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Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

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Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#41

Post by MiroF »

listenallyall wrote: post #22

Level 5 means no human intervention, under any circumstance. Ice, snow, night, fog, unmarked roads, tunnels, mega-urban, isolated rural, parking lots/structures, etc, etc. I think he's correct. It's hard to think of any technology that works without human intervention whatsoever, no matter the conditions. We've had autopilot for decades, we're certainly not flying planes without pilots. Or even getting them from runw…

Most humans can't drive safely in all conditions without outside human intervention.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#42

Post by bstar77 »

lern_too_spel wrote: post #14
shrubble wrote: post #8

If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily have self driving cars. However that would mean that everyone would have access to it. The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.

Staying inside a lane isn't the hard problem.

The point is that (primarily) the road needs to be smart, not the car. There should ideally be a synergy between the car and road, but the road has to be the primary vector to guide the car.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#43

Post by waynecochran »

The technology is not the only problem. The lawyers that are defending every dead body, and there will be dead bodies, that will sink self-driving cars. Even if everyone is 95% safer with self-driving cars, those that are killed by a self-driving car (in combo with a public that is easily swayed with non-objective arguments) will be hard to dismiss.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#44

Post by aguyfromnb »

rgbrenner wrote: post #23
dx034 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He's the CEO of the self driving car division. I'm pretty sure he's well aware of their tech.

Here's a summary of his entire background in order: Formula 1 engineer for many years; Technical director for a Le Mans Prototype vehicle; Head of VWs self driving division for the past 1 year. He has no software background... he specializes in making gas cars go fast. He has no idea how to make a self driving car.. and honestly, why would we think he would? He hasn't exactly been pioneering vision systems, or anythi…

>He has no software background...

Yeah, because making Formula 1 cars "go fast" involves no software whatsoever, right?

I love how you dismiss "Formula 1 engineer for many years". Maybe if he helped build a payment processor we could take him seriously.

>He has no idea how to make a self driving car.. and honestly, why would we think he would?

Because he's running the autonomous car division of the biggest automaker in the world? I have no idea if he's right or not, but dismissing him as not knowing what he's talking about is hubris. He's trying to build this stuff.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#46

Post by Daishiman »

drcross wrote: post #35
lawnchair_larry wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it make no sense? He’s saying we might never get past level 4. And they’re going to offer level 4. That statement is logically coherent.

It could quite easily be a ploy to prevent lost sales.

Consumers don't give two craps about this terminology. And the barrier between level 4 and level 5 is potentially decades out, if not forever.

Nobody's who's contemplating a level 4 is holding out their purchase for a level 5.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#47

Post by listenallyall »

kjaftaedi wrote: post #39
cma wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A wire in the road can't handle stuff like a pedestrian. Pedestrians normally aren't in highways but sometimes are after break-downs, accidents, construction, etc. Lane-following is close to solved on the highway, it is all that other stuff and more that is an issue. A wire could still help, but you'd still need a complex system or significantly more infrastructure than just a wire (maybe caged barriers over the lane…

All you need are machine readable signs or beacons that dictate where full-auto is allowed.

As long as you have places where full-auto isn't allowed, you haven't reached Level 5. Exactly what the subject of the story claims.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#48

Post by DasIch »

wwweston wrote: post #32

Opinion: level 5 autonomy would be cool, but it's not where most of the value of self-driving cars is. Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving. If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when…

This 80% solution already exists in the form of trains and airplanes.

Self-driving cars that only go 80% of the way would compete against those forms of transportation which have established business models, networks and in the case of trains are subsidized in a way that self-driving cars likely won't ever be.

Additionally the key advantage of cars is flexibility, not having to figure out how to get to or from the train station or airport. In your scenario self-driving cars would lack this advantage.

Now granted this may still sound like an appealing proposition in countries with poor public transportation infrastructure but that substantially reduces the size of the overall market. Sure this might be attractive for the US but what about Europe? Asia?

Now of course there is an obvious answer to this problem: Keep the steering wheel and drive the rest of the way yourself. That just means you'll have a lot of drivers who won't gain experience at the current rate though. Not sure I would like to share the road with those people.

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#49

Post by alasarmas »

NikolaNovak wrote: post #37
hinkley wrote: post #6

In the dot com era there was a self driving car startup that started with a simplifying assumption: don’t run the cars at grade. If you go up or down, the number and kind of obstacles reduces. The location of interactions between the vehicles is reduced, and the interactions with other classes of vehicle are zero, so you can negotiate. Solve a simpler problem, if you can.

I've read the paragraph several times and maybe it's my ESL, but I don't quite follow. Is the term "Grade" here used in the "Slope" sense, as in don't run the cars up and down the hill? And if that's the interpretation, I don't necessarily agree with the next point that obstacles are reduced on slopes/hills... so I probably am not following correctly :-/ Thanks!

The "grade" that GP is referring to is this grade: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_separation

Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'

#50

Post by lukifer »

wwweston wrote: post #32

Opinion: level 5 autonomy would be cool, but it's not where most of the value of self-driving cars is. Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving. If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when…

I think self-parking (as in “go find a space, possibly auto-paying”, not auto-parallel-parking) could also be a game-changer, not only for convenience and cost, but even zoning and city planning.
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