Ford CEO says the company 'overestimated' self-driving cars

Voyage.auto [2] claims to be deploying such cars now. Or rather, their web site contains announcements from late 2018 that they were doing so. Later information seems to be lacking. It's a basically good idea, but they claim an on-site staff of 5 for three cars, so they are nowhere near this making financial sense.

A real problem with self-driving cars is the false-alarm rate for emergency braking. If you're conservative about crash prevention, every once in a while the vehicle is going to detect something it doesn't identify as safe and will brake hard. That's why Uber turned off automatic braking in their cars - "to reduce potential for erratic behavior."[3] False-alarm braking, or even strong braking conservative by human standards, limits customer acceptance.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2015/05/googles-quirky-self-dri...

[2] https://voyage.auto/

[2] https://www.latimes.com/business/autos/la-fi-uber-arizona-nt...

That depends on the rate of system failure. I used an early form of autopilot and you quickly started to pay attention to where the system would fail. It was like cruse control where you look for situations where you can turn it on but never stop paying attention.

At the other end with really safe systems they are going to default to safer than a human driver. So, there might be a significantly deadlier middle ground, but no company has deployed anything like that yet.

The sensation would be like driving one of those tracked cars at an amusement park. Try and slam the wheel hard to the right to steer into a guard rail? Computer would physically block it from turning past the point that you would leave your own lane.

This system would:

  * force human drivers to drive the car 100% of the time
  * allow real world testing and enhancement of self driving capabilities (data gathering, model backtesting, etc.)
  * be strictly better than both fully automated and existing non-automated systems

What costs Tesla money is building great big battery factories and car factories, meanwhile the the software engineers working on self-driving are a relative drop in the bucket but justify probably 80% of the market cap.

I'm also a daily user of public transport in a major world city, however, and whilst buses and trains work they also have the fundamental problems highlighted above that are in my view insurmountable, and which (self driving) cars solve. So I'm in a dilemma over whether I think they'd be an improvement, but I ultimately believe they would be.

But yes, absolutely pollution and space saving would have to be addressed. I'm optimistic they could be:

Pollution: hopefully solvable with electric. Yes, of course, there are efficiency gains that trains/buses would perhaps always have (having to move many small things rather than one big thing carrying the same number of people) but I can see electric reducing the absolute level of pollution from cars to a point where it basically doesn't matter. Maybe overly optimistic, but I hope that'll happen.

Space: Driverless cars, particularly electric driverless cars, can be much smaller and can drive much closer together. Different cities have different challenges, but I don't see why we couldn't get to a situation where roads might effectively have capacity for 2x vehicles across and 2-3x vehicles along if the vehicles can be coordinated to drive closer together and are physically smaller (remember that on-demand unlocks certain design constraints - you don't have to provision for peak - if the average number of passengers is 1.5, then most cars on the road could be ultra small 2 seaters). Again lots of conjecture and optimism here, and I am probably assuming that 'manual' cars would eventually disappear or be banned at least from cities too, but nonetheless I think there is hope here.

To the extend low cost ride sharing is a short term unicorn phenomena, that will again become true, although self-contained electric buses might change that a bit. Maybe someday self-driving cars will change this, but that's not in the predictable, foreseeable future.

I've been on double-length public buses where I was the only passenger for most of the journey. And many times where there were only 1 or 2 other people. This is necessary e.g. at night where a bus only runs every 30 minutes, there has to be a bus, but there just aren't that many people.

Obviously in this case individual cars would pollute much less, and even take up less space.

Any realistic solution for a city is going to combine self-driving cars for the long tail of origins/destinations and times, with public transit for the busiest routes at the busiest times, including links between the two.

I'd love to be able to take a self-driving car from a house in Queens directly to the subway, the subway to Brooklyn, and then another self-driving car to my final destination that's 20 blocks away from the subway.

Most buses are rated for "X Standing, Y Seated" passengers.

you need bus fares to cost less than car travel or people'd just drive everywhere and car ownership/congestion comes with it's own set of issues.

it's annoying but having enough capacity to handle peak hours would also see lot more buses parked off hours, lot more technicians doing maintenance.

given the seated:standing capacity on current models, you'd end up with twice to thrice the buses to seat everyone.

now this wouldn't immediately mean to have triple the fares, but it'd be a significant factor and limit/reduce total bus usage, and there's no indication the consequences for society would actually be net positive compared to standing.

