Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people.
This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving. Doesn't work. Machine learning is way too dumb.
You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning. That's just used to guess what they're going to do next. It's not used to decide if they're an obstacle. Obstacle detection and avoidance is all sensors and geometry.
Also, "self driving car", "electric car", and "transportation as a service" are all independent. All will be available, but not from the same companies.
I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong.
> This is mostly about sensors and geometry.
And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses to overcome some geographical feature might expect something to be spherical, but in reality, it ends up being elliptical, only it is too late for the car to adjust, for example, or vice versa. There is literally hundreds of thousands of potential corner cases out there. The earth in itself is a good example: although many people try to do distance calculations with lat/long and some standard radius are usually off by n precision points because the earth isn't perfectly spherical, only approximately. Driverless cars have to be precise. A couple points off might spell the difference between safely driving in the lanes, and veering into a ditch, off a cliff, or into a median or obstacle.
Sensors will suffer some of the same problems (or different problems) as our biological sensors do. How will road signs, lines, and likewise be detected in adverse conditions? Snow? How will radar overcome natural geographical corner reflectors?
Driverless cars seem to becoming along just fine in perfect conditions.
Not trying to be defeatist, but I believe if we want true driverless technology, the infrastructure will have to support the vehicles for these edge cases that we cannot overcome. Or we can continue to be idealists. I for one wish we never gave up on trains -- they are the perfect "driverless" technology candidate.
I think interesting edge cases include:
'empty cardboard box or log?'
'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?'
'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb'
'Police directing traffic'
'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision'
'One lane bridges'
'Busy parking garage with blind corners'
'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your lane'
'Other driver in round about about to cut you off'
'Pulling out to cross a busy 4 line highway with no median or traffic signal'
Not to mention, any snow on the road is going to make it supremely hard for a computer to determine where their lane is, or even the road is.
The infrastructure driverless vehicles rely on is their own internal maps, which have lanes and signage marked out. Being able to visually detect these things is important, but it is a measure for added redundancy.
Great strides have been made in using machine learning to filter out obscurants such as snow. Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem.
The biggest technical challenges are related to planning. So say you're approaching an intersection. There is a pedestrian about to cross, a cyclist in front of you and another vehicle waiting to turn left across your path. As a human, you understand that if you behave one way, it will cause the pedestrian, the cyclist and the other car to respond a certain way, but if you respond to the situation another way, it will cause all three to respond differently.
Our ability to game out scenarios like this is intuitive, but for AI to predict how it's behavior as an agent will influence the behaviour of other agents on the road is a daunting undertaking, particularly when taking into account the full scope of scenarios that need to be mastered before an autonomous can reliably safely navigate anywhere.
> yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong.
There's some video here for:
>“The Yandex.Taxi autonomous car safely navigated the streets of Moscow after a recent snowstorm managing interactions with traffic, pedestrians, parked vehicles and other road hazards on snowy and icy streets,” https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/16/17020096/self-driving-car...
Presumably it's not perfect but it seems to be coming along. Snow and ice covered Moscow is more adverse than what I usually drive.
> come close to being workable in adverse conditions
Given how people drive in the rain and snow in the Northeast, I would argue human drivers have not even come close to being workable in adverse conditions.
We drive in them anyway, despite often times magnitudes more risk of crashing, because we want to.
Also, the lack of support for harder environment isn't because they're impossible, but rather because they are focusing on getting it perfect in normal environments before expanding. The person said they are "coming along fine", not that they are done.
Fundamentally, if a human can drive a car with nothing but two relatively poor eyes with a pretty small field of vision set in a single location inside the vehicle, an AI can be trained to drive using the same inputs - any more sensors are a bonus.
The other thing people forget is the bar isn't that high: self driving vehicles don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans are. All of the "whatabout" edge cases people proffer as examples of areas an AI would have trouble with, people have trouble with too. The difference is that once an AI learns to solve that edge case, it doesn't have to relearn going forward.
No one thinks that you just hook up ML to a camera and you're done. Literally everyone working on this only uses ML for identification. When that Model X crashed into a highway divider, it was because the lines on the road were very faint and there was a fork in the line that actually wasn't the _real_ lane line. The car followed that by mistake, but only because of the misidentification of the lane line.
How are more sensors going to tell the difference between a plastic bag and a cat? How does lidar tell you which car is parked on the side of the road and which one is in your path? Relying on a dozen sensors seems like the crutch to me. Nothing about our current world has been designed for lidar and radar. It was designed for binocular vision. Sure, if your only goal is to not hit things at low speed in perfect weather, lidar is great. But you can't get much further than that.
If the Model X in your example had LIDAR, it would have been able to build up a decently accurate collision model of the world, which it could have then used to say "there is an object in the path I'm on, maybe I shouldn't plow into it." As opposed to relying on implicit and apparently unreliable cues like lane markers. That particular fatal crash seems like a sensors and geometry problem.
"Nothing about our current world has been designed for lidar and radar. It was designed for binocular vision."
Really? Was the world designed for binocular vision, or is it just three dimensional?
Having more sensors, especially when they have different failure modes seems like the only possible way to create a reliable system. LIDAR isn't super dense, but generally has accurate returns. Binocular vision sucks on untextured objects, like the side of a white truck in the fatal Model S collision. Why wouldn't you want the crutch of both types of measurement?
Well, my optical sensors(i.e. eyes) provide me with enough information to discriminate a cat from a bag, so I suppose with enough processing we should be able to do the same with a control system. Cars have an added advantage that their vision systems could work in lower light and non-optical wavelengths. I don't see any fundamental issues with getting self-driving cars working. It may not happen in 5 years, but it will happen.
What do you mean "no one"? Press coverage of Waymo is full of references to engineers who are teaching cars and cars that are learning. The AI car is a big part of the hype.
>You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning. That's just used to guess what they're going to do next. It's not used to decide if they're an obstacle. Obstacle detection and avoidance is all sensors and geometry.
Honestly, getting them to work to this basic level is the "easy" part. Real world driving conditions in urban environments are suboptimal at best. You're not only going to need a system that can navigate around and not hit things. You need it to be able to dynamically route around road-construction, do clever things to find parking.
Roads in most places aren't that well standardized. It takes a lot of small judgement calls for a taxi to actually do its job. Uber and Lyft still have trouble dispatching people to pick you up at your actual door!
Roads are currently designed for human drivers. Roads designed for automated vehicles could use different signalling systems for intersections and road works, and even parking (it would help if unattended vehicles could be moved at will for tighter packing).
Coming along fine, sure, but isn't the point about reality versus hype?
The guy who started iRobot, Rodney Brooks, doesn't believe we'll see a true driverless car operating throughout a city on normal roads until 2035 at the earliest: http://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
As software developers, we all know how big the difference between "a demo the boss is excited about" and "reliably working in production for all users" can be. Given how complex the domain is and how many edge cases it has, I can easily believe Brooks is right here.
I had a look at his predictions re: self-driving cars. He clearly invested quite a lot of thought went into these because he makes a lot of subtle distinctions. However, one of his predictions (probably the one that you're referring to) is this:
> A driverless "taxi" service in a major US city with arbitrary pick and drop off locations, even in a restricted geographical area.
> Not Earlier Than 2032
This is odd because isn't Waymo doing just that in Phoenix with a general release date of 2019? I checked the source because I wanted to verify that it says "a city" and not "any city".
> You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning.
What you wrote makes a lot of sense to me. However, I would also hope that in a matured self-driving environment, traffic lights would be mapped ahead of time. It's always possible that a traffic light shows up in an unexpected place, but in my mental image of the future, this raises a flag for system management to modify the map of permanent objects.
There is a chance that a powered non-permanent traffic light is found somewhere, a dude walking along the side of the street with a stoplight on his back, and connected batteries. In that case, the police need calling. In machine learning, there are just so many corner cases where best to not try to fully interpret, just call out "dude, look at this thing!"
> There is a chance that a powered non-permanent traffic light is found somewhere, a dude walking along the side of the street with a stoplight on his back
Temporary traffic lights are extremely common, at least here in Australia. They are used in the case of roadworks or other short-term disruptions that requires traffic flowing in both directions to share a single lane, in conditions not suited to manual traffic control (i.e. overnight, weekends, long-term works on rural roads).
Ideally you would have a radio transmitter on the traffic light that broadcasts its location, metadata, and state information. You could still have a database, but it would be much more redundant to have live information.
It's relatively common for road maintenance crews in rural areas to install temporary signal lights during major projects. For example when they close one lane on part of a two lane road so traffic can only move in one direction at a time while the drivers going the other direction have to wait a few minutes.
