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Tesla’s Elon Musk Says Autonomous Driving Not All That Hard to Achieve

65 points by T-A 12y ago

Untit1ed 12y ago
I imagine a lot of things look not all that hard when you're trying to build a rocket that can go to space, come back down and neatly land itself on a helipad...
- maxxxxx 12y ago
  To me that sounds much easier than an autonomous car that has to work any time, deal with pedestrians, things falling off other cars, rain, snow, ice and many other unpredictable factors.
  - taf2 12y ago
    I think those thing all on their own is not the hard problem - the hard problem is deciding whether to avoid the child crossing the street by driving over the cliff or slamming into the oncoming traffic...
    - sumitviii 12y ago
      That's just a dark scenario of parent's problem.
      - taf2 12y ago
        well - yeah it's pretty dark scenario... but it's an extreme example of why it's a harder problem IMO to solve than a rocket landing back on earth. You have multiple cases simple or complex where a decision must be made to either drive over a pot hole or drive into the oncoming traffic lane or off the road altogether. I'm certain a computer controlled car can make these decisions faster than a human driver, but much like a computer can typically not always judge the difference between my sarcastic comment and it's literal meaning it I would imagine have a difficult time solving these problems... maybe NP problems are solvable now? Don't get me wrong as a parent - I am super excited that perhaps - just perhaps, my kids when they are ready to hit the road won't have to worry about learning how to drive :D and I can rest easy the other drivers won't be crazy too.
        clarky07 12y ago
        Everyone who wants to take the other side of the self driving car argument brings up stuff like this. Also they say what about icy roads and bad weather etc. Guess what, humans also suck at this. What would YOU do? Do you hit the oncoming traffic, drive off the cliff, hit the kid? Likely the right choice is to slam on the breaks and hope for the best. That's likely the same choice the computer would make, only it will have a faster reaction time making it more likely for the kid to make it. We kill 30,000 people a year driving. Humans suck at driving as a general rule. Will a self driving car be able to handle icy foggy roads? Probably not. And it will note that ahead of time and say dude you really shouldn't be going out in this, I can't handle it. If you want to try it, you'll have to drive yourself today.
    - agildehaus 12y ago
      I think a driverless car would just slam on the breaks, and do so much quicker than you or I ever could. And why is it always a child? You sound like a politician trying to make a "think of the children" argument.
    - bsder 12y ago
      Except that when you have self-driving cars, those other cars are making similar decisions and opening a hole for a car that just might need to avoid that child. This is why self-driving cars are going to be far safer than humans. Your self-driving cars will see a thousand hazardous situations as you are driving and adjust to avoid them pre-emptively and silently. Yes, there will be some bugs on the way there. And it will kill a few people. But we kill about 30,000 people in car crashes per year and about 5,000 pedestrians per year with cars. The programs could be quite buggy, and still beat that by I suspect a very wide margin.
      - brianobush 12y ago
        The decade or so long problem is the mix of self-driving cars and those piloted by humans. And yes, the benefits will be obvious.
    - bsder 12y ago
      As if humans are any better at this decision? Very few humans can execute split-second, emergency decisions correctly. Most simply panic and whatever happens, happens.
    - robbrown451 12y ago
      I don't think that is so hard, given that it can make more common (i.e. less contrived) decisions all the time. In that case, various priorities would be weighted, and those weights can be adjusted to perform as their designers and society prefers, in various simulated scenarios. Are you asking whether the life of the child should be given more priority than the life of the occupant? Who knows. Regardless, my bet is the car will perform better, by any measure, than a human. If only by being a lot quicker to respond and avoid the situation entirely. I think the tough problems involve communication and negotiation with other drivers. A car might have a hard time detecting eye contact, or noticing when someone is waving you to go ahead. It might also be bad at being aggressive enough to merge. But some of these things human drivers are really bad at....especially new drivers or the elderly, both of whom are often timid. People might be able to see that it is an autonomous car and be more likely to take advantage of the fact that they know the car won't do anything rash like risk an accident to force its way in. The nice thing is that these cars are going to keep a lot of data. Some people may not like that, but I don't think it's a bad thing that if you keep driving dangerously, the autonomous cars are going to note your license plate number and your insurance company is going to find out.
    - joosters 12y ago
      That decision is the easy problem. No sensors right now can reliably identify a cliff or a child, even in optimal conditions.
    - jboy55 12y ago
      The hard problem isn't a technical one, in my opinion. Lets say we include an 'emergency stop' button on the autonomous cars. It will be early on, when the autonomous car decides wrong or doesn't detect the kid, and the lone passenger wasn't paying attention and/or was drinking. The question will be, was the human responsible? Should he/she have hit the 'stop' button, and was their intoxication the reason why. Will they be charged with vehicular manslaughter?
  - woofyman 12y ago
    Also, construction zones, traffic cops, parking garages
- diego 12y ago
  It's really not a hard technical problem at this point. It's mostly social and political. Think about the typical car out there: - You need a piece of plastic and metal to unlock it. Losing that object is a serious inconvenience, especially if you're on a road trip. Compare that to unlocking your cellphone or your bank account. - It doesn't have a "settings" functionality. For example, you can't configure a car to refuse to move if a seatbelt is unbuckled. Such a feature (perhaps a default that you can disable if you really want to) would save many lives. - It would be easy to write an app to help you optimize your driving for safety / fuel efficiency if you could download data that most cars have, but you can't. - Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. These are just a few examples of ways in which most cars in the market are archaic and inefficient. This is mostly because of two reasons: the incumbents have no incentive to make changes that don't increase sales, and governments don't pressure car manufacturers to include state-of-the-art life saving technology until it has existed for a LONG time and everyone knows about it: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislation-makes-airbags-mandatory http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislati... The difficulty in making self-driven cars the norm is mostly about the politics of the transition.
  - sjtrny 12y ago
    > Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. It's definitely not trivial.
    - mikeash 12y ago
      It's not trivial from first principles, but traffic sign recognition is more or less a solved problem at this point (production Teslas read speed limit signs as you drive by them, for example) so it would be trivial to implement given what's available now.
      - gamblor956 12y ago
