25 ms·

The self-driving car is a red herring

105 points by dnetesn 6y ago

asah 6y ago
Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.
- echelon 6y ago
  How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade.
  - TotempaaltJ 6y ago
    I think we'll see a lot of approximations of it. Autonomous taxis in predefined spaces (see Cruise, Waymo), trucks on highways (maybe changing to human drivers when entering/nearing cities). But no safe full self-driving for a while. Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines.
    - Super_Jambo 6y ago
      Better public transit can't be leveraged into a monopoly though, it would just quietly improve peoples lives.
      - AstralStorm 6y ago
        Of course it can, that's what most public transport companies are. They tend to be government subsidized. There's very little competition because there is not much to compete for, except in longer distance rail and bus. You also need permission from the city to use public stops, consult routes and times, which is a barrier of entry. Not an insurmountable one and nobody prohibits you from running private stops or garages. You can even negotiate the use of bus lanes or tram lines. The other barrier is much higher capital investment. Both bus drivers, busses and stops are not cheap, while the margin on a ticket is thin. (Compared to taxi fleet.) But it can be done even encouraging competition - see South Korea for an example of where it worked.
    - DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
      > Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines. How much are talking? Waymo is 10 billion in the hole. Tesla spent maybe around that much developing autopilot. This is also not public money being spent. A typical public transit system costs orders of magnitude more than that. Example: California's High Speed Rail project started at 40 billion and projections have already ballooned to 98 billion.
  - audunw 6y ago
    > How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? That depends on your perspective. I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived. But the liability challenges could mean you'll want more "perfect" reliability. > They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. Seems like the solutions out there are already getting pretty good at handling the kind of rain, snow and darkness you'd see in most urban/suburban areas. Maybe you'll "never" be able to drive autonomously to your cabin in the woods, but so what? > I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade. What exactly do you mean by "seeing these things"? By some measures they're already here. The ones that are truly self driving are slow, and mostly on static routes. The ones that drive on highways need to be monitored by a human, but they're doing pretty well. I think you'll see these different solutions just slowly become better and better. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't hail a fully autonomous robotaxi in many urban areas in a decade. Maybe it can't drive it anywhere, maybe you can't use it in a snowstorm, but it'll be a case of "good enough".
    - itsoktocry 6y ago
      >I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived That is a seriously low bar, and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough. In fact, I think it will be the opposite: people will want it to be almost flawless before it's accepted.
      - matz1 6y ago
        For me, "better than a drunk" is good enough >and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough If that the case something can be done such as smart marketing/social media campaign or something like that to change people perception.
      - leetcrew 6y ago
        you and rootusrootus have parsed this phrase incorrectly: > more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived emphasis mine.
  - AdrianB1 6y ago
    When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers, that will be enough. That is not a lot of nines.
    - itsoktocry 6y ago
      >When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers How could you even calculate this? By running massive experiments and seeing if fewer people die over a given period of time driving versus self-driving? Do you really think we can run such an experiment?
      - AdrianB1 6y ago
        It is possible, but hard, to calculate human performance, it was done very scientific in aviation since ~ 1950. It is easier to do it if you consider 1% worst drivers, either older people with long reaction times, distracted drivers, drunk drivers etc. If you have a car that is obeying all traffic rules, it never goes above the speed limit and it has sensors that makes it brake before rear-ending other cars you are already better than the 1% limit. It is a simplistic approach, just giving an example of how 99% is not that hard to reach.
      - kanox 6y ago
        Such experiments are already running and there are statistics available comparing the rate of accidents with human versus computer driving.
  - reader_mode 6y ago
    >They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. No they don't - a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable - not everyone can drive in extreme conditions reliably - doesn't mean they can't drive.
    - itsoktocry 6y ago
      >a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable I don't agree, because of the grey area between the car knowing it can't drive and believing it can, but in practice doing so poorly.
      - srtjstjsj 6y ago
        So, like a human?
    - rootusrootus 6y ago
      I am imagining the whole fleet of self-driving cars stopping on the side of the road at the same time every time a little rainstorm blows through, kinda like what happens now for a snowstorm. Except rain is a heck of a lot more common. I guess we won't be seeing self-driving cars in the PNW ;)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - taneq 6y ago
    The goalposts are attached to the front of the car, so we'll never reach them.
  - bob33212 6y ago
    Cars will never be safe. At any point if you are moving 50 miles an hour and an animal runs out in front of an oncoming car they may swerve and hit you head on. Or if your tire pops you may swerve into a tree. When cars have accidents 10x less frequently than humans it will be stupid not to switch over.
    - falcolas 6y ago
      That “when” is nowhere on the horizon, is what this article and other commenters are saying.
  - srtjstjsj 6y ago
    flying cars and jet packs have VC funding.
  - SuoDuanDao 6y ago
    I rather like the XKCD comic in regards to that question: https://xkcd.com/1720/ https://xkcd.com/1720/
  - kanox 6y ago
    > I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. Flying cars and jet packs are limited by physics (specifically energy density) and progress in this area is almost non-existent. We barely got batteries to be vaguely competitive with internal combustion. Self-driving cars are limited by software and hardware accelerators and this field is making real progress.
- simonh 6y ago
  Well, the predictions 15 years ago that we’d have fleets of self driving cars on all our roads long before now didn’t age all that well either. I remember a friend saying my kids would never need to learn how to drive. My eldest started her driving lessons last month.
- pessimizer 6y ago
  > Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well. People also posted this about 3D TVs and Cuecats.
  - asah 6y ago
