I think that we won't be able to have full self-driving on standard public roads, for a while, where non-self-driving vehicles (and pedestrians and cyclists) mix with self-driving cars.
I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday.
But that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
And we definitely won't be getting flying cars (for the general public), until we have full-self-driving.
> I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday.
We could put them on rails and have overhead cables providing electricity efficiently, and make them go up to 300kph too, damn the future looks bright !
Just as a note, one of the largest iron ore mining operations in the world has been runing autonomous supervised Trucks and trains since ~2015:
> Autonomous trucks [1]
> We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. The system uses pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and knows actual locations, speeds and directions of all vehicles at all times.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
In Australia though .. starting from sheep shearing robots in the early 1980s
> And we definitely won't be getting flying cars (for the general public), until we have full-self-driving.
The irony here is that "flying cars" (which really means eVTOL planes) is in many ways an easier problem to solve in terms of navigation, because the notion of strict air corridors and tracking of every vehicle coupled with fewer annoying pedestrians wandering around makes it far easier to make those accommodations (e.g. virtual "fenced-in and dedicated roads")
Even if you have fenced in and dedicated roads, there are system control problems that will always arise. The more vehicles the greater the opportunity for failure of the system. Even today, simple systems like automated industrial plants have to have humans monitoring them closely to ensure that any errors that arise are actually handled properly.
Once you put a large number of vehicles in play, the entire dynamics of the system would become unmanageable.
You would require multiple hot redundancies at every level with human monitoring to at least minimise the things that could go wrong. It would only take one coding error for the entire system to fail and that coding error might only ever be found after some disaster has occurred.
It might be nice to have self-driving vehicles but the cost may be so prohibitive to make it infeasible.
My take on this is always: we will see first fully automated airplanes and railroad trains before we will see a widespread of autonomous cars.
Airspace is an highly controlled area. We have many years of actual autopilots. We have many years of guided take-offs and landings. But still we relay on the skilled human.
The same applies to railroads. Here in Nuremberg we have an highly automated train running on a railroad track that is even partly shared with trains operated by a driver. But the costs of running the automated trains seems not to benefit so that further development has been stopped, because of costs reasons. Even has we have a huge shortage in drivers, which would suggests that automation would be the solution.
AFAIK there are only isolated airport shuttles that run fully automated.
That means, if can't run automated systems in highly controlled areas. Then why would it work with cars in highly uncontrolled areas?
This always had the taste of being too US-centric anyway. European countries (and I guess the rest of the world as well) has very steep, narrow and weird roads and don't run on neatly organized grids. So it's even harder to achieve then just fencing cars and separating traffic.
I think there won't be a big bang where we go from no self driving to fully self driving vehicles at once. It will be many small changes, that taken together will slowly transition towards full self driving cars. Since quite some years we've had cruise control, now there's adaptive cruise control. Then cruise control became able to overtake other vehicles. Next up, they may be able to take a certain exit based on satnav, etc.
It's hard to say when, but chances are that at some point in time we'll simply have FSD, while nobody realized that's where we were headed because it was all marketed as small(ish) individual features.
What we are seeing right now is that humans are really bad at co-operating with machines. We are asked to pay full attention to everything around us and take over at a moment's notice, while doing nothing >99% of the time. Humans simply do not work like that.
Meanwhile the AI acts like a black box, giving very little information about its inner state to the human. It can fail at any moment, without clear prior warning. It will fail in situations which look completely normal to the human. It will fail in situations it seemingly has successfully driven hundreds of times before. The AI is making decisions, but the human does not know why it is making them - or even that it is making them at all.
Humans are really bad at judging an AI's performance. We have already seen people falling asleep behind the wheel of their self-driving car, and that is not going to stop happening.
Self-driving vehicles are to a large extent an all-or-nothing thing. Until we can fully rely on it, it will only make the driving experience worse. Let's just stick to adaptive cruise control for now.
> It will be many small changes, that taken together will slowly transition towards full self driving cars.
The problem is that there is no smooth transition: there is a "valley of failure" in the middle of it, where there is enough automation that the human can disengage most of the time, but not good enough automation to avoid all errors, so the human operator has to step in to correct errors quickly, and doing do "cold" (i.e. from a disengaged state) is not good enough.
Dekker touches on this in "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'"
It seems to me that the biggest obstacle to that scenario would be legal. At some point the law would need to change to allow the "driver" to be asleep/watching TV/etc. behind the wheel.