        Teslas being able to read a single format of signs is absolutely not indicative of their ability to read and recognize the hundreds of traffic signs in the US, many of which are located in non-standard positions. If traffic sign recognition really was a solved problem, every car manufacturer would have implemented it by now. If implementation really was trivial, we'd all be talking about which self-driving car we're going to buy this year, not when the first self-driving car might become available.
mholt 12y ago
> "I view it as a solved problem" Wow. We've been trying to nail "simple" things like street light timing algorithms for years and all of a sudden, self-driving cars are being prototyped and promised for sale soon. I feel like this is popping out of nowhere, even though self-driving cars are the type of things fantasized about in science fiction from the 20th century. I even thought "I, Robot" was presumptuous to depict automated cars being the majority in 2030. And yet here we are...
- Apocryphon 12y ago
  It's really weird for this sort of parallel invention to happen independently due to corporate secrecy, rather than because of free exchange of ideas and designs. Also: all of these working VR headsets are coming out of the woodwork after decades of being insufficiently immersive.
  - lotsofmangos 12y ago
    "If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree can not find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." Charles Fort http://www.resologist.net/lo104.htm http://www.resologist.net/lo104.htm edit - a quick game of Charles Fort Discovering Things would be great right now, though it is difficult without a frog and an umbrella.
  - dronethinktank 12y ago
    The free exchange of ideas and designs will ultimately win out. This will be evident by 3DRobotics outpacing a company like DJI. Also, I agree with the whole VR thing. Have you heard of the Lighthouse tracking technology by Valve? Crazy stuff
    - Apocryphon 12y ago
      My biggest puzzlement is why after decades, VR is now suddenly a viable thing. But I've heard the answer is because the rise of smartphones have presented us with cheaper high-resolution displays and motion sensors and other tech that finally brought the medium out of the '80s. As far as self-driving cars go, I remember this article, written just over a decade ago: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/robot_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/robot_pr.html Now that's astounding advancement.
TamDenholm 12y ago
For the guy that leads a company that has a rocket that can come back from space, i reckon a car that can drive itself is a comparatively simple problem. The real problem is laws. We're making progress but its going to be damned slow. I reckon there will be a future time where we look at human controlled cars as the same as we look at horse and carts now, but also as very dangerous things that are eventually outlawed unless you're on a racetrack. I think eventually motorsport will be the last place you'll see human driven cars. I cant work out if Formula E with completely autonomous cars would be interesting, or really boring...
- trhway 12y ago
  >I cant work out if Formula E with completely autonomous cars would be interesting, or really boring... in various papers there are announcements of how robots discover cooperative behavior ... I somehow expect that with further development of AI the robots should also discover the benefits of the opposite behavior too :)
- Dewie 12y ago
  > I cant work out if Formula E with completely autonomous cars would be interesting, or really boring... Well it can't get any more boring than it already is.
- baddox 12y ago
  I think producing a consumer-ready autonomous automobile is a significantly more difficult problem than sending a rocket to space and back.
thehodge 12y ago
I'm of the believe that my children will not have to learn to drive and the children they have will not be allowed to drive (under normal circumstances)
aheilbut 12y ago
I'd like to propose finding a new street parking spot in NYC after moving out of the way of the street-sweeper as a Turing test for the autonomous car.
deleted 12y ago
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vessenes 12y ago
I both love this future because I think it will save lives and be awesome, and hate it because I am sure, totally sure, that we won't get a physical disconnect button to turn the car off, open the doors and get out if the car is malfunctioning, on fire, or taken over by hackers or the 'Car Safety Administration and Prevention' department. I think it's interesting there's so much billionaire scare-talk about skynet and the risk of AI and none of these companies mention meatspace-level security with their cool autonomous AI's they're building. I genuinely wonder why that is; is it just preferring control (over the robot product by the company)?
elmin 12y ago
This seems like marketing-speak to me. Or perhaps they haven't gotten far enough in their development for it to be really hard yet. Here are some examples of reasons this is harder than you'd think: - At a complex intersection, how does the computer decide which traffic light is yours? - You see an obstruction in the road. How do you decide if it's something like a plastic bag you can drive through, or something you need to swerve around? A very experienced team has been working on this at Google for almost a decade. I'm not sure how Elon's team would have skipped so many steps.
- joe_the_user 12y ago
  Indeed, And even the google car ignores entirely the traffic lights that aren't on the highly detailed map guiding the car [edit: that disappears when it loses connectivity. But connectivity is a "solved problem" too, right?]. But the simple parts of the problem are solvable. The very simplest parts of the problem could probably be solved with analog relays. One theory: get enough hype and support for autonomous cars and cities will be forced to install wireless guides for autonomous cars. Then the only problem is people stepping in front of them. So you ignore that problem and away you go. I mean, regular automobiles, when they were first introduced, caused massive casualties. Only in the eighties did we begin to get this under control with air bags, sane speed limits and so-forth. Cars have been just rolling death for a large portion of the history of people using them. Well, autonomous cars can just leverage that fine history.
  - lkbm 12y ago
    We haven't been improving on drivers, though. Twenty years ago, humans as a group were as bad as they are today and as they will be in another twenty years. Or thirty or fifty. You can add seatbelts and rear parking cameras, and you can legislate against texting while driving, but you can't legislate away tired or distracted drivers, or just plain unskilled drivers. As a group, the only way we improve is through demographic shift. But autonomous cars get better, as a whole, and consistently, and rapidly. Maybe autonomous cars will be at the 50th percentile in five years, but they're only as good as the bottom 10% of drivers, well, we'd still be better off with those 10% of drivers switching--which would lead to infrastructure to improve it. (I think more importantly, social understanding/recognition of them. The hard problems presented in Dr. Leonard's video posted on this thread aren't peds stepping in front of them, but cops gesturing and unprotected left turns across traffic where you need to make eye contact.) Finding the bottom 10% sounds hard, because, yes, a lot of bad drivers think they're good drivers, but I think the majority of us know we suck. For many, their insurance companies know too.
pseudometa 12y ago
It has been interesting to see how many friends and relatives have an initial "Why would I trust a driverless car on the road" reaction until I point out the idiocy of "other" drivers on the road. People believe they are the best drivers, yet readily agree that everyone else shouldn't be driving. I'm really looking forward to seeing the progression of this. Seems like it could be the next big change to society norms.
