6 ms·

BYD says self-driving tech is more valuable in factories than cars

27 points by NN88 3y ago

arcticbull 3y ago
At least in town there were periods of time when huge quantities of people were on self-driving vehicles. We called them trains. In theory transit is the optimal solution for the vast majority of people, not cars. So from that perspective yeah it's probably more useful to have self-driving tech deployed in mapped areas you control, where the stakes are lower and you can do it really well with existing tech.
- asdfman123 3y ago
  It seems like instead of full self driving they should just paint down something like a yellow line that’s easier for the cars to follow.
  - alanbernstein 3y ago
    I imagine that it we put all the money into expanding city road infrastructure to include sensor networks, rather than autonomous cars, we'd get to the end goal faster and the hardware would be cheaper.
    - xnx 3y ago
      Sounds good in theory, but in the real world smart edges and dumb pipes are almost always the way to go (the Internet is a pretty good example of this).
    - onethought 3y ago
      This some how feels like: "Cover the world in leather rather than just wear shoes" kind of approach.
      - alanbernstein 3y ago
        I guess that would be a fair comparison if shoes were unbelievably complicated to build?
        onethought 3y ago
        Not really covering your feet with leather compared to the world is probably the same ratio of complexity as covering the world in sensors and autonomous driving terrain rather than deploying it on the cars.
        alanbernstein 3y ago
        And yet we have covered the world in paved surfaces
        onethought 3y ago
        Well I guess if we already did it, it must be smart/the best way to do things
        alanbernstein 3y ago
        Ah, so you're suggesting all vehicles should be designed for heavy off-road use, and we can get rid of all the roads?
        onethought 3y ago
        No, just “we covered the world in cement” is not a good reason to keep covering it. Definitely doesn’t justify adding autonomous sensors and paint and whatever else to the whole world to achieve autonomous driving. So I was being polite leaving that conclusion for the reader. But I can see I wasn’t clear enough. Given we cycle cars much more often than we cycle roads (globally) makes sense to update the technology on the car.
  - gojomo 3y ago
    There have been self-driving busses that use such painted guides on fixed routes; here's a story where Las Vegas was testing such a system using the tech of 22 years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/technology/what-s-next-it-s-a-trolley-it-s-a-rail-car-no-it-s-an-optically-guided-bus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/technology/what-s-next-it... But, I doubt they'd be much help for passenger cars on diverse urban per-trip routes: * roads are constantly wearing & being trenched or resurfaced; the lines would often be broken or need refreshing, necessitating an effective 'lineless' mode * cars often need to improvise (including briefly into oncoming lanes) to get around temporary blockages, and need to pull away from the major maintained lanes – again requiring confident off-line operation * after car sensors/decisionmaking can handle all the other challenges & collisions/traps to avoid, merely following lanes (when needed) is not hard at all: guidelines help with an easy, essentially-solved problem but not the actual potential deployment blockers Full-unattended self-driving cars are working pretty well in SF right now - on a nighttime walk you'll see many, which are behaviorally only a little more cautious/tentative than human drivers. So, it's only the branding & empty driver's seat that distinguishes them.
  - danaris 3y ago
    Are you familiar with our rural road infrastructure? There are roads out here that don't even have lines, because they go so long between maintenance cycles that if they did paint them, they'd fade fast enough that they'd still spend more time without lines than with. And how do you handle complicated intersections? Ones where there's 6 different roads all meeting in one place, with three separate pedestrian crosswalks, and traffic lights that handle directing the traffic to various different combinations of possible outflow roads?
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > when huge quantities of people were on self-driving vehicles. We called them trains Are most trains self-piloting?
  - pdc56 3y ago
    If two people are in a car, 50% of them are driving. If 100 people are on a train, 1% of them are driving. My point here is that even trains with drivers can be considered close to driver less vs people driving cars.
    - onethought 3y ago
      So Self driving is door to door. Train suffers from the same problems as "last mile delivery" (i.e it skips the hard part).
