9 ms·

Driverless Cars Tap the Brakes After Years of Hype

45 points by mudil 8y ago

01100011 8y ago
I guess I missed the predictions where people thought we'd have fully autonomous vehicles by 2019. It seems to me that we're on track for having something in a 5-10 year timeframe. Yeah, it won't be perfect, but it doesn't need to be. In the meantime we'll see more and more driver assist technologies which will slowly transition us to fully autonomous driving.
- perl4ever 8y ago
  I don't have specific references, but yes, for several years I have been reading about how we are on the cusp of autonomous driving. For long enough that I got bored of discussing it maybe a year ago. In support, this article says "Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk in 2016 promised to demonstrate a vehicle traveling in fully autonomous mode from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017." Is it possible you don't remember the predictions because you weren't reading about autonomous driving a couple years ago? It seems like trends and popular obsessions come and go very quickly these days. If you blink, you can miss it, like the rise and fall of bitcoin.
  - dlp211 8y ago
    Or it could be that you were looking to techno-optimists for your predictions while others were looking to those that actually were involved in the tech.
    - simonh 8y ago
      He is a techno-optimist, but Elon Musk is not involved in the tech?
    - rayiner 8y ago
      Like Musk?
    - perl4ever 8y ago
      I was a skeptic all along, because it seemed like the "techno-optimists" failed to grasp the difficulty of writing software in general. I'm sure the people that engaged in most online discussions that I remember were not experts. However, I don't see why you point to people actually working on self-driving cars as if they would have been pessimists - why work on such things if they didn't believe it was feasible?
  - LoSboccacc 8y ago
    And Waymo promising full autonomous cars by last year, even if they limited the scope in space and weather they missed it
- drieddust 8y ago
  As an observer of this development, this is not correct.I recollect press releases deliberately ignoring the big elephants in the room. As an outsider relying completely on press, I think they lied by omission. When self driving was first demonstrated to work, constraints were never highlighted. For example I did not see any discussion on the topics like black ice, needing a sufficiently accurate area map, proper road marking etc. in advance were never in new. Humans might struggle but can still drive in those conditions. On the issue of driver assistance, I believe more of might give drives a sense of false safety and hence cause more accidents.
  - rohit2412 8y ago
    This! So much this! I remember a interview by Elon musk at a conference called CODE where he espoused that driverless cars are solved because all you need to do is get a car to stay in Lane and brake safely at low speeds. And everybody bought it. Well, where is the cross country summon, coast to coast autonomous drive, driverless taxi networks. It astounds me that one can blatantly lie repeatedly and not be called out.
- threeseed 8y ago
  When you have car companies throwing about the name AutoPilot you can't blame consumers for thinking it's coming soon.
- allworknoplay 8y ago
  Bits and pieces like trucking or taxis in relatively easy cities have been expected very near-term by a lot of companies for a while. I don't think anyone has said manually driven cars will be entirely off the road at a given point in time. Even the bits, though, should have a hugely disruptive impact on their markets.
- pj_mukh 8y ago
  Yea in 2015, I distinctly remember people were predicting a 5-10 year "aggressive" timeline [1] with most AI peeps citing 10-20 years (I'm discounting Muskian bravado here messing up my averages). We are about on track on that timeline I'd say. As usual, the truth is a lot more boring than most people predicted. But WSJ gotta have something to write about I guess. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2015/01/31/technology-is-going-to-make-truck-drivers-obsolete-in-a-decade-report-says/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2015/01/31/tec...
- JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
  As soon as a few months ago even mentioning here that you didn’t think autonomous cars were close to being ready got downvotes. People don’t understand how complicated driving a car in all conditions is and how much the human brain is doing already.
- Eridrus 8y ago
