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Driverless cars are stuck in a jam
- rosybox 7y agoHow does one get past the registration/paywall?
- rmist 7y agoTry opening with javascript disabled.
- zaroth 7y agoarchive.is has it - but honestly there's not really any content. Several paragraphs to say it's harder and will take longer than some people promised, because "edge cases".
- Consultant32452 7y agoThe answer is usually click the "web" link at the top. In this case it takes you to a google search for the article title, and then clicking the search result on Google opened the article fully for me, presumably it's the referrer.
- winfred 7y agoFixes most paywalls: https://github.com/iamadamdev https://github.com/iamadamdev
- mr__y 7y agoMore often than not, switching User-Agent to Googlebot is enough
- flr03 7y agoBy paying
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoa) Use Firefox b) Have 100+ tabs open c) Click on the link d) Quickly press the "x" button to the right of the address bar to stop the page loading the paywall. Works on my system :|
- sien 7y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218694 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21218694 Previous discussion.
- deepnotderp 7y agoThe most pertinent point here being that although collecting lots of self driving car data is easy, the tail and unexpected events that you care about are surprisingly rare. And many of these events can also be entirely new (never seen before). Current AI SOTA techniques simply require too much data and cannot reason well enough to solve this. Leaving Musk aside, amongst those who are serious about self driving cars, e.g. Waymo, there is still a clear emerging picture that current AI techniques are too weak to get there right now. The limitations of current sensors and compute hardware are not helping either. Going the other way and eliminating LIDAR isn't going to help.
- xbmcuser 7y agoI agree that ditching Lidar by Musk is the wrong move. From what I have read most if not all the self driving accidents that Tesla have been involved in could have been avoided if a Lidar type sensor was involoved. With tech available trying to use the same limits as human vision is stupid.
- postmeta 7y agolidar isn't cheap or small (yet), and you need cameras either way, can add lidar to the sensor suite later if it gets cheaper
- rmason 7y agoI agree with Musk and George Hotz that lidar is never going to get there. That's because in Michigan the terrain that lidar has mastered changes drastically every time it snows. For those of us in snowy climates limiting us to self-driving to seven months a year isn't going to cut it.
- skybrian 7y agoBut this doesn't explain why self-driving cars won't succeed in Arizona. They don't need to take over the world at once, they just need to work somewhere and that would be a good start.
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- crocal 7y agoThe article misses an important point. It’s not only a problem of technology, it’s also a problem of risk acceptance. While we accept to be killed by our own mistakes at the wheel, society (we) will not accept that a machine makes the same, even if the failure rate is on average /better/. This is the fundamental issue Elon Musk has. The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or even rocket science.
- macspoofing 7y ago>even if the failure rate is on average /better/ Which has not been true thus far. That's the problem. > The driverless bar for safety is way higher than very clever driver assistance or even rocket science. Why shouldn't it be higher? Why shouldn't it be on the level of airline travel?
- ghaff 7y ago>Why shouldn't it be on the level of airline travel? In all fairness, commercial airlines operate in an environment that's mostly highly regulated with respect to maintenance, training, traffic management, etc. But I agree with your general point. After all--except arguably with respect to some drug side effects--there isn't really any consumer-facing product that regularly kills people and we shrug out shoulders and say "Hey, stuff happens" and get on with our day.
- vasilipupkin 7y agoTons: alcohol being just one example.
- ghaff 7y agoSubstances used to excess and technology like electricity used improperly are in a different category than consumer-facing products that can kill you randomly through no fault of your own.
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- gremlinsinc 7y agoMaybe we should focus on finding a way to ... clone our brain inside of mechanical box. I know plenty of ethical considerations there, but a human with all the life skills of a human would be a perfect AI and not need the normal learning that focus ML brings w/ it. Imagine if they just clone a driving instructor's brain, and placed copies of that inside the cars...
- IIAOPSW 7y agoImagine being given immortality but you have to work a day job as a car and you don't get time off ever.
- gremlinsinc 7y agoI know..but you could have time off... I mean you're not driving 24/7...maybe when not needed for transport you live in VR space.
