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Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

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Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#41

Post by okareaman »

jeffbee wrote: post #25
okareaman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

This seems like the edgiest of all possible edge case arguments against self-driving cars, considering that a meat-driven car crashed through a working barrier and into a perfectly obvious train in the Bay Area just this morning.

This is where you're wrong because I'm obviously a far better driver than that person who drove in front of a train this morning and it would never happen to me. I trust myself more than I trust other drivers. I trust myself more than I trust Waymo. I'd be happy to have Waymo prove me wrong.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#42

Post by mandeepj »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #15
quickthrowman wrote: post #7

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

Do you have a link to Elon's FSD claim? He definitely uses ambiguity to his benefit (eg "soon", "by fall/winter/spring/summer" (in which year?)), but I haven't heard anything about Tesla being L5 by the end of 2021.

> Do you have a link to Elon's FSD claim?

Google is universally accessible to everyone. Please don't be that guy who corners himself into a blind spot.

Musk claimed coast to coast self-driving trip by end of 2017.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/10/19/13341100/tesla-self-driv...

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#43

Post by carlmr »

okareaman wrote: post #19
rkalla wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

>I suppose they could program the train schedule in, but what if the train system changes the schedule?

I laughed at this, thinking about how the German trains are usually ±30 mins and often off by hours.

The train schedule would probably not fare better than a coin flip, except in Switzerland or Japan.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#44

Post by Swenrekcah »

jeffbee wrote: post #25
okareaman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

This seems like the edgiest of all possible edge case arguments against self-driving cars, considering that a meat-driven car crashed through a working barrier and into a perfectly obvious train in the Bay Area just this morning.

I agree that it’s an edge case but there are always completely bonkers people, out of the world on drugs or just suicidal.

I don’t want to risk getting figuratively in a car with one if I turn on FSD.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#45

Post by mikepurvis »

rkalla wrote: post #9
quickthrowman wrote: post #7

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

Or you need a high-bandwidth coverage-everywhere comms system and a robust infrastructure for remote teleop, like what Starsky was building:

https://medium.com/starsky-robotics-blog/the-end-of-starsky-...

Then the steering-wheel-less car at least has the ability to call for help when it's only 98% sure of what to do instead of 99.99% sure. But obviously this kind of model only makes sense in a fleet context, not as an extension to something you own, so it requires greater shifts, at least for personal automobiles.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#46

Post by craftinator »

xnx wrote: post #28
okareaman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

In addition to obeying all railroad crossing signals, I'm certain the Waymo Driver has the concept of trains built in. The long-range sensors on the vehicle would project the probable path of the train and determine if it was safe to proceed along the car's planned route.

Unless the train was obscured from view by foliage at the height and angle that the lidar rests at, or if a truck pulled up next to the car, or... Well yeah, the only reason people can handle that situation reasonably well is that they have a large range of sensory input, most of that input has symbolic representation in the mind, and there's a healthy fear of dying that causes us to notice when the ground is shaking and reassess whether the train signal is working correctly.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#47

Post by bhk »

andyxor wrote: post #8
minimaxir wrote: post #2

Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...

nothing new here, AI has been "5 years away" since the 1950s

It was 20 years away for a while. And may be again.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#48

Post by ErikVandeWater »

xnx wrote: post #32
ErikVandeWater wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is mostly a hardware problem. Tesla's can't do FSD with current hardware because there aren't redundant cameras in each direction. One camera gets mud on it and your car runs itself into oncoming traffic. (It does that anyway right now, but even if software bugs are fixed this is still intractable). A real solution has to be capable of cleaning all cameras (probably faster than a windshield wiper would), because t…

Tesla would be lucky if the extent of its challenges were having enough cameras pointing in the right direction. Tesla handicapped itself by only developing its driving systems with cameras and not lidar.

I don't disagree. But since adding more cameras to a car that already has cameras is a much more intuitive extension for Tesla to select, I used that as an example.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#49

Post by glofish »

ecpottinger wrote: post #33
okareaman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

In in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, a dad and his son were killed driving a car across a railway crossing with no gates. The dad (driver) was on his phone at the time and it is believed the phone blocked his view of the train and he was talking to much to hear the train. The person he was talking to said they were talking like normal and suddenly the phone cut off. Computers probably can not be worse that the people alrea…

that's not quite right.

Computers currently are far worse than the good drivers out there. It is not clear if they ever could be better than a trained and cautious driver.

For example you can easily avoid the situation above by not talking on the phone while driving across rails.

if the AI abruptly crosses the median how are you going to avoid that?

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#50

Post by mandeepj »

ravenstine wrote: post #16
minimaxir wrote: post #2

Funny in hindsight from 2016: "Lyft's president says 'majority' of rides will be in self-driving cars by 2021" https://www.theverge.com/2016/9/18/12944506/lyft-self-drivin... https://medium.com/@johnzimmer/the-third-transportation-revo...

Back in late 2015, I was working at a media firm and one of our top directors called together a meeting with our engineering team to talk to us about the impact of our products/content. He was convinced that by 2018 most people would be using self-driving cars regularly and that this was going to hurt our core product. I don't think I ever tried harder in my life not to LOL.

Ha! I hope he did not pivot the company or shutdown the core product
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