3 ms·

Pretty bad news for the space as a whole. A decade and a half ago there were a dozen+ companies and tens of billions of VC dollars in the space. People were pro

by paxys 2y ago

Pretty bad news for the space as a whole. A decade and a half ago there were a dozen+ companies and tens of billions of VC dollars in the space. People were proudly proclaiming the end of driving. Now all but one of them have folded. My thoughts today are the same as they were back then. Self driving will only be solved city by city and street by street. Local governments will need to create dedicated closed-off autonomous lanes with sensors. Auto manufacturers will need to abide by a common standard to talk to local infrastructure and to each other. Instead we chose to solve the problem in the most complex and inefficient way possible, and are now seeing the results.

nopinsight 2y ago
With world models like Genie 2 and other advances in LMMs (large multimodal models), the aspiration of human-level autonomous vehicles might be realized relatively soon. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-foundation-world-model/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-...
jcgrillo 2y ago
If you're going to block off lanes and install sensors why not just lay track and use streetcars? Rail is way more efficient. This has been a solved problem for the better part of two centuries.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- paxys 2y ago
  That's like asking why do cars and roads exist at all when everyone can just use public transit. The answer is that people want cars. They want to drive. They want to be taken directly from point A to point B without needing to walk to transit stops and switch buses/trains and face unpredictable schedules and delays. Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
  - jcgrillo 2y ago
    How are you going to keep me in my non-autonomous car out of your special "autonomous only and also maybe busses" lane? EDIT: and yes, it's a completely reasonable question to ask why invest in special new kinds of roads when more people would be better served by public transit.
    - paxys 2y ago
      ..the exact same way every other traffic rule is enforced? How do you stop cars from driving on the wrong side of the road or running a red light?
      - jcgrillo 2y ago
        Those things are easy to detect. It's much less easy to prevent a simple lane change. Some cities have "bus only" lanes, which cars use anyway, but it's easy to detect them since they don't look like busses. How are you going to detect that my car isn't autonomous?
        paxys 2y ago
        These are pointless concerns. It is a technically trivial problem. We are literally in a thread about self driving cars. If there is a will to enforce it then it will be enforced.
        jcgrillo 2y ago
        That's what I'm trying to get at--why would there be any will? Why should we all decide to give up a lane to people who are rich (or stupid) enough to buy a brand new car?
        infthi 2y ago
        Have speed cameras with license plate recognition and add "is_av" bit associated with a license plate. Or maybe just issue license plates with a different color to avs. Like taxis/public transport having yellow license plates in some jurisdictions.
- alwejrlaw 2y ago
  As much as I love urban rail, its usefulness scales in direct proportion to population density. Europe has >2x the population density of the US. Japan has 10x the population density of the US. Rail for transit just doesn't make as much sense for the US. It works in a few of our densest cities, but nowhere else. Buses are cheaper, simpler, and easier than rail, but also are useful in proportion to density.
  - astrange 2y ago
