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Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident
- cygwin98 14y agoI kind of wonder how Google's driverless car handles the situation in extremely populous cities such as Shanghai or HongKong.
- agumonkey 14y agoThat's part of what I'd like to see more. - scalability cases : many many moving obstacles. - reversal cases : gCar behavior if a vehicle is misbehaving. What happens ? can they compute a safe avoidance path ? if not but with impact still being detected in advance by the system, can there be a pre-protection system ? - systemic cases : how 2 gCars react to each others, any oscillatory patterns ? computing a path using the same heuristic leading to avoidable collision. With more than 2 ?
- sukuriant 14y agoForgive me, but could you reformat that? In Firefox, the code-ified view of your text is taxing to read. It has an unpleasant scroll bar and I forget what I've read by the time I get halfway through it, since I can't see it.
- krasin 14y agoIn the city, when there're many pedestrians on the roads, I would expect from autonomous car to drive slower and stop in case of pedestrian spotted (human drivers are smarter, but they usually violate speed limits and have worse reaction time)
- pavel_lishin 14y agoI'm afraid that in New York, this would just lead to total gridlock as a few people would stop traffic by jaywalking, leading to a bigger flow of people following them.
- danweber 14y agoThere's a classic science fiction story that I cannot remember now where people do exactly that. If it becomes a problem, the car can transmit images of the jaywalkers to the police.
- colinhevans 14y agoI see them in heavy traffic on highway 101 near Mountain View most days of the week.
- JonnieCache 14y agoI'd love to see it handle the 17th century layout of central london as well. http://goo.gl/maps/PBaU1 http://goo.gl/maps/PBaU1
- hnriot 14y agoWhile this is very encouraging, the TC article is also very misleading. For example: "There have, of course been some accidents that involved Google’s self-driving cars in the past. All of these, however, happened while humans were in control of the cars." - isn't this far more likely to be the case, since the human only takes control when the car can't figure it out? Also, who's commute doesn't involve temporary construction signs?
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- jessriedel 14y ago> All of these, however, happened while humans were in control of the cars." - isn't this far more likely to be the case, since the human only takes control when the car can't figure it out? That's a really good point, all though I'd wager a guess that most catastrophic accidents (e.g. crashes at highway speeds and t-bones at left-hand turns) happen when the driver is lulled into complacency by normal conditions.
- w0utert 14y agoGood points. Without any statistics about the frequency and nature of situations where the human driver still has to intervene, numbers like '300K miles without an accident' are meaningless. For all I know the Google cars might have had a near-accident every 10 miles if it weren't for the human driver that's always there to save the AI when it fails. The fact that Google never discloses anything besides mile counts, and only lets outsiders take a ride with the Google cars under extremely controlled situations, is quite telling. Statements about Google car achievements like this are not much more than propaganda to me, until Google starts to share actual in-depth details about the performance of the cars. If it really works as well as they claim it does, what can they lose by disclosing everything? Myself, I'm extremely skeptical about self-driving cars, and I've never understood why I seem to be massively outnumbered by people who are utterly convinced it is possible to create AI that can handle the billions of different and sometimes completely arbitrary traffic situations you'll encounter while driving on current road infrastructure. Sure enough it will work great 90% of the time in some places, but that's not enough. It needs to work 99% of the time everywhere. Simply looking at the achievements made in AI in the last 50 years or something doesn't really warrant a whole lot of optimism we'll get there anytime soon.
- secoif 14y agoThis was the easy part. The hard part will be fighting the technophobes when somebody drives into the side of one of these and kills themselves. I don't envy being in that battle.
- daenz 14y agoI would bet they can reconstruct the entire environment through their LIDAR records, play by play, and show the events leading up to the collision.
- huffman 14y agoI hadn't even thought of that. I wonder how this will effect the car insurance industry.
- Devilboy 14y agoI don't think this will be a problem because we're likely to see a gradual move towards fully self-driven cars where humans still drive but the computer takes over only when needed to avoid accidents. Volvo already has a system that stops you rear-ending other vehicles and BMW has a system that safely pulls the car over if the driver suddenly gets incapacitated. Eventually the most advanced cars will never cause an accident while still being human-driven. From there the leap to let go of the wheel is not that big and I think it will be reasonably easy.