Geometry inferred from range sensors can certainly provide an additional useful source of information, but it's far from clear that the right approach to controlling a self-driving vehicle is mostly to solve a geometry problem. For example, even if a range sensor can provide a perfect estimate of the location and geometry of pedestrian, how do you predict whether the pedestrian will dart out into the road or stop because they see a car coming. Human drivers have learned from years of (mostly) visual experience observing human behaviors to make reliable predictions about such things. Perhaps machines can too.
Since evolution didn't provide us with our personal lidars, human drivers are an existence proof that it is possible to learn reliable driving performance from vision alone. Which isn't to say that machine learning based on vision alone is already close to human-level or competency or that human-level competency is sufficient for a automated driving system or that sophisticated sensors don't make the problem a bit easier. But I don't know how you can be so confident that vision alone (or primarily) won't be route that eventually succeeds.
How could it do that? The safety statistics quoted by Tesla is "fatalities per mile of Autopilot-enabled vehicle", compared to "fatalities per mile for the average car on the road". It's by no means an accurate comparison, in fact they're inflating their relative safety versus other cars by more than an order of magnitude.
How did you conclude this? There are other similarly-priced but more-numerous models of car where literally nobody has ever died after crashing one. Controlling for price (as a proxy for the wealth of the occupants) Tesla has a poor safety record.
I was in a statistics class where the Professor was teaching likelihood, then asked if there are cases when we don't want to maximize the likelihood ratio. The answer is when you want to put a limitation on false positive (or negative) detection.
You wouldn't vet a system that is susceptible to high false negatives and likely to kill people- no matter how good the accuracy is.
Arguably, but it's hard to demonstrate the negative. At best, we can compare Tesla accident rates to those of other vehicles in the same class (luxury sedans). I'm sure you're right, but proving you're right against the naysayers is a different problem.
Sir, you have nailed it. No serious robotics project deployed to date does anything more than Good Sensors + Good Geometry. And I do not think a revolution is required, just good old time.
At some point the right balance of sensor quality and manufacturing processes will converge to be an affordable solution to highway driving. (broad daylight, then dusk, then maybe rain, etc etc).
If history is any guide (airlines anyone?) This will come along piecemeal, and the CEOs being forced to make ridiculous promises to appease shareholder anxiety will be given nice scapegoat packages along the way.
All will be available, all from the same company.
EDIT: Waymo laughed at "route-based advertising" when I mentioned, but ZF supports this idea. Route-based advertising or route advertising is an advertising model where your vehicle diverts to make you see a particular place and/or get you to visit a particular shop. For example, it may make you see McDonalds to get you to buy BigMac.
My machine learning professor used to say that people tend to sensationalize self-driving car fatalities, without realizing that if every car on the road was self-driving, deaths would go close to zero.
I think the hard part of the problem is the infrastructure. Everyone wants to fix the cars, but they'll leave the hard part to the government- which is the development of autonomous-ready infrastructure.
I think we need to distinguish between assistive technologies, ADAS, self driving, autonomous, and driverless. They don't mean the same thing but are all interchanged.
For your professor, yes assistive technology like lane keeping assist and collision avoidance will save lives, but are no reason to go driverless.
I'm still taken aback by how quickly government (federal, state) allowed testing of driverless cars on public roads. Feels like a cold calculation made on behalf of citizens to say "some people probably need to die in order to bring this to market quickly, and that's ok with us in these areas."
The existence of cars and airplanes (even horses) is a similar trade-off. Some people have to die for us to even have them.
Ultimately the faster we bring driverless cars to fruition, the fewer people will die, simply because it's inevitable that they will quickly exceed the safety of humans.
Then we will have turned automobile safety into an engineering problem. It was partially that before, we could package the victim better to improve their survivability, but now we can modify the driver ... every driver.
> The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving.
There are about 7 billion instances of those learning systems though.
Will this be replicated with machines in the next 10 years? I have no clue.
There's absolutely no equivalence between a CNN created today with deep learning, compared to the Neural Network in a human brain.
The problem with the human brain is one of inattention. CNNs / Artificial Neural Networks can remain at attention 100% of the time due to their artificial / machine nature.
But CNNs, despite being at 100% attention the entire time, still have issues determining if that splotch on the screen is the sky or an 18-wheeler.
Artificial Neural Networks / Convolutional Neural Networks have a very long way to go before they reach human equivalence. In contrast, sensor systems or LIDAR brute-forces the problem. LIDAR can see things human's can't see, and advanced sensors can tell you (at least, in clear conditions) the location and velocity of virtually every object around the car.
Fake-it till you make it camera-only driverless cars are clearly hype that relies upon a fundamental misunderstanding. Just because CNNs are kinda-sorta like the visual cortex of the human brain doesn't really mean that it works like one.
CNNs have really cool visual learning properties. But I've yet to see one 100% successfully tell you background vs foreground in pictures like a human brain can do. Even in clear weather conditions, the CNN can confuse a truck for the sky and still run full speed into an 18-wheeler.
Look at other people's videos of driving through that section of road around the same time - the pedestrian would have been clearly visible and the car and safety driver should both have easily seen them and stopped. If you read about the preliminary NTSB report [1], it's clear that the car had six seconds of warning and 1.3s of certainty of impact, yet did nothing to avoid it, not even alerting the safety driver. The pedestrian may have been foolish, but the car could easily have avoided killing them.
From Sterling Anderson, former director of Autopilot who oversaw the implementation of HW2:
>Perception is a game of statistics.Crudely speaking, if we have three independent modalities with epsilon miss-detection-rates and we combine them we can achieve an epsilon³ rate in perception. In practice, relatively orthogonal failure modes won’t achieve that level of benefit, however, an error every million miles can get boosted to an error every billion miles. It is extremely difficult to achieve this level of accuracy with a single modality alone.
>Different sensor modalities have different strengths and weaknesses; thus, incorporating multiple modalities drives orders of magnitude improvements in the reliability of the system. Cameras suffer from difficulty in low-light and high dynamic range scenarios; radars suffer from limited resolution and artifacts due to multi-path and doppler ambiguity; lidars “see” obscurants.
I’ll take the “over” on that bet any day of the week. It might not be 20 years, but it’ll be a friggin’ while.
There are scenarios it’s possible to encounter on the road that humans don’t even necessarily know how to handle immediately. In proper, brutal, real-world testing, one very quickly enters the realm of problems that you’d need full-fledged general AI to reason through.
I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest."
I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more cities like Seattle with its rail expansion and fewer New York City where the infrastructure is finally getting money so it doesn't fall apart.
There are already so many tax breaks going into driverless companies. If Alphabet or Here want to do this on their own, go for it; but governments around the world should stop giving tax breaks and municipal incentives for this technology.
I can see it being more useful in Europe, where so much of the country is connected and it'd help sold the last leg problem. But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity, not just for those who can afford to live in the city, but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks.
> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity
While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this.
A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)
I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.
>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor
That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to) and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and comfort will spend it without looking back.
A lot of people think ... the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want.
Well that's because it's actually true for a lot of people. Sure, there's no freedom in commuting between SF and south bay by car, or navigating the most dense downtown environments. But I definitely use my car on a daily basis for things that would be impossible or incredibly time consuming by transit. And yes, many of the transit patrons around here would probably prefer a car if they could afford it. Most places are not like NYC where the subway is often the most effective option regardless of wealth.
I don't think it's really feasible for more spread out suburban environments to implement effective mass transit. The anti-car idealists often seem to forget that there are a lot of people living outside of dense city centers.
Hmmm, weird idea here, but maybe that's the answer then?
If self driving cars are terrible at coping with the chaos humans grit their teeth and deal with, maybe software for engineering cooperative bumper-to-bumper traffic jams involving clogs of slow-moving self driving cars, that reduce the road speeds to constant 20 MPH (the /constant/ part being important), and eliminate chaotic lane changing to near zero for the group, is one way to bootstrap self driving cars.
In other words, low-performance self driving cars might work fine, and since people can lounge about, and disengage from the guidance and navigation tasks, why not go slower?
Then, add swarming to the mix, such that cars going to the same place, all travel slowly in a single group.
It's against the law to obstruct traffic, or violate minimum speed requirements, so certain laws would need to change. For example, zero emission vehicles can idle indefinitely, and software-controlled vehicles can interface with an external control network, approved to operate in such ways, with points of contact at operations centers for resolving problems, technical or otherwise.
So change laws to permit idle electric vehicles (in more places and controlled, desginated places, not just anywhere), and permit large slow moving groups to occupy certain corridors, at certain times, when jammed traffic is a known quantity, that driverless systems aren't the cause of. Driverless networks can cut into a slice of the jam, and possibly improve outcomes for members only at first, and eventually boost efficiency within the jammed system by augmenting flow through expert participation.
