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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'

#831

Post by diffeomorphism »

simias wrote: post #380
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 think self-driving cars are like fusion reactors, they're perfectly possible on paper and, like, totally 15years away from now. I'm sure it'll be possible some day, but I'm not positive that it'll be possible in the general case before we reach the Singularity. And when we get there self-driving cars are going to be a small side-effect of this unprecedented revolution. I can't help to draw a parallel between these…

Fusion research could have been finished in the 90s if we didn't drastically cut funding to keep it "15 years away" forever:

https://i.imgur.com/3vYLQmm.png

I don't think self-driving cars have this problem.

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

#832

Post by j-c-hewitt »

gambiting wrote: post #810
j-c-hewitt wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing and it happens all the time. This is something that a human driver familiar with the road will notice and it will be unlikely to cause an accident. An out-of-towner might get into an accident. An automated vehicle would ideally not even be looking at signs and just operating from its stored data.

That's an absolutely crazy idea. You are only required by law to follow signs that are actually there, full stop, a car should never rely on some built in database of data. I cannot imagine a database of signs that would be constantly up to date and somehow distributed to all cars on the road.

I don't think that's crazy. Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use? They already have such databases for their own records, usage, and analysis. In a world in which SDCs are normal that is how you would expect it to work.

It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person would and make correct on-the-fly decisions about traffic signs when snow obscures the sign and a little bit of ice and muck obscures its cameras ever-so-slightly, making some of the sensors go half-berserk.

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

#833

Post by hutzlibu »

jtolmar wrote: post #517
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…

Aren't all of those problems solved by more trains?

But it is not really efficient, to use one train, for one passenger.

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

#834

Post by aantix »

oblib wrote: post #817
aantix wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to choose between privacy of my location or the convenience of a self driving car, I’d choose the car. Every single time. Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the supermarket.

>> If I had to choose between privacy... That sounds like it's taken right out of an Orwell story.

You already make this tradeoff - you have a bank account instead of hiding your money in a mattress. You're probably browsing the web from a normal internet connection, not a VPN, or some alternative?

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

#835

Post by aantix »

ozim wrote: post #797
aantix wrote: post #785

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I had to choose between privacy of my location or the convenience of a self driving car, I’d choose the car. Every single time. Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the supermarket.

Tell that to guy that had smartwatch and his wife noticed he had high heart rate somewhere at night where he should be doing something else. I don't have link for the story. But idea behind this is not that one should not cheat on his wife because he will get caught. To be really a human and be honest, one must not have an urge to cheat on his wife(husband) because he loves her. If someone has dirty thoughts and only…

This argument is about that you have to make concessions - tradeoffs.

You have a choice to not use the autonomous car, to not use the apple watch, to choose a privacy-conscious internet carrier.

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

#836

Post by gsnedders »

anticensor wrote: post #656
gsnedders wrote: post #637

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> hence the significantly bigger gaps between consecutive trains compared to the gap between consecutive cars or trucks A lot of this is because railway signalling operates on a brick-wall principal: it is constantly assumed the vehicle in front could come to a dead halt instantaneously, whereas most road situations assume if you can match the braking performance of the vehicle in front with some margin. The railway…

> A lot of this is because railway signalling operates on a brick-wall principal That applies to old style -though still in common use- signalling. CBTC (every railway should use, but very few uses it) has similar, or even tighter, margins to road signalling.

No, the gains from CBTC come from two factors: one, it being a moving block system, rather than an absolute block (really you can think of a moving block system as an absolute block one where the length of the block approaches zero), so spacing matches the braking distance required; secondly, as with many modern in-cab systems, it is down to the individual trains to compute their braking curve, rather than the length of the blocks being dictated by the worse-case braking performance of any stock on the line.

I'm also unaware of any freight or mixed traffic application of CBTC, which makes it a stretch to say every railway should, though plenty of proven in-cab systems provide many of the same benefits (and you can decrease block-length substantially to get much of the way there).

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

#837

Post by bobthepanda »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #558
bobthepanda wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is that unless you get rid of them completely, traffic flow is not going to increase. You can't have free-flowing traffic everywhere and also have pedestrians safely crossing the street, and the lower bound on a traffic light cycle today is the amount of time it takes an old person to cross the street from curb to curb.