Personally I'd be satisfied with just being able to hand the highway driving over to the car. Keep me in the middle of the lane, don't let me hit another car or any object in the road, and sound a chime when I'm a mile from the exit.
Same, and current tech is more or less doing this. Even my 2016 Toyota Rav4 has lane departure assist and dynamic cruise control. I still have to keep a hand on the wheel and pay attention to the road of course, but road trips are quite nice just with those 2 features.
Ya, that would make long distance Highway trips more bearable. For city driving, public transit is probably the better option. Although FSD can be a great way to optimize limited city road resources, I don’t expect to see that in the USA anytime soon, but it could happen in China where the traffic is much worse.
Yes - I don't understand why this hasn't been the focus. It would certainly beat airtravel for certain city pairs in the US. Anything in a 800 mile zone I would do a self driving car on interstate vs a plane.
Seems a much simpler problem to solve than full self driving everywhere!
This is not a great article. It's based around Ford admitting they're not a software company, that they won't be able to compete effectively in this space. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
This does not mean that self driving cars "aren't going to happen" -- in fact, the progress by industry leaders has been methodological and constant. The evidence clearly shows that it is happening, and has every indication of continuing to happen. Five years ago people were incredulous that a computer could pilot a car at all. Now, everyone has conceded that this is possible and the criticisms are about how a computer pilots a car and whether it should make more risky maneuvers. This is exactly what we would expect progress to look like.
As progress continues, companies will learn whether or not it is profitable to develop competing products, or concede to market leaders. Ford has conceded. Rivian has conceded. They will license technology developed by other companies with more capable technical teams.
The author seems to think that all self driving companies are basically the same, so Ford must just be facing the harsh truth that everyone else is ignoring, vs Ford being outcompeted by companies with much stronger ML chops
I don't know if Tesla originated the approach, but they're the first I'd ever heard of doing it by my camera or radar or anything like that. I remember my first reaction was befuddlement, when highways cost like $xxx million per mile, why would the trivial cost of dropping electronic friendly markers for lanes and such be anything but a trivial 0.1% cost that should facilitate self driving from the road construction end as a primary means of situating self-driving vehicles?
Instead you have cars with that forever risk of death to their passengers when self-driving due to the non deterministic factor of not having a highway equivalent of train rails.
It's inevitable that roads will eventually be built with electronic assists. However, there are good reasons to develop cars that can still drive without them.
Given that the government would have to do it, it's going to be a really long time to completely retrofit our roads with these devices. We're still not putting them into new roads right now, nor am I aware of any international standard for doing so. A common standardised database of road works would have been useful for decades of GPS navigation but we still don't have that either - most countries don't have one at all, and the ones that do aren't standard (often even varying from city to city) and tend to be incomplete. Relying on the governments of the world to sort this out is a risky strategy.
Secondly, even assuming we do get these systems in place, you can bet good money they will frequently be wrong. Some contractor will come and dig up the road but forget to move/disable/update the electronic markers. So having a parallel visual self driving system to help identify these situations is essential.
Third, pedestrians, bicycles, kids, animals, etc. are unlikely to contain these markers. For trains, we just ban them from the track, put fences around it, etc. but that's clearly not going to work for most roads.
exactly, NFC-like technology would be extremely inexpensive in the scheme of things and could be deployed into road surfaces without much difficulty. I remember seeing a video of self driving technology from the 90s that used a similar approach - magnets in the road IIRC
Actual self driving is likely to happen, but it's going to need some accommodations.
They might be high-resolution mapping with the ability of (local) government to mark changes as they occur. Road workers with devices that can direct automated vehicles to avoid holes in the road and the like plus other special cases.
Along the way there will be many stand-alone (self-parking) and in between (freeway/highway autonomous driving) functions that will be very useful and will be attractive to customers.
If we're only talking about "the holy grail" unlimited full autonomy, then yes, it's probably not possible, since it approaches general intelligence.
Self-driving cars will definitely happen. It won't happen next year, but it will absolutely happen. That's the way humans are. If they can do something and make some money, they will do it.
It could probably be done today with richer sensors on the car than just visual and with "smart" roads outfitted with specialized symbols and transponders to guide the car.
Pure self drive like humans do requires a cognitive model of cause and effect and the nature of the world being navigated, not just pattern recognition and prediction.
