Driverless Cars Tap the Brakes After Years of Hype
wsj.com
wsj.com
Link for the lazy: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/ne...
And that is exactly what I plan on doing for some time yet. Frankly, the bright nav screens, menus and other gunk prove quite distracting. I really hate most of them. A few can be dimmed, or turned off, but none seem to remember that state, always eager to display some warning or other.
Seems to me, if it always needs a warning, I really don't need it in the car.
I feel we are way over hype on self-driving vehicles. The tech is advancing nicely enough, but the problem scope still seems very large relative to what we've solved for.
In support, this article says "Tesla Chief Executive Elon Musk in 2016 promised to demonstrate a vehicle traveling in fully autonomous mode from Los Angeles to New York by the end of 2017."
Is it possible you don't remember the predictions because you weren't reading about autonomous driving a couple years ago? It seems like trends and popular obsessions come and go very quickly these days. If you blink, you can miss it, like the rise and fall of bitcoin.
However, I don't see why you point to people actually working on self-driving cars as if they would have been pessimists - why work on such things if they didn't believe it was feasible?
When self driving was first demonstrated to work, constraints were never highlighted. For example I did not see any discussion on the topics like black ice, needing a sufficiently accurate area map, proper road marking etc. in advance were never in new. Humans might struggle but can still drive in those conditions.
On the issue of driver assistance, I believe more of might give drives a sense of false safety and hence cause more accidents.
I remember a interview by Elon musk at a conference called CODE where he espoused that driverless cars are solved because all you need to do is get a car to stay in Lane and brake safely at low speeds. And everybody bought it.
Well, where is the cross country summon, coast to coast autonomous drive, driverless taxi networks. It astounds me that one can blatantly lie repeatedly and not be called out.
We are about on track on that timeline I'd say. As usual, the truth is a lot more boring than most people predicted. But WSJ gotta have something to write about I guess.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2015/01/31/tec...
https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/30/16720776/gm-cruise-self-...
"GM Hitting Bumps on $5 Billion Road to Driverless Cars by 2019" - 10/25/2018
https://www.insurancejournal.com/news/national/2018/10/25/50...
The hype has definitely been there, and on HN too. I can't find it now, but there was a great Twitter thread around New Year of someone calling in a bet they'd made with an SV figure about self driving Lyfts by 2019.
The simple test for autonomous vehicles is “can they drive in Indian traffic.”
We are very likely, on track for a correction in the form of “ we never meant level 5 autonomy.” We will see some form of assisted driving, and nothing beyond.
It’s concerning that people aren’t thinking of attackers (or the govt) taking over your car first on HN.
This is the happy start of AI, Just like the happy start of the web.
Those were the days before the RIAA, before phishing, five eyes, and the unending loss of innocence that it has been since then.
Yup.
I am quite concerned at how capable newer cars are, sans an equal level of security and safety consideration applied.
There are going to be some ugly things happen, then we will see a correction.
For now? No way I plan on owning anything networked, drive by wire.
And so many things are coming long before we get great self-driving vehicles. In fact, I think they will be requirements to ease the transition to them, due to the reduced complexity when humans are not part of the equation.
"We have geofenced your car, due to erratic, incompatible, [insert irritating justification here], driving patterns."
"Your car has been speed limited for your safety..."
Yeah. Gonna be fun.
Do you know how many people die to drunk driving?
Rash driving?
Accidents in general?
Imagine if we could stop all that? Those millions of lives all over the world, saved.
Who could stand against such a moral argument and defend the right for people to act rashly while piloting tonnes of moving metal every day?
Driverless cars can’t just respond as well as a human would have - they have to be better.
They have to “know” the black ice was there. Or the pothole was there. Or the construction was there. And then they have to respond “reasonably”, which is tough because computers are fundamentally “reasonless” machines at the moment.
If our expectations were driving during the day on a few defined streets in nice weather, perhaps going a bit slower and with the understanding that things may get a little jerky, I think we would be ok.
In other words...we need to give self-driving cars permission to be like we once were: not amazing at driving.
We need to give the cars a learners permit.
Unlike with humans, the learning is transferable with driverless cars.
Today's self driving cars are already better than some drivers. You don't have to look farther than r/IdiotsInCars. I would say that if self driving cars are better than 50% of the population, that would be good enough. Removing most of the accident prone individuals would be greatly beneficial already.
Humans aren’t that good at driving either and most humans won’t know what to do with black ice either at first. I certainly didn’t, my driving school didn’t even talk about winter driving either. I had to learn on my own and it wasn’t “great”. Nothing like spinning out on ice to know never to do that again.
I’d trust robots right now more than drunk or high drivers though.
Tesla has a massive fleet gathering data on every mile driven by humans and they are using that data to build their neural networks. The AI is getting better every second.
I do think it will happen someday but this is an insanely complex problem with enormous danger and risk. I am most impressed with the AI hucksters who convinced investors that the tech was close and then commanded 7 figure salaries to work on it. An impressive feat!
Once the latter become day-to-day reality on highways, I'll become cautiously optimistic about autonomous cars in cities.
I think we'll need some extremely standardized "pre-last-mile" highway exits/transfer points across the whole country to have the beginnings of a new solution. And I doubt the Teamsters will be onboard with that.
But what if that's the only mile driven by a human? Trucks drive autonomously on highways in good conditions, then a human takes over for the last mile?
