Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 411 posts

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

#201

Post by gjjrfcbugxbhf »

MarkMc wrote: post #144
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.

Actually I think Waymo is too cautious. Tesla has thousands of customers effectively acting as test drivers for their autonomous software, which allows them to collect data at a much faster rate and discover more 'edge cases' than with a more cautious test environment. 33,000 people die each year on US roads and self driving cars offer the chance to dramatically reduce that figure over time. The more aggressively we…

If you believe that self driving cars will make roads much safer you should be for lots of testing and a measured approach. It only takes a few more high profile accidents before society turns against them.

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

#202

Post by aianus »

brilliantcode wrote: post #159
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.

> 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 Sil…

What's the equivalent of animal trials for autonomous vehicles? Closed-circuit tests?

Is there any evidence that these companies haven't gone through closed circuit tests and passed before testing in public roads?

The next step in drug trials is, in fact, testing on humans and some do suffer serious injury or death. I don't think there's any way around it and the greater good of having a pharmaceutical industry at all outweighs those unfortunate incidents.

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

#203

Post by differentView »

jacquesm wrote: post #74
differentView wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>You apply here: https://waymo.com/apply/ I tried a bunch of zip codes in California, none are available. Phoenix, Arizona works though, I think they're still only testing there.

GP writes: > * Limited to Phoenix metro area for the time being.

I am the type of person that would benefit from self-driving cars. I don't pay attention.

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

#204

Post by vkou »

Ajedi32 wrote: post #199
Asooka wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting that they only let you borrow for now. Will car ownership be killed with self-driving cars? Will Waymo let you actually buy and own a car that isn't network connected and fully yours? Seeing how value extraction works in today's enterprise, i.e. via rent-seeking, I'm guessing we're headed to not owning cars any more.

> Will car ownership be killed with self-driving cars? Probably. It seems way more convenient and efficient to be able to summon a car to any location on demand than to have just one car that you use for everything. No more parking, no more refueling, no more vehicle maintenance; just push a button and a car shows up within minutes (or in some cases, seconds) to pick you up, and step out of the vehicle when you reach…

It's also more convenient to always eat out, but the world won't become a better place if home-cooking dies.

Under the no-private ownership model, you are going to get screwed by surge pricing.

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

#205

Post by stevenh »

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…

Imagine ransomware infecting your car that gives you 30 minutes to pay or you'll be rammed into a tree at 90mph. I don't care about any contrived and well-funded narratives about how unthinking, unfeeling, driverless cars will somehow save lives. No thanks, I'd rather take my chances continuing to share roads with human drivers who are careful because they fear their own death just as much as I do.

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

#206

Post by gjjrfcbugxbhf »

QuercusMax wrote: post #80
maverick_iceman wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans will do stupid things. A self-driving car has to drive safely in spite of them.

How do you avoid being rear ended at a stoplight? There may be ways to avoid some of the other types of accidents, but those ones (which have happened several times) are difficult to escape. The real question is what's the safety threshold - safer than median human? 90th percentile? 99th?

Change lanes, allow the other driver to overtake, start braking a little earlier and more gently, touch the brakes to flash brakelights let the driver behind know that you are stopping soon. All ways i deal with tailgaters in different situations - it's a judgement call though.

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

#207

Post by bertil »

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…

The case that I have heard is that the decisions will be taken (or rather have been) by a team of software engineers with problem-fixing methods that are meaningfully more efficient at getting the rate of accidents down than someone promising to themselves they’ll drive sober and well rested “next time”.

In reality, the problems encountered by cars are fairly classic and predictably where computers can be very good at: computer vision, 3d projection and modeling, project patterns, control loops (stearing vs. drifting). The beginning was expectedly bad, but is it not a stretch to imagine those solvable, just like Moore’s law and expecting cheaper electronics with mass-market “makes sense”.

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

#208

Post by stcredzero »

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…

what is the validation strategy to show where driverless cars can quantifiably improve?

One big way in which automated drivers could improve traffic: By not being a jackass. I remember at one point driving down Westheimer, which is four lanes wide and one of the major thoroughfares of Houston, when I had to slow down for someone making a right turn to merge into traffic into a middle lane while their head was buried deep into the passenger side footwell looking through their stuff.

Then, there are the people who feel like they have to tailgate you within 6 feet during rush hour traffic on the highway. Also, the people who won't let you in for some personal justice you can't possibly understand.

It would only take a smallish fraction of cars implementing the "stay between" algorithm that CGP Grey mentions in his video to significantly improve traffic.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE

I've implemented this algorithm manually. (Much easier to do since I have the instant accelerator response of an electric car.) It does seem to improve traffic flow. Also, jackass tailgaters are sometimes confused by this, and decide to pass.

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

#209

Post by Neliquat »

jimlawruk wrote: post #157
ginko wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If I bought my own car, I dont want it picking up random people. Then its just public transport, vomit and all, funded by me.

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

#210

Post by teach »

chrismealy wrote: post #121

Google's car clearly isn't going to work in the real world (can it follow detour signs? Get out of the way of emergency vehicles? Understand a cop directing traffic?). Why is Google pretending otherwise? Why are they doing this?

Google's car can already read the hand signals from bicyclists[0]. They have logged literally millions of miles of safe driving. They really aren't "pretending".

However, there are different classifications[1] of autonomous vehicles. Google's car is currently somewhere around level 3. It's true nobody has a level 4 car yet.

[0] https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/05/google-autonomous-cars-c... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification

Post reply on HN