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

471–480 of 501 posts

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

#471

Post by panick21_ »

wolframhempel wrote: post #161
harry8 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I feel that this one is a rather realistic solution. It uses existing technology (cars), existing infrastructure (streets) and existing data infrastructure (cloud providers) to solve a massive problem. The "only" thing that's missing is the self driving part (the only being in very large quotes of course). This means its much less of a stretch to get this scenario working than proposals like Hyperloop, Flying Taxis o…

Here is an idea. Take 2 lanes of that already existing street. Block them off from cars and make dedicated bike lanes. Then take another 2 lane and make a dedicated bus or tram line.

> It uses existing technology (cars)

A technology that kills a huge number of people and destroys the environment.

> existing infrastructure (streets)

Infrastructure that when uses for cars is very expensive to maintain and a safety risk.

> existing data infrastructure (cloud providers)

This computation not fixed, if you want to use it you have to pay more then somebody else is willing to pay. Its note like an unused road at all. So sure it exists, but its not idle.

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

#472

Post by panick21_ »

ufmace wrote: post #338
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.

You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it. Any bus-like thing would need far too many stops to be practical to be able to get people to a reasonable wal…

> You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it.

Its not about 'snapping your finger'. Neither Netherlands or Switzerland built their systems from 1 day to the other.

You need to make decision to change and then consistently and incrementally work on it. Put it in your standards and invest ever $ you have for new roads to that instead.

You need to change your tax policy so that horrible inefficient land uses like parking lots cost a lot more. You need to enable mixed use development so these parking lots can be built on.

> To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians.

I'm sorry that is complete and utter nonsense. Like seriously, completely insane.

If you look into some urbanist and city planning literature you will see that lots of places where there used to be total car shitshows, are now beautiful. Often you would never have guessed that just 10-20 years earlier it was horrible road and a parking lot.

Again, small and incremental steps. Here are some really basic steps you can take:

- Remove parking requirements

- Slow speed of cars

- Don't allow turn right on red

- Make the lanes thinner

- Make the sidewalk broader, maybe add some trees

- Take one of the existing lanes and add painted bike lanes, later add protection for those lanes

- Rezone for mixed use (specially existing commercial zones)

- Change property tax policy to discourage sub-optimal land use

I could literally keep going on and on. Non of this, requires you to demolish anything.

Specifically for the US, there is whole movement about incrementally improving your city, see Strong Towns (https://www.strongtowns.org/). They have lots of podcasts and books. Specially: 'Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity'.

They also point out in detail with real data how these changes make your city safer and economically much better (They have some seriously amazing visualization of city finances that shows how such chances can improve cities).

And this is not some hippy organization, these are coming from a somewhat conservative small towns perspective.

Honestly your attitude of 'we are stuck with this' is horrible. I can understand frustration and bleak outlook, about the situation. But put your hope into incremental low cost change, not some techno futurism and you will be less disappointed.

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

#473

Post by wizofaus »

panick21_ wrote: post #472
ufmace wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it. Any bus-like thing would need far too many stops to be practical to be able to get people to a reasonable wal…

> You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it. Its not about 'snapping your finger'. Neither Netherlands or Switzerland built their systems from 1 day to…

What's wrong with "turn right on red"? It'd be a big problem in that exact form in Australia, but as a cyclist especially I'd rather we had the equivalent "turn left on red" law, and to be honest, cyclists can generally get away with it anyway. But I can't see why it would really be a huge issue if it was allowed for cars, unless they were persistently ignoring pedestrians/cyclists and turning into their path as they crossed in front of you.

The big one for me is traffic lights - cyclists/pedestrians should be able to trigger traffic/pedestrian lights to turn green instantly in most cases (with some reasonable lower limit on the amount of time they've been red for, although ideally all traffic lights in urban areas would be hooked up to sensors able to determine if there was any traffic approaching), and ideally approaching cyclists should be able to trigger them without even stopping to press a button - I gather they have something like this in Copenhagen. There's realistically no way to set up traffic light sequences so that they suit all modes of travel, but they're often especially bad for cyclists, and the act of having to stop and start all the time is far more onerous (and even dangerous, esp. if you're clipped in) for cyclists than it is for cars.

