16 ms·
The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car
- cyphunk 11y agoImagine that for a moment: Self driving car companies could promise to pay all accident expenses provided it was on auto drive at the time of accident. Not only is that a marketing win, potentially reducing accidents and saving costs for owners... if you jump forward many years of Google (or other) defending owners in court you would reach a point even judges would be biased to believe that the auto-driven car could not have caused an accident, further disadvantaging non-auto cars in the market.
- jalonso510 11y agoWill be really interesting to see how insurance is priced for these cars.
- fixermark 11y agoIf the safety records meet goals, it's functionally free money for the insurance company regardless of insurance price. So one could predict a race to the bottom for insuring these machines.
- ender7 11y agoKeep in mind that every autocar will have an extremely accurate recording of the accident that can be analyzed and played back during a hearing. Determining fault will be trivial in almost all cases.
- agumonkey 11y agoAccidents, when non fatal, are such a waste of anyone's resources. And there are so many way to be cheated. I'm stunned no manufacturer included a logging device. Nowadays you have dash cams though.
- freehunter 11y agoMany new cars have black boxes that log what the vehicle was doing, and they can be pulled in case of an accident. It's one of the benefits of having everything be electronically controlled these days.
- agumonkey 11y agoHappy to hear that. I don't know why it's not advertised more, it's reassuring and enforcing at the same time. Maybe people would flock toward log-free models out of a reflex to drive carelesly.
- freehunter 11y agoThat's probably why it's not advertised. Because your car will tattle on you. I've often wondered about the black box in my car, if I were in an accident and I was going 71mph in a 70mph and they pulled by black box, would I be given a ticket even though I was not at fault? Although I'm pretty sure only the manufacturer has access to this data (as part of their copyright on the car), so it would take a warrant for law enforcement to get it. I don't have proof of that, but I would guess that's why you don't hear about it more. It's only used when absolutely necessary.
- agumonkey 11y agoAgreed. The issue when collecting data is that it's a rabbithole, you need to have a lot of data to avoid shallow judgement, and careful jurors too. Going at 71 (74,75) instead of 70 might turn against you, but if you have enough evidence that the other vehicle would have it you even at 70mph then the system will work.
- alexvoda 11y agoThis can be solved. Have all collected data be encrypted AND the owner of the car be the ONLY one with the decryption key.
- EvanKelly 11y agoIs "autocar" a thing? The ambiguity between automatic/automobile/autonomous really makes me hope a better word surfaces. Self-driving car is a bit too long.
- fixermark 11y ago"autoautomobile" ;)
- jcoffland 11y agoI like robocar.
- agumonkey 11y agoIn France a 'car' is a name for non public buses, a diminutive of 'autocar'. Maybe nowadays car will be demoted to semimobile, or Human Driven Car.
- dclowd9901 11y agoI've always been partial to "robocar". It has a nice tinge of dystopia to it.
- theocs 11y agoautobot
- geoelectric 11y agoThe cool thing being that the official launch will be the "Autobot Rollout"
- DanaDanger 11y agoAll I hear is "this car gets in accidents." Maybe not the message marketing wants to send... ;)
- freehunter 11y agoHow do you hear that? It's basically a guarantee, and companies generally don't warrant against things they know will happen. The reason you get a 1 year warranty on things is because they are engineered to not break down within one year. After that, the incidence of failure goes up. "We will pay for any accidents caused" means "this will not cause accidents". Because no company would do that unless they were sure it wasn't going to happen. Just like when Google gives $100,000 for bugs in Chrome. They wouldn't say that unless they were sure there were no or relatively few bugs.
- schoen 11y agoAnother interpretation of the Google bug bounty is that fixing bugs of a certain kind is actually worth $100,000 to them (but you're right that it would be hard to sustain if they expected to make thousands of payouts at that level).
- baddox 11y agoIt's already common for automobile manufacturers to explicitly market the collision safety features of their cars. Many car commercials have collision test footage.
- btian 11y agoI rather the marketing message be like "we tested the self-driving car for xx million miles, and we had zero at fault accident."
- BurningFrog 11y agoI think that will be necessary. The selling point is that these cars drive better than people and get into far fewer accidents. As the manufacturer, you have to show you believe in that.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- comrade1 11y agoOne thing I'm looking forward to with self-driving cars is to be able to step into a street anywhere and have all the traffic stop automatically. Every inch of street now becomes a crosswalk. Even highways. (This is an ironic statement)
- chrismealy 11y agoNo, that'd be awesome. If I could walk or bike everywhere safely I wouldn't need a car.
