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

281–290 of 411 posts

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

#281

Post by ForHackernews »

monkmartinez wrote: post #153
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!…

> Retrofit $75K work trucks with another $75K in self driving gizmos?

Absolutely they will. That's [at least] $60K worth of driver's salary/benefits costs you've just eliminated. $75K is cheap to eliminate the cost of a human employee.

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

#282

Post by sushirain »

Animats wrote: post #194
MarkMc wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Tesla no longer sells cars with automatic driving capability. The hardware is there on newly shipping cars (although the sensor suite is weak) but it's not active. There's a lawsuit.[1] It's unlikely that Tesla gets much useful data from vehicles. To debug a vision system, they'd need the camera data from all the cameras, and that's too big to upload over the cell phone data link. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bro…

I couldn't find a reference to this:"Tesla no longer sells cars with automatic driving capability." Can you point to one?

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

#283

Post by MarkMc »

plopz wrote: post #255
Ajedi32 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

How do you solve the issue of extreme demand M-F at 8am and 5pm and low demand any other time?

Same as Uber does now - surge pricing and car pooling.

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

#284

Post by c22 »

nommm-nommm wrote: post #266
stevenh wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You're not looking at the whole picture here. What's your odds of being killed by a drunk/inattentive/inexperienced driver vs odds of being killed by randomware? Road fatalities are already the number 1 killer of some age groups, its estimated that over a million people worldwide die on the roads every year. Around 40,000 in the US last year. If we trade 40,000 road deaths for 10,000 ransomware deaths, it's a massive…

What are the odds of a single drunk driver killing thousands of people?

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

#285

Post by scottlegrand2 »

MarkMc wrote: post #228
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 it's April 2018 and Waymo releases this statement: "In the past year our autonomous cars have driven a total of 50 million miles in real-world conditions. Over that period there were 4 collisions, plus an estimated 12 which would have occurred if our trained staff in the drivers seat had not intervened. Insurance analysts estimate that if human drivers had driven under similar conditions there would have been…

That depends on the nature of the collisions. Are those 4 fatal accidents vs 51 fender benders? The devil is in the details, not the executive summary.

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

#286

Post by smlacy »

michael_storm wrote: post #268
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" human will beat an L4 car hands-down: * Lack of software bugs due to careless programming. * Millions of years of brain evolution allows adapting to unforeseen circumstances. * Vastly decreased likelihood of being tricked by vandals exploiting flaws in recognition algorithms. * Inability to be hacked en masse and driven into each other/houses/pedestrians. * Much…

You seem to be under some delusion that a vehicle purchased in the year 2017 doesn't have any software in it, and isn't fully electronically actuated (steering, brakes, throttle)

They sell these features as "parking assist" or "smart cruise control" or similar, but don't kid yourself into thinking that there's not a very sophisticated software system that could, if hacked, take over control. Has this ever happened? Have there been catastrophic bugs documented?

More advanced vehicles (i.e. Tesla) have enough hardware to be be nearly fully autonomous today. (i.e. they could rend control from a driver and continue to pilot the vehicle to an alternate destination if hacked)

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

#287

Post by weaksauce »

aetherson wrote: post #270
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

Quick, what's the reaction time for Waymo's driverless cars? Support your answer with evidence. For extra credit: describe what the reaction time is for Waymo's driverless cars are during various points of the garbage collection cycle. People here have a tendency to imagine an idealized version of driverless cars and assume that actual driverless cars are the idealized versions of those cars, and then compare the ide…

> we could imagine putting enough sensors on the vehicle that it truly has 360 degree awareness and visibility. But we do see real cars in the real world that have surprising blindspots.

Not sure I see the point you are making... all cars have blind spots with drivers now. Human drivers are always blind to the spots they are not looking at the moment anyway. I can imagine cars being much safer than they are now.

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

#288

Post by 31reasons »

aetherson wrote: post #270
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

Quick, what's the reaction time for Waymo's driverless cars? Support your answer with evidence. For extra credit: describe what the reaction time is for Waymo's driverless cars are during various points of the garbage collection cycle. People here have a tendency to imagine an idealized version of driverless cars and assume that actual driverless cars are the idealized versions of those cars, and then compare the ide…

>>Waymo's driverless cars are during various points of the garbage collection cycle.

you can say the same thing for rockets. There is entire field dedicated to this, its called Realtime Systems.

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

#289

Post by self-diversity »

monkmartinez wrote: post #273
Qwertious wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Serious counter question; Why is nobody talking about cost? Cars are very expensive... is self-driving tech going to increase or decrease the cost of a vehicle? Do people generally want more freedom or less freedom choice?" Because you don't need to own the car - you could feasibly rent one on demand (like a taxi), since you can now rent a car without the necessary wage overhead of the taxi driver, or the minimum co…

I live in the suburbs. I have a family with two grade school kids that participate in seasonal team sports and year-round gymnastics. They attend a charter school with no school bus system. Let's say each ride cost $10... that is $20 to $40 per day just for the kids on most weekdays. Add in birthday parties, saturday games, doctor/dentist, trip to grandma/grandpa that live 7 miles away... and we are talking $1000 per…

Your lifestyle is being subsidized by the negative externalities your transportation causes that you don't pay for, so it's not a great argument against advancing technology, because your comfort only matters to you.

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

#290

Post by 1123581321 »

aetherson wrote: post #270
smlacy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your argument is about the same as "Humans can calculate arithmetic perfectly accurately, why do we need computers to do it for us?" There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down: * Reaction time. * 360 awareness / visibility. * Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles) * Keeping perfect sp…

Quick, what's the reaction time for Waymo's driverless cars? Support your answer with evidence. For extra credit: describe what the reaction time is for Waymo's driverless cars are during various points of the garbage collection cycle. People here have a tendency to imagine an idealized version of driverless cars and assume that actual driverless cars are the idealized versions of those cars, and then compare the ide…

You've asked an interesting question. I can't find a good source on what is the range of reaction times for autonomous vehicles. However, in the test videos I've seen, they appear to be human-level or better. For reference, human reaction times (to start braking) are typically between .5-2 seconds. It's difficult for humans to react to anything in under .25 seconds.

I don't think it's controversial to say that machines can easily beat those human reaction times.

Most or all autonomous vehicle software is written in C++, so garbage collection shouldn't be an issue. Of course, these programs need to be tested carefully and extremely before we trust them.

Post reply on HN