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

Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

theinformation.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 231 posts

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#181

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

ghaff wrote: post #142
necubi wrote: post #12

The Information sometimes unlocks articles for HN readers, but for those that don't have access the biggest takeaway to me is that Uber has made relatively little progress towards fully autonomous cars despite a huge amount of investment. The most shocking detail: > Uber’s vehicles had also been having what the company refers to as a bad experience—such as a sudden jerk or a potentially dangerous movement—every one-t…

Everyone has made disappointingly little progress on full self-driving in the sense of driving little Johnny from the house to soccer practice by himself. There are possibly opportunities on freeways but anyone who expects to be able to get robo-Ubers door-to-door for decades is likely to be disappointed.

> Everyone has made disappointingly little progress on full self-driving in the sense of driving little Johnny from the house to soccer practice by himself.

Here's a video of Waymo CTO Dmitri Dolgov claiming that he's perfectly comfortable putting his children in a Waymo car without a driver: https://youtu.be/fZHDvKw0QTA?t=952. Whether he's bluffing or not, we don't know.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#182

Post by scoopertrooper »

wheelie_boy wrote: post #110
FreakyT wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Autonomous cars solve that in the same way an personal automobile currently does, albeit removing the inconvenience of actually driving. The problem with autonomous cars as compared to rail is that autonomy doesn't solve the other fundamental problem of cars: congestion. If I waved my magic wand and replaced every car in the bay area with a self-driving one overnight, roads would still clog at rush hour.

If anything, self-driving cars would make congestion a lot worse. If I had a self-driving mini-RV, I would live further from the city, and do my morning routine during my commute. Maybe take a small nap or get some work done.

On the other hand, it'd so radically change the nature of being in a vehicle that it'd be hard to classify it as congestion as we currently understand it. If you're sitting in a comfortable pod with all the conveniences of home and productivity tools available to you in an office, then the impact of taking longer to get to your destination is much less significant.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#183

Post by ALittleLight »

ipunchghosts wrote: post #85
djsumdog wrote: post #28

I wrote this back in 2016 and I think it still holds today: https://battlepenguin.com/tech/self-driving-cars-will-not-so... Self driving cars are dumping an insane amount of time and effort into computer vision and AI for the wrong problem. For the amount of tax subsidies, our money, given to these companies, we could have put down insane amounts of rail. Hell, we could even do small personal autonomous rail car test…

I 100% agree with this. A much better endeavor would have been to built a robot highway and only allow autonomous vehicles on it. Like trains but using 4 wheeled vehicles.

Why would that be better? 2.5 billion doesn't get that much highway and even less robot highway. If you're not someone living on or near the robot highway you get no benefit from it and the vast majority of people won't be living anywhere near the robot highway.

Conversely, inventing self-driving cars scales really well. Invented once. Commoditized. Sold worldwide for a profit. Massive benefits to everyone worldwide.

It's disappointing that Uber's research isn't paying off, but it's clearly a bet in pursuit of much higher stakes than making a highway.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#184

Post by ericmay »

typon wrote: post #138
ericmay wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It blows my mind to see people write things like this. We have two companies, Cruise and Waymo, who have built nothing but toy cars, but they are in the lead while Tesla has years of real-world driving data in cars that are in a manufacturing production operation, receive over the air updates, recognize real world objects, can change lanes automatically, but Waymo is ahead? I’m open to being convinced that I’m not co…

You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic. Solving Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) and Automated Lane Centering (ALC) on highway traffic are much easier tasks than what Waymo and Cruise are solving. You can buy a device from comma.ai that gives you 90% of Tesla's functionality for a few hundred dollars.

I can’t drive a Waymo or Cruise car at all. So they may as well not exist. But Tesla is supposed to be releasing self-driving on city streets soon. And let’s make sure we are clear here, you don’t need to be on a highway to use Autopilot.

Do you own a Tesla? We previously had a car with ACC/ALC and I don’t find it to be even close to the same thing, but that’s me.

