10 ms·

It's time to admit self-driving cars aren't going to happen

75 points by georgecmu 4y ago

HeckaSmart 4y ago
radiojasper 4y ago
Yet.
- fredgrott 4y ago
  Define what safety wise and engineering wise things need to be solved to give substance to that claim. Notice we do not have self piloting planes, or train engines ( ah ah, the non manned power units always run coupled to manned train engines)
  - Grimburger 4y ago
    > train engines Singapore MRT is completely driverless. Over 200km of track and 120 stations serving a city of five million people, intrigued how you wouldn't deem it fully automated?
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      London's Victoria Line has been driverless for decades. It's not a hard problem. You solve it by putting linked activators along the track to control the train speed and acceleration. RMT has backup sensors for train position and radio control for emergencies. It's plain old engineering. No AI required. It's a completely different problem to automating a mixed use national high speed rail network which has to deal with a huge range of contingencies.
    - rippercushions 4y ago
      Only the new fully underground lines are driverless. The aboveground North-South and East-West lines, which are also the backbone of the network, have human drivers.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    > Notice we do not have self piloting planes, or train engines Wait, what. We absolutely have both of these things.
    - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
      We don't have self-piloting planes which routinely take off, fly a route, and land. Setting an autopilot for a route is relatively trivial. Auto-landing in heavy crosswinds or landing on water because of an emergency isn't.
      - cameronh90 4y ago
        Not take off, but we do have many planes which routinely fly a route and land. It depends on the airline and route, but some airlines now have changed their standard company procedure to engage autopilot as soon as you're about 400ft off the ground all the way through to autoland. Some airlines only use autoland when the landing is too difficult for the pilot due to poor visibility (though as you say, high crosswinds usually mean a manual landing). On top of that, autoland is very old technology - ILS is from the 30s and autoland not much later. We don't have automatic taxiing or take off in any common airplanes yet. This phase involves a lot of ATC back/forth so it doesn't really make sense at the moment, but there are some changes coming to ATC and transponders which might make this more feasible in the medium term.
  - seanhunter 4y ago
    Docklands light railway in London is completely driverless
solumunus 4y ago
Yep. Nowhere near. Good chance nobody here sees it in their lifetime.
- shaky-carrousel 4y ago
  We have already reached the point where the best AI driver is better than the worst human driver, so I'm hopeful.
  - manigandham 4y ago
    What does that mean exactly?
    - dom96 4y ago
      Presumably it's better than someone who is blind. That's something I guess /s
    - dagw 4y ago
      The bar to legally drive a car is very low in many parts of the world. As such there are many people who can legally drive, yet do it worse than the best AI, and on the whole people seem to be OK with that.
  - silon42 4y ago
    Yeah, I'm hoping I could use it to get to the shops in a few decades when I'm 70+ or so.
    - shaky-carrousel 4y ago
      That is a good age to stop driving by yourself. With the machines you will keep your independence and won't need the help of another human to go wherever you want. It's a win for me.
  - MontyCarloHall 4y ago
    The worst human driver is blackout drunk. I’m not sure that’s such a high bar to clear.
causi 4y ago
Personally I'd be satisfied with just being able to hand the highway driving over to the car. Keep me in the middle of the lane, don't let me hit another car or any object in the road, and sound a chime when I'm a mile from the exit.
- rco8786 4y ago
  Same, and current tech is more or less doing this. Even my 2016 Toyota Rav4 has lane departure assist and dynamic cruise control. I still have to keep a hand on the wheel and pay attention to the road of course, but road trips are quite nice just with those 2 features.
  - causi 4y ago
    Now if only those systems would dodge debris on the road, like a truck tire or a piece of lumber.
    - rco8786 4y ago
      Therein lies the long tail of challenges to be truly self driving, right? If AI dodges the debris 99/100 the whole world will claim it as a failure because that 1 miss ended in someone's death - even if human drivers are only able to dodge 90/100.
      - f1shy 4y ago
        The problem is 100% of economical, and not technical nature. The car manufacturers are afraid of being made responsible for that deaths, even when you could prove a human would not have been smarter.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - MrMan 4y ago
      and also not suddenly dodge things that are not there
Freeaqingme 4y ago
I think there won't be a big bang where we go from no self driving to fully self driving vehicles at once. It will be many small changes, that taken together will slowly transition towards full self driving cars. Since quite some years we've had cruise control, now there's adaptive cruise control. Then cruise control became able to overtake other vehicles. Next up, they may be able to take a certain exit based on satnav, etc. It's hard to say when, but chances are that at some point in time we'll simply have FSD, while nobody realized that's where we were headed because it was all marketed as small(ish) individual features.
- SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
  > It will be many small changes, that taken together will slowly transition towards full self driving cars. The problem is that there is no smooth transition: there is a "valley of failure" in the middle of it, where there is enough automation that the human can disengage most of the time, but not good enough automation to avoid all errors, so the human operator has to step in to correct errors quickly, and doing do "cold" (i.e. from a disengaged state) is not good enough. Dekker touches on this in "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'"
  - 2sk21 4y ago
    Good point. I think it will get even worse as automation improves. Consider that problems beyond thew ability of the automated driving system are delegated to the human driver. As automation improves, the human driver will have to be even more alert to resume control.
    - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
      Yep, the sibling comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370118 ) explains it well: > humans are really bad at co-operating with machines. We are asked to pay full attention to everything around us and take over at a moment's notice, while doing nothing >99% of the time. Humans simply do not work like that. I have been trying to find some refs. here's a couple: https://www.skybrary.aero/articles/cockpit-automation-advantages-and-safety-challenges https://www.skybrary.aero/articles/cockpit-automation-advant... https://themobilityforum.net/2021/03/15/the-potential-pitfalls-of-automation/ https://themobilityforum.net/2021/03/15/the-potential-pitfal... Like most of the 'Human Error' research, it focuses on Aviation, but is worth a read anyway if you care about topics such as e.g. SRE and Incident response.
bionsystem 4y ago
> Argo AI was considered a leader with solid technological fundamentals by most experts in the field, so its shuttering is a strong signal not to be ignored. I thought Cruise was the leader, with Waymo next.
- lm28469 4y ago
  Waymo already went public several times since 2017 or so saying true self driving would be impossible without major infrastructure changes and might be impossible in bad weather conditions with the tech they use
- martindbp 4y ago
  Cruise seems close technology wise but they're hitched to a parent company that is unlikely to do very well in the coming recession and transition to EVs. They're also spending billions with zero revenue. There's a big risk they'll face the same problem as Argo where GM will try to find a buyer but nobody is interested.
seydor 4y ago
