11 ms·

Maybe Apple doesn't want to pursue a dream which, as far as we know, can only have a limited outcome? They don't really like such compromises in products. Check

by chx 8y ago

Maybe Apple doesn't want to pursue a dream which, as far as we know, can only have a limited outcome? They don't really like such compromises in products. Check this: https://medium.com/s/story/self-driving-cars-will-always-be-limited-even-the-industry-leader-admits-it-c5fe5aa01699 https://medium.com/s/story/self-driving-cars-will-always-be-... > Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that “autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change. Or read https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-cars-is-dying/ https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-... or any number of "sobering up" articles from last year.

no1youknowz 8y ago
This article is a bit sketchy, but serves my point-ish. They say Volvo is going to release a true self-driving car by 2021. But then it goes on to mention level 4. Let's pull it back a little and say by 2021, they release level 4. If any automaker is going to do Level 5 in the snow. It's going to be Volvo. Being a Swedish company (albeit owned by a Chinese firm now), they have a particular track record when it comes to prioritising safety in terrible driving conditions. I'm pretty sure that they are going to work it out. [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/26/volvo-self-driving-car-sleep-watch-movie-on-commute-by-2021.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/26/volvo-self-driving-car-sleep...
- iamgopal 8y ago
  How in the world a car company can attract ( let alone provide environment or infrastructure etc ) sufficient software talent to achieve this ?
  - oblio 8y ago
    $$$, just like every other company.
  - TomMarius 8y ago
    How did they attract sufficient software talent for their other advanced active safety systems?
  - inertiatic 8y ago
    In a world where "software talent" can be attracted to work on "boring" subjects such as advertising, do you have to ask this question? The same incentives apply.
  - maxxxxx 8y ago
    How does NASA attract software talent? Not all smart people are in silicon valley selling ads or spying on people.
    - cenal 8y ago
      Plenty of smart people are staying away thanks to the increasing costs to live in the Bay Area.
      - krn 8y ago
        Also, not all engineers have a risk-taking mentality. The Bay Area attracts mostly the "hacker" types, but there are plenty of more conservative – yet equally technically capable – individuals who prefer working for the government or a Fortune 500 company, where IT is just one of the many departments. Essentially, these are the people who might as well have chosen a career in banking or any other well-paying science-based field. To them, having a stable job is the highest priority.
      - simonh 8y ago
        Against which you have to balance the risk of taking the NASA job, but not getting paid for a few weeks or months every year.
- dmitriid 8y ago
  Current breed of Volvos are already amazing at assisting drivers. Lane control + speed control + steering control is already as close to autonomous driving as anything out there on the market. But they are doing the smart thing: - they keep these things separate and always under driver's control - they downplay the significance of these systems and don't market as THE BEST EVER THING ULTRA POWERFUL UNBELIEVABLE BREAKTHTROUGH UNRIVALLED BY COMPETITION ©™ They are simply adding these features one by one to all their line-up - they have a specific goal called Vision 2020 [1]: "Vision 2020 is about reducing the number of people that die or are seriously injured in road traffic accidents to zero." This is a way more powerful and important goal than the self-serving goal of creating autonomous cars. - oh. And yes, they work in conditions that are way more different than California. Sweden has such things as constant low sun, snow, rain, sleet, active wildlife etc. etc. So yes, all things considered I'd root for Volvo, not for Tesla or any other American company. [1] https://group.volvocars.com/company/vision https://group.volvocars.com/company/vision
  - whafro 8y ago
