[HN Gopher] Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco
___________________________________________________________________
Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco
Author : ra7
Score : 380 points
Date : 2022-03-30 14:24 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.waymo.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.waymo.com)
| Animats wrote:
| AutoX has had driverless taxis in Shenzhen since last year.
|
| Also, this is just driverless rides for Google employees, not
| everybody.
| redytedy wrote:
| I have seen this news but have not seen any videos taken by a
| rider. On the other hand, members of the public have uploaded
| videos of their experiences in Waymo (Arizona, driverless).
|
| Are you aware of any such video for AutoX?
| robotburrito wrote:
| I wonder if it'd just be cheaper and easier in the long term to
| create some sort of track system that the robotic cars could
| drive on? You could even have one car pull other "dumb" self
| driving cars that could hold cargo or even more passengers.
|
| Maybe even have them powered by electricity straight from the
| grid instead of batteries.
| martythemaniak wrote:
| A good illustration of why autonomous EVs will stop trains in
| their tracks.
|
| Tracks are expensive, precise and single-purpose. A road is
| cheap, flexible and multi-purpose. Being tied to the grid means
| you can't go where you need to get to, only pre-set
| destinations. And since every train-car can now drive itself,
| there's no longer a need to tie them together, so instead of 5
| cars bunched up all at once every 10 minutes, you can get a
| single car every 2 minutes.
|
| That is, once this tech matures, no new train development will
| make sense.
| elcomet wrote:
| A train is much more energy-efficient. Convenience is not the
| only important factor here.
| moffkalast wrote:
| Interesting how they seem to keep adding more and more sensors to
| it. Gotta have redundancy I guess.
| leroman wrote:
| Have to say, seeing my Auto Pilot graphics with cars "jumping"
| all over and appearing and disappearing.. (this is not the FSD
| Beta graphics mind you) compared with what seems like a stable
| and coherent visualization of the environment, it really makes
| the difference in my feeling of confidence that it's aware and
| able to react to the same things I see around me
| cjrp wrote:
| Does anyone know if the Waymo one looks like that in real-time?
| It's not just nicely rendered afterwards for the video?
| Honest_Carrot wrote:
| IIRC correctly in their Waymo videos you can see inside the
| cabin. Each passenger gets a video feed of that video, so I
| think it is real-time. Let me find a link.
|
| EDIT: This was posted above for different reasons, but you
| can see the render is real-time.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdKCQKBvH-A&t=401s
| bckr wrote:
| > it really makes the difference in my feeling of confidence
| it's aware and able to react to things as a result of being
| aware to them.
|
| Could you clarify? In which direction does it make a
| difference?
| darknavi wrote:
| Seeing a "stable" visualization of what the car sees
| strengthens your confidence in its ability to perceive the
| world around the car.
| bckr wrote:
| yeah I am still confused because in the first part there's
| jumpy graphics and in the second part there are stable
| graphics, and I'm not sure if this represents a change over
| time, or different vehicles, or what
| jhalstead wrote:
| I believe OP is comparing the visualizations produced by
| the Auto Pilot system in their Tesla (jumpy) to Waymo's
| visualizations (stable and coherent).
| bckr wrote:
| Ah, okay thank you.
| judge2020 wrote:
| > this is not the FSD Beta graphics mind you
|
| For some reason Tesla still uses old visualization software for
| non-FSD beta vehicles. This both means objects the system sees
| aren't on-screen and the interpolation algorithm for making the
| 3d models look smooth-moving is pretty bad.
| valine wrote:
| I wonder if its possible that the FSD beta graphics use more
| power to render. Would be dumb to lower range on all Teslas
| for what is essentially eye candy. Even on FSD vehicles the
| visualization reverts when FSD is not engaged.
| coolspot wrote:
| In reality, cars around you are blinking in and out as they
| jump between dimensions.
|
| You can't see that with your eyes because brain compensates and
| smoothes visual experience.
|
| Tesla accurately represents reality.
| valine wrote:
| That's part of it. Another part of it is that Tesla's
| computer vision is still a work in progress which introduces
| unnecessary jitter into the visualization. The good news is
| that they seem to be making improvements and the jitter is
| slowly going away.
| tapoxi wrote:
| When I see one of these cars in South Boston (narrow streets with
| street parking) during the winter (piles of snow everywhere),
| I'll believe they're a reality. Until then, they'll remain 90% of
| the way there.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| This is a strange perspective. Do you consider subways "not a
| reality" because small rural towns can't sustain one?
| slingnow wrote:
| What does whether or not a rural town can sustain a subway
| have to do with autonomous cars?
|
| Roads currently exist that human beings can currently drive
| on. If you tell me you have a fully autonomous car, I would
| expect that to mean it can do everything a human can do on
| currently existing roads in all conditions that a human being
| can operate in. This seems entirely reasonable.
|
| This has nothing to do with "sustainability".
| wutbrodo wrote:
| What does the behavior of current human-operated cars have
| to do with the value of domain-limited AVs?
|
| Your comment was not "these are not 100% replacement for
| cars yet", which would obviously be uncontroversial. It was
| "these are not a reality yet". You've chosen an arbitrary
| bar for considering these "real", in exactly the same way
| that serving small rural communities is an arbitrary bar
| with which to dismiss the real value that subways create.
| the_other wrote:
| I guess there's a mismatch in some people's understanding of
| what a driverless car should be.
|
| It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited
| set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of
| transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful.
| Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use
| all those: they're great.
|
| I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere
| with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-
| road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless
| cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that
| have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these
| are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods;
| they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep;
| they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone
| giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences
| later.. etc.
|
| These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-
| transit.
| staz wrote:
| > If an autonomous car don't let me run over someone it's
| not really a car.
|
| ... do we even need n-gate anymore?
| wutbrodo wrote:
| > in some people's understanding of what a driverless car
| should be.
|
| I don't understand at all what you mean by "should". The
| comment I was responding to said that [whatever this is]
| "wasn't a reality". This was a top-level comment to the
| announcement itself, not a response to a comment claiming
| "well, human-operated cars are officially over". Doing
| exactly what a current, human-operated car is an
| irrelevant, arbitrary point of comparison, introduced by
| the GP comment.
|
| This makes exactly as much sense as saying that the first
| motor vehicles "weren't a reality" until, like a horse, you
| could take them on trails, jump over low obstacles, and
| live in the wilderness with them indefinitely.
|
| That's what I'm pushing back against: it's classic ignorant
| Luddism to set imaginary bars for new technologies and then
| insist that the new tech isn't valuable at all on that
| basis. I know this is super-common, but it's an eternal pet
| peeve of mine, as I can't help but imagine how much better
| the world would be without people like this.
| shkkmo wrote:
| > They don't get me to a party in the woods;
|
| Many cars today have severely limited ability to drive on
| even rough roads (let alone off-road), that doesn't make
| them not "cars".
|
| In general, I think the argument you are poorly phrasing
| the argument you are trying to make.
|
| You seem to be trying to say that until self-driving
| technology can handle all use cases, you don't want to own
| a car without human driving controls.
|
| I don't think such exclusively driverless cars will be
| marketed to consumers for a long time.
|
| What we will see in the nearer is more standard consumer
| cars with varying ranges of level 4 self driving
| capabilities. These cars will match every one of your
| criteria.
| gfodor wrote:
| I imagine the final standard of skeptics will be that as long
| as there's any manual driving happening anywhere, autonomous
| driving hasn't arrived yet.
| efsavage wrote:
| Boston will certainly be one of the boss levels for AI drivers
| to try and beat, but even then, there's massive value in them
| working for even 50% of the roads out there. If my robot car
| said "I can take you from Rhode Island to Maine, but you're on
| your own while we're in Suffolk County", it would still be very
| useful, or it could just avoid the tricky areas and take a
| longer trip while I sleep!
| thehappypm wrote:
| Most likely they'll just make sure drivers are available for
| tricky pickups and drop offs.
| andbberger wrote:
| people were saying that about SF a few years ago
| acdha wrote:
| The catch is how contiguous that 50% is: humans are terribly
| at switching contexts so it'd probably be okay if your car
| could be fine on, say, a long interstate trip but force you
| to handle the cities but it'd be a different story if you're
| zoning out on the highway but every couple miles there's some
| situation (road work, weather, other drivers, etc.) which it
| can't handle safely but you're distractedly looking up from
| Netflix.
| shkkmo wrote:
| You seem to be conflating level 3 with level 4.
|
| A level 4 car would, by definition, never require you to
| take over while the vehicle is in motion. This level of
| automation operates safely with nobody in the driver's
| seat.
|
| A level 3 car requires a driver to pay full attention and
| "zoning out" would be unsafe behavior on behalf of the
| driver. Level 3 is considered by many to be dangerous given
| the human propensity to zone out despite being responsible.
| acdha wrote:
| If you read more carefully note that this is precisely
| why I drew that distinction: until you reach the point of
| level 4 _everywhere_ under _all_ conditions, you are
| going to have build systems which safely handle that
| challenge of inconsistent attention. Nobody is anywhere
| near that consistently high level of performance so there
| 's an important question about how you can safely
| implement these systems -- for example, a system which
| could be level 4 on a well-maintained road might be
| suitable for a driver-less transit system with a well-
| defined route even if the fire department are driving
| their own trucks for decades to come.
|
| One key question here is how you'd handle the cases where
| the system can't reliably perform at the top level.
| Consider the scenario I described earlier with a system
| which was level 4 in reasonable conditions: attempting to
| switch between full self-driving and human oversight
| frequently would be a safety hazard but you could
| probably safely release a system which is, say, L4 for
| long highway trips where a human driver could take a nap
| for an hour before having to take control to enter a
| complex city like Boston where the system would you to
| treat it as L3 or less for the entire trip during bad
| storm conditions or construction because it's safer to
| set the expected level of attention clearly at the
| beginning of the trip.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Maybe self driving cars will be so amazing in cities which
| don't snow that everyone will leave Boston. And then they will
| be 100% of the way there.
| londons_explore wrote:
| This video is just over 10 years old today:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE
|
| It shows a waymo/google driverless car driving a multi-mile route
| on public streets with no supervision.
|
| And today we're seeing... Pretty much the exact same thing!
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| Has anyone tried this? How did it feel? Did it feel safe?
| redisman wrote:
| Did it get stuck because of an edge case?
| mcrady wrote:
| I took a fully autonomous Waymo in phoenix a year ago. Very
| cool. A little jerky and at one point it said "Figuring this
| out" but whatever it was got resolved very quickly.
|
| Also, it was a pain to book it. I tried once and there were no
| vehicles available. I tried a couple days later and it told me
| I would have to wait a half hour for a ride.
| cwkoss wrote:
| When a Waymo car negligently kills someone, can the family sue
| Waymo? Or have their lobbyists carved out some sort of liability
| exemption?
| abvdasker wrote:
| In the case of the Uber autonomous car which killed a
| pedestrian in 2018, Uber reached a settlement with the victim's
| family and faced no criminal charges (I think the answer to
| your question is clearly yes). The "driver" behind the wheel of
| the autonomous car did get charged with negligent homicide in
| addition to being sued by the family afaik.
| greesil wrote:
| I was biking in SF the other day, pulling my kid in a bike
| trailer. A waymo vehicle pulled up behind me while I was waiting
| for the traffic light. I was pleasantly surprised that it waited
| for me when the light turned green and didn't run me over. Robot
| anxiety is real though.
|
| Edit: anxiety also because I wasn't sure it would recognize the
| bike trailer as a real thing. How many bike trailers end up in
| the training set?
| imperialdrive wrote:
| I bike around the city often, mostly at night. In the last week
| I almost got hit by one turning in front of me, and I watched
| another blow through a red on 9th and Judah. I've also observed
| them slowing drivers down with erratic behavior. Now I
| understand why the sudden uptick in volume, but am predicting
| it gets locked back down soon bc from what I've seen they have
| much more to learn. I'm very cautious around them. Good for the
| company and team behind it tho, it's a good fight to wage.
| Fingers crossed.
| hirundo wrote:
| If you were unpleasantly unsurprised to be run over the other
| day you wouldn't be posting.
| jefftk wrote:
| It would be massive news, and we would still hear about it.
|
| (There has been one death so far, with Uber behaving super
| irresponsibly: https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-
| crash)
| spiderice wrote:
| It would likely have it's own HN post rather than just a
| comment, lol
| wutbrodo wrote:
| This is clearly untrue, given the fact that a biker being run
| over by an at-fault AV would be national news.
| Geee wrote:
| Yeah, survival bias.
| snaily wrote:
| Scania did a neat affordance for this in their (otherwise
| rather incremental) autonomous AXL concept. A band of LEDs
| around the vehicle that light up "towards" a pedestrian once
| the vehicle takes them into account:
| https://youtu.be/0WN9xvAvEls?t=499
| dilap wrote:
| It's been about a year now, but I used to skate around the city
| all the time -- even then I found the self-driving test cars to
| be way less treacherous than the human-driven ones!
|
| Pulling your kid in a bike trailer in SF is awesome and
| admirable, but also a little bit crazy :-)
| mikotodomo wrote:
| Yeah it's funny how human psychology works! We know the
| rational truth is that the AI drivers are millions of times
| less likely to run us over than human drivers, but we still
| can't get rid of the image of evil robots going bezerk from
| Hollywood movies and the (extremely unlikely) possibility of a
| malfunction in the back of our minds!
| HWR_14 wrote:
| I'm not concerned about evil robots. A coordinated cyber
| attack? People intentionally exploiting bugs in perception?
| Errors in general?
|
| I think the risk of a malfunction is much higher with a robot
| than a sober human, and probably most legally intoxicated
| humans.
|
| I don't base it on Hollywood, but in years of programming
| experience. Anyway, did you hear about the 737 that crashed
| due to a software bug last month?
| simondw wrote:
| I think the problem is that (at least for now), we don't have
| good mental models of AI drivers and what their failure modes
| might be.
|
| Dangerous human drivers are likely to be consistently erratic
| (e.g., drunk), or distracted and oblivious in certain
| situations (bikes, intersections, lane changes).
|
| For all we know, an AI driver might drive perfectly for three
| hours, and then accelerate full speed onto the sidewalk.
| bckr wrote:
| Uh... people have already been killed by autonomous cars. And
| they're very new. I don't think it's funny/weird at all that
| someone would be nervous about being in front of one, without
| an airbag.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The fact that someone was killed by a car with an Uber
| computer on board does not mean that people have been
| killed by autonomous cars. It's easy to draw a bright line
| between realistic, responsible self-driving tech companies
| like Cruise and Waymo and the move-fast-kill-people
| shenanigans of Uber and Tesla. They are really two
| different categories.
| bckr wrote:
| Maybe for someone who is paying close attention, or even
| works in the industry, this distinction can be made.
|
| And that's valid _for now_. That a company has not had a
| major accident so far does not mean that I 'm not going
| to be their first victim.
|
| I _love_ the idea of self driving cars.
|
| But they are also really scary.
|
| They're being brought to us by the same industry that
| gave us
|
| * BSOD
|
| * "why the heck can't I share my screen right now? can
| you share your screen? yes? well why can't I share my
| screen?"
|
| * Your account has been terminated for breaking the terms
| and conditions. You cannot appeal this decision. We are
| now deleting 4TB of your life's work.
|
| * An attacker has gained access to your email account.
| Your life is now ruined.
|
| `But they're safer than human drivers!`
|
| So what. They're new, they're capable of killing you,
| they're brought to you by tech.
|
| They're f'n scary.
|
| Self-driving advocates will do well to acknowledge this
| rather than being dismissive.
| jeffbee wrote:
| It's easy to dismiss you because your arguments are
| nonsense.
|
| Uber's murder car was not autonomous. It was not capable
| of ever operating without a "safety driver". Therefore it
| was not an autonomous vehicle. Nor is any Tesla.
|
| Waymo has operated cars with zero humans aboard at
| various points going back quite a few years. They are
| legitimate autonomous vehicles.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > We know the rational truth is that the AI drivers are
| millions of times less likely to run us over than human
| drivers
|
| Thank you for a textbook example of begging the question.
| antattack wrote:
| I would like some kind of visual feedback (maybe countdown
| timer for how long it has stopped for?) from autonomous car.
|
| Something similar to checking if driver is paying attention and
| is aware that I'm going to cross in front of their car by
| looking at direction where driver is looking or a hand gesture.
| SoporificSlip wrote:
| I remember Ford doing some of this work in a research phase a
| few years ago (by putting real people in hilarious empty seat
| costumes). I don't recall anything more recent from the major
| players and it still feels like a missing component to to
| having vulnerable road users feel comfortable around
| autonomous cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KqQyYOPPn7w
| wes-k wrote:
| OMG that is hilarious! How do we I get one of these
| costumes?
| bckr wrote:
| I really want this, too. I highly depend on eye contact with
| other drivers for safety.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > I would like some kind of visual feedback
|
| Good idea. Maybe the car can turn on an indicator when it has
| made the decision it is going to move, something that even
| gives an idea of _where_ it is intending to move.
| kevinventullo wrote:
| Interesting! Like a higher fidelity turn signal.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| This is a great idea. Disney/Pixar have this figured out, why
| not turn fiction into reality for a good use case?
| greesil wrote:
| With a human I try to make eye contact. At least that way if
| I get run over I know it's intentional :)
|
| Maybe they were on to something with the Jonny Cab mannequin
| in Total Recall.
| bduerst wrote:
| Just look directly into the Lidar. That way we'll know when
| the uprising is close.
| greesil wrote:
| Do not look directly into the lidar with remaining eye
| Cd00d wrote:
| How do you achieve this? I feel like _every_ time I 'm
| crossing the street windshield glare is so severe that I
| couldn't even be convinced the driver was in their seat.
| noneeeed wrote:
| This is one of the reasons I wish drivers would stop
| trying to let me cross the street when they could just
| drive past. Most of the time I can't see them clearly
| enough to make eye contact and be sure that they are not
| just lost/confused (I live in a tourist town with
| diabolical roads so that's pretty common).
| azinman2 wrote:
| You could put eyes on the outside of the car.
| greesil wrote:
| -try-
| ehsankia wrote:
| They sometimes post videos of situations they deal with,
| especially around bikers and pedestrians. It's quite impressive
| how well it handles such cases.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWvhw1KCmbo
| yellow_lead wrote:
| The marketing video vs. the in-the-field video:
| https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=833
| ra7 wrote:
| 500k fully driverless miles in Arizona and this is still
| the only video where it's actually demonstrated a
| "failure". That says something.
|
| In fact, the very same channel (JJ Ricks) has a ton of in-
| the-field Waymo videos where it works exceedingly well.
| darknavi wrote:
| > That says something.
|
| Perhaps that not everyone records a taxi ride and posts
| it on YouTube.
| ra7 wrote:
| That's fair. But a lot of them also just try out Waymo
| for the cool factor and capture the ride (like myself).
| darknavi wrote:
| Definitely. I still think it is very impressive, I just
| think they have probably had a few more "bad rides" than
| this video.
| DominikPeters wrote:
| This is a very safe way to fail though, with no vulnerable
| road users nearby.
| judge2020 wrote:
| But at 16:46 it continues on and moves into traffic
| before once again failing, this time with people having
| to go into the oncoming turn lane to go around the Waymo
| vehicle.
| londons_explore wrote:
| It's notable that most of the failures in that video are
| human process and communication failures, not failures of
| the self driving system itself.
|
| It's the kind of thing that could all be fixed in a few
| days of rehearsals of what to do when cars get into this
| state. I suspect that the main failure was that rider
| support had a button to 'pull over', but that the route to
| pull over was blocked by a cone, so the car failed to pull
| over, and then rider support seeing the failure probably
| tried to cancel the pullover (to try again), and it ended
| up keeping driving.
|
| A simple logic change or even just better
| training/documentation could have fixed this.
| kilotaras wrote:
| That is ridiculous intersection. What is the point of bike
| lane if it's used as turn lane anyway?
| simulate-me wrote:
| The video contained almost no information. Just a clip of a
| cyclist cutting in front of a Waymo car and then a cut back
| to the Waymo employee. It doesn't even show how the car
| responded.