- vaksel 14y agoIt's probably a bit misleading. The car is pretty eye catching: http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/public/article_images/self-driving.jpg http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/p... So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay attention. Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd eliminate most of the driver caused accidents
- uncoder0 14y agoYou are suggesting human's will run into it more often right? I sincerely doubt we will see too many autonomous-car-at-fault crashes. The blacked out Lexus SUV's I saw at a Google event a few weeks ago were very discrete minus the velodyne sensor. If it adds an credibility I was on a team at the Victorville final in 2007. :) As an aside, I've been waiting to buy my Google car for 5 long years. During this time I've become so disenfranchised with day to day driving that I avoid it at all costs. Commuting via roads in a car is such a mundane task that is, in my opinion, a solved problem. Bring on the autonomous cars!
- ams6110 14y agoWill you be OK with google tracking everywhere you go and serving you ads for every shop you pass?
- mmanfrin 14y agoI'd love to live in a world where roads were full of auto-driving electric cars that automatically went to recharge and were replaced by fleet cars, and stopped at various points for people to load up. Like personal, on demand busses.
- joshlegs 14y ago> Like personal, on demand buses That use a heck of a lot more gas ;)
- eblume 14y agoNo reason they couldn't be electric. One of the big barriers for electric cars is a short running length and long recharge cycle. Neither is an issue if your 'car' is just an (autonomous) taxi service that runs off to recharge itself when you're done. Obviously that doesn't mean it isn't using a fossil fuel somewhere along the power chain, but I imagine the efficiency isn't much worse than bus routes - and it's not like they need to target the exact same use case, either.
- mmanfrin 14y agoHence my use of the word 'electric' :]
- zanny 14y ago> stopped at various points for people to load up. By that point, we will all have integrated computers in our body, probably with some kind of brain-machine interface so we don't need to interact with them. We can just telepathically request a vehicle to take us somewhere. Screw that, I want Star Trek style beaming up by the Scottie5000 bot in space.
- tbenst 14y agoI would love to see google incorporate the efforts of SARTRE, a system of caravaning cars on highways for reduced drag: http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx
- debacle 14y agoPut another way, Google's Autonomous cars complete less than half of the total daily commute of a small metropolitan workforce. That's not a lot of miles, but the fact that they've done it completely without accident is relatively impressive.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoAutonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up there with computer, Internet, and smart phone. When economists think about technology, they look at it as a productivity booster. From that angle, robot cars will have a huge impact - so many commute hours will be transformed to work, or even leisure, which also boosts productivity. So many smart people are about to be given a 10% or better bump in time to make and to do.
- TylerE 14y agoSo will susceptibility to car sickness become a federally-protected disability?
- fghh45sdfhr3 14y agoI wonder how much of car sickness is thanks to the driver. And if a good enough software could drive without causing car sickness?
- TylerE 14y agoWell, at least in my case, it only happens as a passenger. I can sit there, and I'm fine, but the instant I try to read something, watch a video, or something like that, I start to feel bad. Actually, even a glance at my GPS while driving wil occasionally cause a twinge.
- alexsb92 14y agoI don't necessarily think that will be the case. As far as I knew (and from re-skimming the wiki article), car sickness (and any kind of motion sickness) is caused by the brain seeing different things than what it's processing from the inner ear. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motion_sickness So it's more up to the individual in question, then the driver (considering a normal, average car ride, not anything in the extremes).
- snewman 14y agoCar sickness tends to happen when you're focusing on the interior of the car. That's what leads to the disconnect between your visual field and your mechanical sense of motion. I expect this is the main reason that drivers are rarely affected -- they're always looking out the window (more or less), so their visual sense of motion remains aligned with their other senses.
- robertszkutak 14y agoI wonder how well these cars handle heavy snowfall or ice on the roads. I know firsthand how driving becomes infinitely more complicated under these conditions and it would be major selling point for these cars if they could handle it smoothly.
- SoftwareMaven 14y agoThey don't handle snow at all yet. There is no question that will be quite a hurdle to cross, but I doubt it will be for the reasons most think. My guess is figuring out where the road is at is going to be the hardest part; where I bet most people think it is "how do I drive on ice". Without impatient, jacked-up-4x4 drivers driving a twice what conditions warrant, it is just a slightly different calculation of static and dynamic frictions.
- melling 14y agoLong-haul tractor trailers. We need long stretches of highway where autonomous tractor trailers can carry goods. It'll provide a good business case and limit liability.
- dpcx 14y agoIt would be nice, but I can see the reaction from truckers who become out of work already...