Enormous advances in predictive and pattern recognizing AI have been made in recent years, but these things still don't "understand" anything. I put understand in quotes because I still don't think we understand understanding.
The mistake of those who have bet the farm of self drive (Musk/Tesla being chief among them) is to jump the gun and think that the AI advances of the last decade have made it just a problem of scaling a technology. It's not. It's still a fundamental invention problem, not a scaling problem, but what we have is good enough to fool us into thinking we can get there.
Musk's other big venture SpaceX can successfully build and scale rockets to send humans to the Moon and Mars. That's because that, unlike full self drive, is just a matter of scaling already thoroughly understood physics. We know exactly how to build such things. We just haven't done it yet (beyond Apollo).
> Ford CEO Jim Farley justified this by saying on the company’s earnings call Wednesday evening that “profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off and we won’t necessarily have to create that technology for ourselves.”
i.e., “Tesla has won, we’ll license the technology from them.”
>The fact is that these existing services are extremely constrained in terms of geography and operating hours (though the latter is arguably a regulatory issue)
Is it though? Cruise would like you to believe that the only reason they don’t have fully driverless cars in SF during the day is strictly regulatory. However, it is far easier to drive in a dense urban environment at night when roads are empty than during the daytime when roads are crowded. I bet the disengagement rate is so high during the day (when the cars have backup drivers) that fully driverless operation would be impossible.
the self-driving myth has pumped countless startups in the past 15 years. i guess the downturn is a good opportunity to move to some different myth (i suggest longevity, which is more likely to happen).
I wish some of the investment was used to create semi-autonomous vehicles for the disabled instead.
I beg to differ. Self driving cars are unlikely to make it to the West but the outlook for the East (China) is totally different.
In the West there are economic woes that will make the dream of everyone having 2.2 Teslas in the driveway not happen. There is no getting around this, the West is in a bit of a pickle.
Meanwhile, in China they have an entirely different way of achieving self driving. That is to put 5G (6,7 or 8...) on everything. Therefore, when you approach a junction, the 5G gadgets at that junction with their all seeing eyes and ability to communicate with vehicles just tells your car where to go and when.
By the magic of 5G it will also know what the deal is at the next point of decision, so your car can arrive for when the lights are green and you can be on your merry way.
The sensors on the car can do the lane keeping assist and slam on the anchors should an unexpected object appear on the highway.
There are aspects to this approach that are un-American. So it is not going to happen, even if a magic wand magically fixes economic woes that are far too structural for America to fix.
You could say that the Chinese approach is not 'self driving' but 'networked driving'. But what is the big deal if your car whisks you off from A to B without having to touch the wheel?
Do you have any pointers to this actually happening, or is this just your prediction?
FWIW, I would not start with China if I was looking for an easy place to test self-driving cars. There's plenty of crazy drivers, remarkably heterogenous vehicles on the road including suicidal cyclists and all sorts of weird three-wheeled moped-scooter-truck things, signage is inconsistent and missing, road quality is widely variable, traffic jams can be epic, the list goes on and on.
> You could say that the Chinese approach is not 'self driving' but 'networked driving'. But what is the big deal if your car whisks you off from A to B without having to touch the wheel?
Would this before or after they've locked everyone under indefinite COVID detention, err... quarantine?
Even if this were the way they justify the massive panopticon, there would be so few people that would benefit from this tech that one has to ask what was gained from doing so? The way QR codes made it's way to China isn't entirely just weibo or wechat alone, Xianjing relies on them as does all the AI facial recognition tech and is the very definition of an Authoritarian police-state and if that is what it 'takes' to get to mas adoption of Surveillance Tech than I think we are better off.
Public transportation mixed wit WFH solutions seem far more favourable.
>A couple caveats for those going apoplectic over the headline: I mean self-driving isn’t going to be a thing A) in our lifetimes and B) with any kind of omnipresent scale
Sure, you cannot deny the fact that it already happening. There's a surprising number of driverless cars on the road already.
In terms of meeting the 'omnipresent scale'. This is much harder. There's a ton of people whose life choices mean their car budget is <$5000. Which means they can only afford 20 year old death trap beaters.
So how does society get to the point where $150,000 driverless cars can be afforded by those people? It's from the amortization table and depreciation. It might be decades before there can be any major proliferation. That isn't the goal of driverless. The obvious caveat is most manufacturers are working on subscription models.
