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Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

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Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#151

Post by Piskvorrr »

ghaff wrote: post #111
jacquesm wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Respectfully, with about 30 years of driving experience and some years (fortunately long behind me) with crazy mileage, it sounds like you're wrong, and that experience includes Canada (including winter), a very large portion of the United States, Europe (both East and West) and Latin America. People are great drivers if you take into consideration the conditions that they drive in, and that traffic deaths include al…

>don't drive when there is ice / snow / excessive wind For me, that's been one of the big wins coming from working from home at least some of the time for almost 20 years at this point. I'm pretty much fully WFH or traveling these days but even prior to that I rarely needed to drive in if conditions were bad. Because of various circumstances, I've had to do a few fairly long drives in bad weather for personal reasons…

TBH, having driven in hailstorms, snowstorms and rainstorms, SDVs would refuse driving in such conditions - and that would have been an entirely sane decision. The conditions were literally insane for driving - yet most drivers continued, albeit slightly slower.

In other words, human driving is far more dangerous than we care to admit; that's not a technical issue, that's pure denial.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#152

Post by takk309 »

xiaolingxiao wrote: post #139
takk309 wrote: post #15

I am a traffic engineer and one of the things that I do regularly is write 10 year traffic plans for small to medium sized cities, think 60,000 people max. When a lot of the self driving hype was really kicking off, I was told to make sure to incorporate them into the plans. This mostly consisted of a few sentences about self driving and that was it. When modeling future traffic growth, the client would always say, "…

hey Takk309 could I reach out to you to ask a few question? I am researching what it takes to validate the safety of these cars on the street in relation to other cars, and pedestrians, and your background would be immensely helpful! Feel free to email me at lingxiao@seas.upenn.edu

That is going to be a tough but to crack. Crash statistics are tricky because they are either underreported or very infrequent. Two good resources for just about anything traffic related are ITE [1] and TRB [2].

[1] https://www.ite.org/ [2] http://www.trb.org/

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#153

Post by takk309 »

ctdonath wrote: post #105
skywhopper wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always baffled by folks who assume self-driving cars would reduce traffic. No matter what, even if they are privately owned, truly self-driving vehicles could only increase traffic. If they can be dispatched without a human driver to pick up groceries or take-out, for example, there'll be a lot more trips. And sharing self-driving cars rather than owning them would surely be more likely to increase the number of…

I envision herds of driverless vehicles slowly cruising randomly, summoned when needed, avoiding the cost of parking.

Possibly the a horror worse than Skynet!

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#154

Post by Piskvorrr »

ghaff wrote: post #131
deepspace wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> throws control to a remote driver Throwing a remote driver into a dangerous situation with no context sounds like a terrible solution to me. See also: Cpt Dubois from AF447. Doing that deliberately and repeatedly just multiplies the chances of catastrophic error. And the VR driver job would be so stressful that there may not be many takers. Who would take responsibility if they made a bad call and caused a crash?

I can possibly see an On-Star-like backup VR driver role at some point when there's full self-driving and there needs to be some sort of backup of last resort when a car with no human in it freaks out. (Or if there's just a child, etc.) But there has to be an assumption that this is a rare event and that it takes place in a context where a VR driver has time to establish some situational awareness. (Oh, and in a lot…

The solution would need some massive breakthroughs in reducing latency...and time travel. "We need a decision within 6 seconds...4...2...hey human, watch the inevitable crash!" (This already happened btw)

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#155

Post by Piskvorrr »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #62
ghaff wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go back a couple of years and look on just about any thread about self-driving on a forum such as this one and you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner. Because, after all, that's what the SV hypesters were saying and they'd never lie.

> you'll find no shortage of people arguing that they're just around the corner Ya, but around the corner no one thought that would be 2020. The strawman is always to place around the corner as tomorrow, but many people just mean in a decade or two.

Yeah. It's been juuust beyond reach, but within five years to mass adoption, for a century now.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#156

Post by jihoon796 »

Outside the vacuum of technology (can it be done?), it seems to me that the role that policy plays when it comes to the actual rollout of self-driving cars (should it be done and how?) is vastly underrated. This seems to be the real bottleneck in mass adoption - improvements in technology will have diminishing returns after a certain point.

For example, things like getting companies to agree to a unified standard at a government/industry level & determining frameworks for liability all seem to be as important (and perhaps difficult) as eking out another 0.00001% increase in safety.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#157

Post by SilasX »

bdamm wrote: post #90
wyxuan wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A little bit like how some people aggressively brake in front of Tesla drivers

Exactly. It's a form of bullying. Taking a swipe at cars that are under AI control is a form of intimidation just like "rolling coal", popping the finger, throwing coins at other cars, ICE pickups parking in EV charging spots, etc. So while it makes sense to me that an AI car should do something to indicate it is so to other drivers (e.g. quick double-pulse of the hazards every 10 seconds perhaps) that comes with a v…

For anyone else who was confused like me, ICE here = internal combustion engine, not Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I was wondering what Immigration's connection to electric vehicles was.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#158

Post by jacquesm »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #151
ghaff wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>don't drive when there is ice / snow / excessive wind For me, that's been one of the big wins coming from working from home at least some of the time for almost 20 years at this point. I'm pretty much fully WFH or traveling these days but even prior to that I rarely needed to drive in if conditions were bad. Because of various circumstances, I've had to do a few fairly long drives in bad weather for personal reasons…

TBH, having driven in hailstorms, snowstorms and rainstorms, SDVs would refuse driving in such conditions - and that would have been an entirely sane decision. The conditions were literally insane for driving - yet most drivers continued, albeit slightly slower. In other words, human driving is far more dangerous than we care to admit; that's not a technical issue, that's pure denial.

You can't always decide when you have to drive. If you're on the road and conditions worsen then it may be safer to drive until you can get off the road safely. I've been in rain squalls so heavy that you couldn't see anymore and that is when it gets tricky: you know you should stop driving but that risks being rear-ended by someone who disagrees with you. A self driving car would end up being rear ended just the same.

Stopping traffic only works if everybody starts out with the same playbook in mind.

But to start driving in those conditions (or even if those conditions are likely to occur) that's madness, unless you are a first responder.

Re: Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

#159

Post by xiaolingxiao »

takk309 wrote: post #152
xiaolingxiao wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey Takk309 could I reach out to you to ask a few question? I am researching what it takes to validate the safety of these cars on the street in relation to other cars, and pedestrians, and your background would be immensely helpful! Feel free to email me at lingxiao@seas.upenn.edu

That is going to be a tough but to crack. Crash statistics are tricky because they are either underreported or very infrequent. Two good resources for just about anything traffic related are ITE [1] and TRB [2]. [1] https://www.ite.org/ [2] http://www.trb.org/

Hm for sure that's why it's exciting and super important from a technical standpoint! I'm interested in learning more about how city planners think about traffic in general, so that's why I think learning from your perspective would be super helpful, and obviously super happy to share my perspective on the field, most of my friends work at one of these storied companies so I have a slightly different vantage point.
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