Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen' • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by crusso » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

desc wrote: post #12

crusso wrote: post #9

Despite 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…

I think the point here is that going from level 4 to level 5 is a much, much harder problem than going from, say, level 1 to level 4.

But it's really not. Level 4 will require the vehicle to take you from door to door without driver intervention in normal driving conditions. Level 4 is mostly what people think of when they think of autonomous driving because you can take a nap, work on your laptop, whatever. You get in your car, tell it where you want to go, and it does everything.

Level 5 basically removes the steering wheel so you never drive. But once you're at level 4, almost all of the hard problems have been solved.

https://www.sae.org/news/2019/01/sae-updates-j3016-automated...

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

#192

Post by idreyn » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

brians wrote: post #75

bobthepanda wrote: post #65

Earlier 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…

Self-driving cars cannot plan an entire exchange in a dense urban areas because there will always be actors like pedestrians, cyclists, and stray plastic bags that do not participate in planning and act adversarially to their shared model. Optimizations will be highly local, spatially and temporally, and I suspect they will end up looking a lot like humans trying to coordinate on the same problem. And even if AVs can technically plan and execute faster, their actions will need to be artificially slowed to be legible to humans. Likewise with their raw speed — cars, self-driving or not, are already moving too fast in urban areas. Reaction times might improve but braking distances will not.

So if AVs can't increase the throughput of city streets, I'm skeptical that they can increase the throughput of off-ramps which are bounded by city streets, or urban freeway segments which are bounded by the off-ramps. And even imagining that significant (2x?) throughput is achieved, it's not going to meet the induced demand ceiling; there would be the same amount of congestion, only with more cars.

L5 is dead on arrival as congestion-mitigation technology and I hope at least some of the billions earmarked to be spent on researching and deploying it are redirected towards better walking, cycling, and transit amenities instead.

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

#193

Post by pritovido » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:13 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #26

aplummer wrote: post #5

To go down in a long list of things executives said wouldn’t happen, that ended up happening.

Read an book on space/aerospace engineering from the 1980s and look at how many things happened. Supersonic was a huge bust. (The Concorde is closer in time to wooden biplanes than to today. Routine supersonic travel still nowhere on the horizon.) Energy technology has been a huge disappointment. When I grew up, we were going to have nuclear fusion, expanding the scope of what society can do. Today we’re back to wind…

Windmills' technology has improved dramatically, like also nuclear fusion's.

We are not "back" to windmills that give 3 MegaWatts of power because they never existed in the first place, like affordable solar panels with 20-40% efficiency.

Progress is not automatic. It is millions of times harder to create or improve a technology than imagine it. And also takes lots of money.

We have nuclear tech because Manhattan project, because WWII(and because they were scientists coming from Europe that were scare of Hitler). It took a tremendous amount of money and sacrifice to get there.

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

#194

Post by mlazos » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

robbrown451 wrote: post #51

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 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…

The margins on taxi services are so incredibly thin I find it difficult to believe there is any value in autonomous taxis. Especially when you take into account all the edge cases that will have to be accounted for, and the traffic that will be generated. Shipping and trucking are a massive industry, and I think automating highway driving has a much much better cost/benefit. Not to mention being safer.

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

#195

Post by genezeta » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:15 PM UTC

dpflan wrote: post #81

Digory wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suppose the car crowd would say environmental factors tilt toward cars over airplanes. In the US, trains are for freight. It would cost too much to create a new passenger rail network compared to automating existing intercity roads. Now, increasing the throughput of rail using self-driving trains could make a bundle in the US.

Self driving trains seems like an excellent problem space. Are you aware of any companies working on this?

Subway is already driver-less in a number of cities around the world. In others the drivers are still there but don't actually drive the train.

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

#196

Post by cma » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

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.

Assuming you mean dedicated self-driving lane, what about when a non-self driving car crashes into the self-driving lane? Assuming you mean to have a dedicated lane with barrier (which is already much more than a wire). And what about when a large mining truck tire rim falls off an 18-wheeler and bounces over barrier in a way that any human driver would be able to hit the brakes and be ok?

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

#197

Post by fourthark » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #185

peteradio wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lol that is going to lead to the mother of all pile-ups not if but when something just so slightly goes wrong. Imagine somebody dropping shit from an overpass or really anything. Better build a giant cage over all the highways!

Those kind of pile ups already happen now when people drop crap from overpasses, how would it be any different?

Bigger. Faster.

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

#198

Post by thebruce87m » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:16 PM UTC

ogre_codes wrote: post #21

This is arguably one of the biggest competitive advantages Tesla has. For $47,000 I can get an EV from Tesla with a better self-driving system[1] than a $100k Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus. I haven’t pulled the trigger on a Tesla yet, but I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now. For many people Tesla has made EV and self-driving table-stakes and nobody else is delivering on that. [1]…

I wouldn’t want a loved one driving a Tesla with autopilot enabled. Some of the people who have died so far have been tech enthusiasts who knew the limitations of autopilot, yet they still grew complacent and it cost them their lives.

If my non techy family see the Tesla performing what they deem to be self driving then they will quickly trust it 100%.

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

#199

Post by SECProto » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

semi-extrinsic wrote: post #175

colordrops wrote: post #165

I agree in part in that I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long term. Not only will the tech get as good as humans, but most forget to account for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way. We will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars, implement networks in which the…

We can't even bloody keep the yellow markings on the road visible, and "paint" is a technology we've had for thousands of years. Where in dog's name is the money for installing and maintaining all that smart infrastructure going to come from?

Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item. If original commenter is correct that infrastructure meets halfway, I wouldn't expect self driving cars transition to happen fast at all - maybe on highways first, and busy city streets, later secondary roads. But that kind of thing would result in a decades long transition, and I would estimate it as never being fully autonomous (if beacons die, car would need manual intervention)

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

#200

Post by sschueller » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

I find it extremely unethical for Tesla to sell its customers a $6000 option to "Enable full self driving mode" some time in the future. Does anyone really think that this will happen before their car is totaled/broken/old/end of life (10-15 years)?