The long, winding road for driverless cars
economist.com
economist.com
This is just not convincing. The sales were weak because the products were weak. There are about 500,000 people who have placed orders for the Model 3 sight unseen. There is tremendous pent up demand for these cars, simply because buyers believe that the company selling them finally has the right formula.
"Unlike video cameras, lidar cannot be dazzled by bright light nor blinded by the dark."
LiDAR I've worked with in fact could suffer 'sun poisoning' if the sun shone directly into the receiver.
"Local governments will have to spend scarce resources making road infrastructure more AV-friendly."
Right, like fixing this false lane marker (the actual lane marker is the yellow line in the lane barrier's shadow): http://imgur.com/a/KnsXU
* There are 500,000 people who have put down a fully refundable $1,000 deposit on the option to buy a Tesla Model 3.
That's a long way from 500,000 orders placed.
(But I agree, "less than 2% of all new car sales in most countries" is a weasely stat, because it is growing fast. They are still a small percent of total sales)
If you need to drive long distances, even occasionally, you either need to own another car, or rent one. Either is at best suboptimal compared to owning one car that can do it all.
When I can own an EV that will go 300-400 miles per charge and can be recharged in 5 minutes at any corner "station" I will think about it.
That said, I cant even remember the last time i traveled more than 85mi (half the capacity, so depleting thr battery in a round trip) in a car, and I dont think im that exceptional, so theres probably still a pretty big market for these things.
But personally, Ill stick to the bus. I do all my best thinking on the bus.
There is an enormous difference between demonstrated and available. Showing something could work doesn't address bad batteries or standardization.
Grandparent claim was:
> The size and weight of the full battery pack may make it infeasible to change quickly.
Tesla did it - in 90 seconds. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XdiGMIUxeY
Also WTF is that claim about bad batteries and standarization? Tesla owns entire production/support chain of Tesla cars plus they got live telemetry from each car - they set the standard and got full info about the car battery.
There was another company in Israel (Better Place) that had multiple battery swap stations as well.
Quick battery swap is technically feasible contrary to grandparent claim.
This is probably one reason they scrapped it.
The next reason they scrapped it.
In your video they "torqued every bolt to the factory specification". The Tesla factory specification. This is exactly what I mean by standardization. Standardization is another issue. You can't have a generic "battery swap station" until EV companies standardize on a battery system, which they won't do because battery system is going to be like a model trim. Yes, you can have a just-for-tesla swap station (but even Tesla isn't bothering with that anymore). You could have a standard charge station because charge plugs are quickly moving toward standardization.
Is there anything else you are having trouble understanding?
So again. Show me where this is a regular thing. It is cumbersome you can have a special garage to change out a specific battery pack. It has to be done with garage equipment, and the battery and connection system is specific to a single type of car. That will not scale.
I didn't move the goalpost. I pointed out your arguments falling on their faces 50 yards away from the goalpost.
Imagine if we all had electric cars, and had to switch to gasoline. It would seem so inconvenient to have to go all the way to a gas station to refill, when you're used to having a fully charged vehicle every morning. It would seem so inconsequential that you could make 400-500 mile journeys a whole half hour faster. Why would you not want to stop for lunch while on a 6-7 hour trip?
The environmental cost of switching to electric vehicles is quite low with the caveat that cobalt mining can produce concentrated heavy metal pollution. This is unlikely to be a problem as cobalt mining will diversify from third world countries, specifically Congo. There is a modest increase in manufacturing energy (~30% iirc) which is made up rapidly by electricity (within a year if powered by renewables- a car burns its own weight in gas in several years).
The cost of renewable plants is quite reasonable if you replace old plants, and grid scale batteries are now also cheap. A solar power plant with a 3 day battery backup now costs less than an equivalent nuclear plant. Natural gas is exceptionally cheap but it cant scale fully. Renewables get cheaper at scale. The grid itself will probably not need many upgrades, or even any upgrades. Power draw fluctuates 50%+ between day and night, and electric cars will charge overwhelmingly at night. If we switched all cars to electric it eould increase residential draw by 30-40% (11 kWh per day). The grid will sustain that easily except for specific locations with abnormal charging times or high distance driving.
Heres one on power generation: http://www.nrel.gov/analysis/sustain_lca_results.html
In the US you would need random charging stations lining the highways like we have gas stations. I expect people are much less likely to want to stop for 30 min at a random gas station than in a city center to recharge.
