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

111–120 of 124 posts

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#111

Post by nradov »

ghaff wrote: post #110
nradov wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be ignored.

You can to at least some degree though once you've imposed the constraint that there needs to be a competent licensed driver in the car because they need to handle the endpoints in any case. Certainly, the car needs to be able to recognize conditions where it needs to turn over control with, say, one minute warning. And we're not at that point today. But one can imagine things like radio beacons for construction zone…

You're never going to get a one-minute warning about stupid people doing stupid things. Like when some idiot decides to play Frogger across four lanes of traffic because his car stalled out in the median. I suppose we could just accept some collisions in those cases but it would be a mess.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#112

Post by bigpicture »

bachbach wrote: post #109
mpweiher wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the softball: the practice of heavy trucks delivering directly to stores is a scourge on our cities, a practice that needs to be banned as quickly as possible. Here in Berlin, two children were killed by these monsters on one day last month, with the children doing nothing wrong.

I've always wanted a world in which pneumatic tubes played a bigger role - as they used to with mail in London and Paris. It used to be possible to get a letter in 4 hours. I was walking down a street the other day, early morning, and it stank with food scraps, garbage - it was one of those maintenance streets you find at the back or sometimes even the front of fast food outlets, delis and cafes. The backend of that…

What you are asking for existed 100 years ago. Cheap oil killed it. Oil isn't so cheap anymore, maybe it would be viable again.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Tunnel_Company

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#113

Post by 3pt14159 »

paganel wrote: post #15
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…

Obvious question: why just not take the train? In your example I’d have to depend on other strangers for my private travel, one of the most important things that made me purchase my first car in my 30s, I don’t want that.

I actually think the European model is superior (dense towns with trains between), but we have what we have.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#114

Post by mannykannot »

freehunter wrote: post #72
hodgesrm wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. It's hard to see how you would reduce even the maintenance costs enough to make them practical for universal use. To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy them for personal use. (I know this anecdotally from a relative involved in sales of Airbus helicopters.) If you addressed t…

>Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. So did cars when they were first introduced. Since they solved a need, there was a great incentive to make them easier to use and easier to repair. That incentive doesn't exist for helicopters because most people don't own helicopters. >To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy…

There is plenty of incentive to make helicopters cheaper to own and operate, have simpler and less frequent maintenance requirements, to be easier to fly, require less space to take off and land, be quieter and safer. It hasn't happened so far because these are genuinely difficult problems, not because of lack of incentive.

No one in NYC, not even Bloomberg, is landing, let alone parking, his helicopter at his office. It is completely impractical in terms of safety, space and noise, even if it were just one person doing it, and absurdly infeasible to think it could be scaled up to, say, just the number of people using the Lincoln tunnel in any given half-hour. There are a few helipads around the edges of the city (a number that is likely to decrease on account of noise), that cater to some of the transportation needs of a number of people that can be counted in the hundreds per day, not hundreds of thousands.

The idea that if there is a wish, a solution would have been found by now, does not stand up to the most cursory examination - for one thing, if it were so, not many people would be dying.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#115

Post by gremlinsinc »

mmt wrote: post #98
gremlinsinc wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a wife, kid and one on the way, and even just us 3, I think uber/lyft wouldn't work. Why do a lot of people on HN assume everyone is single(and always will be), or a family I can't wait for self-driving tech, I'll probably buy it when it hits used car lots, though. I'm hoping by 2030 it'll be real. I don't think uber/lyft can sustain more than 4-5 more years on investors alone, without charging a LOT more fo…

> Why do a lot of people on HN assume everyone is single That's an easy one.. for the same reason they assume everyone is a young, urban, technical professional living in a major tech hub. I recall this being a source of criticism (though admittedly not recently) about the problems startups are solving being skewed toward the problems the above people (the same ones doing the solving) tend to have. > (and always will…

I know for one, Tesla has made it so you can't use tesla for rideshare, because you have to use their (forthcoming) service, IIRC, I remember reading that somewhere, I also believe some of the manufacturers of self-driving tech have partnered with lyft or uber to possibly be the software behind their own rideshare.

The future of cars, makes sense not to own... A car just dropped johnny (a kid I have no relation to) off at school a mile from my house 5 minutes before I need to be to work, this car then becomes mine till I get to work, from there it takes someone else to a brunch meeting... and so forth.

Using logistics it can free up roads by sending the closest available car to pick people up, and possibly re-arranging traffic patterns via networking to make roads clearer...etc.

Edit: one more attractive thing for car companies: Subscriptions. Someone paying 800 for life, is MUCH better than someone paying 20k once. They can know with better certainty their monthly recurring revenue when charting growth/etc..

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#116

Post by gremlinsinc »

mmt wrote: post #100
ghaff wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems more likely to be a membership in the 50 cents to $1 per mile range which is what it currently costs to operate a car (including for any deadheading). Not sure why anyone would offer for a fixed fee unless it was for a very high number.

I suspect the assumption is that this cost will go down if insurance/liability (i.e. injury and property damage) costs are drastically reduced by self-driving cars and fuel and maintenance costs are also reduced by all-electric drivetrains. Still, $200 seems far-fetched in light of the average American 1200 miles monthly. At under $.17/mi (not counting deadheading), that might not even cover depreciation/capital cost…

It'd be 400 for a family of 2, 1000 for a family of 5. Could be 300, or 400 per person I just pulled an arbitrary # out of my arse. It does assume more electric use, maybe not 100% electric, but maybe 100 mpg with electric assist.

