8 ms·

Interesting article, though it forgets the elephant in the room: self-driving cars. The two will probably work hand in hand, but it is unlikely, in my opinion,

by swombat 11y ago

Interesting article, though it forgets the elephant in the room: self-driving cars. The two will probably work hand in hand, but it is unlikely, in my opinion, that any electric cars will be charging at home very much, because most electric cars will be owned by companies, not individuals. Why own a car when you can pay a tiny percentage of a cab fare to go anywhere? When a journey that currently costs $50 costs 20 cents, private car ownership will plummet.

danhak 11y ago
The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Even Elon Musk's most ambitious projections for "autopilot" are a car that can drive itself 90 - 95% of the time but will require an alert, licensed driver to take over if necessary. Secondly, I don't feel that the possible rise of truly autonomous vehicles (if that even occurs within the next ten years) affects the main point of this article. In fact, the advantages of battery-electric over gasoline become even more pronounced in a world of self-driving cars. The only drawback (speed to refuel) becomes moot as fully-charged vehicles can be dispatched while others direct themselves to charging or battery-swap stations.
- toomuchtodo 11y ago
  > The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Google cars are pretty damn close to level 4 autonomous vehicles. They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously, and Google runs their self-driving vehicle algorithms against simulated virtual worlds constantly (with data previously collected from their self driving cars). We are so much closer to fully autonomous cars than people think.
  - jtokoph 11y ago
    I've always thought that the Google cars have driven 95%+ of their miles in Mountain View, CA where every single aspect of the roads have been digitized, tested and tweaked a million times over. If you stuck one of these cars in a brand new city, it wouldn't work nearly as well.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      How quickly could a fleet of Google vehicles ingest a major metros geographic data? Assume a similar project as Street View, with minimum wage drivers piloting the data collection vehicles without autonomous mode turned on. Days? Weeks? Under 6 months for sure. EDIT: Current street view coverage: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/68384?hl=en https://support.google.com/maps/answer/68384?hl=en
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      Mapping the roads isn't challenging. How do you think humans perform at driving through brand new cities?
      - CountSessine 11y ago
        Humans don't need cm-scale precise maps in cities to avoid jumping curbs and running into streetlamps. But that's still a requirement for all autonomous cars that have been demonstrated.
        thaumasiotes 11y ago
        I don't see why this matters, though. cm-scale maps aren't hard to produce.
        CountSessine 11y ago
        Aren't hard to produce everywhere?
        swombat 11y ago
        Not much harder to produce than the current street view maps that are almost everywhere...
        peterfirefly 11y ago
        Not all autonomous cars require that, either. Nor is there any reason whatsoever to believe it will be a requirement in the future.
  - danhak 11y ago
    > They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously Zero of those miles were at a speeds > 25 mph. And the cars have averaged > 1 accident per 100,000 miles.
    - toomuchtodo 11y ago
      Audi's TTS autonomous vehicle sped up Pike's Peak successfully 5 years ago: http://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-peak/ http://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-... "The car made five runs during a week of testing, reaching the 14,100-foot summit in 27 minutes. The very fastest drivers — in cars putting down more than 900 horsepower — do it in 10 minutes and change, so clearly the car isn’t terribly fast. But the point isn’t the speed, it’s the fact there was no one at the wheel. According to Audi, race officials said an expert driver in car like the TTS would complete the course in around 17 minutes." Note that none of the accidents Google cars have been involved in were while the vehicles were in autonomous mode. http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/ http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/
      - mod 11y ago
        None of them while a car was moving in autonomous mode* As I recall there were collisions where the autonomous car was sitting still. Others while in manual mode. Zero the fault of autonomous drivers, so far.
        toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Regardless, autonomous vehicles will improve at a staggering pace due to computing power available to them, and sensors rapidly developing. ~33K [1] deaths a year from car accidents currently due to human drivers. I doubt autonomous vehicles can do worse than that. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm
    - mikeyouse 11y ago