| phoe18 wrote:
| I think this blog goes into more detail:
| https://blog.waymo.com/2021/06/beyond-the-bike-lane.html
| simulate-me wrote:
| That still doesn't say anything other than "our data
| includes interactions with cyclists." As far as I can
| tell, they don't treat cyclists any different than they
| do other obstacles on the road.
| ehsankia wrote:
| They do, the model specifically marks cyclist, pedestrian
| and other obstacles as different, and they discuss how
| they're modeled differently. Furthermore, they have
| videos talking about their simulation system, and how
| they create thousands of "variations" of each scenario,
| with the "obstacle" doing different things.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Waymo and cruise vehicles are much safer for bikes than other
| drivers in my experience. I've been commuting by bike in SF for
| years, have a near miss every few days but never even close
| with a waymo vehicle. Every single time I've been hit has been
| a door, another bike, or a taxi. Taxi drivers in SF seem to see
| themselves as natural predators for bicycles.
| screye wrote:
| Waymo has taken a responsible approach to self-driving (level 5
| only, Lidar) over Tesla's collateral reduction approach. Lidar
| gives you exact distance to obstacles around it. Given those 2
| factors, I expect Waymo to have an inbuilt hard-stop for when
| it is on collision course inside of braking distance.
|
| I expect it to be friendlier to bikers and pedestrians than
| human drivers.
|
| As a biker, most of close calls are due to impatient drivers
| who try to overtake me through close calls and when they enter
| turns without looking first. AFAIK, Self-driving cars do not
| initiate same-lane overtakes and can be hardcoded to be
| paragons of patience.
|
| With how hostile American drivers are towards bikers, self-
| driving cars would need Skynet-esque malice towards us to match
| those injury rates.
| tigershark wrote:
| Waymo is level 4, not level 5, and if I remember correctly
| the CEO said that it won't be level 5 for decades.
| kfarr wrote:
| Yeah same experiences here, already feeling like robot cars are
| much safer for cyclists and pedestrians than aggressive humans
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| I'd trust a waymo more than a tesla though
| ajross wrote:
| Tesla FSD beta has something like three orders of magnitude
| more miles driven under full autonomy now, almost all of it
| by non-corporate users free to post whatever mistakes or
| mishaps they can find.
|
| Waymo has one (now two) heavily geofenced service areas
| with a few dozen cars. It won't take highways. It won't
| enter certain intersections or transit certain
| neighborhoods.
|
| Just recognize that there's some level of cherry-picking
| error in this kind of analysis. FSD beta and Waymo both
| make mistakes (mine curbed a tire once, there's the now-
| famous video of the car hitting the plastic bollard in San
| Jose, etc...), but you're going to see _far_ more of those
| from one system than the other.
| ra7 wrote:
| > Tesla FSD beta has something like three orders of
| magnitude more miles driven under full autonomy now
|
| Wait. "Keep your hands on the wheel" drives are NOT fully
| autonomous. By definition.
| hiddencost wrote:
| Glad to see this is getting thoroughly downvoted.
|
| -> Tesla is actively killing people. -> Tesla has much
| higher rate of requiring driver intervention, and mostly
| drives in safer environments.
|
| I really struggle w/ how to communicate to non-industry
| people how deeply wrong-misleading the Tesla pitch is.
| NegativeLatency wrote:
| > Waymo has one (now two) heavily geofenced service areas
| with a few dozen cars. It won't take highways. It won't
| enter certain intersections or transit certain
| neighborhoods.
|
| Literally this is why I trust it more, the people running
| the company are willing to realistically evaluate the
| limitations of their systems and act responsibly
| judge2020 wrote:
| The Tesla pedestrian AEB systems (and those on any vehicle
| made in the last 5 years) are pretty good regardless.
| kfarr wrote:
| Totes. "self driving" Teslas are downright scary for
| cyclists
| bduerst wrote:
| Tesla self driving is scary for _everyone_. There 's more
| than just a few crashes and concerns regarding it's
| capabilities:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Safety_conc
| ern...
| omnicognate wrote:
| I wonder what the stats are on those bike trailers. I see
| people using them in traffic and they look plain terrifying: a
| child dangling out in a flimsy canvas pod behind the cyclists's
| back, too low for drivers to see when close, surrounded by
| vehicle wheels... yikes.
| cjrp wrote:
| There shouldn't be anything inherently dangerous about them,
| a car shouldn't be getting that close to the back of a
| bicycle really. I've seen some that have a tall flag-like
| thing, I guess that's to help show that there's something
| behind the bicycle
| yupper32 wrote:
| Most people I know who regularly bike in SF (for commuting
| at least), have been hit by a car in some capacity.
|
| I have no idea why parents use those bike with the kids in
| the back. Why not just use a car? It's not even like those
| bikes are particularly cheap. The ones I see sell for
| thousands of dollars.
| omnicognate wrote:
| Shouldn't doesn't mean doesn't. Seems to me that common
| sense suggests they're pretty dangerous to use in traffic,
| but I'm not claiming that is actually the case. I'm just
| wondering what the stats are - the only real way to know.
|
| For context, I live in a major city. I've seen people
| pulling these things round busy multi-lane roundabouts and
| the like.
| r0m4n0 wrote:
| Agreed...
|
| I was thinking about this other day with my 4 month old.
| We were looking at four or so houses to purchase with a
| real estate agent. We were having to load her in and out
| of her car seat in the car repeatedly which is not fun
| (she cries when you set her in the thing). One of the
| houses was 1/2 a mile or so away and it crossed my mind
| that I could just hold her in the back seat while we
| coast through a few intersections. I then pictured the
| outcome of a minor accident and decided that it was worth
| the additional effort to ensure that my kid wouldn't be
| ejected.
|
| Everything we do is a risk calculation and some people
| have decided that the risk is worth the convenience or
| cost.
|
| I suppose my thought was illegal while toting your child
| around in a bike trailer isn't so there is that factor
| too...
|
| Those kid trailers seem very dangerous, I ride my bike in
| cities all the time (NYC and SF) and get very close to
| reckless drivers. I have to imagine being a passenger in
| a bike trailer, in a city, is quite a risk
| bckr wrote:
| Many people seem really careless with their children on
| the road. Another example is walking out into a crosswalk
| with a stroller without looking both ways. Yes, it's my
| responsibility to slow down. But for god's sake don't
| assume I'm going to!
| jacquesm wrote:
| Those aren't strollers they are traffic testers.
| tokai wrote:
| The most common accident from biking is falling. Much of
| the danger of falls are removed for a child in a proper
| bike trailer. With a flag and reflectors helping
| visibility my intuition tells me that it is much safer
| for children in trailers. Safer than riding their own
| bike or with a child seat on the adults bike.
| mdoms wrote:
| It must feel very gratifying to be able to say, "hey, you
| shouldn't have done that" after a driver crushes your child
| into a paste. Never rely on what drivers "should" or
| "shouldn't" do.
| greesil wrote:
| There's a subset of cyclists that don't seem to have fear.
| Not me though. When I take by kiddo of out I'm very careful
| with route planning. They're harder to see because they're
| lower down, but the kid literally can't fall out of it if I
| take a fall. That, and it effectively has a roll cage.
| gruturo wrote:
| In Germany many bike trailers have a small brightly colored
| flag on top, so there's an object in your field of view even
| if it's very close to your car.
| asdff wrote:
| The stats are that probably hardly anything happens with
| them. Dying on a bike is extraordinarily rare in the first
| place. For example in my city of some 4 million, 30 people on
| bikes die a year which seems like such small odds.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Merely because so few people bike in a commuter/traffic
| heavy setting.
| asdff wrote:
| I decided to go ahead and do some ballpark math. about 2%
| of my city bikes to work:
|
| 36/80,000 = 0.00045
|
| 80% drive a car and about 250 die a year:
|
| 250/3200000 = 0.000078125
|
| So its not quite a full order of magnitude more
| dangerous, but either way I'd say your odds are pretty
| low in either case. Even lower if you choose to bike
| safely, such as taking less busy residential streets vs
| commercial arteries or even opting for the sidewalk on
| those busy arteries, wearing helmets and using lights,
| using defensive bike strategies like avoiding lefts in
| favor of utilizing a perpendicular street, not being
| drunk, etc. I bet out of those 36 deaths in my city, none
| took place on like a 25mph residential street.
| 29athrowaway wrote:
| So basically all the leverage that truck drivers had collectively
| will vanish over night.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Does anyone know what Waymo is doing in Phoenix? I saw a lot of
| there cars there but they were always being driven by someone in
| the driver seat (Jan-Feb 2022). They say they are driverless
| there but I never saw it and probably saw 500 Waymo cars/Waymo
| cars 500 times while there.
| jseliger wrote:
| Waymo has a relatively small service area in Chandler, Mesa,
| and a very small section of Tempe. The first two are
| essentially Phoenix suburbs. Waymo doesn't reach some of the
| areas that would seem to be particularly useful: light rail
| stops (the Phoenix area now has about 20 miles of light rail:
| see the map tab at https://www.valleymetro.org/maps-
| schedules/rail), or Arizona State University in Tempe, or some
| of the party/bar districts (like Mill Avenue in Tempe).
|
| I live in the Phoenix area and have wanted to try Waymo, but,
| sadly, it doesn't go anywhere useful for me.
| ra7 wrote:
| This blog post is also announcing their expansion to Phoenix
| downtown.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Oh got it. Okay. That makes sense. Thanks.
| Traster wrote:
| >Just as we've done before, we'll start with Waymo employees
| hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the wheel,
|
| Ok. I tell you what, I've got an innovative idea. You see, these
| "autonomous specialists". They sound expensive, right? Got to be
| trained not just to drive, but to debug the computer, to have
| higher concentration levels to mitigate the inevitable higher
| risk of sudden interventions. So what you do - and stay with me
| now - you strip _out_ the autonomous tech and just replace it
| with a steering wheel. All of a sudden you no longer need these
| useless "autonomous specialists" and anyone could drive it. It's
| a billion dollar idea, I guarantee it!
| throw7 wrote:
| Is this really "fully autonomous"? I get the feeling the driver
| (the one with the legal liability) is watching from a remote
| terminal back at waymo hq.
| ra7 wrote:
| It's fully autonomous. They can't "joystick" the car from a
| remote terminal.
| tinybrotosaurus wrote:
| Could you show me the control stack source code to prove
| that? Ah yes, you can't.
| ra7 wrote:
| You can choose to believe Waymo (and all other SDCs who say
| the same) or not. No one's going to show you source code on
| an internet forum.
| qgin wrote:
| There's no remote driver. There are people at a remote center
| that can add labels to scenes if the computer doesn't have
| enough confidence to proceed. One the computer has enough
| information to start planning again, it resumes driving.
| spikels wrote:
| How do you actually get a Waymo ride in SF?
| scoofy wrote:
| CTRL + F: rain
|
| As far as I know, they still don't/won't drive in the rain, and
| they operate safely _and slowly_. I want to believe this thing is
| moving forward, but I 'm skeptical about building a marketplace
| where the service is unavailable exactly when demand is highest.
| It creates conflicts of interest, that at best, encourage actors
| to take risks that can undermine the entire industry.
| idreyn wrote:
| Glad to see they never exceed 20 mph in this video. If AVs can
| stick to city speeds that prioritize pedestrian safety over
| travel time, they'll have a huge head start over human drivers in
| safety and "human decency" metrics. Hopefully have a traffic
| calming effect on the rest of us, too.
| wanderr wrote:
| The graphic showing the platforms from Austin to SF shows a
| disturbing trend of these autonomous platforms getting bigger,
| and therefore more dangerous for those of us on the outside of
| these vehicles. I would love to see regulations capping the size
| and speed of these autonomous platforms to minimize the danger to
| the public. Sure, eventually they might be proven to be safer
| than having humans behind the wheel, and then we can consider
| relaxing those regulations, but even then perhaps the standards
| should be higher, since they are likely to increase the overall
| number of cars on the road significantly - traffic will not
| discourage people from driving as much, if they are not in fact
| driving. (FWIW, I would love love love to never have to drive
| again. I just want us to take a measured approach to getting
| there for safety.)
| moritonal wrote:
| I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years, and I know
| there will be benefits, but has any government yet started
| planning for the relatively near-instant transformation of the
| Trucker and Taxi industry once this "works"?
|
| The fall-out is going to be intense:
|
| * Fuel-stops are going to change completely, what's the point of
| half of the motels on long-haul drives when your car can drive
| all night and likely recharge automatically at a stop-point.
|
| * Reduced downtime on goods movement will impact uptime in every
| other industry.
|
| * Autonomous-vehicle-only lanes that line up with traffic timings
| creating a two-tier driving experience
|
| * Huge influx of unemployed drivers who I guess might get
| "chauffeur" style jobs.
|
| * Security issues, complex legal issues when there's accidents.
|
| * Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for
| "lols".
|
| I know all this is extreme, but if history is studying the past
| to understand the present, science-fiction is studying the
| "future" to predict the problems of tomorrow.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Assuming it will indeed happen (which I'm not yet convinced of)
| you can add these:
|
| * cars sent to pick up stuff without drivers
|
| * kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick up
| the parents afterwards
|
| * cars doing the minimum to stay 'in traffic' to avoid paying
| high fees for parking
|
| * far more miles per car because the biggest limiting factor
| (the presence of a driver) will wall away
|
| * huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
| Zigurd wrote:
| There are a lot of countervailing trends, some directly the
| opposite of what is predicted here: Delivery, not pickup, for
| example. Right-sized shared vehicles with surge capacity
| instead of "orbiting" private cars. Smaller-lighter vehicles
| as the need for crashworthy vehicles declines. More use of
| bicycles as roads become safer for cyclists.
|
| Overall, automated road vehicles are a huge boon.
| vidarh wrote:
| A lot of places have looked at taxation by miles travelled,
| and that would address a lot of those. For places with high
| fuel taxes today this is particularly attractive with the
| transition towards electric cars.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Most of the self driving cars should be fleet, so I doubt any
| of these specifically will occur. It will be more like having
| cheap reliable taxis around, and anyone who has lived in a
| cheaper country (like China) might understand that.
|
| Coupled with electrification going on at the same time (many
| countries and states have set 2030 or 2035 deadlines), the
| CO2 impact won't be as bad, although we should still focus on
| public mass transit.
| snek_case wrote:
| I think the cars picking up things/people without drivers
| could be the worst part. Imagine being driven in a taxi, and
| about half of the vehicles around you have nobody in them. I
| suppose it's not inherently wasteful since you never really
| needed to be in the car to go pick something up. However, if
| the price of delivering something by car decreases a lot, the
| volume of deliveries will increase a lot too.
| ctoth wrote:
| > kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick up
| the parents afterwards
|
| Isn't this backwards? Why should kids have to go earlier than
| parents if the parents don't need to drop them off before
| work?
|
| > huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
|
| Won't most automated vehicles be electric?
| abecedarius wrote:
| Also:
|
| - Mass transit is full of big heavy vehicles running mostly
| empty on off-peak hours. It's more efficient only at rush
| hour. I'd expect net efficiency over the full usage is
| worse, compared to electric cars.
|
| - As they start making custom robocar hardware, it'll
| become a mix probably including smaller lighter single-
| occupancy cars.
|
| - Mass transit ought to become much more useful and
| attractive given on-demand robocar rides to and from your
| station.
|
| - (Added:) Congestion pricing becomes more doable for cars
| that are already networked for other reasons. Congestion
| pricing is the obvious approach to really solving
| congestion.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Mass transit is full of big heavy vehicles running
| mostly empty on off-peak hours. It's more efficient only
| at rush hour. I'd expect net efficiency over the full
| usage is worse, compared to electric cars.
|
| That is really only true in the states right? In other
| countries with decent mass transit systems, it seems like
| they are really full during rush hour but only mostly
| full at other times, utilization is very good. American
| systems seem to be dysfunctional...probably because cars
| are more convenient for off peak travel. I can see how
| door-to-door automated vans or even taxis could fill in
| off peak travel here, while the big vehicles serve mostly
| peak demand (in the states, elsewhere it isn't as
| needed).
| abecedarius wrote:
| Yeah, I looked up this overview
| https://www.templetons.com/brad/transit-myth.html and it
| agrees there's a difference from European/Asian systems.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Isn't this backwards? Why should kids have to go earlier
| than parents if the parents don't need to drop them off
| before work?
|
| Because in most places school starts before work starts,
| this has always been the case, even in places where people
| don't have cars, and not everybody has a car in places
| where most people do.
|
| > Won't most automated vehicles be electric?
|
| Yes, but that doesn't automatically mean all that power is
| made with renewables.
| bduerst wrote:
| >Yes, but that doesn't automatically mean all that power
| is made with renewables.
|
| Electric vehicles are consistently more carbon efficient
| than individual combustion engines, except for specific
| outlier instances in developing countries which are 100%
| dirty coal power grids.
|
| This means a fleet of electric vehicles will have less of
| a carbon impact per mile than the average human driven
| vehicle.
| jacquesm wrote:
| This is true in the case where you compare a fleet of
| electric vehicles with the same size fleet of combustion
| based vehicles.
|
| But that's an entirely different subject. We are simply
| looking at the effect on the total number of miles driven
| here, which will absolutely explode once driverless
| vehicles are a reality. And those KWh will have to come
| from somewhere and they _will_ have a carbon footprint
| even when they are entirely made with renewables.
|
| The solution to this is to drive substantially less not
| to drive more with cleaner vehicles.
| lkbm wrote:
| On the other hand, if I were creating a fleet of self-driving
| taxis, and I could choose between 50mpg cars or 20mpg
| trucks/SUVs, I'd use 90% the former.
|
| People buying personal cars at the moment tend to choose the
| latter: https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/
| tracker1 wrote:
| Better even... Delivery "cars" could be roughly the size of
| smart cars, with just a relatively big storage cabin.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > * kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick
| up the parents afterwards
|
| Only if the parents are WFH and going to lunch. School starts
| too early already.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Sending your kid by themselves in a taxi isn't an uncommon
| thing in China. I can't imagine that changing much with
| self driving cars, but I understand the American
| perspective isn't already used to such things.
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| > * cars doing the minimum to stay 'in traffic' to avoid
| paying high fees for parking
|
| > * far more miles per car because the biggest limiting
| factor (the presence of a driver) will wall away
|
| > * huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
|
| These are all very important. Most cars on the road are
| single occupancy. Once we can have zero occupancy the problem
| will only get worse.
| bduerst wrote:
| Wouldn't it be the other way, through fleet network
| effects?
|
| For example, your fleet of low- or zero-emission vehicles
| would greatly offset the average vehicles that people would
| have been using instead.
|
| Also, zero occupancy vehicles never have to drive around
| looking for parking near their destination. They are
| immediately reusable or could go to an out-of-the-way pool.
| scotuswroteus wrote:
| The existing government doesn't plan for that. Candidates for
| office and thinktanks do, and then when the threat
| materializes, they run for power, take over, and make a change.
| On the one wing, there are gonna be AOC types who say Green
| News Jobs is the play. In the center, you'll have the Yang Gang
| types who call for a UBI program that isn't paid for with
| carbon taxes. On the other wing, you'll have folks who say it's
| time to annex Greenland and mobilize paramilitaries. So we'll
| see
| woah wrote:
| Not even joking, with enough time I'm pretty sure you could
| find an HN post from 2012 saying the same exact thing.
|
| EDIT: Actually it was very quick and easy:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419897600&dateRange=custom&...
