10 ms·

Creating an all-weather driver

125 points by boulos 1y ago

daft_pink 1y ago
i’m really curious at what point it decides that it shouldn’t be driving.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
  Humans are horrible at this I wonder what the limit is. I've always thought that I can tailor my speed to conditions but not everyone on the road slows down.
  - hangonhn 1y ago
    It's really interesting because that's something they definitely don't teach you when you first learn to drive. Growing up in Florida, I learned to pull over and turn on emergency blinkers if the rain gets bad enough. The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. Or maybe I would have learned eventually after a few close calls with skidding. Or maybe I would have never learned until it's too late. I wonder if the different responses to averse conditions you've observed is a function of the different experiences we've had as drivers. You might be a more experienced driver than some of those around you.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      And pulling off through a patch of heavy rain is one thing. There are a lot of issues with pulling off in heavy snow unless you can really navigate off the highway to a safe location. Sometimes there aren't great solutions.
    - candiddevmike 1y ago
      Hazard lights are almost never used by folks when driving, when you really should turn them on anytime the conditions are forcing you to not go the speed limit, IMO. The other lizard brains will see blinky lights and hopefully put down their phones so they don't rear end you.
      - ghaff 1y ago
        I would hope the other folks would recognize that conditions are such that you're slowing down rather than have a bunch of arbitrary blinking lights on the road.
      - potato3732842 11mo ago
        People mostly only turn on their hazards when they're a hazard to other traffic (which is the whole point, IMO) Even if you're the slow guy on the road your speed still probably doesn't warrant this hence why you mostly only see it when people are going a speed of zero.
    - deleted 1y ago
      [deleted]
    - antisthenes 1y ago
      > The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. Did you ever hydroplane in a car, even ever so slightly? That experience teaches you to slow down or stop and wait for the rain to be over pretty quickly.
    - XenophileJKO 1y ago
      It's funny because when I lived in Texas, we just turn on windshield wipers on full blast, put the hazard lights on and drive around at 15mph. (This would have to be an epic downpour though.) The only time people stopped was when it was hailing.. and then they would hide under bridges if they could.
      - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
        I remember driving past Charles de Gaulle Airport when it rained so hard we couldn't see past the end of the bonnet (hood). Everybody just stopped until it passed.
  - amluto 1y ago
    Humans have one advantage over autonomous cars in ice: they can pull over and put on chains. Cars can’t do that (yet). (I’d love to see a serious winter vehicle that can deploy traction devices by itself, perhaps while rolling at very low speed. Off the top of my head, it seems like it might be easier to put them on then to take them off.)
    - ghaff 1y ago
      Outside of some specific areas, how many people do you think carry chains with them?
      - tstrimple 1y ago
        It's pretty much limited to areas with both snow and lots of elevation changes like in the mountainous areas. Having lived most of my life in the midwest now, no one here uses chains except maybe some of the private snow plow operators driving their trucks around at 4AM. Most people won't use dedicated winter tires either. We tend to rock all seasons all year round. Ice and snow on mostly flat roads are just something you get used to dealing with.
        ghaff 1y ago
        As someone who has lived in New England most of my adult life I've never owned either chains or dedicated snow tires. I do try to be relatively conservative in terms of driving in winter. But I haven't invested in special equipment.
      - loeg 1y ago
        They're required for traveling over mountain passes in the winter where I live, so I have them. But I have 3PMSF-rated tires and those are what I'd rather use 99% of the time.
    - beaviskhan 1y ago
      Automatic snow chains are a thing, often seen on emergency vehicles even outside of the normal snow band. Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/yus43b/what_are_these_chains_under_an_ambulance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/yus43b/wha... No idea if they're compatible with Jaguars or whatever Waymo is rolling these days, but my guess is that Waymo could make the economics work.
  - rangestransform 1y ago
    The limit is much higher than human performance given enough low latency compute. [1] is probably the limit, the actual issue is being able to do that while also avoiding colliding with other road users. The challenges of state estimation and control should be the same. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MWib6bnnT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MWib6bnnT8
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    I hate this sort of take. Humans aren't horrible, on average, they're about average. Your opinion is just a statement of "my judgement is decently far from the fat part of the bell curve" but dressed up in "and I know better" type snobbery.
- url00 1y ago
  Exactly. I picture a dystopia where the car refuses to attempt escape from a storm because of the liability factor.
  - brookst 1y ago
    Sounds preferable to a dystopia where AI driven cars are getting into wrecks because they’re overconfident in their abilities.
    - chemotaxis 1y ago
