19 ms·

Waymo has lost its CEO and is still getting stymied by traffic cones

142 points by tim_sw 5y ago

superkuh 5y ago
It's pretty much the other way around (1% done, 99% to go) except for contrived locations that have perfect climates. It's like wifi devices claiming they can work over miles but that's only true if you have line of sight. A long term snow covering of lane markings typical for the winter months of much of north america and the emergent driving lanes people flock to cannot be handled by any existing driving AI. The places people drive are wrong according to absolute road positions and the relative markers are obscured to both human and machine. Unless car AIs can do the wrong thing like all the humans will in those situations it won't work. And that's a hard problem.
- Arnt 5y ago
  Aren't you then saying that people from California or Arizona who come to Norway know 1% of what they need in order to drive? I don't know anyone from Arizona, but the Californians I've known adapted quickly.
  - azinman2 5y ago
    That’s because they’re humans. And also, even those humans who aren’t used to certain conditions will have a difficult time.
    - Arnt 5y ago
      You're saying that for humans it requires perhaps 30% additional learning effort but for computers 9900%, and I'm supposed to accept the 30/9900 discrepancy because… what? When I learned to drive a car, I lived with an uphill driveway in a town whose winter climate varies by the hour. It's quite normal there to get temperatures around zero, some rain, then the temperature drops and 20cm snow fall. So on a January morning I often had to start the car uphill on steel ice covered with water and snow. With a sharp curve as a bonus. That kind of start isn't the simplst, and you could persuade me that that kind of thing is as difficult as navigating an intersection with ~10 other cars, cyclists and pedestrians. But not that it's tens of times as difficult.
      - nextaccountic 5y ago
        Humans generalize what they learn extremely well. Humans also spent their whole life learning how to navigate their environment, and this is transferable to a range of activities.
        Arnt 5y ago
        Yes, that's what I think too. I just don't see a reason why driving skills should not be largely transferable. Being able to drive in California doesn't include all the skills needed for e.g. winter driving in Norway, or for driving in an Indian city, or (list goes on), but I fail to see that it's just 1% (as an upstream poster claimed) or even close to 1%. I fail to see that driving skills are 99% intransferable. I also fail to see that while the skills are transferable for humans, they are intransferable for computers. Various people in the thread assert so, but argument by repeated assertion is meh.
        nextaccountic 5y ago
        > I also fail to see that while the skills are transferable for humans, they are intransferable for computers. Various people in the thread assert so, but argument by repeated assertion is meh. That they are nontransferable is the null hypothesis. I mean, we need evidence for this transfer. It's up for self-driving companies to produce this evidence. But they didn't, unfortunately.
        Arnt 5y ago
        That they are nontransferable and 99 times as diffcult is not any kind of null hypothesis. That's just a nasty rhetorical trick: Take something reasonable, piggyback something ridiculous onto it, and argue that the reasonable thing is reasonable.
        nextaccountic 5y ago
        I didn't say it's 99 times as difficult
digdigdag 5y ago
Throwing random percentages is silly. In reality, these vehicles have only been tested within a very tight scope, in near-controlled conditions in Arizona, California, etc. with very specific conditions for their operations. I would consider it 99% complete when I can pull up a map, point to any stretch of drivable road in the United States and ask it to autonomously operate there. Specifically, there's an especially tricky road in I-35N in Texas where the lane markings come ago, yellow shoulder markings _merge_ into barriers, and the road condition is so bad that the steering rack will _turn_ by itself(!). We're not even close to calling this thing autonomous. If and when it gets to that point, I would consider it "99%" complete. In reality though, I really see this tech being viable in continued controlled conditions. Maybe there will be a point when certain lanes will become dedicated "autonomous lanes", where they're completely isolated from the rest of traffic, come with special markings and sensor suites to assist driveler-less cars operate efficiently. As long as the chaotic human element is ever present, regardless of how well they model these systems, it will fail to cope with the massive amount of discontinuous information humans inject into a situation (swerving into a lane, road rage, cargo suddenly coming loose from a truck, etc.) Oh, and have we tested these things during winter? :p
- ajross 5y ago
  > Specifically, there's an especially tricky road in I-35N in Texas Seems like you could just get some data on that before declaring that "we're not even close". How do shipping Teslas do? FWIW: my impression is that the things people think are hard aren't the problems that are actually hard. People here and elsewhere on the internet have spent years screaming about lidar vs. radar vs. vision. And... it turns out vision basically won. Something like half the Tesla fleet in ths US are vision only in the US now, and... the cars see stuff just fine. We're not having detection failures. It works. If you watch all the FSD beta video being spread around youtube, much of it by drivers specifically looking for edge cases like this, most of the remaining problems are in pathing and decisionmaking, not detection. The cars see a busy intersection and then get paralyzed (there was an amusing clip from one guy of a car trying to make a left turn, giving up, and repathing a right turn that took it back in a loop only to fail at the same left turn repeatedly), or creep too slowly and annoy other drivers. Or they choose the wrong lane, or misread a multiple traffic light environment, or misread the need for detection (the one really dangerous video I remember had the car deciding to take a left turn across a broad street with a complicated blind corner instead of creeping out farther). Those are bugs to fix, for sure. But they're not the bugs we thought we had to fix. Those bugs... got fixed. So you can look at this as a pessimist and say "we'll never get there", or you can judge from previous experience that the hard problems won't turn out to be that hard in the end. Personally, having been watching the progress in this space, my guess is that Tesla and Waymo (and maybe Mobileye -- no one else is close) get this basically fixed within a year or two. At which point the debate will shift from "we'll never get there" to "we'll never be able to regulate this appropriately" or somesuch.
