[HN Gopher] Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft's self-driving ...
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Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft's self-driving car division
Author : bsilvereagle
Score : 184 points
Date : 2021-04-26 20:06 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (investor.lyft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (investor.lyft.com)
| mNovak wrote:
| In the end this makes sense; an actual car company is much better
| positioned to actually profit from marginal improvements in self-
| driving (read: safety improvements) year over year, rather than
| wait for the windfall of FSD taxi service at some unknown point
| in the future.
| joshuawright11 wrote:
| 100m a year, 0 roi expense gone. Also no more shared rides due to
| COVID (which I expect will never come back to Uber or Lyft since
| they were gigantic money sinks). Assuming ridership is bouncing
| back from COVID I wouldn't be surprised if their first profitable
| quarter was this year.
| petra wrote:
| Why we're shared rides such gigantic money sinks ?
|
| In theory at least, it can just be some algorithm and some
| screen space on the app.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| I can try to explain:
|
| - Ideally in a shared ride what happens is that instead of 2
| drivers, driving 12 miles for passenger A and 14 miles for
| passenger B, you have 1 driver who drives 15 miles for both
| passengers trips.
|
| - So 1 driver to pay who is now more efficient, and 2 paying
| customers. You charge each customer X% less, pay the driver
| Y% more, and theoretically you could keep your margin the
| same but now fulfill more rides (another driver is free now
| that you put two rides in 1 car)
|
| - However, now let's consider how much cheaper it can really
| be...
|
| - Sharing a ride for a cheaper cost makes sense when you and
| the person you share with have a generally overlapping route.
| The discount you get as a customer is a function of how
| likely you are to get matched with someone.
|
| - Turns out there aren't a lot of rides with good overlap
| (airport rides might be the best type of ride tbh). Thus the
| discount is quite small. If the discount is small it means
| you have less people using it. Less people using it makes the
| discount even smaller! Eventually you have no discount and no
| incentive to use the service.
|
| - To keep users incentivized to use the shared mode, Lyft and
| Uber have to subsidize the pricing to make sure that match
| rate stays high. Every "shared" mode ride that has only 1
| person in it is a big loss, but incentivizing more people to
| use it can result in a smaller net loss across the
| marketplace
| shaoonb wrote:
| Uber and Uberlikes are doing fine here in New Zealand. As long
| as they can pump money into/scam drivers into being cheaper
| than taxis they will keep market share.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Score on the acquisition bingo card for the phrase "incredible
| journey"!
| minimaxir wrote:
| Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority'
| of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021"
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin...
|
| https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...
| plank_time wrote:
| I saw Levandowski do a presentation of self-driving at an Uber
| all-hands and it was then and there that I knew that self-
| driving is 20+ years away.
|
| The example video showed so many small things that we take for
| granted as a human driver that would need to be built in or
| hand coded that AI or neural nets would never be able to get.
| There just isn't a way that you can train every single little
| thing that could cause an accident. For some things you just
| need experience and fear which I imagine can't be modeled via
| any current AI.
| andyxor wrote:
| nothing new here, AI has been "5 years away" since the 1950s
| bhk wrote:
| It was 20 years away for a while. And may be again.
| ravenstine wrote:
| Back in late 2015, I was working at a media firm and one of our
| top directors called together a meeting with our engineering
| team to talk to us about the impact of our products/content. He
| was _convinced_ that by 2018 most people would be using self-
| driving cars regularly and that this was going to hurt our core
| product.
|
| I don't think I ever tried harder in my life not to LOL.
| mandeepj wrote:
| Ha! I hope he did not pivot the company or shutdown the core
| product
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Same feeling for passenger-carrying drones/quadcopters/etc.
| Not gonna happen for decades in any commercially-viable way.
| thathndude wrote:
| Hard not to feel like we're seeing a swoon in self driving like
| we saw in crypto back in 2017 and 2018.
|
| They hype got ahead of the tech.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| I wonder if it's possible that this is true in some restricted
| area where companies are heavily testing their self-driving
| cars, and COVID reduced the amount of driving people do.
| SECProto wrote:
| From very brief observation a year ago, it seemed like
| Lombard Street [1] was 90% self-driving-car training.
| Definitely a very special case that just disproves the quote
| from Lyft's president.
|
| [1] https://goo.gl/maps/oXrvVYhDXWVxaoQC8
| gtirloni wrote:
| Well...
|
| "In December 2020, Lyft announced that it will launch a multi-
| city U.S. robotaxi service in 2023 with Motional."