The interesting thing about the current system. A tremendous cost to society is the poor investment into transportation. You drive around a city and you'll see millions of $ sitting in driveways not doing anything. Whereas public transit is certainly not the alternative to this poor investment.
This is where the driverless taxis come in. The people who genuinely use their vehicles to a significant extent can still do so, but most people really just need low cost transportation. Which is indeed why public transit must exist and also why large cities are repairing that huge wealth damage.
In the near future public transit like buses will go away and be replaced by driverless taxis. Not exactly nostradamus to see that coming. This will be what presents driverless cars at an omnipresent scale. This absolutely will be happening very soon.
Teslas (while much maligned and deservedly so) can already drive pretty well on most well painted and high traffic roads. Granted it is very conservative and often I take control just to avoid other drivers honking at me for taking too long to turn.
But this article mentions L4 autonomy. L4 still allows for geofencing and human control. Tesla is already pretty much L3, borderline L4. I think it is realistic to say L5 won't exist until radical change to our infrastructure is made but to say L4 won't exist in our lifetimes... I mean, I suppose if you're 80 years old already.
I also think it draws too radical a conclusion in the article. The conclusion is from the author. The people from Ford explicitly said they think that it will be developed independently and Ford will be able to buy it instead of having to make it themselves. Which is very different than "it won't happen in our lifetime." It seems they didn't decide to stop research because it is not possible but because oters can do it cheaper.
Self-driving cars were always overhyped in the US because roads are the only decent transportation infrastructure.
A future where we have better cars is a waste. For long distances, we should build trains. For short distances in cities, we have buses, trams, bikes. This technology already exists and is very good, it’s just not supported by the government-business hybrid that runs the US.
> For short distances in cities, we have buses, trams, bikes
Although I agree, as an urban dweller, I am quite anticipating a possible future with the total proliferation of self driving cars. If self driving cars reach a large majority of the road, I can anticipate local and state governments outlawing the manually-driven kind on urban streets. I personally would really like this, because human drivers are an absolute nuisance to urban life in many ways.
You can't use laws to make humans drive 25 on that road where everyone routinely goes 40. It just doesn't work, and the people whose houses are on that road suffer the noise and danger that results. You can, however, use laws to make algorithms respect the speed limit, because big companies will otherwise face big fines. That's why I want to see self driving cars.
The US still hasn't finished industrializing/urbanizing, so we still have relatively large rural populations that drive longer distances to go to and from stores schools etc. The schools can't even cover the area they serve with bus service for children. Those areas will continue to meed cars, and they aren't a corner case, they are still roughly a fifth of the population.
And buses dont work that well in suburbia and that is over half of the population. Only about a quarter of the US lives in denser urban environments.
Cruise and Waymo are the clear market leaders in Autonomous Vehicles. Tracking the progress of these companies in the past year alone where they are operating with no safety driver in dense San Francisco is incredibly impressive. The field of machine learning in general is advancing at a great pace as well. I think by the end of the decade in places with limited weather events AV will be as common as Uber. At some point people will reconsider buying a new car and just rely on a robotaxi subscription along with walking, cycling, and transit to get around. It will be survival of the fittest though, only few companies will succeed. Tesla 'Autopilot' on the other hand doesn't even use Lidar, seems to disconnect frequently and is much more dangerous. I really think they use deceptive marketing.
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|3 years ago|reply
I think, if we had fenced-in and dedicated roads for self-driving cars, we could have had them yesterday.
But that ain't gonna happen anytime soon.
And we definitely won't be getting flying cars (for the general public), until we have full-self-driving.
[+] [-] lm28469|3 years ago|reply
We could put them on rails and have overhead cables providing electricity efficiently, and make them go up to 300kph too, damn the future looks bright !
[+] [-] defrost|3 years ago|reply
> Autonomous trucks [1]
> We run more than 130 autonomous trucks, part of our Autonomous Haulage System, across our Iron Ore operations. The trucks are operated by a supervisory system and a central controller, rather than a driver. The system uses pre-defined GPS courses to automatically navigate haul roads and intersections and knows actual locations, speeds and directions of all vehicles at all times.
> In 2018, each truck was estimated to have operated on average 700 hours more than conventional haul trucks, with 15% lower costs – delivering clear productivity benefits. They also take truck operators out of harm’s way, reducing the risks associated with working around heavy machinery.