    Won't argue!! But those technologies (a) had a fraction of the upside, (b) don't offer partial wins that pay back the R&D (like self driving trucks), and (c) never attracted the same level of investment or talent. Self driving vehicles will save $250+B/year in labor costs in the US alone - this is more impactful than the cotton gin and rivals the impact of refrigeration. 3D TVs and cuecat are 3-6 orders of magnitude smaller impact Finally, it's worth mentioning that cuecat became QR codes which took off after getting built into cellphone cameras. 3D television didn't take off but 4K did i.e. consumer demand existed for richer TV images just not specifically 3D. Projectors remain niche as well even though they promise to take TV from 80" to 130+" - if ultra short throw (UST) projectors come down in price, I could see them going mainstream, especially in tandem with 4K/8K.
ericmay 6y ago
Actual red herring here is developing new automobile technologies at all.
- tempodox 6y ago
  I have the greatest startup idea ever: Selling petrol-driven generators with a web interface for charging electric cars. Premium tier will include automatic refuel ordering. Of course the generators will be completely useless when the web is down or our hosting company goes out of business.
- Tiktaalik 6y ago
  Yep. The car has created more problems than it has solved, what with CO2 emissions, brake and tire dust, and the incredible amount of car crash and pedestrian deaths. Electric and autonomous cars would be positive steps forward to solving these problems, but are fundamentally still doing the wrong thing better. The technology to solve all of our transportation problems already exists, and often has existed since the 19th century. Autonomous rapid transit has existed since the 1980s. Compact towns with walkable streets, safe cycling lanes and high quality public transportation are all more effective and more affordable approaches to how we primarily move about our world.
  - ericmay 6y ago
    Thank you for summarizing it... I guess I should have as well in my original post versus just the snide remark. Emotion got the best of me.
smitty1e 6y ago
The idea of a spectrum of roads, ranging from "no drivers" to "no robots" seems near-fetched.
- donquichotte 6y ago
  Indeed! Merge onto the highway, relinquish control, program the exit you want to take and lean back.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  It seems expensive and I don't see how we get from here to there. Roads are fairly expensive and require a lot of planning, so how do we go from no-robots to a dedicated road with limited human drivers without having a lot of wasted very expensive infrastructure for a length of time?
ckastner 6y ago
> Some experts now predict that we may never achieve the original dream of a reliable fully self-driving car. And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads. This is a non-starter in the post-pandemic age of austerity. Most state and local governments now struggle to merely maintain a much simpler, yet more fundamental technology for orienting both human and computer drivers—the painted markings that guide us along the pavement. I don't buy this argument. Yes, retro-fitting costs money, but even if one were to lay down guide wires next to every major road, the costs wouldn't be as insurmountable as it is being painted here. The cost of digging up a ditch next to the road just isn't that bad. Furthermore, it's not just costs to bear, but also benefits to weigh. If an AV capable road might get you from city to suburb, the suburb might just pay for the retrofit themselves.
- naravara 6y ago
  In most population dense parts of the country where traffic is a problem, there is no “side of the road” to dig a ditch into. It’s all built up.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    Even in the less dense areas, the side of the road is filled with buried utility lines (it’s cheap). I’m also curious what the tolerances of these magical “wires alongside the road” have.
  - ckastner 6y ago
    I thought of this, too, but believed the solution to be even simpler than rural areas. Dense areas are taken care of even more (snow is plowed, etc.). There's also, much more data being constantly captured. For example, Google Maps can already hyper-accurately predict traffic down to individual road sections simply by observing the position and speed of Android phones on the road.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  I doubt retrofitting will be necessary because it isn't necessary for human drivers. I think the author underestimates how good the technology is for LIDAR-aided visual navigation (and how quickly the technology is growing).
hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago
This article (willfully) mistakes Waymo's caution for allegedly intractable nature of the self-driving problem.
question000 6y ago
Self-driving cars, computer speech recognition and the collapse of the federal reserve system. Things that are going to perpetually happen next year since the inception of Hacker News.
- clows 6y ago
  Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?
  - tim333 6y ago
    I haven't seen that for a while. It seemed to drop off a bit with Chromebooks which are kind of desktop linux.
  - jeltz 6y ago
    No, it has not been used seriously for about 5 years. The last time was probably when SteamOS was released.
  - neogodless 6y ago
    Sort of, now that Microsoft announced native GUI support coming to WSL2 next year!
  - dhruvmittal 6y ago
    I think we called it a win on "The year of desktop linux" when it was clear that Linux was mainstream enough for Microsoft to tie it up with a bow and offer in their app store. Jokes aside, we're at the point where everyone who wants linux on the desktop can get linux on the desktop without having to struggle. Big, known enterprise-friendly companies like Dell and Lenovo will sell you their flagship and business laptops and desktops running Ubuntu, and it's not uncommon for engineers at the 8000+ not-a-software-company I work at to casually have a Linux machine instead of a Mac or PC. It's not 2010, where you had to be willing to navigate UEFI and "will my broadcom wireless work?" to weed out the casuals from the true-believers.
    - marketingPro 6y ago
barnacled 6y ago
I like Filip Piekniewski's take on this [0] - deep learning is appropriate for environments where the cost of mistakes is low (or the errors are reversible) and you're able to 'average them out'. Self-driving cars are absolutely not in that category. "If your errors are irreversible and you can't average them out, and your application is in open domain where there will never be a shortage of out of distribution samples, you are royally screwed. That is why I'm so skeptical of self driving cars, since that is exactly the application described." For me it's obvious the real issue are the edge cases - of course a self-driving car does fine in 99%+ of cases, but those small % of outlier cases are the ones where people potentially die. I suspect an entirely different approach is required to supplement/supplant the deep learning one and fully autonomous vehicles are still quite some way off. I do like all of the driver assist advantages coming out of this work however! I don't think you can underestimate the value of having technology that works _with_ a driver until the point where self-driving cars become viable. [0]:https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/06/08/ai-the-no-bullshit-approach/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/06/08/ai-the-no-bullshit-...
- ianai 6y ago
  Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.
  - barnacled 6y ago
