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Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

• dboreham 7y ago
  Not any exec but "The CEO of Volkswagen's autonomous driving division".
• robbrown451 7y ago
  This strikes me as weird: > "This is one of the hardest problems we have. This is like we are going to Mars," Hitzinger said in a comment. "Maybe it will never happen." First of all, it seems obvious that we are going to go to Mars, eventually. Maybe not any time soon, but never? Seriously? But the bigger thing is that there is about 1000 times more economic benefit to self driving cars than of going to Mars, at least in the near term. To think we'd just give up on it seems absurd.
  • vardump 7y ago
    Yeah, some guy named Elon might not agree.
    • JaRail 7y ago
      Exactly. Using Mars as a second example is basically just doubling down on the "Elon isn't trustworthy" argument. That should be a giant red flag to readers.
  • listenallyall 7y ago
    Not reaching Level 5 is not synonymous with "giving up." We could get to 4+, with 90+% of driving being automated, but never actually reach 100% (the definition of Level 5)
  • Barrin92 7y ago
    >First of all, it seems obvious that we are going to go to Mars, eventually. Maybe not any time soon, but never? Seriously? Given the questionable economics underlying humans having a presence on Mars and the extreme toll on the human body this will have, foremost by radiation I think it's actually a fair comparison in particular because full autonomy like mars colonisation is constantly being overhyped mostly by a very small group of very affluent individuals who seem to be more inspired by sci-fi than engineering.
  • maxbond 7y ago
    I don't mean to be rude, but I have strong feelings about this attitude. Let's take going to Mars. We can't reliably go to the moon. We can't even go everywhere on the Earth, where we have every possible advantage. Spend a year on the ISS and you'll develop all sorts of health issues. Spending time on Mars isn't likely to be less hazardous. We may send humans to Mars but it is by no means guaranteed. (And I would also ask, what reason do we have to go to Mars? Probes do a better job of exploring, and I doubt we could colonize it.) Until someone builds a real self-driving car it is just an idea. On today's roads, it is probably not possible to safely implement a fully self driving car. Driving is not only a technical exercise but a social activity that involves communicating your intentions to other humans, and interpreting the intentions of others. That is something that humans do far better than machines. (Edit: To clarify, humans are better at communicating with other humans. Machines do a great job of communicating with each other, but have mixed results communicating with humans.) If every car was self-driving and the roads were remade from first principles, then sure, that seems feasible. The degenerate case here would be a self-driving train, which seems perfectly reasonable. But the technical challenges are the easy part of that endeavor. Funding such a project, developing the political will to see it through, and organizing the logistics are far more difficult. Consider for instance; what will happen to the legacy vehicles? Will it be illegal to drive them? Will there be a massive government buyback? Who will fund that? Where will the cars go? How will we organize the logistics of moving hundreds of millions of vehicles? How long will that take? What other matters will we need to turn our attention away from to accomplish that task? A much more likely scenario is that companies continue to come up with partial, ad-hoc solutions, driving gets more automated, ride sharing becomes more popular and car ownership less so, but that humans remain in the loop for the foreseeable future. What happens outside the foreseeable future is something we can't and shouldn't pretend to know with any degree of certainty. There are a million ways in which we could never go to Mars or build a self-driving car. We could get a better idea for how transit should work, making self driving cars superfluous. We could discover life on Mars, and make the decision that it would be too dangerous for us to visit. The superpowers of the world could go to war with each other, and our infrastructure could be devastated to the point where space travel is impossible. Climate change could drive us to extinction. Something could happen that we cannot predict or imagine, that we have no precedent for, that completely changes our situation and outlook. Some of these are more likely than others, but the point is that it would be folly to take the future as read. And frankly, a couple of them are more likely than us ever going to Mars.
• ecpottinger 7y ago
  I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws has something to say here.
  • pts_ 7y ago
    Sure. Replace never by 3 billion years +/- 0.5 bill to account for human help (the time it took single celled life to evolve to human brain). What I mean is it's a fascinating but daunting task.
• aplummer 7y ago
  To go down in a long list of things executives said wouldn’t happen, that ended up happening.
  • n8henry 7y ago
    "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
  • rayiner 7y ago
    Read an book on space/aerospace engineering from the 1980s and look at how many things happened. Supersonic was a huge bust. (The Concorde is closer in time to wooden biplanes than to today. Routine supersonic travel still nowhere on the horizon.) Energy technology has been a huge disappointment. When I grew up, we were going to have nuclear fusion, expanding the scope of what society can do. Today we’re back to windmills and we’re told to put on a sweater. AI was of course a huge bust once.
    • pritovido 7y ago
      Windmills' technology has improved dramatically, like also nuclear fusion's. We are not "back" to windmills that give 3 MegaWatts of power because they never existed in the first place, like affordable solar panels with 20-40% efficiency. Progress is not automatic. It is millions of times harder to create or improve a technology than imagine it. And also takes lots of money. We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.
      • xyzzyz 7y ago
        We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there. No, Manhattan project took trivial amount of money by today's standard. It costed less than the rounding error in typically given federal budget figures for past few decades.
• hinkley 7y ago
  In the dot com era there was a self driving car startup that started with a simplifying assumption: don’t run the cars at grade. If you go up or down, the number and kind of obstacles reduces. The location of interactions between the vehicles is reduced, and the interactions with other classes of vehicle are zero, so you can negotiate. Solve a simpler problem, if you can.
  • NikolaNovak 7y ago
    I've read the paragraph several times and maybe it's my ESL, but I don't quite follow. Is the term "Grade" here used in the "Slope" sense, as in don't run the cars up and down the hill? And if that's the interpretation, I don't necessarily agree with the next point that obstacles are reduced on slopes/hills... so I probably am not following correctly :-/ Thanks!
    • alasarmas 7y ago
      The "grade" that GP is referring to is this grade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_separation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_separation
• shrubble 7y ago
  If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily have self driving cars. However that would mean that everyone would have access to it. The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.
  • bstar77 7y ago
    I've been beating this drum for years. Well said.
  • cma 7y ago
    A wire in the road can't handle stuff like a pedestrian. Pedestrians normally aren't in highways but sometimes are after break-downs, accidents, construction, etc. Lane-following is close to solved on the highway, it is all that other stuff and more that is an issue. A wire could still help, but you'd still need a complex system or significantly more infrastructure than just a wire (maybe caged barriers over the lane in a way that doesn't cause issues if there is a fire, and more).
    • shrubble 7y ago
      Pedestrians are lumpy compared to cars however. Even the self driving car that hit a pedestrian, did identify the person.
    • kjaftaedi 7y ago
      All you need are machine readable signs or beacons that dictate where full-auto is allowed.
