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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 withou

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
  Yes, the tremendous capital influx into AV could probably support advances in trains and rail infrastructure. Yet, we will chase after this idea — it receives copious media attention because it is technically challenging and is “sci-fi” idealism that is hard to mitigate and feels like a good idea for society. Also, the investments seem like chasing after what everyone else is chasing after (FOMO); an automaker would find it difficult to “pivot” from vehicle production to advancing rail (competition) so capital will be stuck in that industry.
  - DasIch 7y ago
    It seems to me that the problems that trains and rail infrastructure is facing are: bureaucracy, politics and an increasing inability to execute on infrastructure projects on time/budget by governments. To the extent cost is a a factor, it's unnecessarily high due to these aforementioned issues[1]. So I don't think money invested into self-driving cars hurts trains and rail infrastructure. [1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new-york-second-avenue-subway-phase-2 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
    - dpflan 7y ago
      Yes, the policy issues are real and sticky and act to thwart advance.
- Digory 7y ago
  I suppose the car crowd would say environmental factors tilt toward cars over airplanes. In the US, trains are for freight. It would cost too much to create a new passenger rail network compared to automating existing intercity roads. Now, increasing the throughput of rail using self-driving trains could make a bundle in the US.
  - dpflan 7y ago
    Self driving trains seems like an excellent problem space. Are you aware of any companies working on this?
lukifer 7y ago
I think self-parking (as in “go find a space, possibly auto-paying”, not auto-parallel-parking) could also be a game-changer, not only for convenience and cost, but even zoning and city planning.
- javiramos 7y ago
  Lots of innovation and investment happening in this space. Expect parking lots in ~5-10 years to look very different — a lot of automation is coming.
  - macinjosh 7y ago
    Sure it is, bro.
robbrown451 7y ago
I have to disagree. Most of the value is in taxi services, where you get dropped off / picked up exactly where you want, there is no need to dedicate so much land and structures to parking, there is no need to have cars sit idle for 95% of their existence, and no need to search for parking spots and walk long distances. Of course, I live in a city, where parking is a major pain. But the other things still hold. It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle.
- threeseed 7y ago
  I actually think autonomous taxi services will be niche. Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. Now the liability for that behaviour is with the driver. In an autonomous car the liability would be Uber which is why they won't do it. An Uber that needs to look for parking in order to pick you up is never going to work in most busy cities. So I suspect you will see people opt for the driver based taxi service instead. Or maybe autonomous taxis will be reserved for emerging markets e.g. Indonesia which are more relaxed about parking.
  - robbrown451 7y ago
    I don't doubt that things take time to adjust. But when it makes a lot more economic sense to take a cab compared to owning a car and driving it (after all, the main reasons cabs aren't all that economical today is the requirement of paying a driver while you just sit there), there will be less cars parked on the road and therefore it will be easier to have places where the cars can pull over and pick up / drop off. Anyway, "people are willing to break the law but companies aren't" seems a really weird reason to stick with the status quo over something far more efficient.
  - rapind 7y ago
    I wonder though if autonomous taxi's would simply highlight the parking issues and increase demand for better parking solutions (like no parking, just autonomous taxi lanes).
  - 7y ago
mattlutze 7y ago
There's a fantastic amount of value in cities and urban areas. Self-driving cars can work as a massive network to reduce or eliminate congestion and give people back hundreds of millions of hours spent stuck in traffic. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlock-transportation-study-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlo... They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they can significantly reduce energy consumption requirements for vehicle usage.
- bobthepanda 7y ago
  How would they "reduce or eliminate congestion"? Congestion is inherently caused by too many people trying to go to or through the same place at the same time. That's not possible without reducing the amount of people trying to travel during a given time period in a given place.
  - mattlutze 7y ago
    There's lots of reasons for congestion existing. https://www.geotab.com/blog/traffic-congestion/ https://www.geotab.com/blog/traffic-congestion/ Given the same number of cars on the road, a self-driving fleet would eliminate many mechanical failures and many human failures, and be able to adapt to sub-optimal infrastructure at a network-wide level. Infrastructure would also be easier or more efficient to improve, because you'd have removed much of the human variability that makes identifying choke points difficult.
  - gedy 7y ago
    Freeways can handle much more traffic, but people get jumpy beyond a certain density and cause traffic jams "for no reason"
    - bobthepanda 7y ago
      The problem is that in many cases, many people want to get off at the same freeway exits, and the local network doesn't have the road capacity to match. AI doesn't really have the power to change that, and might actually be worse depending on how it reacts to pedestrians and cyclists.
bobthepanda 7y ago
> 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. Given that planes, which rely on a class of specifically trained professionals with minimum hour requirements, still have issues with this from time to time, I don't think this is a realistic thing for cars. Driving standards, at least in the US, are very low, and raising them is a hard problem.
- kds3 7y ago
  > Given that planes, which rely on a class of specifically trained professionals with minimum hour requirements, still have issues with this from time to time Most of this issues come from the fact that planes can't just stop in the middle of the road and wait for help, they have to land somewhere and do it fast enough not to be out of fuel. Cars don't have to drive themselves to nearest service center when they encounter any hardware malfunction, they can just stop and unload passengers. Self-driving company would use another car to drive you to your destination (not even necessary self-driving car).
