The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving | Hacker News Reader

The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

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391 pointsmgw448 comments

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology.

Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) the world is going to change for the better. From there it's just a matter of optimization until a human watcher isn't even required.

Self-driving cars are worth every penny of research. They will some day be safer than human drivers. With a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes we could almost eliminate traffic-related injury and death. Some day your insurance company will probably charge you more per mile you choose to take control of your car.

Beyond safety, this could make life way more convenient and make living far more convenient. We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing. That's huge! Once the cars are safe enough, you'll be able to read, write, or take a nap.

Life also gets a lot more efficient. We won't all need cars. Think about the social ramifications. We won't need all that parking space we waste at home, work, at grocery stores, or downtown. Rather than needing 2 cars for me and my wife, I could send it back to get her once I get to work - or maybe just sign up for a service that completely eliminates the need to own.

I agree with your overall vision.

But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question."

Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted.

We absolutely have to tread carefully here.

I suspect the higher standard question will be resolved in a couple of ways:

* NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB does its job reasonably competently and independently.

* Gradual introduction: It's unlikely fully self-driving cars will be introduced all at once. What's more likely is the gradual automation of certain driving functions (sort of like cruise control, automatic parking, and other feature sets). I think any system that hands off control from a robot to a human introduces its own safety risks, but you might see something like a dedicated autonomous lane on a freeway with special parking areas where humans can safely resume control for driving in the city. There's also augmented driving where a car is primarily human driven, but will do things like pre-charge brakes and give advanced warning to a human diver when it believes the human is about to screw up.

* Economies of scale: Large business organizations will probably get comfortable more quickly with autonomous cars than individual consumers. If FedEx and UPS support policies like "no left turns," they'll probably be among the first to get on board with fully automated trucks. And you'll certainly see some support for the insurance business, if autonomous vehicles really do result in lower overall accident rates.

UPS employees are unionized, and driving routes (vs. working in the warehouses) is a sought-after position that is one of the benefits of seniority (as I understand it). I expect that they might have issues rolling out a computerized delivery fleet.

So they'll just get replaced. Amazon and Google do seem keen to get into that space.

Also why the airlines go bankrupt approximately once per career. The gross revenue per flight is the same as time increases, but pay raises for seniority decrease the profit as the workforce ages.

(Not making a value judgement here. Airline pilots have a tough job and do it well, and deserve to be well-paid. But the industry is not as nice as me.)

It's not like they're forced to pay their workers more as they age. The ones with unions may be forced to do so by their contract, but non-union airlines are hardly immune from bankruptcy. Airlines go bankrupt because it's a cut-throat business with extreme competition, which drives profits to zero.

An airline customer will switch carriers for as little as a $5 savings on the cost of a multi-hundred-dollar ticket. There is essentially zero customer loyalty. If you can't convince customers to pay more, and all possible cost-cutting measures have already been implemented, then you have no room.

In an ideal world, a business could survive forever in an environment like that. In the real world, business is variable, and with no margin, you can't build any resiliency. A couple of bad years is enough to screw you.

Fedex drivers aren't. That doesn't matter as much when there aren't real alternatives, but it can become critical if technology starts to drastically reduce the need for labor. That's part of what happened to the American auto industry during the 80's.

I hope they replace the workers in the warehouses first; since UPS/FedEx/Amazon own them, they could put QR codes on the floor or other craziness to automate those workers first.

There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate.

Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonomous cars.

If the average self-driving car-as-a-service costs $100,000, then replacing 50 million old cars with 25 million new cars is a $2.5 trillion dollar expense to get your "windfall".

Paying for the self-driving cars will likely be a cost savings by itself, since we won't need as many auto-cars as regular cars. Most cars are only used maybe 5-8% of the time, and sit unused otherwise. An auto-car service could probably get at least 50% usage out of a car, potentially much more. That means a 10x reduction in the number of cards needed.

For this to be true, we have to assume that, during rush hour, at least 90% of all cars are parked and unused. 90%? That's a hell of a lot, dude.

It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.

Great point, was not considering that. I'd love to see some stats on maximum car utilization as a percentage during each minute of rush hour.

You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.

Surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to adjust/stagger their working hours. I already arrive early and leave late to avoid peak hour.

Pod-based transport would also make public transport easier and closer to a door-to-door experience.

Or maybe surge pricing equivalents will motivate people to buy their own cars. If the advantage of a car-sharing scheme is cost savings, and then you start charging more, what's the advantage again?

In any case, I don't think that that's a feasible option for the majority of jobs.

Charging more than the cheaper default. Doubt it will be as much as the depreciation, registration, insurance and servicing of a car.

Right now, my wife and I have two cars. One of them is only used 2-3 days of the week. The other is only used for a small portion of each day.

If taxis weren't needing to cover wage costs, I'd already be better off switching from the second car to using a taxi to get to and from work. Registration, insurance and servicing for the second car is $2-3k/year.

I don't think that insurance is a good cost to include in the comparison. In a driverless car world, we imagine that insurance costs will be pretty much a constant per mile traveled -- there are no better or worse drivers -- and probably lower than they are now. And you'll have to pay for them (directly or indirectly) whether you rent or own.

If your costs for the second car are more than $1k in just registration and servicing are more than about $500 a year, that, first, suggests that you're not very cost-conscious today. My car's cost service and registration fees are much less than that. Second, service costs also are basically a per-mile fee -- your car's quality doesn't degrade when it sits in your garage, and you'll pay the service costs of a vehicle you use directly or otherwise.

You didn't mention fuel, but of course again that's essentially per-mile, and costs what it costs regardless of the car ownership model.

That leaves registration, which is a small cost, but would be shared in a shared ownership model.

Now, of course, the actual major expense is the cost of buying the car in the first place, defrayed over the lifetime of the car, minus any price you get for selling it. The big advantage of a car-share service would be that you could share that cost with others. If a driverless car costs $50,000 (and we have no idea how much they would cost), and you use it for only 5 years, then sell it for $20,000, you get $6k per year. In a shared ownership model where you share it with three other people, and the company that you're going through makes about 10% gross margin, you're looking at $2.2k instead of $6k, so yay, savings of $3.8k per year. That's a lot of money.

If, on the other hand, a driverless car costs $30k and can be sold after five years for $15k, then it's $3k per year to own and $1.1k per year to rent, you're saving $1.9k instead $3.8k, and that's still not peanuts, but you suggest that right now you spend more than that for a not-very-highly-used second car. The advantages of owning are considerable.

Well, that's if you assume that Cars-as-a-Service don't need to be stored anywhere and magical disappear when they are not in use.

I know Google has magical fairy powers, but last I checked, a self-driving car is exactly the same size as a regular car, and takes the same storage space.

Part of the storage space requirements for cars in normal use is access space for human drivers and to allow random access entrance and exits. Cars as a service can eliminate much of the storage space requirement.

As well as 'redundant' storage, since each car effectively gets multiple parking spots at the moment (a dedicated garage, plus a guaranteed spot at work, etc). Once cars are automated you only need enough storage spots for the cars not on the road, which is much smaller.

Also, cars could park on big parking lots, which don't necessarily have to be near someone's home.

Just think of how little time your car is actually driving versus being parked.

Not everyone is driving at the same time, so Google can use their "magical fairy powers" (also known as statistics / data analysis) to determine how many cars are needed to support a city, maximizing the number of them that are constantly in motion, dropping one passenger and picking another. The ones that are not needed at the time can be stacked tightly in a dedicated multi-storey parking garage.

Way to only see everything with rose-colored glasses.

Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario?

First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times?

Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from.

Third, subtract the time I'm waiting in my driveway with the kids screaming and my wife in labor for a car to show up from god-knows-where. Or else the premium I'm paying to get ahead of the other guys in the queue. And while we're at it, all of those times that I wanted something from the store 5 minutes before it closes? Guess what, if I can't get a car in time, that's lost productivity. Have to buy lunch from the cafeteria b/c I couldn't get to the supermarket. Unless you're telling me that in order to accept this vision of the future, I have to be perfect and plan everything. Telling me in the future no one will be able to get to the store 5 minutes before it closes is just unrealistic, undesirable and unacceptable.

Fourth, subtract again, the additional energy needed to take the car to its next destination.

Fifth, consider all of the extra cost of adding, servicing, verifying, maintaining LIDAR and servoes to all of these millions of cars. With thousands of dollars of extra parts, they're going to require thousands in extra maintenance, inspection, training and insurance. Yeah, I know that's boring. It's not an interesting technical problem, but that's the reality of motor vehicles. If anyone thinks this won't make the price of vehicles go up significantly, they've never been in charge of anything critical.

I'm not "against the future," it's just that all of these digit-heads are seeing a grandiose signal-processing problem and doing multiplicative math like yours to make it look attractive and not even operating at a practical level whatsoever.

You sound like you live in the suburbs. I suspect car-as-a-service wouldn't be popular there. Honestly, if you live close enough to the store that you can drive there in under 5 minutes, to me that's a sign that you don't need to drive there.

Where I live (Berkeley), and in the Sf Bay Area in general, car as a service would be remarkably effective and popular.

do people realize that all these space savings mean that builders will now make smaller houses and more of them?

That already happens in mega cities where parking spots are around $500k. I take taxis all the time so I'm already living in the future, the western developed world will catch up eventually.

So, choose to have a dedicated vehicle then.

But don't be surprised when the majority of people refuse to pay 100% of the price for a vehicle they only use 3% of the time.

Interestingly, people pay 100% the price of a microwave oven, which is usually used just a few minutes per day.

Going that direction ... Did you know? A typical microwave oven uses massively more electricity simply powering the LED clock compared to the amount it uses actually cooking food.

[citation needed]. I can't find any information to verify this.

Apparently a Microwave typically uses about 1.5W on standby, so that's: 24 * 3600 * 1.5 = 129600 Joules per day

So, if it draws about a kW in use, that means that if you use it for less than 130 seconds per day, or just under 2 minutes, you'll actually use more power on standby than on cooking / heating.

I think I use my microwave more than 2 mins each day, but there are days I don't use it at all, so I'm not sure how it would even out.

1.5W is a crazy amount of standby power. Not that I don't believe older models may use that much, but there are now regulations and standards for that kind of thing which push that to a much lower power.

That's just the figure I found from a quick google. If you have a more up-to-date figure, feel free to share :)

Entrepreneurs see the future by being optimistic idealists.

The real estate requirement with autonomous vehicles is only the difference between the off-peak maximum required parks and the peak (no cars will be parked). Currently, the real estate required for non-autonomous vehicles is typically more than two spots for each car. (one at home, one at the office, and a fraction of the public parking)

Maybe the store will drive to you ;)

Of course I'm way late to the game here, but thought I'd add one more voice of dissent:

The real estate costs can be extremely low for self-driving cars. Imagine a tower of, say, 10 cars stacked vertically with an elevator mechanism to bring them to and from ground-level. Since each autonomous car is interchangeable, you can just treat the vertical parking lot as a stack. When demand is high, pop off the stack. When demand is low, push back onto the stack. No need for ramps or anything else that existing parking garages use. And just to be totally clear, humans don't interact with this tower, it's just a storage mechanism for empty cars after they've unloaded passengers.

If demand is low traffic should be low too, why not just use empty lanes of streets for the same purpose? Or at least, some variation on that theme. Maybe things work out so well that streets usually only have 1 lane.

Theres already an abundance of parking real estate, there's no need to make more. Look into the predictive analytics used by Uber or Citibike to see how wait times can be minimized. When freed from the redundancy of having to use an overbuilt one-size-fits all for everything, the energy savings will more than make up for a car having to drive two or three blocks from the parking lot to the pick up zone. Shit, I could go on.

That $100 is only low for highly developed wealthy areas.

Square feet of livable housing is cheaper than that in most of the country.

Undeveloped land probably mostly sells for less than $0.10 a square foot (that's still high at $4000 an acre). But that's partly because large sales of relatively isolated land will dominate the acreage transferred.

I think it's pretty unlikely that we're going to see most of the market for family vehicles be turned into a short-term rental model. Some, perhaps! Cars-as-a-service will have some advantages over, say, ZipCar today (primarily convenience, some amount of cost as well).

But owning a self-driving car sounds pretty sweet as well. Not only will you be able to get the status symbol car you want, you'll also be able to leave your stuff in it (without paying extra to rent it for times you aren't driving). And it's better than the cars of today! You don't need to worry about parking! You can drive when drunk or tired! You never need to worry about your cars-as-a-service being unable to send you a car during peak times!

Cars are popular to own today. Self-driving cars would be more valuable to own than normal cars are today. You have to imagine immense benefits to cars-as-a-service for it to displace most of the market for self-owned cars.

Yeah, but how many of those garages are packed full of stuff, with the car parked out in the driveway, anyway?

If you own your garage, I'll bet you'll fill it up pretty quickly. But people who pay extra rent for garage space will reduce their use. So there will be some extra space, if not 50 million.

There's the simple issue of legal liability, though. If you crash into someone, it's your fault and you can be taken to court for it. If a Google driverless car crashes into someone then it's Google's fault. That's an extremely large number of potential crashes and legal challenges.

Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.

I'm thinking there could be an agreement you sign when the car is purchased that states that the self-driving abilities are not to be fully relied on and the driver must be fully aware and ready to take over at all times. Thus if the car ever crashed by fault of Google they can say the driver should have been paying attention. This would have a lot of downsides. For instance, DWI's would still be a thing.

Getting humans to participate only in emergencies is almost the worst of all approaches. With reduced practice the human is deskilled and they are less likely to be alert and aware of the situation if they have to take over suddenly.

Signing an agreement will not make people alert and ready.

Even ignoring the issue of the driver's skill reducing as they practice less, switching from the thing with microsecond-range reaction times to the thing with second-range reaction time when an emergency has already started will almost never result in an optimal outcome.

Should you step in front of a Googlecar and get hurt, remember before you sue that it bristles with sensors and recording devices, and that it'll all be admissible in court.

Is there precedent in courts for how that kind of data is handled?

I think this will eventually be resolved the way vaccines were with liability shifted to government. There's just too much societal good to come out of self driving cars for liability to be the deal breaker.

Is this actually a real problem? There is a robust insurance environment around cars, with a huge amount of both pricing experience, case law, and experience with payouts for people injured in accidents. There is also plenty of experience with recalls and fatal manufacturing flaws.

Is there any reason to believe that insurance companies won't just happily write policies priced for automated cars, and everything will proceed pretty much like it does now? You drive around, accidents happen, insurance companies pay out to the injured parties, and adjust the rates on automatic cars to match the real cost to operate?

Legal liability seems to be a red herring IMHO. At the end of the day, it's an insurance company that pays for it all anyway, regardless of whose fault it is. And car insurance companies already have the capability to adjudicate and litigate a large number of crash-related legal challenges. If anything, Google could use the data collected by its autonomous vehicles to streamline that process.

If I were Google, I would just make some kind of deal with an insurance company to handle all scenarios where a crash occurs when a vehicle is in autonomous mode and bundle said insurance in with the cost of the vehicle.

Exactly. Who's at fault in a self-driving car crash? The car model+software combination (unless the driver explicitly did something negligent or reckless). But the insurance company will cover it, and simply adjust the cost of insurance each year based on how often that model+software combination crashed in the previous year.

Liability should be pretty simple. Just like now, the owner of the car is liable. In my state this is the case even if someone else is driving; not sure this is the case elsewhere but that would seem to apply to a computer driver as well as a human one. The logic is, if you allow someone else to use your property and they cause damage with it, you are liable.

Insurance (assuming the owner has it in force) may pay, but the liability still rests with the owner.

I hear people fretting about liability as a "problem to overcome," but it's actually much simpler than the technical challenges.

People have to drive the same distance regardless. Whether it's human or computer error leading to the accident is irrelevant to your premium. To a car insurance company it's all about rates and risks.

Assuming driverless cars are shown to be safer than humans - and they'll have to be in order to get approval - your car insurance company would be stupid not to cover them. From their perspective it's simple economics. The accident rate is lower, thus the potential liability is lower.

If your insurer isn't willing to insure your driverless car, you'll switch to someone who does. If no established provider insures driverless, that's a no-brainer company to start. Similar payments in a high-margin industry with lower average payouts? Yes, please.

Liability is the easy part.

The problem is your insurance company. If you get in an accident, they're not going to want to pay for it, and they're going to go after Google for the damages. Now we're right back where we started.

Why couldn't Google just offer their own insurance plan? They could bundle the cost with a monthly or yearly service/maintenance fee. If the margins are so high on insurance products, I'm sure they would be more than happy to keep the profits themselves.

It depends on how they decide to hedge their own risk.

  Buy from an insurance agency = safe but more expensive.

  Self-insure = cheaper but riskier.

But what would they insure against? Individual accidents or class actions?

No. Current driver-based insurance policies might be based on the ability to hold the driver personally responsible if they are negligent.

Insuring a vehicle is just figuring out what the likely payout ratio across a cohort of those vehicles is going to be, then working backwards from there to come up with a premium that will cover the claim amounts, administrative costs and provide a pool of funds to invest.

Lots of things are insured today with no interest in who is operating them. Automated cars are no different to that.

Essentially you're imaging a current situation (where a driver is insured) and transferring that to a situation with no driver. That's wrong.

Insurance companies don't care - they just want to be able to predict what the likely payout rate is. And that's how much it will cost. If that includes cover for buggy code, it just means a higher premium. Essentially younger drivers have buggier driving code, and that's why they cost more to insure.

Also, in terms of regulatory capture, it's almost certain that the legal requirement to hold insurance for your car will continue. But the combination of the fact that payouts will probably move towards class action against software bugs (where class action suits usually have a lower per-person payout, and will be paid out by massive policies held by the car companies) and the fact that in general fewer of those people will ever need a payout thanks to safety improvements (especially as we move into most cars on city roads being driverless) will mean insurance companies will have to pay out less.

I will never understand why people think insurance companies will be a barrier to adoption. Insurance companies are going to love this. I think the tipping point will be when insurance rates on driving your own car skyrocket.

