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It's still keeping the self-driving unit thought, even though there's a good chance it won't ever be successful. I don't think self-driving cars are realistic a

• kylec 6y ago
  I think we're very far away from general-purpose self-driving that can drive in all locations, conditions, and handle all scenarios. But we don't necessarily need an all-or-nothing solution - I think we could be reasonably close to a self-driving system that can handle a whitelisted set of roads and highways, especially if those roads were augmented to accommodate that self-driving in some way.
  • mikepurvis 6y ago
    Yeah, I've always understood that to be the big initial play— get all those long-haul trucking miles autonomous, relegate human drivers to handling the in-city miles and cargo yards. I think Ottomotto (remember them?) might have even made a video years ago which pitched this exact scheme. Of course, the environmentalist in me is saddened by the thought of further driving down the cost of that shipping mode which might be most compatible with being switched to rail freight.
  • etrk 6y ago
    Regardless of road quality, weather conditions are unpredictable. When the rain or snow or haboob kicks in, I guess your car will pull over to the side of the road and you'll need to drive manually until conditions improve. We'll need to keep the steering wheel around for the foreseeable future.
    • gizmo385 6y ago
      Does anyone know what Waymo does when a haboob happens? Those are at least relatively common in the Phoenix area.
• kevindong 6y ago
  Self driving cars don't have to truly autonomous to be genuinely useful. Just level 3 or 4 autonomous vehicles would probably be good enough to be worth buying.
• DethNinja 6y ago
  In my opinion self driving cars far exceed the capabilities of current ML algorithms. I mean I guess you can spend couple of billions and implement some sort of expert system on top of that but it won’t be as simple as just training the ML algorithm. Much better approach would be using ML as a safety sensor helper and let people drive the cars instead. For example, ML algorithm can detect if a pedestrian is on the road even on low vision conditions and might warn the driver, or check if there a car is acting weirdly on the road and warn the driver to be aware. I think there is a catch 22 situation going on with self-driving cars. By the time we get to self driving cars at human level, we will already have cybernetic beings at human intelligence level and that will change the entire industries and the society itself, which might actually decrease the profits expected by self-driving car companies.
• Eridrus 6y ago
  It's hard to find out how much has been invested in self driving cars, but I think you're massively underestimating the cost of building rail in the US. A billion dollars a mile is a realistic figure for rail in cities. NYC spent more than double that recently. For those costs, you're probably getting somewhere between 5 and 100 miles of rail.
  • kspacewalk2 6y ago
    A billion dollars a mile is for subways though, and I'm guessing tunnelling is the major component in that cost.
    • bobthepanda 6y ago
      Underground stations is the majority of the cost. The tunnel boring machine is relatively cheap compared to securing enough property to build stations, and it could be said that New York's recent subways have massively overengineered their stations. That being said, elevated railways have always been a very hard sell in dense areas, and ground level has its own host of problems.
  • jcranmer 6y ago
    A billion dollars per mile of rail is an excessively overpriced cost of construction that ought to have severe political pressure to explain why so much money is being wasted. Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about $100-300 million/mile.
    • MiroF 6y ago
      > Construction cost of subways outside of places like NYC that apparently have no concept of cost control is typically about $100-300 million/mile. Where within the United States is this true? (note: United States is known for high construction costs) e: or just downvote me - but I don't know anywhere with a $100 million/mile subway system.
    • Eridrus 6y ago
• jdavis703 6y ago
  There’s at least two success criteria for SDC tech: 1) How much safer than humans does SDC need to be before we can ethically use it? 2) When will it be legalized? The ethics is a hard question. My preference is safety standards should be way higher than the vehicular carnage we accept today. I doubt most people think that way though. Legalization (and commercialization, especially if corporate liability is waived), could come at any moment. Given the US government accepts 3000 daily COVID19 deaths as a reasonable baseline, it seems there would be little moral qualms. If SDCs are about as good (or maybe even no more than a little worse) than human drivers approval could be granted, ethics be damned.
• mattlondon 6y ago
  There will be a large market/human-lives-saved benefit from the tech though, even if we never reach 100% self-driving autonomy E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will automatically adjust the speed to match the car in front and so on (right down to slamming on the brakes to avoid a rear-end shunt if needed). Then there are the self-parking cars, the ones with synthetic overhead 360 degree camera viewpoints, ones that prevent "unintended acceleration" in car parks, ones that read the road signs to let you know the speed limit etc. And these are "normal" cars that a common joe can afford, not high-end six-figure Mercedes/BMW/Lexus/Tesla etc This sort of tech was science fiction not so long ago, yet now it is literally standard-fit. There will be a slow but steady "encroachment" of more and more automation into cars as the years go by - you can guarantee that companies like Cruise are churning out the patents at the least for this sort of thing, even if not outright directly licensing technologies. It feels like a land-grab phase right now, even if there is no real intention to reach L5.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    I’ve always been extremely dubious about the “self driving to save lives” angle for one very specific reason: we already know how to save lives. Slow. The. Cars. Down. Oslo managed to get their car deaths down to 1 in 2019. 1, in a city of 600,000. Los Angeles killed 240 that year, or 36x more per capita. And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives, we’d implement these measures today rather than banking on a long term tech solution. I believe that self driving is about a fantasy world in which we can ignore all the negative consequences of a low density, car centric world. Pedestrian deaths? AI magic will solve it. Long commutes? Just eat breakfast in your car! Emissions? Why well just switch over to EVs! Never mind that half of this tech is either not real, or orders of magnitude less efficient than the transit that Europe has used for almost half a century! The truth is we can fix all of these things right now, but it would involve sacrifices for those whom the system is already benefitting. So instead we’ve made up a fantasy world where we can have our cake and eat it too.