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| We'll have flying cars before driverless cars.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| There's no need. This transition will be slow. A few cities
| first with a limited number of cars. And then it grows
| organically and probably initially quite slowly. It would take
| many years to upgrade all taxis world wide. The production
| capacity to produce the vehicles simply does not exist yet.
|
| So, the grid won't collapse. Drivers won't starve overnight.
| Legal issues will sort themselves out as early adopters
| encounter them, etc. Plenty of time for everybody to adapt.
| greggman3 wrote:
| I think when it really works it will be more like the
| transition from feature phones to smart phones. very very
| quick. If they actually work it's just too compelling.
|
| Further, I expect the number of cars on the road to go way up
| because suddenly so many more people can use a car. For
| example, every one without a license. Kids, elderly,
| disabled. I also suspect it means there will be lots more
| long distance drives as suddenly it becomes "hey, wanna go to
| this place 3 hours away, we can play games and drink while
| the car drives us"
|
| I'd certainly consider visiting my family 9hrs drive away
| more often if Friday at say 12am I could just climb in the
| backseat and go to sleep and arrive at 8am vs having to drive
| myself (usually 7am to 4pm)
| wiremine wrote:
| > I think when it really works it will be more like the
| transition from feature phones to smart phones. very very
| quick. If they actually work it's just too compelling.
|
| The definition of "very very quick" is important here. The
| smart phone adoption took over a decade. to get to 80+%.
| [1]
|
| Cars are much more expensive than phones, and last longer.
| The average age for a car in the US is 11.5 years [2] and
| people replace their cars between 5 and 7 years. [3] And my
| guess is self-driving technology will be used at the top-
| end of the market, and slowly trickle down. This is similar
| to pretty much any consumer technology: the technology
| starts off as a premium and becomes a commodity over a
| longer period if time.
|
| So, if we use cell phones as a benchmark, it will take 10
| years at a minimum. It likely will take 20 years given the
| duty cycle of vehicles. (Assuming we all still own a
| vehicle. If we all move to subscriptions, that might be a
| different story.)
|
| Fleets will be replaced sooner, because the commercial ROI
| will be compelling. But it still takes a ton of capital to
| replace a fleet, and they need to get the ROI out of their
| _existing_ fleet before they invest in new ones. So even
| that won't be immediate.
|
| But it might be uneven. I 100% agree with your example of
| sleeping through the night. If I can do that with a rental,
| and that's cheaper than flying, I might consider it.
|
| [1] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/US-Smartphone-
| Penetra...
|
| [2] https://www.carchex.com/research-center/auto-
| warranties/how-...
|
| [3] https://www.quora.com/How-often-do-people-replace-
| their-cars
| deegles wrote:
| Not if existing fleets can be retrofitted to be self
| driving. At $15/hr, if you can keep a car or truck
| driving 100 hours per week that's $6,000 month of labor
| costs saved. It's reasonable to expect insurance costs
| will be lower as well. Fuel economy would be better too,
| since a self driving car would be happy to drive at 60mph
| or less to get more MPG.
|
| Even if the system + retrofit costs $50,000 that's an ROI
| of ~8 months. These numbers are made up but even with the
| most pessimistic of assumptions I believe widespread
| adoption will happen much faster than 10 years.
| wiremine wrote:
| Good point. That extends the ROI of the original
| investment, so it feels like a no brainer.
|
| The big assumption is the retrofit market. Is that
| something anyone is talking about? Is that something
| Waymo and the like will be offering?
|
| My point is: it makes sense, but is it the low hanging
| fruit someone will be going after right way? Or will this
| happen down the road?
| gpt5 wrote:
| In a way, Waymo is already in that business - as all the
| cars they use are retrofitted.
| remus wrote:
| I think price is an important difference between phones and
| cars. When they started coming out smart phones were
| expensive, but within reach for a big slice of people.
| There's a lot of people who don't buy brand new cars
| because they're expensive and poor value so I suspect
| there'll be a natural transition where the tech takes
| ~10years or so to trickle down in to the second hand
| market.
| ISL wrote:
| When liability insurance costs plummet, the total cost of
| ownership will drop, too.
| dvirsky wrote:
| > I expect the number of cars on the road to go way up
|
| This could also play out totally opposite to that - think
| cheaper on demand rides, no need to park near your work if
| your car can just go do something else, etc. This might
| play out as actually less people owning a car, or families
| owning just one car instead of two, etc. I remember a
| prediction from a few years ago that it may reduce the
| number of cars by 80%, which I doubt, but I also don't
| think it will necessarily mean more people buying cars.
| hibikir wrote:
| First, it's unlikely, as most trips happen in small
| windows of time, and in the same general directions in a
| city, leading to very little chance to reuse: Peak cars
| on the road at 8 am on a Tuesday is not really going to
| drop, and then very few trips will be happening at 2am.
| It's the same thing that happens in many US cities for
| commuter trains: A large fleet spends the night on depots
| far from the center, and then makes a single trip
| downtown, where they stay put all day, just to make a
| lone trip out later in the day: The demand is just too
| low in the other direction to not have most trains idle
| most of the day.
|
| But let's ignore that fact, and instead look at a
| different definition of number of cars on the road:
| Instead of how many cars actually exist, count how many
| cars are on the road at any given time. It's not just
| that there might be more cars in the end, but even with
| fewer cars, each car will be doing more miles, because
| you don't need a driver. Children visiting each other
| while being less of a nuisance for parents mean more
| trips. Old people that are uncomfortable driving. People
| going further away in geneeral, because being driven
| would be less stressful when the technology is doing
| well. More visits to the bar, now that you don't have to
| call an uber, or risk a DUI on the way. And let's not
| forget letting the car go back home to park, instead of
| paying for expensive downtown parking: Same number of
| miles with a passenger, but bonus congestion for everyone
| else.
|
| When driving is cheaper, the number of miles driven goes
| up, and therefore the number of cars that you actually
| find on the road goes up, even with fewer cars.
| bigtones wrote:
| Smart phones when launched cost less than $1200 which a
| majority of people could afford. Cars that have this
| technology onboard would cost upwards of $65000 which
| almost no one can afford comparatively.
|
| This is not going to be a fast rollout.
| tintor wrote:
| "Majority of people can afford $1200 smart phone" What?
| Majority lives on <$8 a day.
| gibolt wrote:
| The economics of a robotaxi are insane. Main cost now are
| the driver, and then fuel, and then vehicle
| wear/tear/depreciation. An autonomous EV taxi makes all
| three of those comparatively negligible. Profit per year
| per vehicle could be $25k+, meaning it is in their best
| interest to produce as many cars as possible.
|
| In addition, each taxi will be replacing at least 10
| cars, if it is sufficiently cheap and convenient.
| mdoms wrote:
| I am convinced people who believe "wear and tear" on
| electric cars is "negligible" have never owned a vehicle.
| I worked as a mechanic at a bunch of small mum and pop
| businesses. Other than oil changes and brake pads (which
| will be less of a concern with electrics) nothing
| changes. The bulk of work in shops like that is
| suspension and steering (bushings, shocks, hydraulics),
| running gear (wheel bearings, hubs), AC problems (pumps
| and clutches mainly) and failing electrical parts (bulbs,
| starter motors, coil packs, wiring gremlins).
|
| Electric cars are heavy, so expect more suspension
| failures. Running gear doesn't really change. AC is
| identical but with electric motors (prone to failure).
| Electrics will be worse if anything.
| gibolt wrote:
| Suspension failures are not particularly common, EVs
| aren't that much heavier, and maintenance can still be
| done. While EVs are somewhat heavier, there are plenty of
| crazy heavy ICE vehicles that work without issue.
|
| Tire wear may increase, but a robotaxi can also optimize
| driving style to reduce it.
|
| None of those costs matter, compared to ICE. EVs just
| have less things that can break, and even less things
| that result in EOL or catastrophic failure. The more
| miles a taxi runs for, the more money it makes. Even if
| costs increased, the profit would easily make up for it.
| mdoms wrote:
| > Suspension failures are not particularly common
|
| Only because we regularly service them by replacing
| bushings, CV joints and ball joints regularly. And shock
| absorber failures are still commonplace.
|
| > EVs aren't that much heavier
|
| They're much heavier. It's obviously hard to make a
| direct comparison because there's no such thing as
| "equivalent but with an ICE engine" but a Golf E weighs
| about 250kg more than a Golf GTI.
|
| > there are plenty of crazy heavy ICE vehicles that work
| without issue
|
| And they have heavier duty components which require more
| servicing and are more expensive to replace.
|
| > None of those costs matter, compared to ICE.
|
| Can you show me some evidence for this? I am not making
| the claim that EVs are more expensive to maintain than
| ICE cars, but you made the claim that wear and tear costs
| (aka maintenance costs) on EVs are "negligible". You will
| need to show some receipts for a claim like that.
| fragmede wrote:
| There are undoubtedly other changes involved, but BMW
| makes an ICE and electric version of their current
| 3-series. The 330i is 3,582 lbs vs the electric 330e's
| 4,039 lbs. Roughly 10%'s difference; quite a bit heavier!
|
| For an apples to oranges comparison, a Tesla Model 3 is
| 3,648 to 4,250 lbs; a Honda Accord is 3,150 to 3,430 lbs.
| Totally difference cars, but same-ish external size
| class. Those battery packs are heavy!
| [deleted]
| tintor wrote:
| "each taxi will be replacing at least 10 cars" Two cars
| maybe, but not ten cars. Ten of us can't commute to work
| in the morning, and return back with the same taxi. Two
| round trips might fit during rush hour.
| Teever wrote:
| One of the easy things that we could do to improve
| quality of life and reduce waste would be to increase WFH
| and also to simply stagger work place start times somthat
| were not all hammering infrastructure at the same time
| twice a day.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| There's reasons to do that already to avoid rush hour,
| but somehow many people still end up getting stuck in
| rush hour traffic twice a day.
| gibolt wrote:
| Not all people commute. Rush hour isn't all at once, but
| distributed over several hours. Not all cars will be
| replaced right at the start, but those who use their cars
| the least will probably be the first to go taxi only.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Even assuming that rigid pattern, the cars can do other
| things between the rush hours. Like deliveries.
|
| Also, if there is an unused resource for most of the day,
| capitalism will find a use for it!
| zepearl wrote:
| > _In addition, each taxi will be replacing at least 10
| cars, if it is sufficiently cheap and convenient._
|
| Maybe the demand would be even higher than that - I'm
| thinking of all people that cannot drive (e.g. because of
| age in a few years for my parents & other relatives), the
| ones that don't own a car (too costly, don't want it,
| whatever), introverted people that don't like driving in
| a taxi/uber (that's me! hehe), etc... .
|
| Of course alternatives exist already now but often they
| lack something (e.g. bus to remote location X drives only
| once every few hours and/or only up to a certain time,
| taxi is very expensive and/or availability is unreliable)
| => a cheap robotaxi would be a game changer, there would
| be many indirect consequences (and in my opinion many
| would be positive, like less parking spaces needed, more
| mobility for old people, more flexibility about where-to-
| go-for-what, room in the trunk, etc...).
|
| > _Main cost now are the driver, and then fuel, and then
| vehicle wear /tear/depreciation_
|
| Especially thinking about an _idle_ taxi vs. robotaxi
| (waiting for somebody wanting a ride): unbeatable, as the
| driver 's cost not generating any revernue would not
| exist anymore (only vehicle deprecation based on time and
| cost of capital used to buy the vehicle, which are both
| very low) => the difference related to fixed costs would
| be _incredible_ (but I assume that some additional /new
| cost will show up, e.g. some data-exchange-service to
| keep maps/routes extremely up-to-date, coverage for
| remote-assisted driver in the case that the car would get
| stuck, etc..., but that would probably still not increase
| costs a lot).
| jfim wrote:
| > Maybe the demand would be even higher than that - I'm
| thinking of all people that cannot drive (e.g. because of
| age in a few years for my parents & other relatives), the
| ones that don't own a car (too costly, don't want it,
| whatever), introverted people that don't like driving in
| a taxi/uber (that's me! hehe), etc... .
|
| Another thing that would increase demand would be the
| cheaper cost of AI driven miles compared to human driven
| ones. Today, it's somewhat expensive to get anything
| delivered from local shops, due to how expensive it is to
| do local point to point delivery. But if the local bakery
| or restaurant could deliver for a dollar or two, that
| would change a lot of behaviors.
| native_samples wrote:
| You appear to be ignoring development costs. Waymo has to
| be one of the most fantastically expensive projects in
| corporate history. Even if they ramped up massively
| tomorrow, they'd still be charging taxi-like prices and
| it will take a long, long time to break even on that
| initial investment. But of course, they aren't ramping up
| tomorrow.
| at-fates-hands wrote:
| Just looking at some data on Tesla's:
|
| _According to RepairPal, the average Tesla maintenance
| cost is $832 per year. That compares to an average of
| $652 per year for all car models sold in the United
| States. Depending on which services your Tesla needs, you
| may end up spending much more than the average car owner
| on yearly maintenance needs._
|
| Also, Tesla's aren't known for their reliability:
|
| _Though not much information exists yet about the
| overall reliability of Tesla models, early results aren't
| encouraging. In the J.D. Power 2021 U.S. Vehicle
| Dependability StudySM, Tesla ranked 30th of 33 car brands
| for overall reliability. That's better than only Jaguar,
| Alfa Romeo, and Land Rover among all automakers across
| the country._
|
| _J.D. Power reported an average of 176 mechanical issues
| per 100 Tesla vehicles, compared to an industry average
| of 121 issues. The organization notes, though, that it
| doesn't rank the electric car brand with other major
| automakers because it doesn't meet the study's criteria._
|
| _What can be known is that Tesla models break down
| relatively regularly and that Tesla maintenance costs are
| pretty steep._
|
| https://jalopnik.com/advisor/tesla-maintenance-cost/
|
| Unreliable cars and a pretty steep per year cost to
| maintain them, along with steep repair costs (a broken
| door handle will run you about 1K plus labor)? This
| doesn't sound like the pipedream you're selling me here.
| gibolt wrote:
| Their reliability score does not take into account
| severity. Most things reported are super minor, and all
| are within the first year. Luxury cars are the 'worst' in
| these surveys, because owners are pickier.
|
| True reliability metrics are average years on the road
| and miles driven.
| unregistereddev wrote:
| Tesla ranks behind Lexus, Acura, BMW, Cadillac, Lincoln,
| and many other luxury cars in the same reliability
| studies. Even if most things are minor, they still have
| significantly more problems than the established
| automakers.
|
| I wonder whether the average amount spent on non-warranty
| repairs would be a good metric to add to "average years
| on the road and miles driven". That would hopefully
| remove initial defects from the first few years and also
| remove defects that are so minor that most people won't
| pay to have them fixed.
| robocat wrote:
| > Tesla maintenance cost is $832 per year. That compares
| to an average of $652 per year
|
| I would be _very_ careful before relying on those
| maintenance cost figures - they are very dependant upon
| the age of the vehicles and neither figure sounds
| realistic, if you look at the following information.
|
| https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-
| expe...
|
| The link shows the cheapest average cost to maintain a
| vehicle over 10 years was $550/annum for a Toyota in
| 2016, and the most expensive was $1780/annum for BMW.
|
| More importantly, further down, the article shows the
| cost increase over time for maintenance is about
| +$150/annum. At age 10 years the average maintenance is
| $1500, and it plateaus at about $2000/annum (because
| people retire vehicles when they get too expensive to
| maintain).
|
| A Tesla doesn't have oil changes or combustion engine
| problems, so some maintenance costs are reduced. However
| the battery eventually needs replacing, which is a large
| expense, so you must know whether the battery replacement
| is included in average yearly maintenance costs or not,
| before the figure is useable over the long term.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >The link shows the cheapest average cost to maintain a
| vehicle over 10 years was $550/annum for a Toyota in
| 2016, and the most expensive was $1780/annum for BMW.
|
| Gotta love how these numbers are both a decent sized
| integer multiple away from what you would think they are
| if you got your advice from the internet.
| satronaut wrote:
| i disagree with the 65,000 figure. A baseline tesla model
| 3 is 38000 dollars, which has a computer that can handle
| full self driving beta. I can see the price going down
| TBH
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Cheapest Tesla atm is 47k
|
| "FSD" is another 12k IIRC
|
| Total 59k
| russh wrote:
| Think driverless Uber.
| jatone wrote:
| businesses can afford it though. 65K to replace a very
| large, yearly, expense of a driver? you bet your ass they
| are going to switch and fast. That is what is going to
| cause most of the fallout. the ROI is basically 1 year, 2
| tops.
| [deleted]
| babyshake wrote:
| > I expect the number of cars on the road to go way up
| because suddenly so many more people can use a car.
|
| With autonomous vehicle adoption, we may see the concept of
| blockchain "gas" (fees paid with rates based on real-time
| demand) come full circle as a real-time congestion tax.
| season2episode3 wrote:
| > Further, I expect the number of cars on the road to go
| way up > I also suspect it means there will be lots more
| long distance drives
|
| This is the wrong direction for the world to move in. We
| need to make our transportation efficient both to reduce
| emissions and not pillage the earth for rare minerals for
| these self driving electric cars.
|
| _MOST_ (not all) 3 hour drives can and should be done
| through train trips. Trains are efficient, they offer more
| equitable access to transportation, and they can be very
| fast. The American obsession with the automobile, and the
| way that obsession is pushed internationally through
| exported media, will ruin us all.
| aardvarkr wrote:
| The phone -> smartphone transition stretched out over the
| course of a decade. It's fast relative to the adoption of
| the automobile for example but nowhere near as quickly as
| you make it sound.
|
| Even in modern times we still have a surprising amount of
| Americans still use feature phones. The Pew Research Center
| found in 2018 that 17% of Americans still use feature
| phones.
| https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/19/a-foolish-
| take-17-...
| Kye wrote:
| I didn't get a smartphone until 2014. It was frustrating
| how so many people in the tech bubble acted like everyone
| had one long before most people did and just didn't
| bother with web sites anymore, leaving me out of so many
| new things. The failure to peek outside one's own
| experience is a continuing problem among the people
| deciding what the world will look like tomorrow.
|
| See also: the internet. People still discussed seriously
| whether or not it had staying power as recently as 2008.
| It didn't really take off until the 2008 election pushed
| so many people to participate in new mediums. 2004 was
| kind of a prelude with Howard Dean's campaign, but he
| mostly reached the already online set. I was already on
| in the 1990s, and it still surprises me when I meet
| people my own age who didn't get on until the 2000s or
| 2010s even though it's the more common experience.
| frutiger wrote:
| > It didn't really take off until the 2008 election
| pushed so many people to participate in new mediums. 2004
| was kind of a prelude with Howard Dean's campaign, but he
| mostly reached the already online set.
|
| I find the idea that the Internet's adoption was related
| to US presidential election cycles a little bizarre. I
| know they dominate the mainstream media for a few months
| every four years but surely the utility of the internet
| vastly exceeds that?
|
| What about online shopping or even email displacing paper
| communications?
| benatkin wrote:
| Thinking about it more...I think texting was much bigger
| during the 2008 campaigns than it was during the 2004
| campaigns, and for some, rudimentary web browsing. And
| they did it on the pre-iPhone concept of a smartphone,
| that we've since thrown out.
| benatkin wrote:
| Obama famously used a Blackberry. That isn't a smartphone
| in the current use of the term IMO, but I think it was
| called that back then.
| bduerst wrote:
| >Further, I expect the number of cars on the road to go way
| up because suddenly so many more people can use a car.
|
| You're assuming that the cost will be much less with self-
| driving than ride share or cabs. It likely won't be a
| significant reduction for a while.
| zepn wrote:
| The upfront cost could remain the same while
| externalities like road deaths, insurance, and even
| pollution (via e.g. more efficient braking / speeds) goes
| down.
| bduerst wrote:
| It sucks, but most consumers are rational actors that
| don't care about those externalized costs (hence why we
| have tragedy of the commons). It's especially so for the
| price-sensitive demographics that GP was describing
| above, who care about their direct cost, which likely
| won't change for a while.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not just cost though. I'm a bit over an hour drive
| to the nearest major city. I find I'm even less inclined
| than I used to be to head in for evening social event. If
| I could be driven, I'd be far more inclined to do that
| sort of thing and a (reasonable) cost wouldn't be a huge
| factor.
| bduerst wrote:
| >If I could be driven, I'd be far more inclined to do
| that sort of thing
|
| The same way a taxi or ride-share would drive you right
| now?
| ghaff wrote:
| The cost for me to get into the city with a human-driven
| car is close to $100 each way which is too high for
| pretty much anything other than going to the airport. Cut
| that in half and eliminate parking and it's more
| thinkable for an evening event.