- rapind 7y ago
  And yet air travel is far safer than road travel and they embraced autopilot long ago. The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived. Probably a good thing considering how low the bar is right now for road safety. Being killed by a robot's mistake is perceived far worse than by human error. I think a middle ground like autopilot on the highway could significantly improve safety while still accommodating perception issues.
  - temporaryvector 7y ago
    >The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived I don't think so. Airplane autopilot automates away the safe, boring parts of air travel, much like highway driving, so in that sense I agree with you. Truly autonomous landing is still a big deal, and planes that the benefit of ATC, and I don't think there are any planes that taxi or takeoff autonomously. Furthermore, accidents involving autopilot are always at the edge, when control changes from computer to human unexpectedly or when the human has to take over the autopilot in less than ideal conditions. I don't think there's much perception in the public eye of "robot pilots killing people" I think once autonomous driving accidents go through the courts a few times, the same will happen to cars. After another decade of development and legislation, people will die not because the robot made a mistake per-se, but because it encountered a situation it can't cope with and the human wasn't ready to take over in an emergency, or because the robot tried to cope with the emergency situation the wrong way and the human didn't notice in time and took over too late (if at all). This may still sound like the computer making a mistake, but the subtle difference is that the mistake is made in an extraordinary situation, as opposed to the current accidents that happened in regular driving conditions. I think this subtle distinction will be enough for the PR people to spin the blame away from the manufacturer. Call my cynical, but I can also see successful lobbying efforts in the future by corporations to reduce liability in class-4 and lower autonomous car accidents involving unusual situations, citing the fact that the driver should have been paying attention and taken over. That aside, road safety is better than ever these days, with a lot of what would have been fatal accidents being merely property damage due to modern safety systems, and highway driving is probably the safest kind of driving out there, thus it is not clear to me (and I have no data either way, I don't think a study has ever been done) that current offerings (Tesla et al.) are any safer compared to similarly priced modern luxury cars per mile driven, and I'm not sure that will change in the future. The only reason I see for adopting highway autopilot is not safety but comfort. You might argue that comfort contributes to safety and enables longer driving times, but driving for 8 to 12 hours is pretty safe regardless, and I don't think I could do more than that even if I was a passenger. This is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I don't think we will see a meaningful reduction in fatal accidents or serious injuries due to self-driving cars for a long time, but I do think we will see a reduction in accidents involving only property damage or minor injuries from low to medium speed accidents, and I see a sharp decrease in parking-lot scrapes and dings in the near future. Low to medium speed streets and tight maneuvers is where I see most "bad" human drivers have the most trouble and already things like parallel parking assist are a godsend to these people.
ghaff 7y ago
Both from a comfort and safety perspective, automating long highway drives is a big win. It’s still disappointing to urbanites in particular who thought they’d never need to own a car, drive anywhere, or maybe even learn to drive in the first place.
deltron3030 7y ago
Onboarding cars onto trains in a driver friendly way should also be considered. This way you don't exclude non self driving cars, and still have good coverage (taking into account that railway systems aren't far behind highway coverage in many countries).
- imhoguy 7y ago
  This is the way of traveling thru Channel Tunnel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurotunnel_Shuttle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurotunnel_Shuttle But one needs to plan and book a travel in advance. There are also capacity limits.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
    Ferries have limits too, like grid-locked streets also do. The way, the channel, the [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit) all there to calculate whodunit in advance, this is no Voodoo, just calm glance at what is there, to not get stuck, that would suck, and be unfair.
Shivetya 7y ago
My opinion along these lines lends itself to depiction of self driving cars in the series Tek War. Upon entering the limit access highway or interstate the car drives on its own for the duration until your exit. that to me is something automakers can easily cooperate with governments to get done and done well. they already mark HOV and Express lanes and with federal legislated lane markings it would make automating those drives pretty simple. Then as the number of cars increase the number of free drive lanes is decreased until the vanish. using metro Atlanta as an example express lanes have their own entrance and exit points so they are already separated. One set for I75 is wholly elevated two lane bridge work nearly the full length of its run. Tesla Model 3 owner, I think even Musk is walking back what he "implies" as self driving. As into self driving with human oversight
antaviana 7y ago
I think that Level 5 would be transformative. It would be the end of owned cars, huge reduction of car production, millions of jobs in the transportation business amortized, to name just a few.
seanmcdirmid 7y ago
That is a bit American centric. The value of self driving cars for society will be the ability to optimize existing road infrastructure. Cars can travel more closely together, can cooperate to work out bottlenecks, and so on. Think about the traffic problems Beijing is having, and that’s the huge opportunity for self driving tech.
iav 7y ago
