151–160 of 236 posts
While I'm almost always bullish on new tech, self-driving cars are one where I frankly have a pretty hard time buying into the hype. I think when they really start to hit the streets, some issues are going to show up. Here's what I mean. Imagine this situation: You're pulling into your driveway in your self-driving car, and one of your kids left a lawn gnome there, blocking it. The car won't go forward because there'…
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Computers are so much better at detecting traction problems that electronic stability control is mandatory in most new vehicles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_stability_control#R...
Cool. But sometimes the road is just plain impassable. And having grown up in many Iowa winter blizzards, I still don't trust even electronic systems. They help, but sometimes there's nothing you can do when there's basically no friction.
Or take a page from the internet playbook: Destroy the car and re-send from the origin.
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Yep, they're pretty close. Late this year or 2018 they'll have cars driving around empty. I'd like to know more, do you have a source for these claims?
It's a prediction, I can't provide a source for events that haven't occurred. But Reuters reported they intend to put 'thousands' of autonomous Bolts on the road in 2018: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-gm-autonomous-exclusive/e... Cruise has released some impressive demos on their YouTube page, of vehicle driving around downtown SF: https://youtu.be/KSRPmng1cmA Cruise reported to the California DMV that they aver…
> It's a prediction, I can't provide a source for events that haven't occurred.
Using the words "they will" makes it sound like an assertion. How are you so confident about "events that haven't occurred" will indeed occur? You listed out reports and demos, none of which necessarily suggest that "Late this year or 2018 they'll have cars driving around empty"? Do you have additional inside information that the rest of us don't have?
> Also, because Kyle Vogt said so, and he's never bullshitted me before, he's got credibility.
Is this a serious comment?
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Cool. But sometimes the road is just plain impassable. And having grown up in many Iowa winter blizzards, I still don't trust even electronic systems. They help, but sometimes there's nothing you can do when there's basically no friction.
The safest thing might be for the car to pull over, put on hazard lights, and tell you to wait or call for assistance. Humans deciding to go continue driving in such conditions is a mistake, leading to more collisions. Perhaps there will be a manual override, like "Unsafe conditions, voice password and waiver required to continue in manual mode; you might die or kill someone else."
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What if the future of public transit is autonomous cars? Why do you need buses or trains when you could have machines that can take you from anywhere, to anywhere, on demand, for less than the cost of current public transit fare?
The fundamental problem with cars in cities is that they make each person take up a crazy amount of road area: http://lh3.ggpht.com/_9F9_RUESS2E/S7tbclwxiPI/AAAAAAAACmw/uI...
* traffic problems will be significantly reduced * you won't need traffic lights like they exist today * the vehicles can be reduced in size (double occupancy perhaps); a family can just order a couple cars and have communication between them * streets can be reduced to fewer lanes; possibly one-way because the vehicles can navigate the best route in any case
Hop into our self-driving car! It was designed by a team of inexperienced developers working under a manager who foreshortened deadlines and delivered ahead of schedule and under budget! The software guys asked for crazy things like 'bug trackers' and 'static analysis tools', but we kept their nose to the grindstone. Some of them said the software required more testing, but you know software guys, always such nervous…
Haha! Love it! This is precisely how enterprise software is developed and if you look at the way our industry has trained its managers, I can't think of any reason why the people that make decisions about these things can be convinced to do anything differently. I mean, if you can build buggy software for a Point of Service system this way, surely you can do the same thing with self driving cars! It's just software!…
And the court looked at it and said "yep, no negligence here. Software has no standards. There are no licensed engineers to hire. Go ahead and do whatever the hell you want, even if it kills people you're fine." No company is going to take the millions of dollars worth of precautions necessary to prevent things like that.
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What's stopping you from taking an Uber everywhere?
Sometimes I drive outside of the city. I go visit my parents a few hours away. Sometimes I want to pick up a huge load of groceries, or go to Ikea.
>Electric self-driving cars will save millions of lives and significantly accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy, but only when they’re deployed in large numbers. Just like cars that we drive, self driving cars enable sprawl. Sprawl will never be environmentally sustainable. We need cities that you move through by foot, bike, and public transit.
> Just like cars that we drive, self driving cars enable sprawl. A self-driving car increases the radius of effect of things like mass transit stations. That can be a useful intermediate step before another transit stop gets built.
Imagine how much money is spent by car manufacturers now just validating the functionality of "simple" tech like locks and wipers at the testing grounds in northern Sweden and similar. All components of these systems will have to go through the same kinds of tests.
My dash display gets funny whenever it's below -20 in the car - I can only imagine what happens to all these sensors.
How cheap do you think this could be made? What price do you think people (consumers, not taxi operators) are ready to pay for decent autonomy in a car?