Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thedrive.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

581–590 of 923 posts

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

#581

Post by cjbillington »

ogre_codes wrote: post #412
_red wrote: post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

its not only lines on the road though: Imagine you are following a pickup-truck and out of the back an obviously empty box floats out of the bed and lands directly in front of your car. For a human its trivial to know the box is empty and its ok to hit it....does "AI" know that? Multiply that case x1000 and you have the conditions self-driving cars will need to handle on a daily basis.

If someone drives around with loose crap in the back of their truck that flies out, the truck driver is at fault not the self driving car. This is a danger we already have on the road. Humans make the wrong call on this sort of thing all the time. They also make stupid passes, yield the right of way at the wrong time, drive the wrong way down one way streets, cut each other off, fall asleep at the wheel, drive drunk,…

I don't think it's super relevant who is at fault, I care what the consequences are.

"It's ok if I get into an accident - it will be the other guy's fault" is only the right reasoning if you're talking on the individual level about about monetary costs of an accident only. If you're talking about injury, or if you're talking about the cost to society as a whole, they are bad consequences regardless of whose fault the accident is.

I think the actual answer is that self-driving cars will end up doing a good enough (i.e. at least human-level but not perfect) job of not wildly swerving or braking to avoid harmless objects like floating plastic bags that this won't be a concern.

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

#582

Post by javagram »

maxbond wrote: post #293
robbrown451 wrote: post #3

This strikes me as weird: > "This is one of the hardest problems we have. This is like we are going to Mars," Hitzinger said in a comment. "Maybe it will never happen." First of all, it seems obvious that we are going to go to Mars, eventually. Maybe not any time soon, but never? Seriously? But the bigger thing is that there is about 1000 times more economic benefit to self driving cars than of going to Mars, at leas…

I don't mean to be rude, but I have strong feelings about this attitude. Let's take going to Mars. We can't reliably go to the moon. We can't even go everywhere on the Earth, where we have every possible advantage. Spend a year on the ISS and you'll develop all sorts of health issues. Spending time on Mars isn't likely to be less hazardous. We may send humans to Mars but it is by no means guaranteed. (And I would als…

We absolutely have the technology to go to Mars. We could probably have sent a manned mission to Mars in the 70s with the same technology level that took us to the moon.

It’s just that it would cost an incredible sum of money for very little gain and so it hasn’t happened - even the mission to the moon was a huge drain on the budget and the program was canceled once we won the space race.

Going to Mars is like supersonic passenger air travel (Concorde) - something we have the technology to do, but it just doesn’t make sense.

An autonomous, self-driving automobile is something we just can’t do today no matter how much money we spent on it. I think it’s a different question because we are trying to predict if we will ever reach the level of technological sophistication to allow it. (Of course we have a solution for “driving a car from one city to another” and it’s putting a human in the seat, or of “making a self driving vehicle” and it’s putting the vehicle on grade separated tracks like the Morgantown PRT)

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

#583

Post by mattkrause »

m463 wrote: post #339
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 agree. new technologies are over-estimated in the short term, and under-estimated in the long term. Decades ago our computers were "soon" to be voice controlled, listening to our speech and doing our bidding. That was a big load of hype. However, over time and below the radar it became true as computers first answered phones, then took limited commands in cars and smartphones and now it is basically true (without a…

"I dictated this , to the quiet office. The word area isn't too bad."

[What I actually said was 'I dictated this entire comment in a quiet office The word error rate isn't too bad '. Built-in recognizer on a Mac.]

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

#584

Post by jasonhansel »

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…

My question about this idea is always: what about pedestrians? Sure, you can use beacons so that cars won't crash into each other, and use signs to avoid collisions with fixed obstacles. But interactions with pedestrians often require guessing at their intentions, and you can't have them wear beacons at all times. Of course, some areas are already fairly hostile to pedestrians, but we don't want self-driving cars to make that problem worse.

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

#585

Post by amelius »

jasonhansel wrote: post #575

I think it's pretty clear that mass transit and (e-)bikes--not cars--should become the primary modes of transportation, at least in urban areas, if for no other reason than that they're inherently more sustainable. I would be concerned that self-driving cars will only arrive after Peak Automobile has already come and gone.

How about mass transit using a fleet of self driving cars?

I can see that this isn't a future a VW exec would dream of, since it would mean far fewer cars per person.

