Google’s Self-Driving Car Project Is Losing Out to Rivals
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
My suspicion is that they are way ahead of competitors in terms of data from testing self driving cars and realize there are still so many unsolved problems that true autonomous vehicles aren't going to happen nearly as soon as competitors claim.
For instance, I see self-driving Google cars on a daily basis here in central Austin. There are a ton of zero visibility turns where you have to slowly edge out and hope no one is coming because visibility is blocked by a hedge.
How can self-driving cars handle that scenario without delegating to manual intervention?
[1] This one police radar seems to also nicely work through stone http://www.camero-tech.com/product.php?ID=38
Second, it will come when cars finally talk to each other, which will become mandatory in a few years.
Discussing your specific example, I wonder if autonomous vehicles might learn to avoid blinds given enough crash data.
One possible way: http://web.mit.edu/~velten/www/corner/
One should not assume that simply because a human can't see through it, doesn't mean a computer with the right kinds of sensors can't.
Granted this can happen now with people calling in but they will forget to do so, won't have images to show for backup, etc. Roads can be made safer this way.
http://bogbit.com/vancouver-man-sacrifices-self-to-save-wife...
Would you rather have surgery from a human with a 90% success rate but a 0.0001% of a heroic save, or a robot with a 98% success rate, with the bonus that the robot will only be getting better with more adoption.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...
But you are correct in that other companies design their cars to drive themselves, and Google's just making an overglorified Google Maps client with collision detection. And the reality that maps will never be accurate actually renders Google's methodology a complete nonstarter for ever being a real product.
If it can't get from A to B without a human behind the wheel, it's not autonomous.
How about if it can achieve this 99.9% of the time, but needs help very occasionally? How many nines do you need? Humans are not at 100% overall. There's no clear definition of autonomy.
Though I guess Google/Uber are probably getting significantly higher resolution data than Tesla/MobileEye/etc since you can't stream all sensor data back to HQ over LTE.
I think a lot of these articles are driven by the fact that Google has been working on this for so long and yet we have upstarts that are getting cars on the road in a fraction of the time.
It's very possible that Google overestimated the problems with Level 3 Autonomy and the public backlash associated with it and building L3 tech as an on-ramp towards L4 may turn out to be the correct path to market and funding further development effort.
Given that Google doesn't make cars, I don't really see how they would go about commercializing L3, even though it's well within their capacity from an innovation standpoint.
I really don't think they expected the auto industry to respond so aggressively with their own proprietary autonomous driving OSs, determined to shut Google out.
At this stage their only option is to get to six sigma level 4 in a way that leaves everyone else scratching their heads wondering how Google did that. It's going to take a lot longer than Google anticipated.
Now Google could probably release level 4 quite soon in a limited capacity that's more an amusement park ride than a relable, profitable transportation service, but it's probably smarter for them to keep their eye on the prize and keep plugging away at it. They're in too deep to throw in the towel.
Plenty of the startups in this space aren't making cars, but buying cars and installing aftermarket kits. Otto is a great example. Or they could have done what MobileEye did and sell L3 tech to car companies to fund further development.
I don't find the auto response particularly aggressive; they've waited 7 years to even start anything. The barrier to entry in that time has gotten so much lower due to deep learning that geohot can build a car that has some level of autonomy in his garage, and I think those advances were what really caught google flatfooted.
Can Google keep funding a pie in the sky research project for another 20 years, which is roughly the timeline they've said about L4 autonomy.
Yes
HTC/Valve and Occulus have produced a high quality product and then you have the trashy phoneVR which isn't even comparable. Is the prevalence of a substandard VR behind the recent slump in sales? It's fairly probable (with other factors).
Not to mention the youtube video of those two guys sleeping while the car is driving. (can't find a link, sorry)
Personally I'll be Will Smith in the movie "I, Robot" and will never trust them.
It's going to get to a point where they say it's all or nothing, we can't rely on people to stay attentive when the car is doing 90% of the driving.
