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The death of self-driving cars is greatly exaggerated
- gdiamos 3y agoSelf driving hype and investment got ahead of the tech.
- VectorLock 3y agoSeems to be the unfortunate progression of almost every potentially transformative technology.
- paulcole 3y agoThe life of self-driving cars also seems to have been greatly exaggerated.
- marssaxman 3y agoIt does seem awfully strange to talk about "the death of self-driving cars" when they haven't actually arrived yet!
- relativ575 3y agoTrue, but that's exactly what has been popular in HN, that self driving is a pipe dream.
- valine 3y agoTesla gets a bad rap because of their notorious missed deadlines. They continue to chip away at the problem though, and have a large number of people paying them to use their beta software. The fact that they’ve figured out how to make income from unfinished self driving software makes them, in my opinion, likely to succeed eventually. For everyone else self driving is a money pit. Tesla can continue working the problem indefinitely until it’s solved.
- Animats 3y agoJust because a scam is profitable for the scammer doesn't mean the thing being sold works.
- valine 3y agoIt kind of works, that’s the point. I pay for an FSD subscription because I get enjoyment from my car driving me around. Am I being scammed?
- agentgumshoe 3y agoWhen people have already been scammed, they will argue till blue in the face that it's not a scam, even if it's clear it is to everyone else... So if I said yes, what's your response? No, of course. Not saying everyone thinks it's a scam here, just that your argument it's not doesn't do much with the bias of already paying...
- valine 3y agoI pay some money once a month for my car to drive me around. My car then drives me around. My argument is that since I’m paying month by month I clearly know what I’m buying and have properly evaluated the value proposition. The classic argument that FSD is a scam because consumers don’t understand what they’re buying falls apart when FSD is a no contract subscription service.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoDoes the car fully self drive, or does it require human supervision by a licensed driver in a particular seat? Sounds like FSD doesn’t actually FSD. In other words, you know what you’re buying is not what’s advertised so it isn’t a scam?
- judge2020 3y agoThe argument is that you know what you're buying, full stop. It doesn't matter what's being advertised, unless you intend to sue for false advertising, in which your best bet is to lie the whole time and say that you based your purchase entirely off of the advertising.
- jp57 3y agoI think there's a question of what bar you're trying to reach. The mid-teens driverless car hype seemed to promise ubiquitous driverless cabs everywhere. I think what people will expect is that you can call them and they'll come any time a human-driven Uber would come. By that I mean on a rainy night, or in the winter in a northern city. I really would like to see them operating year-round in someplace like Boston or, better, Pittsburgh (SF-like hills but with snow).
- tuatoru 3y agoI'd like to see them operating year-round in Delhi and Lagos.
- whywhywhydude 3y agoTesla’s insistence on using vision alone is pretty dumb. Elon and Andrej Karpathy argued that since humans can drive using just vision, that’s how we should do it in self driving cars, but I think that’s a flawed argument. The proper question to ask would be - if given additional senses, wouldn’t humans use them for safer driving?
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- Dalewyn 3y agoHuman vision is simply converting rays of visible light sensed by our light sensors (aka eyes) into electric signals which are subsequently converted into an image by our brain which is then processed. Given that, perceiving the environment with radar, lidar, visible light, infrared, and so on is equivalent to human vision. As far as I'm aware, Tesla uses more than just visible light sensors. Am I wrong in my understanding?
- selcuka 3y agoPark sensors, for example, use radar but they are not equivalent to human vision because humans can't see the back of the car, and they can't measure the distance as accurately.
- Dalewyn 3y agoI meant that they are equivalent in a very fundamentalist sense. You have input, taken by sensors, converted into usable form by a processor. There is no fundamental difference between visible light and radio waves, per se.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoI thought parking sensors used ultrasonic. Wouldn’t that make them sonar?
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- Animats 3y agoThe amusing thing is that there are both articles saying self-driving cars are far away, and articles complaining there are too many self-driving cars in their neighborhood.