- IIAOPSW 7y agoYou could also be turned off and reset. Why waste the power? Who will know? Is it even a crime to kill a simulated person?
- gremlinsinc 7y agoYes. If you buy into the belief that we're living in a simulation. It's a crime if we murder, therefore it's a crime to murder a simulated person.
- etrautmann 7y agoThis is not technically feasible for the foreseeable future and ethically fraught, but a fun thought experiment.
- arpa 7y agoHey, SOMA is a game you would enjoy!
- RavlaAvlar 7y agoWoh, An article that correctly identify machine learning as a sub-field of AI.
- eru 7y agoDoes Waymo even use the kind of machine learning with neural networks that's currently en vogue?
- colorincorrect 7y agoI asked this question before and received no answers, so I'll ask again: Is there a source that details the specific issues that self-driving cars could face, and potential methods of solving them?
- counterpig 7y agohttps://blog.piekniewski.info/2016/11/28/more-thoughts-on-self-driving-car/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2016/11/28/more-thoughts-on-se... Is pretty good. For a more recent take he has also written some blogs on the short comings of AI in general which has some self driving car content. https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/05/28/ai-winter-is-well-on-its-way/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/05/28/ai-winter-is-well-o... https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/10/29/ai-winter-update/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2018/10/29/ai-winter-update/
- aSplash0fDerp 7y agoJust to ask, haven't there been several reports of LTE/5G protocols being compromised, making the worst-case scenario one script-kiddie away from major disruptions? Why would they even contemplate building on a compromised foundation or worse yet, accelerating a roll-out? Since most of the tech from last century was built on trust models/trusted environments, waiting for a clean rewrite sounds like a better plan . I personally hope we see them build new 21st century cities and dedicated autonomous highways to grow driverless technology, instead of trying to overlay it on the existing horse and buggy infrastructure with time-period correct code/models. The world doesn't need any more digital diarrhea on its plate.
- contingencies 7y agoSee also an article on Chinese vs. Western thinking on autonomous vehicles https://www.economist.com/business/2019/10/12/chinese-firms-are-taking-a-different-route-to-driverless-cars https://www.economist.com/business/2019/10/12/chinese-firms-... in last week's Economist, and a recent example of an edge case taking non road based autonomous vehicles off one campus https://thespoon.tech/starships-robots-pulled-from-university-of-pittsburgh-after-accessibility-incident/ https://thespoon.tech/starships-robots-pulled-from-universit...
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoHeathrow has driverless pods: https://londonist.com/2014/09/a-ride-on-heathrows-self-driving-pods https://londonist.com/2014/09/a-ride-on-heathrows-self-drivi... I'm not sure how you could introduce that into a modern mixed traffic environment though. Imagine the howls from all the incumbents.
- sliken 7y agoTesla claims that autopilot is involved in one accident for every 4.34 million miles driven. Seems like a useful number, of course the media reports that the average is 1 accident per 500,000 miles. So 9 times safer... right? Question is how many accidents do similar people (read that as rich enough to buy a $50k+ car) in similar conditions (highways) with similar cars (newish luxury cars) without autopilot? No fair counting drunks, meth heads, crappy cars, or snow storms (where auto pilot wouldn't work anyways).
- davidgould 7y agoSurely some of those autopilot miles involved drunks, so they shouldn't be excluded entirely.
- sliken 7y agoIndeed, but likely at a lower rate than the general public. In any case the general idea is to find as fair a comparison as possible with the Tesla published numbers. I suspect $60k BMW owners driving on the highways in good weather are much safer per mile than random folks in random cars on random roads in random weather.
- mr__y 7y agowhile I generally agree with your point, that new cars with great braking, enhanced safety and in perfect technical conditions are safer than average, I'm not entirely convinced if BMW is the right make for this kind of examples edit: typo
- sliken 7y agoHeh, ok, pick any luxury car priced similarly to the Tesla.
- davidgould 7y agoIt's odd that so many of the comments on the self driving threads make this assumption that drivers of expensive cars are safer than drivers of inexpensive cars. It is just part of the classist bias that attaches virtue to wealth? Or is there some data that suggests that a Mercedes driver is a better driver than a Kia driver?