Definitely not ideal but we can't optimize just for one thing. Putting more busses on demand has really hard scaling problems because of these busses don't appear and disappear like a virtual machine, it needs to be stored somewhere and delivered to the location where that bus is needed. Then you have load-unload problems. This is also why cars that are just like the cars of today but electrical and automatical won't scale too.

You can't really divorce the design of the inhabited areas and the transport systems. This is also probably the reason why the Americans seem so hostile towards public transport. In Europe and even in Asia public transport works fine and the most annoying thing about cars is not that you have to drive them but you have to put them somewhere when you reach your destination.

That's unrealistic, because there are such huge peaks in traffic. You'd need a large number of extra bus drivers only from 7:30 to 8:30 and from 17:00 to 18:00 each day.

Who would want such a job?

it depends on your definition of confort.

Ownership of time ressources for mental cognitive activity > sitting.

So in this case, inside a bus with a driver is a better option that consuming my mental cognitive activity for driving. From my POV, of course

Well, when I was working in the City and living in south London I used to take the DLR (which is a self driving train btw) and walk for 10min.

I can confirm that there were drivers on the streets as well as cyclist, pedestrians, bus riders, tube riders and so on.

All of those at their limits at rush hour. Later the city banned private vehicles from certain locations at rush hour, so you can do such changes to favour one transportation method over the othet but it's far from solving it. It's a very hard problem, very unlikely to be solved without redesigning the city.

Some other comments mentioned classism, and anti-social passengers, but a less emotionally charged way of framing it is just in terms of price discrimination.

Busses and subways have no "first class" or "business class" section. The passengers who would pay double or triple are doing so in their car payments, insurance, and gasoline, and riding in relative comfort, and the people left riding the bus are mostly those who aren't willing to pay more.

It's going to be difficult to get people to put their car payments toward better bussing, while still keeping it accessible to those who want to pay less.

The fact that many people don't indicates there are other factors at play.

I bet there's a diminishing return to this. The more buses you add at rush hour the more traffic you cause and thus slow things down reducing capacity. In heavy traffic buses tend to clump together as they get stuck behind one another due to the nature of smaller vehicles around them.

Also, what would be an acceptable cost increase to pay for this additional capacity? You'd have to balance the theoretical increase in ridership against the decrease from raising prices. Keep in mind that public transport is usually heavily subsidized, in the US its on average 50%.

This has already happened with manufacturer defects. It's just more of the same. As long as a clear liability boundary can be established in principle, there's no problem.

One can learn to drive defensively, and be able to spot the said dipshit in advance, decreasing the likelihood of collision.

Yes, not in all cases, but there's a bell curve. As humans, we can read other humans.

Robots aren't inherently bad either. I love my Roomba precisely because if it fails, it fails predictably. I can and do make my apartment Roomba-friendly.

But the self-driving deep learning-driven cars don't have this feature. They fail unpredictabily, as in your example. We don't have an understanding of what really drives the decision-making there. And we keep discovering failure modes as they manifest.

One day, the car might think the river is a road. Another, it will not recognize a road block as such. But only if it's a Tuesday. Or something. We really don't know.

So I don't think we'll get acclimated to that. Unpredictable failure is a reasonable thing to be afraid of.

A Waymo is basically just following a virtual track on an extremely detailed LIDAR map of the area, obsessively watching for pedestrians and following the rules of the road the best it can. It will never think a river is a road.

Not to say that there aren't a million little things to be concerned about with this approach, or that there aren't major things to overcome (like heavy snow on the ground making your LIDAR map useless). But I think we'll get there, and in many places soon. There's nothing that says this tech has to exist everywhere out the gate.

I think it's more because there's someone to yell at - someone to blame.

Think of it like a taxi driver with a passenger; people ride in these all the time, or uber, or lyft - and have no problems doing so. Even though they aren't in control, and they have no idea about the driver's driving capability. They assume the driver is an average to better driver, when that may not be the case at all. So what happens when an accident occurs?

Well - if the passenger is still alive, and believes it to be their driver's fault, they can yell at their driver. If they believe it's the other driver's fault, they can yell at them...and so forth.

But you put a robot in place of any driver - then who can you yell at when an accident occurs? Nobody. You can yell all you want, you can even blame the corporation that made the car/robot - but you are still yelling at a machine. It won't change anything. It won't feel bad. It probably won't even make you feel better, because it won't restore your agency in the situation.