- DowsingSpoon 3y agoI don’t find it amusing or ironic. That both of those things are true at the same time is telling. There are too many self-driving cars in certain places like SF. This is noticeable, and is a problem, because self-driving cars are incompetent drivers. This, it certainly seems, is a major problem that will be with us for some time. What we were promised is far away.
- Animats 3y agoNYC has traffic jams composed entirely of yellow taxis. The self-driving cars at least report to a control center that can spread them out.
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- fragmede 3y agoJust responding to the headline, Cruise just started rolling out service to the whole city of San Francisco. Before it was limited to areas and times that were hard to take advantage of, but now it's opening up to the whole city (still late night only) so it's started competing with Uber-Lyft for late night rides. we'll just have to wait and see what effect it has on the transportation system as a whole.
- mkw5053 3y agoAnd it’s so much better than a Lyft or Uber. They are clean. Don’t try to talk to you. And take the GOS-recommended routes.
- moomoo11 3y agoI mean.. they're clean right now. Think about when they're GA. You're going to have all sorts of people, not just the invited few as it is right now(fellow techies and such, who mostly are not going to trash and destroy property). The public transit is gross most of the time with trash, vandalism, and grimy seats. Do you really think people are going to treat cars well where they're all alone inside (when have cameras stopped some people from being vile?)? IMO these AI car services should be priced at a premium above Uber/Lyft. I want individual door to door service any time, with a guarantee it will be clean and comfortable. Otherwise, I'm always opting for my own car.
- brenns10 3y agoI don't know if you meant it this way but you sound so classist with this garbage. Afraid of the non-techies coming in and being 'vile' and trashing things? You only want to share space with wealthy, upper class people, as if they're the only ones who know how to respect public space? Are Uber and Lyft not also GA? Are their cars also trashed? Seems strange that you picked on public transit as if the "unwashed masses" can't also order an Uber. The public transit in SF is definitely not vile or trashed. Sometimes there's a bit of litter on the ground. Not grimy seats. I've never seen it the way you describe it and I ride several times a week.
- gary_0 3y agoSelf-driving just suffers from good old software project time underestimation and overpromising executives. It's quite possible to outdo a human at keeping rolling boxes from hitting each other and the unpredictable human particles buzzing around them. (Mainly because humans suck at paying attention and don't have millisecond response times.) It's also quite possible to put people on the moon, but budgetary appetites are always the limiting factor. So self-driving can still die if the difficulty exceeds the money and patience of the people footing the billions. Shareholders are free to say "why are we still paying for this when we were promised success 5 years ago?" and demand the plug be pulled. I hope they don't, but I also hoped NASA would get a higher budget.
- Invictus0 3y agoHumans have 0.2s response time. It’s astoundingly good. I’m in robotics and our pipeline time is nowhere remotely near 0.2s.
- marcosdumay 3y agoWell, not for anything complex. We can't even compensate some unexpected steering in 0.2s, while robots can do that in some µs.
- gary_0 3y agoIf you're measuring a human in front a screen with their finger on a button, and the human is young, healthy, and fully alert, then you get 0.2s. Some electronic safety systems[0] can indeed physically respond in µs. Some robotics might have lag due to mechanical slack or software/processing limitations, but that can always be improved. Whereas humans are never going to do better than 0.2s and will usually do much worse, especially if they have to turn their head, focus their eyes, and manipulate physical controls. [0]for example: https://youtu.be/ynEdke5dzIU?t=10 https://youtu.be/ynEdke5dzIU?t=10
- openweb 3y ago(Sub-elite) sprinters average a response time of 119ms https://www.basvanhooren.com/is-it-possible-to-react-faster-than-100-ms-in-a-sprint-start/ https://www.basvanhooren.com/is-it-possible-to-react-faster-...
- TheCaptain4815 3y agoI get executives over promise and Elon especially, but he's admitted to the difficulty and how FSD was harder than anyone suspected. Why all of a sudden in his videos does he seem extremely confident where he's been silent-ish the past few years? I've seen in numerous recent videos him mentioning Tesla's Ai team is the #1 real world AI company and no one is even close, and that FSD will be here very soon.
