Waymo: Google's self-driving car company
waymo.com
waymo.com
• Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers
• Waymo directly rolling their own fleet
• Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides
• Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up
• All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hoping for consumers to still want to own a vehicle rather than just pay $1 to get a ride
So: How much is Uber's market share worth? I suspect it'll evaporate overnight in every market where another service has autonomous vehicles and they don't.
Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff.
I predict blood on the walls.
I know they gobbled up a bunch of researchers, but moonshot engineering feats like autonomous driving is not (yet) in their DNA. And their current business model is not profitable and will die the moment they go up against an autonomous service.
They don't need to be last to market to lose, they need to be first in order to survive.
Except for the fleet of Ford Fusions and XC90's covered in very nicely implemented custom sensor rafts http://theincline.com/2016/12/12/three-months-of-self-drivin...
Head of the pack of dreams maybe. What does Uber have, in a tangible manner, right now? At least both Tesla and Google have real systems that are on the verge of full autonomy.
Otto was granted permission and began driving on actual highways in Ohio last week:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/self-driving-truck-h...
1 - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-volvo-otto-idUSK...
Or, if everyone has a self-driving car of their own (or one that can be converted to self-driving), people will rent out their cars AirBnB-style when they aren't using them. I mean, why not? You've already got a garage, a driveway, etc. Might as well make a few extra bucks with your vehicle...
Heck, why have driveways? In cities, at least, I could fully imagine new townhouse developments operating more like apartment buildings: one central parking lot for the "pool" of (mostly) driverless cars. Your car drops you off at your door and then parks in the pool; then comes back out to get you in the morning.
My point is that millions of them already exist, with a distributed network of roads leading to them, as well as storage (garages). It would be costly to suddenly rip all those up.
* A large percentage of people will want to have their own car because they don't want to put up with the occasional hassle of unavailability of rental cars during a peak time, and/or occasional long waits for the car to reach them (particularly when they are being picked up in un-dense areas). And before you hand-wave this away, note that the more of a cost advantage you give to rental cars (ie, the higher the utilization of those cars), the more of a disadvantage cost/wait time will be.
* People -- and very especially families with children -- also value cars as a mobile depot for their stuff. If you have kids of certain ages, this is practically a necessity. I definitely am not going to screw around with not just a carseat but like a dozen books and snacks and wipes and cups and so forth every time I get into/out of a rental car.
* Then cleaning and status and all the other things that people regularly bring up here.
* To address the mobile depot use case, I've heard of proposals to have storage areas (possibly trunk, but not necessarily) that are only accessible by the owner, not by renters. Even that may not be perfect though, I do see your point.
Is there a sweet spot where you still experience significant cost reductions but the inconvenience is small enough that you don't mind it? Well, certainly, for some people! But I think the number of people is going to be a lot smaller than many commentators think.
(The only cases I see where there's no increase in the rides-for-hire business after full automation is if the cost of cars drops to the point where there's very little incentive to try to reduce the costs for most people. Given that cars are quite expensive now, that seems unlikely. I can construct a scenario, but you basically have to believe that, first, the additional cost for driverless sensors+software is very low, second, that driverless software is so safe that you can drastically decrease physical safety features on cars, and third, probably that automation drives significant GDP growth).
It's not that hard. For one thing, you don't need to increase the price much, you just need to increase it a little so that you push cost-over-everything riders out of the queue. There are enough of those that whatever capacity is left should be plenty.
And you are worried those riders who were pushed out of the queue will go back to car ownership, but they are by definition cost-over-everything people, so of course they won't do that. If they could afford to own a car they could afford peak pricing.
I suspect the typical case will be a drunk person throwing up in it on the way home. Hopefully they self-report; if they don't, it comes to the next rider to report it, who does and gets a generous reimbursement, charged to the credit card of the last rider.
So far sharing economy companies don't want to vertically integrate their whole service stack down to physical goods. It requires capital raising, and is low margin compared to the value that they provide by scaling their main services. Maybe they will once they've achieved full market penetration and are struggling to increase their profit, but that's decades away IMO.
I am not from U.S. but the experience I have had with using local air travel (with Southwest) in the U.S. I am prepared to caffine up and drive up to 400mi rather than bother with the hassles of flying. (I have done that a few times and found it quite enjoyable, maybe there was a novelty factor to it)
Having the right car helps: trips made in my almost-busted Honda Civic were much less enjoyable than the ones in my brand-new-custom-ordered Mini Cooper. :) The right soundtrack, the right weather, and the right caffeine vehicle are major factors as well.
Uber drivers at first were mostly just driving in their spare time, but over the years the professionals came in and crowded them out.
The lesson here is that it takes work to provide a level of service that consumers are willing to pay for. That work is best done through organization and professionalization. Some guy renting his car out during the work day isn't going to find it profitable enough to continue doing when he has to compete against dedicated on-demand rental services.
It's like you're saying I shouldn't bother with my zero effort $100-a-month passive income just because somebody else is making $200-a-month with higher margins.
Is that crowding out supported by any data?
A fleet would be able to handle these sorts of things better.
I think people severely underestimate Uber's worldwide push in preparing themselves to be a force to be reckoned with when the autonomous vehicle takes off.
Someone already had the domain registered the last time I checked.
Ediy: seems to also include ride sharing now.
- Availability. Who has the largest network and highest availability? - Car Design. Who has the most comfortable or fully featured cars? - Safety. Who has the safest car? Who has the safest track record?
It might eventually become a race to the bottom, but I think there's still plenty of opportunity to compete on other fronts for at least the next five years.
A car with a waterproof interior would be miserable and cheap feeling. No one wants to sit in a humid, rubber car.
It doesn't work, the water spray is not strong enough, or directed enough to remove the mud and sand. We still have to have people going round with water jets to spot clean. A have my doubts a fully automatic system could ever work effectively.
You know how a person nowadays can register for uber and drive people around?
In the future, maybe people will register their CAR (which can drive itself). So they sit at home, getting work done, while their car is off autonomously driving itself and picking people up. When you want it to come home, just call it home.
Anyways, you wouldn't happen to have that announcement handy would you?
Anyone could spin up an app that let's people lease out their self-driving cars. The existing ride-sharing consumers are not loyal to the apps.
Until an optimized business supporting lots of cars supporting fewer people undercuts the individual owner on price per ride, sure. Uber with individual driver/owners makes some sense, because you need the individual driver no matter what the ownership structure is. But with autonomous cars, fleet ownership is going to win over individual.
That said, Facebook has a much larger network effect than Uber. The friction to create a profile and attend an driver orientation on a competing ride broker network is much smaller than telling your everyone on your Facebook friends list you're moving to Diaspora.
The reason I believe that it may collapse is because now when I want to buy something online I rather go to Walmart,Target or to the specific brand store. When I think of Amazon the picture that comes to mind is of shady people trying to scam me out of my money. My perception, even if erroneous, right now is that Walmart is less shady than Amazon when it comes to buying merchandize.
If enough people start to feel this way about Amazon there may come a tipping point and the entire company will collapse. Once the tipping point happens I don't think it will be possible for Bezos to reverse it, though he will spend mountains of cash trying to.
Also, doesn't Amazon have unique defenses against this possibility? If sales suddenly fall off a cliff, Amazon has AWS and lots of B2B products that could keep them afloat for a time while they tried to recover. If people en masse decided to stop shopping at Walmart, they would have nothing to fall back on.
All they really need to do is curate their 3rd parties better. Problem solved.
With Amazon the purchasing is seamless. That's where they really win. And they just keep making it easier. Now I can order things with my voice (using Alexa).
Of course, take everything I'm saying with a big grain of sand since this is all anecdotal. I've also purchased from Columbia Sportwear Store and some other brands that I do not remember right now. I guess so far I've been lucky.
Also the tracking you for 5 minutes after a ride is completely unforgivable.
Why does Apple even allow apps to remove the "only when in use" option?
Furthermore, if there are a bunch of self-driving car services, that service will be commoditized the same way cabs are. These ride-giving services will [and kind of already do] only compete on price.
Yes, Uber may have a global precense, but that's from burning VC cash and they're not exactly successful in major markets like China. And for what? Uber is essentially a messaging app between users and drivers, and their users/drivers are not loyal.
Uber as a self-driving company would need to sell hardware to drivers to convert their vehicles into self-driving cars, and I don't think they'll have the bank to get that far, especially against larger companies with deeper pockets and existing hardware experience/partnerships.
Uber's autonomous trucking model is likely to aid in the complete change of that industry, though.
The rich are buying the future on the backs of the working class. When uber goes under, the jobs won't come back, but transit can't be that cheap. It's not like the cost of a ride was actually based on the cost of the car OR the labor.
Uber's network effect is its driver network. It will find it a lot harder to compete if you no longer need drivers, when it has to compete with real car companies that could be able to undercut them on cost.
I agree. The fact that autonomous cars will likely reduce ownership will put a squeeze on car companies, and it might make sense for them to branch into service areas, as they can get the cars at cost. I guarantee that for 10,000 Camrys purchased by Uber and 10,000 Camrys built and shuffled to a ride service division by Toyota, Toyota's ride-sharing division will get the sweeter deal on price.
Put another way, it's much easier for Toyota to start a ride service company than it is for Uber to start manufacturing cars to get them at cost.
Ah, but the car companies have already expended that capital. The problem here is they will have a lot of building capacity from all the factories they own, and possibly less to build with that capacity. There's nothing stopping them from buying extra needed capacity from another company, but in the meantime it may help them fill the lack of utilization they may see. At some point, some factories will need modernization as normal, and they can choose at that point to reduce factory capacity.
The point is that it's a possible strategy to get them from point A to point B when they've already banked heavily on certain future production trends if they've overestimated.
To succeed worldwide, they simply need to be as good as Uber, but cheaper. And if the capital cost of the car becomes half of the cost base of taxis, a 10% saving matters.
Toyota would have to prepare for worst-case load and let those cars sit idle to keep them available. And they'd have to do that in almost every city in the world or their app would just be another local annoyance.
Also, if you order a Toyota and a Ford shows up you're going to laugh and tweet it.
On the other hand, it does give them a stable production target which would level out manufacturing spikes...
That's the underlying assumption I was working with. If they've invested heavily in production yet they see a downturn in individual ownership, it's a way to capitalize on that resource (factories) to stabilize production until some factories reach end-of-life and have theoretically paid for themselves. Factories which require large capital expenditure are not something you want to see sitting idle. Every year is another year where the tooling is becoming more obsolete.
People will still buy Rolls-Royce or Mercedes S-class for the comfort, but most Toyota customers don't care if they're car pooling with 3 other people or sitting in a car that's not their own.
If car manufacturers tried to clone what Uber has built they'll probably flop on making the technology usable, and the experience may just be overall frustrating.
bold prediction: They won't have fully autonomous cars.
IMHO this is the reason Trump won the election, because there is no plan for these people.
Most other demographics have very a different perspective on that concept, and for good reason.
There will be cataclysmic changes ahead if we don't seriously reconsider, well, everything about society. Under the current way of thinking, millions of people will get sent to the glue factory - to persist in your horse analogy here.
I have no idea how to solve this problem. My cousin's husband is a truck driver. He makes a six figure income running between Indy and Chicago (bang, bang). He's going to retire before they can get rid of him, but this is a huge issue.