    Japan has pretty good rail in the parts of the country that aren't dense. The way you get it is (among other things) transit-oriented development, which the US has the exact opposite of when they surround suburban train stations with giant parking lots.
  - mrguyorama 2y ago
    This has always been a bullshit claim. The US HAD good urban rail infrastructure back when we were less dense and had half as many people total. Even if the claim (you need Europe density) wasn't trivially false, several parts of the US DO meet that level of density and could easily support good public infrastructure. Or do you not know that in the early 1900s nearly every city had copious public transportation that was relied on by literally everyone in the city?
- htrp 2y ago
  I feel like we did that back in the '50s and then the auto lobby had us strip it all out (in the USA)
  - astrange 2y ago
    Earlier than that, and IIRC what actually happened was cities decided the streetcars were greedy, put price caps on the fares, and they went out of business.
- toast0 2y ago
  Streetcar rails are terrible for bikes and pedestrians. Dedicated bus lanes are a lot more flexible. A rail car is probably more efficient than a bus, but a bus is a lot less expensive.
  - Doctor_Fegg 2y ago
    As a cyclist I’d rather take my chances with streetcar rails than with cars. Rails don’t appear from nowhere and hit me.
    - toast0 2y ago
      Street car rails probably won't appear from nowhere, but if your tire falls into the gap for the rail, you're very likely to crash. Seattle has a tiny amount of street car rail, but regularly pays out large damages to people injured by the rails.
      - jcgrillo 2y ago
        I've seen people wreck super hard trying to cross the streetcar rails at too shallow an angle in pdx multiple times. But that's an optional behavior. Just the other day I saw a moose crossing the road over in Twin Mountain, and I chose to slow down and not hit it. If I'd made another choice that resulted in a collision, and I'd survived, I wouldn't expect to get some settlement from the town of Twin Mountain, NH. Similarly if you ride your bike into a train track that one's pretty much on you lol.. being aware of one's surroundings is one of those basic life skills.
        toast0 2y ago
        Installing a huge hazard in the road is optional too, though. If [insert city here] had saved money and used a bus instead of a street car, all of the problems that come from having a rail in the road would have been avoided. For heavy rail, they don't often run in the road, parallel with the road, in the lane of travel. And when they do, it's usually in an industrial area that people aren't walking and cycling through.
cortesoft 2y ago
That could also mean that one company just won, right? Ten companies try to do a really hard thing, nine fail, one succeeds, the nine failures close down. Seems pretty reasonable for difficult new tech.
- paxys 2y ago
  Has Waymo "won"? At its peak Cruise was operating in more cities and had more cars on the road than Waymo does today. Look at how that ended.
  - tialaramex 2y ago
    When was this peak, which cities and how many cars? Waymo has a few hundred cars, and is serving the public in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco, as far as I can tell Cruise had a kinda shaky San Francisco service, with restricted hours, now discontinued, and they have a tourist zone Dubai service and... some test areas. So I must be missing a lot of cars and a lot of extra cities with service. Or you've confused ambitions (Cruise wanted to have thousands of vehicles and wanted to be in dozens of US cities by 2027) with reality (Neither of those things happened)
burlesona 2y ago
Infrastructure for automation is happening: https://www.cavnue.com/ https://www.cavnue.com/