    I have a 2018 XC60 and it's been really great on the whole, but very clearly Not There Yet™: + During a dark and wet night a few weeks ago, I used Pilot Assist (lane/speed/steering control) and it genuinely saw the lane lines better than I was able to during major unexpected downpours. I was in control the whole time, but it was a great help along the way and made the drive a lot more comfortable. - Some of these systems work together rather poorly. For instance, the Pilot Assist system seems to identify white lane lines better than yellow ones, and on US highways (where the left-most edge is often yellow) it will drift left. However, the lane keeping system seems to see the yellow line just fine, so it will vibrate the steering wheel to warn that I'm getting too close, while Pilot Assist continues to insist on moving left. The solution is to get out of the left lane. But I'm very optimistic and supportive about Volvo's trajectory in this area, to all of your points above.
    - matthewdgreen 8y ago
      Oversharing: I've been driving a Volvo XC90 with Pilot Assist and a Tesla Model 3 with autopilot. Of the two systems, I really preferred the Volvo -- but not, ironically, because it was better, but rather because it's worse. The Volvo's system is very clearly about 70% there. Sometimes on sharp curves it just misses the lines and drifts into another lane. Sometimes it seems to basically just follow the car in front, which means that it will blindly follow a bad driver in doing stupid things. However, the upside of this is that its weak behavior (and willingness to yield to driver input) makes it so obviously an "assist" system that I would never really put a lot of faith in it, or trust it entirely. Thus to me it's just sort of a better version of the lanekeeping system. The Tesla, on the other hand, really wants to drive the car. It hates taking feedback from me, and will often boot me out of autopilot mode if I disagree over, say, my position within a lane. It does a much better job seeing lanes and handles lane changes automatically. But: because it's so forceful and doesn't like my input, I find it much more stressful to drive. I don't trust it enough to let it have the absolute control it wants, and find myself missing Volvo's pretty-dumb-but-not-demanding system.
adrianN 8y ago
Sensors on humans don't work well in snow or rain either. That doesn't stop us from driving.
- blub 8y ago
  Have some faith in your sensors. The point is they enable us to drive better than anything man made. It's always a sad spectacle watching AI fans disparage humans when one looks at the miserable results of the various self-driving efforts. They should at least wait until they have something working decently.
  - dmingod666 8y ago
    Humans are so smart that they can't be modeled by AI. Humans are so dumb that they can't even design a system that does the same things that they do :) I find it amusing that AI vs Human is actually 'A group of humans working on a technology' vs Humans. If we say AI sucks it actual that we probably aren't good at making certain type of software. Its funny when we talk about AI like it has some Sentience -- when all the onus on improving it and why it sucks is because of humans. Guess someone should start a 'AI shaming' hashtag! :D
- rubidium 8y ago
  They work amazing when properly developed. Growing up in a land with 4-5 months of winter, I was very comfortable in the snow and ice. Still scary as hell at times but the human body is remarkably adaptable to the environment. 30 feet visibility with snow and ice on the roads engages all the senses (except smell). Listening to the sound the tires are making helps know what they’re encountering. Inner ears helping know if a slide is starting. Sight constantly doubting itself and peering into the barely distinguishable road. All the nervous system helping with steering and the pedals. The road has a feel to it in such conditions that any man made system has quite a ways to go before engaging in it. I do think it can get there. But it may need something better than our current AI tech, as well as some more sensors than lidar.
  - windexh8er 8y ago
pkhamre 8y ago
From the Medium-article you posted: > In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change. With that attitude, you are stuck in the past and don't want to make progress with technology.
- simonh 8y ago
  I don't see how you get to accuse one of the most knowledgeable experts in the field, who's dedicated a career to building autonomous vehicles, of... not wanting fully autonomous vehicles. Wanting things isn't always a good measure of our ability to actually obtain them.
  - EForEndeavour 8y ago
    He (pkhamre) didn't say that John Krafcik (Waymo CEO) "not wanting fully autonomous vehicles" at all. He is criticizing the practice of confidently predicting the forever (im)possibility of something based on a projection of current technologies decades into the future. Krafcik's a world leader in the field of autonomous cars, so we have good reason to weight his opinions more heavily than those of random HN users. On the other hand, his "may never change" verdict on sensor tech is vague to the point of uselessness. Whatever happens, he will have had a point.
