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Comment by nerdchum | Hacker News Reader

Why is autonomous driving being pursued but not remote driving?

Why can I have a seat at my house with controls and drive my Uber/18 wheeler from my house?

Somehow this seems scarier to me than self driving cars.

1. Driving without the physical feedback that comes from acceleration, braking, taking a turn too fast, etc.. is really hard. Maybe they could overcome this with simulators of some sort, but I expect that would be too cost prohibitive.

2. I want the driver that can think to have skin in the game. I don’t want them to be able to drive off a cliff, or in to a crowd, from the comfort of their couch.

You could probably overcome this with some sort of hybrid model that simply doesn’t allow stuff like this. But at that point you’re still having to develop some pretty sophisticated self driving technology, and you still have to pay a driver. Not sure who is motivated to do this.

3. What’s the point? You still have to pay a driver either way. Sure you get some cost savings by being able to switch out tired drivers instantly. But in the end, the most expensive cost is paying someone to sit there and drive.

Yeah ultimately it could be a sort of hybrid where the AI drives until it encounters a situation it is high risk to handle, like crowded street, then a human is alerted to take over. A pool of humans could then manage exponentially far more than one to one vehicles depending on how good the AI is.

That's a huge money saver.

Additionally recruiting truck drivers is difficult to do so maybe having a work from home job would make it easier.

It's not that it's point less it's that some people just don't see the point.

I don't know just seems like an idea worth pursuing for a million reasons, including being able to outsource driving or find the best drivers in the world. Also.mikitary reasons. Save lives with a remote controlled tank.

Remote driving would likely result in worse safety with very little gained by a commercial transportation company. They still have to pay for a driver but now that driver is staring at a screen 12 hours a day. Humans are already mediocre drivers when physically present and that would get so much worse if they were doing everything remotely instead

What's the gain here? Can they pay you less than another driver who will sit in the car? Because dealing with signal being lost sounds like a huge problem to deal with for very little payback.

in the typical scenario taxi/ride-share drivers are only driving paid miles for a small fraction of the time they are on the clock.

with autonomous/remote vehicles you have a fleet of driver-less vehicles that are capable of fully-autonomous operation in some circumstances but are remotely monitored/controlled for situations they can't handle.

this means that you can have a remote driver who is continually switching between driving different vehicles and only driving in the situations where actually needed and profitable.

with driver based transportation when you get into low utilization hours then drivers and cars have to be pulled of the street, the drivers who are working spend more time sitting unprofitably, and they have to driver further to pick up rides.

in a remote scenario you can keep all of your driver-less cars on the street (parked) and your remote driving staff takes control of the car closest to each ride request to pick up and deliver that ride so they spend much more time driving with much less mileage waste.

Drone planes are good for the military because they move all the risk from the pilot to the vehicle. Drone cars are bad for civilians because they move all the risk from the driver to the vehicle. What you’re suggesting would quickly replace America’s mass shooting problem with a VBIED problem. And it wouldn’t even save any time or effort! You’d still need to concentrate on driving the car.

I have literally never used an Internet connection that I feel is reliable enough to consider driving a real car over it

At this point even multiplayer driving games haven't figured out how to not kill half the field every time there is a single late packet. You cannot drive in a concrete jungle and get stable, reliable, verifiably usable internet.

There isn't that much of a difference between the taxi driver sitting in the physical car or at home. Only when you Location A is in low demand, you could "hop" into a car at Location B.

But the goal is to completely eliminate the driver, which increases efficiency a lot.

As far as I understand it, Waymo uses remote driving when the situation isn’t clear for the AI.

But that doesn't create any profit, it's only a convenience for some random number on a sheet. Also managers probably don't like remote work in that industry :p

"autonomous" vehicles are remotely monitored and controlled. that is just not part of the marketing.

the big blocker, and why autonomous/remote vehicles are not being rolled out more widely, is that remote requires lots of very reliable low latency bandwidth.

5G (mmWave 5G in particular) is a key enabling technology. until you get mmWave 5G or some comparable technology the bandwidth for remote at scale doesn't exist.

The Waymo vehicles being discussed in the article are not remote controlled like the GP is talking about. Remote assistance isn't controlling the vehicle, the autonomy stack remains in control throughout. They're just giving it additional information that it can't determine for itself. They're also not a part of the typical operation, but rather for infrequent, exceptional circumstances.

As a passenger you want the driver to have skin in the game.

Connectivity and latency. A stutter would be very bad.

What kind of use case does this solve?

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