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Even After $100B, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere
- helsinkiandrew 4y agohttps://archive.ph/u0be5 https://archive.ph/u0be5
- mrkramer 4y agoThey will evolve step by step just like everything does.
- rayiner 4y agoOr they’ll hit a wall short of their promises, like supersonic airplanes, nuclear, etc.
- spywaregorilla 4y agoMany things die off and cease to evolve.
- Fricken 4y agoYeah, that's the problem. They're never gonna get there at that rate. >In the view of Levandowski and many of the brightest minds in AI, the underlying technology isn’t just a few years’ worth of refinements away from a resolution. Autonomous driving, they say, needs a fundamental breakthrough that allows computers to quickly use humanlike intuition rather than learning solely by rote. That is to say, Google engineers might spend the rest of their lives puttering around San Francisco and Phoenix without showing that their technology is safer than driving the old-fashioned way. The view that something fundamental is missing has been prevalent amongst Google's best self-driving engineers since sometime in 2015. Howver, at that time they still entertained optimism that the AI field was moving fast enough that the fundamental missing thing could be discovered. When ex-google self-driving project director Chris Urmson, Drew Bagnell and Sterling Anderson founded Aurora in 2017, they touted the mantra that "you can't build a ladder to the moon" Meaning, that, while self-driving industry can make continual incremental step-by-step progress with the technology they have, they will not within a reasonable time frame achieve their objective without a fundamental change.
- rwmj 4y agoThe BBC had a video of the journalist travelling around SF in the completely driverless Cruise cars: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-63077437 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/technology-63077437 They seem to be doing alright for a technology which is supposedly "going nowhere". (Yes I know these cars sometimes stop, but that's better than having them crash).
- rvz 4y agoThere is a problem that the BBC won't discuss. LIDAR is very expensive to put in a car and is looks very ugly to have that contraption on top of it. A double negative to sell this to customers and it only works and is trained in SF so far. To counter the expensive point(s) that LIDAR critics have mentioned you then have Tesla's Fools Self Driving (FSD) demoware, which still doesn't work and even if it does it works worse than LIDAR, hence why Elon's 2020 robo-taxi prediction was completely off especially even if you gave him more time. But at least Lidar works better here than vision, only for this robo-taxi use-case here and not for selling such cars with expensive LIDAR systems to individuals at scale.
- leoedin 4y agoThere's nothing fundamental about lidar that means it can't reduce in price. The 20th century is littered with examples of highly complex devices that we made in such high volume that they became cheap. Integrated circuits, optical disk drives, hard drives, all the different display technologies - building ten of these would cost millions, but building 100 million drove the unit cost to almost nothing.
- blagie 4y agoI agree it's possible to make a lidar unit for $25 down-the-line; there's nothing fundamentally expensive. However, it's not just a question of volume. It took decades of Moore's Law before computers became cheap. Optical disk drives took a decade or two as well for reading, and more for writing. Display technologies were a little bit faster, but not fast. I'm pretty convinced if we wanted to make 100 million lidar units in 2023 or 2024, the cost would be approximately* the same as it is today. * From a computer science big-O perspective. Simple volume economics might drive the cost in half, or even a quarter, but not down by an order-of-magnitude.
- edent 4y agoThe thing I don't get is... how are "self driving" cars better than public transport? The two advantages I see is that you have a private space. And that they are point-to-point. Those are important advantages. As, I suppose, is the fringe benefit of finding work for mathematicians. But it seems to me you could do "self-driving" a lot cheaper and easier by improving the commons. Embedding sensors in the roads, street signs, and furniture - isn't that going to make more sense than turning ever vehicle into a super-computer? Even after all that... buses and trams and light rail work absurdly well, at a fraction of the cost.
- loeg 4y agoIn addition to the two advantages you’ve already covered, Americans regularly travel between points without sufficient density to support frequent and convenient public transit.
