[HN Gopher] Waymo has lost its CEO and is still getting stymied ...
___________________________________________________________________
Waymo has lost its CEO and is still getting stymied by traffic
cones
Author : tim_sw
Score : 111 points
Date : 2021-08-22 16:31 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| trhway wrote:
| i think one of the main principal errors on Waymo (and other
| large players) part is not working with military. Given that for
| military the task is simpler while safety requirements is
| significantly laxer, i'd have expected that we'll see self-
| driving tanks/transports/etc. well before cars.
| qeternity wrote:
| We have this. They're called drones.
|
| One of the reasons tanks exist is to protect the operators. If
| you're not going to have boots on the ground in the first place
| (autonomous tank), you can rethink the vehicle completely.
| trhway wrote:
| there are still no autonomous drones either. I posted long
| time ago that before autonomous ground vehicles we should see
| autonomous airborne vehicles because of that task being much
| simpler. And of course the military would be the starting
| point here too.
|
| >tanks exist is to protect the operators
|
| operators of a large gun quite close to the target. If one
| can do without such a gun in such a role on the battlefield,
| then the need for tanks become less. We do see that in the
| recent wars - like Azerbajan/Armenia - the high-precision
| stand-off weapons fired from drones did that job perfectly.
| There were no countermeasures though, like say electronic
| communication and positioning blocking which would have
| necessitated autonomous capabilities for the drones.
| dang wrote:
| All: please don't react just to the title, and especially not to
| the most sensational bit of a title. That's a reflexive response,
| not a reflective one; we want the latter here:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
|
| Also, often we'll change such titles (as I just did above), and
| then the shallow-title-objections become a sort of uncollected
| garbage, referencing something that no longer exists.
|
| I'm going to make a stub reply and bundle those comments
| underneath it so as to collapse them. There are more interesting
| things to discuss here.
| dang wrote:
| Stub for shallow title dismissals. I'm omitting a few that led
| to interesting subthreads and/or contained an interesting
| observation. Admittedly a judgment call.
| loourr wrote:
| This article is hilarious. It's all about the march of 9's.
| Saying they're 99% done means they've only just begun.
|
| Also it doesn't account for their model which requires paying
| engineers and installing tens of thousands of dollars in
| every vehicle to make it work. And the fact that they need
| pre established HD maps to do anything.
| aero-glide2 wrote:
| Then they aren't 99% of the way. I do not like statements
| like this. 99% of what?
| shimonabi wrote:
| Like some other commenters said: the last 1% will require 99%
| of the time.
|
| I'm certain there will have to be smart roads before there
| can be cars without a steering wheel.
| _russross wrote:
| I can't wait for the rest of the series:
|
| Climate change is 99% solved. The last 1% is the hardest.
|
| We are 99% of the way to ending all wars. The last 1% will be
| the hardest.
|
| Scientists are 99% of the way to curing cancer. The last 1%
| will be the hardest.
|
| etc.
| jeffbee wrote:
| "First 99% and the second 99%" is a common software
| industry quip.
| alpaca128 wrote:
| Oh, that's great. That means they can drive on 99% of roads
| in all weather conditions except blizzards, hurricanes and
| wildfires?
|
| Yeah, didn't think so.
| mangecoeur wrote:
| Pretty sure that 1% is more of an ironic quip than a
| statistic. Since the things they can't handle are listed
| include 'cyclists' and 'rain'.
| riffraff wrote:
| "we can safely avoid everything that does not move fast,
| which includes most of the earth's crust"
| infogulch wrote:
| Am I allowed to opt-in to the timeout box if I have a knee-
| jerk reaction to the new title? (In which I Clone the current
| title so that my reference to it doesn't become invalid when
| someone overwrites it on a different thread: "Waymo has lost
| its CEO and is still getting stymied by traffic cones".)
|
| At first glance I thought the title was saying that a Waymo
| car carrying the CEO has been lost for days because it got
| trapped by traffic cones.
| superkuh wrote:
| It's pretty much the other way around (1% done, 99% to go) except
| for contrived locations that have perfect climates. It's like
| wifi devices claiming they can work over miles but that's only
| true if you have line of sight.
|
| A long term snow covering of lane markings typical for the winter
| months of much of north america and the emergent driving lanes
| people flock to cannot be handled by any existing driving AI. The
| places people drive are _wrong_ according to absolute road
| positions and the relative markers are obscured to both human and
| machine. Unless car AIs can do the wrong thing like all the
| humans will in those situations it won 't work. And that's a hard
| problem.
| Arnt wrote:
| Aren't you then saying that people from California or Arizona
| who come to Norway know 1% of what they need in order to drive?
|
| I don't know anyone from Arizona, but the Californians I've
| known adapted quickly.
| azinman2 wrote:
| That's because they're humans. And also, even those humans
| who aren't used to certain conditions will have a difficult
| time.
| Arnt wrote:
| You're saying that for humans it requires perhaps 30%
| additional learning effort but for computers 9900%, and I'm
| supposed to accept the 30/9900 discrepancy because... what?
|
| When I learned to drive a car, I lived with an uphill
| driveway in a town whose winter climate varies by the hour.
| It's quite normal there to get temperatures around zero,
| some rain, then the temperature drops and 20cm snow fall.
| So on a January morning I often had to start the car uphill
| on steel ice covered with water and snow. With a sharp
| curve as a bonus.
|
| That kind of start isn't the simplst, and you could
| persuade me that that kind of thing is as difficult as
| navigating an intersection with ~10 other cars, cyclists
| and pedestrians. But not that it's tens of times as
| difficult.
| azinman2 wrote:
| > You're saying that for humans it requires perhaps 30%
| additional learning effort but for computers 9900%, and
| I'm supposed to accept the 30/9900 discrepancy because...
| what?
|
| Because AI is not even remotely close to "solved", and
| driving is a combination of a million edge conditions,
| social knowledge and communication, common sense
| knowledge, vision understanding, planning, and force
| feedback adjustment.
|
| What's unclear to me is why you'd expect these things to
| be so easy. To even say "for computers" doesn't seem to
| recognize this isn't just about executing basic math, but
| is rather trying to represent intelligence. There is no
| single computer here, these are implementations of ML
| models, which are each unique with their own
| architecture, parameter space, and capabilities.
| nextaccountic wrote:
| Humans generalize what they learn extremely well. Humans
| also spent their whole life learning how to navigate
| their environment, and this is transferable to a range of
| activities.
| qeternity wrote:
| > You're saying that for humans it requires perhaps 30%
| additional learning effort but for computers 9900%, and
| I'm supposed to accept the 30/9900 discrepancy because...
| what?
|
| Have you noticed how a small child will learn to identify
| things like cats and birds after only seeing a few
| examples? But computers need orders of magnitude more
| data and instruction.
|
| Anyone who doesn't understand how modern day deep
| learning works really ought to do an intro course.
| digdigdag wrote:
| Throwing random percentages is silly. In reality, these vehicles
| have only been tested within a very tight scope, in near-
| controlled conditions in Arizona, California, etc. with very
| specific conditions for their operations.
|
| I would consider it 99% complete when I can pull up a map, point
| to any stretch of drivable road in the United States and ask it
| to autonomously operate there.
