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

821–830 of 923 posts

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

#821

Post by supertrope »

spookthesunset wrote: post #307
_red wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Insurance would be a nightmare for a manufacturer. Every accident will initially be pegged to the auto maker (as it should be.. it’s their code!). The auto maker will always try to weasel out and blame the passenger-owners of the car (they didn’t maintain it, the paint was dirty and messed with the sensors, the tire pressure was 2 PSI lower than average). And if you go with the “nobody will own cars, you’ll just summ…

Just like Tesla blames dead drivers for using "autopilot." "They should have kept their hands on the wheel and been paying attention." No you can't have a copy of the data.

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

#822

Post by supertrope »

rorykoehler wrote: post #563
F-0X wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I am going to side with VW on this. I have always been skeptical of fully autonomous vehicles, and I do not believe they will _ever_ exist on the roads that currently stand. Driving safely in all conditions without aid from a human is simply too complex a task for code that can be audited and verified. If some AI model that's been trained on a billion years of driving experience shows promise, but it is some…

5g networks could greatly help bridge the technical gap. A good example of unforeseen consequences similar to smartphones and 4g transforming society.

I don't understand how a vehicle or any other real time system can rely on 5G. For example, electrical utilities have such a critical responsibility for matching supply to demand and maintaining exactly 50/60Hz that the landline phone network is not good enough, they have to maintain a private signaling network. Cellular networks are notoriously unreliable with dead zones, dropped calls, congestion, power failure, etc. Millimeter wave 5G is even worse with line of sight coverage zones measured in meters.

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

#823

Post by supertrope »

nradov wrote: post #539
close04 wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-purposing one of the existing lanes (a bus lane can move more people than 3 SOV lanes combined). Toll roads, reinvesting parking revenue, and increased tax revenue from downtown land used for working, living, and playing instead of just storing automobiles.

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

#824

Post by Faark »

baybal2 wrote: post #458
ehsankia wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it a little silly to call someone "only sane C-level person" after one comment? Also, while claiming these innovations are only a few years way may be insane, saying they will never happen feels probably just as non-sense. History hasn't been on the side of such absolute claims. It will take time, but Waymo already has working 100% self-driving cars out in the wild. Yes it's in a small area, with perfect weathe…

I do feel like that. From my past few years dealing with automotive clients, I haven't heard of a single company that was not completely obsessed with it. All and every piece of electronics we did in the automotive sector had some lame "AI platform" attached somewhere, for no apparent reason. The most blatant "AI washing" I saw was an "AI power steering" which was a plain PID, inferior on all fronts to purpose made s…

Yes, it's a hype based buzzword. Just like "cloud" could be found everywhere a few years ago by people trying to profit from said hype. And just like "cloud", usage will start to become somewhat more realistic eventually. But I doubt the industry will look exactly like it did before... just like many of us didn't switch back to local bare metal servers.

I totally understand mistrust. Less so if there are somewhat capable alpha products already available with huge economic incentives behind made by somewhat reputable companies. It might not happen in the current hype cycle, then it will be a future one. But I don't ever see self driving cars quietly being deployed. That's just a way to well known game changer hardly anyone will want to sit out.

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

#825

Post by dang »

pjkundert wrote: post #586
pjkundert wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, espe…

Please don't let downvotes get to you like this. I know it's not always easy, but the site guidelines ask it explicitly of everyone. That's because it quickly causes comments to sink below the acceptable levels, which is what happened here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#826

Post by BurningFrog »

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…

> So presumably every self-driving vehicle is going to be constantly streaming all sorts of information in their purview to a central hub?

That's a terrible design.

The obvious way is that the sign/beacon itself pings a server every 5 minutes, and when that stops you know it's broken.

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

#827

Post by BurningFrog »

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.

Even current tech can easily drive a car on a road completely without digital beacons.

We won't lose that capacity.

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

#828

Post by tomc1985 »

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…

Gotta love optimism...

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

#830

Post by SirLJ »

BurningFrog wrote: post #827
einrealist wrote: post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Even current tech can easily drive a car on a road completely without digital beacons. We won't lose that capacity.

Try up north during the winter...
Post reply on HN