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/autos-selfdriving-lyft-idUSK...
| ra7 wrote:
| They also have a partnership with Waymo to provide autonomous
| rides. Ultimately, I think Lyft, Uber and the likes will just
| become a provider/maintainer of robotaxi rides, while the
| actual tech will be done by Waymo et al.
| tananaev wrote:
| Lyft still works with third party partners, like Motional and
| Waymo to provide self-driving services on the platform. L5
| division was a separate effort to have own self driving car.
| Traster wrote:
| Yeah, I remember when the company I worked for continually made
| forward looking projections that were ridiculous whilst in the
| process of negotiating a sale. Including the pressure not to
| report anything that would need to be raised as part of the
| acquisition.
| fearling wrote:
| Did not know Lyft had a self-driving car initiative. Was that
| well known? Did they, like Uber, sink tons of money into it
| before bailing?
| ethanbond wrote:
| Of course, yes and yes. The business model is complete nonsense
| otherwise.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| The business model isn't nonsense. It justifies a company
| existing to do what Lyft does, just at a much smaller scale
| and valuation.
| ethanbond wrote:
| Yes, that's a good adjustment assuming the need for
| hundreds (or thousands?) of highly paid engineers isn't
| baked into the business model/product.
| darkwizard42 wrote:
| Not surprisingly it takes a lot of capital to make serious in-
| roads into self-driving. Ultimately if your main business is not
| profitable it is hard to justify spending 100m a year on L5 with
| no reasonable end in sight.
|
| I think this is why only Waymo or Cruise or one of the other
| well-funded-by-profitable-other-business will continue to
| progress towards the true self-driving vehicle... its just too
| damn expensive and uncertain as to when the
| breakthrough/development will happen
| tdhz77 wrote:
| I keep getting downvoted. I'll keep saying it, we need government
| investment into self driving. It cannot be done by private sector
| alone.
| cobaltoxide wrote:
| In what way would government investment help here? The main
| players already have tons of funding.
|
| Also, why should self-driving be a government priority?
| hcrisp wrote:
| Toyota / Woven Planet also just announced it was picking Apex.AI
| as their software platform:
|
| https://electrek.co/2021/04/14/toyota-partners-with-apex-ai-...
| ipsum2 wrote:
| I've seen some directors recently leave Lyft's "Level 5" division
| recently, in the last couple of months. I guess there were a lot
| of warning signs.
| _____bee wrote:
| Most ride-hailing companies that invested in self-driving cars
| are giving up on these projects. Most of these startups struggle
| to sustain their business.
| alonmower wrote:
| *Most ride-hailing companies that needed a narrative ahead of
| their IPO for why they had a defensible long term moat and
| leaned heavily on 'self driving' as their answer to that are
| now getting pressure from investors on why they keep sinking
| more money into a problem it doesn't seem they'll ever be able
| to solve
| elpakal wrote:
| I learned to drive in Mexico at 13, where there are almost
| literally no rules or traffic signals (see the black arrow on the
| wall? that means don't stop). I remember thinking about how
| different things were when trying to get my driver's license in
| US at age 16 - almost easier - in spite of how many more rules
| there were. I wonder how self-driving cars perform when trained
| in a world of rules and order and are then thrown into complete
| chaos in other places.
|
| What does training look like? Do self-driving cars only work in
| certain countries where they have been trained?
| rossdavidh wrote:
| Well, they don't really "work" anywhere, if your standards are
| high enough. But your point is valid; making a self-driving car
| for many national markets has to be harder than making a
| regular car for those same markets.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals
| ...
|
| That's a lie, though. The meme that Mexico is an uncivilized
| place is dumb and doesn't hold much substance.
| quickthrowman wrote:
| Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft.
| Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they
| recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2
| automated.
|
| Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021,
| or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months?
|
| The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they
| issue press releases is Waymo, because Google isn't trying to
| juice their stock price all the damn time, and they have operable
| robotaxis in AZ. I don't think Waymo claims L5 capability either.
| rkalla wrote:
| It's those _edge cases_ that make me think real FSD (vehicles
| with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem.
|
| Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a
| bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a
| steering wheel.
| grecy wrote:
| > _but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is
| blinding the camera?_
|
| I love these wildly over-the-top exaggerations.
|
| When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent
| going off the edge?
|
| What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle
| "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do?
|
| Remember it's projecting and predicting the road ahead, even
| around corners and in the dark - so being blinded by the sun
| isn't going to cause it to swerve wildly off course and off
| the bridge - it can continue to use the data it had before
| being blinded (just as you do).
|
| Also remember it has eight cameras it uses for this. The 16
| year old new driver texting and talking to friends coming
| towards you at 60mph has two.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| > When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to
| prevent going off the edge?
|
| That's a disingenuous question. Many bridges have wooden
| guards that will prevent you from going off if you make a
| small mistake, but not a large one.