sjtrny 12y ago
A better title would be > Tesla’s Elon Musk Has No Fucking Idea What He’s Talking About I guess going to space makes autonomous cars look simple. But in reality it's probably far easier to launch a rocket and dock with the ISS than build a autonomous car. There are so many uncontrollable and unpredictable variables going on when you are driving. The only way that it has been done so far is by Google on a small set of roads that have been meticulously mapped and analysed. What happens if that area changes due to roadworks? It won't work. Attempts by others are just as limited. Take a look at the TerraMax wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraMax_(vehicle) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraMax_(vehicle). This is basically for more off road/rougher situations in which plowing over small bushes and trees to the side of the path isn't an issue. But even still note that it got confused by tumbleweeds in a DARPA challenge. It isn't a solved problem, and won't be for a long time. This is like people in the 80's claiming that we would have flying cars and hover boards by now. The only way right now to get autonomous cars en masse is to embed transmitters or magnetic strips in the road. Essentially we would need to put the cars on tracks.
- cma 12y ago
  This guy runs down a list of things that are unsolved and really fucking hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs#t=94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs#t=94
  - joe_the_user 12y ago
    Everyone interested in autonomous cars should look at this video. John Leonard puts tremendous passion into the subject, has done amazing things and talks about how hard this stuff is. Thanks
  - abalone 12y ago
    Awesome video and another illustration of the critical role that DARPA government funding plays in subsidizing Silicon Valley. I think he mentioned "DARPA" about a million times in the video. DARPA and massive state intervention in the economy should be right up there alongside private entrepreneurs like Musk who complete the last mile of bringing tech to market. It just kills me that there can even be a thing called a "Silicon Valley Libertarian" who's against "big" government. SV is a product of government investment.
ebuth 12y ago
The hardest problem isn't a technical one; it has to do with liability. There will be crashes and deaths, no doubt about it. But who is at fault now? The car maker (or whomever wrote the software)? Because of this, laws regulating autonomous driving will be the bottleneck. I can envision something transitional: approval for long stretches of "easy" driving will come first. For example, driving on the I-5 from LA to SF. For me, this is the perfect use case for a self-driving car so I can enjoy doing something else rather than paying attention to a boring drive. Personally, self-driving cars in a downtown area isn't as crucial. Unless I have no idea where the hell I'm going in a confusing city.
- cma 12y ago
  Tesla could become an auto insurance company that only covers their own cars. I don't think liability insurance is as much of an issue as regulation.
- robbrown451 12y ago
  How is the liability issue different from a mechanical flaw that causes an accident? Say a tire blowout. Is it the fault of the car manufacturer or the tire maker? None of this is particularly new. I don't doubt laws will slow things down, but there will be a point where it is so clear that autonomous cars are overall safer, that they'll figure things out.
- rhino369 12y ago
  There is no problem. They both can be. The owner is responsible for the car they put out in the road. The maker (software, hardware, hell even the retailer) will be liable under products liability for any flaws in the design. There will be some debate about negligence and autonomous car crashes. But you don't even have to pass laws. Courts will just make the rules up as they go along. It's the beauty of the common law system. Judges fill in the gaps when new fact patterns are applied. I'm guessing car companies will end up paying for it because they have the big pockets and they can best handle it. I'm not sure there aren't big technical problems still ahead. The stupid Uber app won't stop sending drivers down alleys in Washington DC. LOL at there being a computer driver in the next 10 years.
nsxwolf 12y ago
Does everyone really believe fully autonomous cars are just around the corner? I thought Google was pretty much just snowing us with how close they really are. They have a car trained to drive the same road, over and over again. Every time I drive now, I noice one or two random events I have to negotiate and wonder if the Google car is going to be able to handle them. Things like misleading turn signals and body language from human drivers, the confusion that occurs with multiple people messing up a 4 way stop, etc.
- krapp 12y ago
  One thing i've noticed on Hacker News whenever subjects about AI come up, particularly with autonomous cars, is that commenters who claim to actually work in the field always call BS on the hype.
ghshephard 12y ago
The one that gets me, is how to make decisions regarding people doing traffic direction. What happens when there is someone standing in front of you, wearing a traffic-safety vest, directing traffic down a lane. Do you go down that lane. Do you ignore them and keep driving forward, potentially running over the person if they don't get out of the way. Do you hit the brakes and accelerate backwards? Depending on the context, any of those decisions might be correct - but I doubt that any "Automated Driving" system will know how to handle it in the next 30 years. Now, Driver Assist, in which the car keeps you in your lane, brakes before hitting the care in front of you, swerves into the emergency lane in the event someone is about to side swipe you, stops at traffic light/stop sign - these are solved problems, and I expect will be rolled out (already are in many cases) in most cars over the next 10 years.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Actually, it sounds simple. You never run over the person directing traffic because of the usual anti-running-over mechanisms that the car will have. You can teach the car to recognize the signs policemen use to wave, and it seems feasible to learn the car to recognize gestures - after all, AFAIR, Google already solved that for recognizing hand signals that cyclists give. And OTOH, if you want to direct traffic in the world of mixed driver/driverless cars, it's on you to know you might be dealing with a machine and make sure you gesture clearly.
  - ghshephard 12y ago
    The point I was trying to make, is depending on the situation, all three responses are entirely reasonable. If it's some idiot/kid/whackjob playing games, you keep moving forward, making it clear he needs to clear out of the way. Maybe lay on the horn. If it's East Palo Alto (or wherever the high-crime area is in the United States right now), and you are about to get jacked, you hit the brakes, reverse, and get the hell out of dodge. If it's a normal traffic situation (Construction, Police Officer, etc...) - you follow their directions. A human can make that assessment in a few hundreds of milliseconds - it's going to be 20+ years at least before any automated driving system is going to figure out what to do in situations like these. (Please don't get overly focussed on the "Some random person pretending to direct traffic situation" - I'm sure you can come up with a hundred other scenarios which require executive, not tactical assessment.) This is why I believe DriverAssist is going to be incredible, particularly on freeways - and already is today - It's an awesome thing to have a recent model BMW brake from 85 mph to a complete stop when the car in front of them slams on the brakes. An entire category of accidents is going to be virtually eliminated as DriverAssist is added to Vehicles.