the self-driving myth has pumped countless startups in the past 15 years. i guess the downturn is a good opportunity to move to some different myth (i suggest longevity, which is more likely to happen). I wish some of the investment was used to create semi-autonomous vehicles for the disabled instead.
zzzzzzzza 4y ago
pretty sure the universe will ensure it happens in the the next 5 yrs just because this guy said it will never happen.
MrMan 4y ago
why is it time to admit that? it may not make anyone as rich as they hoped but I cant imagine we won't solve the problem
MontyCarloHall 4y ago
>The fact is that these existing services are extremely constrained in terms of geography and operating hours (though the latter is arguably a regulatory issue) Is it though? Cruise would like you to believe that the only reason they don’t have fully driverless cars in SF during the day is strictly regulatory. However, it is far easier to drive in a dense urban environment at night when roads are empty than during the daytime when roads are crowded. I bet the disengagement rate is so high during the day (when the cars have backup drivers) that fully driverless operation would be impossible.
ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago
I think that we won't be able to have full self-driving on standard public roads, for a while, where non-self-driving vehicles (and pedestrians and cyclists) mix with self-driving cars. I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday. But that ain't gonna happen anytime soon. And we definitely won't be getting flying cars (for the general public), until we have full-self-driving.
- lm28469 4y ago
  > I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday. We could put them on rails and have overhead cables providing electricity efficiently, and make them go up to 300kph too, damn the future looks bright !
  - jraph 4y ago
    Make them bigger so they can hold many people for one trip, while we are at it.
  - melling 4y ago
    It’s likely profitable and better for the environment if we get electric self-driving trucks on private highways. 70% of freight is moved by trucks. https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data
    - YawningAngel 4y ago
      This analysis is immensely US-specific
      - melling 4y ago
        It would also work in China, of course. In fact, I would expect them to implement it first. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/28/self-driving-tech-company-ponyai-plans-to-deliver-robotrucks-in-china.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/28/self-driving-tech-compan...
nextstep 4y ago
Self-driving cars were always overhyped in the US because roads are the only decent transportation infrastructure. A future where we have better cars is a waste. For long distances, we should build trains. For short distances in cities, we have buses, trams, bikes. This technology already exists and is very good, it’s just not supported by the government-business hybrid that runs the US.
- helen___keller 4y ago
  > For short distances in cities, we have buses, trams, bikes Although I agree, as an urban dweller, I am quite anticipating a possible future with the total proliferation of self driving cars. If self driving cars reach a large majority of the road, I can anticipate local and state governments outlawing the manually-driven kind on urban streets. I personally would really like this, because human drivers are an absolute nuisance to urban life in many ways. You can't use laws to make humans drive 25 on that road where everyone routinely goes 40. It just doesn't work, and the people whose houses are on that road suffer the noise and danger that results. You can, however, use laws to make algorithms respect the speed limit, because big companies will otherwise face big fines. That's why I want to see self driving cars.
  - jokteur 4y ago
    You can also make the road narrower and put obstacles on the road to force to reduce the speed: it is very effective, and very cheap to install with little technology. Here is a typical example of narrow street with obstacles in Switzerland: https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8111357,7.1507033,3a,75y,167.48h,79.65t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1schP4kqDaDy3prbZf3tbrkg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8111357,7.1507033,3a,75y,167....
    - helen___keller 4y ago
      Correct, but that takes active effort on a road by road basis, which becomes a political problem on a road by road basis. In a world where all cars are automated, establishing speed limits is presumably something you do once and auto manufacturers will be forced to comply. Similarly, issues with cycling safety and pedestrian safety are instantly mitigated without complex study groups to examine why this or that particular intersection has seen three cycling fatalities. All of this is assuming the creation of currently-mythical technology, or course
pennaMan 4y ago
Ah yes, the scam companies that care more about raising vc money than solving the actual problem obviously would never make it happen. Then there's comma.ai that's the actual leader in the space having production units you can buy and fit into your car right now. Something the "experts" that seem to be expert only at reading company financial numbers seem to have missed.
- rippercushions 4y ago
  The article is mostly talking about Ford.
dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago
Actual self driving is likely to happen, but it's going to need some accommodations. They might be high-resolution mapping with the ability of (local) government to mark changes as they occur. Road workers with devices that can direct automated vehicles to avoid holes in the road and the like plus other special cases. Along the way there will be many stand-alone (self-parking) and in between (freeway/highway autonomous driving) functions that will be very useful and will be attractive to customers. If we're only talking about "the holy grail" unlimited full autonomy, then yes, it's probably not possible, since it approaches general intelligence.
Theodores 4y ago
I beg to differ. Self driving cars are unlikely to make it to the West but the outlook for the East (China) is totally different. In the West there are economic woes that will make the dream of everyone having 2.2 Teslas in the driveway not happen. There is no getting around this, the West is in a bit of a pickle. Meanwhile, in China they have an entirely different way of achieving self driving. That is to put 5G (6,7 or 8...) on everything. Therefore, when you approach a junction, the 5G gadgets at that junction with their all seeing eyes and ability to communicate with vehicles just tells your car where to go and when. By the magic of 5G it will also know what the deal is at the next point of decision, so your car can arrive for when the lights are green and you can be on your merry way. The sensors on the car can do the lane keeping assist and slam on the anchors should an unexpected object appear on the highway. There are aspects to this approach that are un-American. So it is not going to happen, even if a magic wand magically fixes economic woes that are far too structural for America to fix. You could say that the Chinese approach is not 'self driving' but 'networked driving'. But what is the big deal if your car whisks you off from A to B without having to touch the wheel?
- rippercushions 4y ago
  Do you have any pointers to this actually happening, or is this just your prediction? FWIW, I would not start with China if I was looking for an easy place to test self-driving cars. There's plenty of crazy drivers, remarkably heterogenous vehicles on the road including suicidal cyclists and all sorts of weird three-wheeled moped-scooter-truck things, signage is inconsistent and missing, road quality is widely variable, traffic jams can be epic, the list goes on and on.
- Melting_Harps 4y ago
  > You could say that the Chinese approach is not 'self driving' but 'networked driving'. But what is the big deal if your car whisks you off from A to B without having to touch the wheel? Would this before or after they've locked everyone under indefinite COVID detention, err... quarantine? Even if this were the way they justify the massive panopticon, there would be so few people that would benefit from this tech that one has to ask what was gained from doing so? The way QR codes made it's way to China isn't entirely just weibo or wechat alone, Xianjing relies on them as does all the AI facial recognition tech and is the very definition of an Authoritarian police-state and if that is what it 'takes' to get to mas adoption of Surveillance Tech than I think we are better off. Public transportation mixed wit WFH solutions seem far more favourable.