    I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc. Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultimately general underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe. Thunderf00t has done a series of videos debunking these claims [0,1,2]. Unfortunately Elon has a habit of frankly lying which I think does serious harm to public perception of these things. These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE
lazyjones 6y ago
tl;dr ... "Experts" say we will never have autonomous cars and the author would rather live in Hong Kong anyway.
digital-cygnet 6y ago
I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the technological landscape as momentous as self-driving rarely are as simple as 1:1 replacement of the technology that existed before: the self-driving car is not unattainable, but it is a red herring. Given this, I don't really know why he mentions the challenges involved in self-driving and his skepticism thereof -- it seems to me that his autonomous "rovers" and "software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would. Overall I applaud the imagination that the author applies, bringing together the threads of autonomous vehicles, micromobility, and lingering anxieties from COVID into a set of bold claims about the future of urban transit. What I am curious about is whether the future he paints ("micro-sprawl"; "walking is passé") is one people find compelling and desirable. I think he's basically right that the underlying market forces will lead us there in the next couple of decades absent strong action from municipal governments, but is this the right way to model cities of the future, or are we sleepwalking into another Robert Moses style disastrous reimagining of the urban fabric? Personally I'm undecided.
- ppod 6y ago
  Yes, I think a lot of people here didn't read beyond the first third of the article, which is understandable because it tries to be very poetic and sci-fi and fails to actually make clear what it's talking about until more than halfway through.
- ImprobableTruth 6y ago
  >"software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would. How so? It seems pretty evident to me that having separate, dedicated lanes should make it a lot easier. What I'd say is by far the biggest concern, human-driven traffic, is just completely eliminated with that.
  - AstralStorm 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
francis_t_catte 6y ago
So what if we eliminate some of the hard problems, like steering, traffic, pedestrians, and setup guided routes specifically for automated vehicles? All you would need to control is signaling and the throttle/brakes. You could even couple multiple vehicles together for more capacity! Seems like an idea ripe for implementation. /s
- kylecordes 6y ago
  Hey, we could also make them more efficient by using steel for the wheels and rolling surface!
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    And we'll only have to bulldoze a few houses to do it! Ten, twenty thousand at most, I'm sure. ;)
- andbberger 6y ago
  What's funny is that the railroads of the US were mandated to implement this (PTC) by the end of 2018 and have almost universally blown the deadline. Caltrain tried to roll their own implementation, got caught with their pants down, and iirc are now trying to save face by switching to one of the standard vendor developed systems
TulliusCicero 6y ago
> And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads. No it won't? Why would it? Plenty of companies are testing in other areas, and I haven't heard any suggest that they need special hardware on the roads themselves. Yes, the Phoenix suburbs are the easiest place to start, but that doesn't mean you need special infrastructure in other places. The tech will keep improving, and I predict that this author will turn out to be incredibly wrong.
- mxskelly 6y ago
  I'd love to know how you expect a computer to navigate a blizzard on an unpainted country road when even adaptive cruise control systems can't handle a bit of snow on the sensors. Sure this stuff works fine in Arizona where there is no inclement weather most of the time, and the roads are in perfect condition because freeze/thaw cycles don't cause excessive wear, but what about the rest of the country and the world?
  - TulliusCicero 6y ago
    > I'd love to know how you expect a computer to navigate a blizzard on an unpainted country road when even adaptive cruise control systems can't handle a bit of snow on the sensors. What do adaptive cruise control systems have to do with full self-driving systems? You realize these aren't the same thing, right? > Sure this stuff works fine in Arizona where there is no inclement weather most of the time, and the roads are in perfect condition because freeze/thaw cycles don't cause excessive wear, but what about the rest of the country and the world? Again, what's the problem you're pointing to here? Arizona is easy mode, no doubt...and? We already know companies are also testing in areas with fouler weather, after all. Waymo even demonstrated how their sensors handle snowfall two years ago, and presumably they've improved further since then as they've continued development: https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.ht... It's absolutely bizarre how many HN commenters assume that the engineering departments in every self-driving car company are chock full of the biggest morons on the planet. "Oh ho ho, did they ever consider that other places have different weather than Arizona? Checkmate, tech companies."
marketingPro 6y ago
How outdated/out of touch was that line about Women managing children in a covid world? Just say "parents".
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Unfortunately, the numbers do bear out that women are being extremely disproportionately hit by the need to manage children in a distributed manner during COVID. https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/09/1071502 https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/09/1071502 https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/853073274/women-bear-the-brunt-of-coronavirus-job-losses https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/853073274/women-bear-the-brun... In the US at least (and anecdotally), the driving factor appears to be that in a mixed-gender two-adult household, it is basically assumed that if someone has to step back from their job to watch kids, it's the woman---either because she makes less money than her male partner or because businesses are less flexible with granting men off-time for parenting than they are granting women such time. These factors aren't universally true, but I suspect they're on-average true enough to be driving the visible stats.
dmortin 6y ago
Even if the self-driving can be implemented only partially it can be a big gain. E.g. suppose the car can only drive itself on highways in daytime in good weather. It still a great convenience feature to have if you don't have to drive for 80-90% of your commute (with the above conditions) and you only have to take over in the city.
Gravityloss 6y ago
Maybe it will be like music or video sharing. It's illegal and "can't be done" - until someone big enough does it and then it just becomes trivial. So maybe all new vehicles will have and old ones will be retrofitted with corner reflectors and infrared beacons or some such, and roads will have markers for AI cars, regularly checked and maintained too (by robots). Digital maps will be public domain. Clothes and bikes etc will get AI visibility signs integrated too.