That is exactly the sort of situation self-driving cars are expected to be perfect, or at least superior, to humans at handling. If they're no better than a human driver or even a bit worse when edge-cases occur than what's the point?
That said, I think GP will be proven right in time. Risk compensation[0] is a well-documented phenomenon and this seems highly likely to trigger that sort of behaviour.
[0]: http://www.mercurynews.com/2015/01/23/chp-tackles-surge-in-s...
They might get political pressure to consider high attention events instead of the statistics, but they are partly in the business of pushing back against that kind of pressure.
One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to believe that the news is an accurate reflection of reality. The opposite is actually true, in the sense that what makes it to be high profile news is something unusual and surprising.
Make the autopilot ring alarm when uncertainty reaches some point and that's it. Tesla already can do it, but doesn't do it for some reason.
This blog post pretty much sums it up: https://electrek.co/2016/04/11/google-self-driving-car-tesla...
They'll also have the equiv of a waze killer when the model 3 hits and there are a lot more Tesla vehicles on the road. As it stands today, I am literally unable to come to work and back without seeing at least 2-3 Teslas (model S or X) on the road in Chicago. Tesla is on their way to be a bit of a creepy monopolist, but I'd rather them do it than say General Motors.
I think people are handwaving away the true difficulty of door-to-door (as opposed to lane-keeping) driver-less cars that can operate safely without humans being attentive all the time.
Human drivers have actively-pointed stereo vision sensors, IMU, and haptic feedback from the steering wheel and pedals. That's it. We know it can be done with only those sensors.
I'm pretty sure anyone sane realizes that the current production shipping autopilot hardware is not capable of fully autonomous driving ie: 100% humanless. I also think that no one is handwaving anything as it is a problem that as of yet, has never been solved. However, data is an enabler for this and having more of it means Tesla is uniquely positioned to crack that nut before anyone else. Teslas are collecting data even when AP isn't enabled. That doesn't mean the cameras are off or the radar is off (they aren't). This simple fact gives Tesla a leg up over virtually all of the competition and until Uber has the same or superior tech on all of the uber fleet, they'll be lagging.
So... When the tech is capable of full autonomy, Tesla will be sitting on an absolute treasure trove of fleet data, which they'll be able to exploit.
On the other hand one could argue that putting these sub-par systems out there teach us a lot we couldn't learn in a closed environment.
Also as far as I am aware, Google have had their self-driving cars driving on the road for year now.
What Google is trying to do is an actual autopilot, which is much more difficult, I suppose.
[1] there are examples where this did not happen, but they're considered a failure.
Some can land, in optimal conditions, but can't taxi.
You can still use an autopilot when flying visually but then it's up to you to watch for traffic. This is using it like cruise control.
CMU is working on this (seriously).
Yes, perfectly fine. If Teslas autopilot can rely on external traffic control to provide that information, call it autopilot. As long as it can't don't.
If you put a plane on autopilot and then go read a book for some hours, most likely nothing bad is going to happen (particularly on IFR, but even on VFR, realistically).
Tesla's autopilot is more advanced than aircraft autopilots, I'd say, yet more dangerous (for now) because of all these darned cars and trucks and pedestrians.
In that sense, "Autopilot" was an unfortunate and overly ambitious name.
Autopilot (before Tesla) is a feature on modern aircraft. If you'll notice, aircraft always have an attentive person behind the wheel (if it's a commercial flight, two).
A plane can fly itself under normal conditions (highways for Tesla) and many can land themselves now (Model S can park / summon feature).
Autopilot couldn't be more apt.
> "oh, crap, there is a truck stopped 20 feet in front of you that I failed to detect at highway speed.
To appreciate your differences in measurement. 5 seconds in a plane is something about a mile away. A high performance car can still stop from 60-0 at 110ft; which is about 1 second. In context of time; it takes at least .7 second for the human to respond.
(The car or terrain monitoring autopilot can react in <.1 s; which means if the car sees the obstacle at 110 feet away it can stop in time, while, if a car pulls out in the highway in front of a human it would take closer to 200ft to stop.)