|
| Specifically, there's an especially tricky road in I-35N in Texas
| where the lane markings come ago, yellow shoulder markings
| _merge_ into barriers, and the road condition is so bad that the
| steering rack will _turn_ by itself(!). We're not even close to
| calling this thing autonomous. If and when it gets to that point,
| I would consider it "99%" complete.
|
| In reality though, I really see this tech being viable in
| continued controlled conditions. Maybe there will be a point when
| certain lanes will become dedicated "autonomous lanes", where
| they're completely isolated from the rest of traffic, come with
| special markings and sensor suites to assist driveler-less cars
| operate efficiently.
|
| As long as the chaotic human element is ever present, regardless
| of how well they model these systems, it will fail to cope with
| the massive amount of discontinuous information humans inject
| into a situation (swerving into a lane, road rage, cargo suddenly
| coming loose from a truck, etc.)
|
| Oh, and have we tested these things during winter? :p
| ajross wrote:
| > Specifically, there's an especially tricky road in I-35N in
| Texas
|
| Seems like you could just get some data on that before
| declaring that "we're not even close". How do shipping Teslas
| do?
|
| FWIW: my impression is that the things people think are hard
| aren't the problems that are actually hard. People here and
| elsewhere on the internet have spent _years_ screaming about
| lidar vs. radar vs. vision. And... it turns out vision
| basically won. Something like half the Tesla fleet in ths US
| are vision only in the US now, and... the cars see stuff just
| fine. We 're not having detection failures. It works.
|
| If you watch all the FSD beta video being spread around
| youtube, much of it by drivers specifically looking for edge
| cases like this, most of the remaining problems are in pathing
| and decisionmaking, not detection. The cars see a busy
| intersection and then get paralyzed (there was an amusing clip
| from one guy of a car trying to make a left turn, giving up,
| and repathing a right turn that took it back in a loop only to
| fail at the same left turn repeatedly), or creep too slowly and
| annoy other drivers. Or they choose the wrong lane, or misread
| a multiple traffic light environment, or misread the need for
| detection (the one really dangerous video I remember had the
| car deciding to take a left turn across a broad street with a
| complicated blind corner instead of creeping out farther).
|
| Those are bugs to fix, for sure. But they're not the bugs we
| thought we had to fix. Those bugs... got fixed.
|
| So you can look at this as a pessimist and say "we'll never get
| there", or you can judge from previous experience that the hard
| problems won't turn out to be that hard in the end.
|
| Personally, having been watching the progress in this space, my
| guess is that Tesla and Waymo (and maybe Mobileye -- no one
| else is close) get this basically fixed within a year or two.
|
| At which point the debate will shift from "we'll never get
| there" to "we'll never be able to regulate this appropriately"
| or somesuch.
| zamadatix wrote:
| > Something like half the Tesla fleet in ths US are vision
| only in the US now, and... the cars see stuff just fine.
| We're not having detection failures. It works.
|
| You and I have extremely different experiences with Teslas.
| About the only place I could conceive arguing it works is
| highways and even then I wouldn't trust riding one down the
| highway without a steering wheel. Hell, my coworker can't
| even call his out of the driveway because it has been
| thinking his mailbox is a car for the last 6 months.
|
| I think we'll get there and I don't think it'll matter if
| it's with LIDAR or pure vision but we're certainly not close
| to being able to remove the steering wheel (regulation
| aside).
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Summon uses the old, pre surround video NN. The FSD stack
| is a whole different beast.
| ajross wrote:
| Mine drove me to Yellowstone and back with like two
| disengagements which were my paranoia about other traffic.
|
| But yes: the example was an interstate in Texas. And I
| happen to know it actually works quite well on interstates.
| So a very reasonable experiment about whether or not
| automation "will never get there" on edge cases like the
| referenced interstate is to take a commonly deployed,
| already available automation technology there and test it.
|
| But also recognize that shipping autopilot is now about a
| year old. All the FSD work hasn't made it to released cars
| yet. It's very much evolved, but visible only on youtube
| right now.
| coryrc wrote:
| We're not having detection failures.
|
| Then what do you call them hitting stationary things
| regularly?
| iknowstuff wrote:
| Radar
| ajross wrote:
| A lie. Or at least a giant [citation needed]. What evidence
| exists seems to show (not really surprisingly) that the
| cars are safer with AP engaged than when not.
| coryrc wrote:
| https://www.necn.com/news/national-international/us-
| agency-o...
|
| https://www.foxnews.com/auto/tesla-smashes-overturned-
| truck-...
|
| How often do people hit a giant stationary object in the
| middle of a nearly-empty freeway?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > What evidence exists seems to show (not really
| surprisingly) that the cars are safer with AP engaged
| than when not.
|
| Good way to change goal posts. There are many, many
| instances of Teslas hitting large stationary objects on
| roads, and who knows more instances of near misses due to
| driver intervention.
|
| When the AP can be engaged, which is usually 'better'
| conditions. Unfortunately humans don't always have the
| option of driving in 'better' conditions, so this is an
| entirely cherry picked subset of data.
| jeffbee wrote:
| Cmon. There's a video of a Tesla FSD driving on the wrong
| side of the road, cutting off a car it did not see at an
| intersection, then accelerating straight into a fence, all in
| the space of five minutes in Oakland. Tesla has by no means
| solved the vision problem. Their software is laughably bad.
|
| https://youtu.be/antLneVlxcs?t=633
| sedgjh23 wrote:
| Ancient footage, they fixed this bug
| rcxdude wrote:
| Like it's just a forgotten semicolon which explains all
| this behaviour. This isn't 'a bug', it's a big, complex,
| systemic reliability problem.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's sort of on you to back up the extraordinary claim
| that these defects have disappeared in the last five
| months.
|
| Edit: FSD 9 accelerates across double lines toward bridge
| support in San Francisco.
| https://youtu.be/GlIdu7prsAw?t=155
| leoedin wrote:
| For anyone wondering what "ancient" means - it was 5
| months ago. Maybe the commenter has a different
| definition of ancient than me.
| titzer wrote:
| It's incredible to me that they let this thing on the road.
| It could not pass a driver's test!
| davidcbc wrote:
| Teslas are not self driving cars regardless of what Musk
| claims. They aren't even close. Even Tesla admits that their
| "full self driving" mode is only level 2 automation.
|
| https://techcrunch.com/2021/05/07/tesla-refutes-elon-
| musks-t...