    - xiphias2 8y ago
      At the same time Waymo put a lot of money into working with lidars, which helps Waymo to get to Level 4 faster, which is great, but it seems like on long term Elon is right that to get to L5 autonomous cars have to improve enough to be able to work only with cameras and microphone. John may not want to say this.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Any estimation based on probability can always claim to be right, after all a 1% chance can still happen, but sometimes all we can truthfully do is give an estimated likelihood. Maybe that's genuinely the best he can say, in which case I'd rather hear that than a definite pronouncement.
rushabh 8y ago
Makes me think that autonomous vehicles may run on specially designated roadways, like a highly flexible, adaptive version of railway.
jsight 8y ago
To be honest, that article and the articles like it bother me. Krafcik said there will always be constraints, without spelling out what those constraints will be or their severity. Then the author wrote a line saying they won't work in the snow or rain (implying any snow or rain at all). To me, that assertion doesn't follow from the quote. Where did Krafcik say that they won't be able to deal with light to medium rain? Where did he say that they won't be willing to deal with light to medium snow? There are a lot of other articles asserting these things, but few detailed quotes.
martin_bech 8y ago
If I remember correctly, that statement, mirrors what was beeing said about human flight, right before the wright brothers?
- notahacker 8y ago
  It also mirrors what was said to people who expected us all to have sentient computers that never made an error and second homes orbiting Alpha Centauri by the beginning of this century.
pwthornton 8y ago
I'd like to point out that what he says here about autonomous vehicles and the limits of their sensors applies to humans too. It is just socially acceptable to drive in averse conditions with limited visibility, and if you hit another car, person or something else, you just blame it on the weather. It's not socially acceptable for an autonomous vehicle to just wing it in bad conditions. I find it curious that we are going to hold autonomous vehicles to a perhaps impossibly high standard while we also hold people to barely any standards at all. Think about this: If you are in an advanced autonomous vehicle and you get a warning that conditions are so bad that the sensors can no longer see well enough to drive and that you should take over, should you really take over or should you stop driving?
- endofcapital 8y ago
  I've been driving in intense blizzards and ice and steep bad roads of Colorado for 20 years now. Still never had an accident or even gone off the road. That's the standard. Anything less and I'm completely uninterested, because it's just bad tech. When your engineers say the problem is "too hard to solve" you need to hire better engineers, because those engineers are lying to you. Just because everyone is racing towards a technology and some teams are doing it poorly doesn't mean the problems are insurmountable.
  - planteen 8y ago
    Don't you think part of that experience is luck? What can you do if you are stopped at a red light on an icy road, someone comes in hot and rear ends you, causing you to collide with the vehicle in front of you? You will be at fault for the vehicle you hit. Such accidents are common when it's icy. I have never been in one personally, but lots of friends and co-workers have.
    - endofcapital 8y ago
      Yeah, that exact scenario has happened to me twice. I like to glance at the rearview if I'm the last car in line to avoid some drunk ramming me, and it definitely saved my life once. Once I just saw someone coming in a little too hot and was able to pull forward a bit to make room as they were standing on the brakes. Not a big deal. The lifesaving situation was different though, I was the only car in the right lane and one of those massive F250 trucks was barreling up behind me, not appearing to slow down at all. I was kind of boxed in because the cross street had heavy, fast traffic, and I couldn't pull forward or to the left since there was another car stopped next to me there. So I just quickly scanned the sidewalk to my right to make sure there were no pedestrians, and hopped up the curb to drive on the sidewalk/grass. I wasn't sure if this would work in my tiny car with small wheels, but I figured it would be better than dying. Worked great. The truck blew through the light and T-boned a Tesla. The guy had 37 empty Coors Light cans scattered around the floor of his truck. Have any of the self driving car companies even gotten started on the "when should I drive on the sidewalk" subroutine? No, of course not, they are still mired in the bad, early days of the tech where they can't deal with a missing double yellow. It's laughable, the engineers can do much better instead of just repeatedly lowering the bar.
