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Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

wsj.com

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Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#51

Post by Yhippa »

nostromo wrote: post #6
stcredzero wrote: post #2

In the early 2000's, I was hanging out sometimes in western North Carolina, and there was this young woman who has in the habit of getting together with some friends and driving around the clock to get to Colorado and back on short trips, instead of flying. I'm wondering if this technology isn't going to be used for such purposes.

If I could get in my car, read a bit and fall asleep, and wake up in Las Vegas from San Francisco, I'd prefer it over flying every time. But this has more to do with how air travel has become miserable than anything else.

This could create a whole new class of car as well. Would be cool to see a more modern VW Westfalia.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#53

Post by chc »

teod wrote: post #34
vonmoltke wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I mentioned in a previous thread some time ago, where does this notion of self-driving cars suddenly meaning shared cars come from? To some people these things seem to be joined at the hip.

To me, it seems like the incentives to own a car may not be so great once self-driving taxis are available, especially in the city. No need to worry about parking, insurance, maintainence, or gas.

Those features are already present in human-driven taxis.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#54

Post by oblio »

adekok wrote: post #14
TrevorJ wrote: post #4

The real problem with self-driving cars is the car to human handoff. Over the long term it's incredible unlikely that humans will be any good at all at remaining aware and 'up to speed' on the current situation in the event that the car needs to give control back to the driver due to road conditions, hardware failure, or sudden situation that it cannot contend with.

Normal desktop failure modes don't work well here. "Hi, this is your car. I've discovered that the road is icy, and am currently in the middle of a 360. Would you like to (a) take over, (b) call an ambulance, or (c) retry?" Too late! You've crashed.

A very old joke (circa 1997, when Clippy was introduced):

Two engineers are arguing: a mechanical engineer and a software engineer.

The software engineer brags:

If we were the ones making cars, they'd go twice as fast as they do now and they'd use half the fuel!

The mechanical engineer replies:

Yes, but if you'd want to break in case of an emergency you'd get a pop-up saying: Are you sure you want to break? Yes/No/Cancel.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#55

Post by notJim »

collyw wrote: post #17

Is it legal to let these cars drive themselves?

My friend has a Tesla, and he said it's the same as cruise-control. Basically, it's an assistive feature, but you are still 100% totally responsible for anything your car does while you're at the helm. I don't know if you count that as driving itself or not, since you still have to do most of the things you do as a driver (i.e., pay attention, react to situations.)

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#56

Post by notJim »

ph0rque wrote: post #45
collyw wrote: post #17

Is it legal to let these cars drive themselves?

Yes: http://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-autos-selfdriving...

That's referring to fully-autonomous cars. With systems like the one in this article, the driver is still the human, not the car.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#57

Post by hmahncke »

mikeash wrote: post #31

The article really wants to compare with electric vehicles, for some reason. The subheading says "they are being snapped up faster than electrified vehicles." This is repeated in the article, which says the relevant options packages "are being snapped up at a far higher rate than electrified vehicles." Discussing the Q50's technology package and how many buyers opt for it, it says "That’s three times as many people w…

I noticed the same thing, and my guess is that the WSJ is generally dismissive of climate change risk, and against government incentives to combat climate change, and wanted to frame this article as what the government should be doing instead of encouraging hybrid/electric vehicles.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#58

Post by ipsin »

I'm curious about whether this is going to be a net win or lose for safety.

If users treat these automated cruise systems as a "magic self-driving device" when it can potentially make mistakes or hand back control when it's confused, drivers are going to die.

If people "really want to look at their cell phones", and they take this as the tool that lets them pay no attention to the road, it better be up to that task.

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#59

Post by AnimalMuppet »

naasking wrote: post #39
TrevorJ wrote: post #4

The real problem with self-driving cars is the car to human handoff. Over the long term it's incredible unlikely that humans will be any good at all at remaining aware and 'up to speed' on the current situation in the event that the car needs to give control back to the driver due to road conditions, hardware failure, or sudden situation that it cannot contend with.

> or sudden situation that it cannot contend with. The idea that humans are any better at handling situations they've not previously encountered is dubious.

Well, if you have an inference engine or something, and there's a situation that it hasn't encountered before, but there are sufficient rules to derive a solution, it may do pretty well. But if it's a completely novel situation, AIs of any flavor tend to fail pretty spectacularly.

Humans also can fail spectacularly. But they also can just try something, realize quickly that it isn't working, and switch to trying something else. An AI could do the same, of course. But humans are better (at the moment at least) at eyeballing the situation and realizing that the current approach isn't working. (Or so it seems to me.)

Re: Honda's $20k Civic LX now offers self-driving capability for highway use

#60

Post by Animats »

From the article: "as long as lane markings remain visible and another vehicle is in front of the car." That's more like platooning, which was demoed two decades ago in Demo 97 [1], than self-driving. Are there more details about how this works, especially about autopilot disconnect and user takeover? Tesla's system is known to have trouble with offramps.[2] (Tesla customers are very forgiving. "It's a beta", one says in their forum.)

Honda's follow-the-leader system avoids some of Tesla's problems. Radar systems for not rear-ending the car ahead are already pretty good, and many are already on the road. Lane following by lane markings isn't that reliable, but restricting it to following the car ahead handles traffic jams nicely while locking out most of the hard cases.

The deployment of self-driving systems which are much dumber than Google's is worrisome. I've written before of the "deadly valley" of automated driving. This is another "deadly valley" system. The deadly valley begins where the driver can take their hands off the wheel and tune out. It ends where the automated system can correctly handle more situations than a human driver.

Google is trying hard to get to the far side of the deadly valley. That's good. Look at the problems they're having. Their only known fender-bender in autonomous mode was when the vehicle was trying to deal with a drain blocked with sandbags and very slowly maneuvered around it, to be hit by a bus, while in a wide lane at a right turn, because the AI misjudged the likely behavior of the bus driver. Google's dealing with the hard edge cases. Cruise, on the other hand, ran into a parked car in San Francisco when the autopilot lost lane tracking, veered left, overcorrected right, and the driver took back control too late. That's a more basic failure.

It also shows the problem with semi-autonomous systems. Expecting the driver to compensate for failures of the automation will not work.

Volvo Car Group President and CEO Håkan Samuelsson says that the company will accept full liability whenever one of its cars is in autonomous mode.[3] He has it right. This needs to be a requirement before the "move fast and break things" crowd gets on the road.

nonmarked-ramp [1] http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/.../pavements/... [2] https://forums.teslamotors.com/de_DE/forum/forums/careful-wh... [3] http://fortune.com/2015/10/07/volvo-liability-self-driving-c...

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