I tried to explain this problem to my father, who's a CPA. I've pointed out that his firm can get by with a dramatically smaller office than it use to due to tech. Same's true for his lawyer friends. I pointed out that the law firms are not training the next generation like they use to since they use fewer low-level lawyers for research thanks to Lexus Nexus. Account is next.
I'm not a huge fan of UBI since I think that makes people slaves of their State. We've seen such enslavement in the US under welfare programs. We've set the program up to lock people in. If they try to get out, they will lose benefits (donut hole issue). I think UBI is like that, but worse.
The closest real problem I can think of is not being able to move to a $15/hr minimum wage city from a poor area because you don't have the starting capital to buy the basics there.
Bad policy structuring, because welfare programs are legacy programs and were designed when Economics was still in its infancy.
Also keep in mind that the welfare population is a minority. It's similar to the bank anecdote - if you owe the bank $1000, you have a problem, if you owe the bank $10,000,000, the bank has a problem.
When tens of millions of people in a country with gun ownership depend on UBI - any government structure that tries to reduce benefits or eliminate it will become a target of the masses.
When America will be able to shake off its own mythology about this notion of the "State" as an inherently bad actor - then, perhaps, America will be able to get out of the current rut it's stuck in.
Yes, the "State" can be bad (I should know, I grew up in an actual bad "State" in the Eastern Bloc before the revolutions). But at the other extreme, societies can sabotage themselves from within, trigger the social equivalent of an autoimmune disease, and collapse from endemic distrust in the system - which to me is pretty clearly the direction America is going now.
There surely is a better middle ground somewhere.
> And it will fall on that notion too if it fails to adapt to a changing economy.
I agree with both statements.
I'm not actually sure its a practical option, but I don't see 'enslavement' as being one of it's downsides - where's the 'lock in'?
In general I'm not a fan of going to the United States government hat-in-hand. Look at Scotland. They do that with the Brits. They're kicked around all the time.
Here's an example. South Dakota v Dole, the Supreme Court said the government could tie general funding to states to enacting state laws. In this case the states had to raise the minimum drinking age to 21 if they wanted road funding. What's to stop the government in a UBI world, from putting different life-rules on its people.
The government goes from working for the people to providing for the people. That's a massive power imbalance. I don't know of any government I want to give that power. I do know it's not the United State's.
The answer is of course the same as with any other reason people lose jobs and have done so in the past. It really is nothing new. Neither in scale, nor in severity.
Also, every state already has system to deal with that stuff. The hole point of a generalised systems is that you don't have a major political crisis everytime insert <big company or industy> suffers job loses.
That Trump won because of them is an assertion that is made often, but hard to proove or even show good evidence for.
Certainly some auto makers may choose to go down the route of executive assisted suicide and maximize shareholder (and executive) profit distributions in the process, as IBM decided to do. To pretend than the next 50 years will be like the last 50, I'm not sure how long that charade can hold up.
Personally I think Google and Apple are the ones who hold all of the chips. This definitely can be turned in to a commodity business with a few OS adjustments. There are some cards Uber can play to avoid this, like exclusive infrastructure agreements, although not really sure where that will be permitted geographically.
A more interesting question is will this look like smartphones where a single company gets 90% of the profits and the rest of the companies do huge volume but capture small to zero margins.
And a pox on all of us if we hand firm control over regions to single players.
But how is this going to work? In cities, everyone uses their car at exactly the same time: roughly, between 8-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. If you don't own a car, chances are you won't get one when you need it to get to work on time.
Or, if there are enough cars for peak hours, then demand for new cars will not fall that much (although the structure of ownership may in fact change).
Other things that could change is the need for infrastructure (at least in Europe); you don't need highways and high speed trains that much if speed of travel matters much less. If your car drives itself during the night and you can sleep comfortably in it (or read, or watch movies, whatever), then the length of the trip is not paramount.
Combine the two and you get a self driving car to central location > car or public transit to city center > self driving car in the city. Remember parking is often 10+$ a day due to land value, so two ~4$ trips can be a net savings.
Finally, even a 20-30% drop in demand would be huge in such a capital intense industry.
And can be more of a hassle or less conveniently located than a transit stop.
And then one day I realized some of the buildings were multi story parking structures and it kind of made me mad. So much of the city infrastructure is whored out to the needs of arrogant, obtuse car people, very much at the expense of everyone. It brings quality of life down and cost of living up for absolutely everyone because of people wanting the right to drive their own damn car everywhere, no exceptions.
And I stopped looking on them with pity or sympathy and started looking on them as parasites who totally deserved whatever small misery they were inflicting on themselves with driving around, looking for parking. But I did not deserve the misery they were inflicting on me with things like worse air pollution.
And faster. A lot of the traffic on highways is caused by rubbernecking, which self-driving cars are mostly immune to.
Ride sharing for rush hour would use a ton of compact vehicles. Even if the number of vehicles is the same to account for peak usage, the majority of the vehicles will be much smaller and much less capable, and therefore much less profitable for manufacturers.
As for "much smaller cars most of the time": not if you want to maintain the current safety level while also being able to travel faster than 20 mph.
We can make many technological changes in the world. Some will be huge. However changes that rely on humanity not being social are just very unlikely.
Potentially cheap enough to be a good compromise between current uncomfortable public transport, and owning your own vehicle (but unable to put the commute time to good use).
With that being said... I am also pretty doubtful. People like to own cars.
Don't think of it as replacing what historically was walking outside and hailing a cab, think of it as setting up a carpool with office mates except you don't have to know them, and you don't have to work out all the details, it will be handled for you.
Mass transit works well in dense areas because the vehicles are large and only need to go short distances or go long distance over a specific route. When everyone has their own custom route, person A's route may make person B's route unacceptably longer. Also, sitting on a bus/train with 50 strangers is less of an odd social situation than sitting in a car with one stranger.
Once autonomous cars get to the point where they don't require any driver attention at all, I think it will make ownership even more appealing since you could customize the entire to match whatever you want to do while you're hauled around.
Everyone has their own door as well so there isn't as much jostling past and touching and being touched by strangers even in a full car.
The only time I've ever taken an Uber or Lyft and I not have my own door and/or I've had to scoot past people is in large party situation and those other people were my friends.
I've talked to women and they seem to prefer an Uber or Lyft over taking the train and/or the bus. Also, being dropped off at your destination rather than walking a few blocks from a metro stop to where you are going also makes a massive difference.
The benefits really outweigh the drawbacks. Especially if this is cheaper than owning one's own car. In theory, a private automated car service (calling a car and being the only rider) would still be cheaper than owning a private car and still have the same conveniences. It's just that eventually it will basically just be 4x cheaper to share a ride.
Mass transit remains the most viable method of transporting people over dense, multi-mile terrain.
The last mile and "normal" metros like Memphis, Baltimore, or Cleveland, where it is not dense enough to justify a comprehensive subway/light rail system, are probably the best use cases for self-driving cars and universal car sharing systems.
Rail mass transit does not as efficiently use the land it's on a occupancy basis (there's not always a train on a specific square foot of track). In peak times, cars are more efficient on a vehicle basis. According to BART system facts[1], there are 107 miles of track. There are 669 cars, seating for 72 in 448 of them with each being 70 feet (with 59 of them having an additional 5 feet for a cab), and seating for 64 in 230 cars[2] (with an indeterminate car length, so I'll use the smaller listed), for a total capacity of 46,976 seated people. BART states that all cars can hold over 200 people in a "crush" load, so we'll assume 200 as the theoretical maximum, and say BART can carry 133,000 people when at peak (crush) capacity, and over the 107 miles of track, that gives us a density of 1,250 people per linear track mile, but with only 8.3% track utilization at any one time.
Cars do not as efficiently pack people per vehicle usually, but can more efficiently use the roads on a per-vehicle basis. Assuming very heavy traffic which is not stop-and-go, so perhaps 35 miles an hour average (the same as BART), and a 4-lane highway (two each direction), if each car is allowing two car lengths between itself and the car in front (slow traffic), we have approximately 33% road utilization (or 25%, or 20% depending on what you think the average space between vehicles is). Since carpooling seems to be at about 10% currently carpooling[4] (ignoring that it may be different in certain arterial routes, as we are discussing), we have around 1.066 people per car[5] as a lower bound. With an average car length of 177.2 inches[6], or 14.77 feet, we can estimate the people per mile on the highway during this time as being 604 people per mile of 4-lane highway.
Interesting take-aways for me:
While 4-lane highways may take more room than rail (not sure the actual sizes here), they are also more versatile.
If the highway bogs down below 35 mph, it's then less than the average rate of BART, and we need to start computing people over time instead of just people over distance.
BART has much more room to increase track utilization, but there is likely unaccounted for overhead here on each train. Optimal usage at current speed is one train arriving immediately after the prior one leaving, at 35 mph exact speed and 20 second stops, for a train of six cars (?) and 425 feet, that would be cars 2.42 train lengths apart, and a utilization of 29%, or roughly a 4x increase over current rates, 5,000 people per track-mile.
Cars have much more room to increase vehicle utilization. If we replaced 50% of vehicles with full size vans transporting on average 7 people each and didn't touch road utilization, we would be at an overall average of 4 people per car, and 2600 people per highway mile. Interestingly, if we somehow moved towards a system where smaller vehicles picked up and shuttled people with small amounts of sharing to bus-stations where they were sorted into smaller buses (40 people) going specific area depots, and from those depots dispersed again to final destinations using individual cars with small amounts of sharing, we might easily surpass rail transit systems. averaging 20.5 people per vehicle, but with somewhat more area used should put us close to 10,000 people per highway mile.
Of course, there's a lot of assumptions in all the numbers, and some speculation in the possibilities, but I thought it was interesting to figure out. ;)
1: http://www.bart.gov/about/history/facts
2: I know the total car numbers don't add up. Complain to BART, it's their data.
3: (66970 feet + 695 feet)/(7 * miles * 5280 feet/mile) = (47125 feet)/(564960 feet) = 8.3%
4: https://www.census.gov/prod/2011pubs/acs-15.pdf, table 1.
5: 105,476 drove alone, 13,917 carpooled, if we assume all carpooling was just two people per car, we get person to car density by (105,476+13,917/2)/105,476 = 1.066 people per car
6: https://www.reference.com/vehicles/average-length-car-2e8538...
7: 5280 feet/mile / 14.77 feet/car * 0.33 highway mile utilization = 117 cars at highway lane mile utilization. 117 cars * 1.066 people/car = 126 people per mile of highway lane. 4 lanes fives us 604 people per highway.
I can't really think of any reason why one technology is inherently higher-capacity than the other, it's mostly that private cars are very inefficient, not rubber tyres.
An autonomous car system that supports easy ride sharing, and semi-public transportation through something like uber for busses can fulfill much of the same need, but without quite the expected density, but with the ability to deliver to just about any location.
Both would benefit from a last-mile service . Sort of like arteries and capillaries in the circulatory system.
Actually, you know what would be really cool with this? Autonomous bikes[1]. Not that you need them to drive you, but that you can rent a bike and have it show up for you, or rent it at the bus depot/train station, and have it return after you've reached your destination.
Crossrail in London will have a train every 2.5 minutes with a capacity of 1500 people per train.
Trains also do not slow down to a crawl at high capacity.