Cars with no person inside them at all (vehicle drones?) would unlock the biggest productivity gain in a century. Revolutionize anything that can be delivered to your house (food, goods, groceries) and make sharing items feasible (need a power tool? Just have a drone drop it off for an hour then pick it up after you are done). I think the biggest advance of self driving is having cars with no people in them at all
- usrusr 7y ago
  I'm sure it would be the biggest disadvantage as there is not an infinite amount of roads.
- kart23 7y ago
  You cant have other people on the road then. If I was a protestor or bored teen, I would find it pretty fun to block self driving cars' cameras and sensors, stranding them and creating chaos. Imagine a line of self driving cars just blocking a busy street. It wouldn't be hard to do, but it would take a lot of work to recover them to the point it wouldnt be profitable for the companies running them.
  - cameronh90 7y ago
    It would be fun, then the police would show up and arrest the people who did it using camera footage from the automated cars. Most people are good people, and the ones who aren't already fuck with the road network now causing all kinds of chaos.. throwing bricks from bridges, ripping the copper out of traffic signals, but it's relatively rare because most people aren't trying to ruin everything at great risk to their freedom. I don't really understand why automated cars would be a huge change of affairs.
    - kart23 7y ago
      cuz its just funny. If you saw little robots all over the place run by facebook or $mega_corp, wouldnt you just strand them for fun? Cameras are easily defeated by a hoodie and a mask. Bricks from bridges could kill people and just damages regular people's property. It's just different.
rdiddly 7y ago
What if I told you I could offer you a 99% automated intercity solution? That's right, a solution where 99% of the people involved have no obligation whatsoever to engage with piloting the vehicle... EVER! Where the vehicle just sort of seems to... drive itself? Is this some futuristic sci-fi fantasy? Well hold onto your hat, because the future is NOW! Behold! https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of passengers.
- Sharlin 7y ago
  Yep. Intercity traffic is a problem we solved in the 1800s.
  - dmix 7y ago
    Riding trains is great, getting to the train station(s) in a busy city, worrying about the schedule and being in the right spot for the right train, etc, is not at all fun. But otherwise agreed a ton of this stuff could be solved with modern trains. But appeasing all of the special interest groups in between has made infrastructure development impossibly expensive or takes a decade. So we keep driving cars even long distances between cities.
    - bpye 7y ago
      This is still a solved problem in many European cities. Train stations are often in the city centre, or on the edge of it. They almost always connect with either metro or bus networks, typically with frequent services.
      - zahrc 7y ago
        Not in Germany, may be in big cities, but any other region is plagued by disruptions and way less frequent services paired together with horrible local public transport. The former government owned national railway basically owns every piece of important track and doesn’t give a damn about customers. The prices are constantly rising while the service declines. Can’t count how much time I’ve wasted on several train stations, waiting for up to two hours for late trains, hell, even having to get a hotel multiple times.
alkonaut 7y ago
I don’t mind driving 200 times one hour commuting a year. I want to a) not own a car but be picked up by one I can share with others b) be driven home after having a drink. Both of those use cases are only working if there is a 100% (or close to) self driving solution. Driving 95% of the way or 95% of the trips is nice, but I wouldn’t pay Tesla autopilot money for it. The value in the 95/95 autopilot is because it will make commercial drivers be able to never need breaks (they sleep or rest until the autopilot is in trouble, and they can even remote control cars). And of course because a lot of people seem to hate driving and would pay to avoid it. I don’t - I hate owning a car.
- IanCal 7y ago
  The 95% thing can also be very different depending on how it's split up. 5% of miles have a random "you need to take over" vs. the most rural 5% of roads need manual control make a world of difference. A car that can only drive within major cities in the UK and on motorways would be entirely fine for the vast majority of people. Exceptional journies I can always rent a car that suits my needs for the one week in several years I'm in the Highlands.
- spookthesunset 7y ago
  > Driving 95% of the way or 95% of the trips is nice People will abuse that. They will get high/drunk/whatever and when that “5%” rolls around (quite unexpectedly mind you), they’ll run into a bus full of nuns. Always assume people will be judgement impaired because “the car can drive itself”....
  - alkonaut 7y ago
    Where the 95% ends can only be a decision the car makes. There can’t be a button you push when you think “come on autopilot you can do it, It’s just a short jump and you’ll fit through that narrow passage in the run-up easily!”. Autonomous cars will give up and stop when they require manual intervention. But, this is also why I think the next car manufacturer race will be about who can solve this for their customers. That is, who solves the problem of making 95% autonomous cars able to drive in 99.9% if all situations without manual intervention by the driver, where the provides automatic remote control from massive rooms full of people steering drunk car owners out of situations the autopilot couldn’t. The better the autonomy, the fewer people needed to remote override.
joe_the_user 7y ago
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. A 90% autonomous trip where I have to pay attention 100% of the time gets me no real value. It's just a slightly nicer, maybe, ride. It seems unlikely you commutes would completely autonomous even people commute on freeways.
nosnow 7y ago
> If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions Spoken like someone who does not drive regularly in snow.
ksec 7y ago
I am late to the discussion. I dont understand why we cant have new Cities that only allows self driving cars. Full AV can react to other drivers, but they can surely act upon themselves. This way, you can set out home with cars and you only operate the last part going to Cities for work. And when you leave you drive out to high way and then every full else will be automatics. It also partly solve housing problems and people can now live further away from work. Surely this is a solution that is simply enough for the short term. What am I missing here?