NonContro 5y ago
Right now, our roads are only designed to be human-readable. But what if machines become the dominant drivers? We need to make the roads machine readable: Road signs redesigned 'QR Code' style, maybe even some kind of wireless broadcast system to communicate traffic light changes.
- treis 5y ago
  From anywhere to anywhere is also an unnecessarily lofty goal. Bringing me to the front of a store in a strip mall is nice, but dropping me off at the street is good enough. Even doing enough streets in a city to pickup/dropoff within 1/4 mile would be revolutionary.
- KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
  We can... but it's not needed at the rate things are going. AI will be able to understand almost everything humans can and it's way cheaper to not have to rebuild things for machines.
- aetherson 5y ago
  I don't think that reading the signs and the traffic lights is the significant challenge here.
- arijun 5y ago
  I work in the area. I would say the static stuff that’s hard is stuff that’s also hard for human drivers, like poor lane markers or ambiguous signage. So I’m not sure that QR codes will help—-just fix the signage.
  - sharken 5y ago
    That makes a lot of sense, on a highway with three lanes, I'm always making sure to not merge to the middle lane, if there is a car on the opposite lane, to name another situation. The hard question which really has nothing to do with the tech, is what we do if a self driving car kills a person. Made worse if the accident could be avoided by the majority of human drivers.
fridif 5y ago
Scrap the whole thing and start over. Deliveries should be done by autonomous air drops. Transportation by autonomous aircraft.
- sgtnoodle 5y ago
  I'm working on the air drops at least.
  - fridif 5y ago
    Can I join as 1099/equity? I have 9 years of xp building distributed spring boot services
    - sgtnoodle 5y ago
      Maybe? You'd likely need to be full time to get equity, though. I'm personally not familiar with spring boot, but it sounds like a framework for implementing REST services? I'm mainly an embedded developer.
  - wallacoloo 5y ago
    Mind expanding? Keeping my eye out for new things to work on: if there’s scaled-down autonomous navigation problems that might be both immediately useful and more generally useful when solved, that sounds interesting.
    - sgtnoodle 5y ago
      I'm an embedded software engineer at Zipline. We're delivering high value medical supplies via UAV as a service. We've been operating in Rwanda and Ghana for several years, and we're expanding.
- majkinetor 5y ago
  Yeah, use air and all nasty problems go away. I am shocked that tech isn't mainstream already given multitude of benefits compared to terrestrial transports.
hartator 5y ago
Well, if I code something that just move the car forward if nothing is in front, I am probably 80% there. Not sure if I trust their 99%. It seems an excuse for academics to not release an actual technology that works.
bko 5y ago
Waymo has raised over $5.5 billion and has thousands of employees without so much as a product. If this were any other startup it would be considered insane and never gotten to this point. Don't know why people keep dumping money into this project thinking they're just around the corner. Even Tesla sold some cars when it raised a fraction of that amount, and $70 million came from Musk > By January 2009, Tesla had raised US$187 million and delivered 147 cars. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.
- ctvo 5y ago
  Because when they succeed it will return more than the investment? By many times? The product is being tested. Many things, including life changing drugs, are developed this way. We both agree Waymo definitely doesn’t sell its half baked product calling it Full Self Driving before it’s ready.
  - bko 5y ago
    Why do you need to jump to "Full Self Driving"? Presumably there are intermediaries. They're whole plan lacks a feedback mechanism. You don't even know the return if they succeed. Drug companies have a long history so they can anticipate the cost of development, odds of success and payoff if successful. They do all these things prior to any investments being made. The closest Waymo has is # of truck drivers * salary = profit. The top-down Waymo method is a failure.
    - sidibe 5y ago
      > Why do you need to jump to "Full Self Driving"? Presumably there are intermediaries. They've explained this very often. Unlike Tesla, they don't think you can go through the intermediaries without the dangerous situation of drivers not paying attention because it usually works. Based on their experiences a decade ago of employees using it as drivers assist, people check out and it becomes more and more dangerous even if the software is improving.
- tialaramex 5y ago
dathinab 5y ago
If the last 1% is as hard as the previous 99% then they are not at 99% but at 50% ;=) It's just that a part much larger then 1% of the way is perceived to be just 1%. I.e. there is a insane lot of hidden complexity generally/often overlooked.
neonate 5y ago
https://archive.is/ROjU5 https://archive.is/ROjU5
dang 5y ago
All: please don't react just to the title, and especially not to the most sensational bit of a title. That's a reflexive response, not a reflective one; we want the latter here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Also, often we'll change such titles (as I just did above), and then the shallow-title-objections become a sort of uncollected garbage, referencing something that no longer exists. I'm going to make a stub reply and bundle those comments underneath it so as to collapse them. There are more interesting things to discuss here.
- dang 5y ago
