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Comment by sitzkrieg | Hacker News Reader

curious how the ai experts are so wrong on truck drivers. apparent to anyone whos been on the road the US road system will be completely revamped before self driving cargo trucks are viable

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The thing about that recent rollout of self-driving trucks is they picked a stretch of road connecting Houston to another shipping point in a very straight line. And they bragged about 2000 "unassisted" miles on that stretch of road which is ~250 miles in length. So they're basically championing the idea that their trucks which have driven about less than 10 trips without an on-vehicle driver in that area is competent enough to be relied upon in a real work capacity.

Whether this amount of success is proof that there won't be any issues with the tech in that area, remains to be seen. Hell, they're not even interested yet in talking about how this may pan out outside their Houston trial runs.

Self-driving vehicles are the perfect example of how something that seems so close can be so far away.

April 29, 2014 - "Milken 2014: Driverless cars due in five years"[0]

Nov 24, 2015 - "Ford is 5 years away from self-driving cars"[1]

Oct 20, 2016 - "A Driverless Tesla Will Travel From L.A. to NYC by 2017"[2]

Now general consensus is level 5 autonomous self-driving is decades away, at least.

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/04/29/milken-...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-is-5-years-away-from-se...

[2] https://www.nbcnews.com/business/autos/driverless-tesla-will...

The general consensus may be whatever it is, but a Tesla can drive from L.A. to NYC today with no interventions other than at charging stops.

However, it might kill you and other people at any moment, so be ready for that intervention...

And the same is true for a human driver. I imagine that you could differentiate on accidents per vehicle mile.

That's a false equivalence. Autonomous vehicles need to be significantly safer than human drivers to be allowed on the streets. If a human driver kills or injures somebody or damages property, they are responsible and will face consequences. An autonomous car won't.

The typical tech person will reply to this with some variant of "that shouldn't matter". Well, it does.

You are responding to this thread as if we were arguing for these cars "being allowed on the streets". That is not the discussion here. Instead, we are talking about AI capacity.

Saying that a Tesla can drive autonomously from LA to NYC, except it can't in reality because other cars are on the road and it might kill someone, is an odd way to frame it.

It's like saying Windows 95 doesn't have any security flaws, as long as you don't connect it to the internet.

You: Autonomous driving is years away

Me: My Tesla takes me 20min to work every day without human intervention, and on long trips of hundreds of miles

You: This is illegal because it might kill someone

Call the police on Tesla, I guess?

You mean your "self-driving" Tesla where you're still sitting in the driver's seat with your hands on the wheel (they are on the wheel, unless you want to admit to a crime)?

Are they?

Well? Are they?

Unrelatedly, what's the law on texting, answering a call, and just quickly checking a message while driving? All crimes, I guess?

Even asking the question would seem to indicate that respondents here, do in fact believe that the technology is good enough to drive people around day after day without my hands on the wheel. (It is.)

I don't know what the questions about texting are relevant to here.

Apologies, I was unclear. I mean that the law and what people do are two seperate affairs. When people act like law dictates reality I'm always perplexed.

Here, if you say your Tesla drives you to work hands-free, I've no problem accepting that as a part of the world.

Waymo works really well.

For now Waymo is only used in a few grid cities in southern US where the weather is extremely nice. It's a prime example of the 80/20 problem and a prime example of what the comment your replying to mentions.

Self-driving is solved and is scaling up.

They're deploying Waymo in Atlanta now and they're already driving around sans-humans.

Atlanta is not a grid. Atlanta has crazy and dangerous road design. Random roads built in random places. Potholes, lots of hills, sharp angles, lack of shoulders, no margin or protection from 45mph oncoming traffic (90mph delta with ZERO margin or division), weird infrastructure, five and six and even seven way intersections, pedestrians, jaywalkers, motorcycle gangs that ride in the wrong lanes. You name it, Atlanta's got it.

Atlanta has lots of weather. Tremendous amounts of subtropical rain in the summer, fog, and other low visibility and dangerous conditions. Intermittent summer rain that pours so hard that it's a literal rain curtain white out. Seasonal tornadoes.

Self-driving is here now. It'll be everywhere by the end of the decade. I can't wait to buy my own Waymo-equipped vehicle.

It was supposed to be everywhere by 2020 and even earlier lol, I'll believe it when I'll see it, until then it's wishful thinking or investors talk

> I'll believe it when I'll see it

That time when people had blocky cell phones. Then they were in everybody's pocket.

That's self-driving now.

It's here, just uneven. You can ride in one today. Soon, it'll be taking over for trucking, delivering everything you can think of on-demand, and revolutionizing how we think about transit and travel.

Instacart and Uber Eats and Amazon same-day are blocky cell phones. Soon we'll have instant logistics. A ten times faster Amazon. A world where almost everything can be delivered instantly and cheaply.

Trains and subways and metros are rigid and inflexible transit corridors. Soon we'll have last-mile transit pods for everyone that connect everything and everywhere and make suburbs highly desirable and sought after again.

Self-driving will be like the internet or smartphones all over again. And we're right at the precipice.

The financial gradients of all of this ensure that it'll happen and that it'll happen fast and all at once once we get past the inflection point.

But back to your point: you wouldn't call those blocky cell phone users non-cellphone users. The tech just wasn't evenly distributed. It got there in short time, because the tech was world-changing. So too shall it be with self-driving. The economic advantages are inevitable.

> You can ride in one today.

And you could do it in 2020. It seems unlikely that it will be “everywhere” in 2030 unless you give that word a quite restricted meaning.

It’s not worth replying to some people bro.

The issue around self driving is more laws and regulations than it is a matter of tech.

There’s a reason these companies spend so much time effort and money on legal hurdles.

I didn't realize technology had to be 100% applicable to everything at 100% capability on day one.

My bad.

Okay but it's not even, like, 1% applicable. How many miles out of all miles driven are on Waymo? Honestly, I'm probably being far too generous with saying 1%.

When people say "self driving is here!", they mean most cars on the road are autonomous. The reality is that's 20 years out. The technocrats won't tell you that, but just think about it. Average age of a car on US roads is 13 years right now.

Albeit in limited areas and, as far as we can tell, with pretty high unit costs.

But I think the smart money is that Waymo will get appreciably better in the 5-10 year timeline. Perhaps massively, crazily better, but at least steadily, noticeably better.

> Self-driving vehicles are the perfect example of how something that seems so close can be so far away.

Remember that this was before transformers, LLMs, and more recently VLM/VLAMs, though.

I'm not sure to what extent these are already integrated in self-driving hardware, but I would not be surprised if we see a big improvement in self-driving due to related technologies soon, especially with the smaller models becoming far more (efficient and) potent.

We have already seen the big improvement in Tesla FSD. Have you test driven it recently? The most impressive part for me was it driving us all the way into the parking lot and parking us in a spot at the destination.

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