Comma.Ai’s device is great. It’s better than anything anybody else (Waymo/Cruise included) has put out there.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#185

Post by scoopertrooper »

rrrrrrrrrrrryan wrote: post #102
yholio wrote: post #30

Clearly, we should aim for a less ambitious goal: ultra-compact self driving vehicles on dedicated and physically separated lanes, where cars cannot be encountered unless it's their fault, similar to bike and tram lines. This could increase city trafic capacity by an order of magnitude in congested central zones and suplement public transport in suburban, dispersed areas that cannot be properly served by buses. And i…

My father's a civil engineer, and has told me they've been trying to do this since the 70s. The original plans were to put a magnetic strip beneath one lane of our freeways that could allow simple lane-keeping and some basic communication to keep the cars properly spaced, then raise the speed limit up 100+ mph for those lanes. The problem is, once you ask anything of government infrastructure, it may take forever. I…

In fairness the solution proposed by OP would require the same level of infrastructure investment as a carpool lane.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#186

Post by scoopertrooper »

viburnum wrote: post #39

What I've never understood is how you're going to get a car to understand a construction worker or cop doing hand signals without artificial general intelligence. Why even bother with the car until you've figured that out in the lab?

A simple solution around that problem might be for these companies to form a consortium to develop and distribute (for free) autonomous car friendly signalling equipment to municipalities.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#187

Post by wmf »

ericmay wrote: post #180
wmf wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla didn't support stop signs or traffic lights until a few months ago but Waymo did that years ago. And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that.

Waymo hasn’t produce a single production car. I doubt their software works on random stop signs in Cleveland. Until I see them on the road, I’m ok watching incremental improvement happen. Being first doesn’t matter. > And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I do have a Tesla (without full self-driving) and it…

I guess the question is how you rank a prototype that's actually autonomous against a production car that's far from autonomous. IMO manufacturing cars sounds a lot easier than autonomy. There's also the fact that Waymo's goal is only autonomy within areas that have been mapped in hyper-detail while Tesla apparently wants to drive anywhere. How do you rank more progress towards a smaller goal vs. less progress towards a more ambitious goal?

One example of a stopped vehicle: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2019-09-03/tesla-was-...

https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-autopilot-why-crash-radar/

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#188

Post by bobsil1 »

ericmay wrote: post #180
wmf wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tesla didn't support stop signs or traffic lights until a few months ago but Waymo did that years ago. And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that.

Waymo hasn’t produce a single production car. I doubt their software works on random stop signs in Cleveland. Until I see them on the road, I’m ok watching incremental improvement happen. Being first doesn’t matter. > And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I do have a Tesla (without full self-driving) and it…

Cars in motion → stationary are different from completely stationary objects, which are ignored due to high false positives.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#189

Post by justapassenger »

revscat wrote: post #168
justapassenger wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is great. But it doesn't change the fact, that it's not self driving car.

Your assertion that they are “dead last” remains ridiculous given the millions of self-driving miles their cars have driven.

It’s as much self driving as me saying that my dog understands English because he’s excited when I say “walk”.

Re: Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

#190

Post by ericmay »

wmf wrote: post #187
ericmay wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Waymo hasn’t produce a single production car. I doubt their software works on random stop signs in Cleveland. Until I see them on the road, I’m ok watching incremental improvement happen. Being first doesn’t matter. > And AFAIK Tesla still can't recognize stopped vehicles on the highway and has no public plan to fix that. Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? I do have a Tesla (without full self-driving) and it…

I guess the question is how you rank a prototype that's actually autonomous against a production car that's far from autonomous. IMO manufacturing cars sounds a lot easier than autonomy. There's also the fact that Waymo's goal is only autonomy within areas that have been mapped in hyper-detail while Tesla apparently wants to drive anywhere. How do you rank more progress towards a smaller goal vs. less progress toward…

I don’t give it much rank because it doesn’t matter to me. I’d rather have good, incremental progress toward a larger goal for sure. In my day-to-day I can use a Tesla. I have no use for Waymo so the progress isn’t relevant. Will Waymo map every street in hyper detail, or just Mountain View and New York? If I don’t care about the underlying goal, what reason do I have to care about progress toward that goal?

> “ Just before the crash, a large vehicle — a sport utility vehicle or pickup truck — changed lanes in front of him, the driver told the NTSB.”

And how does Waymo handle these scenarios?

Post reply on HN