  I remember in 2017 being pretty convinced that we'd have something commercially operating within 5 years and my wife being skeptical. As recently as a few months ago, I still felt pretty good about that prediction. WayMo's non-launch launch has made me a lot less bullish, since I really had assumed they were almost there, at least in terms of Phoenix. And 2022 is looking a whole lot closer these days.
- untog 8y ago
  "GM says it will launch a robot taxi service in 2019" - 11/30/17 https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720776/gm-cruise-self-driving-taxi-launch-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720776/gm-cruise-self-... "GM Hitting Bumps on $5 Billion Road to Driverless Cars by 2019" - 10/25/2018 https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/10/25/505576.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/10/25/50... The hype has definitely been there, and on HN too. I can't find it now, but there was a great Twitter thread around New Year of someone calling in a bet they'd made with an SV figure about self driving Lyfts by 2019.
- intended 8y ago
  We are almost certainly not on track for autonomous vehicles. The simple test for autonomous vehicles is “can they drive in Indian traffic.” We are very likely, on track for a correction in the form of “ we never meant level 5 autonomy.” We will see some form of assisted driving, and nothing beyond. It’s concerning that people aren’t thinking of attackers (or the govt) taking over your car first on HN. This is the happy start of AI, Just like the happy start of the web. Those were the days before the RIAA, before phishing, five eyes, and the unending loss of innocence that it has been since then.
  - ddingus 8y ago
    >It’s concerning that people aren’t thinking of attackers (or the govt) taking over your car first on HN. Yup. I am quite concerned at how capable newer cars are, sans an equal level of security and safety consideration applied. There are going to be some ugly things happen, then we will see a correction. For now? No way I plan on owning anything networked, drive by wire. And so many things are coming long before we get great self-driving vehicles. In fact, I think they will be requirements to ease the transition to them, due to the reduced complexity when humans are not part of the equation. "We have geofenced your car, due to erratic, incompatible, [insert irritating justification here], driving patterns." "Your car has been speed limited for your safety..." Yeah. Gonna be fun.
    - intended 8y ago
      And the argument FOR such controls writes itself! Do you know how many people die to drunk driving? Rash driving? Accidents in general? Imagine if we could stop all that? Those millions of lives all over the world, saved. Who could stand against such a moral argument and defend the right for people to act rashly while piloting tonnes of moving metal every day?
      - ddingus 8y ago
        If I thought for a minute those things would not be abused, count me in.
seibelj 8y ago
I’m sure it will be 5 to 10 years away 5 to 10 years from now, just as they were saying 5 to 10 years ago. I do think it will happen someday but this is an insanely complex problem with enormous danger and risk. I am most impressed with the AI hucksters who convinced investors that the tech was close and then commanded 7 figure salaries to work on it. An impressive feat!
WhompingWindows 8y ago
There will be, and have been, people on both sides of the SDC debate, bulls and bears, for years going back and forth. There are good talking-points for bulls in that the technology improves yearly and there are local roll-outs, there are great talking points for bears in delayed national-scale roll-outs, and taking on the overoptimistic estimates of years past.
soup10 8y ago
they should focus on mastering mundane routine driving and have a backup to switch to remote controlled operation for risky or unusual situations.
- googlemike 8y ago
  I am not convinced you understand this problem space well. The very notion of defining two such states is extremely elusive.
  - threeseed 8y ago
    Might want to look into Toyota Guardian before dismissing the approach. As it's exactly what they are planning to roll out in the short to medium term.
  - soup10 8y ago
    what's elusive about it? there's some pretty obvious situations where you expect driverless cars to have trouble: bad weather, unusual traffic or pedestrian patterns, emergency vehicles, rarely travelled roadways...
- nradov 8y ago
  Outside of a few limited areas, remote control driving isn't a viable option due to the unreliability of cellular data networks.