In Australia though .. starting from sheep shearing robots in the early 1980s
[1] https://www.riotinto.com/en/about/innovation/automation
[+] [-] vidarh|3 years ago|reply
The irony here is that "flying cars" (which really means eVTOL planes) is in many ways an easier problem to solve in terms of navigation, because the notion of strict air corridors and tracking of every vehicle coupled with fewer annoying pedestrians wandering around makes it far easier to make those accommodations (e.g. virtual "fenced-in and dedicated roads")
[+] [-] oldandtired|3 years ago|reply
Once you put a large number of vehicles in play, the entire dynamics of the system would become unmanageable.
You would require multiple hot redundancies at every level with human monitoring to at least minimise the things that could go wrong. It would only take one coding error for the entire system to fail and that coding error might only ever be found after some disaster has occurred.
It might be nice to have self-driving vehicles but the cost may be so prohibitive to make it infeasible.
[+] [-] f1shy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PinguTS|3 years ago|reply
Airspace is an highly controlled area. We have many years of actual autopilots. We have many years of guided take-offs and landings. But still we relay on the skilled human.
The same applies to railroads. Here in Nuremberg we have an highly automated train running on a railroad track that is even partly shared with trains operated by a driver. But the costs of running the automated trains seems not to benefit so that further development has been stopped, because of costs reasons. Even has we have a huge shortage in drivers, which would suggests that automation would be the solution. AFAIK there are only isolated airport shuttles that run fully automated.
That means, if can't run automated systems in highly controlled areas. Then why would it work with cars in highly uncontrolled areas?
[+] [-] RamblingCTO|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teh_klev|3 years ago|reply
Seems I'm going to have to downgrade my New Year disappointment about "still no flying cars" to "still no self driving cars" (for the general public).
[+] [-] gremlinsinc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] timeon|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Freeaqingme|3 years ago|reply
It's hard to say when, but chances are that at some point in time we'll simply have FSD, while nobody realized that's where we were headed because it was all marketed as small(ish) individual features.
[+] [-] crote|3 years ago|reply
What we are seeing right now is that humans are really bad at co-operating with machines. We are asked to pay full attention to everything around us and take over at a moment's notice, while doing nothing >99% of the time. Humans simply do not work like that.
Meanwhile the AI acts like a black box, giving very little information about its inner state to the human. It can fail at any moment, without clear prior warning. It will fail in situations which look completely normal to the human. It will fail in situations it seemingly has successfully driven hundreds of times before. The AI is making decisions, but the human does not know why it is making them - or even that it is making them at all.
Humans are really bad at judging an AI's performance. We have already seen people falling asleep behind the wheel of their self-driving car, and that is not going to stop happening.
Self-driving vehicles are to a large extent an all-or-nothing thing. Until we can fully rely on it, it will only make the driving experience worse. Let's just stick to adaptive cruise control for now.
[+] [-] SideburnsOfDoom|3 years ago|reply
The problem is that there is no smooth transition: there is a "valley of failure" in the middle of it, where there is enough automation that the human can disengage most of the time, but not good enough automation to avoid all errors, so the human operator has to step in to correct errors quickly, and doing do "cold" (i.e. from a disengaged state) is not good enough.
Dekker touches on this in "The Field Guide to Understanding 'Human Error'"
[+] [-] harimau777|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] causi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rco8786|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] meetingthrower|3 years ago|reply
Seems a much simpler problem to solve than full self driving everywhere!
[+] [-] throwaway09223|3 years ago|reply
This does not mean that self driving cars "aren't going to happen" -- in fact, the progress by industry leaders has been methodological and constant. The evidence clearly shows that it is happening, and has every indication of continuing to happen. Five years ago people were incredulous that a computer could pilot a car at all. Now, everyone has conceded that this is possible and the criticisms are about how a computer pilots a car and whether it should make more risky maneuvers. This is exactly what we would expect progress to look like.
As progress continues, companies will learn whether or not it is profitable to develop competing products, or concede to market leaders. Ford has conceded. Rivian has conceded. They will license technology developed by other companies with more capable technical teams.
[+] [-] capitalsigma|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] silverpepsi|3 years ago|reply
Instead you have cars with that forever risk of death to their passengers when self-driving due to the non deterministic factor of not having a highway equivalent of train rails.
