Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen' | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

thedrive.com

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I agree in part in that I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term. Not only will the tech get as good as humans, but most forget to account for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way. We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other, and make special lanes for self-driving cars only, among other improvements that will make it easier for the cars. Eventually non-self-driving cars will not be allowed on the road, and will be a niche hobby on race tracks.

Heck. With Toyota building a city of the future. They might make self driving cars entirely common once you are free to design roads for them.

Yea they could put down visual markers on the road to make it easier for CV or ML models to be trained against, or maybe even physical tracks to mechanically guide these cars so that minimal software is needed. Multiple cars can be linked together for efficiency.

Yeah I think if car manufacturers can come together on standards for signs... And even maybe signs that send RF signals to cars to give them hints of what is nearby it could go a long way. Instead of pretending like the only way is to make cars work with our human friendly system.

A car that can drive itself in a specifically prepared environment would hardly qualify as "fully self driving". You could achieve that with all the AI prowess of a mechanical connection between the steering linkage and some guide rails. And you'd still fail to get even the tiniest development budget for a car that won't sell anywhere else.

If you'd build a genuinely smart city completely from scratch, the most elegant way would be to completely remove the need for own cars. But that's obviously not going to happen when its a project designed and financed by an automaker.

It is when you sell them the autonomous cars that people can use and maintain them with the guarantee that they wont breakdown often when used basically.

We can't even bloody keep the yellow markings on the road visible, and "paint" is a technology we've had for thousands of years. Where in dog's name is the money for installing and maintaining all that smart infrastructure going to come from?

Perhaps take 10% of the military budget and you might just have some $ for that

Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item. If original commenter is correct that infrastructure meets halfway, I wouldn't expect self driving cars transition to happen fast at all - maybe on highways first, and busy city streets, later secondary roads. But that kind of thing would result in a decades long transition, and I would estimate it as never being fully autonomous (if beacons die, car would need manual intervention)

The primary deployment potential for self-driving cars is long haul freight, which could be done exclusively via the interstate system.

If we're going to beacon up a road, they easily make the most sense.

this might be true for the US, but in many parts of europe, roads are far more crowded. not to mention this doesn't solve the last mile problem.

> which could be done exclusively via the interstate system.

The interstate system already has working self-driving, even without any beacons. Inherently-safe roads like interstate freeways are already almost solved, and you can already buy a Chevrolet today that can self-drive the interstate system 99% of the time.

It's all the dangerous roads that need the help. The ones with bicyclists and pedestrians and parked cars and uncontrolled access and such.

If there is one thing we can be sure of, looking at the past couple decades of wireless tech, it's that there will be a profusion of mutually incompatible standards, each spanning multiple HW generations. It may not experience the same physical wear, but it will be an expensive maintenance issue nonetheless.

Definitely. If it was clear that external beacons were necessary, you would have the Tesla beacons, you'd have the European manufacturer associated beacons, you'd have the Japanese manufacturers associated beacons... installed at manufacturer's cost (or as a partnership), leading to duplication some places, total absence in others, and exclusivity in the rest. And the EU would do better than the rest of the world, having cars with different receivers (manufactured only for the EU market, of course)

"Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item"

I am extremely skeptical that beacons, sitting out in the heat, and the sun, and the cold, and the rain, and exposed to whatever we use to maintain roads at that juncture, will not be "a wear item".

Sure, but in the sense that road signs or traffic lights are a wear item. They wouldn't be exposed to the real causes of damage to roads (at least in my area) - transport trucks and road plows. They would need to be replaced at 5-30 year intervals, rather than 4-12 month intervals.

Traffic lights seem to have a pretty long lifespan.

They'll get hit and sheared off by plows and over-size loads, or just by drunks or idiots still driving dumb cars.

I do not think people have a solid grasp of how many millions of miles of road would need to be technified for self-driving cars to be widely viable.

Most likely, it's going to be a niche thing, tightly restricted to certain places that can afford to build and maintain the infrastructure.

Don't know about the US, but most roads in Europe already have coded reflectors to aid identification of lane geometry. Roadside reflectors have become a standard feature even on small rural roads, they're just hollow plastic half-tubes with reflecting strips on them. Cheap to install, cheap to maintain.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=road+reflectors&t=ffab&ia=images&i...

I, for one, already fail to grasp where we manage to get the funds required to clear and level the land and butter a fresh layer of asphalt on top of it regularly enough to build and maintain that many roads to begin with.

All it takes is a little bit of rain and hundreds of traffic lights go haywire in my city. What makes you think those beacons would fare any better? Politicians don't a crap for long term maintanance of little visibility infrastructure like that, so they're poorly funded.

And you say "private contactors will save the day", please, stop drinking the Ayn Rand Cool-aid.

What is wrong with the traffic lights in your city would be the much more interesting question here. Everywhere I know, traffic lights work as long as their power supply is intact

Shitty maintenance on top of lower bidder supplying sub-par equipment because half of the money went to corruption. The result is water getting in the circuits and shorting them out.

Alright. I work with roads and traffic infrastructure, and have never seen that situation before. The active equipment (in my experience) is all stored in above ground cabinets - just simple grey metal cabinets, elevated on foundations or poles, sealed with a gasket but with vent holes to prevent heat buildup. It would take almost deliberate misconstruction to cause a short.

Pavement is a wear item.

Yes, the top lift of pavement is a wear item in the decade time frame. Paint is a wear item in the sub-one year time frame (where I live, with low-VOC paint and frequent winter plowing)

Curbs, signage, lights, poles, drainage infrastructure, lower lifts of asphalt and granular material, ...are all non-wear items. This doesn't mean they never need to be repaired, but rather that they tend to get replaced after unintentional damage. Off-surface beacons (what the original comment suggested) would be in this category.

The counter-example to this is train tracks. (There are minimum standards for roads, too.)

Self driving trains would probably be easier. Aren't there already some airport shuttle trains and metro transit that's fully automated?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_syst...

SkyTrain in Vancouver, BC for example is fully automated. It works well unless there are issues with track or sensors, at which point it has to be driven manually.

The SkyTrain is a great example of how easily transportation technology infrastructure fails during even slightly unexpected circumstances. The trains were inoperable for multiple times this past week, for hours at a time due to snow storms.

Trains aren't exactly new technology, yet here we are with them still not functioning properly during what was actually a pretty routine snow storm. It doesn't leave me very optimistic for self driving cars, which will be significantly more compliced technology.

I agree with your point, although I don't think "slightly unexpected" is fair in this case. For non-locals, Vancouver and the region was hit with pretty heavy snowfall, ice and wind that week.

Sources

Footage of conditions in the city: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ek8dN9AoGbo

Hydro woes and 150km/h winds in the region: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-al...

Transit status snapshot: https://www.vancourier.com/news/metro-vancouver-snow-results...

School closures, Blizzard warning: https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/snow-day-highway-al...

Interviews about the ice buildup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FWgx99k585s

Finally, a bit of fun; how Canadians deal with weather: https://bc.ctvnews.ca/video-shows-people-skiing-snowboarding...

Is self-driving the same as fully-automated? I think not.

Self-driving implies intelligence, and fully-automated trains simply follow rote rules, and apply the emergency brakes if something unexpected happens. Not intelligent.

Put another way, self-driving has unbounded complexity, while a fixed number of vehicles on a protected, grade-separated railway is not very complex at all.

Docklands Light Railway works quite well with 45 stations. Humans can take over if needed. Running since 1987 so fairly old tech.

A DLR train has a trained operator, they just aren't (usually) driving. A few places have trains with nobody trained onboard at all. In the event of an emergency remote operators can talk to the passengers e.g. to explain that somebody will come to help or that it has been made safe for them to evacuate (automated trains are invariably electric so it may not be safe to just wander off the train outside a station).

FWIW, self driving trains are a very different problem. With self driving cars, the approach has been to use sensors on the vehicle and make autonomous decisions based on that input. This will never work for trains, because their stopping distances are so long that they cannot use a sensor to detect most oncoming issues.

Self driving trains will require more coordination, with central dispatch to tell them when/where to go. That leaves the intelligence on the train much more basic.

Except you can always install sensors that can look as far as you want

Do you mean on the tracks?

There are hard limitations on sensing onboard the train. Tracks that bend around hills, etc. I have some exposure to wireless communication for trains, and one of the limitations is that you can often not get a line of site even from one end of the train to another.

Not OP, but yes, along the right of way.

Since railroad tracks rarely get up and go walkabout, you can instrument them (conduction, video, lidar/radar) to the limits of your preferences and/or budget. Information can be relayed to both central control and individual trainsets.

So how do drivers stop with long stopping distance?

They have signals to tell them “stop”, they have speed limits posted, they have route knowledge. All detectable by computers, even without changes. Fast trains have in cab signalling in any case.

They have no decision about where to go (signal box sets the points/switch track), they have no decision on when to go (signal goes green)

The only bit which may need human input is the “ok to depart” notification when all the doors are clear at a station.

Now that you mention it, I wonder if tracks would actually be a better solution for most use cases. I could see a situation where highways have tracks and you only have to actually drive at the beginning and end of the journey.

To give access to a very lucrative business endeavor? Someone would come up with the investment. We put a nice canape of cell towers too, or wired up every home for internet, after doing it for cable TV, after doing it for electricity. No one really frowns much at those economics anymore (in big parts of the world at least).

All of these provided access to new technologies.

Autonomous driving is a marginal improvement on an already deployed technology.

It’s hardly a marginal improvement. If FSD were to become a reality, it would offer incredible benefits to economic productivity, safety, and quality of life.

It's also a business endeavour that's done a lot of bragging about the number of people it will render jobless. It's not going to be an easy political sell to erect lots of additional road furniture unless it's cheap and unobtrusive.

Privatized roads?

Those who think FSD can be solved by building special road infrastructure for self driving cars misunderstand the problem.

Cars are already equipped with suites of sensors giving them far more complete information than any human can process. Cars can already react faster and hold lanes with more precision than humans can.

What’s lacking is general intelligence. The ability to creatively respond to unexpected situations, even when it’s something you’ve never seen before.

And those unexpected situations are not edge cases either. Virtually every time you drive you’ll encounter a novel case that has never been seen before. Your human brain is good at improvising. Computers? Not so much...

My average drive distance is under 10 miles. The expected number of miles for Waymo to disengage once is over 3 orders of magnitude higher. I'd have to take 1000 trips before Waymo would have disengaged.

That does not jive with your numbers (1 disengage per trip, roughly 10 miles), unless you're saying that Waymo's numbers are juiced by few city miles?

Gentle correction: 'jive' -> 'jibe'

Oooh, thanks for that!

Last I checked waymo drives a very prescriptive route and doesn’t go over like 35mph or something. It’s also not running at scale, meaning a non trivial amount of them on the road.

Call me back when waymo can drive in all seasons in random places anywhere in the US.

Sure sure, maybe we have FSD only in like SoCal+TX+AZ+AL+FL. That, on its own, is a game changer.

Doesn't have to solve all problems, only sufficiently large problems.

Does it have to be visible? Couldn't it be tokens transmitting their location with great accuracy?

0 visibility in snow happens often.

I don't see why not. We have centimeter-level GPS. It's true you maybe can't always rely on GPS signal being there, but you could also install devices on traffic lights that would allow cars to precisely locate themselves at intersections, so they stop at the correct position, etc.

What I think is that self-driving cars may also force us to confront ways in which real-world driving environments are inadequate, so that we can make them more adequate. For example, there are intersections where stop signs (or other signs) are present but not visible. Humans know they have to stop there, so they stop anyway. Self-driving cars could systematically find and report these locations, and might get the city to do something about them.

I also picture the moment a lot of cube satellites are above broadcasting internet across the globe 24hrs a day combined with millimeter gps combined with 5g cellular technology we could do a reasonable job of driving cars anywhere.

The Advanced Snow Plow system that Caltrans used as a test on Interstate 80 near Donner Summit had four miles with embedded magnets. This cost about $25,000/mile in '98.

The full description of the system can be read at https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/advanced_snowp...

Alaska uses GPS for their precision plowing - https://www.truckinginfo.com/329914/how-alaska-dot-uses-gps-... . Note that to get the 2" precision you need high quality GPS receivers.

> The trucks have two GPS receivers mounted atop the cab. These receivers cost about $10,000 each, Shankwitz says. "That's probably why this hasn't been deployed in many other areas; it's just too expensive and most applications do not require that level of accuracy."

> The two-centimeter accuracy actually comes from a third receiver -- a high-precision, stationary ground-based receiver perched atop a microwave communications tower in nearby Valdez. It's accurate to within millimeters and it acts as reference receiver for the plow-mounted systems.

I don't see this being standard on self driving cars.

That said, ground penetrating radar is being looked at and appears to be a lower price point. https://phys.org/news/2016-06-vehicles-high-precision-advers...

It's called differential GPS. However the new block of GPS sats have higher accuracy without the need for the (multiple) expensive receivers.

However, I'd argue the lanekeeping and "where am I" problems this stuff solves is dwarfed by the common sense and logical reasoning & recognition problems.

We'd have self-driving road marker printers to keep the paint from becoming invisible ;)

The Road Roomba 9000!

Do self-driving cars even need road markings? IIRC Google's self-driving car project started out ignoring road markings entirely, and relied on a centimetre-precision map of the test city instead.

That obviously has downsides too, but unreliable road markings would be a pretty silly blocker to ever having a self-driving car. that's a solveable short-term problem.

all fun and games until some jack-ass spoofs the GPS and moves a road 20 feet to the left.

https://www.wired.com/2012/07/drone-hijacking/

That's the point though, the Waymo car doesn't rely on gps, it's has HD maps on board. Plus is has dead reckoning because it's touching the ground, so it knows where it's moving.

Not sure I get your point.

Having atom-resolution maps doesn't help a bit it you don't know where on it you are.

I think the idea is that with a good idea of where you're starting, either by GPS or some other waypoints, you can avoid the need for GPS through dead reckoning and updating based on other known features. At least, that's my guess.

If you have high res images available of the vicinity ( and constantly update them ) you can work out where you are.

That isn't true. There were car navigation devices that predated non-military GPS. They used inertial sensors to understand the car's acceleration and turning, and used on-board maps to correct for the inevitable drift. The car made a 90 degree turn onto a side street but the map indicated that road was 30 feet ahead, it would reset its position to be 30 feet from where it thought it was.

Can't spoof gps all the time everywhere. Once you have a general idea where you are (usually because that's where you were when you stopped yesterday), you can compare what you can see with hd maps, and fix your position exactly. You know you're not in a building, but on a drivable surface for a start.

My 2006 car was fine driving underground for 10 mins with no gps signal, but got confused when I drove it onto a train and it moved 30 miles without the wheels turning. Then after a few minutes got a gps signal again and fixed itself. Had an option to manually set the position and heading too.

The first navigation devices didn't rely on GPS. I wouldn't be suprised if Waymo reintroduced this.

People in this thread are way too hung up on the "what if cars get attacked" problem. Just because you can't solve every problem, doesn't mean you can't have a usable product.

Cars today don't have any defense against people dropping bricks or pouring paint off an overpass, but somehow the system still works.

They do actually, the humans driving the car can respond to a threat that an autonomous car would have to be programmed to avoid

I'm not sure humans have the reaction time to avoid an object thrown from an overpass.

On the contrary, over the years I've read on many occasions how drivers and passengers have been seriously injured or killed by the morons who get a kick out of dropping objects from an overpass.

https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/local/wilson/mt-juliet...

One brick can attack one car.

One bricked GPS system can attack an entire country. Or planet.

True, but humans can see a bunch of kids loitering on top of a bridge, get suspicious and change lane or slow down as a precaution

Same as usual for the past few decades: private capital that funds existing and upcoming startups, who will deploy proprietary smart infrastructure and allow users to connect to it probably through some monthly subscription service.

I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology. I doubt, that the software / hardware will have a common sense, like we humans have. Its this common sense that keeps us alive in unexpected scenarios, like when the paint on the road is missing.

I would argue that signing beacon messages with a PKI infrastructure would migate that issue.

Also, a stake in the ground on the edge of the road that says, I'm 15 feet to the right of the center lane will probably pay for itself in a couple years of stripping. You put two in the ground that say, I'm 15 feet to the right of the centerline and 35 feet from the next beacon and you never have to paint a centerline there again.

But all you've done is swapped one thing that will be poorly maintained for one thing that's already poorly maintained.

*with a much longer life. Stripping needs to be done every year to stay fresh. You can put a beacon in the ground and I should be able to be there and working 10 years later.

Who is the signing authority? China? The United States? Russia?

Probably whatever authority is responsible for the sign installation/road maintenance.

Makes sense assuming that authority doesn't leak their private keys like a sieve.

Provided they have a way to easily rotate keys via access to the physical hardware it's probably fine. If a local government loses a signing key they would have to register a new one and send a work crew to swap a micro SD card in every traffic light or whatever, but at least that's all they would have to do. In the meantime all an adversary can do with their signing key is install fake beacons, but that requires actually fabricating beacons, and putting themselves at risk by physically installing them in a place they will quickly be noticed, so the potential for damage is pretty limited. Much like how people can already steal stop signs or put up their own speed limit signs, in practice I don't think this will be more than a nuisance.

> If a local government loses a signing key they would have to...

They'd have to know they were compromised first. I think that is a big 'if', and creation of a centralized repository of backdoor keys makes for tempting targets.

Those beacons can be DoSed. Consider how Hong Kong protestors avoid the face recognition with laser pens.

Yeah, but couldn't you also simply disconnect the beacons with a wirecutter?

I mean, every technical system can be shutdown and will shutdown sometimes, isn't that a inherent weakness of such a system?

if that beacon does not respond disable automation for that part?

Sure, but I was thinking about temporary disabling (like a temporary, reversible DoS). If you can temporarily disable something, it is more difficult to find the culprit, and the impact is higher because of the surprise element. If something is permanently disabled, you fix it right away.

Just like bullying: bullying itself is annoying, but what I found annoying is the inconsistency of it. At some point, my bullies were friendly, at another point once more bullying. If it were permanently on-going and not sneaky, they'd be found out by e.g. teachers long ago already.

Ahh, yes that would be a problem.

On the other hand, wouldn't a ddos be visible in the logs?

Logs should be checked centrally anyway, so a 30 second flood of messages should be visible.

But in the end, you are right that it will be hard to do this the right way.

Still better than humans, humans kill 3000 people using vehicles every day, and most of those aren't even trying

Yeah but if the system is designed in the wrong way, hackers could kill millions in a single moment. Admittedly, this danger already exists as in all modern cars between driver and car there is a layer of (hackable and wireless network connected) software.

Hackers could hijack a missile and kill a lot of people too.

This is why we have security. And honestly modern cars are so computerized already I think your argument applies to them as much as autonomous cars.

“We’re already doomed” isn’t a good reason to not be concerned about new ways to be doomed.

Yes, we have security. Yes, cars can (probably) already be hacked, perhaps even en-mass rather than in targeted ways.

But: one the big advantages of machine learning in cars is that every car can learn from the experiences of every other car. That makes them monocultures. Monocultures are fragile. You find the weakness of one, you find the weakness of all.

I want the benefits of the former without the risks of the latter. I don’t know if that’s even possible.

> I want the benefits of the former without the risks of the latter. I don’t know if that’s even possible.

That's where competition comes in. Just like AMD vs. Intel or OSX vs. Windows. If you find a weakness in one, you don't necessarily find a weakness in the other.

Hence, finding a weakness in Tesla doesn't mean it will work against Waymo or Uber.

To the extent that there is competition, there is an identical loss of opportunity to learn from each other’s mistakes.

> Hackers could hijack a missile and kill a lot of people too.

That's a sunken cost fallacy. Only because other things are hackable as well doesn't mean there is no danger.

> And honestly modern cars are so computerized already I think your argument applies to them as much as autonomous cars.

I've said that in my comment above as well, but it was in an edit before you replied so I guess you didn't refresh before submitting the comment.

> That's a sunken cost fallacy. Only because other things are hackable as well doesn't mean there is no danger.

It's really not a sunken cost fallacy. It's good evidence that the "think of the terrorists" angle is overblown. There are plenty of other problems with self-driving cars, but not that one.

And plenty of other problems with missiles before that one too. As the news dramatically reminded us recently, the number one cause of non accidental casualties in plane is being shot down by the military, by a very large margin before terrorism. Similarly it is not hard to guess that car related casualties due to terrorism is never going to be significant compared to others. Terrorism overall is not a big issue, despite we like to think that our main problems are caused by a few malignant individuals.

I'll bite. Aside from Tesla owners, I do not know anyone in my life today whose vehicle connects to the Internet. Of course, I mean to say I don't see how your comparison to present day is accurate.

>Aside from Tesla owners, I do not know anyone in my life today whose vehicle connects to the Internet

When did the whole OnStar botnet start? I think it's earlier than 2010.

I wasn't aware of that. I suppose that would count as the car, but doesn't most car hacking occur when the component has access to i.e the CAM bus?

Why do you think OnStar doesn't have access to the can bus https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10008228

There was the Jeep a few years ago... https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

My 2017 Ford connects to wifi.

pretty much all cars with modern head units connect to the internet for things like traffic data and software updates.

as of 2017 it is no longer legal to sell a car with no backup camera, and 99.9% of cars implement that with a digitized head unit that, wait for it, connects to the internet.

thus, very new-manufacture cars in 2020 do not connect to the internet, bluetooth, sometimes wifi, etc.

Come on, you know missiles are locked down with way more security than consumer vehicles.

I am sorry, what? Which missile system can be hacked and launched remotely? This is a ridiculous claim.

Cars are already getting hacked. The whole point of the post is to highlight how car manufacturers have no concern or competence for security, is will be like the boeing scandal but much worse.

At best, youre conflating two vastly different things - Boeing engineers and car manufacturers.

At worst, youre a troll. Cars are no where being hacked at the scale or magnitude that affected the numbers involved in the Boeing fumble. No where near. Not even remotely close.

I think what they meant by "tricking" the cars is to paint roads in a deceiving way to make cars meander into lakes or something like that, not hacking everyone's cars.

But cars will recognize that something changed and validate it.

This presumes a car with logical abilities that would negate the need for infrastructure to "meet it halfway."

It doesn't even have to be malicious. I was driving through Germany recently and some roadworks on a highway meant we were using temporary contraflow lanes, and even with my big fancy human brain, I was sometimes struggling to decide which of the layers of permanent/temporary lane markings I should observe.

Sounds like a great case for computers. They can communicate with each other and all make the same decisions. Even if it's "wrong", it'll be safer if they all make the same wrong decision than a bunch of people coming to different conclusions and demonstrating it only by putting 3,000 pounds of steel where they think it should go.

Like a lot of technologies. Nuclear plants still happened.

There is no evidence that automated driving systems are any safer than human drivers, or that they ever will be.

Autopilot is evidence that automated systems are already better than humans today. The edge cases scare people but on aggregate the stats show is superior to people. This sort of tech is only going to keep getting better.

Look up "Ergodicity".

Autopilot doesn't need to be 2x or 10x better than a human driver -- it needs to be 100x or 1,000x better, or nobody (sane) should touch it.

The problem is not that autopilot is superior than your own driving in the vast majority of the cases! The problem is the 1 in a million times when it makes a trivial mistake that virtually no human would, and kills you instantly. Like driving under an obvious semi-trailer, and shearing your torso off.

An understandable example: You have two games of chance, both with identical 5/6 chance of winning.

One game, you'll play immediately (and as often as possible). The other, you would never play, not even once.

How is that possible? Both have identical 5/6 chances of winning? But, one is "ergotic", meaning that the odds hold over the long term as often as you play, and one is "non-ergotic", meaning that as soon as you lose, you're finished.

One is a single dice roll.

The other is Russian Roulette.

Self-driving cars are Russian Roulette. One "mistake" on the part of the system, and you're dead. The fact that the "stats" prove that it is safer, overall, don't change the fact: you and your family are dead.

People die all the time from driving under a semi-trailer. Look up "Underride". Over 200 people die every year from underride crashes in the US, so this isn't a mistake made only by autopilots. In other words, if we switched to self-driving cars and three people died every week when the autopilot drove into a semi-trailer, that would be a big improvement.

So, your family would be ok that your car sheared you off in a quirk unnecessary accident, so long as the overall stats were better than average?

Non-ergotic stats are not comparable to ergotic (group) stats.

Given 100 individuals who would have died in everyday accidents all would prefer a 99% chance of survival.

Given a population of a million all would prefer a 1 in a million chance of death under a semi to a 1 in 10k chance of being smeared in a more average fashion.

Your argument is the same one used against seat belts with people advocating a strictly inferior survival strategy to prevent a rare misadventure.

That’s not how it works for humans though. “Other drivers are terrible. I am above average. Other drivers underride. I don’t”

Let's say your autodrive system replaces 100,000 driver-hours.

Let's say those driver-hours would have resulted in 3 deaths of others (in vehicles or pedestrians) but your autodrive results in 1 different death (which wouldn't have occurred with the human drivers).

Your stats are no comfort at all to the loved ones of your victim.

It's like the Trolley Problem but the humans are unidentifiable.

The trolley problem challenges people who don't consider choosing not to act equally an active choice or intuitively feel that action is different than inaction.

I would always pick the most valuable to me side and pull the switch or leave it be to bring about the better end result. Given the availability of self driving vehicles that reduce mortality choosing to drive oneself and kill more people is an unethical choice that will be as little comfort to the 3 victims as the one.

  I would always pick the most valuable to me side

Of course, when you know nothing about the would-be victims. But on a pure numbers theoretical basis, you autodrive veers out away from the three killers fleeing police by driving on the wrong side of the road in favor of running down two kids in a crosswalk.

Real life is complicated.

Where did I say I would decide value purely by number of people?

Why did you include the fact that they were killers fleeing police? Are, you supposing that I will somehow infer this in the 2 seconds I have to react or you just positing completele nonsense to muddy the waters with emotions?

Pedanticaly one would virtually never choose to hit pedestrians instead of cars because pedestrians don't have crumple zones or air bags.

The big question is should cars prioritize the owners health or the greater good and If the latter what is the greater good.

I don't think people will turn on a product that might decide to kill them to save a school bus so it's simplified to minimizing chance of fatalities while protecting the owner absolutely even if this risks others.

It's essentially unheard-of that one's own failure to use a seatbelt results in injury or death to some other party hit by the flying driver/passenger who was unbelted. That's the appropriate analogy.

Do you not fly in airplanes? People make tradeoffs like this ALL the time. It's why the term "freak accident" even exists. People trade off freak accidents against convenience and quality of life, let alone a _higher_ rate of non-freak accidents.

You are overcomplicating things. Every minute of drive time is Russian roulette with on average very low chances of losing.

The only thing that matters is the overall odds there is no inherent mathematical difference between the 2 scenarios.

There is no difference to prefer more likely death in common scenario to less likely death in a stupider scenario.

If you believe otherwise you ought to explicate with numbers.

That doesn't sound like a proper set of assumptions - that human accidents will be fender benders while self driving will be chunk-salsa worthy. The cumulative fatality risk applies to both parties. Humans will die in fatal accidents that no Self Driving car would do.

The 1000x better demand is more a stupid human illusion of control thing like fearing flying more than a road trip of equal distance.

Autopilot is at most evidence that human-machine systems are better than just human drivers. Throughout its history "autopilot" had many cases where the human saved its ass and quite a few where it managed to kill the human anyway.

From Tesla's latest Vehicle Safety Report:

> In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.64 million miles driven. By comparison, NHTSA’s most recent data shows that in the United States there is an automobile crash every 479,000 miles.

It's pretty unsurprising that at least augmenting human attention and input with machine attention and input reduces accidents. I agree that the cross-over point in time for full automation being safer than human drivers is a total unknown though.

Am I correct in thinking that most people use autopilot in the most boring parts of or most boring drives?

It seems to me that knowing the autopilot isn't 100% perfect is a good reason to not rely on it in more dangerous or complicated scenarios (construction, roads with poor markings, school areas).

I haven't followed too closely here though, just curious if that is a reasonable hypothesis.

Autopilot tends to be engaged on freeways / motorways where accidents are much lower than driving through town. If you do the stats properly Tesla's autopilot is probably more crash prone than just having a human drive.

There were some stats that if you compare model S deaths to other luxury cars in the same price range they are about 3x higher for the S. Death rates in luxury cars are much lower than the average vehicle.

I think self driving tech will cut roads deaths eventually but it needs more work.

The vast majority of the data I'm able to find on road types covers only fatalities, not accidents... but New York has accident rates per road type (and junctions!) for several years[1], and their rates are very roughly 1 accident per 300k-500k for rural roads, and 1 per 500k-1m for "[fully] controlled access" (which I read as highways, with divided being by far the lowest rate).

So even if it's just on highways, Autopilot is still out-performing humans by 2-3x, if not more.

On average, ignoring better luxury car rates mentioned elsewhere, and that I have no clue if this is representative. I would be surprised if broader data was so much worse that it would reverse the relationship though.

[1] https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci...

It is not. Or maybe it is. We don't know:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2019/06/09/tesla-aut...

Still, there is IMHO a sampling error that makes the comparison not fully accurate.

