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

thedrive.com

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

#431

Post by lostlogin »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #156
lostlogin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Well, considering that these won't allow anonymous usage this can be mitigated by kicking out "bad" users and big fines. Also cars can visit the cleaning zone frequently. For "free floating car sharing" (DriveNow/ShareNow, Yandex.Drive, ...) this seems to work quite well.

I’ve seen the shared cars in Paris. They are completely awful.

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

#433

Post by odnes »

I can't see L5 happening without, amongst other things, the human ability to reason about things/concepts we've never encountered before (à la consciousness).

Highway driving is the most constrained normal driving problem, and this is solvable in 99% of cases. But there are so many things that can happen in most other driving situations that make me think that model-based approaches (Tesla) are doomed to fail... Go ahead, train a classifier for every situation you can think of - I guarantee you that you've missed many things.

Elon tweeted the other day that FSD is "coming soon". Either I'm totally wrong about this, and of course I hope I am, or Karpathy + the dev team should be tempering his expectations.

That isn't to say that there isn't immense value in L2/L3, there totally is. But I think that solving driving (being able to drive any situation a human can) is pretty much the same thing as solving intelligence generally.

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

#434

Post by Tiktaalik »

Sharlin wrote: post #236
rdiddly wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I told you I could offer you a 99% automated intercity solution? That's right, a solution where 99% of the people involved have no obligation whatsoever to engage with piloting the vehicle... EVER! Where the vehicle just sort of seems to... drive itself? Is this some futuristic sci-fi fantasy? Well hold onto your hat, because the future is NOW! Behold! https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.…

Yep. Intercity traffic is a problem we solved in the 1800s.

Intracity transportation was also solved in the 1800s.

(compact towns & bicycles)

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

#435

Post by skywhopper »

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…

You are so sure about this. I’m curious where you live where the streets are so well maintained, there’s very little non-car traffic, rarely road construction, no bad weather, no emergency vehicles, no overly narrow two-lane roads, no gravel roads, and electronic maps that are correct 100% of the time.

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

#436

Post by lostlogin »

dmortin wrote: post #158
lostlogin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If the taxi is soiled then the next passenger indicates this via the app. The taxi is sent for cleaning and the previous passenger is charged for the cleaning. Also, there will be cameras inside in case it has to be proven who made the car dirty. If people have to pay the cleaning bill they will be careful not to make a mess.

> If the taxi is soiled then the next passenger indicates this via the app

So riders blame the mess on the previous passenger. Then the taxi company installs cameras. It’s all gross (and yes, I’m aware many taxis have cameras already).

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

#437

Post by ben_w »

the-pigeon wrote: post #410
est31 wrote: post #346

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah but if the system is designed in the wrong way, hackers could kill millions in a single moment. Admittedly, this danger already exists as in all modern cars between driver and car there is a layer of (hackable and wireless network connected) software.

Hackers could hijack a missile and kill a lot of people too. This is why we have security. And honestly modern cars are so computerized already I think your argument applies to them as much as autonomous cars.

“We’re already doomed” isn’t a good reason to not be concerned about new ways to be doomed.

Yes, we have security. Yes, cars can (probably) already be hacked, perhaps even en-mass rather than in targeted ways.

But: one the big advantages of machine learning in cars is that every car can learn from the experiences of every other car. That makes them monocultures. Monocultures are fragile. You find the weakness of one, you find the weakness of all.

I want the benefits of the former without the risks of the latter. I don’t know if that’s even possible.

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

#438

Post by standyro »

FireBeyond wrote: post #252
sschueller wrote: post #200

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)?

"some time in the future"... ... while Musk promises "you'll be able to self-drive, coast to coast, this year" (haha, no).

For a bunch of "tech visionaries" that Hacker News is supposed to embody, this thread is full of such shortsightedness. I self-drove from Southern California to Phoenix, Arizona, so I guess that's like 1/10th of the way. I couldn't have imagined that ten years ago. Part of the job of being a CEO is to sell the dream, even if it's years or decades away.

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

#439

Post by mattlutze »

idreyn wrote: post #192
brians wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Self-driving car networks have the benefit of not being bound by the same finite capacity of a network of humans trying to manage real-world traffic.

Neither would they have to operate at artificially handicapped speeds, as no human operator would really be able to keep up regardless with the 10,000 or 100,000 cars running around.

Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).

There's no reason so far here that self-driving vehicles can't improve traffic and overall throughput, and it's a bold claim to declare L5 dead on arrival.

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

#440

Post by robbrown451 »

anotheruser2020 wrote: post #280
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…

I like driving, I also like the assistance that modern vehicles provide on Motorways, however, would I ever fully hand over control? Probably not. A Boeing 747 has autopilot.. however 3 pilots sit behind hit to keep an eye on what it's doing.

But how many passengers are on the 747?

The ratio of pilot to total people on the plane is often something like 1/100. In a cars it might average 1/1.2 or something. I think that should be improved.

Also, on a plane, those pilots are never expected to jump in with 2 seconds notice because something isn't working right. I don't think that is realistic....people zone out, but that is expected in "supervised self driving".

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