api 4y ago
It could probably be done today with richer sensors on the car than just visual and with "smart" roads outfitted with specialized symbols and transponders to guide the car. Pure self drive like humans do requires a cognitive model of cause and effect and the nature of the world being navigated, not just pattern recognition and prediction. Enormous advances in predictive and pattern recognizing AI have been made in recent years, but these things still don't "understand" anything. I put understand in quotes because I still don't think we understand understanding. The mistake of those who have bet the farm of self drive (Musk/Tesla being chief among them) is to jump the gun and think that the AI advances of the last decade have made it just a problem of scaling a technology. It's not. It's still a fundamental invention problem, not a scaling problem, but what we have is good enough to fool us into thinking we can get there. Musk's other big venture SpaceX can successfully build and scale rockets to send humans to the Moon and Mars. That's because that, unlike full self drive, is just a matter of scaling already thoroughly understood physics. We know exactly how to build such things. We just haven't done it yet (beyond Apollo).
dusted 4y ago
I think it's more likely that human-driven cars will become outlawed and infrastructure modified to accommodate fully-autonomous. It's not what I personally would want, as I simply enjoy driving cars and motorcycles, but it's what I think will eventually happen.
bsenftner 4y ago
It's time to admit this is a game: journalism plays with society by projecting dream-like nonsense on the technology industry. It's time to admit we have large institutionalized portions of society whose purpose is basically immature nonsense, such as pushing idolization of the entire landscape of fashion and celebrity.
ksidudwbw 4y ago
fsd beta looking cool with output of what it sees https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9qjDgVXco https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9qjDgVXco
GaylordTuring 4y ago
> Ford CEO Jim Farley justified this by saying on the company’s earnings call Wednesday evening that “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology for ourselves.” i.e., “Tesla has won, we’ll license the technology from them.”
- bananapub 4y ago
  ... tesla doesn't have self-driving cars and doesn't even appear to have an actual plan to get them? they're in fact under investigation for their existing "autopilot" system killing people: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/26/tesla-criminal-investigation-self-driving-claims-sources https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/26/tesla-cri...
- Ekaros 4y ago
  More that self-driving is not coming anytime soon and when it comes it will be commodity technology. So you are better off just buying it from someone else.
emptyfile 4y ago
Talking to a developer about self-driving cars is a good litmus test of sincerity and/or competence. Utterly unbelievable that Tesla is still selling "Full self driving" cars to customers.
silverpepsi 4y ago
I don't know if Tesla originated the approach, but they're the first I'd ever heard of doing it by my camera or radar or anything like that. I remember my first reaction was befuddlement, when highways cost like $xxx million per mile, why would the trivial cost of dropping electronic friendly markers for lanes and such be anything but a trivial 0.1% cost that should facilitate self driving from the road construction end as a primary means of situating self-driving vehicles? Instead you have cars with that forever risk of death to their passengers when self-driving due to the non deterministic factor of not having a highway equivalent of train rails.
- f1shy 4y ago
  This is what I wanted to say. Autonomous driving without changing a thing, will not happen soon. But changing some things, is totally possible.
- phpnode 4y ago
  exactly, NFC-like technology would be extremely inexpensive in the scheme of things and could be deployed into road surfaces without much difficulty. I remember seeing a video of self driving technology from the 90s that used a similar approach - magnets in the road IIRC
- cameronh90 4y ago
  It's inevitable that roads will eventually be built with electronic assists. However, there are good reasons to develop cars that can still drive without them. Given that the government would have to do it, it's going to be a really long time to completely retrofit our roads with these devices. We're still not putting them into new roads right now, nor am I aware of any international standard for doing so. A common standardised database of road works would have been useful for decades of GPS navigation but we still don't have that either - most countries don't have one at all, and the ones that do aren't standard (often even varying from city to city) and tend to be incomplete. Relying on the governments of the world to sort this out is a risky strategy. Secondly, even assuming we do get these systems in place, you can bet good money they will frequently be wrong. Some contractor will come and dig up the road but forget to move/disable/update the electronic markers. So having a parallel visual self driving system to help identify these situations is essential. Third, pedestrians, bicycles, kids, animals, etc. are unlikely to contain these markers. For trains, we just ban them from the track, put fences around it, etc. but that's clearly not going to work for most roads.
novalis78 4y ago
It boils down to the question whether AGI will happen during our lifetimes or not.
jwilk 4y ago
Archived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027152317/https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/27/self-driving-cars-arent-going-to-happen/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027152317/https://techcrunc...
discopicante 4y ago
I have always been skeptical of FSD because of liability. The system we have today distributes liability to the driver in almost all circumstances – 94% to 96%, according to one quick statistic. It is difficult to imagine this liability being redistributed to a handful (or even 1 or 2) auto manufacturers who remove the driver from the equation. In other words, I am not sure that auto manufacturers can afford the liability assuming their system reaches a state in which it is 'safer' than a human driver under any condition. The cost of proving that in courts across the world may not be economically feasible.
- akmarinov 4y ago
  Mercedes already assumes liability for their L3 system, let’s see when others follow
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    More like - let's see when Mercedes will stop selling self driving systems or renounces liability for L3 systems when their self driving car will actually crush somebody.
Jemm 4y ago
Fortunately the system has been prepared for remotely piloted vehicles using partial AI and mostly remote humans over 5G.
gonzo41 4y ago
Just use trains and bicycles. We've had the answer for 100 years. I live where driving is a requirement. Self driving cars will not handle rural roads for a LONG time. And I really don't want something the size of a Cybertruck hurtling along the roads around where I live without someone actually doing some thinking.
TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
Self driving cars can react on what is happening around them (if sensor suite will catch that information) but are unable to predict what is happening around them, because they don't understand situation they are in.
- smileysteve 4y ago
  They're also unable to predict what the human drivers next to them will do because the human drivers don't understand the situation they are in. Anecdotally, the most common flaw I experience while driving (self or not) is me reacting to traffic in front while another car is only reacting to me, the car most immediately in front of them, passes (often erratically switching lanes), merges with less than a car length, only to slam on their brakes because the traffic in front of me has no openings.
  - TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
    Like when children are approaching the pedestrian walk, then you can predict that they are going to cross. If not, then please return your driving license.
illuminerdy 4y ago
Self-driving cars will definitely happen. It won't happen next year, but it will absolutely happen. That's the way humans are. If they can do something and make some money, they will do it.
- acdha 4y ago
  Your last part is important, however: it’s quite possible that full self-driving vehicles might end up like supersonic passenger air travel where the cost is too high to be viable. For example, Uber’s valuation was based on the idea that self-driving cabs would be cheaper than paying a human driver. It would be very easy to imagine that if the vehicle costs $100k it’s cheaper to pay a driver minimum wage instead. This is especially worth thinking about in light of the climate crisis: single-passenger vehicles have much higher emissions than almost anything else, even for EVs, and if the users had to pay the accurate cost the break-even point would be even further away than it is now.
unnouinceput 4y ago
Q: Is this the same article style like the one from New York Times about humanity not able to fly in a million years 9 days before Wright brothers did it? (https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/ https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...) A: Yes, it is.
- tim333 4y ago
  It's more like predicting humans won't be able to fly a few months after the Wright brothers did it. Exhibit: Cruise cars driving happily in SF: https://youtu.be/DNOJFcwXdec?t=61 https://youtu.be/DNOJFcwXdec?t=61 OK they are not at "omnipresent scale" and aircraft took decades before we had proper flights with queues for security and baggage reclaim but I think tech moves faster these days.
throwaway09223 4y ago
This is not a great article. It's based around Ford admitting they're not a software company, that they won't be able to compete effectively in this space. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. This does not mean that self driving cars "aren't going to happen" -- in fact, the progress by industry leaders has been methodological and constant. The evidence clearly shows that it is happening, and has every indication of continuing to happen. Five years ago people were incredulous that a computer could pilot a car at all. Now, everyone has conceded that this is possible and the criticisms are about how a computer pilots a car and whether it should make more risky maneuvers. This is exactly what we would expect progress to look like. As progress continues, companies will learn whether or not it is profitable to develop competing products, or concede to market leaders. Ford has conceded. Rivian has conceded. They will license technology developed by other companies with more capable technical teams.
- capitalsigma 4y ago
  The author seems to think that all self driving companies are basically the same, so Ford must just be facing the harsh truth that everyone else is ignoring, vs Ford being outcompeted by companies with much stronger ML chops
JoeAltmaier 4y ago
Zoox has made a good start. They're technology-intensive with multiple sensor modes integrated with some heavy CPU power.
incomingpain 4y ago
>A couple caveats for those going apoplectic over the headline: I mean self-driving isn’t going to be a thing A) in our lifetimes and B) with any kind of omnipresent scale Sure, you cannot deny the fact that it already happening. There's a surprising number of driverless cars on the road already. In terms of meeting the 'omnipresent scale'. This is much harder. There's a ton of people whose life choices mean their car budget is <$5000. Which means they can only afford 20 year old death trap beaters. So how does society get to the point where $150,000 driverless cars can be afforded by those people? It's from the amortization table and depreciation. It might be decades before there can be any major proliferation. That isn't the goal of driverless. The obvious caveat is most manufacturers are working on subscription models. The interesting thing about the current system. A tremendous cost to society is the poor investment into transportation. You drive around a city and you'll see millions of $ sitting in driveways not doing anything. Whereas public transit is certainly not the alternative to this poor investment. This is where the driverless taxis come in. The people who genuinely use their vehicles to a significant extent can still do so, but most people really just need low cost transportation. Which is indeed why public transit must exist and also why large cities are repairing that huge wealth damage. In the near future public transit like buses will go away and be replaced by driverless taxis. Not exactly nostradamus to see that coming. This will be what presents driverless cars at an omnipresent scale. This absolutely will be happening very soon.
throwaway2016a 4y ago
Teslas (while much maligned and deservedly so) can already drive pretty well on most well painted and high traffic roads. Granted it is very conservative and often I take control just to avoid other drivers honking at me for taking too long to turn. But this article mentions L4 autonomy. L4 still allows for geofencing and human control. Tesla is already pretty much L3, borderline L4. I think it is realistic to say L5 won't exist until radical change to our infrastructure is made but to say L4 won't exist in our lifetimes... I mean, I suppose if you're 80 years old already. I also think it draws too radical a conclusion in the article. The conclusion is from the author. The people from Ford explicitly said they think that it will be developed independently and Ford will be able to buy it instead of having to make it themselves. Which is very different than "it won't happen in our lifetime." It seems they didn't decide to stop research because it is not possible but because oters can do it cheaper.
- slaw 4y ago
  Tesla is L2 and nowhere near L3.
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850 - Oct 2022 (481 comments) Even After $100B, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 - Oct 2022 (107 comments)
rnantes 4y ago
Cruise and Waymo are the clear market leaders in Autonomous Vehicles. Tracking the progress of these companies in the past year alone where they are operating with no safety driver in dense San Francisco is incredibly impressive. The field of machine learning in general is advancing at a great pace as well. I think by the end of the decade in places with limited weather events AV will be as common as Uber. At some point people will reconsider buying a new car and just rely on a robotaxi subscription along with walking, cycling, and transit to get around. It will be survival of the fittest though, only few companies will succeed. Tesla 'Autopilot' on the other hand doesn't even use Lidar, seems to disconnect frequently and is much more dangerous. I really think they use deceptive marketing.
fallingfrog 4y ago
I mean, what’s wrong with trolley cars and light rail? There’s your self driving car. I don’t think automated transportation is a technology problem, it’s more a political problem. Nobody wants to put money towards a system that is for use by the common public. Think about this: trolleys and light rail don’t require batteries, they are more efficient, the maintenance is way lower, they reduce traffic, what’s not to like? And it would be trivial to make them self-driving. But it’s politically unthinkable.
entropicgravity 4y ago
Self driving cars will happen but they will need a bit of help from their environment, just as human drivers need stop signs, light signals etc. I can see urban streets and freeways being first to succumb to self driving. Remote, lightly traveled roads will take a long time ie decades before self driving is safe there. The real conundrum of self driving is that if it becomes capable for 99.9% of situations people find when things go really bad, heavy snow storm, earthquake, floods, forest fires etc drivers will have lost their touch for driving just when they need it most and the self driving abandons them.

