Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

bloomberg.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

251–260 of 501 posts

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

#251

Post by gremlinsinc »

forgotusername6 wrote: post #229
wil421 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Musk coined Hyperloop as a distraction to high speed rail. He wanted people to buy Teslas instead of thinking about high speed rail in California. A lot of people fell for his con.

It is a shame that other partial vacuum systems are not being developed. They seem like a useful concept, fast, less air resistance means less energy use. Surely a technology you'd want to have in a future city.

why does it need to be a vacuum system? Couldn't a similar device be a pod-like maglev device that floats above a magnetic track and maybe can temporarily hover albeit more slowly via some drone-like propeller on the bottom when 'off track', or for final-mile portions, could even turn into a car when not in maglev mode.

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

#252

Post by gremlinsinc »

vanilla_nut wrote: post #52
FL33TW00D wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Cars and trucks continuously degrade the roads beneath them. The infrastructure requirement is never satisfied -- it requires constant, very expensive upkeep.

What if cars were mini maglev trains (or pods), hovering above buried tracks on the road and can 'convert' into a car for last-mile delivery, and parking.

Then you'd still have the asphalt etc, but hovering over it - you degrade it less than actually driving on it. In this situation you could order up any size vehicle you need from 2 seater to 20 seater.

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

#253

Post by gamblor956 »

cs702 wrote: post #185

In the short run, technological progress is much slower than anyone hopes, but in the long run it is much faster than anyone expects. My favorite example is that in 1987, the scientific consensus was that it would take "at least 100 years" and likely much longer to sequence the entire human gnome.[a] But the vast majority of it was sequenced by 2000, only 13 years later. Moreover, just two decades later, anyone could…

My perceptions contradict this article: (1) The technology is progressing faster than is generally recognized, with vehicles getting progressively better at dealing with edge cases and handling failures gracefully. (2) Judging by the videos I've watched online, Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else.

We must be watching different videos. And experiencing Teslas differently. I see Teslas constantly slamming on their breaks on freeways, swerving across lanes, and avoiding collisions by the narrowest margins only because their owners took control before certain death. And that's just driving around in L.A. traffic, the YouTube videos are even worse. Tesla's vaunted camera-based system still can't recognize white semis or other broad, flat obstacles that a human or radar-based system would recognize instantly.

Tesla was ahead of their competitors, several years ago. Now they're way behind, and dropping further behind with every "update" that addresses the problems that got media coverage with "solutions" that indicate brittle, manual programmer overrides rather than any sort of scalable AI-driven capability.

And it's irrelevant that Tesla has 160,000 drivers on the road "training" the system, since they selected the drivers who drive in the safest road conditions using a "safe driver" metric that has no relationship to safe driving. This means that Tesla's "AI" (to the extent it can be called that) is being overwhelmed with tons of useless data that overtrains it to drive easy roads and with almost no training for difficult conditions or edge cases. For point of comparison, most vehicles today with advanced cruise control can drive the same roads that FSD can safely drive...but they don't need advanced AI to do it.

It doesn't matter how far ahead you were at the beginning of the race, it matters how far ahead you are at the finish line.

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

#254

Post by Paradigma11 »

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 am excited because then you can have far cheaper taxis -> less people need to own a car.

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

#255

Post by aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA »

hasmanean wrote: post #154
_0w8t wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We could put GPS beacons on all pedestrians.

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

#256

Post by onethought »

oliveshell wrote: post #204
onethought wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What sensor suite is that?

Radar, ultrasonic proximity sensors, and/or LIDAR, presumably. Tesla has famously removed all radar/ultrasonic sensors from their newer cars in favor of a purely camera-based system.

But they removed them well after they showed they could accurately predict distance with vision.

LiDAR doesn’t make sense as a sensor to me because it only works in good weather. Its Like a car without windscreen wipers.

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

#257

Post by subroutine »

Retric wrote: post #249
subroutine wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True, true. However, if I had to bet... I'd bet in a fully self driving world (using today's tech) there'd be overall far fewer fatal accidents. However there'd also be a lot of bullshit we are simply unwilling to deal with (e.g. cars going 10mph in the rain; slow motion fender benders; car unwilling to turn left; gridlock at intersections; lots of random oddities). I guess my point is that safety metrics are certain…

I think that’s underestimating just how bad people are at driving. There is little meaningful difference for other drivers from a bunch of self driving cars suddenly blocking traffic and an actual traffic accident. People aren’t going to trust cars to safely do level 5 if they can’t do level 4 99.999% of the time. So sure there will be occasional stories of i95 blocked for 3 hours due to software bug, but how is that…

This is the argument self driving car companies are currently trying to make. My contention is this reason doesn't seem compelling to the general public. For whatever reason the public seems more tolerant of human error than machine error. At this point anyway. I foresee a long period of trust-building before widespread adoption.

An interesting experiment would be for Uber to send two cars for pickup, one human and one self driving. And let people choose.

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

#259

Post by Retric »

subroutine wrote: post #257
Retric wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that’s underestimating just how bad people are at driving. There is little meaningful difference for other drivers from a bunch of self driving cars suddenly blocking traffic and an actual traffic accident. People aren’t going to trust cars to safely do level 5 if they can’t do level 4 99.999% of the time. So sure there will be occasional stories of i95 blocked for 3 hours due to software bug, but how is that…

This is the argument self driving car companies are currently trying to make. My contention is this reason doesn't seem compelling to the general public. For whatever reason the public seems more tolerant of human error than machine error. At this point anyway. I foresee a long period of trust-building before widespread adoption. An interesting experiment would be for Uber to send two cars for pickup, one human and o…

That’s fair. I suspect we are at least 30 years from a drunk to be legally able to order their self driving car home without issue simply due to cultural inertia.

Assuming we get to that point it will probably be another 20 years after that before non self driving is seen in the same way as driving a motorcycle is today. Aka something that’s not suicidal, but defiantly excessively dangerous.

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

#260

Post by dang »

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…

We've changed the URL from https://medium.com/@doctorow/100-billion-later-autonomous-ve... to the original source.
Post reply on HN