linuxftw 8y ago
Oh, John Krafcik 'admitted it.' As if the rest of us couldn't draw such an obvious conclusion. Autonomous cars can only treat the symptom, not the disease. The real problem is traffic due to suburban sprawl. People need to quit commuting into cities every day, put $50 tolls on the streets during rush hour into major cities, make bus service free.
kilo_bravo_3 8y ago
> In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change. There are sensors that can see through snow. They are very expensive, and only in the lab right now, but in the very near future there will (not "may") be processing packages that can fuse optical, radar, and other data into a coherent picture that will allow a computer to see a snow-covered road, through falling snow, better than a human could ever hope to. I have seen a synthetic aperture radar system that can see through several inches of snow with such a resolution that it can detect paint lines beneath the snow and create a real-time picture of what the road looks like (potholes and all) that a human could never see. It is too expensive today, but tomorrow? Not only that, but with gyroscopes, rotation sensors, and real-time communications between vehicles, an automobile that can see through the snow like it is not there that can also talk to other cars will (not can) be able to know ahead of time what road and grip conditions are like based on vehicles that have previously and recently gone through the area. It will be able to adjust its driving to match conditions that are impossible for even the best human driver who has ever existed to detect. Having 360-degree multi-band RADAR coverage, fused with optical, LiDAR, ultrasonic, and other technologies will result in systems that can: see that it is snowing, see how much snow there is, see the road through the snow, see ice beneath the snow, predict what the road conditions will be in a certain amount of time based on current and forecasted conditions, inform other cars about current conditions, know what conditions are at points on its route in the future and plan accordingly, and ultimately not care that it is snowing so long as it can cope with the conditions. Today, hooking up some cameras and LIDAR to an Nvidia Jetson doesn't result in a car that can drive in the snow better than a human. Tomorrow isn't today. A human driving in heavy rain at night, hunched over the steering wheel squinting out into the distance, radio silenced to minimize distractions, hazard lights on to warn other drivers, never sure of the depth of any puddle that may be on the road, maybe a little tipsy from dinner and tired from a long day's work, will one day be seen as a wildly dangerous and unreasonable risk compared to automated systems with sensor suites that don't care if it is dark and raining and which can map the depth of any standing water with millimeter precision.
- jki275 8y ago
  SAR is probably going to be the killer sensor that makes all this happen. Just a matter of time.
notus 8y ago
Why do people in these positions use words like 'never' when they are almost always wrong given enough time? Saying there will never be a fully autonomous vehicle is very shortsighted and arrogant.
- cma 8y ago
  If you frame a feature you are lacking as something that will never be possible, your own near term solution that solves lots of things but doesn't solve everything seems much more impressive.
rafiki6 8y ago
Autonomous cars, as with any technology we develop, will likely find it's killer application where it makes the most economical sense. They might start out as busses or even truck, and rather than having a driver behind the wheel, you have control centers where one driver might be managing a whole fleet. Eventually, as we change our infrastructure to accommodate further, I wouldn't be surprised if we rely more and more on them (having a fully ordered traffic system). The key to this is time and patience. It might take 50 years before that occurs.
writepub 8y ago
When Apple lays off, it's because their perfectionist culture doesn't tolerate compromises (as if their existing products are a beacon of idealism). They knew EXACTLY what compromises needed to be made regarding self-driving cars all along. Any real product roll-out needs compromises, and this seemingly moralistic apology for layoffs doesn't cut it. They laid off because they wanted to, because their corporate aims didn't align, and that's that.

