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Cadillac To Release Self-Driving Cars By 2015
- ColinWright 14y agoRelated: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3881315 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3881315 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878730 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3878730
- georgieporgie 14y agoAs a motorcyclist, I really hope that all the upcoming variations of autonomous vehicles are heavily tested in all conceivable edge cases. Also, as a motorcyclist, I welcome the well-tested, never-tiring, unimpaired, highly predictable, self-driving AIs! :-) With all manufacturers pursuing their own AI, though, I wonder if we'll have a future that echoes the past. If, say, Volvo has sub-optimal testing, perhaps 'ovlov' (an old Usenet joke - Volvo in your mirrors) will again become known as the bane of motorcyclists. Will Toyota launch ads bragging about their higher AI safety rating than Volvo?
- excuse-me 14y agoOn the other hand a pair of bikers could start a new sport of Volvo-sniping. Assuming the algorithm is something like - steer away from another vehicle that appears in your lane - your could 'herd' lines of Volvos into each other. Ob biker joke - what's the 2nd most dangerous thing on the road? A Volvo driver in a hat. What's the most dangerous ? A Volvo driver without a hat - because he is driving around trying to remember where he left it.
- tadfisher 14y agoAs a bicyclist, I echo your hopes and concerns. I'll also add a hope that the most common car-bike accidents (right- and left-hooking) are tested for extensively, as they require a bit more math and foresight than simply recognizing that I'm there.
- warfangle 14y agoI'd like it if cars had a warning system for when you open the street-side door, as well. I know far too many people who have gotten broken bones by having someone open their door unexpectedly into the bike lane.
- dsl 14y agoWhat I want is a stick or something that comes out near the bumper to block the path of bikes to protect my passengers. If they ignore it, they get deflected off into the sidewalk. I try to pull as close as I can to block bikes from getting between me and the curb and still have idiots trying to do 20mph in an impossibly tiny gap.
- tadfisher 14y agoFiltering is legal in many places, and municipal governments explicitly enable this by placing bike lanes on the curbside of auto traffic. So if you live in one of these municipalities, all you are accomplishing is impeding the flow of bicycle traffic, making it actively dangerous for bicycles to follow the law, and worst of all perpetuating the so-called "war" between bicycle and automobile traffic. Disclaimer: I avoid the issue by travelling in the center of the auto traffic lane. If you don't like that, tough luck.
- ceejayoz 14y agoA couple second delay before my car permits me to open the door? No thanks...
- mediaman 14y agoIt wouldn't have to lock it. A simple warning LED located on the upper part of the door at eye-level that lights up and blinks when an oncoming cyclist from the rear is detected would prevent a lot of accidental injuries.
- danielharan 14y agoJesus. A thing that warns you that you're about to injure another human being, and you're upset you might have to wait 2 seconds? I hope that was sarcasm on your part...
- mikeash 14y agoI'm going to wager that, while not perfect, AI drivers may well be safer for motorcyclists than the average human driver, and probably quite a bit more predictable.
- jfoutz 14y agofar far safer. Even the best driver sneezes. AI drivers, even if basically not great drivers, are uniform and predictable. Also, i think they'll be heavily weighted towards "safety" and not "excitement". They might drive slower, and stop more often than strictly required, but not causing lawsuits must be priority 1
- jff 14y agoDRIVER-TRON 5000 DID NOT EVEN SEE HIM, MOTORCYCLE CAME FROM NOWHERE
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- stephengillie 14y agoI welcome the well-tested, never-tiring, unimpaired, highly predictable, self-driving AIs! :-) No more drunk drivers, no more mothers dealing with their kids while driving, city buses whose drivers don't need breaks, rental cars that drive themselves from their lot to your house (they pick you up instead of you picking them up), 100% automated home food/parcel delivery, etc. The future is awesome.
- danellis 14y agoThe problem, though, is that as soon as a self-driving car crashes and kills someone, people will declare self-driving cars to be evil and unwanted -- even if they're actually safer than human-driven ones.
- toomuchtodo 14y agoPlanes crash, yet people still get on them everyday. And they're still piloted by humans.
- saraid216 14y agoAFAIK, they're mostly piloted by AI. The humans are there mostly for the takeoff and landing.
- excuse-me 14y agoI thought Cadillacs were already self driving At least you never see any driver behind the wheel, perhaps a pair of hands or the top of a hat but never any driver.
- crusso 14y ago"The only exception is when the lines do not exist, or are not visible, in which case the driver will have to take the old-fashioned route and drive with both hands." That sounds like a severely limited AI. I wonder if some of these half solutions won't actually be worse for safety. Is someone a great deal more likely to completely shift attention from the road if the car is driving? Maybe even by dozing off? When that happens, how long will it take to regain sufficient focus if the white lines disappear on a stretch of road? How robust is the AI for a car that could be fooled by deceptively-painted lines? Google's car is much more sophisticated. Given what Google has demonstrated, I'd rather we skip any intervening generations of half-self-driving cars. These pseudo driving cars seem just as likely to give the whole AI vehicle concept a black eye and set the industry back 10 years.
- excuse-me 14y agoI was involved in some work done many years ago. The principle road tracking was to look for any sets of lines that moved in parallel. The primitive hardware was a series of horizontal line scan cameras aimed at increasing distances in front of the car and a simple sideways shift+correlation to decide which direction. This way that tracked not just white lines, but tire tracks, kerbs, road wear, roadside barriers etc. The main problem we had was on a clean unmarked newly laid road surface that was perfectly uniform. There is a highway I commute on daily which has been undergoing roadworks for the last 3years and has so many painted out lines, repairs, temporary markings, filled in trenches etc that in the rain I have no idea where the lanes are.