>I will never understand why people think insurance companies will be a barrier to adoption. Insurance companies are going to love this. I think the tipping point will be when insurance rates on driving your own car skyrocket.

Yes. The logic goes like this. 'Currently I'm an insured driver'. I will have a car with no driver. It therefore cannot be insured.

Where I live cars are already insured for third-party personal damages, regardless of who is driving them. It's a fixed-cost premium attached and paid at vehicle registration time. Thus, if you are injured in a motor vehicle accident, regardless of who is at fault, you (or your heirs) will be paid compensation in a regulated environment. This is a functioning market which doesn't adjust for driver age or experience, but instead collectively insures all vehicles on the road, and pays out when a claim is made. Periodically, when more than one insurer is involved, they will negotiate an 'at fault' percentage in order to work out which ratio at which the claims are attributed to each insurer. This may involve discussion of the drivers actions (to determine fault), but the payout is always made - because the vehicle itself is the thing that is insured.

In this system, the only way the driver can become liable for the claim is if they specifically and deliberately engaged in a criminal act, such as driving an unregistered vehicle, or driving under influence. Mere speeding or red-light running doesn't void the insurance (as these are traffic infringements rather than criminal acts). And in these cases, the insurance company still pays out the compensation, but may proceed to recover the compensation from the driver that broke the law.

This type of system would easily be translated to driverless vehicles. The owner of the vehicle would pay a registration fee, and a portion of that fee would be passed onto the owners choice of insurer (or a valid certificate of insurance would need to be presented for registration, which is the same thing). As long as the insurance was paid, then third-party personal and property damage would be paid out to any accident claimants. If the insurance company then decided someone was directly liable for causing the claim (such as tampering with vehicle systems or negligent coding) then they could recover the claim money.

Such a system would be a vast improvement on the current situation, whereby it's the driver that is insured, and because of the various risk factors, insurance premiums are all over the place. As a result, the riskiest drivers also tend to be the ones lacking insurance, which is the worst case for someone who needs to make a claim.

But then insurance is one of the most misunderstood products around, so I guess it's not surprising that ignorance of how it works abounds.

I don't understand why you think this. Yes, for small incidents, it won't be an issue, but if there's ever a claim over $X (where X is a figure that outweighs the cost of the time to hire lawyers to seek compensatory damages for that claim), you can bet they'll go right after the maker.

This is not simple issue at all. Who's at fault if anti-lock brakes don't work as expected? What about cruise control? The new cruise control that auto-follows? What about lane-following technology?

We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

> We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

Well "shift" implies that it must be one place or the other; in reality, liability is not zero-sum, so one party having reduced liability doesn't imply another party has more, and vice versa.

This is particularly the caseWe are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

In the case of automotive systems, there's no reason the driver, owner, and manufacturer all can't be liable, and no reason that any changes in the degree of liability for one have to be reflected at all in the liabilities of the others.

I. You shift the goalposts a lot. E.g. in the same sentence you mix statements about the future and the present, e.g. "we will" and "today's technology".

> I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology.

BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular.

II. Also, in your scenario, even if you do send that car over to your wife to use once you get to work, the same car will get more wear and tear than two individual cars b/c it's doing the same work plus more to go between you two.

III. You also mix up the moment when self-driving cars become as safe as humans with the moment they become safER than humans.

IV. You also overly dichotomize safer vs. not safer. What if they kill fewer auto drivers, but more pedestrians? What if they kill fewer adults and more childen? It's not that simple- our values are reflected in our choices to deploy technology.

> It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular.

I'm no LIDAR expert, but I do design and build synchronous detectors (think: boxcar/lock-in amplifier/gated counter). Maybe this has been tried and there's some reason it wouldn't work, but I don't see why you couldn't apply a pseudo-random modulation to the LIDAR emitter and then run the received signal through a correlator. Besides bringing some conversion gain and allowing for more accurate distance determination (compared to a simple pulsed-ToF), PRN modulation allows you to share the channel with other transmitters (CDMA, if you will).

> BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today.

Isn't this just a matter of the wavelength used by today's LIDARs? There's a huge hole in the liquid and solid water absorption spectrum in the visible range.

I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle.

If the system has to deallocate time channels for other vehicles to use, it loses bandwidth, proportional to the number of vehicles in the vicinity.

Sharing the data between vehicles is possible, however, it invokes geographical/networking problems, such as how to partition the acquisition, how to synchronize the acquisition and how to share it, including the necessary bandwidth, which I'm sure is quite high.

As soon as multiple vehicles sharing data enters the picture, security must also get factored in. Besides the link control concerns, the system will be sensitive to jamming with that much multiplexed sampling taking place.

PP is correct in hinting that the leap to multiple self-driving vehicles from one self-driving vehicle will be large indeed.

> I don't know the system, but I'm sure it's already synchronous in that there are numerous receiver channels and their acquisition values are correlated with the illumination angle.

This is not "synchronous detection" in the way I meant it. I don't mean this as a put-down, but it may be instructive to Google "lock-in amplifier," a term I mentioned in my previous post.

All of your other concerns are addressed by appropriate choice of PRN code(s). Additional vehicles, which operate without the need for coordination, merely raise the noise floor. They do not "jam" each other. It should be obvious that a minimum S/N ratio is required for the LIDAR system to work and further that an arbitrarily-high number of LIDAR transmitters therefore cannot coexist. However, it is far from obvious (to me, at least without learning more about LIDAR and plugging in some numbers to a model) that a congested freeway of driverless cars would have "too many" LIDAR transmitters.

No, snow scatters the emitted light and scarcely any is returned at all. A wall covered in ice looks like an air gap.

(I know this because my very expensive 800kg autonomous vehicle almost drove into a lake under my software control due to this effect...)

Aaaah, a domain-knowledge expert, thaaaank god!

Actual information on this topic is sorely lacking....

....While we have you on the line, would you please contribute some more information on LIDAR w/r/t autonomous vehicles?

For example, how well does LIDAR work with rain? fog? How does LIDAR interact with other nearby LIDARs? How much power does a typical system emit? How sensitive is it to jamming? How many frames per second can be acquired? How much computing power is used to re-assemble a scene?

Generally LIDAR "works" reasonably in light rain because the rain drops scatter most of the emitted beams, and you get no returns. Occasionally you'll hit a raindrop straight on and get a reflection back to the receiver, but your algorithms should probably filter this out.

Fog is so much denser that you get heaps of reflected returns, and naive algorithms would treat this as there being lots of solid stuff in the environment. Your best bet is to combine sensors that don't share the same EM bands; e.g. lidar + camera, or + radar, sonar, etc. It's not just redundancy, but the ability to perceive across different frequencies so that things that scatter or absorb in one band don't do so in another, allowing you to distinguish.

I don't think one LIDAR would interact with another to any great extent. Even if off-the-shelf models did, there'd ultimately be some way to uniquely identify or polarise the beams such that this wasn't a problem. I suspect its reasonably easy to engineer a solution around this.

Power emission I'm not entirely sure about, but almost all are at least class 2 laser devices. You shouldn't point an SLR camera at Google's vehicles for example, as you can destroy the CCD. The Velodyne they use draws 4-6amps at 12V, but a lot of that power goes to heating the emitter, motors, etc, and isn't all emitted by any means.

Frames-per-second isn't really the right measure for Velodynes, but their max rotation is 3-4 revs per second IIRC. It's about a million points per second. (For something like the Kinect For Windows V2, which is a flash lidar, it should run at 30fps, but with lower depth resolution.)

I can't think how you could 'jam' a lidar, but you can certainly confuse the crap out of it easily enough. Scatter some corner reflectors on the roads for example, dust grenades, fog cannons, etc.

Computing power to reconstruct is significant (many DARPA Grand Challenge teams had problems containing their power budget for CPUs/GPUs) but manageable. It depends on the algorithms used, and in many cases the amount of "history" you infer over. Google's approach is to log everything, post-process into static world maps, then upload those maps back to the vehicles. When they're actually driving for real, those maps effectively let them take the delta between what they currently see and what the static map says there should be, and they only really have to handle the differences (i.e. people, cars, bikes, etc). This is still hard, but it's much easier than e.g. the Mars Rover problem (more my area of experience)

I don't understand why we're so hung up on trying to proactively create legislation around this. Why don't we let someone get maimed/killed first, and then go from there?

In the world of things, you can't foresee every possible outcome, and it's silly to draw up legislation, which has a nasty habit of becoming rather sticky, for something so potentially earth shattering.

Let it fail, turn it off remotely, and then we'll figure out who to blame and what to do next. For now, this tech is so beyond us, we don't even have a frame of reference for how to properly legislate it.

"a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes" is a long way away, though. And to get there you have to go through a long period of some self-driving cars, sharing the road with old-fashioned human piloted ones. As a human driver, I spend a lot of my time anticipating the behavior of my fellow road-users. That car coming up from the side street - did they see me? They're on their phone, maybe they didn't see me... they're going to pull out... better brake...; now I'm coming up to an exit; the car in the lane to my left just changed speed, probably going to try to cut across in front of me, better give them some room...; cyclist coming up on the right, am I going to get past him before I need to slow for my right turn, or should I slow up behind him?

Understanding and anticipating all those human behaviors seems to me to be well beyond the capabilities of current AI.

I don't know, it seems to me that a computer is particularly suited to this problem. I think a computer would be much more accurate in judging the speed of the approaching bike or the car coming up the side street or in the left lane. The essentially negligible reaction time compared with a human would give significant power to a defensive driving algorithm. And I'd guess probabalistic models are a better predictor of behavior than most people's intuition.

Self driving cars see 360 around themselves at all times. Real world data is used to train self tuning algorithms that drive the cars. These cars see everything and they know everything about how irrationally other human drivers are, and they don't take any chances. They drive slowly when they identify a danger, and they react almost immediately when there is a surprise, compared to the relatively sluggish reactions of humans. And humans make mistakes, lapses in judgement, are tired, and take stupid chances all the time. Self driving cars drive perfectly all the time. Sure they can't do much if someone deliberately drives into them, but it won't be their fault.

There's always a more cautious option in each of those scenarios. If the self-driving car always errs towards that, hopefully it'll mitigate disaster.

Following good driving principles to the letter - accounting for stopping distances etc, like in the Highway Code (UK) - will hopefully allow time for those unpredictable road users. Humans are more risky in that we give ourselves less time to react to begin with.

How about making eye contact? When I'm driving, eye contact & facial analysis ("did that person see me?") is significant in my risk assessment of other vehicles. That is, if I know that the other driver knows, then I don't have to worry as much. I will still be careful, but I don't have to be quite as wary.

It sounds like the equivalent of eye contact for automated traffic is the "full network of communicating cars", but there must be a middle ground with mixed traffic, where automated cars are extra-careful about manual vehicles. Will that be annoying or reassuring to other drivers?

Some of the exact things you mention are covered in the video in the post. I think you are underestimating current AI.

Parking structures might become high-security, automated bldgs that people don't enter. Further, local parking spaces may be unnecessary as your car (or the car you rent) will pick you up.

It's funny how none of the critics think about the human edge-cases. What happens when someone decides to drink and drive? What happens when someone falls asleep or gets distracted on the freeway?

The answer, of course, is that edge cases are just that. They don't impede general use, and though they occasionally cause some worst-case outcomes to occur, we all just decide to live with them.

> We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing.

No you don't. That's why many people use public transport or combine travelling with exercise (bike). Self driving cars doesn't solve the real problem which is that people have the idea that cars are actually sustainable.

Self-driving Teslas charged with nuclear-generated electricity seems very sustainable for me. Make them rented on-demand instead of owned and you have a PRT system, combining the convenience of a car with efficiency of public transport.

You must not live any where in the entire center of the United States

In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b? Here in northern China, many people have very small egg-cars, which are nothing more than an electric bike with a thin shell for the cold, and this is much less likely to kill someone by accident.

I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so that we all believe a nice car is big and has this and that. Maybe these car ads will be seen in 20 years the same way we see cigarette ads right now: dangerous brain washing by a lobby gone crazy.

(Edited slightly to avoid unfortunate pun)

Don't get your hopes up, that brainwashing is still alive and well with the first word of Google's post being "Jaywalking".

Underscoring your sentiment is the origin of the term jaywalking http://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/the-invention-of-jaywalking-w...

Although, to be sure, with the speeds of modern vehicles, it makes sense that people's paths be predictable since vehicles are much less able to be nimble and swerve out of someone's path.

Predictability and not jumping in front of cars is unrelated to not being in a crosswalk. Crosswalks actually worsen these aspects, as they make drivers more prone to needlessly slamming on their brakes to wave people out while also fostering a sense of pedestrian entitlement instead of respectful temporal negotiation.

It's really not hard to look at traffic (all types), spot the existing gaps, and navigate within them. On some roads this is impractical due to traffic levels, but in most areas these type of roads are the exception.

(I suppose it's not surprising to be downvoted for saying this, as California has some of the worst drivers I've seen. It's rare that I am able to start walking and successfully pass behind a moving car, without having the driver needlessly stop while looking annoyed and acting like they're doing me a favor - even in parking lots! But frankly, anyone thinking of themselves as a hacker should surely understand and respect the value of down-to-earth informal negotiation and the peril of overformalized systems).

Perhaps it could be due to the fact that you are legally required to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk? Not to say that people do yield often, but once a pedestrian is in a crosswalk, not yielding is a great way to get a quick ticket.

Yes of course that's what it's due to. But those laws are made for people who need/want traffic to stop so they can take their time, which is understandable. But when you're willing to wait three seconds on the curb for the one last car before a large gap, but you have to turn your entire body away and pretend to daydream just so that it won't needlessly stop, sensibilities have gone too far in the other direction.

I agree with you, but I think I can explain some of the rationale behind wanting big cars. Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed."

> Part of the reason is fear. "If I have a very small egg-car and everyone else has a heavy car, I'll be the one that is killed."

That isn't fear, it's entirely rational behavior. This is one of those many cases where a group of people behaving individually in their self-interest results in a situation that's worse for all participants.

It would be better for everyone if we moved in aggregate to smaller, lighter cars, but no one can take that step unless we all do.

It's not a zero sum game. All else being equal, larger cars for everyone results in more safety for everyone.

Imagine two extremes. 1) You smack into another person at 70MPH while you're both in a cardboard box. Don't ask me how you got a cardboard box up to that speed, but you probably do not survive. 2) You manage to get a Maersk E class up to 70MPH and crash it into another Maersk E class. Assuming you're not at the front, you and the other guy probably both walk away from the crash unscathed.

Now, that doesn't mean that it's best for everyone to have huge cars. There are other factors beyond simply safety. Small cars can be much safer than large cars when designed and built well. My point is just that the shift to larger vehicles is not the sort of game-theoretic tragedy of the commons that one might imagine.

> * Don't ask me how you got a cardboard box up to that speed, but you probably do not survive. 2) You manage to get a Maersk E class up to 70MPH and crash it into another Maersk E class*

I'd be more impressed if you got the Maersk up to 70mph, since it's 100k horsepower engines can manage less than half that.

And I suspect the collision would be pretty terrifying, given it would be dumping a kinetic energy load of 81GJ if I did the maths right (70mph ~= 31m/s, Emma Maersk ~= 170kton, E=1/2mv^2), which is somewhere around 20kton of TNT equiv.

The 300+ metre "crumple zone" might save you, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Also don't ask why I expressed wonder at a 70MPH cardboard box but not a 70MPH cargo ship....

Anyway, the kinetic energy involved in the ship collision would indeed be gigantic, but the mass available to absorb it is similarly gigantic. The energy will be going into the structure rather than into your fragile human body. It will take many seconds just to complete the collision. Compare this to the tiny fraction of a second available to decelerate the meatbags from 70MPH to 0MPH in a car collision at that speed.

Larger cars dont result in more safety for anyone outside the vehicle.

A couple of counter-intuitive thoughts:

* The smaller car will stop and maneuver more quickly, avoiding more accidents.

* I read a study years ago that said the relative sizes and weights of vehicles did not significantly impact the outcomes for the humans inside. Instead, the relative positions of the 'hard-points' did (I forget the term, but the parts that don't crumple on impact). If you rear-end a truck and its rear hard-point goes through your windshield into your head (albeit a personal hard-point), that's bad news. If its hard-point hits your vehicle's hard-point then I imagine you mostly suffer from the sudden stop, at least in modern cars.

That is possible, but fear-motivated reasoning is rarely rational.

because it is a multi-purpose vehicle. i drive a car to work, single passenger. i drive the car to buy stuff, with my wife, 2 passengers, plus hauling stuff in the trunk. i drive the car to various places on the weekend, wife plus kid plus shit in the trunk.

i bought it to cover multiple transportation scenarios I encounter on a weekly basis. it also has a certain size to protect me in an accident. bumping into something at 30mph needs a certain amount of crumple zone to make it survivable. physics are hard to beat.

and I haven't killed anyone so far with my car - and I've driven on multiple continents, on and offroad.

no lobby needed.

Actually, with self-driving cars, it’s likely that those four activity could be handled by different vehicles that you would only rent for the time you need them. If the law allows them to drive empty, they could go to the next user on their own, and reduce both waste parking, and inefficiencies like the ones you describe.

Such plans are however more likely to happen in areas where those issues are more dire (concentrated living) and where non-ownership is already commonly accepted: bike-sharing already exists in NY. Not sure where you are, but I’m assuming you don’t have city-car-sharing there. This discrepancy can come off as a result of lobbying: car companies typically appear hostile to selling a lot less cars to sharing platform operators. I know for a fact there was a lot of lobbying involved in some cases, but I doubt that was the key issues in most places where ‘transportation alternatives’ isn’t used.

sure, but this why ownership as a concept is actually quite nice - i can decide right now to do something with my car. i don't need to plan ahead. i am not dependent on anybody else. i gladly pay for that luxury.