Kaze404 6y ago
I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people? I'm not in the US, and while the public transportation system here is far from perfect, I've managed to get by this far without a car and don't plan on buying one anytime soon. I much prefer a future where this is improved compared to one I have to fork tens of thousands of USD for a chromatic death machine.
- aqme28 6y ago
  I completely agree. I see the benefit for things like trucking. For cities though, I would much rather live in a place like Amsterdam or New York than one that's completely car-centric, even if the cars drive themselves.
- kylecordes 6y ago
  It is a large and very heterogeneous world. There are plenty of places where public transport will work best and plenty of others where a car (self driving or otherwise) is much more useful.
- kindatrue 6y ago
  There's also what's known as the "geometry" problem - 1 self driving car takes up as much space as 1 human driven car. Part of the problem is the general incompetency and mismanagement of US public transit construction -- the costs are insane, even when compared to "socialist" "high-cost" union-heavy Europe. This was a great read on why we get so little for our money: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... - and it busts the common misconception that it's 100% because unions. (tldr: it's because politicians get rewarded for creating jobs (votes) and spending money on contractors (lobbying), and because we outsourced everything)
  - twox2 6y ago
raiyu 6y ago
The problem with self-driving cars is the 1% failure of software. Cars travel at a high rate of speed and a 1% error can easily be fatal. Either by hitting a pedestrian or someone on a bike, or by the car failing to acknowledge something and crashing itself head on into something. Because cars travel in a highly dynamic environment this 1% error and the fatality risk associated with it is very high, so you need to have something that is 99.99999% safe which is extremely challenging because of the dynamic environment. Meanwhile, if you look at automated train and rail systems. Because the environment is 99% controlled and less complex a 1% error is actually much smaller, because the environment is so controlled. The high rate of speed, coupled with fatality risk, coupled with dynamic environments, is why this is such a challenging problem.
- josephcsible 6y ago
  Did you just pull 1% out of the air?
  - raiyu 6y ago
    I'm not saying it's statistical, it's just a reference to a small issue which is compounded because of high fatality risk and that the dynamic environment makes the likelihood of unlikely events more likely to occur.
YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago
>> Ghost roads didn’t demand a massive mobilization of government. The technology of autonomous driving would roll onto existing highways, invisibly weaving a new transportation system. Only this one would be modeled on the Internet. Computers would outnumber people. Code would call all the shots. Mmrright. Imagine a future where anytime public infrastructure stops working you have to contact Google's tech support. Just think of how that turns out today, when Google's algos decide someone's app is violating TOS or something similar, like the news that comes up every once in a while on HN, where the victims are met with a wall of automated messages that explain nothing. "If you want an image of the future, picture a human trying to get through a bot to a human operator for ever".
- seveibar 6y ago
  I think Comma.ai and car manufacturers other than Tesla will probably offer a variety of customer support experiences, especially because the cost of churn is much larger than say gsuite.
Grimm1 6y ago
I know people love public transport because of the supposed larger benefit to society but having ridden NYC public transport for over 7 years now I absolutely loath it. The experience is horrible almost every day. Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault I'm simply not willing to deal with that continuously. I put up with it because it was cheaper than owning a car in NYC at a time where I needed to make that trade off but I don't need to make that trade off any more. This is with the MTA receiving billions of dollars and subsidies. Give us a system like Japan or even some of the light rail like I experienced in France and I can see people moving towards public transport. Continue to give us systems like the New York subway and I don't see cars going away. This article makes largely the same point -- the way we do public transport in the US is flawed and technology can help us make it less so, but it has to have buy in from our political systems and the people. As long as institutions like the MTA have a say we'll only see mismanaged and rapidly aging systems.
- thrav 6y ago
  You could just as easily be writing about BART. The United States fails hard at public transit, even where we’re richest and it makes the most sense. I use it all the time, but I can’t really blame the people who refuse. Tokyo was in a league of its own (2 weeks experience). London Tube was mostly great, with some minor flaws here and there (9 months experience). This is without even beginning to compare the reach and convenience of stations in each system. This feels like looking at our ability to Lockdown for COVID. Even when we attempted to fully close, we sucked at it, and got the worst of both worlds (economic crush + virus still spread). At some point, you have to look in the mirror and stop trying to be something you’re not willing and/or able to be and find a new approach.
- bluedino 6y ago
  >> Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault Three of the four of those are things you don't hear people complaining about with the transit system in Japan because of the culture differences in the USA. How can that be fixed, here?
throwitaway1235 6y ago
Autonomous transportation should be banned. The cost of putting 10 million + people out work do not match the benefits.
- josephcsible 6y ago
  I assume you're also in favor of banning green energy because it puts coal miners out of work.
  - throwitaway1235 6y ago
    No I wouldn't support that. It doesn't scale. Coal work numbers in the 10's of thousands, employment through driving in the 10's of millions.
h2odragon 6y ago
Doesn't the way we build cities have more history with (semi-autonomously guided) horses as the prime engine of transport? Surely there's lessons there worth exploring?
mensetmanusman 6y ago
Electric self-driving enables mass transit that evolves to the needs of the citizens without spewing diesel exhaust everywhere.
birdyrooster 6y ago
Hand waving the economic viability of self driving cars because of assumed post Covid austerity is just lazy thinking.
kangnkodos 6y ago
This article completely ignores China. In the US, if one pedestrian is killed by a self-driving car, the losses are unacceptable. This is true even if thousands of lives are saved. In China, the opposite is true. If thousands of lives are saved, and one pedestrian dies, the self-driving car is a success. China will be the first country to see widespread deployment of self-driving cars for this reason.
- decafninja 6y ago
  Also China would probably move heaven and earth if necessary to get things done. Quickly. Maybe not so perfectly safely though. In the US, getting approval to construct a 10'x10' dog park requires moving heaven and earth to get permits signed off to even start planning, and then come the lawsuits.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

