Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Self-driving cars turned out to be harder than expected

vox.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 287 posts

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

#251

Post by jpindar »

catalogia wrote: post #209
rootusrootus wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier today I was driving on the highway with autopilot (I have a Model 3) and came to a section where the road is angled in such a way and the pavement is old enough that there is a fair amount of standing water. Driving manually, I steer to the right or left slightly to avoid the ruts filled with an inch or two of standing water. Autopilot, on the other hand, was perfectly happy to blast right through it. That's…

That's a particularly insidious circumstance since standing water can conceal hazards from any vision system these cars or humans have. I would expect self-driving cars to refuse to drive through water in any circumstance. There could be a large pothole in the puddle that would ruin your car. Worse than a mere car-destroying pothole, what if the flooded portion of the road no longer existed at all? That's a common en…

I guess no one on my dead end street will be getting a self driving car then. There's a low spot near the main road that causes a large puddle all the way across the street whenever it rains.

There's a few other places in town that often flood, including one on a main road that doesn't really have any alternative route. There's also a section of the road along the coast where high surf sometimes hits the sea wall and splashes up and over it on to the street. It's quite a sight, but I wonder what a self driving car would make of _that_.

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

#252

Post by tptacek »

jcranmer wrote: post #164
Mattasher wrote: post #4

You have to wonder, when you see these stories, whether the engineers in charge of these programs spent much time driving around, trying to see the road like an AI might. In my experience, driving in the city, it's rare that I can go more than a few miles before some exception comes up that requires human judgment. Here's a few of the things I saw just last week: * Car double parked. Do I cross the center line to go…

For a mundane situation that's surprisingly difficult: toll booths. The highway goes from N lanes to N 5 (or more!) lanes and then back into N lanes, usually with the lane markings being completely absent in the process. You have to pick a lane to get into, with your choice being potentially impacted by such things as "are you a truck?", "exact change only", or "I have an EZ-Pass", not to mention the potential for so…

I'm a self-driving skeptic but the toll booth problem doesn't seem logistically all that daunting, since there are so few of them compared to overall road miles. It seems like they could be modeled individually and directly.

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

#254

Post by rootusrootus »

Johnny555 wrote: post #222
rootusrootus wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Earlier today I was driving on the highway with autopilot (I have a Model 3) and came to a section where the road is angled in such a way and the pavement is old enough that there is a fair amount of standing water. Driving manually, I steer to the right or left slightly to avoid the ruts filled with an inch or two of standing water. Autopilot, on the other hand, was perfectly happy to blast right through it. That's…

You have local information that cars don't yet know (but they probably will someday -- cars can send detailed road conditions to a central database, or they can communicate with other cars, so the car in front of you can say "watch out, there's a big pothole 8 inches from the left lane line" and your car will try to avoid it. What do human drivers do there when they are unfamiliar with the road? Seems like the auto p…

> What do human drivers do there when they are unfamiliar with the road?

I assume the same as me -- I avoid water-filled ruts whether I'm familiar with a particular road or not.

It may well get advanced enough some day to pick up the difference between wet pavement and water rut, and car-to-car communication could potentially help, but that's a level of technology improvement that feels considerably farther away than just a few years.

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

#255

Post by derefr »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #121
derefr wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point was an economic one: • cities can afford to "change the problem" to fit the solution (as they already have huge transit-system and other public-works budgets, and extensions to cities are mostly centrally-planned.) Some cities in Europe have already entirely banned cars. • everywhere other than cities —e.g. small rural towns only connected via roads—doesn't have the resources to "change the problem." (But al…

Cities have the problem (congestion, limited parking) in the first place while rural areas generally don’t. Many cities are limited on resources so can’t change the problem as much as they want to, so generalized self driving cars would be a huge economic boon in that case. It is the cheap solution to an expensive urban problem, but getting there requires software that is smarter than what we have right now. Rural ar…

> Rural areas simply don’t need self driving cars

I don’t see why. Certainly, there’s the room for cars, and far more people outside of cities own cars and have room for cars—but these are just questions of the capacity for car ownership, not the capacity for driving.

Consider: being unable to drive yourself places in the country is a far worse problem than being unable to drive yourself places in a city. Every job is far away and expects you to commute to it; there’s little-to-no public transit; and far fewer, far more expensive taxi/ridesharing services. Given the distances involved, walking or bicycling are impractical.

The single real solution to this problem, for the class of people involved (people too young to drive, people old enough their faculties have failed them, teenagers living in suburbs who want part-time jobs in the city, disabled people currently relying on privately-operated minibus service) is personal or family-owned self-driving cars. It’s essentially the middle-class equivalent of the accessibility advantage granted by having a dedicated chauffeur.