- petilon 7y agoTesla is already selling "Full Self-Driving Capability" for $6000. Excerpts: Coming later this year: Recognize and respond to traffic lights and stop signs. Automatic driving on city streets. Fine print includes this: The activation and use of these features are dependent on achieving reliability far in excess of human drivers as demonstrated by billions of miles of experience, as well as regulatory approval, which may take longer in some jurisdictions. https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#autopilot https://www.tesla.com/model3/design#autopilot
- minutillo 7y agoThey've been selling it for years, I think since 2016. They've delivered it so far to nobody.
- petilon 7y agoBut they just delivered "Smart Summon" feature where the car drives itself to you in a parking lot. The rollout of this feature has been glitchy. But it gives them a lot of data which they will learn from and improve. Once they fix all the bugs in Smart Summon they will have made a major step forward. Self-driving safely in a parking lot is very hard--there may be kids walking about randomly, other cars moving in unpredictable ways, and so on. In fact, my guess is that self-driving in a parking lot is harder than self-driving in city streets, because there are more rules, more room and more predictability in city streets. I wouldn't be surprised if Tesla delivers city-street self-driving in a year or two.
- bluGill 7y agoParking lots are hard for the reasons you mention, but they are also easier because the speeds are slow. Hit a kid at 5mph and it is probably not harmful, and even if it would be you get a lot more cycles to recognize the problem and need to react vs if you were driving at high speed.
- jcranmer 7y agoThat reminds me of the canard I haven't seen in quite some time: "Tesla is going to win the self-driving race because they've got the most data!" Has this died because people have started to finally understand that the logic doesn't actually hold, or is it because Musk/Tesla have stopped promising that full self-driving is actually imminent?
- moneytide1 7y agoI'm interpreting this paywalled article title literally, so I'm assuming driverless still can't solve the traffic jam? A solution to this could be far less complex than using AI or sensors (installed per car) to steer the user automatically. Consider curing congestion by connecting most car's existing cruise control to a city-wide traffic light network: Metal strip sensors are embedded into the first couple dozen feet of road at the beginning of an intersection, and this length is determined by the local DoT according to expected throughput (sometimes there are 3 or more sensors to count how many cars are queued up). This is because over the past several decades, classical traffic control created the enforceable expectation that vehicles come to a complete halt at the color red. There is generally a pattern constant throughout all cities: primary arteries take priority until the left turn sensor is activated on the street parallel to the oncoming street, but the perpendicular street sensor activation takes priority before this. These are usually lower speed neighborhood or shopping outlet access capillaries emptying out into the higher speed artery stream. Think about the feeling of seeing a dozen cars and heavy trucks going 40 mph and suddenly having to stop for a yellow light because only one car has activated the perpendicular sensor. That's a lot of wasted kinetic energy for just one car to cross, but timers and sensors guarantee static waiting times for the single car - something that a 2 way stop cannot guarantee. Noticing that a car has activated the sensor is how I manage to catch most lights green - knowledge of the programmed sequence and line of sight of each of the 8 sensor sections means letting gravity slow me down at just the right time. When a red light has been modified to interface with the approaching vehicles smart phone GPS and cruise control - "herds" of traveling cars can have their speed set in order to accommodate cars from lower speed capillaries without ever coming to a complete stop. Here in Reno, a walk up one of the hills surrounding the city at night can lend a birds eye insight into the "herding" concept (large sections of the city can be seen without obstruction, headlights make crowd dynamics clearly visible). Speed limits and fear of enforcement generally means vehicles will cluster up. This pack traveling at their known speed (especially when giving consensual control to what we can call "Herd Cruising") can get through green lights while reducing wait times for perpendicular traffic utilizing the original sensor system. This same traffic could bypass the light similarly if the system already knows about an approaching bulk of participating "Herd Cruising" vehicles, although capillaries would mean cars entering the road and less likely to have time to herd together. This could increase fuel economy, decrease waiting/idling time, save brake pads, and reduce emissions.