105 points by dnetesn 6y ago

asah 6y ago

Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well.

echelon 6y ago
How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade.
- TotempaaltJ 6y ago
  I think we'll see a lot of approximations of it. Autonomous taxis in predefined spaces (see Cruise, Waymo), trucks on highways (maybe changing to human drivers when entering/nearing cities). But no safe full self-driving for a while. Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines.
  - Super_Jambo 6y ago
    Better public transit can't be leveraged into a monopoly though, it would just quietly improve peoples lives.
    - AstralStorm 6y ago
      Of course it can, that's what most public transport companies are. They tend to be government subsidized. There's very little competition because there is not much to compete for, except in longer distance rail and bus. You also need permission from the city to use public stops, consult routes and times, which is a barrier of entry. Not an insurmountable one and nobody prohibits you from running private stops or garages. You can even negotiate the use of bus lanes or tram lines. The other barrier is much higher capital investment. Both bus drivers, busses and stops are not cheap, while the margin on a ticket is thin. (Compared to taxi fleet.) But it can be done even encouraging competition - see South Korea for an example of where it worked.
  - DarmokJalad1701 6y ago
    > Although I do feel like the money spent in the US so far would've been better spent setting up better public transit/train lines. How much are talking? Waymo is 10 billion in the hole. Tesla spent maybe around that much developing autopilot. This is also not public money being spent. A typical public transit system costs orders of magnitude more than that. Example: California's High Speed Rail project started at 40 billion and projections have already ballooned to 98 billion.
- audunw 6y ago
  > How many nines of reliability do self driving cars need before they're safe? That depends on your perspective. I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived. But the liability challenges could mean you'll want more "perfect" reliability. > They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. They have to adapt to novel conditions. Seems like the solutions out there are already getting pretty good at handling the kind of rain, snow and darkness you'd see in most urban/suburban areas. Maybe you'll "never" be able to drive autonomously to your cabin in the woods, but so what? > I don't think we'll see these things for another decade, and when that next decade arrives we'll be saying the same. Another decade. What exactly do you mean by "seeing these things"? By some measures they're already here. The ones that are truly self driving are slow, and mostly on static routes. The ones that drive on highways need to be monitored by a human, but they're doing pretty well. I think you'll see these different solutions just slowly become better and better. I'd be very surprised if you couldn't hail a fully autonomous robotaxi in many urban areas in a decade. Maybe it can't drive it anywhere, maybe you can't use it in a snowstorm, but it'll be a case of "good enough".
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >I think most of us just wants it to be more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived That is a seriously low bar, and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough. In fact, I think it will be the opposite: people will want it to be almost flawless before it's accepted.
    - matz1 6y ago
      For me, "better than a drunk" is good enough >and in no way do I think the majority of people feel that driving "better than a drunk" is good enough If that the case something can be done such as smart marketing/social media campaign or something like that to change people perception.
    - leetcrew 6y ago
      you and rootusrootus have parsed this phrase incorrectly: > more reliable than a human driver that's not drunk or sleep deprived emphasis mine.
- AdrianB1 6y ago
  When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers, that will be enough. That is not a lot of nines.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >When self driving cars will be consistently more reliable than 99% of human drivers How could you even calculate this? By running massive experiments and seeing if fewer people die over a given period of time driving versus self-driving? Do you really think we can run such an experiment?
    - AdrianB1 6y ago
      It is possible, but hard, to calculate human performance, it was done very scientific in aviation since ~ 1950. It is easier to do it if you consider 1% worst drivers, either older people with long reaction times, distracted drivers, drunk drivers etc. If you have a car that is obeying all traffic rules, it never goes above the speed limit and it has sensors that makes it brake before rear-ending other cars you are already better than the 1% limit. It is a simplistic approach, just giving an example of how 99% is not that hard to reach.
    - kanox 6y ago
      Such experiments are already running and there are statistics available comparing the rate of accidents with human versus computer driving.
- reader_mode 6y ago
  >They have to operate in weather. Rain, snow, dark. No they don't - a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable - not everyone can drive in extreme conditions reliably - doesn't mean they can't drive.
  - itsoktocry 6y ago
    >a self driving car that knows when it can't drive is perfectly acceptable I don't agree, because of the grey area between the car knowing it can't drive and believing it can, but in practice doing so poorly.
    - srtjstjsj 6y ago
      So, like a human?
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    I am imagining the whole fleet of self-driving cars stopping on the side of the road at the same time every time a little rainstorm blows through, kinda like what happens now for a snowstorm. Except rain is a heck of a lot more common. I guess we won't be seeing self-driving cars in the PNW ;)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- taneq 6y ago
  The goalposts are attached to the front of the car, so we'll never reach them.
- bob33212 6y ago
  Cars will never be safe. At any point if you are moving 50 miles an hour and an animal runs out in front of an oncoming car they may swerve and hit you head on. Or if your tire pops you may swerve into a tree. When cars have accidents 10x less frequently than humans it will be stupid not to switch over.
  - falcolas 6y ago
    That “when” is nowhere on the horizon, is what this article and other commenters are saying.
- srtjstjsj 6y ago
  flying cars and jet packs have VC funding.
- SuoDuanDao 6y ago
  I rather like the XKCD comic in regards to that question: https://xkcd.com/1720/ https://xkcd.com/1720/
- kanox 6y ago
  > I put the self-driving car in the same category as the flying car and jet pack. This one just happens to have VC funding. Flying cars and jet packs are limited by physics (specifically energy density) and progress in this area is almost non-existent. We barely got batteries to be vaguely competitive with internal combustion. Self-driving cars are limited by software and hardware accelerators and this field is making real progress.
simonh 6y ago
Well, the predictions 15 years ago that we’d have fleets of self driving cars on all our roads long before now didn’t age all that well either. I remember a friend saying my kids would never need to learn how to drive. My eldest started her driving lessons last month.
pessimizer 6y ago
> Classic anti hype cycle. Won't age well. People also posted this about 3D TVs and Cuecats.
- asah 6y ago
  Won't argue!! But those technologies (a) had a fraction of the upside, (b) don't offer partial wins that pay back the R&D (like self driving trucks), and (c) never attracted the same level of investment or talent. Self driving vehicles will save $250+B/year in labor costs in the US alone - this is more impactful than the cotton gin and rivals the impact of refrigeration. 3D TVs and cuecat are 3-6 orders of magnitude smaller impact Finally, it's worth mentioning that cuecat became QR codes which took off after getting built into cellphone cameras. 3D television didn't take off but 4K did i.e. consumer demand existed for richer TV images just not specifically 3D. Projectors remain niche as well even though they promise to take TV from 80" to 130+" - if ultra short throw (UST) projectors come down in price, I could see them going mainstream, especially in tandem with 4K/8K.