——

Also, I feel obligated to mention that specifically in the Rust Belt in the US, there are a lot of people who have lost their licenses because disaffection drove them to alcoholism, which led to a series of DUIs. These people want to work, but they’ll never again be trusted to drive—so how will these people ever get another job?

Cheap driverless cars—ones that don’t have to be smart enough to drive in complex city conditions, only along country roads to about town limits—are clear winners here. (The current attempted semi-solution to these problems is electric bicycles, but they just don’t have the range if you don’t already live pretty close to town. Most such people end up having to move, usually away from their families, which takes away even more of their support-network.)

Just like “why not just give homeless people a house”, a very simple solution to persistent joblessness in these areas is to give the people without driver’s licenses a car that doesn’t require a driver’s license (because it drives itself.)

And the cheaper such a car is, the more of them you can afford to give away on a constrained budget; so you’d better constrain the problem domain as tightly as possible, and ship as MVP-like a product as possible. (Analogy: did the OLPC need to be a powerful computer? No, not for anything it needed to do. So you can cheap out on hardware, and thus make more of them.)

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

#256

Post by wutbrodo »

krm01 wrote: post #28

It’s really just a matter of time. Those that started out optimistic (when it was hyped) but are now saying that they don’t see self driving cars can do the complex situations we humans supposedly can should have some patience. As the tech improves, and more data is used to train models, it’ll surely surpass humans in driving ability.

This is what makes hype cycles so dangerous. Most people are too simple-minded to understand nuance, uncertainty, or cautious optimism. So you end up with either "this is terrible and worthless and impossible" or "this is incredible and game-changing and imminent". I've seen it happen for everything from SDC to politicians that my social milieu pin their wildest dreams on that end up disappointing them by being decent, competent and non-messianic.

It's probably worth ignoring what most people think about topics like this, except to the extent that their insane thrashing affects the situation (votes, funding, etc).

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

#257

Post by wutbrodo »

allhacks wrote: post #193
puranjay wrote: post #192

I've become increasingly jaded about the tech hype cycle. We had 3D Printing, VR/AR, crypto, and self driving cars hyped to no extent in 2-4 year cycles. We were told that they were going to change our world in the next few years. Turns out that the underlying technology was far from maturity in each case and the use cases limited to a handful of enthusiasts.

I worked at a car marketplace company. The number of time people told us back in 2014-2016 that Americans would no longer own cars in “2-3 years” and that consequently our market would vanish over night ... btw this group of people included very respectable folks, many of whom have a lot of fans here on HN :)

That's trivially stupid though; if a perfect SDC came out tomorrow, it would take more than 2-4 years to turn over the vast amount of capital out there, and probably another decade or two to shake people (and thus policy, in a democracy) out of their status quo bias, no matter how terrible the status quo is.

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

#258

Post by derefr »

Piskvorrr wrote: post #243
Qwertious wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

Ignoring control issues, this assumes infinite space at destination: you are still blanketing the road with cars, just in a coordinated manner.

There usually is “enough” space on the road, when you account for all the unused space on the road in the opposite flow direction to rush-hour traffic. Cars just need to quickly take you to work, then slowly drive back the other way. Maybe even borrow a lane of the highway for parking, which shouldn’t worry traffic controllers given that they could send a command to all the cars to get them going again as soon as traffic is going to pick up.

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

#259

Post by Barrin92 »

zelly wrote: post #237
Barrin92 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

>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.

Mostly by taking the subway to the nearest station of the mcdonalds and walking. I've lived in more than 5 cities without ever owning a car. Walkable cities on the planet are the norm, not the exception, the US is very skewed in that regard because it built most of its cities around the car, but that is only a fraction of the world population.

Much more important for the future is to ask what all the places do that still have the decision to make if they want to expand their usage of cars, like the African continent and much of Asia, or if they want to invest into mass transit and built their cities around alternative modes of transport.

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

#260

Post by puranjay »

wutbrodo wrote: post #257
allhacks wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked at a car marketplace company. The number of time people told us back in 2014-2016 that Americans would no longer own cars in “2-3 years” and that consequently our market would vanish over night ... btw this group of people included very respectable folks, many of whom have a lot of fans here on HN :)

That's trivially stupid though; if a perfect SDC came out tomorrow, it would take more than 2-4 years to turn over the vast amount of capital out there, and probably another decade or two to shake people (and thus policy, in a democracy) out of their status quo bias, no matter how terrible the status quo is.

You're going to take even more time to convince people to let go of the control - or at least the idea of control - that comes from driving yourself.
Post reply on HN