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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'

#771

Post by crusso »

smabie wrote: post #405
crusso wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's really not. Level 4 will require the vehicle to take you from door to door without driver intervention in normal driving conditions. Level 4 is mostly what people think of when they think of autonomous driving because you can take a nap, work on your laptop, whatever. You get in your car, tell it where you want to go, and it does everything. Level 5 basically removes the steering wheel so you never drive. Bu…

Like making sure the river you are about to ford in the Serengeti is low enough so you won't get stuck?

Is that what the CEO of VW is saying here? Their Serengeti autonomous adventuring vehicles might get stuck? If so, I totally missed that nuance.

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

#772

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

darkerside wrote: post #316
jsolson wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not be getting in that car, but I certainly will. After all, every driver on the road today is an incomprehensible black box where not only do we not know the parameters, we don't even know the function they're parameterizing. Every instance functions differently, and our testing procedures have woefully low coverage.

When one of those black boxes malfunctions it gets taken off the road. When the AI malfunctions, are we going to shut down entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed? Not to mention that most software fixes cause other bugs...

> are we going to shut down entire classes of vehicles until the problem is confirmed fixed?

Yes of course we will. What is the problem with that approach? That is the exactly logical thing to do and will be done.

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

#773

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

_red wrote: post #271
jsolson wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may not be getting in that car, but I certainly will. After all, every driver on the road today is an incomprehensible black box where not only do we not know the parameters, we don't even know the function they're parameterizing. Every instance functions differently, and our testing procedures have woefully low coverage.

how do you see insurance working? why would drivers be responsible to have insurance when the car is completely controlled by bigcorp programmers?

Sometimes it seems that critics of something like self-driving cars want so badly for the project to fail that they themselves fail to see obvious solutions.

The insurance will work much better than it does today, because insurance in it's core is about spreading the risks and calculating exact costs of those risks, it's about calculating statistics of negative events and predicting total costs of such events for the entire fleets.

ALL parts of that equation are just better calculated if all cars were automatic, - you can better calculate number of accidents, you can see details of all accidents because there is blackbox data including videos, you can compare cars to each other because a Tesla with same hardware drives in exactly the same way as another one (which cannot be said for human drivers), they don't have to calculate for weird human risk activities such as drinking or being tired, they can run simulations of the same situation on the same software etc. etc.

Insurance is not going to have any problems, insurance is going to love it and make a lot of money on the self-driving cars, they are a perfect fit for each other. Insurance companies don't even care for whom do they have to pay to, they just care that the statistic of the number of failures is correctly represented and that manufacturers don't lie about those statistics - that is all they care about, they calculate a simple equation, that's all insurance is about...

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

#774

Post by cmsj »

ajhurliman wrote: post #516
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.

I think what they meant by "tricking" the cars is to paint roads in a deceiving way to make cars meander into lakes or something like that, not hacking everyone's cars.

It doesn't even have to be malicious. I was driving through Germany recently and some roadworks on a highway meant we were using temporary contraflow lanes, and even with my big fancy human brain, I was sometimes struggling to decide which of the layers of permanent/temporary lane markings I should observe.

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

#775

Post by Erlich_Bachman »

moksly wrote: post #556
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…

What makes you say this? Gut feeling? Or do you have any supportive evidence? We’ve done self-driving as a POC for a decade in Denmark, and it hasn’t really improved much, to the point where we too are considering, that it’s probably never going to work in the real world. Don’t get me wrong. Self driving already works, it just doesn’t work on roads. Roads where you’ll suddenly have a bunch of leaves flying around. Ro…

> We’ve done self-driving as a POC for a decade in Denmark

Who is "we"?

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

#776

Post by kharak »

temporaryvector wrote: post #163
rapind wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet air travel is far safer than road travel and they embraced autopilot long ago. The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived. Probably a good thing considering how low the bar is right now for road safety. Being killed by a robot's mistake is perceived far worse than by human error. I think a middle ground like autopilot on the highway could significantly improve safety while still accom…

>The problem with complete automation is how accidents are perceived I don't think so. Airplane autopilot automates away the safe, boring parts of air travel, much like highway driving, so in that sense I agree with you. Truly autonomous landing is still a big deal, and planes that the benefit of ATC, and I don't think there are any planes that taxi or takeoff autonomously. Furthermore, accidents involving autopilot…

I had at least one autonomous landing due to heavy fog. Was announced by the captain, he said something like: "Because of the weather conditions, we'll use automatic landing for safety reasons". Landing was quite flawless, despite the fact that I couldn't see the ground until we were a couple of meters close. But the landing approach seemed to take longer, maybe there is a trade-off.

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

#777

Post by bpfrh »

Fnoord wrote: post #745
bpfrh wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would argue that signing beacon messages with a PKI infrastructure would migate that issue.

Those beacons can be DoSed. Consider how Hong Kong protestors avoid the face recognition with laser pens.

Yeah, but couldn't you also simply disconnect the beacons with a wirecutter?

I mean, every technical system can be shutdown and will shutdown sometimes, isn't that a inherent weakness of such a system?

if that beacon does not respond disable automation for that part?

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

#778

Post by Fnoord »

bpfrh wrote: post #777
Fnoord wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those beacons can be DoSed. Consider how Hong Kong protestors avoid the face recognition with laser pens.

Yeah, but couldn't you also simply disconnect the beacons with a wirecutter? I mean, every technical system can be shutdown and will shutdown sometimes, isn't that a inherent weakness of such a system? if that beacon does not respond disable automation for that part?

Sure, but I was thinking about temporary disabling (like a temporary, reversible DoS). If you can temporarily disable something, it is more difficult to find the culprit, and the impact is higher because of the surprise element. If something is permanently disabled, you fix it right away.

Just like bullying: bullying itself is annoying, but what I found annoying is the inconsistency of it. At some point, my bullies were friendly, at another point once more bullying. If it were permanently on-going and not sneaky, they'd be found out by e.g. teachers long ago already.

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

#779

Post by blattimwind »

cjbillington wrote: post #581
ogre_codes wrote: post #412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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"

Exactly. Most accidents take two people to happen, one who makes a mistake and at least one more who could have prevented the accident as well. For example, when right of way is ignored by someone in a left yield right situation, no accident happens if the one with right of way brakes in time. Or, if someone fails to merge in time and runs out of road, someone else can prevent an accident by braking a little.

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