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| What do you call the video of a Tesla mistaking the moon for
| a yellow traffic light[1], if not a detection failure? That
| wouldn't happen with a lidar-only or lidar-assisted system.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UF-S2czdCk
| sedgjh23 wrote:
| they said most, not all
| iknowstuff wrote:
| The traffic light detection runs on an older NN which works
| over individual image frames instead of the new video-based
| system. They are migrating towards the latter. In any case,
| they can ask the fleet for examples of this and train the
| NN against it.
| qwertox wrote:
| This is a strange bug. As if they weren't making
| predictions about where the yellow light would have to be
| one second later, by using at least speed and accelerometer
| data, and compare the expected result with the new reality.
|
| This is not necessarily a job for lidar, they are just
| omitting some checks.
|
| At second 18 [1] a street light comes into play which looks
| similar to the moon. That relative movement is what the
| system should have been expecting from the moon, but they
| apparently just re-computed the assumption that the moon is
| a traffic light which is moving along with the car.
|
| It's somewhat revealing that they are not doing these kind
| of checks. I actually can't believe that they aren't doing
| it, but I can't see a case where the traffic light would
| always be at the same spot, if you have velocity and
| acceleration data at hand.
|
| A traffic light _is_ a very important thing.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/7UF-S2czdCk?t=18
| zootboy wrote:
| I'm not sure how lidar would help in detecting yellow
| lights correctly. Seems to me like that has to be a vision
| system, at least until we get all traffic lights to report
| their state via radio.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| "how far away is the light?"
| jlund-molfese wrote:
| I was thinking distance--if the object emitting the
| yellow light is 240K miles away from your car, it can be
| assumed that it isn't a traffic signal, right?
| throwaway09223 wrote:
| I have elderly relatives who won't drive at night, or on
| highways. I have friends who won't drive in various degrees of
| inclement weather - and I know a LOT of Californians who can't
| drive in the snow.
|
| Human skill is extremely variable. A car that can drive to any
| road under any condition will be vastly superior to the average
| driver.
|
| Reducing such a complex system to a single percentage may be
| silly, but the idea that a car might have partial coverage
| under certain conditions is quite reasonable and is reflective
| of how real human drivers work as well.
| Natsu wrote:
| I think the GP post also points out that some roads are,
| frankly, terrible. I've had more than a few times where I
| wasn't clear if the cones were set in such a way that I could
| continue down the road or not and I've been wrong at least
| once (though the cop was very understanding after I explained
| it).
|
| Some randomly placed cones are enough to confuse humans in
| many circumstances, as well. I doubt we'll ever have an all-
| encompassing solution for that, either. Even for things like
| autonomous-only lane, well it's not like everyone obeys the
| HOV lanes currently...
|
| There probably isn't a perfect solution, especially when I've
| seen plenty of ambiguous markings.
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| And there's zero possible way self-driving cars are going to
| handle country roads that are sometime dirt in the snow
| during a blizzard.
|
| Humans absolutely can do that. But the very architectural
| basis via ML that's being used never will. Different
| architecture? Maybe. Maybe in 50-100 years.
| bhawks wrote:
| > Specifically, there's an especially tricky road in I-35N in
| Texas
|
| Why are we ok with streets in such slapdash condition in the
| first place?
|
| Yes I think self driving cars need to handle it, but I also
| think we aren't handling it.
|
| Self driving cars have the potential to greatly reduce deaths
| due to accidents and improve accessibility for often ignored
| segments of our population. It is sad to see it so close, but
| held back by reasons like this.
| x0x0 wrote:
| There was always where this was going to end -- demands that
| we spend (from the public) hundreds of billions to upgrade
| roads to make self-driving tech "work".
|
| Also,
|
| > _and right now, no driverless car from any company can
| gracefully handle rain, sleet, or snow_
|
| Good thing the entire US has the weather patterns of the bay
| area, and never experiences rain, sleet, or snow!
| chiph wrote:
| IH-35 has been under continuous construction since .. the
| 90's?
|
| Hindsight being what it is .. they should have built a new
| 8-lane highway a few miles to the West rather than attempting
| to widen it multiple times (with all the bridge replacements
| needed) through towns like Temple and Waco. But as the Texas
| Central Railroad has found, you can't just eminent-domain
| land in Texas for large infrastructure projects.
| ghaff wrote:
| I live about an hour west of Boston. There's a sort of
| half-ring six-lane highway called I-495. It _mostly_
| handles the traffic load fairly well. But it 's a source of
| sometimes genuine surprise to me that a highway of this
| capacity for the area was built in the late 1950s given
| that must have seemed almost outrageously overbuilt for at
| least most of its route at the time.
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| Lots of people aren't okay with road conditions. But lots
| more people aren't okay with a myraid of other pet peeves and
| legitimate grievances they have with just about every single
| aspect of our society. The process of prioritizing which
| matters to address is called "politics", a process so
| notorious I assume I don't need to explain this further.
| bryanlarsen wrote:
| That awful stretch of I95 can be special cased. It's a great
| example of what a computer can be better at than humans who
| each have to individually figure it out.
|
| An unprotected left turn is probably a harder problem. They'll
| be expected to do it aggressively like humans, and also
| expected to do it safely. Those are incompatible directives.
| ghaff wrote:
| The (IMO) "right" way to do an unprotected left is also
| somewhat situational. If there isn't a lot of traffic
| generally on a country road but a somewhat bunched up group
| of vehicles is coming, I'll be patient until the bunch has
| cleared (unless someone flashes their lights at me). If on
| the other hand, I'm in a busier urban area and I can see
| there aren't a lot of openings, I'll be more aggressive
| including at traffic light changes.
|
| In general, my expectation--which may be completely wrong--is
| that we'll see autonomous driving on sections of highways in
| good weather long before we have door to door almost
| everywhere. Which is useful by itself for long highway
| drives.
| samstave wrote:
| I almost feel that relatively short range (meaning they can
| make the hops between charging stations) self-flying passenger
| drones/planes would be better than cars. Leet air-traffic
| control systems with decades of anti collision experience
| interact with and track all flights and inform all flying
| systems of the telemtry data for all slights so they have
| spatial awareness that way. Set flight paths that are low, but
| avoid densly populated areas/neighborhoods/infrastructure etc.
|
| Create small emergency landing areas all over...
|
| The only ground based vehicles I care about being 99% auto
| would be long-haul trucking. With a station to pickup a local
| last-mile-human-driver for actual drop-offf etc.
| qaq wrote:
| Lex interviewed Dmitri Dolgov CTO Waymo
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6prRXkI5HM I think you are
| conflating operating a public service within a very tight scope
| and "only been tested within a very tight scope"
| kenhwang wrote:
| Google Maps navigation can't even reliably call out which lane
| to use for turning in major metro areas, and that's kinda the
| basic best case scenario: clear images/footage, unlimited
| compute time, static road markers, common use case.
|
| I'm not sure how they can do better with far more stringent
| resources and requirements.
| skybrian wrote:
| Yes, it's kind of a silly headline. A percentage compares two
| numbers, in the numerator and a denominator. If you don't know
| what's being counted or measured, it's not a real statistic.
|
| However, people do uses percentages metaphorically and we
| should try not to be so distracted by silly headlines.
| ghaff wrote:
| That's exactly what this is. It's the classic "The first 90%
| is 90% of the work. The last 10% is the other 90%." Or
| whatever the exact quote is. It's not about the number. It's
| the fact that it's a lot of work to get close. It's as much
| or more work to get over the finish line.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| My current work involves ground-truthing sensor and classifier
| hits from various automotive OEMs. Take, for example, reading
| old-fashioned speed limit signs. In principle, doing this
| correctly and reliably in context is a relatively simple
| machine learning problem, particularly when restricted to a
| single country.
