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Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

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Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#151

Post by ghaff »

monkmartinez wrote: post #133
omg_ketchup wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well for one, you don't need to own your car. You just use it. If you (or anyone you know) owns a traditional automobile, it sits unused for 90% of its life. In a driveway, on the sidewalk, in a parking lot, etc. You pay for 100% of the car, but only use 10% of it. If you could rent it out to others ('the grid') while you're not using it, they would share some of the burden, lessening yours. They make things safer be…

You know there is a whole legion of jobs that require a vehicle? All construction jobs for example. Most service techs require a bunch of expensive tools and need a secure place to keep them on site. The list literally goes on and on... Can an hunter ride share the pacifica out to the forest with his/her hunting gear? How about bicyclists? People with kids know about activity shuffling... I am not sure that sharing w…

Once they're available (and I see no reason not to continue thinking that door-to-door self-driving is decades out), the ownership question definitely gets interesting. But I don't think it's as obvious as some think in part for the reasons you say.

Furthermore, a lot of people use their cars at the same time of day. It's also the case that a lot of auto depreciation is mileage-based rather than time-based (especially in non-snowy/salty environments).

The questions others raise about the maintenance/update requirements for these sorts of vehicles are interesting ones.

My guess is that, like Zipcar and Uber, they will make a difference at the margins but won't cause a wholesale shift. But who knows? Especially if, as I believe, this happens over a number of decades with demographic shifts happening in parallel.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#152

Post by rhino369 »

monkmartinez wrote: post #139
rhino369 wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The additional hardware and software will be expensive as hell to develop, but once it's invented, the marginal cost should be fairly cheap compared to the price of a car. processing power = cheap software (marginal cost) = just gotta pay for updates and fixes sensor package = expensive now because nobody is making 6 million of them a month. Once they do, it'll be a lot more affordable. That doesn't mean it'll pay of…

> The additional hardware and software will be expensive as hell to develop, but once it's invented, the marginal cost should be fairly cheap compared to the price of a car. Go talk to a pilot and ask them about Garmin products and the autopilot of their plane. Also ask them about update the software on these devices. Ask how much money they are asked to fork over for software... Have a look at the self-driving tech…

Yet its cheap enough that every commercial plane has it and every tractor has it. Sure they'll try to take their pound of flesh but not to the extent it would make the products affordable.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#153

Post by monkmartinez »

jonmc12 wrote: post #146

Am I the only one feeling the press + big tech narrative of "driverless vehicles = safety" is way ahead of itself? OK, "driver error is blamed for 94% of crashes", but what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve? In 2016, Philip Koopman of CMU discusses that there are non-trivial engineering challenges of achieving safety in NHTSA Level 4 vehicle automation: https://users.ec…

No you are not! HN seems to think the same way, and it is one of the worst cases of rose colored glasses I have ever witnessed. What about the cost? Who is going to be able to afford this? Also, what about people that rely on a vehicle for work? Retrofit $75K work trucks with another $75K in self driving gizmos? Find me a practical plumber, carpenter, A/C, lock smith, self-employed guy/gal that will sign up for that!

Edit to add... Have the crazy expensive and downright hostile self-driving John Deere tractors eliminated farming deaths?

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#154

Post by maxerickson »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #143
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #10

Is there really a race to build self-driving cars? It seems that Waymo is eons ahead of everyone else.

I would argue Waymo is way behind everyone else, but the fundamental point is that companies like Tesla and Comma.ai and most of the car companies have a totally different approach than Google. Namely, that Google relies heavily on their mapping services to make their cars work. This makes a lot of sense for Google, because of self-driving cars require their mapping data, there's a big new market for them. The maps t…

Google was detecting bicyclists making hand signals 4 years ago. I don't think they are as map dependent as you are arguing.

There is also the possibility that having a detailed map accelerates progress (better automatic scoring of sensor based modeling systems).

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#155

Post by adrianN »

foolfoolz wrote: post #78
aianus wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla for shipping something.

