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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'

#491

Post by mr_toad »

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…

> Supersonic was a huge bust.

With the caveat: for commercial travel. And even then it’s partly due to noise restrictions. It’s not like the technology for supersonic flight isn’t widespread.

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

#492

Post by bobthepanda »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #283
bobthepanda wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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.

Values change. No one would take a taxi where the driver is just some unlicensed taxi driver. Back in the 90's that would be consider akin to hitchhiking in danger! Now we have Uber. Also I drive because it's faster, and because once you go from A->B getting to B->C is probably easier. Not for privacy. Most people just need to get to work or school or their kids to school for the bulk of their car use. Kids to school…

Cars are different than a lot of goods though, because in and of themselves they are a wealth signal (at least in the US).

Most Americans don't really need an SUV or a pickup; a minivan or a sedan are more practical. Yet most Americans are buying them, because it makes them feel better about what they're driving and they want to show off. You may only take your car to the grocery store, but if you meet Becky from PTA in the parking lot and she has a really nice car that she owns, that's still a big deal.

Unless the ownership cost of a car were to spike significantly, this part of American culture seems hard to change, particularly when automakers spend lots of money making sure that Americans see premium gas-guzzlers as status symbols.

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

#493

Post by odnes »

ericd wrote: post #329
spookthesunset wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about dirt forest service roads? What about the dirt parking lot at that wedding you just went to? How will it find a parking spot? How will it get into a ferry where people direct you to the correct spot? How will it deal with an accident up ahead where some drunk bystander is trying to direct traffic? How will it know to ignore the drunk guy? What if it isn’t a drunk guy but a sober person directing traffic? D…

How will it deal with an accident up ahead where some drunk bystander is trying to direct traffic? How will it know to ignore the drunk guy? What if it isn’t a drunk guy but a sober person directing traffic? Does the car obey in that case? Most people wouldn't instantly know how to handle those cases either. Many people would obey the drunk guy. Maybe that's the right thing to do. None of those are edge cases because…

But Tesla's fleet is getting more driving experience every day than you will get in your entire life, and every time they train on one of those exceptions, the entire fleet will benefit.

Humans can reason about things that haven't to them happened before. Today's machine learning systems cannot. As you say, to react appropriately they must have been trained to do so using human annotated data.

The argument against FSD is that you would need an infinite number of annotated examples, and an infinite number of subroutines for behaving in any identified situations, because the space of driving is effectively infinite.

Until machines are able to do general reasoning about things they've not experienced before then FSD is not happening. By the way, Demis Hassabis thinks that this sort of transfer learning is the key to solving AI.

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

#494

Post by Groxx »

tim333 wrote: post #462
nrp wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From Tesla's latest Vehicle Safety Report: > In the 4th quarter, we registered one accident for every 3.07 million miles driven in which drivers had Autopilot engaged. For those driving without Autopilot but with our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 2.10 million miles driven. For those driving without Autopilot and without our active safety features, we registered one accident for every 1.…

Autopilot tends to be engaged on freeways / motorways where accidents are much lower than driving through town. If you do the stats properly Tesla's autopilot is probably more crash prone than just having a human drive. There were some stats that if you compare model S deaths to other luxury cars in the same price range they are about 3x higher for the S. Death rates in luxury cars are much lower than the average veh…

The vast majority of the data I'm able to find on road types covers only fatalities, not accidents... but New York has accident rates per road type (and junctions!) for several years[1], and their rates are very roughly 1 accident per 300k-500k for rural roads, and 1 per 500k-1m for "[fully] controlled access" (which I read as highways, with divided being by far the lowest rate).

So even if it's just on highways, Autopilot is still out-performing humans by 2-3x, if not more.

On average, ignoring better luxury car rates mentioned elsewhere, and that I have no clue if this is representative. I would be surprised if broader data was so much worse that it would reverse the relationship though.

[1] https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci...

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

#495

Post by robbrown451 »

threeseed wrote: post #242
njarboe wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So the government is going to allow individuals to do it, but not the self driving cars? I don't see it working that way.

It's just like self driving cars will go a bit over the speed limit if that is the flow of traffic. If they don't, then the laws will be adjusted. It would be silly to indefinitely hold back a huge industry because humans get to exploit legal loopholes but machines don't.

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

#496

Post by tim333 »

ubertoop wrote: post #146
jasonjei wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish governments would consider the death and injury toll of manually driving, and fastlane (pun intended) infrastructure for self driving cars, such as specific roads and lanes.

The tech is changing so quickly that by the time you built the things they would probably be redundant.

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

#497

Post by mr_toad »

xyzzyz wrote: post #422
pritovido wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pro…

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. No, Manhattan project took trivial amount of money by today's standard. It costed less than the rounding error in typically given federal budget figures for past few decades.

It cost 2 billion in 1939. That’s over 20 billion in today’s dollars.

That’s about the same as NASA’s annual budget.

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

#498

Post by MarkMc »

Lots of people are arguing about 'when full self-driving cars will happen' without giving a precise definition (and therefore without having to think too hard about the problem).

The article describes Level 5 as 'full computer control of the vehicle with zero limitations' but what exactly does that mean?

(a) Does it mean a vehicle available for sale to the general public that can drive at night when it is snowing on a new road that has not first been mapped by a human?

or

(b) Does it mean that there is at least 1 city of a million residents where at least 50% of vehicle journeys did not require any occupant to have a driver's licence?

To me (and Volkswagen) it's far more useful to forecast when the second criteria will be met than the first.

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

#499

Post by _greim_ »

umvi wrote: post #349
_greim_ wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this in perspective, imagine this hypothetical conversation happening a century ago: "I have this new auto-mobile concept which doesn't require a horse and which can go fast; I envision up to fifty miles per hour. It will require a smooth, hardened road surface, but that will be achievable someday." "Forget about it. We already have millions of miles of roads, which are bumpy, made of dirt, and hard to build a…

Cobblestone/bumpy/muddy/dirt streets still exist today. I could see autonomous vehicles working in a city, but not out in the country where a driveway might be an unmarked dirt path.

Yes but these things are already problems for human-operated cars. You just need to drive slow and be careful on some roads. You need training, instructions, markers, specialized vehicles, or prior experience on some patches of terrain. These solutions have analogs in the automated driving realm.

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

#500

Post by timq »

_greim_ wrote: post #321
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…

To put this in perspective, imagine this hypothetical conversation happening a century ago: "I have this new auto-mobile concept which doesn't require a horse and which can go fast; I envision up to fifty miles per hour. It will require a smooth, hardened road surface, but that will be achievable someday." "Forget about it. We already have millions of miles of roads, which are bumpy, made of dirt, and hard to build a…

I think the key point is the amount of energy and resources necessary to make self driving cars a reality.

With the ongoing climate change and projected energy crisis, humanity may not have the physical resources to build and maintain self driving cars.

If somehow the energy problem is solved and climate change does not bring chaos, I can see true self driving car before 2100.

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