- bogle 7y agoIf we expect driverless cars to be further delayed and we continue building our cities to encourage micromobility (bikes, electric scooters, segregated lanes, car free streets, etc.) then at which point does the value of the driverless car become moot because we no longer drive? Does this sound unlikely? Consider European cities like Copenhagen and Amsterdam which have encouraged cycling over the last two decades and all the other cities, like London and New York, that are embarking on ambitious transformations to create friendlier streets for people. If you don't need to drive why would you buy a driverless car? Also, why would I prefer a driverless taxi if an electric car with a human driver costs no more? Note that I'm only asking about city travel, not intercity transportation.
- bluGill 7y agoEven in the inner city there are times when a car beats everything else. Or more likely a truck. The store you get groceries from gets deliveries every day, and they probably should have a special waiver to drive on that car free street to get the truck to their back door (I've seen areas in Germany where the old part of town was effectively car free except delivery trucks) Most people will not need to drive very often, so they would not buy a car at all. However everybody has situations where driving of some sort is the best option.
- de_watcher 7y agoThere are places where it's cold, where it rains and snows. So we can't bike everywhere. The good thing about the driverless cars is that they solve the parking problems in the cities. We can even add lanes or pavements by removing all parking spaces in the city centers.
- ed312 7y agoYou can absolutely bike in the cold, and in the rain, and even in light snow. Also, public transit & busses can get you further without even the dreaded prospect of burning a calorie. Removing free rental of public space to park your private vehicle is something I _do_ endorse though!
- reportgunner 7y agoSelf driving cars only make sense to me as a replacement for taxi services. That is, you don't own and don't maintain the car and you don't care where the car is. You call it when you need it and it drives away when you don't. I can't see this realized until we avoid the uphill battle of not running over pedestrians and deciding which one to spare in case you cannot avoid running one over. One way to avoid this battle that I see is completely outlawing pedestrians on the road. Then you have cyclists and similar. What do we do about those ? Considering the above I don't think driverless cars solve a problem that we have.
- bluGill 7y agoSelf driving cars mean I can daydream instead of staring at the road. I daydream anyway: I know it isn't safe but I can't help it.
- YeGoblynQueenne 7y agoSo, do we, as modern people, consciously accept that in order to get faster to our destination some people must necessarily lose their lives because of the technology we use to transport us? Given that our transport technology is not completely safe, we must accept that some people will die using it. Even a very low chance of lethal accidents means that some lethal accidents _must_ happen. Some people _will_ lose their lives. So in order for most of us to get to our destination by plane or car or train, etc, some people must never reach theirs. Does the general public appreciate this or is it just the case that people get into their cars or board planes, etc, thinking "nah, it won't happen to me"?
- rootusrootus 7y ago> Does the general public appreciate this or is it just the case that people get into their cars or board planes, etc, thinking "nah, it won't happen to me"? I think the average person recognizes the risk tradeoff. Though I suspect a lot more people worry about planes than worry about cars, even though planes are statistically safer. Guessing that is probably due to a combination of speed, gravity, and lack of direct control over the plane.
- l33tman 7y agoIt's easy to make polarized judgements, like "AI driving can only follow lanes or drive on wide broad sunny streets". I recently watched a lecture where a guy from Waymo talked and demoed some situations, check out the 3 seconds or so in the timestamp in this video which made me re-evaluate that pessimism a bit: https://youtu.be/Q0nGo2-y0xY?t=865 https://youtu.be/Q0nGo2-y0xY?t=865 Sure it's still nowhere near the general understanding necessary for completely autonomous driving but still much more impressive than simple lane-following.
- WhompingWindows 7y agoNice clip. It's good to see actual evidence and data, rather than the rampant speculation that always comes up with SDC topics.
- igammarays 7y agoThat clip is far from convincing. Sure, the video showed an AI making the correct decision in a single complex circumstance. But that is assuming you have a correctly-modelled situation with accurate sensors. Even if you could guarantee that the AI could make the correct decision every single time, millions of times per year, you have the problem of potentially inaccurate and/or failing sensors which give the AI an incomplete model. This is why airplane auto-pilots disengage when they detect failing sensors, giving humans enough time to take over. Unfortunately in the case of cars, there is not enough time to hand over to a human.