|
| > What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle
| "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do?
|
| Humans can move their head, and block the sun with a hand,
| hat, or sunshade in the car. Humans have two eyes so if one
| is obstructed, the other may still get good vision.
|
| > so being blinded by the sun isn't going to cause it to
| swerve wildly off course and off the bridge - it can
| continue to use the data it had before being blinded (just
| as you do).
|
| Unless it's an incredibly well-trained AI, it may mistake
| lens flare for oncoming traffic, or a pedestrian. Car AI is
| not at the point where it has common sense to assume that
| lens flare is incorrect information.
| thrwyoilarticle wrote:
| >What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle
| "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do?
|
| Self driving software tends to have very poor object
| permanence.
| xnx wrote:
| "Blinded by the sun" is an understandable failure-state
| when you design a driving system that's reliant on cameras.
| From https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/05/feds-autopilot-
| was-acti...: "Theoretically, it should be possible to
| detect the side of a truck using cameras. But it's not
| always easy. In some lighting conditions, for example, the
| side of a trailer might be hard to distinguish from the sky
| behind it."
| grecy wrote:
| How many of the 100 daily fatalities on the roads in the
| US do you think are caused by drivers not "seeing
| clearly"?
|
| The goal of an AI driver isn't no crashes. The goal is
| less crashes than human drivers.
| tayo42 wrote:
| Idk if it's that simple, what if you reduce highway
| deaths by 100 but rural roads go up by 10. If I'm
| primarily a rural driver that's not enticing.
| grecy wrote:
| OK then, let's not put it into full scale production
| until all types of driving are an order of magnitude
| (10x) less.
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| >The 16 year old new driver texting and talking to friends
| coming towards you at 60mph has two.
|
| My two analog eyes see this perfectly well, why didn't the
| AI?
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/news/33789/autopilot-blamed-for-
| tes...
|
| I think there's a lot unfair criticism of human drivers in
| this thread. I don't think we're at the point where we can
| call machines better than humans when it comes to these
| tasks.
| nradov wrote:
| The human driver's two eyes still have a wider dynamic
| range than any current affordable video camera. This makes
| a huge difference in difficult lighting situations like
| looking into the sun.
| theluketaylor wrote:
| The edge case that I always go to on why truly autonomous
| vehicles are decades+ away is winter driving. Lane markers
| and road signs disappear. Slush and salt spray constantly
| obscure sensors.
|
| Winter driving as a human driver requires an entirely
| different approach and Waymo hangs out in the Arizona desert
| where there is basically never any inclement weather.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| That, and construction, detours and city driving. In the
| latter, driving contexts can change without a second's
| notice, without any signs, markings or signals denoting the
| change. You learn what those contexts are from experience
| and understanding of what are ultimately complex social
| situations, and a shared understanding between you and the
| people around you.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| don't even need to go to bad environmental setting. Let's
| talk about other countries. I haven't seen a lot of self-
| driving cars in Rome or Mumbai yet, there's a lot of places
| where traffic rules are treated more like suggestions than
| actual rules. American style neat wide highways and grid-
| like streets are not how the places look where most cars
| are being driven right now already.
| klmadfejno wrote:
| Digital data instead of signs seems like the obvious
| solution.
| fnord77 wrote:
| Driving in all conditions requires the computing power of a
| human brain. When we have computers that powerful, we can
| talk about L5.
| alpha_squared wrote:
| Just like reliability SLAs, I suspect every extra nine
| requires an exponential increase in investment. My armchair-
| know-nothing assessment is we're maybe at 90% coverage* right
| now, with maybe 10x all investment up until this point needed
| to reach 99%; then 10x _that_ to reach 99.9%. Even at 99.9%,
| though, a failure scenario still threatens injuring or
| killing 0.1% of drivers (350,000 motorists for US alone).
|
| * Coverage as a percentage of scenario's occurrence over the
| total duration of driving. For example, over 90% of a long-
| distance trip will be spent on a highway following traffic
| patterns within a lane with the occasional lane change.
| maxerickson wrote:
| We regularize traffic more than your estimate though. Like
| 99.99% of the 300 mile drive I took yesterday was sitting
| in a lane.
|
| The hardest part was that Google hadn't mapped a service
| drive, so it thought the adjacent service drive was the
| best route (which would be addressed pretty fast if you
| were trying to deploy self driving service in that area).
|
| I don't think we get to level 5 very soon, but level 4 cars
| will have the ability to go lots of places pretty soon. If
| I overestimate driveway distances from yesterday, it's like
| 99.966% lane miles. There was some construction, but it was
| already well marked for human drivers.