  - lsc 8y ago
    making a safety-grade data network would be an interesting challenge. I do think it is a possible thing to do over limited areas, and I think that if we had defined areas that had safety-rated networks, that's a thing that self-driving cars could plan around... e.g. if you request a trip outside of those areas, the self driving car would take you as far as it could and then park, allowing you to prepare to drive manually.
Jedi72 8y ago
Driverless cars are IMHO a classic example of technology looking for a problem to solve. Improving road safety, the biggest reason for them (again IMHO) can be achieved with existing technology by implementing smart roads with sensors and cameras as well as vehicle datalinks which can predict and warn when a car is about to blow through an intersection in front of you or whatever, and instantly alert authorities when a driver speeds or is driving erratically (you might call this dystopian, but I would argue you have more freedom here than with an autonomous car you literally cant drive over the speed limit). The second major reason is automation, which I agree is nice, but if you analyze the cost of trucking [0] you see that drivers wages and benefits account for only 20%-40% of the operating costs in the trucking industry. If you use the typical startup cliche that a 10x improvement is necessary to really change a market, the economics of driverless vehicles just dont add up. It seems like a great idea to rich east-coasters who wish they could work on their daily commute, but outside of certain bubbles I don't think they make any sense. IMHO. 0 - http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-Operational-Costs-of-Trucking-2017-10-2017.pdf http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-Opera...
- luckydata 8y ago
  Oh c'mon, let's not be silly. One thing is to say it's unpractical to do now, or maybe ever, but the problem is very real. Having the ability for a vehicle to drive itself reliably on normal roads would have a transformational effect on society, first of all the end of car ownership as we have it today.
  - Jedi72 8y ago
    But of you tackle the problem first, and not the technology, it makes more sense to just build automated road systems. Dumb pod-like cars which are driven by roadside controllers. If we decide to go down this route it can be achieved with existing technology, today. This is the ultimate scenario most people imagine with self-driving cars anyway, a future where hardly any of the cars on the road are driven by humans. We should just go straight there.
    - 8y ago
iambateman 8y ago
There are tons of technical problems but the fundamental issue is our expectations. Driverless cars can’t just respond as well as a human would have - they have to be better. They have to “know” the black ice was there. Or the pothole was there. Or the construction was there. And then they have to respond “reasonably”, which is tough because computers are fundamentally “reasonless” machines at the moment. If our expectations were driving during the day on a few defined streets in nice weather, perhaps going a bit slower and with the understanding that things may get a little jerky, I think we would be ok. In other words...we need to give self-driving cars permission to be like we once were: not amazing at driving. We need to give the cars a learners permit.
- ec109685 8y ago
  That’s why they are deploying driver assitent technology now and human co-pilots for any cars with autonomous driving capability. Unlike with humans, the learning is transferable with driverless cars.
  - masonic 8y ago
    The drivers provide instruction in a form that will be retained by the software?
    - ec109685 8y ago
      Yes, via recording and labeling what the human does when it’s not engaged and during any take overs when it is engaged.
- esturk 8y ago
  People often say self driving cars have to be better than humans but they often neglect to ask "what % of the population does it have to be better than?". Today's self driving cars are already better than some drivers. You don't have to look farther than r/IdiotsInCars. I would say that if self driving cars are better than 50% of the population, that would be good enough. Removing most of the accident prone individuals would be greatly beneficial already.
nine_k 8y ago
Driverless cars are a much harder problem than driverless trucks. Once the latter become day-to-day reality on highways, I'll become cautiously optimistic about autonomous cars in cities.
- gboudrias 8y ago