ericmay 6y ago

Actual red herring here is developing new automobile technologies at all.

tempodox 6y ago
I have the greatest startup idea ever: Selling petrol-driven generators with a web interface for charging electric cars. Premium tier will include automatic refuel ordering. Of course the generators will be completely useless when the web is down or our hosting company goes out of business.
Tiktaalik 6y ago
Yep. The car has created more problems than it has solved, what with CO2 emissions, brake and tire dust, and the incredible amount of car crash and pedestrian deaths. Electric and autonomous cars would be positive steps forward to solving these problems, but are fundamentally still doing the wrong thing better. The technology to solve all of our transportation problems already exists, and often has existed since the 19th century. Autonomous rapid transit has existed since the 1980s. Compact towns with walkable streets, safe cycling lanes and high quality public transportation are all more effective and more affordable approaches to how we primarily move about our world.
- ericmay 6y ago
  Thank you for summarizing it... I guess I should have as well in my original post versus just the snide remark. Emotion got the best of me.

smitty1e 6y ago

The idea of a spectrum of roads, ranging from "no drivers" to "no robots" seems near-fetched.

donquichotte 6y ago
Indeed! Merge onto the highway, relinquish control, program the exit you want to take and lean back.
rootusrootus 6y ago
It seems expensive and I don't see how we get from here to there. Roads are fairly expensive and require a lot of planning, so how do we go from no-robots to a dedicated road with limited human drivers without having a lot of wasted very expensive infrastructure for a length of time?

ckastner 6y ago

> Some experts now predict that we may never achieve the original dream of a reliable fully self-driving car. And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads. This is a non-starter in the post-pandemic age of austerity. Most state and local governments now struggle to merely maintain a much simpler, yet more fundamental technology for orienting both human and computer drivers—the painted markings that guide us along the pavement. I don't buy this argument. Yes, retro-fitting costs money, but even if one were to lay down guide wires next to every major road, the costs wouldn't be as insurmountable as it is being painted here. The cost of digging up a ditch next to the road just isn't that bad. Furthermore, it's not just costs to bear, but also benefits to weigh. If an AV capable road might get you from city to suburb, the suburb might just pay for the retrofit themselves.

naravara 6y ago
In most population dense parts of the country where traffic is a problem, there is no “side of the road” to dig a ditch into. It’s all built up.
- falcolas 6y ago
  Even in the less dense areas, the side of the road is filled with buried utility lines (it’s cheap). I’m also curious what the tolerances of these magical “wires alongside the road” have.
- ckastner 6y ago
  I thought of this, too, but believed the solution to be even simpler than rural areas. Dense areas are taken care of even more (snow is plowed, etc.). There's also, much more data being constantly captured. For example, Google Maps can already hyper-accurately predict traffic down to individual road sections simply by observing the position and speed of Android phones on the road.
shadowgovt 6y ago
I doubt retrofitting will be necessary because it isn't necessary for human drivers. I think the author underestimates how good the technology is for LIDAR-aided visual navigation (and how quickly the technology is growing).

hehetrthrthrjn 6y ago

This article (willfully) mistakes Waymo's caution for allegedly intractable nature of the self-driving problem.

question000 6y ago

Self-driving cars, computer speech recognition and the collapse of the federal reserve system. Things that are going to perpetually happen next year since the inception of Hacker News.

clows 6y ago
Is "Linux on the Desktop next year" still a thing?
- tim333 6y ago
  I haven't seen that for a while. It seemed to drop off a bit with Chromebooks which are kind of desktop linux.
- jeltz 6y ago
  No, it has not been used seriously for about 5 years. The last time was probably when SteamOS was released.
- neogodless 6y ago
  Sort of, now that Microsoft announced native GUI support coming to WSL2 next year!
- dhruvmittal 6y ago
  I think we called it a win on "The year of desktop linux" when it was clear that Linux was mainstream enough for Microsoft to tie it up with a bow and offer in their app store. Jokes aside, we're at the point where everyone who wants linux on the desktop can get linux on the desktop without having to struggle. Big, known enterprise-friendly companies like Dell and Lenovo will sell you their flagship and business laptops and desktops running Ubuntu, and it's not uncommon for engineers at the 8000+ not-a-software-company I work at to casually have a Linux machine instead of a Mac or PC. It's not 2010, where you had to be willing to navigate UEFI and "will my broadcom wireless work?" to weed out the casuals from the true-believers.
  - marketingPro 6y ago

barnacled 6y ago

I like Filip Piekniewski's take on this [0] - deep learning is appropriate for environments where the cost of mistakes is low (or the errors are reversible) and you're able to 'average them out'. Self-driving cars are absolutely not in that category. "If your errors are irreversible and you can't average them out, and your application is in open domain where there will never be a shortage of out of distribution samples, you are royally screwed. That is why I'm so skeptical of self driving cars, since that is exactly the application described." For me it's obvious the real issue are the edge cases - of course a self-driving car does fine in 99%+ of cases, but those small % of outlier cases are the ones where people potentially die. I suspect an entirely different approach is required to supplement/supplant the deep learning one and fully autonomous vehicles are still quite some way off. I do like all of the driver assist advantages coming out of this work however! I don't think you can underestimate the value of having technology that works _with_ a driver until the point where self-driving cars become viable. [0]:https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/06/08/ai-the-no-bullshit-approach/ https://blog.piekniewski.info/2020/06/08/ai-the-no-bullshit-...

ianai 6y ago
Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.
- barnacled 6y ago
  I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc. Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultimately general underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe. Thunderf00t has done a series of videos debunking these claims [0,1,2]. Unfortunately Elon has a habit of frankly lying which I think does serious harm to public perception of these things. These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet. [0]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HBtL3qDvdZc [1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ezF7NmwQZs [2]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hyy-19qyNWE

lazyjones 6y ago

tl;dr ... "Experts" say we will never have autonomous cars and the author would rather live in Hong Kong anyway.