| walshemj wrote:
| Would not they detect the gates where down ? or are there
| still that many crossings without gates in the USA
| rurp wrote:
| Where I live in the Southwest US there are many crossings
| without gates. I'd say very few of the ones outside of
| well populated areas have them.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Gates are only a suggestion - signals/gates malfunction
| so often you can find compilation videos of them on
| youtube.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| The place I talked about had no gates, after the accident
| they added gates.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| That shouldn't be the standard. It probably will be, but it
| shouldn't be.
|
| Humans are terrible drivers. If a self-driving car got into
| half as many accidents as the average human, it would save
| _millions_ of lives. And kill people, to be sure, but fewer
| on net.
|
| I also think you could make a reasonable argument that _all_
| cars should be banned, right now, based on how many people
| they kill, but since I don 't think that's gonna happen...
| markkanof wrote:
| You are correct on the aggregate, but that doesn't
| necessarily work when applied to each individual driver.
|
| I'm a pretty attentive and cautious driver. In the 20 years
| I have been driving I've been in one accident and that was
| because another driver was attempting to make an illegal
| left turn, came across two lanes of traffic, and t-boned
| me. So if self driving vehicles are only doing better than
| the worst human drivers, I'm going to be pretty hesitant to
| turn over control. I'd be in favor of that other driver
| that hit me using an autonomous vehicle though.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| _Everyone_ thinks they 're an above-average driver. Half
| of them must be wrong, so the reliability of any
| individual's self-assessment is about equal to chance.
| Even if you're one of the truly good drivers--your record
| certainly sounds excellent--our laws should account for
| the fact that _most_ drivers can 't judge their own
| skill.
| usrusr wrote:
| Just wait until self-driving "personality" becomes part of
| a car company's brand identity. I suspect that we will see
| no lack cars that are _designed_ to be terrible drivers. Of
| course they will call it "confident", "assertive", perhaps
| for some brands even "masculine". Cars could become even
| more civilian tanks thank that already are. I desperately
| hope that I'm wrong.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Or you need a high-bandwidth coverage-everywhere comms system
| and a robust infrastructure for remote teleop, like what
| Starsky was building:
|
| https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-
| starsky-...
|
| Then the steering-wheel-less car at least has the ability to
| call for help when it's only 98% sure of what to do instead
| of 99.99% sure. But obviously this kind of model only makes
| sense in a fleet context, not as an extension to something
| you own, so it requires greater shifts, at least for personal
| automobiles.
| kgin wrote:
| Most remote assistance is not live driving. A remote human
| adds labels and maybe even marks out a safe path for the
| vehicle so that vehicle has enough information to proceed.
| nostrademons wrote:
| IMHO FSD cars (along with drones, secure programming
| languages/OSes, and distributed manufacturing) are a _post-
| war technology_. The economics don 't make sense while we're
| at peace and locked into the Pax Americana economy. However,
| once folks start trying to kill each other, these
| technologies will give a very large survival advantage to
| those factions that adopt them. Imagine how useful not having
| to risk human lives on supply lines would be. And risk
| expectations get reset when things go from "nobody ever dies
| unnaturally" to "people are actively trying to kill you",
| which eliminates the biggest barrier to FSD adoption.
|
| I think we'll get such a war within the next decade, so we
| may see FSD vehicles sooner than expected, just not in the
| way we want.
| usrusr wrote:
| In a hot industrialized war (one that isn't wildly
| asymmetric), a supply line has so many soldiers' lives
| depending on it that having the transports manned or not is
| insignificant. But I think I know the general concept you
| are getting at, I'd call it the wartime risk economy: when
| a large percentage of your combat aircraft sorties don't
| return, it becomes reasonable to operate the engines much
| closer to the limits of reliable operation than in peace
| time. The extra performance can save more pilots than the
| occasional engine failures caused by the emergency
| operation mode cost.
| okareaman wrote:
| I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars
| so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad
| crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What
| if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train
| coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked.
| Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at
| railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train
| schedule in, but what if the train system changes the
| schedule? That could be adjusted for, but how much would I
| trust this system? Not enough to take a nap behind the wheel.
| jonas21 wrote:
| To be honest, this seems like one of the easier edge cases
| to handle. Before crossing tracks, check if there's
| anything coming down the tracks.
|
| Much easier than all of the weird edge cases related to the
| behavior of other drivers or pedestrians.
| ghaff wrote:
| In England at least, if you're crossing HSR by foot, you
| pick up a handset and call train operations to cross.
| Probably overly conservative but obviously a simple thing
| for a car to implement along with the usual safety
| measures (though those would presumably involve gates or
| not at grade anyway).