      - arcticbull 3y ago
        Most successful transit systems are a short couple minutes walk to the train station, bus stop or streetcar. No further than walking from the parking lot to your destination in a lot of cases. Cars are really only 'door to door' in the suburbs when commuting between two homes with driveways. Otherwise they're no different than a decent transit system. I do find it interesting how people automatically assume all driving is door-to-door, forget about parking lots, forget about finding street parking, etc. and immediately talk about how transit can't work based on the same issue.
        JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Cars are really only 'door to door' in the suburbs when commuting between two homes with driveways American suburbs are incompatible with trains. In cities, Uber is door to door. I get the broader point. But at this crossroad, re-designing our cities for trains is a moot point. We could have, we should have, but we didn’t. Similar to African and Southeast Asian countries leapfrogging copper for mobile and fibre, electric self-driving point-to-point (perhaps with sub regional rail and more-efficient air) looks like the clear future for America, a rich and spread-out country.
- FridayoLeary 3y ago
  >In theory transit is the optimal solution for the vast majority of people, not cars. Not when the train drivers go on strike. In the uk we know all about driverless trains...
- kallistisoft 3y ago
  You can go back in time before the invention of the train and find autonomous transportation!!! People used to own 'vehicles' that were capable of automatic obstacle avoidance and fully autonomous navigation to predefined locations. These vehicles were even capable of refueling themselves, self-repairing minor damage, and even self-assembling new units!! Occasionally the they would glitch and cause unexpected behaviors, and given the technology of the time, the waste products from the 'fuel cell' would cause problems, but they worked pretty well... Eventually they were replaced by the non-intelligent automobiles, but they are still the preferred method of ground transport in rocky/uneven terrain, and can occasionally be seen in urban environments during parades, or being used for crowd control. We called them horses ;)
  - arcticbull 3y ago
    I appreciate your sense of humor but horses were far from self-driving :) In fact the etymology of the words "driver" and "driving" may surprise you. > The origin of the term driver, as recorded from the 15th century, refers to the occupation of driving working animals, especially pack horses or draft horses. The verb ' to drive ' in origin means "to force to move, to impel by physical force". It's literally the job you're implying doesn't exist, heh. Further, the next iteration of transportation after the horse was actually the electric car in the early 1830s, long before the gas car (1886). The arc of history is surprisingly bendy.
    - m348e912 3y ago
      > ... but horses were far from self-driving :) Kind of. But it doesn't get more self driving than this: https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-deputy-drunk-amish-guy-buggy https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-deputy-drunk-amish-guy-buggy Ohio deputy encounters 'drunk Amish guy' slumped over in moving buggy: 'The horse knows how to get home'
noahmbarr 3y ago
Hard to reconcile with the driverless car that just rolled by me as I’m walking down the street in San Francisco. I can’t imagine this is going to age well.
- rgmerk 3y ago
  If - big if - autonomous vehicles can be made to work everywhere, it’s almost as big a leap as the car itself. But boy it’s taken a lot of time and money to get from “mostly there” to “a bit more mostly there”.
  - gojomo 3y ago
    It took over 30 years to go from, say, the Model T (1908) to the 1st automatic transmission in a mass-produced passenger car (1939). The 1st "DARPA Grand Challenge" was in 2004 – when not a single entrant made it further than 8 miles on a 150 mile course of some early stationary obstacles then some straightforward highway driving. Now, just 19 years later, unattended driverless cars are offering reliable commercial service in a real, challenging urban environment. Of course, at times hyperoptimists & promoters had expected this milestone ~5ish years ago. But that's still pretty quick progress! They don't have to work everywhere to be incredibly useful. I'm pretty sure they'll have problems on things like snowy roads, & exceptionally poor roads or extreme-outlier traffic tie-ups, for perhaps another decade. But for many uses, they're already "here".
    - rgmerk 3y ago
