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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

#361

Post by Noos »

monkmartinez wrote: post #339
ghaff wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm skeptical about the "no one will own" meme. That said, there's no reason cleaning would be any more of an issue than it is with Zipcar today. If you go to pickup a car and it needs cleaning, you refuse it and report the problem.

Then what? What if you have something pressing to get to? All these rideshare arguments fall flat on their face when it is anything other than "going out" without much of a timeline.

yeah, the idea that this could cause you to be late for work seems to escape people.

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

#362

Post by ghaff »

amenod wrote: post #332
petters wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, the primary use case of self-diving cars aren't personal ownership. Society as a whole wastes a lot of resources when every household has a car that stands still 95% of the time. With self-driving cars, we can plausibly improve that.

I don't really buy this argument. Most of he stuff I own is sitting idle 95% of the time (except for computer I guess ;) and it is similar with other people I know. The outcome will depend on many factors, including cost of the car, the secondary functions it will get and similar (will it become an extension of our living space?).

Heck. I have ladders/weedwhackers/etc. and other home/yard-maintenance and upkeep devices that probably sit idle for 99.9% of the time.

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

#363

Post by jliptzin »

svachalek wrote: post #254
monkmartinez wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still have $5000 personal computers in the '10s! Hell a new MacBook Pro with everything and some upgrades is $3499 to $4299... very few people can truly afford that.

That's not accounting for inflation - $5000 then was more like $10000 now. And a bare-bones minimum machine for running business software (i.e. no color graphics or floating point hardware) was still close to $2000 (more like $4000 in today's dollars). So, roughly speaking a maxed-out gaming rig today is about as affordable as a bare-minimum box in 1990, without even accounting for the massive difference in absolute…

That's the point

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

#364

Post by sxates »

Noos wrote: post #322
gfodor wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: why is cost such a common argument made here against emerging tech? This argument seems to come up every time some new expensive technology is transitioning closer to consumers' hands, and the current price, which is obviously expected to go down at scale as it does for nearly all widely useful technology, is used as evidence nobody will be able to afford it. I've seen this argument made for technol…

But this doesn't always happen. We have yet to see any electric car reach the price of a low-end kia or hyundai.

In 10 years electric cars will be the cheapest cars. We're at the beginning of this transition right now, still in the early-adopter stage.

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

#365

Post by cromwellian »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #252
cromwellian wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The waymo cars have more sensor data and do more local computation than anything out there. Instead of saying Waymo relies on map data, I'd say they have a defense-in-depth solution that integrates a multitude of different sensors and databases. Do you want a system that only works on forward facing vision? Or only lidar? Or only gps and road databases? Or only machine learning? We know all of these have holes and bl…

Surely your employer would state or demonstrate their cars as being capable of a long-distance trip if they were technically capable of doing so. Bear in mind, with this announcement, they aren't even committing to "it works in the Phoenix metro area". There's that "parts of" statement, that indicates that only parts of the area is mapped and hence the cars are only capable of operating in parts of the Phoenix metro…

You're making lots of evidence free statements due to your anti-Google bias that have little basis in reality. You seem to think that Google is using less machine learning than Tesla. Think about what you're saying, Google, the company which uses machine learning for everything, whose long demonstrated the ability to read street signs and crowdsourced massive ML data on it using Recaptcha, and which makes purpose-built self driving vehicles is doing less than Tesla, whose self-driving capability was an after-thought, the vehicle was not designed from the get-go for Level 3 or 4 capability.

How would Waymo possibly build a car with Level 3 or 4 capability if they weren't doing a hellava lot of onboard visual field processing? Accurate maps data won't let you deal with bicyclists or pedestrians properly, it won't deal with all kinds of hazards.

There's a reason Waymo cars are festooned with LIDAR and cameras and other HW in a giant boxy minivan, and it isn't purely for show to make them ugly on purpose.

