Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders • Hacker News Board

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

#291

Post by stdgy » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:26 PM UTC

monkmartinez wrote: post #222

stdgy wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've already seen price drops for the most expensive self-driving components. LIDARs, GPUs and storage have already fallen in cost, and the products aren't even on the market yet. There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production.

> There is every reason to believe these price drops will continue as more resources are put into scaling production and more companies enter the game of component design and production. Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on t…

How much does your 'top of the line' lane-staying sensor cost? How about your backup camera? How about automatic breaking sensors? How about all of the components required to integrate these sensors into your vehicle?

These are all things that started high and fell low. The historical prices for each of these systems reflects this fact, as does their gradual movement through the available product line-up. They all started in top of the line vehicles that cost well north of the average person's yearly salary, and are steadily creeping into the lowliest models.

I see nothing in self-driving systems that make them special in this regard. They're already largely an amalgamation of commodity components whose prices are trending downwards.

You can bet on them staying a niche product forever, if you wish. I just think it flies in the face of historical evidence.

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

#292

Post by bdamm » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:26 PM UTC

c22 wrote: post #284

nommm-nommm wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

What are the odds of many drunk drivers killing thousands of people? p(x)=1.0, it happens every year.

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

#293

Post by vkou » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:33 PM UTC

Ajedi32 wrote: post #269

plopz wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Same way any other business that has brief periods of high demand (electric companies, ISPs, restaurants, etc) does; you anticipate the demand and make sure you have enough capacity available at those times to meet it. With a self-driving car fleet there are probably lots of other little tricks you can do too, like offer discounts for sharing a vehicle with another passenger, or use machine learning to predict what l…

My non-ML prediction of which locations will have the biggest demand in Seattle:

People on the West Side who want to get to the East Side, and people on the East Side who want to get to the West Side. (You'd figure that maybe optimizing this would bring more value to society then making a car drive itself...) 8am-9am, 4pm-6pm. You don't need ML to figure this out - just look at a Google Maps traffic heatmap in rush hour.

Carpools, vanpools, already exist. For some reason, though, the vast majority of the cars parked on the freeway are single-occupant vehicles. I can't imagine why people aren't keen on sharing their vehicle with a stranger, or pay triple surge pricing to get home when it starts raining.

This community is highly opposed to relying on web services that they don't control... Yet it is perfectly OK with ditching their car, and instead relying on a car-on-demand service to get to and from work?

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

#294

Post by chc » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:34 PM UTC

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…

> Lack of software bugs due to careless programming

This is very much not true of humans.

> Vastly decreased likelihood of being tricked by vandals exploiting flaws in recognition algorithms

This is not particularly true of humans. The human eye is very easily tricked. It's true that there are things that would not fool us and would fool a computer, but the inverse is also true.

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

#295

Post by Houshalter » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:34 PM UTC

djsumdog wrote: post #94

tyingq wrote: post #83

Is Waymo clear about what the end goal is? I can't tell if they plan to launch an Uber like service, or a direct-to-consumer lease type service, or just to be suppliers (whole vehicles, components like lidar, software) to companies like Uber. Or maybe they are leaving all of that undecided for now? I'm not sure this rider trial thing strongly signals any of them. You would want real world end-customer experiences reg…

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…

Self driving cars solve the last mile problem. You get off a train close to your destination and a cheap self driving taxi finishes the journey.

And you could replace the train with a self driving bus. It can carry multiple people efficiently for the majority of their journey. And unlike current buses or trains, it can automatically adapt it's route based on where the occupants want to go. The buses can cooperate with the taxis to bring people to and from convenient pick up points.

The main problem with gridlock is that there is no limit to the number of vehicles on the road. There needs to be an economic advantage to things like buses that transport multiple people. A high tax on using the road in the city might work, if it could be enforced.

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

#296

Post by Animats » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:37 PM UTC

sushirain wrote: post #282

Animats wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Search Google for "Tesla disables autopilot".

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

#297

Post by joshuamorton » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:38 PM UTC

monkmartinez wrote: post #274

joshuamorton wrote: post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Why? We literally never see that with top shelf products. This isn't an arduino solder job. This is going to be an integrated software and hardware package that will rival an aircraft autopilot/navigation. Please check you facts on the cost of these things. Google claims that it dropped the price of lidar by a factor of 10x once it started producing them. That seems like a significant, factual, drop in cost.

The iPhone is how much to produce? Very important point you missed in what I wrote; Hardware and software package. A lidar without software is useless.

The price dropped from something ridiculous (~100K) to something manageable for a luxury car (~10K), and certainly reasonable as a cost offset by multiple consumers (like in a rideshare environment).

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

#298

Post by thereisnospork » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:40 PM UTC

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…

Who says you need to be the rider, and not the car owner? You could be making that $10 a ride renting your Toyota Highlander to other suburbanites when your kid's sports aren't in season? Or when you're on vacation, or at work for an 8 hour chunk? To say nothing of the convenience of a car that can drop off/pick up the little one from soccer practice on its own if you have a scheduling conflict.

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

#299

Post by tyingq » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:41 PM UTC

Houshalter wrote: post #295

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…

Self driving cars solve the last mile problem. You get off a train close to your destination and a cheap self driving taxi finishes the journey. And you could replace the train with a self driving bus. It can carry multiple people efficiently for the majority of their journey. And unlike current buses or trains, it can automatically adapt it's route based on where the occupants want to go. The buses can cooperate wit…

London has a daily fee of £11.50 to drive in their congested area. No idea how much it helps.

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

#300

Post by yeukhon » Tue, Apr 25, 2017, 7:44 PM UTC

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 crucial is data. I am not talking about training road condition, Google has been doing this for years. What is missing is traffic data. I have given this argument before on self-driving. One night a maintenance took place on a busy intersection in Flushing, NY. Police officers were asked to guide traffic. This is a planned event, but driveless car does not know; it doesn't have this data until the car shows up at the scene.

Yes, map services like Google have been receiving some data from government in addition to collecting user's current location and user's generous feedback (e.g. Waze user) to determine best route. But we are no where near the condition we can know what's happening ahead of us. What about weather condition? On intersection who goes first?

A safe driverless vehicles should be able to communicate (check, for as long as the communication is stable), and government and cars will share feedback to other cars. This is a crowd-sourcing effort to make fully autonomous car possible on road. If we just learn as we go on the road, these driverless cars will not work well in very complex road condition.