Isn't buying a car that is able to handle a bunch of different hypothetical future scenarios planning ahead?

sure, but i do it once and then i have peace of mind. i have a car at my disposal, 24/7/365.

should i book a car for the weekend? a last minute shopping tour? etc. etc. etc.

Have you ever used Lyft. In my experience (SF), it literally takes minutes for a car to show up. More often than not, I am still looking for may keys/wallet/jacket or brushing my teeth when the car gets here. I imagine an autonomous car service would be even faster, as car availability could be highly tuned to demand (Lyft and Uber are using comparatively crude methods of demand/availability management, surge pricing).

As others have mentioned, the car-sharing model works best in urban areas, and no one is suggesting that we ban individuals from owning cars. But I will also add that we have spent the last 100 years building infrastructure and public spaces to accommodate for a car-centric society, but this has had a negative impact on people who prefer other forms of transportation. Public transportation is severely underfunded and inadequate in most places, pedestrians and bikers are getting mowed down by reckless drivers, tons of public land is being poorly utilized as parking space, and our air is getting polluted to unprecedented levels. Your "peace of mind" comes at a high cost to the rest of society. Autonomous cars are not a silver bullet for all of these problems by any means, but they can go a long way in getting us to a better place with most of these issues.

Yes, and surely some people (particularly in less dense suburbs and rural areas) will continue to own cars. They will just be self-driving cars, because manually operated cars will be illegal.

You write: > because manually operated cars will be illegal.

I have a question for you. How many years after the introduction of the gasoline powered automobile did it take before horse-drawn vehicles became illegal on the roads?

Near where I live (eastern Pennsylvania, USA) one still encounters a horse-and-buggy occasionally, especially near Amish areas. And a few roads (interstates and limited access highways) are specifically posted for motor vehicles only.

I posit that there will be a LONG period in which manually operated cars will share the road with self-driving cars.

everything always needs to be illegal. ban this, ban that. not exactly a libertarian, but man, is there no other way in your little world?

what if i enjoy driving a car? what about motorcycles? you want to ban them too? oldtimers, just for spite? sugar drinks? sweets? alcohol? drugs?

When you travel abroad, does it trouble you that it's not your plane? Eventually, the majority of people won't care. Some will pay a premium to have a dedicated car or service level, but I would happily be rid of mine.

The ability to book the type of car I need (van to move something large, ute to deliver dirt/gravel, tiny car to commute, 4WD for a family camping trip) as the default way of thinking can't come soon enough for me.

When you travel abroad, does it trouble you that it's not your plane?

Actually, it is quite a hassle to have to operate on the airline's schedule rather than on my own, not to mention having to make travel arrangements weeks in advance. It's just that owning and operating an airplane myself is too expensive for me. Since moving to Boston, so is owning a car. That said, I am definitely not planning to switch to rental bicycles.

Ok I actually have the same usage pattern as you and I have a minivan, which I think optimizes quite well the size.

Also, you say you didn't kill anyone. Great but how much room did cities you crossed have to plan for you? How many other non driving people had to reduce their living space for this? Not counting fossil fuel, materials used, etc.

Safety is probably the mask used by this light to hide their agenda, and it is clever. Buy maybe it is completely made up. Maybe everyone would be much safer in very different cars, maybe our human tastes have been terraformed to fulfill the avidity of some powerful lobby.

Are there any studies that back up your claims that small cars would reduce the death toll? I follow the intuition, but China has over twice as many deaths per car on the road as the United States: (36 per 100k vs 15) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-re...

There are of course other factors going on than just the weight of the cars, e.g. traffic laws, enforcement, community norms around driving, ratio of scooters and motorcycles, car safety ratings, etc etc etc. but there are difficult tradeoffs here too. An egg-car will cause less damage in a low velocity impact with a pedestrian, but at highway speeds it will also do less to protect its passengers.

I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving.

The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup truck and so forth; yeah, that's great and all, but how about crumple zones?

Crumple zones and needing a 'big car' is old fashioned safety.

Probably the best cars to study are the big brothers of the Smart Car - the Mercedes A and B series. The original A series had a problem with the elk test, that was fixed and is a side issue to the main safety advances.

The passenger cell is the key part, ideally you want the engine to go under it rather than land in the passengers laps. That is a key innovation for whether you can walk out afterwards.

Next is the steel the passenger cell is made of. It doesn't crumple, things bounce off it.

Then the real big innovations for survival are inside the passenger cell. Those airbags, the way the seat belt tensions, the way the steering column collapses. These are big things.

There is a 'Fifth Gear' episode on Youtube that you can watch to see how all of this works. They crash a big Volvo that happens to be a decade old and built when the crumple one was king into a modern Renault hatchback. In the hatchback the passenger compartment stays as is, all of the airbags go off, the crash test dummies walk off with not so much as a scratch. Even the doors open. Meanwhile, the Volvo is a scene of carnage. The firemen have to cut the crash test dummies out, leaving their amputated legs behind.

Personally I would want a full rally-car style roll cage inside whatever car I had if I had to have one, however, I gave up driving after crashing into an on-coming car :-) That was a turning point for me, I no longer derived pleasure from speed or sitting in traffic. I cycle now, or get the train. The accidents I am particularly keen to avoid are the rapid decelerations where, regardless of airbaggage, the brain crashes into the inside of one's skull to result in the same sort of complications Shumaker is having now (wish him well). His incident was skiing, not driving, but the same principle applies.

Speaking of F1, I would like to see a Google car do the new Electric Formula E series, lapping every driver on the grid like some mad Scalextric car, taking the most optimal lines through the bends and learning the track to go quicker and quicker... In F1 would be cool too, like an automotive version of IBM's chess playing adventures, taking on World Champions and just beating them hands down. That would be cool.

Here's the Fith Gear video that you mentioned: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=emtLLvXrrFs

> Crumple zones and needing a 'big car' is old fashioned safety.

No. This is modern design. In the very cool Fifth Gear episode, you're seeing a car that is not designed with a good rigid passenger cell component (and also fails to transfer the energy of the crash around the passenger cell). Both cars have crumple zones. They are not all created equal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone

> A misconception about crumple zones sometimes voiced[citation needed] is that they reduce safety for the occupants of the vehicle by allowing the body to collapse, therefore risking crushing the occupants.

> Crumple zones work by managing crash energy, absorbing it within the outer parts of the vehicle, rather than being directly transmitted to the occupants, while also preventing intrusion into or deformation of the passenger cabin.

All modern cars have crumple zones - though smaller cars like the smart and A/B Class have very short crumple zones.

The difference in your video is the improvements in passenger safety cell construction - much of which comes down to higher strength steel being used in the passenger safety cell. Compare the size of the door pillars between a modern car and one from the 90s - in modern cars they are often twice as thick.

A modern volvo of the same size will fare even better than the renault.

A self-driving car doesn't need a steering column.

The steering column is one of the biggest problems to engineer around for impact safety.

> "Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b"

You don't always need them. Short intra-city drives don't require a large vehicle. But most public transportation in the US is rather poor, so people buy a car that will cover their worst case usage: driving multiple people and their luggage between cities, possibly hundreds of miles. An electric egg car isn't safe or efficient for that.

There is a car lobby in the U.S. and it does have influence, but you have ignored Occam's Razor here. People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful. Creating competing services so large, individually owned cars are less useful is what projects like this and Uber are working on.

> People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful.

You surely know that this cannot be true. In China, again, many rich people buy expensive luxury cars, and really have no need for them, except if you include "social status" in "needs".

I have a simple litmus test for detecting unneeded goods that people are trying to force into our minds: ads. We need normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc. Except if it is very different in the US, I think no big ads campain are selling these.

However, each product that require a heavy handed ad campaigns is certainly lacking in desirability or usefulness. And it also means these industries are spending a lot of money selling you goods, instead of spending money making these goods better or cheaper.

Anyways, my bet is that the car industry is rotten to the bones, selling worldwide dangerous and superfluous multi-tons machines that could be replaced by many other, more useful, safe and scalable transportation means. And I hope Google and others will break this industry apart as soon as possible.

I am living in Beijing at the moment (Haidian), spent most of my life in Europe. I get what you mean and understand the efficiency of Chinese transport vehicles. But one huge thing you are missing is the cultural differences. They are pretty big.

>>>normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc

I get what you mean. I spent a little time in the north-east Beijing villages and I know what you mean by minimality. But again, 'not normal' shoes will last longer. The house with a bit more than just doors will make you feel safer (or is just me a paranoid Westerner?).

Yes, there might be some lobbying and brain washing, as you call it. But as you can see, the culture is totally different. It's neither good nor bad. It's just the way it is.

Great and all (and I'm a big fan of smaller, lighter passenger cars) but it only works to a point - a tiny car might not kill a pedestrian or someone else in a tiny car, but it's unlikely to do well in an accident with a semi truck, or a large fixed barrier. (And people buy cars based on how well they protect the passengers, not others.) We should have smaller cars, but with reasonable safety features.

Also in China, and presumably in much of the rest of the world, cars are expensive compared to average income.

Car use would open up to a new class of people who wouldn't need to own it.

Actually, that's already kind of the case -- in China (some parts anyway) it's easy to find a "black taxi" willing to carry your mattress across town when you move. Maybe because labor is cheap in China.

However, I have a hard time seeing automated driving working out in China's traffic. (Maybe I'm just unaware of the sate of the art!)

Beijing also has:

- inexpensive (relative to the West) taxis

- great taxi-hailing apps

- good private hire apps

(and Uber launched a limited service here last week, although I have yet to try it.)

Re: automated driving, the main roads here are pretty wide compared to those in European cities, so perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. I don't know how a computer would deal with a physical confrontation after a minor accident, though.

I agree with the sentiment (and you've seen how small and light my scooter is) but I can totally understand why people buy larger/stronger vehicles for safety. Unfortunately, it becomes an arms race: I'd feel perfectly safe in one of those egg cars if _everyone_ had one. As it is, though, I'd be really worried about driving one because I would be more vulnerable than in a traditional car, but much less able to take evasive action to avoid collisions (vs. my scooter).

Having said that, I'm writing this on the bus, which can take me to most places in Beijing if I'm not in a hurry.

Question for self-driving car aficionados. When I'm driving and encounter a strange or dangerous situation these days I often try to think if a robocar will be able to handle it properly. One situation came up the other day that made me nervous. I was driving on a relatively empty highway at high speed (70mph) and there was a piece of debris in one of the lanes. I spotted the debris far ahead and safely changed lanes.

For an autonomous car, the car will a) need incredibly far range to see this debris in time and b) will need incredibly precise lidar/radar to see the debris if it is small. At a far distance, a small piece of debris covers a minuscule solid angle on the sensor. At high speeds, you have a twofold problem that tests the limits of the onboard sensors and collision avoidance systems: objects approach rapidly, and small objects can cause catastrophic damage or cause other collisions. In the case where other cars are on the road, the problem seems straightforward since the robocar can probably see all the other cars ahead of it changing lanes in a pattern. On a deserted highway however the car is in trouble unless it can spot the debris from a very far distance, it seems. Any thoughts?

My thought: LIDARs and other kind of sensors are much better than human eyes. I'd expect the current self-driving cars to have already better sensory resolution than human drivers.

Yeah and I think a larger problem is deer or other animals running into the road especially at night. I don't know if the Google car can handle that situation yet, but the sensors should be able to see animals way before humans can.

Many (most?) car/deer/moose collisions are unavoidable even for a human driver. In particular, because a human driver focuses on monitoring the road ahead, they cannot determine instantaneously whether it is optimal to continue straight and hit the animal or to swerve into oncoming traffic or the adjacent lane. The reflex reaction is to swerve which can often cause an even worse accident.

Humans also can't process the trade-off of hitting the animal vs. attempting to avoid it based on size fast enough whereas a self-driving car could conceivably be able to.

I would guess, too, that there are mitigation actions that can be taken by computers that humans don't have the reflexes to handle.

For example, I was always told in driving school as a kid that if you're about to hit a deer, you should let up on your brakes right before you hit them. This is so the bumper of the car comes back up and hits the deer center, as opposed to the bumper hitting the deer's bottom half, possibly bringing the deer up on to the hood/windshield where it could injure passengers.

I have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but a self-driving car could easily handle something like that, or automatically turn a car to take the impact of the deer on the side of the car without passengers, whatever the best course of action is.

Plus what can you car do to save you given the context of the accident it's about to have? That's a very cool idea.

Are they? Visual acuity at the fovea is around 1 arc minute. Translating that to 150 by 100 degrees of visual field (humans have a larger visual field) gives a resolution of 9000 by 6000 pixels.

Of course, the human eye doesn't work that way: resolution drops off rapidly away from the fovea. Many electronic sensors do work that way, though. So, individual sensors may, for some tasks, be inferior to human 20/20 vision.

I googled to find out whether the sensors on Google's driverless cars had anisotropic sensors (a simple solution would be to have a wide-field and a telephoto camera), but cannot find good info. Anybody know more?

I'm skeptical at far enough distances LIDAR is accurate, due to noise and the falloff of light's subtended solid angle with distance. I am not a sensor expert but if there is a mattress on the highway far ahead (think 0.1-0.2mi or so) I would not be surprised if am going to see it due to the color contrast and my brain's pattern recognition well before LIDAR will detect it by bouncing light off of it.

At highway speeds of 70 miles per hour, a car covers 0.1 miles in 5.14 seconds. So, with your range of 0.1-0.2 miles, a human would have 5-10 seconds to perceive the problem and stop.

Google's LIDAR can see approximately 60 meters out. At 70mph, this gives the autonomous car under 2 seconds to perceive the problem and stop.

Most humans have a perception-reaction time of approximately 2.5-3.0 seconds on a highway, so the human range drops to 2-7 seconds. Factor in the time it takes to apply a maneuver (move foot to break pedal, apply break) and it drops even further -- I'm not certain by how much -- likely another 1-2 seconds. At your lower bound of 0.1 miles, I think the autonomous car already has the advantage.

I think it's clear that a computer would react and apply a maneuver tremendously faster than a human. I also think it's obvious that to have a clear advantage over a human on a highway, these sensors need additional range. From what I understand, Google is working on their own LIDAR sensor (an upgrade from the Velodyne they use now), so perhaps they also have this in mind.

I'd love to see more data on this stuff.

You're discounting the actuation time for the machine, as well as latency in the system. Nothing is instantaneous. I've seen driving systems with 1-2 second latency from sensor data in to actuate brakes.

LIDARs are not better sensors than our eyes. They are different, but not better.

The human eye is an amazing instrument. Contrast range of 24 stops vs. 16 in a top of the line camera. (Think 24 bit ADC vs. 16 bit). Follow that up with 24 bit color depth and the ability for our eyes to automatically adjust what portion of the spectrum we're focusing on, and you've got a spectacular sensor.

Agreed about the eye. They are great for looking at whatever you point them at, which for drivers in my area is usually their iPhone. I'd be surprised if humans were terribly good at perceiving a meter-high object that appeared in their lane at a distance of 50m, because their occuli are occupied perceiving other things. I'm sure a self-driving car that had an unblinking human eye would be a fantastic instrument.

Anyway the LIDAR is not the only instrument you can put in an autonomous vehicle, right? You can have optical cameras, stereo cameras, infrared, whatever.

Debris is a really hard problem and I don't think they can get that resolution out of their LIDAR. Camera data may serve better, but that's hit or miss.

I'd call this one unsolved.

(Source: I'm a robotics/perception/sensors guy who has worked autonomous vehicles)

Since you're one of the few people here doing more than speculating, could you expand on this a bit? Is the LIDAR resolution a hard physical limit, and if so what's the origin? What makes identifying the debris with the camera so hard, just the standard object recognition problem in computer vision?

Certainly. LIDAR resolution is related to a few things:

- How many beams you're putting out and at what angles

- How fast you're spinning and how fast you can get the data back.

- How many points of data you can get through your bus

If the Google Car is using the big Velodyne (http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx), it puts out 1.3 Mpt/second over a 26.8 degree vertical field of view. That makes it put out ~135 pts per vertical and horizontal degree. At a range of 50 meters, with angular resolution of 0.09 degrees and 0.4 degrees vertical resolution, you're looking at vertical spacing of 34.9 cm/pt and a horizontal spacing of 7.8 cm/pt. You'll need multiple "hits" to make an obstacle, and they have to reflect well enough to be counted. A common thing to do is reject any obstacle below a certain height - since it could just be noise.

Debris with cameras is tough because you can't differentiate between "dry spot on pavement" and "someone's dropped a sheet of drywall".

Could you use some kind of LIDAR stereo configuration to tell the difference between a dry spot and a solid object?

Well, LIDAR doesn't have that differentiation problem - it has a resolution problem for small (sub half meter) things at range.

Stereo LIDAR would just add more points - you can correlate the two, but you'll still have resolution issues.

Well there are "Flash Lidar" sensors, that are effectively instantaneous depth cameras firing a lidar beam for every pixel - but a) they're hugely expensive, and b) they don't seem to have taken off (possibly because academia can't afford them to do the interesting research that'll help them take off)

There are some cheaper ones now - the K4W2 is a flash LIDAR.

But range is always difficult. I think PMD is in use in BMWs. They purport a 90 meter(!) range, but I've never played with one.

Thanks for all the LIDAR info!

A human seems to be able to differentiate pretty reliably (although not perfectly) between dry spots and drywall. And at 50 meters, I expect that binocular vision doesn't do much.

I wonder if people can use parallax (i.e. road being revealed differently) for a 2 inch object like drywall at those kinds of distances and speeds. Parallax is uses in Google's latest software lens blur, so I'm sure it's been in robot cars since the beginning.

Less that perceive the depth (2 inches at 50 meters is tough, especially from above) but that we're really good at pattern matching (vague square thing in the road? likely not road).

You can think of parallax as stereo vision repeated over and over again with different cameras. Cameras/depth sensing has a hard time at range, since the resolution for depth decreases rapidly towards subpixel.