|
| I have yet to work with an automotive OEM that doesn't
| consistently mis-classify some speed limit signs in some common
| cases that are completely unambiguous. It leads one to wonder
| about the quality of classifier design and testing such that
| these end up in production vehicles. The cases that cause a
| classifier to fail are different across automotive OEMs too, it
| isn't intrinsic; other automotive OEMs will handle that
| specific case just fine.
|
| On the other hand, when it works it often works surprisingly
| well. The good/bad news is that most of the problems I see are
| ultimately caused by poor model design and testing. These are
| all surmountable with better quality AI engineering.
|
| There is more AI to self-driving cars than the classifiers that
| pull features out of their environmental sensors. However, the
| driving AIs are making decisions based on the output of those
| classifiers -- garbage in, garbage out.
|
| These are the kinds of situations that will produce relentless
| incremental improvements over time, and there is still a lot of
| low-hanging fruit to improve on.
| cmroanirgo wrote:
| This has always had me wondering about the viability of self
| driving: what's it going to be like in different countries?
|
| Not only are there different signs, different line marking &
| colours, & different widths. Cars are different: not all models
| are sold equally throughout the world. People are different:
| through their clothing, height and build. But the really big
| difference is that not everyone drives on the RHS...
|
| The article lists left turns as a problem, whereas on a LHS
| road system, right hand turns will be the problem.
|
| In NZ (a LHS system), I've heard that turning right across
| traffic has priority over oncoming traffic.
|
| In Melbourne, VIC Australia (also LHS), right turns are made
| from the left most lane because of trams lines.
|
| I'm sure there are loads of other issues specific to other
| geographies.
|
| To me, this never ending self driving experiment screams out
| that the wrong solution is being pursued. (That doesn't imply
| that I know what they should be using as a solution)
| mdoms wrote:
| > In NZ (a LHS system), I've heard that turning right across
| traffic has priority over oncoming traffic.
|
| This is incorrect and would be utterly chaotic. You may be
| thinking of an outdated rule in NZ where right-turning
| traffic takes precedence over left-turning coming in the
| opposite direction to the same side road. This was the case
| for a long time but was reversed[0] in 2012, overnight,
| almost without a hitch.
|
| [0] https://www.nzta.govt.nz/driver-licences/getting-a-
| licence/r...
| 8note wrote:
| It sounds like a pretty good idea to me, and will ensure
| low speed, low traffic roads
| lisper wrote:
| What could "99% complete" even possibly _mean_? That it goes 99
| miles /days/hours/minutes before hitting a tree?
| icedchai wrote:
| I look at it this way: I haven't had a car accident in over
| 25 years of driving. Now if there was a 1% chance of having a
| car accident every time drove, I'd be having multiple
| accidents a year. This seems bad.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| except 99% doesn't necessarily mean "every time you drive";
| it's obvious to me that if you drive for 100 miles you are
| more likely to get into an accident than 10 miles. It's
| probably closer to "in 99% of situations".
| icedchai wrote:
| The reality is that long term trips may, in general, be
| safer since you're on highways. Some statistics show that
| short term trips are more likely to have accidents.
|
| See https://wtop.com/dc-transit/2020/09/study-25-percent-
| of-car-...
| TchoBeer wrote:
| It doesn't necessarily have to scale linearly like that,
| but I assume 10 miles on the highway is safer than 100
| miles on the highway.
| dheera wrote:
| Humans are particularly bad at highway driving long
| distances because they get highway hypnosis or fall
| alseep. On local roads on the other hand humans tend to
| do a good job reasoning with situations.
| kzrdude wrote:
| Highways without intersections are very safe. Only on/off
| ramps. Mixing traffic directions and intersections are
| risk factors which mean that non-highways are more risky
| per kilometer.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| If this is true then why do 25% of car accidents happen
| in first 3 minutes of driving
| vntok wrote:
| Because manoeuvers are hard. And whatever the task a
| human takes, they need up to a few minutes to get "in the
| zone" and fully focused on it. This includes driving.
| skinkestek wrote:
| A steelman interpretation would for example be "works on 99%
| of north American roads" in which case preventing it from
| driving anywhere near known bad patches would get it complete
| enough.
| lisper wrote:
| In that case the problem would be 100% solved, not 99% with
| "the last 1% [being] the hardest."
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| It's clearly based on the HYPER-idealistic driving conditions
| of primarily high-angle sun with dreary-yet-predictable
| Phoenix "stroads".
|
| They picked a good first experiments location but it's NOT
| representative of more than 1% of roads on the planet! It's a
| bizarro-world of simplified challenge and problem space. Drop
| such a system into any real world driving and it will fall
| flat on its face very quickly and endanger both passengers,
| other drivers and pedestrians.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| That stretch of road you describe as difficult is actually not
| difficult at all for Waymo's current technology. Their
| navigation does not depend on vision.
| riffraff wrote:
| how does it know where to be in the lane if it doesn't use
| lane markings?
|
| "stick to the right as far as possible" is not a reliable
| approach when the emergency lane may or may not be there.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| not a gotcha question, I'm actually curious: how does a
| human driver know where to be in the lane?
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| Context. The faint wear marks that tires make on the road
| over years, the seam between lanes, the car in front of
| them, the distance away from the guardrail or ditch, or
| there are no marked lanes at all and you just have to
| share the road with oncoming traffic. Furthermore, it's
| not uncommon for three lane roads to turn into two lanes
| during heavy snow, and in those case, the lanes are
| wherever everyone decided they were, collectively.
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| I'd be really curious to see how a map/gps based system
| handles situations where a divided highway is under
| construction and has temporary lines painted to direct the
| right side of the road to drive on the left side while left
| side traffic is held up by a man in a vest holding a sign.
| This isn't a particularly uncommon scenario, and if the
| road crews are hard at work, the zone where this is
| occurring can move by miles a day. To navigate this, a
| driver needs to rely on road markings, temporary signs, and
| humans directing traffic. Maps won't cut the mustard in a
| situation like this.
|
| If a driver assistance system can't handle this sort of
| situation, that's fine. I'm sure it's still useful most of
| the time. But it's clearly not "99% of the way to FSD."
| ghaff wrote:
| I assume that, once you get vehicles driving autonomously
| on sections of highways, you have some sort of
| beacon/alerting system that cause the vehicle to tell the
| driver that it's going to be dropping out of autonomous
| mode.
| MichaelGroves wrote:
| The "beacon/alerting system" are the signs, and the man
| in a vest. If the car can't respond to those, then the
| words "full self driving" should never be used to
| describe it.
| ghaff wrote:
| On a highway, you often don't have a man in a vest and
| the signs I see are often vague alerts about construction
| and lane shifts ahead that may or may not be actually
| happening at the moment.
|
| But I don't really disagree. Some mechanism (perhaps a
| redundant mechanism) when approaching a possible
| construction area to give a human a minute or so to take
| over.
| 8note wrote:
| I'd see self driving as not needing a person at the
| wheel. I don't care if there are changes to the road,
| it's being driven without a person nat the wheel
| ghaff wrote:
| Autonomous driving systems do not need to be door-to-
| door. They also can't require taking over control on a
| moment's notice. But, systems that can fully autonomous
| for long stretches of highway driving seem useful.
|
| They just don't address use cases where people aren't
| able to drive at all. Which are interesting to a lot of
| people but they may just not happen for a long time.
