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

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

#751

Post by gyk »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #705
ratel wrote: post #588

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wo…

> 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. You're doing that th…

Just the opposite of GP's opinion, I think basing the statistics solely on Telsa will half the figure rather than doubling it. Suppose the average interval of accident is t and the average speed of car is v, as Telsa cars only represent a small portion of all vehicles, we have

    - Only Telsa: distance_travelled / num_accidents = v t / 1
    - Two cars involved, but counted as one accident : distance_travelled / num_accidents = 2 v t / 1

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

#752

Post by akrymski »

m0zg wrote: post #374
akrymski wrote: post #371

Thank God! Self driving cars are not a solution to the world's problems. Better public transport is. Why can't we have self driving buses that replace trams? The level of AI needed for that is already there. As the population of major cities grows, we can't expect everyone riding around in their own car. Public transport is better for citizens and the environment. We need to be reducing the number of vehicles on the…

They are _a_ solution, for sure. They just aren't _the_ solution. I'm not sure dense cities are _the_ solution either, especially as more and more work is done remotely. I think humans weren't meant to be cooped up in a tiny concrete box. I like my backyard, and the forest behind my back yard. One size does not fit all, and it's not really feasible to tackle lower density living setups with "public transport", at lea…

US is a special place. Even Russia has better public transport.

I don't think lack of public parking at a train station is a good enough reason to develop self-driving cars. It's easier to build a car park.

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

#753

Post by NicoJuicy »

threeseed wrote: post #461
NicoJuicy wrote: post #353

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You forgot one thing. Autonomous cars won't have the same algorithm as selfish humans to position themselves. A human will go to one of the busy places and will probably drive back to the original point of pickup. While a computer will be notified ( 1 car only parked on the busy place) and immediately replaced by a new available/nearby car. Making the process more efficient, more remote places will be handled faster.…

> And as always, if income > fine. They will just pay the fine Up until the point they are banned. Everyone, especially lawmakers, are pretty sick of tech companies breaking the law in order to be "disruptive". As we've seen recently with all of the e-scooter bans.

You won't get banned for paying too much parking tickets.

Scooter bans were mostly because it was disruptive having a staple of scooters in the middle of the pedestrian road and they were consistently breaking the rules.

Ps. We do similar stuff for cities at our company. So I don't need an externzl source for this currently.

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

#754

Post by threatofrain »

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.

You can already screw with infrastructure to kill people. Sometimes we just have to hope that the combination of positives and negatives convince people not to go out and screw the world.

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

#755

Post by threatofrain »

kohtatsu wrote: post #722
TwoBit wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you destroy a yield sign, the system will immediately know because all the cars previously recorded it.

So presumably every self-driving vehicle is going to be constantly streaming all sorts of information in their purview to a central hub? That is a privacy nightmare without regulation on scrubbing extraneous information, done before upload: for example blocking out of pedestrian data; not just faces but clothing and gait, and probably also any data captured through windows. It would be ideal to have a limited view of…

I feel like this is almost like trying to resist the allure of drones in war. It’s too easy to do and too hard to stop. It takes almost global consensus.

Any number of parties could lawfully and unobtrusively start slurping up all sorts of data which is in a kind of plain view, and nobody would really be the wiser.

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

#756

Post by beejee »

FriendlyNormie wrote: post #389
toasterlovin wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least the software is fixable. Other humans are not.

At least other humans fear death as a consequence of driving incorrectly. Computers do not.

Too many people still driving around drunk sadly counters that point.

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

#757

Post by rmtech »

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…

Nowadays I live in a city with a tram system, trains to other larger cities and bike lanes.

If you are going from one city centre to another, during the day, the train is the best choice.

If you are moving within a bike-friendly city, bike is best (or Uber, but it is banned here). If you are somewhere in an urban sprawl, it's car or Uber.

I definitely find trains useful, but I think that they are consistently overrated by people for emotional and irrational reasons. I personally use trains for maybe 1% of my journeys and trams for 0% despite them being extremely prominent in my city.

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

#758

Post by heisenbit »

gfodor wrote: post #406
macinjosh wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I want an oceanside villa on the dark side of the moon but that's doesn't mean it will happen. Just because there is motivation to do something doesn't mean it is possible.

Of course it’s possible: we have billions of existence proofs that driving high speed vehicles successfully using sensors equipped to measure light and sound work. The question is how much it takes to replicate that system artificially.

I don‘t think high speed is where there is a problem. The challenges lie in the diverse environments where literally anything can happen.

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

#759

Post by jaclaz »

Groxx wrote: post #494
tim333 wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, A…

Still, there is IMHO a sampling error that makes the comparison not fully accurate.

The pool of "all vehicles" traveling on the road, comprises very old cars and pickup/trucks/vans, and all kind of drivers, including teens (or however inexperienced drivers) and older people that may be more likely to have slower response times or some other condition, like (say) poorer vision.

Besides the fact that Tesla's are at the most a few years old and being on the pricy end (which should imply that they are properly maintained), they are "sport cars" (in the sense that they have very good handling and breaking) and they are driven (I believe) by a certain subset of drivers, relatively young but with no or very few inexperienced drivers.

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

#760

Post by rmtech »

bamboozled wrote: post #351
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…

"Trains kind of suck though. I used them a lot in the UK because I didn't have a car." You're blaming trains because you want to have a boozy night out? Get a hotel or start and leave earlier like everyone else. This is just a silly comment.

I don't drink, but it is very, very inconvenient if your activities are constrained by the train timetable. Much better to have a car available and be able to travel when you want to.

Of course sometimes you dont want to travel late or at weekends

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