Notably, the optical guidance systems in all existing vehicles are subject to exactly the same exploit.
This is one of the criticisms (of self-driving cars, and with LIDAR vs. imaging specifically) I just simply don't get. You can blind a real driver much more easily and less recoverably than you can any sensor.
It's true that the sun low near the horizon at sunup or sundown, especially on clear winter days causes accidents but I'm not all that sure whether or not LIDAR will do better here than humans. Time will tell.
There's no actual problem for a video camera to drive while staring straight into the sun, beyond the need to have a camera shutter.
Human optics is actually really, really good. We can adapt very well to having a light source as bright as the sun in the same field of view as shaded and make at details in both very bright and very dark regions. Optical sensors can't do that--you either wash out the bright stuff and see the shaded detail, or you darken the shade and make the bright stuff visible.
I can't see why a dozen or so cameras can't do quite well compared to a lessor number of lidar units. Especially if you use pairs of cameras which makes it much easier to pick out 3D features. Human eyes are only separated by a few inches, no reason pairs of cameras couldn't be separated by 6 feet if depth perception is a limiting factor.
Machine learning has been increasing quite quickly (things like recognizing human speech, identifying images, computer vision, tracking objects, etc).
Current trajectories seem to imply pretty large improvements in the next 3-4 years. Things are somewhat delayed because Tesla just switched from pretty poor sensors to processors to a significantly improved hardware last year. The software is still in the process of catching up.
I expect quite nice autonmous driving solutions will be available in the discussed 3-4 year time frame and the roads will be significantly safer because of them.
The article also seems to exaggerate the difficulty in testing. Tesla (a fairly small car company) already has quite a few miles under it's belt, even if you ignore all the miles on the previous generation hardware. The previous reported number of dropping airbag deployments by 40% is a huge step in the right direction. With even a pessimistic number of model 3's shipping there will be ample chance to show if tesla's system is better than the average human driver.
I expect pretty much all the large car manufacturers to update their current systems that provide predictive braking to include similar capabilities and catch up and surpass Tesla's 100's of millions of miles driven under computer supervision.
Here's another good source for some pessimism:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/10/self-driving-cars-how...
Here's the best parts:
Contrary to Musk and many of the most prominent advocates of autonomous cars, Shladover insists that so-called Level 5 vehicles—robocars that require no human input—are not on the horizon. “I tell adult audiences not to expect it in their lifetimes. And I say the same thing to students,” he says. “Merely dealing with lighting conditions, weather conditions, and traffic conditions is immensely complicated. The software requirements are extremely daunting. Nobody even has the ability to verify and validate the software. I estimate that the challenge of fully automated cars is 10 orders of magnitude more complicated than [fully automated] commercial aviation.”
Herman Herman, director of the Carnegie-Mellon University Robotics Institute, disagrees as well: "With autonomous cars, you see these videos from Google and Uber showing a car driving around, but people have not taken it past 80 percent. It’s one of those problems where it’s easy to get to the first 80 percent, but it’s incredibly difficult to solve the last 20 percent. If you have a good GPS, nicely marked roads like in California, and nice weather without snow or rain, it’s actually not that hard. But guess what? To solve the real problem, for you or me to buy a car that can drive autonomously from point A to point B—it’s not even close. There are fundamental problems that need to be solved."
Wow, if an 18 year old can be safe enough to drive, that should make piloting easy at what 3 years old?
It makes me think of what a stupendous amount of time that is in engineering terms. And then I think that basically a suit somewhere has a product roadmap, but no real idea of how he's going to get there.
Which in turn tends to make the time estimate questionable at best, wishful thinking at worst.
"Tesla continues to include the Autopilot sensors and software in its cars, but has deactivated the system while further testing is undertaken. The company plans to re-activate it in 2019 or thereafter."
The author might have been confused about the reason for the switch from the Mobileye-based v1 hardware of Tesla Autopilot to in-house v2, which indeed represented a regression in functionality. It is true that the death of the driver was a catalyst in the breakdown of the relationship between Tesla and Mobileye. But there were plenty of other reasons, most related to hardball business tactics. It's false to say that Tesla removed existing Autopilot functionality.
Moreover, even v2 of Autopilot is currently approaching v1's level of functionality. Autosteer works and TACC works. Those are the main parts. I think only minor features like automatic windshield wipers are still missing. (I have only v1 so I don't know first-hand.)
Incidentally, it's rare for The Economist to get facts so wrong. Their articles are usually very well-researched.