| ryukafalz wrote:
| > I expect the number of cars on the road to go way up
|
| This sounds horrific for those of us who live in cities
| that are already overrun with cars.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Also Oregon will probably just ban autonomous vehicles in the
| name of protecting jobs, like they do with gas pumps.
| iancmceachern wrote:
| I agree, it will be slow. These Waymo cars cost hundreds of
| thousands of dollars. A local pizza place in the middle of a
| small community will not be able to support the cost of a
| driverless car as compared to the cost of a local high school
| kid with a $500 Civic. Same with semis, companies invest in
| their truck fleets expecting millions of miles out of each
| truck. It will take time to change all that over, and the
| cost/benefit will take time to tip towards self driving. It
| will happen, but like seat belts, lead free gas and air bags
| it will take decades before they are the majority of vehicles
| on the road.
| mupuff1234 wrote:
| > These Waymo cars cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
|
| Any source on that claim? I thought they reduced the costs
| of lidar to be in the order of a few k.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The cities that do make the transition quicker will have
| economic advantages, so I'm not so sure that the transition
| will be slow once a few cities make it. And we aren't just
| talking about the USA, we have to contend with large cities
| in Asia with worse traffic and more incentives to adopt the
| technology before American ones do.
| jeromegv wrote:
| Labor is cheaper in Asia so I'm not sure why the transition
| would happen faster there. Lots of jobs exists there for
| the sole purpose that the price of a robot/automation is
| way higher than paying someone to do it.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Traffic jams and limited road infrastructure (with no
| space for more, so use needs to be optimized) are a PITA
| in Asia. It isn't really the cost of the taxi drivers
| (who are increasingly becoming scarce as young people
| choose better careers). Coupled with authoritarian
| governments that can push changes more readily than
| western governments, and Beijing, Shanghai, Singapore,
| Tokyo are easily on their way in this direction.
| tobijkl wrote:
| As long as there are still some vehicles with human
| drivers on the roadways, congestion will not change.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > As long as there are still some vehicles with human
| drivers on the roadways
|
| You understand. If the government can tell you that you
| can only drive even or odd days, tell you that you can't
| drive at all (and must use self driving cars inside the
| 4th or even 5th ring road) is a very distinct
| possibility.
| pengaru wrote:
| > congestion will not change.
|
| Congestion arguably will worsen first.
| darepublic wrote:
| why would congestion change if all the drivers were fully
| autonomous? It's one thing to have a fully autonomous
| driver, but having them coordinate perfectly to have good
| throughput even in dense traffic conditions is another
| altogether. I think this second goal is much farther off
| and if the articles I've read on autonomous vehicles is
| any indication I expect they will drive more cautiously
| and slowly than most human drivers when they finally "go
| live" in a widespread fashion
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| > if the articles I've read on autonomous vehicles is any
| indication I expect they will drive more cautiously and
| slowly than most human drivers when they finally "go
| live" in a widespread fashion
|
| They won't get stuck at left turns, on-ramps and rotarys
| due to an inability to use the skinny pedal to its full
| capacity.
|
| That won't solve the sheer numbers problem but it's
| probably a solid sized constant factors improvement.
| jeromegv wrote:
| I fail to see how driverless cars make any of that
| better. Congestion might even get worse as people might
| be willing to wait longer if that means they can be
| "productive" doing something else in the car.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Economic advantages along with a huge number of jobs
| destroyed
| jliptzin wrote:
| Huge number of *shitty jobs destroyed
|
| Isn't that kind of the point of technological progress?
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Shitty or not, they are jobs. You failed to address what
| will happen to these drivers. Average age: 46.
| burrows wrote:
| They will lose their jobs and will have to find new
| sources of incomes.
| kadoban wrote:
| Yes, but since we live in a bootstrappy wonderland, the
| current holders of those shitty jobs will be ~destroyed
| as well.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| The Luddites did ok. Why would it be different this time?
| carlmr wrote:
| Actually a lot of them didn't, hence the protests.
| Innovation can take away your job in a span of ten years
| while not creating new jobs for generations to come.
| bduerst wrote:
| Luddites to the weaving loom, Blacksmiths to the steel
| mill, farm hands to the combustion engine, secretaries to
| the email, travel agencies to the search engine, etc.
|
| Technology has a robust history of displacing jobs, and
| humans have a robust history of learning new skills.
| Change is never comfortable, but predictable.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Innovation can take away your job in a span of ten
| years while not creating new jobs for generations to
| come.
|
| That case isn't true. The new generations had jobs well
| enough (increased productivity grew the economy much
| faster than before), they weren't committed to weaving
| clothes by hand. The Luddites themselves didn't fair as
| well in the short term, but many of them would have aged
| out of the work force in a few years anyways (manual
| weaving is pretty unforgiving on the body).
|
| Truck drivers are rapidly aging as well, if self driving
| vehicles move retirement up by 5 or so years, it isn't
| going that huge of a deal (we can rely even on America's
| social safety net), and their kids didn't want to be
| truck drivers anyways.
| babypuncher wrote:
| As automation gets better and better, the difficulty of
| the remaining jobs for humans goes up. Not everyone is
| cut out to be a software engineer, doctor, or lawyer. We
| have to deal with the fact that people of average (and
| below average) skills and intelligence still need to
| support their families.
|
| I think hampering technological progress to protect jobs
| is the wrong approach though. We need to contend with the
| fact that traditional supply-side economics will start to
| break down as we enter an era where most or all human
| needs can be met with automation.
| spideymans wrote:
| Imo, as automation takes hold, one of two things will
| need to happen:
|
| 1) We'll all need to collectively let go of our societal
| ideal that work is virtuous. We will need to accept that
| a significant portion of people have little to no
| productive work available to them, and that there is
| nothing wrong with that. It's just the natural
| culmination of increasing automation and societal
| advancement. UBI would be a necessity in this scenario.
|
| 2) We'll see an increasing number of "make work jobs"
| that exist solely to keep people busy, and to generate an
| illusion of productivity. These jobs may ultimately be
| government funded, although governments may obscure the
| source of the funding to keep the "productivity illusion"
| going. For example, governments may provide business
| grants to keep a certain number of low-wage workers
| employed. I suppose this essentially would be an indirect
| UBI program, except that we'd make people do some nominal
| amount of unproductive work to "prove" that they're
| worthy of the UBI.
|
| I strongly suspect we'll head towards option 2.
| imtringued wrote:
| https://youtu.be/Qe4x2Fv9to4
|
| I honestly can summarize it this way. Savers keep saving
| even when there is nothing left to save because there is
| no downside to having too much money but lots of upside
| to having more even if each single dollar is
| incrementally less useful. To maintain full employment
| all savings must be invested. The reason for that is
| quite simple. When you spend 50% of your income you are
| working more than you really need to. The extra hours
| that you are putting in mean someone else does not need
| to put in those work hours (50% less employment for
| them). So, you use the money which was previously sitting
| idle on a bank account by lending it out. Of course, the
| modern system has no direct connection between savings
| and actual money being lent out, rather it is the money
| hole (the money you have saved is not circulating) in the
| economy which causes unemployment that is driving further
| borrowing to restore full employment.
|
| One could say that if you are working twice as much as
| you need, every second hour you are working is actually
| charity, it's not productive in the sense that you need
| it to maintain your lifestyle and it is not productive in
| the sense that anyone else has a need for it. There is no
| way you are getting a return off that charity when the
| economy is already saturated and everyone has everything
| they need. Yet money does not represent this act of
| charity, instead we pretend that you are still owed the
| same amount of products and services for all eternity,
| meaning what you are doing is not for the benefit of
| society, it's for your own benefit at the expense of
| someone else.
|
| Probably the worst thing you can do is do what the
| Germany did before WW2. Do massive austerity programs
| during a depression hoping it makes things better.
| Homeless and starving people don't care that all the jobs
| are done by two thirds of the population if that means
| they don't get to eat. As I have said, if you are working
| more than you need to work for yourself, then you ought
| to work for the sake of someone else, anything else is
| selfish. If two thirds of the population is doing all the
| work and only doing it for itself then the rest is going
| to get angry very quickly.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| True, rising productivity does force human beings to be
| more productive.
|
| > Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer,
| doctor, or lawyer.
|
| Society used to say the same thing about reading and
| writing (not everyone is cut out to do that), and society
| was (mostly) wrong. Pushing people higher and higher up
| the value chain has been happening forever. Eventually we
| will hit singularity, but even the software engineers,
| doctors, and lawyers will be obsolete then.
| dfxm12 wrote:
| Yes, but, it unfortunately only leads to _social_
| progress if everything else keeps up - you 'd be
| surprised how many social programs currently have work
| requirements -\\_(tsu)_/-. Unemployment benefits, some
| type of UBI, education/job training affordability, social
| security, etc. are all things that need to be reevaluated
| if a whole job category is going to be removed.
|
| Job automation is great, but there are externalities that
| should be accounted for ahead of time. You can ask, "who
| pays for this?" Well, the obvious answer is the companies
| that will be enriching themselves due to society's
| sacrifice. Although, that has happened during the
| pandemic, so it's clear corporations aren't going to do
| so out of some sense of civic duty.
| munk-a wrote:
| This argument didn't stop cab driving from transitioning
| from a serious employment opportunity to employment as a
| service contractors - so I don't know if that's enough to
| hold back the tide for the taxi side of things... on the
| trucking side I think there will probably be a big
| reckoning at some point though. Teamsters unions mean
| business.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| The transition will not be slow. As soon as there's an addon
| to an existing truck or a taxi, they will be switched over
| very quickly. Businesses aren't stupid, they understand human
| drivers are expensive and get tired and cause accidents.
|
| Millions of jobs will be lost within a few years.
|
| And your comment didn't address of where these drivers will
| go in any way. "Adapt" is not an answer. Your average 46 year
| old truck driver will not be learning Javascript.
| breadzeppelin__ wrote:
| they definitely already have this for tractors / farming
| https://www.agleader.com/blog/ag-leader-unveils-new-
| geosteer...
| logifail wrote:
| > they definitely already have this for tractors /
| farming
|
| As in, a significant % of tractors are without human
| drivers, or as in, a significant % of tractors with human
| drivers have GPS-based assistance?
|
| I live in a rural area and see several dozens of tractors
| every day, and FWIW, I've never seen a tractor without a
| human driver. Yet.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| How fast has warehouse automation occurred? What has
| happened to all the former warehouse workers? Fully
| autonomous warehouses has been a reasonable thing way
| before autonomous driving in the wild. It carries all the
| cost-saving and safety arguments. It might affect more
| people's jobs. What can we learn from that?
| monocasa wrote:
| > Fully autonomous warehouses has been a reasonable thing
| way before autonomous driving in the wild.
|
| The issue in warehouses is that even before talking about
| control software behind automating, we simply don't have
| hardware for manipulators that are as versatile as human
| hands. That's why top of the line automated warehouses
| have sort of converged on automating everything except
| stations where humans can act like task reconfigurable
| pick and place machines. Better manipulators than
| biological hands is still an open research problem.
|
| Automated cars don't have the hardware barrier, and as
| soon as the control software meets the required error
| rates, we should expect a rapid switchover to automated
| fleets.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| > How fast has warehouse automation occurred?
|
| When people hear that term they think of the robots that
| amazon installed that move product around the building
| for you and massive conveyor systems like UPS has for
| sorting packages. While those kind of machines are
| getting better and are slowly making their way into
| "smaller" companies (i.e. not the size of amazon) the
| biggest changes are on the ERP and data management side,
| tbh.
|
| Cheap/plentiful handheld devices and robust/cheap wifi
| tech has been a game changer for us compared to the
| physical processes of using paper to direct staff on the
| floor. The processes we used 10-15 years ago are night
| and day to what we use in 2022, at least in my mid-sized
| fulfillment company.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| As far as I know, there aren't fully automated
| warehouses. Amazon ones are still employing a ridiculous
| number of human pickers, sorters, packers.
| dntrkv wrote:
| And driverless cars will not be able to drive everywhere
| at once. Initially, it will be a few predefined routes
| and certain times. It will take much longer than 10 years
| to have a driverless car that can go anywhere, at
| anytime.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| It seems to me that automating a warehouse would be a
| much larger relative investment than installing
| conversion kits into taxis.
| airstrike wrote:
| We are easily 20+ years away from simply adding a
| conversion kit into a taxi to make it driverless.
| worldsayshi wrote:
| You're probably right but I feel that the incentives to
| create such kits would be quite big once true autonomous
| driving has shown to work on large scale.
| intrasight wrote:
| I think there's more near-term opportunity with trucking. I
| keep an eye on Aurora (AUR) in that space.
| lostgame wrote:
| Yet another reason why Universal Basic Income is going to
| become a necessity. As each industry automates itself more and
| more, it'll be UBI or total riots and chaos.
|
| And thank God. People are not robots. They shouldn't have to
| spend their valuable lives doing repetitive, monotonous tasks
| for 8+ hours a day to barely survive anyway. So long cashiers,
| so long truck drivers, and hello future.
| thehappypm wrote:
| I disagree with this. There's a labor shortage in just about
| every industry right now, we aren't in a high unemployment
| world by any stretch. UBI is not needed when wages are high
| and unemployment is low.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I hope there are new limits to trucking and a concentration of
| those that are licensed to off hours. I-80, for instance,
| already feels like a truck route more than a human commute
| route. That said, so many of the accidents (jack knifing) there
| are trucks in wintery weather, I don't see that being included
| v1.0 of the new trucking reality.
| badthingfactory wrote:
| I-80 always comes to mind when these autonomous vehicle
| discussions occur. I'll believe in autonomous vehicles when I
| see them driving across Pennsylvania during a winter storm.
| There are days where I seriously doubt an autonomous vehicle
| would be able to navigate out of my driveway.
| intrasight wrote:
| Your comment makes me think about the interplay of driving
| and loading. A properly loaded truck can probably be driven
| by an AI in a way that greatly reduces jack knifing compared
| to human drivers. But what about improper loading - and if
| done on purpose to sabotage the endeavour.
| mwattsun wrote:
| My feeling is that the trucker protests in Canada and D.C. were
| ostensibly about masks, vaccines and personal freedom, but a
| lot of people pointed out that didn't make sense since mandates
| were lifted, so they had anxiety about something else.
|
| I think the actual anxiety is about being put out of work by
| self-driving trucks. Truckers can see the future of trucking
| and don't see themselves in it. Nobody seems to be working on a
| plan for the millions of workers whose skills will no longer be
| needed.
|
| _How Many Truckers Are There? Approximately 3.5 million truck
| drivers are employed in the United States, out of which 1 in 9
| are independent, and most are owner-operators._
|
| https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/how-many-truckin...
| gambiting wrote:
| >>I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years
|
| That's sarcastic, right? Like "we'll have fusion power in 50
| years"? Except that we might actually have fusion power in 50
| years and I don't actually think we'll have truly driverless
| cars within 50 years.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| There is ambiguity in the word "have."
|
| It's borderline obvious we will have a taxi/Uber replacement
| for most of lower Manhattan, east San Francisco and southeast
| Phoenix before 2030. (Technologically, at least.) Less
| confident in long-distance interstate-only driving by 2030,
| but that's better than 50/50.
|
| Beyond that, the edge cases are innumerable, so it's
| difficult to estimate. Nevertheless, we have clear line of
| sight to domains where, for all intents and purposes, a
| human-driven vehicle will be obsolete (if not necessarily yet
| unquestionably uneconomical) in well under ten years. That's
| far more than we have ever been able to say for fusion.
| vlunkr wrote:
| There's this great compilation video on youtube of Elon Musk
| promising fully autonomous cars "next year" since 2015.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7oZ-AQszEI Sorry for the
| dumb clickbait title.
| [deleted]
| judge2020 wrote:
| Those are true/eventually did happen up until 2018
|
| 2014 - 90% capable of autopilot, for sure highway travel
|
| 2015 - autonomous driving for highways and relatively
| simple roads
|
| 2016 - S/X can drive autonomously with greater safety than
| a person - generally true, it still messes up for human-
| correctable situations but in general helps more than it
| hurts in terms of "crashes where autopilot was in control
| during impact or within 5 seconds of impact"[0]
|
| 2018 - incorrectly predicted - self driving will be
| 100-200% safer than a person by next year (this talking
| about their full self driving thing that will do turns and
| stop signs and whatnot)
|
| 0: https://www.tesla.com/VehicleSafetyReport
| [deleted]
| dham wrote:
| People, for some reason, still confuse AutoPilot
| (literally just ACC) and Full Self Driving. I guess the
| creator of the video doesn't know the difference either.
| The naming is really bad though.
| jliptzin wrote:
| Definitely within 10 years. 50 years is insane.
|
| Just the other day my Tesla model 3 drove me home from a
| restaurant 10 miles away, at night, with plenty of other cars
| on the road, through side streets and on a highway, _without
| intervention_. Did it do weird things? Sure, but nothing that
| made me nervous enough to intervene. Compared to just a year
| ago when it was still phantom breaking on the highway and
| couldn't do side streets at all. All the people saying it's
| still decades away don't realize how quickly things are
| progressing.
|
| 10 years is a long time and progress is not always linear.
| Think about what happened to the internet between 1995 and
| 2005.
| bitsoda wrote:
| Do you live in a place with weather? I think we'll get
| there eventually, but my timeline is closer to 20 years. I
| just don't see AVs nailing that last 1% for true peace of
| mind in places like the Eastern USA with torrential
| downpours in South Florida or snow and icy conditions in
| New England.
|
| I hope I'm wrong though, I would prefer it if my kids and
| other road users didn't have to drive.
| jliptzin wrote:
| I live in NY
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| You're wrong. It will happen way before 20 years.
|
| And computers are better at reacting to unexpected things
| like icy road. And cameras are better at seeing through
| rain and fog. What's barely perceptible to you, computer
| sees clearly.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>You're wrong. It will happen way before 20 years
|
| Other than random people saying this on the internet, I
| have seen zero indication that this will be the case. You
| cannot will something into existence just by strongly
| believing in it.
| slingnow wrote:
| Are you just saying things that you think are true? Have
| you ever tried to do even rudimentary image processing in
| foggy / rainy / nighttime conditions? Cameras are
| absolutely not better at seeing through rain and fog.
| eklitzke wrote:
| Humans aren't that good at seeing in rain and fog either
| (which is why many people avoid driving or drive much
| more slowly in extreme rain and fog conditions), so
| saying robotic vehicles aren't good at driving in
| inclement weather conditions isn't very interesting. In
| addition to cameras, Waymo and Cruise vehicles have
| multiple lidar and radar units. These are all affected
| differently by inclement weather but in principle
| combining sensor data for perception gives the vehicle a
| lot more data to work off of than a human relying solely
| on vision.
|
| Driving in truly bad weather is still an open research
| problem, but it's also one that most of these companies
| haven't dedicated a lot of resources to, since they all
| have initial rollout plans in places that don't
| experience much extreme weather. But assuming these
| vehicles can drive well in good weather, I don't think
| it's a stretch to assume that progress will be made on
| driving in more extreme conditions once more resources
| are dedicated to it.
| supportlocal4h wrote:
| Isn't that like saying that motorcycles will happen
| eventually but not anytime soon because: weather?
|
| Traditional cars with drivers haven't solved the weather
| problem 100%. But they are here now. Sometimes we ban
| them in some conditions, but they are a game changer the
| rest if the time.
| thinkharderdev wrote:
| One thing that is going to be awkward to navigate in the
| transition to self-driving cars is how they handle
| driving in bad weather. Obviously that's a technical
| problem but I'm not sure it's actually solvable because
| it's not actually solvable for human drivers. We just
| kind of do it anyway. But when a self-driving car has
| some quantified sense that "driving in these conditions
| is unsafe" will we get to the point where we just say f
| it and let them keep going? Or, maybe more likely, we
| remain in the gray zone where the car is fully self-
| driving but the human driver has to be ready to take
| control at any time which I think limits some of the
| larger impacts.
| [deleted]
| Spivak wrote:
| I mean if you live anywhere with weather your motorcycle
| lives in the garage for 3/4 of the year. Not useless by
| any stretch but also not "taking over the world."
|
| It's not that traditional cars have solved for weather,
| it's that self driving cars haven't solved the problem of
| "being as good as human drivers in weather commonly
| encountered."