  I've read somewhere that driverless trucks are pretty much as hard as driverless anything, because there's always that last mile in a city. It's impossible for the ride to be 100% automated, and anything less is pointless at the moment. I think we'll need some extremely standardized "pre-last-mile" highway exits/transfer points across the whole country to have the beginnings of a new solution. And I doubt the Teamsters will be onboard with that.
  - dehrmann 8y ago
    > ...there's always that last mile in a city But what if that's the only mile driven by a human? Trucks drive autonomously on highways in good conditions, then a human takes over for the last mile?
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  One issue is current sensor range. A truck on the highway has a way longer stopping distance than a car and requires sensors that are not quite there yet: sure radar could see obstacle that far but the lane detection necessary to distinguish a car parked on the line from a car on the shoulder can't yet see that far
- yumraj 8y ago
  As long as they both share the same road and drive in the same traffic it doesn't make sense as to how can one be a harder problem than the other. In fact I never want a driverless 80,000lb 18 wheeler anywhere near me when I'm driving. A 5000lb driverless car is scary enough.
ryebreadistasty 8y ago
I wouldn't trust an autonomous vehicle at all unless it wasn't networked; in fact I've made sure that my car isn't networked at all due to the fact that autonomous or not they can be hacked by cutting power to everything except power steering, the radio, and the car outlets. Networking and control of the car being linked is asking for trouble, not to mention that somehow they fucked up the non-autonomous cars so that it's possible to hack those and drive them with a laptop too. Link for the lazy: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/computer-hackers-control-car-deliberate-accidents-national-security-issue-a8066466.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
- ddingus 8y ago
  Having driven very new cars, rentals mostly, there are few compelling features that I can't just add to an older, not smart car. And that is exactly what I plan on doing for some time yet. Frankly, the bright nav screens, menus and other gunk prove quite distracting. I really hate most of them. A few can be dimmed, or turned off, but none seem to remember that state, always eager to display some warning or other. Seems to me, if it always needs a warning, I really don't need it in the car. I feel we are way over hype on self-driving vehicles. The tech is advancing nicely enough, but the problem scope still seems very large relative to what we've solved for.
bitL 8y ago
Almost all technical problems of self-driving cars are solved by current algorithms once we get 100x faster HW, i.e. processing at 1000 fps instead of 10, making things like tracking, collision avoidance, vision, etc. trivial; the only problem left is path planning (down to inch resolution with dynamic vehicle models), which is coincidentally NP-hard and there is very little hope to get it to human level in reasonable time (Waymo is still orders of magnitude worse than an average human).
- lsc 8y ago
  >Almost all technical problems of self-driving cars are solved by current algorithms once we get 100x faster HW, That sounds off to me, because my understanding is that the computer is a small portion of the cost and the mass of the self-driving car. If you could solve the problem by just filling up the back seats with computers, someone would have prototyped it, and probably even brought it to market as a way to drive large vehicles. (I mean, unless you were on some non-parallelizable process, but my understanding is that most image processing tasks are massively parallel.)
xbmcuser 8y ago
I have never believed that we will get fully autonomus cars suddenly. But each year cars will be able to do more on their own. It will be a gradual transition. Where the driver's will let it park on it's own, drive on the freeways/highway on it's own. To allowing it to go from the highway to home or work on it's own on a regularly used routes. I feel people that dismiss autonomuos cars completely and people expecting them to be perfect in the next few years are both wrong.
dongping 8y ago
What astounded me talking to people working in self-driving car start-ups and spin-offs from incumbents, is that how little they care about simulation. The last accident from Uber confirmed that yet again. The fact is absolutely difficult to comprehend, when Waymo has allegely done a huge amount of simulation.