      • listenallyall 7y ago
        As long as you have places where full-auto isn't allowed, you haven't reached Level 5. Exactly what the subject of the story claims.
      • cma 7y ago
• crusso 7y ago
  Despite that, he's confident in VW's ability to make a Level 4 autonomous vehicle, saying that the upcoming I.D. Buzz electric van will be the first VW to receive the technology. He's poo-pooing level 5 autonomous driving and says that they just about have a level 4 autonomous vehicle? This article makes no sense. Honestly, the CEO of my company has very little idea of the details of the technology that we produce. If you picked some cutting-edge technology that isn't key to our market-share yet, he'd have even less of a clue.
  • lawnchair_larry 7y ago
    How does it make no sense? He’s saying we might never get past level 4. And they’re going to offer level 4. That statement is logically coherent.
    • drcross 7y ago
      It could quite easily be a ploy to prevent lost sales.
      • Daishiman 7y ago
        Consumers don't give two craps about this terminology. And the barrier between level 4 and level 5 is potentially decades out, if not forever. Nobody's who's contemplating a level 4 is holding out their purchase for a level 5.
  • desc 7y ago
    I think the point here is that going from level 4 to level 5 is a much, much harder problem than going from, say, level 1 to level 4.
    • crusso 7y ago
      But it's really not. Level 4 will require the vehicle to take you from door to door without driver intervention in normal driving conditions. Level 4 is mostly what people think of when they think of autonomous driving because you can take a nap, work on your laptop, whatever. You get in your car, tell it where you want to go, and it does everything. Level 5 basically removes the steering wheel so you never drive. But once you're at level 4, almost all of the hard problems have been solved. https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated-driving-graphic https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated...
• mymythisisthis 7y ago
  Why not drone cars, driven remotely?
  • flavor8 7y ago
    Latency?
  • bordercases 7y ago
    Because you need to be where the car ends up stopping!
    • smabie 7y ago
      You could pay someone else to drive the car remotely. Though, I suppose they could extract money out of you by threatening to kill you.
      • bordercases 7y ago
        Buddy that's called transit and taxiing.
• rgbrenner 7y ago
  Since when has VW been at the forefront of self driving cars? Is there a reason their insight would be especially accurate? This just reflects VWs ideas to accomplish the goal... ie: they have none. Let me know when Google says it's not possible.
  • threeseed 7y ago
    Apple is in the top tier of self driving cars though. And since he recently worked there I am sure he knows quite a bit about where the industry is at.
    • judge2020 7y ago
      > Apple is in the top tier of self driving cars though. I mean all we have to support that they're working on self driving cars at all is DMV records, articles, and pictures of their car efforts. We have no idea how far along they are.
    • what_ever 7y ago
      > Apple is in the top tier of self driving cars though. Citations needed. I consider Waymo, Cruise and couple of other companies in the top tier. Disc: Googler
    • junipertea 7y ago
      Apple was dead last in the last self driving report in California. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-13/apple-s-autonomous-cars-need-much-more-human-help-than-rivals https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-13/apple-s-a...
  • leoh 7y ago
    The fact that they're a reasonably competent outsider arguably bolsters their position.
    • Ensorceled 7y ago
      Their future sales are dependent upon there NOT not being self driving cars which arguably reduces their position dramatically.
• ogre_codes 7y ago
  This is arguably one of the biggest competitive advantages Tesla has. For $47,000 I can get an EV from Tesla with a better self-driving system[1] than a $100k Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus. I haven’t pulled the trigger on a Tesla yet, but I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now. For many people Tesla has made EV and self-driving table-stakes and nobody else is delivering on that. [1] Yes, I know about the accidents
  • ptx 7y ago
    So, considering the accidents, maybe Tesla is "better" at self-driving in the same way Intel was better at speculative execution before they had to patch it.
    • mamon 7y ago
      The only company that knows what they are doing is Waymo (which actually launched self-driving taxi service in Phoenix), Tesla and others are kind of "fake it until you make it" crowd.
      • ogre_codes 7y ago
        Waymo has 600 cars in a very limited/ well known area and most of their cars still rely on safety drivers. If Waymo is around in 20 years their service might get to the small-ish city I live in. The big thing I would want self-driving capabilities for is long cross country driving. A thing Waymo doesn’t offer even to people in it’s service area. Tesla has hundreds of thousands of cars which range over the entire country and has driven millions of miles doing exactly the sort of self-driving I most care about. The two barely overlap in terms of offerings so I’m not sure what the point of comparing them even is.
  • NikolaNovak 7y ago
    >>I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now It's personal & subjective, and nobody will persuade anybody in a thread, but FWIW I absolutely positively can. - I'm unlikely to utilize self-driving any time soon - The stories of their firmware terrify me. And I don't want a DAW and computer games running on my ECU :O - More pragmatically though, the Tesla UI paradigm is completely foreign to my way of driving/thinking. I'm looking for a "HOTAS" type UI, where I can do anything I want without taking my eyes and focus off the road. A UI that's one giant screen, that may change position of buttons from minor firmware to another, is basically as scary and alienating concept as I can imagine. I get that I am in a minority nowadays - a lot of manufacturer's are replacing switches, buttons and knobs with a touchscreen and deep menus, but not thankfully all just yet :|
• listenallyall 7y ago
  Level 5 means no human intervention, under any circumstance. Ice, snow, night, fog, unmarked roads, tunnels, mega-urban, isolated rural, parking lots/structures, etc, etc. I think he's correct. It's hard to think of any technology that works without human intervention whatsoever, no matter the conditions. We've had autopilot for decades, we're certainly not flying planes without pilots. Or even getting them from runway to gate without humans. Nor is anyone claiming that pilot-less planes are coming soon.
  • MiroF 7y ago
    Most humans can't drive safely in all conditions without outside human intervention.
  • robbrown451 7y ago
    Planes are different in that there is a large ratio of passengers to "drivers". There isn't the same economic incentive to eliminate pilots when the cost of flying a plane is still going to be quite a few dollars a minute. The thing is, there are some conditions where people probably just shouldn't be driving. Like we shouldn't be driving in a heavy snow storm, at least not for most trips where you can just wait it out. Planes will wait out storms, even with human pilots. I don't see a problem with "level 4.9" cars that occasionally say "I'm going to wait out the storm" or that will avoid certain routes (such as "crazy mixing bowl" intersections where you can instead just take a side street)
  • tomp 7y ago
    How much do pilots actually pilot vs how much do they just assume responsibility? I.e. I as a passenger feel much safer knowing that there's someone actually responsible to prevent me from dying (because if the plane crashes, the pilot dies with me), not just some C_O suits pushing PR through legal trying to gaslight the public and avoid any culpability (cough Boeing cough).
