7 ms·

I doubt that real self-driving cars will ever be a thing. OK, assisted driving on prepared streets (e.g. highways today or wie roads with some electronic marker

by jcynix 3y ago

I doubt that real self-driving cars will ever be a thing. OK, assisted driving on prepared streets (e.g. highways today or wie roads with some electronic markers in the future) but as soon as you enter smaller roads which are at most as wide as 1.5 cars the "fun" will begin. I could offer some dashcam videos of many such roads here in Europe. Just imagine people accustomed to highly assisted driving in a metropolitan area suddenly forced to take over when two cars cannot manage to pass each other on such roads. So I liked to watch "There's no such thing as a Self Driving Car - A MOTOMANTV RANT" by a car journalist here: https://youtu.be/8NJQCyv6BSk https://youtu.be/8NJQCyv6BSk

TulliusCicero 3y ago
Self driving car services already exist in Phoenix and San Francisco. Whether they can feasibly scale out to many other cities in an economic fashion is still unknown, but on a technical level they're definitely possible, because we already have them. And yeah, cities and countries vary in difficulty, though as far as the US goes, SF is quite technically challenging in terms of urban obstacles (though the weather is of course quite mild).
- jcynix 3y ago
  Depends on one's definition of "self driving" and as a computer scientist with AI training (although that happened during last century ;-) I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens. And when I see how most modern cars handle signs like a speed limit to e.g. 30km/h with both additional texts like "from 9-15” and additionally on "monday-friday" or limited "for 300m" I always shake my head.
  - TulliusCicero 3y ago
    > I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens. There's no human driver in the car. At most, the cars can stop/pull over and ask for remote navigation from humans (but not remote operation).
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      How do you know there's no remote operation?
      - AlotOfReading 3y ago
        Because they send people out to physically recover the vehicle if it gets too stuck. They wouldn't do that if a human could just drive it out.
        natch 3y ago
        Both can be true. In some cases the remote driver can drive it, in other cases it requires physical presence.
      - rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
        Why would you believe that? How do you know human operators don't type pages of results manually every time you do a Google search?
      - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
        If waymo's entire fleet was operated by real time remote drivers (extremely dangerous because of latench) we would know already
    - jcynix 3y ago
      Granted, there are some niche applications where autonomous vehicles exist. And some level x assisted driving on prepared roads. But I was talking about "real self driving" cars, i.e. cars on any street in any city or even in rural areas. And I still don't see them anywhere, nor do I see them coming in the near future, expect in some tech dreams.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - dilyevsky 3y ago
    Cruise and waymo are running ride hailing service without any drivers at all in multiple cities including SF
    - pipo234 3y ago
      So next up: will they be able to reach profitability servicing SF and Phoenix. So far, highly small scale subsidized pilot projects. The hardware is more expensive than regular cabs. The software has cost billions, an may cost billions more. Operationally, energy use should be marginally higher. Hourly cab-driver wages: gone. Insurance and write off — we'll see, but if the software is any good this should be considerably lower. I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?
      - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        Then ice thing about software is that you can copy it at least, even if it’s expensive. LIDAR prices are coming down at a steady rate, although Tesla is still trying to go the vision only route. > I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car? If we assume the technology won’t improve any longer, this is true. But I don’t think that is a very safe assumption. Everything seems to point to the question being when rather than if.
        pipo234 3y ago
        Another five years away it is, then ;-)
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        There will be progress in 5 years, will it be enough? Who knows, it’s something to play the stock market with if you are into that.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - austinkhale 3y ago
    Weird. Should tell that to the Waymo that drove me 20 minutes from my home to a restaurant downtown last night. I was the only human in the car, located in the back seat.
  - fnord77 3y ago