That's my guess anyhow - pulled straight from my nether regions, with nothing to back it up. I wonder if there have been any studies on this? Are there any data on what happens in other "self-driving" incidents; like perhaps completely automated trains with no humans other than passengers on-board? Do such things even exist?

Or do companies already know this - and put a human "in charge" to take the blame and heat for when an accident happens (maybe they also provide an e-stop button for the human to press - whether it's actually connected to anything or not - but it's logged as to whether it was pressed, just to help "assign blame" later)...?

While I have no proof or anything to back this assertion or theory up, it seems like it would match human nature. When things go wrong, humans want to blame somebody - some actual, sentient being. I'm sure there's a psychological term for this need and the action; I don't know what that term is, but I'm almost certain it's been studied.

Essentially one of two things would have to be done to overcome this: Either the machine would have to become perfect at driving and avoiding accidents (even to the point of avoiding things of natural random consequence, such as rocks falling on the road, or something of that nature) - or it will have to become more sentient, and ideally emotive; that is a GAI with human traits.

The former is likely impossible - randomness will always get ya; even trains have what should be "avoidable" accidents.

The latter - well, if it's achievable; that is, if we can make such a GAI, etc - it will likely also suffer the same problems humans do, most notably that we are failable and we make mistakes.

...but at least then we can blame them on something, right?

What insurers are really scared of is when your 16yo kid and four of his/her friends drunkenly go off a cliff on their way to prom. That's hard to assess the risk of and it costs them big bucks. These kinds of oddball high dollar edge case accidents are exactly the kind that self driving cars seem to be getting into. A Tesla killing someone by driving into a barrier or semi truck sends chills down the insurer's spine because it's only a little bit of bad luck (from the insurer's point of view) away from a not so dead customer that's maxes out their collision and medical coverage.

If I were an insurer I would not be offering any automation discounts until we have more data.

But I'd they are safer than the average driver, you gain from their widespread adoption even if they aren't safer than you. Because you don't have the choice of replacing other drivers with you...

Who claimed that driving is among those "certain tasks"? No, in the near future computers will at best be marginally better than human drivers. Computers are better at decision latency. But that merely compensates for some of their current shortcomings.

And that will be sufficient to save thousands of lives every year. Do you not like preventing deaths?

Delaying "marginally better" for "orders of magnitude better" means delaying the deployment of life-saving measures.

Second, what you call "freedom", is called a "chore" by a good chunk of the population. I can't wait to not touch another steering wheel ever.

What they're saying (and I agree) is that human nature means people won't be willing to get into a car that's 'just a little better than average.' There's a couple reasons I think that will be true: 1) people generally think they're better than they are at driving 2) moving from people to autopilot moves the responsibility from generic 'bad drivers' causing accidents to a single system. Going from a diffuse responsibility to a more concentrated liability on the part of the manufacturer will probably mean they'll be blamed much more for the failures of their cars.

What?? Safety is a great side dish, not the main course. The point is to free up hundreds of millions of man-hours spent daily focusing on roads.

But it's the devil we know, It's fine that we average 3,287 fatalities a day[0].

We also have more empty homes than homeless, more food than starving people, crippling homelessness and 1:4 malnourished children in the US alone. I expect nothing from humanity yet I am still disappointed.

[0]https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/

I think if it is an order of magnitude safer that would override many of those emotional concerns. Insurance companies are decent at thinking rationally about problems. People might have emotional concerns, but I think a halved auto insurance bill would be enough to sway a critical majority of people.

Are you sure?

You do understand that self-driving vehicles inherently rely upon machine learning systems (and I am not talking simple regression here), which are trained and ultimately make decisions by means that we still don't fully understand?

What I'm trying to get it here is that, barring faulty sensors or mechanical systems, any decision that the control system of a self-driving vehicle makes is most likely arrived at via the inner workings of one or more machine learning systems (likely deep learning neural networks of some nature, but there are other systems being experimented with as well).

They are not a huge series of if-then-else statements or anything of that nature; such algorithmic approaches have been tried in the past and dismissed as unworkable due to the sheer complexity that is inherent in driving.