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
Yes, the tremendous capital influx into AV could probably support advances in trains and rail infrastructure. Yet, we will chase after this idea — it receives copious media attention because it is technically challenging and is “sci-fi” idealism that is hard to mitigate and feels like a good idea for society. Also, the investments seem like chasing after what everyone else is chasing after (FOMO); an automaker would find it difficult to “pivot” from vehicle production to advancing rail (competition) so capital will be stuck in that industry.
- DasIch 7y ago
  It seems to me that the problems that trains and rail infrastructure is facing are: bureaucracy, politics and an increasing inability to execute on infrastructure projects on time/budget by governments. To the extent cost is a a factor, it's unnecessarily high due to these aforementioned issues[1]. So I don't think money invested into self-driving cars hurts trains and rail infrastructure. [1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/new-york-second-avenue-subway-phase-2 https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...
  - dpflan 7y ago
    Yes, the policy issues are real and sticky and act to thwart advance.
Digory 7y ago
I suppose the car crowd would say environmental factors tilt toward cars over airplanes. In the US, trains are for freight. It would cost too much to create a new passenger rail network compared to automating existing intercity roads. Now, increasing the throughput of rail using self-driving trains could make a bundle in the US.
- dpflan 7y ago
  Self driving trains seems like an excellent problem space. Are you aware of any companies working on this?

