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

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

#531

Post by mopsi » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:51 AM UTC

thrower123 wrote: post #473

Fomite wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Paint is a wear item, the example of beacons would not be a wear item" I am extremely skeptical that beacons, sitting out in the heat, and the sun, and the cold, and the rain, and exposed to whatever we use to maintain roads at that juncture, will not be "a wear item".

They'll get hit and sheared off by plows and over-size loads, or just by drunks or idiots still driving dumb cars. I do not think people have a solid grasp of how many millions of miles of road would need to be technified for self-driving cars to be widely viable. Most likely, it's going to be a niche thing, tightly restricted to certain places that can afford to build and maintain the infrastructure.

Don't know about the US, but most roads in Europe already have coded reflectors to aid identification of lane geometry. Roadside reflectors have become a standard feature even on small rural roads, they're just hollow plastic half-tubes with reflecting strips on them. Cheap to install, cheap to maintain.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=road+reflectors&t=ffab&ia=images&i...

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

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Post by kalleboo » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:52 AM UTC

0xB31B1B wrote: post #359

rmtech wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trains kind of suck though. I used them a lot in the UK because I didn't have a car. The UK has an OK train network. The problem with trains is that they are very, very inconvenient for most journeys. Sunday evening? forget it. After 11pm? Nope. Journey that runs perpendicular to the local line to London? Lol, enjoy a 5 hour journey to go 100 miles. Want to take cargo like a new washing machine? Lol. Want to go somew…

1) trains go basically everywhere frequently in Japan, it’s very much a functioning rail network, they exist and kick ass. 2) a train doesn’t need to replace 100% of personal car trips to be useful. I’m sure you’re not transporting dishwashers or taking trips after 11 pm every day. Covering 90% of use cases is sufficient, and the other 10% can be handled by either renting a car or taking an Uber. 3) we can and should…

I life in a city of 600,000 in Japan. Trains DO NOT go everywhere. And as GP wrote, they don't run at night. Everyone here owns a car.

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

#533

Post by emmelaich » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:52 AM UTC

Meta: I dislike the use of "admit" in the title and story.

Why are "admit", "confess", "announce", "reveal" etc used instead of the usually more accurate "says"?

(rhetorical question)

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

#534

Post by aetherspawn » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:54 AM UTC

I don’t think full self-driving will happen any more than full self-flying planes exist, however, I do think that lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring and auto merge/lane shift, park assist, emergency auto braking and adaptive cruise control should become mandatory in every car in the next 5 years. This is the same way that stability control is mandatory in nearly every country.

When a work colleague drove home completely wasted and his Mazda CR-V nearly drove itself, you could not tell that his driver input was erroneous. Actually, it felt very safe. It dawned on me that these systems will mitigate a great deal of preventable accidents due to human stupidity.

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

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Post by naravara » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:55 AM 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?

Yeah. For the cost of all this retrofitting of roads, you’d be able to build the most insanely comprehensive transit system anyone has ever heard of.

FWIW though, it probably is possible to use this sort of technology for buses and shuttles. You can’t fix markings on ALL the roads, but you can make sure the markings are good enough on main arterials to have a dedicated bus lane.

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

#536

Post by root_axis » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:55 AM UTC

erikpukinskis wrote: post #467

joe_the_user wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think self-driving cars are like fusion reactors, they're perfectly possible on paper and, like, totally 15years away from now. There's a certain similarity but I don't know any paper that actually gives any assure that self-driving is going to ever be possible. The only theory is "we will prevent extraneous factors and then calculate".

I find these arguments—about how a certain thing is arguably “impossible”—to be the most tiresome arguments on HN. Everything that is possible today... used to be “impossible”. If something appears “impossible” to you... there’s no information there about whether it is possible.

> Everything that is possible today... used to be “impossible”.

That's a tautological argument. Obviously things that happened were possible by definition, but you're not accounting for all the things that were actually impossible which never happened and will never happen.

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

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Post by cameronh90 » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:56 AM UTC

kart23 wrote: post #244

iav wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It would be fun, then the police would show up and arrest the people who did it using camera footage from the automated cars. Most people are good people, and the ones who aren't already fuck with the road network now causing all kinds of chaos.. throwing bricks from bridges, ripping the copper out of traffic signals, but it's relatively rare because most people aren't trying to ruin everything at great risk to their freedom. I don't really understand why automated cars would be a huge change of affairs.

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

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Post by cpitman » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:56 AM UTC

qroshan wrote: post #527

cpitman wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW, self driving trains are a very different problem. With self driving cars, the approach has been to use sensors on the vehicle and make autonomous decisions based on that input. This will never work for trains, because their stopping distances are so long that they cannot use a sensor to detect most oncoming issues. Self driving trains will require more coordination, with central dispatch to tell them when/where…

Except you can always install sensors that can look as far as you want

Do you mean on the tracks?

There are hard limitations on sensing onboard the train. Tracks that bend around hills, etc. I have some exposure to wireless communication for trains, and one of the limitations is that you can often not get a line of site even from one end of the train to another.

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

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Post by nradov » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:57 AM UTC

close04 wrote: post #299

AngryData wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it is on asphalt roads you can easily embed wires and electronics underneath the surface by heating it up. And an embedded wire would be both easy for a computer to track and easy to fix or replace.

We may actually discover it’s cheaper or smarter to limit the scope of what self driving cars have to do by limiting their infrastructure. If cities become more pedestrian (cyclist, public transport) centric then some of the issues disappear. It would be a hell of a lot easier if you eliminate the complexities of navigating city traffic if most of it is gone or car traffic is completely separated from the rest. Eithe…

Where will existing cities find the budget and physical space for separating transportation modes?

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

#540

Post by umvi » Sun, Jan 19, 2020, 1:58 AM UTC

ben_w wrote: post #437

the-pigeon wrote: post #410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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

That's where competition comes in. Just like AMD vs. Intel or OSX vs. Windows. If you find a weakness in one, you don't necessarily find a weakness in the other.

Hence, finding a weakness in Tesla doesn't mean it will work against Waymo or Uber.