[+] [-] cameronh90|3 years ago|reply
Given that the government would have to do it, it's going to be a really long time to completely retrofit our roads with these devices. We're still not putting them into new roads right now, nor am I aware of any international standard for doing so. A common standardised database of road works would have been useful for decades of GPS navigation but we still don't have that either - most countries don't have one at all, and the ones that do aren't standard (often even varying from city to city) and tend to be incomplete. Relying on the governments of the world to sort this out is a risky strategy.
Secondly, even assuming we do get these systems in place, you can bet good money they will frequently be wrong. Some contractor will come and dig up the road but forget to move/disable/update the electronic markers. So having a parallel visual self driving system to help identify these situations is essential.
Third, pedestrians, bicycles, kids, animals, etc. are unlikely to contain these markers. For trains, we just ban them from the track, put fences around it, etc. but that's clearly not going to work for most roads.
[+] [-] blakesterz|3 years ago|reply
And a follow up story from 2016: https://laist.com/news/self-driving-cars-debuted-on-californ...
[+] [-] f1shy|3 years ago|reply
Autonomous driving without changing a thing, will not happen soon. But changing some things, is totally possible.
[+] [-] phpnode|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dkjaudyeqooe|3 years ago|reply
They might be high-resolution mapping with the ability of (local) government to mark changes as they occur. Road workers with devices that can direct automated vehicles to avoid holes in the road and the like plus other special cases.
Along the way there will be many stand-alone (self-parking) and in between (freeway/highway autonomous driving) functions that will be very useful and will be attractive to customers.
If we're only talking about "the holy grail" unlimited full autonomy, then yes, it's probably not possible, since it approaches general intelligence.
[+] [-] illuminerdy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] emptyfile|3 years ago|reply
Utterly unbelievable that Tesla is still selling "Full self driving" cars to customers.
[+] [-] api|3 years ago|reply
Pure self drive like humans do requires a cognitive model of cause and effect and the nature of the world being navigated, not just pattern recognition and prediction.
Enormous advances in predictive and pattern recognizing AI have been made in recent years, but these things still don't "understand" anything. I put understand in quotes because I still don't think we understand understanding.
The mistake of those who have bet the farm of self drive (Musk/Tesla being chief among them) is to jump the gun and think that the AI advances of the last decade have made it just a problem of scaling a technology. It's not. It's still a fundamental invention problem, not a scaling problem, but what we have is good enough to fool us into thinking we can get there.
Musk's other big venture SpaceX can successfully build and scale rockets to send humans to the Moon and Mars. That's because that, unlike full self drive, is just a matter of scaling already thoroughly understood physics. We know exactly how to build such things. We just haven't done it yet (beyond Apollo).
[+] [-] unnouinceput|3 years ago|reply
A: Yes, it is.
[+] [-] GaylordTuring|3 years ago|reply
i.e., “Tesla has won, we’ll license the technology from them.”
[+] [-] solumunus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FL33TW00D|3 years ago|reply
Deep learning didn’t take off until 2012 - so a little over a decade ago.
Do you think it won’t be solved in another decade?
[+] [-] shaky-carrousel|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MontyCarloHall|3 years ago|reply
Is it though? Cruise would like you to believe that the only reason they don’t have fully driverless cars in SF during the day is strictly regulatory. However, it is far easier to drive in a dense urban environment at night when roads are empty than during the daytime when roads are crowded. I bet the disengagement rate is so high during the day (when the cars have backup drivers) that fully driverless operation would be impossible.
[+] [-] seydor|3 years ago|reply
I wish some of the investment was used to create semi-autonomous vehicles for the disabled instead.
[+] [-] dang|3 years ago|reply
Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33212850 - Oct 2022 (481 comments)
Even After $100B, Self-Driving Cars Are Going Nowhere - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33106739 - Oct 2022 (107 comments)
[+] [-] Theodores|3 years ago|reply
In the West there are economic woes that will make the dream of everyone having 2.2 Teslas in the driveway not happen. There is no getting around this, the West is in a bit of a pickle.
Meanwhile, in China they have an entirely different way of achieving self driving. That is to put 5G (6,7 or 8...) on everything. Therefore, when you approach a junction, the 5G gadgets at that junction with their all seeing eyes and ability to communicate with vehicles just tells your car where to go and when.