- croes 3y ago>I've seen in numerous recent videos him mentioning Tesla's Ai team is the #1 real world AI company and no one is even close, Marketing babble >and that FSD will be here very soon. Same story he told the last 5 years.
- michaelsshaw 3y ago> FSD was harder than anyone suspected Literally the only thing most people know about FSD is that it is hard. This is very on brand for Elon: 1. Claim something is super simple and easy 2. Get billion dollar contracts for vaporware 3. Fail to actually achieve anything remotely useful 4. Go silent see: The Boring Company, Hyperloop, FSD, etc... > Tesla's Ai team is the #1 real world AI company Big doubt on that one, I'm sorry, but it's almost certainly false.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago> This is very on brand for Elon: I don’t think SpaceX is a failure in general, and Tesla seems to sell a lot of EVs, I feel like 10 years ago their were many comments on HN that both were impossible achievements. Not really a fan of musk, I bought a BMW i4 instead of a Tesla (although not for dislike of Musk), but the Musk haters seem to have a worse track record on their predictions than the Musk fanboys.
- michaelsshaw 3y ago>I don’t think SpaceX is a failure in general I do take issue with this because I don't really see how a company that essentially leeches off Uncle Sam's bottomless pockets can tell its workers they need to be more "hardcore" or face bankruptcy if Starship doesn't work by EOY 2023
- parentheses 3y agoAI improvements will eventually make their way to self driving. It has too much economic value to fade away. The question is whether self driving cars will be the cause or beneficiary of future innovation. There was a time when it was a cause. It looks like that's changing.
- mberning 3y agoPeople desperately need to keep this grift going. They have enjoyed the billions invested up to this point, and do not want that money to stop.
- MangoCoffee 3y agoArgo AI "grift" stop. there goes your whole narrative.
- tomxor 3y ago> they’re already testing it in Phoenix and San Francisco It's not dead, it's just extremely niche. Try testing in the sticks in country roads in England. Most people from the US who try that for the first time are terrified, and that's not even the worst of it, roads world wide are complex, diverse and require immense adaptability and negotiation. Negotiation of large, well defined city roads is only progress towards that niche not arbitrary self driving ability.
- local_crmdgeon 3y agoThe % of total English driving that occurs on country roads is miniscule. That's the niche* usecase. The vast majority of driving occurs in sub/urban areas. The rate of driving even within the city of London/Manchester/Cambridge is dropping like a rock. If you solve the 80% of that use case, you still have most of the thing, and that seems close.
- acdha 3y agoThe problem is that these systems can't handle a ton of “edge” cases which are actually fairly common — they work in the best case scenarios when conditions are normal, weather is decent, other drivers are behaving, etc. That could, as you point out, still replace a LOT of human driving time but there are two challenges: the first is that you don't know when road or weather conditions will change unexpectedly and require human intervention, and the second is that there's a fair cost to having these systems. That extra cost is easy to justify when the pitch is “you get a robot chauffeur and can watch a movie or sleep” but not when it's “you need to be ready to step in at a moment's notice because we just encountered inconsistent markings, road work, or a spill”. I am expecting something like the automatic convoying some of the trucking companies have been experimenting with to be more successful since they avoid the tedium aspects (they're already paying a driver to handle everything), don't drive in terrible conditions or unusual roadways, and since they get heavy utilization of the vehicles there isn't the problem of paying even more for something which already sits idle 95% of the time.
- storkhm 3y ago
- ChrisMarshallNY 3y agoIsn’t this the same story Ars Technica had, a couple of days ago? https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/06/the-death-of-self-driving-cars-is-greatly-exaggerated/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/06/the-death-of-self-drivi...
- jasmer 3y agoSo private fleets aside, when will it be out-of-the-box on my Toyota? Are we at diminishing marginal returns and not getting closer? Do we need a 'leap' in AI? Or is this just a matter of grinding it out?
- dmbche 3y agoWhat's the actual expected positive outcome when we get automatic driving cars? Marginal efficiency gains? Possibly - impossible to prove - less deaths cause by cars? What else? Is it worth all this hype, money and brain/manpower? Should we chase other things?
