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

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

#241

Post by beefield » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:31 PM UTC

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 will eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the cars.

Or even easier, platooning. I don't understand why autonomous cars is a bigger thing than platooning. I mean, platooning solves 95% of use cases of self driving cars [1] and is orders of magnitude easier problem to solve.

[1] At least for me. I do not mind driving in the cities myself, but if I just could nap or watch a movie on the highway part, that would have some utility

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

#242

Post by threeseed » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

njarboe wrote: post #103

threeseed wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are parking laws different for Taxis than for Ubers? Say in New York City? Lots of Taxis there so if Ubers are working under the same law, seems like an already solved problem. UPS have millions? of parking violations per year, yet it is still in operation.

You're missing the point.

Drivers own the liability for illegal parking. Autonomous cars would make the developer liable.

No government is going to tolerate systemic and wide spread violation of the law.

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

#243

Post by bobthepanda » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

coolspot wrote: post #79

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.

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

Local streets will always have pedestrians and cyclists. The main limit on road capacity is generally where highways interface with the local network, and the local network itself.

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

#244

Post by kart23 » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:32 PM UTC

iav wrote: post #203

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…

Cars with no person inside them at all (vehicle drones?) would unlock the biggest productivity gain in a century. Revolutionize anything that can be delivered to your house (food, goods, groceries) and make sharing items feasible (need a power tool? Just have a drone drop it off for an hour then pick it up after you are done). I think the biggest advance of self driving is having cars with no people in them at all

You cant have other people on the road then. If I was a protestor or bored teen, I would find it pretty fun to block self driving cars' cameras and sensors, stranding them and creating chaos. Imagine a line of self driving cars just blocking a busy street. It wouldn't be hard to do, but it would take a lot of work to recover them to the point it wouldnt be profitable for the companies running them.

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

#245

Post by jakeogh » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

A car that has "self" is equiv to a living being, and it wouldn't be ethical to lock it inside a box. It's not going to happen any time soon and it will never happen with conventional binary computing; a non-wetware system capiable of emulating a mouse would melt itself through the road.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250424

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

#246

Post by macinjosh » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:33 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?

because unless the driver is a raging asshole usually the person behind while you are going 80 has more stopping distance than 5 fucking feet.

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

#247

Post by bobthepanda » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

quickthrower2 wrote: post #136

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.

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…

> "they'll probably share"

The people who are driving, or at least a significant portion of them, pick driving over public transport because of perceived privacy and control.

I don't think uptake of shared mobility is going to be so popular where that becomes the norm.

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

#248

Post by senordevnyc » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:33 PM UTC

threeseed wrote: post #86

robbrown451 wrote: post #51

Earlier 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…

Think about Uber cars today. Their entire value proposition centres around them breaking parking laws in order to pick you up.

I take Uber and Lyft in NYC multiple times per week. No one ever “parks”, they just pull up, you jump in, and off you go. Takes less than a minute in most cases, doesn’t block traffic, and I suspect it virtually never results in a ticket. Maybe if they sit there for 10 minutes or more, but that’s exceedingly rare. And even then, they’re not going to get a ticket outside a few ultra-congested areas of manhattan that make up a tiny fraction of this city. Even in most places in manhattan, you could sit in a running car in a no parking zone for hours without getting a ticket. I had a moving truck up on the curb on the Upper West Side in a no parking zone for hours and the NYPD rolled past several times without a glance.

Also, this is exactly how taxis all work too, btw, which seems to undermine your entire point.

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

#249

Post by bobthepanda » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

gedy wrote: post #74

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.

Freeways can handle much more traffic, but people get jumpy beyond a certain density and cause traffic jams "for no reason"

The problem is that in many cases, many people want to get off at the same freeway exits, and the local network doesn't have the road capacity to match.

AI doesn't really have the power to change that, and might actually be worse depending on how it reacts to pedestrians and cyclists.

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

#250

Post by celeritascelery » Sat, Jan 18, 2020, 9:34 PM UTC

0xff00ffee wrote: post #147

I was at an ML conference in 2017 and the keynote speaker asked the audience how many years they thought it would be until ADAS lvl 5 was on the market. The keynote had proudly proclaimed 5 years, and then audibly scoffed when about 90% of the hands went up for "20 or more years". There's such a disconnect between real engineers and cheerleaders.

I have a friend who a mechanical engineering professor doing robotic research. He says that one of the reasons that robotics has not advanced more is because it has primarily been the domain of computer scientists who don’t operate in the real world. Every robot works great in a simulation. Same could be said for cars.