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I've been saying this for a while. Truly autonomous cars are decades away. My line has always been that I hope that by the time I can't, or am not allowed, to

• alexashka 8y ago
  Uber is ready. It's autonomous for you as a passenger, and you get a free chat buddy if you feel like it. Autonomous cars are interesting for the trucking industry - for everyday driving, reducing traffic via remote work and smarter city planning is what'll make people happy imho. I don't mind a 10 minute drive. It's the 100 minute drive in bumper to bumper traffic that makes people dream of self-driving cars. The real answer is not being in that position to begin with.
  • pmart123 8y ago
    Exactly. Hopefully, it can help reduce the cost of goods and highway road safety. There’s going to be a lot of edge cases in Manhattan traffic.
  • ghaff 8y ago
    I actually think even autonomous cars that can safely handle "highway" (for some definition of highway) driving in "good" weather (for some definition of good) is a huge win in and of itself. Both for safety and freeing up human time. What it doesn't do is satisfy the fantasy of those who live in dense cities that they'll never need to own a car or even learn to drive. But hitting the point where a car can reliably drive itself around a chaotic urban landscape in all sorts of weather conditions by itself is almost certainly a much harder problem.
  • dv_dt 8y ago
    Uh given that Uber was the most recent autonomous car to kill someone, let me be a little skeptical that Uber is ready. And, I suspect that give a 100 minute drive route now, if self-driving cars lower the bar of being in traffic, that the same commutes will actually get longer with even more traffic.
    • PeterFBell 8y ago
      I think the parent poster was suggesting that a human driven uber was here now - not an autonomous one (hence the "chat buddy"/driver)
      • dv_dt 8y ago
        Oh, it seems so on re-reading the comment, that was my mistake in interpretation. Thanks for the check.
  • linuxftw 8y ago
    > The real answer is not being in that position to begin with. That to me is the crux of the issue. Self-driving cars are a poor solution to an entirely self-inflicted problem. The only viable long term solution is to reduce commuting.
    • warkdarrior 8y ago
      You're arguing that in order to solve world hunger, we should have fewer people that need feeding, instead of automating farming for higher output.
      • alexashka 8y ago
        It's not an either/or argument. It's an 'and' argument of autonomous cars are great, AND many believe do not solve the problems that many proponents of autonomous cars think they will. In regards to world hunger - many of this planet's woes, would be helped by advancements in science, agriculture AND not endlessly having children.
• ngngngng 8y ago
  I'm typically an autonomous skeptic, but I disagree. I think autonomous cars are decades away UNLESS we start designing roads specifically for vehicular autonomy. design lanes that are extremely easy for cameras to see. Traffic lights that are easy for computers to parse. Street signs like QR codes etc. Obviously the cost of this is prohibitive. But at some point we have to get it through our heads that for a computer to excel at a task, the task needs to be redesigned.
  • michaelchisari 8y ago
    I think autonomous cars are decades away UNLESS we start designing roads specifically for vehicular autonomy. If the tech industry wasn't so bubbled, this would have been the plan from the beginning.
    • ngngngng 8y ago
      Are there any companies currently trying though? I'd be interested in joining an effort to design self driving cars and the roads those cars would need. I've had the idea for a while but haven't heard of anyone doing it.
      • dmitriid 8y ago
        Scania presented this as an idea for long-distance hauling in Sweden and they had a trial of autonomous trucks somewhere north of Falun (?).
  • vp8989 8y ago
    Yep. Or they shouldn't even need to "see" the lanes. The roads could be enhanced with signal transmitters so that the car is "on rails", in a digital sense. Of course that would require centralization and working with the government. The government has no incentive to do this because it would just create another problem for them (mass unemployment).
    • lallysingh 8y ago
• jandrese 8y ago
  One of the things that hurts autonomous vehicles is that we're basically solving the most difficult situation up front: maneuvering in a world full of vehicles that are operated by unreliable watery sacks of meat that give no indication of their intentions. If all cars were autonomous and interconnected the problem would be far easier to solve. That said, I think "decades" is overly pessimistic. There have been some great strides in computer vision and decision making over the past few years and the hardware is pressing ever onward. That said it will be decades (if ever) before we're willing to rip the controls out of the cabin entirely, but a level 4.5 system where the people in the car can do whatever while it drives and only need to intervene when the computer alerts them that there is a situation it cannot handle (but can stop a safe distance away from if necessary).
  • dsfyu404ed 8y ago
    >operated by unreliable watery sacks of meat that give no indication of their intentions We give plenty of indications. It's just that they're hard to define objectively.
    • jandrese 8y ago
      Sometimes, not always though. Anybody who has been cut off by the driver crossing 4 lanes of traffic without looking 20 feet before the end of the exit lane can attest.