- bluGill 7y agoIt isn't hard to have redundant sensors so that you can drive for a bit on less than all of them. If there is a failure you drive to a mechanic and get the senor fixed before there is a second sensor failure. The odds of a dual sensor failure is low enough to still be substantially better than humans. Assuming of course that the dual sensor failure is dual unrelated failures. That means care in the wiring of power systems, fail safe modes, over design such that failure can't happen, and other engineering tricks.
- rkangel 7y agoThere is an anecdote I half remember, that I would like to find the original source of, because it's illustrative when explaining the issues. It goes something like: In the 70s/80s a research group was working on a CAD system. After adding all sorts of features, the professor assigned a task to one of his students to make it respond to voice commands. The professor expected this to take only a few months. It is difficult, even for experts, to have a good intuitive idea of where a good ML implementation is going to be easy or hard. You can be making good progress and then hit the "diminishing returns" part of the curve unexpectedly.
- jcranmer 7y agoThe classic AI anecdote is that the problem of object recognition in images was assigned as a summer project in 1966. It was still considered an open research problem 40 years later.
- rkangel 7y agoAh, thank you. With a bit of further googling, I found this delightful document: http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/idocs/AIM-100.pdf http://people.csail.mit.edu/brooks/idocs/AIM-100.pdf
- axilmar 7y agoThe AI part of autonomous driving could have easily been handled by creating a network of roads (that is, converting existing roads) that has the appropriate markings and that is easy navigable by machines. But that requires cooperation between governments and/with the private sector, and in 2019, God forbid that.
- ageitgey 7y agoThat's called trains.
- bogle 7y agoAnd isn't it interesting that even though we've had driverless trains for decades many of them still require a driver? In London the DLR (Docklands Light Railway) is fully automatic. In Tokyo the trains are computer controlled but a driver takes over outside of peak hours, apparently for practice. So perhaps we'll never get past a self-driving car requiring a human operator at least pretending to pay attention (so no real change there, then).
- rubidium 7y agoThe bigger hurdle is the cost to redo roads. 2-6 million per mile of road. 4 million+ miles of road in US. It’s not so much the roads though, it’s the other cars and other things/people/animals in the way
- joking 7y agoI don't get why we can't create a "full self driving suitable zone", with standarized road paint, signs, beacons, traffic lights which broadcast their state on a suitable standar, and maybe a car to car communication mesh. Start small with something like the mortantown prt, even in segregated lanes, and grow from there. I can't see a way to have full self driving capabilities, without helping the vehicles with some context information.
- Nasrudith 7y agoInfastructure is hard enough to get spending on when it is needed long term and immediate unfortunately - let alone for experimental applications. That sort of spending would rely upon rational risk assessment instead of irrational fear so utterly unrealistic politically unfortunately.
- bluGill 7y agoThe problem is paint fades, beacon lights burn out (or the power fails). You can detect and fix those problems, but there is still the time between the issue and when it is fixed that the system needs to work. I've driven in cities after heavy snowfall took out all the power and you couldn't see any lane markings - we slowed down and used extra space (4 lane road, but everybody was driving between lanes making it effectively a 2 lane road), but those who needed to get around could - we even got through intersections despite the stoplight being out. That is the self driving car needs to handle cases where the infrastructure around it is dead before it can react to infrastructure helping it out. This is needed in any case to ensure "terrorist" situations are not too harmful.
- xamuel 7y ago>a "full self driving suitable zone", with standarized road paint, signs, beacons, traffic lights... We've done this already. It's called "railroad tracks" and the self-driving cars on it are called "trains".
- evo_9 7y agoI don't understand why there is so much focus on automobiles instead of just about everything else. In every other instance - airplanes, boats, long-haul trucking - the problem in significantly less complex to solve. The only tangible reason I see for such disproportionate focus is some sense of false futurism; aka, driver-less cars have become the 'flying cars' of our times.