by chx 8y ago

no1youknowz 8y ago

This article is a bit sketchy, but serves my point-ish. They say Volvo is going to release a true self-driving car by 2021. But then it goes on to mention level 4. Let's pull it back a little and say by 2021, they release level 4. If any automaker is going to do Level 5 in the snow. It's going to be Volvo. Being a Swedish company (albeit owned by a Chinese firm now), they have a particular track record when it comes to prioritising safety in terrible driving conditions. I'm pretty sure that they are going to work it out. [0]: https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/26/volvo-self-driving-car-sleep-watch-movie-on-commute-by-2021.html https://www.cnbc.com/2018/06/26/volvo-self-driving-car-sleep...

iamgopal 8y ago
How in the world a car company can attract ( let alone provide environment or infrastructure etc ) sufficient software talent to achieve this ?
- oblio 8y ago
  $$$, just like every other company.
- TomMarius 8y ago
  How did they attract sufficient software talent for their other advanced active safety systems?
- inertiatic 8y ago
  In a world where "software talent" can be attracted to work on "boring" subjects such as advertising, do you have to ask this question? The same incentives apply.
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  How does NASA attract software talent? Not all smart people are in silicon valley selling ads or spying on people.
  - cenal 8y ago
    Plenty of smart people are staying away thanks to the increasing costs to live in the Bay Area.
    - krn 8y ago
      Also, not all engineers have a risk-taking mentality. The Bay Area attracts mostly the "hacker" types, but there are plenty of more conservative – yet equally technically capable – individuals who prefer working for the government or a Fortune 500 company, where IT is just one of the many departments. Essentially, these are the people who might as well have chosen a career in banking or any other well-paying science-based field. To them, having a stable job is the highest priority.
    - simonh 8y ago
      Against which you have to balance the risk of taking the NASA job, but not getting paid for a few weeks or months every year.
dmitriid 8y ago
Current breed of Volvos are already amazing at assisting drivers. Lane control + speed control + steering control is already as close to autonomous driving as anything out there on the market. But they are doing the smart thing: - they keep these things separate and always under driver's control - they downplay the significance of these systems and don't market as THE BEST EVER THING ULTRA POWERFUL UNBELIEVABLE BREAKTHTROUGH UNRIVALLED BY COMPETITION ©™ They are simply adding these features one by one to all their line-up - they have a specific goal called Vision 2020 [1]: "Vision 2020 is about reducing the number of people that die or are seriously injured in road traffic accidents to zero." This is a way more powerful and important goal than the self-serving goal of creating autonomous cars. - oh. And yes, they work in conditions that are way more different than California. Sweden has such things as constant low sun, snow, rain, sleet, active wildlife etc. etc. So yes, all things considered I'd root for Volvo, not for Tesla or any other American company. [1] https://group.volvocars.com/company/vision https://group.volvocars.com/company/vision
- whafro 8y ago
  I have a 2018 XC60 and it's been really great on the whole, but very clearly Not There Yet™: + During a dark and wet night a few weeks ago, I used Pilot Assist (lane/speed/steering control) and it genuinely saw the lane lines better than I was able to during major unexpected downpours. I was in control the whole time, but it was a great help along the way and made the drive a lot more comfortable. - Some of these systems work together rather poorly. For instance, the Pilot Assist system seems to identify white lane lines better than yellow ones, and on US highways (where the left-most edge is often yellow) it will drift left. However, the lane keeping system seems to see the yellow line just fine, so it will vibrate the steering wheel to warn that I'm getting too close, while Pilot Assist continues to insist on moving left. The solution is to get out of the left lane. But I'm very optimistic and supportive about Volvo's trajectory in this area, to all of your points above.
  - matthewdgreen 8y ago
    Oversharing: I've been driving a Volvo XC90 with Pilot Assist and a Tesla Model 3 with autopilot. Of the two systems, I really preferred the Volvo -- but not, ironically, because it was better, but rather because it's worse. The Volvo's system is very clearly about 70% there. Sometimes on sharp curves it just misses the lines and drifts into another lane. Sometimes it seems to basically just follow the car in front, which means that it will blindly follow a bad driver in doing stupid things. However, the upside of this is that its weak behavior (and willingness to yield to driver input) makes it so obviously an "assist" system that I would never really put a lot of faith in it, or trust it entirely. Thus to me it's just sort of a better version of the lanekeeping system. The Tesla, on the other hand, really wants to drive the car. It hates taking feedback from me, and will often boot me out of autopilot mode if I disagree over, say, my position within a lane. It does a much better job seeing lanes and handles lane changes automatically. But: because it's so forceful and doesn't like my input, I find it much more stressful to drive. I don't trust it enough to let it have the absolute control it wants, and find myself missing Volvo's pretty-dumb-but-not-demanding system.

adrianN 8y ago

Sensors on humans don't work well in snow or rain either. That doesn't stop us from driving.

blub 8y ago
Have some faith in your sensors. The point is they enable us to drive better than anything man made. It's always a sad spectacle watching AI fans disparage humans when one looks at the miserable results of the various self-driving efforts. They should at least wait until they have something working decently.
- dmingod666 8y ago
  Humans are so smart that they can't be modeled by AI. Humans are so dumb that they can't even design a system that does the same things that they do :) I find it amusing that AI vs Human is actually 'A group of humans working on a technology' vs Humans. If we say AI sucks it actual that we probably aren't good at making certain type of software. Its funny when we talk about AI like it has some Sentience -- when all the onus on improving it and why it sucks is because of humans. Guess someone should start a 'AI shaming' hashtag! :D
rubidium 8y ago
They work amazing when properly developed. Growing up in a land with 4-5 months of winter, I was very comfortable in the snow and ice. Still scary as hell at times but the human body is remarkably adaptable to the environment. 30 feet visibility with snow and ice on the roads engages all the senses (except smell). Listening to the sound the tires are making helps know what they’re encountering. Inner ears helping know if a slide is starting. Sight constantly doubting itself and peering into the barely distinguishable road. All the nervous system helping with steering and the pedals. The road has a feel to it in such conditions that any man made system has quite a ways to go before engaging in it. I do think it can get there. But it may need something better than our current AI tech, as well as some more sensors than lidar.
- windexh8er 8y ago

pkhamre 8y ago

From the Medium-article you posted: > In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change. With that attitude, you are stuck in the past and don't want to make progress with technology.