I'd like to join in on the bikeshedding mass transit into solar-powered self-driving car-apartments that can always drive anywhere with no congestion for free, need no maintenance, and aren't controlled by a monolithic entity with an abysmal reputation for profit over users.
Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?
I live in the countryside but work in the city. This is in the US, so there is no bus I could take for my daily commute, though I've lived in countries where a similar arrangement would have a bus route within walking/biking distance.
The thing is, if there were a bus, it would have to stop to pick up / drop off passengers along the way, which would make it so much slower than driving that it really would be for the poor. I've been on such buses as a kid. Even when traffic is bad, bumper-to-bumper in a car (taking the fastest route) is going to be faster than bumper-to-bumper in a bus (taking a more circuitous route and stopping frequently along the way)
I think the only way buses will stop being for the poor, is when they stop become faster than more expensive alternatives. (Or at least nearly as fast and significantly cheaper.) If you can save a lot of time by spending a little bit of money, which would you choose? What if you could spend a lot of money but it wouldn't save you any (or much) time?
In cities where congestion is a major problem, dedicated bus lanes/roads can help balance the equation in favor of buses. Usually there aren't enough dedicated bus routes though. (I might point out that the people deciding how to balance bus/car traffic are not the people who ride the bus.)
I still think self-driving cars are far in the future, but I find them appealing because they would make "buses" more efficient. A lot of the cost of operating buses is paying the drivers. To maximize economies of scale, buses are large, which means they have to make a lot of stops to pick up and drop off passengers, which in turn makes them slow. Self-driving buses could be a lot smaller and wouldn't need to make as many stops. If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. At some point, the lines between bus/ridesharing/taxi get pretty blurry.
>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)
What the hell is going on in Austin?
Bumper-to-bumper traffic happens mostly at commute hours in commercial zones and during special events. It's very much not the norm for driving at other times. To wit, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest and least car-friendly cities in the U.S., but the last time I returned from a road trip, I traversed the whole city corner-to-corner -- from crossing the Bay Bridge to arriving at my home near the zoo -- in less than fifteen minutes. Why? Because it was midnight! Cars provide unparalleled mobility for irregular trips outside of peak commuting times, even in the largest cities.
I wholeheartedly support deprioritizing car infrastructure and working towards a norm where most people do not drive to work, but I nonetheless believe that car ownership provides a lot of independence and ought to be accessible to the modal citizen, at least outside of the very dense coastal cities (SF/LA/NY). Cars work really well for irregular trips outside of rush hour. They work terribly when large amounts of people need to go to the same place at once.
I suspect that driverless cars will end up somewhere on the spectrum between buses and human-operated cars. They're extremely cautious and will be a lot slower than human-operated.
>Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)
I can count on 1 hand (ok, maybe both hands) the number of times I've been in bumper-to-bumper traffic in my life. One of those was in Austin. There's lots of places to go that aren't big cities.
I think it's pretty clear that Waymo & maybe Cruise are the leaders in this space. If you take a look at the quota from Waymo "it will be “longer than you think” for self-driving vehicles to be everywhere." - the key part is "everywhere".
Maybe it will take 15 years for it to be everywhere, but I'm still fully expecting a deployment in Phoenix this year or next.
I'm not really clear what tax break you're complaining about, AFAIK there is no extra tax break for Waymo.
This is the part that drives me crazy - America HAD electric railroads all over the place. Or at least Illinois (my homestate) did. You can look up 'Illinois InterUrban' and see maps of rails connecting every rural city.
Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over)
The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...
Unfortunately Illinois borrowed from future generations and horribly mismanaged the economy. Now they're struggling just to avoid bankruptcy, let alone building out huge public transit projects.
Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.
Freight traffic dominates the utilization of the rail network in the US and is prioritized over other traffic. Freight trains travel slowly.
This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe.
> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)
> So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6]
- area of Continental US: 3.12 million sq mi [1]
- area of Europe: 2.306 million sq mi [1]
- rail network length, US: 141,808 mi [2]
- rail network length, Europe: 157,667 mi [3]
- goods carried, US: 1.558 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year) (world rank: 1st) (2015 estimate) [4]
- goods carried, "Europe": 0.32604 trillion lg tn mi/yr (long ton-miles per year)
City driving is a hard problem space, and all we'd achieve is cooler taxis.
The real game changer is instead driverless trucks.
Shipping is both a trillion dollar industry, and the problem space of "highway driving when it is sunny out" is much much easier than the consumer usecase, while still being extremely valuable.
I think you underestimate the impact of ubiquitous, free valet parking on urban design. We surround everything with parking to minimize walking distance to/from our vehicles, but you could organise things very differently if everyone was picked up and dropped off.
You could also park cars bumper-to-bumper, because you don't need trusted human drivers to move the cars boxing you in. Removing isles from the parking lot would nearly double the number of cars that could fit in a given space.
It's counter-intuative, but I think driverless cars may eventually make cities more walkable.
I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest."
Driverless. Technology of the future. Always was. Always will be.
But seriously, how much would it take to mostly handle driving trucks on limited access highways between exurb mega-warehouses? By "mostly," I mean, be able to handle 98% of all situations, and be able to flag attention from a remote control human supervisor for the other 2%. I suspect we're pretty close.
> I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest."
And honestly any number is simply just 'pulled out of the ass' anyway. It's not as if they can see daylight on all the problems that need to be solved or predict various soft issues (the government only one example). So this is not that someone is building the atomic bomb and can realistically judge more or less the scope of the problems that need to be solved and then build in a bit of leeway.
Sure, the number is pulled out of the air in a way, but that's not what is important. People in the field know what is holding things back, and even if they don't don't see all the way to the end, they know enough about the journey to recognize that newcomers don't completely appreciate what they're up against, and rosy predictions about the proliferation of driverless cars is a reflection of that naivete.
"The idea that sharing rides is good has become almost axiomatic in transportation discussions. At conferences I have seen people declare that robocars are pointless if they are not shared -- ie. people who are not travelling together ride together in them. The positive of sharing is so axiomatic that public transit is seen almost as a good in and of itself, rather than a means towards real goals like energy efficiency, low cost, and higher road utilization.
It has has attained this status as revealed truth because it is indeed roughly true -- more people together in a vehicle done right will indeed use less energy per person and less road space. But the "done right" is very important as it is commonly done quite wrong.
As I have studied robocars, this has led me to the discovery that some of our old assumptions are wrong. In particular, more sharing is not always good, and the styles of sharing (including the vehicle sizes) of current public transportation are almost certainly not the optimum sizes, and that smaller vehicles are likely more optimal once we eliminate the need for drivers and move to a highly communicating world.
I believe there are strong arguments that while shared travel is beneficial, we actually have too much of it in most transit systems, and not enough in private cars. That the 'shared' future is one of van-sized group vehicles with a mixed fleet of more personal cars with 1-4 seats."
This seems like the inevitable conclusion: autonomous cars bring you from your house to your destination, unless you are traveling through a thoroughfare. In which case they will drop you at a tram (ideally drop you at the platform), the tram gets you through the bottleneck, and another private car will take you from the tram stop to your actual destination.
There’s no efficient way for busses to get people close to their door. It makes no sense. Mass transit should relieve congestion on major routes, it’s not an efficient solution to the last mile problem.
From an economic standpoint, investing in fast mass-transit (e.g. high speed rail) would probably result in a larger net positive than self driving cars. Why?
1. I would theorize that the economic benefits of transportation are directly proportional to how fast the service is, and how much people it can move. As an estimation, I'd say cars are limited to 60 mph while high speed rail would be limited to 200 mph.
2. With fixed-path mass transit, the problem of traffic is greatly simplified. Self driving cars may solve a labor issue but they won't solve the traffic problem: cars routing themselves selfishly will not result in the lowest travel time possible. You can argue that a central coordinator can exist to coordinate routes, but if there's an incentive for a person (not necessarily a driver) to deviate from their set path, why wouldn't they take it?
rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it.
How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses?
What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these lakes in the middle of nowhere?
What about hauling larger personal watercraft? Just don't do that? Store it at the body of water you've chosen to exclusively use your boat/jetski on?
Rely on Amazon to handle the logistics of shipping hay for your livestock?
Maybe these are all just cultural things that need to disappear and be replaced by magical super-efficient factory farms or not replaced at all. But there are other ways of life than just living in an apartment and commuting to an office.
No offense, but this conversation is not for you or your family. The car is the second best thing that ever happened to rural life, after the tractor, and nothing is going to change that.
There’s no reason for rural America to act like these ideas are crazy, nor for urban America to act like these problems are universal. So often these two sides act in opposition to each other when they really have no conflict with each other - except perhaps that both side has a hard time relating to the other lifestyle.