    • the8472 8y ago
      > We give plenty of indications. for some values of plenty < ε. As cyclist I can tell you that human drivers often don't even use their turn signals at intersections where it is important for me to know where they're going. And it's not like I'm sneaking up on them, it's when they're facing me at the other side of the intersection.
  • linuxftw 8y ago
    > we're basically solving the most difficult situation up front I disagree. It's not up-front, there's been decades of work on autonomous systems such as drones, UAVs, trains, robots, etc. It's just that it's a hard, if not impossible problem. Some companies thought they could successfully navigate this problem with enough data. I don't think it's a data problem, I think it's impossible to give real situational awareness to a machine, and that's the problem.
• president 8y ago
  I'm a skeptic as well. There are too many variables to make this kind of technology work perfectly. Reminds me of augmented reality measuring app on iPhones - it's just not reliable at all.
  • the8472 8y ago
    > to make this kind of technology work perfectly. That is a flawed premise. Humans do not operate cars perfectly either. The highest requirement you could put on them is to be as good as the average human driver. And given the other benefits that self-driving fleets offer we can even go a little lower and still come out positive according to various utility metrics.
• Stubb 8y ago
  See Moravec's Paradox for why decades away is likely optimistic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec's_paradox
  • linuxftw 8y ago
    Great quote at the end of that page, quoting from a book: > As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come. Indeed, much of the trading world has been replaced by machines.
    • dboreham 8y ago
      My test case is: self driving lawyers. That seems to me to be quite an easy technical problem, and obviously financially viable, and mostly can't kill people. And yet..
• nostromo 8y ago
  Here in Seattle, we have single-lane roads that go both directions. When two cars are facing each other, there is a lot of human interaction and understanding about who should go first, who should pull off into a parking spot, or perhaps who should reverse into the intersection to let the other pass. This is one of thousands of edge-cases that are going to be extremely challenging to automate. I'm not sure it's even possible without some understanding of the counterparty, their intentions and body language. One problem with developing these technologies in California is that California has very wide, very regular roads. High visibility and dry conditions are the norm. There are few uncontrolled intersections (in Seattle they are the rule, not an exception). I think California's history as a motorist culture has conversely made it one of the easiest places to automate.
  • lallysingh 8y ago
    Easy: don't put that road in the map. The cars don't have to choose the same routes people do, and when you're not the one driving, you're often less sensitive to timing.
    • sbilstein 8y ago
      Lots of residential places have roads exactly like those. In Seattle in particular, it's not just suburbs, but roads filled with apartment buildings on either side (see the neighborhood capitol hill for example). I like Musk's proposal for mostly autonomous tunnel driving because it actually seems much more feasible than handling every edge case known to man.
      • superfrank 8y ago
        > I like Musk's proposal for mostly autonomous tunnel driving because it actually seems much more feasible than handling every edge case known to man. Maybe I'm just not familiar with the specifics of that proposal, but I don't think tunnels solve the problem you presented either. If I need to go down a one lane street to get to my house, I'll still need to do that whether we have tunnels or not, unless for some reason the tunnel exit is right in front of my house. Personally, I think the solution is to make only make certain large, predictable roads self driving and force a user to take over on smaller more complicated roads. As technology advances, you can slowly add more and more of the smaller roads to the self driving map.
• BinaryIdiot 8y ago
  I think you're both correct and incorrect. There has been great progress made and I don't see any reason why we won't see them in less than a decade. However, this is only going to be in very specific areas. Really complex driving, like roads with no lines, a single lane but allows two directions, etc; I think that type of driving will take decades. So in 8 years I can totally see getting off a plane, jumping into an autonomous car and having it drive me somewhere specific. But I can't see driving through all roads until much, much, much later.
• mwfunk 8y ago
  I agree with you, and am in the same boat with most of my friends. I have friends that would normally be shopping around for a new car, but who are deciding to hold off a couple years because they've decided that their next car will be fully autonomous and they insist that it's just around the corner. These aren't people I think of as credulous or not knowledgeable about the technology- these are engineers in SV with many years of experience. I don't get it. I really want autonomous cars to be a thing in my lifetime, and feel like this sort of optimism is more damaging to their future than people being skeptical or even down on the idea. The more people push the narrative that it's a done deal and just around the corner, with no infrastructure changes required, the more backlash (fair or unfair, it doesn't matter) is created whenever there's an accident involving autonomous vehicles.
  • suppressingfire 8y ago
    In the meantime we have Lyft and Uber. I don't think we need fully autonomous vehicles to want to eliminate the need to own a vehicle that needs to be housed and stored for 95% of it's lifetime. Waiting for an L4 transport service is just an excuse.
• amelius 8y ago
  We might even have teleportation before we have self-driving cars.