      “Here” in two American cities, and as I understand it (correct me if I’m wrong) only in low-traffic conditions, and by a company that has almost limitless financial backing and is prepared to lose whatever is necessary. How much is it going to cost to make them work in London? Tokyo? Beijing? Sydney? Delhi?
      - gojomo 3y ago
        Three cities: * 24/7 in San Francisco, over most of the city for their test riders, over part of the city at night for paid customers. (I see their cars all over at night, and occasionally during the day, through every kind of street & congestion.) * evenings in Austin, downtown/campus central area * evenings in Phoenix, central area They've given hints Dallas is next. The maps & hours declared on their website have sometimes lagged actual availability in their app. GM doesn't quite have "limitless" financial backing – it doesn't have its mid-20thC dominance any more! GM was bankrupt as recently as 2009, and has been lagging other companies in some important ways. But yes: it's an important project for GM, which strikes me as a reason to expect rapid progress in tech and rollout will continue, rather than a reason to expect a slowdown. Though SF is where they have the largest fleet, & most testing, bringing on the initial Austin zone/service supposedly took just 90 days from project-start to 1st rides. I used to live in Austin, & was there (& noticed Cruise's cars operating there) a few weeks ago. The central zone they're covering is one of the more congested & idiosyncratic areas to drive – as opposed to newer/wider/calmer roads further out. I've driven a bit in Sydney; don't recall it being any harder than SF. I've walked & otherwise travelled lots of the busiest parts of London, Tokyo, & Beijing. There's more of everything, including megawide avenues, giant intersections, & narrow old alleys – but nothing totally different from what's already been mastered among SF's hills, alleys, illogical intersections, dedicated streetcar/bus lanes, unruly traffic, assertive pedestrians & cyclists, and erratic jaywalkers/skaters/derelicts. Here's an illustrative video of a self-driving Cruise navigating San Francisco's North Beach – a difficult area any time or day – on a busy St Patrick's Day night with streets filled with cars & revelers: https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1641123102858919953 https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1641123102858919953 Can't speak to Delhi, or Kiev, or Moscow, or Havana, or Port-au-Prince. Everyplace has its difficulties. But autonomous cars are working well, right now, in tough places, as the whole stack of sensors, logic, data, & computation keeps getting faster, better, & cheaper. Remaining political & social challenges are likely bigger than technical blocks.
asdfman123 3y ago
s/more valuable/maybe actually works
jval 3y ago
People who can't do it will tell you that it can't be done :-)
senectus1 3y ago
certainly much easier to control the variables in a factory... you dont have to worry about kids on e-scooters or potholes or weather problems or drunk drivers etc etc
onethought 3y ago
I haven't used it myself, but haven't Tesla/Waymo/Cruise all definitely validated it is not "impossible" (like BYD are claiming). They are all working on making it more reliable, not "validating if it's possible". Also, Didn't Tesla Autopilot originate from factory automation/self QAing car in factory? (Maybe I misread that, and I can't find reference now). This feels like a very big "We are giving up on that" call from BYD.
- Animats 3y ago
  Well, not Tesla (the self-driving demo through Los Altos Hills was faked), but Waymo, Cruise, and AutoX have hundreds of real self-driving vehicles operating on real roads in major cities.
  - onethought 3y ago
    Not to turn this into a Tesla thread too much, but there are hundreds of unique trips on YouTube that are more impressive than the Los Altos Hills footage. From an outsider perspective Tesla are the clear leader here on the technology. But the others seem to have commercialised quicker with a more limited scope.
xiphias2 3y ago
BYD has done amazing, growing more than 2x / year its EV output even at Tesla's scale, executing beautifully on Tesla's mission. It's the Android of EVs at this point (low margin cheap cars). Tesla will probably double down on high margin features, like self driving, as I'm not sure it will be able to compete in price with BYD.
intended 3y ago
Yeah. Driving data is culture specific. I have rarely, if ever seen this point hammered home. Simply put, a vehicle trained on US driving data will not manage in many developing nations. You do not control the variables on the road, driving data is by default contingent. The only way to make level 5 to work is if data from road side sensors or a mesh constantly updates driving models. For me this veers wayyy too close to central control. Factories are perfect on the other hand, because you DO control the variables.