| martneumann wrote:
| Apart from weather, a big issue outside the USA is also
| car infrastructure. The US is extremely car centric with
| large, straight, easy-to-maneuver roads everywhere. Here
| in Germany, it's different. We have rather narrow,
| chaotic roads, unclear signage, "right car has right of
| way" traffic rules which sometimes get resolved via hand
| signs, no jaywalking laws, etc.
|
| I am still hoping for fewer cars on the road overall. The
| car itself is inefficient and hopefully on its way out.
| jatone wrote:
| NE cities are more similar to european cities than most
| of the USA. I have no doubt cars can handle european
| cities if they can handle NE cities.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| I think about all the times during winter when my car's
| traction control straight up gives up as I try to
| accelerate through an intersection or when I need to
| start slowing down an extra two blocks away because the
| ABS goes on every time I try to stop. I have no idea how
| AVs will nail that stuff, it's so much harder than
| keeping the car between the lanes and sussing out road
| signs.
| bglazer wrote:
| The control aspects of self driving are much easier to
| solve.
|
| Here's an autonomous drifting Delorean
| https://youtu.be/3x3SqeSdrAE
|
| The physics and control of cars are quite well
| understood, even in extreme conditions. Further, sensors
| allow a car to detect changing road conditions much more
| quickly and adeptly than a typical human.
|
| The hard part of self driving seems to be understanding
| and predicting the humans in its environment.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| That example is still a car on a known good road
| conditions. Do you have an example where half the parking
| lot is covered in ice, or trying to break on a road with
| unpredictable traction so that they don't end up halfway
| through the intersection?
| dont__panic wrote:
| I think about all of the lanes in my city where line
| paint disappears intermittently, or where old
| lines/construction-era lines mess with my ability to
| comprehend where the lanes are, let alone an autonomous
| vehicle's.
|
| And then I think about all the potholes that I dodge when
| I drive around town. And how 4-ton electric vehicles are
| going to make road wear _worse_ , not better.
| holoduke wrote:
| No way. At least 50 years to get somewhere. But we need
| computing power 1000 times better and optics at least 16
| times better. Before that it never can fix all scenarios
| gibolt wrote:
| Here is a video of a customer vehicle driving on snow
| covered roads, now. It isn't perfect, but it is leagues
| better than a year ago.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDK3dRHxOzo He has tons
| of other drives in various weather/road conditions.
|
| Improved software, and maybe one hardware refresh should
| be sufficient to get us all the way there for 99.99% of
| drives.
| shagie wrote:
| It appears that if it doesn't know where the lanes are,
| it drives in the middle of the road. If someone turned
| onto the street from 0:35 to 0:42 there would have been a
| problem.
|
| Aside: some really old drive assist tech for snow plows
| on I-80 Donner pass - https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/def
| ault/files/advanced_snowp... ///
| https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/janfeb-2001/safe-
| plowi...
|
| I'm still waiting to see how an AI would handle Figure
| 5-1 from that. And no, the snow plow's solution of
| burying magnets in the road isn't practical (Cost of
| infrastructure installation for the test sites is
| approximately $11,000 per kilometer ($17,000 per mile),
| including surveying, installation, and magnets).
| ufmace wrote:
| I'd say closer to 50 years myself. But my standard means
| that we not only have near-perfect self-driving, but we're
| confident enough in its quality that we're willing to
| manufacture cars without conventional physical driver
| controls, and people are willing to ride in them. And then
| to actually go through the process of replacing the entire
| national inventory of conventional cars with these new cars
| without controls.
| notahacker wrote:
| > 10 years is a long time and progress is not always
| linear. Think about what happened to the internet between
| 1995 and 2005.
|
| And then compare it to what happened to the internet
| between 2005 and 2022...
|
| Progress isn't always linear but it tends towards
| diminishing returns more often than exponential progress.
|
| And we're not talking simple things like "can billions of
| people and Moore's law result in something a bit more
| exciting than Facebook with a newsfeed and ads and YouTube
| without Flash", we're talking about progress in the form of
| monotonic improvement in complex intractable software to
| solve edge cases the dev team haven't even thought of where
| the failure mode involves corpses, and do it to the
| satisfaction of regulators across many jurisdictions.
|
| The gap between "drive 10 miles without serious incident
| this time" and "consistently drives a billion miles between
| incidents serious enough to be fatal without any
| possibility of intervention" is enormous.
| juanani wrote:
| dmode wrote:
| My Tesla still phantom brakes. And Tesla has been trying to
| solve it for, what 10 years ? My rain sensor also barely
| works. I have seen enough FSD videos and all the scary
| things it does. There is no way it will be ready to solve
| the last 1% in the next 10 years
| frosted-flakes wrote:
| I rode with my uncle in his new Tesla car in rural
| Pennsylvania this winter. Clear weather, daylight, only a
| few other cars on the road. In a 10 mile trip the
| automatic emergency breaking threatened to kick in with
| blaring alarms 5-6 times: whenever an oncoming car
| approached us in the other lane, and over hills where it
| apparently thought we were driving off a cliff. I thought
| it would do better than that, given how much it's touted
| as so good.
| [deleted]
| jasonladuke0311 wrote:
| Wide scale adoption is going to bring a ton of emergent
| consequences that you might never see in a million man-
| hours driving a single car.
| ghostbrainalpha wrote:
| Totally agree. People become SOOO embrace full self driving
| so quickly.
|
| I know 5 people with the Tesla FSD Beta, and EVERY SINGLE
| ONE of them has admitted to letting Tesla drive them home
| when they drank too much and went past the legal limit. And
| not a single one of those 5 people has ever had a DUI. So
| FSD rapidly changed there drinking behavior.
|
| Also I get that I have an atypical and shitty social
| circle. I don't think this represents all Tesla drivers.
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Yeah consider me unconvinced that someone willing to do
| tesla fsd drunk wasn't also willing to drive drunk
| themselves. Lack of a DUI is hardly proof otherwise.
| Bakersfield wrote:
| I know it's off-topic but your username reminded me of
| Bonzi Buddy. Is that the inspiration for your name?
|
| Does anyone else remember that spyware?
| dangrossman wrote:
| Yes, and somehow this immediately triggered my memory of
| the CueCat from the same era.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CueCat
| spywaregorilla wrote:
| Yup :)
| rayiner wrote:
| Progress takes many shapes. Sometimes it goes quicker than
| expected. Sometimes the "last 5%" ends up being completely
| intractable. Lots of technologies got "nearly there"
| (supersonic flight is a good example) but never made it
| across the finish line.
|
| We haven't even begun to address emergent behaviors. You
| say your Tesla does "weird things." What happens when all
| the cars on the road are Teslas and they do the same "weird
| things" at the same time (because they have the same
| programming)? This is an important aspect of systems
| engineering that we haven't even scratched the surface of
| when it comes to self driving cars.
| bobsomers wrote:
| > This is an important aspect of systems engineering that
| we haven't even scratched the surface of when it comes to
| self driving cars.
|
| There are definitely people in the industry who are
| thinking about this and working on it, but AFAIK none of
| them work at Tesla.
| lkschubert8 wrote:
| I'm assuming you mean commercial supersonic flight? I'm
| pretty sure there are plenty of military supersonic
| planes.
| peder wrote:
| If you can do 95%, that might be good enough. Obviously
| if you could automate the entirety of the process, that
| would be ideal, but consumers may simply change their
| behavior to accommodate the 5% difference. Uber/Lyft
| already changed consumer behavior in a marked way: they
| allowed more people to move closer to the city, not pay
| for a car, not pay for a parking spot, etc. In Seattle
| before the pandemic, it was common for young
| professionals that didn't own a car to take Uber/Lyft
| most days. They did this so frequently that yuppies were
| blamed for the increased traffic, even though many of
| them were served by Seattle's great mass transit options.
|
| The cost, simplicity, and availability of self-driving
| cars will undoubtedly change the consumer.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > If you can do 95%, that might be good enough.
|
| Self-driving cars have been at 95% since the 90's.
| They've been at 98% since 2012. Humans are higher than 5
| nines.
|
| It turns out that human drivers, even poor ones, have a
| much better driving record than self-driving cars. With
| this latest Waymo experiment we may finally see some
| significant progress.
| jefftk wrote:
| Ten years doesn't sound sarcastic to me. With fully
| driverless operation starting in SF (and with several years
| in Phoenix), having it widely rolled out within ten years
| seems very plausible.
| mbesto wrote:
| > With fully driverless operation starting in SF (and with
| several years in Phoenix)
|
| As I understand it, they will only operate within a "grid".
| In other words, its use case will be limited to essentially
| a customized route city bus.
|
| > widely rolled out within ten years seems very plausible.
|
| Define "widely". We are decades away from a driverless car
| driving in snow.
| jefftk wrote:
| _> Define "widely". We are decades away from a
| driverless car driving in snow._
|
| I agree snow is a lot harder (I don't think it's decades,
| though). But the cases moritonal brought up mostly don't
| require that.
| jslaby wrote:
| Or black ice.. hitting the brakes and seeing how far you
| slide is the only test to determine safety, from my
| experience.
| aranchelk wrote:
| With copious sensor data and individual wheel control, I
| bet one could devise a more elegant solution.
| minwcnt5 wrote:
| Nah, your understanding is incorrect. I've used it in
| Phoenix and it goes places a bus wouldn't like
| residential culdesacs and parking lots (whithin the
| geofence).
| airstrike wrote:
| > like residential culdesacs and parking lots
|
| Literally the two easiest places it could go into
| treesprite82 wrote:
| Lower stakes because of the speed, but a lot of special
| cases. Higher chance of pedestrians and parked cars in
| the road for both. Parking lots will have a lot of cars
| moving in atypical ways, and markings aren't as
| standardized as on roads.
| airstrike wrote:
| Sure, but at 5mph everything is easier
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Sure a computer can beat an expert human at chess, but
| get back to me when it can beat an expert go player.
| airstrike wrote:
| Self-driving is not even on the same scale of complexity
| as a board game. The latter is an inherently digital
| problem, easy to parse and not played in "real time"
| dane-pgp wrote:
| > The latter is an inherently digital problem, easy to
| parse and not played in "real time"
|
| So people should have been able to correctly predict how
| easy it would be for a computer to master go, right?
| mbesto wrote:
| > customized route
|
| Guess you missed this distinction.
| moritonal wrote:
| Oddly enough from what I've seen when it snows I'd
| imagine a computer's ability to simulate a multi-car
| situation in snow _vastly_ outmatches your normal humans.
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Oddly enough from what I've seen when it snows I'd
| imagine a computer's ability to simulate a multi-car
| situation in snow _vastly_ outmatches your normal humans.
|
| What's the basis for your imagining? Whenever I read some
| strong "computer > human" statement like that, I can't
| help but think it's substantially based on science
| _fiction_ (which can make technology work fantastically
| well because it 's not real, e.g. like Six Million Dollar
| Man vs actual prosthetic limbs).
|
| Also, have you heard about the time I was driving on the
| highway in winter weather, and my adaptive cruise control
| would stop working every few dozen miles because I had to
| get out and scrape ice off the sensor?
| mantas wrote:
| What if sensors are covered in snow?
|
| Parktronics routinely get covered by snow/slush/ice when
| driving.
| 300bps wrote:
| My car's visual sensors (i.e. my eyes) are often blocked
| by snow and ice.
|
| When that happens I hit a button to turn on the defroster
| that then gets rid of the snow and ice.
|
| Could they use a similar system?
| mbesto wrote:
| What do they do while it defrosts? Sit there?
| warcher wrote:
| Joke's on you, we're getting rid of snow!
| modeless wrote:
| They just announced 500k driverless miles in Phoenix. Over
| several years that sounds laughably small to me. For
| comparison, motor vehicle fatalities in the US are around
| 1.5 per 100 million miles. We're several orders of
| magnitude away from even being able to convincingly
| demonstrate that these reduce (or at least do not increase)
| fatalities in the real world.
|
| I'm glad that Cruise beat Waymo to driverless in SF because
| they are providing the swift kick in the butt that Waymo
| seems to require to actually make progress in a reasonable
| amount of time.
| bduerst wrote:
| >500k driverless miles in Phoenix
|
| Waymo has 20 million miles IRL driverless, and 15
| _billion_ miles in simulated driving.
|
| Fatalaties are not the only metric. Accidents are much
| more frequent and driverless cars have already proven
| they're safer in that regard.
| modeless wrote:
| Fatalities are the metric Waymo uses every time they give
| a presentation. They always start off by telling us how
| many people die on the roads and how they can help. And
| it's true! I think it's a very important metric and they
| are right to focus on it.
|
| Simulated miles are not convincing. Miles with a safety
| driver are better but still ultimately different. Also
| the type of miles matters too, and Waymo has been
| focusing on the easiest miles possible until Cruise
| forced them to up their game and try something a little
| more valuable.
| bduerst wrote:
| >Fatalities are the metric Waymo uses every time they
| give a presentation.
|
| Source? Because since 2020 Waymo has been primarily
| touting their "contact events" metric, which is what most
| people consider to be accidents.
|
| Simulated miles are still better than no miles. Given the
| better accident rate it seems to contribute to a degree.
|
| The point is that it's an argument from ignorance to
| narrowly focus on one metric and say we don't have enough
| information on whether autonomous vehicles are safe. We
| do have a range of metrics and information already that
| point to them being safer.
| notahacker wrote:
| > Simulated miles are still better than no miles.
|
| Provided your starting point is AV software with some
| ability to drive, this isn't necessarily true. Tuning on
| simulated miles can lead towards over-optimization for
| the conditions of the simulation.
| bufferoverflow wrote:
| Tesla's FSD traveled billions of miles (2 years ago they
| had over 3 billion miles).
|
| Their crash rate is 1 in 4.4 billion miles. That's crash,
| not a fatality. And it's getting better.
|
| https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/07/tesla-1-crash-
| per-4-41-...
| donkarma wrote:
| yeah because every time it's about to crash it slags it
| off onto the driver
| pranavjoneja wrote:
| Your link says Autopilot, not FSD. Autopilot is highway
| autonomy, which is vastly easier and you can rack up many
| more miles very quickly. This is not at all a relevant
| comparison.
| amelius wrote:
| > They just announced 500k driverless miles in Phoenix.
|
| Not with one version of the software. They are cheating:
| they should reset the mileage whenever they update the
| software.
| bkartal wrote:
| 500K miles does not tell much. It depends on how well
| those miles cover all possible (observed / not observed)
| edge cases, i.e. the famous long tail.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Depending on what you mean by widely rolled out, I agree.
| Driverless trucks driving on the highway and in well-marked
| industrial areas seems extremely plausible within 10 years.
| Driverless taxis at slow speeds as a shuttle service on
| campuses and fair grounds are more or less already a thing
| and will only grow.
|
| Driverless cars in a European city center, during snow, ice
| and rain seems unlikely within 10 years. But we don't need
| that to see transformational change.
| foobarian wrote:
| > Driverless cars in a European city center, during snow,
| ice and rain seems unlikely within 10 years.
|
| The fun thing about European cities is that many of them
| are extremely willing to make (to Americans) unthinkable
| changes to traffic patterns under their jurisdiction. I
| would not be the least bit surprised to see those
| downtown centers closed to all but driverless traffic (if
| they are not closed already).
| bluGill wrote:
| Maybe, but I don't see driverless cars ready for bad
| weather.
|
| BTW, humans are not ready for bad weather either, even
| though we drive in it all the time. However with
| driverless cars we will collect statistics proving it
| isn't ready and never noticing that it is better than
| humans.
| bbarnett wrote:
| The last few percent of any project, takes the longest.
| hwers wrote:
| They told us we were supposed to have driverless cars in 5
| years 10 years ago.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Who is "they" ?
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Google, the tech journalist/blogger consensus, etc.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Sergey might have said it, I don't think the people
| actually working on it ever thought that or said it?
| eptcyka wrote:
| Past performance does not indicate future returns.
| However, I too don't believe that self-driving cars will
| be here in 5 years either.
| treis wrote:
| No they didn't. Cruise didn't even exist 10 years ago.
| barbecue_sauce wrote:
| Why are you bringing up Cruise specifically?
| [deleted]
| golergka wrote:
| They also told us we were supposed to have mass produced
| electric cards in 5 years 30 years ago.
| signatoremo wrote:
| First time I heard of this. Who promised this 30 years
| ago?
| reportingsjr wrote:
| That would have been right around the time of the gm ev1.
|
| A lot of people were expecting electric cars to kick off
| right after that, so OP's claim is not unreasonable.
| signatoremo wrote:
| We're talking about promise, not expectation. I don't
| recall GM promised electric car mass production within 5
| years of EV1.
| jliptzin wrote:
| But with that you also had other fossil fuel companies
| working hard to make sure that didn't happen
| nradov wrote:
| Please explain how fossil fuel companies can keep auto
| manufacturers from selling electric cars? The reality is
| that the biggest obstacle continues to be the high cost
| of battery raw materials.
| dekhn wrote:
| I saw my first self-driving car parked at Google in
| roughly 2008 or 2009, and watched them toodling around
| campus shortly afterward. Many people (like Larry)
| thought it was a 5 year project.
| gambiting wrote:
| There is this famous story about research into image
| recognition back in 1960s - everyone involved thought it
| was literally a matter of few months, maybe a year at
| most, to have a system that has 100% accurate recognition
| capabilities.
|
| Yet we're in 2022 and the best of the best image
| recognition systems spew out absolute nonsense no matter
| how much money is poured into them.
|
| It's just the same sort of issue. It can work amazingly
| well 90% of the time, but the remaining 10% is basically
| impossible without some kind of actual general AI that
| can understand the context of what it's looking at. I
| honestly believe that current approaches to this tech
| will not get us to general self driving tech that is safe
| enough for use on our roads.
| xipho wrote:
| Another story in a similar vein. There are many, many
| stories about how the advent of DNA sequencing would
| finally solve the issues of creating the tree of life for
| all species on Earth, and solve the problem of defining
| species boundaries, this was some 20 years ago or more.
| We're still nowhere close thanks largely to the
| unimaginable quantity of biodiversity out there. We have
| the low-hanging fruit genomes (specimens readily
| available, known to be commercially important, etc), but
| that's about it. Even with those "genomes" (most are not
| curated to any real level of completion) we still haven't
| solved compute at scale, even small analyses (10k
| terminals, 2k genes) take months if not years to
| comprehensively run (i.e. explore parameter spaces),
| albeit thanks in part to limits on resources available to
| scientists.
|
| The Earth is big and complex, I can't see the singularity
| on the horizon yet, but my vision is aging.
| rayiner wrote:
| Another example. An airplane broke the sound barrier in
| 1948. Today, we are as far removed from Yeager breaking
| the sound barrier as Yeager was from a civil war hero
| being President (Grant). But we still have no supersonic
| airplanes in commercial service.
| notahacker wrote:
| tbf, lack of supersonic airplanes is a commercial problem
| rather than a technical one.
|
| On the other hand, most of the commercial jets we _do_
| fly are basically 1950s designs with bigger engines and
| some computers in the cockpit, and HN thinks it was
| crazily irresponsible for Boeing to have decided to use
| sensor-triggered autonomous systems to do something as
| simple as temporarily adjust the trim system...
| dekhn wrote:
| I solved the computational problem for genomics already,
| since it's a mostly-embarassingly-parallel problem (in
| paticular, I made an idle cycle harvester at Google that
| applied 1+M xeon cores to science problems, one of which
| was genomic assembly).
|
| I don't know that creating super-accurate species trees
| is really the most important problem to solve in biology,
| though. Certainly DNA sequencing for health has been a
| really mixed bag.
| xipho wrote:
| > Certainly DNA sequencing for health has been a really
| mixed bag.
|
| Ah, the old why bother since it's a "mixed bag" argument.
| If it wasn't a mixed bag I'd be _really_ worried, as
| someone has some pretty good snake oil.
|
| I vaguely recall something about sequencing and its role
| in creating a vaciine that turned out to be pretty
| useful, something recent maybe?
| dekhn wrote:
| I don't have a complaint about sequencing that leads to
| vaccines. That's what sequencing is for.