75 points by georgecmu 4y ago

HeckaSmart 4y ago

radiojasper 4y ago

Yet.

fredgrott 4y ago
Define what safety wise and engineering wise things need to be solved to give substance to that claim. Notice we do not have self piloting planes, or train engines ( ah ah, the non manned power units always run coupled to manned train engines)
- Grimburger 4y ago
  > train engines Singapore MRT is completely driverless. Over 200km of track and 120 stations serving a city of five million people, intrigued how you wouldn't deem it fully automated?
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    London's Victoria Line has been driverless for decades. It's not a hard problem. You solve it by putting linked activators along the track to control the train speed and acceleration. RMT has backup sensors for train position and radio control for emergencies. It's plain old engineering. No AI required. It's a completely different problem to automating a mixed use national high speed rail network which has to deal with a huge range of contingencies.
  - rippercushions 4y ago
    Only the new fully underground lines are driverless. The aboveground North-South and East-West lines, which are also the backbone of the network, have human drivers.
- rco8786 4y ago
  > Notice we do not have self piloting planes, or train engines Wait, what. We absolutely have both of these things.
  - TheOtherHobbes 4y ago
    We don't have self-piloting planes which routinely take off, fly a route, and land. Setting an autopilot for a route is relatively trivial. Auto-landing in heavy crosswinds or landing on water because of an emergency isn't.
    - cameronh90 4y ago
      Not take off, but we do have many planes which routinely fly a route and land. It depends on the airline and route, but some airlines now have changed their standard company procedure to engage autopilot as soon as you're about 400ft off the ground all the way through to autoland. Some airlines only use autoland when the landing is too difficult for the pilot due to poor visibility (though as you say, high crosswinds usually mean a manual landing). On top of that, autoland is very old technology - ILS is from the 30s and autoland not much later. We don't have automatic taxiing or take off in any common airplanes yet. This phase involves a lot of ATC back/forth so it doesn't really make sense at the moment, but there are some changes coming to ATC and transponders which might make this more feasible in the medium term.
- seanhunter 4y ago
  Docklands light railway in London is completely driverless

solumunus 4y ago

Yep. Nowhere near. Good chance nobody here sees it in their lifetime.

shaky-carrousel 4y ago
We have already reached the point where the best AI driver is better than the worst human driver, so I'm hopeful.
- manigandham 4y ago
  What does that mean exactly?
  - dom96 4y ago
    Presumably it's better than someone who is blind. That's something I guess /s
  - dagw 4y ago
    The bar to legally drive a car is very low in many parts of the world. As such there are many people who can legally drive, yet do it worse than the best AI, and on the whole people seem to be OK with that.
- silon42 4y ago
  Yeah, I'm hoping I could use it to get to the shops in a few decades when I'm 70+ or so.
  - shaky-carrousel 4y ago
    That is a good age to stop driving by yourself. With the machines you will keep your independence and won't need the help of another human to go wherever you want. It's a win for me.
- MontyCarloHall 4y ago
  The worst human driver is blackout drunk. I’m not sure that’s such a high bar to clear.

causi 4y ago

Personally I'd be satisfied with just being able to hand the highway driving over to the car. Keep me in the middle of the lane, don't let me hit another car or any object in the road, and sound a chime when I'm a mile from the exit.

rco8786 4y ago
Same, and current tech is more or less doing this. Even my 2016 Toyota Rav4 has lane departure assist and dynamic cruise control. I still have to keep a hand on the wheel and pay attention to the road of course, but road trips are quite nice just with those 2 features.
- causi 4y ago
  Now if only those systems would dodge debris on the road, like a truck tire or a piece of lumber.
  - rco8786 4y ago
    Therein lies the long tail of challenges to be truly self driving, right? If AI dodges the debris 99/100 the whole world will claim it as a failure because that 1 miss ended in someone's death - even if human drivers are only able to dodge 90/100.
    - f1shy 4y ago
      The problem is 100% of economical, and not technical nature. The car manufacturers are afraid of being made responsible for that deaths, even when you could prove a human would not have been smarter.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - MrMan 4y ago
    and also not suddenly dodge things that are not there

Freeaqingme 4y ago

I think there won't be a big bang where we go from no self driving to fully self driving vehicles at once. It will be many small changes, that taken together will slowly transition towards full self driving cars. Since quite some years we've had cruise control, now there's adaptive cruise control. Then cruise control became able to overtake other vehicles. Next up, they may be able to take a certain exit based on satnav, etc. It's hard to say when, but chances are that at some point in time we'll simply have FSD, while nobody realized that's where we were headed because it was all marketed as small(ish) individual features.

SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
> It will be many small changes, that taken together will slowly transition towards full self driving cars. The problem is that there is no smooth transition: there is a "valley of failure" in the middle of it, where there is enough automation that the human can disengage most of the time, but not good enough automation to avoid all errors, so the human operator has to step in to correct errors quickly, and doing do "cold" (i.e. from a disengaged state) is not good enough. Dekker touches on this in "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'"
- 2sk21 4y ago
  Good point. I think it will get even worse as automation improves. Consider that problems beyond thew ability of the automated driving system are delegated to the human driver. As automation improves, the human driver will have to be even more alert to resume control.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 4y ago
    Yep, the sibling comment ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370118 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33370118 ) explains it well: > humans are really bad at co-operating with machines. We are asked to pay full attention to everything around us and take over at a moment's notice, while doing nothing >99% of the time. Humans simply do not work like that. I have been trying to find some refs. here's a couple: https://www.skybrary.aero/articles/cockpit-automation-advantages-and-safety-challenges https://www.skybrary.aero/articles/cockpit-automation-advant... https://themobilityforum.net/2021/03/15/the-potential-pitfalls-of-automation/ https://themobilityforum.net/2021/03/15/the-potential-pitfal... Like most of the 'Human Error' research, it focuses on Aviation, but is worth a read anyway if you care about topics such as e.g. SRE and Incident response.

bionsystem 4y ago

> Argo AI was considered a leader with solid technological fundamentals by most experts in the field, so its shuttering is a strong signal not to be ignored. I thought Cruise was the leader, with Waymo next.

lm28469 4y ago
Waymo already went public several times since 2017 or so saying true self driving would be impossible without major infrastructure changes and might be impossible in bad weather conditions with the tech they use
martindbp 4y ago
Cruise seems close technology wise but they're hitched to a parent company that is unlikely to do very well in the coming recession and transition to EVs. They're also spending billions with zero revenue. There's a big risk they'll face the same problem as Argo where GM will try to find a buyer but nobody is interested.

seydor 4y ago

the self-driving myth has pumped countless startups in the past 15 years. i guess the downturn is a good opportunity to move to some different myth (i suggest longevity, which is more likely to happen). I wish some of the investment was used to create semi-autonomous vehicles for the disabled instead.

zzzzzzzza 4y ago

pretty sure the universe will ensure it happens in the the next 5 yrs just because this guy said it will never happen.