45 points by mudil 8y ago

I guess I missed the predictions where people thought we'd have fully autonomous vehicles by 2019. It seems to me that we're on track for having something in a 5-10 year timeframe. Yeah, it won't be perfect, but it doesn't need to be. In the meantime we'll see more and more driver assist technologies which will slowly transition us to fully autonomous driving.

perl4ever 8y ago
I don't have specific references, but yes, for several years I have been reading about how we are on the cusp of autonomous driving. For long enough that I got bored of discussing it maybe a year ago. In support, this article says "Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk in 2016 promised to demonstrate a vehicle traveling in fully autonomous mode from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017." Is it possible you don't remember the predictions because you weren't reading about autonomous driving a couple years ago? It seems like trends and popular obsessions come and go very quickly these days. If you blink, you can miss it, like the rise and fall of bitcoin.
- dlp211 8y ago
  Or it could be that you were looking to techno-optimists for your predictions while others were looking to those that actually were involved in the tech.
  - simonh 8y ago
    He is a techno-optimist, but Elon Musk is not involved in the tech?
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Like Musk?
  - perl4ever 8y ago
    I was a skeptic all along, because it seemed like the "techno-optimists" failed to grasp the difficulty of writing software in general. I'm sure the people that engaged in most online discussions that I remember were not experts. However, I don't see why you point to people actually working on self-driving cars as if they would have been pessimists - why work on such things if they didn't believe it was feasible?
- LoSboccacc 8y ago
  And Waymo promising full autonomous cars by last year, even if they limited the scope in space and weather they missed it
drieddust 8y ago
As an observer of this development, this is not correct.I recollect press releases deliberately ignoring the big elephants in the room. As an outsider relying completely on press, I think they lied by omission. When self driving was first demonstrated to work, constraints were never highlighted. For example I did not see any discussion on the topics like black ice, needing a sufficiently accurate area map, proper road marking etc. in advance were never in new. Humans might struggle but can still drive in those conditions. On the issue of driver assistance, I believe more of might give drives a sense of false safety and hence cause more accidents.
- rohit2412 8y ago
  This! So much this! I remember a interview by Elon musk at a conference called CODE where he espoused that driverless cars are solved because all you need to do is get a car to stay in Lane and brake safely at low speeds. And everybody bought it. Well, where is the cross country summon, coast to coast autonomous drive, driverless taxi networks. It astounds me that one can blatantly lie repeatedly and not be called out.
threeseed 8y ago
When you have car companies throwing about the name AutoPilot you can't blame consumers for thinking it's coming soon.
allworknoplay 8y ago
Bits and pieces like trucking or taxis in relatively easy cities have been expected very near-term by a lot of companies for a while. I don't think anyone has said manually driven cars will be entirely off the road at a given point in time. Even the bits, though, should have a hugely disruptive impact on their markets.
pj_mukh 8y ago
Yea in 2015, I distinctly remember people were predicting a 5-10 year "aggressive" timeline [1] with most AI peeps citing 10-20 years (I'm discounting Muskian bravado here messing up my averages). We are about on track on that timeline I'd say. As usual, the truth is a lot more boring than most people predicted. But WSJ gotta have something to write about I guess. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2015/01/31/technology-is-going-to-make-truck-drivers-obsolete-in-a-decade-report-says/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2015/01/31/tec...
JohnJamesRambo 8y ago
As soon as a few months ago even mentioning here that you didn’t think autonomous cars were close to being ready got downvotes. People don’t understand how complicated driving a car in all conditions is and how much the human brain is doing already.
Eridrus 8y ago
I remember in 2017 being pretty convinced that we'd have something commercially operating within 5 years and my wife being skeptical. As recently as a few months ago, I still felt pretty good about that prediction. WayMo's non-launch launch has made me a lot less bullish, since I really had assumed they were almost there, at least in terms of Phoenix. And 2022 is looking a whole lot closer these days.
untog 8y ago
"GM says it will launch a robot taxi service in 2019" - 11/30/17 https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720776/gm-cruise-self-driving-taxi-launch-2019 https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720776/gm-cruise-self-... "GM Hitting Bumps on $5 Billion Road to Driverless Cars by 2019" - 10/25/2018 https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/10/25/505576.htm https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/10/25/50... The hype has definitely been there, and on HN too. I can't find it now, but there was a great Twitter thread around New Year of someone calling in a bet they'd made with an SV figure about self driving Lyfts by 2019.
intended 8y ago
We are almost certainly not on track for autonomous vehicles. The simple test for autonomous vehicles is “can they drive in Indian traffic.” We are very likely, on track for a correction in the form of “ we never meant level 5 autonomy.” We will see some form of assisted driving, and nothing beyond. It’s concerning that people aren’t thinking of attackers (or the govt) taking over your car first on HN. This is the happy start of AI, Just like the happy start of the web. Those were the days before the RIAA, before phishing, five eyes, and the unending loss of innocence that it has been since then.
- ddingus 8y ago
  >It’s concerning that people aren’t thinking of attackers (or the govt) taking over your car first on HN. Yup. I am quite concerned at how capable newer cars are, sans an equal level of security and safety consideration applied. There are going to be some ugly things happen, then we will see a correction. For now? No way I plan on owning anything networked, drive by wire. And so many things are coming long before we get great self-driving vehicles. In fact, I think they will be requirements to ease the transition to them, due to the reduced complexity when humans are not part of the equation. "We have geofenced your car, due to erratic, incompatible, [insert irritating justification here], driving patterns." "Your car has been speed limited for your safety..." Yeah. Gonna be fun.
  - intended 8y ago
    And the argument FOR such controls writes itself! Do you know how many people die to drunk driving? Rash driving? Accidents in general? Imagine if we could stop all that? Those millions of lives all over the world, saved. Who could stand against such a moral argument and defend the right for people to act rashly while piloting tonnes of moving metal every day?
    - ddingus 8y ago
      If I thought for a minute those things would not be abused, count me in.

seibelj 8y ago

I’m sure it will be 5 to 10 years away 5 to 10 years from now, just as they were saying 5 to 10 years ago. I do think it will happen someday but this is an insanely complex problem with enormous danger and risk. I am most impressed with the AI hucksters who convinced investors that the tech was close and then commanded 7 figure salaries to work on it. An impressive feat!

