Thanks for the link! It seems reasonable that there should be some regulation on "x miles per incident" before autonomous vehicle companies are allowed to move forward from carts to full-sized cars. Based on the stats that have been posted on HN, Google is very safe. Uber, on the other hand, is not.
paulsutter 8y ago
I don’t understand why human drivers are live testing with lethal metal vehicles, causing 3000 deaths per day globally[1]. Human drivers should be banned from the roadways until vehicles include the safety systems needed to prevent these needless deaths. [1] 3000 deaths per day is 1.25 million annually, from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic... Edit: Uber’s program is a fiasco wrapped around a joke, but Waymo has taken an extremely careful approach and it’s a mistake to conflate the two.
- pretendscholar 8y ago
  Am I callous for thinking that isn't such a bad death rate?
  - gowld 8y ago
    That's a subjective judgment. What's fact is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_collisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_... > This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of death among young adults of 15–29 years of age (360,000 die a year) and the ninth cause of death for all ages worldwide. > It is estimated that motor vehicle collisions caused the deaths of around 60 million people during the 20th century,[6] around the same as the number of World War II casualties. Approximately 1% of all deaths are in car incidents.
    - pretendscholar 8y ago
      These may be facts, but extremely misleading facts. Why are you comparing WWII casualties (a five year period involving half the worlds population) with a century of the global population? Its also a fact the total deaths per year, at least in the US, is falling and the deaths per mile has dropped precipitously.
    - gambiting 8y ago
      The problem with those statistics is that they include drunk driving accidents(particularly people who drunk drive and die) - it's like saying "10,000 people die on holidays every year!" while including people who do underwater cave diving. If you don't engage in a certain activity, it's impossible to die from it(obviously it's still possible to get killed by a drunk driver at no fault of your own, but to me that shouldn't count in the same category as drunk people dying when driving).
Arnt 8y ago
1. Can polystyrene golfcarts move at real-traffic speeds? And be light enough to not hurt anyone even when they contain fuel, an engine, a human/backup driver and the recording equipment? I'm not an expert but it seems unlikely. 2. I understand that Google does the vast majority of its testing without any iron at all, but rather tests new software using recorded input.
bryanlarsen 8y ago
Something like this? https://www.google.com/search?q=google+self+driving+bubble+car&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=google+self+driving+bubble+c...
wffurr 8y ago
Heck I don't understand why most people drive lethal SUVs for short trips that could be much more efficiently accomplished with a golf cart aka NEV. Especially in dense urban areas where your average speed ends up being only 10-20 mph anyway.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  - People want big cars and big cars are cheap enough for them to get. - For the perceived feeling of safety in larger cars. - For the off chance that once a year they might need to take some extra large load (e.g. help a friend with moving). AKA. emotional needs, not practical ones.
  - bobthepanda 8y ago
    Which is also why I have always found the notion of "everyone will be using shared fleets" so rich. Carpooling rates have declined across the years in America - http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/voices/col-potential-savings-ride-sharing-carpooling-incentives.html http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/voices/col-potential-...
    - stickfigure 8y ago
      I don't see the problem. If you're going to own one vehicle, you need to size for peak loads. If you hail a self-driving vehicle, you can size for the trip. I see no reason to expect the composition of rental fleets to mirror purchased vehicle preferences. Carpooling is not a meaningful comparison. Carpooling requires picking up (and tolerating) other people on a semi-rigid schedule. Hailing a self-driving car has all the benefits of driving solo, plus you don't have to drive.
  - ectospheno 8y ago
    It snows where I live. My street floods. I have a family. I frequently want to carry a large number of items. I get that SUV's aren't for everyone. Acting like they are for no one is silly though.
mlthoughts2018 8y ago
The replies to your comment seem only to focus on ways that this type of safer vehicle differs from the eventual commercial traffic use case. But who cares? It still seems like it would be valuable to collect many millions of simulation hours and eventual live testing hours with far safer vehicle types first, at minimum just as a proof of concept and a prove-out of the appropriate testing and evaluation infrastructure (e.g. we’ll probably be a lot better at extending the audit process that evaluates autonomous golf carts into an audit process for common cars than we would be just jumping straight to auditing cars without ever having audited anything else). In fact, it seems irresponsible to not prove out the entire end to end ecosystem (from simulations to live testing to auditing to a commercially approved deployment in some limited scenario) using a much smaller scale application and vehicle type. I can understand the arms race motivation for cutting corners and jumping straight to the widest use cases on the part of corporations. But I can’t see why society would want it handled that way.
- TulliusCicero 8y ago
  > But I can’t see why society would want it handled that way. Because these self driving cars aren't being developed to solve a hypothetical problem, they're being developed to solve the very real and current problem of cars killing 40,000 people in the US each year. If extra safety measures result in killing ten fewer people in testing, but delay the introduction of self-driving cars by a year or two, that could mean thousands of preventable deaths still occurred. Are the lives of those people definitely getting killed right now worth 100x less than the lives of those who might get killed with these tests? And this isn't baseless speculation. People are already obviously dying all the time, and improving these cars' software would be much harder without the kind of real-world data they're currently collecting.
  - rimliu 8y ago
    It is baseless speculation. There is a high chance, that drivers most likeky to die in a car accident are less likely to use SDC. Also, estimating how safe sekf-driving car is you should take into account all the cases where human took over. Also there are many accidents in weather conditions where self driving car would not be able to drive at all.
ajross 8y ago
Your statement is an indictment of SUVs, not self-driving vehicles. Every one of those reasons for it being a bad idea for Google/Uber applies to it being a bad idea for you, too. Giant vehicles are a bad idea, period. But they're no less bad for robots.
skybrian 8y ago
They already did some of that testing. https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a10016894/google-retires-its-25-mph-self-driving-koala-mobiles/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a100168...

sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago

I can think of half a dozen likely reasons. I'm not sure which one it is, or if all of them could alone be fatal to your idea. - Such vehicles would not be street legal. - They would not be safe for passengers. - They would be unable to carry the necessary payloads. - Most of the weight of a car is in the chassis anyway, not the body. Edit: at any rate, Google did do something like what you described at an earlier stage of testing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnjuhBIhwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnjuhBIhwc They seem to be past that point, though.

ams6110 8y ago
In a modern car, the chassis and body are one and the same (unibody construction). Some cars do use plastic panels for non-structural parts. I would think another big reason though is that the handling and response of such a car would be very different from a real car. Stopping distances, acceleration, cornering, wind behavior, would all be different.
- jerf 8y ago
  I can easily believe in code that adjusts to the underlying vehicle's differences. It seems to me the real problem would be that A: You need the car to be on the real streets, so at a minimum, it must be street legal. B: You need it to be on all the streets, including highways and such, so we're at least up to a Smart car level of body. From there it really isn't that great a leap to a full sedan chassis. Would one of those little cars even have room for all the requisite sensors? Even if they did, sedans are just so much more useful. So it seems like the minimum practical car to test with is a sedan, and that's enough to kill people. Even the little Smart cars are plenty enough to kill people.
  - cimmanom 8y ago
    At least a smart car would be less likely to kill than an SUV.
alehul 8y ago
> Such vehicles would not be street legal. On slow roads, I've often seen them driven around summer communities. It would be silly for the government to not allow this. > They would not be safe for passengers. The above commenter pointed out "enough trust for 2 tons of metal and a passenger," so I'm assuming the idea is that they don't have a passenger in them at this stage. Additionally, regardless of whether an SUV is safer for the individual behind the wheel, shouldn't it be that individual accepting the risk and not a random pedestrian who didn't consent to this experiment? > They would be unable to carry the necessary payloads. Do they really carry payloads at this stage? Isn't the focus on building a safe autonomous system? > Most of the weight of a car is in the chassis anyway, not the body. The golf carts are 1/8th to 1/4th the weight of a crossover, for example. The substantial issue I'd guess would be the differences in all aspects of performance between a real car and a golf cart, but at this stage companies like Uber should clearly just be testing detection of pedestrians et al.
- sdhgaiojfsa 8y ago
  At any rate, Google did do something like what that person described for a few years. Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnjuhBIhwc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJnjuhBIhwc That stage of testing is past, though.
  - alehul 8y ago
    Thanks for the link! It seems reasonable that there should be some regulation on "x miles per incident" before autonomous vehicle companies are allowed to move forward from carts to full-sized cars. Based on the stats that have been posted on HN, Google is very safe. Uber, on the other hand, is not.

paulsutter 8y ago

I don’t understand why human drivers are live testing with lethal metal vehicles, causing 3000 deaths per day globally[1]. Human drivers should be banned from the roadways until vehicles include the safety systems needed to prevent these needless deaths. [1] 3000 deaths per day is 1.25 million annually, from https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic... Edit: Uber’s program is a fiasco wrapped around a joke, but Waymo has taken an extremely careful approach and it’s a mistake to conflate the two.

pretendscholar 8y ago
Am I callous for thinking that isn't such a bad death rate?
- gowld 8y ago
  That's a subjective judgment. What's fact is that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_collisions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_... > This makes motor vehicle collisions the leading cause of death among young adults of 15–29 years of age (360,000 die a year) and the ninth cause of death for all ages worldwide. > It is estimated that motor vehicle collisions caused the deaths of around 60 million people during the 20th century,[6] around the same as the number of World War II casualties. Approximately 1% of all deaths are in car incidents.
  - pretendscholar 8y ago
    These may be facts, but extremely misleading facts. Why are you comparing WWII casualties (a five year period involving half the worlds population) with a century of the global population? Its also a fact the total deaths per year, at least in the US, is falling and the deaths per mile has dropped precipitously.
  - gambiting 8y ago
    The problem with those statistics is that they include drunk driving accidents(particularly people who drunk drive and die) - it's like saying "10,000 people die on holidays every year!" while including people who do underwater cave diving. If you don't engage in a certain activity, it's impossible to die from it(obviously it's still possible to get killed by a drunk driver at no fault of your own, but to me that shouldn't count in the same category as drunk people dying when driving).

