Why Email and Cars are heading down the same road | Hacker News Reader

Why Email and Cars are heading down the same road

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45 pointsmathouc46 comments

> "Parking? Solved! Once we arrive at our destination, the car can self-park while we go on with our day."

Doesn't solve the worst part of parking: reserving that much space for car storage.

The author's vision seems to be one in which everyone owns a self-driving car. Why own the car? Just pay for use, Uber et al. can handle logistics. Only the reserve portion of the fleet should be parked, like buses.

Yep. Why should the cars be parked? Why should we own cars? All we actually need is a very high % chance of getting access to a car whenever needed. If it were 99.9%, and wayyy cheaper than owning a car, why own the car?

> Why should we own cars?

In the city, I couldn't possibly agree with this more. When I lived in Boston I sold my car after the first two years because it was a ridiculous expense and hassle for the utility. Taking a cab a few times a week turned out to be cheaper than parking tickets alone.

Given a choice though, I much prefer to live in less densely populated areas (e.g., northwest Montana), and owning a vehicle is really unavoidable. In these places that also means a 4x4 SUV or truck, not a Prius, or else you'd be calling a tow truck every 5 minutes in the winter.

In order to control what happens in the car when you're not in it.

I would expect driverless taxis to end up like public toilets.

If public toilets had a user reputation system (like Uber), they would be as lovely as the ones in Japan. Unless you had a bad reputation, in which case you deserve what you get.

You don't have to register at the toilet with your ID/driver's license. You do however, have to do that when you use e.g car sharing, and the first question the system usually asks you, is: "is the car clean?". If no, then the previous renter will be liable. So this is already a solved problem.

You can build car parks that aren't in super close proximity to you though and underground too. There are problems to overcome but it's possible. You could have an app that connects to your car that beckons it to us at a certain time or now etc. you could hop in a self driving taxi to where your car is. If all you want is the current system but automated, it's not going to work. Just like if you asked what people wanted pre cars... Faster horse drawn carriages would have been the answer. This will take some vision and a paradigm change.

The notion that we don't "pay atrociously high fees" to own and operate cars is a pet peeve of mine. People look at bus fare, for example, and think it's a lot, but compared to the actual cost per mile of driving (payments, insurance, fuel, maintenance, &c), it's often cheaper, even for short trips.

And this doesn't even get into the costs of pollution (including noise pollution), deaths, injuries, and poor health associated with sedentary lifestyles.

The optimism surrounding self-driving cars is just mind-boggling to me. Decided to drive to work this morning (usually take the train). Siri totally shit the bed and took me on a 45-minute scenic tour through DC. Took me off the highway too early onto busy local streets, kept trying to take me onto a road that was closed for construction, and tried to get me to turn left at a T intersection of two 2-way roads where only right turns were allowed. Just an utter disaster.

And it's not unusual. Siri loves to take my mother in law on harrowing trips through the ghettos of Baltimore.

Yeah what's with gps' and their compulsion to get off the freeway, often many exits too soon? I've experienced this. I don't give in to it, but my wife spent an hour driving 100 blocks downtown and missing her appointment.

Never used Siri (Android user), but Waze is so good that I barely even bother learning routes anymore, I just plug it into Waze and go. Using Waze makes me excited about the future of self-driving cars.

> mind-boggling

Agreed. And you're just talking about the charming parts. What happens when someone's driverless car runs over an column of kids exiting a school bus? It doesn't matter that it could happen with or without a driver. The headline will be "DRIVERLESS CAR RUNS OVER CHILDREN, MFR DENIES SAFETY SYSTEMS FAILED" and that will be the end of driverless cars for 10 years.

Using Siri as a counter argument for self-driving cars completely misses the point. You ignore Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication and using a multitude of sensors besides phone GPS. IDK why you think Siri is the epitome of sophisticated trip pathing, there are better options out there and solutions that will continue to be improved.

I don't think it does. The technology we have for self-driving cars in the near term relies on a known map, and the route-finding core of that technology isn't going to be appreciably better, any time soon, than what's in Siri. You can improve the technology by adding vehicle-to-vehicle communications, etc, but now you're pushing out the "5-6 years" timeline that people keep throwing around.

