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This guy runs down a list of things that are unsolved and really fucking hard: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs#t=94

Everyone interested in autonomous cars should look at this video.

John Leonard puts tremendous passion into the subject, has done amazing things and talks about how hard this stuff is.

Thanks

Awesome video and another illustration of the critical role that DARPA government funding plays in subsidizing Silicon Valley. I think he mentioned "DARPA" about a million times in the video.

DARPA and massive state intervention in the economy should be right up there alongside private entrepreneurs like Musk who complete the last mile of bringing tech to market. It just kills me that there can even be a thing called a "Silicon Valley Libertarian" who's against "big" government. SV is a product of government investment.

I think many issues mentioned in this video could be (partly?) solved with better infrastructures. Just imagine how many infrastructures we have built for the auto cars: We built roads, traffic lights, stop signs, parking signs, we painted lanes, etc, etc. We've made a huge investment into the infrastructures simply for the cars to run safely and efficiently.

With self-driving cars, new infrastructures need to be built, not for human, but for different censors mounted on the car.

I'm going with Elon on this. Google, Uber, Apple and the Big 4 all competing to hit this. And that's to say nothing about the military and how they'd use self driving vehicles in a war zone. That's so much R&D horsepower it's hard ot fathom. Today we are mapping the world, have insane sensors. Cars are getting to being self driving for large periods of time of freeways due to lane change control and speed measuring via radar. 2025 is when the pressure will start to be exerted to get human drivers off the road because they'll be the only ones who don't act in a predictable reliable way and thus the single biggest threat left.

I disagree with you. The problem of autonomous vehicles is yes, a very difficult one, but steps are being taken towards it at a rapid rate. I work in the area, and parking and standard autonomous motorway driving, where the main required algorithms are lane departure, vehicle detection and adaptive cruise control are pretty much considered 'solved' in the research community.

I absolutely agree that there are plenty of aspects that are not solved, and possibly this is my passion for the domain shining through, but I would be much more optimistic for the future, and the near future at that.

The ISS is extremely difficult to "berth" (not dock) with an automated spacecraft due to safety rules to protect a $150bn asset. Berthing with the ISS is currently assisted by a remote control arm, Canadarm2. An actual automated docking (Dragon v2) is even more difficult.

What Elon is saying is that he knows the steps towards an operational automated driving system, and can expand its capability at each step. Most of the limitations are "regulatory" and not technical.

Difficulty and regulatory requirements are not the same thing. The difficulty of berthing with the ISS is technically quite low. There is a single object to contend with (the ISS) of which the full parameters are known. There are no other objects to get in your way. Visibility is good. All in all it's a highly predictable and very static environment.

I completely disagree. The limitations are technical not regulatory. Elon Musk might think he knows at a high level how to slowly introduce the technology. That's great and all but the technology doesn't exist yet and won't for a long time. I'm talking about 100% driving duties here, not just cruising on the highway and parking in a controlled environment.

This is like people in the 80's claiming that we would have flying cars and hover boards by now.

It's not a biggie but I'd say your excellent post implicitly encompass the inaccuracy of maps and so me pointing out that flying cars got their hype in the 50's NOT the 80's only reinforces your basic message.

And I would like to point out that we don't have flying cars not because we can't have them, but because there's no economic reason to. As a civilization we just chose not to make them. The same doesn't hold for autonomous vehicles - there you have a strong incentive, both economic and moral.

(Ironically, it's the same reason we don't have Moon or Mars bases yet - in 60s/70s Wernher von Braun himself had a pretty good plan for a Mars settlement using technology of the 50s. Again, we did't go there because no one wanted to bankroll such a mission (hell, it convinced the US GOV to roll back the whole space race before it goes interplanetary and starts to cost much more than it already had)).

Really, we do have flying cars, we just call them helicopters and they're too expensive for normal people to afford. People with sufficient wealth get to use flying cars, though.

The nice thing with self-driving cars is that it's mostly a computer problem, so the interval from working at all to being affordable by the common person should be short.

There are levels of autonomous driving. We have the basics today. We have cars that can reverse park, maintain appropriate distance between cars, avoid collisions etc.

The next level is coming in the next couple of years. Volvo is targeting 2017 as the start of its rollout:

http://www.cnet.com/au/news/volvo-autonomous-drive-me-detail...

This is autonomous without the tricky parts of driving in inclement weather.

I really don't know why people keep ignoring the large car makers when talking about autonomous cars. They have proven experience with managing complex automation systems and the money/time to pull it off successfully.

I agree with you. I've followed the advancements from automakers like Mercedes (who also put their tech in trucks). Highway driving and parking in highly static environments is at an acceptable level. But that doesn't mean the problem is anywhere near solved.

As long as there is still a wheel and pedals, the car can just beep and say hey i can't handle this you take over. Or it can just pull over and say it's your turn now.

No, it can't just beep and tell the driver to take over. They haven't been concentrating on the road, there's no way they can keep their attention on what's going on for so long with nothing for them to actually do or think about, they have no idea what's going on and can't possibly come up to speed in the time it'd take to react to an unexpected and potentially dangerous situation.

It can pull over to the side of the road fine.

And if the driver is indisposed? Many suggest that with self-driving cars you can simply go to sleep!

IMHO, the path forward is very gradual. Dates below are production vehicles, experimental vehicles are much earlier

Add sensors and assess how they work - Lane departure warning, vehicle detect (years ago)

Next, add lane keeping and distance keeping (we're there, with caveats)

Next, V2V communication (2017)

Next, all the hard problems, one at a time, including infrastructure (2050)

Elon Musk has built (companies and hired people that built) cars that are capable of driving autonomously on the highway. A whole fleet of them in customers' hands will be doing this in the real world in a matter of weeks or months at most.

Full autonomous driving is, of course, much harder than just highway driving. But to say that Musk "has no fucking idea what he's talking about" is completely ludicrous.

The nVidia solution is a bit different to the Google approach and seems to be quite effective? So the Google approach isn't really the only way.

I would get into any car that could safely navigate Mercer Street in Seattle for a full year.

I'm floored by your hubris. Do you really think it's likely that someone who runs a car company and funds artificial intelligence companies isn't well-informed about this subject? Is that really the likeliest explanation of why you two have reached different conclusions?

I'm going to have to agree with the top post, sometimes really smart people say stupid things. I wouldn't read too much into it.

Do I believe someone who delivers cargo to the ISS and is building enough battery production capacity to satisfy the world's EV production requirements? Or do I believe commenters on Hacker News. Tough call. /s

How about the hubris of over-analyzing a sound-bite quote reported by the WSJ, and ignoring Elon's past, lengthy statements that the next step is "on ramp to off ramp" driving? Which is a lot easier than all the hard problems being mentioned in this discussion.