9 ms·

Too 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/

• iskander 14y ago
  I 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 ago
    I thought they were limited to driving on the highway in the empty parts of nevada?
    • andyakb 14y ago
      that is for a car with no human in it, afaik. the google cars drive on normal roads with other cars present
      • eblume 14y ago
        To 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 ago
      I'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.
      • toomuchtodo 14y ago
        The device on top is a laser scanner creating a cloud point map for spatial awareness.
      • michaelt 14y ago
        Did it look like this: http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx Very impressive spec - as you'd expect for a $75,000 product.
    • eblume 14y ago
      I drove behind one yesterday as it returned to Google HQ in Mountain View. It was pretty exciting. It was also rush hour, and people didn't like that it tried so hard to give a safe amount of space in front and behind itself - it ended up being a little bubble of lane-changing space that moved slower than the rest of traffic. Not that I hold any of this against the car - it was clearly doing the intelligent thing. But people... we are animals.
      • RobotCaleb 14y ago
        Weird. Your post didn't have a reply link. I had to click the permalink for it. Anyway, I wanted to say that I read an article about a guy in Seattle that always kept a couple car lengths ahead of him. I seem to remember the article saying he was able to get home quicker that way than by behaving like the rest of the cars on the road.
        • riffic 14y ago
          http://trafficwaves.org/ http://trafficwaves.org/
          • stephengillie 14y ago
            I too live in the Seattle area, and I've heard of this technique. Sadly, when implementing it, all you see is the angry drivers behind you who rush to pass and gobble up the traffic bubble you've been saving.
            • andybak 14y ago
              I thought that this was covered by the Traffic Waves guy who said his method deals with that problem quite well?
              • wbeaty 14y ago
                Yep: it doesn't happen, FAQ: http://trafficwaves.org/tfaq.html#five http://trafficwaves.org/tfaq.html#five - if truckers can maintain a bubble, how can it be impossible? - yes, aggressively weaving drivers sometimes jump in ...then they jump out again. - at merge zones, the entire point is to let people into your lane. - In theory, everyone else wants your precious bubble. In practice, not. ...and in a burning building, we all know the best way to escape, eh? EVERYONE AGGRESSIVELY PUSH FORWARD, DON'T LET ANYONE ELSE GET PAST, COOPERATION AND TEAMWORK ARE FOR LOSERS! Yep, that certainly won't trigger a huge clogged mess where everyone dies.
  • bartonfink 14y ago
    Autonomous cars have driven on the highway in real-traffic conditions [1], [2], although they had a driver at the ready in the event of any problem. I don't know about night or weather conditions for these instances. [1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP (their citations pages aren't responding at the moment) [2] - http://www.argo.ce.unipr.it/argo/english/index.html http://www.argo.ce.unipr.it/argo/english/index.html
  • stephengillie 14y ago
    Could it handle Lombard Street? How would it react to a roadway that's covered in several feet of water due to flooding (and poor road design)? Or sinkholes? One-way streets? Freeways which change directions at different times of day? Dirt roads? (Can we make it autonomously offroad?) How will it react during an earthquake or tornado? How will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's path, when the car has a green light? When the car comes across kids playing football/street hockey/baseball in the street, will it stop for them? How far out of the way will the kids have to move before the car thinks it's safe to go past? Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage?
    • jjwiseman 14y ago
      Yes, a Google autonomous car drove down Lombard Street: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at.html http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/10/what-were-driving-at....
      • mbrubeck 14y ago
        Here you can see video of self-driving cars handling Lombard Street, as well as dirt roads, off-road driving, pedestrians and bicyclists and other obstacles in the road, plus tons of information about how they work: https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/48 https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/48 https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/209 https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/209 https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/210 https://www.ai-class.com/course/video/videolecture/210 (Lombard Street at about 4:40) One thing that strikes me is how much more these robots can potentially see than a human driver. Imagine how much better you could drive if you could see in all directions at once with multiple range-finding sensors and cameras, track dozens of moving objects simultaneously, never get sleepy or look away from the road at the wrong time, react to events in milliseconds, and learn from hundreds of thousands of miles of training data as your driving "experience".
    • danweber 14y ago
      Google's algorithm (which Strum seems to be pollinating everywhere -- and good, because the old algorithms were failing DARPA tests) is to pre-map the road. The car knows exactly where it is and what is supposed to be there, which it also compared with what it sees now. How will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's path, when the car has a green light? It will stop. In fact, the "failure mode" of self-driving cars will be how pedestrians can bully them by stepping in front of them so they stop. When the car comes across kids playing football/street hockey/baseball in the street, will it stop for them? There is already video of this. The radar/lidar isn't good enough to see a baseball, but it's definitely good enough to see a kid. Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage? It will probably pull over and stop if something is wrong.
  • archgoon 14y ago
    They talk about weather issues in this video at 3:40. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkYFIhJ3rnY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkYFIhJ3rnY In summary: They can handle darkness and rain, but not snow. If you're interested, Sebastian Thrun has an intro to the topic as this course (you can preview all videos and problems) http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs373/CourseRev/apr2012 http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs373/CourseRev/apr20...
  • danweber 14y ago
    Driving at night and the rain will probably be where autonomous cars really outshine humans. Lidar systems don't care if you are wearing all black during a night at new moon. Snow is much harder for the time being. A snow drift falling off a car can make a google car think a cooler has appeared in the road.
