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Car companies TODAY have been shipping en masse large number of self-parking and automatic accident avoiding cars and have decades of experience in building and

Car companies TODAY have been shipping en masse large number of self-parking and automatic accident avoiding cars and have decades of experience in building and shipping reliable control systems. Google can't even produce bug-free software, make high quality hardware or even ship anything at any decent scale.

viraptor 14y ago
> self-parking and automatic accident avoiding Unfortunately these are really simple systems relative to safely driving on the road without supervision. If we're talking about the same things, then self-parking is just a software for recognising the front/end of some vehicle parked on the side and where is the good parking space - in some models also a distance monitor for automatic stopping. It's not that difficult to implement and all the tricky conditions still have to be checked by people - for example my auto-parking car will completely ignore people in its way, anything on the street, will abort if it's on a slope down, will not check for lots of issues that you're supposed to correct manually. Collision avoidance is for now a simple break when some object is getting close fast. Only a handful of cars implement something more as far as I know, since actively changing the course is actually a rather large challenge to do it right... I have to disagree with "Google can't even produce bug-free software" too. There's a big difference between programming a web application and doing something that's close to safety critical software. It's a completely different set of skills and requires a specific approach in general. Even then... regarding bug-free at scale, I think they're doing fairly well so far.
jan_g 14y ago
Not that I'm arguing with your assessment of car companies' experiences, but self-parking and autonomous driving are completely different beasts. I wouldn't be surprised, if the first company that creates a viable driverless car isn't one of the incumbent car companies. As Tesla have shown with electric car.
jfoster 14y ago
I'm sure they could produce (mostly) bug-free software if the cost-benefit ratio made sense. The problem with trying to ensure a web application is bug-free is that your incremental spend is probably greater than the incremental revenue. Self-driving cars are a different story. They will get sued when the cars make mistakes.

viraptor 14y ago

> self-parking and automatic accident avoiding Unfortunately these are really simple systems relative to safely driving on the road without supervision. If we're talking about the same things, then self-parking is just a software for recognising the front/end of some vehicle parked on the side and where is the good parking space - in some models also a distance monitor for automatic stopping. It's not that difficult to implement and all the tricky conditions still have to be checked by people - for example my auto-parking car will completely ignore people in its way, anything on the street, will abort if it's on a slope down, will not check for lots of issues that you're supposed to correct manually. Collision avoidance is for now a simple break when some object is getting close fast. Only a handful of cars implement something more as far as I know, since actively changing the course is actually a rather large challenge to do it right... I have to disagree with "Google can't even produce bug-free software" too. There's a big difference between programming a web application and doing something that's close to safety critical software. It's a completely different set of skills and requires a specific approach in general. Even then... regarding bug-free at scale, I think they're doing fairly well so far.

jan_g 14y ago

Not that I'm arguing with your assessment of car companies' experiences, but self-parking and autonomous driving are completely different beasts. I wouldn't be surprised, if the first company that creates a viable driverless car isn't one of the incumbent car companies. As Tesla have shown with electric car.

jfoster 14y ago

I'm sure they could produce (mostly) bug-free software if the cost-benefit ratio made sense. The problem with trying to ensure a web application is bug-free is that your incremental spend is probably greater than the incremental revenue. Self-driving cars are a different story. They will get sued when the cars make mistakes.