Of course there are going to be wide swaths of the United States where passenger rail and bus service isn't going to make much of a dent for local transportation.
Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if people could easily commute by rail to the bigger city 45 minutes away? I bet people would be more interested in living in that small town.
We're talking about commute and long-distance travel. In most scenarios, you don't carry that much luggage. You don't carry your horses and kayaks when you go to work or travel overseas.
> but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks.
Maybe people need to take personal responsibility and not spend money as if the government will make things easier for them and solve all problems. I am not claiming this is possible for everyone there are truly people who need help. But the vast majority of people can try to live in a way that they can have personal transportation (which has been around how long now?) and is reasonably enough priced currently.
Separately back before autos wouldn't people have had the same issue with horses or with even machines that they needed to run their lives or their business? Isn't it part of being human to plan for breakdowns of various things that you need that you can plan around failure?
I suspect that if someone could deliver a fully autonomous car at say 2x the cost of a regular car, the next immediate problem would be massive autonomous traffic jams where you would still need mass transit to work back scaling costs on the transport networks.
At least now the 4 hours you spend in traffic every day can be useful — catch up on some sleep, check your email, train your car's AI by playing "I spy"...
> America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to ....
I don’t think the killer market for driverless cars in America in the first place. Places like China that have all that (commuter rail, subway) but lack places for new roads and parking would benefit greatly from optimizing their limited road infrastructure. They already have people who are used to taking taxies everywhere, now make the ring roads automated only to triple their capacity.
Europe, Asia, can be benefit greatly from driverless cars because they have a different situation from America.
I love the idea because it would remove the need for me personally to own a car. Also it was supposed to happen in the scale of a few years, instead of the decades needed to build the heavy infrastructure projects you mentioned, but remains to be seen. Also, it could quicken the move to electric vehicles if uber/waymo etc fleet was all electric.
I think driverless has the potential to be both - we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient.
we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient
This doesn't seem to require driverless busses. I can see an argument of why self driving taxis would be helpful -- cost of labor is near zero -- but with busses, the cost of labor is amortized across passengers.
Driverless trains are not a problem to begin with. If you have a train and it carries hundreds of people [or trainload of cargo], it is economically irrelevant whether it has a human operator or not. So it is safer to have a human there just in case.
"in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity" - ...because why? I am assuming in good faith you might say:
because a world in which a greater proportion of people travel via multi-passenger vehicles like the buses and trains of public transport networks is a better world because these transportation solutions are 1) more efficient per passenger (does this help w/ reducing carbon emissions?); 2) economically more accessible because passengers pay per trip instead of purchasing vehicle outright; 3) potentially less expensive to operate due to economies of scale (purchasing & maintaining a large fleet of vehicle vs a single vehicle) and higher equipment utilizationl; 4) perahaps encourage more social connection amongst passengers; 5) passengers do not have to focus on driving and can "recover" the time that would have been spent driving a car doing something else.
I ask because I think the endgame for self-driving car companies is not so much to sell cars (self-driving in this case) to individual consumers, but rather to to win the zero-sum-game of becoming the largest on-demand "elastic" self-driving vehicle transportation platform; i.e. 80% of the cars Ford makes in 2030 it reserves for its automated fleet, which it dispatches on a per-ride bases to subscribers/customers for a single trip, a day, a month, etc. The ultimate technological opportunity here is effectively "packet switching" for physical transport via the highway network.
While it's possible (and desirable, in my opinion) the fleet of vehicles enabling this automated transport network could be a composition of myriad different vehicles, from many different vendors, contributed dynamically by everyone from families (or groups of families) that own a single vehicle and rent it out when its not in use to the fleets of large companies like ups, hertz, ford, etc...
it seems more realistic that a few giant companies (Waymo, Uber) will be the ones that can scale up a working network fastest and cheapest by building, owning, and operating huge fleets of vehicles made up of just a few vehicle variants.
Anyway, imagine 60% of the cars on the roads today were capable of participating in an automated-vehicle-on-demand transportation network. This scenario seems like it has the same benefits I attributed to public transportation. What do you think - is it an equally desirable solution, or are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate?
> are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate?
- Substantially reduced traffic on surface streets (a bus or subway is MUCH more densely packed with humans than a road full of cars).
- Encourage more walking and overall fitness
- Improved safety for non-mechanized road and sidewalk users (reduced traffic will do more for pedestrian safety than automated traffic will, I promise).
- Less space required to be devoted to parking and streets, so better land utilization.
It's amazing the serious face some people keep "re-discovering" 100+ years old, derived from basic principles technology. The ultimate of this is the autonomous truck convoy: wouldn't it be amazing if we could just have trucks follow each other closely and save a ton on air drag?
Well, yeah, it exists, it's called a train, it's magnitudes longer than any "autonomous truck convoy" ever will be, and instead of the billion dollar AI machine learning big data system we have to keep them close together, we use a fricking mechanical linkage.
America’s economic bread and butter is innovation. We’re creating an entirely new market segment. That’s why new driverless cars are far more attractive than improving public transport infrastructure.
municipal rail is a money sink. currently across the nation there is over a hundred billion dollars of deferred maintenance on municipal rail; light and heavy. worse bus service tends to suffer because they try to force people to use rail by making bus service less attractive which in effect is just damages the concept of public transport.
no the real solution is get over this mythological idea that America is too car heavy. everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport. what automation will bring is freedom to those who cannot drive so we best better figure out how to get cars talk to each other and which areas will be reserved for automated driving only.
funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly.
It seems that way because the costs are centralized, but cars are as well, and it's disingenuous to compare this way.
If you look at how many people go in debt to own cars or the amount of credit on cars, you would see poor numbers there as well. Cars are incredible money sinks. There is a reason why Uber doesn't operate its own fleet.
If public transit billed by value it would easily be kept afloat. But the value proposition in most cities in America just isn't there, because they simply aren't dense enough. It's not a mythological idea. It's simple math.
> funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly.
Funny you mention things going over budget because nearly all infrastructure projects in this country do - yes, including roads. This is a problem with our government, not mass-transit solely.
In your very own article, the reasons stated for the price increase have nothing to do with mass transit inherently. They would be true of any infrastructure project.
> everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport.
They have freedom to travel, but not freedom to live where they want. The United States has entirely banned dense housing in everywhere that people want to live, and this consequently makes transit impractical. Get rid of zoning restrictions on housing, and we'd be in a much different place.
In level of stupidity, the concept of self driving car in my opinion is second only to a flying car.
The second disregard, that well... there are airplanes.
The first, that driverless busses that creep at 30km/h and do emergency brake every every 10 minutes thanks to overattentive collision avoidance system also been around for decades.
We've had flying cars for decades. They're called helicopters. Unfortunately they're much too expensive for the masses. But I don't see why anyone would consider the concept stupid.
"Driverless car" is probably not the outcome for autonomous vehicles. At one end of the scale, cities will use road space vastly more efficiently with optimized vehicles for groups of riders, and at the other end of the scale, short-haul air travel will be challenged by door-to-door 150mph+ highway vehicles. None of these will look much like a personal car, and only the wealthy will consider owning one that will become rapidly obsolete and have a meagre duty cycle a sensible idea. For many people the answer will be a bicycle because the roads will become a safe place for cycling.
This assessment of the state of play is very uneven. For example, the assertion made by Meredith Broussard quoted in the article "It’s also not true that we must transition to self-driving cars because human-piloted ones are so lethal" is a truism. The article goes on to say "Countless innovations have made cars radically safer since the 1950s and continue to do so."
Yet vehicles remain as lethal as dread diseases, mostly down to the humans piloting them. Just cutting that number of deaths and injuries significantly would be a boon similar to eradicating malaria.
I expect the flourishing of autonomous vehicles to be sudden and unanticipated. Just as you can't tell unless you are looking for the decals or attuned to why back seats are suddenly more populated you might miss the fact there are two million ride share drivers in the US now. One day we will realize the wait for a bus is much shorter because busses are right-sized and more frequent and can surge where they are needed because drivers aren't a bottleneck and routes are dynamic.
"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,' Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"
We like the idea of technological solutions that don't require us to change our lifestyle or make hard choices. Driverless cars are appealing because they would allow us to largely maintain the status quo (as opposed to, say, reorienting toward public transportation). It's like an obese person who says, "I don't want to eat healthy and exercise. Why can't scientists just invent low-calorie versions of the food I like?"
Really? I don't like to fetch water from a lake every day to my house. Instead of using technology to bring water to my house, what lifestyle changes or hard choices should I rather make?