Honestly, what drove the field forward was mainly work done by CMU, mainly ALVINN; but there was interplay between CMU, Hans Moravec, Stanford (the Cart, among others), Thrun, and others. It has a very long, convoluted, but detailed and rich history (I encourage anyone who's interested in the fields of robotics, ai/ml, and/or self-driving vehicles to read up on it - it's very fascinating). ALVINN ultimately gave the hint toward using neural networks and deep-learning, but the tech couldn't make the leap forward until the convergence of a number of technologies.

I find it interesting that the apparent objective is to make driving safer, but apparently the powers that be have decided that it is easier to make cars that drive themselves than to convince people not to drive while drunk.

The census don’t, generally speaking, tend to believe statistics and facts. And the media will always spin a bad situation to boost their click through rates.

So, even though self driving cars may be 100% less prone to accidents (this is just an example), media headlines like “driver killed instantly when self driving car automatically steered into a wall without warning,” will cause the majority to push back and say they’re unsafe.

Right now it's around 10%, but it's different for different regions.

We seem to be able to handle people dying one at a time, but once a whole town is in danger, even if this is something that happens once a generation (this is the hard part to understand), it crosses that threshold of "this isn't worth it".

That said, if self driving car deaths get reported as much as traditional car deaths (that is to say, not very often), perhaps people will think they are just as safe as driving themselves.

Insurers like boring, happens at a consistent rate, human error accidents so long as their slice of the population is not making them at an appreciably different rate than the competitors' slices.

Insurers really don't like hard to predict accidents that cause people to max out their collision and medical (which is exactly what would have happened in the Tesla cases had the customer not died) which is exactly the kinds of accidents self driving cars seem to be having.

The question of liability is always tough to resolve. Is Boeing responsible for the 737 MAX deaths because they wrote the faulty software? Is the airline responsible for poor training or buying the version without the "disagree" light? Or is the FAA liable for their poor oversight of the whole program? Arguments can be made for all three.

In light of that, the money invested in self-driving cars is pretty small.

I'm not sure I want to live in a future where my Tesla is a mobile sensor platform for someone else's benefit besides myself and Tesla, although I can see the allure of negating the need for LEO patrols on road infrastructure once a critical mass of sensor platform vehicles is reached in an area. This would require a herculean amount of governance and transparency to be okay with me, and I would expect more sanity in road legislation (higher reasonable top speeds, for example) as well.

Following any closer then 2 seconds of traveling distance on a clear, dry day, 3 seconds at night, or in the rain, 4 seconds on a rainy night should be considered reckless driving.

I'd assume the Tesla to have a lot better (quicker) reaction skills than you and you should probably just trust it (in this particular scenario) and relax, even though the distance might _feel_ too short.

The solution is to remove dangerous drivers from having control of 2-ton deathtraps, not contributing to the same behavior that is causing the problem.

Opportunistic, unsafe behavior is exactly the reason we need autonomous vehicles, rather than human-controlled vehicles.

There's a reason it's called a safe following distance. Anything closer and you cannot stop in time. Even temporarily. Especially when autonomous cars in front of you may be suddenly braking as well.

Or detect their preferred following distance for any given speed when the system isn't running and copy that.

I don't remember if any studies were cited, but the "elevators vs self-driving cars" was studied in the Planet Money podcast: https://www.npr.org/2015/07/31/427990392/remembering-when-dr...

Actually the government DID try to do this. The U.S. DOT had an entire decades long program researching the following:

1) Costs and plans for updating roads with sensors

2) Upgrading traffic boxes (the things that control traffic lights and such) with a module to communicate back and forth with surround cars

2) Forcing manufacturers to install a module in all cars that would allow them to communicate with surrounding cars + road sensors + traffic boxes.

The problem was the amount of push back the government got from car companies was really absurd. And of course Republican funding games. Republicans love their private companies so they basically sapped the program's funds.

It was able to pick up momentum again from around 2012 onward though:

* https://www.its.dot.gov/about/federal_its_program.htm

* https://www.its.dot.gov/research_areas/automation.htm

* A practical example of its research: https://www.its.dot.gov/pilots/florida_agencies.htm

Um, a human sucks in this case, too.

There is a reason we put reflectors on the lane markers and rumble cuts in the road.

for some values of plenty < ε. As cyclist I can tell you that human drivers often don't even use their turn signals at intersections where it is important for me to know where they're going. And it's not like I'm sneaking up on them, it's when they're facing me at the other side of the intersection.