      The thing about winter driving is that it's just inherently a crapshoot. Sometimes, on a nice morning commute, you hit black ice going downhill and that's that. It doesn't matter that you were going slow, you're still gonna slide and hit something. I doubt the tech will be immune to that. So it's up to how they manage the fallout from the crashes they end up getting into.
      - simulator5g 1y ago
        Crashing after hitting black ice on a hill is a skill issue. Its like skiing, or ice skating, you still have control even though the handling is very different.
        loeg 1y ago
        It depends on the hill. Sometimes you should just avoid the hill. Winter tires also go a long way.
        Zanfa 11mo ago
        Only if you have studded winter tires that are in good condition. Throw in a sprinkling of powder and there's nothing even a professional WRC driver could do. Another personal favorite is driving on ice with a tiny layer of sun melted water so you can also hydroplane.
        11mo ago
- dingnuts 1y ago
  when the remote operator watching five feeds notices it's doing something dangerous
milleramp 1y ago
At the Los Angeles Ciclavia two weeks ago Waymo's were getting stuck at the car crossings. There were police standing there waving cars through but the two I saw were not willing to drive through the intersection.
- nradov 1y ago
  Properly responding to informal hand and voice signals from law enforcement, road workers, and other humans is going to be one of the toughest technical challenges for autonomous vehicles to solve.
  - darth_avocado 1y ago
    Stop signs became universal. No reason why machine readable signals/devices to communicate don’t become the norm with law enforcement and emergency response workers.
    - navi0 1y ago
      Authorization and authentication will be the main challenge to solve here: who is authorized to issue those signals to the automated driver, and how are they authenticated so that malicious actors aren’t able to hijack the automated driver.
      - strbean 1y ago
        We haven't exactly solved that issue for human drivers. People impersonate police in order to commit crimes. How much more problematic is it with autonomous vehicles? I could see action here just because it is a threat to the property of large corporations, though.
        dbt00 11mo ago
        People exercise coordination ability like this all the time. I got stuck getting out of shoreline after a large concert with abnormal parking conditions, and when we didn't move for 30 minutes I got out of the car and directed traffic so both lots could empty equally. Took another 45 minutes for my family to catch up to me, which was good because that's when someone in a safety vest showed up and told me to stop.
tonymet 1y ago
I hope this improves rigor and common sense around winter driving in the USA. In Eastern Europe, drivers care more about tires, angility and driver skill. In the USA , drivers rely on large 4wd vehicles with high clearance for snow and ice driving. I’ve seen way too many issues with large clumsy vehicles losing control due to poor tires . I hope Waymo shares more solutions for winter driving to debunk a lot of the marketing for winter activity driving in the USA
- micromacrofoot 1y ago
  It won't, our economy is somewhat reliant on giant vehicles that people can barely afford to maintain.
  - randerson 1y ago
    Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF). The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires. Most high performance cars come with summer tires. I live in a wealthy area where I often see new cars in parking lots wearing summer tires in winter, probably relying on electronic nannies to mask the lack of grip in normal driving.
    - tonymet 1y ago
      i agree. i was impressed that my recent RWD crossover came fit with All Weather / M+S Rated (light snow conditions) tires
    - ryukoposting 1y ago
      > Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF). Won't happen. Tires affect fuel economy in EPA testing. Your commuter car will always come equipped with the hardest all-season or summer tires the manufacturer can source.
      - potato3732842 11mo ago
b0rbb 1y ago
> Upstate New York I'm guessing they meant _Upstate AND Western New York_. Glad someone in Waymo saw the potential for testing for extreme snowy conditions there.
- boulos 1y ago
  Yes. We went to Buffalo, and a few other locations (https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/waymo-to-double-down-on-winter-testing-its-robotaxis/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/waymo-to-double-down-on-wi... and other reports)
- School-Cotton 1y ago
  Anecdotally I feel like the Upstate vs. Western NY distinction is mostly only made by people who live there. When I lived in NYC I used "upstate" to mean anything not in the five boroughs, Long Island or Westchester, and I don't think this usage is uncommon.
  - counters 1y ago
    Eh, it's a pretty big distinction weather-wise. Extreme Western New York and the Tug Hill plateau are all susceptible to somewhat frequent lake effect snow. Given the right time of year and wind fetch, you can see narrow convective / lake-effect snow bands from the Finger Lakes. But broadly speaking the actual annual expected snow and the phenomenology of the storm systems that produce that snow are very different over the rest of the state.
awaymazdacx5 1y ago
dragnet which is LPRs for fleet vehicles
marstall 1y ago
boston: the ultimate test
- ghaff 1y ago
  Had to drive someone to the Fenway area the other day. And that was bad enough in perfectly reasonable weather :-) I'm OK with driving into the cit(ies) in general but don't regularly go into that area of town.
  - potato3732842 11mo ago
    It's easier in bad weather because the ~10% of stupid people who traffic normally just kinda flows around slow it to a traffic jam that's pretty impossible to screw up too badly.