by paxys 2y ago

nopinsight 2y ago

With world models like Genie 2 and other advances in LMMs (large multimodal models), the aspiration of human-level autonomous vehicles might be realized relatively soon. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-foundation-world-model/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-...

jcgrillo 2y ago

If you're going to block off lanes and install sensors why not just lay track and use streetcars? Rail is way more efficient. This has been a solved problem for the better part of two centuries.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
paxys 2y ago
That's like asking why do cars and roads exist at all when everyone can just use public transit. The answer is that people want cars. They want to drive. They want to be taken directly from point A to point B without needing to walk to transit stops and switch buses/trains and face unpredictable schedules and delays. Autonomous road infrastructure is a sensible, incremental improvement. And in fact city buses will tend to benefit from it the most.
- jcgrillo 2y ago
  How are you going to keep me in my non-autonomous car out of your special "autonomous only and also maybe busses" lane? EDIT: and yes, it's a completely reasonable question to ask why invest in special new kinds of roads when more people would be better served by public transit.
  - paxys 2y ago
    ..the exact same way every other traffic rule is enforced? How do you stop cars from driving on the wrong side of the road or running a red light?
    - jcgrillo 2y ago
      Those things are easy to detect. It's much less easy to prevent a simple lane change. Some cities have "bus only" lanes, which cars use anyway, but it's easy to detect them since they don't look like busses. How are you going to detect that my car isn't autonomous?
      - paxys 2y ago
        These are pointless concerns. It is a technically trivial problem. We are literally in a thread about self driving cars. If there is a will to enforce it then it will be enforced.
        jcgrillo 2y ago
        That's what I'm trying to get at--why would there be any will? Why should we all decide to give up a lane to people who are rich (or stupid) enough to buy a brand new car?
      - infthi 2y ago
        Have speed cameras with license plate recognition and add "is_av" bit associated with a license plate. Or maybe just issue license plates with a different color to avs. Like taxis/public transport having yellow license plates in some jurisdictions.
alwejrlaw 2y ago
As much as I love urban rail, its usefulness scales in direct proportion to population density. Europe has >2x the population density of the US. Japan has 10x the population density of the US. Rail for transit just doesn't make as much sense for the US. It works in a few of our densest cities, but nowhere else. Buses are cheaper, simpler, and easier than rail, but also are useful in proportion to density.
- astrange 2y ago
  Japan has pretty good rail in the parts of the country that aren't dense. The way you get it is (among other things) transit-oriented development, which the US has the exact opposite of when they surround suburban train stations with giant parking lots.
- mrguyorama 2y ago
  This has always been a bullshit claim. The US HAD good urban rail infrastructure back when we were less dense and had half as many people total. Even if the claim (you need Europe density) wasn't trivially false, several parts of the US DO meet that level of density and could easily support good public infrastructure. Or do you not know that in the early 1900s nearly every city had copious public transportation that was relied on by literally everyone in the city?
htrp 2y ago
I feel like we did that back in the '50s and then the auto lobby had us strip it all out (in the USA)
- astrange 2y ago
  Earlier than that, and IIRC what actually happened was cities decided the streetcars were greedy, put price caps on the fares, and they went out of business.
toast0 2y ago
Streetcar rails are terrible for bikes and pedestrians. Dedicated bus lanes are a lot more flexible. A rail car is probably more efficient than a bus, but a bus is a lot less expensive.
- Doctor_Fegg 2y ago
  As a cyclist I’d rather take my chances with streetcar rails than with cars. Rails don’t appear from nowhere and hit me.
  - toast0 2y ago
    Street car rails probably won't appear from nowhere, but if your tire falls into the gap for the rail, you're very likely to crash. Seattle has a tiny amount of street car rail, but regularly pays out large damages to people injured by the rails.
    - jcgrillo 2y ago
      I've seen people wreck super hard trying to cross the streetcar rails at too shallow an angle in pdx multiple times. But that's an optional behavior. Just the other day I saw a moose crossing the road over in Twin Mountain, and I chose to slow down and not hit it. If I'd made another choice that resulted in a collision, and I'd survived, I wouldn't expect to get some settlement from the town of Twin Mountain, NH. Similarly if you ride your bike into a train track that one's pretty much on you lol.. being aware of one's surroundings is one of those basic life skills.
      - toast0 2y ago
        Installing a huge hazard in the road is optional too, though. If [insert city here] had saved money and used a bus instead of a street car, all of the problems that come from having a rail in the road would have been avoided. For heavy rail, they don't often run in the road, parallel with the road, in the lane of travel. And when they do, it's usually in an industrial area that people aren't walking and cycling through.

cortesoft 2y ago

That could also mean that one company just won, right? Ten companies try to do a really hard thing, nine fail, one succeeds, the nine failures close down. Seems pretty reasonable for difficult new tech.

paxys 2y ago
Has Waymo "won"? At its peak Cruise was operating in more cities and had more cars on the road than Waymo does today. Look at how that ended.
- tialaramex 2y ago
  When was this peak, which cities and how many cars? Waymo has a few hundred cars, and is serving the public in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco, as far as I can tell Cruise had a kinda shaky San Francisco service, with restricted hours, now discontinued, and they have a tourist zone Dubai service and... some test areas. So I must be missing a lot of cars and a lot of extra cities with service. Or you've confused ambitions (Cruise wanted to have thousands of vehicles and wanted to be in dozens of US cities by 2027) with reality (Neither of those things happened)

burlesona 2y ago

Infrastructure for automation is happening: https://www.cavnue.com/ https://www.cavnue.com/