simonh 8y ago
I don't see how you get to accuse one of the most knowledgeable experts in the field, who's dedicated a career to building autonomous vehicles, of... not wanting fully autonomous vehicles. Wanting things isn't always a good measure of our ability to actually obtain them.
- EForEndeavour 8y ago
  He (pkhamre) didn't say that John Krafcik (Waymo CEO) "not wanting fully autonomous vehicles" at all. He is criticizing the practice of confidently predicting the forever (im)possibility of something based on a projection of current technologies decades into the future. Krafcik's a world leader in the field of autonomous cars, so we have good reason to weight his opinions more heavily than those of random HN users. On the other hand, his "may never change" verdict on sensor tech is vague to the point of uselessness. Whatever happens, he will have had a point.
  - xiphias2 8y ago
    At the same time Waymo put a lot of money into working with lidars, which helps Waymo to get to Level 4 faster, which is great, but it seems like on long term Elon is right that to get to L5 autonomous cars have to improve enough to be able to work only with cameras and microphone. John may not want to say this.
  - simonh 8y ago
    Any estimation based on probability can always claim to be right, after all a 1% chance can still happen, but sometimes all we can truthfully do is give an estimated likelihood. Maybe that's genuinely the best he can say, in which case I'd rather hear that than a definite pronouncement.

rushabh 8y ago

Makes me think that autonomous vehicles may run on specially designated roadways, like a highly flexible, adaptive version of railway.

jsight 8y ago

To be honest, that article and the articles like it bother me. Krafcik said there will always be constraints, without spelling out what those constraints will be or their severity. Then the author wrote a line saying they won't work in the snow or rain (implying any snow or rain at all). To me, that assertion doesn't follow from the quote. Where did Krafcik say that they won't be able to deal with light to medium rain? Where did he say that they won't be willing to deal with light to medium snow? There are a lot of other articles asserting these things, but few detailed quotes.

martin_bech 8y ago

If I remember correctly, that statement, mirrors what was beeing said about human flight, right before the wright brothers?

notahacker 8y ago
It also mirrors what was said to people who expected us all to have sentient computers that never made an error and second homes orbiting Alpha Centauri by the beginning of this century.

pwthornton 8y ago

I'd like to point out that what he says here about autonomous vehicles and the limits of their sensors applies to humans too. It is just socially acceptable to drive in averse conditions with limited visibility, and if you hit another car, person or something else, you just blame it on the weather. It's not socially acceptable for an autonomous vehicle to just wing it in bad conditions. I find it curious that we are going to hold autonomous vehicles to a perhaps impossibly high standard while we also hold people to barely any standards at all. Think about this: If you are in an advanced autonomous vehicle and you get a warning that conditions are so bad that the sensors can no longer see well enough to drive and that you should take over, should you really take over or should you stop driving?

endofcapital 8y ago
I've been driving in intense blizzards and ice and steep bad roads of Colorado for 20 years now. Still never had an accident or even gone off the road. That's the standard. Anything less and I'm completely uninterested, because it's just bad tech. When your engineers say the problem is "too hard to solve" you need to hire better engineers, because those engineers are lying to you. Just because everyone is racing towards a technology and some teams are doing it poorly doesn't mean the problems are insurmountable.
- planteen 8y ago
  Don't you think part of that experience is luck? What can you do if you are stopped at a red light on an icy road, someone comes in hot and rear ends you, causing you to collide with the vehicle in front of you? You will be at fault for the vehicle you hit. Such accidents are common when it's icy. I have never been in one personally, but lots of friends and co-workers have.
  - endofcapital 8y ago
    Yeah, that exact scenario has happened to me twice. I like to glance at the rearview if I'm the last car in line to avoid some drunk ramming me, and it definitely saved my life once. Once I just saw someone coming in a little too hot and was able to pull forward a bit to make room as they were standing on the brakes. Not a big deal. The lifesaving situation was different though, I was the only car in the right lane and one of those massive F250 trucks was barreling up behind me, not appearing to slow down at all. I was kind of boxed in because the cross street had heavy, fast traffic, and I couldn't pull forward or to the left since there was another car stopped next to me there. So I just quickly scanned the sidewalk to my right to make sure there were no pedestrians, and hopped up the curb to drive on the sidewalk/grass. I wasn't sure if this would work in my tiny car with small wheels, but I figured it would be better than dying. Worked great. The truck blew through the light and T-boned a Tesla. The guy had 37 empty Coors Light cans scattered around the floor of his truck. Have any of the self driving car companies even gotten started on the "when should I drive on the sidewalk" subroutine? No, of course not, they are still mired in the bad, early days of the tech where they can't deal with a missing double yellow. It's laughable, the engineers can do much better instead of just repeatedly lowering the bar.