By the magic of 5G it will also know what the deal is at the next point of decision, so your car can arrive for when the lights are green and you can be on your merry way.
The sensors on the car can do the lane keeping assist and slam on the anchors should an unexpected object appear on the highway.
There are aspects to this approach that are un-American. So it is not going to happen, even if a magic wand magically fixes economic woes that are far too structural for America to fix.
You could say that the Chinese approach is not 'self driving' but 'networked driving'. But what is the big deal if your car whisks you off from A to B without having to touch the wheel?
[+] [-] rippercushions|3 years ago|reply
FWIW, I would not start with China if I was looking for an easy place to test self-driving cars. There's plenty of crazy drivers, remarkably heterogenous vehicles on the road including suicidal cyclists and all sorts of weird three-wheeled moped-scooter-truck things, signage is inconsistent and missing, road quality is widely variable, traffic jams can be epic, the list goes on and on.
[+] [-] Melting_Harps|3 years ago|reply
Would this before or after they've locked everyone under indefinite COVID detention, err... quarantine?
Even if this were the way they justify the massive panopticon, there would be so few people that would benefit from this tech that one has to ask what was gained from doing so? The way QR codes made it's way to China isn't entirely just weibo or wechat alone, Xianjing relies on them as does all the AI facial recognition tech and is the very definition of an Authoritarian police-state and if that is what it 'takes' to get to mas adoption of Surveillance Tech than I think we are better off.
Public transportation mixed wit WFH solutions seem far more favourable.
[+] [-] incomingpain|3 years ago|reply
Sure, you cannot deny the fact that it already happening. There's a surprising number of driverless cars on the road already.
In terms of meeting the 'omnipresent scale'. This is much harder. There's a ton of people whose life choices mean their car budget is <$5000. Which means they can only afford 20 year old death trap beaters.
So how does society get to the point where $150,000 driverless cars can be afforded by those people? It's from the amortization table and depreciation. It might be decades before there can be any major proliferation. That isn't the goal of driverless. The obvious caveat is most manufacturers are working on subscription models.
The interesting thing about the current system. A tremendous cost to society is the poor investment into transportation. You drive around a city and you'll see millions of $ sitting in driveways not doing anything. Whereas public transit is certainly not the alternative to this poor investment.
This is where the driverless taxis come in. The people who genuinely use their vehicles to a significant extent can still do so, but most people really just need low cost transportation. Which is indeed why public transit must exist and also why large cities are repairing that huge wealth damage.
In the near future public transit like buses will go away and be replaced by driverless taxis. Not exactly nostradamus to see that coming. This will be what presents driverless cars at an omnipresent scale. This absolutely will be happening very soon.
[+] [-] throwaway2016a|3 years ago|reply
But this article mentions L4 autonomy. L4 still allows for geofencing and human control. Tesla is already pretty much L3, borderline L4. I think it is realistic to say L5 won't exist until radical change to our infrastructure is made but to say L4 won't exist in our lifetimes... I mean, I suppose if you're 80 years old already.
I also think it draws too radical a conclusion in the article. The conclusion is from the author. The people from Ford explicitly said they think that it will be developed independently and Ford will be able to buy it instead of having to make it themselves. Which is very different than "it won't happen in our lifetime." It seems they didn't decide to stop research because it is not possible but because oters can do it cheaper.
[+] [-] slaw|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nextstep|3 years ago|reply
A future where we have better cars is a waste. For long distances, we should build trains. For short distances in cities, we have buses, trams, bikes. This technology already exists and is very good, it’s just not supported by the government-business hybrid that runs the US.
[+] [-] helen___keller|3 years ago|reply
Although I agree, as an urban dweller, I am quite anticipating a possible future with the total proliferation of self driving cars. If self driving cars reach a large majority of the road, I can anticipate local and state governments outlawing the manually-driven kind on urban streets. I personally would really like this, because human drivers are an absolute nuisance to urban life in many ways.
You can't use laws to make humans drive 25 on that road where everyone routinely goes 40. It just doesn't work, and the people whose houses are on that road suffer the noise and danger that results. You can, however, use laws to make algorithms respect the speed limit, because big companies will otherwise face big fines. That's why I want to see self driving cars.
[+] [-] galangalalgol|3 years ago|reply
And buses dont work that well in suburbia and that is over half of the population. Only about a quarter of the US lives in denser urban environments.
[+] [-] rnantes|3 years ago|reply