The pool of "all vehicles" traveling on the road, comprises very old cars and pickup/trucks/vans, and all kind of drivers, including teens (or however inexperienced drivers) and older people that may be more likely to have slower response times or some other condition, like (say) poorer vision.

Besides the fact that Tesla's are at the most a few years old and being on the pricy end (which should imply that they are properly maintained), they are "sport cars" (in the sense that they have very good handling and breaking) and they are driven (I believe) by a certain subset of drivers, relatively young but with no or very few inexperienced drivers.

To play devil's advocate slightly, you could pretty easily argue that self-driving tech is most useful to apply to the lower-safety brackets, which pull down that average.

So even if it's not as good as the healthy-and-wealthy bracket that might be safer, if it's better than the average then it'd be potentially significantly better than the non-healthy-and-wealthy. In that light this seems like a massive win.

Yep, only that the lower-safety bracket cannot afford it, not today nor - presumably - in a near future.

And - to be fair - think "Sabrina" (the movie with Audrey Hepburn), really rich people traditionally had professional drivers (chauffers) which maybe had an even lower rate of accidents.

That's a nice bit of advertising, but; They cheat. When the car detects an unusual or difficult situation developing it prompts the driver to take over. This means that all the really tricky bits of driving are done by the human and all the easy bits are done by the machine..

There was a competing study done against cars with similar price/age/safety equipment that didn't have the auto pilot option and Tesla caused considerably more accidents.

It also lets them blame the driver for their failure. Tesla is more than happy to share the cars data logs to “prove” it wasn’t the fault of Tesla... remember though, according to Tesla marketing the driver is only there because the lawyers say so....

This is garbage analysis.

When you are comparing numbers. You compare like-to-like. Tesla specifically prohibits engaging Autopilot in difficult situations and encourages during long boring straight drives.

Those figures are not as good as you seem to suggest.

First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.

In that figure of 479.000 miles commercial traffic is also included. Commercial traffic makes up around 60% of all accidents. We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc. Another big category that needs to be excluded from the general figure is motor cycles, that generous source of donor organs, to make it comparable. Passenger vehicles in general are more safe than the overal figure and thus closer to Tesla's figure.

Second point is that Teslas are hardly part of the second hand or n-hand market yet. It is even a question if Tesla will tracks that data in those markets. In those markets you will see more young people as drivers (something to do with income). They are responsible for a majority of the traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles (something to do with tendencies to discount the future and to overestimate their own capabilities).

Third point is that the really good figure comes from auto pilot, but that only works in places and under conditions that are already far less accident prone like highways under normal weather conditions.

The good news from the figures is that enabling the safety measures make Tesla drivers better drivers: From 1.6 miles to 2.1 miles roughly a 25% increase in miles traveled before an accident. That would lead us in the direction of mandating level-2 automation in all new cars for more safety rather than trying to push for level-5 for some brands.

> First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.

You're doing that the wrong way, aren't you?

If 479k is total miles across an average of two cars, then the single-car equivalent, the number you'd compare to the Tesla numbers, is 240k.

It doesn't really make sense to adjust the Tesla numbers to do the comparison, but if you did you'd be doubling them, not halving them.

> We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc.

Neither of those reasons makes them incomparable.

Just the opposite of GP's opinion, I think basing the statistics solely on Telsa will half the figure rather than doubling it. Suppose the average interval of accident is t and the average speed of car is v, as Telsa cars only represent a small portion of all vehicles, we have

    - Only Telsa: distance_travelled / num_accidents = v t / 1
    - Two cars involved, but counted as one accident : distance_travelled / num_accidents = 2 v t / 1

> or that they ever will be

Eventually being better than humans seems like it's obviously going to happen. Not driving drunk, not getting distracted, and not sleeping at the wheel alone are advantages enough that I would be amazed if the balance doesn't eventually fall in favor of the self-driving car. Self-driving cars don't even have to be particularly good drivers to be better than the average human, given how much the human average is dragged down by recklessness.

While I would love for self-driving cars to be a thing, the AI to detect tired, distracted, drunk or sleeping drivers could be in every car way, way before self-driving cars will be a thing.

> Self-driving cars don't even have to be particularly good drivers to be better than the average human, given how much the human average is dragged down by recklessnes

Tell that to the jury when your self driving car runs into the side of school bus full of kids (which will happen given any reasonable adoption).

Self driving cars would have to be held to an almost insanely high standard to be “winnable lawsuit” proof.

Such lawsuits are a net detriment to society. It's why light airplane design remains stuck in the 1960s, and why vaccine companies are protected from lawsuits.

If we (society) took an air traffic safety approach, e.g., analyzing each crash, root causing it, and working to address it, one can imagine a day where self-driving cars are very safe. (I’m sure that day is a long way off still.)

These lawsuits alright happen. Right now.

A car manufacturer can already be sued for things that go wrong, in a car, but the world keeps spinning.

Nope, they already lobbied that car owner is responsible for failures of the self driving system.

I disagree that it's obvious. Even a mediocre driver can do things like change lanes in heavy traffic. The nut of the problem is a social one. You have to signal your intention and then figure out when someone else is going to let you in. The basic human ability to form a picture that includes the intentions of the other human beings around them is part of the "Strong AI problem" and may never be solved, ever.

Humans have been failing to drive safely for longer than we've had computers, and neither has been around for very long.

It's far too soon to claim we've hit peak performance.

There is a lot of evidence that technology tends to improve over time.

Bacteria in a sealed container will reproduce until all resources are consumed. Then they drop to anemic levels or die out entirely. Humans live in a relatively closed system. And modern technology sits atop a very fragile foundation. All that to say past evidence does indicate technology generally gets better, but not necessarily forever.

No we don't.

We live on a planet around a midlife star. The amount of resources available to us over the next 10,000 years is staggering.

Humans haven't proven the ability to live sustainably on one planet. Sustainably utilizing resources beyond the planet is far from certain.

For the record, I don't really like this thread, but GP's point does not hinge on using up other planets sustainably...

Hardware eventual fails, software eventually works.

Good luck getting the system to even that level of proficiency. Not impossible, but people are actually very good drivers (that still kill truckloads of people).

Now imagine every car equipped to 'self-drive'. No manually driven cars anymore anywhere. No old timers, no exceptions. What would the daily dead rate be? 30k? 30m? Somewhere in between? Lower?

It's easy to say they are better, when there are so few of them. (Compared to the amount of human driven cars)

Configurable! A reasonable amount of death. Not to much but enough to still allow for fast traffic. This kind of calc is already done for car safety features. It probably is as ridiculous as it sounds but who am I to judge.

Ascribe it to my typical german worryguts.

DELTA DASH NOVEMBER OSCAR NOVEMBER OSCAR

> I doubt, that the software / hardware will have a common sense, like we humans have

Aren't sanity checks basically common sense? I would suspect they already play a major role in making autonomous driving a reality.

I'd argue those are the opposite - due to the software/hardware failing to have common sense, we've added some extremely coarse checks to shut it down when it's clearly going nuts. Less "common sense", more "don't push this button, it will kill you [presses button anyway]"

Common sense is not just a large number of sanity checks, it also includes the ability to solve some of the problems identified by failed sanity checks. For example, common sense might lead you to break the road rules in an emergency, or drive a car with a safety problem for a short distance instead of getting it towed.

Imagine something like a dangerous situation -- there is an oncoming fire or flood, and you need to get out of there, but your self-driving car decides to do a precautionary stop because one of the sensors stopped working. People are totally underestimating the intelligence required to make these types of decisions. Surrendering your mobility to a program is a much bigger hurdle than people think, and the bar is much higher than being able to successfully avoid collisions.

More then solving problems, common sense involves identifying a problem as a problem. Unknown unknowns.

You might want to consider https://xkcd.com/1958/.

Right, the main question is can one murderer murder lots of people at once with new technology. Can they buy a machine gun, or reprogram every car to crash, or lobby the government to force doctors to prescribe the opiates they sell.

What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now? Sometimes common sense helps, but it you're out to cause chaos, there's a ton of things you can do today that would cause crashes - but most of the time, people don't.

If you destroy a yield sign, maybe it will eventually cause some problems, or maybe not. We could imagine a world in which destroying smart infrastructure could pretty instantaneously and reliably cause massive traffic jams, which seems like it would appeal more to certain trolls and perhaps protestors.

We could also imagine a world in which more subtle attacks could reliably and fairly quickly cause injury/fatality accidents, which might appeal to terrorists.

I think this type of "stress testing" of destroyed or modified signage would be an obvious direction for AV development once the basics are down. With HD mapping and other technology used to augment what is gathered by their sensors, AVs are eventually overall going to be better at handling unexpected scenarios at the road compared to humans

If you destroy a yield sign, the system will immediately know because all the cars previously recorded it.

The permanent signs would already be in the database. The signs you'd worry about would be temporary, for road works or accidents, but perhaps these locations could be made electronically available.

And it will play a helpful message like "Recalculating route: 3 self-driving fatalities registered at this location."

So presumably every self-driving vehicle is going to be constantly streaming all sorts of information in their purview to a central hub?

That is a privacy nightmare without regulation on scrubbing extraneous information, done before upload: for example blocking out of pedestrian data; not just faces but clothing and gait, and probably also any data captured through windows.

It would be ideal to have a limited view of just the roads and signage, and have a retention plan that gradually keeps less and less historical data.

For accident review more of the data might be required, so vehicles should keep the last 24 hours of raw data.

Self-driving vehicles should be implemented with the same care Apple has given Touch ID and Face ID in regards to protecting sensitive data.

Having a central database capable of being scraped and process to determine where any person is at any given time is a non-starter. Care needs to be taken to scrub all extraneous data from the fleet's network.

A lot of things should be implemented in a particular way, but most aren't. Decades of practical experience show that, unless forced by regulations, auto manufacturer will pick the cheaper and more profitable option over the safe option every single time.

If I had to choose between privacy of my location or the convenience of a self driving car, I’d choose the car. Every single time.

Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the supermarket.

Tell that to guy that had smartwatch and his wife noticed he had high heart rate somewhere at night where he should be doing something else.

I don't have link for the story. But idea behind this is not that one should not cheat on his wife because he will get caught. To be really a human and be honest, one must not have an urge to cheat on his wife(husband) because he loves her. If someone has dirty thoughts and only thing that is preventing a person from fulfilling that is that "Tesla will know"...

People should be able to cheat, they also should be caught, but being good only because you are constantly watched?

This argument looks like "because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say".

This argument is about that you have to make concessions - tradeoffs.

You have a choice to not use the autonomous car, to not use the apple watch, to choose a privacy-conscious internet carrier.

Did you read the comment?

The problem is self-driving vehicles implemented with fleet data that vacuums up everything will spy on everyone, not just the driver.

They need to be implemented with on-board redaction.

Otherwise there is no choice for anyone, the companies or the ruling party can do facial or gait recognition on pedestrians and other drivers, and scrape license plates of of all parked and driving cars from the data stored in the cloud.

With just Lidar I imagine this is less of a problem, but at least pedestrians in that case will still need to be redacted for gait recognition.

My first comment wasn't about your regard to personal privacy, it was with regards to everyone's. One person's data is mostly worthless; everyone's is priceless.

Also FWIW Apple has a good track record with privacy, it's all opt-in.

Edit: Health data is also end-to-end encrypted (accessible by your devices only, Apple servers don't have keys, if you forget your passcode you lose the data); https://support.apple.com/en-ca/HT202303

Real world trade offs please...

If there are only autonomous cars that track your position how are you going to make trade off?

Right now I don't have Facebook but no one in my family or friends is contacting me. Why? Because I don't have Facebook. This is my trade off. Real trade off would be if I could select different provider and still be in contact with my family and friends. Right now it is monopoly degrading my quality of life. If I would have different options that I could for example pay for but they would not use my data as tracking that would be different.

If there would be way to pick your autonomous car provider by price/privacy it can be trade off.

If it is one option that you can use or not use it is not about trade off. I am not native English speaker but trade off for me is when you have multiple options to choose. No that you have all or nothing....

I think this might be the story

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2019/12/14/fitbit-jane-s...

I wish there was a way for individuals to make that decision for themselves alone.

As a pedestrian being observed by AVs, your [valid] choice has a significant impact on my ability to choose privacy over convenience.

>> If I had to choose between privacy...

That sounds like it's taken right out of an Orwell story.

You already make this tradeoff - you have a bank account instead of hiding your money in a mattress. You're probably browsing the web from a normal internet connection, not a VPN, or some alternative?

Yes, and I have some control over that which I exercise regularly. Not enough control, but what I have I use proactively.

I'm also active in trying to wrestle more control of the data being collected on me.

And I am not willing to give up my privacy for your convenience and not happy with those who'd willingly give up theirs in a way that sweeps mine up with it.

I feel like this is almost like trying to resist the allure of drones in war. It’s too easy to do and too hard to stop. It takes almost global consensus.

Any number of parties could lawfully and unobtrusively start slurping up all sorts of data which is in a kind of plain view, and nobody would really be the wiser.

> So presumably every self-driving vehicle is going to be constantly streaming all sorts of information in their purview to a central hub?

That's a terrible design.

The obvious way is that the sign/beacon itself pings a server every 5 minutes, and when that stops you know it's broken.

> That is a privacy nightmare

I don't want to disappoint, but the future will have no privacy whatsoever.

There will be privacy until the singularity, don't worry.

Continued encroachments on privacy and personal autonomy may indeed deteriorate them, even cripple our ability to protect those rights, but simply worrying about that doesn't mean I must go gentle into that good night.

> That is a privacy nightmare without regulation on scrubbing extraneous information, done before upload: for example blocking out of pedestrian data; not just faces but clothing and gait, and probably also any data captured through windows.

If you can be photographed legally in a public place, what's going to protect your privacy in public?

So what happens when a road sign legitimately changes? Does the system use the previous values recorded or the new value?

Im also curious how situations will be handled where there are two speed signs: the regular posted speed and a temporary speed for construction. How does it know which to obey.

Ideally we get to a point where we’re at least publishing signage to a database so that cars don’t have to rely on visual cues both human and automated.

I personally don’t think it’s possible to make automated cars work well without a ton of infrastructure support.

Your car wishes to inform you that there's a sign for McDonald's where they're having a sale 2 for 1 quarter pounder with cheese.

The law doesn't require you to follow a sign that's not there. In fact I'd argue that doing so can be dangerous in some situations(and obviously advised in others). A car should only ever follow what it can actually see, which makes the whole idea almost daft, since computer image recognition is still so poor.

If there is a central database with all the signs, you don't need a physical sign on the edge on the road for AV to notice it, they already know it is "there" from that DB

Bear in mind that's not how the traffic law works anywhere right now. You are only required to obey signs and markings which are actually there. And traffic signs get removed all the time for works, I honestly can't imagine that every action like that would be recorded in some central database that all cars could query.

If it's such a busy location to cause a big jam, how did the vandals get away with destroying it? In out of the way places, it won't cause a big jam.

Few places are busy in the middle of the night.

You can cause horrible traffic jams now by throwing a few mattresses or a bunch of caltrops onto the highway at the right time of day.

Then imagine the jam flowing around the blockage without stop-starts due to the automated vehicles networking and managing traffic.

The future needs self-throwing mattresses.

The yield signs could be backed up with an an official map all cars read from as well.

And then let that ‘official map’ from Google charge $100/month subscription fee.

You have to actually go out there and physically do the act.

In a wired world the distance to everything is zero. If you can find an 'in', you can carry out this attack in any place in the world, from the comfort of your nerd cave or barracks.

>What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now?

People do destroy yield signs and other safety critical road infrastructure now. I've known more than one person with an appropriated road or safety sign as a home decoration.

People tag signs on the freeway, to the point where caltrans still has razor wire over some of the signs. It's already happening.

Nothing and it happens all the time. This is something that a human driver familiar with the road will notice and it will be unlikely to cause an accident. An out-of-towner might get into an accident. An automated vehicle would ideally not even be looking at signs and just operating from its stored data.

The obvious counterpoint to "operating from stored data" is an accident or construction causing a lane to be closed, or a child chasing a ball across the road.

In the hypothetical world in which self driving cars are the norm and not the exception detours would be in the system so that SDCs would not need to read signs. Even now a lot of traffic maps get updated to show detours, delays, and temporary closures due to accidents.

FWIW I am a near-term self-driving car skeptic and have been for a long time. I just think that these are not the kind of issues that really pose a major obstacle whereas drunk people wandering across the street are.

We will nano-tag alcohol and keep a database of all wandering drunks, for self-driving cars to either avoid them or take them home!

That's an absolutely crazy idea. You are only required by law to follow signs that are actually there, full stop, a car should never rely on some built in database of data. I cannot imagine a database of signs that would be constantly up to date and somehow distributed to all cars on the road.

I don't think that's crazy. Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use? They already have such databases for their own records, usage, and analysis. In a world in which SDCs are normal that is how you would expect it to work.

It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person would and make correct on-the-fly decisions about traffic signs when snow obscures the sign and a little bit of ice and muck obscures its cameras ever-so-slightly, making some of the sensors go half-berserk.

>>It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person would and make correct on-the-fly decisions about traffic signs when snow obscures the sign and a little bit of ice and muck obscures its cameras ever-so-slightly, making some of the sensors go half-berserk.

Then it should do the same a person is required to do in that scenario - slow down and exhibit caution. Otherwise you will get a car that confidently drives forward because it "knows" a sign is there. If the sensors can't cope with that then the car shouldn't be on the road at all, period.

>>Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use?

Because the same local authorities don't even have the budget, time or competency to fix the most minor issues with our roads. Potholes go unfixed for weeks, there's no budget for cleaning, for salting, for repair of missing signs, lamp posts or simply for review whether existing signage is actually appropriate after changes they make. But yet the same authorities should be tasked with real time updates to some database of signage? I'm sorry, but I'm just trying to be realistic here - we can write legislation to require authorities to do something, but in real world that's just not going to happen reliably enough to trust it. I know I wouldn't.

> I cannot imagine a database of signs that would be constantly up to date and somehow distributed to all cars on the road.

Really depends on where you are. I agree I can't imagine it in the USA, but in the Netherlands, where every square metre is documented, attributed and zoned (yes including the leftover grassy triangle bits between highway ramps, everything). We could totally do that if necessary.

I don't know if documenting all the traffic signs would be the right solution. If anything I would imagine this database to include way more virtual traffic signs than are actually there. Not for the legal traffic rules, but virtual ones that would be nice if they existed and everybody in the flock held to them.

Point is that worldwide there is a huge variety in the quality of roads, the quality of signage, driving culture and attitude, and the general predictability of the environment. Some places will lend themselves more naturally to the first forms self-driving cars will take than other places that are more "free form".

I’ve seen intersections where people have went offroad in an accident and knocked down stop signs and people know when approaching that it should be there. Would a car?

The only way I can see that working is if there is some kind of geographic location of various stops and the like, but at that point, you need consistent connectivity to obtain that kind of data, right? May work in larger towns and cities, but what about rural areas?

We’ve had offline GPS units for decades. You could easily have a database of every stop sign, and it would fit on an SD card.

They do that very often. I once drove the wrong way on a one-way street because some troll had changed the arrow's direction.

Fortunately there was almost no traffic.

Signs get vandalized or stolen all the time here in Uruguay. Mostly vandalized.

It would actually be easier to make smart infrastructure tamper proof relative to existing infrastructure.

This is definitely one of the things xkcd has talked about:

https://xkcd.com/1958/

Trolls can also drop bricks on cars from overpasses, and I suspect fucking with road signs will rapidly carry the same taboo and punishment

There is an ia that we try to learn it common sense.

While "autonomous vehicles" are the biggest practical joke of the 2010's, this artists joke trapping an "autonomous" car in a circle of salt like a medieval demon was pretty good:

https://imgur.com/gallery/24jLd

You can already screw with infrastructure to kill people. Sometimes we just have to hope that the combination of positives and negatives convince people not to go out and screw the world.

Even current tech can easily drive a car on a road completely without digital beacons.

We won't lose that capacity.

Try up north during the winter...

You realize trolls can wreak havoc with traffic today if they wanted to?

I expect private companies will be the ones providing the infrastructure for self driving cars, and your car will have to subscribe to a "awareness service provider", much the same way that your phone needs to subscribe to a carrier.

If it is on asphalt roads you can easily embed wires and electronics underneath the surface by heating it up. And an embedded wire would be both easy for a computer to track and easy to fix or replace.

We may actually discover it’s cheaper or smarter to limit the scope of what self driving cars have to do by limiting their infrastructure. If cities become more pedestrian (cyclist, public transport) centric then some of the issues disappear. It would be a hell of a lot easier if you eliminate the complexities of navigating city traffic if most of it is gone or car traffic is completely separated from the rest. Either via a reduced number of tunnels, suspended roadway, or simply by reducing the number of places where cars and pedestrians cross paths.

Between vastly reducing car traffic and separating it from pedestrians the problem of fully self driving is greatly simplified (probably not eliminated).

Which proves the point the volkswagen guy was trying to make I guess.

Where will existing cities find the budget and physical space for separating transportation modes?

If you do it in the correct order, first massively reducing car traffic and then separating it, the costs should be manageable over time. The point isn’t to do it all at once or overnight. This has the “side” effect of making cities a lot more human friendly even before doing anything to separate traffic while still reducing the complexity of navigating the city FSD.

Re-purposing one of the existing lanes (a bus lane can move more people than 3 SOV lanes combined). Toll roads, reinvesting parking revenue, and increased tax revenue from downtown land used for working, living, and playing instead of just storing automobiles.

This doesn't answer your question about money, but with (mostly) human drivers on the road there isn't much incentive to keep the lines visible, because humans are excellent at inferring where the lines should be, even if they're not there.

It seems to me 99.99% of all road markings are perfectly visible

Assuming you're right in that estimate, the hard work is getting more 9s. As a total kind of spitball number, you want 4 more of them.

I'm incredulous that that can be the case anywhere.

I live in a wealthy jurisdiction, and the road markings here largely are not what I'd consider to be "perfectly visible". I'd guess that currently, probably 3/4 of painted lane markings have one or more of the following issues: a) obscured by snow/ice, b) faded c) road under construction and lane markings don't correspond to current lanes.

If you ever visit a city that gets substantial snowfall, road markings are essentially nonexistent, even when the snow and ice melts in the spring.

This just goes to show how even unperceptive humans are better than the most perceptive car logic.

Where the car would freak out and stop, you don't even notice anything is missing.

If you're going to try to swear like a 60's Brit, at least get you bloody grammar right. ;-) <strikethrough> "bloody" is an adjective, not an adverb, so </strikethrough>:

"We can't even keep the bloody yellow markings on the road visible"

It's bloody well both: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bloody

Hmm, you're absolutely right! (And the dictionary I consulted is as wrong as I was.) So why does the post I was replying to not work as is?

It does bloody work as is. People bloody say "bloody verb" all the bloody time.

Here's a bloody example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OGWhjojt5dw

Probably just because you're not familiar with the usage.

The "even" both breaks up the flow and makes the "bloody" unnecessary - i.e. you've already said "even", you don't need to say "bloody" too.

So although there's nothing grammatically wrong with the sentence, it reads awkwardly. A native British English speaker would be more likely to use your suggestion. It's just one of those barely documented curiosities like adjective order (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/sep/13/senten...).

Oh, that's brilliant! I'd seen this described before, but not distilled down to that specific order. Thank you!

it won't happen overnight everywhere. there are other transportation methods that require lots of infrastructure to maintain, e.g. trams, subways where the need is big enough to worth it. I guess we will see the same with roads, busy avenues will be smart, and small country roads will require manual driving.

In dense urban and suburban areas that's likely not an issue.

Another possibility is Automaker X partnering with comms / infrastructure Company Y (e.g., Comcast). Put another way, if they can get to the point this is the dealbreaker then it's easy compared to what it took to get here.

The money is going to come from ads and VCs

Yeah. For the cost of all this retrofitting of roads, you’d be able to build the most insanely comprehensive transit system anyone has ever heard of.

FWIW though, it probably is possible to use this sort of technology for buses and shuttles. You can’t fix markings on ALL the roads, but you can make sure the markings are good enough on main arterials to have a dedicated bus lane.

A lot of tech solutions to transportation problems are reinventing elements of mass transit. Self-driving trucks that are virtually linked like a train. Telling Uber pool rides to walk to the nearest intersection to optimize routes (like a bus stop). Central scheduling to share right of way timeslots between vehicles. Or tech fails to reinvent the wheel, e.g. assuming that the congestion and parking issues caused by too many single occupancy vehicles can be solved with software instead of dynamic road and parking pricing and high occupancy vehicles.

>A lot of tech solutions to transportation problems are reinventing elements of mass transit.

For sure. And I feel like they're going about it backwards by defaulting to maintaining norms of private property and leasing things starting with private/personally owned property and developing ways to lease it to for communal use.

They'd probably have a more viable business model if they had started with communal property and charged rent or usage fees for maintenance instead. Jitney cabs or dollar vans have been around forever, and their big challenge was figuring out how to do dispatch and routing in a way that didn't give people intolerably long wait times.

For the love of everything holy, some of us just dont want public transit - especially having seen the horrors of most public transit options even in the best managed nations and conditions.

From one of my previous comments on a different post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19638171

- - - -

Reducing the number of cars (and therefore traffic) on the roads will benefit everybody You seem to have a rose-tinted view of the world we live in.

  Have you ever had to commute in less-than-ideal 
  conditions?
  Heavy snow? Sleet? Black ice?
  Have you ever lived in places that are not
  perfectly flat? or lived in places that 
  are hot that make bicycling unfeasible?
  Did you have sporting gear / work gear that
  you had to lug? Did you know some people have
  to fetch their own gear to work
  Did you have to take calls during transit?
  Did you know its common practice for employees
  to call into meetings during their commute and/or
  help assist operations via conference calls?
  Have you had to shop for more than a baguette
  or a bagel at a store? You know how cumbersome
  that gets for even a family of three?
  Do you have the slightest clue how much casual 
  violence and crime happen on public transit?[1]

Not to belabor the point but there simply are dozens of cases where bicycles or public transit just don't cut it. Not to mention the hygiene, personal safety (from other passengers for example) and personal space aspects involved in someone choosing a mode of transportation other than public transit or bicycling. Ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and emission-free vehicles should all alleviate the issues we currently face with traffic, parking and accidents.

However doing away with cars or vehicular traffic is just pollyannaish madness.

[1]

Teen robbed at gunpoint at Fruitvale, BART officer says writing a report is a 'waste of resources'

https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/bart-police-refuse-repo...

- - - -

edit: formatting

> Ride-sharing, autonomous vehicles and emission-free vehicles should all alleviate the issues we currently face with traffic, parking and accidents.

No they won’t. This is just willful self-delusion on the part of transit haters.

Most of your concerns are either just plain petty (like, just wear headphones if you don’t like hearing other people) or lacking in perspective (cars kill way more people than whatever safety concerns on a transit system you want to gussy up).

Volvo has proposed some rather simple infrastructure - driving magnetized nails into the pavement as a lane hint. This is mostly because they have to deal with heavy snow. It's not the sole, or even the primary guidance system, but it helps. They also suggest that snowplows could use the magnets for guidance. In snowy areas, it's common to use posts or flags or even overhead signs (in Hokkaido) to show where the road is.

It's a cool idea, but nails rust, meaning a maintenance issue and outages. Is there a magnetic material that doesn't corrode?

How about magnetic hematite mixed into the road building materials; especially as its a biproduct of iron mining...

The signal doesn't have to be strong, only detectable.

The nails aren't structural, only a signal.

Multiple nails mean the signal is highly redundant, depending on density.

Regular maintenance could detect weakening signal (rusting nails) and result in new nails being inserted.

Iron oxide remains (weakly) magnetic.

Treatments (galvanised nails, coated, etc.) could slow corrosion.

Good point, such an issue could/would become obvious during a multi year trial.

Possibly something between lifts of asphalt would work. But a nail through the surface layer of asphalt would allow water in, and mess with the structural integrity of the wear surface. Also, the water it allowed in would freeze and expand and likely push the "nail" upwards - leading to punctured tires. I'd be curious to read a bit more if you have a link.

The overhead lane markers in Hokkaido work well, but would be an expensive retrofit elsewhere (not the poles themselves, but the foundations)

The impetus will be wartime, just as the impetus for the interstate highway system and most of the railway system was wartime.

In peacetime, self-driving cars are a nice-to-have that can save many billions of driver hours and a few traffic fatalities. In wartime, they're literally a matter of life or death. The side that can handle all of their logistics without exposing their precious humans to enemy fire has a huge advantage over the one whose supply lanes can get picked off one by one.

This argument is tough to swallow. The real push to build interstate highways was in early 1950s and began in earnest in 1956. National defense was only one piece of the justification for the project.

The origins of the interstate highway system in defense is well-documented in the historical record, and the title of the bill authorizing it was the "National Interstate and Defense Highways Act":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Aid_Highway_Act_of_195...

There were of course other civilian concerns as well, but Eisenhower's arguments at the time of the plan primarily cited the importance of Germany's autobahn system during WW2 as a justification.

Dropping bombs on smart highways seems much easier than hitting a moving vehicle.

