6 ms·

Lidar industry unites to make roadways safer for pedestrians

34 points by sbuttgereit 4y ago

favflam 4y ago
Just make drivers liable no matter what if they hit a cyclist or pedestrian.
magic5227 4y ago
Only when cities prioritize and are designed for pedestrians instead of cars will pedestrian safety improve. We need more spaces that are pedestrian and bicycle only.
- coryrc 4y ago
  And they need to connect, efficiently. It's just not possible for soft 70kg humans to safely be near hard 2000kg objects moving quickly.
- randomstring 4y ago
  But hear me out... What if we could make every car $5-10k more expensive instead? </satire> I once thought that using AI to make all cars self driving might be the key to making pedestrians and cyclists safe. Self driving cars are playing a game of Russian Roulette. The systems will get it wrong occasionally, with LIDAR or without. Not if, but when. Whether or not someone dies depends on the situation.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities. But I've also sat in those city council meetings and seen the inane opposition people have to any sort of positive reform in that direction. Self driving vehicles have the potential to actually improve road safety because local governments won't be involved.
    - Gordonjcp 4y ago
      > I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities. Two questions, then. Firstly, do you think that self-driving vehicles will ever get even close to human standards of driving? And second, what do you see as the big challenges to getting them to be acceptably safe?
      - AlotOfReading 4y ago
        I obviously can't talk specific numbers, but there are reasonable arguments to be made that in certain limited scenarios, we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics. Turning that into "unequivocally safer than humans all the time, everywhere" is still an open problem. As for safety, that's both a big topic and a "I have explicitly told not talk about this in public by legal" topic. The teams and organizations I've worked for take it very seriously, but things can always be improved. Phil Koopman puts out some excellent information about where we are currently and where industry could broadly improve.
        Gordonjcp 4y ago
        > we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics. Okay, bearing in mind your second paragraph, what are the conditions under which they're safer? I've been in a few self-driving cars and I'd struggle to see how they would ever get to an acceptable standard - like, pass UK driving test kind of standard.
  - alexashka 4y ago
    The satire is at the heart of it all, innit? Why think through and implement hard political decisions when you can throw money at nerds to make a profit instead?
  - jeffbee 4y ago
    That's fine actually. We (American cities) should adopt systems like they have in Singapore where the certificate of entitlement to purchase a car costs, buy itself, $70k-120k, on top of the cost of the car. The externalized costs of private cars are extremely high and it's completely insane that we have what amounts to welfare for drivers.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- whimsicalism 4y ago
  It's seems like there is very little voter will power to make this happen. Simple traffic cameras would also make roads much safer but they are politically very difficult.
cf141q5325 4y ago
Not quite on topic, but most here will be familiar of the problem of autonomous cars and valuing the life of the driver vs that of a kid running in front of a car. (An autonomous car does have time to react, so do you crash the car, endangering the drivers or keep course and kill the child?) I recently learned of a new perspective when talking to a lawyer and learning of his first reaction. Apparently here in Germany courts assume a certain degree of responsibility for an accident by you simply deciding to drive. So if there is a crash of two cars, it starts with a 50/50 culpability and the circumstances (who crashed into whom because of what) decide the final accountability. The argument is that you knowingly stepped into something with very well known dangers. You took a risk when stepping into a weapon. The child didnt take any such decisions. As such you could (in theory) make the argument for suicide programming in such situations. I only mention it because despite having talked about the scenario in university, this perspective never came up.
- chopin 4y ago
  One should mention that this is applied to civil liability not criminal (in Germany).
  - cf141q5325 4y ago
    He mentioned this as well ( and i forgot to) Could you elaborate on the implications/relevance? It seemed important to you and him. edit: So is it lawyers being pedantic (no offense, its the job description after all) or is there an argument why the logic of criminal law would be more applicable here?
    - leobg 4y ago
      Lawyer here in Germany. I don’t actually know the answer. However, criminal law and civil law regulate different relationships. Criminal law regulates the relationship between the state and the individual. Civil law regulates the relationships between individuals. Criminal law is bound much more closely by the constitution. Specifically, the state may not punish an individual for engaging in lawful behavior. So while another citizen may raise the objection, “But you chose to drive this two ton machine knowing full well that it was capable to inflict harm on other people even when driven with the greatest care”, the state may not. Also, for civil liability, there is (mandatory) insurance. You, as a driver, do not usually end up paying for this (provided that you have not been negligent in your conduct of the machine). Criminal law, on the other hand, always hits you as the individual. You cannot insure against it. This is to say that, if the same standard were applied in criminal law, nobody could afford to drive a car, or operate any dangerous equipment at all, because one mistake, or even just one instance of bad luck, could land you in prison.
simonsarris 4y ago
This seems transparently like the lidar industry uniting to ask for laws requiring car companies to purchase lidar for their driving systems.
- CharlesW 4y ago
  Yes. That doesn't necessarily invalidate their points, but as with any information one has to consider the bias of the source.
robonerd 4y ago
The thought of automotive lidar units being repaired in the same manner as other automotive parts, with dodgy parts ordered off ebay, terrifies me. Advertised power rating and filtering of lasers sold second-hand online only have a loose relationship to reality and can give people permanent vision damage very quickly.
elif 4y ago
Complete misrepresentation: LIDAR manufacturers are trying to mandate LIDAR for driver safety systems. The net result of that would be less consumers being able to afford driver safety systems, and that progress on driver safety systems would be impeded. By citing statistics about human errors.
cesarvarela 4y ago
If TSLA succeeds without Lidar, it will make them obsolete. Time to push for Lidar now before it is too late.
- markovbot 4y ago
  this comment would probably be a lot strong if Tesla didn't have such an abysmal safety record.
  - nyolfen 4y ago
    are there actual numbers for this?
  - elif 4y ago
    Sorry what? They are literally the safest cars on the road in terms of BOTH A) accidents per driven mile and B) probability of injury in an accident
    - woojoo666 4y ago
      Is this compared to other autonomous cars with lidar, like Waymo or Cruise?
      - elif 4y ago
        looks like waymo uses chrysler pacifica, which got a 4/5 for rollover, so worse in crashes than tesla (perfect score). https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2019/CHRYSLER/PACIFICA/VAN/FWD#safety-ratings-rollover https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2019/CHRYSLER/PACIFICA/VAN/FWD... in terms of crashes per mile, nhtsa reported waymo having the most total crashes last year of any automated driving system. https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-06/ADS-SGO-Report-June-2022.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-06/ADS-SGO-... waymo had 62 crashes in 2.3 million miles driven which is 1 crash per 37K miles, compared to autopilot 1 crash per 4.31M miles or 1 crash per 1.9M miles with a human driving (plus emergency safety features included free in every vehicle). so the average autopilot vehicle instance travels ~2 full waymo fleet years of driving before crashing once, rather than crashing 124 times.