What happens if the driver expects the car to react upon seeing the obstacle but it fails to do so? Will the driver have enough of the remaining time to react?
The >=.7 second human reaction time (with a planned/known reaction such as brakes or jerking steering wheel) is the very reason why Autopilots are safer.
> TCAS Resolution Advisory will give an attentive pilot a good 5 seconds to react in the worst case
5 seconds in order to avoid violating intruder's airspace, not to avoid actually hitting the intruder. AFAIK there's even then some additional buffer zone.
Also, reading the list of actual TCAS advisories sheds additional light of the substantial differences:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_collision_avoidance_sy...
Differences from Tesla / cars:
1. Almost all advisories actually tell the pilot what the problem is and what to do, not just that there's a problem. Tesla Autopilot basically has one advisory: "TA".
2. Almost all of the advisories resolve collisions by making one-dimensional maneuvers. Having an extra dimension allows you to substantially simplify the collision avoidance problem.
3. It's a safe bet (although not assumed) that both planes involved in a TCAS event are receiving advisories and cooperating with ground ATC.
When flying on instruments, air traffic control keeps planes apart. It's up to the pilot to program the autopilot correctly. (There are other collision avoidance systems but planes can fly on instruments without relying on them.)
But in the end they're not really comparable. Collision avoidance for airplanes is a different problem.
As long as they are telling people they have to be alert while using autopilot I don't see a problem with it. The 'common sense' assumption then would be that autopilot = assisted driving rather being an autonomous self-driving car. Therefore Google et al shouldn't be using the term autopilot when they mean autonomous self-driving vehicle.
Eventually as this tech becomes wide-spread the distinction will become common knowledge to people.
This is mostly just semantics... context is everything. The important thing is preventing people from dying. Which means looking beyond marketing material to educate people.
The car issues obvious and repetitive warnings about what the technology is capable of and what the driver has to do, and turns off the Autopilot if the driver doesn't pay attention. I wouldn't call that "fine print".
It's not a matter of 'educating people', merely so they can use a popular term. It's just plain the wrong thing to do.
Doesn't this support my argument that this is the real meaning of the term? Which makes 'autopilot' distinct from 'self-driving' or 4th gen?
If you as a sailor can understand this then why can't drivers understand autopilot as a glorified cruise control?
Driving already leads to mind wandering states; it is overwhelmingly likely that the passive aspect of autopilot will lead to mind wandering at even higher rates. Asking a less practiced driver to shift attention from internal to external states very quickly and then make complex judgments is simply not fair. A simple physics and statistics based model will be far more reliable. If it isn't, then Google's strategy of shooting straight to level 4 makes sense.
> The public's perception and 'common sense' understanding of technology is sadly very limited
Common sense is contextual and one of the more complicated aspects of cognition; it depends on the level of detail in the model being used to make inferences. A model's sophistication is dictated by internal preferences and goals. If most people's understanding of a technology is limited, then they're going to be doing what looks like averaging over distinct possibilities to a more informed model.
It doesn't help that if you know nothing about technical uses of the term autopilot but do know something about words (which will be the case for most) then in truth, it is the aviation industry that has misnomered.
Either I can fully rely on the system to get me from point A to point B, or I have to fully concentrate on driving. People aren't robots - they can't go from half-assed sorta-paying attention to a split-second life-saving reaction.
Why are you assuming that other manufacturers are not working towards full autonomy? I strongly doubt that everyone at Ford, GM, VW, Toyota, and Honda is asleep at the wheel... Especially when their luxury vehicles are all incrementally moving towards autonomy.
They certainly have a lot fewer PR pieces about how amazing their autonomous-but-not-really lane assist is.
Of course not, since only Tesla AutoPilot lets you sleep at the wheel
I think it's a fair call using this term.
By the way, I'm pretty sure completely autonomous parallel parking is already available retail.
it is. Tesla was also beta-testing (last I saw a few months ago anyway) completely autonomous head-in/rear-in parking including finding the spot in a crowded parking lot.