Relatively futile, though, when a self-driving cement mixer comes along, patches the crater, and restores any guidechips needed for other vehicles to navigate.

If a road is too dangerous for humans to drive on due to enemy fire, I would expect the conditions of the road to be much worse than American roads today.

Actually, if all we factor in is paint then if we would have autonomous vehicles for which 'paint' was critical there would be a higher frequency in the maintenance cycle using automated robot painters. I'm fairly sure if the highways facilitated 100% autonomous operation their maintenance could be automated thus driving down the costs.

But you are right, road maintenance is never cheap.

It would probably be easier to have a swarm like national airtraffic AI, all cars flying, all cargo in blimps than to maintain a complex ground network of "smart roads"

Never mind that money for basic road maintenance is diverted because people want to pay less tax/rates and vote for politicians who promise this bugger the long term effect.

If subsurface radar imaging tech works out, it will fix the marking/signage problem nicely. Kind of disappointing not to hear more about that since the initial articles came out a couple of years ago.

We can on motorways, which is where I think driverless technology will actually start - motorways are simpler environments than most roads, and have convenient service stations along them.

Driverless lorries that go from one service station to another will be the first fully autonomous vehicles I think.

That's a tragedy of priorities. Priorities of the local municipality or even the federal government. A dysfunction of misplaced deliberations.

All the road and infrastructure taxes being funneled by the politicians to, other areas as they see fit to placate their constituencies or finance their pet projects.

Same with out-of-control grossly over-budget projects that dont deliver the bang for the buck.

If we - as an electorate - insisted on superior paint or "marking technology" for surface roads, we shall have them in one form or the other.

Probably in those places in the world where "we" can keep the markings on the road visible and the roads properly maintained?

Don't get me started on the potholes. There are some traffic lights near me which need patching every month or two in the winter. Can they not just engineer it to lift in a new concrete slab each time?

> implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other

And sing kumbaya, holding hands together....

What about adversarial car AIs? Malicious actors, etc.?

> but most forget to account for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way

Multiple important stake holders seem to have significant incentives to make this happen. Local/state govs want less traffic jams and crashes, auto insurance companies would love to collect premiums and not pay out, Uber, Lyft would love to get rid of their drivers

I want an oceanside villa on the dark side of the moon but that's doesn't mean it will happen. Just because there is motivation to do something doesn't mean it is possible.

but if you had the funds to, why wouldn't you?

Because there are million other better uses for that money.

sounds like you don't actually want it then.

Of course it’s possible: we have billions of existence proofs that driving high speed vehicles successfully using sensors equipped to measure light and sound work. The question is how much it takes to replicate that system artificially.

I don‘t think high speed is where there is a problem. The challenges lie in the diverse environments where literally anything can happen.

There are millions of miles of roads just in the US that will never have that sort of infrastructure because the cost of keeping beacons running and marking in place would be astronomical. Sure maybe California will have some of that around big population areas but that's probably about it.

What happens to all these markings when it snows a couple centimeters?'

Fully self driving cars won't happen in our lifetime, probably not this century.

its not only lines on the road though:

Imagine you are following a pickup-truck and out of the back an obviously empty box floats out of the bed and lands directly in front of your car.

For a human its trivial to know the box is empty and its ok to hit it....does "AI" know that?

Multiply that case x1000 and you have the conditions self-driving cars will need to handle on a daily basis.

> For a human its trivial to know the box is empty and its ok to hit it....does "AI" know that?

This is a great anecdote that definitely needs a source to back it up.

Primarily, there are a significant number of single vehicle accidents caused by drivers jerking the wheel instead of acting in a calm manner.

Secondly, there are many cases where a box is not safe to ignore; that could mean it damaging a fog light, a large staple in it hitting a tire, or it getting stuck somewhere, temporary loss of traction or visibility.

In conclusion; anything on the road should be treated as something to avoid, but definitely something to avoid a high speed collision with.

Other Anecdotes to consider: The first model S firs was caused by a trailer hitch in the road. Hammer hit a model 3. Asphalt coming loose in slabs and hitting a driver. Mattresses and ice from the roof in front of you. Tldr; There are many accidents that do happen with human drivers.

> For a human its trivial...

I anecdotally question this based on both personal experience and stories I've heard. It seems like it would be a hard problem for both humans and AIs, however AIs have the edge in the long run due to sheer processing speed.

AI also has a lot of training data. Humans are highly adaptable but most of us have limited experience with situations like hydroplaning, sudden tire failure, etc.

Also self-driving cars could have better sensors that don't have blind spots, and the multitasking ability to monitor all of them at once.

I think I can write a script what is able to recognize the exact weight of the flying object. I will calculate the rate of falling based on different observation like airfriction, rotation speed, speed decrease etc. With my model I can extract a probability number which I use to make a decision. Easy job. Opencv, tensor flow, some tracker software and php and of course a 16k 4000fps 3d camera will do the job. I am kidding. You are right.

If someone drives around with loose crap in the back of their truck that flies out, the truck driver is at fault not the self driving car. This is a danger we already have on the road.

Humans make the wrong call on this sort of thing all the time. They also make stupid passes, yield the right of way at the wrong time, drive the wrong way down one way streets, cut each other off, fall asleep at the wheel, drive drunk, drive without their glasses on, get road rage, etc etc etc.

There is this sort of one-way lens when it comes to self driving cars. People want to throw up red flags about all things they might do wrong while ignoring the millions of stupid things that humans do to kill each other with cars every single day.

Right, except no one is claiming humans are perfect drivers but I have heard self driving car evangelists say countless times that self driving cars are going to bring an end to traffic deaths.

They will bring an end to avoidable traffic deaths caused by driving. They obviously will not prevent deaths caused by things falling out of trucks.

I don't think it's super relevant who is at fault, I care what the consequences are.

"It's ok if I get into an accident - it will be the other guy's fault" is only the right reasoning if you're talking on the individual level about about monetary costs of an accident only. If you're talking about injury, or if you're talking about the cost to society as a whole, they are bad consequences regardless of whose fault the accident is.

I think the actual answer is that self-driving cars will end up doing a good enough (i.e. at least human-level but not perfect) job of not wildly swerving or braking to avoid harmless objects like floating plastic bags that this won't be a concern.

> I don't think it's super relevant who is at fault, I care what the consequences are.

> "It's ok if I get into an accident - it will be the other guy's fault"

Exactly. Most accidents take two people to happen, one who makes a mistake and at least one more who could have prevented the accident as well. For example, when right of way is ignored by someone in a left yield right situation, no accident happens if the one with right of way brakes in time. Or, if someone fails to merge in time and runs out of road, someone else can prevent an accident by braking a little.

I always felt the film minority report was onto something with regard to this: the vehicles depicted in the movie are (non-optionally) self-driving within dense urban regions and drivable by humans in the country

I think I am going to side with VW on this. I have always been skeptical of fully autonomous vehicles, and I do not believe they will _ever_ exist on the roads that currently stand. Driving safely in all conditions without aid from a human is simply too complex a task for code that can be audited and verified. If some AI model that's been trained on a billion years of driving experience shows promise, but it is some incomprehensible black box of weights, I won't be getting in that car.

Autonomous vehicles will only ever truly exist upon infrastructure literally designed to aid them, greatly simplifying how they need to interact with the environment, thus making the problem tractable with code we can prove works. I really think it will take more than putting markings on existing roads. It is going to take new roads full stop, probably with various wireless checkpoints built into them.

You may not be getting in that car, but I certainly will.

After all, every driver on the road today is an incomprehensible black box where not only do we not know the parameters, we don't even know the function they're parameterizing. Every instance functions differently, and our testing procedures have woefully low coverage.

how do you see insurance working? why would drivers be responsible to have insurance when the car is completely controlled by bigcorp programmers?

Insurance would be a nightmare for a manufacturer. Every accident will initially be pegged to the auto maker (as it should be.. it’s their code!). The auto maker will always try to weasel out and blame the passenger-owners of the car (they didn’t maintain it, the paint was dirty and messed with the sensors, the tire pressure was 2 PSI lower than average).

And if you go with the “nobody will own cars, you’ll just summon one” model... well the fleet owner will just sue the manufacturer instead.

Just like Tesla blames dead drivers for using "autopilot." "They should have kept their hands on the wheel and been paying attention." No you can't have a copy of the data.

I have to have insurance now, even though a lot of the functions of my car are controlled by their software.

Remember when the Toyota had that problem of the accelerator "getting stuck" because the software didn't disengage? Initially the owners' insurances were paying out, until it happened enough that they were able to prove it was Toyota's fault, and then Toyota had to pay them back.

I imagine in a self driving world it would work the same way. You get insurance, the car has a crash, your insurance and the manufacturer fight out whose fault it is.

Seems like it would mostly be the manufacturers that would have to insure the cars, at least for the expensive part (liability)

For me? I'm a self-driving skeptic, but... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it, (I mean, a reasonable amount of insurance, at least a statistical life worth) I'd ride in the thing. I think that's an honest signal.

>... if the manufacturer was willing to properly insure it,

Its not just the manufacturers, who is underwriting all that insurance?

Ford sells approximately 2.3M vehicles per year, imagine if 50% of self-driving...over a 5 year period that 5.5M cars...if each one needs to carry a potential 1M policy thats an incredible amount of liability on someone's balance sheet. (even if you say the policy is only 100K thats still $576B in liability)

Thats only for Ford, add in all vehicles manufacturers and extend that to 10-15 years into the future and thats an incredible amount.

However there is nothing to say that a new laws won't be passed to allow manufacturers to escape liability. Most likely this is what will happen (see vaccine courts, etc)

But all of those cars are insured (and that insurance is underwritten) today. So the liability already lives on the balance sheet of insurance companies. Maybe the specific companies change...

eh, right now most people are massively underinsured; minimum coverage in California is like $35k, and most insurance companies won't sell you a plan with more than a half million of liability (at least not without an umbrella policy) - if we stop subsidizing driving through pushing costs on to victims of accidents, the cost of driving will go up. But yeah, it should be about the cost of a good umbrella policy+auto policy is now, modulo any savings if the self-driving car gets in fewer accidents.

but note, we're paying most of that already in the form of people who are killed and under-compensated by under-insured drivers. Increasing liability insurance minimums would roll that cost that is currently born entirely by the victim into the cost of operating a car, which is where it ought to be.

Sometimes it seems that critics of something like self-driving cars want so badly for the project to fail that they themselves fail to see obvious solutions.

The insurance will work much better than it does today, because insurance in it's core is about spreading the risks and calculating exact costs of those risks, it's about calculating statistics of negative events and predicting total costs of such events for the entire fleets.

ALL parts of that equation are just better calculated if all cars were automatic, - you can better calculate number of accidents, you can see details of all accidents because there is blackbox data including videos, you can compare cars to each other because a Tesla with same hardware drives in exactly the same way as another one (which cannot be said for human drivers), they don't have to calculate for weird human risk activities such as drinking or being tired, they can run simulations of the same situation on the same software etc. etc.

Insurance is not going to have any problems, insurance is going to love it and make a lot of money on the self-driving cars, they are a perfect fit for each other. Insurance companies don't even care for whom do they have to pay to, they just care that the statistic of the number of failures is correctly represented and that manufacturers don't lie about those statistics - that is all they care about, they calculate a simple equation, that's all insurance is about...

Insurers like standards and features that can be easily verified and improve predictability of the crowd. The issue with high tech solutions, especially mono-cultures is malicious hacking or outages of central services that result in simultaneous failure. An insurer can't handle 50% of cars crashing in the same year.

When one of those black boxes malfunctions it gets taken off the road. When the AI malfunctions, are we going to shut down entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed?

Not to mention that most software fixes cause other bugs...

At least the software is fixable. Other humans are not.

At least other humans fear death as a consequence of driving incorrectly. Computers do not.

Some humans, when seeking to end their own lives, end the lives of others: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525

That's an extreme example, but automotive suicides that kill other passengers, drivers, or pedestrians fall into the same category. Consider also deaths from accidents involving drunk driving or fatigue -- thousands of motorists take to the roads every day modified in one manner or another that reduces their driving aptitude.

Also, while it may be correct to say that computers don't "fear death", there's no reason that "risk to self" can't be part of the criteria for decision making by an autonomous system.

Too many people still driving around drunk sadly counters that point.

Humans are fixable in that they are held accountable. One person can be taken off the road if they are unfit to drive. (Revoke license, imprison, etc). Then the incident has become Someone's Fault, and society can move on.

I’d personally rather have less death and mayhem than be able to blame someone for it...

That's a fine opinion, but it's the minority. Maybe not in the abstract, but as soon as you have unexplainable deaths (meaning there's nobody to blame), people freak the fuck out.

> When the AI malfunctions, are we going to shut down

> entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed?

Yes, a malfunction AI would have to be grounded, just like for example the Boeing 737 MAX is now.

Or a car model with severe problems. This rarely (if ever) happens because with that many cars, severe problems tend to be noticed fairly quickly. That shouldn't change with self driving cars. With several million miles driven each day for more popular models, even rare edge cases should appear within days.

In an extreme example I expect that's precisely what would happen. Consider what's currently unfolding around the 737 Max. In the automotive space there's a long history of serious flaws that resulted in loss of life, ranging from faulty airbag deployment systems to flawed designs for ignition systems.

We have precedent for how we qualify and evaluate things for safety: test them across a variety of conditions, accumulate driver-miles or operator-hours and incident frequencies. Then, using that data establish a bar for what constitutes an acceptable level of risk given the utility something provides. If we wanted to ensure nobody ever died in a car accident, we would ensure there were no cars, but collectively we've made a different choice.

We've made a choice to allow people to kill each other in cars from time to time, but that's different from choosing to allow automated cars to kill anybody. Knowing human nature, I don't think the general public will accept double digit automated deaths without an outcry.

Shutting down a plane is completely different from taking an entire class of publicly owned vehicles off the road. People will be furious.

Yes, they will be furious about the deaths and the shutdown, both. Don't forget that people are made up of individuals.

> are we going to shut down entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed?

Yes of course we will. What is the problem with that approach? That is the exactly logical thing to do and will be done.

5g networks could greatly help bridge the technical gap. A good example of unforeseen consequences similar to smartphones and 4g transforming society.

I don't understand how a vehicle or any other real time system can rely on 5G. For example, electrical utilities have such a critical responsibility for matching supply to demand and maintaining exactly 50/60Hz that the landline phone network is not good enough, they have to maintain a private signaling network. Cellular networks are notoriously unreliable with dead zones, dropped calls, congestion, power failure, etc. Millimeter wave 5G is even worse with line of sight coverage zones measured in meters.

There is no one solution that is meant to not fail.

It is layers of redundancy. If one fails, the car continues to operate normally. If all are operating at peak, the car is near perfect. If multiple fail, it operates with somewhat degraded performance, but still markedly better than a human.

* Digital maps * P2P Networks * Human-reported obstructions and changes (Waze) * Machine-focused traffic markings * LIDAR * Cameras

but it is some incomprehensible black box of weights, I won't be getting in that car.

You don't understand the complex weighted probabilities in your doctor's head either, but you trust them to diagnose cancer (which incidentally machine learning is beating humans at). None of the algorithms in doctors' heads can be formally proved to work in all circumstances, nor can the code that runs medical equipment.

A full understanding of complex systems (machine or human controlled) is not possible today in many domains, that's why we measure results. If the data shows that self-driving cars are safer, we will switch. At present, that's what it shows.

As to special roads/markers, these would make the technology less effective at dealing with the unexpected (crash ahead, moose on road, cyclist in the lane etc), and many of the leading companies don't think they are necessary. I can see cars forming networks which report danger, or adding more sensors, but don't think our roads will have to change for self driving, which will be prevalent within the decade IMO without infrastructure changes.

"I'm going to agree with the side I already agreed with."

... ok.

> We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other, and make special lanes for self-driving cars only, among other improvements that will make it easier for the cars.

I feel like the correct way to describe this future isn't "self-driving cars", but rather "personal autonomous trains." In est, the road system described here would just be a rather clumsy railroad network.

I interpret the goal of having "self-driving cars" as referring to the ability to have a passenger vehicles that can autonomously navigate (wayfind?) off-road, i.e. what the aim of the DARPA Grand Challenge would eventually evolve into.

It's my belief that self driving cars will, for a very significant time in the future, still need to make human control possible. Think about the vast amounts of rural roads -- dirt, gravel. Anyone who's ever taken a 4x4 out to a trailhead in the desert knows that sometimes those roads don't even exist except on a map. Washouts can be a weekly problem in certain seasons. But you don't start in the desert, right? You have to take highways at a minimum, and quite likely national interstates as well, to get to the desert roads.

Think about attending a festival or fair with grass parking. You follow a line of cars, pull up to a guy who's standing out in the field. He looks around and says, "Why don't you go park next to that red Toyota two rows over?" Sure, that part is not "on the road," but certainly I had to take highways to get there.

Maybe I, as an urban-dwelling American, only need functionality like this a few times per year. But there are significant chunks of this country and the world in general where this is part of daily life. Adopting fully self-driving cars without manual driving modes is going to take extreme amounts of change and adaptation, not only technologically but also culturally. I would recommend spending a few weeks in the deep country if you want to fully understand some of the difficulties in reaching level 5.

If the time scale you're talking about is on the order of 50 years, I could maybe see it. But I do think there will always be a need for personal vehicles with some level of manual control.

Beyond all that, however, this article to me seems like 90% clickbait. The statement merely was "Maybe it will never happen," and it was stated in the context of a discussion of the difficulty in reaching level 5 autonomy. But now we have articles throwing headlines up saying "VW Exec admits fully self driving cars may NEVER happen." Feels a little disingenuous.

eh, something that only works in cities would be pretty nice for more than half of us. If you need an off road vehicle twice a year, you rent one; we have that technology already.

(I mean, we're still a long ways away from level 5 in the city.. I'm just saying, something that was level 5 only on pavement and only in the city would be damn useful; and good enough for more than half of us.)

> We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars.

Or even easier, platooning. I don't understand why autonomous cars is a bigger thing than platooning. I mean, platooning solves 95% of use cases of self driving cars [1] and is orders of magnitude easier problem to solve.

[1] At least for me. I do not mind driving in the cities myself, but if I just could nap or watch a movie on the highway part, that would have some utility

If cars could assemble into close convoy trains on multi-lane highways / motorways / autoroutes / whatever, then it would probably also solve electric car range for many people - you only care about range on relatively long distance journeys, and you're likely to be doing those on major multi-lane carriageways. If you could split the air resistance between a bunch of other vehicles then you'd add considerably to the range. I similarly don't understand why we're not trying to solve that instead. As you say, it seems easy compared to full autonomous driving.

https://peloton-tech.com - I mean, that's just one company, I think there are a handful working on just the problem you're talking about.

Yes. Can you estimate how much these companies have received funding compared to self-driving tech companies/projects? My wild guess (based only on the general visibility) is that it amounts pretty much to a rounding error.

sure, but I think the truck convoy companies are run a little bit more like regular companies than startups? they have a reasonable near-term goal and sales pipeline. Like, I think if you have a couple modern trucks you can go have peloton install their system and you can use it right now.

Yes, but what we are missing is a platform[1] where I can join a random convoy going the same direction than me. And pay something for the lead car or offer myself as a lead car in case I feel like driving and earning some money. This would be in startup territory for me that would deserve more VC money than autonomous technology. At least just now.

[1] I assume also some regulatory developments for this are missing in addition to platform and universal tech kit for private cars. In case such platform already exists and all regulatory hurdles have been tackled, then I miss only widespread adoption and marketing...

Actually, I think there's a huge opportunity for the incumbent car manufacturers there. Considering how much identification many consumers have with their car brands, this could work out well (maybe even better) if it were only compatible with cars from the same manufacturer.

I mean, you could do a retrofit kit for regular cars, too... but that seems harder to get exactly right (I mean, considering the cost of a fuckup) and would require a bunch of new marketing infrastructure, whereas if Ford, say, just bought peloton and said "hey, make this work across our model lines" - well, that'd be a pretty good argument for buying a ford.

This could be solved for cheaper with better public transport.

All of this discussion on smart infrastructure is moot, imho, because it won't be guaranteed to be there on all roads and cars will have to be designed to work even when the smart infrastructure breaks down.

So this means that self-driving cars will have to safely handle these cases and that also means that it is likely that cars will have to still be able to be driven manually.

Bottom line: self-driving cars will have to handle absence of smart infrastructure (in which case do we really need that infrastructure? I think we'll still need it, though, to guide and improve traffic)) and/or cars will continue to be driven manually at least some of the time.

> All of this discussion on smart infrastructure is moot, imho, because it won't be guaranteed to be there on all roads and cars will have to be designed to work even when the smart infrastructure breaks down.

Also, a vast majority of the world doesn't even have proper roads like many western countries do.

In many parts of the world a road is not even paved or asphalted, and let's not forget what is actually making use of that road.

Seeing animals on roads might be a rare sight in a western country, but in much of the world, the road is shared by more then just passenger cars and trucks.

I dunno. Americans seem to want these giant 4x4s even when they leave the city twice a year; they'd be better off (certainly safer... most trucks are more dangerous for other people and for the occupants) if they had a little car for city driving and rented the off road cargo hauler when they needed it.

A city-only car would be totally useful for people who live in cities; you just rent something when you want to go to the boonies.

Heck, most BEVs are that way now; I've got like 120 miles of range on mine, which is fine almost all the time. the two or three times a year I need something with more range or with more cargo capacity or what have you, I borrow or rent.

I think that the economics of the first level5 cars might be similar to current BEVs, in that you can only go where there is infrastructure. which is where most of us go most of the time.

Sure there are niche markets where fully self-driving and self-driving only cars may make sense.

But they still need to handle fault cases: e.g. they cannot only rely on a beacon sent by traffic lights because that beacon or the whole traffic light might out of order. So, imho, while smart infrastructure may help self-driving cars and traffic management it does not allow you to avoid the "hard work", which to make sure self-driving cars will behave safely and reasonably completely on their own.

eh, my argument is that as long as they are intelligent enough to safely get to the side of the road, I think there's a very large number of people who would be okay with a car that "broke down" every 10K miles if it was otherwise great. (heck, I've been in some sort of breakdown or accident in an uber more often than that, even not counting app failures, so people would probably tolerate a lot more than that if the things were really self-driving.)

Note, you still have the safety problems to solve. You need to know how to get out of the road if the road infrastructure is on the blink. I'm just saying that "I don't know what to do so I will pull over" as long as it doesn't happen too often, is an acceptable answer.

more to the point, for "full self driving" even with infrastructure, the "don't hit unexpected pedestrians" technology needs to get way better. You probably can regulate transponders in cars. You probably can't regulate transponders on children.

I like driving, I also like the assistance that modern vehicles provide on Motorways, however, would I ever fully hand over control? Probably not. A Boeing 747 has autopilot.. however 3 pilots sit behind hit to keep an eye on what it's doing.

Sometimes I like driving, but I also like sleeping or hacking or drinking, and it'd be great to have the choice.

I don't think our generation will ever let a computer take full control.

But how many passengers are on the 747?

The ratio of pilot to total people on the plane is often something like 1/100. In a cars it might average 1/1.2 or something. I think that should be improved.

Also, on a plane, those pilots are never expected to jump in with 2 seconds notice because something isn't working right. I don't think that is realistic....people zone out, but that is expected in "supervised self driving".

The cost of that infra is so huge, it might be easier to imagine low-altitude self-flying pods.

What about dirt forest service roads? What about the dirt parking lot at that wedding you just went to? How will it find a parking spot? How will it get into a ferry where people direct you to the correct spot?

How will it deal with an accident up ahead where some drunk bystander is trying to direct traffic? How will it know to ignore the drunk guy? What if it isn’t a drunk guy but a sober person directing traffic? Does the car obey in that case?

None of those are edge cases because every time it drives it will encounter some novel edge case that has never happened before and it will have to perform better than a human.

Don’t even get started with liability. Once you take away the steering wheel the manufacturer is on the hook for every single mistake and every single accident. You’d be insane to be a manufacturer and sign up for that.

Sorry, but self driving cars are a complete fantasy.

Most people wouldn't instantly know how to handle those cases either. Many people would obey the drunk guy. Maybe that's the right thing to do.

None of those are edge cases because every time it drives it will encounter some novel edge case that has never happened before and it will have to perform better than a human.

That's why these things could never be rule based, there are too many small exceptions. When they're not overfitting/able to memorize all your training examples, neural nets learn heuristics, just as people do. Different people learn different heuristics. Granted, they don't have much of the same context about the world that people do, it will take a long time to build enough examples for them to infer all of that. But Tesla's fleet is getting more driving experience every day than you will get in your entire life, and every time they train on one of those exceptions, the entire fleet will benefit.

If drivers no longer carry their own insurance, this is probably going to be handled by insurance at the manufacturer level, and baked into the price. The insurance will demand certain processes to prevent large-scale bugs being rolled out.

I don't see any fantasy here, just a lot of work.

But Tesla's fleet is getting more driving experience every day than you will get in your entire life, and every time they train on one of those exceptions, the entire fleet will benefit.

Humans can reason about things that haven't to them happened before. Today's machine learning systems cannot. As you say, to react appropriately they must have been trained to do so using human annotated data.

The argument against FSD is that you would need an infinite number of annotated examples, and an infinite number of subroutines for behaving in any identified situations, because the space of driving is effectively infinite.

Until machines are able to do general reasoning about things they've not experienced before then FSD is not happening. By the way, Demis Hassabis thinks that this sort of transfer learning is the key to solving AI.

> But Tesla's fleet is getting more driving experience every day than you will get in your entire life, and every time they train on one of those exceptions, the entire fleet will benefit.

Prove they are getting better. They run into the sides of trucks and off ramps on the freeway quite often (and don’t you dare blame the driver... it’s “full self driving” remember?)

Can you prove a machine learning algorithm does the right thing in novel cases it hasn’t encountered before? Nope.

And also, don’t reply with “well can humans”. That is a lame rebuttal. Computers will be held to an almost 100% non-failure standard before society accepts them. And that will never happen because of, well, reality.

> But Tesla's fleet is getting more driving experience every day than you will get in your entire life, and every time they train on one of those exceptions, the entire fleet will benefit.

That’s not how machine learning works. You can “train on exceptions” as much as you want, and you have 0 guaranteed results. It can help, it can make no change or it can cause unexpected regressions.

It certainly can cause unexpected regressions, but of course that's being monitored during training. I'm not saying this is some real time learning system, nor that the system behaves perfectly on an exception case as soon as it's added to the training set. My point is that their engineers are getting an incredible amount of data on tricky driving situations to train their models on, far more than a human will see in their entire driving career, and when their model improves to deal with those, it improves for everyone. And at some point, these systems will be much better at driving than any human alive.

It’s one of great misunderstandings (or more likely - very effective way of getting money) to claim that machine learning is a data problem. We’re so far away from that point, that we have literally no idea what’s needed to make ML a data problem. Algorithms are extremely simple, and it’s all more or less curve fitting.

Media (and surprising amount of tech people as well) tend to claim that ML learning is like human learning - repeat something enough times and you’re done, you know how to do it. ML is no where close to that point.

You have any idea what the current state is of neural networks and their practical use? Most work only in very predictable controlled environments. Once you add one new ingredient things will fall apart. A 'complex' ai currently has less than 100 different things to deal with. And you need a hell of a fast machine to simulate millions of gens. In case of a self driving car you need approximately 1.000.000.000 different inputs. If you would the Moore law to predict the moment we deal with that amount you would have to wait about 500 years.

I do have some idea, I use them in my work. What are you calling inputs here? And gens?

The big reasons I want a self driving car is because I want to eliminate the boring drudgery and make the routine parts of driving safer. If I have to drive the last 1% myself, it's not a big deal. I suspect this is how most people feel.

I haven't done the math, but time spent on forest service roads, wedding parking lots, and boarding ferries is quite low overall. And the idea of driving in those instances doesn't bother me. Having the car take care of the other 99.999% of my driving live is what I do care about.

> None of those are edge cases because every time it drives it will encounter some novel edge case that has never happened before and it will have to perform better than a human.

If most of your driving involves drunks directing traffic, forest roads, and dirt-lot weddings then a self-driving car is likely not for you.

> If I have to drive the last 1% myself, it's not a big deal. I suspect this is how most people feel.

Which is all well and good until you realize a few things:

1) that “last 1%” happens every trip at any time. You will always encounter an edge case the machine cannot handle. Period.

2) as a result you have to always pay attention in order to immediately take over

3) you can’t because you (the royal you) are three sheets to the wind plastered drunk.

Sorry. If I have to pay attention for that 1%, it ain’t full self driving. And anything that encourages you not to pay attention 100% of the time is unsafe and shouldn’t be allowed in the road. And if I have to pay attention 100% of the time in order to take over, what the fuck is the point?

And if you have not been doing the driving, it will take precious seconds - too long - to assess the situation and react appropriately.

Either you're driving, or you're a passenger in a car with a driver who seems reliable, but really isn't totally so. Eventually, that will become a winning bet, but when?

Not necessarily.