In fact I never want a driverless 80,000lb 18 wheeler anywhere near me when I'm driving. A 5000lb driverless car is scary enough.
The fact is absolutely difficult to comprehend, when Waymo has allegely done a huge amount of simulation.
As it's exactly what they are planning to roll out in the short to medium term.
That sounds off to me, because my understanding is that the computer is a small portion of the cost and the mass of the self-driving car. If you could solve the problem by just filling up the back seats with computers, someone would have prototyped it, and probably even brought it to market as a way to drive large vehicles.
(I mean, unless you were on some non-parallelizable process, but my understanding is that most image processing tasks are massively parallel.)
0 - http://atri-online.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/ATRI-Opera...
I live in silicon valley, and the traffic isn't SF or LA bad yet, but it's pretty bad, and it's also clear that the voters around here aren't prepared to vote in usefu public transit; (one could make the argument that VTA is proof that voters are prepared to pay for public transit but aren't willing to allow useful public transit)
The upshot is that most people outside of NYC don't think automotive transportation is broken. Most people prefer automotive transportation. I personally am with you; driving when you could be on transit is nuts, but I'm clearly in the minority.
No, this looks like SV companies drinking their own coolaid and ignoring actual world problems they can’t get rich off of.
It's that the car is tied to you.
Everywhere you go, it needs a place to stay while you're doing anything outside your car. Parking spots average $5,000 per surface space, $20,000 per space in an above-ground parking structure, and $32,0000 underground. Every moment your car sits in one, it depreciates without performing useful work.
My point of view would be that Americans are spending on average about an hour every day driving. That's an hour that could very well be spent doing any number of more interesting and/or productive tasks. How is that not a high priority problem?
Rides are often too short to context switch into doing anything useful.
Even then there are all sorts of situations today where people are being transported in a car not requiring focus -- but aren't effectively recovering this time:
* Riding in a Lyft: I suppose in practice someone could whip out a laptop, but you rarely see it happen. Rides too short, induces carsickness, etc.
* Riding in a vehicle that is L2 autonomous. While not legal or particularly safe, in practice, someone driving an Autopiloting Tesla can read and respond to emails. (i.e. similar situation as being in a Lyft)
People on public transit usually use their newspaper / book / phone. Sometimes they miss their stop because they are too involved doing that. Have you used SF<->Bay transit on Google buses or something like that? From my experience it's pretty comfortable and productive to use laptops during ride to check tons of morning emails and it saves a lot of on-campus time.
> where people are being transported in a car not requiring focus -- but aren't effectively recovering this time:
Your examples require some kind of attention to driver or focus on road situation:
> Riding in a Lyft: I suppose in practice someone could whip out a laptop, but you rarely see it happen.
Riding alone vs riding with human driver differs a lot, especially for introvert people (e.g. talking in company of friends is much more comfortable then talking in company of strangers). It's hard to ignore presence of other human during ride.
> Riding in a vehicle that is L2 autonomous. While not legal or particularly safe, in practice, someone driving an Autopiloting Tesla can read and respond to emails. (i.e. similar situation as being in a Lyft)
You have to use your peripheral vision to control situation on the road. You can't fully concentrate on your work and be productive.
I see the idea thrown around a lot that self-driving cars will make us all use taxis because, absent human drivers, the taxis will be far cheaper than owning a car -- but I have yet to see strong analysis on this claim. There's lots of issues here:
* inconvenience: Unless the network is extremely dense, this means waiting for a taxi vs. driving myself. Denser networks, however, all things equal, mean lower utilization.
* storage: All sorts of people need to store things in their car. Contractors with tools, parents of toddlers with car seats, etc. Taxis prove to be too inconvenient, leading this population to prefer owning (hurting network density)
* traffic patterns: Commute patterns are heavily one-way, meaning in practice, after dropping someone off, the car will need to return without a person. Say you have a core commute time of 2.5 hours and take people on 30 minute journeys; you've managed to turn 3 cars into 1 [1], but at the cost of increasing miles by 60%. It's somewhat questionable if such a conversion has positive ROI.
* existing contrary evidence: You see plenty of private car ownership in areas with cheap labor (Chinese cities come to mind). Even cheap taxis aren't sufficiently solving transit needs.
[1] Yes, you could also pick up multiple people.. but now you introduce inconvenience again!
We really are on the cusp of L2 highway autonomy, and will get there in 2020 as originally envisioned. This WSJ article is insufficiently researched.
My car’s utilization rate is about 8%. The remaining 92% of the time it’s sitting idle and since I work in a metropolitan area I even get to pay $190 per month to have it sit idle in a parking garage while I work.
My car is an enormous expense. It’s my second largest expense outside of my house. And it sits idle 92% of the time. I pay $900 per year to insure it, I pay to register it, get it inspected, pay for maintenance, depreciation, etc.
Autonomous cars run by service companies like Lyft and Uber will dramatically reduce costs for anyone driving their own cae today. Eventually overall car utilization will flip from 8% utilization to something like 90% utilization making transportation drastically more affordable.
And like you said, you get to work (or sleep or FaceTime with your kids) on your commute.
There's also efficiency gains to be had since computers don't need sleep, could have reduced insurance premiums, etc.
I also expect that with lighter vehicles, the cost of labor is an even higher percentage of total costs.
Driverless cars are IMHO a classic example of technology looking for a problem to solve