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LInDo1A0J4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LInDo1A0J4I
- ZanyProgrammer 3y ago
  Ah yes, the famously narrow, cramped and heavily utilized by pedestrians streets of Phoenix.
  - Finn_ 3y ago
    Completely ignoring that they they also mentioned SF?
  - TulliusCicero 3y ago
    Aside from weather, SF is probably one of the hardest to drive in cities in the US.
- Lonestar1440 3y ago
  From my perspective as an SF resident, it truly does not exist here. We have some interesting experiments (Cruise, Waymo) wandering around (a subset of) our streets, but they simply can't drive nearly as well as 98% of humans. They achieve some measure of "safety" by failing safe e.g. stopping and putting hazard flashers on when confused. But they're not an effective or useful "service" for us, in the current state. Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing?
  - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
    > or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing? The problem is by the letter of the law, the car can simply never proceed. People drivers don’t need to adhere to that letter so much, so can get creative, auto taxis can’t.
  - fnord77 3y ago
    Every waymo ride I have had has been at least as good of a driver as a mediocre Uber driver. Haven't tried it, but I hear Cruise is considerably worse. > Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing? I've done considerable mileage in Waymo and these two situations it handles pretty well. I think the software is improving rapidly - I've reported some problems that happened consistently that a week later seem to have been resolved
- abecedarius 3y ago
  Austin too. I signed up to try it, though I haven't got around to it yet.
fnord77 3y ago
I've taken about 40 rides in Waymo in SF with no safety driver. One thing it did handle surprisingly well was a narrow 1.5 car width road, with bumper to bumper on-coming traffic. It took a bit longer than a human driver would, but it made it through. I should have videoed it because I thought for certain it would get stuck. My biggest complaint with Waymo's driving was it sometimes didn't plan ahead to be in the correct lane for a turn coming up within a few blocks and then couldn't get over due to aggro drivers. They seem to have addressed this though The most impressive feat was when it went down a narrow road to find it was blocked. It managed a 3-point turn in a difficult situation and found another route. The biggest "bug" I witnessed was a situation with only one road going to the destination and that road was closed with a police road block. It turned around and then kept coming back to the road block, basically looping forever. Had to have an engineer intervene. If Waymo can handle SF roads, I think it can handle anything in the US (at least without deep snow on the roads). Dunno about other places where you might have to get "creative" with your driving.
- MisterTea 3y ago
  > It turned around and then kept coming back to the road block, basically looping forever. Had to have an engineer intervene. How does one tell the robot car to pull over, I'm done and getting out here? Can you open the door and jump out if need be?
  - fnord77 3y ago
    there's a "Pull Over" button on the front seat and back seat screens
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    You hit the end ride/pull over button. It's generally not advisable to attempt to leave a moving vehicle.
adrianN 3y ago
Two cars in close quarters seems like the ideal application for driving assistants. Robots are much better at the actual mechanics of moving the car.
- InCityDreams 3y ago
  Does that include knowing which wheels (the driving ones) would be better to keep off the verge whilst turning?
- MisterTea 3y ago
  > Robots are much better at the actual mechanics of moving the car. [citation needed] This is a very dubious statement and it really sounds like you have never driven a car or anything larger.
  - rescripting 3y ago
    I mean, it seems self evident to me. Human perception + reaction time is eons compared to how quickly a computer can move the wheels and pedals. Whether the machine makes the _right_ decision is much more difficult, but a computer can actuate with speed and precision humans simply cannot.
    - MisterTea 3y ago
      > Whether the machine makes the _right_ decision is much more difficult, This is why I said what I said; the OP wording implies they meant just that.
- Tempest1981 3y ago
  True. I saw a self-driving car (not a Tesla) approach a parked car from behind at around 15 mph, then at the last second, swerve around it, leaving what looked like a 6" gap. I was frightened, but impressed. (Good thing nobody opened the door.)
- dynisor 3y ago
  Yeah, I agree. If everyone was in a self-driving car and predictable it would be fine. As it stands now, the car is basically trying navigate chaos. Humans already do a terrible job, yet we are expecting machines with less experience and less information to do better. It’s asinine.