Take Japanese highway system. It is well maintained, has “rest” stations where you can park car for free.

If you could get an app that can drive drunk salaryman, or not even drunk just tired from Tokyo interchange to closest rest area to wherever.. you will win. Nobody will buy a car without that who uses car for highway driving, period. It is a killer app. Get off work at 9pm Friday, get the car to the IC punch the destination, wake up at a rest are 20mins from Ski resort, Onden, parents house etc

Snow, taiphoon coming whatever. Park at closest rest area.

I am very pessimistic about cars without steering wheels. I am quite optimistic about cars that have ability to drive well marked roads. Here is a crazy thing Charge fairs for highways like Japan does, then maintain them.

The safe disengage problem is solvable to match human level outcomes. Unexpected event? Slow down, avoid obstacles, flashing lights, slowly go to a spot that's ok-ish for parking.

Yes there can be a big hole in the road anytime, the AI has to watch the vehicle in front of it, if no such vehicle then it should chose a speed that let's it evaluate road conditions for the given weather/visibility.

Vehicle coming into our lane? The AI has to match human level maneuvering to evade the incoming car. It already has much better chance given it won't panic, will be always fully alert, and will be as accurate and precise as it can.

So the big categories are sudden road/environment changes (tree falls on road, hail, mudslide, earthquake damages road, animal crosses road), other vehicles, and pedestrians/cyclists/etc.

All are manageable with inferences from the environment (weather and roadside context determine visibility and how much space there is for maneuvering, how likely are unexpected crossings - eg. deer, kids) and surrounding traffic.

Are these hard? Sure, but none require human level cognitive reasoning.

> that “last 1%” happens every trip at any time.

Are you are going to randomly have to park in a wedding lot? The only example you gave which might happen in the middle of a trip, the Tesla can handle just fine for long enough to pass control over to the driver.

> you can’t because you (the royal you) are three sheets to the wind plastered drunk.

It's still the driver's responsibility to drive sober. Even so, I'd far rather someone who is drunk be behind the wheel of a self driving car than otherwise.

Most people never see a dirt road all year round. Don't let perfect be the enemy of good enough (ie SDCs in urban areas).

The "edge case" I worry about is driving on ice or snow.

Driving safely on frozen surfaces is not a solved problem for human drivers, but most of us insist it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

If the vehicle drives as slowly as it should in those conditions, it would probably frustrate a lot of people who really depend on their false sense of invincibility.

> Driving safely on frozen surfaces is not a solved problem for human drivers, but most of us insist it is a perfectly reasonable thing to do.

What does that mean? That it actually is solved by humans? Or that it's not, and we just take the increased risk? If the former, then we can automated it. If the latter, then the self driving cars can also drive at increased risk, opt-in of course.

I meant the latter, but "equally safe as the status quo" might not be sufficient here.

If we built planes that were only as safe as highway driving, people would be outraged.

We aren't exactly rational about this stuff, and we expect a lot more from machines we don't directly control.

But I like your opt in solution. Maybe the UI loudly complains about the risk of current conditions and sticks to <5 MPH, unless the user enables "never tell me the odds" mode.

Ice or snow should be WAY easier for a self-driving car than a human (especially one with no or little experience).

A car has access to all 4 wheel sensors independently, it can apply brakes on each 4 wheels independently. It can always turn the steering wheel in the right direction, and it wouldn't panic.

Also, it would always drive the 'right' speed limit... sure, other human drivers might get annoyed, but assuming the true 'full self driving' future happens, there shouldn't be many of them on the road in time anyways.

Most realistic comment in the entire thread.

No way. The tech and liability will be too expensive for many years, at least till parents run out.

My guess is that interstate type highways will be instrumented for trucks and cars will benefit.

To put this in perspective, imagine this hypothetical conversation happening a century ago:

"I have this new auto-mobile concept which doesn't require a horse and which can go fast; I envision up to fifty miles per hour. It will require a smooth, hardened road surface, but that will be achievable someday."

"Forget about it. We already have millions of miles of roads, which are bumpy, made of dirt, and hard to build and maintain. Who will do the extra work to smooth them? Harden them? Maintain them? What if some jerk digs a hole in one as a prank? Maybe this could happen in a limited way in cities, but this is overall a pipe dream."

My point is, it isn't a question of whether this is feasible, it's a question of incentives. If the incentives lead society in this direction, it will happen.

Cobblestone/bumpy/muddy/dirt streets still exist today.

I could see autonomous vehicles working in a city, but not out in the country where a driveway might be an unmarked dirt path.

Yes but these things are already problems for human-operated cars. You just need to drive slow and be careful on some roads. You need training, instructions, markers, specialized vehicles, or prior experience on some patches of terrain. These solutions have analogs in the automated driving realm.

What features of an unmarked dirt path make it "driveable" that you can pick out but a camera cannot?

Yes, imagine that world. We wouldn’t have a million direct deaths every year, a million more caused by pollution. We wouldn’t waste trillions a year on roads, hospitals, signs, sprawl, and so much more. Just so someone can get a donut at 3am.

You can compare these levels of progress, sure but that doesn't mean the comparison is valid. Lots of people dismissed flying cars in the 60s and heck, they were right, the problem is fundamentally different.

The difference because the horse-to-auto transition and the auto-to-self-driving-auto is that autonomous cars solutions are inherently fragile and cars reasonably robust. (Flying cars are inherently fragile too - the problem isn't get a car-like-thing to fly, it's getting it to not hit things).

What are the incentives, though? There’s not actually that much money to be made here, despite dreams of self driving taxis (something that could never be possible). Maybe in the trucking industry, but the tech doesn’t exist and is nowhere close to being reliable enough consistently enough.

Many many many incentivrs... Cars that can drive at double the speed and much closer together, meaning a much higher throughput. Productivity while commuting. Ability to serve content and ads to people while commuting. Virtual public transport through large automated vehicles. Much cheaper, full time delivery of goods. Lower death rates. Ability to live in the suburbs and commute 4 hours a day without wanting to shoot yourself into the head. Ability to punch in a destination across the country, then sleep in your car while it drives all night. the list goes on and on

People could more safely play on their phones while 'driving'.

Of course cars did happen and worked with the crappy roads of the time. Self driving cars will probably have to do the same - work with existing crappy roads including dirt tracks and the like.

I think the key point is the amount of energy and resources necessary to make self driving cars a reality.

With the ongoing climate change and projected energy crisis, humanity may not have the physical resources to build and maintain self driving cars.

If somehow the energy problem is solved and climate change does not bring chaos, I can see true self driving car before 2100.

Well. Old cars - and new ones - can run on the old roads. It’s just as comfortable as a caleche. Changes were way more incremental.

What happens during major power outages though, which isn’t an infrequent event? Like the one that happened in NYC last year when you had citizens directly traffic in the dark? I’m struggling to understand how self driving cars would react to that.

Clearly all the intoxicated individuals who were passengers now become drivers... or it is edge case and edge cases don’t matter for... reasons... or something. Am I getting the FSD hype train right here?

Wouldn't be simpler to just develop smaller trains?

Smaller trains with bimodal traction. Because steel on steel is terrible at spontaneous braking, hence the significantly bigger gaps between consecutive trains compared to the gap between consecutive cars or trucks. And because steel on steel is terrible at the long tail of events that would cause contingency diversion, be it maintenance, disasters or organizational confusion. And because it would neatly solve the last mile (well, dozen miles).

Take an electrified rail network, pave it over to resemble a tramway track and add on/off ramps wherever they might be useful. Figure out an economic mechanical design that would allow a computer to precision-drive along the rail for on the fly mode switching. Which is an extremely limited task scope where computers would excel, very much unlike the almost-AGI requirements of full self driving. Mandate strong requirements for access to that network including a small minimum range of battery-autonomous operation so that you don't have to reach the atrociously high number of availability nines a conventional rail network needs to avoid total schedule collapse.

> hence the significantly bigger gaps between consecutive trains compared to the gap between consecutive cars or trucks

A lot of this is because railway signalling operates on a brick-wall principal: it is constantly assumed the vehicle in front could come to a dead halt instantaneously, whereas most road situations assume if you can match the braking performance of the vehicle in front with some margin.

The railway case is safe for the trailing vehicle in the situation there's a concrete block on the track ahead, the road one is not.

> A lot of this is because railway signalling operates on a brick-wall principal

That applies to old style -though still in common use- signalling. CBTC (every railway should use, but very few uses it) has similar, or even tighter, margins to road signalling.

No, the gains from CBTC come from two factors: one, it being a moving block system, rather than an absolute block (really you can think of a moving block system as an absolute block one where the length of the block approaches zero), so spacing matches the braking distance required; secondly, as with many modern in-cab systems, it is down to the individual trains to compute their braking curve, rather than the length of the blocks being dictated by the worse-case braking performance of any stock on the line.

I'm also unaware of any freight or mixed traffic application of CBTC, which makes it a stretch to say every railway should, though plenty of proven in-cab systems provide many of the same benefits (and you can decrease block-length substantially to get much of the way there).

But that not just some weird quirk railroad engineering clings to because Musk has not disrupted them yet, it's a consequence of braking performance.

Drivers feel safe to attempt brake matching (they fail often enough) because road code assumes that you never go fast enough to make stopping distance exceed visual range. Even if that rule is routinely broken the brake-match distance stays comfortably within visual range (stoplight waves travel upstream). In rail, everything happening within visual range is basically too late to even bother and this is entirely a consequence of braking performance.

> In rail, everything happening within visual range is basically too late to even bother

Not really. EMU passenger trains, such as subway trains, do have good acceleration times--good enough that it's limited by passenger comfort, not by physical hardware. This limit is about 1 m/s², with emergency brake conditions reaching 3 m/s² (note that the latter does imply several passengers are going to be nursing injuries--there's no seat belts after all). That's roughly comparable to typical passenger vehicles.

Freight trains have much longer braking distances, but that's a factor of 10,000 tons moving at 50mph has an insane momentum combined with relatively few axles being able to contribute to stopping force.

The main reason you need large distances between trains: switches. To control where a train goes requires moving a physical piece of infrastructure at the switch. You can't move the switch until the previous train clears it, and you don't want to let the subsequent train reserve a path over it until it switches into a new position--if the switch gets stuck in the middle, the train derails instead (or worse). The "brick-wall" principal follows from this situation.

I agree.

new technologies are over-estimated in the short term, and under-estimated in the long term.

Decades ago our computers were "soon" to be voice controlled, listening to our speech and doing our bidding. That was a big load of hype. However, over time and below the radar it became true as computers first answered phones, then took limited commands in cars and smartphones and now it is basically true (without all the hype).

Also, I wonder if these kinds of comments risk becoming

"I think there is a world market for about five computers."

"640K of memory should be enough for anybody."

"I dictated this , to the quiet office. The word area isn't too bad."

[What I actually said was 'I dictated this entire comment in a quiet office <period> The word error rate isn't too bad <period>'. Built-in recognizer on a Mac.]

darn autocement.

It would be interesting to see those cars on these Parisian streets, with this level of dynamic hazard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jojf3Ci2H3A

I reckon motorways could be handled easily enough, and basic dual carriageways and normal intersections, but once you start mixing up multiple modes in inner cities, some tough decisions need to be made.

Update markings and beacons? So far just mere road repairs are poor and take ages to be done.

I think self-driving cars are like fusion reactors, they're perfectly possible on paper and, like, totally 15years away from now.

I'm sure it'll be possible some day, but I'm not positive that it'll be possible in the general case before we reach the Singularity. And when we get there self-driving cars are going to be a small side-effect of this unprecedented revolution.

I can't help to draw a parallel between these threads about self-driving cars where many people are saying that it's basically a done deal and we just need to wait a few years, and that thread I read a few hours ago about the Boing 737 Max re-certification being delayed once more. I know it's a bit of a fallacy to treat HN has a singular entity but when I read the threads about the 737 the consensus in here is that "it's a death trap and I'll never fly one of these planes ever again" but at the same time we're totally optimistic that the industry will have perfected self-driving technology in our lifetimes? The industry has been cutting corners on planes that cost a fortune and didn't manage to make them safe to operate in unobstructed airspace because of a minor sensor dysfunction but they're totally gonna nail the incredibly complex task of operating a 1+ton vehicle at highway speeds in much less controlled environment?

I can totally see an ever-increasing amount of driver assistance in the future. But fully autonomous driving everywhere at all times? I'm really not so sure.

I think self-driving cars are like fusion reactors, they're perfectly possible on paper and, like, totally 15years away from now.

There's a certain similarity but I don't know any paper that actually gives any assure that self-driving is going to ever be possible. The only theory is "we will prevent extraneous factors and then calculate".

So is that different to fusion power? We know how to build automobiles, and we know how to trigger nuclear fusion, but in both cases we are struggling to build the technology to harness these powerful forces in a safe and convenient way.

I find these arguments—about how a certain thing is arguably “impossible”—to be the most tiresome arguments on HN.

Everything that is possible today... used to be “impossible”.

If something appears “impossible” to you... there’s no information there about whether it is possible.

IDK,

It seems like interested and substantial arguments happen arguments happened around what might or might not 10-30 years from now. Travel to other stars once was considered no more impossible than travel other planets and living on other planets used to be considered not much harder than traveling to them. We now can actually travel to other planets and we know now how dependent on earth-gravity, how hard it is to traverse the distances between stars and so-forth.

Which is to say, no, you're simply wrong, we haven't really progressed from everything impossible to something things possible. Just as technology has progressed very unevenly, our ideas of possibility have gone from a lot of things sort-of possible to something things quite possible and other relatively more unlikely.

> Everything that is possible today... used to be “impossible”.

That's a tautological argument. Obviously things that happened were possible by definition, but you're not accounting for all the things that were actually impossible which never happened and will never happen.

How am I not accounting for them?

> If something appears “impossible” to you... there’s no information there about whether it is possible.

I agree that an argument from personal incredulity is generally not a good one. But that doesn't mean we can't demonstrate that things are very unlikely to happen. E.g., there's good reason to think that perpetual motion machines are impossible.

It's also important to realize that "possible" in a colloquial sense often doesn't mean "having an non-zero chance of happening before the heat death of the universe". When people are asking whether self-driving cars are possible, they clearly are asking with implicit constraints on where, when, and how.

In that context, we can have quite a lot of information about how possible something is. E.g., Elon Musk predicted that Tesla would have one million robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020. Rodney Brooks, AI expert and iRobot founder, thinks that's impossible, and I agree. https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2020-january-...

Perpetual motion machines are not incredible because many people have failed to build them.

They are incredible because they violate the laws of physics.

I'm glad you now agree that one can indeed have information about whether something is possible.

The difference is SDC taxis are already in operation in the wild. Maybe it's only in a small part of Phoenix but its happening right now. Full SDCs in all developed high density urban areas will probably be a thing in this decade and the next decade for sure.

Fusion research could have been finished in the 90s if we didn't drastically cut funding to keep it "15 years away" forever:

https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png

I don't think self-driving cars have this problem.

Personally, I think Drones will meet self driving... Easier to have a system without need of "markings on the ground" when things are flying.

Agreed, "never" is a ridiculously unfathomable amount of time if you define it on say our species extinction date.

I'm presonally bullish on fully autonomous transport because of the industry interest shown in it and the potential demand for it. The latter I don't see going away unless something comes around that makes it redundant.

I think a lot of people sharing this sentiment assume cars will always be there, or at least will still be relevant when we finally have generic autonomous driving nailed down.

If it takes 50 years to have a fully ready environment with beacons, networking etc., will we still be riding “cars” on “streets” ? I ‘d guess when we reach that point we’ll also have solved the “getting from A to B” in completely different ways.

You are so sure about this. I’m curious where you live where the streets are so well maintained, there’s very little non-car traffic, rarely road construction, no bad weather, no emergency vehicles, no overly narrow two-lane roads, no gravel roads, and electronic maps that are correct 100% of the time.

If you have to modify the environment to make it easier for the cars, then you haven't achieved fully self-driving technology.

So unless cars can navigate without roads then they are not self driving?

Navigating off-road might actually be easier in practice for AI than navigating on roads, since off-road there are generally many fewer other cars to deal with.

As a rough rule of thumb, I'll call a car fully self-driving if, without any changes having been made to the road system to accomodate self-driving cars, I feel comfortable getting in the back seat, telling it to drive me to a certain house in a city a few hundred miles away, and falling asleep.

There is something to this, in the sense that Palm (and others) couldn't get their machines to do complete handwriting recognition so Palm's solution was to have the computer and the human meet in the middle with Graffiti.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffiti_(Palm_OS)

Modifying the environment sounds a lot like the the level 4 autonomy the exec said would be quite possible.

What makes you say this? Gut feeling? Or do you have any supportive evidence?

We’ve done self-driving as a POC for a decade in Denmark, and it hasn’t really improved much, to the point where we too are considering, that it’s probably never going to work in the real world.

Don’t get me wrong. Self driving already works, it just doesn’t work on roads. Roads where you’ll suddenly have a bunch of leaves flying around. Roads where the paint job is cracking, perhaps even missing. Roads where the street signs are old and faded.

In ten years of testing with some of the best in the business, we’ve had maybe two days worth of self-driving.

> We’ve done self-driving as a POC for a decade in Denmark

Who is "we"?

Initially in this decade I fully subscribed to your view, on paper. Then I observed how things panned out and thought some more.

Here's a grim reality: at ~3 million per death in a car crash (that was a reasonable estimate of insurance cost, overall, a decade ago or so), with ~37k deaths/year in motor vehicule accidents in the USA for instance, that's roughly $100 billion / year — a mere 0.5% of its $20 trillion GDP. So I'm not holding my breath for public or private action at a massive scale (think that fracking alone was orders of magnitude more profitable for the US, and came with a strong geopolitical advantage to boot with).

Do the math for your country, $3M/death over GDP, it's usually negligible compared to "the big thing" that your local politicians and corporations keep talking about.

Even in Western Europe, where

- regulation is people's #1 method for solving everything and anything,

- "the value of life" is emphasized every other speech and publication and actual social security systems, free medical care, free education even, etc. (a few hundred bucks away from actual UBI, for real),

- companies could actually compete (Europe has 0 tech giant, but several big car manufacturers),

you don't hear a lot of political or popular or private (business) support for Level 4 infrastructure (L4: roads dedicated to self-driving cars, likely to kill ~1000x less than human-driven roads, not to mention the economic gain of time while commuting and travelling by road, which whether work or leisure is a net psychological gain).

Actually L4 is not even a "topic" in many such countries (let alone L5), it's a curiosity, a funny segment to wrap up the news. Even though L4 is totally doable NOW. What you actually hear is much fear about tech — as usual. That's about it for self-driving cars.

I have no idea why, it makes no sense to me, but even if rich cosy comfortable life-adoring 35h/week western Europe doesn't want it bad, I don't know who does/will, in the short/medium term.

The above "grim reality" is just my way of fishing for answers, really. I don't know. I'm just skeptical that self-driving cars are a thing that people or leaders (public and private) actually want. I hear much, much resistance to the idea and very little interest for the upsides from the mainstream. I sees smiles and eyes rolling, and 10 years later there is still no decent infrastructure to charge EVs except Tesla's — a foreign entity, by far the biggest promoter of it all, but can they do it? Can they reach L5 or politically negociate L4? Back to the above concerns, or absence thereof really, of the mainstream.

It's like space, basically: it would be incredibly little of the world's GDP to put massively more effort and shorten industrial-scale space activities dramatically — like if it's 30 years away at current rate, we could make it by 2030 really easily, without pushing it far (nothing like a war effort for instance). And the benefits are so immense it's basically stupid to argue against, the question is how to do it best. And yet it's still anecdotal in most countries budget, it's mostly just PR. Even as we speak, a "prime time" for space as a topic of (positive) interest for the mainstream. Go figure.

Self-driving cars, it seems, are met with even more political and social resistance than they are made impossible by idealistic goals, because the former is a current showstopper whereas our current technological capacities are not.

The current technology capacity is the showstopper and always will be. Technology works for humans not the other way around. Nobody will adapt our society to conform to self driving cars. It just doesn’t make sense....

As I see it, it's a case of

- ridiculous before the fact

- dangerous as disruption becomes real

- obvious in hindsight

I.e. a "paradigm shift". These things take time, from inception to maturity for adoption, regardless of tech. Usually about a generation: that customers and voters be mostly people born with the idea as an "almost reality" (after PoC, before mass adoption), that's what it usually takes to raise the S-curve.

Cars themselves weren't accepted or desired by most people years after their appearance, it took time to change minds.

But in some cases, it was much faster, like the web or mobile phones. I just hoped this would be a case of that.

(meta: I think it's totally OK to disagree, upvoting you for discussion as a shield against downvoters based on opinion)

My question about this idea is always: what about pedestrians? Sure, you can use beacons so that cars won't crash into each other, and use signs to avoid collisions with fixed obstacles. But interactions with pedestrians often require guessing at their intentions, and you can't have them wear beacons at all times. Of course, some areas are already fairly hostile to pedestrians, but we don't want self-driving cars to make that problem worse.

> .. and will be a niche hobby on race tracks

Just like horses. Am sure there was a time no one ever imagined cars would completely replace horses on roads.

There are still horses on roads sometimes. I passed through a town recently and saw two separate horse drawn carriages on the roads.

I don't think self driving cars will be a thing until self driving friendly roads are a thing. Just one example is roads could have RFID embedded everywhere. Maybe that specific idea is bad but that's the kind of way I think we'll have to approach this. If we start embedding RFID as we're repaving roads today, in 5 years the roads where most miles are driven will be equipped. In 20 years basically every road is done.

Lets assume the environment does meet half way.

How resilient would such a system be.

How easily can it be attacked to fiddle with the ability of the car to navigate safely?

Also, and much longer term, isnt it kind of weird to think that human infrastructure can only be seen to massively scale i. The planet so long as we turn the planet into a cyborg?

Isnt it weird and wasteful to build a planet wide cage of tech infrastructure for the evonomies of the world to survive and for human civilization to operate along the trajectory we are currently pointing?

Seems dismal to me.

"May never happen" is such a cautious statement that to argue against it means "will certainly happen", and that's a pretty extreme position to take -- so extreme I would call it techno-utopianism. I'm still waiting for my flying car, but you are already promising me a thinking car, when there are so many obstacles, each of which could sink it:

- researching it may not be feasible

   * because it becomes a waste of engineering resources to continue the research

   * because almost self-driving cars may be good enough

- even if researching it is, it may not be economical because

   * political resistance or liability laws prevent mass rollout

   * the cost of building and maintaining required infrastructure is too high

   * not enough car purchasers may want it

I don't think the hard part of autonomous driving is recognizing the markings on the road. It's inferring what other people on the road want to do next. Including pedestrians and cyclists. Autonomous driving is a lot simpler if you only have to deal with other robots.

We could have them tomorrow if we could magically ban human drivers overnight. Humans are the only thing making it so hard. And the problem is that until we have 100% artificial general intelligence, that can introspect and understand the human psyche the way another human can, there will always be an intractable tail of cases where AI will fail.

So it's like the IPv6 problem. If we could all coordinate at once, it would be easy-peasy. In reality, it's virtually impossible.

Edit: a commenter pointed out that pedestrians are also a major problem; even in a far-fetched imaginary scenario I don't know how you would remove those from the equation.

> Not only will the tech get as good as humans

[citation needed]

It's possible, sure. But it only seems likely to me because I grew up in an age of rapid progress in information technology. History, though, has plenty of examples of technological plateaus and regressions. To people in the 1970s, it seemed obvious that by 2000 they could vacation on the moon. But the rapid progress of the space race quickly dwindled; the problems were harder than we thought and the rewards smaller.

The notion that we can make a computer as smart as a human is one of those things that seems like it will be just around the corner. But it seemed that way 50 years ago, too. E.g. HAL from 2001. It's perfectly possible that humans aren't able to make anything smarter than themselves. Judging by most of the software I use, we're barely able to make things much dumber than ourselves.

>>but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term.

Never means never, not even in 145 million years. But he probably meant not in our lifetimes and with current urban planning. When all cars are self-driving it will probably be better

Isn't that exactly what the article said? Lvl 4 on good prepared roads - possible, lvl 5 go anywhere you want - maybe not.

I am generally of the philosophy that all "disruptive" technologies end up looking basically like slightly modified versions of what they replace, mostly achieved by pushing at the regulatory environment a little bit. Uber/Lyft replaces taxis. Self driving cars begin to resemble trains.

”We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars”

We have already done this, they are called railways. Some of them evening have self driving trains.

To get self driving cars on roads you need a human level AI. Trying to get away with less intelligence by restricting the environment will never get to the point where it will be safe to have automated vehicles - you can’t provide infrastructure clues to the vehicle to help it tell when a child is about to run out into the road for example (and there are many other examples too) so you would have to segregate them physically from everything else and then you might as well stick to railways

"Human level AI" is a tricky wording. Sure, we may never get a program we would trust to serve in a jury, convince us about existence of God or just have a casual conversation with. But ask Go players how is that resistance to machines going.

When I drive and there's a child walking on the sidewalk, I'm not analyzing the chances the child will jump onto the road. I'm just assuming the parents have succeeded at explaining how to not kill yourself, without that assumption I would go crazy with too much things to worry about. AI does not get crazy, nor even tired, with too much tasks. It might usually come up with the same result that I always apply - just drive slowly through roads with children on sidewalks. But it might do something I won't do - slow down even more if the child seems to be doing something suspect.

One of the problems with Google-designed self-driving is that it goes slow and refuses to go if uncertain. I imagine that's why those cute little cars without driving wheel were axed. Even if the system has driven a bajillion miles without inflicting any risky situation, it won't sell if it can't guarantee doing your commute in your usual time. But it can't assume the same risk you take every day, that if that child behaves extra stupid and law misfires, then you might find yourself traumatized and without a driving license. Because when AI loses that license, it's killing the whole business. So, the bar for safety must be higher, slowing you down to a fully-controllable crawl, or constraining to high-safety situations. Hence, you get all those highway-assist features all over the place.

Disclaimer: I work in Google, but have no insider information about Waymo. Just remember these marketing materials back from the Chaffeur days and still think that was the way to go.

Or we can allow Google to have the same amount of accidents as regular drivers and not penalize them if they don't go out of certain margins. let's say if the vehicle has 1 accident on every 10m km travelled - google can go on. Sure, some people may die, but each accident will contribute to safety of the system. So called "Antifragile" property.

Then you give users of the service a choice: maps where service was very reliable, where some accidents happened or where not enough data was gathered i.e. there can be problems. Let users decide where they want to go and what level of risk they are willing to take.

Maybe we can have a device (smartphone?) that serves as marker for vehicles and helps them identify people/dogs/properties around them. If you ask me this can be done even now.

But we can't allow Google to have the same amount of accidents as regular drivers, because we are not allowing them to have the accidents in the first place. "Everyone" breaks the code and the police is not enforcing unless some special conditions happen (e.g. the infraction is in front of a policeman or a well marked speed trap). The code generally is designed to prevent accidents, e.g. by stating that if there is a child nearby a road, you should slow down. But how often do you see drivers going significantly below the limit because of pedestrians on the sidewalk?

Now, drivers take these risks because they subconsciously learned that the probability of accident is vanishingly small, while probability of being honked at for going anything below the limit is rather large. Thus, they subconsciously balanced the expected reward/punishment to lean to the direction of taking the risk. But AI is always aware of the risk and very well able to calculate it. Now imagine the headlines "Google's AI intentionally kills X children per year" and the regulatory reaction.

Agreed, level 5 autonomy is an ever shrinking number of edge cases. Human drivers also have edge cases like being drunk or otherwise incapacitated by strokes, heart attacks, getting phone calls, old, tired, etc. We still allow them on the road despite this and the notion that those things are some of the root causes of the many deadly accidents each year. Once autonomous cars are obviously safer than that, it will become the norm. We're not that far off from that. First we'll see mass deployment of level 3 & 4 first with safety drivers and when it becomes clear that those are a liability at best, also without. From there to level 5 is a matter of semantics since we'll basically have vehicles driving themselves most of the time.

I don't even think level 5 at individual car level is needed. Tesla can operate their fleet like a Amazon does with their warehouse robots.

> We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other

In fact, the new generations of Volkswagen Golf, Škoda Octavia, Seat Leon, and Audi A3 (released between October 2019 and March 2020) will already be able to communicate with each other[1] and with the traffic authority[2] in real-time to prevent road accidents.

Volkswagen Golf, Škoda Octavia, and Seat Leon are #1 best-selling car models in multiple European markets, and Audi A3 is one of the most popular and affordable premium cars in Europe.

[1] https://innovationorigins.com/nxp-makes-volkswagen-golf-cars...

[2] https://youtube.com/watch?v=AM_NjfZX-F0

What you are describing is Level 4-geofenced solution. Select roads, where infrastructure in place (be it 100% of aphalt, but that is not the single possible road type out there)

You just need to slow the cars down enough to increase safety drastically where the environment is not adapted.

Having cars move slowly but steadily does not make trips longer on average, at least in areas prone to traffic jams. Even though human drivers can find it frustrating, it's actually the opposite. If vehicles are consistently slow enough, you can even get rid of traffic lights and stop signs.