- pavel_lishin 14y agoAren't autonomous cars required to have a human "driver" while on the road? I can definitely see truckers lobbying to have some sort of law of that nature - they sit behind the wheel "in case something goes wrong", but would be allowed to drive longer hours with fewer mandated breaks. Sounds like a win for the profession in general... setting aside that longer drive times mean that at least some will be out of work.
- dpcx 14y agoThey do now. Doesn't necessarily mean that in 5 years they still will.
- pavel_lishin 14y agoDo unions still hold significant political sway these days? I can definitely see truckers pulling their weight to keep those laws on the books for commercial freight at least long enough to stay employed 'til retirement.
- simonbrown 14y agoAssuming the laws are removed at some point, there would still be a huge transition between companies needing truck drivers and not needing truck drivers.
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- duck 14y agoWhile impressive, not as big as this guy who has driven 3 million miles without one: http://compass.ups.com/article.aspx?id=370 http://compass.ups.com/article.aspx?id=370
- nostromo 14y agoToo bad it doesn't mention if this is better than a human or not. So, I decided to figure it out... 2.9 trillion miles driven in 2009 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/09dectvt/09dectvt.pdf http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/09dectvt/09dectvt.pdf 10.8 million traffic accidents in 2009 http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.pdf http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.p... If my math is correct the average american can expect to get in an accident every ~250,000 miles driven, (NYC to LA 90 times) so this does seem to be an improvement if all else is equal (which I'm sure is not the case!).
- iskander 14y agoI don't know much about this google project. Can autonomous cars (i) drive on the highway (ii) drive at night (iii) drive in snow or rain?
- jacobquick 14y agoI thought they were limited to driving on the highway in the empty parts of nevada?
- andyakb 14y agothat is for a car with no human in it, afaik. the google cars drive on normal roads with other cars present
- eblume 14y agoTo date, all Google autonomous cars have had two occupants - a driver (who is strictly hands-off - she's only there in case something goes wrong) and a tech who monitors the data to make sure things are proceeding as expected.
- datasink 14y agoI've seen the Google self-driving car navigating within morning traffic in San Jose. There were two men with laptops in the driver and passenger seats, presumably monitoring the car and available to step in if something went wrong. It was also kind of surprising to see the roof-mounted device it used to map its surrounding. It was fairly large and rapidly rotating.
- Homunculiheaded 14y agoDoes anybody have a citation for accidents per mile for a human driver? I've seen, uncited, 1/200,000 but when I tried to verify this I came up with 2,967 billion miles traveled in 2010 [0] and 5,419,000 crashes total (based on police reports for: property damage, injury, or fatality) [1]. Which, unless there is an error in my math, is roughly 1 crash every 550,000 miles. 0. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Trends/TrendsGeneral.aspx http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Trends/TrendsGeneral.aspx 1. http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811552.pdf http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811552.pdf table 4
- diggan 14y agoWhat happen if I have a accident in the car? Will Google pay my damages if it's the car's fault? How quickly will we adapt to the car?
- hbharadwaj 14y agoThat's the current problem. If it gets into litigation, whose fault is it? Currently, the person who is operating the vehicle is responsible for what the car does.
- zanny 14y agoIf it is gcar on gcar, it is googles fault, because they programmed it wrong / poorly. If it is gcar on car, with the normal car responsible, it is the traditional fault model. If it is car on gcar and it is gcars fault, Google really fudged it up. If it is no ones fault (ie, falling rocks on top of the thing) then that falls into the same catagory as natural disaster damage. I would hope, at least.
- hiker 14y agoI would guess that it's still your responsibility as you're supervising the car while it's been driven by Google's software. The same way you're responsible for your speed even if you're using cruise control.
- duck 14y agoThe cars still need to learn how to handle snow-covered roads That is going to be hard to pull off. For places that get a lot of snow, often you can't even be sure if you're on the road or not.
- abraham 14y agoIn theory autonomous care would be able to include a number of other factor to decide if they are on the road or not. Including, GPS, wifi signals, the grade of the road, the texture of the road, etc.
- bryans 14y agoWhat about situations where lanes have been plowed off-center? Even the most accurate GPS and accelerometers aren't going to help the vehicle understand that the appropriate path has been shifted.
- abraham 14y agoThe car would still factor in the 3d analysis of nearby objects so assuming the use technology that works in heavy snow/rain fall they wouldn't run into anything.