I resent that you're accusing Tesla of intentionally misleading the public on what the feature does.
The car issues very obvious and repetitive warnings to the driver to explain the shortcomings of the technology and what the driver has to do to compensate. If the driver fails to act in accordance with the warnings, the car turns off the feature.
I mean, I dunno. To me, it looks as if Tesla has already gone above and beyond to communicate accurately, and the main reason they're pushing things even further is because of the intense media scrutiny on Tesla accidents (which the incumbent manufacturers probably love).
Whether or not they intend to mislead, in practice the name is misleading, and I think it is a mistake they could easily fix.
For example 'copilot': a competent, capable partner, but the ultimate responsibility still rests with the pilot.
They are both fully aware of the importance of the human awareness implications not expecting continuous input from the human driver and choosing to encourage it.
Humans fundamentally can't stay attentive when their attention has no reactive feedback loop and they're only using the "stay attentive" (even though we know that it's essentially impossible at a psychological level) argument to shield themselves from legal liability.
It's both fair play because they knew in advance (and have since proven) that they can beat the odds against a human driver, and have simultaneously built in their legal defense to mitigate their downside. "We told you to pay attention. Your death is not on our hands."
I bet if I asked ten people in my office right now, less than half would say confidently that airplane autopilot is a turnkey solution.
"Less than half" is way too much.
Like I see Belgian drivers driving terribly every day and I'm pretty certain that they're much worse than British and German drivers in every way. But the only statistical thing I can go back to is the number of deaths [1], which could include other aspects rather than just stupid driving.
My brain wants to shout out that their's clearly a problem, but that 'clearly' is only on the stretch of road I see. It could be that Belgian drivers are really good everywhere else in Belgium.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rateTo me it seems so hard as to be almost impossible to jump directly from no computer assistance to fully autonomous driving, without first moving through (and learning from) all of the semi-autonomous steps in between.
Tesla on regular highways with sleepy consumers behind the wheel.
This means that Uber can implement 'mostly there' driveless vehicles in a patchwork fashion before everything is perfect.
If Ubers engineers can master a circuit for driverless cars that runs from, say, the airport to downtown and back, but only when the weather is good and traffic is light, they can do it because they've got the human drivers available to pick up any slack in the service.
With Google, if they're only taking passengers partway to their destination or if the system is down 20% of the time, it's just going to piss people off.
Do you mean Tesla? Is quite pointless for Uber to have a car that almost drives itself. They are not car makers trying to sell a better product, they need to get rid of the driver to get any money out of it.
If you are going from the airport to downtown you don't want your car to stop working because it is starting to rain and wait until a human driver comes along.
I think that in that sense Uber is competing directly against Google and not, for example, Tesla. And it looks like Google's technology is more mature, even that it is still not good enough.
For Google is a long time investment, I think that Uber is quite wrong if they think that is a short time investment for them.
There are lots of places where it doesn't rain very much.
They could also be running only when the weather forecast says that it will definitely not rain.
If there are problem locations where it is difficult to drive, simply don't run them in those locations!
Also, they could have self driving being opt in for a discount. If there are problems, well you signed HP for it. Don't want to deal with them, then don't take the 90 percent discount!
Tesla can sell cars with autopilot even when it doesn't work all the time, but they would have very hard time selling autopilot if it only worked on very specific cities or "tracks."
In contrast, Uber can start rolling out autopilot which works very reliably but only on a specific and well-understood "track." They can start phasing it into the market by dispatching autonomous vehicles only when you request a route that they're very confident on. In the medium term, they can dispense with having a driver on such routes at all.
One thing that Uber might try is a self-driving car "delivery" service. People might not be confident enough to ride in a self-driving car yet, but you could have an app deliver a car for you to drive to your destination (maybe w/ driver assist).