You’ve described level 4 automation, not level 5. So you’re agreeing with the VW exec (for what it’s worth, I also agree with you and the VW exec)

Gotta love optimism...

> I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term

I think when someone says 'will never happen' they mean 'not in the foreseeable future'.

Obviously the environment, usage and science can change such that full self driving could happen. I mean in the 1600s nobody could imagine a Boeing 747 flying loaded with hundreds of people, sure.

But the hype around self driving (by all the dreamers) has been that it's more or less 'right around the corner' not in 30 or 40 years or even 20 years.

You will never, ever, have only self driving cars on the roads, unless you're talking exclusively about reserved motorways. You'll always have, at the very least, pedestrians and cyclists.

Opinion: level 5 autonomy would be cool, but it's not where most of the value of self-driving cars is.

Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving.

If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when those conditions aren't met), then at least 80% of the value is there.

Wrestling with the harder edges of the problem is still the right thing to do for tolerance reasons, but I hope we don't have to see last-mile problems solved before we start reaping the benefits.

This 80% solution already exists in the form of trains and airplanes.

Self-driving cars that only go 80% of the way would compete against those forms of transportation which have established business models, networks and in the case of trains are subsidized in a way that self-driving cars likely won't ever be.

Additionally the key advantage of cars is flexibility, not having to figure out how to get to or from the train station or airport. In your scenario self-driving cars would lack this advantage.

Now granted this may still sound like an appealing proposition in countries with poor public transportation infrastructure but that substantially reduces the size of the overall market. Sure this might be attractive for the US but what about Europe? Asia?

Now of course there is an obvious answer to this problem: Keep the steering wheel and drive the rest of the way yourself. That just means you'll have a lot of drivers who won't gain experience at the current rate though. Not sure I would like to share the road with those people.

Yes, the tremendous capital influx into AV could probably support advances in trains and rail infrastructure. Yet, we will chase after this idea — it receives copious media attention because it is technically challenging and is “sci-fi” idealism that is hard to mitigate and feels like a good idea for society. Also, the investments seem like chasing after what everyone else is chasing after (FOMO); an automaker would find it difficult to “pivot” from vehicle production to advancing rail (competition) so capital will be stuck in that industry.

It seems to me that the problems that trains and rail infrastructure is facing are: bureaucracy, politics and an increasing inability to execute on infrastructure projects on time/budget by governments.

To the extent cost is a a factor, it's unnecessarily high due to these aforementioned issues[1]. So I don't think money invested into self-driving cars hurts trains and rail infrastructure.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/1/1/14112776/ne...

Yes, the policy issues are real and sticky and act to thwart advance.

I suppose the car crowd would say environmental factors tilt toward cars over airplanes.

In the US, trains are for freight. It would cost too much to create a new passenger rail network compared to automating existing intercity roads.

Now, increasing the throughput of rail using self-driving trains could make a bundle in the US.

Self driving trains seems like an excellent problem space. Are you aware of any companies working on this?

Self driving trains already exist: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation

Lots [1][2]. These have seen most deployment in closed networks (e.g. subways, or remote mining railways [3]), but experiments on "normal" interconnected networks are ongoing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_train_operation [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system... [3] https://www.railwaygazette.com/australasia/rio-tinto-complet...

Subway is already driver-less in a number of cities around the world. In others the drivers are still there but don't actually drive the train.

I think self-parking (as in “go find a space, possibly auto-paying”, not auto-parallel-parking) could also be a game-changer, not only for convenience and cost, but even zoning and city planning.

Lots of innovation and investment happening in this space. Expect parking lots in ~5-10 years to look very different — a lot of automation is coming.

I have to disagree. Most of the value is in taxi services, where you get dropped off / picked up exactly where you want, there is no need to dedicate so much land and structures to parking, there is no need to have cars sit idle for 95% of their existence, and no need to search for parking spots and walk long distances.

Of course, I live in a city, where parking is a major pain. But the other things still hold. It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle.

I actually think autonomous taxi services will be niche.

Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. Now the liability for that behaviour is with the driver. In an autonomous car the liability would be Uber which is why they won't do it.

An Uber that needs to look for parking in order to pick you up is never going to work in most busy cities. So I suspect you will see people opt for the driver based taxi service instead. Or maybe autonomous taxis will be reserved for emerging markets e.g. Indonesia which are more relaxed about parking.

I don't doubt that things take time to adjust. But when it makes a lot more economic sense to take a cab compared to owning a car and driving it (after all, the main reasons cabs aren't all that economical today is the requirement of paying a driver while you just sit there), there will be less cars parked on the road and therefore it will be easier to have places where the cars can pull over and pick up / drop off.

Anyway, "people are willing to break the law but companies aren't" seems a really weird reason to stick with the status quo over something far more efficient.

I wonder though if autonomous taxi's would simply highlight the parking issues and increase demand for better parking solutions (like no parking, just autonomous taxi lanes).

Are parking laws different for Taxis than for Ubers? Say in New York City? Lots of Taxis there so if Ubers are working under the same law, seems like an already solved problem. UPS have millions? of parking violations per year, yet it is still in operation.

You're missing the point.

Drivers own the liability for illegal parking. Autonomous cars would make the developer liable.

No government is going to tolerate systemic and wide spread violation of the law.

I think “making the developer liable” is jumping to a conclusion that isn’t certain quite yet.

Well, no company is going to be able to put in writing "Our plan is to have cars park illegally." Any system that gets built will be constrained by actually having to be law-abiding, which Uber drivers are not constrained by.

So the government is going to allow individuals to do it, but not the self driving cars? I don't see it working that way.

It's just like self driving cars will go a bit over the speed limit if that is the flow of traffic. If they don't, then the laws will be adjusted. It would be silly to indefinitely hold back a huge industry because humans get to exploit legal loopholes but machines don't.

I think Uber sells the cars to John Doe who registers it in their name then let’s their car take Uber rides. Uber is off the hook for both the illegal parking and the capex.

If passengers can jump into the car while it's moving slowly (sliding or gull wing doors), then you technically don't need somewhere to park.

Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up.

I take Uber and Lyft in NYC multiple times per week. No one ever “parks”, they just pull up, you jump in, and off you go. Takes less than a minute in most cases, doesn’t block traffic, and I suspect it virtually never results in a ticket. Maybe if they sit there for 10 minutes or more, but that’s exceedingly rare. And even then, they’re not going to get a ticket outside a few ultra-congested areas of manhattan that make up a tiny fraction of this city. Even in most places in manhattan, you could sit in a running car in a no parking zone for hours without getting a ticket. I had a moving truck up on the curb on the Upper West Side in a no parking zone for hours and the NYPD rolled past several times without a glance.

Also, this is exactly how taxis all work too, btw, which seems to undermine your entire point.

Umm, that is is point though - with autonomy the cars presumably won't break the law and stop where it's technically illegal for 30s to pick you up. They will presumably need to find somewhere legal to park to do so.

You might want to look up the legal difference between parking, stopping, and standing.

The vast majority of pickups in nyc at least are not illegal under any current law.

They block bike lanes all the times. It’s illegal to stand, stop or cruise in bike lanes.

Anecdotally, I've often had Ubers pick me up in specifically marked and designated passenger loading zones when and where that's been appropriate and necessary. And in principle it's really no different from picking up a friend if you're giving them a ride somewhere.

I’m not convinced it is illegal, and even if it is, no one cares.

There are explicit laws in NYC to allow this behaviour which is understandable given the power of the taxi lobby and history of the city.

Similar laws simply aren't present in most other cities. Stopping in the middle of the road to pick up passengers is illegal and drivers do it since the police are never there. Hence my point that Uber would never program this illegality into their self driving algorithm.

You forgot one thing.

Autonomous cars won't have the same algorithm as selfish humans to position themselves.

A human will go to one of the busy places and will probably drive back to the original point of pickup.

While a computer will be notified ( 1 car only parked on the busy place) and immediately replaced by a new available/nearby car. Making the process more efficient, more remote places will be handled faster. Busy places more efficient.

Not all cabs will need to earn money, since the biggest expense will be the car driving and not the human driver ( waiting for work).

And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine, some companies even negotiate it because of the sheer amount.

> And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine

Up until the point they are banned.

Everyone, especially lawmakers, are pretty sick of tech companies breaking the law in order to be "disruptive". As we've seen recently with all of the e-scooter bans.

You won't get banned for paying too much parking tickets.

Scooter bans were mostly because it was disruptive having a staple of scooters in the middle of the pedestrian road and they were consistently breaking the rules.

Ps. We do similar stuff for cities at our company. So I don't need an externzl source for this currently.

If valuable, common and practical use breaks parking laws, the laws should be changed.

> Most of the value is in taxi services

I’m imagining how gross a taxi would be that doesn’t have a driver to provide passengers a low level of behaviour moderation.

It'll probably just be smooth, hard plastic.

Hard plastic covered in the last rider's vomit :/

Doesn't happen on GetAround.

BART went with vinyl because the riders were really uncomfortable with the old wool ones: https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2012/04/how-bart-fina...

This isn't much a problem in terms of self-driving, but solutions to this aren't hard; eg. someone could use the app before they enter a self-driving taxi to report that the car has stains, trash, food, etc. left in it. The company behind it could then queue it to be cleaned.

Well, considering that these won't allow anonymous usage this can be mitigated by kicking out "bad" users and big fines. Also cars can visit the cleaning zone frequently.

For "free floating car sharing" (DriveNow/ShareNow, Yandex.Drive, ...) this seems to work quite well.

I’ve seen the shared cars in Paris. They are completely awful.

If the taxi is soiled then the next passenger indicates this via the app. The taxi is sent for cleaning and the previous passenger is charged for the cleaning. Also, there will be cameras inside in case it has to be proven who made the car dirty.

If people have to pay the cleaning bill they will be careful not to make a mess.

Great. Let’s give companies even more ways to violate privacy.

That sounds horrendous, honestly.

You won't have to use the service, but if you do then companies will have to have a way to protect the service from abusers.

That’s the theory. If doing the right thing is not the default, it’s bound to get bad pretty fast.

> If the taxi is soiled then the next passenger indicates this via the app

So riders blame the mess on the previous passenger. Then the taxi company installs cameras. It’s all gross (and yes, I’m aware many taxis have cameras already).

Trade offs. Now we exploit humans, pay them quasi minimum wage, and we get the occasional rape story.

Self driving taxi will be a new possible way to get from A to B, and people will chose their own trade offs.

Probably human driven taxis will become the luxury eventually.

This doesn't work for the most common issue with taxis: the smell.

And often that is the hardest thing to get rid of.

> I’m imagining how gross a taxi would be that doesn’t have a driver to provide passengers a low level of behaviour moderation.

I've talked to a number of uber drivers. The cameras recording the passengers are a much greater inhibitor of bad behavior than the driver.

Except if you are living in Japan.

The margins on taxi services are so incredibly thin I find it difficult to believe there is any value in autonomous taxis. Especially when you take into account all the edge cases that will have to be accounted for, and the traffic that will be generated. Shipping and trucking are a massive industry, and I think automating highway driving has a much much better cost/benefit. Not to mention being safer.

> It it far more efficient of resources to have cars be used most fo the day, rather than sitting idle.

This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars. The more I use them the more I wish for a world where every car was shareable: you need to go somewhere? you simply get into the nearest parked car and drive it to where you want to go. And, unlike autonomy, there are no technical barriers to this, only the will to do it and the economic model to sustain it. Sadly these services seem to be in full retreat now but I will miss them and still hope they'll rise again soon.

> This is better and more easily addressed by car sharing services like car2go than autonomous cars.

This is not the conclusion I would draw from car2go failing out of North America. They still had the problem that you are required to find a legal parking spot and there's no guarantee that there will be a car available anywhere near you. Taxis and private vehicles solve the latter and former respectively but they all suffer from the inefficiencies inherent to the system design.

In the end the availability comes down to fleet size. car2go worked best here when they blanketed Seattle with Smart Cars, the fleet peaked around 750 and they were easy to find. After they switched to Mercedes exclusively the fleet was smaller and it became harder (though not impossible) to find them close by. My guess is that 2,500 cars would be enough to make them feel ubiquitous. A small fleet of autonomous cars won't mean it's likely one will be available to pick you up, and nobody has figured out how to deploy & maintain them at scale yet (I think Waymo in Phoenix is only running around a hundred vehicles).

The catch is the cost of parking: they weren’t hard to find here in DC but if you’re seeing lots of available cars nearby that means they’re paying a fair amount for all of that unused capacity. The Uber/Lyft model shifts that cost to the drivers so it looks cheaper as long as you don’t factor in congestion.

How do carseats for children work with these services?

BYO. Which is borderline OK for boosters (the Mifold [1] weighs under 2 pounds and folds to fit in a handbag), but totally impractical for a baby/child seat.

[1] https://mifold.com/products/mifold-the-grab-and-go-booster

Well you still need to park them somewhere, but yeah you could have less cars. And they don't work if you can't drive (or are drunk). And it is more complicated if you need one with a car seat or other special accommodations.

A car also functions as a usually-secure place to store a good chunk of stuff, rather than taking it with you. This is more relevant if you have children (carseats) or take multiple-destination trips.

This is such an under-mentioned point. Cars are fantastic for logistics and storage. Though I imagine if we can automate people-moving, we can figure out logistics bots as well.

Having every parked, idle car driving around aimlessly around looking for fares is going to create incredible traffic congestion.

Studies have shown that the growth in Uber/Lyft has increased traffic congestion. This system autonomously will be even worse.

There's a fantastic amount of value in cities and urban areas. Self-driving cars can work as a massive network to reduce or eliminate congestion and give people back hundreds of millions of hours spent stuck in traffic.

https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlo...

They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they can significantly reduce energy consumption requirements for vehicle usage.

How would they "reduce or eliminate congestion"? Congestion is inherently caused by too many people trying to go to or through the same place at the same time. That's not possible without reducing the amount of people trying to travel during a given time period in a given place.

There's lots of reasons for congestion existing.

https://www.geotab.com/blog/traffic-congestion/

Given the same number of cars on the road, a self-driving fleet would eliminate many mechanical failures and many human failures, and be able to adapt to sub-optimal infrastructure at a network-wide level.

Infrastructure would also be easier or more efficient to improve, because you'd have removed much of the human variability that makes identifying choke points difficult.

Freeways can handle much more traffic, but people get jumpy beyond a certain density and cause traffic jams "for no reason"

The problem is that in many cases, many people want to get off at the same freeway exits, and the local network doesn't have the road capacity to match.

AI doesn't really have the power to change that, and might actually be worse depending on how it reacts to pedestrians and cyclists.

By offering laminar rather than turbulent flow. Take a two lane highway where traffic moves at 100 kph. It contracts to one lane at 100kph. Humans will pull up close, stall in one lane, do a flaky and awful zipper merge. Latency will be higher than necessary and throughout lower.

Self driving cars can plan the whole exchange, negotiate (or be directed by an intersection controller) to decelerate, align, merge, and maintain high throughout at low latency. ATC does this for planes already; we have the coordination technology. It’s just about getting drivers to listen to precise instructions without deviation. For everywhere I know of, that’s going to take automation.

Reading up on standing waves taught me a lot; you might like adding that wrinkle to your model.

> By offering laminar rather than turbulent flow.

That's only going to work on roads that are AI-only.

There are already cities where buying a car is difficult and/or expensive because of traffic concerns. Singapore, Beijing, Shanghai, Tokyo, ...

I don’t see an AI requirement to be a huge hurdle for those cities.

There are other actors on the road, namely pedestrians and cyclists. Unless we're going to remove the right of citizens to the street at all, they will be present and will need to be accommodated for.

Computers can or will deal with the other actors as well as humans do now, which is quite a low bar anyways.

My point is that unless you get rid of them completely, traffic flow is not going to increase. You can't have free-flowing traffic everywhere and also have pedestrians safely crossing the street, and the lower bound on a traffic light cycle today is the amount of time it takes an old person to cross the street from curb to curb.

That neglects limited access roads and wide boulevards. In either case, even if pedestrians aren’t banned, they are rare enough to be an exception rather than a rule. For example, the old guy trying to make their way across 8-lane Chang-an Road in Beijing...well, there is a reason Chang an road forces pedestrians onto bridges.

By and large, today the congestion problem is not really on the massive roads themselves, but where they interface with low-capacity local networks. Most destinations are not located on a limited access road by definition, and the busy exit into city center with lots of pedestrians is not going to get any less congested, AVs or not.

In modern Western urban planning, large car-capacity streets aren't considered a good thing to be running through urban areas anyways. Most of the large cities (Paris, Berlin, New York) are taking steps to reduce road widths to more equally distribute the road between pedestrians, cyclists and transit users. As it turns out, building pedestrian overpasses at a convenient enough spacing for pedestrians is extremely expensive.

It's hard for me to guess how much something like this would reduce delays caused by traffic compared to the increased number of cars driving due to the fact that some driverless cars would be out with no passengers heading to pick people up.

Self-driving cars cannot plan an entire exchange in a dense urban areas because there will always be actors like pedestrians, cyclists, and stray plastic bags that do not participate in planning and act adversarially to their shared model. Optimizations will be highly local, spatially and temporally, and I suspect they will end up looking a lot like humans trying to coordinate on the same problem. And even if AVs can technically plan and execute faster, their actions will need to be artificially slowed to be legible to humans. Likewise with their raw speed — cars, self-driving or not, are already moving too fast in urban areas. Reaction times might improve but braking distances will not.

So if AVs can't increase the throughput of city streets, I'm skeptical that they can increase the throughput of off-ramps which are bounded by city streets, or urban freeway segments which are bounded by the off-ramps. And even imagining that significant (2x?) throughput is achieved, it's not going to meet the induced demand ceiling; there would be the same amount of congestion, only with more cars.

L5 is dead on arrival as congestion-mitigation technology and I hope at least some of the billions earmarked to be spent on researching and deploying it are redirected towards better walking, cycling, and transit amenities instead.

Self-driving car networks have the benefit of not being bound by the same finite capacity of a network of humans trying to manage real-world traffic.

Neither would they have to operate at artificially handicapped speeds, as no human operator would really be able to keep up regardless with the 10,000 or 100,000 cars running around.

Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).

There's no reason so far here that self-driving vehicles can't improve traffic and overall throughput, and it's a bold claim to declare L5 dead on arrival.

In a dense urban area, the speed limit is generally not dictated by road design but by the simple physics interaction between a person made of meat and bones, and a multi-ton metal vehicle.

Follow distances in urban areas with low speeds are already really small. I don't think AVs would make them meaningfully tighter.

> Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).

This was supposed to be what Waze and Google Maps were set to achieve, and they did not, but they did piss off a lot of people when cut-through drivers started jamming up their formerly quiet residential neighborhoods.

When roads belong exclusively to self-driving cars, they can increase speed, reduce gaps between cars and eliminate traffic wave effect.

Imagine highway where everyone drives 80mph with 5ft of distance between cars. No one suddenly changes lanes, no one suddenly slows down for no reason.

Here is illustration from Waymo testing facility: https://youtu.be/hKfEivMfDPU

Even if there is no reaction time, 5' of space at 50mph is silly. You still need room to maneuver if whatever caused the vehicle ahead to throw on its breaks comes back or halts the vehicle ahead faster than your breaks can stop you.

It’s basically a virtual tandem semi. The presumption is that you are delegating command and control to the lead vehicle, and there is bidirectional communication between the lead and follow vehicles.

Well, why don't we go a step further then and physically connect the vehicles? Maybe we can also make them longer and fit more passengers? And we could optimize the rolling friction, replace rubber on tarmac with something better like steel on steel, and use some sort of tracks to provide the sideways forces?

You jest, but I'd love it if we could automatically group cars into physically connected trains for long distance travel, and have them automatically split off when they approach their destination. Maybe there's some way to do that with rails, carrying peoples' cars, but not sure if the efficiency gain is worth the increased complexity of including another set of wheels/motors/etc, and making the automated separation/joining work with all of that.

Are the other passengers quiet and housebroken? Does the steel track go to my office? (Broken or misused rail switches cause a lot of accidents.)

Lol that is going to lead to the mother of all pile-ups not if but when something just so slightly goes wrong. Imagine somebody dropping shit from an overpass or really anything. Better build a giant cage over all the highways!

Those kind of pile ups already happen now when people drop crap from overpasses, how would it be any different?

Bigger. Faster.

because unless the driver is a raging asshole usually the person behind while you are going 80 has more stopping distance than 5 fucking feet.

That's because you're thinking of human drivers whom are so slow to react that it is recommended they keep a whopping 2 or 3 seconds [0] worth of trailing distance to respond to changing road conditions like the person in front of you slamming on their breaks. The hypothetical clustering of self driving cars requires them to react at much faster times so they don't need to keep as much space between them.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-second_rule

Also https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE

Local streets will always have pedestrians and cyclists. The main limit on road capacity is generally where highways interface with the local network, and the local network itself.

I believe you'd have better throughput by dedicating roads exclusively to buses and bicycles, which are technologies that already exist.

Congestion is not just caused by reaching capacity. It is also caused by human behaviour:

- selfishness eg stopping or parking in no parking zones, driving aggressively

- error eg causing accidents

- ignorance eg not knowing the traffic flow in an intersection, driving slowly to find your bearings.

Also, if we have fewer cars, but higher utilisation of vehicles then we will require less parking.

When I drive to work there is an empty transit lane for cars with 2+ people which seems to imply that most rush hour cars have just the driver in. If everyone is ubering in robot cars then they’ll probably share. It’s not that weird as people share public transport and choosing between $10 to get to work and $3 is a no brainer.

They might even Uber to the train station then Uber from the destination train station to work. Lots of ways of cutting traffic!

> "they'll probably share"

The people who are driving, or at least a significant portion of them, pick driving over public transport because of perceived privacy and control.

I don't think uptake of shared mobility is going to be so popular where that becomes the norm.

Values change. No one would take a taxi where the driver is just some unlicensed taxi driver. Back in the 90's that would be consider akin to hitchhiking in danger! Now we have Uber.

Also I drive because it's faster, and because once you go from A->B getting to B->C is probably easier. Not for privacy. Most people just need to get to work or school or their kids to school for the bulk of their car use. Kids to school might work by sharing with other parents you know.

Cars are different than a lot of goods though, because in and of themselves they are a wealth signal (at least in the US).

Most Americans don't really need an SUV or a pickup; a minivan or a sedan are more practical. Yet most Americans are buying them, because it makes them feel better about what they're driving and they want to show off. You may only take your car to the grocery store, but if you meet Becky from PTA in the parking lot and she has a really nice car that she owns, that's still a big deal.

Unless the ownership cost of a car were to spike significantly, this part of American culture seems hard to change, particularly when automakers spend lots of money making sure that Americans see premium gas-guzzlers as status symbols.

Jones gonna keep up

Easily scheduled, ubiquitous micro-buses or other vehicle form factors may change the 20th century compulsion of having to have your own private car.

Self-driving cars will of course increase congestion because it will be possible just to chill out and do something else while car is driving itself. In Silicon Valley normal story will be “I worked in the car for 3 hours while commuting to the office”.

Work also needs to be decoupled from inner city offices (so you don't have to go into the city/office/etc) and local and regional legislation needs to be enacted in concert to lower overall personally operated vehicle density.

This is where the Chinese companies are digging. Instead of a self-driving car, they are trying to make a car driven by an external server.

Half of the work on "self"-driving is actually traffic dispatch.

If self driving cars make driving in any way more attractive than now, they'll increase demand which will increase congestion.

> If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when those conditions aren't met), then at least 80% of the value is there.

Given that planes, which rely on a class of specifically trained professionals with minimum hour requirements, still have issues with this from time to time, I don't think this is a realistic thing for cars.

Driving standards, at least in the US, are very low, and raising them is a hard problem.

> Given that planes, which rely on a class of specifically trained professionals with minimum hour requirements, still have issues with this from time to time

Most of this issues come from the fact that planes can't just stop in the middle of the road and wait for help, they have to land somewhere and do it fast enough not to be out of fuel.

Cars don't have to drive themselves to nearest service center when they encounter any hardware malfunction, they can just stop and unload passengers. Self-driving company would use another car to drive you to your destination (not even necessary self-driving car).

And yet air travel is far safer than road travel and they embraced autopilot long ago.

The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived. Probably a good thing considering how low the bar is right now for road safety. Being killed by a robot's mistake is perceived far worse than by human error.

I think a middle ground like autopilot on the highway could significantly improve safety while still accommodating perception issues.

>The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived

I don't think so. Airplane autopilot automates away the safe, boring parts of air travel, much like highway driving, so in that sense I agree with you. Truly autonomous landing is still a big deal, and planes that the benefit of ATC, and I don't think there are any planes that taxi or takeoff autonomously. Furthermore, accidents involving autopilot are always at the edge, when control changes from computer to human unexpectedly or when the human has to take over the autopilot in less than ideal conditions. I don't think there's much perception in the public eye of "robot pilots killing people"

I think once autonomous driving accidents go through the courts a few times, the same will happen to cars. After another decade of development and legislation, people will die not because the robot made a mistake per-se, but because it encountered a situation it can't cope with and the human wasn't ready to take over in an emergency, or because the robot tried to cope with the emergency situation the wrong way and the human didn't notice in time and took over too late (if at all). This may still sound like the computer making a mistake, but the subtle difference is that the mistake is made in an extraordinary situation, as opposed to the current accidents that happened in regular driving conditions. I think this subtle distinction will be enough for the PR people to spin the blame away from the manufacturer.

Call my cynical, but I can also see successful lobbying efforts in the future by corporations to reduce liability in class-4 and lower autonomous car accidents involving unusual situations, citing the fact that the driver should have been paying attention and taken over.

That aside, road safety is better than ever these days, with a lot of what would have been fatal accidents being merely property damage due to modern safety systems, and highway driving is probably the safest kind of driving out there, thus it is not clear to me (and I have no data either way, I don't think a study has ever been done) that current offerings (Tesla et al.) are any safer compared to similarly priced modern luxury cars per mile driven, and I'm not sure that will change in the future. The only reason I see for adopting highway autopilot is not safety but comfort. You might argue that comfort contributes to safety and enables longer driving times, but driving for 8 to 12 hours is pretty safe regardless, and I don't think I could do more than that even if I was a passenger.

This is a bit of a controversial opinion, but I don't think we will see a meaningful reduction in fatal accidents or serious injuries due to self-driving cars for a long time, but I do think we will see a reduction in accidents involving only property damage or minor injuries from low to medium speed accidents, and I see a sharp decrease in parking-lot scrapes and dings in the near future. Low to medium speed streets and tight maneuvers is where I see most "bad" human drivers have the most trouble and already things like parallel parking assist are a godsend to these people.

The first airplane that received CAT IIIc autoland certification was the Lockheed L-1011 Tristar back in 1970. It's far from a big deal 50 years later.

I had at least one autonomous landing due to heavy fog. Was announced by the captain, he said something like: "Because of the weather conditions, we'll use automatic landing for safety reasons". Landing was quite flawless, despite the fact that I couldn't see the ground until we were a couple of meters close. But the landing approach seemed to take longer, maybe there is a trade-off.

I think there are already studies about Tesla safety, both for self driving and based on the results of independent government studies.

Travel by plane is orders of magnitude safer than by car. Your odds of dying in a traffic accident are close to 1:100. Your odds of dying in an air accident are closer to 1:10,000.

If anything, I think your example underlines just how valuable and realistic this is for cars.

Full autonomy was always, IMHO, a silly pipe dream. But that doesn't mean that there isn't tremendous value -- in terms of safety, time, money and environment -- to partial autonomy.

> If anything, I think your example underlines just how valuable and realistic this is for cars.

I interpret the stats the other way. Cars are not planes and driving involves constant encounters with potential collisions and which would make level 5 too difficult technically and socially rendering them too costly to be valuable.

Maybe if cars could fly, they could sort themselves at different heights so that they would never hit each other. And also communicate with others to make sure there are no collision courses. Tall buildings could be a problem. But it should be way easier problem to solve then city street driving. Because it would be a new tech we could require all flying cars to be autonomous and only allow manual control in case of emergency.

Both from a comfort and safety perspective, automating long highway drives is a big win. It’s still disappointing to urbanites in particular who thought they’d never need to own a car, drive anywhere, or maybe even learn to drive in the first place.

Onboarding cars onto trains in a driver friendly way should also be considered. This way you don't exclude non self driving cars, and still have good coverage (taking into account that railway systems aren't far behind highway coverage in many countries).

This is the way of traveling thru Channel Tunnel. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurotunnel_Shuttle

But one needs to plan and book a travel in advance. There are also capacity limits.

Ferries have limits too, like grid-locked streets also do.

The way, the channel, the [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit)

all there to calculate whodunit in advance, this is no Voodoo, just calm glance at what is there, to not get stuck, that would suck, and be unfair.

My opinion along these lines lends itself to depiction of self driving cars in the series Tek War. Upon entering the limit access highway or interstate the car drives on its own for the duration until your exit.

that to me is something automakers can easily cooperate with governments to get done and done well. they already mark HOV and Express lanes and with federal legislated lane markings it would make automating those drives pretty simple. Then as the number of cars increase the number of free drive lanes is decreased until the vanish.

using metro Atlanta as an example express lanes have their own entrance and exit points so they are already separated. One set for I75 is wholly elevated two lane bridge work nearly the full length of its run.