|
| There are people who just want cheaper Ubers but there
| are others who are fine with handing off long boring
| sections of highway driving.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Waymo's system doesn't depend on GPS for navigation
| either. They use their "realtime sensor suite" (lidar) to
| localize the vehicle position within the map.
|
| As part of that localization, there will be a metric of
| how good the local solution is vs. the map. If a divider
| moves, for example, the data will be inconsistent with
| the map, and the software will know that something is
| amiss, without having to intelligently classify anything.
| The software can drive confidently when in a consistent
| environment, and drive conservatively when in an
| inconsistent environment.
|
| Generally, any object that isn't in the map will stand
| out obviously. That's where having stuff like cameras
| becomes useful. Asking a computer, "is there a
| construction worker in this 20MP image of a street?" is
| hard, but asking a computer, "is this 0.1MP human sized
| blob a construction worker?" is a lot easier. Waymo has
| been responding intelligently to bicyclist hand signals
| for years. "Is this sign shaped blob a construction
| sign?" is even easier.
|
| The lidar and mapping is a key difference between Waymo
| and Tesla. Waymo works because they have the big data
| infrastructure, and the budget to deck out every car with
| orders of magnitude more sensors and compute.
| kurthr wrote:
| I think responding to the human element is huge for safe
| driving. You would not want to safely drive the same way in LA
| as Boston, or Seattle. Other drivers make very different
| assumptions on your response to their (and others) actions, and
| that can create danger irrespective of navigation.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| You should come drive some of the mountain roads in CA. I
| wouldn't consider roads in TX any trickier than roads
| elsewhere.
| dathinab wrote:
| I e.g. think that many self driving car systems are good enough
| to drive on German highways (and kraftfahrstrassen ~ slower
| smaller highways).
|
| But only IFF there is no external accident and no construction
| site.
|
| If both would be handles truckers could sleep/nap while driving
| on the highways, which could have interesting effects tbh.
|
| Handling construction sites could be made feasible.
|
| But I have no idea how to handle accidents happening around/in-
| front of the truck in a good way.
|
| Similar I would be worried about improvised marking of fresh
| accident sites before emergency responders arrive...
| NonContro wrote:
| Right now, our roads are only designed to be human-readable.
|
| But what if machines become the dominant drivers? We need to make
| the roads machine readable: Road signs redesigned 'QR Code'
| style, maybe even some kind of wireless broadcast system to
| communicate traffic light changes.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Reading signs is the really, really easy part. If your vision
| system can't read and recognise the signs and signals reliably,
| it's not even beginning to solve the other problems. Trying to
| adapt the roads to make this part easier is a terrible return
| on investment. 99% of what you could do to make roads easier to
| use for self-driving cars is basic maintenance: making sure the
| signs, markings, and signals remain clearly visible, which also
| helps improve the performance of human drivers.
| 8note wrote:
| Hmm. Reading signs automatically could be added to human
| driven cars, I think.
|
| Eg. Putting the current speed limit on the speedometer
| sega_sai wrote:
| That already exists. I.e. I know for sure in the UK some
| Toyotas have it (even pretty cheap ones).
| ysavir wrote:
| What if we put some metal railings on the ground and had the
| cars follow them?
| acdha wrote:
| That's really expensive on top of the inherent inefficiency of
| cars: you're paying a ton of money for something which uses a
| lot of energy and pollution (yes, even BEVs) to carry slightly
| over one person on average. Rebuilding the road system won't
| change that or make climate change go away, especially since
| you'd need a lengthy transition period.
|
| What might make sense is limited deployment in areas where the
| problem can be constrained: dedicated bus routes, truck convoy
| lanes on an interstate, etc.
|
| For the rest of it we should be focusing on how to get people
| out of cars since even BEVs pollute far more than buses, rail,
| bicycles, or walking.
| bluetonium wrote:
| I've always wondered whether it would be possible to have
| some kind of compartmentalized bus.
|
| Some kind of compromise between asking people to cram
| themselves like sardines against a bunch of strangers, while
| still allowing people to sit next to their family members and
| friends.
|
| It's convenient to say a desire to not jam up close to
| strangers implicates its holder in some terrible character
| flaw of not caring for ones fellow human. But if you really
| want to get more people on buses it's a desire we'll have to
| accommodate and contend with.
| prova_modena wrote:
| You're describing a system that is operating beyond
| capacity. There's no special fix required other than
| increasing capacity, by adding more buses to existing
| routes or new routes. There may be political issues with
| allocating funding or getting authorities to
| acknowledge/address lack of capacity. But it's not
| something that requires redesigning the bus.
| mike_d wrote:
| Energy consumption is a factor of distance. "Get people out
| of cars" in inherently implying removing the fundamental
| right to freedom of movement and living a better life. Cars
| have done more to equalize rural populations and give them a
| quality of life closer to city dwellers than any other modern
| invention maybe short of publicly funded water and power
| infrastructure.
|
| I'd highly encourage you to move to the middle of the country
| and live a 30 minute drive outside of town (because that is
| all you can afford). You'll quickly realize that super bad
| evil cars are the means by which a good percentage of the
| population has access to fresh food, medical care, and other
| basic needs.
| acdha wrote:
| Energy consumption is a factor of both distance and
| efficiency: this is why trains are so much more efficient
| than semi-trucks which are more efficient than personal
| vehicles even if they're traveling between the same points:
| steel on steel rails have less friction and the first two
| have better engine to cargo ratios. My comment was
| specifically focused on the latter since a huge fraction of
| vehicle pollution comes from affluent people driving in
| urban areas, not farmers.
|
| Also note that I'm not disagreeing that mobility is
| important but that we literally cannot afford to continue
| polluting the way we have. You tried to make this emotional
| with the "super bad evil cars" phrasing but it's a simple
| engineering question: right now, people have built
| lifestyles based on low subsidized fossil fuel prices and
| being allowed to ignore externalities. I'm aware of what
| that lifestyle is like - and how often it's not "all you
| can afford" but "where you can afford to buy the house as
| big you think you deserve", too - the latter being far less
| sympathetic when asking everyone else to subsidize it.
|
| When energy is cheap and you can ignore pollution, you can
| drive an overpowered vehicle on frequent trips with minimal
| use of the total cargo capacity. If the cost goes up, those
| calculations all change: people pay attention to fuel
| efficiency when buying vehicles and combine / reduce trips,
| invest in household efficiency, etc. Cost-constrained
| American rural dwellers and those I've met in other
| countries with higher fuel costs don't drive a vehicle
| designed to haul livestock to pick up groceries because
| it's overkill.
|
| That extends to things like zoning: the majority of people
| living in exurbs for financial reasons are doing so because
| closer in development was low density, often required by
| code, and significant amounts of land were required to be
| used for car storage.
|
| Part of climate change mitigation will be reversing those
| problems, and that kind of thing seems like a more fruitful
| area for us to be spending time than trying to make high-
| pollution commuting more appealing.
| treis wrote:
| From anywhere to anywhere is also an unnecessarily lofty goal.