- mrec 11y agoGiven that all the traffic will record you doing so, I don't imagine that this will be a huge problem in practice. Might need to tighten up the jaywalking rules a bit, but nothing major.
- xnxn 11y agoYou can already stop traffic by doing this. Why not give it a go? ;) On a serious note: I'm sure strolling into highway traffic will be approximately as legal as it is presently.
- pdxandi 11y agoAll joking aside, that's exactly how traffic works in Portland.
- masklinn 11y agoAlso belgium and germany. Getting too close to the street/sidewalk interface will often cause cars to stop even if you have no intension whatsoever of crossing.
- resurge 11y agoI'm Belgian and now living in Norway, it's even "worse" here. It's really one of the first things you notice when being here. Being a few meters off from a crosswalk cars will stop while they would easily be able to drive on before you (Which they would do in Belgium).
- return0 11y agoWhen the car is too good and fast to respond, it will get hit from behind it seems. I guess they could change their algorithm to be slow-reacting. dumbing down machines so that petty humans can catch up.
- tablatom 11y agoYou'd want to get smarter, not dumber: taking into account the fact that the unpredictable (to the car behind) braking could in itself cause an accident, and calculating a best compromise to avoid both collisions, with priority to the more dangerous of the two (the fender-bender could be a great option if you avoid another car doing 50). I'd be surprised if their software doesn't support this kind of thing already.
- skrause 11y agoThe priority will be probably be not to hit the car in front of you so that you're not at fault for an accident.
- ams6110 11y agoI'd guess that most from-behind collisions are due to excessive speed for conditions, or driver inattention. Not much that the leading car can do about either of those.
- JoshTriplett 11y agoThe leading car can do several things in those scenarios, ranging from increased stopping time (which it should already likely be doing to maximize fuel efficiency), brake light usage, or in extreme cases changing lanes to get out of the way.
- agumonkey 11y agoI hope they already did that, they say they can track all moving agents around, and roboticists know physics so they know they have to dissipate energy as smoothly as possible in the system including all neighbors.
- emptybits 11y agoFor balance: In the past eight months, four of the 48 self-driving cars licensed in California were involved in accidents. Three were Lexus SUVs from Google. http://www.startribune.com/ap-exclusive-self-driving-cars-getting-dinged-in-california/303248161/ http://www.startribune.com/ap-exclusive-self-driving-cars-ge... This does not assign blame. It is an observation.
- ender7 11y agoFrom your own link: "Google and Delphi said their cars were not at fault in any accidents, which the companies said were minor."
- toomuchtodo 11y agoAlso from article this thread is tied to: > If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you’re in a car or a self-driving car. Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.
- afarrell 11y agoI'm curious many of these miles were on snow and ice.
- ams6110 11y agoIn Mountain View? I'm not from around there but I'd guess zero?
- tikhonj 11y agoI'm pretty sure I've seen Google's car being tested up in Tahoe, so the answer is some. (The areas around Tahoe's ski resorts get quite a lot of snow and ice too, so it's certainly a good place for this sort of testing.)
- jordn 11y agoI'm wondering if the self driving cars should report these bad drivers.
- tablatom 11y agoI was thinking the same thing. If Google start logging license plate numbers (and, hey, it's Google), they could build a database of known dangerous vehicles and automatically give them a wide berth.
- drhodes 11y agoAt that point they'd necessarily have some way to quantify dangerousity. There will be a ranking. Somewhere deep in the bowels of google, there will be a list, Top Ten most dangerous drivers. Google is about to get into the car insurance business.
- platinum1 11y agohttps://google.com/compare https://google.com/compare
- ams6110 11y agoSo it's OK for Google to record license plates, but it's flip-out time when the police do it?
- mildbow 11y agoOf course. The most google can do: send you ads for shovels. The most police can do: pull you in for murder because they correlated your car to where and when some body was buried.
- scott_karana 11y agoI like how in your examples, "Google" is just algorithms, not the humans behind them, but for the police, you allow for humanity. You may as well say, "the most police cameras can do: send you an automated speeding ticket", which is of course painfully naïve. Google could do plenty of evil with your data.
