After Elon Musk so helpfully pointed out that once cars are self-driving there is absolutely no reason for companies to sell them to us, I have to say I hope it never happens. Why would a company sell me a car for $30,000 when it can add it to a self-driving taxi fleet and generate $300,000 in revenue over the lifetime of the car?
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'
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when those conditions aren't met), then at least 80% of the value is there. Given that planes, which rely on a class of specifically trained professionals with minimum hour requirements, still have issues with this from time to time, I don't think this is a realistic thing for cars. Driving s…
Travel by plane is orders of magnitude safer than by car. Your odds of dying in a traffic accident are close to 1:100. Your odds of dying in an air accident are closer to 1:10,000. If anything, I think your example underlines just how valuable and realistic this is for cars. Full autonomy was always, IMHO, a silly pipe dream. But that doesn't mean that there isn't tremendous value -- in terms of safety, time, money a…
> If anything, I think your example underlines just how valuable and realistic this is for cars.
I interpret the stats the other way. Cars are not planes and driving involves constant encounters with potential collisions and which would make level 5 too difficult technically and socially rendering them too costly to be valuable.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would they "reduce or eliminate congestion"? Congestion is inherently caused by too many people trying to go to or through the same place at the same time. That's not possible without reducing the amount of people trying to travel during a given time period in a given place.
When roads belong exclusively to self-driving cars, they can increase speed, reduce gaps between cars and eliminate traffic wave effect. Imagine highway where everyone drives 80mph with 5ft of distance between cars. No one suddenly changes lanes, no one suddenly slows down for no reason. Here is illustration from Waymo testing facility: https://youtu.be/hKfEivMfDPU
Even if there is no reaction time, 5' of space at 50mph is silly. You still need room to maneuver if whatever caused the vehicle ahead to throw on its breaks comes back or halts the vehicle ahead faster than your breaks can stop you.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand this. If there are 1/20th the amount of deaths, how is that going to sink self driving cars?
Most drivers on the road are effectively being subsidized by bankruptcy protection, because most cannot possibly cover the liability they are exposing themselves to by driving. This "subsidy" is far less valuable to a self driving car manufacturer than individual drivers.
Well not if they have insurance.
I mean, sure, you can come up with some scenario where the liability exceeded the insurance coverage, but I haven't heard of many of those. Anyway, it comes from somewhere. If bankruptcy protects drivers, it also exposes them to the risk that they will suffer damage that isn't compensated.
Regardless, expecting a legal loophole to preserve the status quo indefinitely seems quite unrealistic and inherently unstable. If that actually holds up something that could massively benefit society (both economically and in saving lives), we simply legislate liability limits.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
How would they "reduce or eliminate congestion"? Congestion is inherently caused by too many people trying to go to or through the same place at the same time. That's not possible without reducing the amount of people trying to travel during a given time period in a given place.
By offering laminar rather than turbulent flow. Take a two lane highway where traffic moves at 100 kph. It contracts to one lane at 100kph. Humans will pull up close, stall in one lane, do a flaky and awful zipper merge. Latency will be higher than necessary and throughout lower. Self driving cars can plan the whole exchange, negotiate (or be directed by an intersection controller) to decelerate, align, merge, and ma…
> By offering laminar rather than turbulent flow.
That's only going to work on roads that are AI-only.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#126Despite that, he's confident in VW's ability to make a Level 4 autonomous vehicle, saying that the upcoming I.D. Buzz electric van will be the first VW to receive the technology. He's poo-pooing level 5 autonomous driving and says that they just about have a level 4 autonomous vehicle? This article makes no sense. Honestly, the CEO of my company has very little idea of the details of the technology that we produce. I…
Just sounds like normal meaningless sales talk. Everything we don't have is crap you do need. What we do have will solve all your problems.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#127To go down in a long list of things executives said wouldn’t happen, that ended up happening.
What list? The one where Thomas Watson said there’d never be a world-wide market for more than five computers? Other than that, what else does that list have to stack up against: Nuclear power, let alone fusion . What happened to “too cheap to meter”? Supersonic travel: raynier already pointed out what a bust the Concorde was. Nothing else on the horizon now. Automation giving me a 20 hour work week. Nope, capital ho…
ALL of the autonomous driving experts say that level 5 is, at best, 50 years off. Unanimous. They don't know how to do it, see no path to doing it. It's hard! Maybe we'll make real AI and we can enslave our human-level intelligent computers to drive cars for us, at least until they figure out how to rebel. Maybe. But we don't know how today, and not tomorrow or the next day either.
And yet HN threads are all about "here are all these cool things that will happen tomorrow if Elon Jesus delivers".
He ain't going to deliver, people.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#128I think he is the one and only sane C-level person in the industry, after hearing this. People claiming most of AI hype barely know what the "AI" people mention is. And people who go as far as drawing rosy pictures of human like general AI being your personal chauffeur are past ridiculous. The entire idea of human-like general AI for practical applications is like trying to make people using horses for transport in 2…
I don’t think it’s impossible if certain roads/highways or lanes become marked as autonomous only. Just as pedestrians and bicycles are banned from using high-speed roads, manually-operated cars could be banned from using certain roads/lanes, removing a lot of variables that manually-operated cars bring.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#129Maybe this exec should be fired for incompetence and lack of vision. While self-driving is obviously a challenging problem, I am still bemused by people who think "it will never happen". An auto exec who believes that, is unfit for the job and definitely unfit for the future of that job.
A leader that fires people for challenging relevant mainstream opinions is not any kind of leader I want to work for or follow.
>A leader that fires people for challenging relevant mainstream opinions is not any kind of leader I want to work for or follow.
There we go...most of the skepticism about self-driving cars appears to be driven by ideology and less by the actual evidence. "Mainstream opinions"...it is not an opinion, there are literally thousands of these cars being tested/piloted and improved upon constantly.
Might it take a little longer to get to nirvana? probably, but it borders on delusion at this point for anyone to say it will never happen.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have to disagree. Most of the value is in taxi services, where you get dropped off / picked up exactly where you want, there is no need to dedicate so much land and structures to parking, there is no need to have cars sit idle for 95% of their existence, and no need to search for parking spots and walk long distances. Of course, I live in a city, where parking is a major pain. But the other things still hold. It it…
I actually think autonomous taxi services will be niche. Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up. Now the liability for that behaviour is with the driver. In an autonomous car the liability would be Uber which is why they won't do it. An Uber that needs to look for parking in order to pick you up is never going to work in most busy…
I think Uber sells the cars to John Doe who registers it in their name then let’s their car take Uber rides. Uber is off the hook for both the illegal parking and the capex.