The bigger problem, IMHO, is the attitude that it's some kind of moral quandry if technology allows us to solve a problem without effort. For example, I've heard people really say that an obesity-preventing drug would be a bad thing because it would discourage exercise. This fetishization of hardship does a lot of harm, because in reality, the kind of progress we can make as a civilization essentially amounts to refocusing exertion on increasingly impactful things.
Other examples of this phenomenon:
Direct atmospheric carbon removal is bad. It encourages emissions!
Contraceptives are bad. They encourage sexual license! (I had to try to avoid the obvious joke here.)
Highways are bad! They encourage driving.
Word processors are bad. They discourage good penmanship!
Fertilizers and farm equipment are bad! They discourage small family farms!
GPS navigation is bad! It discourages map reading and mental direction finding!
Some of these examples look ridiculous to us now, but people really did think these things at some point. I see some opposition to autonomous vehicles falling into the same category.
We like the idea of technology improving our quality of life because as a civilization it's worked for us spectacularly so far. Driverless cars are appealing because they build on top of a transportation solution that already works, reducing the problems and externalities of it, without requiring us to completely overhaul the way we build cities and live which could take decades. When half of the world lives in remote or insecure areas, driving vs public transport is not a lazy lifestlye choice like eating poorly. Autonomous cars will also bring about a lot of new use cases which could improve public transport design, reach and usage, like driving you to a metro station which has no parking in the morning and picking you up in the afternoon.
And as a society we reject a lot of possible technology out of hand.
For example, we could have a device on cars that transmit basic information. Such as licence ID number, speed, location, pedal position etc. It would be ridiculously useful data for a whole host of different things. You could use it to bill parking, catch speeders, sequence traffic lights, and warn of hazards ahead. And maybe even help self driving cars make sense of the world.
From a technological point of view this is a no-brainer. But this is incompatible with the way that we think about cars and roads. Every car has to pretend to be isolated from every other car.
But human drivers kill a lot of people. It would be a shame if that's the best we can do. And some car tech improvements have saved lives, so it's not necessarily chauvinism it's just extrapolation.
As long as the U.S. personal-injury legal system remains in place (with strong support from media coverage of fatal crashes), it won't be enough for self-driving systems to have lower death rates/mile in aggregate. They will need to be better or equal to human performance in every subcategory of driving. That's really hard.
To wit: It's not enough to say "Our self-driving cars avoid 14,000 drunk-driving, texting and asleep-at-the-wheel fatalities," if it's also true that: "Our self-driving cars hit and kill 30 errant pedestrians a year that a human driver would have noticed."
I know that 14,000 > 30. But the specter of roadway martyrs being murdered by killing machines needs only a few examples to sustain itself.
I think Musk notwithstanding, folks who are actually developing ADAS technologies are not* really touting driverless capabilities – that's the ultimate goal but the genuine projects today are focused on HD mapping and image recognition from cameras to overcome the LiDAR price hurdle.
OEMs are very interested in startups working on those specific issues, but for various reasons these incremental steps aren't as widely reported so all we get left is the hype that self driving cars "are here" and things like Tesla Autopilot
The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true.
The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong.
There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.
Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled.
Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?
> Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents
Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally?
Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US.
When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000 (depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]. We can and should fix this first and foremost.
With over 3.1 Trillion miles driven annually in the US, that's about 0.001 fatalities per 100,000 miles driven, or about 1 fatality per 80,000,000 miles driven. Driving is pretty safe - although I agree we can make it safer.
Unfair? Why should a technology touted as the future be half-measured to something as "50%", as just "good enough"?
When you have the human element at play, fault is easy to judge, as is blame easy to lay. When, say, a drunk driver is involved, it's clear what the problem is, and the state can fund enforcement against drunk driving and take other measures to reduce accidents. But with driverless cars, who does the victim and/or the victims family blame? What can the state and law enforcement do when there's nothing to prosecute besides some corporate entity (and possible laws that protect it) and a faulty algorithm or similar? The human element is no longer at play, and instead there's a car manufacture, protected by decades of lobbying, deciding what is safe enough to unleash on the populace. It's pure negligence to release driverless vehicles onto the roads simply because some statistics show it's "50% safer, thus safe enough".
Note that the 3000 daily deaths is worldwide, not just the US. The daily US total is about 100. I do agree that any improvement on those numbers with AI should be applauded.
Waymo have driven 8 million miles and had one minor accident that was the cars fault where it thought a bus would give way and a dent resulted.
I've driven about 200,000 miles and done considerably worse including two cars written off, though no injuries. I'd say Waymo seems safer than me. And judging from my insurance premiums which are low, I'd be safer than the average human driver.
Waymo alone is fine, but when you take into account fatalities caused by others like uber, right now I think self driving cars are worse than humans by a pretty large amount.
Driverless vehicles are "the new fusion power".
Always "about 10 years in the future".
>Driverless cars are coming along just fine.
Even if this were true it doesn't mean humans will be fine with them being deployed. We had working driverless trains 20+ years ago yet almost none are deployed today (AND we have plenty of human-caused fatal train crashes that might be a good reason to want driverless trains).
Except Waymo is being used by real people in Phoenix right now, albeit on an invite only system. They've said they'll go public by next year, and expand to other cities afterwards. Most of what is blocking them is regulation. I'd predict that by 2025, they will be in at least 10 major cities, regulation willing.
Readit News
This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine learning system, train it, and you have self driving. Doesn't work. Machine learning is way too dumb.
You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with machine learning. That's just used to guess what they're going to do next. It's not used to decide if they're an obstacle. Obstacle detection and avoidance is all sensors and geometry.
Also, "self driving car", "electric car", and "transportation as a service" are all independent. All will be available, but not from the same companies.
I am curious why you believe this to be the case? Driverless cars have yet to even come close to being workable in adverse conditions, to my knowledge, please correct me if I am wrong.
> This is mostly about sensors and geometry.
And mostly about the limitations of sensors, and the limitation of available algorithms to overcome geometry. A algorithm a driverless car uses to overcome some geographical feature might expect something to be spherical, but in reality, it ends up being elliptical, only it is too late for the car to adjust, for example, or vice versa. There is literally hundreds of thousands of potential corner cases out there. The earth in itself is a good example: although many people try to do distance calculations with lat/long and some standard radius are usually off by n precision points because the earth isn't perfectly spherical, only approximately. Driverless cars have to be precise. A couple points off might spell the difference between safely driving in the lanes, and veering into a ditch, off a cliff, or into a median or obstacle.
Sensors will suffer some of the same problems (or different problems) as our biological sensors do. How will road signs, lines, and likewise be detected in adverse conditions? Snow? How will radar overcome natural geographical corner reflectors?
Driverless cars seem to becoming along just fine in perfect conditions.
Not trying to be defeatist, but I believe if we want true driverless technology, the infrastructure will have to support the vehicles for these edge cases that we cannot overcome. Or we can continue to be idealists. I for one wish we never gave up on trains -- they are the perfect "driverless" technology candidate.
Not to mention, any snow on the road is going to make it supremely hard for a computer to determine where their lane is, or even the road is.
Great strides have been made in using machine learning to filter out obscurants such as snow. Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem.
The biggest technical challenges are related to planning. So say you're approaching an intersection. There is a pedestrian about to cross, a cyclist in front of you and another vehicle waiting to turn left across your path. As a human, you understand that if you behave one way, it will cause the pedestrian, the cyclist and the other car to respond a certain way, but if you respond to the situation another way, it will cause all three to respond differently.
Our ability to game out scenarios like this is intuitive, but for AI to predict how it's behavior as an agent will influence the behaviour of other agents on the road is a daunting undertaking, particularly when taking into account the full scope of scenarios that need to be mastered before an autonomous can reliably safely navigate anywhere.
There's some video here for:
>“The Yandex.Taxi autonomous car safely navigated the streets of Moscow after a recent snowstorm managing interactions with traffic, pedestrians, parked vehicles and other road hazards on snowy and icy streets,” https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/16/17020096/self-driving-car...
Presumably it's not perfect but it seems to be coming along. Snow and ice covered Moscow is more adverse than what I usually drive.
Given how people drive in the rain and snow in the Northeast, I would argue human drivers have not even come close to being workable in adverse conditions.
We drive in them anyway, despite often times magnitudes more risk of crashing, because we want to.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/05/08/waymo-snow-navigation/
Also, the lack of support for harder environment isn't because they're impossible, but rather because they are focusing on getting it perfect in normal environments before expanding. The person said they are "coming along fine", not that they are done.
Much more improvement has yet to come before we get to being safe enough with level 5 autonomy.
But in the meanwhile, we can also still celebrate the intermediate stepswise improvements that have been made.
The other thing people forget is the bar isn't that high: self driving vehicles don't have to be perfect, they just have to be better than humans are. All of the "whatabout" edge cases people proffer as examples of areas an AI would have trouble with, people have trouble with too. The difference is that once an AI learns to solve that edge case, it doesn't have to relearn going forward.