    • ottowinter 7y ago
      That's exactly the point, even if pilots use autopilot most of the time (level 4 autonomy). Guess when they take control? When something bad is happening (and there are literally a million things that can go wrong and the autopilot could not fix, ever). Guess why MCAS did not result in more crashes (the system has been known to malfunction a couple of times before the crashes)? Righty because there were pilots that could manually control the plane well enough to land safely.
• hownottowrite 7y ago
  Clickbait. This is definitely not consistent with statements Alex has made in the past. Seems like more of an off the cuff remark a German engineer would make while confident that the fully realized result is right around the corner.
  • deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
• wwweston 7y ago
  Opinion: level 5 autonomy would be cool, but it's not where most of the value of self-driving cars is. Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving. If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when those conditions aren't met), then at least 80% of the value is there. Wrestling with the harder edges of the problem is still the right thing to do for tolerance reasons, but I hope we don't have to see last-mile problems solved before we start reaping the benefits.
  • furyofantares 7y ago
    People who can't, or shouldn't, drive themselves at all are totally unaccounted for in this logic. Full autonomy would be hugely freeing to the elderly, for example. Presumably it would enable travel for people too young to get a driver's license as well. And I have to assume driving patterns for capable drivers would change too, in ways that are likely hard to predict or appreciate right now.
  • DasIch 7y ago
    This 80% solution already exists in the form of trains and airplanes. Self-driving cars that only go 80% of the way would compete against those forms of transportation which have established business models, networks and in the case of trains are subsidized in a way that self-driving cars likely won't ever be. Additionally the key advantage of cars is flexibility, not having to figure out how to get to or from the train station or airport. In your scenario self-driving cars would lack this advantage. Now granted this may still sound like an appealing proposition in countries with poor public transportation infrastructure but that substantially reduces the size of the overall market. Sure this might be attractive for the US but what about Europe? Asia? Now of course there is an obvious answer to this problem: Keep the steering wheel and drive the rest of the way yourself. That just means you'll have a lot of drivers who won't gain experience at the current rate though. Not sure I would like to share the road with those people.
    • dpflan 7y ago
• temporaryvector 7y ago
  To a certain extent I agree. I had already written at length in another post about this topic, but my opinion is that what we think of as a "car" right now will never be fully autonomous. I see the future diverging into two paths, fully autonomous commercial vehicles, like taxis, delivery vehicles, semi-trucks, etc. that work within urban areas or other designated, mapped and specially prepared areas. This will possibly involve a centralized system of control and communication, something like an ATC but for cars. These will be owned by corporations and only used by people. It makes no sense for a person to buy one of these fully autonomous vehicles, although I imagine some people would pay extra to have priority access so they always have one available. The other side of the coin will be privately owned cars that have autonomous capability, or autonomous cars with override. These will be able to go anywhere the driver wants, including unmapped villages, small towns, off road tracks, etc. I suspect these will be the domain of enthusiasts, people who really need them for work (ranchers and farmers, for example) and people who choose to live away from urban centers. They will be more expensive than cars now, but the need for these vehicles will never go away. Even if we get true AI capable of driving anywhere with only the sensors aboard the vehicle, there will still be the need for a human to override it, even if that involves just authorizing a risky maneuver or putting the AI into "unsafe driving" mode. I think the movie I, Robot (with Will Smith) got the future of autonomous cars surprisingly right, autonomous inside cities and on highways, and using the manual override comes with penalties (higher insurance, being at fault in an accident, etc.). On a personal note, and this may sound bad, but I would never buy a car which I cannot use to break the law. Even if I never plan to do it, being able to speed, jump the curb, intentionally crash into a wall (or another car) or even run over a person (for example, in self defense) may be at some point required or the least bad of many bad options. In this case any consequences should fall on me, but I don't think a thing I own should be designed to prevent me from breaking the law or doing something stupid if I really want or need to, although providing warnings or an optional safe-mode is fine. I suspect many people feel the same way, even if they don't put it in such an extreme way. This can be seen by the fact that a lot of cars, particularly those focused on performance or off-roading, come with switches to turn traction control off, and if they don't, it will get mentioned as a negative in any review done by publications focused on those audiences.
• waynecochran 7y ago
  The technology is not the only problem. The lawyers that are defending every dead body, and there will be dead bodies, that will sink self-driving cars. Even if everyone is 95% safer with self-driving cars, those that are killed by a self-driving car (in combo with a public that is easily swayed with non-objective arguments) will be hard to dismiss.
  • robbrown451 7y ago
    I don't understand this. If there are 1/20th the amount of deaths, how is that going to sink self driving cars?
    • mattlutze 7y ago
      Reactionary legislation is a risk to the industry.
    • creato 7y ago
      Most drivers on the road are effectively being subsidized by bankruptcy protection, because most cannot possibly cover the liability they are exposing themselves to by driving. This "subsidy" is far less valuable to a self driving car manufacturer than individual drivers.
      • robbrown451 7y ago
        Well not if they have insurance. I mean, sure, you can come up with some scenario where the liability exceeded the insurance coverage, but I haven't heard of many of those. Anyway, it comes from somewhere. If bankruptcy protects drivers, it also exposes them to the risk that they will suffer damage that isn't compensated. Regardless, expecting a legal loophole to preserve the status quo indefinitely seems quite unrealistic and inherently unstable. If that actually holds up something that could massively benefit society (both economically and in saving lives), we simply legislate liability limits.
        • creato 7y ago
• Edmond 7y ago
  Maybe this exec should be fired for incompetence and lack of vision. While self-driving is obviously a challenging problem, I am still bemused by people who think "it will never happen". An auto exec who believes that, is unfit for the job and definitely unfit for the future of that job.
  • baybal2 7y ago
    I think people who overhyper very lacklustre neural algorithm based CV systems, thinking they can do what they cannot, are unfit for the job.
  • jariel 7y ago
    To the contrary he should be admired for his candour. It's very easy for execs to talk up utopian smack, it's harder the other way around. I for one agree: L5 may not be viable for many decades at least, not with the tech we have. It may never happen because conditions will change to the point wherein it won't make sense. What is viable, that nobody really talks about are 'controlled areas' - for example, highways built for long-haul trucks with 0 human drivers. This is a great place for AI because the conditions are set for all the crazy unknowns (esp. humans) to be controlled. Special roadways within cities, where there are no pedestrians, AI drivers only, that can communicate with 'the grid' etc - could not only mean full L5 'driverless' but no stop-signs either - traffic could be designed to flow much, much more efficiently using 'today's tech'. Cars won't have steering wheels, they can be called 'on demand' and 'parking' will be very different, more like 'temp storage' and won't involve humans. All viable.