| Bringing me to the front of a store in a strip mall is nice,
| but dropping me off at the street is good enough. Even doing
| enough streets in a city to pickup/dropoff within 1/4 mile
| would be revolutionary.
| KaoruAoiShiho wrote:
| We can... but it's not needed at the rate things are going. AI
| will be able to understand almost everything humans can and
| it's way cheaper to not have to rebuild things for machines.
| aetherson wrote:
| I don't think that reading the signs and the traffic lights is
| the significant challenge here.
| DasIch wrote:
| Machine readable roads already exist. They are called train
| tracks and are already used by autonomous trains. They also
| allow for far more energy and space efficient transport with
| better throughput than cars.
| arijun wrote:
| I work in the area. I would say the static stuff that's hard is
| stuff that's also hard for human drivers, like poor lane
| markers or ambiguous signage. So I'm not sure that QR codes
| will help---just fix the signage.
| sharken wrote:
| That makes a lot of sense, on a highway with three lanes, I'm
| always making sure to not merge to the middle lane, if there
| is a car on the opposite lane, to name another situation.
|
| The hard question which really has nothing to do with the
| tech, is what we do if a self driving car kills a person.
| Made worse if the accident could be avoided by the majority
| of human drivers.
| trhway wrote:
| >The hard question which really has nothing to do with the
| tech, is what we do if a self driving car kills a person.
| Made worse if the accident could be avoided by the majority
| of human drivers.
|
| we have already had exactly such a case - Uber. Even though
| Uber was totally negligent, nothing happened to them,
| beside probably some settlement behind the scene. In part
| they were able to wiggle it by showing a bad dynamic range
| video (which is completely different from how human eyes
| see in such situation) there the victim appears as if out
| of nowhere.
|
| I think that case just sets the pattern that the autonomous
| vehicles will not be judged according to human driver
| standard.
| ulnarkressty wrote:
| I remember watching a documentary on Discovery in the early 90s
| where they showed a motorcade of 10 Audis closely following
| each other using radar and some magnetic markers embedded in
| the road surface. They could maneuver within inches of one
| another, stop on a dime etc. I wonder how much embedding such
| passive markers into the new roads would have cost compared to
| the amount of money pumped into autonomous driving companies so
| far.
| tinco wrote:
| So, genuinely curious, how can it happen that a system that's
| been developed over 12 years, can not deal with a common road
| obstruction? If something truly rare/dangerous happens I can
| imagine it not being able to deal. But it seems this sort of
| situation is not only easy to deal with, it's actually easy to
| predict.
|
| Maybe not something you could predict in a product with just a
| couple years of time, with just a couple employees, but we're
| talking over a decade, and thousands of employees. Oh and in
| Phoenix Arizona, one of those ultra uniform grid cities the US is
| famous for.
|
| What's stopping them from having their AI operate in simulations
| in literally _every_ possible traffic situation? Every location a
| pot hole can be in, every type of traffic cone arrangement, every
| kind of jaywalking, every kind of vehicle approaching any kind of
| street from any kind of location, possible speed, reaction time,
| everything? How could a government approve any autonomous agent
| that is not tested in such a way?
|
| My world view gets rocked a little everytime I see a headline
| like this. I want to believe these companies are ran by the
| smartest engineers on the planet, but then I read about a Tesla
| running into an emergency services vehicle, or a Waymo being
| confused about traffic cones and I can't help but wonder what the
| heck are they doing?
| qeternity wrote:
| > What's stopping them from having their AI operate in
| simulations in literally every possible traffic situation?
| Every location a pot hole can be in, every type of traffic cone
| arrangement, every kind of jaywalking, every kind of vehicle
| approaching any kind of street from any kind of location,
| possible speed, reaction time, everything? How could a
| government approve any autonomous agent that is not tested in
| such a way?
|
| Because this approach has huge limitations, principally that
| you're now optimizing against a cost function that isn't the
| real world. RL has a place for sure, but limitations.
|
| It's like saying that you'd expect someone who's played 10k
| hours of Call of Duty to be equivalent to a Navy Seal. They're
| just really good at playing the simulation, not the real thing.
| dham wrote:
| It's because they're trying to code the problem instead of
| solving it end to end. As you can imagine if you're trying to
| code driving scenarios you're never going to finish. Only Tesla
| and Comma.ai are on the right track. Think Alpha Zero vs
| Stockfish.
|
| This problem has to be solved end to end. It can be done with
| just vision as humans can drive with just vision. It's
| literally just a software, machine learning and data problem.
| Just takes time
| furi wrote:
| Except didn't Leela Zero (the closest thing we have to Alpha
| Zero anyone can actually use) beat StockFish, then StockFish
| was upgraded to use neural networks in a few edge cases and
| otherwise keep doing what it was doing and now StockFish is
| back on top? Seems like a Waymo-style approach is actually on
| top there.
| fridif wrote:
| Scrap the whole thing and start over.
|
| Deliveries should be done by autonomous air drops.
|
| Transportation by autonomous aircraft.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I'm working on the air drops at least.
| fridif wrote:
| Can I join as 1099/equity? I have 9 years of xp building
| distributed spring boot services
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| Maybe? You'd likely need to be full time to get equity,
| though. I'm personally not familiar with spring boot, but
| it sounds like a framework for implementing REST services?
| I'm mainly an embedded developer.
| wallacoloo wrote:
| Mind expanding? Keeping my eye out for new things to work on:
| if there's scaled-down autonomous navigation problems that
| might be both immediately useful and more generally useful
| when solved, that sounds interesting.
| sgtnoodle wrote:
| I'm an embedded software engineer at Zipline. We're
| delivering high value medical supplies via UAV as a
| service. We've been operating in Rwanda and Ghana for
| several years, and we're expanding.
| majkinetor wrote:
| Yeah, use air and all nasty problems go away. I am shocked that
| tech isn't mainstream already given multitude of benefits
| compared to terrestrial transports.
| fridif wrote:
| Mostly political/regulatory
| colesantiago wrote:
| If you are a 'self driving' car company that claims that they are
| 99% done with self driving and you are still having this issue:
|
| > ...still getting stymied by traffic cones
|
| Maybe you're nowhere done or near to that 99%, perhaps around 10%
| done considering that this doesn't work worldwide either so seems
| like 5% to me.
| mike00632 wrote:
| Also, the weather must be perfect.
| seibelj wrote:
| I wrote this in Feb 2020 after years of downvotes criticizing
| self driving cars and AI https://medium.com/@seibelj/the-
| artificial-intelligence-scam...
|
| I will still take a thousand dollar bet from anyone who thinks
| self driving cars will be here in 10 years. No one ever accepts!
| shkkmo wrote:
| Self driving cars are here now, I'll take that 1000 dollars.
|
| Or do you have some specific definition of what qualifies as
| "here" that generally makes people unwilling to take this bet?
| seibelj wrote:
| Able to pick me up at my apartment in Boston and take me to a
| location in Cambridge. I would not say the current "self
| driving cars" in Phoenix are anything close to ready (even
| for Phoenix!)
| dathinab wrote:
| If the last 1% is as hard as the previous 99% then they are not
| at 99% but at 50% ;=)
|
| It's just that a part much larger then 1% of the way is perceived
| to be just 1%. I.e. there is a insane lot of hidden complexity
| generally/often overlooked.