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

#586

Post by pjkundert »

pjkundert wrote: post #489
tensor wrote: post #391

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autopilot is evidence that automated systems are already better than humans today. The edge cases scare people but on aggregate the stats show is superior to people. This sort of tech is only going to keep getting better.

Look up "Ergodicity". Autopilot doesn't need to be 2x or 10x better than a human driver -- it needs to be 100x or 1,000x better, or nobody (sane) should touch it. The problem is not that autopilot is superior than your own driving in the vast majority of the cases! The problem is the 1 in a million times when it makes a trivial mistake that virtually no human would, and kills you instantly. Like driving under an obvi…

Don’t be a drone. What are you downvoting for? Are you going to remain ignorant, or start to think?

I’m totally in support of, and believe in the value of self-driving vehicles.

But, the SV soy-boys need to bring their A-game. Not the “My machine learning system that underperforms a nematode worm’s neural performance is going to totes solve self-driving cars” toy they’re delivering now. Come on!

I expect better, especially from Elon Musk, who should know better - he’s a Saskatchewan boy! You can’t see the highway 6 months of the year, and there’s no static friction; only dozens of variants of dynamic friction, which can only be distinguished by a sensor suite that includes vision, sound, vibration and predictive estimation from historical models, recent historical temperature profiles, and precipitation, insolation energy and angle, wind and recent traffic over the same road.

So man up. Increase your model learning and real-time solving power by between 10 and 100 times. Increase your sensor suite. Include historical memory and group learning.

Sheesh.

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

#587

Post by [deleted] »

yellow_lead wrote: post #482
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.

I'll bite. Aside from Tesla owners, I do not know anyone in my life today whose vehicle connects to the Internet. Of course, I mean to say I don't see how your comparison to present day is accurate.

[deleted]

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

#588

Post by ratel »

nrp wrote: post #394
heavyset_go wrote: post #366

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no evidence that automated driving systems are any safer than human drivers, or that they ever will be.

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.…

Those figures are not as good as you seem to suggest.

First of all. Tesla counts the number of miles for every Tesla being involved in an accident. The other figure you quote is for all miles driven by motor vehicles before getting involved in an accident. Given that accidents tend to involve two or more vehicles the number of miles traveled before an accident involving a Tesla without autopilot or safety measures would be closer to 820.000 miles.

In that figure of 479.000 miles commercial traffic is also included. Commercial traffic makes up around 60% of all accidents. We cannot translate this to miles per accident comparable to Tesla, because commercial traffic tends to drive more miles than passenger vehicles do, but there are far less of them, etc. Another big category that needs to be excluded from the general figure is motor cycles, that generous source of donor organs, to make it comparable. Passenger vehicles in general are more safe than the overal figure and thus closer to Tesla's figure.

Second point is that Teslas are hardly part of the second hand or n-hand market yet. It is even a question if Tesla will tracks that data in those markets. In those markets you will see more young people as drivers (something to do with income). They are responsible for a majority of the traffic accidents involving passenger vehicles (something to do with tendencies to discount the future and to overestimate their own capabilities).

Third point is that the really good figure comes from auto pilot, but that only works in places and under conditions that are already far less accident prone like highways under normal weather conditions.

The good news from the figures is that enabling the safety measures make Tesla drivers better drivers: From 1.6 miles to 2.1 miles roughly a 25% increase in miles traveled before an accident. That would lead us in the direction of mandating level-2 automation in all new cars for more safety rather than trying to push for level-5 for some brands.

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

#589

Post by spookthesunset »

K0SM0S wrote: post #568
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…

Initially in this decade I fully subscribed to your view, on paper. Then I observed how things panned out and thought some more. Here's a grim reality: at ~3 million per death in a car crash (that was a reasonable estimate of insurance cost, overall, a decade ago or so), with ~37k deaths/year in motor vehicule accidents in the USA for instance, that's roughly $100 billion / year — a mere 0.5% of its $20 trillion GDP.…

The current technology capacity is the showstopper and always will be. Technology works for humans not the other way around. Nobody will adapt our society to conform to self driving cars. It just doesn’t make sense....

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

#590

Post by Zarel »

einrealist wrote: post #257
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology. I doubt, that the software / hardware will have a common sense, like we humans have. Its this common sense that keeps us alive in unexpected scenarios, like when the paint on the road is missing.

This is definitely one of the things xkcd has talked about:

https://xkcd.com/1958/

Post reply on HN