- HPsquared 3y agoMore phone time
- ramraj07 3y agoThe irony being I get nauseus if look at my phone in a moving car. In a potential future with self driving cars i do see massive benefits for women wanting safe rides home. Many still have hard time with being creeped out by drivers often enough.
- rcpt 3y agoLess deaths. This is a huge win.
- emceestork 3y agoI imagine a world in which I can take a road trip while asleep in my car (or reading or working). That would be pretty wonderful.
- manicennui 3y agoYou mean like a train?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ravitation 3y agoA majority of the use cases for self-driving cars are either solvable, or already solved, by some combination of better urban planning (i.e. zoning and probably large-scale regulatory reform), public transit (specifically useful public transit), and public investment. Unfortunately, in the United States, we are unable to do even one of these things sufficiently well, hence the need for self-driving cars (or, in some cases, some other technological solution; e.g. hyperloop).
- kbos87 3y agoSo many armchair opinions here about Tesla FSD. It drove me 175 miles today from a dense and complicated city to a distant destination without me intervening once. Reading the comments here you’d think it’s completely smoke and mirrors.
- MangoCoffee 3y agoi noticed on HN. if you gave Tesla/Elon any credits. you get down voted.
- LanceJones 3y agoAbsolutely true. A lot of emotions on this forum.
- bboygravity 3y agoThis tells me the FUD/smearing campaigns by hedge funds that are (or have been) short Tesla have been extremely effective at brainwashing everybody including the relatively intelligent who roam HN. The average (hedge fund owned) media outlet, especially the financial ones, basically read "please remember to hate Elon".
- jillesvangurp 3y agoYep, it's either science fiction or science fact. There seems to be a lot of opinionated people that insist they can counter reality by yelling harder. But their points of view don't necessarily align with the facts. My view is very simple. Lots of people insist that this stuff is dangerous and will kill people. Lots of Tesla FSD capable cars are on the road and are racking up billions of miles. Where are the traffic deaths? Where are the countless crashses? Those supposedly dangerous situations escalating all the time? It's all failing to happen as people insist it ought to be happening. Maybe that's because they are wrong. If anything, it seems Tesla runs circles around the likes of Volvo in terms of car safety by now. They certainly seem to insist so and they claim to have the numbers to prove it. And I'm not hearing a lot of statistics that counter that. Meanwhile, there are of course lots of traffic deaths. The vast majority of which involve human drivers making fatal mistakes and getting themselves into trouble. Even adjusted for relative miles driven by humans and AI, the numbers aren't good for humans. They are terrible actually. It's not that hard to do better than that. AI vs. drunk, tired, reckless, moronic, etc. human drivers is basically no contest. And there are a lot of those. Roads are dangerous because of that.
- jasonhansel 3y agoThe issue is that these self-driving cars are limited to a few big cities--where they're least necessary, since good public transit is far more efficient, many things are within walking distance, and speed limits are low anyway. IMHO the biggest potential for self-driving cars is in suburbs and exurbs where mass transit is inherently less efficient.
- sumedh 3y ago> A human driver would disengage FSD long before it got into situations like that, which means Tesla would be unlikely to have the training data necessary to train its cars to handle it properly. Wouldnt Tesla just just have Auto Pilot simulate what it would do and then compare that with what a human actually did and then learn from that?
- bottlepalm 3y agoThat is literally what they do with a massive battery of regression tests that run new versions through simulations.
- stephc_int13 3y agoThe mix of unconstrained input (the real world, not a lab, not a simu, not a factory) and safety-critical output make this kind of problem particularly hard to tackle. I don’t understand why anyone could think that it would be easy or fast. Guys like Elon or Geohot have been simply delusional. I think that being naïvely over optimistic is a good trait for innovation engineering, but we should also manage expectations… Nothing is done until it’s done, proof is in the pudding.
- rektide 3y agoIt's just crazy because you can get to driving great 99.99999% of the time very very quickly. The unceasing attention & ability to keep track of known unknowns is a huge superpower versus humans. But all the other cases, that wild element of reality, is so endlessly widely puzzling.
