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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

#231

Post by AlotOfReading »

ghaff wrote: post #92
AtlasBarfed wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As usual the article conflates the (very difficult problem) of self-driving everywhere with various other sub-problems. The self-driving problem on highways is much more solvable, and can further be improved by convergent infrastructure evolution (forewarning of traffic jams from central control, embedded rfid to aid pathfinding in bad weather, weather reports, wildlife nets/barriers, highly standardized signage, int…

I suspect that part of it is that a lot of people in the tech and tech journalism space live in and around cities. Many of them are mostly focused on being driven around and not owning a car. Long highway drives may be something they don't do that often. So the ability to own a car that can automate that subset of their driving probably doesn't strike them as all that interesting. Personally, as I've said elsewhere,…

It's way more difficult from a fleet operational perspective and more importantly, way less profitable. Take LASF as an example. That's about 6h driving, and buses do it for $25-50. That's a measly 7-14 cents per minute. Once you've made the trip, the company has to find someone going the other way. If there's any directional or temporal imbalance, the fleet ends up with a lot of cars sitting idle or driving hours to be useful, further reducing utilization. If the car has an issue halfway, now someone has to pick the customer up hours from a company facility and get them to their destination. All this for pennies. You don't even get an easier problem, because you still have to drive in the city to drop people off.

Compare to city driving: 10 minute drive, $5. That's at least 5x more profitable and takes less capex. Plus, if anything goes wrong, your facilities and backup vehicles are already nearby.

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

#232

Post by __m »

mikepurvis wrote: post #162
vorpalhex wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can see you've never tried to actually get charges brought against someone using dashcam footage...

I wear a helmet cam, and yes, as an individual it's basically impossible to get traction, even when you have a clear plate and face shot. But when the self-driving car company has thousands or millions of these incidents on record, they'll quickly find themselves wielding enormous power. They'll be able to correlate across time and space, similar to how phones running Google Maps are reporting their position and velo…

Why would they do that? That footage might include their own customers.

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

#233

Post by bdamm »

perl4ever wrote: post #218
bdamm wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "collision imminent" scenario would occur whether or not the car is in self-driving. If the car manages to avoid a collision that is the amazing part to me. And there's plenty of evidence that the Teslas do, in fact, avoid quite a lot of collisions. It would be foolish, however, to drive like it's going to resolve all your collisions for you. I view these as assistance to driving. It's a comfort that the steering…

If the car avoids 99% of crashes, but crashes happen 1% of the time, and it causes crashes 1% of the time, then it's making you less safe. Those are just arbitrary numbers and a simplistic framework, but the point is, you can have a huge increase in safety by the numbers, and a very small increase in problems due to the safety system that cancel it out, because the prior underlying rate of crashes was pretty small. I…

True, the implementation quality does matter.

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

#235

Post by tialaramex »

nomel wrote: post #174
salawat wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah. You need to have an ALRU and vehicle to vehicle comm net whereby all the self-driving AI's distribute amongst themselves information on jerk behavior so the entire macropopulation of AI cars can wolfpack these drivers. Now please laugh, put down the phone and don't even think about implementing this. It's a terrible idea.

I assume, by then, you'll see massive insurance discounts if you provide the feeds to your insurance company. They'll use these feeds to evaluate your risk and the risk of every car around you. Cars, especially those with manual drivers, who are seen causing unsafe conditions will receive an eventual, or maybe immediate, notice: "Your premium has been increased for aggressive driving".

No. Or maybe in America but nowhere else.

In countries where regulating things is understood as a purpose of government the availability of self-driving will end the "everybody needs to" justification for lax driving standards.

First thing you'll see is Continuing Education. Today for personal drivers testing is once and done. If you can hold in your instinct to aggressively cut off other drivers, pass on the inside and generally be a maniac for the length of the test you're set for life. There are small moves towards more continuing education (e.g. Speed Awareness requirements for people who keep getting tickets) but that'll speed up enormously once self-driving is viable.

Compare the regime for driving an articulated lorry (mandatory refresher courses, licenses automatically expire and you must be re-tested) to my grandfather being legal to drive long after he was in no physical or mental condition to be safe on the road.

Then I think you'll start to see tightening of basic requirements. That incautious fast turn you took becomes a Test Failure not a slap on the wrist. All fatalities result in lifetime disqualification. And when your lawyer says "My client needs a car..." the judge says "This isn't a license for a car, it's a license for driving. Buy a car that drives itself" much more often. Rich footballers who used to get away with this have already started to see judges say well, why don't you just hire a chauffeur? Self-driving tech would push this down to middle earners.