|
| What i'm troubled by is the projects that sequence a
| million people, using $1B to do so, and then just dump a
| bunch of genomes with some hand-wavy claims about how
| it's going to cure cancer. The costs here are rathre
| significant, but the health outcomes are not.
| xipho wrote:
| Nice work with that solution! I did similar! I solved the
| earth's hunger issues, funny thing is we produce enough
| food, we just can't _deploy_ it to the people who need
| it. Problem is I can 't figure out the logistics of how
| to make it work... I think maybe you have the same
| problem? We should compare notes.
| dekhn wrote:
| the mark i perceptron did image recognition with a single
| layer neural network and was surprisingly good at it.
| Some days I think Rosenblatt was on to something, but
| about 40 years ahead of the time.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| What do you mean spout absolute non sense? The progress
| in image recognition has been insane in the past decade
| so your comment might have been accurate 10 years ago. If
| there's one thing DL/ML are very good at it's computer
| vision
| gambiting wrote:
| Sorry I thought it was clear from the rest of my comment.
| Image recognition is amazing in 90% of the cases, and
| then in 10% it's worse than a blind human. Another famous
| example of that is the(now solved) Google image
| recognition saying with 99% certainty that a sofa in a
| zebra print is in fact, a zebra(4 legs, zebra pattern =
| must be a zebra). Look at any demonstrations from Tesla
| at what comes out of their clasiffier as the car drives
| around, sure, most of it is correct but some of it is
| insane, the car thinking there's a ship or a cow in the
| middle of the road when there's nothing there. Sure the
| car doesn't act on it, but the fact that the recognition
| gets it so catastrophically wrong is indicative of the
| quality of the whole thing.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Likewise, a lot of computer scientists didn't take
| Engelbart's 1969 "mother of all demos" seriously because
| they thought general artificial intelligence was right
| around the corner. Why bother with a mouse and bitmapped
| display when you can just tell the computer what you
| want?
| jefftk wrote:
| That was wrong, clearly. But it was a prediction made
| with far less evidence than we have today. Considering
| progress so far (which we had far less of in 2012) I
| don't think ten years is wrong today.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| And even if it is wrong, it's obviously not stupid to
| think we'll have driverless cars in 10 years. Waymo are
| literally down to solving edge cases. There are more than
| people might have expected, but there isn't anything
| fundamental to solve.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Waymo are literally down to solving edge cases.
|
| But: there are very large numbers of these edge cases and
| they are of the kind where new ones keep popping up all
| the time. This is a very easy problem for the first 99%
| or so and then the last 1% is super hard.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Sure - but they've been working on the last 1% for years
| now. Nuclear Power plants are almost always over budget
| and over time, big misses. And they've built lots of
| them. Every piece of software ever built suffers from
| this issue to some degree. Elon Musk misses every
| deadline he ever sets. Something taking longer than
| initially thought shouldn't instantly set off alarm bells
| suggesting it won't ever get done.
| jacquesm wrote:
| > Sure - but they've been working on the last 1% for
| years now.
|
| Indeed, and we aren't any closer compared to say 5 years
| ago. That is more or less my point: you can solve for
| some of this and then you are still left with a mountain
| more. And then at some point there is an even harder
| problem to deal with: how to ensure that fixing one
| problem won't regress one or more others.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| > Indeed, and we aren't any closer compared to say 5
| years ago
|
| That's just flat wrong.
| jacquesm wrote:
| I'm sorry, I evaluate tech for a living and I don't see
| us being closer in a way that moves the needle.
| Objectively, however long it will take to get to self
| driving we are 5 years closer, but that doesn't really
| matter. What matters is whether or not the state of
| technology is at a level where it will enable self
| driving to the point where a car will no longer have a
| steering wheel. Because less than that isn't going to cut
| it.
|
| And that may well require another leap of capabilities on
| the AI front, it might even require GAI. But you are
| entirely welcome to your own opinion, as I am to mine,
| but after watching the self driving industry since the
| 80's my timeframe is something like 25 years before
| fusion will arrive.
|
| There may be some intermediary 'artificial artificial
| intelligence' solution where when stuck a remote driver
| can take over. But that has its own set of problems and I
| don't want to set this up as a strawman.
| dastbe wrote:
| Isn't the kind of driving that waymo and others have been
| doing so far the edge case? Normal/ideal driving
| conditions is not what I spend the majority of my time
| driving in even if the different kinds of edge cases I
| drive in are individually less of my time.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| They are driving around the streets of San Francisco. It
| may not be Mumbai, but it's not the highway either.
| adoxyz wrote:
| And we have various versions and levels of drivereless
| cars today...
| gambiting wrote:
| Do we? Where? The best version currently in existance
| could be (generously) described as an automated bus that
| only drives on a pre-mapped grid and still needs human
| supervision because you can't quite trust it yet. The
| most well known commercialy available "autopilot" (from
| Tesla) is so hilariously bad that I honestly don't
| understand how it's even legal to use, much less to sell
| for real money.
| treesprite82 wrote:
| Waymo arguably reached level 4 with commercial taxis with
| no human at the wheel a while back:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__EoOvVkEMo
| warcher wrote:
| Even wide distribution of long-haul trucking
| _exclusively_ on the interstate, or an automated bus-like
| commuter service (but actually good, unlike the regular
| bus), would be a pretty meaningful innovation, wouldn 't
| it?
| gambiting wrote:
| Of course, and it would be awesome, and I believe that
| sort of thing is actually possible within a relatively
| short timescale. General self driving like 90% of people
| do every day? Nope, don't see that.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Neither waymo nor cruise currently require human
| supervision. That's the whole point of this announcement:
| waymo is expanding their driverless program to SF.
|
| Whether the grid is pre-mapped or not isn't particularly
| relevant. It's just how the technology works. The
| vehicles aren't driving on rails, they just have more
| semantic information about the world around them.
| vkou wrote:
| We have various automated versions of lane assist, auto-
| braking, and parallel parking that mostly work.
|
| Fortunately, we also have a developing world where we can
| pay humans $2/hour to mechanical-turk tele-operate our
| 'mostly-working' AI.
| brandonmenc wrote:
| > with several years in Phoenix
|
| I lived in Phoenix for nearly a decade. I moved there from
| the snow belt.
|
| Teaching a car to drive itself in Phoenix is barely a step
| up from teaching it to drive in an empty parking lot.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| It does not look far fetched at all. Current issues stem more
| from legal wrangling over who is liable than whether cars can
| drive in 'driverless' mode. I don't know what the future
| holds, but it is nothing like fusion.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Current issues stem more from legal wrangling over who is
| liable than whether cars can drive in 'driverless' mode.
|
| Honestly don't believe that at all. The tech is immature
| and works only in a very narrow set of circumstances with a
| lot of constraints - it's so far away from being functional
| that the whole legal discussion around it is almost
| academic at this point.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Seeing is believing I suppose[1]. I dislike both Tesla
| and CNN, but it is hard for me argue from this video that
| the technology is immature. I stand by my original
| comment. The tech is here. At this time, the main
| question is who picks up the death toll responsibility.
|
| [1].https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PMu7MD9GvI
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Tesla tech is much less mature than either Waymo or
| Cruise.
| adamsmith143 wrote:
| Seems like a strange take. Companies are consistently making
| measurable progress in driverless cars but Fusion is barely
| inching forward over 5 year increments.
| dmode wrote:
| I agree with you. I used to be in the "driverless car in 10
| years" camp. But after driving a Tesla for the last 5 years,
| I know it is close to 50 years. My Tesla still does phantom
| braking. So forget about dealing with weather, construction,
| people, traffic, weird turns, weird signs etc. There is zero
| chance I will turn Tesla FSD on in a place like Market street
| in San Francisco
| blhack wrote:
| Do you actually have FSD or are you going off of how it
| behaves when you use autopilot on city streets?
|
| The FSD is _really_ good.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| I've been hearing "ten years" for ten years. I've learned not
| to trust the opinions of tech people. They're really good at
| fixating on only the pieces of a whole problem that they're
| familiar with or interested in.
| grandmczeb wrote:
| We have self-driving cars operating in multiple cities
| right now (Chandler and now SF) so it sounds like those
| predictions were accurate?
| [deleted]
| greycol wrote:
| Sure, and in much the same way robot chefs that can cook
| a whole meal exist. You just need to open the door put
| your food in and push the start button and 30 seconds
| later your food is ready.
| grandmczeb wrote:
| You can, today, order a car and go to sleep in the back
| for 20 min while it drives you to your destination and
| get out with no intervention. Can you explain how that
| matches up with your analogy?
| greycol wrote:
| Just because something is semantically similar doesn't
| mean it is what people expect when talking about an
| object. I'm implying with that comparison that most
| peoples definitions of a self driving car is not a car
| that runs in such a limited set of circumstances, just
| like most peoples definition of a cooking robot isn't a
| microwave no matter if you start pointing out sensors and
| movement to ensure better cooking. It may be a no true
| scotsman fallacy but for me (and I'm assuming a chunk of
| the people in this thread who are still talking about how
| long _into the future_ until self driving cars are ready,
| in the comment section of an article about exactly the
| "self driving cars" you're talking about no less) a self
| driving car that I can't buy or hire (at any cost) as a
| replacement for my current car and have it self drive my
| commute to work or an address on the other side of the
| country is not a self driving car.
|
| That opinion doesn't diminish the progress that has
| already been made or the accomplishments of the various
| engineering teams involved. It's just saying that when
| people talk about self driving cars they're talking about
| it as a drop in replacement to the general population of
| car owners' cars not as a curated location/digital track
| limited taxi service.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| Given that by some reasonable definition we already _have_
| driverless cars, albeit limited to two cities, why does that
| sound implausible to you?
|
| Cars that can drive everywhere, in every condition, without
| humans intervening at least remotely and occasionally in some
| limited way? Probably not.
|
| Robo-taxis in most major cities and trucks that can reliably
| handle the full interstate network, to be picked up by a
| human driver for the last mile? Why not?
| agumonkey wrote:
| I'd say 30. War and climate slowing the money and motivation.
| But it's really close to get done. It need one more leap and
| I don't consider it impossible at all.
| endymi0n wrote:
| Well, it depends on your viewpoint. Just today somebody
| celebrated a fusion Q of 0.005, while each year since many
| now Tesla's Autopilot pulls off more accident-less miles than
| humans.
|
| Sure, it's apples to oranges, but for self-driving, we're
| solving the last (and obviously hardest) percent, while for
| fusion, we're still stuck solving the first.
| blhack wrote:
| I have a mostly driverless car _right now_ parked in my
| garage. My Tesla does about 95% of driving for me.
|
| I rode in a _fullY_ autonomous car, with nobody in the
| drivers seat, about a year ago (we have had fully autonomous
| waymos in Phoenix for a few years now).
| gambiting wrote:
| Yes, a do you not find yourself anxious about the remaining
| 5%? I've seen FSD do some batshit insane stuff on the road
| that even a geriatric blind driver wouldn't do. And it's
| not like you have any time to react either, like, you have
| to take over the steering _NOW_ because the car decided to
| just give up in the middle of an intersection.
| blhack wrote:
| The remaining 5% are almost all situations where I take
| over because I'm underestimating what the car is capable
| of.
|
| For instance: I don't like how close it drives to the
| curb. _I_ don't drive close to the curb (and bias towards
| the center of a road) because I only have two eyes, and
| can't really see the curb as I'm moving. I have an
| intuitive sense of how close I am, but that's it.
|
| The car knows _exactly_ how close I am. So it driving in
| the center of a lame, while it makes me nervous because
| it's now how I drive, is perfectly acceptable.
|
| What I wish Tesla would do: set up some closed courses
| for people to come and experience what FSD is actually
| capable of. It would help the current FSD users gain
| confidence in the system, _and_ it would show it off to
| people who haven't ever experienced it.
|
| I seriously don't believe that most of the people who are
| critical of this thing have spent much time with it. I'll
| admit after the first day or so I was skeptical too, in
| the same way I was skeptical of lane keeping and
| proximity aware cruise control.
|
| But at this point: I hate driving without these things.
| They are an almost indescribable upgrade to the driving
| experience for me.
| adoxyz wrote:
| Not at all, because I know that if the driving conditions
| change and I have a feeling the car won't do well, I take
| over. In other instances, where I know the car is going
| to do just fine, like driving on the freeway, I enable
| it.
|
| FSD/Autonomous driving isn't an all or nothing scenario
| for me. I use it when I deem it safe to be used, and
| drive manually every other time.
| belter wrote:
| The 5% is the rest of Owl...
| tomca32 wrote:
| I was really disappointed with the service area though. I
| was hoping it would be available as you say "in Phoenix",
| but it's only available in Chandler which is just one
| suburb south-east of Phoenix. Service has been this way
| since it was introduced a few years ago. I really expected
| them to expand by now.
| ohyoutravel wrote:
| For a lot of the things mentioned such as highway driving and
| sleeping in the car, auto recharges, etc. I don't think it's
| far fetched at all. For a driver assisted version of the
| others, meaning autonomous driving lanes with precision
| timing I don't think it's far fetched either given it's
| basically building the infrastructure of highways in cities,
| but even if not, I can completely imagine same but a driver
| is required to be behind the wheel and aware.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| If you asked me 20 years ago if cars would drive as well as
| they do now autonomously, I would have made the fusion power
| joke. Today, no way. The technology hasn't gotten "stuck"
| like fusion or (before DNNs) speech recognition did.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| We'll probably have a lot more partially automated vehicles
| in 20yr.
|
| Look at advanced ports and inter-modal yards. That sort of
| human to vehicle ratio will probably move up the spectrum of
| complexity in which it can be deployed and down the spectrum
| of cost.
| robotnikman wrote:
| In cities with good weather I can see this (it basically sunny
| clear weather here in phoenix all the time)
|
| However, I could not see this working well in places like
| Chicago. I have a hard time believing a self driving car could
| safely navigate a road mostly covered in snow.
|
| Either way it will be interesting to see what happens in the
| next 10 years.
| whyenot wrote:
| How about:
|
| Autonomous cars that can "tattle" to the authorities on
| vehicles that break speed limits or violate traffic laws. Maybe
| the owner of the autonomous vehicle would even get a cut of any
| traffic fines.
| tetsusaiga wrote:
| > I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years
|
| Anyone else wish there was a platform to place this bet on?
| Maybe with a smart contract? lol
| trebligdivad wrote:
| I think it's the 'relatively near-instant' that's not
| happening; it's slowly happening in a few cities in limited
| routes; I'm sure it'll get better/wider but as long as it's an
| incremental thing then a lot of these problems aren't suddenly
| going to happen.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| A person's professional life lasts for around 30 years
| (probably much more for the people born on some interval from
| the 1980's to 2010's, depending on your country).
|
| How does that speed compare?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 30 years seems kind of short. I get that in some places
| (France comes to mind) it is common to retire pretty early.
| With the associated destruction of cognitive skills,
| unfortunately. But in the US I'd wager most people have a
| professional life more along the lines of 45-50 years.
| BatFastard wrote:
| Going on 40 years here, just starting on a 10 year project.
| I hope I am not 10 years overripe!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| A blueprint for handling this can be cribbed off of "just
| transition" plans for folks in fossil electrical generation
| (coal) [1] [2] who are going to be out of a job in the next
| 5-10 years. Looking back at history, the productivity gains
| from automated vehicles can be split with the firms operating
| these fleets with those being transitioned out (as happened
| with the invention of the cargo container and Longshoremen's
| unions [3]). Another resource that covers this topic (in part)
| is The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller
| and the World Economy Bigger [4].
|
| [1] https://www.justtransitionfund.org/
|
| [2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/11/03/for-
| a-j...
|
| [3]
| https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.1999.96...
|
| [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Box_(Levinson_book)
| boredumb wrote:
| Even if we migrate all energy production from coal to solar,
| solar panels require massive amounts of coal to produce. It's
| a shell game at best.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| > solar panels require massive amounts of coal to produce
|
| I'm would prefer to not derail this thread (as I really
| wanted to focus on the existing economic solutions for
| industry transitions), but this is patently false and can
| be determined as such with 5 minutes of using a search
| engine with terms around solar EROEI (energy return on
| energy invested) and the electrical generation mix of grids
| where solar panels are produced.
| boredumb wrote:
| Coal and Quartz are used to produce modern solar panels.
| No hand waving or EROEI can negate this fact.
|
| Takes less than 5 seconds "using a search engine" to
| discover this.
| ChrisClark wrote:
| He's not disputing that, he's disputing your "shell game"
| comment. It's not a zero sum, and solar panel creation is
| better in the long run compared to burning coal.
| boredumb wrote:
| That's not what he quoted so I misunderstood. I was
| responding originally to the person insinuating that we
| need to find new jobs for people in the coal industry.
| Regardless of the energy returns, solar requires coal
| which would require people to work in the coal industry.
| dane-pgp wrote:
| Just to put things in perspective:
|
| 1. A 300 W solar panel weighs about 20 kg
|
| 2. Approximately 90% of most PV modules are made up of
| glass, so let's assume (incorrectly) that the other 10%
| (i.e. 2 kg) is PVC
|
| 3. It takes three pounds of coal to create one pound of
| polyvinyl chloride (PVC), so 6 kg of coal
|
| 4. 127 GW of new solar capacity was added in 2020, which
| would require 127 GW / (300 W / 6 kg) = 2,540,000 tonnes
| of coal
|
| 5. Global coal production in 2019 is estimated at 7.9
| billion tonnes, which is 3110 times more than is needed
|
| 6. The coal mining industry employed 42,117 people in the
| United States in 2020.
|
| Therefore if that number of people could be scaled down
| linearly with the amount of coal, to cover just the
| production needed for solar panels, less than 14 people
| would be needed to work in the US coal industry.
|
| [1] https://ecowowlife.com/solar-panel-
| dimensions/#300w_monocrys...
|
| [2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/201
| 8/05/23...
|
| [3] https://solvoltaics.com/much-coal-make-solar-panel/
|
| [4] https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Apr
| /World-...
|
| [5] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-
| resources/minerals-minin...
|
| [6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/215790/coal-
| mining-emplo...
