As an HNer, I find what Waymo (and other autonomous vehicle companies) are doing is simply fabulous. Technology improvement is a big impetus for human progress. Looking back over the past century, inventions like transistor, rockets, internet, satellites, nuclear power and aviation significantly improved our quality of life.
Autonomous vehicles belong to the same league. I am very happy that a non trivial amount of resources are devoted to them and it's not just a next SV fad like some ICO / Juicero / photo sharing app. Rooting for the success of this technology.
While I hope the technology succeeds I don't think it is going to be as big of a change as people think. If you are upper middle class in a large city where labour is cheap, like in some Asian countries, driving is already close to free. And while that is somewhat nice from a quality of life perspective, it also means that rush hour traffic is horrible and sitting in a car isn't much more fun just because it is cheap. Basically a car is still a car.
Cars destroy the environment (with the infrastructure needed to accommodate them) and are one of the primary drivers of climate change. We need technology to make them obsolete, not to make more of them that can drive themselves (or not).
With the possible exception of MAD geopolitics, I can't point to instances where nuclear power has significantly shapes my day to day experience in the US. Certainly much less than hydropower. Sure Voyager and other nuclear powered space craft have provided infotainment for many years, but terrestrial electricity is fungible for the end user and nuclear power plants have always correlated with more expensive watts when I've had utility service that owned them.
A serious question here, and not trying to ruffle any SV'ers feathers, but why do you see autonomous vehicles to be as valuable as...say transistors, or satellites? In terms of long term usefulness for the 99% who care much more about turning up at work on time and/or transporting things efficiently from one place to another.
Do they really belong to the same league? I’m sure this will be downvoted into oblivion because everyone on here is working on these projects but I don’t think self driving cars should be uttered in the same breath as any of the aforementioned technologies. It just doesn’t matter all that much.
Maybe I’m being dense but can soemone spell out the glorious moment we are all waiting for here after spending all this money?
- Trucking is cheaper because we fire the drivers?
- There are cheap Ubers taking people from ramen to sushi in SF but clogging the streets?
- There safer roads because there are no bad drivers?
Ugh, this is not a transportation revolution folks. Where are the personal transportation devices? The hypersonic planes? The hyper loops?
Number of fatalities per million miles driven is only one of the metrics. Hours spent per lifetime driving is arguably a more important metric. I can't wait for everything (cities, highways etc.) to be redesigned for self-driving cars but looks like its not going happen in my life time :(
There's more to safety statistics than just the mortality rate. We should be able to look at frequency and severity of non-fatal accidents too. Those happen a lot more often.
For example, accidents that occur at 35 MPH or less are much less likely to result in a fatality or major injury, due to the amount of kinetic energy that a human body can safely dissipate. So if Google cars have even slightly better braking or speed control, you're going to see an improvement. Looking at the average speed at which accidents occur would be useful information.
People almost always tell me autonomous vehicles are much safer than Human drivers, but that has not yet been proven [1]. Luckily Tesla, Waymo, etc. are starting to put major amounts of mileage into the data.
Waymo have driven 5 billion in simulation. I think simulation is going to be the major change that automous vehicles can bring.
Assuming simulation is proven to be good enough for training cars, then having the ability to simulate crashes so that cars can respond in an optimal way is going to make a massive difference.
Waymo has tested in 25 cities, they aren't currently in 25 cities. Of the 600 Pacifica's they have, only ~160 are deployed. So to do 25,000 miles per day, that's an average of 156 miles per vehicle.
That seems pretty reasonable - 8 hours/day at 20mph, 5 hours/day at 30mph, and 2.5 hours/day at 60mph. Given a mix of highway, rural, and city driving, 156 miles/vehicle sounds about right.
That does seem like a lot, I suppose they theoretically could be driving 24/7/365 (the wear and tear would be serious, you'd think).
The idea of moving people to public transit sounds good, but I wonder if there's enough spare capacity in most transit systems to serve lots of new riders...
To me, the very existence of a self driving vehicle is an amazing technical achievement against a really hard challenge. I suppose that explains why the math makes sense. 25,000 aggregate miles/day for a fleet of 600 vehicles is below 42 miles/day/vehicle. Each vehicle is providing a level of service below 2 miles per hour. Again, as a geek I think it's amazing but not convinced it is going to scale to the point that will justify those governors pushing public policy changes that impact the general public...at least for now.
The number of miles is not a sufficient metric; the question is, how much of the automotive phase space (weather, traffic conditions, terrain, road surface type, time of day, etc) has been explored? Running over the same mile a million times does not add anything to the self-driving model.
Interestingly, going with that logic disengagements per mile will at some point correlate with the most advanced AV companies, not the least.
I guess the response would be to target some SLO budget and, once disengagements get too high, refocus on existing cases to get it down to an acceptable level.
Waymo is supposedly planning on launching a ride-hailing service. Perhaps they can start giving rides to customers while continuing to test with a live driver (to take over if necessary). The revenue from the ride-hailing service could offset the cost of testing, and allow them to operate indefinitely until full autonomy is ready and legal.
ride sharing isn't exactly very profitable at the moment. I don't think the revenue would offset the additional engineering/product costs of just running the rideshare service, much less the cost of testing.
I can't imagine these poor video streams are useful inputs for the algorithm...
Maybe simulations are when the human is controlling the vehicle and the algorithm is only allowed to .. simulate what it's actions would be if it were in control?