lukifer 7y ago

I think self-parking (as in “go find a space, possibly auto-paying”, not auto-parallel-parking) could also be a game-changer, not only for convenience and cost, but even zoning and city planning.

javiramos 7y ago
Lots of innovation and investment happening in this space. Expect parking lots in ~5-10 years to look very different — a lot of automation is coming.
- macinjosh 7y ago
  Sure it is, bro.

robbrown451 7y ago

I have to disagree. Most of the value is in taxi services, where you get dropped off / picked up exactly where you want, there is no need to dedicate so much land and structures to parking, there is no need to have cars sit idle for 95% of their existence, and no need to search for parking spots and walk long distances. Of course, I live in a city, where parking is a major pain. But the other things still hold. It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle.

threeseed 7y ago
I actually think autonomous taxi services will be niche. Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. Now the liability for that behaviour is with the driver. In an autonomous car the liability would be Uber which is why they won't do it. An Uber that needs to look for parking in order to pick you up is never going to work in most busy cities. So I suspect you will see people opt for the driver based taxi service instead. Or maybe autonomous taxis will be reserved for emerging markets e.g. Indonesia which are more relaxed about parking.
- robbrown451 7y ago
  I don't doubt that things take time to adjust. But when it makes a lot more economic sense to take a cab compared to owning a car and driving it (after all, the main reasons cabs aren't all that economical today is the requirement of paying a driver while you just sit there), there will be less cars parked on the road and therefore it will be easier to have places where the cars can pull over and pick up / drop off. Anyway, "people are willing to break the law but companies aren't" seems a really weird reason to stick with the status quo over something far more efficient.
- rapind 7y ago
  I wonder though if autonomous taxi's would simply highlight the parking issues and increase demand for better parking solutions (like no parking, just autonomous taxi lanes).
- 7y ago

mattlutze 7y ago

There's a fantastic amount of value in cities and urban areas. Self-driving cars can work as a massive network to reduce or eliminate congestion and give people back hundreds of millions of hours spent stuck in traffic. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlock-transportation-study-trnd/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlo... They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they can significantly reduce energy consumption requirements for vehicle usage.

bobthepanda 7y ago
How would they "reduce or eliminate congestion"? Congestion is inherently caused by too many people trying to go to or through the same place at the same time. That's not possible without reducing the amount of people trying to travel during a given time period in a given place.
- mattlutze 7y ago
  There's lots of reasons for congestion existing. https://www.geotab.com/blog/traffic-congestion/ https://www.geotab.com/blog/traffic-congestion/ Given the same number of cars on the road, a self-driving fleet would eliminate many mechanical failures and many human failures, and be able to adapt to sub-optimal infrastructure at a network-wide level. Infrastructure would also be easier or more efficient to improve, because you'd have removed much of the human variability that makes identifying choke points difficult.
- gedy 7y ago
  Freeways can handle much more traffic, but people get jumpy beyond a certain density and cause traffic jams "for no reason"
  - bobthepanda 7y ago
    The problem is that in many cases, many people want to get off at the same freeway exits, and the local network doesn't have the road capacity to match. AI doesn't really have the power to change that, and might actually be worse depending on how it reacts to pedestrians and cyclists.

bobthepanda 7y ago

> 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. Given that planes, which rely on a class of specifically trained professionals with minimum hour requirements, still have issues with this from time to time, I don't think this is a realistic thing for cars. Driving standards, at least in the US, are very low, and raising them is a hard problem.

kds3 7y ago
> Given that planes, which rely on a class of specifically trained professionals with minimum hour requirements, still have issues with this from time to time Most of this issues come from the fact that planes can't just stop in the middle of the road and wait for help, they have to land somewhere and do it fast enough not to be out of fuel. Cars don't have to drive themselves to nearest service center when they encounter any hardware malfunction, they can just stop and unload passengers. Self-driving company would use another car to drive you to your destination (not even necessary self-driving car).
rapind 7y ago
And yet air travel is far safer than road travel and they embraced autopilot long ago. The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived. Probably a good thing considering how low the bar is right now for road safety. Being killed by a robot's mistake is perceived far worse than by human error. I think a middle ground like autopilot on the highway could significantly improve safety while still accommodating perception issues.
- temporaryvector 7y ago
  >The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived I don't think so. Airplane autopilot automates away the safe, boring parts of air travel, much like highway driving, so in that sense I agree with you. Truly autonomous landing is still a big deal, and planes that the benefit of ATC, and I don't think there are any planes that taxi or takeoff autonomously. Furthermore, accidents involving autopilot are always at the edge, when control changes from computer to human unexpectedly or when the human has to take over the autopilot in less than ideal conditions. I don't think there's much perception in the public eye of "robot pilots killing people" I think once autonomous driving accidents go through the courts a few times, the same will happen to cars. After another decade of development and legislation, people will die not because the robot made a mistake per-se, but because it encountered a situation it can't cope with and the human wasn't ready to take over in an emergency, or because the robot tried to cope with the emergency situation the wrong way and the human didn't notice in time and took over too late (if at all). This may still sound like the computer making a mistake, but the subtle difference is that the mistake is made in an extraordinary situation, as opposed to the current accidents that happened in regular driving conditions. I think this subtle distinction will be enough for the PR people to spin the blame away from the manufacturer. Call my cynical, but I can also see successful lobbying efforts in the future by corporations to reduce liability in class-4 and lower autonomous car accidents involving unusual situations, citing the fact that the driver should have been paying attention and taken over. That aside, road safety is better than ever these days, with a lot of what would have been fatal accidents being merely property damage due to modern safety systems, and highway driving is probably the safest kind of driving out there, thus it is not clear to me (and I have no data either way, I don't think a study has ever been done) that current offerings (Tesla et al.) are any safer compared to similarly priced modern luxury cars per mile driven, and I'm not sure that will change in the future. The only reason I see for adopting highway autopilot is not safety but comfort. You might argue that comfort contributes to safety and enables longer driving times, but driving for 8 to 12 hours is pretty safe regardless, and I don't think I could do more than that even if I was a passenger. This is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I don't think we will see a meaningful reduction in fatal accidents or serious injuries due to self-driving cars for a long time, but I do think we will see a reduction in accidents involving only property damage or minor injuries from low to medium speed accidents, and I see a sharp decrease in parking-lot scrapes and dings in the near future. Low to medium speed streets and tight maneuvers is where I see most "bad" human drivers have the most trouble and already things like parallel parking assist are a godsend to these people.