34 points by sbuttgereit 4y ago

Just make drivers liable no matter what if they hit a cyclist or pedestrian.

Only when cities prioritize and are designed for pedestrians instead of cars will pedestrian safety improve. We need more spaces that are pedestrian and bicycle only.

coryrc 4y ago
And they need to connect, efficiently. It's just not possible for soft 70kg humans to safely be near hard 2000kg objects moving quickly.
randomstring 4y ago
But hear me out... What if we could make every car $5-10k more expensive instead? </satire> I once thought that using AI to make all cars self driving might be the key to making pedestrians and cyclists safe. Self driving cars are playing a game of Russian Roulette. The systems will get it wrong occasionally, with LIDAR or without. Not if, but when. Whether or not someone dies depends on the situation.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities. But I've also sat in those city council meetings and seen the inane opposition people have to any sort of positive reform in that direction. Self driving vehicles have the potential to actually improve road safety because local governments won't be involved.
  - Gordonjcp 4y ago
    > I work on self driving vehicles. I would also like more walkable, bikeable cities. Two questions, then. Firstly, do you think that self-driving vehicles will ever get even close to human standards of driving? And second, what do you see as the big challenges to getting them to be acceptably safe?
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      I obviously can't talk specific numbers, but there are reasonable arguments to be made that in certain limited scenarios, we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics. Turning that into "unequivocally safer than humans all the time, everywhere" is still an open problem. As for safety, that's both a big topic and a "I have explicitly told not talk about this in public by legal" topic. The teams and organizations I've worked for take it very seriously, but things can always be improved. Phil Koopman puts out some excellent information about where we are currently and where industry could broadly improve.
      - Gordonjcp 4y ago
        > we may already be hovering around or exceeding equivalent human metrics. Okay, bearing in mind your second paragraph, what are the conditions under which they're safer? I've been in a few self-driving cars and I'd struggle to see how they would ever get to an acceptable standard - like, pass UK driving test kind of standard.
- alexashka 4y ago
  The satire is at the heart of it all, innit? Why think through and implement hard political decisions when you can throw money at nerds to make a profit instead?
- jeffbee 4y ago
  That's fine actually. We (American cities) should adopt systems like they have in Singapore where the certificate of entitlement to purchase a car costs, buy itself, $70k-120k, on top of the cost of the car. The externalized costs of private cars are extremely high and it's completely insane that we have what amounts to welfare for drivers.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
whimsicalism 4y ago
It's seems like there is very little voter will power to make this happen. Simple traffic cameras would also make roads much safer but they are politically very difficult.