- buss 11y agoEvery time I hear about the amazingly low accident rates in current generation self-driving cars I'm reminded of this joke (unfortunately I can't remember the source): Grandpa, what did you do before self-driving cars? Well, we just drove them ourselves. We just needed a little practice and to take a test. Wow, and nobody got killed!? Oh, no, millions of people died.
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- Squarel 11y agoThis will only be the case when all cars are self-driving. Many of these articles do not give a comparison...so,11 per 1.7m miles sounds awesome, but how do you know what the current rate is? The data I found had a passenger vehicle fatal crash per 100m miles as between 1.0 and 1.33, and a property damage only crash rate per 100m miles of 145, which relate to 0.01 fatalities per 1m miles, and 1.45 property only crashes per 1m miles. EDIT for link because posting went silly http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-truck-and-bus-crash-facts-2012 http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-tr...
- pdxandi 11y agoI think it's important to note that the 11 accidents the self-driving cars were involved in were the fault of the other driver.
- ams6110 11y agoAt fault doesn't always mean "sole contributor" to the cause of the accident.
- Anm 11y agoThe article is pretty clear that most of the light-damage, no-injury accidents don't get reported, and that all 11 accidents fell in that category. Half the point of the article is that this data is not well known. Granted, taking those 1.45 and 55% figures, we might compare the 11 accidents to approximately 3.2 accident (reported and unreported) per million miles in passenger vehicles. Emphasis on "approximately".
- ams6110 11y agoConsidering that the number of vehicle-miles driven annually is in the trillions, that is still a pretty small sample size. Do we know whether it's statistically significant?
- gwern 11y agoThe number that people drive isn't important, what's important is the accident rate: do humans get into enough minor accidents over 1.7m vehicle-miles that 14 is clearly bigger or smaller? Your answer is going to be driven almost entirely by what human-rate you select. For example, if I use https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/accident-rates https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci... , then I see that most of the quoted accident-rates are 1.8-3.29 per million miles. If I use a rate of 2.2/1m and use the simple binomial approach of x events per million miles, then the self-driving cars are statistically-significantly higher accident rates (since 14>3.74, and `binom.test(14, 1700000, p=(2.2/1000000)) ~> _p_=3.778543e-05`). But what kinds of accidents are those? If I instead look at https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/accident-costs https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci... and look at "Property Damage Only" accident-rates, it seems the human rate per million mile is more like 65-85. Now, unsurprisingly, the robots look superior (14<110, `binom.test(14, 1700000, p=(65/1000000)) ~> _p_=2.2204e-16`). And if you try to argue apples and apples and use fatal accidents from the same source, noting a range of 0-1.33 fatal accidents per million miles, and 0 fatalities due to the robots' 1.7m so far then the difference is unclear (0<0.85 but `binom.test(0, 1700000, p=(0.5/1000000)) ~> _p_=1`) because the usual tests don't like 0-counts and the robots have not driven enough to clearly distinguish themselves from normal human rates.
- coldcode 11y agoI want to know how the person playing the trumpet was able to drive. And how well did they play?
- the8472 11y agoI guess by actuating the steering wheel with their knees
- munificent 11y agoI'd be more impressed if they actuated the trumpet with their knees.
- mng2 11y agoThe trumpet can be played one-handed, actually. Gets a little heavy after a while, but you can rest the bell on the dashboard. Also you won't be able to use the first and third valve slides to correct the lower notes, but who's listening?
- paulornothing 11y agoI'm pretty excited for the prospect of a self driving car. My commute is about 40 miles round trip not too traffic ridden but I wouldn't mind relaxing a little. I would rather telework more often than two days a week, but it looks like he self driving car is more imminent.
- NovaS1X 11y agoI want to hear the argument about people who want to drive. I enjoy driving. I like driving cars. I still drive a manual and will not buy an automatic transmission. I participate in car clubs and I compete in autocross events. I enjoy automotive photography and I do my own maintenance on my vehicles. What happens to people like me who actually enjoy driving and the act of owning a car? Do my loves get phased out because the majority of people just think of cars as appliances? Will this give birth to "classic-driving shows" just like we have classic-car shows and cruises? Not saying I don't like innovation, I'd absolutely love to own a Tesla Roadster, but some things need to be preserved.
- wwkeyboard 11y agoPeople still ride horses and we've had cars for over 100 years. I don't see driving going away, it just might be constrained in when and where you are allowed to drive(maybe like Autobahn in Chicago and Motorsports Ranch in Houston).