MrMan 4y ago

why is it time to admit that? it may not make anyone as rich as they hoped but I cant imagine we won't solve the problem

MontyCarloHall 4y ago

>The fact is that these existing services are extremely constrained in terms of geography and operating hours (though the latter is arguably a regulatory issue) Is it though? Cruise would like you to believe that the only reason they don’t have fully driverless cars in SF during the day is strictly regulatory. However, it is far easier to drive in a dense urban environment at night when roads are empty than during the daytime when roads are crowded. I bet the disengagement rate is so high during the day (when the cars have backup drivers) that fully driverless operation would be impossible.

ChrisMarshallNY 4y ago

I think that we won't be able to have full self-driving on standard public roads, for a while, where non-self-driving vehicles (and pedestrians and cyclists) mix with self-driving cars. I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday. But that ain't gonna happen anytime soon. And we definitely won't be getting flying cars (for the general public), until we have full-self-driving.

lm28469 4y ago
> I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday. We could put them on rails and have overhead cables providing electricity efficiently, and make them go up to 300kph too, damn the future looks bright !
- jraph 4y ago
  Make them bigger so they can hold many people for one trip, while we are at it.
- melling 4y ago
  It’s likely profitable and better for the environment if we get electric self-driving trucks on private highways. 70% of freight is moved by trucks. https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data https://www.trucking.org/economics-and-industry-data
  - YawningAngel 4y ago
    This analysis is immensely US-specific
    - melling 4y ago
      It would also work in China, of course. In fact, I would expect them to implement it first. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/28/self-driving-tech-company-ponyai-plans-to-deliver-robotrucks-in-china.html https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/07/28/self-driving-tech-compan...

nextstep 4y ago

Self-driving cars were always overhyped in the US because roads are the only decent transportation infrastructure. A future where we have better cars is a waste. For long distances, we should build trains. For short distances in cities, we have buses, trams, bikes. This technology already exists and is very good, it’s just not supported by the government-business hybrid that runs the US.

helen___keller 4y ago
> For short distances in cities, we have buses, trams, bikes Although I agree, as an urban dweller, I am quite anticipating a possible future with the total proliferation of self driving cars. If self driving cars reach a large majority of the road, I can anticipate local and state governments outlawing the manually-driven kind on urban streets. I personally would really like this, because human drivers are an absolute nuisance to urban life in many ways. You can't use laws to make humans drive 25 on that road where everyone routinely goes 40. It just doesn't work, and the people whose houses are on that road suffer the noise and danger that results. You can, however, use laws to make algorithms respect the speed limit, because big companies will otherwise face big fines. That's why I want to see self driving cars.
- jokteur 4y ago
  You can also make the road narrower and put obstacles on the road to force to reduce the speed: it is very effective, and very cheap to install with little technology. Here is a typical example of narrow street with obstacles in Switzerland: https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8111357,7.1507033,3a,75y,167.48h,79.65t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1schP4kqDaDy3prbZf3tbrkg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656 https://www.google.com/maps/@46.8111357,7.1507033,3a,75y,167....
  - helen___keller 4y ago
    Correct, but that takes active effort on a road by road basis, which becomes a political problem on a road by road basis. In a world where all cars are automated, establishing speed limits is presumably something you do once and auto manufacturers will be forced to comply. Similarly, issues with cycling safety and pedestrian safety are instantly mitigated without complex study groups to examine why this or that particular intersection has seen three cycling fatalities. All of this is assuming the creation of currently-mythical technology, or course

pennaMan 4y ago

Ah yes, the scam companies that care more about raising vc money than solving the actual problem obviously would never make it happen. Then there's comma.ai that's the actual leader in the space having production units you can buy and fit into your car right now. Something the "experts" that seem to be expert only at reading company financial numbers seem to have missed.

rippercushions 4y ago
The article is mostly talking about Ford.

dkjaudyeqooe 4y ago

Actual self driving is likely to happen, but it's going to need some accommodations. They might be high-resolution mapping with the ability of (local) government to mark changes as they occur. Road workers with devices that can direct automated vehicles to avoid holes in the road and the like plus other special cases. Along the way there will be many stand-alone (self-parking) and in between (freeway/highway autonomous driving) functions that will be very useful and will be attractive to customers. If we're only talking about "the holy grail" unlimited full autonomy, then yes, it's probably not possible, since it approaches general intelligence.

Theodores 4y ago

I beg to differ. Self driving cars are unlikely to make it to the West but the outlook for the East (China) is totally different. In the West there are economic woes that will make the dream of everyone having 2.2 Teslas in the driveway not happen. There is no getting around this, the West is in a bit of a pickle. Meanwhile, in China they have an entirely different way of achieving self driving. That is to put 5G (6,7 or 8...) on everything. Therefore, when you approach a junction, the 5G gadgets at that junction with their all seeing eyes and ability to communicate with vehicles just tells your car where to go and when. By the magic of 5G it will also know what the deal is at the next point of decision, so your car can arrive for when the lights are green and you can be on your merry way. The sensors on the car can do the lane keeping assist and slam on the anchors should an unexpected object appear on the highway. There are aspects to this approach that are un-American. So it is not going to happen, even if a magic wand magically fixes economic woes that are far too structural for America to fix. You could say that the Chinese approach is not 'self driving' but 'networked driving'. But what is the big deal if your car whisks you off from A to B without having to touch the wheel?

rippercushions 4y ago
Do you have any pointers to this actually happening, or is this just your prediction? FWIW, I would not start with China if I was looking for an easy place to test self-driving cars. There's plenty of crazy drivers, remarkably heterogenous vehicles on the road including suicidal cyclists and all sorts of weird three-wheeled moped-scooter-truck things, signage is inconsistent and missing, road quality is widely variable, traffic jams can be epic, the list goes on and on.
Melting_Harps 4y ago
> You could say that the Chinese approach is not 'self driving' but 'networked driving'. But what is the big deal if your car whisks you off from A to B without having to touch the wheel? Would this before or after they've locked everyone under indefinite COVID detention, err... quarantine? Even if this were the way they justify the massive panopticon, there would be so few people that would benefit from this tech that one has to ask what was gained from doing so? The way QR codes made it's way to China isn't entirely just weibo or wechat alone, Xianjing relies on them as does all the AI facial recognition tech and is the very definition of an Authoritarian police-state and if that is what it 'takes' to get to mas adoption of Surveillance Tech than I think we are better off. Public transportation mixed wit WFH solutions seem far more favourable.

