Autonomous vehicles are just around the corner
economist.com
economist.com
The initial launches of autonomous taxi services will be underwhelming - relative slow, sometimes frightening (there will be accidents for sure), and with limited deployment areas in limited weather. The novelty will wear off quickly, and then the real work is going to start.
There are basically going to be two ways to survive it - be part of a larger organization that can shoulder a long-term R&D burden to go from 'toy' to 'real infrastructure'. I can see Cruise and Waymo making it that way, unless GM gets cold feet.
The other survivors will be either super lean like Voyage, who went straight to revenue generating niches like retirement communities and rely on being downstream of the technical innovation being done elsewhere (no in-house vehicle or sensor development to cut down R&D costs and move quickly).
Or else they'll be in niches like logistics (e.g. Peloton, Nuro) where the parameters of the game are different, and the structure is more B2B than B2C.
One other play is the autonomy-tech licensing structure like Aurora is trying, but that's a hard sell, especially since they're dealing with German automakers who (from first hand experience in this domain in particular) are clueless about autonomy.
This is an incredibly exciting, risky time to be a part of this new, emerging industry. It feels in many ways like the very very early P.C era, where everything is very much still in play. I'm glad I made the career shift to get there.
You made me curious, care the elaborate?
There is a vast pyramid of Tier-1 and Tier-2 suppliers that feed into that logistics chain. A lot of those suppliers are promising automakers that they can deliver either components that feed into autonomy, or else autonomy in full. This fragments the effort across literally hundreds of small teams, many of whom have little to no expertise at all in the necessary disciplines.
Additionally, every German automaker also has its own in-house autonomy team, and the relationships between in-house, contracting, and supplier teams is chaotic. Many managers see autonomy as another way to build a small empire and make a name for themselves, and it just results in a huge organizational snarl.
The fact that this is an area no one knows how to execute on yet since it's brand new, coupled with these gross inefficiencies, will mean autonomy efforts from the automakers will be stillborn. They will eventually learn from it though, acquire the right teams, and get on with putting it into their cars just as they're doing with EV.
There's so many hurdles before it becomes something that is commonplace or accepted, that really it's decades around the corner.
The technical hurdles to get to level 4 and 5 are just the start. Once you get past that, there's going to be a whole slew of legal and public opinion challenges.
The first time an autonomous vehicle is involved in an accident that kills a few kids, you'll have a Challenger level probe to figure out what happened and probably a whole revamp of safety measures.
Don't count your chickens yet.
Although I have serious reservations about the safety of autonomous vehicles, or at least our ability to predict it (see earlier comment referencing a RAND corp study of the subject) I'm afraid that running over kids with an auto-car is not going to be such big news as it perhaps should be.
For instance- can you remember the first time in history when an automobile ran over a child, or even several children at once? Rhetorical question- you most likely can't. Because it was never such a big issue to go down in history as the "Minors Motor Massacre" or whatever. And there most likely was no Challenger-level probe into the whys and wheretofores of that first time, either.
Besides, remember that, for many, many decades people drove around in cars that had no provision for driver safety. For instance, seat belts were first adopted by big car manufacturers in the early '50s and made compulsory by law for the first time in the '70s. It's clear that most of the world cares a lot more about fast, efficient transport than about safe transport.
Taking on a great project that hasn't been attempted before presents great challenges along the way that couldn't be anticipated.
These forecasters mean well but have no idea.
Gearheads will refuse to let go of their cars. They love driving and maintaining their vehicle. They'll argue that no robot can drive better than they can, no matter how wrong they are.
Imagine a world where police no longer pull you over for speeding, running red lights, or other traffic infractions. The legal fight will be huge, as those easy revenue sources suddenly disappear.
There are hundreds of more fights and scenarios like this we haven't even begun to imagine, that will tie up progress in the courts for decades.
We're going to need a concentrated force focusing on this tech as the next thing we are going to do, and able to get out in front of these issues. Right now, I see autonomous driving as a thing that a few groups are seriously working on, while everyone else takes a passive stance, or dips their toes into the idea as a passing fancy and not a serious milestone to tackle. We need to move it past a novel toy, and in to a serious undertaking that we all need to be vested in shaping the future of.
Because in my opinion, the automobile is the most efficient and prolific human killing machine we have ever invented. I feel autonomous driving is a step toward fixing that issue.
That's an interesting point I hadn't heard before. Are there stats for what kind of revenue various little cities, counties, etc, in the US are generating with speed traps, red light cameras, and similar tactics? Those tactics obviously lose to self driving cars.
Exactly.
Because why would they? Why would we even need speed limits, if the computer it in control and proven safe at X speed, because it has a Y reaction time vs a human's Z reaction time.
If people see a vehicle has stopped for them to cross, they oftenbassume it's safe for them to cross. Unfortunately they are then less attentive to see if other lanes are following suit.
Pedestrians are constantly being hit in my "friendly" town where the culture has people stop for pedestrians even if the vehicle has right of way. But then the stopped vehicle blocks the view of another car in a neighboring lane, which keeps on coming.
In fact, if you have an autonomous vehicle with the wrong reactions and very short reaction times, it will pose a much greater risk to agents with slower but safer reactions (like humans, or just safer auto-cars) who won't be able to get out of its way fast enough.