digital-cygnet 6y ago

I think this article actually makes quite a fresh and interesting point, after the first few paragraphs that sound like stock self-driving skepticism. The author is pointing out that imagining self-driving cars of the same form-factor and niche as the human-driven cars today is a fallacy on par with a 1990s futurist imagining the internet as simply a way to send letters faster. The point is that changes to the technological landscape as momentous as self-driving rarely are as simple as 1:1 replacement of the technology that existed before: the self-driving car is not unattainable, but it is a red herring. Given this, I don't really know why he mentions the challenges involved in self-driving and his skepticism thereof -- it seems to me that his autonomous "rovers" and "software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would. Overall I applaud the imagination that the author applies, bringing together the threads of autonomous vehicles, micromobility, and lingering anxieties from COVID into a set of bold claims about the future of urban transit. What I am curious about is whether the future he paints ("micro-sprawl"; "walking is passé") is one people find compelling and desirable. I think he's basically right that the underlying market forces will lead us there in the next couple of decades absent strong action from municipal governments, but is this the right way to model cities of the future, or are we sleepwalking into another Robert Moses style disastrous reimagining of the urban fabric? Personally I'm undecided.

ppod 6y ago
Yes, I think a lot of people here didn't read beyond the first third of the article, which is understandable because it tries to be very poetic and sci-fi and fails to actually make clear what it's talking about until more than halfway through.
ImprobableTruth 6y ago
>"software trains" face basically all of the same challenges as a self-driving sedan would. How so? It seems pretty evident to me that having separate, dedicated lanes should make it a lot easier. What I'd say is by far the biggest concern, human-driven traffic, is just completely eliminated with that.
- AstralStorm 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

francis_t_catte 6y ago

So what if we eliminate some of the hard problems, like steering, traffic, pedestrians, and setup guided routes specifically for automated vehicles? All you would need to control is signaling and the throttle/brakes. You could even couple multiple vehicles together for more capacity! Seems like an idea ripe for implementation. /s

kylecordes 6y ago
Hey, we could also make them more efficient by using steel for the wheels and rolling surface!
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  And we'll only have to bulldoze a few houses to do it! Ten, twenty thousand at most, I'm sure. ;)
andbberger 6y ago
What's funny is that the railroads of the US were mandated to implement this (PTC) by the end of 2018 and have almost universally blown the deadline. Caltrain tried to roll their own implementation, got caught with their pants down, and iirc are now trying to save face by switching to one of the standard vendor developed systems

TulliusCicero 6y ago

> And even if we do, spreading the technology beyond the Arizona suburbs will require costly retrofits to add navigational hardware to existing roads. No it won't? Why would it? Plenty of companies are testing in other areas, and I haven't heard any suggest that they need special hardware on the roads themselves. Yes, the Phoenix suburbs are the easiest place to start, but that doesn't mean you need special infrastructure in other places. The tech will keep improving, and I predict that this author will turn out to be incredibly wrong.

mxskelly 6y ago
I'd love to know how you expect a computer to navigate a blizzard on an unpainted country road when even adaptive cruise control systems can't handle a bit of snow on the sensors. Sure this stuff works fine in Arizona where there is no inclement weather most of the time, and the roads are in perfect condition because freeze/thaw cycles don't cause excessive wear, but what about the rest of the country and the world?
- TulliusCicero 6y ago
  > I'd love to know how you expect a computer to navigate a blizzard on an unpainted country road when even adaptive cruise control systems can't handle a bit of snow on the sensors. What do adaptive cruise control systems have to do with full self-driving systems? You realize these aren't the same thing, right? > Sure this stuff works fine in Arizona where there is no inclement weather most of the time, and the roads are in perfect condition because freeze/thaw cycles don't cause excessive wear, but what about the rest of the country and the world? Again, what's the problem you're pointing to here? Arizona is easy mode, no doubt...and? We already know companies are also testing in areas with fouler weather, after all. Waymo even demonstrated how their sensors handle snowfall two years ago, and presumably they've improved further since then as they've continued development: https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.html https://www.engadget.com/2018-05-08-waymo-snow-navigation.ht... It's absolutely bizarre how many HN commenters assume that the engineering departments in every self-driving car company are chock full of the biggest morons on the planet. "Oh ho ho, did they ever consider that other places have different weather than Arizona? Checkmate, tech companies."

marketingPro 6y ago

How outdated/out of touch was that line about Women managing children in a covid world? Just say "parents".

shadowgovt 6y ago
Unfortunately, the numbers do bear out that women are being extremely disproportionately hit by the need to manage children in a distributed manner during COVID. https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/09/1071502 https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/09/1071502 https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/853073274/women-bear-the-brunt-of-coronavirus-job-losses https://www.npr.org/2020/05/09/853073274/women-bear-the-brun... In the US at least (and anecdotally), the driving factor appears to be that in a mixed-gender two-adult household, it is basically assumed that if someone has to step back from their job to watch kids, it's the woman---either because she makes less money than her male partner or because businesses are less flexible with granting men off-time for parenting than they are granting women such time. These factors aren't universally true, but I suspect they're on-average true enough to be driving the visible stats.

dmortin 6y ago

Even if the self-driving can be implemented only partially it can be a big gain. E.g. suppose the car can only drive itself on highways in daytime in good weather. It still a great convenience feature to have if you don't have to drive for 80-90% of your commute (with the above conditions) and you only have to take over in the city.

Gravityloss 6y ago

Maybe it will be like music or video sharing. It's illegal and "can't be done" - until someone big enough does it and then it just becomes trivial. So maybe all new vehicles will have and old ones will be retrofitted with corner reflectors and infrared beacons or some such, and roads will have markers for AI cars, regularly checked and maintained too (by robots). Digital maps will be public domain. Clothes and bikes etc will get AI visibility signs integrated too.