darth_avocado 1y ago
I was told by a very intelligent man demanding a trillion dollar salary that you only need vision cameras to have full self driving in all weather conditions. All of this is apparently unnecessary.
- TrainedMonkey 1y ago
  He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines which in this case necessitates superhuman sensory abilities. Current evidence shows that having non-vision sensors is a faster way to create a reliable system. I would personally choose to ride in an autonomous vehicle with Lidars.
  - Gigachad 1y ago
    It seems quite likely that once self driving cars are well perfected, we will demand more than just human level driving which is currently horrendously dangerous. If lidar systems can exceed vision only, we are going to demand it as a baseline standard.
  - dbt00 11mo ago
    > He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines I have a model 3 with v3 FSD hardware. FSD is an objectively terrible driver compared to the average human.
    - ramraj07 11mo ago
      And if the US government operated with 10% of the agency or spine it ought to operate with, the entire feature would be banned and tesla fined for costing so many lives already. And the cyber truck wouldn't be coasting the roads with no safety sense whatsoever.
  - UltraSane 11mo ago
    He is very obviously wrong since Waymo cars drive millions of trips with 0 drivers while every single robotaxi still has a safety driver in it at all times.
zeroq 1y ago
I remember, back in the day, when first driving assistance systems rolled out - you know, keep lane, speed assistance according to road signs, etc. - I thought to myself "I bet you haven't seen our roads". When I was getting my driver license I had to perform a series of tasks as part of the process. On of first was driving a 50m narrow curve forth and back. I had my exam in the middle of winter. The training yard was fully covered in snow. I was young and didn't knew better, so I got in the car and begin my test to quickly realize I couldn't see shit. I tried my best, but next moment I was told I got off the curve - the examiner knew it by heart - and I failed the test. Back to school and see you next semester. A learning experience on so many levels. Anyway, since then I always come back to that single experience when I read about self driving vehicles.
- voidfunc 1y ago
  Heh this must be Europe. In the US the driving test I took involved taking a right hand turn. Another right. Execute a 3-point and then drive back the half a mile to the testing center.
  - zeroq 1y ago
    Correct. You have to pass theory exam - when I was doing it it was 30 questions with four possible answers out of ~500 pool [1] now the pool is 3700. If I'm not mistaken you could make two mistakes and still pass the test. The questions are either road diagrams, ie. intersection with three cars, road signs and/or lights and you have to tell in which order cars will go or a picture from drivers POV and a question what you should do in such situation - like three lanes, car on the middle, the right is a bus lane and the question is if the driver is allowed to take the left lane. Once you get that done you can take practical driving test. It starts on a training yard where you have a series of tasks, like said driving forth and back on a curve in one sweep motion, starting a car on a incline without going back or losing your engine - mind you we're driving manual - parallel parking between cones [2], etc. If you ace them instructor will take you for a 30-45 minutes ride around town. Apart from normal driving he will ask you to few random tasks like parking in normal conditions. Any mistake will end the trial with a fail and you have to start all over again. Three failures and you need to redo your theory exam. [1] I have really good memory and when I taking my exam I went through all questions few times - they are publicly available - and when I had my exam I only looked at the picture and double checked if the question ended up with question mark or period as some images were reused and I knew my answer. I don't think I would be able to do that again with that 3700 question database lol. [2] before taking exams you go to a private driving school and my instructor gave me a cheat code for parallel parking - which is extremely tight, but also, as pointed by my instructor, government regulated, so all the cones have to be in very precise spots. Not only that, but you take the exam in government selected car (whoever won current bids). So he told me to back up until I saw a cone lining with door post, then full stop, rotate the steering wheel by a exact amount of degrees, etc. PS. gun permits are given on similar grounds, plus you are required to have a regulated gun safe at your premise and it has to be permanently attached, so given the fact that many of our apartments are smaller than your garages and most people are renting significantly reduces access to guns :)
gniv 11mo ago
I wish Google would use their learnings from Waymo/Streetview in Maps navigation. When I drive through a complicated intersection for the first time it's a bit of guesswork what's the right thing to do. Here in France at least since space is at a premium there are a lot of weird intersections that are hard to navigate.
- IneffablePigeon 11mo ago
  What learnings? Google maps can’t even reliably tell me what lane to be in for the next junction, or what the speed limit of the current road is.
- okdood64 11mo ago
  They're a separate company.
- tim333 11mo ago
  I've found maps navigation can be quite good with complex junctions in places like Austin where there can be seven lanes splitting off in weird ways. Maybe they are just confused by French junctions as I have been myself at times. The Arc de Triomphe is quite a thing to drive around. (as in https://youtu.be/-2RCPpdmSVg https://youtu.be/-2RCPpdmSVg)