That neglects limited access roads and wide boulevards. In either case, even if pedestrians aren’t banned, they are rare enough to be an exception rather than a rule. For example, the old guy trying to make their way across 8-lane Chang-an Road in Beijing...well, there is a reason Chang an road forces pedestrians onto bridges.

By and large, today the congestion problem is not really on the massive roads themselves, but where they interface with low-capacity local networks. Most destinations are not located on a limited access road by definition, and the busy exit into city center with lots of pedestrians is not going to get any less congested, AVs or not.

In modern Western urban planning, large car-capacity streets aren't considered a good thing to be running through urban areas anyways. Most of the large cities (Paris, Berlin, New York) are taking steps to reduce road widths to more equally distribute the road between pedestrians, cyclists and transit users. As it turns out, building pedestrian overpasses at a convenient enough spacing for pedestrians is extremely expensive.

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

#838

Post by gambiting »

j-c-hewitt wrote: post #832
gambiting wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's an absolutely crazy idea. You are only required by law to follow signs that are actually there, full stop, a car should never rely on some built in database of data. I cannot imagine a database of signs that would be constantly up to date and somehow distributed to all cars on the road.

I don't think that's crazy. Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use? They already have such databases for their own records, usage, and analysis. In a world in which SDCs are normal that is how you would expect it to work. It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person woul…

>>It's a bigger expectation to suppose that the car will perceive the environment better than a person would and make correct on-the-fly decisions about traffic signs when snow obscures the sign and a little bit of ice and muck obscures its cameras ever-so-slightly, making some of the sensors go half-berserk.

Then it should do the same a person is required to do in that scenario - slow down and exhibit caution. Otherwise you will get a car that confidently drives forward because it "knows" a sign is there. If the sensors can't cope with that then the car shouldn't be on the road at all, period.

>>Why shouldn't local authorities, state DOTs, and the national DOT be obligated to also update a database that self driving cars use?

Because the same local authorities don't even have the budget, time or competency to fix the most minor issues with our roads. Potholes go unfixed for weeks, there's no budget for cleaning, for salting, for repair of missing signs, lamp posts or simply for review whether existing signage is actually appropriate after changes they make. But yet the same authorities should be tasked with real time updates to some database of signage? I'm sorry, but I'm just trying to be realistic here - we can write legislation to require authorities to do something, but in real world that's just not going to happen reliably enough to trust it. I know I wouldn't.

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

#839

Post by fastball »

umvi wrote: post #349
_greim_ wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put this in perspective, imagine this hypothetical conversation happening a century ago: "I have this new auto-mobile concept which doesn't require a horse and which can go fast; I envision up to fifty miles per hour. It will require a smooth, hardened road surface, but that will be achievable someday." "Forget about it. We already have millions of miles of roads, which are bumpy, made of dirt, and hard to build a…

Cobblestone/bumpy/muddy/dirt streets still exist today. I could see autonomous vehicles working in a city, but not out in the country where a driveway might be an unmarked dirt path.

What features of an unmarked dirt path make it "driveable" that you can pick out but a camera cannot?

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

#840

Post by bobthepanda »

mattlutze wrote: post #439
idreyn wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving cars cannot plan an entire exchange in a dense urban areas because there will always be actors like pedestrians, cyclists, and stray plastic bags that do not participate in planning and act adversarially to their shared model. Optimizations will be highly local, spatially and temporally, and I suspect they will end up looking a lot like humans trying to coordinate on the same problem. And even if AVs can…

Self-driving car networks have the benefit of not being bound by the same finite capacity of a network of humans trying to manage real-world traffic. Neither would they have to operate at artificially handicapped speeds, as no human operator would really be able to keep up regardless with the 10,000 or 100,000 cars running around. Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early eno…

In a dense urban area, the speed limit is generally not dictated by road design but by the simple physics interaction between a person made of meat and bones, and a multi-ton metal vehicle.

Follow distances in urban areas with low speeds are already really small. I don't think AVs would make them meaningfully tighter.

> Part of reacting and mitigating acute issues is being able to reroute traffic early enough, or slow cars down early enough, to minimize disruption (instead of a traffic slinky blocking everyone up).

This was supposed to be what Waze and Google Maps were set to achieve, and they did not, but they did piss off a lot of people when cut-through drivers started jamming up their formerly quiet residential neighborhoods.

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