Kaze404 6y ago

I have a feeling I'll be down voted to hell for this, but self driving cars always felt like going the complete wrong direction for me. Aside from small personal satisfaction to the few that will be able to afford them, how is revolving our infrastructure and culture around them any better than simply investing in public transportation by making it a more feasible option for people? I'm not in the US, and while the public transportation system here is far from perfect, I've managed to get by this far without a car and don't plan on buying one anytime soon. I much prefer a future where this is improved compared to one I have to fork tens of thousands of USD for a chromatic death machine.

aqme28 6y ago
I completely agree. I see the benefit for things like trucking. For cities though, I would much rather live in a place like Amsterdam or New York than one that's completely car-centric, even if the cars drive themselves.
kylecordes 6y ago
It is a large and very heterogeneous world. There are plenty of places where public transport will work best and plenty of others where a car (self driving or otherwise) is much more useful.
kindatrue 6y ago
There's also what's known as the "geometry" problem - 1 self driving car takes up as much space as 1 human driven car. Part of the problem is the general incompetency and mismanagement of US public transit construction -- the costs are insane, even when compared to "socialist" "high-cost" union-heavy Europe. This was a great read on why we get so little for our money: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-construction-costs.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-... - and it busts the common misconception that it's 100% because unions. (tldr: it's because politicians get rewarded for creating jobs (votes) and spending money on contractors (lobbying), and because we outsourced everything)
- twox2 6y ago

raiyu 6y ago

The problem with self-driving cars is the 1% failure of software. Cars travel at a high rate of speed and a 1% error can easily be fatal. Either by hitting a pedestrian or someone on a bike, or by the car failing to acknowledge something and crashing itself head on into something. Because cars travel in a highly dynamic environment this 1% error and the fatality risk associated with it is very high, so you need to have something that is 99.99999% safe which is extremely challenging because of the dynamic environment. Meanwhile, if you look at automated train and rail systems. Because the environment is 99% controlled and less complex a 1% error is actually much smaller, because the environment is so controlled. The high rate of speed, coupled with fatality risk, coupled with dynamic environments, is why this is such a challenging problem.

josephcsible 6y ago
Did you just pull 1% out of the air?
- raiyu 6y ago
  I'm not saying it's statistical, it's just a reference to a small issue which is compounded because of high fatality risk and that the dynamic environment makes the likelihood of unlikely events more likely to occur.

YeGoblynQueenne 6y ago

>> Ghost roads didn’t demand a massive mobilization of government. The technology of autonomous driving would roll onto existing highways, invisibly weaving a new transportation system. Only this one would be modeled on the Internet. Computers would outnumber people. Code would call all the shots. Mmrright. Imagine a future where anytime public infrastructure stops working you have to contact Google's tech support. Just think of how that turns out today, when Google's algos decide someone's app is violating TOS or something similar, like the news that comes up every once in a while on HN, where the victims are met with a wall of automated messages that explain nothing. "If you want an image of the future, picture a human trying to get through a bot to a human operator for ever".

seveibar 6y ago
I think Comma.ai and car manufacturers other than Tesla will probably offer a variety of customer support experiences, especially because the cost of churn is much larger than say gsuite.

Grimm1 6y ago

I know people love public transport because of the supposed larger benefit to society but having ridden NYC public transport for over 7 years now I absolutely loath it. The experience is horrible almost every day. Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault I'm simply not willing to deal with that continuously. I put up with it because it was cheaper than owning a car in NYC at a time where I needed to make that trade off but I don't need to make that trade off any more. This is with the MTA receiving billions of dollars and subsidies. Give us a system like Japan or even some of the light rail like I experienced in France and I can see people moving towards public transport. Continue to give us systems like the New York subway and I don't see cars going away. This article makes largely the same point -- the way we do public transport in the US is flawed and technology can help us make it less so, but it has to have buy in from our political systems and the people. As long as institutions like the MTA have a say we'll only see mismanaged and rapidly aging systems.

thrav 6y ago
You could just as easily be writing about BART. The United States fails hard at public transit, even where we’re richest and it makes the most sense. I use it all the time, but I can’t really blame the people who refuse. Tokyo was in a league of its own (2 weeks experience). London Tube was mostly great, with some minor flaws here and there (9 months experience). This is without even beginning to compare the reach and convenience of stations in each system. This feels like looking at our ability to Lockdown for COVID. Even when we attempted to fully close, we sucked at it, and got the worst of both worlds (economic crush + virus still spread). At some point, you have to look in the mirror and stop trying to be something you’re not willing and/or able to be and find a new approach.
bluedino 6y ago
>> Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault Three of the four of those are things you don't hear people complaining about with the transit system in Japan because of the culture differences in the USA. How can that be fixed, here?

throwitaway1235 6y ago

Autonomous transportation should be banned. The cost of putting 10 million + people out work do not match the benefits.

josephcsible 6y ago
I assume you're also in favor of banning green energy because it puts coal miners out of work.
- throwitaway1235 6y ago
  No I wouldn't support that. It doesn't scale. Coal work numbers in the 10's of thousands, employment through driving in the 10's of millions.

h2odragon 6y ago

Doesn't the way we build cities have more history with (semi-autonomously guided) horses as the prime engine of transport? Surely there's lessons there worth exploring?

mensetmanusman 6y ago

Electric self-driving enables mass transit that evolves to the needs of the citizens without spewing diesel exhaust everywhere.

birdyrooster 6y ago

Hand waving the economic viability of self driving cars because of assumed post Covid austerity is just lazy thinking.

kangnkodos 6y ago

This article completely ignores China. In the US, if one pedestrian is killed by a self-driving car, the losses are unacceptable. This is true even if thousands of lives are saved. In China, the opposite is true. If thousands of lives are saved, and one pedestrian dies, the self-driving car is a success. China will be the first country to see widespread deployment of self-driving cars for this reason.

decafninja 6y ago
Also China would probably move heaven and earth if necessary to get things done. Quickly. Maybe not so perfectly safely though. In the US, getting approval to construct a 10'x10' dog park requires moving heaven and earth to get permits signed off to even start planning, and then come the lawsuits.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]