api 4y ago

It could probably be done today with richer sensors on the car than just visual and with "smart" roads outfitted with specialized symbols and transponders to guide the car. Pure self drive like humans do requires a cognitive model of cause and effect and the nature of the world being navigated, not just pattern recognition and prediction. Enormous advances in predictive and pattern recognizing AI have been made in recent years, but these things still don't "understand" anything. I put understand in quotes because I still don't think we understand understanding. The mistake of those who have bet the farm of self drive (Musk/Tesla being chief among them) is to jump the gun and think that the AI advances of the last decade have made it just a problem of scaling a technology. It's not. It's still a fundamental invention problem, not a scaling problem, but what we have is good enough to fool us into thinking we can get there. Musk's other big venture SpaceX can successfully build and scale rockets to send humans to the Moon and Mars. That's because that, unlike full self drive, is just a matter of scaling already thoroughly understood physics. We know exactly how to build such things. We just haven't done it yet (beyond Apollo).

dusted 4y ago

I think it's more likely that human-driven cars will become outlawed and infrastructure modified to accommodate fully-autonomous. It's not what I personally would want, as I simply enjoy driving cars and motorcycles, but it's what I think will eventually happen.

bsenftner 4y ago

It's time to admit this is a game: journalism plays with society by projecting dream-like nonsense on the technology industry. It's time to admit we have large institutionalized portions of society whose purpose is basically immature nonsense, such as pushing idolization of the entire landscape of fashion and celebrity.

ksidudwbw 4y ago

fsd beta looking cool with output of what it sees https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9qjDgVXco https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ui9qjDgVXco

GaylordTuring 4y ago

> Ford CEO Jim Farley justified this by saying on the company’s earnings call Wednesday evening that “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology for ourselves.” i.e., “Tesla has won, we’ll license the technology from them.”

bananapub 4y ago
... tesla doesn't have self-driving cars and doesn't even appear to have an actual plan to get them? they're in fact under investigation for their existing "autopilot" system killing people: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/26/tesla-criminal-investigation-self-driving-claims-sources https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2022/oct/26/tesla-cri...
Ekaros 4y ago
More that self-driving is not coming anytime soon and when it comes it will be commodity technology. So you are better off just buying it from someone else.

emptyfile 4y ago

Talking to a developer about self-driving cars is a good litmus test of sincerity and/or competence. Utterly unbelievable that Tesla is still selling "Full self driving" cars to customers.

silverpepsi 4y ago

I don't know if Tesla originated the approach, but they're the first I'd ever heard of doing it by my camera or radar or anything like that. I remember my first reaction was befuddlement, when highways cost like $xxx million per mile, why would the trivial cost of dropping electronic friendly markers for lanes and such be anything but a trivial 0.1% cost that should facilitate self driving from the road construction end as a primary means of situating self-driving vehicles? Instead you have cars with that forever risk of death to their passengers when self-driving due to the non deterministic factor of not having a highway equivalent of train rails.

f1shy 4y ago
This is what I wanted to say. Autonomous driving without changing a thing, will not happen soon. But changing some things, is totally possible.
phpnode 4y ago
exactly, NFC-like technology would be extremely inexpensive in the scheme of things and could be deployed into road surfaces without much difficulty. I remember seeing a video of self driving technology from the 90s that used a similar approach - magnets in the road IIRC
cameronh90 4y ago
It's inevitable that roads will eventually be built with electronic assists. However, there are good reasons to develop cars that can still drive without them. Given that the government would have to do it, it's going to be a really long time to completely retrofit our roads with these devices. We're still not putting them into new roads right now, nor am I aware of any international standard for doing so. A common standardised database of road works would have been useful for decades of GPS navigation but we still don't have that either - most countries don't have one at all, and the ones that do aren't standard (often even varying from city to city) and tend to be incomplete. Relying on the governments of the world to sort this out is a risky strategy. Secondly, even assuming we do get these systems in place, you can bet good money they will frequently be wrong. Some contractor will come and dig up the road but forget to move/disable/update the electronic markers. So having a parallel visual self driving system to help identify these situations is essential. Third, pedestrians, bicycles, kids, animals, etc. are unlikely to contain these markers. For trains, we just ban them from the track, put fences around it, etc. but that's clearly not going to work for most roads.

novalis78 4y ago

It boils down to the question whether AGI will happen during our lifetimes or not.

jwilk 4y ago

Archived copy without GDPR nag screen: https://web.archive.org/web/20221027152317/https://techcrunch.com/2022/10/27/self-driving-cars-arent-going-to-happen/ https://web.archive.org/web/20221027152317/https://techcrunc...

discopicante 4y ago

I have always been skeptical of FSD because of liability. The system we have today distributes liability to the driver in almost all circumstances – 94% to 96%, according to one quick statistic. It is difficult to imagine this liability being redistributed to a handful (or even 1 or 2) auto manufacturers who remove the driver from the equation. In other words, I am not sure that auto manufacturers can afford the liability assuming their system reaches a state in which it is 'safer' than a human driver under any condition. The cost of proving that in courts across the world may not be economically feasible.

akmarinov 4y ago
Mercedes already assumes liability for their L3 system, let’s see when others follow
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  More like - let's see when Mercedes will stop selling self driving systems or renounces liability for L3 systems when their self driving car will actually crush somebody.

Jemm 4y ago

Fortunately the system has been prepared for remotely piloted vehicles using partial AI and mostly remote humans over 5G.

gonzo41 4y ago

Just use trains and bicycles. We've had the answer for 100 years. I live where driving is a requirement. Self driving cars will not handle rural roads for a LONG time. And I really don't want something the size of a Cybertruck hurtling along the roads around where I live without someone actually doing some thinking.