  Stub for shallow title dismissals. I'm omitting a few that led to interesting subthreads and/or contained an interesting observation. Admittedly a judgment call.
  - aero-glide2 5y ago
    Then they aren't 99% of the way. I do not like statements like this. 99% of what?
  - alpaca128 5y ago
    Oh, that's great. That means they can drive on 99% of roads in all weather conditions except blizzards, hurricanes and wildfires? Yeah, didn't think so.
  - mangecoeur 5y ago
    Pretty sure that 1% is more of an ironic quip than a statistic. Since the things they can’t handle are listed include ‘cyclists’ and ‘rain’.
    - riffraff 5y ago
      "we can safely avoid everything that does not move fast, which includes most of the earth's crust"
  - 5y ago
seibelj 5y ago
I wrote this in Feb 2020 after years of downvotes criticizing self driving cars and AI https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam-is-imploding-34b156c3537e https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam... I will still take a thousand dollar bet from anyone who thinks self driving cars will be here in 10 years. No one ever accepts!
- shkkmo 5y ago
  Self driving cars are here now, I'll take that 1000 dollars. Or do you have some specific definition of what qualifies as "here" that generally makes people unwilling to take this bet?
  - seibelj 5y ago
    Able to pick me up at my apartment in Boston and take me to a location in Cambridge. I would not say the current "self driving cars" in Phoenix are anything close to ready (even for Phoenix!)
    - mchusma 5y ago
      I think if I knew you I'd happily bet this, but I don't make it a habit of randomly betting people online. I think if the bet is a robotaxis ride across Boston area by 2031, should be no problem. Frankly a Tesla could probably do it now.
      - seibelj 5y ago
        There is a website https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ Long Bets that's let people do this. Essentially it's to publicly state to the world you are betting, and the winner donates to charity. I would do this here with my real name. My requirements: - The time of day or night of my choosing - Anytime type of weather - except: - Will not be during snow or with excessive ice coverage (although this should be fine, IMO) - Must not have a driver physically there who takes over, nor be driven primarily by remote drivers (remote support could be an option, but it's not a "remote control car" robo taxi) If you accept, I'll arrange it and wager the $1000
mdasen 5y ago
> In reality, skilled disassembly is required. Engineers must take apart the cars and put them back together by hand. One misplaced wire can leave engineers puzzling for days over where the problem is, according to a person familiar with the operations who describes the system as cumbersome and prone to quality problems. I think this is one of the more interesting pieces in the article for me. We all kinda know by now that there are issues around AI handling all driving situations. I think it's interesting to hear Waymo having difficulty with the manufacturing aspect. It does make a certain amount of sense. Waymo is a company that is mainly trying to solve the AI problem around self-driving cars, but other things can stymie those efforts like assembly. This isn't meant as a dig at Waymo, just more an observation that just because a company is excellent in one area doesn't mean that they will be excellent in all areas and that even excellent companies like Alphabet/Google/Waymo can stumble in new areas.
- kenhwang 5y ago
  I think it explains why the established automakers don't take any of the aspiring automakers from tech seriously. They know how hard it is to supply, assemble, and mass produce a car, and they know how little investment to desire there is from big tech to be better at that aspect. It doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't actually ship it.
  - AtlasBarfed 5y ago
    You basically are describing big auto's attitude towards Tesla 10 years ago. Look at where big auto is now. Terrified, and behind by 10 years. And by terrified I mean their CEOs. Do you think the BMW CEO would still have his job if he didn't squander their EV efforts that started about 15 years ago? The BMW CEO getting bounced was the warning shot that made every automaker executive sit up and realize: my company either has an EV platform program underway, or the investors will bounce me. If they are still not taking Tesla (to a lesser degree Rivian and Lucid) seriously, they're in big denial at this point. GM and VW have basically woken up. Ford and Mercedes are toe-dipping. BMW seems paralyzed by internal management dissent,
    - 5y ago
trhway 5y ago
i think one of the main principal errors on Waymo (and other large players) part is not working with military. Given that for military the task is simpler while safety requirements is significantly laxer, i'd have expected that we'll see self-driving tanks/transports/etc. well before cars.
- qeternity 5y ago
  We have this. They’re called drones. One of the reasons tanks exist is to protect the operators. If you’re not going to have boots on the ground in the first place (autonomous tank), you can rethink the vehicle completely.
  - trhway 5y ago
    there are still no autonomous drones either. I posted long time ago that before autonomous ground vehicles we should see autonomous airborne vehicles because of that task being much simpler. And of course the military would be the starting point here too. >tanks exist is to protect the operators operators of a large gun quite close to the target. If one can do without such a gun in such a role on the battlefield, then the need for tanks become less. We do see that in the recent wars - like Azerbajan/Armenia - the high-precision stand-off weapons fired from drones did that job perfectly. There were no countermeasures though, like say electronic communication and positioning blocking which would have necessitated autonomous capabilities for the drones.
    - qeternity 5y ago
      > there are still no autonomous drones either Of course there are. Drones can fly given waypoints and return to base. Hell, even consumer quadcopters can do this.
yalogin 5y ago