electrondood 3y ago
Smaller roads you say? FSD Beta handles this now, including the negotiation of which car passes first https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6KLC3S5gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6KLC3S5gc
- jcynix 3y ago
  OK, if two "self driving" cars meet they can negotiate somehow, nice. But they will have to cope with all those older cars and often older drivers in rural areas. Or cows, sheep, or snow drifts or landslides. I soon will be on holiday in rural France again and you might not believe who and what is driving on those small roads. Which is totally OK with me, but I highly doubt tech will handle that in the near future.
  - CamperBob2 3y ago
    Personally, I stopped saying things like that when AlphaGo showed up. Thrashing a 9-dan master also wasn't supposed to be "something that tech could do." Humans aren't really all that special.
parentheses 3y ago
Self driving is a cost problem and a software problem. Over time it will become solved fully and cheap. I can't believe that a human can outperform a computer at paying attention. re: 1.5 car width lanes or trails or whatever Have you seen humans drive in other countries? Italy, India and Boston (lol - many more) have driving situations where lane lines are not obeyed and cars pack pretty tightly on a regular basis. I cannot imagine a world where that is not solved.
- ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
  > I can't believe that a human can outperform a computer at paying attention. The issue are the millions of edge cases in which humans remain far better at analyzing, figuring out a solution, and compromising in.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    That is the issue, but that means that to say that we'll never have self-driving cars is to say that we're either at or close to the limit on advancement of computing technology. That seems implausible to me, and if you don't accept it as a premise, then it's just a question of how long it is before computers surpass people at all of those things.
    - xyzelement 3y ago
      You are making a lot of sense, you are setting up logical arguments but some folks go like "uhhh I just don't think so"
    - Detrytus 3y ago
      >> [...] is to say that we're either at or close to the limit on advancement of computing technology. Well, we are approaching physical limits of minimum transistor size, so that might not be as ridiculous as you think. What if the best we can do is to triple the current processing power, but that's not enough?
      - 3y ago
idopmstuff 3y ago
I'll ask you what I always ask folks who say that something will never be a thing - do you really think that 1000 years from now, cars won't be able to fully drive themselves under all conditions better than humans? As a reference for the amount of progress we can make in 1000 years, roughly that long ago, someone invented the compass. If you can agree that in 1000 years, it's extremely likely that we'll have self-driving cars, then to paraphrase Churchill, now we're just haggling over timeline. 500 years from now, will we have self-driving cars? 500 years ago, gunpowder and windmills were new technology. How about 200 years? The big thing was steam power then. And so forth and so on. Unless there is some natural or physical law that would prevent self-driving cars, it's just a matter of when. And honestly, if you watch some of these Tesla FSD drives that people post on Twitter, it's pretty clear that self-driving is production-ready under a significant number of circumstances. The problem is, of course, that there are a lot of edge cases, and because the stakes are high, we have to solve most of those to get true full self driving. But given that cars can pretty reliably traverse the streets of SF, I struggle to see the argument that the remaining edge cases are impossible to solve.
- whiplash451 3y ago
  In 100s of years, many other things will have changed which could make self-driving cars (as we think of them today) completely irrelevant.
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    The question wasn't about relevance, though; it was about technical capability. Whether or not anyone actually uses one, will the technology to make one exist? Regardless of whether they're in use in 1000 years, will one ever have existed?
- bbddg 3y ago
  The probability that humans are still driving around in cars, self driving or not, in 1000 years is incredibly unlikely.
  - 3y ago
birdyrooster 3y ago
Driving through Mount Hamilton I realized this as well, I would never trust self driving to those roads up there with thousands of feet of elevation just over the side of the road and parts which must be shared by both directions of traffic.
sixQuarks 3y ago
We’ll see how this comment ages in 5 years.