There is at least one lane on either side of the road at full capacity. Always bumper to bumper. But, the cars do not move save 2% of the time when their operators remove them from the traffic jam, I mean parking spot. There are 275,450 streetside parking spots in San Francisco city limits. Assuming a pooling of some drivers, and an increased utility of roads due to size & traffic flow then we can look forward to a net decrease of cars on roads and a net increase of available land for expanded sidewalks and bike paths.
The self-driving vehicle needn't be a small car.
People do it already to save money. Making it easier, and adding the ability to set up a standing appointment with the same people over multiple days would alleviate a lot of people's concerns, IMO.
> Lots of people still have relatively specific needs, e.g. requiring car seats of various sizes for their young children, needing to pick-up or drop-off kids at school, sports practice, etc.
Many families have two cars, purely because of the few times a day when both are needed at the same time. For example, I have a Honda Odyssey for family use, since I have three kids. I also have a cheap commuter that I lease, purely to get to and from work a few times a week, since I work from home a couple days. That's a car I could happily and easily remove from service with little impact, as long as I had a way to get to and from work.
> When everyone has their own custom route, person A's route may make person B's route unacceptably longer.
The idea is, with thousands of routes, you might find quite a few that overlap a significant percentage of the time. Compute what percentage each person is responsible for of the whole, subtract some portion of the route for the distance that's spent going to the other pickups/dropoffs that aren't on your path, and provide a a discount depending on how much you share. Use minivans and/or full-size vans if there are enough rides to maximize people, comfort and space. The carrier maximizes profit over people and vehicle wear over a ride, and the people minimize price.
> Once autonomous cars get to the point where they don't require any driver attention at all, I think it will make ownership even more appealing since you could customize the entire to match whatever you want to do while you're hauled around.
Sure, but that's a luxury use. People that drive luxury cars that cost a lot will undoubtedly do that. People that are trying to minimize cost so they can spend that money on essentials or even just other luxuries they value more will opt for the cheaper option. It's why people carpool now.
Why not just keep your partition up between you and the other passengers? Because no human driver needs visibility out all of the windows, you can split the car into private spaces. When no driver is needed, it opens up a lot of different configurations.
Initially, no, but long-term you can move much parking to cheaper places around the periphery of the urban area rather than needing a parking spot where people live, one where they work, and fractions everywhere else they might go. So sustainable density of everything that isn't parking spaces in the city core goes up, walkability and transit access improve, so the cars/people ratio drops.
Depending on the location there are 3-4 rush hours in the morning and 3-4 in the afternoon.
Have you ever been in a car?
I've gotten plenty of sleep in cars, but never has the word "comfortable" crossed my mind when I woke up afterwards. I reckon it's something about that whole annoying safety thing requiring you to sit still upright strapped to your seat that ruins the comfort factor for me. YMMV though.
The ones designed for slow night travel don't need to be air efficient, they could be shaped like a big square with almost real beds (like on a train).
It doesn't matter how slow and safe the autonomous car is, as long as it's traveling on the same roads as other cars, some of which are fast and driven by humans, crash safety is very much an issue.
Good question. How the system deals with congestion. Two things:
1) Taxis make variable pricing possible, which gives markets an incentive to spread out demand. "Would you like a $15, 45 minute ride to San Francisco by 9:15, or $4, 25 minute ride arriving at 10:30?"
2) In big cities we'll start to see quick transfers to- and from- mass transit.
You'll push a button on your phone. The phone will say "Ride begins in 8 minutes to minimize transfer time". You finish your email, put on your coat and walk outside. A car picks you up, drives you to the transit center. You get out, walk across the platform, get onto a train. Train stops, you walk back across the platform into another car. It takes you to your destination.
Why? It will save you time in traffic if you care about, and it'll be cheaper if you care about that. Of course during off peak times, you can just take the cab the whole way for the shortest trip.
Uber hasn't demonstrated a capacity to succeed, but unlike their rivals, they need self-driving cars to succeed for their company to succeed. The CEO has called self-driving cars "existential" to Uber.
Contrast this with Google. Self-driving cars are an expensive hobby to Google, and completely inconsequential to the success of their core business.
I really dont agree with this. Cars a so cheap now and I'd much rather use my own than some dirty shared car.
Already renting a car is annoying as you never know if you'll get charged for some damage that you didn't cause, I can't imagine having the same issue every day.
Having the car drop me off then go away and autopark is something that I'd value though. :)
Over the medium term, this will only encourage ever more massive and distant suburb creep. Also, with longer commutes less tiresome, the negative cost of having a longer commute will be mitigated.
As for the stranger effect, there are many innovations on that front as well. Google is already has a working app that tries to arrange commutes for true ride sharing where passengers only compensate the driver for the pure cost of the ride. It's cheap and effective if you are a bit flexible in the morning.
I can see autonomous services being so cheap that they become the new corporate perk and companies find value by having employees ride together, share ideas, socialize, etc.
Also, the economies of scale alone would make a private automated car trip still cheaper than owning privately an autonomous vehicle.
The technology will move fast enough that the vast majority people will be switching from a human operated car to a self-driving car service. I can see the ad campaigns now. Basically showing people how much cheaper and safer and more convenient it is.
Cars can be seen like horses were before them, an expensive hassle that requires land for storage and usage. If you think about it, people have whole buildings just for storing cars, garages, like we did with horses, barns.
15 years from now suburbs will be built without garages and driveways. There will be a cottage industry for people to convert garages and carparks into more usable space.
20 years from now, multistory car parking lots will be the new conversion buildings like the old meat packing and textile plans that used to be in downtown areas that were turned into lofts. Polished concrete floors will feature the original parking space numbers. The open sides will feature panoramic views.
Lastly, having your own car will be a throwback element. People who like to 4x4 or work on their own cars (a huge market that might actually grow in the medium term) will fill this but, even then they'll use automated services to commute. The number of people who have hobby cars (off-roading, auto racing, vintage collectibles, restoration) will skyrocket because a car no longer has to be a daily driver.
Or people might care less about cars, I don't presume to know the complex of a future of human desire. But, in a world full of cheap cars that you driver yourself, automated car services will still create so much value that people will still switch.
1) It will take atleast 5-7 years for self-driving cars to become ubiquitous. Till then there is good uprising market for every player to make money. secondly, if you have a product ready, it might open up new markets in future which currently no one realizes.
2) Car ownership will still be there. People who can afford it will still prefer private self-driving car than waiting for Uber/Lyft. I would say self-driving private car will be seen as a new luxury status.
3) car manufacturing will definitely go down with less demand but car manufactures will venture into different pricing model with ride companies. Right now, a car is a one time sell for a manufacturer. It might be subscription which ride company uses.
* All the big auto manufacturers are shipping self-driving cars. Volvo is the first to ship a Level 3 system to real customers.
* Tesla is doing OK, but the big electric car brand is Chevy.
* Waymo is a Tier I supplier to Fiat/Chrysler.
* GM and Ford are using their own self-driving technology.
* Uber is still around, but is out of investor cash, and has to be profitable to pay back its loans. The service is much more expensive to use. Their self-driving thing never works out for them because they can't spend big money to buy cars, build garages, and staff up for maintenance.
* Lyft is still around, about the same as it is now.
* The mini autonomous bus people have some installations, but they're rare outside airports and campuses.
Volvo have announced shipping that in 2017. I don't think anyone else has. (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2q00jIBhkq4)
L4 basically says the car can drive itself without attention in most cases. Driver only needs to take over in extreme cases where the computer can't figure it out (something on the road blocking, sever weather, super abnormal situation).
Now we actually have working software and hardware, and real people are experiencing self driving. I live in the bay area, but not a month goes by that I don't see a self driving vehicle at some point. And that's not counting the Teslas that are autopiloting their way down the highway next to me that I don't even know about.
Maybe my negative feelings are excessive; I'm just really, really tired of having people jump in with the whole "but self-driving cars will change everything!!!" routine every time people try to have a serious conversation about public transit investment.
And also there is Uber's self driving fleet. They are actually taking people from place to place who use the Uber app in a self driving vehicle.
In all cases someone is still at the wheel, but they aren't doing anything other than monitoring and logging the ride and cases where the car didn't behave like a "normal" driver.
The problem is people expect self-driving cars to be perfect on day one. They won't be. But they are already safer than humans driving.
Safe driving is one of the most complex things done by people. If tech companies are good enough to solve that, there many things more profitable and easier to solve.
I beleive it will be more realistic for them to develop seprate and exclusive infa for these vechiles. We can then plan rest of the things around that infra.
Integrating self driving cars into current infra will require a true AI or something closer.
There are already autonomous Ubers taking people around Philadelphia and now San Francisco.
What limits do you think will exist?
I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment:
Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why?
All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicles will bring to the world of transit basically boils down to a model that's a mixture between taxi service and (really crappy) bus service, both of which exist today and have existed for several decades--and basically predate the automobile when you think about it. Yet somehow self-driving vehicles are supposed to completely change the mix of transit use when it's not really adding any capability changes. So I'm genuinely curious as to what the magic sauce is that makes people so giddy for this future.
Depending on the city, better might be faster, more available, less racist, less intense experience, cleaner, etc, etc, etc.
They don't need to be cheaper in most places, at least not yet.
Not having to own, insure, maintain, or park a car. End to end transportation with no transfers that allows you to internet while you travel. Cheaper than human driven cabs (presumably).
And when self-driving cars are a viable option, insurance will strongly encourage it. And by strongly encourage it I probably mean "absurdly high fees for driving your own car", because people are much worse drivers. Which should drive up the price of car ownership significantly. The increased cost to car storage in populated areas will probably lag a long while behind, so the second cliff will be much slower to hit.
Safer options will, as they become available, be disproportionately chosen by the safety conscious. This can, potentially, make the less-safe legacy option more dangerous (per use) than before the safer option became available, because the safest users of the less-safe option before the new one are users of the new option afterward, and no longer bringing the average risk of the old option down.
Also, cost is another big factor. I would also assume that taking a self driving car would be a smaller expense than owning for the average user.
When human drivers are not required you have neither of these problems. It will be significantly easier for ridesharing companies to provide availability in non-dense areas.
Hell, they'll be able to control where these vehicles go by algorithm, so it will simply be a matter of adding more vehicles to their fleet and the algorithm will take care of minimizing response time for everyone.
Also, you can easily send a car from one city to another. A human driver needs to get home to their family. You can't just say "drive to Miami and work there for three weeks".
Also, simply decreasing the cost per mile by cutting labor costs makes further flung areas more accessible. You can't sell a $10 ride if it costs $10 just to pay someone to drive to the area and back. But if it costs $4 to send a car, that ride becomes financially viable.
Also, getting a driver has never been this easy. Taxis have existed for hundreds of years, but smartphones are a recent invention. There's a huge difference between calling a phone number and trying to setup a rendezvous than the current workflow on Uber or Lyft, that literally takes 10 seconds from the moment I unlock my phone.
We need a radically new car seat design, either:
1. Super portable and quick to install/remove, or
2. Built into the car, safe for all ages, easily extended/retracted.
eg. "I need a 4wd vehicle for 2 adults and 2 bikes to take me to X park at 10am tomorrow."
The cost savings for car rental are predicated on increased utilization. Increased utilization is predicated on each car having more people using it on any given day. And these things don't scale infinitely -- each car can only serve a particular locality.
