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Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

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Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#421

Post by eof »

Joeri wrote: post #406
eof wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes they are different. They are also WILDLY different value propositions. Crash prevention is nice, just getting safer and safer is nice--though I personally wouldn't stop driving ~$5k cars for even "really good" crash protection. But a car that can drive me while I sleep and become a Taxi while I work is something I would go into debt for.

But a car that can drive me while I sleep and become a Taxi while I work is something I would go into debt for. I don't think most regular people will actually own fully autonomous cars to rent them out. Big players will do the capital expenditure to buy a fleet, and rent out transportation service. Renting in uber style will be basically the price of owning, but without the up-front capital expenditure, and it will…

Certainly if most people owned them, there wouldn't be a market to rent them out.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#423

Post by eighthnate »

dperfect wrote: post #57

I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will r…

Until we get a very generalized form of AI, I think cities will have to be remodeled to assist self-driving cars. Places like NYC ( manhattan ) can be easily converted into a self-driving car city given it's grid-like layout and I can easily see china building cities around the idea of self-driving cars.

I don't think the technical aspects are as difficult for the 99.99% of the cases. It is the 0.01% of unknowns that will be difficult to overcome. But we can minimize that by modifying or building cities specifically for self-driving cars.

The most difficult part I think is the legal/regulatory issues.

This is why I see self-driving cars taking off in china/asia first before the US. They'll probably limit it to city limits initially. And when the technology is mature enough, broaden it to the entire country.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#424

Post by cmurf »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #384
cmurf wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Planes aren't automated mostly for technical and infrastructural reasons, the exact opposite of what you stated. The social worry of pilotless airplanes inhibits the massive investment that would be required to solve the technical and infrastructure limitations of the existing system.

There are very few technical and infrastructure issues remaining. No such investment is necessary. https://jonathannen.com/captain-ai.html

Really? No investment at all? At least it's a falsifiable statement.

Denver International Airport has 10 runways. Only three have ILS CAT IIIc approaches, and that is the only instrument approach procedure that permits full autoland in zero visibility. So you're saying it's completely OK to have 1/3 utilization of the airport's runways for automated landings.

Oh and, those three runways? 34L, 34R, 35R. They all point north. So you can't do auto landings to the east, west, or south. Due to wind direction, your planes won't be able to land on quite a few days out of the year, at all. And in fact the wind could shift while a flight is enroute and now where does it go? All of a sudden the required alternate may be insufficient because a simple wind shift, rather than a change in visibility, becomes the new metric for whether a plane can land or not, and whether the alternate is legal.

This is one logical flaw. There are thousands of these. Totally surmountable, with metric tons of money. But you said no investments necessary.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#425

Post by koffiezet »

dperfect wrote: post #57

I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will r…

I absolutely disagree. Self-driving cars are complex, but not unmanageable.

> What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will require the refinement of innovations that probably haven't even been invented/researched yet.

Like what? Object detection/recognition? Better sensors? Path/trajectory prediction? Vehicle control? Sensors and processing/unifying their data? The hardest part is letting all these building work together, and then produce a mass-production product from it, but we do have the base technologies, companies like Google, Tesla and Volvo have proven already that.

The problem comes down to software, and Toyota has the problem that it's a hardware-focused company. In the car-industry, just like in any industry, software will become more and more important, and Toyota - just like many other car-companies - simply doesn't have an answer here since they don't understand it.

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#426

Post by [deleted] »

ChrisLTD wrote: post #297
enugu wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would not be too costly to augment roads with electronic signalling devices which give information to the software in cars. This information can do what signboards or traffic signals do for humans. The difficult part - when there is an error in these signals, or things shut down, autonomous cars will suffer much bigger problems than human driven cars. Its these edge cases that are the problem. We already rely on s…

> It would not be too costly to augment roads with electronic signalling devices which give information to the software in cars. Sounds costly to me. There are a lot more roads than airport runways. And then the big question is: Who is going to pay for it?

[deleted]

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#427

Post by kyrra »

1_2__4 wrote: post #266
dperfect wrote: post #57

I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g., making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality, making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize is that full autonomous driving will require more than just faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will r…

Every time this gets brought up here people scoff. Nobody seems to be willing to notice that tech companies have for quite a while now been misrepresenting the pace of innovation in areas that not-coincidentally are attempts at diversifying revenue streams by hitting new tech home runs. See also: Glass, any of the other nonsense coming out of Google X (Loon? Cyber contacts?), drone delivery, digital assistants, and s…

To Loon's defense, it actually worked well in the recent flooding on Peru[0].

[0] https://blog.x.company/helping-out-in-peru-9e5a84839fd2

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#428

Post by adventist »

eof wrote: post #385
strebler wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla took the opposite approach of what I described (the Subaru approach). Tesla took the approach that the machine is in control and the human has to detect and take over when the machine makes a mistake. That is known to be a very problematic strategy, it's easy for the human to get distracted. What Subaru has done is to leave the human in control, the machine only steps in when it sees a problem. It's totally dif…

Yes they are different. They are also WILDLY different value propositions. Crash prevention is nice, just getting safer and safer is nice--though I personally wouldn't stop driving ~$5k cars for even "really good" crash protection. But a car that can drive me while I sleep and become a Taxi while I work is something I would go into debt for.

I would go into debt for that also!

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#429

Post by jessriedel »

ilaksh wrote: post #263
jessriedel wrote: post #115

Does anyone have concrete evidence on an over-under date for something commercial, e.g., availability of self-driving (or at least a self-delivering) taxi? The most specific hint at a number I've seen recently was in the neighborhood of 2022, which comes from a recent Morgan Stanley report on Waymo: "The analysts believe Waymo can get to an operating profit by 2022 and reach 8% margins by 2030." https://www.forbes.co…

There is actually no reason to predict this to be years away except for like just future shock or something. Which is the big thing holding it back is just general disbelief. Waymo is actually testing for real in Arizona with selected people from the public. Yes, they include an employee in the car to monitor or take over if necessary. But from the numbers I saw they reported to the DMV like a year ago, with Waymo's…

> there is no way that we will be waiting until 2022 for this to be deployed

How sure would you say you are? Want to put some money on that?

Re: Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close”

#430

Post by vsl »

will_hughes wrote: post #412
Trundle wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Unfortunately most of the world thinks pilots in commercial aircraft turn on the autopilot and can then go for a sleep They can go for a sleep though.

Only if you're happy waking up to find you're about to plow into another large object at a high rate of speed. The Pilot in Command is expected to sit in their seat and monitor the aircraft, surrounding airspace and the radios, and be ready to take control at a moments notice. They can't go for a snooze without handing that over to another pilot first.

The same expectation applies to drivers of Tessa's Autopilot.
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