125 points by boulos 1y ago

daft_pink 1y ago

i’m really curious at what point it decides that it shouldn’t be driving.

2OEH8eoCRo0 1y ago
Humans are horrible at this I wonder what the limit is. I've always thought that I can tailor my speed to conditions but not everyone on the road slows down.
- hangonhn 1y ago
  It's really interesting because that's something they definitely don't teach you when you first learn to drive. Growing up in Florida, I learned to pull over and turn on emergency blinkers if the rain gets bad enough. The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. Or maybe I would have learned eventually after a few close calls with skidding. Or maybe I would have never learned until it's too late. I wonder if the different responses to averse conditions you've observed is a function of the different experiences we've had as drivers. You might be a more experienced driver than some of those around you.
  - ghaff 1y ago
    And pulling off through a patch of heavy rain is one thing. There are a lot of issues with pulling off in heavy snow unless you can really navigate off the highway to a safe location. Sometimes there aren't great solutions.
  - candiddevmike 1y ago
    Hazard lights are almost never used by folks when driving, when you really should turn them on anytime the conditions are forcing you to not go the speed limit, IMO. The other lizard brains will see blinky lights and hopefully put down their phones so they don't rear end you.
    - ghaff 1y ago
      I would hope the other folks would recognize that conditions are such that you're slowing down rather than have a bunch of arbitrary blinking lights on the road.
    - potato3732842 11mo ago
      People mostly only turn on their hazards when they're a hazard to other traffic (which is the whole point, IMO) Even if you're the slow guy on the road your speed still probably doesn't warrant this hence why you mostly only see it when people are going a speed of zero.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - antisthenes 1y ago
    > The reason I know to do this is because I saw other drivers do this on the highway and realized that's pretty wise. It's tempting to imagine that a younger version of me would have been smart enough to realize this on my own but I think most of us learn a lot by observing the behavior of others. Did you ever hydroplane in a car, even ever so slightly? That experience teaches you to slow down or stop and wait for the rain to be over pretty quickly.
  - XenophileJKO 1y ago
    It's funny because when I lived in Texas, we just turn on windshield wipers on full blast, put the hazard lights on and drive around at 15mph. (This would have to be an epic downpour though.) The only time people stopped was when it was hailing.. and then they would hide under bridges if they could.
    - tonyedgecombe 11mo ago
      I remember driving past Charles de Gaulle Airport when it rained so hard we couldn't see past the end of the bonnet (hood). Everybody just stopped until it passed.
- amluto 1y ago
  Humans have one advantage over autonomous cars in ice: they can pull over and put on chains. Cars can’t do that (yet). (I’d love to see a serious winter vehicle that can deploy traction devices by itself, perhaps while rolling at very low speed. Off the top of my head, it seems like it might be easier to put them on then to take them off.)
  - ghaff 1y ago
    Outside of some specific areas, how many people do you think carry chains with them?
    - tstrimple 1y ago