Tesla Model 3 owner, I think even Musk is walking back what he "implies" as self driving. As into self driving with human oversight

I think that Level 5 would be transformative.

It would be the end of owned cars, huge reduction of car production, millions of jobs in the transportation business amortized, to name just a few.

That is a bit American centric. The value of self driving cars for society will be the ability to optimize existing road infrastructure. Cars can travel more closely together, can cooperate to work out bottlenecks, and so on. Think about the traffic problems Beijing is having, and that’s the huge opportunity for self driving tech.

People who can't, or shouldn't, drive themselves at all are totally unaccounted for in this logic. Full autonomy would be hugely freeing to the elderly, for example. Presumably it would enable travel for people too young to get a driver's license as well. And I have to assume driving patterns for capable drivers would change too, in ways that are likely hard to predict or appreciate right now.

Cars with no person inside them at all (vehicle drones?) would unlock the biggest productivity gain in a century. Revolutionize anything that can be delivered to your house (food, goods, groceries) and make sharing items feasible (need a power tool? Just have a drone drop it off for an hour then pick it up after you are done). I think the biggest advance of self driving is having cars with no people in them at all

I'm sure it would be the biggest disadvantage as there is not an infinite amount of roads.

You cant have other people on the road then. If I was a protestor or bored teen, I would find it pretty fun to block self driving cars' cameras and sensors, stranding them and creating chaos. Imagine a line of self driving cars just blocking a busy street. It wouldn't be hard to do, but it would take a lot of work to recover them to the point it wouldnt be profitable for the companies running them.

It would be fun, then the police would show up and arrest the people who did it using camera footage from the automated cars. Most people are good people, and the ones who aren't already fuck with the road network now causing all kinds of chaos.. throwing bricks from bridges, ripping the copper out of traffic signals, but it's relatively rare because most people aren't trying to ruin everything at great risk to their freedom. I don't really understand why automated cars would be a huge change of affairs.

cuz its just funny. If you saw little robots all over the place run by facebook or $mega_corp, wouldnt you just strand them for fun? Cameras are easily defeated by a hoodie and a mask.

Bricks from bridges could kill people and just damages regular people's property. It's just different.

What if I told you I could offer you a 99% automated intercity solution? That's right, a solution where 99% of the people involved have no obligation whatsoever to engage with piloting the vehicle... EVER! Where the vehicle just sort of seems to... drive itself? Is this some futuristic sci-fi fantasy? Well hold onto your hat, because the future is NOW!

Behold! https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg

Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of passengers.

Yep. Intercity traffic is a problem we solved in the 1800s.

Riding trains is great, getting to the train station(s) in a busy city, worrying about the schedule and being in the right spot for the right train, etc, is not at all fun.

But otherwise agreed a ton of this stuff could be solved with modern trains.

But appeasing all of the special interest groups in between has made infrastructure development impossibly expensive or takes a decade. So we keep driving cars even long distances between cities.

This is still a solved problem in many European cities. Train stations are often in the city centre, or on the edge of it. They almost always connect with either metro or bus networks, typically with frequent services.

Not in Germany, may be in big cities, but any other region is plagued by disruptions and way less frequent services paired together with horrible local public transport.

The former government owned national railway basically owns every piece of important track and doesn’t give a damn about customers. The prices are constantly rising while the service declines. Can’t count how much time I’ve wasted on several train stations, waiting for up to two hours for late trains, hell, even having to get a hotel multiple times.

Cities like Tokyo have solved most of that for now decades. Def depends on whether the government is willing to make the investment (heavy) into the right amount and level of infrastructure. When you know that Los Angeles used to have over a 1000 miles of rails before the 60's and after pressure from car and tire makers ripped it all away, you understand where all our traffic problems come from :)

I know it’s practically impossible and sheer utopic but I dream of an never-ending Train going in a circle, kind of like a moving tunnel.

The main loop in Tokyo comes every two minutes; it’s as close as you can get practically get to a constantly moving tunnel.

You might enjoy this classic story.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Roads_Must_Roll

> Riding trains is great, getting to the train station(s) in a busy city, worrying about the schedule and being in the right spot for the right train, etc, is not at all fun.

I'd say that, in the majority of cases, it's either no more difficult or outright easier than getting to an airport, as airports tend to be located on the outskirts of cities (requiring connecting train/bus service or private cars), while most rail hubs tend to be in city centers.

Intracity transportation was also solved in the 1800s.

(compact towns & bicycles)

It's interesting to consider what would have happened had the US invested the money it spent on the interstate system on intercity rail instead.

Trains kind of suck though. I used them a lot in the UK because I didn't have a car. The UK has an OK train network.

The problem with trains is that they are very, very inconvenient for most journeys. Sunday evening? forget it. After 11pm? Nope. Journey that runs perpendicular to the local line to London? Lol, enjoy a 5 hour journey to go 100 miles. Want to take cargo like a new washing machine? Lol. Want to go somewhere that's not near a station by bus? Enjoy Journey times that are 4, 5 or 10 times slower than a car.

Trains are good for busy commuter lines and nothing else.

1) trains go basically everywhere frequently in Japan, it’s very much a functioning rail network, they exist and kick ass.

2) a train doesn’t need to replace 100% of personal car trips to be useful. I’m sure you’re not transporting dishwashers or taking trips after 11 pm every day. Covering 90% of use cases is sufficient, and the other 10% can be handled by either renting a car or taking an Uber.

3) we can and should make busses faster than cars during times of congestion by giving them their own lanes.

Most people don’t live in Japan.

There are no commuter trains Tasmania.

Compared to Japan, there are no people in Tasmania.

I guess my wider point was that today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, a proportion that is expected to increase to 68% by 2050.[1]

Urban commuter trains will have little effect on that ~45% of people who won't live near them even if they are built.

On the flip side, though, I guess, that doesn't mean we shouldn't build more train lines.

1. https://www.un.org/development/desa/en/news/population/2018-...

I life in a city of 600,000 in Japan. Trains DO NOT go everywhere. And as GP wrote, they don't run at night. Everyone here owns a car.

The biggest fault of the entire Japanese system is the stoppage at night. 24 hour service is not the solution and is one of the reasons the services there work very well. But I don't understand why they don't have a replacement system. In Philadelphia the (smaller) system is completely replaced by buses. In other countries the trains run 24 hours but only Friday nights and weekends nights which could increase the use case of 90% of riders to 95% of riders.

The Japanese rail network is awesome but it does not stop everywhere and it’s quite expensive. Japan is huge and taxis get expensive real quick.

Consider Singapore, which is tiny, has a kick ass public transport system (trains and busses) and where it costs 90-100k SGD to own a beater Corolla: people still own cars.

Some people own cars. Car ownership rate is around 11% according to [1], which doesn't look that high.

That said, Singapore public transportation (at least SMRT trains [2]) is freaking strict about food and drinks. I could not even have a sip of water without triggering a warning message. So anyone who can't control their thirst or hunger (like, you know, basically any kid) isn't really welcome there.

[1] https://www.budgetdirect.com.sg/car-insurance/research/car-o...

[2] https://www.smrttrains.com.sg/Journey-with-Us/Travel-Informa...

Train definitely does not go "everywhere" in Japan, and one of the problems he mentioned (late night) is especially relevant there even in Tokyo.

Nowadays I live in a city with a tram system, trains to other larger cities and bike lanes.

If you are going from one city centre to another, during the day, the train is the best choice.

If you are moving within a bike-friendly city, bike is best (or Uber, but it is banned here). If you are somewhere in an urban sprawl, it's car or Uber.

I definitely find trains useful, but I think that they are consistently overrated by people for emotional and irrational reasons. I personally use trains for maybe 1% of my journeys and trams for 0% despite them being extremely prominent in my city.

Look, from the point of view of a passenger, the best transport system goes:

- where you want,

- when you want,

- carrying what you want,

- as fast

- and as safely as possible,

- at the lowest cost possible.

Trains are weak on multiple axes here: they do not go where you want to go and they do not go when you want to go, and you cannot carry large amounts on them. They are also quite slow.

The only reason that anyone uses trains is because in dense urban areas like London, cars are even slower, and for intercity trips it is both slow and hard to park when you get to the destination city. There are perhaps some exceptions to this but they don't really exist in the West. Really fast intercity trains are a thing in China and Japan, but the UK has no trains that take you from A to B at an average speed greater than a fast car once you take waiting and stopping time into account. As far as I am aware the same applies to the US as well.

Trains do not cover 90% of use cases, they cover maybe 10%. In my opinion, trains are a technology that should be completely scrapped in favor of driverless minibus and driverless car networks. Modern electric & driverless vehicles with internet connectivity and global transport optimization like Uber would beat trains on every single axis.

I agree. For people who really like trains, think of a bunch of automatic buses traveling right next to each other as a train.

Aren't all of those problems solved by more trains?

But it is not really efficient, to use one train, for one passenger.

No, trains in the UK are not "OK", they are crap compared to most of Western Europe. Fewer trains and more cancellations than any other country I've ever used trains in, stupid connections and pricing structure, all because of privatization. Look to Switzerland for the best train network in Europe. Reliability is top notch, there's only one company to deal with, and prices are reasonable for the income level.

Reliability of trains in the UK really varies by route. When I was studying and when I first started working I extensively used mainline routes and had no issues.

The last train I could take on a Friday night was 10pm, but given it was a 3 hour journey that didn't seem unreasonable. Each year there was usually one incident that caused delays, but other than they worked well. If I took a fast train the journey time was around the same as driving - quicker in fact given on the journey I would stop for a break - and ticket prices were about the same as driving (for 1 person).

On the other hand I was working in London in 2018, and at weekends often flying from LTN. In the end I added an hour buffer (to a 45 minute journey) because the reliability of Thameslink was so bad.

They're not as good as the best, but they're a lot better than the worst countries for trains. The train network is also fairly thorough in its coverage of the country. I think it's a good representative example (not best, not worst).

Albany is a middlin' sized city. Taking the train to NYC is like, still a nontrivial event. Also passenger rail has to sidestep freight on this corridor. Megabus is a bit better experience overall but also kinda meh.

On top of that, I personally (and know many agree) HATE the stress of keeping track of times, scheduling around infrequent departures, logistics to/from stations, etc.

> Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of passengers.

Yeahno. "please wait 15-30 minutes as we shuffle cars around the rail yard" is not exactly "at will"

Waiting 30 minutes while a new carriage is attached still beats sitting in a traffic jam. At least for me.

I gladly pick rail over car for good lines, because it's stress free. Get to the station in time (with public transportation it's quite deterministic, subways and trams don't get into traffic jams, buses sometimes do).

Cars of course win when it comes to flexibility (late night getting to a small town address).

I quite like trains. I hope someday the US gets back to having better rail service.

Highway-autonomous vehicles would give you the benefits of rail service plus arbitrary departure times, more direct routes, on-demand route changes, and you're traveling in a vehicle that you can use for first and last mile and intra-city travel.

The problem in the US is we aren’t going to start getting European level train infrastructure anytime soon. Also it’s arguably not a worthwhile goal, we have so much space, and it’s an uphill battle to change US culture to be one where trains are going to be a good fit for our land use and urban planning.

I think surmounting those challenges is useful in itself, not just as a way to enable trains. Using self driving cars to avoid doing that would be a real shame.

I don’t mind driving 200 times one hour commuting a year. I want to a) not own a car but be picked up by one I can share with others b) be driven home after having a drink. Both of those use cases are only working if there is a 100% (or close to) self driving solution. Driving 95% of the way or 95% of the trips is nice, but I wouldn’t pay Tesla autopilot money for it.

The value in the 95/95 autopilot is because it will make commercial drivers be able to never need breaks (they sleep or rest until the autopilot is in trouble, and they can even remote control cars). And of course because a lot of people seem to hate driving and would pay to avoid it.

I don’t - I hate owning a car.

The 95% thing can also be very different depending on how it's split up. 5% of miles have a random "you need to take over" vs. the most rural 5% of roads need manual control make a world of difference.

A car that can only drive within major cities in the UK and on motorways would be entirely fine for the vast majority of people. Exceptional journies I can always rent a car that suits my needs for the one week in several years I'm in the Highlands.

> Driving 95% of the way or 95% of the trips is nice

People will abuse that. They will get high/drunk/whatever and when that “5%” rolls around (quite unexpectedly mind you), they’ll run into a bus full of nuns. Always assume people will be judgement impaired because “the car can drive itself”....

Where the 95% ends can only be a decision the car makes. There can’t be a button you push when you think “come on autopilot you can do it, It’s just a short jump and you’ll fit through that narrow passage in the run-up easily!”. Autonomous cars will give up and stop when they require manual intervention.

But, this is also why I think the next car manufacturer race will be about who can solve this for their customers. That is, who solves the problem of making 95% autonomous cars able to drive in 99.9% if all situations without manual intervention by the driver, where the provides automatic remote control from massive rooms full of people steering drunk car owners out of situations the autopilot couldn’t. The better the autonomy, the fewer people needed to remote override.

Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving.

A 90% autonomous trip where I have to pay attention 100% of the time gets me no real value. It's just a slightly nicer, maybe, ride.

It seems unlikely you commutes would completely autonomous even people commute on freeways.

> If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions

Spoken like someone who does not drive regularly in snow.

I am late to the discussion. I dont understand why we cant have new Cities that only allows self driving cars. Full AV can react to other drivers, but they can surely act upon themselves.

This way, you can set out home with cars and you only operate the last part going to Cities for work. And when you leave you drive out to high way and then every full else will be automatics. It also partly solve housing problems and people can now live further away from work.

Surely this is a solution that is simply enough for the short term. What am I missing here?

I think he is the one and only sane C-level person in the industry, after hearing this.

People claiming most of AI hype barely know what the "AI" people mention is.

And people who go as far as drawing rosy pictures of human like general AI being your personal chauffeur are past ridiculous.

The entire idea of human-like general AI for practical applications is like trying to make people using horses for transport in 21st century, by trying to make a horse than if better than a car.

I don’t think it’s impossible if certain roads/highways or lanes become marked as autonomous only. Just as pedestrians and bicycles are banned from using high-speed roads, manually-operated cars could be banned from using certain roads/lanes, removing a lot of variables that manually-operated cars bring.

That's level 4, by definition.

(full autonomy on some/many roads)

Defeating the promise of automated driving, and underscoring the obviousness of its impossibility, since this is roughly as useful as a Tram.

How is the ability to leave at your own time, have your own dedicated cabin, and ability to stop nearly anywhere, even in the same ballpark as a Tram...?

If you have to restrict to marked highways then you could have had this "self driving" technology in the 80s.

I wish governments would consider the death and injury toll of manually driving, and fastlane (pun intended) infrastructure for self driving cars, such as specific roads and lanes.

The tech is changing so quickly that by the time you built the things they would probably be redundant.

Isn't it a little silly to call someone "only sane C-level person" after one comment?

Also, while claiming these innovations are only a few years way may be insane, saying they will never happen feels probably just as non-sense. History hasn't been on the side of such absolute claims.

It will take time, but Waymo already has working 100% self-driving cars out in the wild. Yes it's in a small area, with perfect weather, and with technicians ready to jump in, but it's still a good start and easily paves the way for it to extend over the next decade or so.

I do feel like that. From my past few years dealing with automotive clients, I haven't heard of a single company that was not completely obsessed with it.

All and every piece of electronics we did in the automotive sector had some lame "AI platform" attached somewhere, for no apparent reason.

The most blatant "AI washing" I saw was an "AI power steering" which was a plain PID, inferior on all fronts to purpose made systems already on the market.

Second to it was an "AI airbag," which was basically an OpenCV hello world that will trigger the airbag ahead of time. Terribly unreliable, and would've probably killed more people than saved.

Yes, it's a hype based buzzword. Just like "cloud" could be found everywhere a few years ago by people trying to profit from said hype. And just like "cloud", usage will start to become somewhat more realistic eventually. But I doubt the industry will look exactly like it did before... just like many of us didn't switch back to local bare metal servers.

I totally understand mistrust. Less so if there are somewhat capable alpha products already available with huge economic incentives behind made by somewhat reputable companies. It might not happen in the current hype cycle, then it will be a future one. But I don't ever see self driving cars quietly being deployed. That's just a way to well known game changer hardly anyone will want to sit out.

https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...

Waymo ceo made a similar statement.

To me those are two very different statement, at least for my interpretation of the first statement. If the VW exec was referring to very hard weather conditions, then fair enough, but I doubt that's what he meant.

The Waymo CEO was very clearly referring to extreme conditions like storms, and honestly, most humans can't and shouldn't drive in said conditions, so it's not that crazy to say Waymo may never be able to either.

> saying they will never happen feels probably just as non-sense. History hasn't been on the side of such absolute claims.

I wish there was a collection of stubborn dismissals of things that did come to pass and became bigger and better than originally imagined, so we could point and laugh at those cynical sticks in the muds.

Steve Ballmer's dismissal of the iPhone being a popular relatively recent case.

I still remember that quote I discovered through Civilization, apparently made by some popular leader (Napoleon?) about steam engines: "You would make a ship of iron and without sails move by lighting a bonfire under its deck?? Absurd!"

You don't understand. We just need more data. Once we have enough data the AI will be able to model all possible scenarios and make a better decision than a human driver ever could! /s

Agreed. I have running bet with fellow at work who owns a Tesla about when we will have self driving cars. He keeps telling me the AI revolution is just around the corner. Still waiting.

He talks about difference between level 4 and level 5 (4 - attainable, 5 - may never happen). This is a strange proposition in my book: level 4 is already good enough to bring a lot of value (taxis in a big city are level 4 afaiu), level 5 - ideal but who cares?

It's actually debatable that you ever need level 5, because once you reach level 4 it's probably only a matter of time until most road infrastructure is converted for L4 self-driving vehicules (once you can statistically prove a self-driving road kills 1000x less than one with human drivers).

Like we never wondered about self-driving trains, essentially. It just became a fact once we could do remotely supervized L4, and that novelty was short-lived too.

taxis in a big city isnt neccessarily level 4. True, theres no person in the drivers seat, but there are still things that restrict the operation of a Level 4 system, while 5 is supposed to go anywhere, anytime. Snow, Rain, Fog, even night could all impede Level 4 systems depending on the implementation's restrictions.

AI and autonomous vehicles don't relate.

Driving a vehicle is not an AI problem and none of the serious autonomous vehicle teams are using AI.

Unless you are using a super loose definition of AI that includes anything with an if statement.

You are wrong. And the "serious autonomous teams" are also wrong in not using AI (which is mostly true AFAIK, as long as we don't call basic image recognition to already be "AI").

But that's just because the AI we currently have - basically idiot-savants made of silicon - is mostly useless to them, since the kind of AI they would need for actual, 100%, no-compromise level 5 self driving capabilities hasn't been invented yet, nor does anyone have a promising idea as to how to invent one.

I am pretty sure that the only way to actually reach this goal requires a full-blown AGI. Because what we call "driving" and what is often misunderstood as a rather mundane and repetitive mechanical operation of machinery governed by a few simple ground rules is actually an insanely complex task that requires several higher-level capabilities of the human intelligence: besides pattern recognition, quick evaluations of situations with an unbounded number of variables and application of knowledge and concepts to an unlimited number of ever-new traffic situations it requires foresight, communication (of the difficult nonverbal kind) and sometimes even carefully dosed brazenness - to know when rules should better be ignored or bent instead of followed.

Or perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because it would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service instead of cars being a prized possession. That, of course, would mean far less cars. So don't expect a traditional car manufacturer to lead the way.

This is incidentally one reason for Tesla's huge market value. The company actually has a plan to transition from individual ownership to fleet, so when this happens it will be prepared to deal with a new manufacturing reality.

Just try to imagine VW without all those ads to sell a positive self image because you drive a sexy cool car they make.

>Or perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because it would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service instead of cars being a prized possession.

Cuts both ways. Tesla execs have the same reason to overhype autonomous driving, because their market value depends on being perceived as a hypermodern tech company.

So far reality has proven VW right. Elon himself had to walk back on grandiose claims about full autonomy and robotaxi fleets, or advertising cars with slogans like "the driver is only there for legal reasons, the car drives itself" a bunch of years ago.

Full autonomy on a human level requires human levels of intelligence and 'common sense', it's a ridiculously hard problem that requires several leaps in AI and plenty of other fields.

> O r perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because it would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service instead of cars being a prized possession.

Why on earth would anyone use this over public transit? That would be a hugely expensive way to travel.

Public transportation where I live is disgusting and often dangerous. Buses and trains don't pick me up and drop me off in front of my home. And they run on fixed schedules.

Due to these advantages, I usually take Uber/Lyft instead of BART or Muni. Autonomous vehicles would reduce the cost of such services even more.

the benefits of accelerating a transition to a sustainable future and being a network in the truest sense make me believe it would be _cheaper_

Same reason people use Uber and Lyft. Same thing but no driver. Uber pool is already down to maybe 3x public transport cost, without the driver and with EVs the cost could be quite close.

I think it's pretty clear that mass transit and (e-)bikes--not cars--should become the primary modes of transportation, at least in urban areas, if for no other reason than that they're inherently more sustainable. I would be concerned that self-driving cars will only arrive after Peak Automobile has already come and gone.

How about mass transit using a fleet of self driving cars?

I can see that this isn't a future a VW exec would dream of, since it would mean far fewer cars per person.

Buses are always going to be more efficient than cars for that purpose (less weight per person). An adequately funded, high-quality bus system would, in my view, make self-driving cars redundant for almost all purposes.

Sorry, but I think this point of view really does not take into account the reality of the situation in many US cities (or, more importantly, many US suburbs). I would love it if I could take a highly quality bus instead of be stuck in traffic driving, but it's simply not feasible given where I live. Driving downtown to work takes about 20 mins with no traffic, about 35 mins during rush hour, and even if there was a bus that I could take (there isn't) given the additional stops it would still take longer than that, even though it can take the 'express' lane.

Where I live self-driving cars, even if "highway only", IMO are much more feasible than an adequate public transportation system that would cost billions to construct.

The business model changes then from car sales to a mix of car sales and being a mobility provider. VW would need to be able to move into those directions.

I can't see bikes taking over in urban area with actual climate. Even the biggest enthusiasts in Chicago or New York will tell you it sucks during the winter.

And I can't see mass transit being viable when our biggest cities with the money and initiative to improve it plan these projects over the scale of decades and billions per mile.

Self driving cars or trolleys on the existing road surface is probably the most realistic form of mass transit out there. We have the vehicles and the infrastructure already.

It doesn't have to be self driving at first either. Uber's forays into mass transit with shared rides and fixed pickup locations was always pretty solid for me and reasonably priced.

Self-driving cars, vans and buses are better than mass transit that operates on fixed lines and schedules in nearly every respect, including energy use. Mass transit on fixed routes is a fossil and it will increasingly be phased out in favor of self-driving transport networks where the route, the timing and the size of the vehicle adapts to needs.

This strikes me as weird:

> "This is one of the hardest problems we have. This is like we are going to Mars," Hitzinger said in a comment. "Maybe it will never happen."

First of all, it seems obvious that we are going to go to Mars, eventually. Maybe not any time soon, but never? Seriously?

But the bigger thing is that there is about 1000 times more economic benefit to self driving cars than of going to Mars, at least in the near term. To think we'd just give up on it seems absurd.

Yeah, some guy named Elon might not agree.

Exactly. Using Mars as a second example is basically just doubling down on the "Elon isn't trustworthy" argument. That should be a giant red flag to readers.

Not reaching Level 5 is not synonymous with "giving up." We could get to 4+, with 90+% of driving being automated, but never actually reach 100% (the definition of Level 5)

>First of all, it seems obvious that we are going to go to Mars, eventually. Maybe not any time soon, but never? Seriously?

Given the questionable economics underlying humans having a presence on Mars and the extreme toll on the human body this will have, foremost by radiation I think it's actually a fair comparison in particular because full autonomy like mars colonisation is constantly being overhyped mostly by a very small group of very affluent individuals who seem to be more inspired by sci-fi than engineering.

I don't mean to be rude, but I have strong feelings about this attitude.

Let's take going to Mars. We can't reliably go to the moon. We can't even go everywhere on the Earth, where we have every possible advantage. Spend a year on the ISS and you'll develop all sorts of health issues. Spending time on Mars isn't likely to be less hazardous. We may send humans to Mars but it is by no means guaranteed. (And I would also ask, what reason do we have to go to Mars? Probes do a better job of exploring, and I doubt we could colonize it.)

Until someone builds a real self-driving car it is just an idea. On today's roads, it is probably not possible to safely implement a fully self driving car. Driving is not only a technical exercise but a social activity that involves communicating your intentions to other humans, and interpreting the intentions of others. That is something that humans do far better than machines. (Edit: To clarify, humans are better at communicating with other humans. Machines do a great job of communicating with each other, but have mixed results communicating with humans.)

If every car was self-driving and the roads were remade from first principles, then sure, that seems feasible. The degenerate case here would be a self-driving train, which seems perfectly reasonable. But the technical challenges are the easy part of that endeavor. Funding such a project, developing the political will to see it through, and organizing the logistics are far more difficult. Consider for instance; what will happen to the legacy vehicles? Will it be illegal to drive them? Will there be a massive government buyback? Who will fund that? Where will the cars go? How will we organize the logistics of moving hundreds of millions of vehicles? How long will that take? What other matters will we need to turn our attention away from to accomplish that task?

A much more likely scenario is that companies continue to come up with partial, ad-hoc solutions, driving gets more automated, ride sharing becomes more popular and car ownership less so, but that humans remain in the loop for the foreseeable future. What happens outside the foreseeable future is something we can't and shouldn't pretend to know with any degree of certainty.

There are a million ways in which we could never go to Mars or build a self-driving car. We could get a better idea for how transit should work, making self driving cars superfluous. We could discover life on Mars, and make the decision that it would be too dangerous for us to visit. The superpowers of the world could go to war with each other, and our infrastructure could be devastated to the point where space travel is impossible. Climate change could drive us to extinction. Something could happen that we cannot predict or imagine, that we have no precedent for, that completely changes our situation and outlook.

Some of these are more likely than others, but the point is that it would be folly to take the future as read. And frankly, a couple of them are more likely than us ever going to Mars.

"Until someone builds a real self-driving car it is just an idea."

I think it's more than an idea when we have self driving cars, they just don't meet our standards for safety yet so they aren't legal on public roads.

I mean, we had airplane flight in 1903. Good chance you'd die if you went up in one for the first decade. But we did have powered flight.

I think making a self driving car that is safe - they are billed as being safer than humans - is part of the problem definition. I could put a brick on my gas pedal and my car will drive autonomously, but I don't think anyone would be willing to give me credit for solving this problem. Clearly there is a threshold somewhere.

We absolutely have the technology to go to Mars. We could probably have sent a manned mission to Mars in the 70s with the same technology level that took us to the moon.

It’s just that it would cost an incredible sum of money for very little gain and so it hasn’t happened - even the mission to the moon was a huge drain on the budget and the program was canceled once we won the space race.

Going to Mars is like supersonic passenger air travel (Concorde) - something we have the technology to do, but it just doesn’t make sense.

An autonomous, self-driving automobile is something we just can’t do today no matter how much money we spent on it. I think it’s a different question because we are trying to predict if we will ever reach the level of technological sophistication to allow it. (Of course we have a solution for “driving a car from one city to another” and it’s putting a human in the seat, or of “making a self driving vehicle” and it’s putting the vehicle on grade separated tracks like the Morgantown PRT)

I disagree. I'm sure that, if we really wanted to, we could put a person onto Mars. I don't think we have the ability to send someone & retrieve them, or for them to fend for themselves on the surface. So this is a bit like saying we have the technology to explore the inside of a volcano because we can jump into one. It's not really the proposition people are talking about when they say "go to Mars".

But I agree that it's actually a generous comparison to self driving cars. After all, we do occasionally send machines to Mars, and they work quite well.

Thank God! Self driving cars are not a solution to the world's problems. Better public transport is. Why can't we have self driving buses that replace trams? The level of AI needed for that is already there. As the population of major cities grows, we can't expect everyone riding around in their own car. Public transport is better for citizens and the environment. We need to be reducing the number of vehicles on the roads and ideally not covering the planet with asphalt altogether. Trams in cities like Amsterdam and the London underground are much more efficient modes of transportation than self driving cars will ever be.

They are _a_ solution, for sure. They just aren't _the_ solution. I'm not sure dense cities are _the_ solution either, especially as more and more work is done remotely. I think humans weren't meant to be cooped up in a tiny concrete box. I like my backyard, and the forest behind my back yard. One size does not fit all, and it's not really feasible to tackle lower density living setups with "public transport", at least not in a large country like US. Moreover, this isn't "either-or" thing. I'd love it if my car could drop me off at the train station and then parked itself at home, then picked me up on my way back.

US is a special place. Even Russia has better public transport.

I don't think lack of public parking at a train station is a good enough reason to develop self-driving cars. It's easier to build a car park.

