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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

#121

Post by fnord77 »

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.

Driving in all conditions requires the computing power of a human brain. When we have computers that powerful, we can talk about L5.

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

#122

Post by drzaiusapelord »

grecy wrote: post #29
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.

> but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? I love these wildly over-the-top exaggerations. When was the last bridge you saw without a barrier to prevent going off the edge? What makes you think a vehicle vision system will handle "blinded by sun" any worse than humans already do? Remember it's projecting and predicting the road ahead, even around corners and in the dark - so being…

>The 16 year old new driver texting and talking to friends coming towards you at 60mph has two.

My two analog eyes see this perfectly well, why didn't the AI?

https://www.thedrive.com/news/33789/autopilot-blamed-for-tes...

I think there's a lot unfair criticism of human drivers in this thread. I don't think we're at the point where we can call machines better than humans when it comes to these tasks.

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

#123

Post by usrusr »

nostrademons wrote: post #91
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.

IMHO FSD cars (along with drones, secure programming languages/OSes, and distributed manufacturing) are a post-war technology . The economics don't make sense while we're at peace and locked into the Pax Americana economy. However, once folks start trying to kill each other, these technologies will give a very large survival advantage to those factions that adopt them. Imagine how useful not having to risk human live…

In a hot industrialized war (one that isn't wildly asymmetric), a supply line has so many soldiers' lives depending on it that having the transports manned or not is insignificant. But I think I know the general concept you are getting at, I'd call it the wartime risk economy: when a large percentage of your combat aircraft sorties don't return, it becomes reasonable to operate the engines much closer to the limits of reliable operation than in peace time. The extra performance can save more pilots than the occasional engine failures caused by the emergency operation mode cost.

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

#124

Post by cameronh90 »

okareaman wrote: post #90
admax88q wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bar is "better than someone talking on cell phone while crossing a railroad crossing without looking," I'll stick to manual driving. Self driving needs to be better than me, not better than average.

How many people on Hacker News think self-driving cars will be a better driver than themselves in the near future?

Probably me. Waymo may already be in most situations.

I drive about once or twice a year, always in a rental, and consequently never really know how well my car handles or its dimensions. That, plus generally being rusty, tends to make me fairly nervous.

Yet, nevertheless, I am in charge of a 2000kg block of metal hurtling around pedestrians and cyclists at 70mph.

Scares the shit out of me, to be honest.

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

#125

Post by drzaiusapelord »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #74
LightG wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if I don't want to, I can't help but keep up with his marketing-claims through the interests I have. My take, being aware of him but not focused, is that beta-FSD has already been released! ... I mean ... what? Maybe I've got it wrong.

It's been released to a small number of people, but... beta-FSD isn't level five. The only specific statement I've read from him is that the basic functionality for level five will be available this year. What's interesting to me is that people seem to attribute what news articles synthesize about his statements as statements made by him. https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53349313

>news articles synthesize about his statements as statements made by him

Musk promised the coast to coast drive in 2017:

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

Then admitted he couldn't do it in 2017:

https://www.autonews.com/article/20180208/MOBILITY/180209770...

This isn't the media delivering a dishonest commentary. These are his words.

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

#126

Post by thathndude »

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...

Hard not to feel like we’re seeing a swoon in self driving like we saw in crypto back in 2017 and 2018.

They hype got ahead of the tech.

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

#127

Post by redis_mlc »

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.

Same feeling for passenger-carrying drones/quadcopters/etc. Not gonna happen for decades in any commercially-viable way.

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

#128

Post by heavyset_go »

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #101
admax88q wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the bar is "better than someone talking on cell phone while crossing a railroad crossing without looking," I'll stick to manual driving. Self driving needs to be better than me, not better than average.

Does the average driver even look both ways at the railroad crossing? I do every single time. Such a low-cost preventative measure that could very well end up saving my life one day.

At least where I learned to drive, not only was stopping to look both ways at railroad crossings taught in driving classes at school, it was part of the written test to get a permit/license, as well.

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

#129

Post by usrusr »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #106
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.

That shouldn't be the standard. It probably will be, but it shouldn't be. Humans are terrible drivers. If a self-driving car got into half as many accidents as the average human, it would save millions of lives. And kill people, to be sure, but fewer on net. I also think you could make a reasonable argument that all cars should be banned, right now, based on how many people they kill, but since I don't think that's g…

Just wait until self-driving "personality" becomes part of a car company's brand identity. I suspect that we will see no lack cars that are designed to be terrible drivers. Of course they will call it "confident", "assertive", perhaps for some brands even "masculine". Cars could become even more civilian tanks thank that already are. I desperately hope that I'm wrong.

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

#130

Post by plank_time »

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...

I saw Levandowski do a presentation of self-driving at an Uber all-hands and it was then and there that I knew that self-driving is 20+ years away.

The example video showed so many small things that we take for granted as a human driver that would need to be built in or hand coded that AI or neural nets would never be able to get. There just isn’t a way that you can train every single little thing that could cause an accident. For some things you just need experience and fear which I imagine can’t be modeled via any current AI.

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