    • tylerrobinson 7y ago
      > Special roadways This is a point that always seems to be missing. All of our roads are/were constructed at a specific size with specific engineering requirements and specific materials. If we have a major change in the technology of the cars, it seems to be perfectly reasonable that we could have a new type of road to accommodate that. For example, before interstate highways it probably would have sounded strange to imagine high-speed roads with limited entry and exit. And before that, may have sounded strange to have automated stoplights and traffic signals.
• Geee 7y ago
  Volkswagen doesn't develop self-driving tech. They use Mobileye's solution like everyone expect Tesla, Waymo and GM/Cruise. They aren't really in the position to make that argument. Level 5 means that the car can drive autonomously > 95% of the time, and it will absolutely be possible. Level 4/5 distinction doesn't really make any sense once the autonomy gets beyond certain percentage. It doesn't mean that it's level 4 until it hits 100% (which is impossible). Level 5 car is designed to drive in all conditions, but there are always statistically unlikely corner cases or situations that require high-level decision making, which the car can't handle by itself. A single driver may never hit such case, and for them the experience is full self-driving.
  • simfoo 7y ago
    This is not true. VW fully owns AID which is developing its level 4 stack. VW is also invested in Argo
    • Geee 7y ago
      I stand corrected. Still, VW is using MobilEye's tech in their ride-sharing service [0], which probably means that their own tech is not very close to the competitors. [0] https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/volkswagen-mobileye-champion-motors-invest-israel-deploy-first-autonomous-ev-ride-hailing-service/ https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/volkswagen-mobileye...
      • simfoo 7y ago
        I don't know about Israel but VWs ride-sharing service in Germany is MOIA
    • 0xff00ffee 7y ago
      VW is also working with Magna on ADAS, which is a huge Tier-1 vendor. I think VW is covering all their bases by having multiple design efforts.
    • savrajsingh 7y ago
      simfoo is right, Argo.ai is essentially a joint venture of ford and VW at this point, to the tune of billions of dollars invested. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/12/vw-invests-2-6-billion-in-self-driving-startup-argo-ai-as-part-of-ford-alliance/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/12/vw-invests-2-6-billion-in-...
• wojciii 7y ago
  I would like to read the article, but an add covers 1/2 of the screen and can't be closed or moved.
• baybal2 7y ago
  I think he is the one and only sane C-level person in the industry, after hearing this. People claiming most of AI hype barely know what the "AI" people mention is. And people who go as far as drawing rosy pictures of human like general AI being your personal chauffeur are past ridiculous. The entire idea of human-like general AI for practical applications is like trying to make people using horses for transport in 21st century, by trying to make a horse than if better than a car.
  • jasonjei 7y ago
    I don’t think it’s impossible if certain roads/highways or lanes become marked as autonomous only. Just as pedestrians and bicycles are banned from using high-speed roads, manually-operated cars could be banned from using certain roads/lanes, removing a lot of variables that manually-operated cars bring.
    • maxerickson 7y ago
      That's level 4, by definition. (full autonomy on some/many roads)
    • intended 7y ago
      Defeating the promise of automated driving, and underscoring the obviousness of its impossibility, since this is roughly as useful as a Tram.
      • ubertoop 7y ago
        How is the ability to leave at your own time, have your own dedicated cabin, and ability to stop nearly anywhere, even in the same ballpark as a Tram...?
    • petermcneeley 7y ago
      If you have to restrict to marked highways then you could have had this "self driving" technology in the 80s.
    • ubertoop 7y ago
• Booktrope 7y ago
  Or perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because it would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service instead of cars being a prized possession. That, of course, would mean far less cars. So don't expect a traditional car manufacturer to lead the way. This is incidentally one reason for Tesla's huge market value. The company actually has a plan to transition from individual ownership to fleet, so when this happens it will be prepared to deal with a new manufacturing reality. Just try to imagine VW without all those ads to sell a positive self image because you drive a sexy cool car they make.
  • Barrin92 7y ago
    >Or perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because it would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service instead of cars being a prized possession. Cuts both ways. Tesla execs have the same reason to overhype autonomous driving, because their market value depends on being perceived as a hypermodern tech company. So far reality has proven VW right. Elon himself had to walk back on grandiose claims about full autonomy and robotaxi fleets, or advertising cars with slogans like "the driver is only there for legal reasons, the car drives itself" a bunch of years ago. Full autonomy on a human level requires human levels of intelligence and 'common sense', it's a ridiculously hard problem that requires several leaps in AI and plenty of other fields.
  • krawakoliz 7y ago
    > O r perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because it would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service instead of cars being a prized possession. Why on earth would anyone use this over public transit? That would be a hugely expensive way to travel.
    • ggreer 7y ago
      Public transportation where I live is disgusting and often dangerous. Buses and trains don't pick me up and drop me off in front of my home. And they run on fixed schedules. Due to these advantages, I usually take Uber/Lyft instead of BART or Muni. Autonomous vehicles would reduce the cost of such services even more.
• gok 7y ago
  Well it certainly falls far outside of VW's tech wheelhouse. It would be really hard to cheat on autonomous driving tests.
  • 0xff00ffee 7y ago
    AWS mechanical turk that shit. :) Yeah, probably not 30fps...
• Causality1 7y ago
  After Elon Musk so helpfully pointed out that once cars are self-driving there is absolutely no reason for companies to sell them to us, I have to say I hope it never happens. Why would a company sell me a car for $30,000 when it can add it to a self-driving taxi fleet and generate $300,000 in revenue over the lifetime of the car?
  • maksimum 7y ago
    Many reasons. Time value of money, competition, maybe even regulation.
• dyeje 7y ago
  It's kinda funny that we're investing so much into a potentially impossible technology just to avoid building public transport.
  • colordrops 7y ago
    If it works it could be so much better in many ways. It's like a packet switching network instead of circuit switching. And there's no reason larger vehicles couldn't be part of this "packet-switched" vehicle network and act as a virtual public transport system.
• 0xff00ffee 7y ago
  I was at an ML conference in 2017 and the keynote speaker asked the audience how many years they thought it would be until ADAS lvl 5 was on the market. The keynote had proudly proclaimed 5 years, and then audibly scoffed when about 90% of the hands went up for "20 or more years". There's such a disconnect between real engineers and cheerleaders.
  • celeritascelery 7y ago
    I have a friend who a mechanical engineering professor doing robotic research. He says that one of the reasons that robotics has not advanced more is because it has primarily been the domain of computer scientists who don’t operate in the real world. Every robot works great in a simulation. Same could be said for cars.