• arrrg 14y ago
  What I’m interested in is whether they counted hypothetical accidents. As far as I know, there always has to be someone in the driver’s seat, ready to step in at any time. How often did that person have to step in? Now that would be an interesting metric, especially when plotted over time. As is, it should be pretty unlikely for the autonomous cars to cause accidents, even if they were much less reliable than human drivers (since there is always a human ready to step in). I think autonomous cars are awesome and very clearly the future, but I find it hard to believe that humans never had to step in, especially not in the beginning. I mean, that’s why they do those extensive test drives, right? To find bugs that they can squash.
  • ShabbyDoo 14y ago
    Agree. Did humans step-in when they noted conditions which they believed the car unable to handle and perhaps prevent the majority of likely accidents?
    • Tycho 14y ago
      My suspicion is that the figures quoted around these Google cars and their safety record, if you take them at face value, lead to a ludicrous level of optimism.
      • VBprogrammer 14y ago
        I think that Google have simply done a better job of creating a self-driving car than you are willing to let yourself believe. They have done this by attacking the problem from the 'Big Data' mindset which Google are intimately familiar with. Instead of trying to crack hard AI problems (computer vision being the most obvious) they are simply counting on being able to record and use enough information both before and during the actual driving that they simply avoid these problems. From what I have seen this approach seems to be working. My real concern is it will not be economically viable to integrate the kind of sensor arrays they are depending on into a real car (2 radars and the laser scanner being the killers).
        • 14y ago
• spitfire 14y ago
  What type of accidents though? Do people get in a number of fender benders over their lives? or head on at 65mph? What sort of accidents will GoogleCar be prone to? Fender benders, or a head on at 65mph every 500K? I'm very hopeful about this. Most people don't want to drive most of the time. As long as I can still drive my V12 Aston martin manually when I want to, this is awesome.
  • mike-cardwell 14y ago
    I imagine, once automated cars are safe and popular enough, they will mandate that all new cars must have it and set a date after which only automated cars are allowed on the road. It will become an offence to take over and drive manually unless the circumstance demands it. You'll be fine driving your Aston Martin, but your kids, or their kids might not be.
    • notatoad 14y ago
      We're already heading down that route [1]. Although I can't see it ever being an offense to manually drive your car, the car will just automatically take over the driving duties if it doesn't like the way you are driving. [1] http://www.autoweek.com/article/20120803/carnews/120809942 http://www.autoweek.com/article/20120803/carnews/120809942
    • sparky_z 14y ago
      I don't buy it. In that scenario, how does anybody learn to drive in the first place? Someone who hasn't spent years of their life driving manually won't have developed the skills to intervene properly in an emergency. At best, driving would, become a specialty career/hobby, like piloting aircraft. By the time all personal transportation is automatic, it won't just be the status quo with "robot chauffeurs". The whole transportation ecosystem will have to change substantially. Self-driving cars are just a first step to get people used to (or even enamored with) the idea of automatic transportation on a large scale.
      • VBprogrammer 14y ago
• ridiculous_fish 14y ago
  I'm guessing that more accidents happen in intersections than on the highway. My understanding is that Google's self-driving cars are currently limited to highways and known-course driving. I don't think it's going to do a very good job driving in San Francisco city streets (but then, who does?)
  • danweber 14y ago
    From what I know it's always known-course. If you were to get a google car today for your commute (you can't), you would first drive to and from work yourself, probably more than once, so it can map everything. Knowing where there should be a stop sign and traffic lights significantly reduces risks. The computer still needs to be able to learn when new ones appear, of course.
    • protomyth 14y ago
      It would also help with some roads that are incorrectly marked on the GPS. There is a highway in ND that has a 4 mile stretch that has a miss marked road. Multiple GPS maps show the road about 100 yards west of where it actually is. Damn annoying driving 4 miles with the GPS constantly saying "Get back on the road". Thought it was just a garbage GPS map, but it happened on a couple of models. Guess I really don't have to worry until they figure out how to get the car to drive on snow covered roads.
• zitterbewegung 14y ago
  Only problem is sample size really. We need 2.9 trillion miles on Google cars with x accidents then.
  • ShabbyDoo 14y ago
    If the Google Car had gotten into 100 accidents over 300 miles, we easily could claim it much worse than most drivers. However, as with most rare events...
• fl3tch 14y ago
  A lot of those accidents happen in rain and snow, which the Google folks admit are not as well tested. Under clear conditions on open roads, humans probably do better than 300K miles too.
  • danweber 14y ago
    That doesn't seem right to me. A person driving 10K a year will hit 300,000 miles over the course of 30 years. Does the average person really have less than 1 accident every 30 years? Especially when they are younger?
    • adgar 14y ago
      I put 40k on my first car and hit stuff enough to warrant replacing something - often just a fender etc - at least 5 times. Only one fender bender when I rear ended someone at ~15 mph talking on my phone like an asshole. I know I'm a worse driver than most. But I also wouldn't say that my similarly young friends average anywhere close to 1 such error per 250k miles. Definitely closer 25k.
    • justin66 14y ago
      Mentally reviewing the people I'm close to, the figure seems to be off by at least an order of magnitude.
    • lmm 14y ago
      Per mile is a pretty poor measure. My dad drives at least 40K/year (long commute) and has averaged one accident per 20 years - but obviously for a regular driver following a familiar route the chances of an accident are pretty low. I would expect someone who drives less would actually have more accidents/year.
    • Retric 14y ago
      I think it includes truckers who are far safer than normal drivers on average and do a lot of driving.
• freiheit 14y ago
  That's 10.8M crashes. The vast majority aren't really "accidents", since they are caused by human actions. Census needs to fix their reports to be consistent with Department of Transportation terminology...
• exue 14y ago
  I think the true rate of human accidents is higher than 1 per 250K miles - many are simply never reported to the police or DMV, especially because many states have a cost threshold ($750 in California, higher in other states) or require an injury to be reported