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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#131

Post by anticensor »

Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

  Self-driving car: ZF
  Electric car: ZF
  TaaS: ZF
  Self-driving advertising services: ZF
All will be available, all from the same company. EDIT: Waymo laughed at "route-based advertising" when I mentioned, but ZF supports this idea. Route-based advertising or route advertising is an advertising model where your vehicle diverts to make you see a particular place and/or get you to visit a particular shop. For example, it may make you see McDonalds to get you to buy BigMac.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#132

Post by ModernMech »

Jdam wrote: post #112
Nydhal wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sorry I can't back up my claims but you will be proved wrong with time. I would bet in less than 10 years you'll have camera only fully autonomous systems.

Have you ever heard about that thing called fog?

As an existence proof, people drive through fog every day. We prove that it's possible to take binocular visual data and convert that into a series of control signals that will propel a car through fog. Sure sometimes accidents happen, but every day thousands upon thousands of people safely navigate fog in e.g. San Francisco or London. I see no reason machines shouldn't be able to perform at least as well one day.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#133

Post by tertius »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #95
Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

So did the surgeon who killed that poor girl because he was overconfident and took too many risks.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#134

Post by lighttower »

stephengillie wrote: post #44
save_ferris wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, an…

I'd like to join in on the bikeshedding mass transit into solar-powered self-driving car-apartments that can always drive anywhere with no congestion for free, need no maintenance, and aren't controlled by a monolithic entity with an abysmal reputation for profit over users. Mass transit is expensive, boring, and thankless. How many bus companies have ever applied to YC?

Bridj which went bust a little while back. It was awesome. I was an early adopter in Boston

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#135

Post by dwighttk »

rockinghigh wrote: post #123
dwighttk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it. How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses? What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these la…

We're talking about commute and long-distance travel. In most scenarios, you don't carry that much luggage. You don't carry your horses and kayaks when you go to work or travel overseas.

My dad regularly drives 8 hrs with his kayaks to fish for bass. Though he usually leaves them behind when he flies to Mexico to fish.

People do carry their horses to work with them. They aren't just luxury goods.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#136

Post by Alupis »

yannyu wrote: post #85
iabacu wrote: post #74

The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This will take decades to be true. The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong. There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability for accidents caused.

Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled. Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?

> Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents

Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally?

Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US.

When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000 (depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]. We can and should fix this first and foremost.

With over 3.1 Trillion miles driven annually in the US, that's about 0.001 fatalities per 100,000 miles driven, or about 1 fatality per 80,000,000 miles driven. Driving is pretty safe - although I agree we can make it safer.

[1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-releases-2016-fat...

[2] https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-safety/index.ht...

[3] https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatali...

[4] https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...

[5] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/02/21/516512439...

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#137

Post by kwillets »

save_ferris wrote: post #21
djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so culturally opposed to anything like this. A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, an…

I suspect that driverless cars will end up somewhere on the spectrum between buses and human-operated cars. They're extremely cautious and will be a lot slower than human-operated.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#138

Post by ModernMech »

landryraccoon wrote: post #42
expertentipp wrote: post #20

Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money. Graduating the car from break-clutch-engine machine to airliner level of complexity vehicle is a perfect money sink.

> Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money. I wasn't aware that the government is funding self driving car development. Do you have a source?

In the 00s driverless car tech was heavily incubated by DARPA, a branch of the US DOD.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#139

Post by justinpaulson »

baybal2 wrote: post #36
djsumdog wrote: post #15

I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15 years out at the earliest." I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s. We need more citie…

In level of stupidity, the concept of self driving car in my opinion is second only to a flying car. The second disregard, that well... there are airplanes. The first, that driverless busses that creep at 30km/h and do emergency brake every every 10 minutes thanks to overattentive collision avoidance system also been around for decades.

I guess you don't know many people that have died at the hands of human drivers if you think it is "stupid"

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#140

Post by dwighttk »

zrail wrote: post #125
dwighttk wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

rail and bus infrastructure is never going to be feasible in the small town in Texas where I grew up, 1.5 hrs from Ft. Worth. Not to mention all the even smaller towns in that county and the counties around it. How is one supposed to move 3 horses across the state using rail and buses? What about my parents driving to surrounding lakes to kayak? Just cary that on a train that for some reason actually goes to these la…

Of course there are going to be wide swaths of the United States where passenger rail and bus service isn't going to make much of a dent for local transportation. Regional transportation is an entirely different question. Is there a rail line running through the small town in Texas where you grew up? I bet there is, and I bet there is the remnants of a passenger station too. What would it mean to your small town if p…

There is a rail line, but no passenger station. Realistically there would be 1 train per day max to the big city and you'd have to spend the night instead of making a day or half day trip. (I currently live in Durham and I can catch a morning train to Charlotte and back in the evening according to the schedule, as long as I can fit my business in between the arrival time of the morning train and the departure time of the evening train, and that is servicing two much larger populations.)

And that is just going to the nearest larger city... What if you want to go to a different city? Or a smaller town? Or a random place that doesn't have a bus station?

I predict very few people would participate.

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