linuxftw 8y ago

Oh, John Krafcik 'admitted it.' As if the rest of us couldn't draw such an obvious conclusion. Autonomous cars can only treat the symptom, not the disease. The real problem is traffic due to suburban sprawl. People need to quit commuting into cities every day, put $50 tolls on the streets during rush hour into major cities, make bus service free.

kilo_bravo_3 8y ago

> In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change. There are sensors that can see through snow. They are very expensive, and only in the lab right now, but in the very near future there will (not "may") be processing packages that can fuse optical, radar, and other data into a coherent picture that will allow a computer to see a snow-covered road, through falling snow, better than a human could ever hope to. I have seen a synthetic aperture radar system that can see through several inches of snow with such a resolution that it can detect paint lines beneath the snow and create a real-time picture of what the road looks like (potholes and all) that a human could never see. It is too expensive today, but tomorrow? Not only that, but with gyroscopes, rotation sensors, and real-time communications between vehicles, an automobile that can see through the snow like it is not there that can also talk to other cars will (not can) be able to know ahead of time what road and grip conditions are like based on vehicles that have previously and recently gone through the area. It will be able to adjust its driving to match conditions that are impossible for even the best human driver who has ever existed to detect. Having 360-degree multi-band RADAR coverage, fused with optical, LiDAR, ultrasonic, and other technologies will result in systems that can: see that it is snowing, see how much snow there is, see the road through the snow, see ice beneath the snow, predict what the road conditions will be in a certain amount of time based on current and forecasted conditions, inform other cars about current conditions, know what conditions are at points on its route in the future and plan accordingly, and ultimately not care that it is snowing so long as it can cope with the conditions. Today, hooking up some cameras and LIDAR to an Nvidia Jetson doesn't result in a car that can drive in the snow better than a human. Tomorrow isn't today. A human driving in heavy rain at night, hunched over the steering wheel squinting out into the distance, radio silenced to minimize distractions, hazard lights on to warn other drivers, never sure of the depth of any puddle that may be on the road, maybe a little tipsy from dinner and tired from a long day's work, will one day be seen as a wildly dangerous and unreasonable risk compared to automated systems with sensor suites that don't care if it is dark and raining and which can map the depth of any standing water with millimeter precision.

jki275 8y ago
SAR is probably going to be the killer sensor that makes all this happen. Just a matter of time.

notus 8y ago

Why do people in these positions use words like 'never' when they are almost always wrong given enough time? Saying there will never be a fully autonomous vehicle is very shortsighted and arrogant.

cma 8y ago
If you frame a feature you are lacking as something that will never be possible, your own near term solution that solves lots of things but doesn't solve everything seems much more impressive.

rafiki6 8y ago

Autonomous cars, as with any technology we develop, will likely find it's killer application where it makes the most economical sense. They might start out as busses or even truck, and rather than having a driver behind the wheel, you have control centers where one driver might be managing a whole fleet. Eventually, as we change our infrastructure to accommodate further, I wouldn't be surprised if we rely more and more on them (having a fully ordered traffic system). The key to this is time and patience. It might take 50 years before that occurs.

writepub 8y ago

When Apple lays off, it's because their perfectionist culture doesn't tolerate compromises (as if their existing products are a beacon of idealism). They knew EXACTLY what compromises needed to be made regarding self-driving cars all along. Any real product roll-out needs compromises, and this seemingly moralistic apology for layoffs doesn't cut it. They laid off because they wanted to, because their corporate aims didn't align, and that's that.