- monero-xmr 3y agoThe amount of engineering, testing, rigor, and so on for a rover on Mars is stunning. And they are working with much more constrained environments without human actors. Society won’t accept robots that kill people. You can bring out statistics until you are blue in the face, but a major reason car accidents are tolerated is that a person can be convicted if they break the law. A faceless AI that hides behind insurance won’t cut it. Enthusiasts of self-driving cars can be hyper-logical about statistics, safety analyses, etc. while simultaneously ignoring all the other areas of political life that are based on emotion rather than rational logic. If we can’t convince huge fractions of society about basic truths - pick whatever truths you are passionate about that half the country disbelieves - why do you think society will accept robot cars that cause accidents (even 1)? It’s not going to happen.
- hamilyon2 3y agoExactly this, or something very close to this already happened in history. There was a time it was legal for pedestrians to just walk on the road. Now it is illegal and nobody blames "killer bolt" or it's operator if this person is hurt. Society adapted around technology, not the other way around. The other example is of course railroads and trains. People literally made laws and diminish freedoms of people to allow giant polluting noisy hazardous carriages do their thing and punish anyone who impeded them harshly. No reason to think it can't happen third time. We just adapt roads, laws and customs to tell people e.g. "if a purple vehicle on purple road kills you, it is 100% your fault because this law says so". And other nations will have to accept it too because nobody wants to be outcompeted.
- jrm4 3y agoI can't be the first person to think that trying to do the "every possible situation, individually" thing is stupid. Why no focus on e.g. a top down federal "system" that would take over the driving e.g. just on the highways/interstates? Seems like that would be orders of magnitude EASIER.
- jboy55 3y agoI always felt there would be 'carpool'/express lanes that would just be for automatic driving cars. They would communicate with each other and so they could pack together really tightly. You'd enter your destination, then drive you car to the point that you enter the lanes, then the car would take over. It would warn before your exit, then you'd take over.
- bandyaboot 3y agoI would like to see such a system installed at a high volume intersection. When the light turns green the system instructs all the cars lined up to accelerate simultaneously. The motivation isn’t necessarily practicality, just pure entertainment value.
- dghlsakjg 3y agoThat’s called a streetcar normally.
- dgunay 3y agoHonestly I wish people would just do that. It doesn't have to be in perfect lockstep but it significantly increases the amount of backed-up traffic you can get through the light in one cycle if everyone does that.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoOne reason super high traffic cities will probably be the first ones to mandate self driving cars will be to optimize limited road infrastructure. Surely Beijing and Shanghai would go for it, they already have what Americans would consider drastic rules that limit when you can drive your own car (like even odd days based on your license plate number).
- ck2 3y agoSelf-driving manufacturers will simply kill as many people as it takes until they "get it right". There's no downside, no-one is going to be put in prison, they'll just pay the fine which will be less than a month of profit.
- jofinjoseph 3y agoYou dream for years together and one fine day, it will becoem a reality. For AI, that momebt has happened. Will soon for Self Driving Cars too.
- pmontra 3y agoAbout problems to solve, maybe not American ones, how well do these cars avoid potholes, especially the new ones that develop after heavy rain on worn out roads? I mean, I'll be happy if massive adoption of driverless cars will materialize the money to regularly maintain the pavement of all roads but I don't believe it.
- cypress66 3y agoI don't know about waymo et al. But Tesla FSD beta is awful with potholes.
- AlotOfReading 3y agoCurrent vehicles don't do much to avoid potholes. It's not an especially important issue for scaling and you can work around them with simple map blacklists. I've only seen a couple potholes that led to recovery events, even in the shitty roads of SF. One of those was really more of a sinkhole that physically broke the car.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoYou total up all the R&D budgets burned trying to crack this problem and I have to wonder just how profitable would it really be to put (at first) taxi and (now) rideshare drivers out of a job? Did any of this actually make sense?
- tuatoru 3y agoMaybe, in the long run...? Take a look at working-age population projections in NA and Europe [1]. I have for a long time had a gut feeling that practical broadscale self-driving is a $ trillion- or 2 trillion-dollar R&D project. It's still under a trillion so far, I think. 1. https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/20-69/1829 https://population.un.org/wpp/Graphs/Probabilistic/POP/20-69...