robbrown451 12y ago
I wonder if saying "it is a solved problem" might be a bit discouraging/demotivating to the engineers who are continuing to work to make it better.
mikerg87 12y ago
I am always struck that you always see the autonomous driving demonstrations in favorable climate conditions. I have never heard of a test at night with low visibility due freezing rain on snow packed roads like you might experience in the northern Midwest or Canada.
- clarky07 12y ago
  Guess what, people really suck at that too. Most decide to stay home when it's like that because it's not safe. No reason to focus on that now. Just say, nope, this isn't safe you should stay home. If it's an emergency, you can drive yourself in these terrible conditions.
oroup 12y ago
I'm a huge fan of Musk, but this was an intemperate thing to say. Inevitably at some point someone is going to get killed by one of his autonomous cars and at the wrongful death suit the plaintiffs lawyer will bring up video of him calling the problem not that hard and "solved" and he will have a much worse problem on his hands. The truth is, it is hard to make any system as flawless as we're going to want these systems to be.
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phkn1 12y ago
‘In the distant future people may outlaw driver cars. You can’t have a person operating a two-ton death machine!’ I don't care how good the design is, people will always require a way to take control when they wish. The trick will probably be to make the UX (passenger experience - PX?) so much easier than driving that nobody will want to. But outlaw them? Nah...
- benologist 12y ago
  Pretty easy to imagine manually driven cars (one day) becoming "not street legal", while still legal to own and drive on private tracks etc as with current exotic/powerful cars.
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  Will they? You have zero control over the bus, or if they're driven by a chauffeur. For all intents and purposes, such vehicles are self-driving, just with some meat brain instead of a silicon one doing the thinking. Also note that in both of my examples, you're not the owner of the vehicle. With self-driving cars there will be little reason to own a car, and such the need for having control will be smaller.
  - phkn1 12y ago
    Right, an autonomous ride-share car service would be ideal in its capacity to reduce the need for personal car ownership. But even so, technology is fallible in extenuating circumstances, and human intervention will always be needed as a recourse.
    - TeMPOraL 12y ago
      > But even so, technology is fallible in extenuating circumstances, and human intervention will always be needed as a recourse. I disagree. The basic assumption for banning human drivers on public road is that the technology will reach the level of being strictly superior in terms of driving safely. At this point letting humans drive is just very stupid.
- 12y ago
cwyers 12y ago
I feel like there needs to be a stronger phrase than "cognitive dissonance" to describe someone who thinks that the software that can write captions of pictures of cats is evidence of a possible existential threat to humanity but advocates for letting software control what he himself calls "two-ton death machine[s]."
- TeMPOraL 12y ago
  We then need a set of stronger phrases for "failing at reading comprehension 101", "uncharitable presentation" and "failing to think on a topic for even 30 seconds". Also, I see no cognitive dissonance here - just a realistic understanding of how powerful software can be.
abalone 12y ago
What about liability? Today if a driver makes a mistake and hurts someone, the driver is responsible. If a self-driving car makes a mistake, is the automaker responsible? In 2013 auto insurance companies paid out $124 billion in liability and property damage claims.[1] Plus who knows how much courts awarded in tort trials for serious automobile accidents. Even if a self-driving car is 10X safer than a human driver, that's still equivalent to 10% of today's insurance and litigation burden being shifted to automakers. Won't this have a significant impact on the cost of autonomous cars? I can't see courts upholding the standard software license agreement that indemnifies software makers from bugs when it comes to autonomous vehicles. Injury & death are not the same as data loss, and in any event that would only cover the driver, not all victims. For this reason alone I think the future will be one of semi-autonomous driving, where humans are still required to be trained and in control and ultimately liable for decisions. "Cruise control on steroids." [1] http://www.iii.org/table-archive/21338 http://www.iii.org/table-archive/21338
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > What about liability? Today if a driver makes a mistake and hurts someone, the driver is responsible. Most likely, liability will be addressed to some extent in statute authorizing general use of driverless vehicles, but there's been quite a lot of analysis of this issue just based on generally applicable liability principles. For one example, see http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/04/products-liability-driverless-cars-villasenor http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/04/products-li... > Even if a self-driving car is 10X safer than a human driver, that's still equivalent to 10% of today's insurance and litigation burden being shifted to automakers. Won't this have a significant impact on the cost of autonomous cars? At the numbers you give, not particularly. Let's use that 10% number, and assume that the $124 billion paid out in 2013 was spread out over just the new cars sold in the US 2013, rather than all cars sold in 2013, or all cars on the road in 2013. 15.6 million cars were sold in that year, and we've got to spread $12.4 billion in additional automaker liability across them -- that's less than $1,000 per car. (And, of course, if the automakers are taking all the liability, that means 100% of the cost of liability insurance to drivers goes away for driverless car purchasers, so the total cost to the consumer will be dramatically lower, even with the cost added to pay for the automaker's liability burden.)
adamconroy 12y ago
Shouldn't Elon be concerned that the car might decide the human is superfluous, open a door and swerve wildly until the body is ejected
PinguTS 12y ago
> Mr. Musk has said Tesla plans to be the first company to offer customers an autopilot feature. “I think we will be the leader in autonomous cars that you can actually buy,” he said. That is interesting to read, especially with the knowledge that they brought this technology from Bosch/Daimler. Without their technology cooperation Tesla still would not even had adaptive cruise control, which every decent car of the last 10 years offers. BTW, from the technology point of view, we are at about 90% of the self driving car. But developing the last 10% is hard. Besides that there are a lot of ethical questions and insurance questions to answer. Ethical: what happens when the car detects an unavoidable accident: where should the crash in? Who decides that? Who is responsible for that? These days it is easy to answer that questions: it's the driver. But in a self driving car? Insurance: what happens if an accident takes place and a person dies from it? Who is responsible? The driver? The car owner? The car manufacturer? The sub-system manufacturer? The developer? There are a lot of non-technical issues to solve.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  Re: Insurance - that one will be straight forward. Cars with Full On automation/DriverAssist will be 10x (if not more) safer than human drivers, so the accidents that do occur, will be fully covered by insurers. Your policy will probably be 1/2 of what it is today as well.