TheLoafOfBread 4y ago

Self driving cars can react on what is happening around them (if sensor suite will catch that information) but are unable to predict what is happening around them, because they don't understand situation they are in.

smileysteve 4y ago
They're also unable to predict what the human drivers next to them will do because the human drivers don't understand the situation they are in. Anecdotally, the most common flaw I experience while driving (self or not) is me reacting to traffic in front while another car is only reacting to me, the car most immediately in front of them, passes (often erratically switching lanes), merges with less than a car length, only to slam on their brakes because the traffic in front of me has no openings.
- TheLoafOfBread 4y ago
  Like when children are approaching the pedestrian walk, then you can predict that they are going to cross. If not, then please return your driving license.

illuminerdy 4y ago

Self-driving cars will definitely happen. It won't happen next year, but it will absolutely happen. That's the way humans are. If they can do something and make some money, they will do it.

acdha 4y ago
Your last part is important, however: it’s quite possible that full self-driving vehicles might end up like supersonic passenger air travel where the cost is too high to be viable. For example, Uber’s valuation was based on the idea that self-driving cabs would be cheaper than paying a human driver. It would be very easy to imagine that if the vehicle costs $100k it’s cheaper to pay a driver minimum wage instead. This is especially worth thinking about in light of the climate crisis: single-passenger vehicles have much higher emissions than almost anything else, even for EVs, and if the users had to pay the accurate cost the break-even point would be even further away than it is now.

unnouinceput 4y ago

Q: Is this the same article style like the one from New York Times about humanity not able to fly in a million years 9 days before Wright brothers did it? (https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-impossible/ https://bigthink.com/pessimists-archive/air-space-flight-imp...) A: Yes, it is.

tim333 4y ago
It's more like predicting humans won't be able to fly a few months after the Wright brothers did it. Exhibit: Cruise cars driving happily in SF: https://youtu.be/DNOJFcwXdec?t=61 https://youtu.be/DNOJFcwXdec?t=61 OK they are not at "omnipresent scale" and aircraft took decades before we had proper flights with queues for security and baggage reclaim but I think tech moves faster these days.

throwaway09223 4y ago

This is not a great article. It's based around Ford admitting they're not a software company, that they won't be able to compete effectively in this space. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. This does not mean that self driving cars "aren't going to happen" -- in fact, the progress by industry leaders has been methodological and constant. The evidence clearly shows that it is happening, and has every indication of continuing to happen. Five years ago people were incredulous that a computer could pilot a car at all. Now, everyone has conceded that this is possible and the criticisms are about how a computer pilots a car and whether it should make more risky maneuvers. This is exactly what we would expect progress to look like. As progress continues, companies will learn whether or not it is profitable to develop competing products, or concede to market leaders. Ford has conceded. Rivian has conceded. They will license technology developed by other companies with more capable technical teams.

capitalsigma 4y ago
The author seems to think that all self driving companies are basically the same, so Ford must just be facing the harsh truth that everyone else is ignoring, vs Ford being outcompeted by companies with much stronger ML chops

JoeAltmaier 4y ago

Zoox has made a good start. They're technology-intensive with multiple sensor modes integrated with some heavy CPU power.

incomingpain 4y ago

>A couple caveats for those going apoplectic over the headline: I mean self-driving isn’t going to be a thing A) in our lifetimes and B) with any kind of omnipresent scale Sure, you cannot deny the fact that it already happening. There's a surprising number of driverless cars on the road already. In terms of meeting the 'omnipresent scale'. This is much harder. There's a ton of people whose life choices mean their car budget is <$5000. Which means they can only afford 20 year old death trap beaters. So how does society get to the point where $150,000 driverless cars can be afforded by those people? It's from the amortization table and depreciation. It might be decades before there can be any major proliferation. That isn't the goal of driverless. The obvious caveat is most manufacturers are working on subscription models. The interesting thing about the current system. A tremendous cost to society is the poor investment into transportation. You drive around a city and you'll see millions of $ sitting in driveways not doing anything. Whereas public transit is certainly not the alternative to this poor investment. This is where the driverless taxis come in. The people who genuinely use their vehicles to a significant extent can still do so, but most people really just need low cost transportation. Which is indeed why public transit must exist and also why large cities are repairing that huge wealth damage. In the near future public transit like buses will go away and be replaced by driverless taxis. Not exactly nostradamus to see that coming. This will be what presents driverless cars at an omnipresent scale. This absolutely will be happening very soon.

throwaway2016a 4y ago

Teslas (while much maligned and deservedly so) can already drive pretty well on most well painted and high traffic roads. Granted it is very conservative and often I take control just to avoid other drivers honking at me for taking too long to turn. But this article mentions L4 autonomy. L4 still allows for geofencing and human control. Tesla is already pretty much L3, borderline L4. I think it is realistic to say L5 won't exist until radical change to our infrastructure is made but to say L4 won't exist in our lifetimes... I mean, I suppose if you're 80 years old already. I also think it draws too radical a conclusion in the article. The conclusion is from the author. The people from Ford explicitly said they think that it will be developed independently and Ford will be able to buy it instead of having to make it themselves. Which is very different than "it won't happen in our lifetime." It seems they didn't decide to stop research because it is not possible but because oters can do it cheaper.

slaw 4y ago
Tesla is L2 and nowhere near L3.

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850 - Oct 2022 (481 comments) Even After $100B, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 - Oct 2022 (107 comments)

rnantes 4y ago

Cruise and Waymo are the clear market leaders in Autonomous Vehicles. Tracking the progress of these companies in the past year alone where they are operating with no safety driver in dense San Francisco is incredibly impressive. The field of machine learning in general is advancing at a great pace as well. I think by the end of the decade in places with limited weather events AV will be as common as Uber. At some point people will reconsider buying a new car and just rely on a robotaxi subscription along with walking, cycling, and transit to get around. It will be survival of the fittest though, only few companies will succeed. Tesla 'Autopilot' on the other hand doesn't even use Lidar, seems to disconnect frequently and is much more dangerous. I really think they use deceptive marketing.

fallingfrog 4y ago

I mean, what’s wrong with trolley cars and light rail? There’s your self driving car. I don’t think automated transportation is a technology problem, it’s more a political problem. Nobody wants to put money towards a system that is for use by the common public. Think about this: trolleys and light rail don’t require batteries, they are more efficient, the maintenance is way lower, they reduce traffic, what’s not to like? And it would be trivial to make them self-driving. But it’s politically unthinkable.

entropicgravity 4y ago

Self driving cars will happen but they will need a bit of help from their environment, just as human drivers need stop signs, light signals etc. I can see urban streets and freeways being first to succumb to self driving. Remote, lightly traveled roads will take a long time ie decades before self driving is safe there. The real conundrum of self driving is that if it becomes capable for 99.9% of situations people find when things go really bad, heavy snow storm, earthquake, floods, forest fires etc drivers will have lost their touch for driving just when they need it most and the self driving abandons them.