      I don't think this is accurate.. It was pretty common to pass the Lexus SUVs that Google was using for their autonomous platforms on the highway at speeds of 65+ MPH. I'm not sure if they're still around since my commute changed, but they were previously all over the Bay Area. I personally saw them on HWYs 101, 280, 880, and 92..
  - ninkendo 11y ago
    The number of miles driven autonomously doesn't really matter if drivers have to intervene even for a second to resolve an issue. If the car is driving by itself 99% of the time, that's not good enough for the "share an autonomous car" use case. It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%. It's a lot more interesting if google's cars actually had no steering wheel or way of intervening. Because that's what we're talking about when we talk about the price reduction of a fleet of autonomous cars: the car driving to your house, completely on its own, with nobody in the car. 99.9% isn't good enough, and we're not even close to 99.9%. The difficulty of the last remaining difficult problems will only increase as we approach 100%, too. I think completely driverless cars are a problem on a similar scale as AI or nuclear fusion, but with the timescales decreased... we're probably going to be always perpetually "five years out" from having them (as opposed to fusion's perpetual "30 years"), even though we're making improvements all the time. We just don't understand the scale of the problems we haven't solved yet.
    - waterlesscloud 11y ago
      "It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%." That's not completely right. If that 99.9% covers 100% of certain use cases, they will be used for those cases. It's like much else in tech, it's not an instant change, it's going to be all about expanding the uses cases over time.
      - hvidgaard 11y ago
        That is the thing with driving - it's amongst other drivers, pedestrians, especially children. There are so few use cases where 99.99% is enough. I can only think of one, highway from A to B - how you get to and from the A and B respectively is not by selfdriving cars.
      - ninkendo 11y ago
        The thing with autonomous ride sharing though, is that the car has to make it from its last stop to your home on its own. And there's any number of scenarios that can happen on its way... a traffic light could lose power and turn into a 4-way stop, for instance. Or a big event at a large venue where hundreds or thousands of pedestrians are crossing the street and you kinda have to inch forward and wait for some of them to wave you on to go forward (basically everybody jaywalks at that point.) There's a million different 0.01% scenarios that could happen, and if you ramp the usage of a really really good autonomous car up to scale, you'll see them every day. Unless it can handle all of them without intervention, you simply can't ditch the driver, or you'd face huge PR nightmares when you either hit a pedestrian or you block an intersection and cause huge traffic in a major metropolitan area ("Mayor bans autonomous cars due to one too many gridlocks caused by them", etc.) I really think it's down to the PR issues and the fact that one too many mistakes can really kill the idea, that companies will be cautious to just not need a driver altogether. And for autonomous ride sharing, you must be able to do nearly half your miles without a driver. Hence why that last .01% is still crucial.
  - Qwertious 11y ago
    Do they drive properly in rain/fog yet? IIRC they can't drive in rain, which is a hell of a limitation.
philwelch 11y ago
What if the self-driving electric cab gets soiled with the last passenger's bodily fluids?
- JoshTriplett 11y ago
  Then it drives to a location to be cleaned at that passenger's expense. And depending on the nature of the issue, it may be treated as intentional vandalism.
- TD-Linux 11y ago
  Send it to the service hub and ask for another?
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  It will probably have facilities for identifying that condition and either self-cleaning or notifying the central dispatch system that it needs to be taken out of the rotation until cleaned. Pretty much the same thing as a human-driven cab. Worst case, all those things fail, and a dirty cab shows up, and you reject it on the hailing app with an explanation of why, leading to some delay till you get the next available cab. Its not like unexpected failures and delays don't happen with personally owned and operated owner-driven vehicles.
  - philwelch 11y ago
    People are still disincentivized from soiling taxis by the presence of the driver. Though at the very least, you'll have to have a membership/accountability system in place, and that becomes harder and harder as you scale.
    - jannotti 11y ago
      Cars can drive autonomously, but they can't sense a spill?
      - Qwertious 11y ago
rorykoehler 11y ago
I published a piece on exactly this earlier in the week. Admittedly I took an extreme position, but not an impossible one: https://medium.com/@rorykoehler/carpocalypse-how-the-robot-car-will-kill-it-s-maker-879e2fe32f46 https://medium.com/@rorykoehler/carpocalypse-how-the-robot-c... The major point of value I took from the OP here was that we have no idea what the landscape will look like in 10 years. It is totally open for disruption.