      It's pretty much limited to areas with both snow and lots of elevation changes like in the mountainous areas. Having lived most of my life in the midwest now, no one here uses chains except maybe some of the private snow plow operators driving their trucks around at 4AM. Most people won't use dedicated winter tires either. We tend to rock all seasons all year round. Ice and snow on mostly flat roads are just something you get used to dealing with.
      - ghaff 1y ago
        As someone who has lived in New England most of my adult life I've never owned either chains or dedicated snow tires. I do try to be relatively conservative in terms of driving in winter. But I haven't invested in special equipment.
    - loeg 1y ago
      They're required for traveling over mountain passes in the winter where I live, so I have them. But I have 3PMSF-rated tires and those are what I'd rather use 99% of the time.
  - beaviskhan 1y ago
    Automatic snow chains are a thing, often seen on emergency vehicles even outside of the normal snow band. Ex: https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/yus43b/what_are_these_chains_under_an_ambulance/ https://www.reddit.com/r/whatisthisthing/comments/yus43b/wha... No idea if they're compatible with Jaguars or whatever Waymo is rolling these days, but my guess is that Waymo could make the economics work.
- rangestransform 1y ago
  The limit is much higher than human performance given enough low latency compute. [1] is probably the limit, the actual issue is being able to do that while also avoiding colliding with other road users. The challenges of state estimation and control should be the same. [1]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MWib6bnnT8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MWib6bnnT8
- potato3732842 11mo ago
  I hate this sort of take. Humans aren't horrible, on average, they're about average. Your opinion is just a statement of "my judgement is decently far from the fat part of the bell curve" but dressed up in "and I know better" type snobbery.
url00 1y ago
Exactly. I picture a dystopia where the car refuses to attempt escape from a storm because of the liability factor.
- brookst 1y ago
  Sounds preferable to a dystopia where AI driven cars are getting into wrecks because they’re overconfident in their abilities.
  - chemotaxis 1y ago
    The thing about winter driving is that it's just inherently a crapshoot. Sometimes, on a nice morning commute, you hit black ice going downhill and that's that. It doesn't matter that you were going slow, you're still gonna slide and hit something. I doubt the tech will be immune to that. So it's up to how they manage the fallout from the crashes they end up getting into.
    - simulator5g 1y ago
      Crashing after hitting black ice on a hill is a skill issue. Its like skiing, or ice skating, you still have control even though the handling is very different.
      - loeg 1y ago
        It depends on the hill. Sometimes you should just avoid the hill. Winter tires also go a long way.
      - Zanfa 11mo ago
        Only if you have studded winter tires that are in good condition. Throw in a sprinkling of powder and there's nothing even a professional WRC driver could do. Another personal favorite is driving on ice with a tiny layer of sun melted water so you can also hydroplane.
        11mo ago
dingnuts 1y ago
when the remote operator watching five feeds notices it's doing something dangerous

milleramp 1y ago

At the Los Angeles Ciclavia two weeks ago Waymo's were getting stuck at the car crossings. There were police standing there waving cars through but the two I saw were not willing to drive through the intersection.