27 points by NN88 3y ago

At least in town there were periods of time when huge quantities of people were on self-driving vehicles. We called them trains. In theory transit is the optimal solution for the vast majority of people, not cars. So from that perspective yeah it's probably more useful to have self-driving tech deployed in mapped areas you control, where the stakes are lower and you can do it really well with existing tech.

asdfman123 3y ago
It seems like instead of full self driving they should just paint down something like a yellow line that’s easier for the cars to follow.
- alanbernstein 3y ago
  I imagine that it we put all the money into expanding city road infrastructure to include sensor networks, rather than autonomous cars, we'd get to the end goal faster and the hardware would be cheaper.
  - xnx 3y ago
    Sounds good in theory, but in the real world smart edges and dumb pipes are almost always the way to go (the Internet is a pretty good example of this).
  - onethought 3y ago
    This some how feels like: "Cover the world in leather rather than just wear shoes" kind of approach.
    - alanbernstein 3y ago
      I guess that would be a fair comparison if shoes were unbelievably complicated to build?
      - onethought 3y ago
        Not really covering your feet with leather compared to the world is probably the same ratio of complexity as covering the world in sensors and autonomous driving terrain rather than deploying it on the cars.
        alanbernstein 3y ago
        And yet we have covered the world in paved surfaces
        onethought 3y ago
        Well I guess if we already did it, it must be smart/the best way to do things
        alanbernstein 3y ago
        Ah, so you're suggesting all vehicles should be designed for heavy off-road use, and we can get rid of all the roads?
        onethought 3y ago
        No, just “we covered the world in cement” is not a good reason to keep covering it. Definitely doesn’t justify adding autonomous sensors and paint and whatever else to the whole world to achieve autonomous driving. So I was being polite leaving that conclusion for the reader. But I can see I wasn’t clear enough. Given we cycle cars much more often than we cycle roads (globally) makes sense to update the technology on the car.
- gojomo 3y ago
  There have been self-driving busses that use such painted guides on fixed routes; here's a story where Las Vegas was testing such a system using the tech of 22 years ago: https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/technology/what-s-next-it-s-a-trolley-it-s-a-rail-car-no-it-s-an-optically-guided-bus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/26/technology/what-s-next-it... But, I doubt they'd be much help for passenger cars on diverse urban per-trip routes: * roads are constantly wearing & being trenched or resurfaced; the lines would often be broken or need refreshing, necessitating an effective 'lineless' mode * cars often need to improvise (including briefly into oncoming lanes) to get around temporary blockages, and need to pull away from the major maintained lanes – again requiring confident off-line operation * after car sensors/decisionmaking can handle all the other challenges & collisions/traps to avoid, merely following lanes (when needed) is not hard at all: guidelines help with an easy, essentially-solved problem but not the actual potential deployment blockers Full-unattended self-driving cars are working pretty well in SF right now - on a nighttime walk you'll see many, which are behaviorally only a little more cautious/tentative than human drivers. So, it's only the branding & empty driver's seat that distinguishes them.
- danaris 3y ago
  Are you familiar with our rural road infrastructure? There are roads out here that don't even have lines, because they go so long between maintenance cycles that if they did paint them, they'd fade fast enough that they'd still spend more time without lines than with. And how do you handle complicated intersections? Ones where there's 6 different roads all meeting in one place, with three separate pedestrian crosswalks, and traffic lights that handle directing the traffic to various different combinations of possible outflow roads?