The number of variations that you propose is a fast geometric progression. Kids 0-12 months or so need different car seats from kids 12mo to about 3y need different car seats for older kids. The idea that you could support high utilization on "I want a car that has already installed a carseat for a 1-2year old + a carseat for a 5 year old plus a bike rack" is nuts.
(Regardless, also, parents carry a mountain of stuff that's THEIRS. The heck with a car seat, I need board books, toys, snacks, and wipes in the car.)
Only if you're an engineer. To a marketing person, you bundle groups of features together and price them at various tiers.
And if the fleet can successfully meet arbitrary needs around constraints, then the fleet is going to be heavily overprovisioned, and thus expensive.
e.g. Customer orders a self-driving car with 1 infant car seat. A robot bolts-in a modular infant car seat at the depot and sends it off.
"4WD, Bike rack, Dog area" -> 4WD SUV.
You'll probably have to snap on your own accessories (kayak/ski/bike rack) when the vehicle arrives. Or if you order in advance, you can pay extra to have a specific accessory configuration prepared and set up for you (vehicle drives itself to local servicing point to get configured).
I would like that.
I really want to see a day, where I drive my car to work. It then drives other people around and picks me when I am finished.
You don't need drastically different car seat.
But I don't need or want to buy a wheel, batteries, cameras, lasers, etc. Those also should be upgraded as technology gets better but my box doesn't really need to be anything but a box.
So what if I could sit in my box and have a transporter thing come over and clip onto me and take me away? You could have child seats and I could have a lazyboy chair, or I might need 8 seats and you need storage space.
This would then let the actual transporters take other types of cargo too, rather than having a people vs items split. It would allow a pony-express style swapover rather than needing huge range in a single one. It would even allow completely different types of transport, what if my pod could just be clipped onto a big train and whip me to the other side of europe?
This would all likely have other downsides, but is a fun thing to think about.
TL;DR shipping containers
Even the ones for babies, that people for some reason I can't fathom like to carry around in the supermarket, are actually also 20+ lbs, you've just left 15 lbs remaining in the car occupying a seat while you're shopping. And they're also bulky.
2. could happen for children aged 4+ in a minivan-sized car. I've already seen it on some long distance buses. For younger kids however, they really need to sit facing rearward, but also must be well protect against side impacts, so it's very tricky to make something retractable that doesn't take a huge amount of space.
Would Ubering with something like this work?
Can we apply some if this science for making car seats for taller people. I am so unhappy when seat ends midway of my thigh or shoulders ram into headrest (mostly airplane problem).
These are awesome because you can take your sleeping baby out of the car, carry them with you without waking them up, and put them back in the car without waking them up. Shopping is 10x faster this way than when you have to spend most of your time comforting/distracting an awake and fussy baby.
https://us.britax.com/car-seats/marathon-70/ (see specifications)
Those detachable seats you see mom's carrying in the supermarket weigh about 10 pounds, and the base will be about the same.
We have this one, which is what I'd consider the gold standard. It's ISOFIX, and only rearward-facing since kids under 4 should not be facing front, and it's won basically every test there is:
http://www.besafe.com/product-int/izi-kid-x2-i-size/
It weighs 40.6 lbs. Quite a bit of structural steel in there, including a full integral roll bar and a brace against being rear-ended, both of which your linked Britax seat lacks.
Also bloody expensive, but if there's one thing I won't skimp on, it's the safety of my children.
https://us.britax.com/car-seats/marathon/https://us.britax.c...
So maybe in Europe you are going to have a harder time with self driving cars because you need heavier car seats, but you'll probably find a workable compromise. Yu can just build your base into the center seat or something.
They do, though, you just haven't been to places where this is standard. Try finding a place that's more than 10 minutes walk from public transit: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Warsaw,+Poland/
They have fricking helipad that takes them to the bus stop!
This is important to note. I'm on those margins, and have been saving for my first automatic car for ages. I live in a mildly rural community, and don't wanna wait for uber or whatever to deploy autonomous cars here.
Per the 2010 US census, over 80% of the US population lives in urban areas.
Here's a link to the definitions of urban and rural: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/gtc/gtc_urbanrural.html
Here's the 2010 figures for the split between the urban and rural: https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/ua/urban-rural-2010.htm...
Taxi service exists, but the reliability factor is very poor right now (in that you call and you have to wait n minutes, where n sometimes is a very large number). I see Uber is rolling out a pre-scheduled service and I wonder how good this has been so far for the markets that have it. This would basically be the same thing only with human drivers.
I don't think this pattern works for rural areas and all situations. I also envision some nostalgia and/or tech discomfort keeping the car ownership pattern going for a while. Still, I am wondering if there are a lot of 2+ car families that would be in the same boat. Even drastically reducing the 2+ car families will drop vehicle demand.
Self-driving vehicles could be at your door within a 1 minute timeframe (say). That's a huge change, and will nullify the benefits of owning a car.
Of course, this will be possible because driverless taxi companies will have the logistics in place to make this happen (they know where every car is, and they can compute where to send empty cars to increase the capacity).
I can imagine that a cheaper service will offer the same but, say, in 5 minutes.
Also, you will never have to find a parking spot, which may be an even better argument.
Except I like owning my car. I can take it where I want. When I need it, I have it. I can leave my stuff in it if I want to (e.g. if I decide to go to the park for the day I can leave my coat in the car if it is warm). If it's pouring rain I don't have to wait, I can just get in it and go.
I think the magic sauce is utilization. A fully autonomous car's utilization rate can be close to 100%.
Higher utilization --> same demand for mobility hours/miles can be satisfied with fewer vehicles --> ceteris paribus, fewer vehicles sold every year.
Viewed through this lens, it seems inevitable that, in equilibrium (ie once the non-autonomous to autonomous fleet transition is complete) annual per-capita demand for vehicles will be lower with the advent of fully autonomous cars.
So if every car is almost always at 100% how am I going to be able to instantly get a car on demand from my suburban mcmansion?
I believe people like owning things, and using them to do stuff. This is a basic fact of being human. Probably goes right back to the stone age. I doubt autonomous cars will change that pattern.
The idea is that a subscription car service is likely to be significantly cheaper than owning your own.
There are some objects we enjoy forming a relationship with. Your favorite kitchen knife. Your bed. Your sports car you take out on the weekend.
There are other objects we just want to work. Your running shoes. Your daily commuting vehicle. Your dish rack.
Of course it varies from person to person which items fall in which category.
There will always be a market for people who want to own and fetishize a car. The same way there is a market for people who want to own and fetishize their record collection.
But it is usually a smaller market than the market for people who just want convenient access to the thing. I.e. Spotify.
Which will be bigger, Spotify for mobility, or your neighborhood hipster automobile dealer?
I have a maid who does my laundry so I don't care about my washing machine anymore. I still cook so I want good knives, but if my maid were to start cooking I'd stop caring.
I don't own a car, but sometimes I rent one. And when I do I almost always pay 2-3x for a sports car because it's fun.
When I use Uber, I never pay for the upgrade to a nicer car. I'm just going to read or fiddle with my phone, so I don't care about the car at all.
I predict the exact same behavior for autonomous cars. And why would I pay $25k for a car when I can get the same thing for $1 a ride (and not have to worry about parking or maintenance or upgrades to new models).
Imagine you leave your laptop at home... Just get your car to drive home, receive it robotically, and bring it to your location before your next meeting!
It would work just like Uber (even better), only you would own it. Every delivery company would be out of a ride the moment your car can go make restaurant pickups.
Yes.
There isn't a reliable taxi service or public transportation in most suburbs. Even if you have Uber in your town, it's much more expensive than owning/leasing a personal car.
I can't use Uber when I need to go to another town 50 miles away or 500 miles away.
Autonomous ride service could change that.
Except that they are not really cheap, safe, or convenient. They are not door to door. Public bus/trains run at their own scheduled time, not at my desired time. Even services like Uber involve humans who are more concerned about their profit than my schedule or preferences, so they cancel rides when I need them the most because some other ride is more profitable for them. Moreover in countries like India where road accidents are the highest in the world, rash and unsafe driving is a big problem (government run bus, car drivers or private ones). This can just wipe that out! So personally, I'm super excited about this future.
I think ownership means more to most people than just convenience or being the cheapest option.
In a cooperative environment, bad players bring everyone down. In competition, they drown, and only the strongest survive.
Say initial cost of the electric self driving car is $50,000. It has life of 20 years. After 20 years, value will go to 0.
Per year: $2500
Service per year: $2500 (HN mechanics, is this reasonable?)
Miles travelled/ year: 50,000 (5x human utilization)
Miles/Kwh: 3 (based on tesla efficiency)
Avg electricity cost in US: 12c / Kwh
Cost to drive 50,000 miles: $2000
Total / year: $7000
Cost per mile: 14c / mile
Average trip length: 7 miles
Cost per trip: 98c (very close to $1)
I think this is definitely possible.
Not for electric self driving cars which optimize for safety and wear and tear. They have less moving parts too.
There are plenty of trucks, buses and taxis that have done a million miles in 20 years.
- communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block the road, allowing just one car through. Or traffic light out of action, so you negotiate with other cars using hand gestures, light flashes etc
- endless roadworks, that change what lane you're allowed to go on, turn a two way road to one way road.
- random debris on road. Plastic bag - safe to drive through, wooden plank - safe, plank with nail - not safe.
- loss of GPS, mobile data, or both (again, surprisingly frequent)
- making way for emergency vehicles (sometimes need to drive into lane you're not normally allowed to go, I.e. Bus lane, pavement)
- policeman coordinating traffic
So far, I haven't found any evidence of autonomous cars dealing with the above. If anyone has, please post.
If she had been in an automated car, it would have almost certainly have stopped before the collision.
And what's wrong with slowing/stopping for a plastic bag? How often do plastic bags really sit in the street shaped like babies?
It's also not particularly clear that the costs will drop rapidly to zero or even to a level that leads to mass adoption (see air travel at Mach 1+, Segways...).
If I had to compare, I expect the change to be more akin to what Excel has done to paper spreadsheets.
Good sensors aren't cheap, the optical and mechanical elements aren't likely to drop in price soon. Only the computing power is getting cheaper, but harnessing it isn't particularly easy (we're not getting better at programming as quickly as we're making faster chips).
If you need another example, consider automated cleaning robots. It's a considerably simpler problem to solve, and they're still only a marginal product. At the moment, autonomous tech is only really used in well-controlled industrial environments. It will surely break out of there progressively, but chances are it will take a while.
The "goal", such as it is, is to have a technology worth using. It's not to transcribe whichever comic book utopia someone has in mind.
So if all of America's 11 million professional driving jobs were to disappear over the span of a decade, it would be a blip, not an apocalypse.
It's still NHTSA level 3, not 4 or 5, but it's a major step up from pretty much anything currently available and will be in consumer's hands. Even more so when the Model 3 comes.
I think you'll be surprised how fast this technology will exit the labs. Just that Google has decided to brand around it is a big indicator that they're growing confident.
But that's an obvious chicken or egg problem that has unrealistic solutions like making sure everyone starts driving a networked car at all once.
For example getting out of the way of emergency vehicles on a blocked road. It will ask you what to do and if you tell it to drive up the pavement or into a bus lane or cross to the wrong side of the road -- the car will just do it.
