Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division • Hacker News Board

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

#261

Post by meowkit » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 4:34 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #186

Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora. Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1] Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion i…

Waymo is at the head of the pack. I think we will see full self driving limited to cities + highways this decade.

ZOOX is another company I'm watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoox_(company)

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

#262

Post by astrange » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 4:46 AM UTC

theluketaylor wrote: post #38

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.

The edge case that I always go to on why truly autonomous vehicles are decades+ away is winter driving. Lane markers and road signs disappear. Slush and salt spray constantly obscure sensors. Winter driving as a human driver requires an entirely different approach and Waymo hangs out in the Arizona desert where there is basically never any inclement weather.

You can simulate poor weather with sensors by either 1. simulating it or 2. driving at night.

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

#263

Post by lumost » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 4:48 AM UTC

cma wrote: post #257

repsilat wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google tells me that Uber takes a 25% cut for human-driven rides. So a rider's fare is 3:1 driver to Uber. If (just to make the math easy) you need to pay a robot a third of what you need to pay a human, I wonder whether the negotiation would come out closer to 1. One part Uber, one part driver (so Uber's cut maintains its value) or 2. Still one part Uber, three parts driver, but the values are all lower and the tota…

3:1 of the gross goes to the driver. Much less after driver expenses like wear and tear, gas and insurance.

that's the rub of a robotaxi service. A hypothetical taxi launchable today would probably have

~30 billion R&D 1:10 remote safety operator ratio (1p employees, not contractors). 100K Bill of materials/vehicle for the lidar sensors etc.

Compare this with an externally owned 8 year old vehicle being driven by someone who doesn't confer liability to the company.

Even if the dream was realized there likely isn't a viable business for robotaxis until the cars are on the road for 10-20 years.

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

#264

Post by astrange » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 4:50 AM UTC

tdhz77 wrote: post #151

bbddg wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's bad enough private investors are wasting so much capital on self-driving. The last thing we need is the government doing the same.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/technology-innovation/automated-vehicl... Government has been studying this since the 1960’s…

This seems to be counting seat belts as an FSD technology since it's all under "safety".

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

#265

Post by litoorachure » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 4:54 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #186

Uber gave up in December 2020 and sold off their technology to Aurora. Waymo is now offering rides in Phoenix AZ with no "safety driver".[1] "Waymo One is our fully public, fully autonomous ride hailing service. Now anyone can take fully autonomous rides anytime they're in Metro Phoenix. Just download the app and ride right away."[1] Waymo also now has significant non-Alphabet investors, having raised US $2 billion i…

Toyota's interest may not be in Level-5 autonomous taxis. They have a history of striving to fully understand every part of their supply chain; this could be a play at developing advanced in-house driver assists.

As an example, I was surprised to learn that Toyota designed their own ECU chips rather than buying off-the-shelf automotive grade MCUs until 2019, when they spun that business off to a subsidiary[1]. They really take vertical integration seriously.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-japan-fukushima-anniversa...

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

#266

Post by danielheath » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 4:55 AM UTC

hawaiianbrah wrote: post #242

danielheath wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Autonomous trucks for urban trucking are a pipe dream, but maybe for long-haul routes. That said, it's not at all clear to me that developing autonomous trucks for long interstate routes would be meaningfully cheaper than laying rail on literally every high-traffic route on the planet, which uses perfectly-understood technology and has entirely predictable returns.

Presumably you would be able to leverage a lot of that effort and expand into autonomous driving for other scenarios, right?

That's what's being attempted, essentially.

Autonomous driving in good conditions on highways is already working quite well, but once it's wet/foggy and there are animals wandering onto the roads and other cars are behaving unpredictably... those are not straightforward problems to solve.

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

#267

Post by notsureaboutpg » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 5:07 AM UTC

dmix wrote: post #133

plank_time wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

So everyone gets in an accident when that protocol has a bug or some server assisting the communication has unplanned downtime?

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

#268

Post by dillondoyle » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 5:12 AM UTC

sasper wrote: post #141

moralestapia wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>where there are almost literally no rules or traffic signals ... That's a lie, though. The meme that México is an uncivilized place is dumb and doesn't hold much substance. Edit: Downvote me all you want, GP's statement is laughably easy to disprove. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

OP was being a bit hyperbolic, but driving in Mexico (and most of Latin America) is much different than in the US. I lived and overlanded with motorcycles in Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and Chile for the last 12 years and could talk for hours about how the mentality of driving in the US doesn't translate to Latin America. Blinkers can mean something different at different times, depending on context, while traffic l…

+1 If you've never seen or riden a camionetas it's hard to describe!

I go (or used to) Guatemala a lot and the Camionetas are so insanely scary! Going over huge mountains, roads with giant holes in them, tipping this way and that, filled 3x per seat or omre with mounds of carrots and cargo on top. lots of times the money guy hangs out the front entrance while it's driving!

They go SO fast it's super scary to me I'm surprised I haven't seen one tip over on those corners or bust a brake and run off the mountain.

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

#269

Post by hijklmno » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 5:13 AM UTC

How long will this game of musical chairs go on? Technologically we are not there yet. What is called as AI by all these self-aggrandizing people is nothing more than glorified "pattern matching". Can the current technology have its use cases? Sure. But calling it self-driving is laughable at best and deceptive at worst.

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

#270

Post by alasdair_ » Tue, Apr 27, 2021, 5:14 AM UTC

johannes1234321 wrote: post #174

rhodozelia wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Well, you can take the input as a data point, but make the final decision based on sensor data. Thus the shared data can make the flow smoother. But I'm also waiting for fake street signs to troll/manipulate self driving vehicles :)

I tried “tesla swatting” with a fake speed sign a couple of years ago. It worked then (autopilot went from 45 to 15 MPH) and I assume it still does.

Can I copyright the phrase “Tesla swatting”? :)