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Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

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Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#41

Post by Osiris »

daeken wrote: post #8
ebbv wrote: post #7

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…

Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.

I understand that you're talking about the interactions between real drivers and autonomous drivers. I still think that the autonomous driver will be better able to react to even a poor human driver than a real one. With all the sensors, they can detect when someone is drifting lanes, not stopping at a stop, etc. and can react accordingly with much more accuracy than a human driver.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#42

Post by schabernakk »

jjcm wrote: post #14
ebbv wrote: post #7

No thank you. I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing possible at any given moment. But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be…

I politely disagree. Having driven next to self-driving cars for the past few years in the bay area, in my opinion they are far more competent than most drivers. They don't stop tracking the road to put on makeup or check their phone. They don't get distracted by the kids in the back seat. They have their sensors on the road constantly, and not just in front of them. They don't have blind spots. Will bugs happen even…

A problem I see is every car manufacturer building his own system, maybe with a standardized communication channel to speak to other cars but the control software in itself will be bound to a certain manufacturer. This means different bugs in each car, fixing a bug in one car doesnt mean the error doesnt exist in other cars and so on. New players entering the market are facing pretty much impossible hurdles to enter.

Some kind of Android for autonomous cars would be quite nice I guess.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#43

Post by jerf »

mason240 wrote: post #17

"Work is already underway in Japan to build a dedicated autonomous driving proving ground, to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2014. Featuring real townscapes - masonry not mock-ups - it will be used to push vehicle testing beyond the limits possible on public roads to ensure the technology is safe." Meanwhile Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets with their autonomous car.

Still under controlled circumstances, though. This sort of mockup is necessary for full testing.

I'm not sure how autonomous Nissan is shooting for, and I think they're rather deliberately not defining it. You can draw a fairly smooth continuum between "antilock brakes" and "full autonomous car you'd put your unaccompanied children into in the middle of a Midwest winter", and I imagine they're not leaping straight towards the latter. But still, to get there, you need to be able to test things like "what does the car do on a street covered in a patchwork of ice when a dog jumps out in front of it?" without waiting for exactly those conditions to emerge.

If you want a fun thought exercise, imagine how an antilock brake system handles the left wheels being on ice and the right wheels being on dry pavement. And remember... torque. You can't "just" brake with the right wheels....

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#44

Post by Apocryphon »

I'm really wondering about how the social change will occur. Creating the technology will end up the easy part. How do we deal with our cars being software driven, and that software being created by companies which may not have the best track record on consumer privacy? (That's a concern I have about the hyperloop as well- wouldn't these proposed futuristic transportation involve a lot of surveillance by default, compared to old-fashioned modes?) How do we deal with the transition when the majority of cars are still people driven? How does government handle this revolutionary shift?

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#46

Post by mtinkerhess »

schabernakk wrote: post #25
daeken wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it would take some serious failure to make it any worse than the average driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.

You're right, but the software of an autonomous car will be held to much higher standard than just 'has be to better or equal to a human driver'. The whole thing gets interesting when you look at the judicial side of it: Who is responsible in the case of an accident? The car manufacturer (if it was a software failure)? Then even one accident triggered by it is too much.

For autonomous cars or not, whoever is liable in the case of an accident will acquire insurance to cover the cost of accidents. Currently, that's the driver. With autonomous cars, that may be the manufacturer, in which case 1) The cost to the manufacturer of insurance will be factored into the retail price of the vehicle and 2) The total cost of insurance will be lower because the accident rate will be lower.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#47

Post by dylangs1030 »

tbrownaw wrote: post #11
wayne_h wrote: post #2

Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars? The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the highway up for them... what a waste.

Cars cost something like $15+ per (calendar) day, and cause congestion when used in big cities. Making them autonomous won't help with either of those, but replacing them with usable mass transit does.

Making cars autonomous would virtually eliminate traffic. Traffic only exists because of the inefficiency generated by cars driving at different speeds in a "pack" on the highway.

Aside from traffic caused by accidents or unavoidable roadwork, the vast majority of traffic - caused by raw inefficiency and poor reaction to the aforementioned two - can be regulated away.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#48

Post by ebbv »

venus wrote: post #35
ebbv wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you read what I wrote. I said people are terrible drivers. I think likely a fleet of all automated cars will be safer than a fleet of human drivers. The problem comes in the interaction between automated drivers and human drivers. Among other things.

The thing is, you're trying to say that automated cars are a bad idea, but all the arguments you make actually militate for getting rid of the humans ASAP!

If you were going to pass a law against humans driving cars I'd be the first to vote for it.

But as long as humans are driving cars, solving the issue of having an automated car driving alongside them is a non-trivial task which people seem to be underestimating.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#49

Post by 001sky »

hobs wrote: post #19
tbrownaw wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cars cost something like $15+ per (calendar) day, and cause congestion when used in big cities. Making them autonomous won't help with either of those, but replacing them with usable mass transit does.

Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing who is doing what when. I am not a network engineer, but I cant imagine that people are driving the most efficiently to even attempt to maximize throughput.

Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing...

== No. You can't 'optimize' traffic away. LA is a case study.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#50

Post by hardtke »

I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same road system, there would need to be massive subsidies for the poor to swap out their cars and we would need to outlaw classic automobiles. Creating a separate road system would take a massive public investment.
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