For Tesla, the incremental strategy is partial autonomy "anywhere." For Uber, it's probably full autonomy in specific locations. That's a huge advantage because it can seamlessly mesh with their existing app—they can simply start serving a percentage of Uber rides with autonomous vehicles.
Cynically, I think Google is realizing that they need an incremental adoption plan and that's why they're launching their own ridesharing platform.
When I think of companies that are good at execution, Google isn't on the list.
Gradually introducing self-driving features lets the competition gradually gain consumer trust and confidence in the technology, as well as giving them more data for future improvements, and it also gives them a revenue stream to fund future development.
Cars have always been coevolutionary with infrastructure and, hell, society as a whole.
Why solve a problem for a point in time and its assumptions... the hard way?
By adopting adaptive and coevolutionary timelines, self-driving cars and a society that uses them can "organically" (sorry for the buzzword) adopt them.
And ignores multiple levels of useful intermediate achievements:
stage 1: self-driving on superhighways for the long haul: a wayyyy easier task with much more controlled information, markings, protocols, risks, etc. And with massive payoffs in consumer and business transportation.
stage 2: more extreme weather events, highways besides superhighways, handle commuting and congestion
after that: progressively more local streets and conditions.
Automotive doesn't work like that. GM, for example, insists that if a supplier's part causes a recall, the supplier is responsible for the costs of the recall.[2] Auto manufacturers demand the right to send their inspectors into a supplier's plant. If supplier quality slips, the oversight becomes tougher. It has to be that way; a car has thousands of suppliers, many of whom can make the final product defective.
The new head of Google's self-driving project is a car guy from Hyundai. He understands this. Google now has a center in Novi, MI where 100 self-driving mini-vans are being built in a joint venture with Fiat Chrysler. That's step 1.
This is more of a management ego problem than a technical problem. Selling self-driving technology as an auto parts supplier doesn't fit with the "change the world" mentality. The automaker gets all the credit. Few people know the names of the major Tier I automotive suppliers. Microsoft ran into this once. Microsoft wanted the Microsoft logo to appear when the dashboard display booted up. They were insistent about this. The automaker involved went with QNX instead.
[1] https://cloud.google.com/compute/sla [2] http://gmauthority.com/blog/2013/08/general-motors-adopts-ne...
I'll believe that Tesla is a real player if they're able to scale to 500K/units a year.
I was just reacting to the "Manufacturing is hard/messy" - no doubt, but Apple has been orchestrating manufacturing at a huge scale to exacting tolerances for a while now.
Google does software (plus Glass, Nest, Chromebooks, ok, Nexus, etc., maybe, but mostly software...), while Apple has been been doing hardware and software all along.
(the population is also at an all-time high. ;)
Why not assume that Toyota will be the big player? They are obsessive about quality... And ship 10 million vehicles a year.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-12-17/google-hp-...
Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that, but the story 2 years ago is very interesting nonetheless:
https://techcrunch.com/2014/12/11/ford-ditches-microsoft-for...
HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8735719
Always wondering who writes up that shit. Car makers are way long before in autonomous driving. It is a huge difference in "just doing things and not talking about as long as technology is not ready" vs. "talking about technology and presenting even unfinished products." Especially Tesla is very big in the later once.
Car makers are in self driving since technology went into cars. Without that research we would not had any driving assistants these days. I remember mid 1990s when I was an intern at then DASA (Daimler Benz Aerospace) and they worked with a self-driving S-class powered by a new chipset developed by then TEMIC (now Continental) based on Radar technology. Today we have this technology in any decent new car as part of the adaptive cruise control. Back then the test drives where made on a airport runway.
> Google’s project started in 2009, long before carmakers and most other companies seriously considered the technology.
Luxury cars (Audis / Mercedes / Jaguars / BMWs) have had semi-autonomous options for at least 10 years with lane-keeping, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, etc. They've been working on the technology for decades. Improvements in the accuracy and cost of sensors along with processing power makes this a much easier problem now but to say they hadn't considered this before is so silly.