- forgetfreeman 3y agoMy gut tells me even that figure is low but taking that at face value either industry players think they can recover the GDP of Saudi Arabia on a timescale that doesn't lead to a tidal wave of investor lawsuits OR a whole bunch of people are full of shit.
- thehappypm 3y agoIt’s got a lot of long term benefits. For one, a self driving car can be designed radically differently — like easily accommodate more passengers.
- forgetfreeman 3y agoYou mean like mass transit?
- thehappypm 3y agoYep! Point to point, decentralized mass transit using the same infrastructure as everyone else.
- iguana_lawyer 3y agoIf only the death of self-driving car owners was greatly exaggerated
- simondotau 3y agoIt is greatly exaggerated. I may be wrong, but as far as I’m aware, the death toll associated with Tesla’s self-driving beta is still zero. There are a handful of highly publicised deaths associated with Tesla drivers that misused adaptive cruise control and lane centring features. Such features are available on most new cars sold today. It is unclear whether the death rate from cruise control misuse is actually higher with Tesla vehicles, or if the apparent difference is from differing levels of media attention.
- tuatoru 3y ago> Sam Abuelsamid, the industry analyst, told me that he “did some math” on Cruise’s plan to generate a billion dollars in revenue in 2025. He concluded that the goal was “actually probably achievable.” He estimates that the goal corresponds to a fleet of around 6,000 driverless vehicles Let's plug in some reasonable guesses and see. 6000 vehicles x 10 trips/day average x $25/trip average x 250 days/year: $375M. To an analyst that maybe be practically the same as a billion, but not to an accountant. And that's gross revenue. Take off all the car costs as well as the overhead. (Remember: these vehicles can't cope with the busiest, most profitable locations for taxis.)
- carstenhag 3y agoWhy would a self-driving car only drive for 250 days? You have to consider maintenance/repairs, but that won't be 115 days. The 10 trip a day guess is probably also low, but seems okay as an average to me.
- AlbertCory 3y agoDid I miss the part where they operate in a city that gets a lot of snow? Dallas and Houston: maybe they get snow once in a great while. Phoenix and San Francisco: never. > But it’s hard to judge the risk of something that’s never happened. That isn't even a Black Swan; it's a known unknown.
- camgunz 3y agoAll my tech podcasts (and now print media apparently) have been pushing a "self-driving cars are almost here" narrative for the last couple weeks. But to be blunt here, isn't this total bullshit? Let's say that's 5 years away; well that's at best in the realm of "who knows". Has anyone here made an accurate 5 year roadmap? Yeah.... I don't know what exactly is going on here, maybe Waymo and Cruise media relations teams are really earning their bonuses this year, but it's pretty gross. Kevin Roose had the guy from Cruise on and they were talking about the effect of self driving cars on gig drivers, and he said he felt like Cruise needed to take an active part in helping those drivers retrain or find other work. All I wanted was a single follow up: "what are you currently working on in that space?" Because the answer would be "lol we're not actually working on it, and if anyone does it it will be the government" (which is also the AI industry's response). But also these cars are driving in the best of circumstances: nice weather, slow or predictable traffic, reasonable road layouts, etc. Wake me up when a car can drive me through snow on a highway narrowed to a single lane on New Year's Eve after I've been drinking heavily. My guess here is that industry is hoping we'll start adapting to self-driving cars, not the other way around. I'm not saying that's bad, but it's an entirely different story than "The tech is close to working!" It would be more like "The tech never worked right, we basically made trams, and that was fine, but woof very expensive"
- mg 3y agoHas anyone here made an accurate 5 year roadmap? In 1961, Kennedy proclaimed that the USA would put a man on the moon within the decade. And in 1969 they did.
- camgunz 3y agoIn fairness, that's many more years using the resources of probably the most lopsided government in human history racing to embarrass a rival. Do we think Google could put a man on the moon using 60s tech? They can't even make a messaging app (burrrrrrrn :)
- Ekaros 3y agoEssentially poor loser that has lost the race to space started to waste money just so they can later brainwash their citizens to believe they won... Not that they lost in the first place horribly.
