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Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

bloomberg.com

11–20 of 501 posts

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#11
post #2

> In fact, no one has come close to making an AV Correct me if im wrong, but Honda has done this? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35729591/honda-legend-lev... https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2021/4210304eng-legend.ht... Toyota: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-02/toyota... And Cruise: https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-... I don't really see how this all qualifies as "…

> I don't really see how this all qualifies as "not close to AV", when really, it looks quite viable (with some already driving autonomously...?)

Also Tesla. You can see real advancements in these videos of Tesla FSD Beta [0].

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/AIDRIVR/videos

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#12
post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2022-10-06/even-afte...

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#13
post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

I always imagined the future of self driving cars wouldn't lie in cities (except maybe some main ringroads or arterial roalds) but in highways. Just tell the computer to go to highway X exit Y, and from there the driver can drive the last few miles. Basically geofencing known 'sane' locations, which cuts down on the boring bits of driving significantly.

That's just trying to solve a simpler problem. It wasn't what we were promised!

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#14
$100B is not that much when you compare it to the value self-driving cars will create.

There are over 1 billion cars on the road which need humans to drive them. How much are they used? I don't know. Let's say one ride per day. When cars turn into a service business, the "driver" will be software. What will be paid to the driver? Let's say $1 per ride.

That is 1B * $1 * 365 = $365B per year. Give that a p/e ratio of 10 and the value is $3650B.

So we could spent 30 times more and still break even.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#15
post #2

> In fact, no one has come close to making an AV Correct me if im wrong, but Honda has done this? https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35729591/honda-legend-lev... https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2021/4210304eng-legend.ht... Toyota: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-02/toyota... And Cruise: https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-... I don't really see how this all qualifies as "…

AV is basically level 4 or 5 in the SAE classification ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car ). And those vehicles are either not existing yet (i.e. just marketing ploys), or far from it (requiring remote drivers, for example), or just research prototypes that have not been really tried at scale.

>or just research prototypes that have not been really tried at scale.

Furthermore, all of those research prototypes are geofenced, since they rely on extremely detailed mapping and lots of training data from humans driving the same routes. There is not a single AV in the world close to capable of driving on any road, at any time, in any condition, that a skilled human could drive on without ever having seen it before.

In my mind, that means we are indeed nowhere close to a true AV.

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#17
welcome to the future

maybe its just the case that we have already picked the low hanging fruit in computing...from this point forward, the remaining loftier goals will take decades and billions to achieve

don't fall into the trap of thinking something can't be done if it can't be done easily. quickly and cheaply

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always imagined the future of self driving cars wouldn't lie in cities (except maybe some main ringroads or arterial roalds) but in highways. Just tell the computer to go to highway X exit Y, and from there the driver can drive the last few miles. Basically geofencing known 'sane' locations, which cuts down on the boring bits of driving significantly.

That's just trying to solve a simpler problem. It wasn't what we were promised!

[deleted]

Re: Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere

#19
post #4

This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO. Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) i…

Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to things like highways and the like where the easier, less complex driving environment already exists.

Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?

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