But you are filtering the LIDAR data (source: I have I Velodyne LIDAR in my office). Yes, one stray hit will be ignored. But, you aren't getting one stray hit. You get 20 hits on this revolution, 6 on the next, 21 on the next, and so on, and then use various algorithms to determine if you are seeing objects or noise. Recall that besides the inaccuracy of the spinning lidar (it does not hit exactly the same spot even when sitting still and hitting an immobile object), the car is moving. Any decent Bayesian filter derives a heck of a lot of information from these changes. I'm not talking about the physical change, which is also important (change of position = change in angle = different reflection point). I'm talking about how your process model generates information via hidden variables - from position over time we derive velocity, and the correlation between velocity and position increases our accuracy. In the context of the LIDAR, the filter can detect that there is a small clump of points moving towards the car at 70 mph (from it's point of view, of course from our POV it is the car approaching the debris at 70 mph). Reflections that are true noise will not be clumped, and will not consistently have a velocity that matches the car's.

With all that said, I've just played with the LIDAR, I can't give you lower detection limits. But with proper algorithms it is better than the static computation suggests.

Of course. Filters do wonders - but they're still not a panacea.

You also get the covariance across that filter. Which means you still need to decide how much to cut, whether or not to reject as rain, dust or a reflection, whether to trust your reflections under a certain reflectivity value. Data helps with this, but, as always, there's a ton of corner cases.

Most human drivers tend to over-estimate the consequence of a collision — it’s common that swerving to avoid a wild animal poses a greater danger than hitting, for instance.

However, what a robocar can do that most humans can’t is organise the clean-up, and that’s hundred times more important, because presently, hundreds of cars will pass that debris.

Let’s say you have a radar under the chassis (not unlikely given Telsa’s latest PR issue): the car OS can warn the authorities instantly with an exact location; images from several cars can be compiled to form an exact estimate of what it is. All car with significant connectivity can be informed that this lane is closed a small portion before any physical equivalent (orange cones) has time to be set up, possibly allowing a safer clean-up if the (connected) highway detects that all cars in the next x minutes have been warned, and a brusher drone can be dispatched.

Could we have the cars drive in such a way that the effect on air pressure as they pass would push some debris off the roadway?

I can’t tell if that’s a fantastic idea, or you've watching too many Fast-and-Furious action movie. Let’s agree it’s both.

Serious answer: probably not. What you describe involves turbulence control — an area that has driven the most spectacular effort in computing for half a century, and as far as I can tell, still a very dark box.

Having self-driving space flight to Jupiter trigger philosophical debate by quasi-human AI, that’s pretty much a given by now; using a fan in a controlled manner… no way. Who would have though in 1968 that 2001 was the realistic one, and Iron Finger 2 non-sensical?

What do you think the odds are that a human will be able to handle it properly?

90% of the time, a human will either 1) not notice the debris at all, and plow into it 2) brake to a sudden stop, causing a massive hazard for all around or 3) swerve dangerously into another lane.

Just this morning I watched a car come within inches of plowing into a gigantic orange traffic barrel. He was going 30MPH on a quiet residential road but he simply was not paying attention, and braked just barely in time to stop before hitting it. And this is not some unusual thing, this is how people drive. I've nearly been run down in a crosswalk at a four-way stop sign by drivers who simply decided that they did not need to look forward while going through the intersection. And you think that humans are going to have a good record at spotting and handling small debris when cruising at 70MPH? Good luck with that.

One thing I will say about humans: when they're about to run over you at low speeds, you can usually get them to stop by shouting at them. I doubt computers can manage that yet.

if there is a large object in the middle of the highway in broad daylight i am pretty sure humans navigate it pretty well since their eyes can see it far ahead due to color contrast, pattern recognition etc. the human visual system seems to excel in this situation and it seems to be a one where LIDAR may be at a disadvantage, where the stakes are high.

The program driving the car is aware of the limits of its perception, though. My grandma probably isn't.

The visual system does well, but the decision-making system behind it often does not. I'm sure that guy this morning had no trouble seeing the orange barrel he nearly rammed, but actually noticing it is another matter.

Humans have a tendency to focus on the bizarre while dismissing the average. Perhaps a self-driving car will not see this debris, although I would be surprised if that was true. The robot car has far superior sensors, compared to yours, and it never looks at anything else. Probably the consequences of hitting the debris would have been minor anyway.

On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of people every day. A robot-driven car won't do that. It would even be acceptable if the robot car stuck the debris in the roadway at full speed, every single time, as long as it wasn't mowing down little kids at the local farmers' market every Sunday.

Hitting debris, if it's severe, can endanger the driver or other drivers on the road.

I hate cars as much as anyone, but I'm a stickler for real numbers:

In 2012, the average number of deaths per day in the USA by motor vehicle was a touch under 100, not even close to "hundreds." And talking worldwide, it'd be much more accurate to say thousands--about 3k per day.

To your broader point, I'd be curious about how many accidents occur because of exceptional or long tail situations versus the everyday. Long tail happens more rarely, but presumably is also much more dangerous per unit time or unit distance. I think autocars will handle both sooner rather than later, but there will be a period where they outperform human drivers on the everyday (AFAIK, that may be now or very soon) while being inferior, probably even substantially inferior, in exceptional circumstances. Will the sum of net deaths of those two regimes be positive or negative?

I think that autocars will actually surpass us in the exceptional situations very soon. Humans are notoriously bad at handling high stress, high speed situations where fast assessment and precise actions are required. Evading an animal on the road would be an example. Because such situations are by definition rare, we cannot gain experience in handling them. The few evading lessons in driving school are no way near enough.

100/day is lower than I thought but it does make me shake my head to think about the media and public uproar that would exist if robotic cars were responsible for 100 deaths each and every day!

Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people.

And I would say that mowing down little kids at the local farmer's market would be one of those 'bizarre' incidents, unless there has been a rash of farmer's market mow-downs that I'm not aware of.

I've never hit anyone, and I'd rather not let a robot wreck my car and endanger my life in a situation that would have been easily avoidable, should I have been in control. There's your counter argument.

We let people kill more than a few of us. We let people wreck our cars and endanger our lives in situations that would have been easily avoidable.

And we don't have a choice but to live with people.

Selling a random person an item and asking them to give over control to said item, when the item carries the very real possibility of causing harm, is a harder sales pitch. You have to remember that not everyone is sold on technology, just for the sake of technology.

So you need to pitch the safety. Because you're selling an item that carries much, much less possibility of causing harm than the human-driven car does, and also that allows you to reclaim your time spent commuting (in a self-driving car you could easily e.g. read a book, code or talk to people).

I think you misread. He's saying that it's better for everyone if a robot hits debris every now and then vs a human driver that causes 100ish deaths a day.

According to http://www.nhtsa.gov/NCSA a pedestrians is killed every two hours and injured every 7 minutes. A robot car would reduce these rates to near zero.

I'm still not sold that "A robot car would reduce these rates to near zero" as you claim. Your statistics give: time of day; weather conditions; area (pedestrian or motor vehicle designated); alcohol consumption; and state/city data;

BUT I don't see conditions predicating the crash.

I would be very interested, and would be sold more on the idea of self-driving cars if the advocates who make your claim could point to examples that would reduce these rates. How many accidents are caused by drivers swerving to miss something? How many are caused by driver inattentiveness? How many are caused by mechanical error? Without these numbers, saying that a robot car would reduce these rates to near zero is on the same footing as anyone who wants to claim that self-driving cars would kill more people, because we can plan ahead. I hope that makes sense, I'm having a hard time with the language today.

By the way, I love the concept of self-driving cars, I just don't think they're the cure-all most advocates, such as yourself, claim them to be.

You're acting like one of those people who say that we don't have all the evidence on global climate change yet. There's no mystery about what causes motor vehicle collisions. Here is a huge report from the administration to Congress on the causes of motor vehicle collisions.

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811059.PDF

The majority of crashes occur in daytime, in clear weather, while the car is moving in a straight line. You'll note that substantially all of these causes would be solved by a computer-driven car.

""" About 41 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were recognition errors that include inattention, internal and external distractions, inadequate surveillance, etc. Of these, the most frequently occurring critical reason was inadequate surveillance that refers to a situation in which a driver failed to look, or looked but did not see, when it was essential to safely complete a vehicle maneuver. This critical reason was assigned to drivers in about 20 percent of crashes. Internal distraction as a critical reason was assigned to drivers in about 11 percent of the crashes. About 34 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were decision errors that included too fast for conditions (8.4%), too fast for curve (4.9%), false assumption of others’ actions (4.5%), illegal maneuver (3.8%), and misjudgment of gap or others’ speed (3.2%). In about 10 percent of the crashes, the critical reason was a performance error, such as overcompensation (4.9%), poor directional control (4.7%), etc. Among the nonperformance errors assigned as critical reasons to drivers in about 7 percent of the crashes, sleep was the most common critical reason (3.2%). The effectiveness of vehicle-based countermeasures used in mitigating the effects of various driver performance, recognition, and decision errors could be evaluated using this information. """

You'll note that "vehicle problem" is the critical pre-crash event for only 1.2% of crashes. Therefore if the computer _only_ solves the sleeping driver problem, and even if it is twice as bad as humans at handling vehicle mechanical failure, society is still reaping a net benefit. But, of course, computer-driven cars can solve nearly all of these causes of crashes: inattention, misperception, distraction, sleeping, driving too fast for conditions, and on and on.

Your belief in the superiority of your own mattress-avoiding abilities seems odd. One likely outcome of a meat module detecting a mattress ahead at 70MPH would probably be to slam on the brakes, lose control, flip over the barrier, slam head-first into a van full of little kids on a field trip where a dozen people die in the fire and it's all over the local news. Whereas a computer-driven car is likely to 1) detect such a large obstacle well in advance, 2) apply the brakes as safe levels while it thinks about something else to do, and 3) safely maneuver around the object within the performance envelope of the vehicle.

Frankly, although I'm not pinning this on you, the widespread belief in one's own superiority is part of the problem with the legacy human driver.

> Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more. That seems like it's not going to go over well with most people.

Even if this was thrownaway2424's argument - which it isn't - it would still be valid. It actually illustrates one of the biggest problem with people - the public's inability to "shut up and multiply". If we would replace (ceteris paribus) human drivers, that kill hundreds of people a year, with self-driving cars, which kill a few people a year, then it'd be a clear-cut Good Thing, a win, the right thing to do.

> Your basic argument is that, although robots will make mistakes, we'll let them kill just a few of us to save many more.

What's the alternative? The argument that, although humans will make mistakes, we'll let them kill lots of us to avoid saving some by having robots instead?

this response has nothing to do with my question. my question is how to address the technical challenge of the 'mattress in the middle of the highway' problem, not if we should ignore that challenge because on net we'll have less accidents with robocars.

Do your eyes have zoom and both active and passive (near or far)-infrared detectors? Because you could easily put those on robotic (or even non-robotic) cars. You could even put several on a robotic car.

Take this, for example: http://news.discovery.com/tech/infrared-car-system-detects-w...

But, I think you are overestimating your own ability to see debris far away, and underestimating other bigger problems.

A much bigger problem, for example, is a two-lane highway with many blind spots in the form of hills, other vehicles, and blind curves, especially those filled with slow-moving bicyclists and animals. Think the 1 in California, or the switchback-heavy roads of ski resorts in the western United States.

I remember hearing that debris is a very hard problem that Google hasn't figured out quite yet. They can detect it just fine, but they can't tell if it's safe to run over or the car should swerve to avoid it. I think they said that currently they monitor other cars and use what they do to determine what they should do, but that obviously won't work if every car is a robot.

As a stopgap, could the car just decelerate/stop and loudly alert the human driver, "Hey, you handle this"

For consumer use (as opposed to an experimental vehicle), this is never an option. Even if you assume the person in the car is (present, of-age, licensed, awake, sober), the context switch of promptly having to drive on a busy road after hours/days/months of not having driven would be terrible.

Unfortunately the thing to think about here is that as these things become more mainstream, there will be less people who are even skilled enough to control a car. So in the long run, if the system works well, any part of the design that relies upon human intervention is doomed. Ultimately your stopgap would become the equivalent of giving the wheel to the child in the backseat: more dangerous than just letting the computer do its best.

On the other hand, it will be best case a decade or two before these things are out on the road en masse and even then only the youngest drivers wouldn't have gained many hours of driving experience. Meanwhile, in that time both automated car and sensor tech will have advanced quite a bit. It's only been a decade since that first DARPA challenge and five years since google started their project, after all.

Probably not a great idea to stop on the highway.

In a driver-less future, all cars communicate their intents to other nearby cars, stopping on a highway will be as safe as pulling over on a shoulder is today. It will feel dangerous, and it will be unsettling knowing cars are passing you by at speed, but the driver-less aspect of all cars ensures a high degree of safety.

That would be the result in the long term. But in this transition period TO driverless cars, I agree that stopping on the highway in your driver-less car is a big no-no.

I believe car-to-car communication and auto-slowing-down based on that will come much sooner than driverless cars (US regulators are already talking about making V2V communications mandatory by 2017), so by the time the first driverless cars are sold, it'll probably be reasonably safe to slow down on the highway.

Or they invest in a mechanical turk "supervisory remote driver" system.

If every car was a robot they'd just avoid everything and the other cars would swarm around the object and the cars avoiding it. A lot of the rules of the road are designed to narrow the number of things a driver has to focus on while remaining safe.

Along the same lines another thing that I think most of us in the US this winter (or least parts of it) had to deal with are potholes. I've gotten quite good at avoiding the potholes around me by preparing for their presence well ahead of where they actually are. In one case there's one right at the top of a hill near me and right under the passenger side tires if you don't move slightly to either side. But because of the incline of the hill you can't even see it until it's less than a few feet in front of you. I'd hope they figure out how to detect these but it seems like a pretty difficult problem.

But now that you know that pothole is there you avoid it your next time passing. I assume an autonomous car would have a similar memory about road conditions. I also imagine the cars could share that information among themselves so instead of each driver having to learn about the pothole only one car would have to and then the network would be aware of it.

These cars will almost certainly be sharing what they've learned about the road with each other. The hard part of this is the mobile data network required to share high resolution LIDAR or other sensor data with many cars. The fact that roads are constantly changing makes it even harder.

Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.

why not (mostly) a mesh network made up of the individual cars themselves, with a few connecting to the actual internet and acting in a sense like mobile cell towers? the cars would probably vote on which one in a vicinity was going to be come the next "hub" based on some algorithm accounting for location of surrounding cards, location of its own access point, as well as info about its likely route & destination.

Why not let the cars can talk to eachother, and through eachother to the outside world?

If you need to know its location to circumnavigate a pothole, you are to fast to react to other, unexpected, obstacles.

Not a coincidence that Google bought Waze, a crowd sourced traffic and warning detection system. They are definitely cognizant that subjective data is just as important as the objective data picked up by its sensors. This is a great use case that we should expect to be handled.

working with technology teach me one thing: technology cannot solve everything :D

So what can be done with unknown situation encountered by the auto-car? alert the human: Please take control of the car, undetermined obstruction ahead (or something to that effect)

Yeah sure that sounds great, alert the human, but guess what?

The human is asleep, reading, writing, or drunk.... as has been promised elsewhere as one of the main advantages to a self-driving car.

"This future is better than the current one b/c you don't have to pay attention"

So if you're telling me I still have to suddenly pay attention, poof! up in smoke goes the advantage of this supposedly self-driving car. I can't take a nap, b/c I might have to wake up and grab the wheel when a ladder starts flying off the back of a truck towards me.

This is not a consistent picture. It's just a bunch of fairy tales. Each day dream breaks down when it relies on a neighboring, magical scenario.

You're responding to one person's suggestion as though it presents the ultimate plan of those dedicated to this technology.

You are thinking of the wrong failure mode. Going too fast to react to a piece of debris is something a well programmed robotic car will never encounter in the first place. It will not go faster than the limits posed by its perception (known) and road conditions (approximately known), and err on the side of caution. It knows no impatience. It is aware of its surroundings at all times, which means it may go faster if it knows it can change lanes, or slower if it perceives a lorry behind it.

In extreme situations where a human would outperform a robotic car, the robotic car will simply be slower. I would, however, assume that in most situations where somebody perceives the car as too slow, what is actually happening is the human overlooking some risk factor.

Smart. A good lesson in identifying misplaced assumptions, thanks.

Humans aren't particularly good at that problem either. I wouldn't be surprised if Google has or will soon get their autonomous cars to perform better than humans on a variety of road obstacles.

There is also the likelihood of the development of 'close area' networks, where a car ahead that spots the debris (and either hits or avoids) passes down a message along the chain, so that following vehicles are alerted and all begin to slow down in unison. Development efforts have been spent on this technology for existing vehicles, with the idea of alerting a driver to a hazard before they can visibly see it. This is especially important in low-visibility fog/snow conditions where massive pileups can occur.

It's amazing how new technology is meeting old technology again. For example, the horse drawn carriage.

Typically, the carriage driver doesn't steer the horse but points it in the direction they want to go. The horse and it's little horse brain negotiates the terrain and immediate obstacles.

You never had to steer the horse to avoid driving over the cliff, it was smart enough to know self preservation. The modern mechanical car doesn't even have that level of avoidance systems. This left the driver to manage more strategic tasks. There were downsides obviously. Horses could freak out and run over a crowd of people.

As a city cyclist, the Google solution looks way safer than the current status quo...

Even before we get self-driving cars, autonomous braking should be mandated so that cars and trucks are literally incapable of coming too close to a cyclist.

For trucks, ASL360. This uses 4 cameras around the vehicle and some simple software to synthesize an "eye in the sky" view. Actually, I'd like this on my car.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvKReY1tYHw

I'm a cyclist as well as a driver and I give a lot of space to cyclists when overtaking them but I don't see that working too well. When cyclists/pedestrians get used to the system they will start to abuse it and rely on the systems to force the vehicles to avoid them/stop.

Also what defines too close? If you stray 1mm inside that zone do the brakes come on hard regardless of other traffic? What happens when the cyclist has come close to the car (overtaking either side in traffic).