65 points by T-A 12y ago

I imagine a lot of things look not all that hard when you're trying to build a rocket that can go to space, come back down and neatly land itself on a helipad...

maxxxxx 12y ago
To me that sounds much easier than an autonomous car that has to work any time, deal with pedestrians, things falling off other cars, rain, snow, ice and many other unpredictable factors.
- taf2 12y ago
  I think those thing all on their own is not the hard problem - the hard problem is deciding whether to avoid the child crossing the street by driving over the cliff or slamming into the oncoming traffic...
  - sumitviii 12y ago
    That's just a dark scenario of parent's problem.
    - taf2 12y ago
      well - yeah it's pretty dark scenario... but it's an extreme example of why it's a harder problem IMO to solve than a rocket landing back on earth. You have multiple cases simple or complex where a decision must be made to either drive over a pot hole or drive into the oncoming traffic lane or off the road altogether. I'm certain a computer controlled car can make these decisions faster than a human driver, but much like a computer can typically not always judge the difference between my sarcastic comment and it's literal meaning it I would imagine have a difficult time solving these problems... maybe NP problems are solvable now? Don't get me wrong as a parent - I am super excited that perhaps - just perhaps, my kids when they are ready to hit the road won't have to worry about learning how to drive :D and I can rest easy the other drivers won't be crazy too.
      - clarky07 12y ago
        Everyone who wants to take the other side of the self driving car argument brings up stuff like this. Also they say what about icy roads and bad weather etc. Guess what, humans also suck at this. What would YOU do? Do you hit the oncoming traffic, drive off the cliff, hit the kid? Likely the right choice is to slam on the breaks and hope for the best. That's likely the same choice the computer would make, only it will have a faster reaction time making it more likely for the kid to make it. We kill 30,000 people a year driving. Humans suck at driving as a general rule. Will a self driving car be able to handle icy foggy roads? Probably not. And it will note that ahead of time and say dude you really shouldn't be going out in this, I can't handle it. If you want to try it, you'll have to drive yourself today.
  - agildehaus 12y ago
    I think a driverless car would just slam on the breaks, and do so much quicker than you or I ever could. And why is it always a child? You sound like a politician trying to make a "think of the children" argument.
  - bsder 12y ago
    Except that when you have self-driving cars, those other cars are making similar decisions and opening a hole for a car that just might need to avoid that child. This is why self-driving cars are going to be far safer than humans. Your self-driving cars will see a thousand hazardous situations as you are driving and adjust to avoid them pre-emptively and silently. Yes, there will be some bugs on the way there. And it will kill a few people. But we kill about 30,000 people in car crashes per year and about 5,000 pedestrians per year with cars. The programs could be quite buggy, and still beat that by I suspect a very wide margin.
    - brianobush 12y ago
      The decade or so long problem is the mix of self-driving cars and those piloted by humans. And yes, the benefits will be obvious.
  - bsder 12y ago
    As if humans are any better at this decision? Very few humans can execute split-second, emergency decisions correctly. Most simply panic and whatever happens, happens.
  - robbrown451 12y ago
    I don't think that is so hard, given that it can make more common (i.e. less contrived) decisions all the time. In that case, various priorities would be weighted, and those weights can be adjusted to perform as their designers and society prefers, in various simulated scenarios. Are you asking whether the life of the child should be given more priority than the life of the occupant? Who knows. Regardless, my bet is the car will perform better, by any measure, than a human. If only by being a lot quicker to respond and avoid the situation entirely. I think the tough problems involve communication and negotiation with other drivers. A car might have a hard time detecting eye contact, or noticing when someone is waving you to go ahead. It might also be bad at being aggressive enough to merge. But some of these things human drivers are really bad at....especially new drivers or the elderly, both of whom are often timid. People might be able to see that it is an autonomous car and be more likely to take advantage of the fact that they know the car won't do anything rash like risk an accident to force its way in. The nice thing is that these cars are going to keep a lot of data. Some people may not like that, but I don't think it's a bad thing that if you keep driving dangerously, the autonomous cars are going to note your license plate number and your insurance company is going to find out.
  - joosters 12y ago
    That decision is the easy problem. No sensors right now can reliably identify a cliff or a child, even in optimal conditions.
  - jboy55 12y ago
    The hard problem isn't a technical one, in my opinion. Lets say we include an 'emergency stop' button on the autonomous cars. It will be early on, when the autonomous car decides wrong or doesn't detect the kid, and the lone passenger wasn't paying attention and/or was drinking. The question will be, was the human responsible? Should he/she have hit the 'stop' button, and was their intoxication the reason why. Will they be charged with vehicular manslaughter?
- woofyman 12y ago
  Also, construction zones, traffic cops, parking garages
diego 12y ago
It's really not a hard technical problem at this point. It's mostly social and political. Think about the typical car out there: - You need a piece of plastic and metal to unlock it. Losing that object is a serious inconvenience, especially if you're on a road trip. Compare that to unlocking your cellphone or your bank account. - It doesn't have a "settings" functionality. For example, you can't configure a car to refuse to move if a seatbelt is unbuckled. Such a feature (perhaps a default that you can disable if you really want to) would save many lives. - It would be easy to write an app to help you optimize your driving for safety / fuel efficiency if you could download data that most cars have, but you can't. - Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. These are just a few examples of ways in which most cars in the market are archaic and inefficient. This is mostly because of two reasons: the incumbents have no incentive to make changes that don't increase sales, and governments don't pressure car manufacturers to include state-of-the-art life saving technology until it has existed for a LONG time and everyone knows about it: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislation-makes-airbags-mandatory http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/federal-legislati... The difficulty in making self-driven cars the norm is mostly about the politics of the transition.
- sjtrny 12y ago
  > Your car could warn you if you're approaching a red light or a stop sign and not slowing down. It's trivial, and it would save lives. It's definitely not trivial.
  - mikeash 12y ago
    It's not trivial from first principles, but traffic sign recognition is more or less a solved problem at this point (production Teslas read speed limit signs as you drive by them, for example) so it would be trivial to implement given what's available now.
    - gamblor956 12y ago
      Teslas being able to read a single format of signs is absolutely not indicative of their ability to read and recognize the hundreds of traffic signs in the US, many of which are located in non-standard positions. If traffic sign recognition really was a solved problem, every car manufacturer would have implemented it by now. If implementation really was trivial, we'd all be talking about which self-driving car we're going to buy this year, not when the first self-driving car might become available.

mholt 12y ago

> "I view it as a solved problem" Wow. We've been trying to nail "simple" things like street light timing algorithms for years and all of a sudden, self-driving cars are being prototyped and promised for sale soon. I feel like this is popping out of nowhere, even though self-driving cars are the type of things fantasized about in science fiction from the 20th century. I even thought "I, Robot" was presumptuous to depict automated cars being the majority in 2030. And yet here we are...