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

#236

Post by yibg »

mullingitover wrote: post #136
falcolas wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being excessively cautious makes you an unpredictable driver as well. Unpredictability is the antithesis of safe driving.

In my experience, I have never been surprised by overly cautious drivers, only drivers who have an excess of confidence. How do you define 'excess caution'?

Been surprised plenty by “overly cautious” drivers, mostly having to do with slowing down or stopping unexpectedly.

Folks that hit the brakes crossing a green light. Braking well before the off ramp so they are going 40 on the highway. Slowing down while merging.

The worst ones are those that are scared to go but decide too late. Like stopping in the middle of the intersection while turning left because there is a car coming from the distance but late enough they end up blocking the left lane going straight.

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

#237

Post by zelly »

Barrin92 wrote: post #204
zelly wrote: post #200

Self-driving stops being a (difficult) AI problem if you force all cars to be self-driving and network with each other. It converts the behavioral/theory-of-mind problem into a distributed computing problem. We could have had self-driving in the 80s with this approach. Imagine where we would be today if we had decades of 24/7 trucks and ubiquitous robotaxis. It would be a completely different world. It's a shame huma…

relying on networked cars is monstrously fragile . One critical error in the system is going to tank everyone, disconnecting from the system is going to drastically reduce the safety of both the individual and the system, as it now has to deal with rogue elements, and the potential for malicious attacks, like terrorism or simply some sort of natural freak event is huge problematic. I think the direction of the though…

Those concerns are legitimate. My proposal is not a purely centralized hub-and-spoke network topology where one data center drives a million cars. Yes, you can have the central brain too, but I'm thinking more of a mesh network among nearby cars on the road. The network can be fully connected so that one nefarious car cannot take down the whole mesh. There are a lot of cryptographic safeguards to prevent bad actors too. Each car is able to drive on its own, or pull over, only relying on networking for a stream of sensor output from nearby cars. The upstream servers can go down without doing anything worse than making all its client cars pull over and stop. All the steering is done on the client side.

What if terrorists spoof phantom cars or rewrite maps to send people off cliffs? Assume they stole the master signing keys, have root on the central servers, exploited 0-days on the client car software, etc. One car misbehaves somewhere, triggering sensors of nearby cars which tell every other car in an N kilometer radius to pull over en masse. If anything, it is more robust to hacking/terrorism than the independently-self-driving Tesla or Waymo approach because those do not have the benefit of the herd. One gazelle in a herd who gets tackled can yell out to save the rest of the herd.

> I think the direction of the thought is reasonable though, you should just take it a few steps farther. If networked infrastructure is a good idea, then maybe cars are not a good idea. We already have driverless, well defined, organised modes of transportation, they're called trains.

How do I take a train/subway from my apartment to the front door of a McDonald's? People go from building to building. It's not practical to do this without cars or buses outside of maybe 5 cities in the world like HK or NYC.

Also there is an ungodly amount of cars in the world. It's a lot cheaper and efficient to retrofit cars with self-driving modules than to recycle all that metal into trains/subways.

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

#238

Post by jfoster »

sascha_sl wrote: post #229
jfoster wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Waymo are. https://www.azfamily.com/news/police-say-man-deliberately-ca...

451, can you provide an alternative source?

https://www.mercurynews.com/2020/02/14/ex-waymo-driver-accus...

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

#239

Post by catalogia »

kumarvvr wrote: post #175

And they are just getting started with in Developed countries. The real test for a self driving car would be on roads in third world countries. That would be a real test of capability. Meanwhile, I just wish I could drive my car without moving my legs or hands so often. Why can't somebody make a car such that it can be driven by, say a simple joystick like thingy.

Saab tried joystick control back in the 90s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saab_9000#Prometheus_(prototyp...

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

#240

Post by Qwertious »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #225
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are only thinking about the USA, but there are places outside of the USA where SDVs can be transformative. Specifically, huge Chinese mega cities with really really crappy traffic and pollution problems.

Am not, but your point has merit, if you mean a networked system without physical rails. As a drop-in replacement - I don't see how a human vs. robot driver, on the same vehicle footprint, helps congestion.

Imagine 10 cars all in a line. Each car can only see the car in front of it, and has a delay of 3 seconds between seeing the car in front of it move and accelerating.

Given these numbers, we would expect car #10 to have to wait 30 seconds or so before they start moving.

As congestion is a feedback loop (lack of car movement results in other cars being unable to move), self-driving cars with a coordination mechanism and microsecond-level control would reduce the problem exponentially.

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