I do wonder about all the non-verbal human-to-human communication. But a friendly baxter type screen with eyes that move (and messages that scroll across) would solve that.
We have to remember that these cars are all feeding unusual situations back to the google BRAIN that is learning. It'll watch us react to an emergency and learn. It'll see that 20 or 30 times a day and generalise a response.
ED: Not hitting kids is manditory, not blocking traffic is mandatory, parking in every random stop is optional as long as their are safe places it can drive to.
Basically, you don't need a perfect solution in every case, just a safe solution in every case. A self driving car that get's to a gas station is a good enough step 1 even if you have some human attendants there to fill up. Sure, it might add $2 bucks per fill up that's still cheaper than highway driving.
PS: Self driving car, only works in NYC is also useful.
The fully-autonomous route runs head-first into the inevitable, messy problems with software: security, maintenance, feature creep, complexity, unreliable networks etc. In theory, humans could nail all of these in car software. In practice, it's highly unlikely. The software industry can't even get basic security for IoT devices right.
The human-in-the-loop route runs directly into the only problem more daunting than reliable software: human nature. Human overrides for self-driving cars that need to be activated in a timely manner will not work. The drivers won't be paying enough attention to react in sufficient time. Note that overrides add even more complexity to an already fantastically complex system.
Say an always on self driving car, but it doesn't drive. Human has to drive, and the computer can correct any obvious mistakes the human does. Keep a really high liability for the car manufacturer though
https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
Are there seriously cars on the road with complete fly-by-wire brakes which have no pure mechanical backup? That's horrifying. How did we go from dual redundant hydraulic systems that work (if in a reduced capacity) even when the ignition is off, to something at the mercy of some code that can be bamboozled over 3G?
It's more that if an autonomous car with no human stalls, due to a traffic light that's stopped working, or an oddly shaped plastic bag in the road, it's stuck, and would cause a traffic jam. Not sure how to resolve such a scenario, can't rely on someone remotely taking control, as mobile data doesn't have 100% coverage, so a human who is allowed access to the car would somehow need to get thorough the traffic jam to move the vehicle on. Can't think of an efficient way to resolve this situation.
I mean the other day on my daily commute there were two cars right in the middle of a freeway, one attempting to jump start the other and they were at it for a while. This is not shockingly new ground.
I can guarantee you that on a one to one driving skills shootout between you and the software you will loose 98% of the time.
Forget it, driver-less s cars will be the norm in the future. You won't be able to afford the insurance associated with a meat-driven car.
If we're crediting the car with being able to handle merging into a crowded multi-lane highway and dealing with idiot human drivers who don't indicate or hold lane position very well, it seems a bit odd to arbitrarily presume that it won't be able to identify non-hazards like said tumbleweed.
In any case, I'm not talking about whether it "should be allowed to drive", I'm talking about the level of capability an autonomous car would have to reach in order to become a viable product.
Hell yes I will still be using a "non-autonomous transport appliance" in ten years - it's called a "motorcycle" :) - and I don't want your high-tech self-driving future if it has no room for that.
People will continue to spend stupid amounts of money on hobbies. I'm not going not hand in the keys to my Landcruiser or my CRF250. But I don't leave those parked at the train station as a rule either.
That remark was separate from and unrelated to the actual point I've been trying to make: there is a very significant gulf between the notion of a "self-driving car" as a form of automation built into a vehicle which is still under the control and responsibility of a human driver, and the notion of a "self-driving car" which is a fully autonomous robot built in the shape of a car, that must be capable of doing something reasonable in all situations without depending on a human. The latter is a much harder problem than the former, and we don't yet know whether it can be solved in a way that yields a practical, profitable transportation system of the sort many people like to fantasize about when they discuss (for example) Google's autonomous vehicle program.
It is very clear that autopilot will be a successful feature and we can reasonably expect continued improvement in human-driver-assist technologies for years to come.
But people keep on handwaving past the very important gap between "automation which assists a human operator" and "autonomous vehicle which gets around on its own", as though doing well at the first problem necessarily makes the achievement of the second problem inevitable.
Driver assist technologies make all kinds of sense but they do not fundamentally change the nature of our transportation systems. They just make it easier to do a better job as a human driver.
Getting to the point where most wheeled vehicles are self-piloted autonomous robots with no human driver interaction...? I still think that's a really hard problem.
Sales. That's what makes a viable product. One that will sell. Despite elsewhere in this comment chain you saying "I'm talking about product viability not technical" I can't help but think that your response to me was about technical viability.
People are already willing to buy and trust their cars to drive for them right now, when they're specifically being told "don't trust it to drive for you". The second it's legal to advertise "let it drive for you!" autonomous cars will sell regardless of their ability to perform well in unregular circumstances.
But people keep talking about "self-driving car" as though it is going to be a robot capable of running errands on its own, with no human driver and not even necessarily any human passenger. The question is still open: can this be done well enough, enough of the time, solving a valuable enough class of problems, that producing such car-shaped robots will actually become a significant industry? Furthermore, will the problems solved by such hypothetical car-shaped robots be significant and widespread enough to justify the hype currently being lavished on them?
Personally I'm of the opinion that because we've been making tools for 2.5 million years and don't seem any happier than the average animal, the very concept of a new tool making all that much of a difference is absurd.
Does it drive better than me driving while being supervised continuously by a computer? I still make the important decisions, and my mistakes are pointed out by the computer.
The competition for self driving cars are not humans, but humans being adviced by driver assistance programmes
If google actually starts selling a self-driving car and doesn't give any information about whether it can deal with a policeman-controlled intersection, then you can be concerned. Until then, implying their self-driving car programs haven't considered the basic problems that any uninformed commenter on the internet can think up is not incredibly helpful.
Now you've reduced all your problems down to simply "identify problem and alert a remote human".
If each of those problems only happen once per day, and they are resolved in 30 seconds, it's going to cost only about $30 per car per year to have that remote expert on hand.
I think we'd need a huge infrastructure upgrade to make life easier for autonomous cars. It'd have to be >100 Mb/s mobile data, with extremely good coverage (for the recovery mechanism you mention). Think GPS would need to be replaced too, the signal is way too weak and unreliable. We'd have to embed digital markers/emitters alongside lane markings, traffic lights, signs etc, so they're easier to deal with.
Connectivity you see is from a single mobile phone. A car could have a better antenna, service from all the mobile networks rather than just one, wifi fallback and a backup satellite uplink. If all those fail, you dispatch an engineer to find the car wherever it's stuck and add a solar powered LTE repeater.
If you have a map of the whole service area and know where you started and have a camera looking out the window the whole time, there is no need for GPS really.
Considering these are car companies doing this, true remote control is not a good idea. The industry response to the car hacks was pathetic. Only Tesla reacted properly. (And probably Google...)
But you have touched some use cases that are more frequent than most people think. London is a great example. My hometown Athens is much more closer to London as far as driving is concerned as opposed to LA or NY. I guess many other metropolis also.
How will AI brand A communicate with AI brand B about life critical decisions ? Hey we can either both crash to each other or kill that kid on the pavement. ( just an example , I don't want to go to the morality of the situation)
I assume there is going to be a "standard " . But have a look at your everyday tech. Standards are not easy. There are still WiFi routers/repeaters that cannot talk to each other nicely, just to give an example.
Usually in life critical systems you don't have interoperability issues because there is no interoperability. Huge fail-safe systems from a single vendor.
You don't use your general AI to see someone extending their hand in traffic ex. General AI is the ability to both drive car, score a girl, cook food, clean your room etc.
I think you would be surprised how little general AI have to do with this.
Anecdote: I was driving down a long, narrow country road, lots of turns, space only for 1 car, land rover coming in opposite direction, and another car behind me. We had to verbally negotiate who reverses back 50m to let the others go past. I cannot think how an ML algo could resolve this situation, even if it could, how would it communicate it's intentions to the humans, when flashing your lights isn't enough?
Comparatively, the car did not attempt to do any of this and actually didn't even realize its cameras were in a state of failure.
These cars are overhyped. They've been just around the corner for the last 10 years. They are the Duke Nukem Forever of Silicon Valley.
Not really, they're correctly hyped. The concept is revolutionary.
> They've been just around the corner for the last 10 year
B-S. Holy revisionism BS!!
We were NOT talking about self-driving cars in 2006! There was no company seriously designing fully autonomous cars in 2006! It was fully in the realm of science fiction, no investment, no major players, nothing.
And you make it sound like it was supposed to be released 10 years ago! Vaporware! They told us we'd have AI cars in 2006! It never came! <---- False reality that never occurred.
Why do you feel the need to lie about recent history? Shouldn't you observe that if you have to make a nasty lie to support your argument, maybe your argument is wrong?
You're definitely parroting the contrarian point here, but you're being very low-effort about it. Contrarian can be cool but please try harder.
I don't know how serious it was, but part of the initial PR about the Grand Challenge included the goal that it would enable the US military to convert some significant fraction of their fleet of ground vehicles to autonomous operation within ten years.
I do think the previous poster was overstating their case a little, but not so badly as you seem to believe.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
> In 2006, Volkswagen showed off a self-driving version of its Gold car, named "53 plus 1" in honor of the original #53, Herbie. Autoblog.com posted a video of the car in action.
Should I go further back in history? Because we can.
Yes, the concept is revolutionary. But so is matter teleportation, and that's not going on sale next month either.
What do we call technologies that have been hyped for 10+ years? This is not just a knee-jerk contrarian point of view. Vaporware is actually the correct term we use for these products, not a slur.
It's not bullshit revisionism. People really have been talking about these things forever but not delivering them.
> Why do you feel the need to lie about recent history? Shouldn't you observe that if you have to make a nasty lie to support your argument, maybe your argument is wrong?
Settle down, nobody's doing any nasty lying, see the link above, this discussion has been going on longer than 10 years.
In contrast, fission reactors have been around the corner for a long time, however, there if you use the metric of net power generated from fission as a metric, no real progress is being made there.
I see a real difference between these two "always around the corner" technologies.
https://www.google.com/search?q=fusion+progress&source=lnms&...
I would encourage humility when considering whether to make a claim about a field that you are not well informed of. Real progress is being made, by a number of different groups, in a number of different directions.
Imagine I am a cyclist and I don't signal but I swiftly swerve to the right. Unless the self-driving car is already at a slow speed, it would impose an undue risk. Or, it is hard to expect that humans will rigorously adhere to this traffic discipline.
This is why these cars will drive slow for the foreseeable future and will frustrate a good chunk of the drivers.
Unless it gets dedicated lanes, the way bicycles do.
Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio.
Emergency vehicles, roadworks, traffic signs etc will do the same.
Or so I assume, because it makes so much of sense. I know there is vehicle-to-vehicle communication in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-vehicle
I should also add: - very fast mobile data, with no blackspots, so a remote driver can take over a car that's confused by a situation - a replacement for GPS, it's not reliable enough, the signal is far too weak - digital signal beacons embedded in lane markings, and edges of the road, and on traffic cones for roadworks
nope. nope.
The remote takeover seems entirely separate, and both promising and terrifying.
Most of the traffic lights in Las Vegas already support vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, although you need an Audi A4, Q7 or Allroad manufactured after 1st June 2016 and an Audi Connect Prime subscription ($33.33/month) to make use of it [1].
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/12/13923254/audi-v2i-las-veg...