Autonomous braking exists for those kinds of events: When a person steps out in front of a car, for example. Yet I don't see people deliberately jumping out in front of cars just to mess with them.

It's pretty clear why, because there are too few cars with automatic breaks. When 100% of the cars have them, you might see it.

Because only a small fraction of cars have them.

Jay-walking can be dangerous. When you know that all cars will stop for you, it becomes a lot safer to just cross the street wherever you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation

It's not deliberately jumping out to mess with them (although that might be a hijack risk in some regions of the world) but the person in a hurry seeing a street full of uncrashable cars and just running across the road in a much smaller gap than they would normally risk.

Google 'russia dashcam' videos and have your worldview adjusted. Incredibly, in Russia people apparently throw themselves in front of cars to try to get injury compensation. It doesn't happen often but often enough that people have made compilation videos. That and a whole pile of crazy drivers are the reason that dashcams are so popular in Russia in the first place, they give the driver some evidence to show what happened prior to the accident.

So maybe the data collected by the cars could be used to sue people deliberately running through traffic to the Moon and back.

The kind of people who would abuse that system likely already act that way expecting the human driver to break.

The point of an auto breaking system is to prevent accidents when a well-intentioned cyclists makes an error in judgement.

I'll back that as soon as a system to force bicyclists to abide by traffic laws is required.

As a sometime cyclist, I agree that cyclists should abide by traffic laws. I assume this was downvoted for tone. The premise is undeniable. Bicycles should obey the laws. Greater rule adherence means a more predictable, and thus safer, street.

Like the law to come to a full and complete stop at every stop sign, including the four ways that blanket every neighborhood? No thank you; cyclists treat stop signs as four-dimensional yields for some damn good reasons.

There's a lot of terrible bike-riders (riding on the left side of the road around a blind corner...), but there are also a lot of terrible laws and signage. Don't delude yourself into believing that strict adherence to rules will solve the world's problems.

Non-cyclists don't typically understand the very real cost of losing momentum at a stop sign/light. Cyclists don't tend to understand that unfairness aspect many drivers seem to feel when cyclists cheat.

That said, some states are starting to address the stop sign/stop-light problem for bicyclists (well, sort of). Virginia, for example, lets cyclists (including motorcycles) treat stop lights as stop signs after a certain amount of time/cycles. I'm sure most cyclists would prefer they be treated like flashing yellow or flashing red lights (yield sign and stop sign equivalent, respectively), but we've got a ways to go before that can happen.

I think we'll need to start licensing street riding and overhaul traffic law to include bicycles on the road before things get much better.

I understand that it is seen as unfair, but write that off as Stockholm syndrome. It does suck that cities are constantly erecting even more traffic signals (etc), but the appropriate response is to blame the job-justifying behavior of city hall, not to go zero-sum and get mad at the people who can better skirt them.

For what it's worth, I don't even really bike that much these days and certainly encounter my share of idiotic bikers when driving/walking. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give in to blowhard legality tropes when it's clear that the real nuisance bikers are doing things that are so stupid (against traffic, on sidewalk, left turn from right lane, texting) that they don't care about even bodily harm. Meanwhile there are plenty of actions that are illegal yet affect nobody else that can be performed prudently and thoughtfully.

Also, any observably-broken traffic light can and should be treated as a stop sign. What else do you do, strictly follow the narrow part of the law that you've been told and patiently wait for the police to hold your hand?

He's being downvoted for content, not tone. Opposing failsafe systems that can prevent tragedy until millions of people start behaving in a way that common sense shows people (whatever their mode of transport) are not likely to is:

a) monumentally callous, b) completely idiotic and c) a sadly all too common, stereotypical response.

Can you imagine someone saying "I'll support seatbelts when everyone stops drinking and driving". No, because it would be a stupid thing to think or say, just as it is to wish death and injury on large number of perfectly blameless cyclists because of the behavior of some.

Stopping at a stop sign in residential neighborhoods as a cyclist is frequently stupid. Idaho even has a law that lets cyclists treat stop signs as yield signs, which makes perfect sense. Cyclists aren't a large threat to other road users (pedestrians/cars/other cyclists) the way cars are.

Burlington, VT (last I knew, anyway) has a similar law -- stop signs are effectively yield signs, while red lights are stop signs, as far as cyclists are concerned.

Predictable is bad. It makes people lazy and inattentive.

I have a feeling that the general populace of hacker news will disagree with us, but I am with you 100%.

I live in a small-ish town on the outskirts of Philadelphia that happens to be in the middle of some sort of really popular biking route. Unfortunately, we have a ton of really small streets with cars parked on both sides.

I understand and appreciate that cyclists have no other place to ride then in the street, and they as much a right to the road as drivers. But it can be quite frustrating to be stuck behind a cyclist who is making no effort to pedal quickly on a road where it is impossible to pass them.

The really frustrating thing though is that they completely ignore traffic rules. If you have to ride in the street and I have to treat you as part of traffic, fine. But why do you get to creep up the side of the street at red lights, then positioning yourself in front of more cars to slow down. And why do you get to run red lights? It seems it needs to be one way or the other. Either you are a pedestrian, and you should be trying to avoid traffic, or you are a participant on the road and you should obey the traffic laws.

If the biking routes are that popular, one side of the street should be a bike lane separated from traffic. Until such time, cars need to be patient. Each one of those cyclists you are stuck behind is keeping a 3 ton multi-kilowatt biggest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions car off the road. Cars are huge polluters and energy consumers. Would you be equally pissed off if the residents along narrow streets had speed bumps installed to reduce noise from fast traffic?

Cyclists are using roads that are subsidized and paid for by gasoline taxes and automobile registration fees. If you really want dedicated lanes and preeminence then pay your fair share. I don't think bicycling would be as attractive if cyclists paid for all the externalities of their hobby.

I can't tell if this is satire.

Pedestrians, bicyclists & mass transit reduce the number of cars on the road, making the gas taxes that you pay go further. And since buses & bicycle lanes are a lot cheaper than widening the road or other measures that allow more cars on the road, as a car driver you should be happy that gas taxes go towards bicycle lanes.

Very few bicyclists just use a bicycle. Most, including myself, own a bicycle and a car, and choose the bicycle for trips where it makes sense(single person trip, short distance, safe route, no cargo).

I would be willing to bet that people like me put less wear and tear on the road since the effects of bike on asphalt are negligible.

As your first assignment in transit 101, calculate the wear and tear on a road from a bike vs a car vs a semi.

I'm not aware of any country where gas taxes cover the externalities of the emission of that carbon.

I'm also not aware of any country where gas taxes and car registration fees come close to paying for the total cost of roads.

This is nonsense. Roads that cyclists ride on in the states, which are city roads, hardly ever state highways, are paid for via sales tax, not the state gasoline taxes and registration.

In Virginia, there is no longer a gas tax. Roads are funded by an extra half percentage added to the sales tax. This means non-drivers now subsidize the roadways with each purchase, while people buying gas/diesel for their mowers and generators no longer do.

That said, how much toward road maintenance would you say the average commuter pays? You're looking at $214/car/year, according to the FHA and Census Bureau (see, for example, http://www.artba.org/about/transportation-faqs/faqs/#4).

How much more roadway is used by a car than a bicycle? How much less maintenance is caused by a bicycle than a car? (N.B. cars are more than an order of magnitude heavier than bicyclists; trucks are two orders more per axle.) How much do you think a bicyclist's fair share should be? How should it be measured, applied, and taxed?

As for registration, I was under the impression that was more akin to registering a firearm; it's chief purpose is enforcement of laws and property taxes, rather than offsetting the costs of highway maintenance. Is there a state where vehicle registrations are a major source of highway maintenance monies?

>I understand and appreciate that cyclists have ... as much a right to the road as drivers.

The rest of your comment does not make me feel like you truly believe this.

Bikes are slower than cars. All road users deserve to be treated with respect and should follow the law.

I understand your frustration, but (a) there are no easy answers, and (b) as I'm sure you can imagine, bicyclists don't like riding near your car either.

I've pissed people off by following traffic laws on a bicycle as much as breaking them; I'm slow to get going from stop signs and I won't pull to the side of the road so you can squeeze me into a 2ft space of sand and crap next to the curb as you pass me.

A lot of the times that I break traffic laws, the result is me getting out of your way (running the light/not stopping at the stop sign/riding on sidewalk).

Of course yours and my experience could be very different. Traffic isn't too much of a problem here, one way or the other. The biggest problem I have to deal with is if a train comes through town and I have to wait 5 minutes for it to pas.

Why I pull in front of the line of cars stopped at the red light on my bike is because otherwise a car will clobber me. It's not a matter of if but when and the consequences will be severe for my family and me. On my commute I am minimally wearing a bright neon green penny over my clothing. When I have stopped in the line of cars at the light I have had cars almost rear end me. Also when I get to the intersection drivers do not seem to notice me there and turn right directly in front of me or a car from the oncoming lane decides to turn into me. So I crawl to the front. And do you know what happened here a handful of time? Even when I make eye contact with an oncoming car, the moment the light turned green, the driver forget I was there and tried to turn left as I was crossing on the green. So for my safety on this particular intersection on my commute I crawl to the front, wait for the light for the cross traffic to turn red and verify that all the cars are slowing, then I book it across before the light turns green for me and the other people barely awake behind the wheel. In this way I am not there anymore when another car starts going. I know it's illegal, but it is the only way I have found to get to and from work safely as it is the only entrance. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know why I do that. Some people that do not ride bicycles enough just don't have the experience to appreciate what other things might be going on when not in a car.

This is absurd. Your solution to the mere possibility of being rear-ended while waiting in the line of cars at an intersection is to "book it" across an intersection before the light is fully turned. And you somehow think this is safer?

I agree Stanley that it is absurd that what I do is safer, but sadly more than an dozen years of experience with this intersection and what I have witnessed there makes it clearly the case based on the level of care taken by too many of the motorists I share that part of the road with, good road to you as well Mr. Drew.

In the UK this is actually enforced, and we have ASLs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_stop_line) allowing cyclists to move in front of other traffic at junctions, and start ahead of them. Is this sort of thing not part of the road system i9n the US?

It's quite rare here in US, I've only encountered it sporadically near some universities. I think they make a lot of sense and wish they were common. Typically here there is enough room for a bicycle and then some ahead of the stopped cars, so it makes little sense to me why the extra markings are not painted on the road - possibly lack of familiarity?

As someone who was nearly run down by a cyclist running a red while I walked a cross walk this weekend, I agree wholeheartedly. Boston is in a constant battle between cyclists and motorists and neither side is playing by the rules.

Yet, you would think that the side of your "battle" with the tendency to kill should be expected to behave better?

I ride a bike and drive a car. And while doing both, I do my best to obey the laws and not injure other people. In Boston, and more specifically in my area of Cambridge we have major issues with drivers turning without looking at the bike lane and bikers running through red lights or riding on sidewalks.

In MA, we have very specific laws regarding how bikes are to be treated under the law and whenever riding I abide by them because they exist to keep myself (most important) and others safe. As the biker nearly hit me (I fortunately jumped out of the way with less than a foot of clearance), he yelled at me calling me an asshole and continued through the intersection with himself having a red light.

I watched a college kid die last year while walking to work as he slammed into the side of a truck. It ignited a debate about who was at fault and if trucks should be allowed to turn at that intersection. Nothing but finger pointing was done, a young man was killed, and just last week another pedestrian was hit at that same intersection crossing the street to catch the T.

Our transportation is changing in this country and instead of adjusting, in most areas we're just pointing the finger, much like you did in this post.

I'm also in the Boston area (Somerville) and have been wondering about the proper way to respond to right turns with a cyclist in the bike lane behind me.

When I have right-of-way and use my turn signal ahead of time, shouldn't I have the ability to turn right without waiting for the bike to pass (similar to how the cars behind me must wait for me to make my turn before continuing?)

I believe (so don't take it as fact), if your turn signal is on and they're behind you, you have the right of way. IF they edge forward to the line (as many do, which I think is legal?) and are to your front-right you should wait.

Again, driving and biking laws get muddled so it's hard to tell.

I wait for the cyclist to stop or pass me.

I'm not pointing fingers. I'm saying both parties are guilty. I just thing that the level of danger posed by the automobile drivers demands greater attention. Less than one person per year is killed by a cyclist. Drivers kill 100 in the united states every day.

Really? Ever drive on a public road? What percentage of drivers break the speed limit laws? 95%? 7 nines in California? Cops don't even pull you over until you're driving at least 10-15 over. So obviously speeding is a totally fine law to break, but when I roll through a residential stop sign at 5 mph (that has obviously been installed only to enforce right-of-way) what I'm doing is inexcusable?

Until drivers fall all over themselves to apologize for driving 2 tonnes of metal at 80 in a 55, I'm not going to beat myself up for rolling through stop signs (that aren't stopped at for cars either, by the way).

The problem is not with breaking the law. Drivers and cyclists do this more-or-less equally I'd imagine.

The problem is in breaking expectations.

If I see 10 cars driving 80mph in a 55mph zone, then it is reasonable for me to expect an 11th, and I'm certainly not shocked when I do see that.

At stop signs and red lights when I'm riding my bike I've seen far too many fellow cyclists seem to take pleasure in their ability to do the unexpected and get away with it.

They weave between stopped traffic, overtake slowing cars on the right, breeze through stop signs without yielding, block pedestrians by entering crosswalks and stopping.

These are legitimate bad behaviors on the part of cyclists, and until we admit that and start working on changing the culture towards one of behaving within expectations we're not going to get much respect from all the drivers on the road who largely do adhere to expectations.

Those aren't legitimate bad behaviors, cyclists are just being efficient by using the roads organically. Im travelling right now in Indo, and there are no traffic controls, few sidewalks, the roads are as narrow as a bike path and shared by pedestrians, cows, horse and carriage, and anything else you can think of. Scooter drivers do all the bad things you talk about, and it's amazing how efficient traffic is. You can get from one end of Mataram to ther on a scooter without ever having to come to a complete stop. Nobody seems to get angry or frustrated.

When a driver's expectation is that he shouldn't have to pay attention to what is going on around him, I think it's the expectation that is the problem, not the violation of that expectation. When I return to Canada, I'm going to be an even worse cyclist than I am now. I've learned a lot.

Of course, I also read an article the other day about a shopping mall that painted fast and slow lanes on the floor for pedestrians. Traffic controls for pedestrians. Never underestimate the faith Americans place in the incompetence of their fellow citizens.

Replace bike with car. You seem to think that drivers are not massive traffic law violators? Speeding, double parking, tailgating, failing to signal, need i go on? Expecting an entire group to act like pristine angels before life saving laws can be put in place is asinine at best.

the problem is bicyclists tend to do things that are far more dangerous / serious:

* running red lights * running stop signs * driving down the wrong side of the road * driving on sidewalks

bikes are far less dangerous than cars, which is why nobody minds that they routinely break far worse rules. in addition, bicyclists routinely break the rules you mentioned.

As a resident of Brooklyn, I see cars that do those things more often than bicycles that do those things. (granted, the car driving the wrong way on a one way is usually one going in reverse at 30mph, or a police radio car with or without sirens on)

Agreed, and I wish there would be fines and enforcement. Though for half of those you can frequently argue that the biker is avoiding more-common dangers to themselves, like having to squeeze between parked and moving cars where there isn't enough room to do so safely.

In the vast majority of America, including the vast majority of cities, biking is ludicrously poorly supported and heavily favors killing bicyclists over losing a lane. Not that this is any surprise, but it is what it is.

The problem is that these things only seem more dangerous. At the end of the day, momentum kills. Speeding in an automobile, especially in urban areas, is far and away the most dangerous thing of any of the "crimes" here, and it's treated as though it should be expected, not reprehensible as it is.

A cyclist yielding at a stop sign isn't going to kill anyone. The car flooring it after each one and rolling the crosswalks may.

I don't get it. This is not a zero sum game. If a cyclist breaks the law, does that mean you can now pass the next one closer?

You seem to lack the necessary maturity to operate a multi-ton vehicle, getting agitated and trying to portray driving in the street as some tit-for-tat game. Stop and think about what you are doing.

Apples to oranges.

No car passengers have ever died because a cyclist hit them.

I absolutely agree, and I now feel like offering to cyclists a t-shirt that reads in bold “We WANT Google self-driving cars.” and maybe, in tiny ‘Because, if you can read this, your driving sucks and you don’t respect security distance.’

I think they have a lot more work to do. I bike through Mountain View every day and over the last few years I've had more close calls with self-driving cars then the normal kind.

As a city cyclist in Amsterdam, I have to disagree...

The fellow people over at Reddit have alerted me to the fact that the Google car is actually still breaking the law (while being a tremendous improvement over the idiots that normally operate cars):

Turning Across Bicycle Lanes 21717. Whenever it is necessary for the driver of a motor vehicle to cross a bicycle lane that is adjacent to his lane of travel to make a turn, the driver shall drive the motor vehicle into the bicycle lane prior to making the turn and shall make the turn pursuant to Section 22100 [general turning regulations]

The car must be in the bicycle lane before turning. You can not turn by crossing over the lane, and if you couldn't get into the lane before, you will have to wait to get into the lane and then turn.

This figures in nicely with the people here saying we should disregard cyclists because they constantly break the traffic laws. Are you always in the bicycle lane when turning with your car? Don't claim this is a surprising rule and not generally known; try cycling some time, you'll find the traffic laws are setup in a way that often makes it impossible to travel efficiently, safe and legally.

(If I can just add this: traffic laws for cycling are the ultimate bikeshed. Imagine a bikeshed committee, where the people on the comittee have no need for a bikeshed and no concept of how people use a bikeshed, or why. In Germany, up until some time ago, they regulated the voltage and energy source for bike lights.)

Interesting thing about that law is that it's probably there due to the limitations of human drivers. An autonomous vehicle that is fully aware of objects on every side probably doesn't need the precaution that the law requires. It will only turn when there is no cyclist coming.

This is amazing, but if anything it's made me more wary of some of the challenges the project faces.