WhompingWindows 8y ago

There will be, and have been, people on both sides of the SDC debate, bulls and bears, for years going back and forth. There are good talking-points for bulls in that the technology improves yearly and there are local roll-outs, there are great talking points for bears in delayed national-scale roll-outs, and taking on the overoptimistic estimates of years past.

soup10 8y ago

they should focus on mastering mundane routine driving and have a backup to switch to remote controlled operation for risky or unusual situations.

googlemike 8y ago
I am not convinced you understand this problem space well. The very notion of defining two such states is extremely elusive.
- threeseed 8y ago
  Might want to look into Toyota Guardian before dismissing the approach. As it's exactly what they are planning to roll out in the short to medium term.
- soup10 8y ago
  what's elusive about it? there's some pretty obvious situations where you expect driverless cars to have trouble: bad weather, unusual traffic or pedestrian patterns, emergency vehicles, rarely travelled roadways...
nradov 8y ago
Outside of a few limited areas, remote control driving isn't a viable option due to the unreliability of cellular data networks.
- lsc 8y ago
  making a safety-grade data network would be an interesting challenge. I do think it is a possible thing to do over limited areas, and I think that if we had defined areas that had safety-rated networks, that's a thing that self-driving cars could plan around... e.g. if you request a trip outside of those areas, the self driving car would take you as far as it could and then park, allowing you to prepare to drive manually.

Jedi72 8y ago

Driverless cars are IMHO a classic example of technology looking for a problem to solve. Improving road safety, the biggest reason for them (again IMHO) can be achieved with existing technology by implementing smart roads with sensors and cameras as well as vehicle datalinks which can predict and warn when a car is about to blow through an intersection in front of you or whatever, and instantly alert authorities when a driver speeds or is driving erratically (you might call this dystopian, but I would argue you have more freedom here than with an autonomous car you literally cant drive over the speed limit). The second major reason is automation, which I agree is nice, but if you analyze the cost of trucking [0] you see that drivers wages and benefits account for only 20%-40% of the operating costs in the trucking industry. If you use the typical startup cliche that a 10x improvement is necessary to really change a market, the economics of driverless vehicles just dont add up. It seems like a great idea to rich east-coasters who wish they could work on their daily commute, but outside of certain bubbles I don't think they make any sense. IMHO. 0 - http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-Operational-Costs-of-Trucking-2017-10-2017.pdf http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-Opera...

luckydata 8y ago
Oh c'mon, let's not be silly. One thing is to say it's unpractical to do now, or maybe ever, but the problem is very real. Having the ability for a vehicle to drive itself reliably on normal roads would have a transformational effect on society, first of all the end of car ownership as we have it today.
- Jedi72 8y ago
  But of you tackle the problem first, and not the technology, it makes more sense to just build automated road systems. Dumb pod-like cars which are driven by roadside controllers. If we decide to go down this route it can be achieved with existing technology, today. This is the ultimate scenario most people imagine with self-driving cars anyway, a future where hardly any of the cars on the road are driven by humans. We should just go straight there.
  - 8y ago

iambateman 8y ago

There are tons of technical problems but the fundamental issue is our expectations. Driverless cars can’t just respond as well as a human would have - they have to be better. They have to “know” the black ice was there. Or the pothole was there. Or the construction was there. And then they have to respond “reasonably”, which is tough because computers are fundamentally “reasonless” machines at the moment. If our expectations were driving during the day on a few defined streets in nice weather, perhaps going a bit slower and with the understanding that things may get a little jerky, I think we would be ok. In other words...we need to give self-driving cars permission to be like we once were: not amazing at driving. We need to give the cars a learners permit.

ec109685 8y ago
That’s why they are deploying driver assitent technology now and human co-pilots for any cars with autonomous driving capability. Unlike with humans, the learning is transferable with driverless cars.
- masonic 8y ago
  The drivers provide instruction in a form that will be retained by the software?
  - ec109685 8y ago
    Yes, via recording and labeling what the human does when it’s not engaged and during any take overs when it is engaged.
esturk 8y ago
People often say self driving cars have to be better than humans but they often neglect to ask "what % of the population does it have to be better than?". Today's self driving cars are already better than some drivers. You don't have to look farther than r/IdiotsInCars. I would say that if self driving cars are better than 50% of the population, that would be good enough. Removing most of the accident prone individuals would be greatly beneficial already.