I live in the capital city of an EU country, population 2 million, and there's a traffic light about two blocks away from where I live which has not been functional for about 2 weeks now. And the bad thing is that the other traffic lights from that intersection DO work, so you cannot rely on the road-signs, like one usually does when ALL traffic light from an intersection malfunction (from loss of power, mostly). So I'm a little skeptic that traffic lights will be able to "reliably" guide no-driver vehicles using radio signals anytime soon.
... that's right, now you know what the driving force behind all those flying cars in sci-fi was. It's simply a way to separate the autonomous and old-style vehicles.
I thought it was that winged flight makes for crappy cars and wingless, vectored thrust flight is horribly fuel hungry. (Sci-fi versions are usually wingless and either have magic drive systems or just ignore the fuel issue.)
They just have to make them safer than human drivers.
And these days with everyone swerving as they text, the bar isn't exactly set very high.
That system can fix the negatives of human drivers without affecting the advantages of humans over machines
People get this stuff wrong all the time. Especially when they're drunk, tired or texting. These cars won't be perfect but I think pretty good and conservative under uncertainty will be better than human, drunk and overconfident.
The cars don't have to be perfectly safe, just safer than the average driver.
I think (and I could be wrong) that there are many more cases where conservative driving is safer than aggressive driving.
In a lot of the cases mentioned, doing nothing or stopping are the safest choices. What's safe to drive over? Just assume everything is unsafe and only drive over it if it puts others in danger to avoid it.
If the road is blocked and you need to communicate to navigate, don't. Wait.
If the road conditions are changed due to construction in ways the car can't understand, stop. Find a new route.
Most humans wouldn't do these things. The nice thing about the autonomous car is that it can drive extremely cautiously.
Are there statistics?
It's true that humans do stupid things, but so do robots.
What would be _safer_ is an automated "hit" avoid system (if you're about to hit a wall, warn!!) or long distance driving system (for trucks/buses).
Why are people looking at the extremes? Only human drivers or a completely self driven car? What about a driver assistance system, that corrects a Human's stupid mistakes and still lets the human drive. I'm sure this hybrid (which is the current industry) is safer than both your extremes
I would also add; that I will stay consider these vehicles to be unsafe until the manufacturers can prove to be beyond a shadow of doubt that I or the local computer are the ones piloting the vehicle.
When a random person can remotely take control of a vehicle; whether it be the windshield wipers, or full control of the vehicle, then it is not safe to contain a power source in the vehicle near a public road. I don't want 4chan driving me into another vehicle.
If there was some chance my car could get hacked, or other weird vulnerabilities that robocars had that traditional cars did not, I would still want to be in a robocar if my chance of dying was cut in half.
My only questions are
1) will the skiddie tools be on github first, or will someone have to buy/leak them and repost on github?
2) If a minor executes the scripts and lives are taken; and assuming you can determine who ran them, will they be tried as adults and will the verdict or punitive actions make up for the damages?
It may be true that the chance for an average person to get targeted multiplied by the chance for a targeted person to get their car hacked is lower than the chance of dying while driving yourself, but that's not reassuring at all if you think you have a higher than normal chance of being targeted or are already being targeted. From experience of being on the receiving end, it's really not that hard to piss off 4chan or get unwanted attention from other crazed parts of the internet. (For an extreme case, consider a certain pizza place in the news lately...)
> By early 2015, Fairfield thought they were getting close: The cars were clocking full days at Google’s testing grounds without needing human takeovers. They had driven 1.2 million miles on public roads and could pull over for emergency vehicles. They could detect and brake for squirrels, and read hand signals from cops and construction workers. They knew when to honk politely (Just making sure you see me here) and when to blare it (You’re about to slam into me!). Then the team spent the next year putting another 800,000 miles on the fleet’s collective odometer, to fine tune everything. And it gave 10,000 rides to employees and “guests.”
There are good reasons why things like these happened:
> The law of some states, such as Louisiana, explicitly lists a killing in the course of defending oneself against forcible entry of an occupied motor vehicle as a justifiable homicide.
While I'm interested in self driving cars that still feature manual controls you can override, like Tesla, I have no interest in a future controlled by Google's AI without my input.
Something I've never seen adressed is how SDV fleets behave when change occurs. Are there chaotic oscillation patterns that emerge from AI trying similar avoiding behavior.
There's research in massive multi agent behavior, but I've never seen it tested on the field with SDV makers actual models.
Driverless cars will never (until we have general AI) be able to fully replace a human driver. However we don't need to get to 100% for the technology to become useful. It might be that driverless cars will be restricted to only driving on certain mapped roads. Or every car's movements are tracked in a central control room and if a problem is detected either by the car or the passenger it could be controlled remotely. Or let's say a GPS sensor breaks an actual human driver might be issued to come and rescue you. Lastly we might even accept a certain failure rate. Society is willing to tolerate failure of technology to a certain degree in cars and planes today. All we need is is for the technology to make us all better off on average for it to be successful.
It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than average human drivers. Sure there will be cases it can't handle. But the same is much more true for human.
Machines might not be able to, humans definitely can't.
I would shorten that to "other humans", to specifically include pedestrians. That 1/2-second eye contact between driver and human is key. Would anyone here dare walk in front of a car without that little nod from the driver?
The other edge case, one that is never discussed, is how these things expect to deal with off-road driving. I regularly use car ferries. Getting on and off those, and negotiating the terminals, stumps many human drives.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2016/12/13/googles-s...
TL;DR:
> “We’re now an independent company within the Alphabet umbrella,”
> Google is currently equipping a fleet of 100 hybrid Chrysler minivans with its sensors and computing gear that will soon join its nearly 60 prototype autonomous vehicles. The company hasn't yet disclosed when and how it will begin generating revenue from its efforts and Krafcik declined to discuss specific business plans today.
By the sound of it, they already have an L4 going (can drive itself in 99.99% of the situations, might need user take over in very rare cases).
Why not for now release an initial car with L4, and collect pile and pile of data, which is what they need to get over that last 0.01%.
(The thought is you'd hand off to a real driver once you get in to a city)
Yes, it's easy and safe if competing traffic is only fellow truckers or other level-headed, observant drivers.
It's when you mix in the distracted, newbie, or skittish drivers that things get difficult. Long-haul truckers (the majority, the good ones) develop a sixth sense about such risks; I can't imagine thoroughly coding a software replacement.
Freightliner recently did a PR stunt where a self driving truck delivered a load of beer: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3134879/car-tech/self-d...
We'll see commercial self driving trucks before we see consumer self driving cars. Self driving trucks will first connect depots outside of cities, with humans solving the local driving problem, but eventually, they'll just completely drive themselves.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
Take a look at the distribution of current jobs [1]. What perspective can you give people working as a truck driver right now?
I believe, america first has to find an answer to this question before there will be automated trucks.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
I'm not sure the driver is the most expensive part...
A self driving truck can pretty much drive 24/7 but the driver has to rest more than half the day.
Truck drivers are allowed to work 70h per week.
Is that not typically the case?
Vehicle-based
Fuel & Oil Costs $0.590
Truck/Trailer Lease or Purchase Payments $0.189
Repair & Maintenance $0.152
Truck Insurance Premiums $0.067
Permits and Licenses $0.038
Tires $0.042
Tolls $0.017
Driver-based
Driver Wages $0.460
Driver Benefits $0.151
TOTAL $1.706
So driver ~ 36%
If we are riding along in the current heaviest production car, the Rolls Royce Phantom Extended-wheelbase[1], which weighs in at 6000 pounds, and we are moving at 70 miles per hour, we have a kinetic energy of 1.33 Megajoules. [2]
Now, let's hop in the heaviest federally allowed tractor-trailer, which weighs 80,000 pounds, and get ourselves to 60 mph, a more reasonable speed for such a massive object. This comes to 13 Megajoules. [3]
The upshot is, one fully loaded truck moving at 60mph could cause the same amount of damage as 10 passenger cars all moving at 70mph. This means that as a firm, your liability is 10 times greater per vehicle. Insurance is 10 times more expensive. Regulation is 10 times as strict. At that level of risk, it'd be stupid to not put a human in the cab of your autonomous truck right? Just in case, and to shield yourselves from legal issues. But wait, why not just get him to drive and save yourself a lot of R&D money?
I work in the commercial trucking industry and real-world challenges mean this self-driving equation is not as lucrative as people believe. And we haven't even touched the Jobs Problem. Hence the focus on passenger vehicles. I do think autonomous trucking will become popular eventually, but this industry moves at a glacial pace for a reason.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_superlative...
[2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.5+*+6000+pounds+*+70...
[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.5+*+80000+pounds+*+6...
Once those folks prove that it works and it's safer than a human, the other companies will quickly fall as the insurance rates become lower than a human driven truck.
I guess it is a mix of both. The SV elite pretending they can do another trick and keeping themselves busy and entertained and Google/ABC pretending they are a growth company (beyond search ads). Why should they bother with worldly billion dollar markets such as office communication equipment (which Microsoft is successfully attacking as we learned earlier today).
Admittedly pre-orders are essentially marketing, but marketing of an actual product with intent to deliver, I'm not convinced it's "marketing bullshit".
Ie. you're gonna have to get new laws in place allowing empty vehicles in not just one, but many states.
Current driverless carpool plans might well only allow use when someone is in the vehicle, and they will likley only operate in a single state. The people-transport industry is also worth more than the goods transport industry.
[citation needed]
I'm going to assert that 100% of the income of that 1% of the population is less than 13% of the whole population's income.
[1]: http://www.alltrucking.com/faq/truck-drivers-in-the-usa/ [2]: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/cesan.nr0.htm
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/07/convoy-se...
In my town (a suburban town with a low crime rate), the police spend the majority of their time enforcing traffic laws. The municipal courthouse is always filled with people, and if I had to guess, I’d say that 80% of the people are there as a result of a traffic violation, while the other 20% are there for drug offenses/other.
It seems like autonomous cars would lead to a drop in traffic offenses and thus revenue. Even if only a tiny portion of the town’s revenue actually comes from traffic violations (when compared to local property tax), there would probably be a lot more idle time for police.
I suspect that they will first start to raise our property taxes to compensate for the lost revenue, but I would think that the long term effect would be a reduction of municipal workers/police.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to other areas like Philadelphia, where police spend only a small percentage of their time enforcing traffic laws.
[1]: http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/us/google-self-driving-car-pul...
Given that Tesla doesn't even have emergency braking and auto-steering, I'd guess they compare quite favorably...
So you can say that Tesla is at least 1-years behind. More like 4-5.
That is extremely aggressive. Getting data is the easy part of self-driving.
We haven't heard much from Google because they've been programming and validating all the unglamorous little problems that training data and a neural net can't solve alone. 4 way stops, passing motorcyclists and stuff like that, where old fashioned hand coded features are necessary to adress situations in which specific kinds of reasoning is necessary.
Tesla has to solve all this boring stuff as well before they can offer comparable capabilities in an AV.
I don't think hand coded features are necessary. No one hand codes humans to drive.
I don't believe your hand coded features will outperform ML trained over a billion miles, even in the long tail rare events.
Sure ML is bad at rare events, but hand coded features also map poorly to such rare events, because it's unlikely you'll be able to imagine them all, or even manage to handle categories of rare events well.