People are more apt to buy into an 'unlimited' plan. Road trips would cost extra (because you're gaining unlimited full-multi-day access to a vehicle), maybe something like $30/day + gas.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#117

Post by glenra »

chopin wrote: post #107
glenra wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. Lanes are as wide as they are and following distances are as long as they are because people are terrible at driving. A mostly-driverless 4-lane highway could more than double capacity just by reducing following distances when computers rather than human beings are making the decision when t…

The basic problem is that generally more capacity invites more traffic. This isn't solved with autonomous vehicles. As well I expect more empty traffic. Example: I currently drive to work 20km. As my wife needs occasionally as well, we have two. With an autonomous car we could forgo one and I send it back after I arrive at work. In the evening it'll pick me up again.

In cities a substantial fraction of traffic is people circling the block trying to find parking near their destination and some fraction of traffic holdups is from people stopping in a lane while waiting for somebody else to pull out of a parking space. These problems are substantially reduced with autonomous vehicles. Instead of slowly going around the block looking for a parking spot, you get out at your destination and the car drives away to some place where parking is cheap and a spot is known to be available. (When you need to leave, you tell the car via an app and it comes back to get you.)

Self-driving cars can park far more densely without fear of being blocked in and can park inconveniently far away while still being reasonably available. Thus cities will need less on-street or near-street parking and can reclaim a lot of that space for traffic or transit or bikes or people or commerce.

If your wife only occasionally needs a car, couldn't she call a local on-demand one - an automated uber? That seems cheaper than paying to send an empty car on two daily 20km trips...

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#118

Post by mmt »

gremlinsinc wrote: post #116
mmt wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect the assumption is that this cost will go down if insurance/liability (i.e. injury and property damage) costs are drastically reduced by self-driving cars and fuel and maintenance costs are also reduced by all-electric drivetrains. Still, $200 seems far-fetched in light of the average American 1200 miles monthly. At under $.17/mi (not counting deadheading), that might not even cover depreciation/capital cost…

It'd be 400 for a family of 2, 1000 for a family of 5. Could be 300, or 400 per person I just pulled an arbitrary # out of my arse. It does assume more electric use, maybe not 100% electric, but maybe 100 mpg with electric assist. People are more apt to buy into an 'unlimited' plan. Road trips would cost extra (because you're gaining unlimited full-multi-day access to a vehicle), maybe something like $30/day + gas.

> Could be 300, or 400 per person I just pulled an arbitrary # out of my arse.

That's part of my point, though, that what the number is (or at least its order of magnitude), actually does matter.

For something like a per-person charge, if that number is high enough, for large enough families, people are going to start looking at whether they could be saving by using the per-vehicle pricing of buying versus renting. I'm also saying that this number must be high enough to be attractive for the car company.

> maybe not 100% electric, but maybe 100 mpg with electric assist.

I'd say that's misguided, then, because fuel cost alone is too low a fraction of total operating cost.

> Road trips would cost extra

So like today's cellphone "unlimited" data? In that case, sure, an actually-limited subscription plan would easily be attractive to a car company, since they could write in any limits they want and change them any time, as well as vary the pricing at any time.

How many consumers would opt for that instead of outright buying is another matter.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#119

Post by freehunter »

mannykannot wrote: post #114
freehunter wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and significant training to fly safely. So did cars when they were first introduced. Since they solved a need, there was a great incentive to make them easier to use and easier to repair. That incentive doesn't exist for helicopters because most people don't own helicopters. >To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy…

There is plenty of incentive to make helicopters cheaper to own and operate, have simpler and less frequent maintenance requirements, to be easier to fly, require less space to take off and land, be quieter and safer. It hasn't happened so far because these are genuinely difficult problems, not because of lack of incentive. No one in NYC, not even Bloomberg, is landing, let alone parking, his helicopter at his office…

I like your point about the number of people in the Lincoln Tunnel and people dying in crashes.

I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree for different reasons. I think it's a genuinely difficult problem because there is no way to make a flying car as safe as a car that is stuck to the ground. There's just not. Normal cars break down, they run out of gas, they stop working all the time. You coast to a stop and call a tow truck. Flying cars break down and you plummet to your death. Normal cars crash into each other in just 2 dimensions. Flying cars crash into each other in three dimensions, and then you plummet to your death. Normal cars get stuck in traffic and sit with their engines at idle, producing small amounts of pollution, noise, wind and heat, yet still contribute substantially to global warming. Flying cars sitting at idle in a traffic jam still have to hover above the ground, which means they're running their engines almost as hard as if they were actually moving, producing tons more waste byproduct than even the most gas-guzzling SUV.

Of course, my argument isn't "flying cars are a bad idea", so all of those points might seem offtopic. But it links back to the idea that we already have flying cars and we've already realized that it's a terrible idea. Short of true anti-gravity, a flying car is always going to be less safe, more polluting, more complicated mechanically, and is always a bad idea. If people actually wanted flying cars, we would deal with the downsides long enough for smart people to overcome the reliability and price issues, but overcoming "plummeting to your death" is a genuinely difficult problem that only has one solution: true anti-grav that works even when the power is disconnected. Since that's a far-future sci-fi plot, the closest thing we have to flying cars is a helicopter.

It just turns out that using them as reliable daily individual transport is a really bad idea.

Re: The dream of driverless cars is dying

#120

Post by Shorel »

mpweiher wrote: post #65
grigjd3 wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks for the softball: the practice of heavy trucks delivering directly to stores is a scourge on our cities, a practice that needs to be banned as quickly as possible. Here in Berlin, two children were killed by these monsters on one day last month, with the children doing nothing wrong.

Here they only destroy all the tarmac in just six months, but surely what you mention is way worse.
Post reply on HN