• gopalv 6y ago
  > I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. ... > I feel in the minority in thinking self driving tech will ever be viable. Take out "cars" from that phrase and I think there might be a different answer to it, sooner or later. Specifically I liked Otto's original proposals and it sounded almost viable. The idea of having a Sacramento -> Chicago or Houston to Dallas routes for trucking with autonomous vehicles, with the last mile routes covered by normal container trucks sounded like it would work in the near term. The fact that these are big rig trucks ensures the unit volume cost of the hardware isn't going to be a big problem (a 25k computer in a 35k car vs a 120k one in a 800k truck), the servicing can be legally mandated (patch upgrades or cleaning cameras), the power supply management can also be handled if they want to go electric with a container + rig model. There are fewer questions about a long haul highway only self-driving route, maybe even something which will change the economics of shipping stuff through the panama canal vs going over land in a hub-spoke model without a train depot style unloading/inventory station.
  • xoxoy 6y ago
    Otto? You mean the company that stole trade secrets from Google to sell to Uber and whose founder is currently staring at a $179M settlement?
    • arijun 6y ago
      Yes? The whole thing may have been a ploy but I (and I assume GP) think their stated plan was very reasonable.
  • virtue3 6y ago
    Ho would this provide significant benefit over a rail freight system?
    • _jal 6y ago
      It won't - if the idea is to keep it confined to specific overland routes, it is economically absurd vs. trains. But that's not the idea. It is the camel's nose under the tent. The goal is to get them on the road somewhere, and then gradually expand use as they can re-legislate at the cost of pedestrians. There's a template for doing this - when cars were first commercialized, pedestrians had to be kicked off the roads, so they invented "jaywalkers", and launched a huge propaganda campaign to make it a thing[1]. Too much money and priming has been dumped into self-driving tech to abandon, so they'll try to create markets by pushing the squishy slow things that complain when they get smooshed out of the way. [1] https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history
• MiroF 6y ago
  > I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all. How do you explain actual self-driving cars on the road? I find this attitude confusing as it seems to not jive with empirical reality. I agree that we should focus on mass transit, but Waymo drives hundreds/thousands of miles without driver intervention.
  • anyfoo 6y ago
    More important than simple probability is the “expectancy value”, which is roughly spoken (and cumulatively) the probability multiplied by the effect when the probability comes to pass.
    • MiroF 6y ago
      I'm confused what this comment is saying - are you just trying to say that someone getting killed by a car is really really bad? If so, I agree. I've never heard of "expectancy value" in my life - it's definitely not a standard probability term.
      • anyfoo 6y ago
        I just translated the German term Erwartungswert wrong. The English term seems to be “expected value”, and it’s basic enough that you learn it in high school.
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
  • djsumdog 6y ago
    There aren't any self driving cars on the road that don't have a safety driver, and the ones that are out there get confused all the time. The Uber one had a software dev turn off the lidar sensor to test the computer vision at night and it ended up killing a woman crossing the street.
    • 6y ago
• economicslol 6y ago
  >I don't think self-driving cars are realistic at all They said the same thing about a Computer beating a Human at Chess or Go, or Radiology, or countless other examples. I don't see why a random person on hackernews would be any more correct than any of the previous naysayers.
  • OpieCunningham 6y ago
    They also said the same thing about time travel and dragons.
    • anyfoo 6y ago
      This might be more like turning lead into gold, which after (at least) several hundred years of effort we can do now, with merely completely absurdly uneconomic and unpractical levels of effort and energy.
  • golemiprague 6y ago
    Because Chess is a closed limited system with strict rules which you can easily emulate and with enough brute power might even be able to calculate all possible cases. Go probably less but still a closed system with strict rules. Those we can usually solve as technology improves. Driving is an open endless system with no rules since people and nature might do any action at any time. That's why it is in a different level of difficulty. The next level is to give a machine some emotions. Improving within the same level of difficulty is foreseeable, jumping to the next level is matter of faith, you need to believe a breakthrough will come, but it might not, ever.
• kgin 6y ago
  We may never have 100% level 5 driving. But with level 4 + remote assistance, you don't need to support all the edge cases to have a car with no steering wheel. You only need to reduce the need for remote assistance enough to make the economics work out. We will all have been riding around happily in cars without steering wheels for decades before "true self driving" comes to pass. It's possible that remote assistance centers will never shut down entirely, even 100 years from now, still waiting on the off-chance that a .00000000001% edge case pops up that the system still can't handle.