I used to believe in the self driving hype. Then I learned ML and started working in related areas. Now I know full self driving is not happening, not with the technology/algorithms we have. So what ever anyone does is just an approximation and we will never be able to trust the car will handle any situation thrown at it. So its always going to be a souped up cruise control, the likes of which Tesla and others are selling. We need some kind of breakthrough to get fully autonomous self driving where we can sleep in the car while it takes us to the destination. I would, of course, love to hear if folks here think I am wrong.
- weego 5y ago
  You're not. At least for a good few decades more. Anyone committed to self driving cars needs to be a road building company and own the road network that will manage these mostly-automated efficiency lanes, with car provision (more likely tech/compatability licensing) as a secondary income stream.
  - Retric 5y ago
    Waymo is currently successfully handling extreme edge cases on city streets via a call center. Which is a viable option as their cars average 30,000 miles completely autonomously. Worst case come to a complete stop and then ask a human to take over is perfectly reasonable option. Google running this as a pure Taxi substitute is seemingly a completely viable option today. They don’t need to be 100% autonomous as long as one person can handle a dozen or more cars that’s easily good enough to out compete traditional taxis or ride sharing services. Granted this is limited to a 50 square mile area, but collecting more data isn’t the difficult part.
    - lumost 5y ago
      Including all the expense of r&d, call center training, liability insurance etc. Is this a viable business in a 50 square mile area? Is it scalable nationwide? Is it price competitive with traditional taxi and ride share? The overnight use case is compelling as it opens entirely new transit options. Cars could be made competitive with air travel for the overnight use case. And traffic wouldn’t be nearly as large of a concern for most if they weren’t driving.
tinco 5y ago
So, genuinely curious, how can it happen that a system that's been developed over 12 years, can not deal with a common road obstruction? If something truly rare/dangerous happens I can imagine it not being able to deal. But it seems this sort of situation is not only easy to deal with, it's actually easy to predict. Maybe not something you could predict in a product with just a couple years of time, with just a couple employees, but we're talking over a decade, and thousands of employees. Oh and in Phoenix Arizona, one of those ultra uniform grid cities the US is famous for. What's stopping them from having their AI operate in simulations in literally every possible traffic situation? Every location a pot hole can be in, every type of traffic cone arrangement, every kind of jaywalking, every kind of vehicle approaching any kind of street from any kind of location, possible speed, reaction time, everything? How could a government approve any autonomous agent that is not tested in such a way? My world view gets rocked a little everytime I see a headline like this. I want to believe these companies are ran by the smartest engineers on the planet, but then I read about a Tesla running into an emergency services vehicle, or a Waymo being confused about traffic cones and I can't help but wonder what the heck are they doing?
- dham 5y ago
  It's because they're trying to code the problem instead of solving it end to end. As you can imagine if you're trying to code driving scenarios you're never going to finish. Only Tesla and Comma.ai are on the right track. Think Alpha Zero vs Stockfish. This problem has to be solved end to end. It can be done with just vision as humans can drive with just vision. It's literally just a software, machine learning and data problem. Just takes time
  - furi 5y ago
    Except didn't Leela Zero (the closest thing we have to Alpha Zero anyone can actually use) beat StockFish, then StockFish was upgraded to use neural networks in a few edge cases and otherwise keep doing what it was doing and now StockFish is back on top? Seems like a Waymo-style approach is actually on top there.
  - ahahahahah 5y ago
colesantiago 5y ago
If you are a 'self driving' car company that claims that they are 99% done with self driving and you are still having this issue: > ...still getting stymied by traffic cones Maybe you're nowhere done or near to that 99%, perhaps around 10% done considering that this doesn't work worldwide either so seems like 5% to me.
- mike00632 5y ago
  Also, the weather must be perfect.
  - jimmyjimmyjimmy 5y ago
    Agreed mate. It's like that grumpy bloke from England who can only swing the ball when the weather is perfect - clouds hovering, moisture in the air, slight breeze and yes, some fish and chips during the breakfast.
yawaworht1978 5y ago
Yes full self driving is not happening any time soon unless the roads and cars are purpose built for it. Everyone here has worked in some sort of tech company where some procedures are just wrong, some training material doesn't work, or the content is full of rot and unmaintainable, sometimes the code of the product has a couple bugs, never to be fixed, or the back office. Or better how often people make human mistakes and general imperfect things are wiped under the carpet. Code testing? Happens on all new features and to what degree? Think of all these things and then reflect on the possibility to fsd implementation within, say 10 years. Not going to happen.
MathMonkeyMan 5y ago
I don't know anything about AI, but I've heard that asking "how do humans do it?" is not the right question. Still, though, how _do_ humans drive? One answer that comes to mind is "humans are smart." True. But I suspect a severely "dumb" person can drive safely in a variety of novel scenarios. It makes me think of child development, all that time making sense of depth perception, distinguishing objects, fine motor controls, expectations of motion, etc. It takes years. Could a non-human animal trapped in a "car suit" drive effectively, if it could somehow overcome the panic? Maybe it could maneuver safely, but what about a four-way stop? I have no idea what it takes to drive a car in general, and specifically I don't know how humans do it. Where do you even start when trying to model the task in a computer?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