- bane 7y agoLarge aircraft are basically self-driving these days. Pilots can choose to do almost nothing at all from takoff to landing. However, the failure modes are all mostly catastrophic so pilots remain under the assumption that they can slightly increase the survivability rate when the automation fails. Modern drone systems are also have elements of this kind of automation and can fly complex flight paths and station keep and land and so on more or less on their own. Some large boat systems have are also similarly "self-driving" and can navigate to way points and along various lanes without too much intervention. They need pilots and tugs for the small-nav stuff like canals and ports and so on, there's simply too many permutations of "things that can be hit and sunk" to rely on the automation. Smaller boats can also buy commercial "autonav" systems that link the engine, steering and such to GPS. However, the marine environment is hellish on equipment. Trucking is being seriously looked at, with active test runs, but like big ships needs local pilots for the end-points and local nav. Again too many things in flux and too many things to hit. Cars exist basically continuously at the terminal ends of the trucking problem and are trying to solve the local pilot problem. Humans, with our highly adaptive sensory-response systems can do it to various levels of skill, but even we have lots and lots of failure modes even without impairment.
- i_am_proteus 7y agoOne advantage of ocean-going ships for automation is that they can (and do) embark pilots for operation waters. On the flipside, the machinery isn't designed to operate for weeks on end without any engineering crew.
- boxy310 7y agoLong-haul trucking would be a great use-case. Even if you need humans for local pilot guidance, you can queue them up to a "cell phone lot" and courier the last-mile drivers in between shifts of going back & forth. It would also mean drivers would be based more locally to points of loading, rather than having to be constantly on the road away from home.
- elisharobinson 7y agowhy is this foam of words called an article . And why is this on the first page of HN .
- pjdemers 7y agoI don't remember the source, but a few years ago I saw the results of a poll about self driving cars. The question was: "How much more would you pay for a car that could drive itself?" In the US, 50% of the responses said $0. It is not a feature that the market wants. That's why we don't have self driving cars.
- mkcny 7y agoBut this is so obviously wrong. Every time someone takes a cab, they're paying for a "car that could drive itself". There's a huge market for this. How much more often would you take a cab if the cost was dramatically lower? Not to mention the existing market for professional drivers that aren't transporting people.
- flowerlad 7y agoPeople don’t always know what they want. Before Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone how many people knew they wanted a smart phone?
- rootusrootus 7y agoAnybody who had a palm pilot with a cellular radio strapped to the back :).
- flowerlad 7y agoTouché! I do think Apple owes PalmOS a lot! I wish other platform vendors such as Microsoft had also copied from PalmOS.
- jeffreyrogers 7y agoI don't think that's the reason. There's a lot of money going into self driving cars and a lot of talented people working on them. The reason is that it's easy to make a self-driving car that can drive in predictable situations (first done in the 80s), but it's extremely hard to make one that handles unusual situations.
- rdlecler1 7y agoWe just invested an ag robotics company started by senior engineers from some of the top driverless car companies because they felt that they were never going to actually get a driverless car to market. We welcome the influx of talent.
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- tempsy 7y agoI'm a little confused by the delivery only cars like Nuro. Logistically how would the package be delivered once it arrives at my apartment...? Would I have to be home and physically grab my package from the vehicle? If there's a human assistant who needs to drop off my package to my doorstep then is there really any cost savings over a regular driver?
- ceejayoz 7y agoYes, you'd have to be home to take things out of the vehicle. It's more the pizza/grocery delivery model than the "we left your Amazon package on the porch" one.
- tempsy 7y agoThat seems pretty inconvenient. I'd predict a ton of missed deliveries. Even with Amazon/Whole Foods delivery they ring but will just drop it off at my door.
- ceejayoz 7y agoI'd expect them to be very clear about needing to be home, letting you pick a specific time, and a fee for a missed window.
- rossdavidh 7y agoThe "easiest" (read: least difficult) to automate would be long-haul, between cities. But, we have an "automated" system for that, it's called railroads, where one driver can steer dozens or hundreds of cars. The hardest to automate is in-city driving, where the environment is much more complicated to parse, and there are many more kinds of fellow-users (pedestrians, bicyclists, etc.). So, naturally, that's where they went first, because it's not about what makes engineering sense, it's about what gets the "dumb money" to invest.
