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Comment by dharmon | Hacker News Reader

I am not so confident that even in 8 years the outcome will be clear. Just like today Tesla is selling hot garbage and calling it "self driving", I am sure manufacturers will be selling cars that claim to satisfy the requirements of the bet, and even do so... sometimes. I am not confident they will work as reliably as the bettors here are intending, even if it is marketed as L5.

Edit: What I'm getting at is even though it is a friendly bet, they should define the terms of success / failure a little more clearly. Unless there is some governing body that grants L5 status?

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Given that these gentlemen are known to have at least ordinary prudence, even in the face of a $10k loss, an operational definition might take the form

  L5 = the person asserting that L5 has been achieved is willing to be driven by the vehicle, without access to the controls, through mixed conditions for X hours.

I feel that is pretty bad. It doesn't require system to actually work too well. It doesn't name anything about effectiveness of system. Just safety. Still, effectiveness might come to abstract things like:

L5 = vehicle can achieve similar travel times and destinations to average human driver in mixed conditions.

This is what they are using: https://www.sae.org/binaries/content/assets/cm/content/blog/...

That still has room for interpretation though.

What if the car "works" under all conditions, but moves extremely slowly, takes huge detours to avoid tricky roads etc. In fact what is stopping this "technically correct" approach: car calls a human driven tow truck, gets hitched and towed to destination?

> what is stopping this "technically correct" approach

Decency and reasonableness. Neither John nor Jeff are going to try to lawyer they way out of losing.

Of course. I meant this in response to dharamon above talking about manufacturer's misleading claims. But I see their edit and I think I also misunderstood your point - in the context of this bet the selected criteria are probably good enough.

I don't think it's that insanely ambiguous.

If the car moves extremely slowly in a major city, it would get banned after a handful of traffic jams, and so wouldn't be commercially available. And anyways no company would risk the bad PR of launching a car that tops out at below the speed limit.

If the car calls itself a tow truck, it has obviously failed to drive itself.

If the car is programmed to avoid tricky roads, it can't "drive everywhere in all conditions" per SAE.

Great user name!

Exactly. "All conditions" means all conditions. Once a self-driving 4WD truck can be relied upon to get me over Echo Summit pass on US-50 during chain control / whiteout blizzard conditions, then maybe, just MAYBE I'll start to take it seriously. "Full" self driving, at least as of 2022, relies too heavily on all cows being spherical.

I don't really care for the L5 definition. Humans can't drive on all roads in all conditions even if their vehicles are theoretically capable of it. There are certainly weather conditions I don't want to be driving in. And there are certainly some unpaved roads I don't want to be driving on even with high clearance 4WD.

The realistic definition would be that if a human could not reasonably be expected to drive in it (fog/smog with less than 6 inches visibility, hurricane, blizzard, military invasion) then the cars are not required to drive it in. And perhaps the cars can accept a circumstance or two where humans can't drive, in exchange for one or two where humans could, but the cars can't. But it would need to be circumstances that humans can predict/understand. Like if the car won't drive if the countrywide car-to-car comms network is down or something.

If a company falsely claims level 5 they can be disproved pretty easily by some posts on twitter. If the stoppages are too rare to even show up there, then it might as well be level 5.

Just ask Elon?

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