142 points by tim_sw 5y ago

It's pretty much the other way around (1% done, 99% to go) except for contrived locations that have perfect climates. It's like wifi devices claiming they can work over miles but that's only true if you have line of sight. A long term snow covering of lane markings typical for the winter months of much of north america and the emergent driving lanes people flock to cannot be handled by any existing driving AI. The places people drive are wrong according to absolute road positions and the relative markers are obscured to both human and machine. Unless car AIs can do the wrong thing like all the humans will in those situations it won't work. And that's a hard problem.

Arnt 5y ago
Aren't you then saying that people from California or Arizona who come to Norway know 1% of what they need in order to drive? I don't know anyone from Arizona, but the Californians I've known adapted quickly.
- azinman2 5y ago
  That’s because they’re humans. And also, even those humans who aren’t used to certain conditions will have a difficult time.
  - Arnt 5y ago
    You're saying that for humans it requires perhaps 30% additional learning effort but for computers 9900%, and I'm supposed to accept the 30/9900 discrepancy because… what? When I learned to drive a car, I lived with an uphill driveway in a town whose winter climate varies by the hour. It's quite normal there to get temperatures around zero, some rain, then the temperature drops and 20cm snow fall. So on a January morning I often had to start the car uphill on steel ice covered with water and snow. With a sharp curve as a bonus. That kind of start isn't the simplst, and you could persuade me that that kind of thing is as difficult as navigating an intersection with ~10 other cars, cyclists and pedestrians. But not that it's tens of times as difficult.
    - nextaccountic 5y ago
      Humans generalize what they learn extremely well. Humans also spent their whole life learning how to navigate their environment, and this is transferable to a range of activities.
      - Arnt 5y ago
        Yes, that's what I think too. I just don't see a reason why driving skills should not be largely transferable. Being able to drive in California doesn't include all the skills needed for e.g. winter driving in Norway, or for driving in an Indian city, or (list goes on), but I fail to see that it's just 1% (as an upstream poster claimed) or even close to 1%. I fail to see that driving skills are 99% intransferable. I also fail to see that while the skills are transferable for humans, they are intransferable for computers. Various people in the thread assert so, but argument by repeated assertion is meh.
        nextaccountic 5y ago
        > I also fail to see that while the skills are transferable for humans, they are intransferable for computers. Various people in the thread assert so, but argument by repeated assertion is meh. That they are nontransferable is the null hypothesis. I mean, we need evidence for this transfer. It's up for self-driving companies to produce this evidence. But they didn't, unfortunately.
        Arnt 5y ago
        That they are nontransferable and 99 times as diffcult is not any kind of null hypothesis. That's just a nasty rhetorical trick: Take something reasonable, piggyback something ridiculous onto it, and argue that the reasonable thing is reasonable.
        nextaccountic 5y ago
        I didn't say it's 99 times as difficult

digdigdag 5y ago

Throwing random percentages is silly. In reality, these vehicles have only been tested within a very tight scope, in near-controlled conditions in Arizona, California, etc. with very specific conditions for their operations. I would consider it 99% complete when I can pull up a map, point to any stretch of drivable road in the United States and ask it to autonomously operate there. Specifically, there's an especially tricky road in I-35N in Texas where the lane markings come ago, yellow shoulder markings _merge_ into barriers, and the road condition is so bad that the steering rack will _turn_ by itself(!). We're not even close to calling this thing autonomous. If and when it gets to that point, I would consider it "99%" complete. In reality though, I really see this tech being viable in continued controlled conditions. Maybe there will be a point when certain lanes will become dedicated "autonomous lanes", where they're completely isolated from the rest of traffic, come with special markings and sensor suites to assist driveler-less cars operate efficiently. As long as the chaotic human element is ever present, regardless of how well they model these systems, it will fail to cope with the massive amount of discontinuous information humans inject into a situation (swerving into a lane, road rage, cargo suddenly coming loose from a truck, etc.) Oh, and have we tested these things during winter? :p

ajross 5y ago
> Specifically, there's an especially tricky road in I-35N in Texas Seems like you could just get some data on that before declaring that "we're not even close". How do shipping Teslas do? FWIW: my impression is that the things people think are hard aren't the problems that are actually hard. People here and elsewhere on the internet have spent years screaming about lidar vs. radar vs. vision. And... it turns out vision basically won. Something like half the Tesla fleet in ths US are vision only in the US now, and... the cars see stuff just fine. We're not having detection failures. It works. If you watch all the FSD beta video being spread around youtube, much of it by drivers specifically looking for edge cases like this, most of the remaining problems are in pathing and decisionmaking, not detection. The cars see a busy intersection and then get paralyzed (there was an amusing clip from one guy of a car trying to make a left turn, giving up, and repathing a right turn that took it back in a loop only to fail at the same left turn repeatedly), or creep too slowly and annoy other drivers. Or they choose the wrong lane, or misread a multiple traffic light environment, or misread the need for detection (the one really dangerous video I remember had the car deciding to take a left turn across a broad street with a complicated blind corner instead of creeping out farther). Those are bugs to fix, for sure. But they're not the bugs we thought we had to fix. Those bugs... got fixed. So you can look at this as a pessimist and say "we'll never get there", or you can judge from previous experience that the hard problems won't turn out to be that hard in the end. Personally, having been watching the progress in this space, my guess is that Tesla and Waymo (and maybe Mobileye -- no one else is close) get this basically fixed within a year or two. At which point the debate will shift from "we'll never get there" to "we'll never be able to regulate this appropriately" or somesuch.