  • anyfoo 6y ago
    Can you explain this more thoroughly? So the AI cannot itself resolve a situation that requires resolution within a split second, therefore it passes control (reliable, latency free?!) to a remote operations center where humans get to... assess the situation in order to remotely tell the vehicle how to react in time? I must have completely misunderstood, because I don’t see how any part of that plan is working?
    • tomlu 6y ago
      The idea is that such situations are non life threatening. The vehicle will pull over and wait for a human operator. It's not crazy to imagine that computers could handle split second decisions better than humans but choose to bail out to the side of the road if there's something they can't handle.
      • ulfw 6y ago
        There isn’t always a “side of the road” tho. (think tunnels, walls, Old Towns, busy city centres...)
        • MertsA 6y ago
          So long as "bail to a human" doesn't take long e.g. 5 seconds to connect to an operator, it might not need to pull aside at all.
        • 6y ago
• fiftyfifty 6y ago
  Why rails? With some of this self driving tech you could just put sensors in the road and have the vehicles follow pre-determined routes. I've always thought that's where this self driving tech should have first gone in the early stages. Instead of having a large bus come by once every 30 minutes you could have a fleet of small self driving vans coming by every 5 minutes. If you don't have to pay so many drivers that could be cost effective. Something like that could change public transport and would be very accessible to even small cities.
  • MiroF 6y ago
    Transporting people together in a single thing is much more efficient than having a big roomy box for every person.
    • fiftyfifty 6y ago
      Agreed, I was thinking the self driving vans or mini-buses would hold maybe 10 people. They wouldn't have to be as big as a full size bus as they would come by more often, making them more convenient for the riders. I live in a smaller city and we have full size buses that only come by every half an hour, which means if you miss a connection it could take you an hour and a half to travel a distance you could easily drive in 15-20 minutes. If the buses came by more often, more people would ride them, but that would be cost prohibitive if you had to pay all the drivers.
  • anyfoo 6y ago
    Sometimes I am speechless. You’ve just made public transport less efficient on several axis.
    • fiftyfifty 6y ago
      Speechless? Where I live we have full size public buses that are frequently only carrying one or two people. In fact if I had a nickle for every time I've seen a completely empty light rail train in the middle of the day in Denver, I'd be a rich man by now. Public transport in the vast majority of the US is a failure. In Colorado Uber and Lyft probably haul 10-100 times more people every day than ride our public transportation, that's not efficient at all. The main complaint people have is public transportation doesn't run often enough, or provide enough routes, self driving vehicles could fix that and make it economic for US cities. If you had smaller buses (sometimes called vans) you could run them more often and thus make them more appealing to the masses. Is it less efficient, yes, but if it gains more riders that's a net gain IMO.
• CaffeineSqurr 6y ago
  It's not getting publicized very much but they did lay off people from the core AV teams (planning, controls, perception, mapping, etc.) in addition to the otherwise cited groups.
• sida 6y ago
  > I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars Guess what, these people have run the numbers > solve any real transport issues compared to traditional mass transit I think that's thinking small. Why can't self-driving be applied to mass transit. Let's take out all the cars and replace them with 15 passenger self-driving vans. And set up many stops that are dynamically routed by UberPool. You can get convenience of a car, the cost of a bus and far less pollution.
• TulliusCicero 6y ago
  > I bet if you did a study and ran the numbers, it would be cheaper to put down rail on existing roads and make them rail-car only, automate those and subsidize rail cars. Lane miles in the US are in the many millions. Each mile of track costs a million+ dollars. You're talking many trillions of dollars to railify every road in the country. So no, there's basically no way that's cheaper than figuring out self-driving.
  • bob33212 6y ago
    It is so strange that people don't see what is happening at Tesla. They are driving billions of miles under AI control. It is totally fine to dislike Musk or to think that autopilot is unsafe today, but how can you look at billions of miles and say that it isn't going to work within the next few years.
    • colechristensen 6y ago
      There is a long long tail of edge cases that kill people. When drivers go a few trillion miles per year in the US, any anomaly in your driving software is going to be measured in deaths per hour. There is a built-in human sympathy for accidents caused by people which will not be at all present with accidents caused by machines. You can't sure a maker for wrongful death by a faulty human, you can easily sue a car company. It will just take one cute kid getting killed by an errant robot car to end the dream completely. Machines don't make human mistakes, they make mistakes that are alien and frightening, things you couldn't ever a person imagine doing. The public will get scared and automatic driving will be banned. For Tesla and everyone else doing unattended driving, it isn't a matter of covering the last few bits left, it's a matter of increasing precision by several factors of ten, and ultimately, I'm guessing robot cars won't be a reality until their intelligence starts to reach the point where people are asking questions about sentience.
    • TulliusCicero 6y ago
      That's easy: recording billions of miles of data is only part of solving the problem. I'm sure they'll get there eventually, but having a ton of data isn't a cheat code that makes rapid progress inevitable.
• squnch 6y ago
  Are you talking about "successful" as "no fatalities" or "fewer fatalities than those caused by texting meatbag drivers?" The former is impossible, the latter is certainly not.
• staticassertion 6y ago
  That's interesting that you feel that way. Living in SF I see self driving cars all the time - how do you account for that?