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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

#271

Post by Animats »

grandmczeb wrote: post #209
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…

> No pricing yet, so this is still a demo. If you’re referring to the Waymo rides in Chandler/Phoenix, they do charge. JJRicks (a YouTuber with no affiliation to Waymo AFAIK) has a spreadsheet of the rides he’s taken. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1OiYGH4Vmdo_4HYMC9YVA...

Oh, good. Waymo's site says you can sign up, but there's no indication of pricing there.

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

#272

Post by azinman2 »

danielheath wrote: post #218
azinman2 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human drivers still do meaningfully cost money to employ, and they do annoying things like needing to sleep or take rest room breaks. Autonomous trucking would completely revolutionize the industry.

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.

We already have a lot of rail in the world, but still have lots and lots of trucks. Is it just not enough rail? Roads are also useful for people in a really dynamic way that rail isn’t (especially for big countries like the US).

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

#273

Post by Ekaros »

netrus wrote: post #230
johannes1234321 wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :)

It's easy to put up fake street signs to troll/manipulate human drivers, yet that hardly ever happens. I have read stories of people putting up fake speed cameras in their front yard to slow down traffic, but no one dares to fake speed limit signs.

Except Finland during elections. Where advertisement with nice white round circles with numbers inside are a standard. Single vote for candidate system where number of candidates can run to over hundred.

No human would think that number next to person is speed limit, but machines aren't trained for that...

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

#274

Post by enos_feedler »

paxys wrote: post #210
aeturnum wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At a technical level, I think smart roads are more straightforward. However, I think a purely technical analysis ignores why self driving cars have been so popular. The cost of replacing the entire US road system with "smart" roads would doubtless be astronomical - as well as increase the maintenance and infrastructural requirements. We've probably had the technical capabilities to create self-driving-capable roads f…

You don't have to replace the entire road system. A hybrid model can also exist. Complicated city streets can be "smart", while self driving tech can be good enough to traverse long stretches of highways (which it can basically already do).

Great! Do you want to sit in the first city council meeting and bring up this topic? :P

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

#275

Post by plank_time »

manigandham wrote: post #148
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…

Can you share examples of these things? Isn't training data considered "experience"?

Example: One of the examples was a self driving car driving down a busy road. There was a car trying to cross that road perpendicularly. As a driver you could see that car inching its way into traffic but the self driving car didn’t recognize that as a threat. Suddenly the car drove into traffic and the self-driving car almost t-boned it but the human driver intervened before it hit. That’s something that as a driver I would have caught and slowed down because the car was acting weird.

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

#277

Post by aparsons »

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 chuckled! I spoke to Anthony at the Udacity office in Mountain View around 2018 (he’d already left Uber to found his trucking company). He seemed like he’d given up on city streets being autonomously drivable any time soon, but highways were still on the table in the next five years. One idea he floated was to employ drivers only from the exit ramp for the last mile journey. For trucking, this made sense.

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

#278

Post by notka »

jogjayr wrote: post #236
netrus wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just to comment on the math (not the actual numbers): 624k/1M is the expected number of serious accidents. The probability of getting into at least one serious accident is 1 - (999999/1000000)^624000 = 46% (Every mile, you have a 99,9999% chance of no serious accident. You want that 624k times in a row).

Neat, thanks! So nearly a 1 in 2 chance of getting into a serious accident in a lifetime. Not great odds IMO.

I believe the mileage should be higher because most of us spend time as passengers in cars too.

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

#279

Post by rsj_hn »

handmodel wrote: post #256
fgonzag wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you in the freight industry? Because drivers are exactly what is expensive and limits growth right now. there is a humongous supply of trucking jobs, and they are paying really high rates right now (up to 70-80 cents per mile)

Fuel is still wayyyy bigger than the driver. Both would be valuable - but a truck that is 30% more fuel efficient is probably going to save more money than one that doesn't need a driver (but still needs people more loading). There are different estimates everywhere - but I usually see 20-30% of trucking costs are drivers. In other freight industries (cargo ships, trains, etc.) it would obviously be less. https://www…

Thanks for that chart, but I read it differently. Just because something isn't the No 1. cost doesn't mean people aren't interested in lowering the cost. So let's say there are 3 million truck drivers in the US that earn an average of say 50K {1}. That's $150 Billion in costs per annum. Sure, there are other costs that are higher, but if you could lower that only by 50% -- say automate some (but not all routes), that technology would save $75 Billion per year, and that number would grow with inflation. Even at a real discount rate of 8% (10% with 2% inflation), that is worth 937 Billion dollars -- nearly a trillion. Now let's say the software vendor who solves this splits the savings with the trucking industry, so they get 37.5 B per year and the industry gets the other half. That's some nice recurring revenue, worth significant investment if it's technologically feasible.

So this is all about scale. Everyone is obsessing over Uber for cultural and political reasons, but there are 1/10 as many taxi drivers as truck drivers, and they earn half as much. The big money is in trucking, and even if the problem is only half solved (say just for some long-haul routes), it would be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, even if truck driver wages are not the single most expensive cost. Hell they could be the 10th or 20th most expensive, what matters is the billions that could be saved, not the rank ordering.

{1}https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2019/article/is-the-us-labor-ma...

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

#280

Post by throwawayzRUU6f »

nradov wrote: post #229
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…

Beyond experience and fear, I think an autonomous vehicle will need a reasonably accurate mental model of how other human drivers on the road are likely to react.

The technical term for this is 'situational awareness'

> Situational awareness or situation awareness (SA) is the perception of environmental elements and events with respect to time or space, the comprehension of their meaning, and the projection of their future status

There's an bearish case to be made - not only are the state-of-the-art algorithms nowhere near this - it takes kids quite some time to acquire this skill. Playing ball games with my kids, I've noticed even a 3yo still doesn't intuitively grasp Newtonian mechanics - they're trying to catch the ball where it is now, not where it's going to be in a few seconds. 8yo - notably better, though not fine tuned yet. Heck, I know some adults who're lacking in this respect.

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