- What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? How quickly can the computer process the real-time imagery and react compared to a human with their peripheral vision. - What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road. A human driver will probably have spotted the hazard (we all train for that kind of thing when learning to drive) earlier. What are the limitations of the peripheral vision of the car when checking hazards? - What if a fire hydrant bursts on the side of the road 50m in front of the car and makes the road ahead really wet? Can the cameras determine and detect quickly enough the need for different driving (and probably braking) due to a change in surface?

The sad truth of this is that whilst it's an interesting technical challenge, I really can't forsee a situation where a computer could react to all the different things that could happen when driving a car as well as a human.

The thing is .. what happens if a cyclist falls in front of a car with a human driver? Probably the car drives over him and the cyclist dies. The challenge is to do better than that, which is a rather low bar.

People won't see it like that. If a human driver makes a mistake, it's "human error". If a robot driver makes a mistake it's criminal negligence -- because robots are capable of not making mistakes.

In other words, robots are held to a higher standard than humans.

I don't think it's quite that... If a human driver makes a mistake, the driver is liable. If the car makes a mistake, the car manufacturer is liable. This is true today; if you're driving along and you swerve into someone/something, that's your fault. But if your wheel falls off because of a manufacturing defect the car company is going to get sued. The car company faces a much higher liability risk, because they're responsible for ALL of the cars they manufacture, unlike the driver who is responsible for a single car.

It'll be the same with automated driving software. All of the liability for accidents that occur in cars using the software will be concentrated with the software developer, instead of distributed amongst all of the drivers. That might be too much liability to make the business viable.

The good news for us drivers: our insurance rates should drop once the cars are fully automated and manual control isn't even possible. At that point we'll just be passengers, and we shouldn't need to pay insurance.

There's two points about insurance: If you own the car, and assuming cars are still stolen / dented etc, then you'll want insurance the same way you insure your house and other possessions.

However the bigger point is I doubt you'll own a car. More likely there will be lots of driverless taxi companies, and it'll just be very convenient to use your phone to call a taxi to take you where you want. In this case, the insurance cost is folded into the cost of hire.

Maybe. Many people (particularly parents) in suburban areas store a substantial amount of equipment in their cars, and can't effectively use a taxi-service. If I had to pack everything my kids need in a day in and out of shared car at every stop, it would add 10 minutes to each leg of my trip. Plus, do I haul the stuff I bought at the store on my way to work into the office so that my self-driving car can go somewhere else? What about my kid's stroller? That lives in the car.

In urban areas, people travel light, but that's not the case in sub-urban and rural areas.

Taxis are an incredible pain when you have kids, because of the carseat issue. For example, they're required by law in CA for kids under 8 (with a height exception that doesn't apply to most kids).

For bigger kids there are some sorta options like RideSafer vests, but with a baby you're just screwed.

Zipcar has the same issue; our use of it dropped hugely once kids appeared, because it's just too painful.

But regardless, isn't the total liability the same. N number of cars x N drivers paying for N insurance policies vs N number of cars x 20 car companies paying for N insurance policies.

Is it "making a mistake" to take tens of milliseconds to realize that a human has fallen down in front of you?

You're right, I should have said "accident" instead of "mistake".

> Is it "an accident" to take tens of milliseconds to realize that a human has fallen down in front of you?

And the answer is still 'no'.

I think the day when a computer is more reliable than the median licensed driver will quickly come. A big piece of that is because the software will be aware of and respect traffic law.

Wow. You are giving waaaayyy to much credit to the responsiveness of humans. Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system. Lets also not forget distractions like cell phones, finding/selecting music, passengers, OTC and prescription drugs, et al.

From my perspective, I'm the only good driver on the road and everyone else needs to go back to driving school or have their license revoked. :)

> Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system.

1 in 4 seems high, especially if you mean to the level of impairment. I'd be interested to see the source of that statistic.

Impairment is on a continuous scale. Even a totally sober person would have their concentration slightly impaired if say they caught something out of the ordinary in the corner of their eye. If that happens at the wrong time, you have an accident.

The CDC says alcohol impairment is a factor in 31% of traffic fatalities.

On Friday and Saturday nights (presumably peak impairment time), checkpoints determine that about 3% of drivers are impaired. http://www.iihs.org/iihs/sr/statusreport/article/48/10/1

It's not just high, it's ludicrously high. Over the easter weekend in my city, extensive random breath testing of almost 60,000 people caught 58 driving above 0.05 - still too high but orders of magnitude less than the GP's assertion.

One in 10^4 would be (much) more accurate.

Source: http://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/breaking-news/nsw-poli...

I too, as "statistically significant amount" to me means "measurable above detector error."

FWIW, http://www.allergy.org.au/patients/product-allergy/alcohol-a... says:

> The human body constantly produces small amounts of alcohol itself. Normal levels of 0.01 to 0.03 mg of alcohol/100 ml are contained in the blood. By contrast, a blood alcohol limit for driving of 0.05 per cent is equal to around 50 mg of alcohol/100 ml of blood.

Thus, according to my definition, 100% of drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system, though nowhere near to the level of impairment.

> "Roughly 1 in 4 drivers have a statistically significant amount of alcohol in their blood system"

You're going to need to provide a citation here.

As I understand it, the computer has enough sensors (LIDAR, etc) that it has far better vision coverage than a human. That is, I believe it can see in all directions at once.

On the other hand it might be a lot better to detect other kinds of hazards.

The car has many fewer limitations on its peripheral vision when checking hazards because it has dozens of sensors all over the car, as opposed to the humans' very limited eyesight.

There are over 30,0000 deaths in the US alone every year, which is actually near historical lows. I believe there are several million accidents and hundreds of thousands of injuries.

Now the computer might not be perfect but if it's 10x better, wouldn't that be acceptable?

Getting to that point is the challenge. I'm just throwing out questions and raising the point that there are some very very hard challenges to solve, where humans are probably much better.

You should try to be more specific. What are the hard challenges that remain? Where are humans better? If it's bad weather driving, for example, perhaps humans would drive in those instances.

There is a type of trolling - the concern troll - where a person just asks questions.

There's a risk that you look like a concern troll or like someone with a superficial understanding of the topic or someone with vested interests in competing technology.

Concern trolling has a long history in, for example, big tobacco campaigns.

I don't believe you are trolling and I didn't downvote you. I am giving a possible explanation for downvotes.

30,000 deaths a year in a country like the US is nothing. More people die from falling down the stairs. Should we ban stairs next?

Your statement is factually incorrect according to official statistics,[1] which I found through a very easy Google search after reading your comment. (Note that the statistic shown is for all accidental falls, not just falls on stairways, and even in the aggregate all falls cause fewer deaths than car crashes.)

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc-inj.htm

He's way off. About 1300 people die from falling down stairs every year.

http://danger.mongabay.com/injury_death.htm

So, if we reduced auto deaths to 1300 by using self-driving cars, that would be acceptable?

Pretty comparable - 26,000 accidental falls, 30,000 car deaths.

You said "fall down the stairs", which I addressed hours ago. Also, you aren't accounting for the hundreds of thousands of people injured and the millions of dollars of damage.

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but Google cars still can't drive in the rain or in the snow. Not even on a wet street. They have driven all those thousand miles in Mountain View, Calif. in good weather.

Generally lidar's don't work well with rain or reflective surfaces.

My understanding is that it uses vision processing algorithms on a camera nowadays, and works just fine in rain. Snow is an issue because the car can't see the lane markings through the snow -- a human drives through snow by remembering where they were or making a guess.

"... works just fine in rain". For some levels of rain. ;) I've been in some downpours so strong I couldn't see the lane markings.

And if you ever look at a large parking lot after a thaw when it had been snowing earlier in the day you can see we're also horrible at predicting where the lines are and, for the most part, use other drivers as our guide.

A computer can do dead-reckoning off of fixed objects (buildings, bridges) and remember a millimeter-level resolution map of where lanes are better than any human.

They still have trouble in snow. I think that's fine for a first version.

I fully expect the first consumer versions of automatic cars will have a "No, I won't drive for you today, Dave" mode. Driving in everything but snow would still be a huge win.

There's a relatively simple fix for lane markings, that would help autonomous cars even in good weather. You know those reflective lane marking doodads they embed in the road surface? We start replacing them with magnetized nails that are pounded into the asphalt in intervals. Sensors in the car could recognize the lanes even in deep snow or pea-soup fog. And homeowners could easily outfit their driveways with a trip to Home Depot.

They don't use the embedded ones in most parts of snow countries like Canada, because it's hard to get them flush with the road so that they work with snowplows. AFAICT, Toronto still uses just plain old paint on most of its roads.

Indeed — I remember a projet in high-school, explaining how lidar were being used to measuring rain drops direction…

The thing is: there apparently now is a technology (at Mercedes or BMW) that uses beamers instead of front lights; a secondary camera detects droplets’ movement, predicts their fall and the beamer doesn’t shine light precisely on them. It helps light in front of you at night without shining mainly the rain. I was stunned when I learned we are now that fast. Same thing with cooking mosquitoes with lasers. I’m assuming that with those tech handy, a lidar should work properly through the rain. It leaves braking as a problem, especially on black ice — and that one is tougher.

You're thinking of the intel system:

http://iq.intel.com/future-headlight-technology-could-make-r...

BMW does have an interesting new headlight system available on the coming i8 which boosts the high beam range using lasers, which is still pretty cool but doesn't avoid rain.

Black ice is only black in our limited visual spectrum. On an infrared camera it would likely stand out like a sore thumb.

I am also curious about multiple vehicles using LDAR at the same time. Is it possible for two or more vehicles to operate using LIDAR independently, or must they synchronize with one another and how far apart do they have to be?

Humans have very poor peripheral vision, while the self-driving car can see perfectly in all directions. I think it also has a faster reaction time. (Though either way, a car may not always be able to break in time.)

But what about distance? Imagine a cyclist travelling down a hill at 50km/h and running straight over some crossroads in a residential neighbourhood. Assuming a line of sight to the hill, a human can probably recognise that that fast moving object (that may or may not run over the cross-roads) is a bicycle with a cyclist on it quicker than a computer can do the same.

This of course, assumes the driver has good vision or is wearing any prescription they might be required to do so by law.

> The sad truth of this is that whilst it's an interesting technical challenge, I really can't forsee a situation where a computer could react to all the different things that could happen when driving a car as well as a human.

I agree, at least for some time. But it's not about a computer reacting to as much as a human. The question is, can a computer can do a better job overall (e.g. drnk driving or texting while driving accidents are eliminated)? So dont look for a perfect driving record, as humans have loads of accidents today. As long as the computer has less frequent or severe accidents it is a welcome improvement to our roads even if it does have infrequent limitations.

I personally think society is going to have a much harder time accepting death by software bug, than human error.

A software bug IS a human error. We need to accept the overall better (statistical) performance. In aviation this works out pretty well. As well a bug will harm at most on a limited number of events after which it is weeded out (like in aviation). The same human error (eg. drunk driving) will occur over and over again.

People will have a lot of trouble accepting that they drive worse than the self-driving car, but less that others do. After all, we all think we're better than average drivers.

What I think we'll see initially is that people won't think they need self-driving for themselves but will be all for it for others. Think parents buying a car for their teenager: they'll want that car to have every safety feature under the sun. Likewise, the younger generation helping their aging Baby Boomer parents buy a new car.

Once you've started to get some mindshare that way, I think usage will spread pretty quickly. Then I think we'll hit a cultural tipping point.

When there are a lot of self-driving cars on the road and people have seen the evidence of their safety, not driving one will clearly become a selfish act: you're choosing to endanger others because you want to be in control of your car.

In the same way that we scorn people who don't wear seatbelts (even though it only puts them at risk) and despise people who don't make their children buckle up, I expect eventually we'll feel the same way about self-driving cars. It will be considered a public safety issue where you are a bad person if you don't drive one.

>What if the cyclist swung from the pavement on to the road

My Volvo already has a system that is better at that than me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5nfT9dfPi7g

Very impressive, although I'd like to throw a few more edge cases at the system than the one shown in the demo video.

The good thing about computers is that they can simulate the future based on current physical data and make decisions in realtime, so if a cyclist fells off on front of it, computer can detect the diversion as it happens, simulate each possible scenario beforehand, and choose the one that has the best outcome. actually it can perform a lot better than humans. look at this unbeatable rock-paper-scissors robot video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nxjjztQKtY

The intermediary step (computer driving with human failsafe) is also incredibly challenging, because you are unsure of the computer's knowledge and intent (this is also what makes backseat drivers so annoying).

This computer drives much more conservatively than a human driver, so much so that I'm not sure a human failsafe driver would grok what is going on.

Waiting for a railway crossing to be completely clear before proceeding is not something most drivers do (ehem, especially at that particular intersection), and may seem like odd behavior to a failsafe driver behind the wheel. Similarly, waiting for a bicyclist coming from behind may also seem odd. For one, he may not have that information since he is less attentive in 'failsafe' mode... or many human drivers would see the cyclist and proceed a bit more quickly to make the turn to get out of traffic and free the intersection for the oncoming cyclist (and cars behind him).

On the other hand I would have probably pulled the plug on the computer driver when Mr. Indecisive-Cyclist was in the road. The computer handled it fine, but as the failsafe, am I sure that the computer will handle it well?

This intermediary stage is going to get really weird, I don't even know how you'd manage liability in this world.

I think the fail safe human laws are only useful to license research.

For day to day driving, the cars should either be fully autonomous or have the automated systems limited to intervening in dangerous situations (like current brake priming systems and the like). If the driver is able to take (primary) control, they should be required to be in control.

Tricky. There may be situations where the car stops and says "I can't do this" at which point primary control is handed over to the driver. Think about the system being damaged or obstructed, or a protest rally staring in the street up ahead. The driver should be able to take over, maybe after a stop.

Given this "stop, your turn" option, IMHO it would be horrible to also deny the driver from taking over during normal driving conditions, seeing as though computers will certainly make mistakes. Allowing that option to exist, however, should not equate to the human 'driver' being liable for not taking control when the computer failed.

Basically, you should give passengers an emergency stop option and not make them liable for not using it.

My thinking about this is based on humans being very bad at handling situations where they don't really need to pay attention. I think if the system is only good enough that an attentive driver/passenger can use it well, then it needs to be made better before it is licensed for everyday use.

The stop to change control thing makes sense to me.

I'd actually go further. An autonomous driving system that works for routine driving pretty much has to be designed on the basis that the human "failsafe" will NOT be paying attention and will not be prepared to take over on short notice. Heck, enough people don't pay close attention to their driving today without self-driving cars.

The most obvious intermediate stage is designated sections of highways in which self-driving cars can operate without active human drivers. The question though is whether that's an interesting enough use case to push through all the legal/regulatory/etc. changes that would be required.

I see where your concern is: this is the sort of lateral synthesis of ideas that computers are still vastly our lessers at performing. We can fill in what we know is going to happen before the rider hits the ground and potentially react before the event happens, while the computer would have to have an algorithm in place specifically to detect a combination of rider posture, angular acceleration of the bike, identify a heavy package affecting the center of balance, and so on.

Ideally the system can compensate in another area where it does beat us, such as reaction time.

> while the computer would have to have an algorithm in place specifically to detect a combination of rider posture, angular acceleration of the bike, identify a heavy package affecting the center of balance, and so on.

Or just an algorithm to detect that the rigid body in moving in front of the car is about to enter a collision trajectory. Isn't that a pretty much solved problem? There's no need for computer to "know" that the dangerous object is a cyclist.

I don't understand why people seem to always imagine that human drivers are all Michael Schumacher or Mario Andretti.

Most drivers are terrible at driving. They're unobservant, they have slow reaction times, they have inappropriate reactions, they don't adjust to conditions, they don't understand the laws, they can't anticipate other drivers, they can't plan ahead, you're lucky if they're actually looking where they're going half the time.

What if the cyclist fell off his bike in front of the car? I'd be surprised if a human was able to react to this in less than two seconds. The cyclist probably dies. It wouldn't take much for a computer-driven car to do better than this.

What if a fire hydrant bursts and makes the road really wet? I bet the computer would do something besides continue driving at full speed the way 90% of human drivers would.

These standards are just ridiculously high. Everybody is imagining scenarios that 90% of the time would not be handled correctly by human drivers, and then saying that anything less than a 100% success rate on the part of the computer is insufficient.

I'd like to think that Google isn't meticulously evaluating the situations where humans have to take over. In those cases, the software needs to be much more robust. Only way to encounter these situations is to get more cars out there in the greatest variety of markets.

My guess is that the car would fare much better in reaction time than any human, not just with reacting to the biker, but also with surrounding conditions (e.g., not flying into an opposing lane and hitting a car or something similar).

People have a very hard time grasping the speed of computers. Imagine you saw the world in 1/1000 speed, and how quickly you'd be able to react to occurrences.

I love how the car understands the cyclist's hand signals. The self-driving car is going to have a gigantic impact on the world, I can't wait to see it commercialised.

As a cyclist, I was shocked to see the cyclist change his mind like that —unless he was a tester too, that’s how you get bumped– but I really hope Google Cars learn that most cyclists actually don’t signal their turn that well.

Cars don’t bother either, and the last frame show how most non-car drivers get killed: don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang. Seeing how Google taught its car to behave literally had me shout in joy an dance at my desk.

don’t notice what passing just being, shift in gear, swerve and… bang

Can you rephrase this? I can't understand it.

It's my guess that he's referring to the common motorist behavior of switching lanes and accelerating when the car in front slows down or stops. The car in front of you slowed down for a reason. I've witnessed two accidents caused by such behaviour.

I assume GP's talking about when a car overtakes a cyclist and then turns in front of (or across) them without having driven forward enough to be clear. All too common and very dangerous.

At the very end of the video, you can see a common situation: a car waits at an intersection to turn right. Nothing seems to block its way. Actually, in the US, cars seem to turn right even when the light is red, for instance.