- JshWright 11y agoPretty easy to s/cars/guns/g and s/driving/shooting/g in your comment and I think you may have a reasonable idea what the future holds...
- calvin_c 11y agoI think it's perfectly acceptable to expect that the enthusiasts will be the ones to preserve the things they love that fall out of favor. I enjoy driving on a nice empty road as well, but I don't think it's something that "need[s] to be preserved." It's something we have to do that we've learned to enjoy and do more than we need to. If it stops being something we have to do it's up to us to make time to do it for pleasure.
- trequartista 11y agoDriving isn't going to go anywhere, but I can see driving being "penalized" via exorbitant insurance rates - so much so that the it probably might offset the cost of buying a manually driven car. It'll probably end up being a hobby, albeit an expensive one.
- swalsh 11y agoMy newly born son will be 16 in 2031. I wonder if he will ever get a drivers license.
- danans 11y agoWhen my 4 year old asks me when she will be allowed to drive, I tell her she won't have to, and that she'll just tell her watch to call a car for her, the same way she sees me talking to my smartwatch now.
- holri 11y agoThe driver is not the problem of cars. It is the fact that in average 1,5 t and 10 m2 are used to transport 100 kg and 1 m2. Driverlessness does not change the bad physics of car transportation decisively.
- branchan 11y agoThat's not the problem it is trying to solve. The problem description is: drivers cause accidents.
- holri 11y agoA technology that solves the wrong problem is doomed to die.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoIt sorta kinda might, if the cars have high utilization and don't need to park at their passengers' destinations.
- holri 11y agoThere is already working car sharing. No driverlessness needed.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoOne-way? Even with a car share you have to park it at the other end, right?
- holri 11y ago100 % driving utilization for driver less cars seems unrealistic. No?
- sparkzilla 11y agoThe solution is driverless motorbikes
- js2 11y agoThis is why we’ve programmed our cars to pause briefly after a light turns green before proceeding into the intersection I programmed my brain to do this after learning to drive in Miami. I always look both ways before proceeding, just as I would before crossing as a pedestrian. When approaching an intersection, especially at night, I also try to look for what's coming from the side. Intersections can be scary places As a runner I find intersections terrifying and will typically cross instead a few hundred yards away. I'd rather jaywalk and have to deal with cars from only two directions. In my experience crosswalks are often the least safe place to cross. Also, some comic relief: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NEFYCaKakE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NEFYCaKakE (Starman) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_BtPZRbZxY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_BtPZRbZxY (George Carlin)
- rhino369 11y agoSome areas just give a "brief" period where both lights are red. I'm surprised not everywhere does, or that is isn't increased.
- Tloewald 11y agoWhat completely infuriates me is pedestrian crossings that don't automatically allow pedestrians to cross when the lights are in a state that would allow it.
- bequanna 11y agoAre you asking why peds are required to press a button at some intersections for a walk signal? If so, consider that some intersections may require a long time (~45 seconds) for a ped to cross. When no one is crossing, this may be sub-optimal and a shorter time for that specific light combination should be used.
- thrownaway2424 11y agoNobody should have built an intersection anywhere that big, then. But such behaviors are totally infuriating in places where there are many pedestrians, for example all of the stations on the SF Muni's T-Third line require passengers to push the button to cross the street after disembarking at center platforms. These crossings are not far (only half of a moderately wide street) but they don't have a pedestrian walk phase by default. If you haven't pushed the button you get to just stand there for another cycle. Example: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.790723,-122.390108,3a,75y,92.34h,87.25t/data=!3m4!1e1!3m2!1sSh6VN2cAVHyHpohWFYG10g!2e0 https://www.google.com/maps/@37.790723,-122.390108,3a,75y,92... As you can see, the street-view car has captured a brilliant scene. Traffic is jammed. Many pedestrians are waiting to cross. The guy in the Mini is either going to run the light or stop in the crosswalk. The person in the white minivan has somehow managed to drive up the street car tracks. And for the topping, someone has blocked the bike lane with a portable sign.
- jedberg 11y agoI'll admit that every time I see one of the self driving cars, I'm tempted to do something crazy nearby to see what it does, like cut it off or swerve towards it. So far I've been a responsible adult and not done that But it's so tempting. Until I think of all the lives I will put in danger. Maybe they can invite me to a test track so I can be an a-hole to the self driving car in a safe and controlled environment. :)
- jcoffland 11y agoWhy is it that we feel this strong urge to mess with robots? They may exact their revenge one day.