cf141q5325 4y ago

Not quite on topic, but most here will be familiar of the problem of autonomous cars and valuing the life of the driver vs that of a kid running in front of a car. (An autonomous car does have time to react, so do you crash the car, endangering the drivers or keep course and kill the child?) I recently learned of a new perspective when talking to a lawyer and learning of his first reaction. Apparently here in Germany courts assume a certain degree of responsibility for an accident by you simply deciding to drive. So if there is a crash of two cars, it starts with a 50/50 culpability and the circumstances (who crashed into whom because of what) decide the final accountability. The argument is that you knowingly stepped into something with very well known dangers. You took a risk when stepping into a weapon. The child didnt take any such decisions. As such you could (in theory) make the argument for suicide programming in such situations. I only mention it because despite having talked about the scenario in university, this perspective never came up.

chopin 4y ago
One should mention that this is applied to civil liability not criminal (in Germany).
- cf141q5325 4y ago
  He mentioned this as well ( and i forgot to) Could you elaborate on the implications/relevance? It seemed important to you and him. edit: So is it lawyers being pedantic (no offense, its the job description after all) or is there an argument why the logic of criminal law would be more applicable here?
  - leobg 4y ago
    Lawyer here in Germany. I don’t actually know the answer. However, criminal law and civil law regulate different relationships. Criminal law regulates the relationship between the state and the individual. Civil law regulates the relationships between individuals. Criminal law is bound much more closely by the constitution. Specifically, the state may not punish an individual for engaging in lawful behavior. So while another citizen may raise the objection, “But you chose to drive this two ton machine knowing full well that it was capable to inflict harm on other people even when driven with the greatest care”, the state may not. Also, for civil liability, there is (mandatory) insurance. You, as a driver, do not usually end up paying for this (provided that you have not been negligent in your conduct of the machine). Criminal law, on the other hand, always hits you as the individual. You cannot insure against it. This is to say that, if the same standard were applied in criminal law, nobody could afford to drive a car, or operate any dangerous equipment at all, because one mistake, or even just one instance of bad luck, could land you in prison.

simonsarris 4y ago

This seems transparently like the lidar industry uniting to ask for laws requiring car companies to purchase lidar for their driving systems.

CharlesW 4y ago
Yes. That doesn't necessarily invalidate their points, but as with any information one has to consider the bias of the source.

robonerd 4y ago

The thought of automotive lidar units being repaired in the same manner as other automotive parts, with dodgy parts ordered off ebay, terrifies me. Advertised power rating and filtering of lasers sold second-hand online only have a loose relationship to reality and can give people permanent vision damage very quickly.

elif 4y ago

Complete misrepresentation: LIDAR manufacturers are trying to mandate LIDAR for driver safety systems. The net result of that would be less consumers being able to afford driver safety systems, and that progress on driver safety systems would be impeded. By citing statistics about human errors.

cesarvarela 4y ago

If TSLA succeeds without Lidar, it will make them obsolete. Time to push for Lidar now before it is too late.

markovbot 4y ago
this comment would probably be a lot strong if Tesla didn't have such an abysmal safety record.
- nyolfen 4y ago
  are there actual numbers for this?
- elif 4y ago
  Sorry what? They are literally the safest cars on the road in terms of BOTH A) accidents per driven mile and B) probability of injury in an accident
  - woojoo666 4y ago
    Is this compared to other autonomous cars with lidar, like Waymo or Cruise?
    - elif 4y ago
      looks like waymo uses chrysler pacifica, which got a 4/5 for rollover, so worse in crashes than tesla (perfect score). https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2019/CHRYSLER/PACIFICA/VAN/FWD#safety-ratings-rollover https://www.nhtsa.gov/vehicle/2019/CHRYSLER/PACIFICA/VAN/FWD... in terms of crashes per mile, nhtsa reported waymo having the most total crashes last year of any automated driving system. https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-06/ADS-SGO-Report-June-2022.pdf https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-06/ADS-SGO-... waymo had 62 crashes in 2.3 million miles driven which is 1 crash per 37K miles, compared to autopilot 1 crash per 4.31M miles or 1 crash per 1.9M miles with a human driving (plus emergency safety features included free in every vehicle). so the average autopilot vehicle instance travels ~2 full waymo fleet years of driving before crashing once, rather than crashing 124 times.