  • tim333 7y ago
    Though there's the Kurzweil argument that people's intuition doesn't work well with exponential growth. The engineers are probably thinking these systems work terribly and have for decades and so will for decades more but meanwhile GPU performance is doubling every year or two and many people are trying to take advantage of that. I've been following this stuff casually since about 1980 when I totally failed to write an AI program and since then processor performance has been steadily increasing, first with clock speed and now more with multi cores. Hans Moravec, a robot guy did a reasonable estimate that to get equivalent hardware to the brain you'd need about 100 teraflops and just recently the first 100 teraflop GPU has come out (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/v100/ https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/v100/) which is kinda historic in a way, maybe a billion times faster than a cheap computer in 1980. Of course this will keep going for a while so the situation will flip from we can't do much because processors are much slower than the brain to the other way around. (update NIDIA may have fudged the numbers a bit but anyway.)
• 8bitsrule 7y ago
  Building intelligence into a path for vehicles to follow is probably an easier and less expensive option.
• colordrops 7y ago
  I agree in part in that I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term. Not only will the tech get as good as humans, but most forget to account for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way. We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other, and make special lanes for self-driving cars only, among other improvements that will make it easier for the cars. Eventually non-self-driving cars will not be allowed on the road, and will be a niche hobby on race tracks.
  • oblio 7y ago
    > implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other And sing kumbaya, holding hands together.... What about adversarial car AIs? Malicious actors, etc.?
  • giancarlostoro 7y ago
    Heck. With Toyota building a city of the future. They might make self driving cars entirely common once you are free to design roads for them.
    • chrischen 7y ago
      Yea they could put down visual markers on the road to make it easier for CV or ML models to be trained against, or maybe even physical tracks to mechanically guide these cars so that minimal software is needed. Multiple cars can be linked together for efficiency.
      • giancarlostoro 7y ago
        Yeah I think if car manufacturers can come together on standards for signs... And even maybe signs that send RF signals to cars to give them hints of what is nearby it could go a long way. Instead of pretending like the only way is to make cars work with our human friendly system.
    • 7y ago
• ec109685 7y ago
  Yes, that is why trying to ship a level 5 car for the general public’s use is folly. There are .001 situations that will take 1000x the effort to automate, so automating almost all is a better approach.
• sschueller 7y ago
  I find it extremely unethical for Tesla to sell its customers a $6000 option to "Enable full self driving mode" some time in the future. Does anyone really think that this will happen before their car is totaled/broken/old/end of life (10-15 years)?
  • rainyMammoth 7y ago
    People seem to drink enough marketing PR to buy it. That whole company is built as a cult and as a PR playbook. Any other company would not be able to pull that type of dirty tricks.
    • system2 7y ago
      *Any other company without an Elon Musk type of frontman. Maybe Richard Bronson could do it if he were a little younger. No one else comes to my mind.
  • FireBeyond 7y ago
    "some time in the future"... ... while Musk promises "you'll be able to self-drive, coast to coast, this year" (haha, no).
    • standyro 7y ago
      For a bunch of "tech visionaries" that Hacker News is supposed to embody, this thread is full of such shortsightedness. I self-drove from Southern California to Phoenix, Arizona, so I guess that's like 1/10th of the way. I couldn't have imagined that ten years ago. Part of the job of being a CEO is to sell the dream, even if it's years or decades away.
      • FireBeyond 7y ago
        Highway driving in SoCal on nicely maintained highways in the summer is the easy part of self-driving. Winter driving on local roads in Pittsburgh is the less easy. > Part of the job of being a CEO is to sell the dream, even if it's years or decades away. He literally said you would be able to do it _this year_. That's after he said you would be able to do it in 2018. And that's after he said you'd be able to do it in 2016. And all the while charging thousands of dollars for the promise of it "coming".
• mbostleman 7y ago
  I think that the amount of demand and market momentum that appears in the future is a better predictor if what will get done than an executive’s opinion based on current costs.
• owens99 7y ago
  It’s not a coincidence this guy works at a big corporation like Volkswagen and holds the opinion he does. If you want to know about the future, don’t ask the incumbents. They will only tell you about the status quo.
• FpUser 7y ago
  "Not only will the tech get as good as humans" Let's suppose it will happen. Do you have a proof that such "good" tech does not develop a will to one day run over every human it can?
• jakeogh 7y ago
  A car that has "self" is equiv to a living being, and it wouldn't be ethical to lock it inside a box. It's not going to happen any time soon and it will never happen with conventional binary computing; a non-wetware system capiable of emulating a mouse would melt itself through the road. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250424 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250424
  • mprev 7y ago
    Your framing of the issues seems so far removed from the rest of the discussion that I can only assume I’m misunderstanding your point. Could you elaborate?
    • jakeogh 7y ago
      The links I provided contain significant context, can you be specific on what is unclear? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108631 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108631
      • erik_seaberg 7y ago
        They sell self-heating canned food. It's not a claim about sapience.
        • jakeogh 7y ago
          That's the point, I'm arguing that human-level sapience is required. Even if you disagree, set aside the driving part; these machines must correctly interact with real (and adversarial) general intelligences. And really, yes it is used that way in the marketing. It's not accidental. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620132 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620132
  • smabie 7y ago
    Are you suggesting that it's immoral to create a self-driving car? I'm not sure what you are talking about...
• joshuaheard 7y ago
  I don't understand why they want to make them fully autonomous. Even human drivers must stay inside the lanes. Why can't they make a semi-autonomous car that operates automatically with some sort of electronic lane marker, and have drive by wire with a human driver for off-road?
• peterwwillis 7y ago
  Put the cars on rails, focus on the safety and switching systems. We don't need full AI, we just need to not have an individual human be solely responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times.
• antirez 7y ago
  It was quite clear to many of us that autonomous driving at a certain level is a very hard goal to reach, but it may happen in the long run. However what is incredible is that actually a form of AD, that is public transportation, is available for centuries yet in many places in the world this option is ignored. Guess why? The key is in the "public" part.
• martythemaniak 7y ago
  There seems to be an implicit assumption here that Level 5 = human = 100% of drivers. I honestly don't think that's the case at all. If I am being charitable, I'd say half of drivers would meet the implicit level 5 criteria discussed in these threads. For example, there's a snowstorm out here today. Unless they really need to, people aren't going out displayed their incredible skill at navigating through snowsquals with centimeters of snow on the ground. They just stay home. What will determine the success of self driving cars is not philosophical musings but their usefulness in day to day life. And if you can spend 10k on a system that'll work most of the time, but refuse to go out in snow squeals, it'll sell very well. I'd buy it.
• RedComet 7y ago
  Good.