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

#366

Post by sxates »

onwchristian wrote: post #235
notahacker wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could significantly improve it now with more Zipcar type apps (at least in cities where people live close together) but the most people want guaranteed access to a vehicle at 8am and 5:30pm weekday situation isn't easily solved just by making them mobile when not in operation. Nor - at least in the short term - is people's tendency to use cars, and especially cars with no previous owners, as a status symbol (many…

Agreed. I also think another big reason for personal car ownership is having kids. With the increasing ages/weights recommended and/or required by law for car seats, that can be a hassle if trying to use a ride sharing service. It increases difficulty with increased number of kids at varying ages. For those without kids, while it's not crazy difficult to install a car seat, it can still take upwards of 5-15 minutes (…

Lots of people are single. Lots of people's kids are grown. Lots of people could own one car for the kids stuff and car-share the second vehicle as needed. Even with private ownership for cases like children, the total number of cars on the road could decrease considerably.

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

#367

Post by sxates »

ghaff wrote: post #362
amenod wrote: post #332

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't really buy this argument. Most of he stuff I own is sitting idle 95% of the time (except for computer I guess ;) and it is similar with other people I know. The outcome will depend on many factors, including cost of the car, the secondary functions it will get and similar (will it become an extension of our living space?).

Heck. I have ladders/weedwhackers/etc. and other home/yard-maintenance and upkeep devices that probably sit idle for 99.9% of the time.

If your ladder could deliver itself to someone for $10/hr. (or a ladder could be delivered to you on demand) I suspect we'd have a lot less ladders.

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

#368

Post by ilaksh »

Fifer82 wrote: post #107

I would like to see little leased pod cars which trundle around at the local speed within a certain range, and have the ability to go to a Bus Lane (I presume the bus is dead), and join a Magnetic Track of sort where they go 200 miles an hour. That would be pretty amazing. Why they are sticking shit all over 2 ton vehicles? If they are solving Fuel and Emissions and Driver, can't they just take the final step of a re…

I think the size of vehicles is related to safety features and mass being safer in collisions in addition to the expectation for capacity.

But I agree the it is ludicrous to continue with these massive vehicles if we can find a way to move forward. I think the other massive vehicles present a safety hazard to small vehicles so you may need to separate them physically.

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

#369

Post by sxates »

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!…

Your arguments make no sense.

1. A Tesla with full self-driving hardware can be had today for ~$75k. And the model 3 will cut that in half. And the model after that will be even less. Millions of people can afford this.

2. Who said anything about retrofitting old cars? As far as I know, nobody is planning to do this.

3. This isn't a requirement, and it won't happen all at once. The plumber with an old F150 will continue to drive as he always has until the cost/benefit makes sense for him to upgrade.

4. Self driving tractors move at 3mph, and I don't think farm-field traffic fatalities are the big driver behind automated farming. Different use case.

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

#370

Post by jdietrich »

Noos wrote: post #355
jdietrich wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's just following a list made for it, albeit a fairly substantial list. You're operating on a completely archaic understanding of AI. Modern systems can and do adapt to situations on-the-fly. What's more, they can adapt on aggregate - the experiences gathered by a single car can be shared to all cars. Very quickly, every car in the fleet will have billions of hours of cumulative driving experience. The overwhelmin…

I don't think so. I think when you introduce computers to anything, you add more edge cases, not less. They are just different ones though. And I'm also skeptical about the quality of this software once it hits an actual mass-market. People here are assuming high levels of rigor when for all we know, it could be similar to Android in the long term.

>I don't think so. I think when you introduce computers to anything, you add more edge cases, not less.

That's sort of my point. Accidents are rarely caused by edge cases, but by predictable human failures. All the information needed to avoid the typical accident was plainly available, but the driver just didn't see it, process it or react to it appropriately. Driving is generally very predictable, but human attention and perception is hugely fallible. An AI that gets the basics consistently right but occasionally freaks out in an unpredictable situation would be a huge improvement over human drivers.

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