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| Theoretically it should be able to use side-facing lidar
| and cameras to sense that a big truck-like thing is
| crossing.
| acover wrote:
| Why not radar?
| adrr wrote:
| Because radars lacks resolution. Why my Tesla phantom
| brakes due to low hanging signs or slow cars in the other
| lane. They tune it down to ignore these anomalies and it
| has issues running into disabled cars and emergency
| vehicles.
| baybal2 wrote:
| You don't need resolution to detect train about to ram
| into you.
|
| Similarly, lidar resolution is a great overkill, and
| overcomplication over a moderatly sophisticated mm wave
| radar, which is on top of that will be much more durable,
| and reliable.
| xnx wrote:
| In addition to obeying all railroad crossing signals, I'm
| certain the Waymo Driver has the concept of trains built
| in. The long-range sensors on the vehicle would project the
| probable path of the train and determine if it was safe to
| proceed along the car's planned route.
| craftinator wrote:
| Unless the train was obscured from view by foliage at the
| height and angle that the lidar rests at, or if a truck
| pulled up next to the car, or... Well yeah, the only
| reason people can handle that situation reasonably well
| is that they have a large range of sensory input, most of
| that input has symbolic representation in the mind, and
| there's a healthy fear of dying that causes us to notice
| when the ground is shaking and reassess whether the train
| signal is working correctly.
| okareaman wrote:
| I'm not certain the Waymo Driver has the concept of
| trains built in, but what if they did? How good is it? I
| applied at Waymo and found out they don't do well in the
| rain. What if they train is splashing up water in front
| of it? I'd like to know how it deals with falling rocks,
| which is a problem in California. Would they tell me or
| lie about self-driving, like some well known spoke
| persons do? What are the hackable weaknesses of Waymo?
| Have they tried to have visual and computer hackers fool
| the car and send it the wrong way? It just seems to me
| it's going to take awhile, maybe decades in my amatuer
| opinion.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| In in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, a dad and his son were
| killed driving a car across a railway crossing with no
| gates. The dad (driver) was on his phone at the time and it
| is believed the phone blocked his view of the train and he
| was talking to much to hear the train.
|
| The person he was talking to said they were talking like
| normal and suddenly the phone cut off.
|
| Computers probably can not be worse that the people already
| on the road.
| simias wrote:
| Even if you're right, that's the same argument for
| airplane safety. The problem is being in control versus
| putting your hands in the hands of an unknown third
| party.
|
| The psychological, ethical and legal implications are
| completely different. If tomorrow I drive a car and run a
| kid over then I'll be in trouble and you'll probably
| never hear about it. If tomorrow I get in my Tesla self-
| driving car and it runs a kid over then you'll hear about
| it everywhere and Tesla's responsibility will be invoked.
| Because whose else?
|
| The bar for self driving cars is not being as good (or
| bad) as a human driver, they need to be orders of
| magnitude safer in all situations. They need to have
| airplane industry numbers, not Average Joe drunk driving
| numbers.
| mrtksn wrote:
| People are great at some things that computers suck and
| computers are great at some things that human suck.
|
| Machines doing horrible mistakes that no conscious person
| would ever do is problematic because we don't have
| reliable error correction methods for that kind of
| mistakes.
|
| A FSD car will never accidentally press acceleration
| pedal whey trying to press the brakes or loose control
| when trying to read an SMS. Instead it will mistake a
| bird for a train, hit and run someone and it would be
| like "something slowed me down, are my batteries
| degrading?"
|
| How do you deal with a driver that fails to understand
| what's going on?
| joe_the_user wrote:
| A human being can drive a million miles without a serious
| accident. 2018 saw 1.1 deaths per 100 _million_ vehicle
| miles driven[1]. Human beings are extremely good at
| driving safely overall.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_
| rate_in...
| steve_adams_86 wrote:
| Yeah, I think people conflate seeing people drive
| erratically or doing dumb things in cars with an
| inability to operate a car in a way that ultimately
| prevents deaths. Humans are incredibly good at that in
| the bigger picture for reasons that are currently
| impossible to replicate with a computer.
|
| Criticize human driving all you want, but even the worst
| of us can typically manage to get from point a to point
| b... Somehow.
| joe_the_user wrote:
| One of the eye-opening things about the wikipedia
| statistics is that advent and universality of mobile
| phones at worst caused a very small uptick in fatalities.
| With all the bullshit you see with on the road, somehow
| people manage to mostly avoid death doing it. My guess is
| people can pull attention back to the road at moments
| it's really needed.
| admax88q wrote:
| If the bar is "better than someone talking on cell phone
| while crossing a railroad crossing without looking," I'll
| stick to manual driving.
|
| Self driving needs to be better than me, not better than
| average.
| andy81 wrote:
| Not a problem if you only sell to the bottom 50% of
| drivers.
| alexanderchr wrote:
| Only a small minority of drivers consider themselves to
| be in the bottom 50% of drivers, so you might have
| trouble with that strategy.
| 2muchcoffeeman wrote:
| It would be interesting to put a black box in a car tied
| to the driver. Anyone who shows patterns of driving worse
| than average gets a self driving car.
|
| If you are better than average you can keep your dumb
| car.