NonContro 5y ago

Right now, our roads are only designed to be human-readable. But what if machines become the dominant drivers? We need to make the roads machine readable: Road signs redesigned 'QR Code' style, maybe even some kind of wireless broadcast system to communicate traffic light changes.

treis 5y ago
From anywhere to anywhere is also an unnecessarily lofty goal. Bringing me to the front of a store in a strip mall is nice, but dropping me off at the street is good enough. Even doing enough streets in a city to pickup/dropoff within 1/4 mile would be revolutionary.
KaoruAoiShiho 5y ago
We can... but it's not needed at the rate things are going. AI will be able to understand almost everything humans can and it's way cheaper to not have to rebuild things for machines.
aetherson 5y ago
I don't think that reading the signs and the traffic lights is the significant challenge here.
arijun 5y ago
I work in the area. I would say the static stuff that’s hard is stuff that’s also hard for human drivers, like poor lane markers or ambiguous signage. So I’m not sure that QR codes will help—-just fix the signage.
- sharken 5y ago
  That makes a lot of sense, on a highway with three lanes, I'm always making sure to not merge to the middle lane, if there is a car on the opposite lane, to name another situation. The hard question which really has nothing to do with the tech, is what we do if a self driving car kills a person. Made worse if the accident could be avoided by the majority of human drivers.

fridif 5y ago

Scrap the whole thing and start over. Deliveries should be done by autonomous air drops. Transportation by autonomous aircraft.

sgtnoodle 5y ago
I'm working on the air drops at least.
- fridif 5y ago
  Can I join as 1099/equity? I have 9 years of xp building distributed spring boot services
  - sgtnoodle 5y ago
    Maybe? You'd likely need to be full time to get equity, though. I'm personally not familiar with spring boot, but it sounds like a framework for implementing REST services? I'm mainly an embedded developer.
- wallacoloo 5y ago
  Mind expanding? Keeping my eye out for new things to work on: if there’s scaled-down autonomous navigation problems that might be both immediately useful and more generally useful when solved, that sounds interesting.
  - sgtnoodle 5y ago
    I'm an embedded software engineer at Zipline. We're delivering high value medical supplies via UAV as a service. We've been operating in Rwanda and Ghana for several years, and we're expanding.
majkinetor 5y ago
Yeah, use air and all nasty problems go away. I am shocked that tech isn't mainstream already given multitude of benefits compared to terrestrial transports.

hartator 5y ago

Well, if I code something that just move the car forward if nothing is in front, I am probably 80% there. Not sure if I trust their 99%. It seems an excuse for academics to not release an actual technology that works.

bko 5y ago

Waymo has raised over $5.5 billion and has thousands of employees without so much as a product. If this were any other startup it would be considered insane and never gotten to this point. Don't know why people keep dumping money into this project thinking they're just around the corner. Even Tesla sold some cars when it raised a fraction of that amount, and $70 million came from Musk > By January 2009, Tesla had raised US$187 million and delivered 147 cars. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.

ctvo 5y ago
Because when they succeed it will return more than the investment? By many times? The product is being tested. Many things, including life changing drugs, are developed this way. We both agree Waymo definitely doesn’t sell its half baked product calling it Full Self Driving before it’s ready.
- bko 5y ago
  Why do you need to jump to "Full Self Driving"? Presumably there are intermediaries. They're whole plan lacks a feedback mechanism. You don't even know the return if they succeed. Drug companies have a long history so they can anticipate the cost of development, odds of success and payoff if successful. They do all these things prior to any investments being made. The closest Waymo has is # of truck drivers * salary = profit. The top-down Waymo method is a failure.
  - sidibe 5y ago
    > Why do you need to jump to "Full Self Driving"? Presumably there are intermediaries. They've explained this very often. Unlike Tesla, they don't think you can go through the intermediaries without the dangerous situation of drivers not paying attention because it usually works. Based on their experiences a decade ago of employees using it as drivers assist, people check out and it becomes more and more dangerous even if the software is improving.
tialaramex 5y ago

dathinab 5y ago

If the last 1% is as hard as the previous 99% then they are not at 99% but at 50% ;=) It's just that a part much larger then 1% of the way is perceived to be just 1%. I.e. there is a insane lot of hidden complexity generally/often overlooked.

neonate 5y ago

https://archive.is/ROjU5 https://archive.is/ROjU5

dang 5y ago

All: please don't react just to the title, and especially not to the most sensational bit of a title. That's a reflexive response, not a reflective one; we want the latter here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... Also, often we'll change such titles (as I just did above), and then the shallow-title-objections become a sort of uncollected garbage, referencing something that no longer exists. I'm going to make a stub reply and bundle those comments underneath it so as to collapse them. There are more interesting things to discuss here.