I have no doubt that in 50 years we'll have self-driving cars. It's not an intractable problem by any means. But I have friends who were researching self-driving cars a decade ago, as part of the DARPA Grand Challenge, and in many ways those techniques were more sophisticated than what's on the table for commercialization in the near-term. It's going to be a very long slough from here to there.

It also fails to address the major problem of low-passenger vehicles vs. public transportation.

Does Siri rely on Apple Maps?

> But traffic jams won’t even be a problem anymore: freed from the wheel, we’ll be able to make phone calls, work on a computer, or have a business meeting from inside our car (and maybe a doctor appointment, cf cosmopolis).

This just seems foolish. If i'm on my way home to my daughters birthday party, then traffic is traffic. If I"m on the way to the airport, then traffic is still a problem.

I can already make a call when driving and I can already take Uber or a taxi allowing me to do the things the author mentions any time I wish.

Self driving cars don't solve any of those problems. Self driving cars have many uses, but the author's use cases aren't any of them.

Traffic is still a problem regardless of whether or not i'm driving.

Speed limits will be raised with fully automatic cars. The cars will also be able to travel closer to each other. The same roads will be able to handle bigger volume of traffic.

Only if all the cars are automatic...

Won't self-driving cars significantly reduce traffic? They can drive closer together, maintain a consistent speed, and work out the most efficient route. We may also get smaller cars eventually (without such large dashboards, steering, gear sticks etc.) which would also help.

One of the biggest reasons of traffic is accidents. If self driving cars can reduce those, perhaps traffic will improve?

Another problem is coordination: one slow driver can cause a huge jam. Perhaps coordinated, self-driving vehicles can reduce those?

Granted, none of those things would work if you introduce one self-driving car in a jungle of meat-based drivers.

Much of the enthusiasm for driverless cars assumes that the automated systems will work perfectly.

Here is a fact: the systems will fail from time to time. Maybe a lot.

The reaction to deaths that occur due to automated systems will be like Biblical wailing and gnashing of teeth. It will be utter outrage.

Americans' (perceived) outrage to tragedy seems to be to usually be totally out of sync with the reality of the threat. It won't matter if they are safer statistically. In addition to more efficiency, the driverless cars need to have the best-designed fail-safe systems ever constructed or we will not see widespread adoption within decades, at least in the US.

> Much of the enthusiasm for driverless cars assumes that the automated systems will work perfectly

Because the software industry has such a sterling reputation for delivering complex systems that are nonetheless extremely reliable!

The automobile industry does.

Or at least, they should. Even the very newsworthy recalls of recent years have only had consequences for very small numbers of people, across millions/tens of millions of vehicles (which still needs addressing, but the amount of problem being mitigated per recall dollar is growing smaller over time).

The automobile industry doesn't have a great record with software, though. And a self-driving car is orders of magnitude more complex than a single bit of logic sitting in a throttle or engine controller.

Well, with the drive assist stuff that is already on the road, we get to see how they do with an in between problem.

(The early evidence is that they treat it as a serious engineering problem, but I'm sure no hands on the wheel needs a lot more complexity to fail safe than anything that is shipping)

do you have any data to back up your "fact"? I'm specially interested on statistics compared to human drivers.

My fact is based on the related fact that all engineered systems fail from time to time. There is no such thing as perfectly engineered systems any more than there are perpetual motion machines.

The interesting questions are: - what is the likelihood of failure? - what are the likely failure modes? - are they designed to fail safe? - are there backups to the fail safes? - are there backups to the backups?

And of course complex systems will always have unpredictable failure modes. Failures due to interplay with complex external systems that couldn't possibly be predicted.

And so on and so on.

I think what most people are afraid of is the fact that you can predict unexpected human behavior fairly well, you can't with a machine.

If you see a car moving weird, you can make stuff to reduce the risk of an accident happening, when a self driving car suddenly turn and kill you, you weren't able to do anything.

Now I love the intellectual challenge to it, however I don't think we'll ever see the today's situation only with self driving cars, way too many cars. My guess is self driving stuff will improve a lot public transportation and people will only travel that way.

once self-driving cars become the standard, intersections and merge points can be optimized for much greater efficiency, which will reduce traffic. also, speed limits will be eliminated.