by swombat 11y ago

danhak 11y ago

The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Even Elon Musk's most ambitious projections for "autopilot" are a car that can drive itself 90 - 95% of the time but will require an alert, licensed driver to take over if necessary. Secondly, I don't feel that the possible rise of truly autonomous vehicles (if that even occurs within the next ten years) affects the main point of this article. In fact, the advantages of battery-electric over gasoline become even more pronounced in a world of self-driving cars. The only drawback (speed to refuel) becomes moot as fully-charged vehicles can be dispatched while others direct themselves to charging or battery-swap stations.

toomuchtodo 11y ago
> The truth is we're really not that close to fully-autonomous cars. Google cars are pretty damn close to level 4 autonomous vehicles. They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously, and Google runs their self-driving vehicle algorithms against simulated virtual worlds constantly (with data previously collected from their self driving cars). We are so much closer to fully autonomous cars than people think.
- jtokoph 11y ago
  I've always thought that the Google cars have driven 95%+ of their miles in Mountain View, CA where every single aspect of the roads have been digitized, tested and tweaked a million times over. If you stuck one of these cars in a brand new city, it wouldn't work nearly as well.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    How quickly could a fleet of Google vehicles ingest a major metros geographic data? Assume a similar project as Street View, with minimum wage drivers piloting the data collection vehicles without autonomous mode turned on. Days? Weeks? Under 6 months for sure. EDIT: Current street view coverage: https://support.google.com/maps/answer/68384?hl=en https://support.google.com/maps/answer/68384?hl=en
  - thaumasiotes 11y ago
    Mapping the roads isn't challenging. How do you think humans perform at driving through brand new cities?
    - CountSessine 11y ago
      Humans don't need cm-scale precise maps in cities to avoid jumping curbs and running into streetlamps. But that's still a requirement for all autonomous cars that have been demonstrated.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        I don't see why this matters, though. cm-scale maps aren't hard to produce.
        CountSessine 11y ago
        Aren't hard to produce everywhere?
        swombat 11y ago
        Not much harder to produce than the current street view maps that are almost everywhere...
      - peterfirefly 11y ago
        Not all autonomous cars require that, either. Nor is there any reason whatsoever to believe it will be a requirement in the future.
- danhak 11y ago
  > They've driven more than a million miles fully autonomously Zero of those miles were at a speeds > 25 mph. And the cars have averaged > 1 accident per 100,000 miles.
  - toomuchtodo 11y ago
    Audi's TTS autonomous vehicle sped up Pike's Peak successfully 5 years ago: http://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-peak/ http://www.wired.com/2010/11/audis-robotic-car-climbs-pikes-... "The car made five runs during a week of testing, reaching the 14,100-foot summit in 27 minutes. The very fastest drivers — in cars putting down more than 900 horsepower — do it in 10 minutes and change, so clearly the car isn’t terribly fast. But the point isn’t the speed, it’s the fact there was no one at the wheel. According to Audi, race officials said an expert driver in car like the TTS would complete the course in around 17 minutes." Note that none of the accidents Google cars have been involved in were while the vehicles were in autonomous mode. http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/ http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/
    - mod 11y ago
      None of them while a car was moving in autonomous mode* As I recall there were collisions where the autonomous car was sitting still. Others while in manual mode. Zero the fault of autonomous drivers, so far.
      - toomuchtodo 11y ago
        Regardless, autonomous vehicles will improve at a staggering pace due to computing power available to them, and sensors rapidly developing. ~33K [1] deaths a year from car accidents currently due to human drivers. I doubt autonomous vehicles can do worse than that. [1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/accidental-injury.htm
  - mikeyouse 11y ago
    I don't think this is accurate.. It was pretty common to pass the Lexus SUVs that Google was using for their autonomous platforms on the highway at speeds of 65+ MPH. I'm not sure if they're still around since my commute changed, but they were previously all over the Bay Area. I personally saw them on HWYs 101, 280, 880, and 92..
- ninkendo 11y ago
  The number of miles driven autonomously doesn't really matter if drivers have to intervene even for a second to resolve an issue. If the car is driving by itself 99% of the time, that's not good enough for the "share an autonomous car" use case. It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%. It's a lot more interesting if google's cars actually had no steering wheel or way of intervening. Because that's what we're talking about when we talk about the price reduction of a fleet of autonomous cars: the car driving to your house, completely on its own, with nobody in the car. 99.9% isn't good enough, and we're not even close to 99.9%. The difficulty of the last remaining difficult problems will only increase as we approach 100%, too. I think completely driverless cars are a problem on a similar scale as AI or nuclear fusion, but with the timescales decreased... we're probably going to be always perpetually "five years out" from having them (as opposed to fusion's perpetual "30 years"), even though we're making improvements all the time. We just don't understand the scale of the problems we haven't solved yet.
  - waterlesscloud 11y ago
    "It's no good at 99.9% either. Or 99.99%." That's not completely right. If that 99.9% covers 100% of certain use cases, they will be used for those cases. It's like much else in tech, it's not an instant change, it's going to be all about expanding the uses cases over time.
    - hvidgaard 11y ago
      That is the thing with driving - it's amongst other drivers, pedestrians, especially children. There are so few use cases where 99.99% is enough. I can only think of one, highway from A to B - how you get to and from the A and B respectively is not by selfdriving cars.
    - ninkendo 11y ago
      The thing with autonomous ride sharing though, is that the car has to make it from its last stop to your home on its own. And there's any number of scenarios that can happen on its way... a traffic light could lose power and turn into a 4-way stop, for instance. Or a big event at a large venue where hundreds or thousands of pedestrians are crossing the street and you kinda have to inch forward and wait for some of them to wave you on to go forward (basically everybody jaywalks at that point.) There's a million different 0.01% scenarios that could happen, and if you ramp the usage of a really really good autonomous car up to scale, you'll see them every day. Unless it can handle all of them without intervention, you simply can't ditch the driver, or you'd face huge PR nightmares when you either hit a pedestrian or you block an intersection and cause huge traffic in a major metropolitan area ("Mayor bans autonomous cars due to one too many gridlocks caused by them", etc.) I really think it's down to the PR issues and the fact that one too many mistakes can really kill the idea, that companies will be cautious to just not need a driver altogether. And for autonomous ride sharing, you must be able to do nearly half your miles without a driver. Hence why that last .01% is still crucial.
- Qwertious 11y ago
  Do they drive properly in rain/fog yet? IIRC they can't drive in rain, which is a hell of a limitation.