- pojntfx 3y agoSelf-driving cars are already here - they are trams, light rail, metro, HSR and more.
- hkt 3y agoAs someone who lives in a largely Victorian town with narrow, double parked streets, I look forward to the carnage of self driving cars. Seeing how they've been coping on big, roomy grid systems has left me amused that anyone has any hope at all for these things. In the end, we'll regret the investment in these things. A few reliable, human-assisted tramways in and between towns is all people actually need. It isn't high tech, but it is high value: the ROI for society is huge. The money spaffed on self driving cars is just a waste.
- carstenhag 3y agoI only see it as a problem if cities (and citizens...) think and act as if cars would be perfect for everything once they are self-driving. As an example, I can't imagine Munich without public transport. It's great. But 3-6 times per year I do need a car. If my friends or I didn't need to get a license, that would have been nice as well (it costs 2000-3000€ here), it also allows everyone to get driven.
- hkt 3y ago> I only see it as a problem if cities (and citizens...) think and act as if cars would be perfect for everything once they are self-driving. No doubt that's how they'll be marketed though. I just hope segregated cycle lanes become ubiquitous first so driverless cars don't kill me and my kids.
- leke 3y agoI think it's still a reality, but just needs to be implemented differently. Something similar to how railway works, that is railway has infrastructure for trains and nothing else, but at the same time there are crossings for interactions with roads and train stations for interactions with people. When we have a place for self driving cars you can drive onto and have our car switch to automatic, it frees up a lot of the problems you need to solve. We can control the traffic more like a network then by having nodes at various intervals that conducts the traffic allowed on the route. This removes the need for the car to take on the responsibility of being aware of its surroundings. The same could be implemented more cheaply for passenger (arial) drones.
- ikhatri 3y agoSo with the disclaimer that these views don't reflect those of my employer, as someone who works in the industry I think this article is basically spot on. The only point I would add is that the top line cost for all these vehicles is quite high right now, so scaling up the service alone isn't really a solution to the profitability problem. I won't get into specifics, but I think this blog post from Cruise summarizes the point pretty well (https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/av-compute-deploying-to-an-edge-supercomputer/ https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/av-compute-deploying-to...). The term "edge supercomputer" really is the best way to describe AV hardware deployment. And that doesn't even cover the sensor suite which is quite costly as well. So if I was a betting man, I'd say that you can expect Cruse, Waymo & others to scale a little bit now, just to show investors that they can but for them to really save the bulk of the scaling (to hit that targeted figure of 1B/yr of revenue) until after they've found a way to get the costs down. That's going to come in the form of more bespoke vehicles that are better vertically integrated with custom hardware and sensing solutions (like the Cruise Origin).
- noobermin 3y ago>It’s appropriate to criticize Waymo and Cruise for incidents like this, but we should also maintain a sense of perspective. While these incidents were undoubtedly frustrating for everyone involved, they don’t seem to have posed a serious danger. Incidents like this help the companies learn and improve their technology. Well officer, I'm sorry I ran through yellow tape and killed a paramedic responding to the crash scene, but have some perspective. I've now learned not to do that, incidents like this help me improve my driving ability.
- HyperSane 3y agoNo one was killed.
- sorokod 3y agoFrom the article On March 18, 2018, a prototype Uber self-driving car slammed into Elaine Herzberg as she walked her bike across a road in Tempe, Arizona. First and foremost, Herzberg’s death was a tragedy for her family.
- noobermin 3y agoThis is hyperbole, yes, I'm not parodying the actual incident but the attitude. Anyhow, crossing yellow lines isn't okay for that reason in particular, it's to keep first responders safe. The incidents listed should be just seen as failures which developers need rectify, not as a "learning experience" the public needs perspective on. The learning experiences should have happened in their controlled testing, not on the road. I will say that generally in life, when you fail, even spectacularly; sure, you can tell yourself it was a learning experience to keep your mind sane. You do have to be careful saying such things to others judging you as if to ward them off because it comes across as cheapening the fault, or even faulting them for judging you (the lacking "perspective" bit). The best you can do is apologize, admit fault, and then assure them you'll do better in the future.