- huntertwo 7y agoPerhaps a city is more complicated because of the environmental hazards you mention, but I'd imagine it's easier to outfit a city with self-driving friendly sensors or lanes than those long-haul routes. In the article, it says this is how China is approaching the problem. I personally believe a society with autonomous cars and regular cars sharing normal roads is a pipe dream in both a technical and political sense.
- gmadsen 7y agocargo by rail is actually pretty expensive. A fleet of autonomous trucks driving interstates would definitely be more cost effective
- acd 7y agoThe solution is pretty simple. We need to design electric highways that have a self driving lane. In the self driving lane there is guidance in the road that assist self driving cars. Since the cars are self driving they can coast in 80km/h sharing the lane with trucks. Add electric supply and rails to lessen the tire friction and we are a long way to reduce carbon emissions from transportation. For city centers cars should for now assist the driver but not self drive as the system are not yet safe enough todo so. From machine learning we know that image analysis has probabilities associated with them. Probably might not be safe enough in cities.
- vkou 7y ago> The solution is pretty simple. We need to design electric highways that have a self driving lane. So, build train lines.
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- rtkwe 7y agoAny product that requires refitting existing roads is pretty much dead in the water, there's a chicken and egg problem inherent in that solution because before there's a push for billions of dollars and decades to be spent refitting the highway system there has to be a big demand for that project/product and that will only happen with a proven viable self driving car. And even once it starts the vehicle will only be useful once enough roads have be refitted. So a company has to 1) convince the US government to dedicate years and a few billion dollars to build them the infrastructure to run their product then 2) protect that funding across a couple decades (including multiple party switches) and 3) not go broke in the process waiting for the infra to be in place for people to actually buy their product.
- Animats 7y agoSelf-driving got taken over by the "fake it til you make it" crowd. Uber, Cruise (go find Cruise's original demo video and marketing claims), Tesla, etc. Only Google/Waymo approached it as a hard problem, and only Waymo has something that's deployed, even in a limited way, without a "safety driver". Somebody will probably make it work, but it may come from some boring old company like Ford or Continental or Fujitsu. A background in webcrap has negative value in this area, as it does in avionics.
- samuell 7y agoEinride got driverless trucks running on a public road: https://insideevs.com/news/350293/autonomous-einride-t-pod-public-road/ https://insideevs.com/news/350293/autonomous-einride-t-pod-p...
- reaperducer 7y agoAnd Las Vegas had driverless mini-buses running around downtown for about a year. Not anymore because funding ran out. https://lasvegassun.com/news/2018/apr/05/how-does-downtowns-autonomous-bus-work/ https://lasvegassun.com/news/2018/apr/05/how-does-downtowns-...
- Animats 7y ago"a short distance on a public road within an industrial area – between a warehouse and a terminal – where traffic speeds are typically low".
- ezzzzz 7y agoI honestly wouldn't be surprised if these 'Auto-Pilot' cars are actually being controlled remotely from some off-shore ops center.
- jandrese 7y agoIn fact at least one company is looking into this, having the car self-navigate as much as possible, but when confronted with a difficult situation like construction or debris in the road it would call back to a remote operator who would take over until you are past the difficult situation. They also saved the operators response so when the next car hits the same obstacle and calls back the next operator can just repeat the same solution. I thought it was a good idea, but somewhat more expensive since you have to keep a big call center running and it depends on having reliable and fast internet connectivity at all times. The alternative is what everybody else is doing where you have to have a full set of controls and a licensed driver behind the wheel ready to take over when the AI runs into a situation it can't handle.
- rmuesi 7y agoI remember 2014 being a year full of these incredible claims of fully autonomous vehicles in the near future. One article in particular I remember, about some large car company expecting 80% of cars on the road to be autonomous by 2018. I remember this vividly because I was house hunting at the time and became truly conflicted what location to buy. Should I choose a smaller more much more expensive house nearer to the city center, or a nicer drastically cheaper house further away? If I’ll be essentially chauffeured to work in a few years, why not go for the bigger cheaper house. I eventually chose the more expensive house nearby. Since then, the small yet constant worry that Autonomous cars are going to show me what a mistake I’ve made has disappeared, in parallel with any noticeable progress of autonomous vehicles hitting the roads. Thank god I didn’t choose that house in the boonies.