philwelch 11y ago

What if the self-driving electric cab gets soiled with the last passenger's bodily fluids?

JoshTriplett 11y ago
Then it drives to a location to be cleaned at that passenger's expense. And depending on the nature of the issue, it may be treated as intentional vandalism.
TD-Linux 11y ago
Send it to the service hub and ask for another?
dragonwriter 11y ago
It will probably have facilities for identifying that condition and either self-cleaning or notifying the central dispatch system that it needs to be taken out of the rotation until cleaned. Pretty much the same thing as a human-driven cab. Worst case, all those things fail, and a dirty cab shows up, and you reject it on the hailing app with an explanation of why, leading to some delay till you get the next available cab. Its not like unexpected failures and delays don't happen with personally owned and operated owner-driven vehicles.
- philwelch 11y ago
  People are still disincentivized from soiling taxis by the presence of the driver. Though at the very least, you'll have to have a membership/accountability system in place, and that becomes harder and harder as you scale.
  - jannotti 11y ago
    Cars can drive autonomously, but they can't sense a spill?
    - Qwertious 11y ago

rorykoehler 11y ago

I published a piece on exactly this earlier in the week. Admittedly I took an extreme position, but not an impossible one: https://medium.com/@rorykoehler/carpocalypse-how-the-robot-car-will-kill-it-s-maker-879e2fe32f46 https://medium.com/@rorykoehler/carpocalypse-how-the-robot-c... The major point of value I took from the OP here was that we have no idea what the landscape will look like in 10 years. It is totally open for disruption.