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Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

Five years ago, car companies were saying around the world that in five years, their cars would be 100% self driving. I said it was bonkers, unless they create a new infrastructure for self driving cars (new roads that can be used only by these types of cars).

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Five years ago nobody could fully automate driving in a warehouse. It's honestly hilarious that so many people believed public roads were so close.

Google has been running self driving cars on public roads since 2010. There were driver interventions back then, but I doubt they would have any trouble running those cars in a warehouse after driving 7 years on public roads.

That tech probably wouldn't be economical to use in a warehouse though.

Driver interventions, on a few streets, with highly instrumented cars. But compared to public roads warehouses are easy. There isn't fog or rain or snow. There aren't potholes. The light doesn't change. And to prove my point: look at all these self-driving cars on the streets today.

It's a peculiar case of Bay Area Tech brain. "We very rarely kill pedestrians in SF and Arizona. I'm sure this tech will work fine in Ohio."

There are fully self driving cars on the road today. They don’t have even close to global coverage, but empty cars are driving on public streets.

Extending these limited trials to every road in the world isn’t going to be fast, but a few cities with zero human taxi drivers could happen surprisingly quickly.

Right, but those are fragile. Geofenced, unable to drive in inclement weather, speed capped, etc. To get to 100% self driving, you need a lot more than what we’ve seen from, say, Cruise.

Much of that is simply how conservative GM has been with their testing. Extending geofencing just comes down to cost, but it’s pointless to map most locations when they aren’t looking to start selling any time soon.

The technology can also handle speed and inclement weather at least as well a people do, but they have little reason to push when they have little to gain and a lot to lose.

> Five years ago, car companies were saying around the world that in five years, their cars would be 100% self driving

I know Tesla has made big claims like that, but I'm not aware of any other car companies having done so?

https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/general-motors-president-...

https://www.wsj.com/articles/nissan-speeds-ahead-of-rivals-w...

And today, I have an app on my phone which will summon a self-driving car to pick me up and drop me off (within very strict parameters in space and time).

I also said this, self-driving will only become a thing if the roads are modified. Then I realised that this has already happened. The changes made to urban environments when cars first became a thing aren't to be underestimated. Curbs are a result of cars. Traffic lights. Pedestrian lights. Footpaths.

Back in the day, no one even considered these changes to be bad. Today if politican came up with the idea that we need to remove pedestrians (and bikes) from the streets so that self-driving cars could be safe, there would be an uproar.

> Today if politican came up with the idea that we need to remove pedestrians (and bikes) from the streets so that self-driving cars could be safe, there would be an uproar.

Rightly so, telling people they can't enter their own neighbourhood unless they have a $50k+ car is beyond awful. I think it would be better to remove cars from towns and cities.

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