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

#474

Post by Veserv »

panick21_ wrote: post #453
Veserv wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've yet to see Tesla FSD Beta perform in any meaningful operational environment, no matter how restricted, within a factor of 100x of Waymo or Cruise, and Waymo and Cruise are still at least a factor of 10x off of "equal to human drivers". Superiority can not be claimed if a system is unacceptably bad in all circumstances (i.e. 1,000x worse than the minimum acceptable standard for real commercial usage) and worse in…

Tesla has not focused on any individual area to any large extent so why would you measure them on that? That not the problem they are trying to solve and its not the problem that worth investing 30 billion for. > within a factor of 100x of Waymo What's your evidence for this? Is there anybody who has done a systematic comparison of Tesla performance in Arizon zone of Waymo?

California has a reporting requirement for all companies testing L4/5 vehicles:

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

Here is a more human digestible summary:

https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/02/09/2021-disen...

In 2021, Waymo averaged ~7,900 miles per disengagement and Cruise averaged ~41,000. In 2020, Waymo averaged ~30,000 and Cruise around 28,500.

Tesla is absent from those reports as they have deliberately declared that all of their vehicles do not even qualify as L4/5 autonomous vehicles. They have furthermore not released any 3rd party auditable metrics for any of their claims. So, from an official perspective, Tesla is infinitely worse than Waymo.

From an unofficial standpoint, we can use Youtube videos and self-reported tracking by invested fans such as here https://www.teslafsdtracker.com/

Both of those classes of unofficial metrics by positively biased groups consistently demonstrate around 10-20 miles per disengagement at max.

As Waymo averaged 8,700 last year, that makes Tesla around 400-800x worse than Waymo as of last year and around 2,000-4,000x worse than Cruise as of last year.

We can also see from the unofficial Tesla fan metrics that FSD Beta has seen no material improvement from around one year ago.

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

#475

Post by aeternum »

paganel wrote: post #74
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,…

Not all driving outside city areas happens on the highways. My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows…

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/fRAAf83QzR0

And this is just a single clip. The huge advantage Tesla has is their massive amount of training data. If it happens in the real world, they probably have a clip of it and can train on it.

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

#476

Post by aeternum »

dm319 wrote: post #163
benj111 wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sheep are worse. They run from one side of the road across you to get away from you.

Add to that the vagueness of where the road ends and field/bank begins for many country roads.

This is also why Tesla switch to using 'drivable area' rather than strict road boundaries.

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

#477

Post by aeternum »

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.

Try taking 2-3 young children on crowded public transport. What works for you can be pretty exclusive.

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

#478

Post by aeternum »

sgtfrankieboy wrote: post #62
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…

Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors. But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads. Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.

Tunnels might now be cheaper to build than roads just because of land rights. It's very difficult/impossible to acquire the property rights to build a new roads/rail lines nowadays.

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

#479

Post by prng2021 »

nichochar wrote: post #283
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…

[Disclaimer] I worked for Cruise for 4 years. I agree with everything you said, but chuckled at this particular part (which is very wrong): > Tesla is significantly ahead of everyone else. Everyone in the industry knows that Tesla is nowhere near the tip of the technology. What Tesla does is _fantastic marketing_. Their whole self-driving division is just a mechanism to sell more cars. At a high level, this is why: -…

95% is a ridiculous exaggeration. How well can these cars do in the winter? You know, that season we have that can easily keep the ground covered with snow and/or ice for 30% of the year in many cities. I lived in Chicago and it was genuinely difficult to drive for 3-4 months of the year. How well can these cars do during the very rainy hurricane season in Florida?

Do people who work in this industry actually think they've solved 95% of driving scenarios because their software can manage driving in sunny California, Nevada, and Arizona?

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

#480

Post by ryan_lane »

bergenty wrote: post #351
oblio wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll be blunt about this. Most of this research is funded in the US and the hyper individualistic Americans as a group don't believe in public transport.

Yes, as a hyper individualistic American fuck public transport. I don’t want to travel with other people, I don’t want to live in dense cities and I don’t want to go to like the 10 places with public transport. I love national parks, camping, hiking, road-tripping etc.

Then stay out of the cities, and live in the country. If this is how you want to live, then your opinion doesn't matter for how cities are run.
Post reply on HN