• linuxhansl 7y ago
  Hah. I've been saying that for a while, much to the amusement of some of my friends and coworkers. Some of them claim that their kids will never need to learn how to drive. Maybe I'll have the last laugh, although I wish I'd be wrong about this. I hope that by the time I'm too old to drive - a few decades from now - self-driving are available, but I'm not betting on it.
• rmason 7y ago
  Almost all the self-driving programs use rules based solutions literally a big if this do that. Only one, comma.ai, uses artificial intelligence. There's video on YouTube from three years ago with George Hotz predicting that Level 4 or 5 would never be reached without artificial intelligence. It made sense to me then and it still does today.
• holoduke 7y ago
  I believe the first fully automated transport system will go via the air. Air is so much easier to control. The complexity of automating vehicles in a very chaotic setting (land) exceeds that of building drones capable of flying from a to b. It will start with freight transport and slowly as reliability increases you get human transport via drones as well. Fully automated land transport is only possible when the system is clean and predictable. That means closed roads are open to only the entities which are part of the automation. Very difficult to establish.
• akrymski 7y ago
  Thank God! Self driving cars are not a solution to the world's problems. Better public transport is. Why can't we have self driving buses that replace trams? The level of AI needed for that is already there. As the population of major cities grows, we can't expect everyone riding around in their own car. Public transport is better for citizens and the environment. We need to be reducing the number of vehicles on the roads and ideally not covering the planet with asphalt altogether. Trams in cities like Amsterdam and the London underground are much more efficient modes of transportation than self driving cars will ever be.
  • m0zg 7y ago
    They are _a_ solution, for sure. They just aren't _the_ solution. I'm not sure dense cities are _the_ solution either, especially as more and more work is done remotely. I think humans weren't meant to be cooped up in a tiny concrete box. I like my backyard, and the forest behind my back yard. One size does not fit all, and it's not really feasible to tackle lower density living setups with "public transport", at least not in a large country like US. Moreover, this isn't "either-or" thing. I'd love it if my car could drop me off at the train station and then parked itself at home, then picked me up on my way back.
    • akrymski 7y ago
      US is a special place. Even Russia has better public transport. I don't think lack of public parking at a train station is a good enough reason to develop self-driving cars. It's easier to build a car park.
  • ryukafalz 7y ago
    Not everyone lives in a major city though. Certainly self-driving cars are less efficient than buses for transport within a denser city, but go a few miles outside the city (at least in the US) and you’ll find yourself far from practical bus range. The situation may be different in Europe, but I think self-driving cars could be useful for navigating the sprawling American suburbs or less-dense cities. But yes, we shouldn’t attempt to replace perfectly functional and more efficient public transport within cities, only supplement where public transit isn’t (yet) practical.
• m0zg 7y ago
  Translation: we were caught with our pants down, we're now 10 years behind the leaders in the field, and when the tech actually matures in 10 years, it might undo Volkswagen.
• wavegeek 7y ago
  The trough of disillusion has arrived. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle The big challenge for self driving cars is that they are held to a standard of perfection. No human driver can meet that standard either, but they are exempted due to incumbency bias. The benefits of self driving cars are so phenomenally huge that if they are possible they will happen. Apart from the costs of paying people to drive, there are the time benefits of not wasting time driving cars - is there anything more boring and tedious? - and the fact many people, the young, the old, those with poor eyesight cannot drive. I don't see any evidence it is not possible within 10-20 years. Cars will get smarter and easier to drive and the final step will not seem large. For the edge cases, there is always the possibility of having the vehicle temporarily being taken over by someone remote. Remote driving is already done in some mines.
• j45 7y ago
  30-60% automated driving will still be a big leap forward. Less attention used up while driving. Compare driving somewhere vs taking a ride share and how much more prepared/present you are when you arrive.
• OrgNet 7y ago
  That's a nice way of saying that Elon Musk is full of it with his autopilot...
• pcarolan 7y ago
  All I want is to sleep or read on freeways. Solve that first and you’re competing with airlines and unlocking billions or more in value. Prioritize please.
• odnes 7y ago
  I can't see L5 happening without, amongst other things, the human ability to reason about things/concepts we've never encountered before (à la consciousness). Highway driving is the most constrained normal driving problem, and this is solvable in 99% of cases. But there are so many things that can happen in most other driving situations that make me think that model-based approaches (Tesla) are doomed to fail... Go ahead, train a classifier for every situation you can think of - I guarantee you that you've missed many things. Elon tweeted the other day that FSD is "coming soon". Either I'm totally wrong about this, and of course I hope I am, or Karpathy + the dev team should be tempering his expectations. That isn't to say that there isn't immense value in L2/L3, there totally is. But I think that solving driving (being able to drive any situation a human can) is pretty much the same thing as solving intelligence generally.
  • axguscbklp 7y ago
    Musk, for all his genuine achievements, is also a bullshitter. If/when his FSD prediction fails to come to pass, I expect that he will just say "Well, when I said FSD, what I really meant is..."
    • rootusrootus 7y ago
      That is already happening. Go visit the Tesla forums, and you will hear a lot of fans trying to tone down expectations for FSD, redefining what that term means. I would have thought "full self-driving" was pretty explanatory, but from things I've recently read, the goalposts have already shifted significantly.
• LastZactionHero 7y ago
  never? What does that even mean? We've only been driving cars like 100 years. Only had computers for 60, and decent portable ones for 20. Self-driving literally just became remotely possible, and you're telling me never? This is an off-the-cuff remark turned into a clickbait headline for a fairly bland article.
• KKKKkkkk1 7y ago
  Mr. Hitzinger is saying that L5 cars will never happen. Most people feel that L5 is equivalent to artificial general intelligence, and it's pretty much a given that it may never happen. But now that Waymo and Cruise and everyone else have failed to hit their self-imposed milestones, the more pressing question to ask is whether geo-fenced only-in-good-weather autonomy will ever happen.
• LifeLiverTransp 7y ago
  Honestly, germany has a whole generation going into retirement. These people drive slow, insecure and endanger others with poor sight, poor reflexes and fast cars. The roads are already filled to a standstill- even without these. I have really high hopes, that AI would drive those old folks -and would do so faster then they would drive themselves.
• keanzu 7y ago
  Incorrect use of the word admit admit (v): confess to be true or to be the case. Correct use in a sentence: "VW admits guilt and pays $4.3bn diesel emissions scandal penalty" The word admit doesn't apply to predictions of the future.
