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Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

nytimes.com

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Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#11

Post by waterlesscloud »

ghaff wrote: post #8
seibelj wrote: post #2

I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

Pretty much. All the summon-a-robocar with an app in 5-10 years predictions seem to merrily ignore all the edge cases having to do with weather, direct driver interactions (e.g waving someone out into traffic), construction, parking in unmarked spaces, etc., etc. I have little doubt that autonomous highway driving for example is both achievable and desirable but a lot of folks extrapolate that to the more general cas…

The people developing Google's autonomous car say it will be available for consumers in four years.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#12

Post by koenigdavidmj »

seibelj wrote: post #2

I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

You are still not applying equal measures to the Google car and a hypothetical human driver. Your standard for humans is the current rate of accidents. Your standard for the Google car is absolute perfection. Not being in an accident. Ever. Even one caused by inattentive drivers. Otherwise, they're not ready.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#13

Post by civilian »

Heh, google is training cars to drive like grandmas.

> But the technology, like Google’s car, drives by the book. It leaves what is considered the safe distance between itself and the car ahead. This also happens to be enough space for a car in an adjoining lane to squeeze into, and, Mr. Windsor said, they often tried.

Yeah. We just don't have the infrastructure in major cities for all of us to drive safely. We've been slowly crowding our roads over the last century and we're at the point where most people are used to driving with a 1 or 2 second rule. Which isn't good, but it's how we do things.

Now I wonder if google-driven cars would actually be less efficient for LA. Sure there wouldn't be any traffic-slowing accidents, but there'd be 50% less volume traveling 20mph slower.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#14

Post by teraflop »

seibelj wrote: post #2

I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

> Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned.

You should be skeptical of drawing conclusions based on a news article's two-word excerpt of a presumably much longer comment. I seriously doubt Google actually thinks their cars will only be usable if human drivers massively change their behavior. It sounds more like an off-hand joke than a serious description of their product strategy.

> I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

Ten years ago, the best autonomous vehicles in the world could barely make it through an empty desert test track. Five years ago, they could do a reasonable job of navigating urban areas that were closed off from normal traffic. Today they drive about 50 miles per day, per car on public roads with a safety driver. It's likely not much longer before the safety drivers are considered unnecessary.

If you want to get a skewed, unreliable view of how this technology is developing, feel free to keep listening to "armchair futurists". But if you actually look at what the engineers who are working on it say, and what they've actually achieved, it's clear that steady progress is being made.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#15

Post by x3n0ph3n3 »

seibelj wrote: post #2

I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

I'm a big human-driven car skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that accident rates won't go down until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art and it's full of edge cases. Can we expect all humans to be driving artists?

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#16

Post by themodelplumber »

seibelj wrote: post #2

I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

How about something like this? You can opt to pay (e.g. hit a payment button inside your car) to enable manual, hands-on driving on a per-roadway basis. Otherwise you let the car drive in what it sees as the most efficient way, and pay nothing. When traffic problems are at their worst, you pay the most. Conversely, on an open road, no charges apply.

In addition, some multiplier involving driving conditions (rain, wind, proximity to other vehicles) and driver stats (driving record) comes into play.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#17

Post by qntty »

jerf wrote: post #5

'“It’s always going to follow the rules, I mean, almost to a point where human drivers who get in the car and are like ‘Why is the car doing that?’” said Tom Supple, a Google safety driver during a recent test drive on the streets near Google’s Silicon Valley headquarters.' This is a drum that, like privacy and encryption, we techies need to start banging hard before it's too late. The fact that laws are fundamentall…

I think you're onto something that a lot of people don't understand or don't buy into

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#18

Post by fizzbatter »

seibelj wrote: post #2

I'm a big self-driving cars skeptic. Expecting humans to "drive less idiotic" is basically saying that google's cars won't work until human drivers are banned. Driving is something of an art, and it's full of edge cases. So many edge cases. I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

> I'll just keep reading articles that say they are 5 years away, just as I did 5 years ago, and the armchair futurists will keep dreaming...

I'm quite surprised that you can be a skeptic on the concept as a whole. Being skeptical about the given timeframes is perfectly reasonable (and probably correct), but humans do so, so many things terribly. We have automated away so many tasks in our world, both for efficiency and safety, that i can't even see an argument to counter that.

To extend that further then, why shouldn't we want human drivers off the roads asap? It's a dangerous act that, frankly, many people aren't qualified for.

Self-driving cars have so much potential behind them, that being a "skeptic" seems quite confusing to me. Just because it's a difficult problem, does not warrant giving up. The safety benefits alone, are well, well worth it.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#19

Post by makeitsuckless »

Being a cyclist in Amsterdam, the lack of driver eye contact and understanding of body language is what worries me about the application of self driving cars.

Amsterdam traffic is a chaos in which pedestrians and cyclists mix with cars, and the former two frequently (some would say always) ignore the rules. Not out of some anarchistic impulse, but for mutual convenience. Especially with cyclists, for whom coming to a full stop and accelerating again is both "expensive" and risky (accelerating cyclists tend to swerve), relying on eye contact and mutual understanding of intent rather than following the rules of the road by the book results in safer and more fluent traffic.

I imagine a current generation Google self-driving car in Amsterdam coming to a grinding halt and not being able to move backwards or forwards.

But most of all, as a cyclist I wouldn't feel safe sharing the road with "drivers" with whom communicating via eye contact and body language are impossible.

To me, self-driving cars and liveable, human-scale cities are mutually exclusive, and I very much prefer the latter.

Re: Google Says It’s Not the Driverless Car’s Fault. It’s Other Drivers’

#20

Post by Flimm »

gregwtmtno wrote: post #6

I think the accident statistics are a little misleading because as far as I'm aware (and please correct me if I'm wrong) Google only operates its driverless cars in good weather conditions. Not that Google doesn't have good reasons for doing so, but the safety of these vehicles might look different if they were operated in the rain and snow.

They also only work in areas where Google already has "very detailed maps of the roads and terrain", kind of like invisible train tracks. ( http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intel... )
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