It looks kind of (extremely) ridiculous now, but think about all the things that changed between then and now. The iPhone is ubiquitous now, but it only came out in 2007, and we really only got modern cellular internet after that.
I think that the Smartphone revolution had a huge impact on the way most people think, to the point where it is hard to remember what life was like before them.
The autonomous, decentralized nature of smartphones, along with the cloud for updates and backup is beyond game changing, and software designed before this REALLY shows its age.
DISCLAIMER: I work for GM, any opinions are solely my own, etc.
Thanks for posting that, very fun 8 min watch.
Likewise, despite Apple's other faults, bringing quality touchscreen technology to high volume mobile devices back in 2007 is the what made that company stand out from those who preceded them in that endeavor.
Just because Google talks big doesn't mean the other car makers are stupid idiots who can't see a technology trend coming from a mile away.
I have a feeling that piece of news requires extraordinarily loose interpretations of the words "autonomous" or "soon".
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/11/technology/no-driver-bring...
Source: I live in Pittsburgh, have seen the self-driving cars on the road, and friends have driven in then. I unfortunately, have not lucked into a ride in one yet.
Fact is, it's extremely unlikely we'll see self-driving cars outside the most constricted of environments for decades yet. This should be obvious to anyone who (1) has driven and (2) works with computers. It's scary to me that everyone is eating up the hype and pretending they're imminent.
It will indeed be interesting to see how the well the Uber deployment goes in practice. They certainly did not choose an easy place to start.
Thiel argues that monopoly is a necessary condition of innovation, and Google can qualify as a monopoly under any reasonable measure. But it's starting to feel like PARC and Bell Labs were an accident of history; both were perfectly positioned at the cusp of the digital computer revolution. If we're approaching a similar technical revolution, it's not clear at all. Machine learning, chat bots, drones, ride-hailing apps, etc., are great, but we're in the midst of evolutionary -- not revolutionary -- progress. That's fine. It's the normal state of affairs, progress marching slowly on.
Whether Google wants to do long-term green-field research or it wants to incubate new businesses, it's not clear. From the outside, it looks like a bit of an identity crisis.
Otto (and Uber's acquisition of it) might end up being an example of that in the self-driving car side. Google incubates that vision, unable or unwilling to release it as the founders of Otto wanted; they leave and eventually find commercial success elsewhere.
Get everyone salivating for glorious, apocolyptic disruption, scare the crap out of the traditional auto industry, incite a mad scramble that mobilizes billions of dollars and thousands of men, and then turn around and say 'well, actually... this is really hard, guys.'
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_generation_computer
[Edit: I worked on a couple of EU Esprit projects so I shouldn't complain too much!]
Strangely enough, a decade or so later Sony tried an exotic architecture with its PS3 only to go back to a generalist x86/x64 architecture with the PS4. Funny how the top-down approaches fail compared to bottom up 'kitchen sink' approaches almost consistently and how so many countries and companies never learn this lesson. The West didn't panic from what I can tell. AMD and Intel kept raising transistor density and clock speeds and kept giving their customers what they wanted via a competitive market approach.
On the one hand, the PS3's weird architecture made porting older PC game engines (like Bethesda's Gamebryo, which drives Skyrim and Fallout 3+) extremely difficult, and much-anticipated Skyrim DLCs were long-delayed by problems that existed on the PS3 but no other platform Gamebryo supports.
On the other hand, once Xbox 360 games started getting ported to PS3 and the graphics were compared across the two systems, the consensus was that the PS3 really wasn't much more graphically powerful at all. There was one sports game in particular (boxing? I can't recall-- it's been too many years) that was a particularly telling case because the PS3 port had had something like 6-8 months of extra optimization work, and despite that the launch-day Xbox 360 version of the same game looked and played better.
"Failure" is strong; obviously the PS3 wasn't a failure as a gaming system. But its weird architecture certainly didn't deliver the benefits Sony claimed it would, and it definitely made things more difficult on game developers.
The basic problem is it's hard to find tasks that scale out past ~8 cores really well yet can't just go to the GPU.