dang 5y ago
Stub for shallow title dismissals. I'm omitting a few that led to interesting subthreads and/or contained an interesting observation. Admittedly a judgment call.
- aero-glide2 5y ago
  Then they aren't 99% of the way. I do not like statements like this. 99% of what?
- alpaca128 5y ago
  Oh, that's great. That means they can drive on 99% of roads in all weather conditions except blizzards, hurricanes and wildfires? Yeah, didn't think so.
- mangecoeur 5y ago
  Pretty sure that 1% is more of an ironic quip than a statistic. Since the things they can’t handle are listed include ‘cyclists’ and ‘rain’.
  - riffraff 5y ago
    "we can safely avoid everything that does not move fast, which includes most of the earth's crust"
- 5y ago

seibelj 5y ago

I wrote this in Feb 2020 after years of downvotes criticizing self driving cars and AI https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam-is-imploding-34b156c3537e https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-artificial-intelligence-scam... I will still take a thousand dollar bet from anyone who thinks self driving cars will be here in 10 years. No one ever accepts!

shkkmo 5y ago
Self driving cars are here now, I'll take that 1000 dollars. Or do you have some specific definition of what qualifies as "here" that generally makes people unwilling to take this bet?
- seibelj 5y ago
  Able to pick me up at my apartment in Boston and take me to a location in Cambridge. I would not say the current "self driving cars" in Phoenix are anything close to ready (even for Phoenix!)
  - mchusma 5y ago
    I think if I knew you I'd happily bet this, but I don't make it a habit of randomly betting people online. I think if the bet is a robotaxis ride across Boston area by 2031, should be no problem. Frankly a Tesla could probably do it now.
    - seibelj 5y ago
      There is a website https://longbets.org/ https://longbets.org/ Long Bets that's let people do this. Essentially it's to publicly state to the world you are betting, and the winner donates to charity. I would do this here with my real name. My requirements: - The time of day or night of my choosing - Anytime type of weather - except: - Will not be during snow or with excessive ice coverage (although this should be fine, IMO) - Must not have a driver physically there who takes over, nor be driven primarily by remote drivers (remote support could be an option, but it's not a "remote control car" robo taxi) If you accept, I'll arrange it and wager the $1000

mdasen 5y ago

> In reality, skilled disassembly is required. Engineers must take apart the cars and put them back together by hand. One misplaced wire can leave engineers puzzling for days over where the problem is, according to a person familiar with the operations who describes the system as cumbersome and prone to quality problems. I think this is one of the more interesting pieces in the article for me. We all kinda know by now that there are issues around AI handling all driving situations. I think it's interesting to hear Waymo having difficulty with the manufacturing aspect. It does make a certain amount of sense. Waymo is a company that is mainly trying to solve the AI problem around self-driving cars, but other things can stymie those efforts like assembly. This isn't meant as a dig at Waymo, just more an observation that just because a company is excellent in one area doesn't mean that they will be excellent in all areas and that even excellent companies like Alphabet/Google/Waymo can stumble in new areas.

kenhwang 5y ago
I think it explains why the established automakers don't take any of the aspiring automakers from tech seriously. They know how hard it is to supply, assemble, and mass produce a car, and they know how little investment to desire there is from big tech to be better at that aspect. It doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't actually ship it.
- AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  You basically are describing big auto's attitude towards Tesla 10 years ago. Look at where big auto is now. Terrified, and behind by 10 years. And by terrified I mean their CEOs. Do you think the BMW CEO would still have his job if he didn't squander their EV efforts that started about 15 years ago? The BMW CEO getting bounced was the warning shot that made every automaker executive sit up and realize: my company either has an EV platform program underway, or the investors will bounce me. If they are still not taking Tesla (to a lesser degree Rivian and Lucid) seriously, they're in big denial at this point. GM and VW have basically woken up. Ford and Mercedes are toe-dipping. BMW seems paralyzed by internal management dissent,
  - 5y ago

trhway 5y ago

i think one of the main principal errors on Waymo (and other large players) part is not working with military. Given that for military the task is simpler while safety requirements is significantly laxer, i'd have expected that we'll see self-driving tanks/transports/etc. well before cars.

qeternity 5y ago
We have this. They’re called drones. One of the reasons tanks exist is to protect the operators. If you’re not going to have boots on the ground in the first place (autonomous tank), you can rethink the vehicle completely.
- trhway 5y ago
  there are still no autonomous drones either. I posted long time ago that before autonomous ground vehicles we should see autonomous airborne vehicles because of that task being much simpler. And of course the military would be the starting point here too. >tanks exist is to protect the operators operators of a large gun quite close to the target. If one can do without such a gun in such a role on the battlefield, then the need for tanks become less. We do see that in the recent wars - like Azerbajan/Armenia - the high-precision stand-off weapons fired from drones did that job perfectly. There were no countermeasures though, like say electronic communication and positioning blocking which would have necessitated autonomous capabilities for the drones.
  - qeternity 5y ago
    > there are still no autonomous drones either Of course there are. Drones can fly given waypoints and return to base. Hell, even consumer quadcopters can do this.