• MarkMc 7y ago
  Lots of people are arguing about 'when full self-driving cars will happen' without giving a precise definition (and therefore without having to think too hard about the problem). The article describes Level 5 as 'full computer control of the vehicle with zero limitations' but what exactly does that mean? (a) Does it mean a vehicle available for sale to the general public that can drive at night when it is snowing on a new road that has not first been mapped by a human? or (b) Does it mean that there is at least 1 city of a million residents where at least 50% of vehicle journeys did not require any occupant to have a driver's licence? To me (and Volkswagen) it's far more useful to forecast when the second criteria will be met than the first.
• stretchwithme 7y ago
  It will happen. When it will happen is impossible to predict. But I am pretty sure it will happen within 20 years. 5 years? Unlikely. In any case, it will require much better testing than just letting it learn on the street. A vehicle should be able to deal with a snow covered road in the dark going down a hill with babies crawling across the road. And EMP-induced total electrical failure. No sense in a million people getting injured at once, should that ever happen. Emergency brakes should quickly engage in a predictable way when power is lost.
• yalogin 7y ago
  Yeah I am on the side of the skeptics. We cannot do AI in a fully controlled environment properly. What hope do we have to master a use case where the nature, elements in the physical world, vandals are all throwing all kinds of wrenches into the mix. The vision or dream of a level 5 self driving car is something I will only believe once I see.
• axguscbklp 7y ago
  Well yeah, of course. Full self-driving probably requires artificial general intelligence and it is quite possible that humans will never develop artificial general intelligence. The real surprising thing, for me, is how many otherwise intelligent people bought into full self-driving hype. It's likely that if humans ever developed the sort of AI necessary for full self-driving, this AI technology would radically transform the world. Using it for cars would be one of the least important applications.
• rhizome 7y ago
  Computer models of reality will always be simulacra, and the gap between reality and the model is where death and failure in general reside. "A map is not the territory," explains that computer models are always a perception, and while a technology may even be able to switch between myriad of these "perceptions", the conclusions derived will themselves be limited to a simulation of reality, no matter what. Sure, technological advances will boost the vision resolution or interpretive rigor to insane levels (compared to present day), and this will be used to acquire increased confidence from the public, but is that enough for you to sit your child in the street and trust the driverless car to steer around it? This is the question I would ask of any proponent of any model-interpreting public technology.
• anonytrary 7y ago
  They "admit"? It's not like the recent "full self-driving car by 2025" craze fooled anyone who knew even a modicum about the current state-of-the-art in ML applied to self-driving cars. I remember doing a back-of-the-napkin on this a couple years ago. It would take something like 7 nines of accuracy across all types of driving tasks for us to remove the need for a fallback human behind the wheel. AFAIK we don't even have 7 nines of accuracy for highway driving yet, so this is clearly a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Maybe ask again in 2070.
• emmelaich 7y ago
  Meta: I dislike the use of "admit" in the title and story. Why are "admit", "confess", "announce", "reveal" etc used instead of the usually more accurate "says"? (rhetorical question)
• aetherspawn 7y ago
  I don’t think full self-driving will happen any more than full self-flying planes exist, however, I do think that lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring and auto merge/lane shift, park assist, emergency auto braking and adaptive cruise control should become mandatory in every car in the next 5 years. This is the same way that stability control is mandatory in nearly every country. When a work colleague drove home completely wasted and his Mazda CR-V nearly drove itself, you could not tell that his driver input was erroneous. Actually, it felt very safe. It dawned on me that these systems will mitigate a great deal of preventable accidents due to human stupidity.
• sakopov 7y ago
  Wouldn't self-driving cars require substantial changes in road infrastructure to support full autonomy?
• yzh 7y ago
  Experiences tell us, when someone makes a comment that something may __never__ happen, she probably is wrong. Our current transportation infra is designed for our current transportation tools. Full self-driving cars require a revolution of urban design and transportation infra. Long-term wise I think these will happen for sure.
• jasonhansel 7y ago
  I think it's pretty clear that mass transit and (e-)bikes--not cars--should become the primary modes of transportation, at least in urban areas, if for no other reason than that they're inherently more sustainable. I would be concerned that self-driving cars will only arrive after Peak Automobile has already come and gone.
  • amelius 7y ago
    How about mass transit using a fleet of self driving cars? I can see that this isn't a future a VW exec would dream of, since it would mean far fewer cars per person.
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • jasonhansel 7y ago
      Buses are always going to be more efficient than cars for that purpose (less weight per person). An adequately funded, high-quality bus system would, in my view, make self-driving cars redundant for almost all purposes.
      • hn_throwaway_99 7y ago
        Sorry, but I think this point of view really does not take into account the reality of the situation in many US cities (or, more importantly, many US suburbs). I would love it if I could take a highly quality bus instead of be stuck in traffic driving, but it's simply not feasible given where I live. Driving downtown to work takes about 20 mins with no traffic, about 35 mins during rush hour, and even if there was a bus that I could take (there isn't) given the additional stops it would still take longer than that, even though it can take the 'express' lane. Where I live self-driving cars, even if "highway only", IMO are much more feasible than an adequate public transportation system that would cost billions to construct.
    • lispm 7y ago
      The business model changes then from car sales to a mix of car sales and being a mobility provider. VW would need to be able to move into those directions.
• euske 7y ago
  I always thought that self-driving technology is one of the schemes devised by researchers for getting a long-term funding. It has an immense appeal to the public and sounds plausible enough to laypeople. We've seen a bunch of promises like this: nuclear fusion energy and earthquake forecasting. In Japan, trillions of yens were (and still are) spent to these two technologies but their practicalities are pretty much questionable. I think self-driving tech joined this.
• zweep 7y ago
  The only way we NEVER fully get self driving cars is if we nuke or bioterrorism advanced civilization off the planet in the next 50 years.
• jay_kyburz 7y ago
  Climate Change will have a very significant impact on our entire society such that people don't need or want cars any more. We may turn to virtual environments and telecommuting for everything. Updated to clarify message a little.
• zhoujianfu 7y ago
  I think they may never happen because full self-FLYING “cars” (vtol drones) will very likely happen first (it’s more a regulatory thing than a tech thing). And flying would be superior to driving (faster, no traffic, no need to maintain infrastructure, etc..) so there’d be little incentive to continue even trying to get to level 5 for self-driving.
  • ladberg 7y ago
    I really like this take and I would love it to come true, but I have some doubts. Fully self-driving cars could probably eventually be accomplished with our current level of hardware (we just need much better software), but flying cars would require decades of continuous improvements in the hardware required.
• steveharman 7y ago
  I am not one, nor have I ever knowingly met anyone who wants a a self-drving-car. Electric, sure, bring it on.
