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Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4. I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?
by pbreit 5y ago
Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4.
I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking?
- mchusma 5y agoI think almost no commercial value is at 4. I'm fact, it could be negative value. Because you need the expense of a "digital driver" and the expense of a human driver. It's basically level 5 or bust.
- ghaff 5y agoLevel 4 (e.g. highways in good weather) is something that people buying cars will pay a significant amount for as an option in good weather. It does nothing for those who want robotaxis. But the former don't care about the latter. You have multiple groups of drivers including those who appreciate self-driving assistance on long boring highway stretches and may not even drive in cities that much and those who never want to get behind a wheel or perhaps ever own a car.
- rrrrrrrrrrrryan 5y agoLevel 4 doesn't necessarily mean just highways - it could also easily include suburbs with well-designed roads that have been mapped in excruciating detail. You could force the car to avoid certain intersections with lots of close calls, or give the car advance info about unexpected objects detected in the road by cars up ahead, etc. which would make the task a little easier.
- ghaff 5y agoA selection of highways in good weather is just one example that seems particularly easy (relatively speaking), well-defined, and genuinely useful.
- pavon 5y agoCurrent California regulations for remote operators are identical regardless of whether the car is considered SAE level 4 or 5. I'm not sure what constitutes "continuous monitoring" there (I could interpret that as anything between eyes on road at all times down to positive SOH messages arrived). Apart from regulations, level 4 doesn't require a remote operator monitoring at all times. It just requires them to be available when the car recognizes it can't handle the situation. Depending on how frequently interventions are needed, that could mean a remote operator for every car, or one for every 10 thousand. The important part about Level 4 is that the car recognizes its own limits and doesn't act outside of them. How practical those limits are is completely undefined by SAE. Level 4 is a continuum whose limit is level 5. We will definitely be seeing practical commercial value as we approach level 5 but haven't yet gotten there.
- mbesto 5y ago> Most of the commercial value is achieved at Level 4. There are two markets: - Level 4 driverless taxis (~$500B market) - Level 5 driverless cars for every human being (~$10T+ market) So, most of the commercial value for Uber, Lyft, etc. is from L4, but L5 is where the most overall economic value is. But L4 has to be achieved in all locations, otherwise that TAM is highly variable.
- pbreit 5y agoWhat does L5 get you that L4 does not (commercially)?
- runarberg 5y agoAFAIK most of the cynicism around self driving cars is not that it is not possible, but rather that it doesn’t solve the problems they claim to be solving. E.g. self driving cars won’t solve traffic (busses do), they won’t be safer (trains are), they won’t be convenient (unless you are rich enough to afford one), and at the end of the day, they are still massive things that takes tonnes of space and infrastructure and pollute a bunch. Just like human driven cars.
- afavour 5y ago> I'm curious what all the folks who claimed this was decades away are thinking? What is the "this" you're talking about here? I don't think there were many skeptics out there saying that it'll be decades before a taxi service will be able to launch a small, manned trial in a single municipality. Given that it's manned it still isn't quite at Level 4. The cynicism (and I'd consider myself a mild cynic I guess) was and is around the notion that the vast majority of us would be sat in self-driving cars by now. That was always wildly optimistic. We're making progress and that's great! But there were a lot of breathless predictions years back that have not come to fruition.
- Olreich 5y agoWe look right on track for my prediction of 2050
- fnord77 5y agoflimflam man Musk stated in 2015 that their robotaxis would be up and running by the end of 2015... and he made similar claims each year after that. You can thank him for the hype and cynicism
- pbreit 5y agoThis is the 2nd market and the other is unmanned.
- marcellus23 5y agoOkay... let me know when their market is the contiguous United States.
- ra7 5y agoThat's the point of this comment chain. They don't have to make it work everywhere in the contiguous United States to have a useful product. The (robo)taxi market is concentrated in big metro areas and that's what their focus is.
- 5y ago
- pvarangot 5y agoAFAIK no one recently claimed level 4 with a safety driver was decades away, and I was working on self driving until a few months ago so I was kinda "plugged" into the news. A handful of serious companies have plans and funding to deploy L4 taxi fleets or L4 features to consumer cars in 4/5 years. There's no commercial value at L4 whatsoever if you still pay a safety driver. It's usually even more expensive per hour than a normal human driver and the cars don't work under adverse weather conditions.
- pbreit 5y agoDon't have to pay safety drivers with L4.
- ThomasBHickey 5y agoWhen someone says 'in about 5 years' it means they have no idea when.
- marcellus23 5y agoDid anyone claim _this_ was decades away? The claim is usually about when self-driving cars will actually be viable for anyone to use in arbitrary areas, not when experimental pilot programs are launched in individual cities.
- panick21 5y agoMost commercial value is at Level 2 for quite a while.
- oakfr 5y agoLevel 2 is becoming a commodity. Its commercial value will fall to zero very quickly.
- panick21 5y agoI disagree. Only the most simple basic highway lane keeping is commodity and that is only small part of overall driving.
- valine 5y agoLevel 2 varies dramatically by car maker. On the low end you have companies like Ford and Honda doing lane keep cruise control, and on the high end you have Tesla which does automatic lane changes, takes on/off ramps, and stops for traffic lights. Tesla also charges a high premium for their software making it basically the opposite of a commodity.
- jessriedel 5y agoI would think most commercial value comes when you eliminate the human labor from driving, which is the dominant cost of transporting when there is less than ~10 passengers. What makes you think Level 4 is the most economically impactful threshold?
- arduinomancer 5y agoHow is there commercial value if you still need a driver in the car?
- pavon 5y agoYou don't need a driver in the car for level 4. That is level 3 and below.
- jdavis703 5y agoThe program was first publicly revealed nearly 11 years ago. People saying this project would take decades aren’t wrong.
- pavon 5y agoThat things are progressing about as expected. More specifically, Waymo is doing a bit better I than my general expectations, Cruise is about on par, and the rest slower. Waymo has been at it for a bit over 12 years now. We'll have to see if Waymo's progress ramps up after San Francisco, but to me this is still looking like an 80/20 problem, with the added twist that each new region they expand to will have it's own unique 20% to learn that adds another 80% to the schedule. But that just validates Waymo's approach even more in my eyes.