Merge points maybe...but merge points are, by definition, bottlenecks. Even hyper-optimized, you are still limited by geometry.

And definitely not intersections...despite what the fancy visual simulations propose. You would have to eliminate pedestrians to even get close to that.

I think that the answers to a lot of these problems lie in extremely complex algorithms and a drastic change in technology. Instead of each person owning and operating a car that operates exactly the same way that cars do today, I imagine pod-like cars that can connect and disconnect with any other car. Then, if every car knew where every other car in the area was headed and could coordinate, they could join and travel together, then disconnect and reconnect until each reaches its destination. So essentially a hybrid between trains and cars.

Yeah, I know, science-fictiony and a stretch of the imagination, and I don't expect to see anything resembling this in my lifetime, but I do think there are ways that self-driving cars could operate in a much more efficient network-based system than with each driver making their own decisions based on what is immediately around them.

The biggest cause of traffic is wrapping each individual person in a 6 by 10 foot steel cage. http://giftrunk.com/gif/public-transit-vs-gridlock

This is a fun analogy to think of, but it stops at the comparison of the ubiquity and resistance to change for the things.

Replacing cars with driverless cars is fundamentally different because it also involves a massive replacement of infrastructure and safety regulation at a level that humankind has never before seen.

Wrapping email protocols in innovative clients doesn't seem like the same thing at all.

The argument is that self-driving cars would reuse existing roads, fuel, service, and manufacturing infrastructures that have been developed for existing cars. And, adoption can be incremental. Start with cars which drive themselves highway only, and require a capable driver to be at the wheel at all times. That may be soon. Gradually add more use cases at the speed of engineering, regulation, and social acceptance.

Some of the hard things to change in the world are hard because they require many people to change their behavior in coordination. Cars to self-driving cars doesn't. Email to Email with innovative clients doesn't. Introducing a new communication protocol does (though of course it's not impossible). Of course, this is only one aspect of a complex world.

Let's consider just one aspect of this that I see as a show-stopper out of the gate: networks.

Driverless cars, even even in a narrowly adopted context, like a single highway, will need to be networked. Not only will they need to be networked during the time that they are on that highway, for cars in close proximity, it needs to be a network with 99.999999999% uptime. At a minimum, the cars will need to have a transponder with nearly zero bandwidth (like planes); but more likely, this connection will need to send more data than just position. GPS isn't nearly accurate enough unless cars can be spaced 100s of feet apart.

Do you know of any networking technologies that you would trust with your life?

Compare driving on a highway to being in a plane. In a plane, there are usually minutes following a worse-case equipment failure or total loss of communication. In a car, there are seconds or less.

Nobody suggests driverless cars are working open-loop from GPS coordinates; no current driverless cars work that way. Its generally a combination of gps, local sensors including sonar, radar and cameras, and car-to-car networks. The UofIowa Driving Simulator has done studies of trains of cars linked by short-range networks, where they coordinate braking and acceleration to achieve inter-car distances of a few feet.

Sure, in principle; my point is that even the best networks fail way too much for this to be practical. In the context of this particular thread, I'm saying that implementing driverless cars even in a narrow context is a non-trivial infrastructure upgrade, whatever form it takes. These networks will need to have reliabilities and uptimes on par with medical or nuclear safety systems.

We don't need any networks. Self driving cars will always need to be able to share the road with normal cars. That mechanism will support the case of sharing the road with other self driving cars too. Networks can add fancy features, but they can happen on their own time, incrementally.

A declaration of love to emails! Original but very true comparison. Mail will always be the base and the best way to communicate

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8535919

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8536014

Both deleted. It appears this was submitted, then deleted, then submitted again, until finally it got traction. So the item is of interest, obviously, but is this a god thing to be doing?

There's also a bit of pleasure in driving for many, sports cars, convertible's, that pleasure doesn't correlate to emails, there's no sports car email client. maybe not? =/

I've got a feeling that as cars start driving themselves, us motorheads/car-fanatics will be like horse owners, relegated to car farms (tracks with much larger garages and warehouses attached).

I've had this exact position about cars for a while, but never took the time to think about emails that way. Makes per-fect sense for me.

Are you a genius?

"Driving in Circles: The autonomous Google car may never actually happen."

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2014/10/...

Self driving email? Yes please.

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