yalogin 5y ago

I used to believe in the self driving hype. Then I learned ML and started working in related areas. Now I know full self driving is not happening, not with the technology/algorithms we have. So what ever anyone does is just an approximation and we will never be able to trust the car will handle any situation thrown at it. So its always going to be a souped up cruise control, the likes of which Tesla and others are selling. We need some kind of breakthrough to get fully autonomous self driving where we can sleep in the car while it takes us to the destination. I would, of course, love to hear if folks here think I am wrong.

weego 5y ago
You're not. At least for a good few decades more. Anyone committed to self driving cars needs to be a road building company and own the road network that will manage these mostly-automated efficiency lanes, with car provision (more likely tech/compatability licensing) as a secondary income stream.
- Retric 5y ago
  Waymo is currently successfully handling extreme edge cases on city streets via a call center. Which is a viable option as their cars average 30,000 miles completely autonomously. Worst case come to a complete stop and then ask a human to take over is perfectly reasonable option. Google running this as a pure Taxi substitute is seemingly a completely viable option today. They don’t need to be 100% autonomous as long as one person can handle a dozen or more cars that’s easily good enough to out compete traditional taxis or ride sharing services. Granted this is limited to a 50 square mile area, but collecting more data isn’t the difficult part.
  - lumost 5y ago
    Including all the expense of r&d, call center training, liability insurance etc. Is this a viable business in a 50 square mile area? Is it scalable nationwide? Is it price competitive with traditional taxi and ride share? The overnight use case is compelling as it opens entirely new transit options. Cars could be made competitive with air travel for the overnight use case. And traffic wouldn’t be nearly as large of a concern for most if they weren’t driving.

tinco 5y ago

So, genuinely curious, how can it happen that a system that's been developed over 12 years, can not deal with a common road obstruction? If something truly rare/dangerous happens I can imagine it not being able to deal. But it seems this sort of situation is not only easy to deal with, it's actually easy to predict. Maybe not something you could predict in a product with just a couple years of time, with just a couple employees, but we're talking over a decade, and thousands of employees. Oh and in Phoenix Arizona, one of those ultra uniform grid cities the US is famous for. What's stopping them from having their AI operate in simulations in literally every possible traffic situation? Every location a pot hole can be in, every type of traffic cone arrangement, every kind of jaywalking, every kind of vehicle approaching any kind of street from any kind of location, possible speed, reaction time, everything? How could a government approve any autonomous agent that is not tested in such a way? My world view gets rocked a little everytime I see a headline like this. I want to believe these companies are ran by the smartest engineers on the planet, but then I read about a Tesla running into an emergency services vehicle, or a Waymo being confused about traffic cones and I can't help but wonder what the heck are they doing?

dham 5y ago
It's because they're trying to code the problem instead of solving it end to end. As you can imagine if you're trying to code driving scenarios you're never going to finish. Only Tesla and Comma.ai are on the right track. Think Alpha Zero vs Stockfish. This problem has to be solved end to end. It can be done with just vision as humans can drive with just vision. It's literally just a software, machine learning and data problem. Just takes time
- furi 5y ago
  Except didn't Leela Zero (the closest thing we have to Alpha Zero anyone can actually use) beat StockFish, then StockFish was upgraded to use neural networks in a few edge cases and otherwise keep doing what it was doing and now StockFish is back on top? Seems like a Waymo-style approach is actually on top there.
- ahahahahah 5y ago

colesantiago 5y ago

If you are a 'self driving' car company that claims that they are 99% done with self driving and you are still having this issue: > ...still getting stymied by traffic cones Maybe you're nowhere done or near to that 99%, perhaps around 10% done considering that this doesn't work worldwide either so seems like 5% to me.

mike00632 5y ago
Also, the weather must be perfect.
- jimmyjimmyjimmy 5y ago
  Agreed mate. It's like that grumpy bloke from England who can only swing the ball when the weather is perfect - clouds hovering, moisture in the air, slight breeze and yes, some fish and chips during the breakfast.

yawaworht1978 5y ago

Yes full self driving is not happening any time soon unless the roads and cars are purpose built for it. Everyone here has worked in some sort of tech company where some procedures are just wrong, some training material doesn't work, or the content is full of rot and unmaintainable, sometimes the code of the product has a couple bugs, never to be fixed, or the back office. Or better how often people make human mistakes and general imperfect things are wiped under the carpet. Code testing? Happens on all new features and to what degree? Think of all these things and then reflect on the possibility to fsd implementation within, say 10 years. Not going to happen.

MathMonkeyMan 5y ago

I don't know anything about AI, but I've heard that asking "how do humans do it?" is not the right question. Still, though, how _do_ humans drive? One answer that comes to mind is "humans are smart." True. But I suspect a severely "dumb" person can drive safely in a variety of novel scenarios. It makes me think of child development, all that time making sense of depth perception, distinguishing objects, fine motor controls, expectations of motion, etc. It takes years. Could a non-human animal trapped in a "car suit" drive effectively, if it could somehow overcome the panic? Maybe it could maneuver safely, but what about a four-way stop? I have no idea what it takes to drive a car in general, and specifically I don't know how humans do it. Where do you even start when trying to model the task in a computer?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]