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The self-driving car is a red herring

nautil.us

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Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#281

Post by SomeHacker44 »

screye wrote: post #239
Grimm1 wrote: post #153

I know people love public transport because of the supposed larger benefit to society but having ridden NYC public transport for over 7 years now I absolutely loath it. The experience is horrible almost every day. Between being crammed in the cars, the mentally unstable accosting you, the lack of cleanliness and the occasional assault I'm simply not willing to deal with that continuously. I put up with it because it…

This happens because the US cannot commit to proper public transport fully. In other places, there are either dedicated bus lanes or entirely separated trams which circumvent traffic all together. They also routinely upgrade their public transport, instead of NYC which incurs massive costs as it keeps 200 yr old infrastructure barely alive. It is also unreasonably cheap. $127 a month is lower than the cost of insuran…

$255/month for a 2020 Tesla Model 3 in a garage in Brooklyn for pleasure use. With a 2 car discount. From Geico. A 2010 Acura MDX was just over $200 as a single car, previously.

So just one car's insurance is worth two monthly transit passes.

I regardless heavily dislike driving in NYC and would rather take Subway or Express Bus to commute.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#282

Post by 908B64B197 »

d_burfoot wrote: post #179
sirsar wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LA has an order of magnitude more population than is required for functioning public transit. But you're right they don't have the density. The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density . Parking lots, parking spaces, and extra lanes all conspire to push humans and human spaces further apart. This then makes walking less feasible, cars more required, and more space required to accommodate those cars in a f…

> The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density. People have very naive explanations of why the US is so bad at density and urbanism. Canada and Australia, which are very similar to the US, have very dense cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Melbourne. Do they not have cars in Canada and Australia? If you want to find the real reason why all other developed countries have dense cities with good public trans…

> very dense cities like Montreal

Remember it was founded in 1642. The older a city is, the more dense it is.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#283

Post by question000 »

marketingPro wrote: post #277
question000 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok why do you believe this if you can't make one verifiable prediction that it will happen? Will it happens tomorrow? In 20 years? In 5 months? It's just a feeling you have that isn't backed by data. I can't really ever disprove this because you're not really making any claim. This is every FED conversation on HN. People totally believe hyperinflation is "just around the corner" but it never happens only standard nor…

Efficiency is everything. Give it a Google. Also, why are you discounting the last 100 years of federal reserve policy? We obviously had greater than 10x inflation. Is 30% inflation in 8 months not considered hyperinflation? My kids bank account is 30% less valuable now. I'm not going to fight over definitions that 30% inflation isn't enough to be considered hyperinflation.

Ok you're right the Federal Reserve has already collapsed. /s

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#284

Post by mthoms »

bluedino wrote: post #223
d_burfoot wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The key is to realize the cars themselves killed density. People have very naive explanations of why the US is so bad at density and urbanism. Canada and Australia, which are very similar to the US, have very dense cities like Montreal, Toronto, and Melbourne. Do they not have cars in Canada and Australia? If you want to find the real reason why all other developed countries have dense cities with good public trans…

From the internet: Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city. In Toronto, there are 4,457 people per square kilometre. In fact, Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541). And cruc…

>Even Vancouver—Canada’s densest major city with 5,493 people per square kilometre—ranks 13th out of 30, and is significantly less dense than San Francisco (7,171 people per square kilometre), a comparable west coast city.

The transit systems in both cities operate across the entire metro area not just the "city" proper.

Vancouver Metro Area: 2,463,431 / 2,878km² = 856 persons per km²

San Francisco Metro Area: 4,729,484 / 9,128km² = 518 persons per km²

(Numbers from Wikipedia)

>Toronto’s population could triple and the city would still barely have the density of Brooklyn (14,541)

Brooklyn is not a city. It's a densely populated subsection of one.

>crucially, Toronto’s population density is less than many other American cities including Philadelphia (4,512), Chicago (4,594)

I'm not sure why you think Chicago and Philly are not comparable to Toronto despite being being only 1% and 3% more dense. They're effectively all the same density for the purpose of this discussion.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#285

Post by dmitrygr »

hardtke wrote: post #177
neaanopri wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally agree with you. So why hasn't this happened yet? I believe this is because what we have here is not a technical problem, but primarily a regulatory and legal problem. If the political leadership of the NHTSA had the will to make highway self-driving happen, they could publish a draft safety and liability standard. The technical problem here is that while shuttle and robotaxi systems can go slow enough as to…

My proposal is that we treat liability in the self driving car space similar to the way we have a specialized liability framework for vaccines [1]. Similar to vaccines, self driving cars would lead to reduced deaths on aggregate, but there are cases where the technology fails and people are injured/killed. In the case of vaccines, consumers cannot sue the manufacturers using regular courts but instead there is a sepa…

   > In the case of vaccines, consumers
   > cannot sue the manufacturers using
   > regular courts but instead there is
   > a separate system where the standard
   > for liability is much higher.
So when your car runs me over, I cannot even get my medical bills paid?!