Apocryphon 12y ago
It's really weird for this sort of parallel invention to happen independently due to corporate secrecy, rather than because of free exchange of ideas and designs. Also: all of these working VR headsets are coming out of the woodwork after decades of being insufficiently immersive.
- lotsofmangos 12y ago
  "If human thought is a growth, like all other growths, its logic is without foundation of its own, and is only the adjusting constructiveness of all other growing things. A tree can not find out, as it were, how to blossom, until comes blossom-time. A social growth cannot find out the use of steam engines, until comes steam-engine-time." Charles Fort http://www.resologist.net/lo104.htm http://www.resologist.net/lo104.htm edit - a quick game of Charles Fort Discovering Things would be great right now, though it is difficult without a frog and an umbrella.
- dronethinktank 12y ago
  The free exchange of ideas and designs will ultimately win out. This will be evident by 3DRobotics outpacing a company like DJI. Also, I agree with the whole VR thing. Have you heard of the Lighthouse tracking technology by Valve? Crazy stuff
  - Apocryphon 12y ago
    My biggest puzzlement is why after decades, VR is now suddenly a viable thing. But I've heard the answer is because the rise of smartphones have presented us with cheaper high-resolution displays and motion sensors and other tech that finally brought the medium out of the '80s. As far as self-driving cars go, I remember this article, written just over a decade ago: http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/robot_pr.html http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/robot_pr.html Now that's astounding advancement.

TamDenholm 12y ago

For the guy that leads a company that has a rocket that can come back from space, i reckon a car that can drive itself is a comparatively simple problem. The real problem is laws. We're making progress but its going to be damned slow. I reckon there will be a future time where we look at human controlled cars as the same as we look at horse and carts now, but also as very dangerous things that are eventually outlawed unless you're on a racetrack. I think eventually motorsport will be the last place you'll see human driven cars. I cant work out if Formula E with completely autonomous cars would be interesting, or really boring...

trhway 12y ago
>I cant work out if Formula E with completely autonomous cars would be interesting, or really boring... in various papers there are announcements of how robots discover cooperative behavior ... I somehow expect that with further development of AI the robots should also discover the benefits of the opposite behavior too :)
Dewie 12y ago
> I cant work out if Formula E with completely autonomous cars would be interesting, or really boring... Well it can't get any more boring than it already is.
baddox 12y ago
I think producing a consumer-ready autonomous automobile is a significantly more difficult problem than sending a rocket to space and back.

thehodge 12y ago

I'm of the believe that my children will not have to learn to drive and the children they have will not be allowed to drive (under normal circumstances)

aheilbut 12y ago

I'd like to propose finding a new street parking spot in NYC after moving out of the way of the street-sweeper as a Turing test for the autonomous car.

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vessenes 12y ago

I both love this future because I think it will save lives and be awesome, and hate it because I am sure, totally sure, that we won't get a physical disconnect button to turn the car off, open the doors and get out if the car is malfunctioning, on fire, or taken over by hackers or the 'Car Safety Administration and Prevention' department. I think it's interesting there's so much billionaire scare-talk about skynet and the risk of AI and none of these companies mention meatspace-level security with their cool autonomous AI's they're building. I genuinely wonder why that is; is it just preferring control (over the robot product by the company)?

elmin 12y ago

This seems like marketing-speak to me. Or perhaps they haven't gotten far enough in their development for it to be really hard yet. Here are some examples of reasons this is harder than you'd think: - At a complex intersection, how does the computer decide which traffic light is yours? - You see an obstruction in the road. How do you decide if it's something like a plastic bag you can drive through, or something you need to swerve around? A very experienced team has been working on this at Google for almost a decade. I'm not sure how Elon's team would have skipped so many steps.

joe_the_user 12y ago
Indeed, And even the google car ignores entirely the traffic lights that aren't on the highly detailed map guiding the car [edit: that disappears when it loses connectivity. But connectivity is a "solved problem" too, right?]. But the simple parts of the problem are solvable. The very simplest parts of the problem could probably be solved with analog relays. One theory: get enough hype and support for autonomous cars and cities will be forced to install wireless guides for autonomous cars. Then the only problem is people stepping in front of them. So you ignore that problem and away you go. I mean, regular automobiles, when they were first introduced, caused massive casualties. Only in the eighties did we begin to get this under control with air bags, sane speed limits and so-forth. Cars have been just rolling death for a large portion of the history of people using them. Well, autonomous cars can just leverage that fine history.
- lkbm 12y ago
  We haven't been improving on drivers, though. Twenty years ago, humans as a group were as bad as they are today and as they will be in another twenty years. Or thirty or fifty. You can add seatbelts and rear parking cameras, and you can legislate against texting while driving, but you can't legislate away tired or distracted drivers, or just plain unskilled drivers. As a group, the only way we improve is through demographic shift. But autonomous cars get better, as a whole, and consistently, and rapidly. Maybe autonomous cars will be at the 50th percentile in five years, but they're only as good as the bottom 10% of drivers, well, we'd still be better off with those 10% of drivers switching--which would lead to infrastructure to improve it. (I think more importantly, social understanding/recognition of them. The hard problems presented in Dr. Leonard's video posted on this thread aren't peds stepping in front of them, but cops gesturing and unprotected left turns across traffic where you need to make eye contact.) Finding the bottom 10% sounds hard, because, yes, a lot of bad drivers think they're good drivers, but I think the majority of us know we suck. For many, their insurance companies know too.

pseudometa 12y ago

It has been interesting to see how many friends and relatives have an initial "Why would I trust a driverless car on the road" reaction until I point out the idiocy of "other" drivers on the road. People believe they are the best drivers, yet readily agree that everyone else shouldn't be driving. I'm really looking forward to seeing the progression of this. Seems like it could be the next big change to society norms.