Anyway: what they show is that, just behind the car, just at its right, there is a cyclist. But it is in the dead spot. That cyclist is most likely going steady because the path is clear: cars were waiting at the intersection, but what was blocking them just passed, so you can move along. My experience is that cars always forget to signal they are turning, and they never think about check the deadspot.

This is how most cyclists die.

It was notoriously how the first death involving a Vélib, (Paris’ free bike scheme); it actually happened meters away from where I was at the time.

More importantly, this is something that most car drivers don’t care to check: they always blame the cyclist for “showing up out of nowhere” and usually do so violently. They completely neglect that the don’t have the right of way at all, nor that it would make no sense for them to pretend to have it if the vehicle was anything else than a bicycle: I’ve seen them always apologise profusely when they caught a motorbike in the same situation.

I was living in a very busy street (the largest in Paris, actually) where there are dozens of such intersections, and it used to happen to me everyday. By ‘happen’, I mean that I had to bang on the car side to prevent the blow daily; there was visible damage to either the car or the bike weekly. I had to drop my bike at the last minute, letting it be crunched by the car wheel, or jump on the car front/engine to avoid being crushed almost every other month. That’s why I rapidly switched from my beloved bike to Vélib, to be able to afford such frequent accidents. I was hit badly twice, fell on the macadam both time: the first time, my front teeth cut my lip open (still have a scar, and one front tooth is still visibly broken in half); the second time, I busted my knee and couldn’t walk for a month. I have less of a limp now, but I can predict the weather quite accurately; and I can’t play tennis, basketball, ski, skate or do anything remotely fun, really.

In a dense city, there is nothing you can do to prevent it, except never cross a street: cars would come out and turn at any time when the light is green to cross. You are inches away from the car (because that’s how much space city planning grants you) and a ton of steel is going full Bruce-Lee finger-length punch on you. It’s very hard to describe the feeling it gives you: imagine a car willingly crushing you to death. That’s about as reassuring at that. It’s unexpected, sudden and overwhelmingly violent.

This is why cyclists insist one staying one meter away from deadly machines as much as they can. Most drivers reaction is “I didn’t touch you! Why do you care?!” -- including when the bicycle wheel was torn under the car front wheel. Taxi drivers are particularly violent in that circumstance -- and their parent company don’t care, at all, when you mention the problem, and a need for training.

Out of principle, I refused to yield and stop cycling around: I felt I was right, and should be respected for it. Once you’ve experience Paris with a bicycle (and I had for a decade) walking in painfully slow, metro stinks and driving is absurd on every level.

I’ve asked several Police officers to do something, from warning, surveilling the most common intersection; offer training; all those I talked to (including a Commissioner’ aid) felt clueless and said that they only thing they can do is scrape away the leftovers… I never dared to ask how much gore was in those. Official statistics purposely downplay the issue. I’ve challenged every local ‘Open data’ initiative to let me cross-reference hospital, morgue and police reports and sort death by vehicle driven and exact location — in vain.

Someone in my family worked on car electronics, and I did challenge him to implement a side radar on the right side to prevent it -- his reaction was the usual, dis-heartening reaction from all drivers and car makers: it doesn’t threaten people inside the car, why should I care? I’ve called this the “I have a tank! Fuck You!” mentality.

Notice how until couple of years ago, not a single security feature, or even measurement was about people outside the car? That’s how you ended up with a ton of reinforced metal with narrower and narrower windows, up to the point now where standard cars are actually stronger than the first armored tanks.

I have banged on car side windows at the last minute as much as I could, but my life remained in constant danger. After seeing that the Police was powerless, I have investigated the idea that in this particular situation, my life was expressly at stake; no public authority could do something. I even asked them to sign affidavit confirming that was what they told me. Therefore, I believed I was left in a state of nature, i.e. a legal void in principled law systems, meaning should be allowed to defend myself using deadly force. I had started to learn how to use a firearm, and working on a campaign saying that cyclists were now armed, would not hesitate to shoot in that particular case. I considered some scary premiss around the idea that the blood would stop being ours, and start being those of the actual culprits.

I considered the very likely scenario that would lead me in jail for manslaughter, i.e. for a decade. As someone who had taught classes at the local security jail, I knew what that meant: daily, violent anal rape; possibly forced drug addition if I wasn’t cooperative.

This is something that made me have nightmares for years. Imagine having bruises from living your worst dream on a regular basis, and contemplating rape for a decade as your only way out.

The friend who showed me how to shoot noticed I was more scared of the gun that beginners usually are; I was more scared after. I mentioned why, or rather, I said that I wasn’t sure I could stop a car swerving by killing the driver -- which was true; that just wasn’t the main reason holding a gun scared me. He thankfully pointed how far I had gone -- ignoring the main extent of it.

I realised how this had repeatedly triggered very problematic psychiatric issues over the years. It’s strange and yet very empowering to have a paranoia directly triggered by a perfectly rational inference from regular lucid experience.

This is the actual reason why I left Paris, the city I spent my life in, and whom I will always love. I have swore to not come back until taxi drivers, by far the worst offenders, are gone.

That’s why I’m so supportive of Uber, other similar services, and Google Self driving cars: there offer a working solution. I can recognise the tiny license Uber cars have, and they have consistently respected road rules. I never considered owning a car myself, or even moving around in such a violent mean of transport. But those became the only ways for me to come back home without having crippling, yet rational, nightmares.

That last five seconds, that “side death”, has been a haunting companion for years. This exact situation, so let me answer your question precisely: a car turns right without checking there is a bike there in the blind-spot (one that actually has the right of way, and more importantly a body about to be crushed).

Detecting it, and waiting for the bike to pass first might be some engineers’ couple of month of work, but it is far more to me.

I have never mentioned this to anyone. I just though the discrepancy between what that means to cyclist and your misunderstanding mattered.

In the US, that situation is called a "right hook", and it's indeed very dangerous for cyclists. Once you know about it, though, it's pretty easy to ride defensively and avoid it: just refuse to pass on the right of a car that might turn right. Get behind them instead and wait for them to turn (or go straight). In California, at least, a cyclist is legally entitled to take the lane at any intersection where a right turn is allowed.

(In practice, I admit that I don't do this 100% of the time. I never pass to the right of a car with a right turn signal on, but if a car is waiting at a red light without a turn signal, I'll sometimes pass on their right, always stopping well in front of the front of the car, so that I'm confident the driver sees me.)

It really looks like the cyclist is a tester.

I agree, most cyclist don't signal at all, sometimes they will just subtly point with their finger.

Not the best idea to rely on the cyclist's signals.

> Not the best idea to rely on the cyclist's signals.

Not the best idea to rely on car's signals, either, given how frequently they're incorrectly used (or not at all). Not really any different to the cyclists case.

Maybe the cyclist was avoiding debris on the shoulder.

I think it will only take a few on the road to teach motorists what legal driving looks like. Hopefully it'll have a traffic calming effect in general.

Right. I rarely drive and actually try to obey the law when I do so, but where I live (Chicago), obeying the law is a recipe for angering other drivers. Things like obeying the speed limit or stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks delay other drivers, who are quick to express their anger. In a few years, maybe they'll just think I'm in a robot car!

Now all you have to do is to get cyclists to actually use hand signals. Sure they're technically required but in any of the countries that I have been to where bikes are a frequent mode of transportation hand signals appear to be mostly optional.

> Now all you have to do is to get cyclists to actually use hand signals.

I was waiting for the snarky comment. All I'm highlighting is the system's ability to recognise such intention (many times ignored by drivers). Regardless, such indications seem not to be "necessary", the GSC detects the cars direction/intention primarily via its mounted laser, rather than "looking" for left/right light indicators.

This is hardly city driving. Try driving in a European city. (I love this project and can't wait to buy or rent a self-driving car)

Harder yet, Southeast Asia. Hundreds of pedestrians, tons of vehicle variety (some entirely makeshift), uncontrolled intersections, very little regard to any regulations.

> very little regard to any regulations.

That's an important point, I never expected lanes count and lane direction to be interpreted as suggestions until I saw people going through a roundabout on both sides at the same time.

Your other comment in this thread got killed, probably because of the url shortener.

Edit: I think comments killed for some reasons can't be recovered by editing them.

Thanks, I replaced it with the huge ugly full URL, does it work now?

edit: well, removed the link entirely, better?

edit 2: welp, I can't delete it either so whatever. Thanks for the notice and help.

Yeah I was just biking in Vietnam and Cambodia and it's quite a different system with stuff all over the place. There is a kind of logic to it - you project their trajectory and yours and if there's no impact you keep going, otherwise you modify speed and direction in a minimal way to avoid impact regardless of going the wrong way on the wrong side of the road etc. It takes quite a bit of getting used to as a western driver though from a computational software point of view the above is probably a fairly simple algorithm.

The basics of flock behavior.

I think swarm-like logic might work better at that level.

In my mind structured road conditions are a prerequisite for driverless cars.

I've been in many situations where conservative driving according to the rules of the road is not possible. In the West this is more limited to dense cities and exceptional situations. In India, though, this is the rule.

If you waited for pedestrians to finish crossing or for cars to clear intersections, maintained a safe following distance, signaled before turning, waited for other parties to yield, etc, you would never leave your driveway.

It's difficult for me to imagine a computer deciding to gently nudge pedestrians with its bumper in order to proceed through a green light, which I've had to do several times while driving there.

Crime of the future: change the road environment at the right time to get the target's car to crash themselves.

@zimbatm (because there isn't a reply option at this level)

I'm also sure there are screenwriters already working on incorporating such scenes into movies. Likely we'll see it on the big screen before we see it in real life.

Which is why Self Driving Cars™ will never be legal without strong AI.

There's no such thing as "Structured Road Conditions" anywhere in the world. Whether it's the ice storms of the Northeast US, radar interference, one lane two-way roads, potholes that can devour a wheel or roads that turn into mud -- the analog world is a harsh and unrealistic place for a technology that has never made its way out of cherry-picked municipalities in ideal conditions.

The last chapter is not city driving. It's the first chapter. So far Google has tackled only the lowest hanging fruit.

I will give you a more harder test environment. Try driving in any major Indian city, especially in the city core.

Super narrow roads. Zero adherence to traffic rules. Kids playing on the roads, sudden reactions from people on the road when they have to cross. Unsignalled sudden breaking, turns, U-turns, people popping up in front of the vehicle from no where etc etc.

What's more how should you expect the car to react when a dog comes chasing. Or when a traffic police guy asks you to stop or take a diversion(You won't believe how common this is here). How will you negotiate frequently occurring speed breakers and pot holes. The list is endless.

I believe starting to test some where in the streets of a city like Bangalore/Mumbai would help.

I think self-driving cars will be introduced very gradually. First only highways where it's really easy for a computer, then maybe American cities. The harder the street layout, the longer we'll have to wait for this technology. So maybe American cities will get the technology a few years before European.

I don't understand why the detractors don't understand this. Many people (including some commenters here) seem to think that the technology is useless unless it can handle all possible situations.

Auto-drive on long highway sections would be an amazing improvement by itself and prevent all kinds of fatigue related accidents. The cars could just announce ("Driver, take control") as they exit the highway system.

Hell, trucking companies could just have drivers waiting at highway exits to do the last-mile driving, the long-haul sections of trucking wouldn't require a person on-board.

I don't think it would be unfeasible to install beacons designed to aid driverless vehicles either, especially on highways where things don't change very quickly. Simple posts with machine-readable signalling (visual/radio/whatever). Most signage is designed for human recognition, but I bet it wouldn't be impossible/terribly expensive to install signage designed for automated driving.

Southern Europe in particular, Sicily was good fun; I hear Naples is even more exciting.

The interesting thing was that the drivers were quite skilled but the way they drove and the traffic moves they had to be and even with those skills there were far more dented cars around than in the UK where systems and organisation allow a lower skill level.

Exactly, I live in Rome and you'd really be surprised by the number of bikers who drive on the sidewalk to avoid morning traffic. I don't think Google cars are prepared to respond to people merging from the sidewalk, they're just unpredictable and nothing will ever change that.

Human drivers can't predict that either, and the Google car should have a much faster reaction time than a human driver.

Reaction time isn't the problem. Cars can't make moral decisions.

It's not uncommon that a pedestrian will jump in the road (sometimes intentionally to commit suicide). This happens to me personally on a daily basis in San Francisco. Sometimes the driver has a moral choice to ether run the car off the road killing people on the sidewalk or killing the pedestrian.

What do you expect a Self-Driving car to do in that situation?

"Cars can't make moral decisions."

There are moral problems that I'd be uncomfortable putting to a computer.

This isn't one of them. Am I missing something, is there something wrong with simply modeling likely impacts and trying to cause the least harm to the fewest number of people? That's what I would do, only with worse reaction time and less information.

Wait .. what ..? People try to kill themselves under your car daily? Are you confusing reality with GTA?

I don't see why not. If I were writing a self-driving car I would care that

1. My car stays in lane and obeys the rules of the road

2. It doesn't hit anything

Fulfilling 2) is "easy", you just need to make sure you have sensor coverage within a safe stopping distance.

Besides, a biker is just a faster cyclist, and it's common and often legal for cyclists to merge from the sidewalk, if the sidewalk is marked for that purpose

I wonder if far more cars surrounding the driverless car will make it even more robust in some ways, for the short-medium term. If there are swarms of cars surrounding a driverless car, tricky things like hand signals and sign interpretation will be less important, as other human cars will hint at a correct traffic flow. It's surely far easier to detect the predict the motion of a gigantic car, as opposed to relying on interpreting roadwork signs.

There are lots of subtleties in in-town driving. For example, the Google car will crawl its nose forward just a bit to indicate when it thinks its turn has come at 3 and 4-way stops. This is a strong signal to the other drivers that the car is about to make the turn, and reduces the frequency of contentions inside the intersection.

It's a nice touch to have the robot replicate behaviour that most people are not even aware they are using.

somehow the current scuffle between uber and regular cabs seems to miss the joke. we're going to need a plan for the eventual unemployment of a lot of cab drivers, regardless of how the cab is hailed.

Even New York City seems to only have tens of thousands of cab drivers ('seems' because I just looked at wikipedia for a minute), I don't think they are that big a percentage of the population.

I think the real markets are long haul trucking and small delivery van for the last miles. All in all it is probably a significant portions of job.

There are several million truckers in the U.S., so it's somewhere around 1% (but it's probably less than 2%).

I guess there are probably lots of delivery drivers, but those vehicles will still need tenders (at least until robots can do the last 100 feet of the delivery).

The "issue" is probably not for the general workforce, but it will significantly reduce the number of not-so-qualified jobs. According to a quick googling "1 in 15 worker in a long truck driver according to the ATA" [1]. But this is expected that automation tend to reduce these kind of jobs first.

[1] http://truck-driver-salary.org/how-many-truck-drivers-are-th...

Your link says that 1 in 15 workers is employed in the trucking industry. It says there are 3.5 million truck drivers, which is consistent enough with my 1%.

I'm sure it will create lots of turmoil if truckers are put out of work. But there is already an enormous amount of turmoil in the employment market (for lots of reasons). Especially in the part of the employment market that truckers participate in.

I don't understand why subways and trains aren't implementing. The universe of possibilities is so incredibly limited in these situations that it seems like a piece of cake, compared to city driving.

"Can you see that the track is clear of obstacles? If not, stop!"

A lot of subways built in the latest years are totally of partially automated. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_driverless_trains

They are, often on a huge scale. The DLR[1] in London is entirely automated (although sometimes the ticket inspector will sit at the front with the backup control panel open, presumably so they can pretend to drive a train), and the Central, Northern, and Jubilee lines also run semi-automated, and I'm pretty sure the bits that aren't automated are due to union lobbying rather than any particular need.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docklands_Light_Railway

My step-dad was a NYC cab driver. It's true that they're a small percentage of the population, but that's not the right way to think about it. In NYC (and other US cities as well I believe) to become a cab driver requires buying a Medallion, which is a license to operate a cab. They cost a LOT of money, roughly the same as a small NYC condominium. My step-dad's cost a couple hundred thousand dollars many years ago, and Wikipedia[1] says they can cost over $700k today. They used to be mostly individually owned, but today, because of the expense, they're mostly owned by fleet operators.

The individual owners of these medallions are small business owners, and those who operate cab fleets are large business owners who employ many drivers. Automated vehicles aren't just going to put some people who drive out of work; they're going to eliminate an industry and destroy investments in a lot of businesses.

Or, maybe not. The TLC (Taxi and Limousine Commission) in NYC is a powerful lobbying group. They'll probably fight to prevent automated taxis in NYC until they're proven, without a doubt, to be safer than experienced taxi drivers. Then, they'll fight to ensure that an automated taxi requires a medallion just like any other taxi. Very few new medallions are issued each year, so the onus will be on the existing taxi owners to convert their cars into automated cars. That's probably a good deal for the individual owners, since they're usually either the drivers as well or they're paying a driver (or both, to keep the taxi on the road as much as possible.) Automation will get them out of the drivers seat, while still preserving their investment. But this is a bad deal for the regular drivers who aren't owners; they'll either be out of work, or maybe paid (less) to sit and ride along until passengers get used to the automated cars.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxicabs_of_New_York_City#Medal...

So at $1 million per, there is ~$15 billion in notional medallion value. That's a tiny slice of the New York City economy.

The individual impact will be pretty large, but I doubt it would be much of a problem for the city as a whole.

Someone proposed some food for thought a little while ago that intrigued me. One day in the not too distant future it'd be completely reasonable for cabs to drive themselves and automatically accept payment via bitcoin or some other digital currency. It'd also be reasonable for them to refill their fuel tanks when empty, paying with the money they received, and additionally go into the shop whenever their diagnostics detect an issue.

At this point, they may not be self aware, but they are completely autonomous, capable of making their own living wages, and can look after their own well-being.

It will be something like a merger of traditional cab services and modern car-sharing services like https://www.car2go.com/

Most of those car-sharing services are owned directly by the large car companies like BMW or Mercedes. It's very likely that they'll eventually just become big cab services with self-driving cars in addition to just producing them.