Not sure if the research was worth the money but we certainly did eat well.
We do things because we thought they would be easy.
https://twitter.com/pinboard/status/761656824202276864
and the JFK mashup:
The only thing that jumps to my mind is Google Glass?
Edit: but it only works because of the space in a PC tower. It doesn't work for laptops, and I was sort of in the same boat as you. I couldn't imagine it would work for phones. Specifically that they are so space constrained.
Now modularity in PCs is the domain of gaming PCs, plus a few speciality niches. Gamers as a market could be seen as analogous to audiophiles: a bit cranky and hard to please.
DSLR bodies go through a release cycle that is not much longer than major phone models, these days.
One reason to put up with this crap is that you can save thousands of dollars buying nice old glass for your nice new camera. But even though the glass lasts forever, once you get 50MP sensors in cameras, old glass that was designed for the best resolution of 35mm film will limit the performance of a 50MP+ image sensor. Soon, photography will be mostly computational, and big old lenses will all be museum pieces.
I don't even want to think about whether I've kept the firmware on my Sony E-mount lenses up to date.
Google has never had a successful original product. It has only been successful in slight refinements (or in the case of Android, just changes - not refinements) within already successful product categories. To be really harsh; if success means profit, it's only ever been successful with ads.
It keeps potential disruptees twitchy because they're all cognizant that they could be the next Blockbuster if they don't respond aggressively.
Google Books kicked off to a really nice start, but seems to be languishing. OTOH, much of the accessible out-of-copyright material has been scanned, and a significant amount of in-copyright material (books and articles) is being provided ... by other means. Still, the Google Ngram Viewer tops out at 2008, which is increasingly irksome.
A great many of Google's social products: Orkut, Buzz, and Wave.
Whatever those barges were supposed to have been used for.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/williampentland/2014/11/30/why-g...
Are there other big examples in history of this phenomenon? When a company announces a lot of genuinely pioneering progress at something, and then is immediately beaten to market by a competitor who was paying close attention and moving more nimbly?
They completely left out that Google has a lot of Waze data (50 million users)
It would've been a much better comparison to compare uber app miles with waze or google maps. They probably don't because that comparison would not fit with their goal of attacking google.
How many people die of traffic fatalities? We are so close to a world where such deaths are the exception rather than a commonplace occurrence. If only we had truly bold individuals at the helm.
"Tesla, with thousands of internet-connected cars on the road, has a similar data advantage, one former member of the Google car project said."
But it is absolutely the case that data here trumps brilliance. Its really too bad that Google isn't still partnering with Uber rather than trying to compete with them.
Does it take instructions? Can the rider change his mind?
What happens if a fight breaks out in the car?
Will there be a hotline you can call if your car goes rogue? Or just parks and won't move?
I guess these questions are why they are doing a pilot program.
What happens if a fight breaks out in the car of an Uber driver?
Comparing apples to oranges.
I think it boils down to actually getting rid of the driver entirely means it had to handle 1 in 10000 or 1 in 100000 situations. It also means there is no person to blame in the event of an accidents, which are impossible to avoid 100% regardless of how good the system is, due to the laws of physics. None of that would be a problem if we had a tech-savvy and tech-friendly, carefully considering public. But we don't have that really. When it comes down to it, many people depend on cars for a living and almost everyone has accepted them as a daily part of life. Google knows that any collisions could result in a massive angry mob out to get them.
I actually hope articles like this one can gode them into letting us use their system and if it does the occassional Google-had-a-collision mobs turn out to be short lived and relatively tame.
Fun fact: There's no such thing as "waiving liablity" in the US. Those papers you sign are nothing more than a placebo deterrence. Companies can be, and are, sued regardless every day.
That's technically true (you disclaim liability or waive the right to recover for particular torts), but substantively false.
> Companies can be, and are, sued regardless every day.
There are limits on what liability can be signed away, and certainly many go beyond that, and certainly there are disputes over whether the requirements for others to be effect are met which results in lawsuits where that is a threshold issue.