How are more sensors going to tell the difference between a plastic bag and a cat? How does lidar tell you which car is parked on the side of the road and which one is in your path? Relying on a dozen sensors seems like the crutch to me. Nothing about our current world has been designed for lidar and radar. It was designed for binocular vision. Sure, if your only goal is to not hit things at low speed in perfect weather, lidar is great. But you can't get much further than that.
"Nothing about our current world has been designed for lidar and radar. It was designed for binocular vision."
Really? Was the world designed for binocular vision, or is it just three dimensional?
Having more sensors, especially when they have different failure modes seems like the only possible way to create a reliable system. LIDAR isn't super dense, but generally has accurate returns. Binocular vision sucks on untextured objects, like the side of a white truck in the fatal Model S collision. Why wouldn't you want the crutch of both types of measurement?
Does binocular vision even matter at such distances (i.e. beyond a few meters)? I thought it was only effective for relatively close objects.
Infrared transparency? Radar cross section? There are so many ways. Sensor doesn't just mean "webcam".
Honestly, getting them to work to this basic level is the "easy" part. Real world driving conditions in urban environments are suboptimal at best. You're not only going to need a system that can navigate around and not hit things. You need it to be able to dynamically route around road-construction, do clever things to find parking.
Roads in most places aren't that well standardized. It takes a lot of small judgement calls for a taxi to actually do its job. Uber and Lyft still have trouble dispatching people to pick you up at your actual door!
The guy who started iRobot, Rodney Brooks, doesn't believe we'll see a true driverless car operating throughout a city on normal roads until 2035 at the earliest: http://rodneybrooks.com/my-dated-predictions/
As software developers, we all know how big the difference between "a demo the boss is excited about" and "reliably working in production for all users" can be. Given how complex the domain is and how many edge cases it has, I can easily believe Brooks is right here.
> A driverless "taxi" service in a major US city with arbitrary pick and drop off locations, even in a restricted geographical area.
> Not Earlier Than 2032
This is odd because isn't Waymo doing just that in Phoenix with a general release date of 2019? I checked the source because I wanted to verify that it says "a city" and not "any city".
Could be correct. I think likely it is correct. BUT, everyone thought we still wouldn't be winning games of Go by now. So could be wrong.
What you wrote makes a lot of sense to me. However, I would also hope that in a matured self-driving environment, traffic lights would be mapped ahead of time. It's always possible that a traffic light shows up in an unexpected place, but in my mental image of the future, this raises a flag for system management to modify the map of permanent objects.
There is a chance that a powered non-permanent traffic light is found somewhere, a dude walking along the side of the street with a stoplight on his back, and connected batteries. In that case, the police need calling. In machine learning, there are just so many corner cases where best to not try to fully interpret, just call out "dude, look at this thing!"
Temporary traffic lights are extremely common, at least here in Australia. They are used in the case of roadworks or other short-term disruptions that requires traffic flowing in both directions to share a single lane, in conditions not suited to manual traffic control (i.e. overnight, weekends, long-term works on rural roads).
http://www.datasigns.com.au/Products/Portable-Traffic-Lights
Since evolution didn't provide us with our personal lidars, human drivers are an existence proof that it is possible to learn reliable driving performance from vision alone. Which isn't to say that machine learning based on vision alone is already close to human-level or competency or that human-level competency is sufficient for a automated driving system or that sophisticated sensors don't make the problem a bit easier. But I don't know how you can be so confident that vision alone (or primarily) won't be route that eventually succeeds.
You wouldn't vet a system that is susceptible to high false negatives and likely to kill people- no matter how good the accuracy is.
Dead Comment
At some point the right balance of sensor quality and manufacturing processes will converge to be an affordable solution to highway driving. (broad daylight, then dusk, then maybe rain, etc etc).
If history is any guide (airlines anyone?) This will come along piecemeal, and the CEOs being forced to make ridiculous promises to appease shareholder anxiety will be given nice scapegoat packages along the way.
I think the hard part of the problem is the infrastructure. Everyone wants to fix the cars, but they'll leave the hard part to the government- which is the development of autonomous-ready infrastructure.
For your professor, yes assistive technology like lane keeping assist and collision avoidance will save lives, but are no reason to go driverless.
Ultimately the faster we bring driverless cars to fruition, the fewer people will die, simply because it's inevitable that they will quickly exceed the safety of humans.
Then we will have turned automobile safety into an engineering problem. It was partially that before, we could package the victim better to improve their survivability, but now we can modify the driver ... every driver.
There are about 7 billion instances of those learning systems though.
Will this be replicated with machines in the next 10 years? I have no clue.
Is this doable at all? Sure.
The problem with the human brain is one of inattention. CNNs / Artificial Neural Networks can remain at attention 100% of the time due to their artificial / machine nature.
But CNNs, despite being at 100% attention the entire time, still have issues determining if that splotch on the screen is the sky or an 18-wheeler.
https://electrek.co/2016/07/01/understanding-fatal-tesla-acc...
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Artificial Neural Networks / Convolutional Neural Networks have a very long way to go before they reach human equivalence. In contrast, sensor systems or LIDAR brute-forces the problem. LIDAR can see things human's can't see, and advanced sensors can tell you (at least, in clear conditions) the location and velocity of virtually every object around the car.
Fake-it till you make it camera-only driverless cars are clearly hype that relies upon a fundamental misunderstanding. Just because CNNs are kinda-sorta like the visual cortex of the human brain doesn't really mean that it works like one.
CNNs have really cool visual learning properties. But I've yet to see one 100% successfully tell you background vs foreground in pictures like a human brain can do. Even in clear weather conditions, the CNN can confuse a truck for the sky and still run full speed into an 18-wheeler.
Dead Comment
Are you referring to the midnight jaywalker in Uber's case? I still feel like most of the blame goes to the pedestrian.
[1] https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/NR20180524.as...
I would bet in less than 10 years you'll have camera only fully autonomous systems.
>Perception is a game of statistics.Crudely speaking, if we have three independent modalities with epsilon miss-detection-rates and we combine them we can achieve an epsilon³ rate in perception. In practice, relatively orthogonal failure modes won’t achieve that level of benefit, however, an error every million miles can get boosted to an error every billion miles. It is extremely difficult to achieve this level of accuracy with a single modality alone.
>Different sensor modalities have different strengths and weaknesses; thus, incorporating multiple modalities drives orders of magnitude improvements in the reliability of the system. Cameras suffer from difficulty in low-light and high dynamic range scenarios; radars suffer from limited resolution and artifacts due to multi-path and doppler ambiguity; lidars “see” obscurants.
https://medium.com/aurora-blog/auroras-approach-to-developme...
There are scenarios it’s possible to encounter on the road that humans don’t even necessarily know how to handle immediately. In proper, brutal, real-world testing, one very quickly enters the realm of problems that you’d need full-fledged general AI to reason through.
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I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more cities like Seattle with its rail expansion and fewer New York City where the infrastructure is finally getting money so it doesn't fall apart.
There are already so many tax breaks going into driverless companies. If Alphabet or Here want to do this on their own, go for it; but governments around the world should stop giving tax breaks and municipal incentives for this technology.
I can see it being more useful in Europe, where so much of the country is connected and it'd help sold the last leg problem. But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity, not just for those who can afford to live in the city, but all the people who are barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks.
While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this.
A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)
I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure benefits.
That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to) and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and comfort will spend it without looking back.
Well that's because it's actually true for a lot of people. Sure, there's no freedom in commuting between SF and south bay by car, or navigating the most dense downtown environments. But I definitely use my car on a daily basis for things that would be impossible or incredibly time consuming by transit. And yes, many of the transit patrons around here would probably prefer a car if they could afford it. Most places are not like NYC where the subway is often the most effective option regardless of wealth.
I don't think it's really feasible for more spread out suburban environments to implement effective mass transit. The anti-car idealists often seem to forget that there are a lot of people living outside of dense city centers.
If self driving cars are terrible at coping with the chaos humans grit their teeth and deal with, maybe software for engineering cooperative bumper-to-bumper traffic jams involving clogs of slow-moving self driving cars, that reduce the road speeds to constant 20 MPH (the /constant/ part being important), and eliminate chaotic lane changing to near zero for the group, is one way to bootstrap self driving cars.
In other words, low-performance self driving cars might work fine, and since people can lounge about, and disengage from the guidance and navigation tasks, why not go slower?
Then, add swarming to the mix, such that cars going to the same place, all travel slowly in a single group.