ghaff 7y ago

Both from a comfort and safety perspective, automating long highway drives is a big win. It’s still disappointing to urbanites in particular who thought they’d never need to own a car, drive anywhere, or maybe even learn to drive in the first place.

deltron3030 7y ago

Onboarding cars onto trains in a driver friendly way should also be considered. This way you don't exclude non self driving cars, and still have good coverage (taking into account that railway systems aren't far behind highway coverage in many countries).

imhoguy 7y ago
This is the way of traveling thru Channel Tunnel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurotunnel_Shuttle https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurotunnel_Shuttle But one needs to plan and book a travel in advance. There are also capacity limits.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  Ferries have limits too, like grid-locked streets also do. The way, the channel, the [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit) all there to calculate whodunit in advance, this is no Voodoo, just calm glance at what is there, to not get stuck, that would suck, and be unfair.

Shivetya 7y ago

My opinion along these lines lends itself to depiction of self driving cars in the series Tek War. Upon entering the limit access highway or interstate the car drives on its own for the duration until your exit. that to me is something automakers can easily cooperate with governments to get done and done well. they already mark HOV and Express lanes and with federal legislated lane markings it would make automating those drives pretty simple. Then as the number of cars increase the number of free drive lanes is decreased until the vanish. using metro Atlanta as an example express lanes have their own entrance and exit points so they are already separated. One set for I75 is wholly elevated two lane bridge work nearly the full length of its run. Tesla Model 3 owner, I think even Musk is walking back what he "implies" as self driving. As into self driving with human oversight

antaviana 7y ago

I think that Level 5 would be transformative. It would be the end of owned cars, huge reduction of car production, millions of jobs in the transportation business amortized, to name just a few.

seanmcdirmid 7y ago

That is a bit American centric. The value of self driving cars for society will be the ability to optimize existing road infrastructure. Cars can travel more closely together, can cooperate to work out bottlenecks, and so on. Think about the traffic problems Beijing is having, and that’s the huge opportunity for self driving tech.

iav 7y ago

Cars with no person inside them at all (vehicle drones?) would unlock the biggest productivity gain in a century. Revolutionize anything that can be delivered to your house (food, goods, groceries) and make sharing items feasible (need a power tool? Just have a drone drop it off for an hour then pick it up after you are done). I think the biggest advance of self driving is having cars with no people in them at all

usrusr 7y ago
I'm sure it would be the biggest disadvantage as there is not an infinite amount of roads.
kart23 7y ago
You cant have other people on the road then. If I was a protestor or bored teen, I would find it pretty fun to block self driving cars' cameras and sensors, stranding them and creating chaos. Imagine a line of self driving cars just blocking a busy street. It wouldn't be hard to do, but it would take a lot of work to recover them to the point it wouldnt be profitable for the companies running them.
- cameronh90 7y ago
  It would be fun, then the police would show up and arrest the people who did it using camera footage from the automated cars. Most people are good people, and the ones who aren't already fuck with the road network now causing all kinds of chaos.. throwing bricks from bridges, ripping the copper out of traffic signals, but it's relatively rare because most people aren't trying to ruin everything at great risk to their freedom. I don't really understand why automated cars would be a huge change of affairs.
  - kart23 7y ago
    cuz its just funny. If you saw little robots all over the place run by facebook or $mega_corp, wouldnt you just strand them for fun? Cameras are easily defeated by a hoodie and a mask. Bricks from bridges could kill people and just damages regular people's property. It's just different.