nradov 1y ago
Properly responding to informal hand and voice signals from law enforcement, road workers, and other humans is going to be one of the toughest technical challenges for autonomous vehicles to solve.
- darth_avocado 1y ago
  Stop signs became universal. No reason why machine readable signals/devices to communicate don’t become the norm with law enforcement and emergency response workers.
  - navi0 1y ago
    Authorization and authentication will be the main challenge to solve here: who is authorized to issue those signals to the automated driver, and how are they authenticated so that malicious actors aren’t able to hijack the automated driver.
    - strbean 1y ago
      We haven't exactly solved that issue for human drivers. People impersonate police in order to commit crimes. How much more problematic is it with autonomous vehicles? I could see action here just because it is a threat to the property of large corporations, though.
      - dbt00 11mo ago
        People exercise coordination ability like this all the time. I got stuck getting out of shoreline after a large concert with abnormal parking conditions, and when we didn't move for 30 minutes I got out of the car and directed traffic so both lots could empty equally. Took another 45 minutes for my family to catch up to me, which was good because that's when someone in a safety vest showed up and told me to stop.

tonymet 1y ago

I hope this improves rigor and common sense around winter driving in the USA. In Eastern Europe, drivers care more about tires, angility and driver skill. In the USA , drivers rely on large 4wd vehicles with high clearance for snow and ice driving. I’ve seen way too many issues with large clumsy vehicles losing control due to poor tires . I hope Waymo shares more solutions for winter driving to debunk a lot of the marketing for winter activity driving in the USA

micromacrofoot 1y ago
It won't, our economy is somewhat reliant on giant vehicles that people can barely afford to maintain.
- randerson 1y ago
  Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF). The average car owner seems oblivious to the different types of tires. Most high performance cars come with summer tires. I live in a wealthy area where I often see new cars in parking lots wearing summer tires in winter, probably relying on electronic nannies to mask the lack of grip in normal driving.
  - tonymet 1y ago
    i agree. i was impressed that my recent RWD crossover came fit with All Weather / M+S Rated (light snow conditions) tires
  - ryukoposting 1y ago
    > Manufacturers should fit all-weather tires by default (not all-seasons) - they are decent in both summer and snow (3PMSF). Won't happen. Tires affect fuel economy in EPA testing. Your commuter car will always come equipped with the hardest all-season or summer tires the manufacturer can source.
    - potato3732842 11mo ago

b0rbb 1y ago

> Upstate New York I'm guessing they meant _Upstate AND Western New York_. Glad someone in Waymo saw the potential for testing for extreme snowy conditions there.

boulos 1y ago
Yes. We went to Buffalo, and a few other locations (https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/waymo-to-double-down-on-winter-testing-its-robotaxis/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/08/15/waymo-to-double-down-on-wi... and other reports)
School-Cotton 1y ago
Anecdotally I feel like the Upstate vs. Western NY distinction is mostly only made by people who live there. When I lived in NYC I used "upstate" to mean anything not in the five boroughs, Long Island or Westchester, and I don't think this usage is uncommon.
- counters 1y ago
  Eh, it's a pretty big distinction weather-wise. Extreme Western New York and the Tug Hill plateau are all susceptible to somewhat frequent lake effect snow. Given the right time of year and wind fetch, you can see narrow convective / lake-effect snow bands from the Finger Lakes. But broadly speaking the actual annual expected snow and the phenomenology of the storm systems that produce that snow are very different over the rest of the state.

awaymazdacx5 1y ago

dragnet which is LPRs for fleet vehicles

marstall 1y ago

boston: the ultimate test

ghaff 1y ago
Had to drive someone to the Fenway area the other day. And that was bad enough in perfectly reasonable weather :-) I'm OK with driving into the cit(ies) in general but don't regularly go into that area of town.
- potato3732842 11mo ago
  It's easier in bad weather because the ~10% of stupid people who traffic normally just kinda flows around slow it to a traffic jam that's pretty impossible to screw up too badly.

darth_avocado 1y ago

I was told by a very intelligent man demanding a trillion dollar salary that you only need vision cameras to have full self driving in all weather conditions. All of this is apparently unnecessary.