Not everyone lives in a major city though. Certainly self-driving cars are less efficient than buses for transport within a denser city, but go a few miles outside the city (at least in the US) and you’ll find yourself far from practical bus range.

The situation may be different in Europe, but I think self-driving cars could be useful for navigating the sprawling American suburbs or less-dense cities. But yes, we shouldn’t attempt to replace perfectly functional and more efficient public transport within cities, only supplement where public transit isn’t (yet) practical.

There's no reason you can't have buses outside major cities - most EU countries do this fine. Self driving, self-recharging buses, that you can track and hail on-demand would be much more efficient than self driving cars. It means you may have to walk the last mile, but I can only see that as a benefit in a country where obesity is one of the biggest problems.

People with disabilities or those living in extremely remote areas are the only ones that should have their own cars.

Maybe, provided they run 24/7 and have very good coverage. Europe has much higher population density than all but the most populous regions of the US, though. Perhaps self-driving buses could do an amazingly better job than our current transit infrastructure, but I'd have to see some really convincing estimates.

For some context here: it would take on average 1.5 hours for me to get to a friend's house by bus/train, when that's ordinarily about a 30 minute drive. That's highly variable too; if I miss one bus with a 1.5 hour route, there's another one a few minutes later, but that one would take 2 hours. If I didn't leave before 8pm for the return trip, I'd be stuck there until morning, as the buses stop running around then.

And Google Maps won't even give me transit directions to the venue for a friend's recent wedding, which I interpret as "don't even try."

> Why can't we have self driving buses that replace trams?

Why can't we have both, and sizes in between, and then dispatch whichever vehicle size is most appropriate for the situation?

I can't see L5 happening without, amongst other things, the human ability to reason about things/concepts we've never encountered before (à la consciousness).

Highway driving is the most constrained normal driving problem, and this is solvable in 99% of cases. But there are so many things that can happen in most other driving situations that make me think that model-based approaches (Tesla) are doomed to fail... Go ahead, train a classifier for every situation you can think of - I guarantee you that you've missed many things.

Elon tweeted the other day that FSD is "coming soon". Either I'm totally wrong about this, and of course I hope I am, or Karpathy + the dev team should be tempering his expectations.

That isn't to say that there isn't immense value in L2/L3, there totally is. But I think that solving driving (being able to drive any situation a human can) is pretty much the same thing as solving intelligence generally.

Musk, for all his genuine achievements, is also a bullshitter. If/when his FSD prediction fails to come to pass, I expect that he will just say "Well, when I said FSD, what I really meant is..."

That is already happening. Go visit the Tesla forums, and you will hear a lot of fans trying to tone down expectations for FSD, redefining what that term means. I would have thought "full self-driving" was pretty explanatory, but from things I've recently read, the goalposts have already shifted significantly.

I find it extremely unethical for Tesla to sell its customers a $6000 option to "Enable full self driving mode" some time in the future. Does anyone really think that this will happen before their car is totaled/broken/old/end of life (10-15 years)?

People seem to drink enough marketing PR to buy it. That whole company is built as a cult and as a PR playbook. Any other company would not be able to pull that type of dirty tricks.

*Any other company without an Elon Musk type of frontman. Maybe Richard Bronson could do it if he were a little younger. No one else comes to my mind.

"some time in the future"...

... while Musk promises "you'll be able to self-drive, coast to coast, this year" (haha, no).

For a bunch of "tech visionaries" that Hacker News is supposed to embody, this thread is full of such shortsightedness. I self-drove from Southern California to Phoenix, Arizona, so I guess that's like 1/10th of the way. I couldn't have imagined that ten years ago. Part of the job of being a CEO is to sell the dream, even if it's years or decades away.

Highway driving in SoCal on nicely maintained highways in the summer is the easy part of self-driving. Winter driving on local roads in Pittsburgh is the less easy.

> Part of the job of being a CEO is to sell the dream, even if it's years or decades away.

He literally said you would be able to do it _this year_. That's after he said you would be able to do it in 2018. And that's after he said you'd be able to do it in 2016. And all the while charging thousands of dollars for the promise of it "coming".

You're right. SoCal summer roads are definitely the easy part. I bought a Comma Eon for a few hundred dollars and it does most of what Tesla's Extended Autopilot does. It's a solved problem, that's relatively inexpensive.

However, if people are willing to pay Tesla $7k for the promise of a "coming" full self driving product that doesn't exist yet, I don't really feel bad for them. It's kind of Tesla's business strategy at this point. I don't think they're acting in bad faith to their customers, because they have a track record of (eventually) delivering great products, but their leadership is unreasonably optimistic. I worry for the future of the company. Whether Musk's isn't living up to his fiduciary responsibilities to investors, I have a lot of issues with... that's a whole separate topic.

Elon’s predictions have been wildly out of touch with reality when it comes to self-driving.

In Jan 2016: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920

“In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY”

Four years later, summon works in parking lots at 2-3 mph, while a person is supposed to be monitoring and watching the car the entire time and holding a button to keep it moving.

Whilst either "being distracted by a fussy child" (if you listen to their marketing copy), or "paying full attention to the vehicle" (if you listen to their legal disclaimers).

I use autopilot between Seattle and Portland regularly. It requires intervention a half dozen times or so, each way. Sometimes my wife makes me switch back to TACC-only, because she finds the interventions unnerving.

Agree 100%. It is now $7000, by the way.

At some point in the not-to-distant future I expect them to bundle most of what they currently package as FSD and sell it as enhanced autopilot again, for a whole lot less than $7K. Then I might buy it.

Level 5 means no human intervention, under any circumstance. Ice, snow, night, fog, unmarked roads, tunnels, mega-urban, isolated rural, parking lots/structures, etc, etc. I think he's correct. It's hard to think of any technology that works without human intervention whatsoever, no matter the conditions.

We've had autopilot for decades, we're certainly not flying planes without pilots. Or even getting them from runway to gate without humans. Nor is anyone claiming that pilot-less planes are coming soon.

Most humans can't drive safely in all conditions without outside human intervention.

Planes are different in that there is a large ratio of passengers to "drivers". There isn't the same economic incentive to eliminate pilots when the cost of flying a plane is still going to be quite a few dollars a minute.

The thing is, there are some conditions where people probably just shouldn't be driving. Like we shouldn't be driving in a heavy snow storm, at least not for most trips where you can just wait it out. Planes will wait out storms, even with human pilots. I don't see a problem with "level 4.9" cars that occasionally say "I'm going to wait out the storm" or that will avoid certain routes (such as "crazy mixing bowl" intersections where you can instead just take a side street)

How much do pilots actually pilot vs how much do they just assume responsibility? I.e. I as a passenger feel much safer knowing that there's someone actually responsible to prevent me from dying (because if the plane crashes, the pilot dies with me), not just some C_O suits pushing PR through legal trying to gaslight the public and avoid any culpability (cough Boeing cough).

That's exactly the point, even if pilots use autopilot most of the time (level 4 autonomy).

Guess when they take control? When something bad is happening (and there are literally a million things that can go wrong and the autopilot could not fix, ever).

Guess why MCAS did not result in more crashes (the system has been known to malfunction a couple of times before the crashes)? Righty because there were pilots that could manually control the plane well enough to land safely.

There will always be a facility to manually override the decisions of the autopilot. It’s likely to be a legal requirement so that in an emergency the vehicles can be directed to do things they normally wouldn’t (like drive on the wrong side of the road). But you don’t need a steering wheel to do that.

I imagine there’ll also be manual modes to get the car into trucks and ships, or even just out of the factory.

Since when has VW been at the forefront of self driving cars? Is there a reason their insight would be especially accurate?

This just reflects VWs ideas to accomplish the goal... ie: they have none.

Let me know when Google says it's not possible.

Apple is in the top tier of self driving cars though.

And since he recently worked there I am sure he knows quite a bit about where the industry is at.

> Apple is in the top tier of self driving cars though.

Citations needed. I consider Waymo, Cruise and couple of other companies in the top tier.

Disc: Googler

> Apple is in the top tier of self driving cars though.

I mean all we have to support that they're working on self driving cars at all is DMV records, articles, and pictures of their car efforts. We have no idea how far along they are.

Apple was dead last in the last self driving report in California. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-13/apple-s-a...

The fact that they're a reasonably competent outsider arguably bolsters their position.

Their future sales are dependent upon there NOT not being self driving cars which arguably reduces their position dramatically.

> Let me know when Google says it's not possible.

https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-kra...

Despite that, he's confident in VW's ability to make a Level 4 autonomous vehicle, saying that the upcoming I.D. Buzz electric van will be the first VW to receive the technology.

He's poo-pooing level 5 autonomous driving and says that they just about have a level 4 autonomous vehicle?

This article makes no sense.

Honestly, the CEO of my company has very little idea of the details of the technology that we produce. If you picked some cutting-edge technology that isn't key to our market-share yet, he'd have even less of a clue.

How does it make no sense? He’s saying we might never get past level 4. And they’re going to offer level 4. That statement is logically coherent.

It could quite easily be a ploy to prevent lost sales.

Consumers don't give two craps about this terminology. And the barrier between level 4 and level 5 is potentially decades out, if not forever.

Nobody's who's contemplating a level 4 is holding out their purchase for a level 5.

I think the point here is that going from level 4 to level 5 is a much, much harder problem than going from, say, level 1 to level 4.

But it's really not. Level 4 will require the vehicle to take you from door to door without driver intervention in normal driving conditions. Level 4 is mostly what people think of when they think of autonomous driving because you can take a nap, work on your laptop, whatever. You get in your car, tell it where you want to go, and it does everything.

Level 5 basically removes the steering wheel so you never drive. But once you're at level 4, almost all of the hard problems have been solved.

https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated...

Like making sure the river you are about to ford in the Serengeti is low enough so you won't get stuck?

Is that what the CEO of VW is saying here? Their Serengeti autonomous adventuring vehicles might get stuck? If so, I totally missed that nuance.

He's the CEO of the self driving car division. I'm pretty sure he's well aware of their tech.

Here's a summary of his entire background in order: Formula 1 engineer for many years; Technical director for a Le Mans Prototype vehicle; Head of VWs self driving division for the past 1 year.

He has no software background... he specializes in making gas cars go fast. He has no idea how to make a self driving car.. and honestly, why would we think he would? He hasn't exactly been pioneering vision systems, or anything else related to the tech.

>He has no software background...

Yeah, because making Formula 1 cars "go fast" involves no software whatsoever, right?

I love how you dismiss "Formula 1 engineer for many years". Maybe if he helped build a payment processor we could take him seriously.

>He has no idea how to make a self driving car.. and honestly, why would we think he would?

Because he's running the autonomous car division of the biggest automaker in the world? I have no idea if he's right or not, but dismissing him as not knowing what he's talking about is hubris. He's trying to build this stuff.

So much ignorance and inaccuracies in one comment.

(a) He was the Head of F1 Development and Advanced Technologies which involves significant software exposure. F1 has a ridiculous amount of software both on car and in the factory to process all of the sensor data and design future cars. I've first hand seen their streaming big data stacks and they are on par with anything you will see at a top tier startup.

(b) He was the Head of Product Design for Apple's Car and we know they were going to have autonomous capabilities as well as hundreds of ML models powering AR, Maps, facial recognition etc. If you think you can get away without deeply understanding software whilst leading a major Apple project then you really don't understand how that company works.

(c) He's the CEO of VW Autonomy. He doesn't even need to be an expert in software. He just needs to be able to listen to his engineers.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexander-hitzinger-2163a035

Jeff Bezos never worked at Barnes & Noble or Borders. What does he know about selling books?

If Bezos started a book company, then failed and admitted he's not sure if it's possible to sell books... then I would question whether or not he has the background to sell books... especially if I look around, and other experts in the field don't agree.

My eyes looked at this comment, see that it's totally true, but yet downvotes. Context. But yes, there's an absolute truth to someone that can't think outside the box and deny something is possible vs the people that make it happen.

It's called a sceptic. Almost every great true visionary had them. I'm no Musk fanboy but he's kinda like the modern day epitome of everyone saying no this isn't possible and it happened anyway. And to add insult to injury he started a rocket company kinda simultaneously. There absolutely is truth to scepticism literally blocking the mind. If you will it enough it can happen is a thing. If we all just put our heads down on how complicated that would be, I don't think we'd be very far.

Just sounds like normal meaningless sales talk. Everything we don't have is crap you do need. What we do have will solve all your problems.

Consider the Osborne effect. And consider that this person has a strong vested interest in making sure potential VW customers does not decide to delay their car purchase decision in the hope of getting a more automated solution next year or the year after.

Maybe he's right, maybe he's not. But either way it'd be dumb of him to claim level 5 autonomous cars were right around the corner.

> Consider the Osborne effect.

Agree completely. It would be suicidal (in a business sense) to say that Level 5 was right around the corner right when you're on the verge of rolling out Level 4.

Mr. Hitzinger is saying that L5 cars will never happen. Most people feel that L5 is equivalent to artificial general intelligence, and it's pretty much a given that it may never happen. But now that Waymo and Cruise and everyone else have failed to hit their self-imposed milestones, the more pressing question to ask is whether geo-fenced only-in-good-weather autonomy will ever happen.

Meta: I dislike the use of "admit" in the title and story.

Why are "admit", "confess", "announce", "reveal" etc used instead of the usually more accurate "says"?

(rhetorical question)

never? What does that even mean? We've only been driving cars like 100 years. Only had computers for 60, and decent portable ones for 20. Self-driving literally just became remotely possible, and you're telling me never?

This is an off-the-cuff remark turned into a clickbait headline for a fairly bland article.

The technology is not the only problem. The lawyers that are defending every dead body, and there will be dead bodies, that will sink self-driving cars. Even if everyone is 95% safer with self-driving cars, those that are killed by a self-driving car (in combo with a public that is easily swayed with non-objective arguments) will be hard to dismiss.

I don't understand this. If there are 1/20th the amount of deaths, how is that going to sink self driving cars?

Reactionary legislation is a risk to the industry.

Most drivers on the road are effectively being subsidized by bankruptcy protection, because most cannot possibly cover the liability they are exposing themselves to by driving. This "subsidy" is far less valuable to a self driving car manufacturer than individual drivers.

Well not if they have insurance.

I mean, sure, you can come up with some scenario where the liability exceeded the insurance coverage, but I haven't heard of many of those. Anyway, it comes from somewhere. If bankruptcy protects drivers, it also exposes them to the risk that they will suffer damage that isn't compensated.

Regardless, expecting a legal loophole to preserve the status quo indefinitely seems quite unrealistic and inherently unstable. If that actually holds up something that could massively benefit society (both economically and in saving lives), we simply legislate liability limits.

> we simply legislate liability limits.

Liability you can incur while driving is almost arbitrarily high. Individual drivers rely on the existence of bankruptcy protection to cover these rare scenarios, or simply don't think about or plan for this at all.

> but I haven't heard of many of those.

How many do you think it takes to put a self driving car manufacturer out of business?

I'm not saying the status quo is a great situation, or that this is a good or bad argument for or against self driving cars. Only that it's a description of the current situation, and why legal issues might be a much bigger problem for self driving car manufacturers than individual drivers.

Because the deaths will be network level effects that a person would be helpless to mitigate through behavior. There's no sense of being a careful or responsible driver with a self-driving car; its all whether or not the algorithm or software is correct.

It's a different type of potential error and a much more scary one. I can mitigate human drivers as a pedestrian by taking care walking, but I cannot mitigate an AI that thinks my shirt makes me look invisible due to its learning being deceived by a pattern.

Because a jury will hand out a huge multi-million dollar award against a self-driving car company when its car crashes causing a death, while when a human causes a death it is usually just an "accident" or a much smaller settlement based on the person's insurance coverage.

Because the autonomous car is a systematic issue that could affect every single car on the road using that manufacturer's software, and the "driver" of the car has no way to stop or mitigate the risk, or cause risk. He puts his life in the company's hands each time he drives the vehicle.

I'm not sure why people even embrace self-driving cars. By now we know that centralization, lack of maintenance, and fragmentation in software are serious risks, as well as how software can increase the attack vector on people as well as provide benefit. I'm not sure if the risks are worth the modest efficiency increase, and this isn't even getting into existential risks like external parties being able to control when you drive, or attacks on the networks or technology.

Even if the death toll 1/100th ... the few dead will be paraded as examples. There will be outrage. There will be lawsuits. You are correct, it is not logical, but logic does not always prevail.

That works both ways, though. Once self-driving is proven, the higher accident rates from human-driving will become a greater liability. "Why were you driving yourself at night instead of engaging autopilot?!?"

You are correct; the public won’t accept the technology until it’s at least as safe statistically as air travel (and even then, there’ll be pushback in response to specific inevitable tragedies).

However, I think the profit incentives of the trucking industry will manage to carve out some regulatory exceptions; something like “freight trucks can self-drive between 11a and 5a on these specific Nebraska highways, with warning signs on both roads and vehicles”. This sort of lobbying will be the thin end of the wedge for both iterating the tech, and normalizing its acceptance.

We could say that now about automobiles. If I were to get into an accident and then have lawyers for the other vehicle, plus everybody stuck in traffic behind me also sending their lawyers after me, I’d never drive.

Insurance solved that problem, both by eliminating the possibility of a catastrophic financial loss, and by creating a buffer between me and all those lawyers.

I predict that insurance will solve the lawyer problem for self-driving cars as well. At some point, it will cost me $5,000 a year to drive my own car, and $500 to let it do all the driving.

And on top of all that, if my car drives itself into an accident, the lawyers will talk to my insurance company, not to me. I see the insurance companies as the enabler for this tech. And they will want to enable it, it will put them in control of the market.

>We could say that now about automobiles.

Indeed we can which is why some cities on the planet have gone carless and more and more opposition is mounting in the face of traffic deaths, pollution and so so on. Even in the US, maybe the most car dominated country in the world, there is a political revival of talks about high speed rail and alternative forms of transportation.

The other important difference being that the step from having no cars at all to having cars was one of the largest leaps in mobility in human history. Self-driving cars are nice, but not that much of a leap, and they have much more ambiguous implications when it comes to the job-market. They will face significantly larger hurdles with significantly less payoff in sight.

Which cities have gone carless? Are you saying that's it illegal to drive a car in some cities?

Pontevedra in Spain for example, Venice and Oslo are also to large degrees car-free in the city proper. Yes cars are banned from the city, here's an article about the consequences.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2018/sep/18/paradise-life...

The world is not the USA. The legal system that exist in the US is different in other places of the world.

With a self driving car you know exactly what happened in an accident as video and telemetry is recorded. This is a tremendous advantage over having to reconstruct it without this data.

On the contrary I expect legislation forcing every car to include telemetry like the Chinese are forcing every car to be connected.

This accident's data is evidence, not opinion, not a belief, not a prejudice.

The usefulness of this has already been proven with airplanes.

How happy will it be when camera data in the age of hyper realistic cgi films and “foolproof” telemetry will protect us from killing robot car makers at court. :)

Agreed, if a self driving car hits me and breaks my neck, who do I sue to pay my bills and care? The driver? The car manufacturer? Or the self driving software company? Right now with a driver its clear.

Yeah I am on the side of the skeptics. We cannot do AI in a fully controlled environment properly. What hope do we have to master a use case where the nature, elements in the physical world, vandals are all throwing all kinds of wrenches into the mix. The vision or dream of a level 5 self driving car is something I will only believe once I see.

To go down in a long list of things executives said wouldn’t happen, that ended up happening.

"Everything that can be invented has been invented."

Read an book on space/aerospace engineering from the 1980s and look at how many things happened. Supersonic was a huge bust. (The Concorde is closer in time to wooden biplanes than to today. Routine supersonic travel still nowhere on the horizon.) Energy technology has been a huge disappointment. When I grew up, we were going to have nuclear fusion, expanding the scope of what society can do. Today we’re back to windmills and we’re told to put on a sweater. AI was of course a huge bust once.

Windmills' technology has improved dramatically, like also nuclear fusion's.

We are not "back" to windmills that give 3 MegaWatts of power because they never existed in the first place, like affordable solar panels with 20-40% efficiency.

Progress is not automatic. It is millions of times harder to create or improve a technology than imagine it. And also takes lots of money.

We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.

No, Manhattan project took trivial amount of money by today's standard. It costed less than the rounding error in typically given federal budget figures for past few decades.

It cost 2 billion in 1939. That’s over 20 billion in today’s dollars.

That’s about the same as NASA’s annual budget.

Yes, and that's smaller than a rounding error in our current $4.7T budget. Hell, the $100B (today's dollars) Apollo program would also be smaller than the rounding error, since it was spread over a decade. The R&D costs on F-35 were almost triple the whole costs of Manhattan project.

Truly, we are easily able to afford projects like Manhattan and Apollo today, it's just we aren't able to pull them off anymore.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/12/united-states-should...

But of that 4.7T budget we only spend 600 million of that on fusion research.

> Supersonic was a huge bust.

With the caveat: for commercial travel. And even then it’s partly due to noise restrictions. It’s not like the technology for supersonic flight isn’t widespread.

He never said it wouldn't happen, “Maybe it will never happen.”

What list? The one where Thomas Watson said there’d never be a world-wide market for more than five computers? Other than that, what else does that list have to stack up against:

Nuclear power, let alone fusion. What happened to “too cheap to meter”?

Supersonic travel: raynier already pointed out what a bust the Concorde was. Nothing else on the horizon now.

Automation giving me a 20 hour work week. Nope, capital holders just skim that efficiency right into their pockets.

I’d go on, but suffice it to say that about the only thing much different than my childhood in the 70s are computers in our pockets. Revolutionary, no doubt, but we are still burning oil for our energy needs, our cars don’t fly, and I still show up and do my 40 hours. And healthcare has gotten worse in the U. S., not better, if you can believe that.

So, yeah, when the head of the autonomous driving division of VW says Level 5 ain’t gonna happen, I don’t immediately jump to doubting him/her and attacking their resume.

ALL of the autonomous driving experts say that level 5 is, at best, 50 years off. Unanimous. They don't know how to do it, see no path to doing it. It's hard! Maybe we'll make real AI and we can enslave our human-level intelligent computers to drive cars for us, at least until they figure out how to rebel. Maybe. But we don't know how today, and not tomorrow or the next day either.

And yet HN threads are all about "here are all these cool things that will happen tomorrow if Elon Jesus delivers".

He ain't going to deliver, people.

Check out Boom for a new company working on supersonic airplanes [1].

[1]https://boomsupersonic.com/

Health care is worse? More expensive, yes, but anybody getting cancer and wanting to live is much better off now than in the 1970's.

The list of 'visionaries' who said something was going to happen, but never did is 10x longer.

Think about it. Soft AI that assists the driver (automatic turning, cruise control, automatic brakes) is now mainstream. Why is it that full self-driving cars are categorically different? Because it requires full faith in the machine. When assistive technology goes wrong, the driver can correct it and -- get this -- the reason the driver can correct it fast enough is precisely because the driver doesn't fully trust the technology. the driver is on alert, always, because they know the technology is not meant to be trusted fully. now a full self-driving car asks the driver to trust it fully. so the "driver" can take a nap, read a book, whatever. if the driver needs to be on alert, it's by definition not a fully self-driving car. and i dont think we will get there, ever.

Lots of people are arguing about 'when full self-driving cars will happen' without giving a precise definition (and therefore without having to think too hard about the problem).

The article describes Level 5 as 'full computer control of the vehicle with zero limitations' but what exactly does that mean?

(a) Does it mean a vehicle available for sale to the general public that can drive at night when it is snowing on a new road that has not first been mapped by a human?

(b) Does it mean that there is at least 1 city of a million residents where at least 50% of vehicle journeys did not require any occupant to have a driver's licence?

To me (and Volkswagen) it's far more useful to forecast when the second criteria will be met than the first.

They "admit"? It's not like the recent "full self-driving car by 2025" craze fooled anyone who knew even a modicum about the current state-of-the-art in ML applied to self-driving cars. I remember doing a back-of-the-napkin on this a couple years ago. It would take something like 7 nines of accuracy across all types of driving tasks for us to remove the need for a fallback human behind the wheel. AFAIK we don't even have 7 nines of accuracy for highway driving yet, so this is clearly a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Maybe ask again in 2070.

To build a true self-driving car, as a prerequisite, you'll need a true general AI. Imagine a complex construction site in an intersection with police navigating traffic. The AI driver will need to understand the officer's visual and audible cues and act accordingly. That level of sophistication requires something far more advanced than anything we're seeing today.

There are much more mundane cases. Imagine a self-driving car arriving at a toll booth that takes only cash payments. There is a long tail of situations like this that a human driver handles easily and would require a cross-functional team of engineers to implement the appropriate solution.

The headline is a masterclass in weasel words.

1. First, it begs the question. By saying "X admits Y" we are assuming that Y is true. This is very different than writing "X says Y", or "X believes Y" etc etc

2. Then, they carefully chose Y to include the word "may" so that they can claim it is true regardless of its content. As long as the rest of Y isn't literally a tautology, you're good to go. "A teacup may be orbiting Jupiter" etc etc

3. But step 2 is sneaky. The way that the word "may" makes the overall statement true is different than how it functions in the quoted speaker's sentence. In his sentence, he means like "there is a good chance it will never happen." When they use "may" to make Y true, it is invoked in a much weaker sense.

Basically they are reusing the word "may" in two different sentences to achieve a misleading headline. They obviously have skin in the game and I don't expect this to be a fair article.

It was quite clear to many of us that autonomous driving at a certain level is a very hard goal to reach, but it may happen in the long run. However what is incredible is that actually a form of AD, that is public transportation, is available for centuries yet in many places in the world this option is ignored. Guess why? The key is in the "public" part.

To a certain extent I agree. I had already written at length in another post about this topic, but my opinion is that what we think of as a "car" right now will never be fully autonomous.

I see the future diverging into two paths, fully autonomous commercial vehicles, like taxis, delivery vehicles, semi-trucks, etc. that work within urban areas or other designated, mapped and specially prepared areas. This will possibly involve a centralized system of control and communication, something like an ATC but for cars. These will be owned by corporations and only used by people. It makes no sense for a person to buy one of these fully autonomous vehicles, although I imagine some people would pay extra to have priority access so they always have one available.

The other side of the coin will be privately owned cars that have autonomous capability, or autonomous cars with override. These will be able to go anywhere the driver wants, including unmapped villages, small towns, off road tracks, etc. I suspect these will be the domain of enthusiasts, people who really need them for work (ranchers and farmers, for example) and people who choose to live away from urban centers. They will be more expensive than cars now, but the need for these vehicles will never go away. Even if we get true AI capable of driving anywhere with only the sensors aboard the vehicle, there will still be the need for a human to override it, even if that involves just authorizing a risky maneuver or putting the AI into "unsafe driving" mode.

I think the movie I, Robot (with Will Smith) got the future of autonomous cars surprisingly right, autonomous inside cities and on highways, and using the manual override comes with penalties (higher insurance, being at fault in an accident, etc.).

On a personal note, and this may sound bad, but I would never buy a car which I cannot use to break the law. Even if I never plan to do it, being able to speed, jump the curb, intentionally crash into a wall (or another car) or even run over a person (for example, in self defense) may be at some point required or the least bad of many bad options. In this case any consequences should fall on me, but I don't think a thing I own should be designed to prevent me from breaking the law or doing something stupid if I really want or need to, although providing warnings or an optional safe-mode is fine. I suspect many people feel the same way, even if they don't put it in such an extreme way. This can be seen by the fact that a lot of cars, particularly those focused on performance or off-roading, come with switches to turn traction control off, and if they don't, it will get mentioned as a negative in any review done by publications focused on those audiences.

SAE level 5 is unlikely to happen since the autonomous cases will be developed and optimized for the common case of a semi-clear weather mostly urban environment with plenty of signs and full mobile and GNSS coverage. The odd cases will simply not be a priority.

Can one take an "autonomous car" up a barely visible car wide path (not a real road) which squiggles through a forest (up to a cottage)?

Can one make an autonomous car understand a free-form textual sign when there's a roadwork or accident?

Drive in a place without marked roads?

There are plenty of edge cases and difficult situations.

Hitzinger says that level 4 might be achievable. I agree, it is conceivable that some day a lane of a motorway could get reserved for semi-autonomous vehicles; those vehicles can communicate with each other and are allowed to drive much faster (say, 250 km/h) since it's mostly a straight way, computers have faster reaction times especially given early warnings from cars ahead in the chain and so on.

In the dot com era there was a self driving car startup that started with a simplifying assumption: don’t run the cars at grade.

If you go up or down, the number and kind of obstacles reduces. The location of interactions between the vehicles is reduced, and the interactions with other classes of vehicle are zero, so you can negotiate.

Solve a simpler problem, if you can.

I've read the paragraph several times and maybe it's my ESL, but I don't quite follow.

Is the term "Grade" here used in the "Slope" sense, as in don't run the cars up and down the hill?

And if that's the interpretation, I don't necessarily agree with the next point that obstacles are reduced on slopes/hills... so I probably am not following correctly :-/

Thanks!

The "grade" that GP is referring to is this grade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_separation

If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily have self driving cars.