- stephengillie 14y agoA snow-covered road is a situation where: 1. Road indicators are difficult to identify 2. Roadway has less traction than usual 3. Humans are having emotional reactions (joy, terror) which impacts their processing abilities. 3 is mitigated by design. 1 is a sensor issue, it's also a problem that very accurate GPS can solve. There are many causes of slick road surfaces, from snow and ice to excessive water, spilled materials, collision debris, and low-quality roadways (dirt and gravel roads). Driving in reduced-traction situations shouldn't be an edge-case.
- stephengillie 14y agoThis brings up another question: How will these cars react when a street is blocked and unpassable, due to heavy snowfall (unplowed), heavy rainfall over the street, mudslides & rock slides, etc? What about where a street has parked cars on both sides and just enough room for one car to go through the middle of the street - one of the narrow city streets where drivers have to wait in the intersection for oncoming cars - will these autonomous cars wait and let drivers through, or will they get stuck?
- bengl3rt 14y agoI'm of two minds on these. On the one hand, these will help close the "fun gap" between the city and the suburbs. One big problem with living in the suburbs is that you can't really drink a lot wherever you are, because you have to drive home afterwards. If your car drove itself that restriction would be removed, and over time the suburbs could start to compete with cities for nightlife despite the large delta in density. Places might even start staying open later because they could make more money selling alcohol. On the other hand, I have a power-nothing manual-everything sports car that I love to drive. Already most people I know drive cars with automatic transmissions, and now some manufacturers don't even ofter manuals anymore, even on fairly powerful high-end cars. I can imagine many of the same people who choose an automatic transmission today will choose a fully automatic self-driving car tomorrow because to them it's a utility and not a form of entertainment. Eventually, the market for non-self-driving cars will shrink in the same way the market for cars with manual transmissions has.
- damoncali 14y agoImportant detail: "It’s not clear how many of these 300,000 miles were driven on Google’s secret racecourse, by the way."
- kevinalexbrown 14y agoThe most amazing part is that autonomous cars have completed 300,000 miles at all. Congratulations to the engineering team! Around fifteen years ago, I read as a child with fascination an account in Scientific American about an automated highway project where sensors were to be placed every few feet on the road, and cars would follow them, until a driver retook control at the end. I imagined a future network of roads in which cars read from sensors to determine where they were, and was kind of saddened that governments didn't immediately start putting these sensors into highways. This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense). What this reminds me of, rather spectacularly, is that if one method of getting to your solution fails, either because those sensors didn't work out, or the bureaucracy didn't, if you come up with a solution, and say "oh by the way I did it already", it's a lot harder for anyone to ignore it.
- saraid216 14y ago> This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense). And taxes. Google isn't being funded by our dollars, except through a series of indirections.
- waterlesscloud 14y agoI wonder if they get a tax credit for this kind of research? Seems possible, and certain kinds of tax credit may as well be subsidies. All speculation on my part, though. I wonder if anyone knows?
- charlieok 14y agoA tax credit for a research project which until very recently was known only to a small group of people in Google's super-secret "project X" labs?
- 3amOpsGuy 14y agoI wonder what kind of denial of service attacks we'll see on autonomous cars once they're popular. Trivial example, could i choose to always pull out in front of the robot even if it's not my right of way? (presumably safe in the knowledge the robot will always give way to avoid a collision) Could that escalate to the robot being treated as a mobile speed trap / felony snitch? Interesting times.
- johngalt 14y agoWill it be a problem when you have 50 autonomous cars in close proximity? Potential for crosstalk from the sensors? Similar to headlights at night making it so you can see, but blinding oncoming traffic.
- danweber 14y agoThe people doing this have talked about how their autonomous car met another company's autonomous car. There didn't seem to be a problem. Really, when there are more autonomous cars on the road, each and every one will get better from their neighbors. They can directly share the data they see and what they are doing. The network effects will be huge.
- rondon1 14y agoYou will not know how safe they are until accidents happen. I would love to see someone with money run an experiment with real drivers vs google cars. Create a worst case scenario course with simulated drunk drivers, blown tires, missing stop signs, etc.. and run this with real and fake drivers. I suspect the average driver would crash 10% of the time, autonomous car would crash 1% of the time, and a professional driver would crash never. The real safety improvements will come when all cars are autonomous and they talk to each other.
