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Uber Wasted $2.5B on Self-Driving Cars

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

#221

Post by bobsil1 »

ericmay wrote: post #191
bobsil1 wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If there is a stationary car and I turn on autopilot as I approach my car doesn’t ram into it. If I turn autopilot on when I’m stationary and the car in front of me is stationary it does not drive into the other car. If autopilot is on and a car is stopped at a red light in front of me my car does not slam into that car. I do this on a daily basis. Do you?

I don't drive a Tesla, but I’m guessing that’s done via image classifiers which recognize car rear ends, which have failed Tesla drivers on stopped fire trucks, police SUVs, Chinese garbage trucks, trailers crossing the freeway, etc.

The radar returns on stationary objects are discarded AFAIK because of poor radar resolution leading to inability to precisely locate objects both horizontally and vertically, leading to roadside and overhead signs being mistaken for cars.

Common auto radars have limited vertical discrimination, and this is partly intrinsic due to radar wavelengths.

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

#222

Post by ghaff »

KKKKkkkk1 wrote: post #181
ghaff wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It will possibly be safe enough under some well-tested limited circumstances/locations. I'm skeptical that translates into something made generally available.

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

#223

Post by ericmay »

bobsil1 wrote: post #221
ericmay wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is a stationary car and I turn on autopilot as I approach my car doesn’t ram into it. If I turn autopilot on when I’m stationary and the car in front of me is stationary it does not drive into the other car. If autopilot is on and a car is stopped at a red light in front of me my car does not slam into that car. I do this on a daily basis. Do you?

I don't drive a Tesla, but I’m guessing that’s done via image classifiers which recognize car rear ends, which have failed Tesla drivers on stopped fire trucks, police SUVs, Chinese garbage trucks, trailers crossing the freeway, etc. The radar returns on stationary objects are discarded AFAIK because of poor radar resolution leading to inability to precisely locate objects both horizontally and vertically, leading to…

I can't say I've come across these cases (stopped Firetruck for example on a highway) where AutoPilot has driven me straight into something. I'm also paying attention, as you should.

To throw you a bone, I do think that the names of the software lead people to believe that it's something more than what it is. Full self-driving is going to do things like swerve to avoid an obstacle in the middle of the road and it probably doesn't do that right now. But if we go back to the original post, the discussion was about comparisons to Waymo and Cruise. I'm not sure I trust their "more advanced systems" to do that either, and on top of that they haven't made a single production car that works in Erie, Pennsylvania and drives in the snow, changes lanes automatically, and navigates on and off ramps.

Tesla is making progress toward general self-driving, which is far and away more valuable in my opinion. Even if that progress is incremental. I look at it as more of a safety feature and something to make driving on the highway much easier.

If we want to take this a step further, I'm actually not a fan of self-driving cars because it makes it too easy to drive everywhere, and I view driving as a problem. We should be walking.

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

#224

Post by fantod »

taf2 wrote: post #101
xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

I bought an iRobot and I really think if they incorporated a camera it could be significantly better. There are obvious things it picks up and gets stuck in like shoelaces and power cables. Obviously a vacuum is not self driving but it’s a similar problem and at least my casual observation is that proximity sensors along won’t solve real world navigation because we need some kind of inference to understand what the i…

Sounds like the Roomba i7 is for you.

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

#225

Post by aembleton »

objektif wrote: post #114
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?

What if we replace them with cheap light signals?

Lights can fail. When that happens you need a human to direct traffic.

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

#226

Post by ghaff »

xoxoy wrote: post #86
judge2020 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking about four nines in terms of reliability (not crashes) and on level 3, where the car still has all the regular driving controls - so if there is a problem or the system has high uncertainty about certain road situations it can force/return control to the driver and have them navigate the unknown situation. I'm also probably being too optimistic predicting four nines in 5 years, it'll probably be 10 years…

the issue is that randomly requiring non-professional drivers to take over during a trip is an underestimated danger. people get accustomed to it working 99% of the time and get lazy - then the 1% it fails and the driver is asleep or distracted or watching a movie and becomes a major safety issue. ex all the horror stories of distracted Tesla drivers using autopilot like full autonomous driving today.

Furthermore, if you stipulate hand-offs will sometimes be needed, you now can't use the car for many of the use cases that proponents want because you need a competent adult driver to take over.

And, yes, people imagine scenarios like remote drivers taking over. That seems a very difficult problem--especially if the situation is such that the autopilot is confused.

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

#227

Post by Cactus2018 »

Cactus2018 wrote: post #166
xiaolingxiao wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile.

>Indeed amazing because I know employees at Tesla who take it home on autopilot in the freeway! It’s also very unsafe ans I dot believe camera only is the way to go, but at least it can drive for more than a mile. Google/Waymo did a pilot - letting employees commute - and canceled because the system was too good and staff stopped paying attention. This is a clip, there was a longer clip and description in a Waymo CEO…

Description and clip at about 4 minutes https://youtu.be/qJiFKxvJlhY?t=243

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

#228

Post by grumple »

ummonk wrote: post #192
revscat wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just drove from Dallas to southwestern Colorado and back. Of that, I estimate I drove ~15% of the entire miles driven. The rest was the car driving itself.

It's not the car driving itself if you need to be constantly attentive and ready to override it.

Does this mean my server doesn't compute things on its own because I have to monitor it?

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

#229

Post by chillacy »

xiphias2 wrote: post #124
beisner wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The United States is structurally incapable of large-scale public works projects. There are a lot of reasons for this and they aren’t particularly partisan, rather reflect how decisions are made. My guess is places like China and Singapore will have the first true deployments of self-driving, because they’re actually capable of building road infrastructure to support it when it isn’t fully level 5.

I vote for China, as they have the political strength to allow it even at a stage when it's not yet safer than an average driver. I believe that's not good enough for Singapore or U.S.

I’ve taken a cab in Shanghai and it was terrifying. If they can make autonomous cars drive there then they can drive anywhere...

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

#230

Post by kwhitefoot »

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.

> You can't drive a Tesla in "self-driving" mode in non-highway traffic.

Yes you can. At least my ap1.5 s70d does a fair job on quite a lot of roads and I expect that ap2 is better.

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