That would be entertaining to watch. Possibly also useful to check the cars don't freak in weird situations. They kind of had a real one in the Chandler crash https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxqBS2-4puw
Are Waymo using AI and humans to build a ginormous curated decision tree that can be audited or are they doing something more black-box / pure AI / something else?
I always imagined a big decision tree that could get diff’d after each AI training run and tuned by an army of humans.
> ...the company is also working to apply its self-driving system to three other areas, including logistics (so trucking)...
This whole 'disenfranchised underclass' thing that America is struggling with will get considerably worse when automation turns all the truck drivers and their families out onto the street.
Most people used to be farmers, too, but prohibiting industrialization was not the right call.
Driving trucks is a dangerous occupation that's terrible for your health, and often takes you away from your family for long periods of time. In a few generations when it's long gone as an occupation, no one will miss it. Getting from now to then is unfortunately going to be a rough transition for some people, but stopping that transition entirely isn't the right call.
And I think that is the place it will happen first. At least outside America where most roads are far too complicated for driverless cars.
Motorways, on the other hand are relatively simple. And we have service stations that driverless lorries could drive themselves to, to be picked up by human drivers for the final leg. And there's an obvious commercial need. And there's an obvious safety need (who hasn't seen a swerving lorry?)
When automation arrive to that level, that could happen, but it's far from unavoidable.
If automation happens is because it makes the economy more productive. If before happening the economy could sustain all the people, logic tell us that now could do it even more easily.
[+] [-] RestlessMind|7 years ago|reply
Autonomous vehicles belong to the same league. I am very happy that a non trivial amount of resources are devoted to them and it's not just a next SV fad like some ICO / Juicero / photo sharing app. Rooting for the success of this technology.
[+] [-] njoro|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cosmon0t|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbrock|7 years ago|reply
Maybe I’m being dense but can soemone spell out the glorious moment we are all waiting for here after spending all this money?
- Trucking is cheaper because we fire the drivers?
- There are cheap Ubers taking people from ramen to sushi in SF but clogging the streets?
- There safer roads because there are no bad drivers?
Ugh, this is not a transportation revolution folks. Where are the personal transportation devices? The hypersonic planes? The hyper loops?
[+] [-] mrlatinos|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzdt|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hcnews|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bmcusick|7 years ago|reply
For example, accidents that occur at 35 MPH or less are much less likely to result in a fatality or major injury, due to the amount of kinetic energy that a human body can safely dissipate. So if Google cars have even slightly better braking or speed control, you're going to see an improvement. Looking at the average speed at which accidents occur would be useful information.
[+] [-] prolikewh0a|7 years ago|reply
https://orfe.princeton.edu/~alaink/SmartDrivingCars/Papers/R...
[+] [-] kuprel|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icc97|7 years ago|reply
Assuming simulation is proven to be good enough for training cars, then having the ability to simulate crashes so that cars can respond in an optimal way is going to make a massive difference.
[+] [-] gok|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fricken|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nostrademons|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] blacksmith_tb|7 years ago|reply
The idea of moving people to public transit sounds good, but I wonder if there's enough spare capacity in most transit systems to serve lots of new riders...
[+] [-] JoshuaEddy|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brudgers|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vannevar|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] scarmig|7 years ago|reply
I guess the response would be to target some SLO budget and, once disengagements get too high, refocus on existing cases to get it down to an acceptable level.
[+] [-] agumonkey|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tlrobinson|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bob_theslob646|7 years ago|reply
The idea is pretty clever. People paying to be guinea pigs.
Sure if people signed off, it would reduce some of the liability but that's still the golden question: who's responsible if something happens?
[+] [-] bdod6|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] trhway|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickopotomus|7 years ago|reply
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...
[+] [-] y4mi|7 years ago|reply
Maybe simulations are when the human is controlling the vehicle and the algorithm is only allowed to .. simulate what it's actions would be if it were in control?
[+] [-] tim333|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TomK32|7 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] oddmind|7 years ago|reply
I always imagined a big decision tree that could get diff’d after each AI training run and tuned by an army of humans.
[+] [-] ebikelaw|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] droopyEyelids|7 years ago|reply
This whole 'disenfranchised underclass' thing that America is struggling with will get considerably worse when automation turns all the truck drivers and their families out onto the street.
[+] [-] CydeWeys|7 years ago|reply
Driving trucks is a dangerous occupation that's terrible for your health, and often takes you away from your family for long periods of time. In a few generations when it's long gone as an occupation, no one will miss it. Getting from now to then is unfortunately going to be a rough transition for some people, but stopping that transition entirely isn't the right call.
[+] [-] IshKebab|7 years ago|reply
Motorways, on the other hand are relatively simple. And we have service stations that driverless lorries could drive themselves to, to be picked up by human drivers for the final leg. And there's an obvious commercial need. And there's an obvious safety need (who hasn't seen a swerving lorry?)
[+] [-] RobertoG|7 years ago|reply
If automation happens is because it makes the economy more productive. If before happening the economy could sustain all the people, logic tell us that now could do it even more easily.
At the end, it's a political decision.
[+] [-] lewis500|7 years ago|reply
[+] [-] YeGoblynQueenne|7 years ago|reply
Impressive. That's roughly equivalent to about 0 miles driven in real-world conditions.
[+] [-] bob_theslob646|7 years ago|reply