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| It will be interesting, but I'd guess the "near instant" part
| is wrong. Goods need to be moved around - trucks are in
| constant use. It will take a long time to retro-fit trucks or
| manufacture new ones. It will still be positive ROI to have a
| human driving an existing truck for years. Taxis is harder and
| could happen faster, but I'd still bet it's a 5-10 year
| process.
| boredumb wrote:
| Short of a decades long infrastructure project, there won't be
| any driverless cars outside of a few small areas of a few
| cities.
| tomc1985 wrote:
| The unemployment part really concerns me. We are going to be
| automating so many people out of jobs and there is going to be
| no work or only minimum wage jobs out there for them. Whatever
| field the majority of them train to will be slammed with pay
| cuts as a glut of new workers gets added to the pool.
|
| We really need to start implementing universal basic income
| dalbasal wrote:
| >>but has any government yet started planning for the
| relatively near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi
| industry
|
| Let me put it this way.... How often do any governments have a
| plan for changes *beforehand?."
|
| Almost every western country saw "deindustrialization" at some
| point, predictably cutting off whole cohorts from wages,
| pensions and lifestyles. None had a plan.
|
| They watched Walmart behead high streets and then watched
| Amazon behead the survivors. No plan. War is, arguably, the
| thing we plan and provision for the most. Wartime refugees
| always seem to take us by surprise.
|
| I'm sure someone somewhere, in theory, had a plan for a
| pandemic. But when it happened, a whole lot seemed to be off
| the cuff.
|
| Stuff happens, then we plan and react. At best.
| amelius wrote:
| We have a plan for climate change.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Given that climate change is already well underway, it
| looks more like a wishful attempt at reaction than any kind
| of plan.
| asdff wrote:
| I think you overestimate government planning and the amount of
| infrastructure that will actually be built. For example,
| assuming autonomous vehicles will get signal preemption, when
| not even city buses get even signal priority today.
| throw8383833jj wrote:
| Right now there is a vast undersupply of truck drivers and it's
| only getting much worse within the next few years. There's so
| many truck drivers just about to retire. One presentation
| called it a truck driving apocalypse.
| givemeethekeys wrote:
| What will happen: - Truckers will go out of work in very large
| quantities. - They will go into other trades. - Many won't.
| Crime may go up if we don't figure out how to create more jobs
| for the type of people who chose trucking.
| dogman144 wrote:
| No, I don't think anyone with the possible means is preparing
| meaningfully.
|
| Yang did a good job of grokking the implications, but he wasn't
| taken very seriously and his messaging wasn't great I think.
| But the crux of it was solid - "XX thousand mid 30's truckers
| w/ iffy education all out of work, and that work was one of the
| last solid, fairly high paying long term jobs that demographic
| could land so how happy will that demographic be?"
|
| Buttigieg is a smart guy and he might be thinking about it per
| his DoT seat, but I haven't followed his takes on it if they
| exist. Watching some of the cybersec-focused hearings and
| comments from Ben Sasse also seem to indicate technical
| awareness.
|
| Overall, I do think some of the more tuned-in politicians have
| read some Jaron Lanier though based on the policy ideas that
| nod in this direction I've heard about and how they mirror his
| writing. He doesn't paint a great mid-term picture (tldr a lot
| of unemployment) but long term he offers some interesting ideas
| on how there might be a positive landing - data-aggregators
| collapse under the weight of their own data management costs
| vs. ability to really parse it well for profit ("siren
| servers"), automation/internet taxes which open up a UBI based
| on the robot labor, that sort of thing.
|
| This sounds really cynical and ageist but I do think we're in a
| standstill until Buttigieg and his generation are the senior
| leaders. Even breaching the surface of the pretty good
| certainty of what you describe (to include the sci fi -> real
| life mapping trend you mention, which I agree with) when
| watching these tech hearings makes me think we have some time
| to wait.
| emkoemko wrote:
| what do you mean 10 years? i remember Elon saying to buy a
| Telsa in like 2018 because in a year it would make you 60,000 a
| year by being a robo taxi? this has not happened?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I still get a chuckle out of the Elon fans who thought for
| some reason a huge fleet of robotaxis would somehow make them
| rich instead of become an instant race to the bottom on
| prices.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| 10 years is a pipe dream. It will be much slower. And you seem
| focused only on the easy cases, when it's the hard ones that
| will make it such a slow transition.
|
| Long haul drives are the edge case, last-mile trucking won't be
| anywhere near the first thing to get automated, people aren't
| suddenly going to want to sleep in their car to do overnight
| trips, etc. The biggest future change to fuel stops is
| electrification, not automated cars.
|
| Consider for a moment that Waymo is very early into the "hey,
| we are allowing driverless rides on _very well mapped_ roads! "
| situation. How many years have they been almost at that point
| already? Now put that together with the typical R&D timeline
| for a new car (perhaps 6 years plus or minus), and the average
| lifespan of a car (11 years and climbing, last I checked). No
| manufacturer has legitimate driverless cars in the production
| pipeline. We're quite a lot farther than 10 years from seeing
| _any_ consumer driverless cars on the road, much less a
| significant enough number of them to worry about 'two-tier'
| driving experiences. The EV transition is going lightning fast
| by comparison.
| gitfan86 wrote:
| If you are saying that people will still be driving cars in
| 10 years, then yes you are right. I wouldn't be surprised if
| 100 years from now there were still roads where it was legal
| for humans to drive cars.
|
| But we should expect that this transition will be very
| similar to the transition from horses to cars. The first cars
| were unreliable and unsafe and didn't work well on roads
| designed for horses. But as cars improved the advantages
| quickly became huge and demand for horses dropped quickly.
|
| The same situation is happening with Tesla. FSD is unreliable
| and unsafe today but once it hits an inflection point the
| advantages are so big more and more people become willing to
| accept the downsides.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| I remain skeptical. The differences between horse and car
| were dramatic. An automated car is still a car. I suspect
| it may have as many downsides as upsides, to be honest
| (similar to things like Uber making traffic worse, not
| better, counterintuitively).
| gitfan86 wrote:
| True, the first order effects can be worse in some ways.
| Horses can easily go off road and step over obstructions
| and cars cannot.
|
| The big deal is the second order effects. Cars can driver
| 50 MPH so we build highways and now we can have suburbs.
|
| For autonomy it means that logistics systems can be
| centrally planned and programmed like never before with
| no need to factor in the human costs or restraints around
| sleeping, stopping for food, etc. Then the third order
| effects of that are very hard to predict
| spideymans wrote:
| >An automated car is still a car
|
| Early cars were designed as [carriages with the horses re
| moved](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseless_carriage).
| It would not be until many years later until we saw car
| designs that leveraged the unique technological
| advantages of horseless cars to deliver designs that
| looked and functioned nothing like horse-drawn carriages.
| We're still at this stage with automated driving.
|
| As automated vehicles become more commonplace, we'll see
| designs that leverage the inherent benefits of automaton.
| For example, we might see designs that essentially
| function as moving living rooms, bedrooms or meeting
| rooms on wheels. We might see other designs that resemble
| small busses, where groups of people travelling to
| geographically proximate locations can carpool into a
| single automated vehicle. Heck, we might even see
| something like moving diners on wheels (potentially
| serving several clients at once), because why wouldn't
| you want to eat a hot breakfast in the "car" while on the
| way to the airport or work.
|
| Once these new designs and use cases become commonplace,
| people in the future will view our car designs as
| increasingly archaic and restrictive (just like how we
| view horse-drawn carriages today).
| megablast wrote:
| Hopefully cars are banned soon.
|
| So we can put an end to all the death they cause, and the
| pollution they create.
| darepublic wrote:
| seems like waymo is ahead of tesla now, just gleaning from
| the articles I read on HN. and because tesla only uses
| cameras and not lidar I don't know if this is a temporary
| situation or something more fundamental
| Seattle3503 wrote:
| I am a bit petty. After my last speeding ticket in a small
| drive through town I thought to myself "In a decade or two,
| these police departments will need to find a new way to fund
| themselves"
| mejutoco wrote:
| I will believe self-driving car is near once I see truck
| drivers automated. If truck-driving cannot be profitable (with
| the advantage of no breaks, unlike humans, and a semi-fixed
| route) how could a personal vehicle or taxi be profitable? It
| seems it could be one of the first places to optimize. Trucks
| are so expensive, so they could be early adopters.
|
| I still think your prediction is too optimist. IMO (I admit,
| based on gut feeling) either we won't have it or the goals will
| have changed and it will only work in special roads (almost
| like rails for trains). See you in 10 years (if hn still
| exists!)
| mc32 wrote:
| Also high-jackings. Not sure if automation would encourage it
| or discourage it. It's not a big problem presently but who
| knows... trains in LA were getting looted in their yards.
| jordanpg wrote:
| If industry leads regulation on this, I predict a Challenger-
| like disaster that sets the self-driving industry back by
| decades. A fatal school bus collision or something like that.
|
| I hope the companies making these things are calculating
| margins for safety, tripling them, adding triple failsafes for
| everything, and not compromising on any safety standard, ever.
|
| But we all know they aren't. There's far too much money at
| stake.
|
| If there ever was a case for the government to proactively
| apply standards, this is it. Yes, there would be a delay, but
| it would be worth it, measured against the psychological and
| legal damage that will occur _when_ (not if) the unthinkable
| occurs. Given probability p, and sufficiently large N and t, it
| is inevitable.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| There's already been an industry-shaking accident that led to
| vast reforms in regulation and program design: the Elaine
| Herzberg crash.
|
| I can't speak to every company in the space (and I can think
| of a couple that don't seem to have much in the way of
| safety), but all of organizations I've worked for are very
| diligent about safety and looking to improve. N > 1 here, so
| they exist.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That crash did not have the kind of effect on the
| perpetrators that it should have had.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| Neither did the challenger disaster. Both are
| continuously (and somewhat tediously) referenced in the
| introduction to every safety-related discussion,
| alongside therac-25 for software talks and the martian
| orbiter for units library talks.
| sebzim4500 wrote:
| I don't think a single fatal school bus collision will do
| much. After all, there are fatal collisions with human
| drivers all the time and yet there is very little public
| support for banning human drivers.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| We can't live without human drivers, though. We can
| absolutely live without automated cars. And when it becomes
| clear that corporate greed drove some cost-cutting choice
| which made the automated car less safe by design, it will
| be the kiss of death for the technology.
| munk-a wrote:
| I, personally, am waiting for the first self-driving car flash
| mob where everyone on 4chan decides to order a taxi to pick
| them up at mission & embarcadero (as an example) to swarm and
| DDoS intersections - or try to route a lot of requests to an
| intersection cut off by a parade. If self-driving cars were a
| thing last year do you think antifa folks would order a bunch
| of cab pickups for key intersections in the middle of the Jan
| 6th march?
| simsla wrote:
| Sounds like a thing you can do with Uber already.
| munk-a wrote:
| Humans would error correct - if there are too many uber
| drivers in the area already new drivers would drop the ride
| request. I think if you managed to remove all humans from
| that process you'd be able to get some truly bizarre
| scenarios.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Hopefully governments do what they do best; get out of the way.
|
| There will still be plenty of jobs for drivers for the next
| 10-20 years. We'll see a mix of people retiring early,
| retraining, and switching into support and operational roles.
|
| Out legal system is extremely flexible and will easily
| accommodate self driving cars. It already handles more complex
| ownership issues related to product liability.
|
| There won't be a problem with fake taxis just like there isn't
| problem with fake mail delivery (delivering bombs for the
| "lols").
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| >Hopefully governments do what they do best; get out of the
| way.
|
| I really don't want a world in which governments get out of
| the way of food regulation, building codes, and other such
| things.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| Well I didn't say they should always do nothing. They are
| just better at getting out of the way than solving problems
| in most cases. Sometimes the issue is that nobody else has
| the incentives or means to solve a problem (climate change,
| food safety)
|
| Reorganizing the economy around trucker job displacement is
| not something the government needs to be involved in.
| JaimeThompson wrote:
| Providing worker retraining & job placement assistance
| isn't the government getting out of the way. They are
| humans and they will need assistance so we should provide
| it.
| la64710 wrote:
| On top of all these , this particular announcement is nothing
| close to a commercial launch. It is like this forever beta
| phase where only Waymo engineers are getting picked up and
| nothing different than a thousand other startups that are
| running autonomous cars in SFO along various spectrum of
| autonomy.
| TheDong wrote:
| > * Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for
| "lols".
|
| Some of the other points seem legitimate, but this one seems
| silly.
|
| It's trivially easy _now_ for someone to sign up for uber and
| drive people to random locations, and that doesn't happen.
|
| Presumably, with driverless taxis, we'll still have the same
| level of assurance we have now (use the app, app tells us a
| license plate for a valid car, that's the one you get into).
| Right now, you can get a driver who misbehaves, or uber could
| get hacked and send incorrect dropoff locations. In a
| driverless world, only the second attack matters since the
| chance of a malicious driver is gone.
| freedomben wrote:
| This is (hopefully) overly cynical, but having worked in and
| closely with politicians in the past, I highly doubt it.
|
| There are surely interest groups and think thanks that are
| working on the problem, and they will (if they don't already),
| have some legislation either ready to go or close to it.
|
| The politicians won't even think about it until it becomes an
| actual problem that threatens votes, and when they do start
| caring they will just take whatever they can get from
| friendly/trusted think tanks and try to ram it through. The
| bills will be thousands of pages long and practically nobody
| will read them before voting for them.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| Good. Law should always lag social consensus. The power of
| the state should not be thrown around at the behest of
| unaccountable experts or a razor's edge majority. It should
| require the support and consent of the bulk of the people.
| HWR_14 wrote:
| > Law should always lag social consensus.
|
| Oh fuck no. Social consensus is too slow. Look at the
| social consensus that tracking was bad followed expert
| consensus by like a decade, and really only started
| appearing after EU regulation.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| The "experts" also thought if Vietnam went communist the
| whole continent would. The "experts" gave us the war on
| drugs. The fatherless black household and the lazy black
| man weren't stereotypes until the "experts" tried to help
| minorities.
|
| How many lives are you willing to ruin and how much blood
| are you willing to spill getting things wrong? The power
| of the state shouldn't be thrown around on a whim or
| subject to subject specific industry fads and circle
| jerks.
| eptcyka wrote:
| I don't believe that there's a right answer that will fit
| all cases here - for issues like same sex marriage, you
| can find all permutations of social acceptance and lawful
| acceptance all over earth, yet I think it's hard to
| justify any position besides lawful and social
| acceptance.
| jjoonathan wrote:
| So if you don't touch the lever on the trolley you aren't
| responsible for the millions of people it plows through
| on the default track? Uh-huh. Keep telling yourself that.
|
| Look, I invest in companies that stand to benefit in this
| transition and I want my stonks to go up -- but I'm
| horrified by the apathetic excuses people toss out to
| rationalize ignoring the externalities. Strengthening the
| safety net is the _least_ we can do. "What if we get it
| wrong?" sounds an awful lot like "it's gonna cost money
| and I don't want to pay" to my ears.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| History is littered with the stories of people who
| thought the end justified the means. The 20th century
| eugenicists thought they were improving humanity. The
| people who tried to civilize the natives with
| Christianity thought they were saving them from eternal
| suffering. The "if the .gov doesn't get involved things
| will go to shit and you'll be sorry" stuff you are saying
| is basically what people who were ardent proponents of
| things like restrictive zoning were saying and we all
| know how well that worked.
|
| I'm not saying don't do anything. I'm saying it's more
| than ill-advised to get the vast resources of the modern
| state involved in things on the whims of "experts"
| because hubris abounds.
| freedomben wrote:
| I think you and GP are both right. The Trolly Problem is
| legit and real. OTOH humans (especially those exercising
| any sort of power) are grossly incompetent, arrogant, and
| good at leaving trails of suffering behind them.
|
| I also think you're not really disagreeing. GP is talking
| about specific implementations while you are talking
| about high level philosophy.
| ffggvv wrote:
| saw this same comment 10 years ago..
| dham wrote:
| It's becoming very clear that we'll have to solve general
| purpose AI to solve self driving completely.
| mbesto wrote:
| > I know we'll have driverless cars within ten-years
|
| _If_ we get driverless cars (meaning there literally isn 't a
| steering wheel), it may happen within 10-years BUT only for
| last mile stuff (or vice versa for trucking). It won't be an
| overnight event. We won't see truly driverless vehicles across
| the board for decades, if at all.
|
| TL;DR - It won't be as instant as you think.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Are there examples of a government seeing a large shift coming
| and preparing well for it? I guess there's be fewer because
| they might not mention it after the fact, but...
| thehappypm wrote:
| There is a labor shortage. Shifting labor from essentially low
| productivity things like overseeing gas stations to other
| industries is better for the economy.
| boredumb wrote:
| "Anybody who can go down 3,000 feet in a mine can sure as
| hell learn to program as well... Anybody who can throw coal
| into a furnace can learn how to program, for God's sake!"
| reaperducer wrote:
| _There is a labor shortage. Shifting labor from essentially
| low productivity things like overseeing gas stations to other
| industries is better for the economy._
|
| Only if you believe that every person is equally able and
| qualified to perform every other job that exists in an
| economy.
|
| People aren't cogs, and they're not universally
| interchangeable, no matter what the economic textbooks would
| like people on the internet to believe.
| ydlr wrote:
| > People aren't cogs
|
| Exactly. They are extremely adaptive, capable of learning
| and doing many things. Sure, not everyone can do
| everything, but there are also no purpose-built humans
| capable of only one job.
| thehappypm wrote:
| Sure, but the labor demand is also large and spans a wide
| gamut of skills. Someone who used to be a gas station
| cashier can certainly find work elsewhere.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > People aren't cogs, and they're not universally
| interchangeable
|
| People aren't, but humanity is...meaning those drivers
| might not adapt to new work, but at least their children
| will. The Luddites had huge problems with obsolescence, but
| their kids got by OK. A social safety net could take the
| edge of the transition rather than just delaying the
| transition indefinitely.
| nevir wrote:
| On the trucking side of things, I think it'll actually be a
| positive for the industry in the short term (a decade or two),
| before the jobs really start to dry up.
|
| Rail freight will probably be impacted by automated trucks
| sooner than road freight, weirdly enough.
|
| My guess about the industry's progression:
|
| * Automated trucks take over long haul routes (e.g. highway
| driving) between major distribution hubs, and previous long
| haul drivers move to middle and last mile routes.
|
| * Shippers begin to shift freight away from trains and towards
| trucks (because price of trucks goes down, speed of delivery
| goes up)
|
| * Automated truck centric freeways (or lanes) begin to show up,
| allowing for higher density and speeds of truck traffic. Price
| further falls, volume increases. More jobs created in short and
| medium haul trucking to handle increased volume of things being
| shipped.
|
| * Automated trucks begin to be able to handle medium haul
| (inner city between warehouses), jobs start declining.
|
| * Automated trucks begin to be able to handle short haul (last
| mile), truckers are a truly dying breed at this point.
| munificent wrote:
| This sounds like slowly reinventing trains, but worse.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| A lot of people in America suffer from car-brain. Car
| infrastructure is the only thing they know.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| Conversely, a lot of people in smaller, denser countries
| suffer from anti-car-brain, and don't appreciate the
| difficulty implementing comprehensive public
| infrastructure on an America scale.
| 1270018080 wrote:
| And those difficulties are imaginary. If I wanted a high
| speed public rail line throughout Florida, a dense,
| narrow, flat state that's the size of a small country.
| Where is the scale challenge?
|
| Europe and America are about the same size. Why aren't
| you concerned about European scale? Why does it matter
| how your brain pictures administrative boundaries?
| smoe wrote:
| Wouldn't it be faster for the autonomous trucks to go on
| autonomous trains in-between major hubs then drive off to do
| the last mile?
|
| Might require a built up of rail infrastructure and I don't
| know the limits of freight trains in general, but seeing
| passenger trains, going 2-3x faster than road speed limits I
| reckon while maybe not by as much, freight trains could still
| go quite a bit faster than driving the trucks long distances.
| marcusverus wrote:
| Once the driving is automated, what would prevent us from
| having a "fully" automated package delivery infrastructure?
| The roadblocks that come to mind (Box & labeling
| standardization, warehouse automations like
| pickers/packers/unpackers) all seem like much simpler
| problems than automated driving.
|
| I may be grossly oversimplifying the issue :)
| reaperducer wrote:
| _has any government yet started planning for the relatively
| near-instant transformation of the Trucker and Taxi industry_
|
| I can't say for taxis, but according to the newspapers, Texas
| has been running automated tractor trailers between Dallas and
| Houston (about 230 miles) for at least a year, and at least one
| other state has been doing it for at least two years. (Possibly
| Nevada, between Vegas and either Reno or Phoenix. But my memory
| is fuzzy on that, and I have zero confidence in Google.)
|
| Texas has also been thinking about building special lanes or
| highways just for automated tractor trailers.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That is in my opinion the way to go with this, to either
| adapt the infrastructure to make it work or to at least
| separate the self driving traffic and the 'normal' traffic so
| the two won't interfere.
| dont__panic wrote:
| > special lanes or highways just for automated tractor
| trailers.
|
| I know that there's last-mile advantages to this compared to
| what already exists, but god damn I just cannot get over the
| fact that we've just reinvented trains with a much larger
| environmental impact.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| but they're cheaper _at first_
| clairity wrote:
| the way to think of these is as instantly reconfigurable
| trains. in an ideal market, an enterprising entreprenuer
| would be able to install tracks on the most used routes and
| lower costs (and emissions). but we've long succumbed to
| corruption and financialization in markets (note that if
| risk is priced properly, capital wouldn't need to evaluate
| opportunities deeply, but would rather take every NPV-
| positive project available, in order of expected returns,
| in a large and diverse enough portfolio to mitigate
| systemic risk).
| tintor wrote:
| You forgot: * risk of cyber attack instructing all vehicles in
| one fleet to accelerate, steer into groups of pedestrians, or
| drive off bridges
| tonmoy wrote:
| This looks exactly like a comment I saw around 2008. In all
| seriousness, I don't think it makes sense to waste resources on
| planning for autonomous vehicles as it is not guaranteed
| (probably not even likely) to have them in the near future
| zjaffee wrote:
| Lowering the cost of driving doesn't mean there will be less
| jobs in the transportation space, if anything it means there
| will be more jobs.