TrainedMonkey 1y ago
He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines which in this case necessitates superhuman sensory abilities. Current evidence shows that having non-vision sensors is a faster way to create a reliable system. I would personally choose to ride in an autonomous vehicle with Lidars.
- Gigachad 1y ago
  It seems quite likely that once self driving cars are well perfected, we will demand more than just human level driving which is currently horrendously dangerous. If lidar systems can exceed vision only, we are going to demand it as a baseline standard.
- dbt00 11mo ago
  > He is not wrong, but we demand superhuman performance from our machines I have a model 3 with v3 FSD hardware. FSD is an objectively terrible driver compared to the average human.
  - ramraj07 11mo ago
    And if the US government operated with 10% of the agency or spine it ought to operate with, the entire feature would be banned and tesla fined for costing so many lives already. And the cyber truck wouldn't be coasting the roads with no safety sense whatsoever.
- UltraSane 11mo ago
  He is very obviously wrong since Waymo cars drive millions of trips with 0 drivers while every single robotaxi still has a safety driver in it at all times.

zeroq 1y ago

I remember, back in the day, when first driving assistance systems rolled out - you know, keep lane, speed assistance according to road signs, etc. - I thought to myself "I bet you haven't seen our roads". When I was getting my driver license I had to perform a series of tasks as part of the process. On of first was driving a 50m narrow curve forth and back. I had my exam in the middle of winter. The training yard was fully covered in snow. I was young and didn't knew better, so I got in the car and begin my test to quickly realize I couldn't see shit. I tried my best, but next moment I was told I got off the curve - the examiner knew it by heart - and I failed the test. Back to school and see you next semester. A learning experience on so many levels. Anyway, since then I always come back to that single experience when I read about self driving vehicles.

voidfunc 1y ago
Heh this must be Europe. In the US the driving test I took involved taking a right hand turn. Another right. Execute a 3-point and then drive back the half a mile to the testing center.
- zeroq 1y ago
  Correct. You have to pass theory exam - when I was doing it it was 30 questions with four possible answers out of ~500 pool [1] now the pool is 3700. If I'm not mistaken you could make two mistakes and still pass the test. The questions are either road diagrams, ie. intersection with three cars, road signs and/or lights and you have to tell in which order cars will go or a picture from drivers POV and a question what you should do in such situation - like three lanes, car on the middle, the right is a bus lane and the question is if the driver is allowed to take the left lane. Once you get that done you can take practical driving test. It starts on a training yard where you have a series of tasks, like said driving forth and back on a curve in one sweep motion, starting a car on a incline without going back or losing your engine - mind you we're driving manual - parallel parking between cones [2], etc. If you ace them instructor will take you for a 30-45 minutes ride around town. Apart from normal driving he will ask you to few random tasks like parking in normal conditions. Any mistake will end the trial with a fail and you have to start all over again. Three failures and you need to redo your theory exam. [1] I have really good memory and when I taking my exam I went through all questions few times - they are publicly available - and when I had my exam I only looked at the picture and double checked if the question ended up with question mark or period as some images were reused and I knew my answer. I don't think I would be able to do that again with that 3700 question database lol. [2] before taking exams you go to a private driving school and my instructor gave me a cheat code for parallel parking - which is extremely tight, but also, as pointed by my instructor, government regulated, so all the cones have to be in very precise spots. Not only that, but you take the exam in government selected car (whoever won current bids). So he told me to back up until I saw a cone lining with door post, then full stop, rotate the steering wheel by a exact amount of degrees, etc. PS. gun permits are given on similar grounds, plus you are required to have a regulated gun safe at your premise and it has to be permanently attached, so given the fact that many of our apartments are smaller than your garages and most people are renting significantly reduces access to guns :)

gniv 11mo ago

I wish Google would use their learnings from Waymo/Streetview in Maps navigation. When I drive through a complicated intersection for the first time it's a bit of guesswork what's the right thing to do. Here in France at least since space is at a premium there are a lot of weird intersections that are hard to navigate.

IneffablePigeon 11mo ago
What learnings? Google maps can’t even reliably tell me what lane to be in for the next junction, or what the speed limit of the current road is.
okdood64 11mo ago
They're a separate company.
tim333 11mo ago
I've found maps navigation can be quite good with complex junctions in places like Austin where there can be seven lanes splitting off in weird ways. Maybe they are just confused by French junctions as I have been myself at times. The Arc de Triomphe is quite a thing to drive around. (as in https://youtu.be/-2RCPpdmSVg https://youtu.be/-2RCPpdmSVg)