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| Does the average driver even look both ways at the
| railroad crossing? I do every single time. Such a low-
| cost preventative measure that could very well end up
| saving my life one day.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| At least where I learned to drive, not only was stopping
| to look both ways at railroad crossings taught in driving
| classes at school, it was part of the written test to get
| a permit/license, as well.
| okareaman wrote:
| How many people on Hacker News think self-driving cars
| will be a better driver than themselves in the near
| future?
| cameronh90 wrote:
| Probably me. Waymo may already be in most situations.
|
| I drive about once or twice a year, always in a rental,
| and consequently never really know how well my car
| handles or its dimensions. That, plus generally being
| rusty, tends to make me fairly nervous.
|
| Yet, nevertheless, I am in charge of a 2000kg block of
| metal hurtling around pedestrians and cyclists at 70mph.
|
| Scares the shit out of me, to be honest.
| jandrese wrote:
| Self driving cars would have to kill over 1.35 million
| people each year to be as bad as human drivers[1].
|
| But there is no reason we should be happy if a self
| driving technology "only" kills 1.2 million people in a
| year. That number is absurd and should not be considered
| acceptable. I think in the semi-distant future we are
| going to look at manual operation of a motor vehicle as a
| dangerous party trick, something only to be attempted by
| professionals or in limited circumstances like pulling
| into a field to park or some other low speed maneuvering.
|
| [1] https://www.asirt.org/safe-travel/road-safety-facts/
| gpm wrote:
| We should be _delighted_ if we have a self driving
| technology that only kills 1.2 million people a year.
|
| 1. That's an incredible amount of saved time, people now
| get that time back that they use to have to spend
| driving. We would have eliminated the largest suck of
| human time on the planet (truck driving). Etc. The main
| benefit of self driving is not safety.
|
| 2. We have a working baseline that we can improve upon to
| drive that number down, and since computer programs don't
| have the "new drivers need to learn from scratch"
| problem, those improvements will stick around
| approximately forever.
| okareaman wrote:
| > semi-distant future we are going to look at manual
| operation of a motor vehicle as a dangerous party trick
|
| totally agree but I'm skeptical of current tech to get
| there in the near time frame being talked about. It's all
| in how you define semi-distant
| f6v wrote:
| Now look at AstraZeneca craze. Vaccines save lives,
| thrombosis cases are extremely rare. Yet the guy on
| street is talking to someone on the phone: "Do not take
| AZ! I repeat: do not take AZ!!!". Technology has to make
| just one mistake to lose layman's confidence.
| heavyset_go wrote:
| > _Computers probably can not be worse that the people
| already on the road._
|
| And yet there is no evidence that computers are better
| drivers than people are.
|
| I do have to ask, are we using the same computers? I've
| been using them for decades, and they're consistently
| buggy, error prone and straight-up factually wrong a lot
| of the time.
| [deleted]
| glofish wrote:
| that's not quite right.
|
| Computers currently are far worse than the good drivers
| out there. It is not clear if they ever could be better
| than a trained and cautious driver.
|
| For example you can easily avoid the situation above by
| not talking on the phone while driving across rails.
|
| if the AI abruptly crosses the median how are you going
| to avoid that?
| carlmr wrote:
| >I suppose they could program the train schedule in, but
| what if the train system changes the schedule?
|
| I laughed at this, thinking about how the German trains are
| usually +-30 mins and often off by hours.
|
| The train schedule would probably not fare better than a
| coin flip, except in Switzerland or Japan.
| AnssiH wrote:
| > I suppose they could program the train schedule in, but
| what if the train system changes the schedule?
|
| Just check the train locations instead :)
|
| https://rata.digitraffic.fi/api/v1/train-locations/latest/
| jeffbee wrote:
| This seems like the edgiest of all possible edge case
| arguments against self-driving cars, considering that a
| meat-driven car crashed through a working barrier and into
| a perfectly obvious train in the Bay Area just this
| morning.
| mulmen wrote:
| Obviously meat-based drivers have flaws. The question is
| if the FSD robots at least retain all the existing
| capabilities of meat-based drivers. Trading one set of
| deficiencies for another raises the question of which set
| is preferable.