But it is not the case that signing away the right to collect on certain claims generally has no legal effect in the US, even though it might not always have the full effect it would seem from the text viewed in isolation.
You may want to look up "mandatory binding arbitration" for its ability to stop lawsuits. You may also note the Supreme Court of the United States of America has already decided that no meeting of the minds was necessary to lose your right to the courts.
We seriously need new words to seperate "self-driving car" from "vehicle with driving assist systems". Something the marketers can't fuck up by diluting it. I suggest "Fully autonomous vehicle".
This is like saying ITER has been overtaken in fusion power development because Dubai just installed a large solar collector plant that generates quite a lot of power. It's a ridiculous comparison and shifting of the goalposts.
http://www.nhtsa.gov/About+NHTSA/Press+Releases/U.S.+Departm...
Ouch, I had no idea it was that far away.
Hard to believe that when Uber is already testing with passengers in cities, though.
Let X = # of years before true class 4 self driving cars are available to buy Let Y = # of years after introduction before class 4 self driving cars are the majority sold Let Z = # of years after Y where self driving cars provide the majority of trips.
Z could be 19/2, but we can probably assume that newer cars are used for more miles than the older ones, so Z is probably somewhere between 5 and 10.
That could mean that X+Y is as little as ten years away. X=5 and Y=5 both seem fairly optimistic to me.
The government involvement in a positive direction will probably be somewhat tough. It's not hard to frame this as a job-destroying technology initially primarily for the benefit of the better off.
What it does want is to make self-driving cars widely used, because that would mean that the time currently wasted in commuting by car could turn into increased internet usage, which drives Google's revenue. That's why Google was an early investor in Uber. Its efforts in building self-driving technology are intended as a catalyst for the industry, in which case it seem to have been a success.
But I think Google imagines itself as an "AI company", and self driving cars are just one of the goalposts of AI. I have to admit, I am frustrated by the secrecy of their development process, years passed and nothing of essence was announced about their progress.
The idea that Google has poured billions into a decade-long project to solve an extremely hard technology problem in order to lure people into marginally more internet use that will help Facebook as much as Google? When, if that technology problem is solved by Google, there is genuinely a big business in it?
But I don't get what Uber is getting by using partial autonomous vehicles. Their only goal is to replace its fleet with fully autonomous cars. To that end, outside of getting data I don't see anything else. By that logic I would be really surprised if they expanded their partial autonomous offering beyond what they have today.
This service is different from the Tesla autopilot feature since it is aspirationally an autonomous vehicle. In Uber's case, it is expected the driver will have to actually take over in some corner case situations.
The two main ways for Google to commercialize the technology are by including Chauffeur,
the name for its self-driving software, in cars made in high volume by existing auto manufacturers ...
[1]: http://comma.ai/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauffeur
It would be like calling a generic domestic robot 'Butler'. So it makes sense for an autonomous driving solution.
It might even bring a whole new audience to the sport.
Just a thought.
Source: http://www.eurosport.co.uk/formula-1/how-formula-one-technol...
You also ensure that you're taking the same type and length of trips at the same time of day as you otherwise would be.
You now also don't need an extra car. Instead of one car taking passengers and one gathering data, you only need a single car doing both.
So it's cheaper and you get more information, as well as more accurate information from it.
Wouldn't that launch point give them a huge leg up against the other?
Google is a data driven company and not a hardware manufacturer. Even that Google is building their own hardware in regards of server, server racks, and such think. But all that is only to support their data driven model.
The problem here is, that car makers have no interest to buying this software from Google and as such selling the data to Google. They want to keep the data to them-self.
But I doubt either company wants to actually deal with automotive manufacturing and sales. They'd be better off just being a supplier to car companies. You'd go buy a Ford Fusion with the Google Self Driving package, or something similar.
There were rumors Apple would actually build cars, but I think they were either wrong or Apple gave up. It's not that profitable of an industry.