Even after $100B, self-driving cars are going nowhere • Hacker News Board

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

#151

Post by onethought » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:58 AM UTC

lll-o-lll wrote: post #34

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?

You get safer drivers, less crashes and less death.

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

#152

Post by _0w8t » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:59 AM UTC

almost_usual wrote: post #97

andrepd wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big, inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious space. Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities which are designed around cars are terrible . This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely . Focusin…

This is the logical answer but companies need to profit off something and EVs are what “save the world” right now. Everyone is committed to being green as long as their lifestyle isn’t inconvenienced and they have the funds to buy the green equivalent technology.

EV promotes energy independence of a country. In the worst case they can use electricity from coal that is widely available on this planet. And as long as the coal plant is modern they still will generate less CO2 than petrol-based cars.

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

#153

Post by stephc_int13 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 11:59 AM UTC

Companies are going to die on that hill. I would not call it a waste of money.

It might work in the end, and even if the current tech is not sufficient to attain the goal of fully autonomous driving, the car is a very good guinea pig for robotic research.

We're collectively learning a lot in this process.

I am not surprised that it turns out to be much more difficult than anticipated.

I think it is 95% vaporware, but I liked the ideas behind the latest Nvidia presentation.

Machine learning is all about the training quality, useful robots (such as autonomous vehicles) have to operate in the real world.

We can't have robots that kills by accident.

It is difficult/risky/costly to train them in the real world. Good virtual twins are needed to achieve safe training with infinite repetitions in extreme situations.

Not sure if that is sufficient, but it is worth trying.

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

#154

Post by hasmanean » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 12:00 PM UTC

_0w8t wrote: post #139

Fricken wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't seem to go away. The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do. (However yo…

I recently drove a rented Tesla 3. On a highway in Norway it failed to detect speed limit signs in like 25% of cases. And if the speed limit sign was a temporary one due to road repairs it failed with those like 50% of times. And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.

Signs are nice but the simplest way to know the speed is to store it in a database and look it up from position.

In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.

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

#155

Post by BlargMcLarg » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 12:01 PM UTC

wolframhempel wrote: post #147

Lutger wrote: post #106

Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.

I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between - basically driverless, electric ueber. As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas. Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. E…

This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues.

If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.

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

#156

Post by oblio » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 12:01 PM UTC

yreg wrote: post #91

zinekeller wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything) I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do other things with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires predetermined stops which people outside the US sh…

Trains won't do last mile delivery.

Current trains? Not directly.

But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.

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

#157

Post by harry8 » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 12:01 PM UTC

wolframhempel wrote: post #147

Lutger wrote: post #106

Huge waste of money that could have been poured into public transport to actually solve our problems and improve our lives. What a tragedy.

I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between - basically driverless, electric ueber. As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas. Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. E…

I too rather like rainbows, unicorns, chocolate waterfalls and free happiness growing on trees as a solution to all problems.

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

#158

Post by wolframhempel » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 12:06 PM UTC

BlargMcLarg wrote: post #155

wolframhempel wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between - basically driverless, electric ueber. As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas. Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. E…

This isn't going to work for the most obvious case: rush hour. Which is the case that is the root cause of most issues. If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.

I guess it's just a question of capacity. If you can cram a lot of travelers into a subway train during rush hour, you could just as well imagine an uber pool type function where clever route finding combines riders into a single car during rush hour.

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

#159

Post by usrusr » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 12:07 PM UTC

jimmytidey wrote: post #64

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…

I think non-human payloads make more sense for virtually every kind of innovation: -- Radically reduced safety margins, if the vehicle itself contains no humans. -- You can often move cargo at any time of day or night, and therefore do a much more sophisticated job of collaboratively load-levelling traffic. -- Doesn't matter how uncomfortable a non-human payload is with in reason. Acceleration, cornering, waiting, da…

Humans are freight units that embark and disembark and change vehicles autonomously with very little instruction. Other freight units aren't. Parcel hubs are a hard problem that's far from solved enough to set them up in masses.

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

#160

Post by ChildOfChaos » Sat, Oct 15, 2022, 12:07 PM UTC

It will come eventually, but I wonder how much of my lifetime I will be able to appreciate it, i'm already almost 40 and I don't drive.

I live in a small city, I can walk most places and I get the train to larger cities for social events, I save a huge amount of money and I love it.

But the trains are awful, good, decent public transport and self-driving transportation would be awesome. I might never get to the point of having owned a car and i will be pretty happy with that.