I think you slept through an ethics class

There are different kinds of ethics.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#156

Post by notahacker »

jacquesm wrote: post #125
skuzye wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regular software, yes, they crash all the time. But I would think these systems would be more safely handled. For example, nuclear energy, air traffic control, bank systems and automated train lines don't crash nearly as often, for example. Being such an important feature (not crashing) it shouldn't be ignored. I am also skeptical but we have examples of reliable systems so I believe they can work.

> nuclear energy, air traffic control, bank systems and automated train lines don't crash nearly as often, for example. Bank systems crash with great regularity. Source: worked for a bank, customer of a bank. Industrial systems and anything related to flight is typically much better from a design point of view than your average bit of firmware. Redundancy is built in from the first day and all failure modes are teste…

Also, all of these are much simpler problems than fully-autonomous operation of a vehicle on a regular road surrounded by other users, which involves teaching the system how to deal with an enormously long list of edge cases.

I don't envy people tasked with balancing the need for self-driving car software to be able to handle a sufficiently large number of possibilities to consider eliminating the driver with the need for it to have a small surface area and sufficient degree of tractability to be able to minimise bugs.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#157

Post by jimlawruk »

ginko wrote: post #137
djsumdog wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder this about autonomous cars in general from any company. They're cool tech and in Europe, they can really help solve several last leg problems and cut down on car ownership (I really don't think people should be able to own self driving cars. They really need airplane style maintenance for sensors and companies need to work together so all fleets have the latest safety and security updates). However I don't r…

> I really don't think people should be able to own self driving cars. They really need airplane style maintenance for sensors and companies need to work together so all fleets have the latest safety and security updates Couldn't this be solved as easily as you car telling you that while you're at work it will head over to the repair shop to get its sensors checked up?

More importantly, while you are at work, it pick ups other riders. Which is why people won't need to buy these cars.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#158

Post by monkmartinez »

rhino369 wrote: post #152
monkmartinez wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The additional hardware and software will be expensive as hell to develop, but once it's invented, the marginal cost should be fairly cheap compared to the price of a car. Go talk to a pilot and ask them about Garmin products and the autopilot of their plane. Also ask them about update the software on these devices. Ask how much money they are asked to fork over for software... Have a look at the self-driving tech…

Yet its cheap enough that every commercial plane has it and every tractor has it. Sure they'll try to take their pound of flesh but not to the extent it would make the products affordable.

Are you serious with this reply? It is obvious that you do not know very much about the cost of these systems. It is pointless to continue.

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#159

Post by brilliantcode »

aianus wrote: post #54
pythonaut_16 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a lot of respect for Waymo's approach to this. While Tesla and Uber have both just recklessly (imo) jumped in and started setting loose self driving cars and making bold claims, Google/Waymo has really taken a slow and measured approach and given great care to making sure their cars are actually safe.

Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla for shipping something.

> Killing a few extra people today to bring self driving cars to market faster could actually save more lives in total. I have much more respect for Tesla for shipping something.

There's no evidence to suggest that is the case. If anything, Tesla has made it more dangerous to assume that it's safe and falsely autonomous.

When you create new drugs, the FDA definitely doesn't look to kindly on people who think like Silicon Valley. "Killing people is product testing" won't fly in pharmaceuticals.

I'm glad that we don't have people like you designing drugs for the masses!

Re: Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders

#160

Post by ghaff »

maxerickson wrote: post #147
tyingq wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume a lease program with baked in maintenance costs and a lockout if maintenance is skipped would suffice. Edit: And I assume the car could drive itself to preventive maintenance appointments if it's something that can't be done OTA.

Or just decertify outdated systems. I guess "DRM" for self driving cars is something people will complain about, but for vehicles that have controls it doesn't seem real horrible to have an autonomous system do a check to see if it is still licensed. There could be an emergency override if the person that needed the vehicle didn't know how to drive, an override that automatically issued a fixit ticket.

The thing is that today the average age of cars on the road is something like ten years. Many people don't and many people can't afford to buy new vehicles. They may not have the money to deal with that fixit ticket which probably has to be handled by a licensed service station with a lot of fancy equipment.

So, if all this comes to pass, you'll end up with a system where the wealthy lease or ride-share their self-driving cars while the plebes are stuck with trying to keep their manually driven clunkers running.

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