Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bane | Hacker News Reader

One the problems with government run transportation R&D is that the responsible agencies are fundamentally not in the R&D business. DoT and subordinate agencies like the FAA are regulatory and risk management organizations (with some mandates in inspection, construction and telecommunications). They lack the expertise, structure and know-how to build effective Research and Development programs and to overcome their own institutional risk management culture. For example, the FAA has been trying to roll-out a new air traffic control system for decades and at a cost that regularly far overruns any estimates the Agency can put together.

The DoD, DoE and the Intelligence Agencies have dedicated R&D arms (DARPA, IARPA, ARPA-E, etc.) with long legacies of knowing how to to research and shepherd it into operational development states and/or commercialization. Even other parts of the civilian government has things like the NSF,

The closest the civilian world has for transportation is maybe NASA? But for self-driving cars, the DoT's R&D components are not well organized and seen very much as side-show "Administrations" and are generally new affairs. DOT's version of DARPA is called "RITA" and was formed only in 2005 by strapping together a handful of previous organizations inside of DoT and are focused mostly on, you guessed it, improving safety and studying statistics.

It's no wonder that most of the government research that's actually made progress in this area have all come from DARPA.

I think you're missing a few factors. Most critically, DARPA has some success because they have a customer (the DoD) with specific requirements and a nearly unlimited source of funding compared to any other government initiative. The Defense Department probably wastes more money each year on meandering, unfinishable snake-oil projects than has been spent on driverless car R&D by all entities in all of history.

But it's true that driverless car tech is unlikely to come out of direct government funding. Instead, that money should be going to fund quality education at all levels, and to build proven technologies that would solve many of the same problems the driverless-car pipe dream would only be an inferior version of--ie high speed rail links in the middle distance where it's a better form of transport than cars (driverless or not) and planes.

Driverless cars are directly coming out of DARPA funding ex: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge. Google for example can trace it’s program directly back to DARPA.

Companies are more willing to fund after the basic proof of physical possibility shows up. Vs the kind of this might be possible in 30 years projects DARPA gets off the ground.

PS: It’s often just as much about people getting experience working on these problems as it is any specific technology.

Driverless cars aside for a second, government grants are essential to R&D and commericialization. Having learned recently about Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grants, I can't believe I didn't know about it

Department of Transportation topics for 2018: https://www.sbir.gov/node/1413255

Even if the research isn't done by government itself, it's likely the result of government grants. VC usually step in and reap profits way later

Most of those grants require ridiculous amounts of paperwork, with projections and business plans. That basically forces you to lie and jump through hoops to get through the process.

There are plenty of companies that are experts at getting those funds, which is essentially part of their business model. But it can be a big distraction for a small firm where it would likely be better to find private funding sources.

I worked for such a firm. Basically almost nobody gets to a Phase III which is the commercialization stage. If anyone does get to that stage, they are not usually set up to make a commercial product and generally require some kind of licensing or partnership to make commercialization possibile. This is typically because these businesses are set up to satisfy the bureaucracy of the SBIR award process and not to actually produce a product (in most cases). In another case I worked at a VC funded company that had some government contracts to try to help self fund R&D activities. These activities proved to be orthogonal to our main product focus and became paperwork exercises. I had to fill in a time sheet for years where I put zero hours on it.

I’m thinking about getting into this space — any chance you could share a bit about the experience?

Yeah it's a huge problem the military has such a monopoly on this stuff, and civilian agencies are so cut out. I hope I live to see this reversed.

Tempting to claim that Silicon Valley’s methodology is the only way to come under budget.

Even if it runs afoul of basic ethics and safety concerns.

I'd argue that the apparent lack of ethics and safety concerns are what make Silicon Valley more effective in this arena. There's no upside for government agencies (or, more specifically, the bureaucrats that greenlight research proposals) to take on high-risk projects like these, and plenty of downside. SV-types have a ton of potential upside that they weigh against ethics and safety. Their calculus is different, and makes them far more aggressive in advancing their agenda. Imagine a government-sponsored version of Uber, for a moment. How fast would they have grown? Would they even have gotten off the ground or just folded at the first sign of resistance from current stakeholders (taxis and limos). Not to say that SV-types shouldn't be held accountable, and they're certainly capable of wasting money, but man do they get stuff done in a hurry (for better or worse ...)

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