Can Detroit Beat Google to the Self-Driving Car?
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
That just doesn't make sense. To my mind, there's "cruise control" as it exists today, and "car drives itself completely and safely even in adverse conditions". Pretending that it's safe to suddenly hand over to the human in an emergency is just crazy.
It's not as if all these new entrants are taking Ford's erstwhile philosophy of building everything inhouse. Rather tbey cobble lots of things from different sources together.
Fine but where do you draw the line? Is it still safe if "cruise control" adds speed matching, steering, lane changing, or braking? As far as safety today, when I'm on the highway, I'd rather have a Telsa on autopilot than a human driving behind me.
Pretending that it's safe or not is an issue for 2025 cars technology as there are no cars on the road that "drive itself completely and safely even in adverse conditions". Not even Google's self-driving cars are there yet. They still don't drive on in inclement weather and have a professional driver monitoring them at all times.
That ship sailed years ago. Even in the 2015 model year (mid-2014 release) all of those features are available.
My car does speed matching, minor steering to keep you in the lane (at highway speeds), and auto-braking (both for auto cruise control and for collision avoidance). It works fine.
The manufacturers will fall back on the "these are only assistive systems." It says so in bold type in the user manual.
He basically took video of his commute in the Boston area over the course of a few weeks and pulled out snippets of situations that would be really difficult for an AI. IMO, a lot of people are far too eager to extrapolate from works-mostly under a controlled set of conditions to letting AI cars loose on the road in a wide variety of real-world conditions.
Even if you accept that we'll never have perfection (and humans certainly aren't), you do have to get to a point where serious failures are fairly rare events as they are with driving today in the context of the millions of road miles driven.
See its not just GM looking to do this, almost every make of components for cars is into this space so a solution is already in the pipe. however when it comes to delivering cars that people want; not what government agencies might be coerced into buying; google doesn't stand a chance.
Supply chain management, government, warranty, unions (UAW), this is not an easy industry to operate within.
I don't think Google's gotta worry about building cars. They can just buy someone who does.
Hence the 30,000+ death toll on the roads for the past century, their big push in the 1990s to replace lightweight cars with big heavy SUVs, and their present push to build big automated distraction screens into the middle of cars.
I think you are overstating your case. They all provide as much as their market demand. So, in some markets you see fewer safety features (see south African auto market)
The car is prone to making a sharp turn towards the curb and then beeping and handing control back over to you.
US auto manufacturers are worse than laggards when it comes to the electronic systems they embed in their vehicles -- things like Ford MyTouch are borderline hostile to the user, and Jeep has definitely demonstrated a dangerous level of malfeasance when it comes to such things. US manufacturers also arguably lag behind when it comes to core automotive technologies as well.
Historically, they seem to be pretty bad at this. I've never had a positive experience with Google support, whether it was for an 'Enterprise' product, or for consumer products. In my experience, they've always got amazingly friendly support staff, but their technical knowledge and ability to resolve issues has always been a major shortcoming.
Their whole development process is glacial and hardware focused. A ten year feature cycle, between conception and release, seems normal.
Tesla using actual software people is going to wipe their floor in this regard.
Will a Google car be able to caravan with a GM car? Is a single hive mind able to produce better energy/travel time results than the multiple hive mind of Google/gm/tesla/toyota/+100m humans?
Given what Google has already demonstrated, its more likely we will see fully autonomous within 5 years. I'm betting less than that in a few test cities.
So probably too late already for "Detroit"
Even the "car in charge" in 2025 seems ridiculously optimistic even if the problem is tightly bounded by type of road.
I think maybe in 1-2 cities in limited areas I will be able to use an app on my phone to order a Google car from point A to B. I think it will have lots of limits, perhaps limited to certain areas within a city, perhaps limited by speeds, time of day etc.
I don't think it will be long distance, most cities won't have it, highways later, etc.
So, in other words, no. Not to pick on you but the scenario you (optimistically IMO) describe is that, on a test basis, under certain limited circumstances and locations, might be able to have fully autonomous vehicles. (Though if they're that limited, why would they be legally allowed on the streets?)
And highways actually seem like a more likely nearish-term scenario given that, aside from the occasional deer/moose, debris, and construction (which could presumably be dealt with in various ways) seems far more manageable than the typical city street.
Really? I thought that Google's car doesn't work in bad weather (and it say so in the article too).
Sure it will be limited in all kinds of ways, but many cities will and want to support the early versions.
Do you object to a farm helper being called a "hand", because he's an entire man?
People understand that "hand" denotes the person, just like they understand that Detroit, in context, isn't literally the city of Detroit.
If the President is visiting Los Angeles, and is informed of something, then "Washington is informed".
Likewise, financial business is not only on Wall Street.
Broadway musicals aren't played only on Broadway --- even if we restrict the context to New York.
A few minutes later: Especially regulation of hands off systems.
That's it, I've had enough of you internet, I'm going to use a adblocker. I really tried to give you a chance. I tried to let you do the right thing and show polite respectful ads. I understand that you need to make money, and I wanted to let you show your ads I really did, I even clicked on them sometimes when they looked interesting, but this is just too much. This is just abuse. I'm not taking this any more. You brought this on yourself, and your bad behaviour has ruined it for everyone else. Goodbye world of advertising, I hope you drown in your own filth. I look forward to an internet where people pay for things they like and the advertising revenue model dies a painful death.
edit: I meant when people start paying for adblockers
I'd like to be warned "if you follow this link you'll go to a site that is know to use auto-playing audio, are you sure?", preferably a purely visual warning rather than one that requires extra clicks if I do interact with the link.
That way they don't even count me as a visitor, never mind an advert impression.
Of course writing add-ins to do that, populating the database, protecting the data from malicious updates, and so forth, would not be a quick one-off job. This is one of the (many) items on my list of stuff to do if I ever develop infinite free time...