However that would mean that everyone would have access to it.

The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.

I've been beating this drum for years. Well said.

A wire in the road can't handle stuff like a pedestrian. Pedestrians normally aren't in highways but sometimes are after break-downs, accidents, construction, etc. Lane-following is close to solved on the highway, it is all that other stuff and more that is an issue. A wire could still help, but you'd still need a complex system or significantly more infrastructure than just a wire (maybe caged barriers over the lane in a way that doesn't cause issues if there is a fire, and more).

Pedestrians are lumpy compared to cars however. Even the self driving car that hit a pedestrian, did identify the person.

All you need are machine readable signs or beacons that dictate where full-auto is allowed.

As long as you have places where full-auto isn't allowed, you haven't reached Level 5. Exactly what the subject of the story claims.

Assuming you mean dedicated self-driving lane, what about when a non-self driving car crashes into the self-driving lane? Assuming you mean to have a dedicated lane with barrier (which is already much more than a wire). And what about when a large mining truck tire rim falls off an 18-wheeler and bounces over barrier in a way that any human driver would be able to hit the brakes and be ok?

Staying inside a lane isn't the hard problem.

I agree completely. Putting a guide wire in the road would be spending a lot of money to (incompletely) solve a problem that’s already been solved.

The point is that (primarily) the road needs to be smart, not the car. There should ideally be a synergy between the car and road, but the road has to be the primary vector to guide the car.

This backfires badly in places with cold winter climates where the offical road markings and edges become obscured due to snow and ice for days and sometimes seasons (road edge creep) at a time.

Human drivers don't follow the official lane markings because they can't be seen. They follow the paths in the snow everyone else has packed down. These paths often diverge from the road markings or any sort of absolute positioning system.

Why? There's very little information that would be better coming from the road. To drive you want to know where you are, what the road surface conditions are like, where the road goes, and what else is on the road.

Road conditions can easily come from anywhere. Weather radar is at least good enough to know when roads might be wet or cold. Making roads smart enough to sense oil spills or even wetness would be incredibly hard.

Knowing where the road goes is certainly far better done by cellular. Connection to each segment of road would be fraught with hard to repair problems. Traffic conditions likewise are far better done from somewhere else, and cars would be much more able to see things on the road etc.

The only argument I can see as at all reasonable is that locating cars is difficult, and doing it with vision is incredibly challenging. You may not be aware how much GPS has improved. With a good view of the sky you can get (somewhat slow) accuracy to about a foot. Realistically that's just as good as you could possibly expect from a roadside device like RFID, bluetooth, or induction. The last inches may be important, but billions of dollars spent burying things in the road will not help.

To elaborate on this, camera based lane keeping systems are readily available and generally work well if the lane markings are in good enough condition and aren't obscured by snow.

A signal embedded in the pavement wouldn't be subject to wear, but it would make adjusting lanes much more difficult (if you've driven in the bay area, you've probably noticed lane lines moved back and forth for construction pretty regularly) and it would actually be worse in the snow/ice --- a consensus lane appears which may not follow the marked alignment, and following the marked alignment would involve driving over accumulated snow and ice.

Does Tesla or Waymo actively lobby against such efforts?

What would that help?

There are thousands of miles of roads without lane markers, shoulders, signage. Some aren't even paved. Who's going to come along and bury RFID tags or wires?

I don’t think it will be winner takes all. I expect competitors to be relatively close, and may not even be clear who is the winner. One brand may do better in cities, another on highways, etc.

That will affect how outsized the profits will be.

Also, because of politics, I expect there to be separate geographical winners, at least in China and not-China.

Traffic inductive loop counter costs a couple thousands to install. I don't have a source for the detailed cost breakdown, but I can imagine the majority of the cost is labor and digging up/filling the road since the sensor itself should be less than a thousand.

Now imagine we're doing that 1000 times per mile, like what you're suggesting. Even if the device is free (both initial cost and maintenance) it's just too cost inhibited.

I think we shouldn't assume that the reason is some malicious intention behind "However that would mean that everyone would have access to it." It could simply be that the idea is not economical.

> I don't have a source for the detailed cost breakdown, but I can imagine the majority of the cost is labor and digging up/filling the road since the sensor itself should be less than a thousand.

Those are installed with a massive handtruck saw while cutting off a lane of traffic all day. It takes a half dozen people working on-and-off, doing different jobs. It takes jackhammers, high pressure water from a tanker truck, and people to place and wire the sensor to power. It's way more complicated than anything you'd do at scale, because it's infrequent and the goal is to do it thoroughly with non-specialists.

If you were installing millions of tags you'd have a dry drill that could go off the back of a truck and place+fill a tag in ten minutes. If you had a line you'd have a it hanging off the back of a truck and place it continuously, like a street cleaner or edge clearer. For tags there's no reason they'd need more than one person to place and no reason to even put them in the road when they could just go on the edges. Triangulate with directional antennas or something.

That said, I think it's pretty obvious that locating the roads is by far the easiest problem for self driving. If you wanted to make a serious attempt you'd want every car to broadcast a short range location, and to share data over a mesh network. "Knowing where the road is" to precision RFID would give you has been solved for over a decade with GPS and digital maps.

Much more pressing issues are non-obvious sensing like hearing a car around a blind corner or knowing when to be cautious about moving. Knowing when something is coming onto the road or when a vehicle is having a problem. Inter-vehicle communication is just so obviously important to that... it's really frustrating how vaguely it gets talked about. I don't give a shit about teslas coordinating braking so they can form a tailgate train for efficiency, I want cars of all kinds to be warning each other about what they intend to do. I worry that legislation or at least a regulatory body will be the only way to even get people talking about it seriously.

Other than that, cameras watching for intrusion into a road would be easier than solving it from vehicles. It seems patently ridiculous putting cameras to watch every 50' section of road. 1080p+ cameras, simple detection, and mesh wifi can be built in a $30 package... but there are >2.5 million miles of paved roads in the US. 30$ per 50' would cost, bare minimum (and ignoring electricity requirements+labor+the pole to put the cameras on) 8 billion dollars.

Creating a local mesh network for cars to communicate is an idea I've had for a while. Something like an open hardware and software stack/protocol for future autonomous cars. It's an inevitable thing that must exist to realize the full potential of autonomous cars, all a question if I'd be the one to build it :).

Would be curious to know the current work in this area.

http://www.umtri.umich.edu/story/simultaneous-deployment-c-v...

If I were to put wires in roads, it would be for wireless charging, so that autonomous taxis and delivery vehicles could keep driving forever (or at least until they require maintenance) without needing to stop to charge.

I can see this happening gradually, beginning with docking stations, followed by parking spots with wireless charges and then downtown roads and highways. With each step reducing the required amount of space destined to parking.

https://youtu.be/Gw6XtzEOlyI

This doesn't work in climates where the road is obscured for days at a time due to snow and ice.

The tags, whatever form they may take, will designate the official lanes. But people in snowy climates don't drive in the official lines because they can't be seen. They drive an emergent set of paths where everyone else drives. It's often, if not most of the time, that these paths human drives take don't follow the actual road markings.

Sounds like you described a really complicated train system.

Computer models of reality will always be simulacra, and the gap between reality and the model is where death and failure in general reside. "A map is not the territory," explains that computer models are always a perception, and while a technology may even be able to switch between myriad of these "perceptions", the conclusions derived will themselves be limited to a simulation of reality, no matter what.

Sure, technological advances will boost the vision resolution or interpretive rigor to insane levels (compared to present day), and this will be used to acquire increased confidence from the public, but is that enough for you to sit your child in the street and trust the driverless car to steer around it? This is the question I would ask of any proponent of any model-interpreting public technology.

There seems to be an implicit assumption here that Level 5 = human = 100% of drivers. I honestly don't think that's the case at all. If I am being charitable, I'd say half of drivers would meet the implicit level 5 criteria discussed in these threads.

For example, there's a snowstorm out here today. Unless they really need to, people aren't going out displayed their incredible skill at navigating through snowsquals with centimeters of snow on the ground. They just stay home.

What will determine the success of self driving cars is not philosophical musings but their usefulness in day to day life. And if you can spend 10k on a system that'll work most of the time, but refuse to go out in snow squeals, it'll sell very well. I'd buy it.

It’s really hard to predict. I have sat in a Tesla, have a comma ai kit, seen tons of videos of Cruise, Zoox, Waymo, Voyage Taxis.

The space is incrementally improving. Lots of new ideas.

I’m very bullish on systems that improve human driving and slowly move to more and more autonomy than “replace humans”

Anyone claiming full self driving is around the corner is prolly lying. I have no idea when it will be here. The edge cases are enormous.

But self driving on selected city routes and highways in good weather is here.

I would say Highway lane following and distance keeping is already better than human.

We aren’t great at holding monotonous focus. Machines on the other hand excel at that. We do excel at edge cases though. Marrying the two seems like a good bet.

I don’t think full self-driving will happen any more than full self-flying planes exist, however, I do think that lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring and auto merge/lane shift, park assist, emergency auto braking and adaptive cruise control should become mandatory in every car in the next 5 years. This is the same way that stability control is mandatory in nearly every country.

When a work colleague drove home completely wasted and his Mazda CR-V nearly drove itself, you could not tell that his driver input was erroneous. Actually, it felt very safe. It dawned on me that these systems will mitigate a great deal of preventable accidents due to human stupidity.

Not any exec but "The CEO of Volkswagen's autonomous driving division".

I believe the first fully automated transport system will go via the air. Air is so much easier to control. The complexity of automating vehicles in a very chaotic setting (land) exceeds that of building drones capable of flying from a to b. It will start with freight transport and slowly as reliability increases you get human transport via drones as well. Fully automated land transport is only possible when the system is clean and predictable. That means closed roads are open to only the entities which are part of the automation. Very difficult to establish.

I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws has something to say here.

Sure. Replace never by 3 billion years +/- 0.5 bill to account for human help (the time it took single celled life to evolve to human brain).

What I mean is it's a fascinating but daunting task.

Yes, that is why trying to ship a level 5 car for the general public’s use is folly. There are .001 situations that will take 1000x the effort to automate, so automating almost all is a better approach.

It will happen. When it will happen is impossible to predict.

But I am pretty sure it will happen within 20 years. 5 years? Unlikely.

In any case, it will require much better testing than just letting it learn on the street. A vehicle should be able to deal with a snow covered road in the dark going down a hill with babies crawling across the road.

And EMP-induced total electrical failure. No sense in a million people getting injured at once, should that ever happen. Emergency brakes should quickly engage in a predictable way when power is lost.

"[Engineers] tend to overestimate what can be done in the short-term and underestimate what will be done in the long-term."

I'd expect level 5 autonomy to be slow, because level 4 delivers 80% of the benefits for 20% of the cost.

BUT "never" seems crazy unless you've got a very pessimistic outlook on humanity's medium-term future. Other than extinction or the collapse of civilization, what could cause it to "never" happen?

Hah. I've been saying that for a while, much to the amusement of some of my friends and coworkers. Some of them claim that their kids will never need to learn how to drive. Maybe I'll have the last laugh, although I wish I'd be wrong about this.

I hope that by the time I'm too old to drive - a few decades from now - self-driving are available, but I'm not betting on it.

It's kinda funny that we're investing so much into a potentially impossible technology just to avoid building public transport.

If it works it could be so much better in many ways. It's like a packet switching network instead of circuit switching. And there's no reason larger vehicles couldn't be part of this "packet-switched" vehicle network and act as a virtual public transport system.

Almost all the self-driving programs use rules based solutions literally a big if this do that. Only one, comma.ai, uses artificial intelligence.

There's video on YouTube from three years ago with George Hotz predicting that Level 4 or 5 would never be reached without artificial intelligence. It made sense to me then and it still does today.

The title is awful..

Volkswagon can speak for its own company. It can't speak for the industry. If it were to speak for the industry the word admit can't be used. It would be a different word, like "believe".

Volkswagon can certainly admit that "they" won't have full self driving capability, but it can't "admit" that for other people.

Until we have roads designed to fully participate in assisting self-driving cars, and cars that communicate with each other, we'll have serious issues that will make it unsafe, and thus impractical.

The cost to upgrade roads appears to be a significant hurdle. A google search says:

"There are approximately 4,071,000 miles (6,552,000 km) of roads in the United States, 2,678,000 miles (4,310,000 km) paved and 1,394,000 miles (2,243,000 km) unpaved."

And there's this:

>> einrealist 18 hours ago [-]

>> I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology.

That's even more difficult to address.

We have to evaluate the cost/benefit of implementing this once we get the tech to the point of near total awareness of real world conditions. It might make sense to implement it on major highways, but probably not on rural roads and neighborhood streets because it's not something we can skimp on.

To make it cost effective the roadway tech has to be for the most part "dumb". We cannot rely on "smart" tech that requires complex communication systems or dumb tech that's easy to hack, like lines painted on the road or stop signs and traffic lights that AR can "see".

I think we'd be better off working on implementing assistive safety technologies for automobiles and mass transportation infrastructure like high speed railways.

After Elon Musk so helpfully pointed out that once cars are self-driving there is absolutely no reason for companies to sell them to us, I have to say I hope it never happens. Why would a company sell me a car for $30,000 when it can add it to a self-driving taxi fleet and generate $300,000 in revenue over the lifetime of the car?

Many reasons. Time value of money, competition, maybe even regulation.

I do think that full self-driving cars will exist (meaning that you can put in the GPS coordinates of a location and it will drive itself there.)

What won't happen is cars without the ability to have a human take over. There are too many fringe cases to allow cars without steering wheels.

I don't understand why they want to make them fully autonomous. Even human drivers must stay inside the lanes. Why can't they make a semi-autonomous car that operates automatically with some sort of electronic lane marker, and have drive by wire with a human driver for off-road?

Wow. A CEO without a vision. A CEO should be pushing for boundaries.

I were a VW engineer, why would I continue working in the autonomous driving division, if my CEO says the team would never succeed in the end game ?

I'd rather work in a company where the leadership is actually leading instead putting on the brakes.

Being that there are levels to autonomy the engineers still serve a purpose.

I'd prefer an executive to be level-headed than spouting dreams that will never come true and expecting engineers to just make it happen.

If anything I respect him as a leader more than "visionary" executives.

I would suspect he simply has a different vision

It's not enough to have a vision. The vision has to be correct.

Building intelligence into a path for vehicles to follow is probably an easier and less expensive option.

The trough of disillusion has arrived.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle

The big challenge for self driving cars is that they are held to a standard of perfection. No human driver can meet that standard either, but they are exempted due to incumbency bias.

The benefits of self driving cars are so phenomenally huge that if they are possible they will happen. Apart from the costs of paying people to drive, there are the time benefits of not wasting time driving cars - is there anything more boring and tedious? - and the fact many people, the young, the old, those with poor eyesight cannot drive.

I don't see any evidence it is not possible within 10-20 years. Cars will get smarter and easier to drive and the final step will not seem large. For the edge cases, there is always the possibility of having the vehicle temporarily being taken over by someone remote. Remote driving is already done in some mines.

Lo and behold, there still exist actual engineers that recognize the "AI" bullshit propaganda for what it is. Good that there are still engineers whose job description does not include the dissemination of fashionable lies.

Clickbait.

This is definitely not consistent with statements Alex has made in the past. Seems like more of an off the cuff remark a German engineer would make while confident that the fully realized result is right around the corner.

Put the cars on rails, focus on the safety and switching systems. We don't need full AI, we just need to not have an individual human be solely responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times.

I predict it would take a good few centuries for the entire planet to only consist of self driving vehicles. I doubt we'd have a single country in our lifetime solely using self driving vehicles.

It’s not a coincidence this guy works at a big corporation like Volkswagen and holds the opinion he does.

If you want to know about the future, don’t ask the incumbents. They will only tell you about the status quo.

Incorrect use of the word admit

admit (v): confess to be true or to be the case.

Correct use in a sentence: "VW admits guilt and pays $4.3bn diesel emissions scandal penalty"

The word admit doesn't apply to predictions of the future.

30-60% automated driving will still be a big leap forward. Less attention used up while driving.

Compare driving somewhere vs taking a ride share and how much more prepared/present you are when you arrive.

All I want is to sleep or read on freeways. Solve that first and you’re competing with airlines and unlocking billions or more in value. Prioritize please.

This is arguably one of the biggest competitive advantages Tesla has. For $47,000 I can get an EV from Tesla with a better self-driving system[1] than a $100k Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus. I haven’t pulled the trigger on a Tesla yet, but I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now. For many people Tesla has made EV and self-driving table-stakes and nobody else is delivering on that.

[1] Yes, I know about the accidents

So, considering the accidents, maybe Tesla is "better" at self-driving in the same way Intel was better at speculative execution before they had to patch it.

The only company that knows what they are doing is Waymo (which actually launched self-driving taxi service in Phoenix), Tesla and others are kind of "fake it until you make it" crowd.

Waymo has 600 cars in a very limited/ well known area and most of their cars still rely on safety drivers. If Waymo is around in 20 years their service might get to the small-ish city I live in.

The big thing I would want self-driving capabilities for is long cross country driving. A thing Waymo doesn’t offer even to people in it’s service area.

Tesla has hundreds of thousands of cars which range over the entire country and has driven millions of miles doing exactly the sort of self-driving I most care about.

The two barely overlap in terms of offerings so I’m not sure what the point of comparing them even is.

>>I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now

It's personal & subjective, and nobody will persuade anybody in a thread, but FWIW I absolutely positively can.

- I'm unlikely to utilize self-driving any time soon

- The stories of their firmware terrify me. And I don't want a DAW and computer games running on my ECU :O

- More pragmatically though, the Tesla UI paradigm is completely foreign to my way of driving/thinking.

I'm looking for a "HOTAS" type UI, where I can do anything I want without taking my eyes and focus off the road. A UI that's one giant screen, that may change position of buttons from minor firmware to another, is basically as scary and alienating concept as I can imagine.

I get that I am in a minority nowadays - a lot of manufacturer's are replacing switches, buttons and knobs with a touchscreen and deep menus, but not thankfully all just yet :|

Tesla's increasing have voice commands for most functions. What you said was true before but isn't now. Honestly this feature, being able to push updates to the entire fleet when ready is a significant killer feature.

Again, at the risk of sounding like a grouchy old man (which I suppose I am :P), when I'm chatting with my wife and kids, I have limited intetion of interrupting that conversation to turn on the lights or seat warmer or wipers or change a song :-/. And even when alone - the amount of time and subconscious effort to hit a button, vs converse with the computer...

Honestly - these shouldn't be "either or". Sure, have a screen and voice for those who prefer - but leave a button or six for us ol' timers :-)

They should look into how the US Navy switched back to physical switches from touch screens on ships for unambiguous commands.

Gas and steering are physical controls though.

Radio and other such features do not need dedicated buttons. Crazy how many buttons my normal car has.

Everything you need at least once week while driving in a car should be doable without taking your eyes from the road for more than a second. Radio, AC, window heating and such fall under this category. And you have exactly the same amount of buttons on a screen anyway, they're just not physical.

Again, that's a personal preference.

Next, Previous, Pause, Play, Mute - I personally want them to be physical controls. On steering wheel ideally, on the dashboard otherwise. I use them multiple times a drive, and I don't want to take my eyes off the road to do them.

Same with seat heat, lights, wipers - anything I may want to do while driving, I want a button.

Setting up the exact shade of my dashboard light - that can be buried in a menu :D

Basically... when you say "Crazy how many buttons my normal car has" :

- You say that as a bad thing

- I see that as a brilliant thing... IFF done well:

Of course, physical buttons/levers/knobs can still be done well, or poorly.

Having many identical buttons in a confusing layout is just as bad as touchscreen - I have to look at them to use them.

Having buttons in a good, intuitive layout; especially buttons which are distinct from each other, as opposed to row of 6 buttons all the same, is brilliant. Even better if it's a distinct combination of buttons, knobs, switches, levers, etc - anything to help haptic feedback and intuitive access. Sometimes I think people who are against buttons may simply never had a car with good physical UI:/

(simple thing - my old 2004 WRX has a next / previous knob-like-thing, rather than two identical buttons next to each other [1]. It felt ridiculous when I first saw it - but then I realized its quality of purpose vs sexiness - I never ever ever have to think or be distracted even a millisecond to know exactly how to skip a song :). Compare to cars which have several identical square buttons for next, previous, pause, play; or temp up, temp down, fan up, fan down, A/C -- that's just horrible UI by clueless people for customers who don't know / haven't experienced better :-/ ]

1: Bottom right of the stereo: https://images.crutchfieldonline.com/ImageBank/v200311131204...

> It's personal & subjective, and nobody will persuade anybody in a thread, but FWIW I absolutely positively can.

I wasn’t trying to paint a broad picture because as you suggest, it’s subjective. But there is some evidence that I’m not alone.

https://www.wheelsjoint.com/tesla-model-3-is-wreaking-havoc-...

> I'm looking for a "HOTAS" type UI, where I can do anything I want without taking my eyes and focus off the road.

I agree, the cockpit design on the Tesla is not my choice and may actually be a deal breaker. But since there is a 30 day no commitment period I’m willing to give it a shot and see how it works in actual use.

>>But there is some evidence that I’m not alone.

Oh, absolutely - as I said, I'm in a minority.

But I feel a lot of it is: Sexiness of how it looks vs Practicality of usage

The problem is, sexiness is immediately obvious & attractive. Practicality takes a long time and active observation to notice and appreciate. I fear that touchscreens with bad UI will win; though I hope eventually there may be some backlash from consumers - or at least thought and compromise from manufacturers. :-/

Is Tesla following accepted industry best practices for designing their algorithms? If not, Tesla is exposing itself to a tremendous amount of liability when their autonomous system fails(and, as software engineers, we know it will fail). I applaud them for pushing the technological envelope and driving expectations. I'm not criticizing them for the damage those failures will cause, because it may be offset by reductions in human caused damage. I'm saying there is established legal precedent that will cost them dearly if they're not properly developing and testing their code(ISO26262, MISRA, etc). See the Toyota accelerator debacle for background.

>I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now

Aside from the fact that the Tesla is not available where I live, if I was only going to own one car, it would not be a Tesla. A Tesla (or any other EV, really) does about 80% of what I need a car for, so it would be perfect to buy as a second car for me, to be used most of the time and have the other car be a backup for when I really need to.

If I had to settle for only one car, it would probably have to be something like a Chevy Volt, which I am quite sad got discontinued. Even then, that would get me about 95% of the way there.

I wouldn’t want a loved one driving a Tesla with autopilot enabled. Some of the people who have died so far have been tech enthusiasts who knew the limitations of autopilot, yet they still grew complacent and it cost them their lives.

If my non techy family see the Tesla performing what they deem to be self driving then they will quickly trust it 100%.

Wouldn't self-driving cars require substantial changes in road infrastructure to support full autonomy?

I am not one, nor have I ever knowingly met anyone who wants a a self-drving-car.

Electric, sure, bring it on.

I think they may never happen because full self-FLYING “cars” (vtol drones) will very likely happen first (it’s more a regulatory thing than a tech thing).

And flying would be superior to driving (faster, no traffic, no need to maintain infrastructure, etc..) so there’d be little incentive to continue even trying to get to level 5 for self-driving.

I really like this take and I would love it to come true, but I have some doubts. Fully self-driving cars could probably eventually be accomplished with our current level of hardware (we just need much better software), but flying cars would require decades of continuous improvements in the hardware required.

Experiences tell us, when someone makes a comment that something may __never__ happen, she probably is wrong. Our current transportation infra is designed for our current transportation tools. Full self-driving cars require a revolution of urban design and transportation infra. Long-term wise I think these will happen for sure.

"Not only will the tech get as good as humans"

Let's suppose it will happen. Do you have a proof that such "good" tech does not develop a will to one day run over every human it can?

Translation: we were caught with our pants down, we're now 10 years behind the leaders in the field, and when the tech actually matures in 10 years, it might undo Volkswagen.

I think that the amount of demand and market momentum that appears in the future is a better predictor if what will get done than an executive’s opinion based on current costs.

Why not drone cars, driven remotely?

Latency?

Because you need to be where the car ends up stopping!

You could pay someone else to drive the car remotely. Though, I suppose they could extract money out of you by threatening to kill you.

Buddy that's called transit and taxiing.

Well it certainly falls far outside of VW's tech wheelhouse. It would be really hard to cheat on autonomous driving tests.

AWS mechanical turk that shit. :) Yeah, probably not 30fps...

I would like to read the article, but an add covers 1/2 of the screen and can't be closed or moved.

Never? lol this guy is joking

just say tesla is farther ahead and anyone will not catch up

That's a nice way of saying that Elon Musk is full of it with his autopilot...

Good.

I was at an ML conference in 2017 and the keynote speaker asked the audience how many years they thought it would be until ADAS lvl 5 was on the market. The keynote had proudly proclaimed 5 years, and then audibly scoffed when about 90% of the hands went up for "20 or more years". There's such a disconnect between real engineers and cheerleaders.

I have a friend who a mechanical engineering professor doing robotic research. He says that one of the reasons that robotics has not advanced more is because it has primarily been the domain of computer scientists who don’t operate in the real world. Every robot works great in a simulation. Same could be said for cars.

Though there's the Kurzweil argument that people's intuition doesn't work well with exponential growth. The engineers are probably thinking these systems work terribly and have for decades and so will for decades more but meanwhile GPU performance is doubling every year or two and many people are trying to take advantage of that.

I've been following this stuff casually since about 1980 when I totally failed to write an AI program and since then processor performance has been steadily increasing, first with clock speed and now more with multi cores. Hans Moravec, a robot guy did a reasonable estimate that to get equivalent hardware to the brain you'd need about 100 teraflops and just recently the first 100 teraflop GPU has come out (https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/v100/) which is kinda historic in a way, maybe a billion times faster than a cheap computer in 1980. Of course this will keep going for a while so the situation will flip from we can't do much because processors are much slower than the brain to the other way around.

(update NIDIA may have fudged the numbers a bit but anyway.)

Full self-driving cars would be cool, but even a good satnav + cruise control and lane assist gets you most of the way there. Apart from smaller roads, the car almost drives itself.

The only way we NEVER fully get self driving cars is if we nuke or bioterrorism advanced civilization off the planet in the next 50 years.

Climate Change will have a very significant impact on our entire society such that people don't need or want cars any more. We may turn to virtual environments and telecommuting for everything.

Updated to clarify message a little.

I always thought that self-driving technology is one of the schemes devised by researchers for getting a long-term funding. It has an immense appeal to the public and sounds plausible enough to laypeople. We've seen a bunch of promises like this: nuclear fusion energy and earthquake forecasting. In Japan, trillions of yens were (and still are) spent to these two technologies but their practicalities are pretty much questionable. I think self-driving tech joined this.

A car that has "self" is equiv to a living being, and it wouldn't be ethical to lock it inside a box. It's not going to happen any time soon and it will never happen with conventional binary computing; a non-wetware system capiable of emulating a mouse would melt itself through the road.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250424

Your framing of the issues seems so far removed from the rest of the discussion that I can only assume I’m misunderstanding your point. Could you elaborate?

The links I provided contain significant context, can you be specific on what is unclear?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21108631

They sell self-heating canned food. It's not a claim about sapience.

That's the point, I'm arguing that human-level sapience is required. Even if you disagree, set aside the driving part; these machines must correctly interact with real (and adversarial) general intelligences.

And really, yes it is used that way in the marketing. It's not accidental.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16620132

Are you suggesting that it's immoral to create a self-driving car? I'm not sure what you are talking about...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21106367

Volkswagen doesn't develop self-driving tech. They use Mobileye's solution like everyone expect Tesla, Waymo and GM/Cruise. They aren't really in the position to make that argument.

Level 5 means that the car can drive autonomously > 95% of the time, and it will absolutely be possible. Level 4/5 distinction doesn't really make any sense once the autonomy gets beyond certain percentage. It doesn't mean that it's level 4 until it hits 100% (which is impossible).

Level 5 car is designed to drive in all conditions, but there are always statistically unlikely corner cases or situations that require high-level decision making, which the car can't handle by itself. A single driver may never hit such case, and for them the experience is full self-driving.

This is not true. VW fully owns AID which is developing its level 4 stack. VW is also invested in Argo

I stand corrected. Still, VW is using MobilEye's tech in their ride-sharing service [0], which probably means that their own tech is not very close to the competitors.

[0] https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/volkswagen-mobileye...

I don't know about Israel but VWs ride-sharing service in Germany is MOIA

VW is also working with Magna on ADAS, which is a huge Tier-1 vendor. I think VW is covering all their bases by having multiple design efforts.

simfoo is right, Argo.ai is essentially a joint venture of ford and VW at this point, to the tune of billions of dollars invested. https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/12/vw-invests-2-6-billion-in-...

Well yeah, of course. Full self-driving probably requires artificial general intelligence and it is quite possible that humans will never develop artificial general intelligence. The real surprising thing, for me, is how many otherwise intelligent people bought into full self-driving hype.

It's likely that if humans ever developed the sort of AI necessary for full self-driving, this AI technology would radically transform the world. Using it for cars would be one of the least important applications.

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