Arnt 8y ago

1. Can polystyrene golfcarts move at real-traffic speeds? And be light enough to not hurt anyone even when they contain fuel, an engine, a human/backup driver and the recording equipment? I'm not an expert but it seems unlikely. 2. I understand that Google does the vast majority of its testing without any iron at all, but rather tests new software using recorded input.

bryanlarsen 8y ago

Something like this? https://www.google.com/search?q=google+self+driving+bubble+car&tbm=isch https://www.google.com/search?q=google+self+driving+bubble+c...

wffurr 8y ago

Heck I don't understand why most people drive lethal SUVs for short trips that could be much more efficiently accomplished with a golf cart aka NEV. Especially in dense urban areas where your average speed ends up being only 10-20 mph anyway.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
- People want big cars and big cars are cheap enough for them to get. - For the perceived feeling of safety in larger cars. - For the off chance that once a year they might need to take some extra large load (e.g. help a friend with moving). AKA. emotional needs, not practical ones.
- bobthepanda 8y ago
  Which is also why I have always found the notion of "everyone will be using shared fleets" so rich. Carpooling rates have declined across the years in America - http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/voices/col-potential-savings-ride-sharing-carpooling-incentives.html http://www.governing.com/gov-institute/voices/col-potential-...
  - stickfigure 8y ago
    I don't see the problem. If you're going to own one vehicle, you need to size for peak loads. If you hail a self-driving vehicle, you can size for the trip. I see no reason to expect the composition of rental fleets to mirror purchased vehicle preferences. Carpooling is not a meaningful comparison. Carpooling requires picking up (and tolerating) other people on a semi-rigid schedule. Hailing a self-driving car has all the benefits of driving solo, plus you don't have to drive.
- ectospheno 8y ago
  It snows where I live. My street floods. I have a family. I frequently want to carry a large number of items. I get that SUV's aren't for everyone. Acting like they are for no one is silly though.

mlthoughts2018 8y ago

The replies to your comment seem only to focus on ways that this type of safer vehicle differs from the eventual commercial traffic use case. But who cares? It still seems like it would be valuable to collect many millions of simulation hours and eventual live testing hours with far safer vehicle types first, at minimum just as a proof of concept and a prove-out of the appropriate testing and evaluation infrastructure (e.g. we’ll probably be a lot better at extending the audit process that evaluates autonomous golf carts into an audit process for common cars than we would be just jumping straight to auditing cars without ever having audited anything else). In fact, it seems irresponsible to not prove out the entire end to end ecosystem (from simulations to live testing to auditing to a commercially approved deployment in some limited scenario) using a much smaller scale application and vehicle type. I can understand the arms race motivation for cutting corners and jumping straight to the widest use cases on the part of corporations. But I can’t see why society would want it handled that way.

TulliusCicero 8y ago
> But I can’t see why society would want it handled that way. Because these self driving cars aren't being developed to solve a hypothetical problem, they're being developed to solve the very real and current problem of cars killing 40,000 people in the US each year. If extra safety measures result in killing ten fewer people in testing, but delay the introduction of self-driving cars by a year or two, that could mean thousands of preventable deaths still occurred. Are the lives of those people definitely getting killed right now worth 100x less than the lives of those who might get killed with these tests? And this isn't baseless speculation. People are already obviously dying all the time, and improving these cars' software would be much harder without the kind of real-world data they're currently collecting.
- rimliu 8y ago
  It is baseless speculation. There is a high chance, that drivers most likeky to die in a car accident are less likely to use SDC. Also, estimating how safe sekf-driving car is you should take into account all the cases where human took over. Also there are many accidents in weather conditions where self driving car would not be able to drive at all.

ajross 8y ago

Your statement is an indictment of SUVs, not self-driving vehicles. Every one of those reasons for it being a bad idea for Google/Uber applies to it being a bad idea for you, too. Giant vehicles are a bad idea, period. But they're no less bad for robots.

skybrian 8y ago

They already did some of that testing. https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a10016894/google-retires-its-25-mph-self-driving-koala-mobiles/ https://www.roadandtrack.com/new-cars/car-technology/a100168...