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> when huge quantities of people were on self-driving vehicles. We called them trains Are most trains self-piloting?
- pdc56 3y ago
  If two people are in a car, 50% of them are driving. If 100 people are on a train, 1% of them are driving. My point here is that even trains with drivers can be considered close to driver less vs people driving cars.
  - onethought 3y ago
    So Self driving is door to door. Train suffers from the same problems as "last mile delivery" (i.e it skips the hard part).
    - arcticbull 3y ago
      Most successful transit systems are a short couple minutes walk to the train station, bus stop or streetcar. No further than walking from the parking lot to your destination in a lot of cases. Cars are really only 'door to door' in the suburbs when commuting between two homes with driveways. Otherwise they're no different than a decent transit system. I do find it interesting how people automatically assume all driving is door-to-door, forget about parking lots, forget about finding street parking, etc. and immediately talk about how transit can't work based on the same issue.
      - JumpCrisscross 3y ago
        > Cars are really only 'door to door' in the suburbs when commuting between two homes with driveways American suburbs are incompatible with trains. In cities, Uber is door to door. I get the broader point. But at this crossroad, re-designing our cities for trains is a moot point. We could have, we should have, but we didn’t. Similar to African and Southeast Asian countries leapfrogging copper for mobile and fibre, electric self-driving point-to-point (perhaps with sub regional rail and more-efficient air) looks like the clear future for America, a rich and spread-out country.
FridayoLeary 3y ago
>In theory transit is the optimal solution for the vast majority of people, not cars. Not when the train drivers go on strike. In the uk we know all about driverless trains...
kallistisoft 3y ago
You can go back in time before the invention of the train and find autonomous transportation!!! People used to own 'vehicles' that were capable of automatic obstacle avoidance and fully autonomous navigation to predefined locations. These vehicles were even capable of refueling themselves, self-repairing minor damage, and even self-assembling new units!! Occasionally the they would glitch and cause unexpected behaviors, and given the technology of the time, the waste products from the 'fuel cell' would cause problems, but they worked pretty well... Eventually they were replaced by the non-intelligent automobiles, but they are still the preferred method of ground transport in rocky/uneven terrain, and can occasionally be seen in urban environments during parades, or being used for crowd control. We called them horses ;)
- arcticbull 3y ago
  I appreciate your sense of humor but horses were far from self-driving :) In fact the etymology of the words "driver" and "driving" may surprise you. > The origin of the term driver, as recorded from the 15th century, refers to the occupation of driving working animals, especially pack horses or draft horses. The verb ' to drive ' in origin means "to force to move, to impel by physical force". It's literally the job you're implying doesn't exist, heh. Further, the next iteration of transportation after the horse was actually the electric car in the early 1830s, long before the gas car (1886). The arc of history is surprisingly bendy.
  - m348e912 3y ago
    > ... but horses were far from self-driving :) Kind of. But it doesn't get more self driving than this: https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-deputy-drunk-amish-guy-buggy https://www.foxnews.com/us/ohio-deputy-drunk-amish-guy-buggy Ohio deputy encounters 'drunk Amish guy' slumped over in moving buggy: 'The horse knows how to get home'