It's against the law to obstruct traffic, or violate minimum speed requirements, so certain laws would need to change. For example, zero emission vehicles can idle indefinitely, and software-controlled vehicles can interface with an external control network, approved to operate in such ways, with points of contact at operations centers for resolving problems, technical or otherwise.
So change laws to permit idle electric vehicles (in more places and controlled, desginated places, not just anywhere), and permit large slow moving groups to occupy certain corridors, at certain times, when jammed traffic is a known quantity, that driverless systems aren't the cause of. Driverless networks can cut into a slice of the jam, and possibly improve outcomes for members only at first, and eventually boost efficiency within the jammed system by augmenting flow through expert participation.
Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?
The thing is, if there were a bus, it would have to stop to pick up / drop off passengers along the way, which would make it so much slower than driving that it really would be for the poor. I've been on such buses as a kid. Even when traffic is bad, bumper-to-bumper in a car (taking the fastest route) is going to be faster than bumper-to-bumper in a bus (taking a more circuitous route and stopping frequently along the way)
I think the only way buses will stop being for the poor, is when they stop become faster than more expensive alternatives. (Or at least nearly as fast and significantly cheaper.) If you can save a lot of time by spending a little bit of money, which would you choose? What if you could spend a lot of money but it wouldn't save you any (or much) time?
In cities where congestion is a major problem, dedicated bus lanes/roads can help balance the equation in favor of buses. Usually there aren't enough dedicated bus routes though. (I might point out that the people deciding how to balance bus/car traffic are not the people who ride the bus.)
I still think self-driving cars are far in the future, but I find them appealing because they would make "buses" more efficient. A lot of the cost of operating buses is paying the drivers. To maximize economies of scale, buses are large, which means they have to make a lot of stops to pick up and drop off passengers, which in turn makes them slow. Self-driving buses could be a lot smaller and wouldn't need to make as many stops. If they could tell that no one will be boarding or deboarding at a given stop, they could skip it entirely and take a shorter path instead. At some point, the lines between bus/ridesharing/taxi get pretty blurry.
What the hell is going on in Austin?
Bumper-to-bumper traffic happens mostly at commute hours in commercial zones and during special events. It's very much not the norm for driving at other times. To wit, I live in San Francisco, one of the densest and least car-friendly cities in the U.S., but the last time I returned from a road trip, I traversed the whole city corner-to-corner -- from crossing the Bay Bridge to arriving at my home near the zoo -- in less than fifteen minutes. Why? Because it was midnight! Cars provide unparalleled mobility for irregular trips outside of peak commuting times, even in the largest cities.
I wholeheartedly support deprioritizing car infrastructure and working towards a norm where most people do not drive to work, but I nonetheless believe that car ownership provides a lot of independence and ought to be accessible to the modal citizen, at least outside of the very dense coastal cities (SF/LA/NY). Cars work really well for irregular trips outside of rush hour. They work terribly when large amounts of people need to go to the same place at once.
I can count on 1 hand (ok, maybe both hands) the number of times I've been in bumper-to-bumper traffic in my life. One of those was in Austin. There's lots of places to go that aren't big cities.
<Insert obligatory Portal reference.>
Maybe it will take 15 years for it to be everywhere, but I'm still fully expecting a deployment in Phoenix this year or next.
I'm not really clear what tax break you're complaining about, AFAIK there is no extra tax break for Waymo.
Plus driverless car tech is global. The US infrastructure problems are irrelevant to me as a Canadian or the billions of people in Asia.
Many of the carriages were used as scrap metal for WWII, and once cars took off the demand wasn't there to rehabilitate them. But it would be so much cheaper to build out than even just replacing the signals in NYC would be. All the right of ways are still there, many of them turned into bike trails (which is great, but I'd rather have a $5 ride to the next town over)
The carriages back in the day were pretty slow, maybe 20mph, so I get why cars won, but rebuilding this infrastructure with modern equipment would be a really nice situation, and if gas was 10$/gal we would probably see the demand, but as long as gas is cheap we lack the ability to plan ahead...
Not to mention a multibillion dollar, unnecessary tunnel linking O'Hare with downtown which will almost certainly cost multiples higher than Elon Musk and Rahm Emanuel claim. We'd rather spend money on vaporware than build something that would actually help.
This is why US passenger train service is so poor compared to Europe.
> The picture for freight is different. According to Panorama 2009 , 46 percent of EU-27 freight goes by highway while only 10 percent goes by rail, while in the U.S. 43 percent goes by rail and only 30 percent by road. (In both cases, nearly all of the rest is waterways and pipelines.)
> So, it isn’t so much that Europe decided to move people by train rather than by automobile. It is more that Europe decided to use its railroads to move people while the United States decided to use them for freight. America moves almost six times as many ton-miles (or tonne-kilometers) of freight by rail as Europe, while both move about the same number of tonne-kilometers by road. While Europe moves about twice as many tkm of freight by waterway as the U.S., we move six times as much oil by pipeline. [6]
[1] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=continental+united+sta... [2] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [3] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+Europe+%7C+r... [4] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=total+%7C+United+State... [5] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Europe+%7C+rail+transp... [6] https://ti.org/antiplanner/?p=11847City driving is a hard problem space, and all we'd achieve is cooler taxis.
The real game changer is instead driverless trucks.
Shipping is both a trillion dollar industry, and the problem space of "highway driving when it is sunny out" is much much easier than the consumer usecase, while still being extremely valuable.
I think you underestimate the impact of ubiquitous, free valet parking on urban design. We surround everything with parking to minimize walking distance to/from our vehicles, but you could organise things very differently if everyone was picked up and dropped off.
You could also park cars bumper-to-bumper, because you don't need trusted human drivers to move the cars boxing you in. Removing isles from the parking lot would nearly double the number of cars that could fit in a given space.
It's counter-intuative, but I think driverless cars may eventually make cities more walkable.
Driverless. Technology of the future. Always was. Always will be.
But seriously, how much would it take to mostly handle driving trucks on limited access highways between exurb mega-warehouses? By "mostly," I mean, be able to handle 98% of all situations, and be able to flag attention from a remote control human supervisor for the other 2%. I suspect we're pretty close.
And honestly any number is simply just 'pulled out of the ass' anyway. It's not as if they can see daylight on all the problems that need to be solved or predict various soft issues (the government only one example). So this is not that someone is building the atomic bomb and can realistically judge more or less the scope of the problems that need to be solved and then build in a bit of leeway.
It has has attained this status as revealed truth because it is indeed roughly true -- more people together in a vehicle done right will indeed use less energy per person and less road space. But the "done right" is very important as it is commonly done quite wrong.
As I have studied robocars, this has led me to the discovery that some of our old assumptions are wrong. In particular, more sharing is not always good, and the styles of sharing (including the vehicle sizes) of current public transportation are almost certainly not the optimum sizes, and that smaller vehicles are likely more optimal once we eliminate the need for drivers and move to a highly communicating world.
I believe there are strong arguments that while shared travel is beneficial, we actually have too much of it in most transit systems, and not enough in private cars. That the 'shared' future is one of van-sized group vehicles with a mixed fleet of more personal cars with 1-4 seats."
https://ideas.4brad.com/sleeper-cars-and-unexpected-efficien...
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2018/07/31/waymo-partners-with-phoeni...
There’s no efficient way for busses to get people close to their door. It makes no sense. Mass transit should relieve congestion on major routes, it’s not an efficient solution to the last mile problem.
1. I would theorize that the economic benefits of transportation are directly proportional to how fast the service is, and how much people it can move. As an estimation, I'd say cars are limited to 60 mph while high speed rail would be limited to 200 mph.
2. With fixed-path mass transit, the problem of traffic is greatly simplified. Self driving cars may solve a labor issue but they won't solve the traffic problem: cars routing themselves selfishly will not result in the lowest travel time possible. You can argue that a central coordinator can exist to coordinate routes, but if there's an incentive for a person (not necessarily a driver) to deviate from their set path, why wouldn't they take it?
How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses?
What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these lakes in the middle of nowhere?
What about hauling larger personal watercraft? Just don't do that? Store it at the body of water you've chosen to exclusively use your boat/jetski on?
Rely on Amazon to handle the logistics of shipping hay for your livestock?
Maybe these are all just cultural things that need to disappear and be replaced by magical super-efficient factory farms or not replaced at all. But there are other ways of life than just living in an apartment and commuting to an office.
This conversation is about the 62% of Americans that live and work in 3.5% of the land area. (Source: https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....)
There’s no reason for rural America to act like these ideas are crazy, nor for urban America to act like these problems are universal. So often these two sides act in opposition to each other when they really have no conflict with each other - except perhaps that both side has a hard time relating to the other lifestyle.
Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if people could easily commute by rail to the bigger city 45 minutes away? I bet people would be more interested in living in that small town.