sjtrny 12y ago

A better title would be > Tesla’s Elon Musk Has No Fucking Idea What He’s Talking About I guess going to space makes autonomous cars look simple. But in reality it's probably far easier to launch a rocket and dock with the ISS than build a autonomous car. There are so many uncontrollable and unpredictable variables going on when you are driving. The only way that it has been done so far is by Google on a small set of roads that have been meticulously mapped and analysed. What happens if that area changes due to roadworks? It won't work. Attempts by others are just as limited. Take a look at the TerraMax wiki page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraMax_(vehicle) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraMax_(vehicle). This is basically for more off road/rougher situations in which plowing over small bushes and trees to the side of the path isn't an issue. But even still note that it got confused by tumbleweeds in a DARPA challenge. It isn't a solved problem, and won't be for a long time. This is like people in the 80's claiming that we would have flying cars and hover boards by now. The only way right now to get autonomous cars en masse is to embed transmitters or magnetic strips in the road. Essentially we would need to put the cars on tracks.

cma 12y ago
This guy runs down a list of things that are unsolved and really fucking hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs#t=94 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs#t=94
- joe_the_user 12y ago
  Everyone interested in autonomous cars should look at this video. John Leonard puts tremendous passion into the subject, has done amazing things and talks about how hard this stuff is. Thanks
- abalone 12y ago
  Awesome video and another illustration of the critical role that DARPA government funding plays in subsidizing Silicon Valley. I think he mentioned "DARPA" about a million times in the video. DARPA and massive state intervention in the economy should be right up there alongside private entrepreneurs like Musk who complete the last mile of bringing tech to market. It just kills me that there can even be a thing called a "Silicon Valley Libertarian" who's against "big" government. SV is a product of government investment.

ebuth 12y ago

The hardest problem isn't a technical one; it has to do with liability. There will be crashes and deaths, no doubt about it. But who is at fault now? The car maker (or whomever wrote the software)? Because of this, laws regulating autonomous driving will be the bottleneck. I can envision something transitional: approval for long stretches of "easy" driving will come first. For example, driving on the I-5 from LA to SF. For me, this is the perfect use case for a self-driving car so I can enjoy doing something else rather than paying attention to a boring drive. Personally, self-driving cars in a downtown area isn't as crucial. Unless I have no idea where the hell I'm going in a confusing city.

cma 12y ago
Tesla could become an auto insurance company that only covers their own cars. I don't think liability insurance is as much of an issue as regulation.
robbrown451 12y ago
How is the liability issue different from a mechanical flaw that causes an accident? Say a tire blowout. Is it the fault of the car manufacturer or the tire maker? None of this is particularly new. I don't doubt laws will slow things down, but there will be a point where it is so clear that autonomous cars are overall safer, that they'll figure things out.
rhino369 12y ago
There is no problem. They both can be. The owner is responsible for the car they put out in the road. The maker (software, hardware, hell even the retailer) will be liable under products liability for any flaws in the design. There will be some debate about negligence and autonomous car crashes. But you don't even have to pass laws. Courts will just make the rules up as they go along. It's the beauty of the common law system. Judges fill in the gaps when new fact patterns are applied. I'm guessing car companies will end up paying for it because they have the big pockets and they can best handle it. I'm not sure there aren't big technical problems still ahead. The stupid Uber app won't stop sending drivers down alleys in Washington DC. LOL at there being a computer driver in the next 10 years.

nsxwolf 12y ago

Does everyone really believe fully autonomous cars are just around the corner? I thought Google was pretty much just snowing us with how close they really are. They have a car trained to drive the same road, over and over again. Every time I drive now, I noice one or two random events I have to negotiate and wonder if the Google car is going to be able to handle them. Things like misleading turn signals and body language from human drivers, the confusion that occurs with multiple people messing up a 4 way stop, etc.

krapp 12y ago
One thing i've noticed on Hacker News whenever subjects about AI come up, particularly with autonomous cars, is that commenters who claim to actually work in the field always call BS on the hype.

ghshephard 12y ago

The one that gets me, is how to make decisions regarding people doing traffic direction. What happens when there is someone standing in front of you, wearing a traffic-safety vest, directing traffic down a lane. Do you go down that lane. Do you ignore them and keep driving forward, potentially running over the person if they don't get out of the way. Do you hit the brakes and accelerate backwards? Depending on the context, any of those decisions might be correct - but I doubt that any "Automated Driving" system will know how to handle it in the next 30 years. Now, Driver Assist, in which the car keeps you in your lane, brakes before hitting the care in front of you, swerves into the emergency lane in the event someone is about to side swipe you, stops at traffic light/stop sign - these are solved problems, and I expect will be rolled out (already are in many cases) in most cars over the next 10 years.

TeMPOraL 12y ago
Actually, it sounds simple. You never run over the person directing traffic because of the usual anti-running-over mechanisms that the car will have. You can teach the car to recognize the signs policemen use to wave, and it seems feasible to learn the car to recognize gestures - after all, AFAIR, Google already solved that for recognizing hand signals that cyclists give. And OTOH, if you want to direct traffic in the world of mixed driver/driverless cars, it's on you to know you might be dealing with a machine and make sure you gesture clearly.
- ghshephard 12y ago
  The point I was trying to make, is depending on the situation, all three responses are entirely reasonable. If it's some idiot/kid/whackjob playing games, you keep moving forward, making it clear he needs to clear out of the way. Maybe lay on the horn. If it's East Palo Alto (or wherever the high-crime area is in the United States right now), and you are about to get jacked, you hit the brakes, reverse, and get the hell out of dodge. If it's a normal traffic situation (Construction, Police Officer, etc...) - you follow their directions. A human can make that assessment in a few hundreds of milliseconds - it's going to be 20+ years at least before any automated driving system is going to figure out what to do in situations like these. (Please don't get overly focussed on the "Some random person pretending to direct traffic situation" - I'm sure you can come up with a hundred other scenarios which require executive, not tactical assessment.) This is why I believe DriverAssist is going to be incredible, particularly on freeways - and already is today - It's an awesome thing to have a recent model BMW brake from 85 mph to a complete stop when the car in front of them slams on the brakes. An entire category of accidents is going to be virtually eliminated as DriverAssist is added to Vehicles.