There are a few hamlets out west where the local sheriff and justice-of-peace got into the business of modern highway robbery, extracting fines from unsuspecting travelers. For other cities, fines aren’t nearly as significant as people love to think.
Case in point: fines make up $140 million of LA’s $9 billion budget. That’s 1.5%.
That’s not even factoring all the positive changes, financially and otherwise, cities will see from autonomy: parking can happen off-site, freeing up two lanes on a typical street for pedestrians, bikes, or public transport. Smart algorithms can make far more efficient use of existing infrastructure, reducing the need for construction and maintenance. Fewer accidents means less need for emergency response...
Like..."Palmer wrote 1,080 speeding and warning tickets last month alone, according to city administrator Doug Young. The city has just 2,023 residents". (https://www.theblaze.com/news/2015/06/04/in-a-few-small-texa...)
In that world, I can also imagine people modding their autonomous cars in ways which would still violate traffic laws.
Driving on the public roads has long since ceased to be much fun. Traffic density is ever-increasing. The average drivers' skill level has deteriorated noticeably and their distraction level has increased such that 60% of them might as well be actively trying to kill you. Meanwhile the guys with the blue lights have much denser coverage.
Occasionally, far from the cities, I manage to find a brief stretch of fun, but they are ever more scarce. I've also given up my road bike and stick to mountain biking. And my observations aren't unique among those I know.
At this point, I'd much rather just be able to hop in my car and read as it gets me to my destination. Save the fun driving for the racetracks or off-road.
And yes, the loss of revenue to the Police Depts who spend their time catching the easy to measure infractions instead of the ones who actually create hazards will be delicious.
Eventually enough people will figure out and/or admit that some of driving a vehicle on current public streets with current traffic occasionally but too often requires real, actual, full, no compromise, human intelligence complete with ability to read, hear and understand, and speak and be heard, to comprehend situations and plan and execute solutions. That's essentially full AI, no compromises, parlor tricks, claimed grand successes in narrow contexts, driving on roadways defined by electronics, etc.
It's possible the convenience and cost savings of autonomous transport would be great enough that society would be willing to change its relationship with roads.
Smart roads are not going to happen.
> This special report will assume that the technological hurdles to full autonomy can be overcome. It will consider the implications of autonomous vehicles (AVs) for personal mobility, car ownership and carmaking, but will also look at the wider economic, social and cultural knock-on effects. How will everyday activities be transformed? How could AVs reshape cities? And what lessons does the rise of the car in the 20th century hold for driverless vehicles in the 21st?
I would love to bet in favor of the article.
I will bet against the article. You will not be able to buy a L4 self driving car in the next 5 years, at minimum.
But the first step to getting good at something is sucking at it.
Bet money, or bet life and limb?
Besides the fact that it's obvious how these nice, tidy, exact-multiple-of-ten values are unlikely to be accurate, that last 90% in particular was totally pulled out of thin air and without any experimental, theoretical, or other justification whatsoever.
That's according to a study on the safety of self-driving cars, by the RAND corporation, Driving to Safety; How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability:
https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/research_reports/...
Quoting from that (bullet points, sidebar on first page):
Autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds
of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions
of miles to demonstrate their reliability in terms of
fatalities and injuries.
Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing
fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years
to drive these miles—an impossible proposition if the
aim is to demonstrate their performance prior to releasing
them on the roads for consumer use.
Therefore, at least for fatalities and injuries, test-driving
alone cannot provide sufficient evidence for demonstrating
autonomous vehicle safety
My thinking is this is two-pronged. It won't make sense to make the infrastructure investment until there are sufficient proof points that this is 1.) something people want and 2.) something that's economically viable.
It's likely that the early geofenced version of passenger autonomy will demonstrate what further infrastructure is needed and how much it would cost.
One interesting side point; dedicated lanes for autonomous traffic are already being proposed on some roadways, particularly interstates in the U.S and highways in Europe. The economic benefits from autonomous logistics (e.g. trucking) are more readily capturable, so the infrastructure investment might make more sense there up front.
Good autonomous vehicles don’t work primarily by sensing and detecting the roadway, they work by sensing the environment and having a complete, detailed 3D map of drivable areas, matching their environment to the map as they go along. This only requires annotation of the terrain, not clear road markings or anything like that.
The 3D detail of the environment is the smart roadway. With always-on GPS and an incredibly detailed map of the environment stored on a honking hard drive in the trunk, there’s never a question where you are in the world.
In fact, now that I think about it, this makes reduced infrastructure possible, since you don’t even need things like signs or streetlights in an all-autonomous world, and can even get by with narrower lanes.
There is no such thing as a _complete, detailed 3D map of driveable areas_. Most current efforts rely heavily on high resolution, large scale, semantically labeled maps, but on any given stretch of road this is only a first approximation of the environment. Live sensors embedded in infrastructure that could pass along real-time information and updates, particularly from directions our on-board sensors can't capture, would be very useful indeed.
And yes, road markings are part of the semantics we use.
Imagine knowing that if your child runs in the road, the cars will stop? Safety is a great feeling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...