- danweber 14y ago"Missing stop signs" is one place where a google car would be great, since they pre-map the area and would know a stop sign has disappeared. Knowing that would cause them to slow down and be even more careful. Autonomous cars never get distracted, have 360 degree vision, look at all things all the time, and can react in tens of milliseconds versus hundreds of milliseconds. I'd trust that over a "professional driver."
- joshlegs 14y agoNow just imagine putting in an address into the GPS and not missing any turns on the way there cuz your computer-car does everything for you. Now also imagine if that address isn't up-to-date (I found it on the web!), or there is some other problem with the address.
- ShabbyDoo 14y ago>Google warns that “there’s still a long road ahead.” The cars >still need to learn how to handle snow-covered roads, ... What if the car was smart enough to identify situations where it was unable to auto-navigate safely? It could pull-over and ask the human to take-over for awhile. I would rather see a mostly capable self-driving car come to market sooner than wait around for near perfection. On this note, it seems that the trucking industry could adopt a self-driving truck even if it was only good enough to travel along long stretches of highway. The first/last miles would be manually driven just like today. Could the trucking companies use remote navigation (much like military drones) to handle first/last mile and perhaps problem spots along the way? What's the minimum viable product?
- Cushman 14y ago> What if the car was smart enough to identify situations where it was unable to auto-navigate safely? It could pull-over and ask the human to take-over for awhile. This is precisely what the Google car does, in fact.
- andrewljohnson 14y agoIt won't be consumers who drive the adoption of robot cars, it will be the logistics companies. This will all start with factory-to-doorstep supply chain integration. First, Amazon and Wal-Mart and Fed-Ex will have giant fleets - then consumers and mid-sized businesses will follow. Small local governments and developed Asian nations like South Korea and Japan will also drive adoption. Having a fully-automated supply chain will break the competition who doesn't have the capital to get there fast enough. The big companies already automate the factories, and once delivery is automated, the circle is complete.
- malkia 14y agoIn the future, there must be some communication between vehicles how to minimize the effect of the crash - e.g. if in one vehicles there is no-one, and no hazardous material - then this car somehow should be able to take more of the damage. Oh, and I would very much like if every vehicle put on the back and front of the car - it's current speed measured by the car.
- ilaksh 14y agoI doubt that there were really no accidents at all or close calls, but even if that is the case, you have to expect some accidents as more and more of these vehicles get out there. But even if there are 1000 accidents in the next 300000 miles or whatever, I hope people are realistic and give the technology time rather than writing it off as soon as a very well-publicized collisions occur.
- tocomment 14y agoDoes anyone know how an autonomous car can handle stop lights being out? Or a traffic cop at an intersection? Will it has to learn and recognize the hand gestures?
- elchief 14y agoPredictions of the economic effects of the GCars: http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self-driving-cars-are-going-to.html http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self-drivin...
- vibrunazo 14y agoHere's a much better and through article on the subject the RWW: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_self-driving_car_where_it_stands_in_histor.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_self-driving_ca...
- eloisant 14y agoThe problem is, if it gets to production, the first real accident will be considered totally inacceptable. It doesn't matter if you reduce by a 1000 the risk of accident. When an accident is caused by a human error you have someone to blame, you can think "I would have done better". But when the accident is cause by a machine, then people will stop trusting the car and be done with it.
- hooande 14y agoI've seen this argument made in many forms. The short response is: "Google already thought of that." People will be upset, even outraged, by the first few autonomous car accidents. But as long as they're still legal, they'll be building up a safety record that will quickly surpass what humans can achieve. Google has already invested enough money in the legislative system to prevent laws from being yanked off the books after one accident. The general form of "People won't like it when machines do X" doesn't have a lot of merit. There are always problems and people never like it at first. Then they get used to it and quality of life improves over time. I'm sure similar arguments were made about the automobile itself.
- kayoone 14y agomay i remind people here cheering for automated cars that most of the world hasnt even accepted automatic transmission because they want to control their car themselves? This will take decades
- GFischer 14y agoErm, at least over here (Uruguay) we don't buy automatic transmission because it's more expensive. If they were priced the same, I'd probably buy automatic.
- nileshtrivedi 14y agoParaphrasing Peter Norvig: ".. if you do experiments and you're not failing half of the time, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments." (from http://www.slate.com/blogs/thewrongstuff/2010/08/03/error_message_google_research_director_peter_norvig_on_being_wrong.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/thewrongstuff/2010/08/03/error_me... ) ;-)
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