Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The dream of driverless cars is dying

spectator.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 124 posts

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#51

Post by omg_ketchup »

TulliusCicero wrote: post #26
3pt14159 wrote: post #12

We're going to get driverless cars one way or another. Even if the problems are much more intractable than we first gave them credit for people are too clever. Take driving in the snow, for instance. It might be completely impossible to do it safely for the next twenty years by having a computer manage the drive path, but designs might create the ability for cars to form mini-trains where the lead car is driven by a…

Snow seems like one of the easier problems, honestly. Pretty much all the "technical" problems seem pretty straightforward. Waymo already posted an article where they talked about how they can filter falling snow out of their LIDAR input, for example. It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around. Those don't always have e…

So construction signs now need a QR code on them to provide guidance. Companies that work on the road like that are presumably regulated somehow, right?

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#53

Post by ghaff »

anoncoward111 wrote: post #5
blakesterz wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He wrote a great book "Silicon Snake Oil" that is full of things just like this he was so very wrong about, it's a great read still. He complains about how bad things were in the late 90s, but somehow misses how things will get better. It's really worth reading. Somewhere there's a great review, written somewhat recently, on all the things he had wrong. I can't seem to find the one I'm thinking of. I guess he was cor…

Well, much like in buying options, you have to guess both the outcome of a bet and the time at which it happens. The author right, in 2003, I doubt you saw many people reading books on the beach with a clunky laptop or whatever version of kindle existed back then. So, from the mid 90s to mid 2000s, the author was decidedly right for 10 whole years, which is a long time. Now, if he continued to say that not many peopl…

And, on still the other hand, I daresay a lot of the books read on a beach are still in dead tree form. Not that I really sit around beaches reading much, but I'd probably take a paperback over a Kindle for a variety of reasons.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#54

Post by MegaDeKay »

grigjd3 wrote: post #25

While I'd agree that driverless cars are not here today, that the hype is over-doing it, and that Tesla has tried to push too fast, there is a huge economic incentive to have driverless cars. If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver, that saves some on insurance and tons on labor, not to mention not having to limit driving time per day. With those…

I don't think "slightly safer" is enough. Slightly safer would likely be determined based on the average accident rate, but the problems lie farther out on the bell curve. It is one thing if, say, a driverless Model 3 hits a bus full of people: almost everyone involved woud probably walk away from that. But if a driverless Tesla Semi hauling two full trailers of heavy batteries does the same thing, the results would be horrific. Lawyers would appear out of nowhere, claim that people aren't perfect sure, but the trucking company took an undue risk on a technology with known flaws etc. Bad press everywhere, said trucking company then gets sued out of existence, etc.

Given our litigious society, I think that driverless systems for big trucks need to be far far safer than the human-guided equivalent. When accidents happen, they have the potential to do far more damage.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#55

Post by grigjd3 »

mpweiher wrote: post #48
grigjd3 wrote: post #25

While I'd agree that driverless cars are not here today, that the hype is over-doing it, and that Tesla has tried to push too fast, there is a huge economic incentive to have driverless cars. If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver, that saves some on insurance and tons on labor, not to mention not having to limit driving time per day. With those…

> If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver I think such a system can be built. It's called a train .

That's a disingenuous comment. Trains don't deliver to stores directly. In the US, there is a severe infrastructure imbalance. Trains don't make sense for smaller (less than train-sized) loads.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#56

Post by hodgesrm »

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles.

Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by getting at least some of the vehicles off the ground using emerging passenger drone technology. [0] That incidentally looks like an easier place to attack automation as there are fewer corner cases. Commercial aircraft achieved high levels of automated flight decades ago.

[0] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/28/kitty-hawk-prototype-perso...

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#57

Post by ghaff »

allannienhuis wrote: post #50
sixstringtheory wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of highway? We have a 2016 Outback with EyeSight and basically never use it. Lane keeping beeps for every line of tar sealant on the road. Adaptive cruise control puts the pedal to the metal once it's 2 MPH lower than the set speed. Like, I don't want the engine to rev to 8K RPM while I'm going uphill, alright? Has nobody heard of an easing curve?

Sounds like just a really poor implementation. My 2011 BMW does all of those things really well. I'd have hoped that safety systems like this wouldn't fall into the 'you get what you pay for' category, but I guess that's the case. Not sure how to address that except through more regulation which doesn't exactly help on the innovation front...

For another perspective though, my dad got Mobileye on a new Outback recently and he really likes it.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#58

Post by mannykannot »

bobwaycott wrote: post #37
KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But ML and DNNs are not supposed to be driving cars. The big players (Waymo and Cruise) are using DNNs only for perception.

Isn’t perception necessary for driving?

It is not sufficient.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#59

Post by dragonwriter »

CPLX wrote: post #7

The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental. It seems almost a certainty that we will gradually ease into the concept. Some cars will be able to do some things autonomously, a little, for some people, some of the time. Eventually the cost/benefit levels will improve, more features will roll out…

> The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental.

Because there is a significant difference in kind between human driving with driver assistance and self-driving, because having both on the road creates problems that's neither alone faces, and because once self-driving becomes viable for general use, regulatory and insurance factors will probably drive a rapid transition to a state where it's the only thing most people can do on most publicly accessible roads.

> or container based shipping

Intermodal container-based shipping was a fairly rapid global phase change, going quickly from introduction to international standards to global dominance of shipping. So it's kind of an odd example to use to counter the idea of a rapid phase change.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#60

Post by mannykannot »

freehunter wrote: post #44
paganel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots, things that have been prophetized 100 to 50 years ago. Going back more in time we still don’t have a philosophical stone. The idea is that some technological prophecies are indeed wrong.

>We still don’t have flying cars Why does no one consider a helicopter to be a "flying car"? What can a flying car do that a helicopter can't? The only difference I see is that a flying car would be cheaper and owned by more people, which a helicopter could easily be if people actually wanted a flying car. Helicopters are expensive because they're very niche devices. The fact that almost no one owns a helicopter prov…

Helicopters do not, in fact, do what people want flying cars to do. The fact that the masses are not using helicopters to go to the mall shows this, and by reflecting on what would happen if this were tried, you can figure out why helicopters are not flying cars.
Post reply on HN