| yalogin wrote:
| I used to believe in the self driving hype. Then I learned ML and
| started working in related areas. Now I know full self driving is
| not happening, not with the technology/algorithms we have. So
| what ever anyone does is just an approximation and we will never
| be able to trust the car will handle any situation thrown at it.
| So its always going to be a souped up cruise control, the likes
| of which Tesla and others are selling. We need some kind of
| breakthrough to get fully autonomous self driving where we can
| sleep in the car while it takes us to the destination.
|
| I would, of course, love to hear if folks here think I am wrong.
| weego wrote:
| You're not. At least for a good few decades more.
|
| Anyone committed to self driving cars needs to be a road
| building company and own the road network that will manage
| these mostly-automated efficiency lanes, with car provision
| (more likely tech/compatability licensing) as a secondary
| income stream.
| Retric wrote:
| Waymo is currently successfully handling extreme edge cases
| on city streets via a call center. Which is a viable option
| as their cars average 30,000 miles completely autonomously.
| Worst case come to a complete stop and then ask a human to
| take over is perfectly reasonable option.
|
| Google running this as a pure Taxi substitute is seemingly a
| completely viable option today. They don't need to be 100%
| autonomous as long as one person can handle a dozen or more
| cars that's easily good enough to out compete traditional
| taxis or ride sharing services. Granted this is limited to a
| 50 square mile area, but collecting more data isn't the
| difficult part.
| lumost wrote:
| Including all the expense of r&d, call center training,
| liability insurance etc.
|
| Is this a viable business in a 50 square mile area? Is it
| scalable nationwide? Is it price competitive with
| traditional taxi and ride share?
|
| The overnight use case is compelling as it opens entirely
| new transit options. Cars could be made competitive with
| air travel for the overnight use case. And traffic wouldn't
| be nearly as large of a concern for most if they weren't
| driving.
| [deleted]
| muttantt wrote:
| I think the real innovation would be having my car be equipped
| with a bunch of sensors and cameras, and then have a well paid
| dedicated remote driver in a third world country doing the
| driving for me. I'm only half joking.
| mixmastamyk wrote:
| BUFFERING... BUFFERING...
| sidibe wrote:
| How is what Waymo offering anything like a souped up cruise
| control?
|
| Sure it's EXTREMELY limited but that doesn't seem like an
| accurate description since they trust it enough to be liable
| for it to drive by itself or stop safely when it can't. Given
| the number of their cars going around SF lately I think they'll
| expand some soon too.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Is the future driver assistance perfected to the point where
| the car lets you drive but prevents you from doing something
| bad?
|
| Try to jerk the wheel into the woods and it won't obey.
| qeternity wrote:
| The moment driver assistance is good enough to overrule human
| input, it ceases to be merely driver assistance.
|
| It's unlikely this will ever be the case.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| Navigating is more difficult than just not crashing.
| mike_d wrote:
| This viewpoint seems to be a strange version of Schneier's law.
| Just because you learned ML and can't think of a way to make a
| car drive itself doesn't mean it is impossible.
|
| I believe within the next few years we will see driverless long
| haul freight operations. Freeways are orders of magnitude
| easier than dynamic city streets, longer routes can be taken at
| little cost to avoid adverse conditions (a human rider isn't
| going to be ok with adding 10 hours to avoid a snow storm, a
| truck load of coffee beans doesn't care), and the cost of
| humans in this case is stupid high.
|
| Once it is demonstrated in the real world that corporations
| stand to profit from eliminating drivers, you'll start to see
| pressure on the public sector to annotate the world. Stop signs
| will by law include an RF beacon, lanes will no longer be
| defined by paint but by transmitters in the pavement, federal
| law will mandate that personal vehicles transmit their location
| and dimensions to other nearby cars, etc.
|
| Eventually once we have the infrastructure built, every new car
| will piggyback on it. Remember the Interstate Highway System
| was started in 1955 and completed in 1992 - progress just takes
| time.
| javagram wrote:
| Annotating every object on the road with RFID beacons seems
| like it actually would be an impossible project. Yes, you can
| attach beacons to stoplights and signs (although they already
| have "beacons" that display in the visible light spectrum).
|
| But you can't attach them to people like the homeless
| pedestrian killed by Uber's test self driving car, animals,
| trash thrown on the roadway or falling off a truck, or a
| boulder falling from the side of a mountain.
|
| And looking at the decades-long process it took to install
| PTC on train lines, it would take decades to install radio
| beacons on everything we can and by then technology should
| have advanced to the point where we don't need them.
| mike_d wrote:
| It varies from state to state, but on average Type 1 (the
| most important) signs are replaced every 7 to 10 years.
|
| If you tag each one with some sort of RF beacon, not only
| do you tell the car "this is the spot to stop" you also
| have an absolute fixed reference point and can correct GPS
| or other navigational systems.
|
| At the point you know where everything is, and cars begin
| to share their location with each other, you have an
| absolute map of everything in the environment. If LIDAR
| detects anything that isn't part of the gold standard of
| what the world looks like, _that_ is an exception and
| handled as a danger (the person Uber should have detected
| had they had all the sensors turned on).
| mike00632 wrote:
| I saw a trash bag on the highway yesterday. It was full but
| looked light, as if it were stuffed with pillows or plastic
| bags. I could have safely hit it with my car (I didn't)
| whereas other objects that size I wouldn't. This decision
| making happens often like with pieces of paper or plastic
| bags. I thought about how much contextual knowledge it
| takes for us to make these everyday decisions.
| tootie wrote:
| I think it will be way easier to rebuild our infrastructure
| around self driving than to teach computers how to react to
| human drivers.
| silisili wrote:
| I've considered this before, but never ironed out details.
| What would it entail? Magnets/IR/Beacons of some type marking
| roads and lanes? And each car would need them too I guess. It
| doesn't sound insurmountable, especially if the auto
| manufacturers worked together on speccing it out.
| mojuba wrote:
| Recognizing the roads is not the biggest problem, it seems.
| It's the myriad of purely human situations. Anything and
| anyone can suddenly appear on the road in front of the car,
| not just traffic cones. Which means the AI needs a pretty
| much full understanding of the world it operates in.
|
| On the other hand, isolating the roads for AV's from us may
| become a major inconvenience. I really don't see how this
| tech can evolve today, unless cars learn to fly already.
| mike00632 wrote:
| Why not trains then? We could put the vehicles on tracks and
| link them together for extreme space and energy efficiency.
| justicezyx wrote:
| I agree.
|
| Modern cars depend on modern road infrastructure. Like
| traffic lights, lane markers, traffic engineering, etc,
| enabled the efficiency and convenience we enjoy today.
|
| And this infrastructure was built for human driver. And they
| do not work well for software driver.
| thereisnospork wrote:
| >And this infrastructure was built for human driver. And
| they do not work well for software driver.
|
| How much would it cost though for parallel infrastructure
| that is suitable for a software driver? (better signage,
| rfid tags in the roads, 'smart' traffic cones, etc.) For
| say the Bay Area. 10 billion to a few hundred billion?