The next software update, scheduled for june, should bring automatic perpeticular parking, automatic windshield wipers and an improved "smother" autopilot.
Although perhaps disturbing for some, I enjoy the monthly software updates. Like a little surprise every month.
First off, I enjoy driving. I identify with the brand of car I just bought. Yes, I have to deal with traffic and competing for parking in my congested city neighborhood... but that's a choice I made because driving and the freedom that comes along with it are, to me, things I value. If you think I'm a small minority, look at all of the car owners in my neighborhood who still choose to own cars despite an Uber being available in 120 seconds, and affordable public transit being a 3 minute walk away. I use both of these services, and I still choose to own a car.
Second - who is to say that autonomous vehicles are the cure for all of our ails? Yes, we'll eliminate some traffic fatalities. We'll also eliminate one of the biggest sources of employment in our society, which I worry will set an entire chunk of the population down a negative path toward bad outcomes like depression, suicide, and drug addiction when they can't sustain the meager existences they already live.
Lastly, I don't like the idea of some self aggrandizing tech entrepreneurs in SV who have decided that they know what the future of the place where I live should look like.
Does Henry Ford count as a self-aggrandizing tech entrepreneur deciding what the future of the places where people live should look like?
I personally enjoy driving too. It's like a video game but more immersive! However, that's not true for passengers. There are a lot of passengers in the world who get no value from the fun of driving.
From the parent's parent: "Second - [snip] We'll also eliminate one of the biggest sources of employment in our society."
From [1]: "The trucking industry is the lifeblood of the U.S. economy. [snip] To move 10.5 billion tons of freight annually requires over 3.4 million heavy-duty Class 8 trucks and over _3.5_million_truck_drivers_." (This is the American Trucking Industry's website so they may be biased; I've heard numbers similar to this cited elsewhere)
The parent parent poster can very well decide not to use it (and clear they're going to do just that). Despite that individual's choices the technology can still change the world substantially. It's reasonable to fear the effects of reducing and/or eliminating employment options for millions of people.
----- 1:http://www.trucking.org/News_and_Information_Reports_Industr...
Here in the first world we live in times of cartoonishly over the top abundance unparalleled by any other era in history, yet still there are people who don't have enough to cover the basics, and even more who in spite of having plenty believe they don't have enough and are hell-bent on hoarding even more. In evolutionary terms we're not wired for managing abundance, we're wired for managing scarcity, and a failure to adapt to these new circumstances could very well mark our downfall. With or without autonomous vehicles.
There will eventually be a time when cars are truly driverless. None of the passengers will need to be attentive to the car's driving. Once that becomes a reality, many people will have tremendous increases in leisure time during their day. Some people have massive commuting times to get to work.
Families will save money by not having to buy multiple cars. One car could be shared among all the members of a family. If each family member needs to be at different places at different times and all start at the same destination like the family residence, the car could pick up and drop off each person, while still returning to the same start destination. The children could be dropped off at school at an earlier time and you could be picked up later. In the meantime, while you are waiting for the car to return, you could find yourself having extra time to eat breakfast or to finish your coffee by not having to chauffeur anyone else. I find it strange that there will be driverless cars zipping around with no passengers.
I used to drive 50 miles back and forth every day, which ended up being an hour each way. If I can have a car that takes the stress and attention away from having to do the drive, that's 2 hours of my day that I can do whatever I want within the constraints of my car. I can watch a movie. I can read a book. I can get a head start on work. I can socialize with other passengers. I can learn that new programming language that I always wanted to learn. I can learn some other new skill like playing guitar. And, yes, even though driving can be an enjoyable experience, driving can definitely involve stress. Have you ever driven in a metropolitan area like New York City? Driving there can be completely chaotic.
To a first approximation, if driverless cars reduce total miles driven by cars, they are good - otherwise they are bad.
Driving should be illegal.
How many times have pedestrians and cyclists been advised to look for eye contact before crossing? Where are the eyes of an autonomous car?
Think of a situation where you have to choose from either hitting an other car killing everyone inside it but saving you, or driving off the road killing you but saving everyone. Well, we all save ourselves if we can choose (timing, etc). But what if the other car has 5 passengers and you are alone?
The driverless car will be required to kill you, the driver. In future the car will know, and take away your control, and simply kill you.
When people realize this, and the legislation has to take a stance, there will be a major backlash against driverless cars. People are basically selfish.