robbrown451 12y ago

I wonder if saying "it is a solved problem" might be a bit discouraging/demotivating to the engineers who are continuing to work to make it better.

mikerg87 12y ago

I am always struck that you always see the autonomous driving demonstrations in favorable climate conditions. I have never heard of a test at night with low visibility due freezing rain on snow packed roads like you might experience in the northern Midwest or Canada.

clarky07 12y ago
Guess what, people really suck at that too. Most decide to stay home when it's like that because it's not safe. No reason to focus on that now. Just say, nope, this isn't safe you should stay home. If it's an emergency, you can drive yourself in these terrible conditions.

oroup 12y ago

I'm a huge fan of Musk, but this was an intemperate thing to say. Inevitably at some point someone is going to get killed by one of his autonomous cars and at the wrongful death suit the plaintiffs lawyer will bring up video of him calling the problem not that hard and "solved" and he will have a much worse problem on his hands. The truth is, it is hard to make any system as flawless as we're going to want these systems to be.

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phkn1 12y ago

‘In the distant future people may outlaw driver cars. You can’t have a person operating a two-ton death machine!’ I don't care how good the design is, people will always require a way to take control when they wish. The trick will probably be to make the UX (passenger experience - PX?) so much easier than driving that nobody will want to. But outlaw them? Nah...

benologist 12y ago
Pretty easy to imagine manually driven cars (one day) becoming "not street legal", while still legal to own and drive on private tracks etc as with current exotic/powerful cars.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
Will they? You have zero control over the bus, or if they're driven by a chauffeur. For all intents and purposes, such vehicles are self-driving, just with some meat brain instead of a silicon one doing the thinking. Also note that in both of my examples, you're not the owner of the vehicle. With self-driving cars there will be little reason to own a car, and such the need for having control will be smaller.
- phkn1 12y ago
  Right, an autonomous ride-share car service would be ideal in its capacity to reduce the need for personal car ownership. But even so, technology is fallible in extenuating circumstances, and human intervention will always be needed as a recourse.
  - TeMPOraL 12y ago
    > But even so, technology is fallible in extenuating circumstances, and human intervention will always be needed as a recourse. I disagree. The basic assumption for banning human drivers on public road is that the technology will reach the level of being strictly superior in terms of driving safely. At this point letting humans drive is just very stupid.
12y ago

cwyers 12y ago

I feel like there needs to be a stronger phrase than "cognitive dissonance" to describe someone who thinks that the software that can write captions of pictures of cats is evidence of a possible existential threat to humanity but advocates for letting software control what he himself calls "two-ton death machine[s]."

TeMPOraL 12y ago
We then need a set of stronger phrases for "failing at reading comprehension 101", "uncharitable presentation" and "failing to think on a topic for even 30 seconds". Also, I see no cognitive dissonance here - just a realistic understanding of how powerful software can be.

abalone 12y ago

What about liability? Today if a driver makes a mistake and hurts someone, the driver is responsible. If a self-driving car makes a mistake, is the automaker responsible? In 2013 auto insurance companies paid out $124 billion in liability and property damage claims.[1] Plus who knows how much courts awarded in tort trials for serious automobile accidents. Even if a self-driving car is 10X safer than a human driver, that's still equivalent to 10% of today's insurance and litigation burden being shifted to automakers. Won't this have a significant impact on the cost of autonomous cars? I can't see courts upholding the standard software license agreement that indemnifies software makers from bugs when it comes to autonomous vehicles. Injury & death are not the same as data loss, and in any event that would only cover the driver, not all victims. For this reason alone I think the future will be one of semi-autonomous driving, where humans are still required to be trained and in control and ultimately liable for decisions. "Cruise control on steroids." [1] http://www.iii.org/table-archive/21338 http://www.iii.org/table-archive/21338

dragonwriter 12y ago
> What about liability? Today if a driver makes a mistake and hurts someone, the driver is responsible. Most likely, liability will be addressed to some extent in statute authorizing general use of driverless vehicles, but there's been quite a lot of analysis of this issue just based on generally applicable liability principles. For one example, see http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/04/products-liability-driverless-cars-villasenor http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/04/products-li... > Even if a self-driving car is 10X safer than a human driver, that's still equivalent to 10% of today's insurance and litigation burden being shifted to automakers. Won't this have a significant impact on the cost of autonomous cars? At the numbers you give, not particularly. Let's use that 10% number, and assume that the $124 billion paid out in 2013 was spread out over just the new cars sold in the US 2013, rather than all cars sold in 2013, or all cars on the road in 2013. 15.6 million cars were sold in that year, and we've got to spread $12.4 billion in additional automaker liability across them -- that's less than $1,000 per car. (And, of course, if the automakers are taking all the liability, that means 100% of the cost of liability insurance to drivers goes away for driverless car purchasers, so the total cost to the consumer will be dramatically lower, even with the cost added to pay for the automaker's liability burden.)

adamconroy 12y ago

Shouldn't Elon be concerned that the car might decide the human is superfluous, open a door and swerve wildly until the body is ejected

PinguTS 12y ago

> Mr. Musk has said Tesla plans to be the first company to offer customers an autopilot feature. “I think we will be the leader in autonomous cars that you can actually buy,” he said. That is interesting to read, especially with the knowledge that they brought this technology from Bosch/Daimler. Without their technology cooperation Tesla still would not even had adaptive cruise control, which every decent car of the last 10 years offers. BTW, from the technology point of view, we are at about 90% of the self driving car. But developing the last 10% is hard. Besides that there are a lot of ethical questions and insurance questions to answer. Ethical: what happens when the car detects an unavoidable accident: where should the crash in? Who decides that? Who is responsible for that? These days it is easy to answer that questions: it's the driver. But in a self driving car? Insurance: what happens if an accident takes place and a person dies from it? Who is responsible? The driver? The car owner? The car manufacturer? The sub-system manufacturer? The developer? There are a lot of non-technical issues to solve.

ghshephard 12y ago
Re: Insurance - that one will be straight forward. Cars with Full On automation/DriverAssist will be 10x (if not more) safer than human drivers, so the accidents that do occur, will be fully covered by insurers. Your policy will probably be 1/2 of what it is today as well.