- LatteLazy 3y agoI miss when products were only announced when you could actually order them. The new process where people announce they "will totally definitely might have something in [now()+18months]" then everyone blindly believes it because they want it to be true is just frustrating. Still at least my General AI will be able to compute to work by Fusion powers self driving cars on a blockchain tomorrow morning...
- dojomouse 3y ago> One reason is that there are some problems that a company will only encounter once it begins testing fully driverless operations. Waymo and Cruise’s problems with fire hoses and caution tape is a good example. A human driver would disengage FSD long before it got into situations like that, which means Tesla would be unlikely to have the training data necessary to train its cars to handle it properly. The reasoning here seems flawed to me. I assume Tesla use periods when the human is driving for training data, so this is no constraint at all.
- seydor 3y agoI thought self-driving was always an aspiration. Full self driving requires solving the holy grail of robotics + the ultimate safety problem. There should be by now a few technologies that can be deployed as side-benefits instead of waiting for the whole package to be achieved
- torginus 3y agoWhat I don't understand is why aren't companies pushing ahead with intermediate solutions on constrained paths that's more like public transport - imagine a small van or mini-bus carrying 4-10ish passengers that travels on well-mapped, public, main roads (and is allowed to use the bus lane). The main paths in big cities already go pretty close to big venues, and we could set up these paths in such a way that the pickup and dropoff point is at most a few minutes walk away from people's true destinations. It would serve as a replacement for public transport instead of a way of having your car drive itself (which isn't that big of a help considering the biggest issue with city driving is parking).
- mindwok 3y agoYou have pretty much described what Waymo is doing. They use specific, pre-mapped zones only in certain conditions.
- skywhopper 3y agoHow is this better than a regular bus?
- gadflyinyoureye 3y agoTheoretically you could have more on rotation at a time. Rather than have a whole bus that’s 25% full, you can have a few vans shuttling along the route. This should allow greater access since people don’t have to wait as long between buses. For example, the bus on my city are few. If I want to go to the grocery that is only a 8 miles await, the trip would take about 15 minutes by bike because there is no bus route to it. However mini vans on a known route could come get me most of the way.
- lang4d 3y agoThere are a few companies around the world working on that sort of solution to the public transit problem (called autonomous Personal Rapid Transit), and one or two systems similar to what you’re describing that have been built. Open road autonomy has to deal with all sorts of unexpected situations, still has to contend with traffic (until all cars are communicating with all other cars… very very far in the future), and still quite unprofitable for the driverless robotaxi use case. PRT - and what it sounds like you’re suggesting - get around these types of problems: By operating in dedicated (fenced off) lanes, the perception and planning problems become trivial (especially if you put sensors on the roadway). With one company building and operating the system, coordination between vehicles becomes possible (with no pedestrians and stations off of the mainline, this means little traffic and still high throughput). Small, lightweight vehicles with reduced sensing/compute requirements are cheaper and require less road space (meaning cheaper infrastructure too) The main downsides I can think of being it would requiring walking to your final destination from the bus stop/station (but for public transit prices instead of Uber prices I’m sure that’d be an appealing option to many), and requires new (or at least dedicated) infrastructure which is a harder sell to companies and cities.
- EyeSayUntoThee 3y agothe interest in self-driving cars (by anyone except salivating bean-counters and CEOs) has been greatly exaggerated. Most people seem to prefer driving to being a passenger, particularly the passenger of some broken half-baked tech (the kind of semi-broken tech all consumer computing systems seem to say is OK to bring to market)
- Razengan 3y agoSelf-driving cars will work best when ALL cars are self-driving, and connected with each other, over a standard protocol shared by all manufacturers, to develop swarm networking to avoid collisions and cooperatively decide optimal routes and speeds on the fly.
- dtgriscom 3y agoPerhaps off-topic, but are there any estimates of how much power it takes to run one of these "supercomputer on wheels"? Is the compute energy a significant portion of the total energy for a given trip?
- thehappypm 3y agoNo, not compared to locomotion.