• jnurmine 7y ago
  SAE level 5 is unlikely to happen since the autonomous cases will be developed and optimized for the common case of a semi-clear weather mostly urban environment with plenty of signs and full mobile and GNSS coverage. The odd cases will simply not be a priority. Can one take an "autonomous car" up a barely visible car wide path (not a real road) which squiggles through a forest (up to a cottage)? Can one make an autonomous car understand a free-form textual sign when there's a roadwork or accident? Drive in a place without marked roads? There are plenty of edge cases and difficult situations. Hitzinger says that level 4 might be achievable. I agree, it is conceivable that some day a lane of a motorway could get reserved for semi-autonomous vehicles; those vehicles can communicate with each other and are allowed to drive much faster (say, 250 km/h) since it's mostly a straight way, computers have faster reaction times especially given early warnings from cars ahead in the chain and so on.
• deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
• je42 7y ago
  Wow. A CEO without a vision. A CEO should be pushing for boundaries. I were a VW engineer, why would I continue working in the autonomous driving division, if my CEO says the team would never succeed in the end game ? I'd rather work in a company where the leadership is actually leading instead putting on the brakes.
  • sl1ck731 7y ago
    Being that there are levels to autonomy the engineers still serve a purpose. I'd prefer an executive to be level-headed than spouting dreams that will never come true and expecting engineers to just make it happen. If anything I respect him as a leader more than "visionary" executives.
  • thesumofall 7y ago
    I would suspect he simply has a different vision
  • GoToRO 7y ago
    It's not enough to have a vision. The vision has to be correct.
• hotz 7y ago
  I predict it would take a good few centuries for the entire planet to only consist of self driving vehicles. I doubt we'd have a single country in our lifetime solely using self driving vehicles.
• speedplane 7y ago
  To build a true self-driving car, as a prerequisite, you'll need a true general AI. Imagine a complex construction site in an intersection with police navigating traffic. The AI driver will need to understand the officer's visual and audible cues and act accordingly. That level of sophistication requires something far more advanced than anything we're seeing today.
  • KKKKkkkk1 7y ago
    There are much more mundane cases. Imagine a self-driving car arriving at a toll booth that takes only cash payments. There is a long tail of situations like this that a human driver handles easily and would require a cross-functional team of engineers to implement the appropriate solution.
• dlkf 7y ago
  The headline is a masterclass in weasel words. 1. First, it begs the question. By saying "X admits Y" we are assuming that Y is true. This is very different than writing "X says Y", or "X believes Y" etc etc 2. Then, they carefully chose Y to include the word "may" so that they can claim it is true regardless of its content. As long as the rest of Y isn't literally a tautology, you're good to go. "A teacup may be orbiting Jupiter" etc etc 3. But step 2 is sneaky. The way that the word "may" makes the overall statement true is different than how it functions in the quoted speaker's sentence. In his sentence, he means like "there is a good chance it will never happen." When they use "may" to make Y true, it is invoked in a much weaker sense. Basically they are reusing the word "may" in two different sentences to achieve a misleading headline. They obviously have skin in the game and I don't expect this to be a fair article.
• interdrift 7y ago
  Never? lol this guy is joking
• nojvek 7y ago
  It’s really hard to predict. I have sat in a Tesla, have a comma ai kit, seen tons of videos of Cruise, Zoox, Waymo, Voyage Taxis. The space is incrementally improving. Lots of new ideas. I’m very bullish on systems that improve human driving and slowly move to more and more autonomy than “replace humans” Anyone claiming full self driving is around the corner is prolly lying. I have no idea when it will be here. The edge cases are enormous. But self driving on selected city routes and highways in good weather is here. I would say Highway lane following and distance keeping is already better than human. We aren’t great at holding monotonous focus. Machines on the other hand excel at that. We do excel at edge cases though. Marrying the two seems like a good bet.
• acolumb 7y ago
  I do think that full self-driving cars will exist (meaning that you can put in the GPS coordinates of a location and it will drive itself there.) What won't happen is cars without the ability to have a human take over. There are too many fringe cases to allow cars without steering wheels.
• rhacker 7y ago
  The title is awful.. Volkswagon can speak for its own company. It can't speak for the industry. If it were to speak for the industry the word admit can't be used. It would be a different word, like "believe". Volkswagon can certainly admit that "they" won't have full self driving capability, but it can't "admit" that for other people.
• oblib 7y ago
  Until we have roads designed to fully participate in assisting self-driving cars, and cars that communicate with each other, we'll have serious issues that will make it unsafe, and thus impractical. The cost to upgrade roads appears to be a significant hurdle. A google search says: "There are approximately 4,071,000 miles (6,552,000 km) of roads in the United States, 2,678,000 miles (4,310,000 km) paved and 1,394,000 miles (2,243,000 km) unpaved." And there's this: >> einrealist 18 hours ago [-] >> I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology. That's even more difficult to address. We have to evaluate the cost/benefit of implementing this once we get the tech to the point of near total awareness of real world conditions. It might make sense to implement it on major highways, but probably not on rural roads and neighborhood streets because it's not something we can skimp on. To make it cost effective the roadway tech has to be for the most part "dumb". We cannot rely on "smart" tech that requires complex communication systems or dumb tech that's easy to hack, like lines painted on the road or stop signs and traffic lights that AR can "see". I think we'd be better off working on implementing assistive safety technologies for automobiles and mass transportation infrastructure like high speed railways.
• growlist 7y ago
  Full self-driving cars would be cool, but even a good satnav + cruise control and lane assist gets you most of the way there. Apart from smaller roads, the car almost drives itself.
• jeromebaek 7y ago
  Think about it. Soft AI that assists the driver (automatic turning, cruise control, automatic brakes) is now mainstream. Why is it that full self-driving cars are categorically different? Because it requires full faith in the machine. When assistive technology goes wrong, the driver can correct it and -- get this -- the reason the driver can correct it fast enough is precisely because the driver doesn't fully trust the technology. the driver is on alert, always, because they know the technology is not meant to be trusted fully. now a full self-driving car asks the driver to trust it fully. so the "driver" can take a nap, read a book, whatever. if the driver needs to be on alert, it's by definition not a fully self-driving car. and i dont think we will get there, ever.
• trasneoir 7y ago
  "[Engineers] tend to overestimate what can be done in the short-term and underestimate what will be done in the long-term." I'd expect level 5 autonomy to be slow, because level 4 delivers 80% of the benefits for 20% of the cost. BUT "never" seems crazy unless you've got a very pessimistic outlook on humanity's medium-term future. Other than extinction or the collapse of civilization, what could cause it to "never" happen?
• edisonjoao 7y ago
  just say tesla is farther ahead and anyone will not catch up
• classified 7y ago
  Lo and behold, there still exist actual engineers that recognize the "AI" bullshit propaganda for what it is. Good that there are still engineers whose job description does not include the dissemination of fashionable lies.