Volvo's Self Driving Pilot in Hands of Customers

I wouldn't call a car self-driving if the occupant needs to be involved.

Unfortunately marketing has figured out that "self-driving car" is the next cool thing, so they're rebranding driving assist technologies as "self-driving".

(I am aware of the definition of different "levels" of self-driving cars; from my perspective, that's marketing. Either the car drives itself, or it does not.)

It's fine to get on a bus or get in a taxi while drunk, I don't see any reason a 100% autonomous car should be any different... in theory. The dilemma here is can the person take control of the vehicle?

Being able to get hammered, and then pass out in the back seat of your car while it drives you home is the dream. But in the slim chance it does get into an accident, there needs to be a way to prove you really were blacked out in the backseat, and the car crashed on its own. And not that you drunkenly grabbed the wheel and tried to do a u-turn to McDonald's.

Not sure why you got downvoted. While I think the number of cars sold will decrease, I don't think it will be by very much. The biggest problem is that most people go to work and go home at roughly the same times during the day, so realistically you can't have more than maybe 2-3 people sharing a car if they're both employed. Yes, some fraction of a city's residents work non-standard hours, but the majority are on something close to a 9-5 schedule.

Also keep in mind that while the number of cars sold might go down, it's also fairly likely that the margin on each car will go up, and the total number of miles driven will go up as well. Basically when you take the unwanted part of driving out of the equation (sitting in traffic wasting time) and don't need driver attention anymore, you can start adding all kinds of value-add features to vehicles like giant in-vehicle displays or massage chairs. And if you can do whatever you want while on the road, longer commutes aren't so bad, so it's easy to put more miles on a car in a year, which means more replacement parts, service visits, etc. over time.

The market will no doubt change significantly, but existing OEMs are by no means going to be excluded entirely.

Totally agree with you.

Also some of the freight traffic will be shifted to nights; self-driving cars will allow door-to-door service, so number of parking spaces will be reduced; also when no driver is needed you get that extra seat.

I disagree. While the number of cars may plummet initially, when you share cars between multiple people, the mileage on those cars is going to increase dramatically. Shared cars may end up hitting 300,000 miles in 5 years rather than 15.

Unless self driving cars dramatically increase the lifespan of the average car, things will balance out in a few years.

People's appetite for suburban environments is insatiable. Given the chance to work or relax 1 hour on a laptop before getting to the office and after getting to the office will exacerbate sprawl.

Car sharing is an interesting possibility, but it may turn out people will live at the farthest distance they can possibly live [due to costs], thus will be unable to afford even a five minute detour that is critical for enabling sharing.

I expect real estate to explode, car production to increase, possibly significantly, and we'll spend a whole lot more time in our private mobile offices.

To be fair, the Tesla submission covers an recent rare event while this here is more of general information about things that will happen in the future. Just this is enough to cover for the amount of comments. There is a lot to discuss.

Because the Tesla one isn't just words. I read up till "They plan to..."

Depending how you look at it this isn't entirely true for a few reasons, but also not entirely wrong either. I'll do "why its not true" first but also "why you're not wrong"...

Tesla's are actively collecting data all the time for autopilot-enabled cars, even if autopilot isn't purchased. Some basic info here: http://electrek.co/2016/04/11/google-self-driving-car-tesla-...

The usage of this data is relatively unknown, but based on how autopilot is improved week to week it is assumed that it is being used to learn the speed to take turns, where lanes are, etc. The provider of Tesla's autopilot hardware (partially) calls this something like "Active Mapping". Or something.

The reason you're not wrong though is that Google has more sensor-rich data. Tesla vehicles currently just don't have the same level of sensor package onboard. So Google has a lot of data Tesla can't get.

Generally I would say that a company like Google is researching self-driving, while a company like Volvo is building self-driving cars. It's very likely that Google has the edge when it comes to something like autonomous taxis (i.e. pods), but that is still some years ahead and who knows how much of that will have been a relevant effort then. I guess they will have a lot of patents though.

Apple? I wonder why you say this? Thy haven't publicly announced anything to do with cars until now as far as I am aware. Admittedly they are very secretive about things like that, but I would be surprised if they had any sort of lead over the competition other than with the brand name.

To me Google had an edge because Thrun came from winning the DARPA challenge, after years of 'nobody finished the race'. Even if traditional car brands had unused research for SDV, I assumed it wouldn't be as advanced as the DARPA project.

Do you consider automatic braking part of autopilot? Several cars already do this if they think you're going to hit something in front of you at low speed.

Here is a somewhat related video with the reversed situtation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ytVdBLMmRno

Of course, the chances of such a clear-cut moral dilemma are likely worse than the chances of winning the lottery. Besides, if the ice is so slippery that you can't stop, it's likely too slippery to steer off the road.

There are very few legitimate reasons for someone to purposely steer off the road at highway speeds, but many reasons for the car to prevent it.

This is basically the plot of "I, Robot". (The Hollywood movie, not the Asimov stories.)

Presumably, stepping on the brake or doing manual steering input above some treshold would take the car off autopilot immediately.

The opposite problem that the autopilot would have to drive the car off the road is equally hard, or even harder: if a concious driver would have made that decision (ditch the car over hitting someone) then so would the autopilot have to, or it would be vastly inferior to a human driver.

That means that the autopilot has to make that judgement and make it very well, since it will involve potentially harming the car and its passengers on purpose. Driving the car into a tree because of misidentifying something that isn't a human for a human would be very bad news.

It's the same deal with wildlife: if a moose is on the road you may have to drive off the road if you can't break, but if it's just a deer you'd likely rather hit it than drive off the road. Autopilot would have to do the same.

Volvo already has this feature in some cars, and from my testing it appears to only work on freeways where there are clear lines to show the lanes, not just any road. As well, it only seems to do adjustments, not full on overtake, so if you're gunning for the ditch I don't think this feature will help much. (Although, for obvious reasons I didn't actually try that.)

I think you would enjoy Trolley problem memes (a fb page: https://www.facebook.com/Trolley-problem-memes-2503531819802...)

Yeah, its not as rare as many folks would imagine. You can steer a lot better than you can break on suddenly slippery roads. The choice of a ditch versus an accident is pretty straightforward.