It's kinda funny that we're investing so much into a potentially impossible technology just to avoid building public transport.
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'
#132To 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…
Check out Boom for a new company working on supersonic airplanes [1].
[1]https://boomsupersonic.com/
Health care is worse? More expensive, yes, but anybody getting cancer and wanting to live is much better off now than in the 1970's.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a fantastic amount of value in cities and urban areas. Self-driving cars can work as a massive network to reduce or eliminate congestion and give people back hundreds of millions of hours spent stuck in traffic. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlo... They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they c…
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.
Congestion is not just caused by reaching capacity. It is also caused by human behaviour:
- selfishness eg stopping or parking in no parking zones, driving aggressively
- error eg causing accidents
- ignorance eg not knowing the traffic flow in an intersection, driving slowly to find your bearings.
Also, if we have fewer cars, but higher utilisation of vehicles then we will require less parking.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#134Opinion: 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 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…
> Most of the value is in taxi services
I’m imagining how gross a taxi would be that doesn’t have a driver to provide passengers a low level of behaviour moderation.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#135If 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.
Traffic inductive loop counter costs a couple thousands to install. I don't have a source for the detailed cost breakdown, but I can imagine the majority of the cost is labor and digging up/filling the road since the sensor itself should be less than a thousand. Now imagine we're doing that 1000 times per mile, like what you're suggesting. Even if the device is free (both initial cost and maintenance) it's just too c…
> I don't have a source for the detailed cost breakdown, but I can imagine the majority of the cost is labor and digging up/filling the road since the sensor itself should be less than a thousand.
Those are installed with a massive handtruck saw while cutting off a lane of traffic all day. It takes a half dozen people working on-and-off, doing different jobs. It takes jackhammers, high pressure water from a tanker truck, and people to place and wire the sensor to power. It's way more complicated than anything you'd do at scale, because it's infrequent and the goal is to do it thoroughly with non-specialists.
If you were installing millions of tags you'd have a dry drill that could go off the back of a truck and place+fill a tag in ten minutes. If you had a line you'd have a it hanging off the back of a truck and place it continuously, like a street cleaner or edge clearer. For tags there's no reason they'd need more than one person to place and no reason to even put them in the road when they could just go on the edges. Triangulate with directional antennas or something.
That said, I think it's pretty obvious that locating the roads is by far the easiest problem for self driving. If you wanted to make a serious attempt you'd want every car to broadcast a short range location, and to share data over a mesh network. "Knowing where the road is" to precision RFID would give you has been solved for over a decade with GPS and digital maps.
Much more pressing issues are non-obvious sensing like hearing a car around a blind corner or knowing when to be cautious about moving. Knowing when something is coming onto the road or when a vehicle is having a problem. Inter-vehicle communication is just so obviously important to that... it's really frustrating how vaguely it gets talked about. I don't give a shit about teslas coordinating braking so they can form a tailgate train for efficiency, I want cars of all kinds to be warning each other about what they intend to do. I worry that legislation or at least a regulatory body will be the only way to even get people talking about it seriously.
Other than that, cameras watching for intrusion into a road would be easier than solving it from vehicles. It seems patently ridiculous putting cameras to watch every 50' section of road. 1080p+ cameras, simple detection, and mesh wifi can be built in a $30 package... but there are >2.5 million miles of paved roads in the US. 30$ per 50' would cost, bare minimum (and ignoring electricity requirements+labor+the pole to put the cameras on) 8 billion dollars.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a fantastic amount of value in cities and urban areas. Self-driving cars can work as a massive network to reduce or eliminate congestion and give people back hundreds of millions of hours spent stuck in traffic. https://edition.cnn.com/2019/08/22/us/traffic-commute-gridlo... They can also, if Level 5 becomes a thing, reduce traffic collisions. And if they all end up electric, through route optimization they c…
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 I drive to work there is an empty transit lane for cars with 2+ people which seems to imply that most rush hour cars have just the driver in. If everyone is ubering in robot cars then they’ll probably share. It’s not that weird as people share public transport and choosing between $10 to get to work and $3 is a no brainer.
They might even Uber to the train station then Uber from the destination train station to work. Lots of ways of cutting traffic!
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#137After 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?
Many reasons. Time value of money, competition, maybe even regulation.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#138Earlier 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…
It's hard for me to guess how much something like this would reduce delays caused by traffic compared to the increased number of cars driving due to the fact that some driverless cars would be out with no passengers heading to pick people up.
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#139I 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.
That's level 4, by definition.
(full autonomy on some/many roads)
Re: Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen'
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 unrea…
> we simply legislate liability limits.
Liability you can incur while driving is almost arbitrarily high. Individual drivers rely on the existence of bankruptcy protection to cover these rare scenarios, or simply don't think about or plan for this at all.
> but I haven't heard of many of those.
How many do you think it takes to put a self driving car manufacturer out of business?
I'm not saying the status quo is a great situation, or that this is a good or bad argument for or against self driving cars. Only that it's a description of the current situation, and why legal issues might be a much bigger problem for self driving car manufacturers than individual drivers.