FWIW I know of at least one company that's developing their autonomous vehicles with a remote piloting feature. In the event that the vehicle runs into a situation it cannot handle control is passed to human operators in cubicles that take over control of the vehicle on the spot and release control only after clearing the obstacle and the on-board autonomy gives the green light. They also had ambitions to record what the human operator did and program that into other vehicles into the fleet on the fly as they approach the obstacle. It sounded very ambitious (and data hungry) to me, but is probably the only way to fully remove the controls from the vehicle cabin in the foreseeable future.

It has few enough that you can route around them and still get where you're going.

This is one of the things that self-driving cars WILL do better--and fairly quickly.

Having a sensor system that isn't blinded by aerosolized water will be a huge benefit to driving.

I like Musk's proposal for mostly autonomous tunnel driving because it actually seems much more feasible than handling every edge case known to man.

Not reasonable. You'd be parking the car at least half a mile from where I live because it's full of these streets. Usually they're one car at a time because cars are parked on both sides of the street causing the streets to become just big enough for one car to get through.

For reference, I live in San Carlos (Bay Area). I've encountered this same issue in many other parts of the USA too. It's not uncommon at all.

I think we'll need general artificial intelligence to handle that.

Ah yes, so simple.

Yes, but 80% of the population lives in urban areas, so would be better served by improved public transit. That doesn't mean anyone is taking your personal car away if that's the best way to get around in a low population density area.

Short of arguing for FULL COMMUNISM NOW, where society would also be democratically telling businesses exactly what to do, these two things are not meaningfully connected. If the people decided to take public transport more seriously, we could do so at any time.

Also good luck carrying your children on your bike.

Now the cost is an issue - in the UK driving is almost invariably cheaper than taking the train, even when going solo. When taking any passengers with you driving will win every single time, sometimes it's even worth renting a car for the journey and it will still be cheaper than the train.

Depending on the route, I could see those numbers being reversed in the UK and Europe; intercity trains are fast but pricey, even allowing for the much higher fossil fuel taxes.

Commuter trains are a similar story; while it's expensive and unpleasant to commute into central London by train, doing it by car will be even slower, incur the congestion charge, and there's nowhere to park.

Never mind https://www.iride.io/

I'm talking about social in terms of reading the intentions of other drivers (eg joining a busy motorway or deciding who goes first on a spot island when all lanes have stopped and waited for the other) and other hazards (eg pedestrians crossing the road without looking properly because they're distracted with young kids, chatting to friends, or tapping on their phone)

As a driver you developer an intuition for how other drivers would react in different situations. Sometimes that's based on the speed of a vehicle, the angle of the car or driving style (eg are they bumper to bumper with the car in front?). Sometimes it's based on profiling/prejudice about people who drive certain brands of cars (eg BMW owners do tend to be pushier drivers than perhaps someone in a Fiat 500 - obviously this isn't always the case but you might still be more cautious if you see someone approach a busy junction in a powerful car).

Another thing experienced drivers might react to is if they see a series of brief break lights ahead at roughly the same point but cars aren't swerving around an obstruction then that might suggest there's a speed trap.

There's even been times when I've been on a motorway and a car has suddenly swerved in front of me however I was already hovering over the break just in case as I was expecting it through a series of subtle clues I picked up from their driving style. I knew that they were about to change lanes without checking their mirror even before they committed to the manoeuvre themselves.

There are so many hints and cues that drivers pick up on from other drivers. So much non-verbal communication. And that was the hardest part to train an AI. Sure you can teach them to react to hazards as they happen but having them pre-empt hazards before they happen without having that algorithm react to every false positive is a whole over level of engineering. It's something that takes humans literally years of driving every day to get good at and we already come pre-programmed with more sophisticated hazard detection before we even sit our bum behind that steering wheel than AIs have currently.

So this is the social aspect I was referring to. And I'm sure autonomous cars will learn this in time too - or at least get a close enough approximation where they're "good enough" for general purpose driving.

edit: I should have added that one good thing about AI is at least it's reaction times are lower. That reduces the significance of pre-emptively spotting likely hazards somewhat.

The real trick will be automating the horn.

I'd really be willing to take bets that, for the next thirty years (paid out at the end of that period), nothing remotely like AGI will happen. Should fund my retirement pretty nicely.