rdiddly 7y ago

What if I told you I could offer you a 99% automated intercity solution? That's right, a solution where 99% of the people involved have no obligation whatsoever to engage with piloting the vehicle... EVER! Where the vehicle just sort of seems to... drive itself? Is this some futuristic sci-fi fantasy? Well hold onto your hat, because the future is NOW! Behold! https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of passengers.

Sharlin 7y ago
Yep. Intercity traffic is a problem we solved in the 1800s.
- dmix 7y ago
  Riding trains is great, getting to the train station(s) in a busy city, worrying about the schedule and being in the right spot for the right train, etc, is not at all fun. But otherwise agreed a ton of this stuff could be solved with modern trains. But appeasing all of the special interest groups in between has made infrastructure development impossibly expensive or takes a decade. So we keep driving cars even long distances between cities.
  - bpye 7y ago
    This is still a solved problem in many European cities. Train stations are often in the city centre, or on the edge of it. They almost always connect with either metro or bus networks, typically with frequent services.
    - zahrc 7y ago
      Not in Germany, may be in big cities, but any other region is plagued by disruptions and way less frequent services paired together with horrible local public transport. The former government owned national railway basically owns every piece of important track and doesn’t give a damn about customers. The prices are constantly rising while the service declines. Can’t count how much time I’ve wasted on several train stations, waiting for up to two hours for late trains, hell, even having to get a hotel multiple times.

alkonaut 7y ago

I don’t mind driving 200 times one hour commuting a year. I want to a) not own a car but be picked up by one I can share with others b) be driven home after having a drink. Both of those use cases are only working if there is a 100% (or close to) self driving solution. Driving 95% of the way or 95% of the trips is nice, but I wouldn’t pay Tesla autopilot money for it. The value in the 95/95 autopilot is because it will make commercial drivers be able to never need breaks (they sleep or rest until the autopilot is in trouble, and they can even remote control cars). And of course because a lot of people seem to hate driving and would pay to avoid it. I don’t - I hate owning a car.

IanCal 7y ago
The 95% thing can also be very different depending on how it's split up. 5% of miles have a random "you need to take over" vs. the most rural 5% of roads need manual control make a world of difference. A car that can only drive within major cities in the UK and on motorways would be entirely fine for the vast majority of people. Exceptional journies I can always rent a car that suits my needs for the one week in several years I'm in the Highlands.
spookthesunset 7y ago
> Driving 95% of the way or 95% of the trips is nice People will abuse that. They will get high/drunk/whatever and when that “5%” rolls around (quite unexpectedly mind you), they’ll run into a bus full of nuns. Always assume people will be judgement impaired because “the car can drive itself”....
- alkonaut 7y ago
  Where the 95% ends can only be a decision the car makes. There can’t be a button you push when you think “come on autopilot you can do it, It’s just a short jump and you’ll fit through that narrow passage in the run-up easily!”. Autonomous cars will give up and stop when they require manual intervention. But, this is also why I think the next car manufacturer race will be about who can solve this for their customers. That is, who solves the problem of making 95% autonomous cars able to drive in 99.9% if all situations without manual intervention by the driver, where the provides automatic remote control from massive rooms full of people steering drunk car owners out of situations the autopilot couldn’t. The better the autonomy, the fewer people needed to remote override.

joe_the_user 7y ago

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. A 90% autonomous trip where I have to pay attention 100% of the time gets me no real value. It's just a slightly nicer, maybe, ride. It seems unlikely you commutes would completely autonomous even people commute on freeways.

nosnow 7y ago

> If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions Spoken like someone who does not drive regularly in snow.

ksec 7y ago

I am late to the discussion. I dont understand why we cant have new Cities that only allows self driving cars. Full AV can react to other drivers, but they can surely act upon themselves. This way, you can set out home with cars and you only operate the last part going to Cities for work. And when you leave you drive out to high way and then every full else will be automatics. It also partly solve housing problems and people can now live further away from work. Surely this is a solution that is simply enough for the short term. What am I missing here?