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Comment by jcynix | Hacker News Reader

Depends on one's definition of "self driving" and as a computer scientist with AI training (although that happened during last century ;-) I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens.

And when I see how most modern cars handle signs like a speed limit to e.g. 30km/h with both additional texts like "from 9-15” and additionally on "monday-friday" or limited "for 300m" I always shake my head.

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> I still see no real self driving cars, just highly assisted driving where a human always has to be prepared to take over in case something severe happens.

There's no human driver in the car. At most, the cars can stop/pull over and ask for remote navigation from humans (but not remote operation).

How do you know there's no remote operation?

Because they send people out to physically recover the vehicle if it gets too stuck. They wouldn't do that if a human could just drive it out.

Both can be true. In some cases the remote driver can drive it, in other cases it requires physical presence.

Why would you believe that? How do you know human operators don't type pages of results manually every time you do a Google search?

If waymo's entire fleet was operated by real time remote drivers (extremely dangerous because of latench) we would know already

Granted, there are some niche applications where autonomous vehicles exist. And some level x assisted driving on prepared roads. But I was talking about "real self driving" cars, i.e. cars on any street in any city or even in rural areas. And I still don't see them anywhere, nor do I see them coming in the near future, expect in some tech dreams.

Weird. Should tell that to the Waymo that drove me 20 minutes from my home to a restaurant downtown last night. I was the only human in the car, located in the back seat.

Cruise and waymo are running ride hailing service without any drivers at all in multiple cities including SF

So next up: will they be able to reach profitability servicing SF and Phoenix. So far, highly small scale subsidized pilot projects.

The hardware is more expensive than regular cabs. The software has cost billions, an may cost billions more.

Operationally, energy use should be marginally higher. Hourly cab-driver wages: gone. Insurance and write off — we'll see, but if the software is any good this should be considerably lower.

I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?

Then ice thing about software is that you can copy it at least, even if it’s expensive. LIDAR prices are coming down at a steady rate, although Tesla is still trying to go the vision only route.

> I guess it comes down to the big unknown: will it work at scale. Can we find enough cities with great weather, where enough people will use it? What will happen when the price goes up? What is a fair, sustainable price? Will that be higher than human-driven car?

If we assume the technology won’t improve any longer, this is true. But I don’t think that is a very safe assumption. Everything seems to point to the question being when rather than if.

Another five years away it is, then ;-)

There will be progress in 5 years, will it be enough? Who knows, it’s something to play the stock market with if you are into that.

Who says they need great weather?

People said the same shit about Phoenix: "ohhhhhh, but what about the cities that don't have extremely wide streets and almost no pedestrians???" Now that they're in SF, the goalposts immediately move.

Weather will be gradually solved, just like other technical aspects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LInDo1A0J4I

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