noahmbarr 3y ago

Hard to reconcile with the driverless car that just rolled by me as I’m walking down the street in San Francisco. I can’t imagine this is going to age well.

rgmerk 3y ago
If - big if - autonomous vehicles can be made to work everywhere, it’s almost as big a leap as the car itself. But boy it’s taken a lot of time and money to get from “mostly there” to “a bit more mostly there”.
- gojomo 3y ago
  It took over 30 years to go from, say, the Model T (1908) to the 1st automatic transmission in a mass-produced passenger car (1939). The 1st "DARPA Grand Challenge" was in 2004 – when not a single entrant made it further than 8 miles on a 150 mile course of some early stationary obstacles then some straightforward highway driving. Now, just 19 years later, unattended driverless cars are offering reliable commercial service in a real, challenging urban environment. Of course, at times hyperoptimists & promoters had expected this milestone ~5ish years ago. But that's still pretty quick progress! They don't have to work everywhere to be incredibly useful. I'm pretty sure they'll have problems on things like snowy roads, & exceptionally poor roads or extreme-outlier traffic tie-ups, for perhaps another decade. But for many uses, they're already "here".
  - rgmerk 3y ago
    “Here” in two American cities, and as I understand it (correct me if I’m wrong) only in low-traffic conditions, and by a company that has almost limitless financial backing and is prepared to lose whatever is necessary. How much is it going to cost to make them work in London? Tokyo? Beijing? Sydney? Delhi?
    - gojomo 3y ago
      Three cities: * 24/7 in San Francisco, over most of the city for their test riders, over part of the city at night for paid customers. (I see their cars all over at night, and occasionally during the day, through every kind of street & congestion.) * evenings in Austin, downtown/campus central area * evenings in Phoenix, central area They've given hints Dallas is next. The maps & hours declared on their website have sometimes lagged actual availability in their app. GM doesn't quite have "limitless" financial backing – it doesn't have its mid-20thC dominance any more! GM was bankrupt as recently as 2009, and has been lagging other companies in some important ways. But yes: it's an important project for GM, which strikes me as a reason to expect rapid progress in tech and rollout will continue, rather than a reason to expect a slowdown. Though SF is where they have the largest fleet, & most testing, bringing on the initial Austin zone/service supposedly took just 90 days from project-start to 1st rides. I used to live in Austin, & was there (& noticed Cruise's cars operating there) a few weeks ago. The central zone they're covering is one of the more congested & idiosyncratic areas to drive – as opposed to newer/wider/calmer roads further out. I've driven a bit in Sydney; don't recall it being any harder than SF. I've walked & otherwise travelled lots of the busiest parts of London, Tokyo, & Beijing. There's more of everything, including megawide avenues, giant intersections, & narrow old alleys – but nothing totally different from what's already been mastered among SF's hills, alleys, illogical intersections, dedicated streetcar/bus lanes, unruly traffic, assertive pedestrians & cyclists, and erratic jaywalkers/skaters/derelicts. Here's an illustrative video of a self-driving Cruise navigating San Francisco's North Beach – a difficult area any time or day – on a busy St Patrick's Day night with streets filled with cars & revelers: https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1641123102858919953 https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1641123102858919953 Can't speak to Delhi, or Kiev, or Moscow, or Havana, or Port-au-Prince. Everyplace has its difficulties. But autonomous cars are working well, right now, in tough places, as the whole stack of sensors, logic, data, & computation keeps getting faster, better, & cheaper. Remaining political & social challenges are likely bigger than technical blocks.

asdfman123 3y ago

s/more valuable/maybe actually works

jval 3y ago

People who can't do it will tell you that it can't be done :-)

senectus1 3y ago

certainly much easier to control the variables in a factory... you dont have to worry about kids on e-scooters or potholes or weather problems or drunk drivers etc etc

onethought 3y ago

I haven't used it myself, but haven't Tesla/Waymo/Cruise all definitely validated it is not "impossible" (like BYD are claiming). They are all working on making it more reliable, not "validating if it's possible". Also, Didn't Tesla Autopilot originate from factory automation/self QAing car in factory? (Maybe I misread that, and I can't find reference now). This feels like a very big "We are giving up on that" call from BYD.

Animats 3y ago
Well, not Tesla (the self-driving demo through Los Altos Hills was faked), but Waymo, Cruise, and AutoX have hundreds of real self-driving vehicles operating on real roads in major cities.
- onethought 3y ago
  Not to turn this into a Tesla thread too much, but there are hundreds of unique trips on YouTube that are more impressive than the Los Altos Hills footage. From an outsider perspective Tesla are the clear leader here on the technology. But the others seem to have commercialised quicker with a more limited scope.

xiphias2 3y ago

BYD has done amazing, growing more than 2x / year its EV output even at Tesla's scale, executing beautifully on Tesla's mission. It's the Android of EVs at this point (low margin cheap cars). Tesla will probably double down on high margin features, like self driving, as I'm not sure it will be able to compete in price with BYD.

intended 3y ago

Yeah. Driving data is culture specific. I have rarely, if ever seen this point hammered home. Simply put, a vehicle trained on US driving data will not manage in many developing nations. You do not control the variables on the road, driving data is by default contingent. The only way to make level 5 to work is if data from road side sensors or a mesh constantly updates driving models. For me this veers wayyy too close to central control. Factories are perfect on the other hand, because you DO control the variables.