by jcynix 3y ago

TulliusCicero 3y ago

Self driving car services already exist in Phoenix and San Francisco. Whether they can feasibly scale out to many other cities in an economic fashion is still unknown, but on a technical level they're definitely possible, because we already have them. And yeah, cities and countries vary in difficulty, though as far as the US goes, SF is quite technically challenging in terms of urban obstacles (though the weather is of course quite mild).

jcynix 3y ago
Depends on one's definition of "self driving" and as a computer scientist with AI training (although that happened during last century ;-) I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens. And when I see how most modern cars handle signs like a speed limit to e.g. 30km/h with both additional texts like "from 9-15” and additionally on "monday-friday" or limited "for 300m" I always shake my head.
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  > I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens. There's no human driver in the car. At most, the cars can stop/pull over and ask for remote navigation from humans (but not remote operation).
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    How do you know there's no remote operation?
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      Because they send people out to physically recover the vehicle if it gets too stuck. They wouldn't do that if a human could just drive it out.
      - natch 3y ago
        Both can be true. In some cases the remote driver can drive it, in other cases it requires physical presence.
    - rcMgD2BwE72F 3y ago
      Why would you believe that? How do you know human operators don't type pages of results manually every time you do a Google search?
    - CrampusDestrus 3y ago
      If waymo's entire fleet was operated by real time remote drivers (extremely dangerous because of latench) we would know already
  - jcynix 3y ago
    Granted, there are some niche applications where autonomous vehicles exist. And some level x assisted driving on prepared roads. But I was talking about "real self driving" cars, i.e. cars on any street in any city or even in rural areas. And I still don't see them anywhere, nor do I see them coming in the near future, expect in some tech dreams.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- dilyevsky 3y ago
  Cruise and waymo are running ride hailing service without any drivers at all in multiple cities including SF
  - pipo234 3y ago
    So next up: will they be able to reach profitability servicing SF and Phoenix. So far, highly small scale subsidized pilot projects. The hardware is more expensive than regular cabs. The software has cost billions, an may cost billions more. Operationally, energy use should be marginally higher. Hourly cab-driver wages: gone. Insurance and write off — we'll see, but if the software is any good this should be considerably lower. I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?
    - seanmcdirmid 3y ago
      Then ice thing about software is that you can copy it at least, even if it’s expensive. LIDAR prices are coming down at a steady rate, although Tesla is still trying to go the vision only route. > I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car? If we assume the technology won’t improve any longer, this is true. But I don’t think that is a very safe assumption. Everything seems to point to the question being when rather than if.
      - pipo234 3y ago
        Another five years away it is, then ;-)
        seanmcdirmid 3y ago
        There will be progress in 5 years, will it be enough? Who knows, it’s something to play the stock market with if you are into that.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- austinkhale 3y ago
  Weird. Should tell that to the Waymo that drove me 20 minutes from my home to a restaurant downtown last night. I was the only human in the car, located in the back seat.
- fnord77 3y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LInDo1A0J4I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LInDo1A0J4I
ZanyProgrammer 3y ago
Ah yes, the famously narrow, cramped and heavily utilized by pedestrians streets of Phoenix.
- Finn_ 3y ago
  Completely ignoring that they they also mentioned SF?
- TulliusCicero 3y ago
  Aside from weather, SF is probably one of the hardest to drive in cities in the US.
Lonestar1440 3y ago
From my perspective as an SF resident, it truly does not exist here. We have some interesting experiments (Cruise, Waymo) wandering around (a subset of) our streets, but they simply can't drive nearly as well as 98% of humans. They achieve some measure of "safety" by failing safe e.g. stopping and putting hazard flashers on when confused. But they're not an effective or useful "service" for us, in the current state. Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing?
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
  > or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing? The problem is by the letter of the law, the car can simply never proceed. People drivers don’t need to adhere to that letter so much, so can get creative, auto taxis can’t.
- fnord77 3y ago
  Every waymo ride I have had has been at least as good of a driver as a mediocre Uber driver. Haven't tried it, but I hear Cruise is considerably worse. > Have you ever seen one try to deal with a contested left turn, or a 4 way stop with pedestrians constantly crossing? I've done considerable mileage in Waymo and these two situations it handles pretty well. I think the software is improving rapidly - I've reported some problems that happened consistently that a week later seem to have been resolved
abecedarius 3y ago
Austin too. I signed up to try it, though I haven't got around to it yet.

fnord77 3y ago

I've taken about 40 rides in Waymo in SF with no safety driver. One thing it did handle surprisingly well was a narrow 1.5 car width road, with bumper to bumper on-coming traffic. It took a bit longer than a human driver would, but it made it through. I should have videoed it because I thought for certain it would get stuck. My biggest complaint with Waymo's driving was it sometimes didn't plan ahead to be in the correct lane for a turn coming up within a few blocks and then couldn't get over due to aggro drivers. They seem to have addressed this though The most impressive feat was when it went down a narrow road to find it was blocked. It managed a 3-point turn in a difficult situation and found another route. The biggest "bug" I witnessed was a situation with only one road going to the destination and that road was closed with a police road block. It turned around and then kept coming back to the road block, basically looping forever. Had to have an engineer intervene. If Waymo can handle SF roads, I think it can handle anything in the US (at least without deep snow on the roads). Dunno about other places where you might have to get "creative" with your driving.

MisterTea 3y ago
> It turned around and then kept coming back to the road block, basically looping forever. Had to have an engineer intervene. How does one tell the robot car to pull over, I'm done and getting out here? Can you open the door and jump out if need be?
- fnord77 3y ago
  there's a "Pull Over" button on the front seat and back seat screens
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  You hit the end ride/pull over button. It's generally not advisable to attempt to leave a moving vehicle.

adrianN 3y ago

Two cars in close quarters seems like the ideal application for driving assistants. Robots are much better at the actual mechanics of moving the car.