nine_k 8y ago

Driverless cars are a much harder problem than driverless trucks. Once the latter become day-to-day reality on highways, I'll become cautiously optimistic about autonomous cars in cities.

gboudrias 8y ago
I've read somewhere that driverless trucks are pretty much as hard as driverless anything, because there's always that last mile in a city. It's impossible for the ride to be 100% automated, and anything less is pointless at the moment. I think we'll need some extremely standardized "pre-last-mile" highway exits/transfer points across the whole country to have the beginnings of a new solution. And I doubt the Teamsters will be onboard with that.
- dehrmann 8y ago
  > ...there's always that last mile in a city But what if that's the only mile driven by a human? Trucks drive autonomously on highways in good conditions, then a human takes over for the last mile?
LoSboccacc 8y ago
One issue is current sensor range. A truck on the highway has a way longer stopping distance than a car and requires sensors that are not quite there yet: sure radar could see obstacle that far but the lane detection necessary to distinguish a car parked on the line from a car on the shoulder can't yet see that far
yumraj 8y ago
As long as they both share the same road and drive in the same traffic it doesn't make sense as to how can one be a harder problem than the other. In fact I never want a driverless 80,000lb 18 wheeler anywhere near me when I'm driving. A 5000lb driverless car is scary enough.

ryebreadistasty 8y ago

I wouldn't trust an autonomous vehicle at all unless it wasn't networked; in fact I've made sure that my car isn't networked at all due to the fact that autonomous or not they can be hacked by cutting power to everything except power steering, the radio, and the car outlets. Networking and control of the car being linked is asking for trouble, not to mention that somehow they fucked up the non-autonomous cars so that it's possible to hack those and drive them with a laptop too. Link for the lazy: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/computer-hackers-control-car-deliberate-accidents-national-security-issue-a8066466.html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...

ddingus 8y ago
Having driven very new cars, rentals mostly, there are few compelling features that I can't just add to an older, not smart car. And that is exactly what I plan on doing for some time yet. Frankly, the bright nav screens, menus and other gunk prove quite distracting. I really hate most of them. A few can be dimmed, or turned off, but none seem to remember that state, always eager to display some warning or other. Seems to me, if it always needs a warning, I really don't need it in the car. I feel we are way over hype on self-driving vehicles. The tech is advancing nicely enough, but the problem scope still seems very large relative to what we've solved for.

bitL 8y ago

Almost all technical problems of self-driving cars are solved by current algorithms once we get 100x faster HW, i.e. processing at 1000 fps instead of 10, making things like tracking, collision avoidance, vision, etc. trivial; the only problem left is path planning (down to inch resolution with dynamic vehicle models), which is coincidentally NP-hard and there is very little hope to get it to human level in reasonable time (Waymo is still orders of magnitude worse than an average human).

lsc 8y ago
>Almost all technical problems of self-driving cars are solved by current algorithms once we get 100x faster HW, That sounds off to me, because my understanding is that the computer is a small portion of the cost and the mass of the self-driving car. If you could solve the problem by just filling up the back seats with computers, someone would have prototyped it, and probably even brought it to market as a way to drive large vehicles. (I mean, unless you were on some non-parallelizable process, but my understanding is that most image processing tasks are massively parallel.)

xbmcuser 8y ago

I have never believed that we will get fully autonomus cars suddenly. But each year cars will be able to do more on their own. It will be a gradual transition. Where the driver's will let it park on it's own, drive on the freeways/highway on it's own. To allowing it to go from the highway to home or work on it's own on a regularly used routes. I feel people that dismiss autonomuos cars completely and people expecting them to be perfect in the next few years are both wrong.

dongping 8y ago

What astounded me talking to people working in self-driving car start-ups and spin-offs from incumbents, is that how little they care about simulation. The last accident from Uber confirmed that yet again. The fact is absolutely difficult to comprehend, when Waymo has allegely done a huge amount of simulation.