- drekk 4y agoThere's no reason you can't have frequent and convenient public transit as a subsidized service. This also ignores how between the years of 1938 and 1950 National City Lines — with investment from GM, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil of California (through a subsidiary), Federal Engineering, Phillips Petroleum, and Mack Trucks — acquired and dismantled the streetcar rail transit systems of 25 cities, including Los Angeles. We have worse transit systems in the US today than we did a century ago. All in the service of cars which we rebuilt our cities around. While we fucked around for a decade the CPC built out a high speed rail network on the mainland. Similar landmass, similar geographical challenges, less wealthy nation. Guess Americans will have to wait until public transit is more profitable than making everyone get their own car with its very own JARVIS.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rhino369 4y agoYou really can't have convenient public transit that replaces cars in our current carcentric metroareas. The density isn't there. You'd have to totally dismantle the suburbs, which most people live in. Unless you mean point-to-point buses, but that's just uber. You could slowly do it over decades in places primed for growth. Places like Arlington, Va are being urbanized.
- johnnymorgan 4y agoThis is the thing I'll say about this tech. I have lane assist and drive assist in my new car and I really do love it for highway driving, it's pretty suttle overall but very useful. Feels like a solid backup and less of self driving but I am enjoying it as a user. It will follow the bends hands free and keep you centered but doesn't intrude the way lane assist does by itself.
- onetokeoverthe 4y ago
- civilized 4y agoIt was always going to take longer than the professional class of tech bullshitters wanted us to think, but it still seems to me like the sort of thing we should be able to pull off this century.
- mochomocha 4y agoThe biggest surprise to me from this article was learning that Levandowski is not in jail anymore and back at it. The whole article reads like free publicity for him and his new company, and is light on data backing up the claims (beyond usual anecdotes).
- greenyoda 4y ago> learning that Levandowski is not in jail anymore... He never spent a day in jail. According to the article: > Levandowski pleaded guilty to one and was sentenced to 18 months in federal prison in August 2020. Because of the pandemic, the sentence was delayed long enough that he never served a day before his pardon, which came on the last day of the Trump presidency.
- xiphias2 4y agoThere will be losers and winners, but $100B is not that big compared to the problem they are working on. Also Tesla is profitably improving at this point. Even though I don't have a Tesla, the fact that they are able to increase software margins means that they are noticably improving step by step.
- yaseer 4y agoYou could put self-driving tech into one of two categories: 1) So hard, even with incremental progress, we can't predict the problem will be solved even in a decade or two, e.g. Nuclear fusion, General AI (AGI). 2) Hard, but the progress over decades has been notable, implying convergence in a decade or two. Voice recognition and Natural language processing seem to fit this category. I'd put self-driving in category 2, but I can see why hubris around projects like nuclear fusion and AGI might make you think this is of the same type.
- streetcat1 4y agoSo I think it is 95% of (2) and 5% of (1). This is why there is a lot of companies that did (2), but we will not have self driving car in the next 10 years.
- Yizahi 4y agoI always wonder - what happens when a modern self-driving car encounter a contradicting road markings? For example when real new markings contradict old markings? E.g. just recently had to do a left turn on a recently re-opened road, which required me to cross several solid lines, because previously there was no turn there. Or in another example when the road has double sets of markings - regular, and temporary, for the maintenance period. What happens then?
- ceejayoz 4y agoIt gives up and you take over. In the cars you can't do that in, there's teleoperation as a backup; the car stops until someone can manually resolve. https://www.motortrend.com/news/mira-self-driving-car-remote-control-car/ https://www.motortrend.com/news/mira-self-driving-car-remote...
- helsinkiandrew 4y agoI wonder if Self Driving will go like AI did in the seventies? A lack of significant results/returns on investment means that funding/investment will dry up and we'll enter a self driving winter. According to the report sited in the article [1] $100B is nearly a third of the total research into automation, connectivity, electrification, and smart mobility (ACES). Is this sustainable? [1] https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/our-insights/mobilitys-future-an-investment-reality-check https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/automotive-and-assembly/...
- sausagefeet 4y agoIsn't all this investment in self-driving cars kind of a wasted investment anyways? In that, once you have a lot of self-driving cars, I'd expect municipal infrastructure to be installed that would require significantly less smarts in the self-driving car. So it's a massive investment just to cover this transition period where maybe if you just invested in the transition infrastructure now, you could get there faster and cheaper.