Maybe people need to take personal responsibility and not spend money as if the government will make things easier for them and solve all problems. I am not claiming this is possible for everyone there are truly people who need help. But the vast majority of people can try to live in a way that they can have personal transportation (which has been around how long now?) and is reasonably enough priced currently.
Separately back before autos wouldn't people have had the same issue with horses or with even machines that they needed to run their lives or their business? Isn't it part of being human to plan for breakdowns of various things that you need that you can plan around failure?
Whenever someone says this I assume the opposite; America is not a place of uniquely irresponsible people.
People have had cashflow issues since the dawn of cash, often mitigated by complex family informal credit systems.
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I don’t think the killer market for driverless cars in America in the first place. Places like China that have all that (commuter rail, subway) but lack places for new roads and parking would benefit greatly from optimizing their limited road infrastructure. They already have people who are used to taking taxies everywhere, now make the ring roads automated only to triple their capacity.
Europe, Asia, can be benefit greatly from driverless cars because they have a different situation from America.
I think driverless has the potential to be both - we can have a bus system that runs dynamic routes based on the users that are going to ride it and runs closer to ideally efficient vs. a fixed route that is likely inefficient.
This doesn't seem to require driverless busses. I can see an argument of why self driving taxis would be helpful -- cost of labor is near zero -- but with busses, the cost of labor is amortized across passengers.
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c'mon, who is gonna dream about that ? </cynism>
https://www.eca.europa.eu/en/Pages/DocItem.aspx?did=46398
because a world in which a greater proportion of people travel via multi-passenger vehicles like the buses and trains of public transport networks is a better world because these transportation solutions are 1) more efficient per passenger (does this help w/ reducing carbon emissions?); 2) economically more accessible because passengers pay per trip instead of purchasing vehicle outright; 3) potentially less expensive to operate due to economies of scale (purchasing & maintaining a large fleet of vehicle vs a single vehicle) and higher equipment utilizationl; 4) perahaps encourage more social connection amongst passengers; 5) passengers do not have to focus on driving and can "recover" the time that would have been spent driving a car doing something else.
I ask because I think the endgame for self-driving car companies is not so much to sell cars (self-driving in this case) to individual consumers, but rather to to win the zero-sum-game of becoming the largest on-demand "elastic" self-driving vehicle transportation platform; i.e. 80% of the cars Ford makes in 2030 it reserves for its automated fleet, which it dispatches on a per-ride bases to subscribers/customers for a single trip, a day, a month, etc. The ultimate technological opportunity here is effectively "packet switching" for physical transport via the highway network.
While it's possible (and desirable, in my opinion) the fleet of vehicles enabling this automated transport network could be a composition of myriad different vehicles, from many different vendors, contributed dynamically by everyone from families (or groups of families) that own a single vehicle and rent it out when its not in use to the fleets of large companies like ups, hertz, ford, etc... it seems more realistic that a few giant companies (Waymo, Uber) will be the ones that can scale up a working network fastest and cheapest by building, owning, and operating huge fleets of vehicles made up of just a few vehicle variants.
Anyway, imagine 60% of the cars on the roads today were capable of participating in an automated-vehicle-on-demand transportation network. This scenario seems like it has the same benefits I attributed to public transportation. What do you think - is it an equally desirable solution, or are there other particular benefits to a world with significantly more (conventional) public transportation / less cars that I failed to articulate?
- Substantially reduced traffic on surface streets (a bus or subway is MUCH more densely packed with humans than a road full of cars).
- Encourage more walking and overall fitness
- Improved safety for non-mechanized road and sidewalk users (reduced traffic will do more for pedestrian safety than automated traffic will, I promise).
- Less space required to be devoted to parking and streets, so better land utilization.
Well, yeah, it exists, it's called a train, it's magnitudes longer than any "autonomous truck convoy" ever will be, and instead of the billion dollar AI machine learning big data system we have to keep them close together, we use a fricking mechanical linkage.
no the real solution is get over this mythological idea that America is too car heavy. everywhere that people get freedom of travel they go their own transport. what automation will bring is freedom to those who cannot drive so we best better figure out how to get cars talk to each other and which areas will be reserved for automated driving only.
funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/transportation/500...
If you look at how many people go in debt to own cars or the amount of credit on cars, you would see poor numbers there as well. Cars are incredible money sinks. There is a reason why Uber doesn't operate its own fleet.
If public transit billed by value it would easily be kept afloat. But the value proposition in most cities in America just isn't there, because they simply aren't dense enough. It's not a mythological idea. It's simple math.
> funny you mention Seattle, a city that blew over their recent rail budget by half a billion dollars [1]. plus is it also a city deferring maintenance to hide the costs of their folly.
Funny you mention things going over budget because nearly all infrastructure projects in this country do - yes, including roads. This is a problem with our government, not mass-transit solely.
In your very own article, the reasons stated for the price increase have nothing to do with mass transit inherently. They would be true of any infrastructure project.
They have freedom to travel, but not freedom to live where they want. The United States has entirely banned dense housing in everywhere that people want to live, and this consequently makes transit impractical. Get rid of zoning restrictions on housing, and we'd be in a much different place.
The second disregard, that well... there are airplanes.
The first, that driverless busses that creep at 30km/h and do emergency brake every every 10 minutes thanks to overattentive collision avoidance system also been around for decades.
Yet vehicles remain as lethal as dread diseases, mostly down to the humans piloting them. Just cutting that number of deaths and injuries significantly would be a boon similar to eradicating malaria.
I expect the flourishing of autonomous vehicles to be sudden and unanticipated. Just as you can't tell unless you are looking for the decals or attuned to why back seats are suddenly more populated you might miss the fact there are two million ride share drivers in the US now. One day we will realize the wait for a bus is much shorter because busses are right-sized and more frequent and can surge where they are needed because drivers aren't a bottleneck and routes are dynamic.
Other examples of this phenomenon:
Direct atmospheric carbon removal is bad. It encourages emissions!
Contraceptives are bad. They encourage sexual license! (I had to try to avoid the obvious joke here.)
Highways are bad! They encourage driving.
Word processors are bad. They discourage good penmanship!
Fertilizers and farm equipment are bad! They discourage small family farms!
GPS navigation is bad! It discourages map reading and mental direction finding!
Some of these examples look ridiculous to us now, but people really did think these things at some point. I see some opposition to autonomous vehicles falling into the same category.
For example, we could have a device on cars that transmit basic information. Such as licence ID number, speed, location, pedal position etc. It would be ridiculously useful data for a whole host of different things. You could use it to bill parking, catch speeders, sequence traffic lights, and warn of hazards ahead. And maybe even help self driving cars make sense of the world.
From a technological point of view this is a no-brainer. But this is incompatible with the way that we think about cars and roads. Every car has to pretend to be isolated from every other car.
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To wit: It's not enough to say "Our self-driving cars avoid 14,000 drunk-driving, texting and asleep-at-the-wheel fatalities," if it's also true that: "Our self-driving cars hit and kill 30 errant pedestrians a year that a human driver would have noticed."
I know that 14,000 > 30. But the specter of roadway martyrs being murdered by killing machines needs only a few examples to sustain itself.
Tough problem to solve.
We've been there before.
After the AI winter, many people argued AI will never come, and many achievements we already have (such as speech recognition) are impossible.
Self-driving cars need to be even better or people will die.
Perhaps self-driving cars can be deployed in a limited way, as taxis, for example.
OEMs are very interested in startups working on those specific issues, but for various reasons these incremental steps aren't as widely reported so all we get left is the hype that self driving cars "are here" and things like Tesla Autopilot
The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong.
There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.
Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?
Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally?
Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US.
When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000 (depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]. We can and should fix this first and foremost.
With over 3.1 Trillion miles driven annually in the US, that's about 0.001 fatalities per 100,000 miles driven, or about 1 fatality per 80,000,000 miles driven. Driving is pretty safe - although I agree we can make it safer.
[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat...
[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht...
[3] https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatali...
[4] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...
[5] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439...
It you really want a fair comparison, one can start by controlling statistical variables by car price point, car age and driver demographics.
It’s not hard to spot blatant data fudging by companies that are big on marketing.
I've driven about 200,000 miles and done considerably worse including two cars written off, though no injuries. I'd say Waymo seems safer than me. And judging from my insurance premiums which are low, I'd be safer than the average human driver.
I’m not sure what you’re waiting for.
(edited to remove unique shortlink url)
>Driverless cars are coming along just fine.
Even if this were true it doesn't mean humans will be fine with them being deployed. We had working driverless trains 20+ years ago yet almost none are deployed today (AND we have plenty of human-caused fatal train crashes that might be a good reason to want driverless trains).