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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

#161

Post by smoe »

plank_time wrote: post #130
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…

I don’t know much about the space, but always found it interesting that most of the conversation is about autonomous driving for individuals, which to me seems to be the last step after e.g cargo outside cities and public transportation has been automated. I reckon because the latter are less sexy, lead to job losses and maybe require more public acceptance?

I know there is a lot of work being done in this areas as well but what is the current state of it and what are the barriers?

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

#162

Post by lettergram »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #157
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...

Self-driving cars are perennially five years away. Putting aside the question of whether the tech is there or not (and I would argue it isn’t there for commercial consumer use), the infrastructure and the laws will take years to catch up. This isn’t an overnight problem and many of the barriers are things that tech can’t just design around.

Not to mention there’s a huge voting block that’ll be against automation. I think the best first bet is just localized (robots in factories).

I’m personally of the opinion we are 10 years away or more technically. Main issue is weather and the risk threshold people can tolerate. All the tests thus far are in environments are high sun, no rain environments. If we are already localizing to southern cities, we may as well just add fiducial markers and guide wires.

In terms of risk threshold, look at COVID, risk of death under 45 is something like 0.5%. Or the black unarmed homicide count (<30). People have no way of measuring risk, just a few fatalities would have the public in a panic.

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

#163

Post by gher-shyu3i »

darkwizard42 wrote: post #104

Not surprisingly it takes a lot of capital to make serious in-roads into self-driving. Ultimately if your main business is not profitable it is hard to justify spending 100m a year on L5 with no reasonable end in sight. I think this is why only Waymo or Cruise or one of the other well-funded-by-profitable-other-business will continue to progress towards the true self-driving vehicle... its just too damn expensive and…

What will happen afterward? They'll get acquired by Uber or something?

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

#164

Post by mattnewton »

Alupis wrote: post #150
cameronh90 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet driving deaths are the leading cause of death in older children and young adults. It's not that we're bad at driving, I suppose, it's that we do an awful lot of it and it's quite a risky activity - especially if you're not 100% engaged. That being said, if the US cared about road safety, there's quite a lot they could do to improve it already. Many techniques have been used successfully in other countries to sign…

> Yet driving deaths are the leading cause of death in older children and young adults. All vehicle-related deaths in the US average around 32,000 annually, of which about 50% of those are alcohol and/or drug related, leaving the true accidental vehicular death number around 15,000 annually. The problem we're trying to solve with FSD just doesn't exist at the levels FSD proponents would have you believe. Humans are i…

I’m not sure you can remove any driving deaths as alcohol or drug related. A hypothetical FSD system would be a solution to those deaths too, and as long as you are driving on the same road as everyone else, abstaining from them yourself still puts you at risk.

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

#165

Post by rhodozelia »

johannes1234321 wrote: post #153
dmix wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think at a minimum all the cars need to be taking to each other over a protocol.

However that has to be secure that a hacker can't simply stop all traffic or cause speeding

Which is pretty much impossible if you let people have the physical cars. They will report their speed to other cars, they will measure their speed from pulses generated by something rotating on the vehicle, replace rotating thing with your function generator and then you can tell other cars you are going any speed you want. Turn up your reported speed and watch all the other cars get out of your way!

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

#166

Post by toast0 »

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…

> Computers probably can not be worse that the people already on the road.

Computers are better than some drivers, but they're worse than others. If the goal is safety, computerized assistance is almost certainly better than self driving. Keeping the human driver engaged and doing their best, but having the computer supervising works a lot better than having the human supervising; it's hard for a human to remain alert enough to intervene quickly enough when needed. I don't know if there are good studies yet, but I expect automatic emergency braking to reduce severity of a lot of collissions. Cross traffic warnings probably eliminates a lot of minor (and some major) collisions. There are systems now to detect wakefulness; if those are combined with something to safely pull over and stop, that could reduce a lot of tragic collisions as well.

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

#167

Post by ghaff »

Alupis wrote: post #150
cameronh90 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet driving deaths are the leading cause of death in older children and young adults. It's not that we're bad at driving, I suppose, it's that we do an awful lot of it and it's quite a risky activity - especially if you're not 100% engaged. That being said, if the US cared about road safety, there's quite a lot they could do to improve it already. Many techniques have been used successfully in other countries to sign…

> Yet driving deaths are the leading cause of death in older children and young adults. All vehicle-related deaths in the US average around 32,000 annually, of which about 50% of those are alcohol and/or drug related, leaving the true accidental vehicular death number around 15,000 annually. The problem we're trying to solve with FSD just doesn't exist at the levels FSD proponents would have you believe. Humans are i…

And if everyone drove modern high-end cars with the best assistive driving systems, especially as those improve to something approaching FSD on highways (or even achieve on certain highways in certain conditions) over the coming few years, it would be better still.

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

#168

Post by rhodozelia »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #159
mNovak wrote: post #112

In the end this makes sense; an actual car company is much better positioned to actually profit from marginal improvements in self-driving (read: safety improvements) year over year, rather than wait for the windfall of FSD taxi service at some unknown point in the future.

Toyota is the last company I expect to bring something new to market well. The last time they did that it was the Prius and it was kind of a fluke IMO. Toyota's entire market is convincing people (the bulk of whom will trade in in a few years) that a Camry/4Runner/Sienna is worth substantially more than an Altima/Tahoe/Pacifica based on a bunch of promises about reliability after 150k that the statistical first owner…

Not only are Toyota’s more reliable in the long run, they have fewer defects out of the factory, fewer lemons, and because of this reputation they don’t depreciate as quickly. I am going to get a new Tacoma every 2 years because I can sell the old one for nearly the same price as the new one. No more losing 50% of the value as soon as you drive it off the lot.

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

#169

Post by Clewza313 »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #159
mNovak wrote: post #112

In the end this makes sense; an actual car company is much better positioned to actually profit from marginal improvements in self-driving (read: safety improvements) year over year, rather than wait for the windfall of FSD taxi service at some unknown point in the future.

Toyota is the last company I expect to bring something new to market well. The last time they did that it was the Prius and it was kind of a fluke IMO. Toyota's entire market is convincing people (the bulk of whom will trade in in a few years) that a Camry/4Runner/Sienna is worth substantially more than an Altima/Tahoe/Pacifica based on a bunch of promises about reliability after 150k that the statistical first owner…

I think you're conflating self driving cars with ride-sharing here. Yes, getting rid of human drivers would lower the cost of ride shares and hence increase that market at the expense of having your own car, but the vast majority of current car owners will still have their own cars. Hell, we might even see car ownership increase once you can have your cake and eat it: all the comforts of your own car plus an AI doing the actual driving.

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

#170

Post by matz1 »

elpakal wrote: post #73

I learned to drive in Mexico at 13, where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals (see the black arrow on the wall? that means don't stop). I remember thinking about how different things were when trying to get my driver's license in US at age 16 - almost easier - in spite of how many more rules there were. I wonder how self-driving cars perform when trained in a world of rules and order and are then t…

>What does training look like?

The same way how human learn/train.

Observe how most people behave then imitate.

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