|
| The reality is that for a long time we will combine both
| sets of capabilities and use "self driving" tech to
| enhance human driver capabilities.
|
| In that case self-driving first needs to be able to avoid
| the relatively simple case of not of smashing through a
| barrier and the human driver can use their wetware to
| figure out how to handle railroad crossings which are
| diverse and complicated.
| okareaman wrote:
| This is where you're wrong because I'm obviously a far
| better driver than that person who drove in front of a
| train this morning and it would never happen to me. I
| trust myself more than I trust other drivers. I trust
| myself more than I trust Waymo. I'd be happy to have
| Waymo prove me wrong.
| Swenrekcah wrote:
| I agree that it's an edge case but there are always
| completely bonkers people, out of the world on drugs or
| just suicidal.
|
| I don't want to risk getting figuratively in a car with
| one if I turn on FSD.
| echelon wrote:
| > It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles
| with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem.
|
| I'd be willing to bet it's a quarter century or longer
| problem. (Longbets, anyone?)
|
| FSD is absolutely achievable, but the task is much bigger
| than some proponents give it credit.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| I think you're right. For the AI we have today, it's the
| equivalent of 1990. My guess is that as sensor arrays
| improve, wireless networks improve and quantum laptops are
| available in 2040 or so.
|
| Think about it -- most software is deployed cloud first these
| days, but one of the most complex computing tasks we have is
| relying on some black box computer.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| It is mostly a hardware problem. Tesla's can't do FSD with
| current hardware because there aren't redundant cameras in
| each direction. One camera gets mud on it and your car runs
| itself into oncoming traffic. (It does that anyway right now,
| but even if software bugs are fixed this is still
| intractable).
|
| A real solution has to be capable of cleaning all cameras
| (probably faster than a windshield wiper would), because the
| distortions caused by even normal rain are hellish to train
| an AI to handle.
| xnx wrote:
| Tesla would be lucky if the extent of its challenges were
| having enough cameras pointing in the right direction.
| Tesla handicapped itself by only developing its driving
| systems with cameras and not lidar.
| ecpottinger wrote:
| Right, because people have LIDAR installed already.
| ErikVandeWater wrote:
| I don't disagree. But since adding more cameras to a car
| that already has cameras is a much more intuitive
| extension for Tesla to select, I used that as an example.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| 100% agree but i wonder about the standards applied.
|
| Where I live the streets are tight and most drivers mediocre at
| best, unaware that cyclists might have right of way and about
| 1/20 doesn't seem to know the difference between different kind
| of light settings in the car. At least half the cars on my
| street have visible scratches/dents.
|
| For me _that_ is the standard to be beaten, not perfection. And
| the car could still give signal and ask for a human to take
| over in some cases. Self-drivinf cars for me could also be much
| slower, no need to speed when you can read a book or play games
| waltherg wrote:
| So, essentially, you live in Italy where traffic signs and
| lights are nothing more than street art and some extra frills
| on the side of the road.
| borroka wrote:
| Silly generalization, please avoid.
| ryanlol wrote:
| It's not a generalization.
| galuggus wrote:
| It's a generalisation but not silly.
| utexaspunk wrote:
| I dunno, I've seen the Domino's [Nuro](https://www.nuro.ai/)
| car roaming Houston and it seems to be doing okay and I haven't
| heard of any issues... If it's good enough for my pizza, it's
| good enough for me -I'm mostly pizza anyway! :P
| Hydraulix989 wrote:
| I think it's remote-controlled though?
| sanguy wrote:
| Waymo has given up on ever getting L5 capabilities. They have
| so much invested they can't just shutter it, and keep it going
| in hopes it attracts an interesting partnership or purchaser.
|
| They did the same thing with Skybox imaging/Terra Bella.
| jollybean wrote:
| I loathe to think about more complicated regulation, but I
| think Elon is pushing the boundaries of disclosure. That, and
| that we have a lot of new populism in stocks, makes me think
| the SEC maybe needs an update.
|
| I kind of like Elon being able to say 'whatever', but on the
| other hand, it's not his money now, it's crossed the threshold
| into public financing, so statements like L2 v. L5 are
| 'material' and saying the wrong thing is a 'lie' and 'bad'.
|
| Again with the paradox is that he's going to be hosting SNL
| which is kind of fun to see, on the other hand, it's going to
| be another occasion to hustle a stock or some kind of crypto
| which is distasteful.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Do you have a link to Elon's FSD claim?
|
| He definitely uses ambiguity to his benefit (eg "soon", "by
| fall/winter/spring/summer" (in which year?)), but I haven't
| heard anything about Tesla being L5 by the end of 2021.
| LightG wrote:
| Even if I don't want to, I can't help but keep up with his
| marketing-claims through the interests I have. My take, being
| aware of him but not focused, is that beta-FSD has already
| been released! ... I mean ... what? Maybe I've got it wrong.