| Speaking for myself, I'd be happy to pay say an additional
| 1% sales tax if it meant facilitating an area wide 24/7
| autonomous 'public transit' taxi service, presumably with
| at-cost per mile fares.
| justicezyx wrote:
| I don't know. There has not been any serious effort in
| theoretizing the changes needed for software driver. The
| so-called vechle and road codesign has been mostly
| gimmick as far as I know.
| clon wrote:
| Perhaps we should just bring back horses. BI as in biologic
| intelligence. Where I'm from it was common merely 100 years ago
| to exit the tavern, plonk yourself into the wagon, let the
| horse free and fall asleep in pleasant stupor. Usually the
| horse had no issues finding its way home. Usually. Sometimes it
| supercharged itself on a nearby pasture. Crashes were uncommon.
|
| If you think this is sarcasm, it is not. That horse was clearly
| more reliable, adaptable and performant, not to mention safer,
| than anything Tesla or Wayomo is offering today.
| pm90 wrote:
| Except that they poop and piss everywhere and need to be fed
| and watered.
| yawaworht1978 wrote:
| Yes full self driving is not happening any time soon unless the
| roads and cars are purpose built for it. Everyone here has worked
| in some sort of tech company where some procedures are just
| wrong, some training material doesn't work, or the content is
| full of rot and unmaintainable, sometimes the code of the product
| has a couple bugs, never to be fixed, or the back office. Or
| better how often people make human mistakes and general imperfect
| things are wiped under the carpet. Code testing? Happens on all
| new features and to what degree? Think of all these things and
| then reflect on the possibility to fsd implementation within, say
| 10 years. Not going to happen.
| mdasen wrote:
| > In reality, skilled disassembly is required. Engineers must
| take apart the cars and put them back together by hand. One
| misplaced wire can leave engineers puzzling for days over where
| the problem is, according to a person familiar with the
| operations who describes the system as cumbersome and prone to
| quality problems.
|
| I think this is one of the more interesting pieces in the article
| for me. We all kinda know by now that there are issues around AI
| handling all driving situations. I think it's interesting to hear
| Waymo having difficulty with the manufacturing aspect.
|
| It does make a certain amount of sense. Waymo is a company that
| is mainly trying to solve the AI problem around self-driving
| cars, but other things can stymie those efforts like assembly.
| This isn't meant as a dig at Waymo, just more an observation that
| just because a company is excellent in one area doesn't mean that
| they will be excellent in all areas and that even excellent
| companies like Alphabet/Google/Waymo can stumble in new areas.
| kenhwang wrote:
| I think it explains why the established automakers don't take
| any of the aspiring automakers from tech seriously. They know
| how hard it is to supply, assemble, and mass produce a car, and
| they know how little investment to desire there is from big
| tech to be better at that aspect.
|
| It doesn't matter how good your product is if you can't
| actually ship it.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| You basically are describing big auto's attitude towards
| Tesla 10 years ago. Look at where big auto is now.
|
| Terrified, and behind by 10 years. And by terrified I mean
| their CEOs. Do you think the BMW CEO would still have his job
| if he didn't squander their EV efforts that started about 15
| years ago?
|
| The BMW CEO getting bounced was the warning shot that made
| every automaker executive sit up and realize: my company
| either has an EV platform program underway, or the investors
| will bounce me.
|
| If they are still not taking Tesla (to a lesser degree Rivian
| and Lucid) seriously, they're in big denial at this point.
|
| GM and VW have basically woken up. Ford and Mercedes are toe-
| dipping. BMW seems paralyzed by internal management dissent,
| mike_d wrote:
| Look where Tesla is now. At every step that have faced
| production consistency and reliability issues. They flat
| out suck at making cars and have 20 years of quality
| engineering learnings to catch up on.
|
| Consumer Reports 2021 report puts Tesla in 16th place among
| US car brands. In JD Powers 2021 Dependability Study Tesla
| came in 30th, followed only by Jaguar, Alfa Romero, and
| Land Rover.
| mostdataisnice wrote:
| Underrated truth - have owned a Tesla for 5 years, and
| the number of stupid things that go wrong with it is
| incredibly high. It works like a phone...after a number
| of years, it takes forever to boot and has plethora of
| bugs. Random stuff breaks/falls off. We're going to see
| even more of this in 10 years, as the cars that were
| produced during the scaling period start falling apart.
| What sets automakers apart is that you can buy a used car
| after 10 years and expect it to still work.
| johnny53169 wrote:
| > Terrified, and behind by 10 years.
|
| Terrified? When Tesla will sell more cars maybe, they are
| badly lagging against virtually any other car maker, let
| alone all of them.
| hartator wrote:
| Well, if I code something that just move the car forward if
| nothing is in front, I am probably 80% there. Not sure if I trust
| their 99%. It seems an excuse for academics to not release an
| actual technology that works.
| bko wrote:
| Waymo has raised over $5.5 billion and has thousands of employees
| without so much as a product.
|
| If this were any other startup it would be considered insane and
| never gotten to this point. Don't know why people keep dumping
| money into this project thinking they're just around the corner.
|
| Even Tesla sold some cars when it raised a fraction of that
| amount, and $70 million came from Musk
|
| > By January 2009, Tesla had raised US$187 million and delivered
| 147 cars. [0]
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Tesla,_Inc.
| ilaksh wrote:
| They have had a working product for many months.
|
| And although it does occasionally have issues, it is remarkably
| reliable.
| ctvo wrote:
| Because when they succeed it will return more than the
| investment? By many times?
|
| The product is being tested. Many things, including life
| changing drugs, are developed this way.
|
| We both agree Waymo definitely doesn't sell its half baked
| product calling it Full Self Driving before it's ready.
| bko wrote:
| Why do you need to jump to "Full Self Driving"? Presumably
| there are intermediaries.
|
| They're whole plan lacks a feedback mechanism.
|
| You don't even know the return if they succeed. Drug
| companies have a long history so they can anticipate the cost
| of development, odds of success and payoff if successful.
| They do all these things prior to any investments being made.
|
| The closest Waymo has is # of truck drivers * salary =
| profit.
|
| The top-down Waymo method is a failure.
| sidibe wrote:
| > Why do you need to jump to "Full Self Driving"?
| Presumably there are intermediaries.
|
| They've explained this very often. Unlike Tesla, they don't
| think you can go through the intermediaries without the
| dangerous situation of drivers not paying attention because
| it usually works. Based on their experiences a decade ago
| of employees using it as drivers assist, people check out
| and it becomes more and more dangerous even if the software
| is improving.
| tialaramex wrote:
| So, wait, you believe Waymo One is _free_? That seems like a
| pretty significant subsidy for everybody who lives in the
| region served by it.
| bko wrote:
| So their plan is to go into cities one by one, map out the
| terrain to the centimeter and have a few thousand engineers
| support each region in which they operate?
|
| I don't even know what their plan is. Do they want to sell
| cars, operate trucks, license out the software, have robo-
| taxis?
| sidibe wrote:
| Not sure if you are honestly asking or just expressing
| skepticism but right now it's clearly robotaxis then
| trucks. They've talked about the rest but much less.
|
| As far as expansion plans there's no reason to think each
| place they go will require thousands of engineers.
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.is/ROjU5
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