And you wonder why there is no political will behind this?

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#286

Post by nickik »

barnacled wrote: post #27
ianai wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.

I am extremely skeptical of the boring project. The claimed money saving (a 10x improvement vs. every single tunnel digger in the world without any evidence to back it up?) the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel or being brought up and down, the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels, etc. etc. Road tunnels exist and have been built all around the world, these kinds of ideas have been tried and ultim…

Its quite funny to me that literally everybody that is against Boring company is sighting these 'Thunderf00t' videos, and judging from some of his other videos he has a pretty clear bias. He is also a chemist and why his knowledge of engineering is better then those of the engineers at SpaceX and Elon Musk is highly questionable to me.

> the safety issues of a car breaking down in a tunnel

The cars have front radar and can break. It would stop the line but I don't see how it is a safety issue. Most danger in tunnels is from bidirectional traffic that Boring avoids.

> the enormous cost with digging deeper tunnels

The same could have been said about other Elon Musk projects. Nobody is surprised that an electric car can have better performance and power and yet a diesel driven tunnel boring machine can not be improved? Tunneling is incredibly conservative and uses both diesel driven tunnel boring and diesel driven locomotives to transport out the dirt. The inherent problems of having lots of diesel engines a tunnel are quite clear and eliminating it has clear operational advantages.

> underground road tunnels are just not economical or particularly safe

What the evidence for underground one-way tunnels not being safe?

> These kind of infrastructure problems are just hard and have a ton of trade offs, there is no silver bullet.

Therefore we should try to improve it with modern technology from other fields? Its not a silver bullet, it is tacking new technology from automotive and aerospace and applying it to tunneling and mass transportation.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#287

Post by nickik »

itsoktocry wrote: post #53
ianai wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. We’d probably be better as a society if we were interested and willing to do some infrastructure projects to alleviate the burden of driving cars. I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along and getting much more headwind for this reason.

> I really wish Elon’s boring company were further along It's unfathomable to me that people believe car tunnels are the future of anything. Right now The Boring Company is trying to recreate an underground train in Las Vegas, and is already behind schedule and running into issues people predicted before this started: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/16/21519692/elon-musk-borin...

What the difference between electric buses behind each other in a tunnel compared to multiple rail way cars behind each other?

One system is cheaper because the units are mass produced far more often and the system is more flexible.

Carrying around a battery rather then having complex high power electronics along the tunnel seems like a no brainier as well.

Las Vegas is literally a first of its kind system, being a few month behind is not surprising or concerning. And the problems have to do with specific fire codes, not any inherent flaw in the system.

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#288

Post by nickik »

dathinab wrote: post #138
yreg wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be rather unfortunate. If a system generally performs significantly safer than humans, its use should be encouraged. Outlier incidents shouldn't matter.

The Problem is that it might not be significant safety outside of well suited situations. This systems expect the user to shim in fastly if something goes wrong, which just can't work reliable given how human brains work. Furthermore the situations which can make a self driving car crash are not the same which make a human driver crash. Such crashes can be pretty arbitrary. Random things like advertisement on a bus h…

> Another problem is that traffic's in different countries have different rules and dynamics a self driving system working well for idk. the US might not at all be safe to use in idk. insert arbitrary EU country here even if trained for that country.

That is why Tesla is not hyper focused on one city and is not building a team of exclusively AI experts, rather build a tool that other people can use to configure the specifics.

Tesla already are able to read signs in many languages and know about lots of different country specific rules.

> Tesla is supposedly the leader wrt. self driving cars, but people where easily able to trick that car to drive into the lane for the opposite direction and it has since a while one of the worst emergency brake assistants.

'Tricking' the car is kind of nonsense, you can also trick people into things pretty easily.

I have seen a number of reports where Tesla AHAD got the top marks and I have seen many videos of Teslas breaking when the driver was not paying attention. What are you basing this analysis on?

Re: The self-driving car is a red herring

#290

Post by andbberger »

francis_t_catte wrote: post #31

So what if we eliminate some of the hard problems, like steering, traffic, pedestrians, and setup guided routes specifically for automated vehicles? All you would need to control is signaling and the throttle/brakes. You could even couple multiple vehicles together for more capacity! Seems like an idea ripe for implementation. /s

What's funny is that the railroads of the US were mandated to implement this (PTC) by the end of 2018 and have almost universally blown the deadline.

Caltrain tried to roll their own implementation, got caught with their pants down, and iirc are now trying to save face by switching to one of the standard vendor developed systems

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