Furthermore, I believe it would be possible to train an ML based rare-event detector, which simply detects the difference between "regular driving I'm familiar with" and "something funny is going on, I haven't seen this much in the training dataset", and then refer to a remote human to resolve the issue.
Successful remote control is a whole different project, very different from self-driving. In order to give the remote pilot enough situational awareness, you need plenty of streamed imagery (recreated or recorded). And you need a feedback loop with a very small latency. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it won't happen "organically" by cars becoming self-driving.
* that road with the one-foot deep pothole (it's more like a sinkhole at that point, though) in the middle of a lane
* the perpetual construction zone where there are five layers of lane markers, only one of which is the actual layer of lane markers
* the 10% grade two-lane winding road in the dark with 2 inches of snow on the road and more coming
* open highway with a constant 30mph crosswind
* dense fog with less than 100m visibility
* torrential downpour with so little visibility you can't even see the lane markings on the road right in front of you
Those are all conditions I've driven in, and I can think of several other horrible driving conditions that I haven't yet had the (mis)fortune to drive in. Just because you can drive well in good conditions doesn't mean you can drive well when things get tougher--as the driving records of many human beings can well attest.
We can likewise say there are some situations a machine shouldn't be driving.
As long as the machine can identify when it is incapable as a driver, it's only the same as the human pulling over for a nap because they can't stay alert.
Sure, if you ran a taxi service with such a system you'd have to send a regular taxi to pick up the customer, but it's only the same as any other kind of breakdown like a puncture.
And "autopilot" has been on the market for over a decade, it's OEM off-the-shelf equipment.
Google/Waymo is actually piloting a car from origin to destination without a steering wheel or pedals. That's a much more difficult challenge.
Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to the supermarket. Google's car actually does this, on real roads, today... and that's amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3DbrYx-SN4
The issue is Google is doing it with (prohibitively) expensive hardware, so we don't know yet if Google's self-driving system works with cheaper Autopilot 2.0-level hardware that the other car makers are going to use as well.
Tesla had the luxury of running test drives until they had a success. This is a different thing than putting a car on the road with no steering wheel and saying bon voyage. The first is a demonstration of a single successful instance (which is probably repeatable on average); the second is a much stronger demonstration of a > 99% success rate.
https://www.aaafoundation.org/sites/default/files/2011Pedest...
That's exactly what Tesla is marketing and working on with their new self-driving features, and you can buy cars that will allegedly be capable of this today.
"All you will need to do is get in and tell your car where to go. If you don’t say anything, the car will look at your calendar and take you there as the assumed destination or just home if nothing is on the calendar. Your Tesla will figure out the optimal route, navigate urban streets (even without lane markings), manage complex intersections with traffic lights, stop signs and roundabouts, and handle densely packed freeways with cars moving at high speed. When you arrive at your destination, simply step out at the entrance and your car will enter park seek mode, automatically search for a spot and park itself. A tap on your phone summons it back to you."
It should be obvious that Tesla is going to win this race. Tesla already does fully autonomous driving, they released that video in November. And they build real, production cars. "Real artists ship", as Steve Jobs said.
If you a manufacturing ace, would you join the company with a long list of failed projects and no actual production cars, or would you join the company that is building 500,000 of the most advanced autos right now?
If I was a hardware expert, would I join Google who shies at giving a fraction of it's cash to hard tech, or Tesla who buys german automation companies?
Or plain old software. Tesla has magnitudes more data and can update neural networks to hundreds of thousands of cars at a whim. Soon millions.
The trouble with just throwing the statistics around and saying "it's fewer deaths!" is that it has to be fewer deaths in comparable situations. A tesla having fewer deaths per mile in perfect driving conditions shouldn't be compared to a possibly-drunk person in possibly-awful weather. This isn't the media creating controversy, it's people expressing skepticism when a corporation's incentives are to let a couple people die, and trying to maintain a high bar.
On the other hand, if you think fault doesn't matter and it's just one life for another, then it essentially becomes the trolley problem, which doesn't have a clear answer either.
If you can go from 30000 to 1000 just by changing to good enough autonomous cars that's a change worth doing. Then you can look at improving it to 0 and encourage that process if not through insurance liability processes through regulations that require ongoing improvement in autonomous safety.
That video, for reference, is: https://www.tesla.com/videos/full-self-driving-hardware-all-...
I'm not super convinced by that video. That drive had almost no challenges/obstacles. No bicycles, no construction, basically no pedestrians, no other vehicles behaving erratically.
Google has cars that can respond to everything from a cyclist making hand signals, to a school bus (which must not be passed), to a police car pulling it over, to a woman chasing a duck across the road: https://youtu.be/tiwVMrTLUWg?t=8m49s
I'm also not sure this is a simple case of "throw data and hardware at the problem." If it were that easy, it wouldn't have taken Google so long to get to where they are today.
https://www.tesla.com/videos/autopilot-self-driving-hardware...
So either the problem in practice is much harder than a simple video can show, or something else is up.
Though, I think the real issue is that google wants to go straight for L5 (meaning 100% automated, and you can remove the steering wheel). As compared to an L4, which is more like 99.9% automated, but you still need steering wheel for those rare edge cases.
I'm not sure there's a better spot in Austin to test autonomous cars.
That said, they aren't perfect. 1. They wait just long enough at stop signs when it is their turn, which confuses other drivers. 2. They drive well under the limit, causing small jams at peak congestion.
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20161016050722/http://www.google...
[1] http://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/files/reports/report-09...
EDIT: I think I triggered them all to be archived, links in [0] should work now.
To the surprise of many folks (myself included) it has turned out that SDC tech is probably for existing manufacturers to develop versus software guys learning how to build cars without the massive supply chains needed to assemble 4000lb widgets. Before anyone points to Tesla, try getting inside a $140k Tesla and then a $140k Mercedes and it will be obvious what advantages there are to having manufacturing experience stretching decades.
The interior of the 7 series seemed special to me. All of the buttons felt great, seats looked beautiful and were super comfortable to sit in. The control panel had many small OLED displays and they looked great. And small details like when I went to adjust the seat, by placing my fingers on the buttons, information about my seat configuration popped up on the center console, so I could see what I was changing. Also the rear passenger seats and rear windshield had power sunscreens.
Here is a picture of the iterior of the BMW: http://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2015/11/2016-BMW-75...
Here is a video of the 7 series interior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GHDMAibH1G4
In comparison, the Tesla's interior felt mostly large and empty.
Here is a picutre of the interior of a 2016 Model X: http://st.motortrend.com/uploads/sites/5/2016/03/2016-Tesla-...
Don't get me wrong, Tesla makes some super amazing cars. But the high price tag isn't for the interior.
(Disclaimer: I own a lowly 3 series so I may be slightly biased to BMW)
The Tesla is putting most of your money into the tech.
Rather, Mercedes has access to better credit terms and availability than Tesla because they produce 100x more cars per year. And because of that, they don't need to recoup future R&D money from current cars. Ergo when you buy an expensive mercedes, more money goes into the car you bought than future cars.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulators-call-on-cars-to-chat-...
If anything else, during the transition to fully-automated, it would be wonderful if human drivers were able to visualize the intent of the automated vehicles around them. To know that a car is going to merge into my lane in 50m, or is attempting a U-turn, is so much more useful than simply seeing a turn signal.
Wouldn't Google want to be first in line to get something out into the field? Morphing Waymo into a V2V base would be a smart thing to do IMO.
If you've ever driven in bumper to bumper traffic on a highway you know how invaluable this info would be, even to a human driver.
Plus info about road conditions (icy spots ahead!), etc..
There is no reason to sit at a red light at 2:00 in the morning when there are no other vehicles, pedestrians or bicycles on the road. But the law currently requires it.
They already require other safety devices like lights at night and brakes.
Anyways, if this is true, it's a grim future then. Radar is incredibly trivial to interfere with.
It uses many kinds of sensors. Yes I know about clutter, I've spent quite a lot of time in the radar industry. But by combining data from radars of multiple wavelengths, it becomes pretty feasible. Though yes, difficult.
We need to fundamentally redesign our road systems to accommodate self driving cars. That might happen... in 50-100 years...after we address the already crumbling infrastructure we have. For perfect, sunny conditions, like the roads in Nevada all these self driving startups are doing their testing, with straight flat landscapes, I am sure the tech can work fine. Rest of the country, maybe not so much.
Radar clutter, attenuation, penetration, etc are all affected by wavelengths. By using multiple frequencies, you can get a better idea of what is and isn't really there. As far as interference, there are ways to filter out noise. The car presumably knows how fast it is going. Therefor, it can do doppler filtering on the received waves. IE... car knows it sent waves at 50 GHz and is traveling at 60 mph. It knows to expect a response at ~54 GHz from the front and 50 GHz from the side.
For tracking objects, you can use a pulse-doppler radar [0] to get both range and rate information.
One is the basic "environmental" interference with competing radar signals from other devices. Imagine how much more complicated this gets when a majority of competing traffic is likewise equipped.
But the other risk, which seems to be mostly ignored thus far, is sabotage. Can you design a system that is hardened not only against stray competing EMR but also against attempts to hack or vandalize your system into misbehavior or malfunction? For example, consider a terrorist plot. Or even a smart neighborhood crazy who wants the neighborhood kids off his lawn and neighborhood traffic to stop during his midday nap. Or, a British organized crime gang using stopped traffic to cover an escape[0].
This would be very difficult to train with ML, however. I'm sure there are other downsides I'm not thinking of
But I wonder about the snow though. How does the car know where to go when there are no identifying lane features? Maybe its not as hard of a problem as I believe it to be?
For substantially less crazy conditions, you can infer where the lanes would be by (a) looking at the spots of the road you can see, (b) prior knowledge of the road from experience, and (c) looking at oncoming cars and the flow of traffic, and driving in a way that doesn't surprise them. Though it's likely the case that you shouldn't be driving in these conditions anyway.
You mean carefully get to the nearest settlement as soon as possible? Some of these storms can last for days at a time. Stopping to wait it out in the middle of nowhere, especially if you don't have a full tank of fuel to keep the car warm for extended periods, is a pretty scary situation.
While I think it's plausible to teach a self-driving car to drive in snow (like I do, generally following in the tracks of the cars ahead of me), I honestly think this is one of the best justifications that cars should continue to have steering wheels and pedals: Because automated snow driving is going to take a lot longer to become a solved problem than fair weather driving.
These kinds of extreme situations are scary, but that's what insurance is for.
Everyone is worried about how we get autonomous driving that's perfect in every situation, but that's not how automation works. You just have to automate the common case so a small number of humans can focus on the corner cases.
We are? I went up the comment chain again and still did not get that impression the second time around. What statement in particular gave you that idea?
> These kinds of extreme situations are scary, but that's what insurance is for.
Like... life insurance?
> You just have to automate the common case so a small number of humans can focus on the corner cases.
If I'm going to be sitting in the car anyway, I can drive it in those conditions, assuming the vehicle allows me to. However, Google has stated before that it is unlikely that they will release a car that needs to be taken over by human drivers. It's all or nothing for them.
What's becoming clear is that the self-driving car industry will be the car industry. Autonomous driving equipment may come from suppliers, but they'll just be suppliers to the automakers. That's not a great place to be; the margins are low and suppliers are totally under the thumb of the automakers.