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| It's been released to a small number of people, but...
| beta-FSD isn't level five.
|
| The only specific statement I've read from him is that the
| basic functionality for level five will be available this
| year.
|
| What's interesting to me is that people seem to attribute
| what news articles synthesize about his statements as
| statements made by him.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313
| drzaiusapelord wrote:
| >news articles synthesize about his statements as
| statements made by him
|
| Musk promised the coast to coast drive in 2017:
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13341100/tesla-self-
| driv...
|
| Then admitted he couldn't do it in 2017:
|
| https://www.autonews.com/article/20180208/MOBILITY/180209
| 770...
|
| This isn't the media delivering a dishonest commentary.
| These are his words.
| mandeepj wrote:
| > Do you have a link to Elon's FSD claim?
|
| Google is universally accessible to everyone. Please don't be
| that guy who corners himself into a blind spot.
|
| Musk claimed coast to coast self-driving trip by end of 2017.
|
| https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13341100/tesla-self-
| driv...
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| I've searched, but I haven't found any comment from Musk
| about level five being ready by 2021.
|
| edit - The closest is about the basic functionality for it
| being ready by the end of the year (see above).
| bidirectional wrote:
| If someone says by "fall/winter/spring/summer" and they don't
| mean the immediate upcoming instance of that season, they are
| lying. That is not being cleverly ambiguous, it is pure
| dishonesty.
| [deleted]
| heymijo wrote:
| This feels like bad faith. Musk has been making these claims
| every year since 2016. His coverage of these claims on HN is
| regular and thorough.
|
| I went ahead and Googled one for you from 2020:
|
| _Tesla will be able to make its vehicles completely
| autonomous by the end of this year, founder Elon Musk has
| said.
|
| It was already "very close" to achieving the basic
| requirements of this "level-five" autonomy, which requires no
| driver input, he said._
|
| - July 2020
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313
| omgwtfbyobbq wrote:
| Do you mean this comment?
|
| _I remain confident that we will have the basic
| functionality for level five autonomy complete this year._
|
| Basic functionality for level five isn't level five.
| gcanyon wrote:
| You are probably right about 2021, but I think it is very
| likely that when L5 _does_ come, it will arrive suddenly and
| unexpectedly. The same as AlphaGo did. Yes, I am aware that
| AlphaGo was the result of years of effort. Obviously there is
| an element of "how do you define 'arrive'" here.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I don't think Tesla will have L5 in 2021, but the FSD videos on
| youtube are pretty impressive no ?
| dawnerd wrote:
| Yes, they are but also a lot are sped up. The videos that are
| raw show the car still struggling to see around corners since
| the cameras are just not in a good enough spot. They really
| should have put cameras on the very front corners.
|
| But TBH I'm not really THAT impressed it can take corners and
| follow more lines. It still doesn't handle very important
| edge cases, and the people testing and uploading videos are
| naturally biased to show how good it is to push their
| referral codes.
|
| I'm not anti-Tesla, I love my M3, but we need to be realistic
| about the future of what these particular cars can do.
| They're never going to be L5 with the current sensor suite -
| and they're certainly never going to be robo taxies. Who
| really wants that anyways? Last thing I want is some drunk
| bros to destroy my car and have to deal with Tesla support.
| Philip-J-Fry wrote:
| They're impressive when they're on a straight road. But I
| think it's very concerning just how noisy and low resolution
| the data the cameras are working with is. You can watch some
| of the videos and the car won't recognise other traffic until
| it's literally within 20 meters of the car. The 3D positions
| of the cars are jumping around constantly. It will get the
| speed of traffic wrong and try to turn straight in front of
| someone that would cause an accident. Yes it's Beta but it's
| still a huge huge huge way behind what Elon claimed it would
| be by now. And he's doubled down on the current hardware
| being all that's required.
|
| I am 100% unconvinced that Tesla can get anywhere with their
| current system. I don't see how their low resolution cameras
| can get the necessary information for Level 5 autonomy. It
| almost feels like a reckless brute force approach to the
| problem. "Just let AI figure it out". Every autonomous
| vehicle company is going to be using some sort of machine
| learning but they're going to be feeding in huge amounts of
| data. Waymo for example is using multiple LIDAR scanners to
| build up an accurate 3D model of the world surrounding the
| car. That's what you need. Not what is effectively guesswork
| by an AI.
|
| We still don't have truly reliable face detection even after
| decades of research and we're supposed to believe that a car
| can reliably drive itself on shitty low resolution cameras
| alone.
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