|
| Truck drivers jobs are the monitor and secure the shipment just
| as much as anything else. Taxi drivers have to keep their cars
| clean.
|
| And a lower cost of shipping will just mean that more stuff
| gets shipped in what would otherwise be a less efficient way,
| no different than how faster computers often just lead to less
| efficient software design.
| [deleted]
| daenz wrote:
| The clip at 0:42s impressed me https://youtu.be/O8TSA-X9UlU?t=42
| because the behavior seems to be trying to "edge in" and assert
| fairness, which is what humans expect of each other in these
| situations.
| akira2501 wrote:
| There's a huge danger in trying to anthropomorphize these
| systems too much, unless you believe there really is a
| "fairness" model built in. If not, then we shouldn't try to
| understand what it's doing in these terms.
|
| A problem I spotted is, shortly after that turn, it sees the
| person ahead trying to parallel park... and then it give them
| several car lengths of distance while it waits. It's waiting so
| far back that the vehicle behind it couldn't fully clear the
| intersection.
|
| That's not particularly "fair" of it to do that.. nor is giving
| such a large space to the parallel parking particularly useful
| or expected. I do not have high expectations for a road filled
| with this level of barely autonomous agents operating smoothly
| en masse.
| spupe wrote:
| This is a major landmark. Excited to see the results.
| atx42 wrote:
| Trucks that drive highways solely automatically, I'd expect would
| come way before cars navigating cities. I'd think trucks could
| just pull over on the shoulder in unusual conditions, e.g. bad
| weather, construction.
|
| I suppose it's more a legal issue. Cars just need permission
| within a city, whereas trucks cross lots of legal boundaries?
| adam_arthur wrote:
| That's been the confusing thing for me. I'm sure automated
| trucking is being worked on, but all the media/conversation
| seems to be around consumer vehicles.
|
| Automated trucking is a much more impactful, and frankly easier
| problem to solve. You could simply automate highway part and
| have manual take over near cities to remove 90% of the
| challenge.
| redytedy wrote:
| There's also a perception challenge that doesn't exist in
| cities. At highway speeds and longer stopping distances, you
| need your perception stack to see much further. Still an active
| area of research.
| phendrenad2 wrote:
| I'm hoping that self-driving trucks result in separate highway
| lanes, or perhaps even dedicated roads. A road just for self-
| driving trucks wouldn't need a passing lane, or a breakdown
| lane (if a truck breaks down, someone can be dispatched to fix
| it, and it's okay if the whole roadway of autonomous trucks
| comes to a stop).
|
| (Yes I know, I've just reinvented trains, but trains would
| likely coexist with this, and they serve different purposes
| (trucks are better at going over mountains, for instance))
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| With some minimal standardization, these could also drive
| with almost zero distance between each other, braking
| together. This would significantly reduce air resistance and
| road space usage.
| belter wrote:
| Anything that changed radically since 2021?
|
| "Waymo and Cruise self-driving cars took over San Francisco
| streets at record levels in 2021 -- so did collisions with other
| cars, scooters, and bikes" [1]
|
| "...Many of the accidents, which the companies are required to
| report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, occurred
| while the vehicles were operating in manual mode, with a safety
| driver in control.
|
| ...But according to an analysis by Insider, a majority of the 98
| reported accidents in 2021 occurred while the vehicles were in
| autonomous mode, or within seconds after the autonomous mode
| technology had been switched off..."
|
| [1] https://www.businessinsider.com/self-driving-car-
| accidents-w...
| grandmczeb wrote:
| Can't read the article because of the paywall, but just because
| an accident "occurred while the vehicles were in autonomous
| mode, or within seconds after the autonomous mode technology
| had been switched off" doesn't mean the collision was the car's
| fault. The real question is how many of those accidents would
| have been prevented if a human was driving.
| shkkmo wrote:
| I'm not sure what you are getting at? As that article notes, in
| 2021 accidents only doubled while the autonomously driven miles
| more than tripled?
|
| Waymo has been scaling their level of testing with their level
| of safety. What has changed is that Waymo think they are safe
| enough to start doing more widespread testing in SF without a
| safety driver.
|
| This seems to be a strong counter to all those who were
| claiming that level 4 self-driving cars would be limited to
| flat, dry climates for the forseable future.
| consumer451 wrote:
| I recently learned of Wayve via Pieter Abbeel's interview of Alex
| Kendall.
|
| This seemed like the first real contender for Tesla in my view.
| Would love to hear everyone else's take.
|
| https://www.therobotbrains.ai/who-is-alex-kendall-wayve
| sytelus wrote:
| Wayve pushes very hard on what is called "end-to-end" approach.
| That means, you input sensing into the deep network and out
| comes the controls. No ifs and buts. When it came out on 2017,
| no one I knew believed that it can possibly work with
| reasonable reliability to actually put things in production.
| Deep learning is simply not there. You can converse with GPT-3
| and find few great example to cite but within few tried you
| will encounter things which don't make sense. Deep learning is
| a great component to provide pattern recognition but there are
| still a lot many more pieces such as memory, abstractions,
| compositions etc that we have no idea how to do it. The pattern
| recognition can certainly emulate those pieces to certain
| extent but it's not the same thing. Consequently, E2E self-
| driving only using current state of deep learning is unlikely
| to produce something beyond video clip demos.
| jeffbee wrote:
| One thing I am glad for is the presence of Waymo in SF has
| upgraded the detail on Google Maps in that city. Every curb,
| sidewalk, marked crosswalk, and other feature of the streetscape
| now appears in Google Maps. It's really improving. Compare:
|
| https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/37.76628/-122.46048
|
| https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7663897,-122.4603632,19.6z?h...
|
| Google Maps has this level of detail in. S.F. and Phoenix, their
| two self-driving launch cities, and not in other places like say
| Denver or Charlotte, so I surmise this data is attributable to
| Waymo.
| dntrkv wrote:
| Oh wow I didn't realize they have the trees marked on the maps.
| That's pretty cool.
| ra7 wrote:
| Do you happen to know if this is because of Waymo? I've always
| wondered how much of a feedback loop there is between Waymo and
| Google Maps. They've never officially confirmed anything and I
| can't find any literature on it.
| advisedwang wrote:
| I got the impression that the extra data is not collected by
| Waymo, it's collected by ariel photography and streetview
| cards. However it is in a sense _because_ of waymo - they
| need to collect this additional data to provide the best maps
| to the autonomous cars.
| gundmc wrote:
| According to their blog post[1], this is done with satellite
| imagery and not Waymo data.
|
| [1] - https://blog.google/products/maps/google-maps-101-ai-
| power-n...
| jeffbee wrote:
| Interesting. If true, I wonder why the highly detailed map
| of Chandler AZ ends abruptly at the boundary of the Waymo
| One service area.
| habi wrote:
| OpenStreetMap has all the curbs, sidewalks and crosswalks, too.
| They are not _rendered_ in OSM Carto [1], but show up in the
| data, when you click on the edit link, or load the region in
| JOSM [2].
|
| Here's a screenshot of the region in JOSM
| https://share.getcloudapp.com/X6uEexZo, and here in iD [3]:
| https://share.getcloudapp.com/7KuQPyLg
|
| The benches are even mapped with their 'viewing direction' and
| color :)
|
| [1]: The standard style on osm.org:
| https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
|
| [2]: The powerful editor for OSM data:
| https://josm.openstreetmap.de
|
| [3]: The editor behind the 'Edit' button on osm.org:
| https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD
| AvAn12 wrote:
| Is anyone thinking about "road neutrality" issues, such as: -
| Tiered priority: can people pay up to give their autonomous ride
| priority over others? - Differential access: can certain
| neighborhoods be made inaccessible to Avs originating in certain
| other neighborhoods? Or only accessible to friends and families
| of residents? (virtual gated community / virtual redlining)
| hammock wrote:
| Good social credit score? The fast lane opens up for you (or
| you pay a lower toll).
| dymk wrote:
| This isn't really a set of "problems" that don't/couldn't exist
| already with human driven cars. You can already pay to use the
| HOV lane in some places, gated communities already exist, etc.
| AvAn12 wrote:
| I'm thinking more like an algorithmic bias, which we have
| already seen in retail and banking ML/AI systems. Virtual
| version of how taxis won't serve certain neighborhoods or
| pick up certain people based on appearances. How do we ensure
| that autonomous vehicles don't surreptitiously implement
| biased behavior like this?
|
| And I think it's actually a problem if it's possible to pay
| up for expedited routing. Implementing faster car travel for
| rich people is not the same as HOV lanes.
| dontreact wrote:
| I'm curious on the HN community opinion on whether Cruise is
| ahead of Waymo in SF, or if Waymo is just more careful and has
| spent less time training models specific to SF, but will expand
| to a fully public program sooner
| avthrowaway35 wrote:
| My take as someone in the industry, but at neither of these two
| companies:
|
| Cruise is limited (by their own choice) to operating between 11
| PM and 5 AM. Waymo is operating at all hours of the day. That
| alone indicates a much greater level of confidence in their
| capabilities. The complexity of driving in a busy street in SF
| at daytime is dramatically higher than at night, especially in
| SF, which tends to be pretty sleepy after hours. Note that both
| companies avoid driving in SOMA, FIDI, and other challenging
| parts of the city.
| [deleted]
| wutbrodo wrote:
| Cruise is running _driverlessly_ at nighttime. Like Waymo,
| they're driving autonomously 24/7 around San Francisco, just
| with a safety driver.
|
| This new announcement doesn't specify their driverless hours.
| I suspect that they would have highlighted it if they were
| the first to be driving around SF in the daytime, just as
| they highlighted the first of being driverlessly deployed in
| multiple cities.
|
| My guess (also in the industry) would be that Waymo combines
| Google's incredible technical skill with Google's incredible
| incompetence at focused execution. This is why they haven't
| had a milestone in a couple years since their deployment in
| Phoenix. I also think that this combination of strengths and
| weaknesses is a good fit for the AV industry.
| avthrowaway35 wrote:
| They include footage of their drive without a safety
| operator and it's in the middle of the day.
|
| https://youtu.be/O8TSA-X9UlU
| jeffbee wrote:
| I wonder what the little icon is that the Waymo viz is
| putting on top of those double-parked cars.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| I'd guess you answered your own question. It's an icon of
| a car next to some car-shaped blobs, so "double parked"
| or "stopped in a traffic lane" sounds like a good guess.
| wutbrodo wrote:
| You are correct, and it says so in the article. Really
| not sure how I missed that. Sorry!
| jdavis703 wrote:
| At this point, being let's say a "transportation safety
| activist" in the Bay Area, they seem about the same.
|
| That said, I've seen Waymo still being too cautious relative to
| Cruise. Like I was waiting on the crosswalk with my bike at a
| 45-degree angle, and Waymo seemed terrified that I was going to
| bike diagonally through on-coming traffic. It was kind of
| hilarious.
|
| That said when I've tried to test the safety parameters on
| Cruise while on my bike or skateboard and the system has called
| my bluff. I don't know if this means Cruise is less safe. Or
| they've found a way to give the AI a sense of confidence and
| assertiveness against people using micromobility to
| aggressively bypass urban traffic congestion.
| bckr wrote:
| > Or they've found a way to give the AI a sense of confidence
| and assertiveness against people using micromobility to
| aggressively bypass urban traffic congestion.
|
| I'm looking forward to mass robotics.
|
| I'm not looking forward to corporate dark patterns in mass
| robotics.
| spikels wrote:
| I live/work in SF and signed up for both Cruise and Waymo yet
| have never been able to get an actual ride. As best I can tell
| almost everyone getting rides from these services in SF are
| employees or specially selected. Neither is available the
| general public.
|
| Waymo's "Waymo One" app makes you fill out a pretty extensive
| questionnaire to sign up and suggests they will do some kind of
| checks about the other members of your household. Filled out
| rather invasive info out yet still no access.
|
| Cruise makes you fill out a simpler form but puts you in a cue
| to get the actual app. Know several people who have filled it
| out but none have gotten the app.
|
| So far no actual robotaxis in SF.
| hamandcheese wrote:
| This is not very scientific at all, but I see Waymo and Cruise
| cars driving around SF all the time. Waymo cars appear to drive
| much more naturally than Cruise to my eyes.
| exhaze wrote:
| Can you give some examples? I feel like perception of safety
| will be a big adoption gap. What made the Waymo cars appear
| more natural?
| hamandcheese wrote:
| It's hard to put my finger on any specific thing, and it
| may even come down to the fact that I see a lot more Waymos
| than Cruises, and have also seen Waymos around SF for much
| longer (or at least noticed them for longer).
|
| I feel like Cruises are a bit more cautious, to the point
| of making me skeptical. But again, I'm struggling to think
| of any example in particular.
|
| This might be silly but I also think the Cruise cars are
| much more ugly.
| exhaze wrote:
| I wonder if it's something like the "bozo bit"? Once you
| see one Waymo car doing something that looks unsafe, your
| entire perception of "Waymo car" becomes (nearly
| irreversibly) lower.
| ra7 wrote:
| 1. Cruise only operates between 10 PM and 6 AM and under 30
| mph. Waymo operates all day without an artificial speed
| restriction.
|
| 2. Waymo's service area in SF is more than twice that of
| Cruise's. Unsurprisingly, both of them avoid downtown areas.
|
| 3. Waymo has hundreds of vehicles in San Francisco. Cruise only
| has a fraction of that -- last I heard, only <10 of them were
| providing driverless rides.
|
| 4. According to CA DMV 2021 disengagement data, Waymo is
| driving almost 3x more miles than Cruise.
|
| Waymo seems to love a slow and steady approach, but when they
| announce a service it's fully featured as we've seen in
| Chandler, AZ.
| jeffbee wrote:
| I don't think it's fair to say that either Cruise or Waymo
| avoid downtown areas. Cruise cars come pouring out of their
| depot at Van Ness and California nightly at 10pm, like bats
| or something. That's not downtown but it's in a very dense,
| very busy area. Cruise's offices are in SoMa where Dropbox
| used to be, and I see tons of Cruise cars in the vicinity of
| Folsom/Embarcadero. I also see Waymo working Embarcadero on
| both sides of Market, which _is_ downtown.
| ra7 wrote:
| Oh yes, they test in downtown areas. I meant they avoid
| them for their public beta program rides.
| silentsea90 wrote:
| Sounds like Google. Slow, steady and more reliable.
| dymk wrote:
| Reliable?
|
| https://killedbygoogle.com/
|
| It sounds like Waymo, sure, but not like Google. There's a
| reason they're separate companies.
| fshbbdssbbgdd wrote:
| Google tends to explicitly kill projects they don't want
| to maintain instead of letting them languish. This
| strategy has obvious disadvantages, but it does mean that
| their products are usually reliable (until they get
| killed).
| dymk wrote:
| Okay, in that case we're talking about the reliability
| (in the sense of uptime/bugs) versus reliability (in
| terms of Steve? Oh yeah, he's reliable!).
| ehsankia wrote:
| Considering Waymo has had almost a year of no-one-in-driverseat
| service in Phoenix, I would say they are overall ahead, even
| though that's not in SF specifically. Being first to driverless
| in SF also shows that. They are definitely taking things very
| very carefully, as they know a single major accident is all it
| takes to set them back years.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The first to driverless in SF was Cruise, who's had a public
| driverless program running there for a few months, albeit at
| night.
| avthrowaway35 wrote:
| I think it's "public" in air quotes - technically non-
| Cruise employees have taken rides, but it doesn't seem like
| they're pulling people organically from the waitlist. It's
| mostly local influencers or Cruise investors in the few
| videos I've seen that aren't Cruise employees.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| They're pretty limited by the number of vehicles they
| have available and resources to support them. Even
| employees have trouble accessing the program due to the
| lack of vehicles and the waitlist is in the tens of
| thousands of people. I imagine they prioritized
| influencers or actual users since they can't possibly
| meet total demand.
| spikels wrote:
| Waymo is "public" in the same sense. The general public
| can't just request a ride.
| ehsankia wrote:
| People who have zero connection to Google or Waymo have
| gotten in the program and used the service for months.
| Waymo also removed any sort of NDA allowing people to
| post videos of the full experience, hence all the videos
| on Youtube. Lastly, I would still say "10 PM and 6 AM at
| a maximum speed of 30 MPH" is quite a major restriction
| compared to what Waymo can do.
| lvl102 wrote:
| Any studies on traffic and congestions with regards to autonomous
| cars? I'd imagine it would be fun to simulate something like
| this.
| RankingMember wrote:
| Edit: I'm wrong, misread the context of the quote. Please
| disregard the below. Thanks to the people who double-checked me!
|
| Despite the claims of "no human driver behind the wheel",
| there'll still be what amounts to a driver, they're just calling
| the person a "specialist" instead of a "driver":
|
| > Just as we've done before, we'll start with Waymo employees
| hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the wheel, with
| the goal of opening it up to members of the public via our
| Trusted Tester program soon after.
| avthrowaway35 wrote:
| Some of the rides going forward will include safety drivers,
| but no, this announcement is about how they took the
| "specialist"/driver/human safety operator out of the car for
| the first time in San Francisco.
|
| Edit: looking at the full context of that quote, they're
| talking about their plan for removing the safety driver in
| downtown Phoenix.
|
| >Our commitment to Phoenix and the community there remains
| strong, and we'll soon be expanding to another area: Downtown
| Phoenix. Just as we've done before, we'll start with Waymo
| employees hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the
| wheel, with the goal of opening it up to members of the public
| via our Trusted Tester program soon after.
| RankingMember wrote:
| You are correct, thanks for double-checking me. Updated my
| comment to indicate my error.
| jefftk wrote:
| I think you're misreading the post? I'm interpreting that
| sentence as being specifically about the Phoenix expansion:
|
| _" Our commitment to Phoenix and the community there remains
| strong, and we'll soon be expanding to another area: Downtown
| Phoenix. Just as we've done before, we'll start with Waymo
| employees hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the
| wheel, with the goal of opening it up to members of the public
| via our Trusted Tester program soon after."_
|
| (Disclosure: I work for Google, a sibling company to Waymo.)
| RankingMember wrote:
| You are correct, thanks for double-checking me. I've updated
| to my comment.
| Lamad123 wrote:
| They know their socks will get a hit so they do stunts like
| this!!
| greggman3 wrote:
| Just 2 days ago I saw a waymo car stuck at 4th and Townsend in SF
| facing NE (toward the bay). The car was in the left of 2 lanes.
| The light for the left lane turned green. The car sat there.
| People behind started honking. Eventually it went. Not if there
| was a driver or not.
|
| In the driver's defense (computer or human), SF's signals have
| gotten very complicated in the last ~10 yrs and even non-robot
| drivers fail to follow the rules about 20% of the time. 3 places
| I can see this happen every day are (1) 4th and Townsend on
| Townsend facing NE (the one above). The issue is the left lane
| has a green light but the right lane has a separate right turn
| signal because there is a bike lane further to the right that
| gets green first. Sit at the corner and I guarantee within 10
| right turning cars someone will turn on red.
|
| Similarly, 5th and Bryant on 5th going NW (into the city). This
| has a similar deal. There's an on ramp to the freeway but it has
| a separate right turn signal from the green forward signal. This
| one, for me, is around 100% violation by which I mean I've never
| NOT seen a violation at the corner. Not ever car, but ever signal
| at least one car will turn right on to the freeway even though
| there are 2 large no right turn lights and a green bike light.
|
| The last is 4th and King, on 4th going SE facing the bay. I'm not
| sure these are technically violations. The left lane is painted
| as left turn only. The right as right turn only. The middle lane
| crosses King. Again, this is close to 100% for at least one car
| per signal ignoring those markings. I don't blame them as there's
| no way to see the markings until you're just a few car lengths
| from the intersection and if there are other cars there you can't
| see them at all. Further, looking up the law, solid white lines
| are just guidelines. It's legal to cross them. (double white are
| not). Still, people in the center lane get angry and honk when
| people in the left or right lanes cut them off since they weren't
| expecting it.
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