- _dark_matter_ 11y agoYou are already too late... http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
- TOMDM 11y agoSo who's working on the AI that will punish anyone for creating Roko's basilisk, removing the motivation for creating Roko's basilisk in the first place?
- fixermark 11y agoPossibly because of this effect. http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/assets/machete_juggling.gif http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/assets/machete_juggling.gif
- grecy 11y agoYou just described my ultimate "marketing" video for a self-driving car. Google should take one to a test track and get other drivers to mess with it and show us the video of what it does :)
- js2 11y agoAbout 33,000 people die on America’s roads every year. There will eventually be a fatality caused by a self-driving car. I wonder how many of these we will be willing to accept. Say self-driving cars reduce fatalities by 10x. That is, by switching 100% to self-driving cars there are 3300 deaths a year, but they are all caused by self-driving cars. Would America accept that? I personally doubt we would. I think the number will have to be in the hundreds at most, closer to what we accept from plane crashes. How safe do self-driving cars have to be before we start using them?
- sp332 11y agoWhy not?
- jdhawk 11y agoBecause its easier to accept it if it was a humans fault, not some piece of code.
- dubcanada 11y agoI think the problem is, people really don't care about autonomous objects. There is so many unknowns with this, it's really hard to know. Like if the self-driving car gets in an accident (that is a result of the self-driving car), who is responsible? Google? Me? Other driver? Car maker? Car seller? Insurance company? Humans have kind of accepted that humans make mistakes, you're trained from day 1 to when you die, humans make mistakes. It's a bit different when it's a program with a giant state machine.
- _lce0 11y agotwo self-driving cars, from different owners, crash: who is going to pay for that?
- NeutronBoy 11y agoThe one at fault in the accident
- devsquid 11y agoI would love to watch some vids of that visualization they showed off towards the end
- justinpaulson 11y agoIt's your lucky day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsaES--OTzM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsaES--OTzM cut to 0:55
- devsquid 11y agoAwesome thank you
- Tloewald 11y agoMy takeaway — pause slightly before responding to a green light. (Something I usually do already as it happens.)
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- jcoffland 11y agoGoogle says their self-driving cars were not at fault in all 11 cases and perhaps technically they were not but I don't think you can discount the possibility that the self-driving cars may have behaved in an unexpected manner that may have contributed to the accidents. A machine might make choices that are logical but which throw off other drivers. Strict adherence to the rules could cause problems. For example, there are cases where changing lanes in an intersection, although illegal, could avoid an accident. If a machine controlled car insisted on following the rules an accident might be unavoidable or the action could force another driver in to an unavoidable accident. I don't look forward to the day when I'm no longer allowed to drive my own car but it would be awesome if robot controlled cars coordinated among themselves to avoid traffic jams and to operate safely at much higher speeds. I could see cars of the future running normally at 200MPH+ were typical human drivers would find it difficult to operate safely. Hey and no more traffic tickets. One possible way to move in this direction would be to introduce robot only lanes.
- fixermark 11y agoGiven the information available on how people actually drive (besides that mentioned directly in this article), how would one distinguish the automated car behaving "strangely" from regular human driver weirdness? I bet if you quiz twenty of your driving friends, you'll find more than three opinions on the right way to clear a four-way stop, for example.
- cheshire137 11y agoPause long enough that everyone else is equally hesitant, then gun it into the intersection!
- andrewtbham 11y agohow cool would it be to have a drone above your self driving car to augment it's perception and add another dimension to the driving conditions?
- branchan 11y agoCome to think of it. Imagine driving a car yourself on a road full of self-driving cars. You would be able to drive as fast as you like and cut off anybody without ever being afriad of retaliation. Self-driving cars will always let you in because they do not want to cause a collision.
- danans 11y agoI imagine that reckless driving laws will still be in effect in that scenario, so that will likely deter the behavior, unless it is sociopathic in motivation.
- crocowhile 11y agoself-driving cars will have cameras and sensors all over them. I expect them to act as vigilantes by alerting police of reckless behaviour.
- cheshire137 11y agoArrrgh those diagrams are giving me road rage.
- kabouseng 11y agoWhat will be interesting will be how human behaviour will change once all cars are self driving cars. Some cyclist / pedestrians might blatantly cross a red light intersection because he knows the self driving cars will detect and stop for him... something to think about.