And the number of people who actually need to own their own car will shrink every year.

I assume that someone has done an analysis of how the sensors will interact when there are many self-driving cars on the road?

Because many of the primary sensors are active (radar, lidar), will they work when they're surrounded by 50 other cars also blasting out the same signals?

When 50 other cars are nearby actively communicating with each other about the road conditions that they each see, only a representative subset of those cars need to correctly identify road conditions and report them to the entire group as a road-conditions map. Cars in the group validate the observations and risk-factors reported by other cars. Then each car independently makes its driving decisions based on this shared-data based on its relative position in the group.

In this way, being surrounded by hundreds of other cars is a plus, and leads to more data by which to determine safe self-driving behavior.

It won't be able to drive around New York if it follows the rules so strictly. It will never be able to turn. They'll have to add a setting for aggression...

That's funny, but probably a very real challenge. As a (human) driver, it happens that we come across ambiguous, contradictory or just plain impossible constraints and we overcome them by deliberately breaking the rules. I wonder how they would cope with that?

This is part of the larger problem of roboethics—prioritizing and balancing a set of conflicting objectives and requirements. There's a neat introductory article with some video of example scenarios here:

http://footnote1.com/what-should-a-robot-do-designing-robots...

If I remember correctly, they already have one.

There was a report some time ago about making the cars be somewhat aggressive. If I recall, they had a lot of trouble with left turns until they programmed in some lurching forward behavior.

A video from 2011 shows it crossing an intersection (on its turn) while other cars were still crossing perpendicularly: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel...

Will a cyclist be able to troll you by continuing to signal in front of your car, stopping it from ever overtaking?

This is my concern. If we treat cyclists as the sacred cow of the roads, they'll more or less have the root password to my car and be able to dictate where it stops and for how long.

I find cyclists to be much more disingenuous and reckless than any driver, at least here in Chicago where they'll put up next to your car on the right, on the shoulder to make a dangerous and illegal right, and pound on the side of your car with their fists to let you know they're there.

I don't see how empowering that group and its "cars suck, rules don't apply to me" attitudes can help.

Haha, I knew as soon as I saw that you think respecting people's lives is treating them as "sacred cows" that you must be a Chicago driver.

Safety goes both ways. If your going to act like an entitled snot who takes chances with your life because you can't be bothered to follow the rules of the road and respect cars, other cyclists, and pedestrians then you kinda deserve what happens to you. Heaven forbid we all play by the rules.

Nope. Even entitled snots don't deserve to be killed when it can be avoided. Not going to debate that point.

Passing on the right by cyclists is legal in Chicago, BTW, when done so with care (the law was clarified last year). It's not clear if that's the behavior you're referring to.

Not killed, but fined. We need to regulate bikes like we do cars and monetize bike violations. Oh I can hear the critical mass whining from here. Pedestrians should also consider bikes on the sidewalk a form of assault and it should be a criminal violation. If I can't drive on the sidewalk then you can't ride on it.

/Guy who cycles and drives in Chicago.

Google cars sometimes got stuck at four-way stop sign intersections if they literally obeyed the rules on the book. They had to be a little aggressive to get their turn.

That is a flaw I noticed with four-way stops when I drove in the US. The only way to break a stand-off once the first arrivals had moved through (and no one could remember the order of arrival) was to be the aggressive one that just went.

I'm from Australia and roundabouts solve this problem very easily. Even during reasonable traffic, I barely need to slow down at the roundabouts near my house as they're so effective. And this is at intersections about the same size as those with the four-way stops I encountered in LA.

Robotic cars can probably pass through gaps like lines of ants crossing each other if roundabouts are too difficult to introduce.

What happens when some asshole with some knowledge of the algorithm decides to troll commuters? For example, standing around an intersection, pretending to move forward/backward, forcing cars to just stop there.

We'll all be a little bit later somewhere and nobody has to die in traffic collisions.

I would assume the same thing that would happen to some asshole standing at a busy intersection today holding up traffic by standing in the road.

Standing in the middle of the intersection is going to be an effective way to stop cars even if they have human drivers.

The cars will gradually edge forward until the pedestrian is no longer an issue. That trolling option is available to pedestrians now and I don't encounter it day to day.

Someone will get angry enough to call the police to deal with that asshole. Also, every car will be a source of court-admissible proof that the person in question was in fact disturbing the traffic purposefully.

> Jaywalking pedestrians.

There was a episode on this on the 99% invisible podcast: http://99percentinvisible.org/episode/episode-76-the-modern-...

The above page has photos and a full transcript of the episode, I very highly recommand it.

This piece reminded me of the 'problem' of jaywalking because the complexity the self driving Googe car boast to be able to handle, could also be instead reduced or anhilated by adequate urban policies. There are movements to get the car out of urban areas [1] or at least make the pedestrian the 'owner' of the street, and I think self driving cars should be positionned more as an auto-pilot for long distances, rather than attempt to make sense of the current chaos in high density areas.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/v3ff7FY.jpg ("you are the traffic", a Roumanian poster seen in /r/bycicling)

I think the coolest thing about self-driving cars is they can create a mesh network with one another. If I'm driving to work and a traffic accident occurs 2 miles ahead on my route, with multiple self-driving cars present at the accident, those cars can share traffic information with all self-driving cars in the area. My car will then plan an alternative route around the accident before I've even seen it.

Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering.

> Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering.

There's little purpose in encrypting a signal like this. You're still proposing to trust random cars you've never met before, so how would you know which messages are fake and which aren't?

Apparently Mercedes Benz has come quite far regarding autonomous driving.

In September 2013 they let one of their S-Class models drive the historic route from Mannheim to Pforzheim in Germany with some journalist(s) on board[1].

On this route the worlds first long-distance (194km/121mi) ride in a motorized car was undertaken in 1888 by Bertha Benz, wife of Carl Benz, who developed, what is known today as the worlds first modern automobile.[2]

This route contains interurban as well as urban parts. The prototype car nicknamed "Bertha" is not easily recognizable from a standard S-Class model, which already contains most of the systems necessary to enable autonomous driving.

[1] Google translation: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=de&sl=auto&tl=en&pr...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_Benz_Memorial_Route

I see no Lidar. What are the sensors?

"With sensors Bertha analyzed their environment [...] detailed and peppered with additional information navigation map"

I suspect a front-radar, camera and a detailed navigation map with GPS points especially for this route.

I saw an interesting comment on the blog post. Is anyone keeping tab on the project knows if Google in working on some sort of communication between vehicles on road. That will make the self driving cars much more accurate. Lot of 'sudden' circumstances will be predictable by the car.

This would also be better for optimal traffic routing. I remember reading about it previously somewhere, but it gets bad PR for privacy reasons so I think it's brought up less often.

Many manufacturers are working on it, and in fact the Feds are already planning to standardize and mandate them:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2014/02/03/nhtsa-ve...

https://www.dot.gov/fastlane/v2v-cars-communicating-prevent-...

What fun it will be when someone figures out how to fake the signals and, for example, force other cars to slow down or stop.

You can do that now already, e.g. pretend to quickly step on a road while a car is approaching and watch the human drives hit their brakes. Yet I don't see that happening because the majority of people aren't jerks.

Doing so physically, that is, driving erratically or aggressively, or giving false signals, is both visible to other drivers and illegal. It can also be recorded on camera. Electronic signals are not visible, and fewer people have the ability to record and analyze the signal traffic.

While the majority of people aren't jerks, consider existing cases of people/jerks who use traffic signal preemption devices for personal gain - see http://boingboing.net/2006/04/18/man-fined-50-for-usi.html for an example and some discussion. See also http://www.statter911.com/2012/04/05/preempting-the-preempte... .

I believe this shows that is a non-trivial population of people/jerks that will be interested in traffic shaping for personal gain.

Note how the defenses against those signal devices include state and federal laws and the addition of auditing techniques. The latter is possible because the transmitters and receivers are effectively controlled by the state. This is harder with cars.

Errr... wouldn't it be easier to record such 'jerks' electronically? I mean isn't it difficult to catch a number plate in dark while it would be lot easier to record someone doing it if there is a communication along with an ID for each vehicle?

In the traffic signal example, the lights can be programed, with a whitelist of all IDs which are allowed to change the signals, and where the signals can be reprogrammed, to mitigate cloning.

I presume that any sort of illegal device which modifies car-to-car communications for other than safety reasons would not be tied to an id registered to a specific car. If only because those devices may need to be replaced, making a registration headache.

I also presume that there won't be a global upload/download of the message traffic for centralized analysis, so who do you think will be doing the recording and analysis?

There is a huge difference between a kid playing a prank to a few cars on the road and a malicious hacker willing to take control of a portion of the street indefinitely.

Imagine for example some hacker programming all the cars in the proximity of a bank to grind to a halt and cause congestion so his team can go rob said bank and have the police delayed because of the inconvenience. Yes, it sounds like the plot for a Batman movie, but still the potential is there.

Today you can do this as well, just take (rent) a car or two, stop them in the middle of the road and get out. Things like this happen and will happen, it's what we have to deal with when the enemy actors are sentient beings. They will find workarounds.

Accountability is much easier with physical objects like cars.

The car has a VIN. The VIN is tied to a owner, which is the rental car company. The car company requires that renters present a license, which is tied to the renter's name, address, etc. The car company likely also requires a credit card, which has additional clues about who the enemy actors are.

These can be circumvented, but it's not easy.

I think a better example is of enemy actors who drop large cinder blocks on the road. This is much less traceable, and occurs sometimes as part of carjacking.

Still, I meant to compare with people who currently use traffic signal preemption devices. While illegal, it's harder to detect and prosecute than, say, people who run red lights.

We need a DIY Lidar or a cheap Lidar. Any ideas or existing projects?

(the 3D scanning device on top of the Google car, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar )

The Lidar that Google uses costs 80k dollars, more than most cars.

Reading a lot of comments here, the theme seems to be that the benefits will trickle down to the average consumer. I can see immediate cases where it's just going to go to those with sufficient economic muscle.

Less need for a garage means smaller houses, and more of them (for example).

Improved insurance? Probably the same insurance premiums (inflation adjusted), with a higher premium for more human miles driven.

If there is money on the table, it will get taken by those with the wherewithal to grab it.

Which is why all the wealth generated by the Industrial Revolution went to the feudal lords in their castles?

As a trivial counterexample, since automated taxis will be considerably cheaper than human-driven ones, they'll become an affordable commodity usable for day-to-day travel, instead of a rare luxury used only when absolutely necessary (or somebody else foots the bill).

I'm wondering how much self-driving cars will improve the system?

far less accidents, much faster, less traffic jams, more efficient, no traffic light, different speed limits etc...

0 day exploit kills 300 in a pileup on the freeway...

Almost 100 people a day die by motor vehicle in the US right now so while your above example would hit the media hard, unless it's a daily occurrence it's probably improving on the current situation.

I still think that the best application for computer controlled cars is to have humans driving and computers handling the safety, braking when they detect danger, stuff like that. Lots of accidents like hitting pedestrians, cyclists or other cars could be avoided, and it's not as high level and difficult as what they're currently trying to figure out.

Looking forward to see how self-driving cars can handle traffic in a city like Mumbai or Cairo.

Indeed…

I just hope that problem is the same as when someone asked them, 15 years ago, how their crawler could handle websites with “tens of thousands of pages” fearing libraries would put their ressources on-line, overburden and halt their effort.

In my experience driving is much more interactive and not so much rule based in those cities. You have to judge other drivers - there aggression and willingness to drive into your lane, there willingness to let you sneak in in front of them.

Taking traffic from all sides into account might be something that works better for self-driving cars. Knowing when its ok to force someone else to slow down might be harder. I don't expect this to be just a question of scaling up. It will require new concepts and models. You might have to choose the country like you can now choose the language for predictive typing on your phone.

Indeed. I actually believe — or rather, sense, because that tends to be a fairly instinctive appreciation for me, after modeling things for so 15 years — that aggressivity is a fairly straightforward parameter in driving style: basically, it’s the margin you allow yourself to touch, or the acceptable risk you‘d take. Choosing “the country”, on a vehicle with more GPS captors that anyone could remember is probably not something difficult, but there are major and new ethical issues around that point, precisely: what do we let the user control?

Can, should, will Google include a ‘Don’t abide to local driving laws’ mode? How explicit should it be? Modern ethics tend to surround several though exercices, most of which are centered around transportation accidents, namely one involving throwing, or letting fall, or pushing a button to release a lever… to have one obese man fall and prevent a car or a train from hurting three other people; those may or may not be relatives, have been careful in their behaviour, etc. What used to be theoretical questions, used to classify philosophers in their principles might become soon electronic options. Should your car, detecting a swerving vehicle is about to hit a child running after his ball, run that car into the nearby wall (after checking in 10 ms that it has working airbags) and stop the accident? Whose insurance pays the damages?

I'm just waiting for them to test in snow.

I'm sure there will be problems, but self-driving cars might be the only way to archieve orderly traffic in cultures where it's assumed that you "make" as many lanes as the width of the pavement will support.

Consider that only a minority of cars have to behave rationally w.r.t speeds in heavy traffic to prevent stop-and-go waves.

The interesting problems are:

- tracking thousands of objects' trajectories to avoid as many threat-weighted collisions as possible. (think NYC times square)

- not going too fast when visibility is blocked

FYI: When I was at Trimble Nav, there were self-driving farm equipment demonstrated c. 2000.

Autonomous car in the Berlin city center (2011): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YZqL6j2D5H4

Between truck drivers, bus drivers and taxi drivers, that's 3 million people who should look for another line of work when this starts to happen.

I wonder how that deals with potholes or roads that lack the proper markings or one way streets.

Chicago has both of those.

Probably the same way humans do, only better. Computers do have memory, as well as access to external information.

Are their cameras visible spectrum ones? How will it work at night? Night vision? IR?

Night, hell tell me how it works in snow, with fully covered roads. I would love to see how they make that leap that people do when looking at situations where the road is fully obscured, but you know exactly where its at based on objects your used too (like mailboxes/trees/etc) GPS ain't that accurate.

Computers can remember more objects better, recall them faster and calculate your position against them with much more detail, as well as apply inference rules to correct for any missing/moved objects much better than humans can.

Genuine question, can anybody answer how these cars will: 1) Allow for situational aspects of driving eg I need to get there quickly so might drive faster because I'm running late? 2) Protect from people intentionally take advantage of safety mechanisms eg cutting in front, stepping out onto the road?

No safety system is perfect and fatal accidents won't drop to zero (even with the best self-driving systems), so I guess people generally won't do 2) because they don't want to get killed.

My guess is that it won't cater for either of those cases. It seems unlikely that Google would program their cars to break the speed limit just to save you a few minutes (speeding probably saves you a lot less time than you think it does). Also, I cannot see why anyone would deliberately and continuously take advantage of the automatic safety mechanisms on self-driving cars such that the problem would be common enough that it would cause a passenger any irritation.

Ever heard of trolling?

I think we'll adjust laws to handle 2). There will be more than enough court-admissible sensor data from cars to sue offenders from here to the Mars and back.

I'm wondering how a robot car is going to park in a driveway -- or in a parking lot.

Probably better than everyone here.

Very easily. Not to mention that storage will be simpler as cars will be able to park closely together without requiring doors to open before moving to where you can enter them, or in elevated storage.

At some point in the future, most people will be unlikely to own a car (just use one on demand) so their driveway will go mostly unused and their garage will be used for something else also.

The issue comes up somewhere like a townhouse complex. Maps does not contain detailed data on assigned parking spaces and the like for these areas.

This is not an issue if everyone is using self-driving cars. But when only some people are, I don't see how you'd avoid the need for cars to take over in these instances.

Same with street driving really, you already have self-parking cars, but the car would need to be able to not only determine where the parking spaces are (and deal with issues like faded parking lines) but also determine whether or not there are any laws restricting the use of that space -- not only handicapped spaces, but also time of day and week.

Again, not an issue when everyone is in self-driving cars because most of these rules seem designed to optimize traffic flow, but until that point (and maybe for a time after) these laws will remain in affect.

I imagine that eventually cars will park themselves in dedicated areas or move on to another job and most of us won't leave a car in a particular place and expect it to be there when we return.

Most apartment owners would probably elect to use their parking space for a storage capsule and then subscribe to a robo-car service. The car would be waiting when they got downstairs and leave to go elsewhere when it returned them home.

Eventually, street parking will disappear. If I still want to be driven to work, the car will drop me at the front door and then head elsewhere. In the evening, a different car will likely arrive for pick-up.

Any cars not on a job or driving to a job would head to a depot for charging, service or storage.

Inspirational.

Given that the NSA will likely have a backdoor into any automated driving system, is this really a technology you'd like to see become all pervasive? "We don't like this guy's ideology - ok, let's arrange for him to have an 'accident'".

They control killer robots in the sky with missiles... It doesn't really get worse than that...

That's a much more obvious way of doing away with someone though. Having a car experience a 'software failure' and driving you into a wall at 80MPH, is less so.

If the government was willing to pull those kind of tactics to have you killed, I'm pretty sure they could do it without self-driving cars.

Your government maybe. What about North Korea's government?

They also have many methods at their disposal - North Korea's government can throw you in a labour camp easily enough.

In the US, a car accident in an environment where accidents are less common (presumably the case with robo-cars) will stand out more.

Minority Report comes to mind. And, I, Robot (I think). That's just a few examples of stories in which futuristic cars are conveniently control-able by the police when necessary.

The next step is highways!

as a theoretical problem highway should be much easier because few types of "street agents" can access them (i.e. no bicycles, no pedestrians, no traffic lights)

As far as I know, they already have a pretty good handle on limited access roads.

People use 'highway' to describe all manner of roads, I wonder if the gp is thinking about major 2 lane roads that have higher speeds but still lots of intersections to deal with.

Many cars already have dynamic cruise controls, which is basically auto pilot for highway driving. The one which are installed on BMW, brakes when the car in front of you brakes and decreases speed on curves.

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