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

bloomberg.com

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

#31

Post by XorNot »

MontyCarloHall wrote: post #15
Reventlov wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befor…

I'm not sure I agree with this success metric: for one thing, there's plenty of roads any given human can't or won't drive on due to perceived difficulty.

But when I think "autonomous vehicle" I definitely don't think "arbitrarily capable of driving on roads" - I think something capable of navigating well-understood national roads. I don't see any inconsistency with the idea that there'd be "no automation" zones or roads, or that pre-approved travelways for AVs is a failure scenario.

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

#32

Post by batmanturkey »

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided?

I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill?

I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in suburban US locales coupled with maglev capsules being routed around electronically by magnetic field switching, etc… Or flying jetson mobiles etc…

Why is the current obsession a robotic driver of a boring old car ?

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

#33

Post by _dain_ »

oplaadpunt wrote: post #10
case0x00 wrote: 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.

And then in those safe geofenced locations we could put down metal guide rails so that navigation is easier. And then use metal wheels with flanges to reduce rolling resistance. And then hook many cars together into one long vehicle. And ...

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

#34

Post by lll-o-lll »

origin_path wrote: post #25

The main lesson here seems to be about the value of incrementalism. This project was always pitched as self driving cars in one leap, which set huge expectations and more or less ruled out just shipping incrementally better driver assistance year after year. Probably because the space became dominated by Google and Page-ist futurism, so they weren't able to sell anything that would be expected to come with an actual…

It’s because self driving doesn’t provide much value until you can remove the human. If you can remove the human, last mile package delivery is suddenly super cheap; taxis are cheap; trucking is much cheaper; share car services are transformed as a business model.

With the human still required you get nothing, so why invest at all?

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

#35

Post by viscanti »

brutusborn wrote: post #23
noobermin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and ease of implementation.

The question is what value would a city get after, what seems to be, a very expensive process? What value do they get from unlocking semi competent AI cars that's worth the time, effort, and requires dedicated street space and an inconvenience to everyone else who travels a different way? It doesn't seem like it's replacing public transit and if someone needs a private vehicle to go beyond the area that's optimized they'll need a different transportation solution. It seems like a lot of cost for a very small benefit.

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

#36

Post by YawningAngel »

brutusborn wrote: post #23
noobermin wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and ease of implementation.

It seems like it would be cheaper and easier to get rid of cars entirely

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

#37

Post by tkk23 »

tgv wrote: post #26
mg wrote: post #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…

It's not only off topic, it's also wildly unrealistic (IMO). 1$/day may seem little, but that's for middle-class US standards, and it gets proportionally worse when you realize many people make more than one trip per day. What incentive do you have for people to pay that amount?

With self-driving cars, you don't have to own cars anymore. That $1 per day frees your $5.000 per year budget for owning a car.

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

#38

Post by FL33TW00D »

batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

Those infrastructure requirements are already satisfied - and ~3000 people died on US roads last year.

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

#40

Post by gizmo »

batmanturkey wrote: post #32

WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided? I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill? I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in subur…

Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver, and even in a world with ubiquitous fully autonomous cars you still want public transportation.

Driver assistance on highways is probably the right 80/20 solution, at least for the foreseeable future.

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