InCityDreams 3y ago
Does that include knowing which wheels (the driving ones) would be better to keep off the verge whilst turning?
MisterTea 3y ago
> Robots are much better at the actual mechanics of moving the car. [citation needed] This is a very dubious statement and it really sounds like you have never driven a car or anything larger.
- rescripting 3y ago
  I mean, it seems self evident to me. Human perception + reaction time is eons compared to how quickly a computer can move the wheels and pedals. Whether the machine makes the _right_ decision is much more difficult, but a computer can actuate with speed and precision humans simply cannot.
  - MisterTea 3y ago
    > Whether the machine makes the _right_ decision is much more difficult, This is why I said what I said; the OP wording implies they meant just that.
Tempest1981 3y ago
True. I saw a self-driving car (not a Tesla) approach a parked car from behind at around 15 mph, then at the last second, swerve around it, leaving what looked like a 6" gap. I was frightened, but impressed. (Good thing nobody opened the door.)
dynisor 3y ago
Yeah, I agree. If everyone was in a self-driving car and predictable it would be fine. As it stands now, the car is basically trying navigate chaos. Humans already do a terrible job, yet we are expecting machines with less experience and less information to do better. It’s asinine.

electrondood 3y ago

Smaller roads you say? FSD Beta handles this now, including the negotiation of which car passes first https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6KLC3S5gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l6KLC3S5gc

jcynix 3y ago
OK, if two "self driving" cars meet they can negotiate somehow, nice. But they will have to cope with all those older cars and often older drivers in rural areas. Or cows, sheep, or snow drifts or landslides. I soon will be on holiday in rural France again and you might not believe who and what is driving on those small roads. Which is totally OK with me, but I highly doubt tech will handle that in the near future.
- CamperBob2 3y ago
  Personally, I stopped saying things like that when AlphaGo showed up. Thrashing a 9-dan master also wasn't supposed to be "something that tech could do." Humans aren't really all that special.

parentheses 3y ago

Self driving is a cost problem and a software problem. Over time it will become solved fully and cheap. I can't believe that a human can outperform a computer at paying attention. re: 1.5 car width lanes or trails or whatever Have you seen humans drive in other countries? Italy, India and Boston (lol - many more) have driving situations where lane lines are not obeyed and cars pack pretty tightly on a regular basis. I cannot imagine a world where that is not solved.

ThrowAway1922A 3y ago
> I can't believe that a human can outperform a computer at paying attention. The issue are the millions of edge cases in which humans remain far better at analyzing, figuring out a solution, and compromising in.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  That is the issue, but that means that to say that we'll never have self-driving cars is to say that we're either at or close to the limit on advancement of computing technology. That seems implausible to me, and if you don't accept it as a premise, then it's just a question of how long it is before computers surpass people at all of those things.
  - xyzelement 3y ago
    You are making a lot of sense, you are setting up logical arguments but some folks go like "uhhh I just don't think so"
  - Detrytus 3y ago
    >> [...] is to say that we're either at or close to the limit on advancement of computing technology. Well, we are approaching physical limits of minimum transistor size, so that might not be as ridiculous as you think. What if the best we can do is to triple the current processing power, but that's not enough?
    - 3y ago

idopmstuff 3y ago

I'll ask you what I always ask folks who say that something will never be a thing - do you really think that 1000 years from now, cars won't be able to fully drive themselves under all conditions better than humans? As a reference for the amount of progress we can make in 1000 years, roughly that long ago, someone invented the compass. If you can agree that in 1000 years, it's extremely likely that we'll have self-driving cars, then to paraphrase Churchill, now we're just haggling over timeline. 500 years from now, will we have self-driving cars? 500 years ago, gunpowder and windmills were new technology. How about 200 years? The big thing was steam power then. And so forth and so on. Unless there is some natural or physical law that would prevent self-driving cars, it's just a matter of when. And honestly, if you watch some of these Tesla FSD drives that people post on Twitter, it's pretty clear that self-driving is production-ready under a significant number of circumstances. The problem is, of course, that there are a lot of edge cases, and because the stakes are high, we have to solve most of those to get true full self driving. But given that cars can pretty reliably traverse the streets of SF, I struggle to see the argument that the remaining edge cases are impossible to solve.

whiplash451 3y ago
In 100s of years, many other things will have changed which could make self-driving cars (as we think of them today) completely irrelevant.
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  The question wasn't about relevance, though; it was about technical capability. Whether or not anyone actually uses one, will the technology to make one exist? Regardless of whether they're in use in 1000 years, will one ever have existed?
bbddg 3y ago
The probability that humans are still driving around in cars, self driving or not, in 1000 years is incredibly unlikely.
- 3y ago

birdyrooster 3y ago

Driving through Mount Hamilton I realized this as well, I would never trust self driving to those roads up there with thousands of feet of elevation just over the side of the road and parts which must be shared by both directions of traffic.

sixQuarks 3y ago

We’ll see how this comment ages in 5 years.