- mdorazio 4y agoI'm getting kind of tired of these poorly-informed journalist hit pieces. Yes, self-driving cars are only ready in a handful of locations and still have some kinks to work out. No, that does not mean they are decades away or that the money invested is wasted. If you work in the industry or even follow the public announcements closely, it's very clear that the next 5 years will see a rapid uptick in deployments with improving ODD capabilities. It's just taking longer and is more complex than the marketers and pundits thought it would be. And let's be honest, if you want to see videos of cars doing funny or stupid things, the surest bet will always be the idiotsincars subreddit for human drivers. Cherrypicking incidents is easy.
- blagie 4y agoI live in a location where human drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians have lots of kinks to work out. As I'm getting older, I think I'll soon fall into the category of "human drivers with kinks to work out" too. I'm pretty sure my city would, on the net, be safer with self-driving cars. I think 90% of human drivers here will be better drivers than a self-driving car, but and it's not even the next 9% which scare me, but that 1% of least-safe human drivers. From a purely technical and apolitical perspective, if we could magically replace every car here with self-driving, I'd do it in a heart beat. I won't pretend, though, that technical perspectives are the most important. The financial, political, legal / liability, and similar organizational and human issues are important to get right. I'd like to see that before mass adoption. Today, I wouldn't buy a Tesla since I want to _own_ my car. If there is a new piece of shared infrastructure, I'd like to make sure it's run _in the public interest_. I don't see subscription-based, car-rental, cloud-based, algorithmic, freemium, network-effect tech-style models as something I'd want in my city.
- Fricken 4y agoAnthony Levabdowski might be an asshole, but he is not poorly informed. If you've been following the public announcements in self-driving for the last decade closely then you don't assign them much value, particularly with respects to timelines.
- lelanthran 4y ago> If you work in the industry or even follow the public announcements closely, it's very clear that the next 5 years will see a rapid uptick in deployments with improving ODD capabilities. I follow the public announcements very closely, and have seen your sentiment about "ready in five years" expressed since at least 2014.
- gregoriol 4y agoResearch always goes "nowhere" at first, then there are results and sometimes successes. Don't you think people said the same thing about research for airplanes? most first attempts crashed, but then we had very good flying machines. Could probably find the same for first cars with combustion engines, for some medical treatments or vaccines, ... Let them search, try, improve. Just stop the hype: do the work like engineers and not like silicon valley bros.
- swellguy 4y agoThis article is a bit cringe. And it's a bit ironic that Levandowski is the one driving it, as he profited massively at a megacorp on the hype, despite delivering nothing over 10 years ago and then trying to hype it up again at a competitor. I've never seen a person's name appear so many times in an article before, so I guess he is trying to hype up his new scheme.
- namlem 4y agoIt's time to accept that self driving needs roadside infrastructure support.
- incomingpain 4y agoCant read the article but I find this title quite disingenuous. Self-driving is being extensively used all over north america. I'm in the detroit area, so I've seen them. Haven't had the chance to be driving near one yet :( Kind of impossible to say 'going nowhere' when there's popular youtubers with videos showing it working in real life. The thing that's happening right now is the big shift in transportation. It's better for the wealth of our countries to have driving services at a monthly cost rather than some large cap-ex purchase that mostly sits in a driveway taking up space. The problem? Boy do we have a ton of lazy people working for insurance companies who are about to lose their job.
- syntaxing 4y agoDisclaimer: I work in this industry. One company you probably heard of and another you probably haven’t but my opinions are of my own. It’s interesting to see how much people get wrong about autonomous vehicles (AV), mostly because of how little these companies can share publicly. IMO, geofenced driverless vehicles are closer than you think and AV are getting more affordable to manufacture as we progress thanks to economies of scale. Can it replace all cars immediately in the next decade? No. Can you use it like a Uber in SF after a long eventful night within this decade? Probably.
- jnsaff2 4y ago> It’s interesting to see how much people get wrong about autonomous vehicles (AV), mostly because of how little these companies can share publicly. People get it wrong because its the marketing departments who are doing the sharing in these companies.
- bamboozled 4y ago$100B is an absurd amount of money, could’ve built a lot of automated light rail with that.
- airstrike 4y agoSlow is smooth and smooth is fast.
- rkwasny 4y agoSelf driving cars will work, very soon, people underestimate recent breakthroughs in AI. ( Leaving a note on HN just to say "I told you so" ;-)