Volvo, which will deploy 100 self driving cars with actual customers in Gothenberg, Sweden in 2017, is way ahead on the user interface.[2] Volvo takes the firm position that, in autonomous mode, the driver is not required to pay attention at all, and if something goes wrong, it's Volvo's problem. They have redundant sensors, actuators, and computers.
Volvo is also way ahead on ads for self-driving.[3]
[1] http://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/our-innovation-brands/in...
Does this mean that Alphabet will keep on working on building their own cars but under a different company? The association between the two is a little confusing at the moment.
I think autonomous transport will be very popular but shared vehicles will be hardly more popular than Uber / taxis are now. If you think that shared autonomous vehicles will be significantly more popular than shared conventional vehicles are today, I'd be interested to hear why. Is it primarily cost savings?
This is a problem with Uber now. I need to be at the airport at 5:00 AM tomorrow morning and I'm just hoping like hell that there will be an Uber around. Most drivers will be home sleeping.
Low-volume times like my example above are where autonomous vehicles can shine. Making the economics work during times of high volume is more difficult. You can always buy more cars, but that's just that many more cars you need storage space for outside of peak hours.
How do you get to work every day? How often do you go to the grocery store? What about going out to dinner?
For myself, living in the Bay Area, anything related to driving or owning a car is a nightmare -- not that that has stopped me from owning a car. Driving from Mountain View to San Mateo takes about 45 minutes in the morning at 75 minutes in the evening. I went to SF to have breakfast with a friend this past weekend and finding parking took half an hour. I'd love a self-driving car that could just drop me at my door. Autonomous cars should also lead to drastic traffic improvements, assuming the cars will eventually be able to communicate with each other in a reliable way.
Maybe you live in a less densely-populated area? I have an aunt that lives in a rural area and I couldn't imagine a need or desire for autonomous cars there.
There is definitely a long way to go, but think of all the advantages! Parking can be automated and condensed, which means more land is available for buildings or parks or anything else. If you suffer from traffic problems now, your daily commute could be cut by 50% or more. Shared vehicles should cost less than what you pay for gas and insurance now. High availability is a real possibility if someone can figure out how to make the economics work. Ride sharing can be almost completely automated, leading to less pollution.
Example:
Traffic is improved with self-driving cars because most traffic jams are caused by humans. However, traffic is improved even more when carpooling is automated with a shared self-driving fleet.
Shared autonomous cars will become popular as these compounded benefits are realized.
We have fleets of shared vehicles today, but most people prefer personal transportation.
What is it about autonomous shared cars vs shared cars with a human driver that makes you believe that driverlessness will lead to increased use of shared vehicles vs personal vehicles?
The lack of control is still kind of terrifying so I think they're trying to make it as non-threatening as possible.
This is true of all Google products, and has been the basis of Google's branding strategy from the very beginning. The dorky, colorful logo isn't an accident. They are a scary, dangerous and harmful company with an extremely friendly face.
Tesla's auto-pilot can be over-ridden due to the presence of the steering wheels and the pedals. But in a car that has none, you're not in control. And that, is scary no matter how you look at it.
They seem pretty clearly, however, to have changed their minds on the topic. It's enlightening to compare the information on this new site with information on the old site (https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/). You can see what language they've either removed, or toned down.
Anything more than that would mean your system is not fully autonomous, because the driver would have to pay attention all the time. What good is manual override if there's nobody paying attention? It would also mean you need a qualified driver, you couldn't use it to ferry around children, disabled people or simply people without a license.
Honestly, with Google's track record, I'm starting to doubt that this will ever ship. It just seems like a huge marketing tactic at this point. Plus. all of the talent has moved to companies like Otto and comma.ai; who are making tangible progress in this space.
I also really think someone should invent a solution to convert existing modern cars with brake, gas and steering from CANbus to self driving cars by installing a kit.
The current car manufacturers can simply make really good cars with cameras and sensors integrated. One can then install open software adapted for the region that is always getting updates. The test cases and lidar data is put in a giant shared repo whose ownership is the community. E.g OpenStreetMap and wikipedia.
Same software can be used for smaller robots to dispatch packages to the front door, or robotic lawn mowers, rubbish trucks, cleaning trucks e.t.c
That would be a fantastic future to be part of.
They tried the kit that can be self installed[2] but decided not to continue[3]
They also have a dataset that can be downloaded by anyone[4]
And they have open sourced the software on their github, [1]: http://comma.ai/ [2]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/13/comma-ai-will-ship-a-999-a... [3]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13453344/comma-ai-self-dr... [4]: http://research.comma.ai/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
In my view, all of this technology is much better suited to aid the human driver as a safety enhancement system rather than a full replacement for vehicle navigation.
Q: "I'd like to join the team. Where can I find a list of open roles?" A: "You can learn more about available roles here[1]."
And interestingly, that link[1] is broken :)
Update: it's fixed NOW!
I'm really pleased I was forced to learn the web in layers. I learnt basic HTML, then CSS came along. I realised I needed some dynamic behaviour so looked into CGI/Perl and later PHP. The DHTML became all the rage and I picked up a bit of javascript. PHP began to show it's weaknesses and luckily Django and Rails popped up. Ajax became a thing somewhere in all that and returning JSON instead of HTML snippets was sometimes useful.
If you start now and dive into learning Angular/React/Ember/Whatever - you are so insulated from the lower layers it must get a bit baffling trying to understand how all the parts fit together and why some things are done the way they are.
tl;dr - Get off my lawn.
Dogfooding is nice, but not at the expense of risking not having the site showcasing your new autonomous vehicle company ready by the time the press release hits.
How are CARS supposed to be automated??
> subways aren't completely automated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
> planes aren't completely automated
Many of which are still piloted by people on the ground.
And I can't take a flight without a pilot yet.
A car is more than a commuting tool, it really matters how it looks.
1. Pedestrian->driver observation and interaction are the primary factors in deciding what's safe.
2. Roads full of networked autonomous vehicles are a hack away from becoming hoards of hurtling tonnage.
In my opinion this is all a solution looking for a problem and we should know better than to make our roads so utterly hostile to our own kind.
Seriously, Google has had so many growth businesses in their hands and just fails to execute on them. This might be for one part because of its internal structure but I get the impression that many of these things look not exciting enough for its leadership.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/11/17/humans-will...
"Reckless driving shall mean driving...in a manner which unreasonably interferes with the free and proper use of the public highway"
Simple aggressive driving as described in the linked article is, well, not a real problem. Unless you cause an accident.
In 2013, though, there's a regression in number of new miles logged, and it took until 2015 to catch up to 2012 numbers. Can anyone give insight into the cause?
While I'm excited, I'd love to know how they actually plan to roll this out!
I don't really think we should place drunk driving at the same level as tired or distracted driving.
I wonder about the internationalization of this product, especially if (or when?) it's brought to other countries and regions, such as the Middle East. In some of those countries, women aren't allowed to drive and men drive with extreme speed (and park in the most horrible of ways). While this will cut down on things like speeding / drinking / etc, it may also potentially impact social norms as well.
I'm hoping to keep a level-head about this project, but any step forward in this endeavor is worth being excited about.
So I don't think self driving cars will solve that problem at all, sadly.
[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/-ne...
Quora answers from people that appear to be saudi: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-women-not-allowed-to-drive-in-...
Well decided Alphabet, very well decided!
Probably safe to say they're in talks with other auto manufacturers that are looking to add self-driving software to their portfolios.
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/california/mountain_v...
"Snowfall is 0 inches."
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/arizona/phoenix
"Snowfall is 0 inches."
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/texas/austin
"Snowfall is 1 inches."
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/washington/kirkland
"Snowfall is 4 inches."
I hope they are driving far enough from their home bases to get some snow miles under their belt.
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/massachusetts/boston
"Snowfall is 47 inches."
Why not walk before running? Especially when this is a technology that is heavily driven by machine learning?
I am not a self-driving car expert (software or hardware). Nor am I an expert in ML, computer vision, etc. But I do have minor experience in each of those. Currently, I am enrolled and taking Udacity's new "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree course. For my cohort (November), we just completed the first basic project - Lane Finding.
This project utilized Python and OpenCV, and was far from a robust enough system for it to be used on a real vehicle (for one thing, it wasn't fast enough - it does well with non-real time video and still photos, but it would likely need to be re-written in C/C++ for it to stand a chance in a real-time situation). It couldn't deal with curves, and it has other corner cases.
We had several still pictures to work with, then two required videos, and one bonus "challenge" (ie - extra credit) video. If we had time, we could try our hand with our own videos, etc. It was very easy to get things working with the still images, and the two regular videos. But the challenge video was something else entirely.
In that video, you had to deal with not only different color lines, but also a section of different color roadway, shadows and varying light conditions. With enough effort and thought, it was easy enough to get things working properly, but it highlighted the fact that humans do some amazing things when they drive.
For one thing, our eyes are better capable to handle subtle differences in color, shadow, and lighting (particularly brightness and contrast) than most traditional image sensors. Furthermore, we can "fill in gaps" and "infer" where and how things should be, based on other information in the environment. In cases of rain or snow, we can - for instance - watch where other cars go, follow the "tracks" other cars make in front of us, follow road "edges", and use other subtle cues to help us guide our vehicles as we drive (another instance - recently they repaved the road near my work - but haven't painted new lane markings - I and probably others instead used the "seams" between the asphault runs as "lane markers" instead).
These and many other issues likely are "edge cases" that haven't been fully explored in this relatively new cycle in self-driving car engineering. I am confident that the problems will be solved, likely with deep learning systems of varying kinds, as well as better sensors. Sensor data fusion and priority could also help (ie - use a LIDAR to "follow" a car in front of you, perhaps? Of course, filter out the noise of the falling rain/snow, first).
So far, this course has enlightened me more on just how hard of a problem overall self-driving vehicle systems are to solve. Furthermore, there aren't many players (companies nor individuals) in the market (which is why I am taking the course - to expand on my current skills). Solving these kinds of hard problems will be paramount for a successful self-driving vehicle to last in the market.
Tesla's goal is high fidelity GPS mapping of roads and their landmarks, so that the car can navigate down a lane in the absence of normal visual signals (i.e. clear road markings). It will be interesting to see how everyone else deals with weather conditions, but it's also not a problem that needs to be solved instantly.
The site loads large pictures for all viewport widths (ideally they'd load downscaled images for smaller viewports — it's wasteful to load a large image for small devices) and the image files are PNGs when they should be jpeg or webp (example: http://waymo.com/static/images/journey/streets.png)
That's pretty much all you need to know about performance.
Not that the site in question isn't bloated brochure-ware. Just that I wouldn't characterize Google that way.
Yes, they may only work in places with clearly marked streets but if I could use my autonomous car for daily commute or roughly 50% of the time it's still an incredible achievement and well worth the cost.
I think that there are a lot of little steps towards 100% autonomy that will still provide tremendous value to people, even if the product is far from perfect.
- Instead of talking about their car's capabilities on the front page, they include a pathos about drunk driving. I feel embarrassed how Google doesn't have more things to say about the car.
- It looks really unattractive, I could hardly call it cute.
- It's not in production, it's in testing.
These companies are sitting on mountains of cash! And they still fail to do things effectively! Apple and Google are just sitting on their fat cashflows while the world is getting very scary very fast. I'm tired of these "technology" companies doing complete fails of R&D projects, too damn shy to leave their advertising revenues. We need leaders with real courage.