- jberryman 14y agoMade me think of those sections of freeway (I mostly notice this in SoCal, not sure if anyone is familiar w this) where there are grooves or gradations that sort of slowly drift off of the lane dividers on a curve. People often start to follow the false lanes at first. I imagine such a system would have trouble with that.
- SpiderX 14y agoI'm fairly certain that someone somewhere at Google has given a thought to this. You aren't the "smartest person in the room".
- moocow01 14y agoHave insurance companies figured out how accidents, tickets and liability are being handled? If there is anything I've learned in my career it is that building systems that are 100% completely error-free is pie in the sky thinking even in moderately controlled environments. Suffice it to say, I will be a very late adopter although I think the efforts are very exciting.
- bgutierrez 14y agoIt doesn't need to be 100% error-free, it just needs to be on average way better than human drivers. Even if there are occasional major catastrophes (e.g., 1000 cars drive off a collapsed bridge) it will still be better than what we have now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in_U.S._by_year http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...
- moocow01 14y agoFrom a statistical, macro perspective you are correct. But from the perspective of a driver this could be a hard sell. I would say it is similar in essence to air travel. Even though commercial airline travel is way safer than driving, I'm pretty sure more people fear airline travel due to the element of having no control. Unfortunately when they release probably any automated car crash, as rare as it may be, will be played up as death by machine. I think they will have to really play up the ability to easily override the automation (even though I doubt it will mitigate automated car crashes in that once you get used to it being successful you'll probably be reading a book when the override is actually needed)
- mashmac2 14y agoWe also don't have TSA checkpoints to get through just to get in our cars...
- jfoutz 14y agoReally, it's all in the black box. Old person hits gas instead of break, crashes into robot car. What would a human do differently? teenager runs red light, gets tboned by robot car. What would a human do differently? Child runs in front of car. What would a human do differently? It might take a few years, but thousands of hours of video of humans making avoidable mistakes will probably change people's minds.
- ChuckMcM 14y agoBetter coverage on Endgadget: http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/20/cadillac-super-cruise/ http://www.engadget.com/2012/04/20/cadillac-super-cruise/ But it leaves me deeply suspicious. Having some insight into what it took the team at Google to get theirs to work I find that unless GM starts with that team, and their patent portfolio, this will be be a longer term thing. I'd put money on a self driving car from someone before 2020 but 2015 seems a bit early. In spite of Google's fudging the delicate bits (see my comment on the drive thru non-experience) they have done a tremendous amount of work that a car company would be hard pressed to duplicate quickly. That and Lidar or their functional equivalent systems are still darn expensive. That being said, I think it is AWESOME that we've got a major car company putting this stake firmly in the ground. If nothing else it will motivate a response from the others.
- mc32 14y agoDon't forget that Caltrans + UCB (among other DOTs) has been doing research into autonomous cars/highways with RTOSes --going on two decades now.
- Someone 14y ago"Having some insight into what it took the team at Google to get theirs to work I find that unless GM starts with that team, and their patent portfolio, this will be be a longer term thing." You write that as if Google's team is the only one in the world working on this, or far ahead of all others. Their PR department may be superior, but I do not think they are the only ones; many car companies have been working on this for years, sometimes decades (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driverless_car#History). I cannot judge whether they are far ahead; please show data proving that if you know more.
- danielharan 14y agoWasn't the DARPA grand challenge enough proof that they were ahead of everyone else?
- Someone 14y ago
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- khafra 14y agoDARPA challengers have gotten really good at this, even when the road isn't that well marked. I think they can do it. I just hope there's a "sport mode" button to make it launch at its quickest 0-60, drift around corners and such.
- tzz 14y agoWho really believe Cadillac will release such car in 3 years? This news is missing the following statement: This release contains "forward-looking-statements". Forward-looking statements can generally be identified by words such as "believe," "appears," "may," "could," "will," "estimate," "continue," "anticipate," "intend," "should," "plan," "expect," and other words and terms of similar meaning in connection with any discussion of projections, future performance or expectations, beliefs, plans or objectives for future operations (including statements of assumption underlying or relating to any of the foregoing). Actual results may differ materially from those reflected in these forward-looking statements
- ilaksh 14y agoI think the journalist made a mistake because he mentioned radar but not LIDAR. Far as I know no one has a serious self-driving vehicle without LIDAR, and I doubt that Cadillac is really proposing to change that.
- Porter_423 14y agoDon't you think consumers would be more interested in less cars on the highway? does that mean we can take our eyes off the wheels for more than 15 minutes? will it be able to park? the consequence of everyone owning a vehicle means more commute time which takes away time from work and life. if this technology is flawless, then mobile office/resting quarter will be the whole new trend.
- scoot 14y agoQuestion re. LIDAR (slightly OT to the specific article, but relevant to the general subject). How will LIDAR behave when there are multiple sources transmitting similar but overlapping scanning patterns across the terrain (like, say, a highway full of self-driving vehicles)?
- mneedham 14y agoAs the parent of two young boys (one of whom will be 16 in ~10 years) I can't begin to tell you how excited this makes me. Ford Taurus introduced a 'parent key/child key' concept a few years ago that did things like limit stereo volume and top speed. This takes it one further. No fretting about stupid accidents! No fretting about drunk driving! "Sorry son, you can't ride with Johnny - he still has a manually controlled car."
- gigawhat 14y agoI guess one doesn't need a car at all with a helicopter parent.
- millzlane 14y agoThey may be onto something. If we get all the bad drivers into these things. Maybe We'll finally have drivers that can drive and follow the rules of the road. Hooray! One concern though if these cars will watch for the lines on the road, how will they handle roads with no lines? I live in a place where apparently lines on the road are a new concept. And are non existent in a lot of places.