The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving • Hacker News Board

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#371

Post by seanmcdirmid » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 3:24 AM UTC

intended wrote: post #365

encoderer wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You sound like you live in the suburbs. I suspect car-as-a-service wouldn't be popular there. Honestly, if you live close enough to the store that you can drive there in under 5 minutes, to me that's a sign that you don't need to drive there. Where I live (Berkeley), and in the Sf Bay Area in general, car as a service would be remarkably effective and popular.

do people realize that all these space savings mean that builders will now make smaller houses and more of them?

That already happens in mega cities where parking spots are around $500k. I take taxis all the time so I'm already living in the future, the western developed world will catch up eventually.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#372

Post by brc » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 3:30 AM UTC

dclowd9901 wrote: post #334

ignostic wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hear people fretting about liability as a "problem to overcome," but it's actually much simpler than the technical challenges. People have to drive the same distance regardless. Whether it's human or computer error leading to the accident is irrelevant to your premium. To a car insurance company it's all about rates and risks. Assuming driverless cars are shown to be safer than humans - and they'll have to be in or…

The problem is your insurance company. If you get in an accident, they're not going to want to pay for it, and they're going to go after Google for the damages. Now we're right back where we started.

No. Current driver-based insurance policies might be based on the ability to hold the driver personally responsible if they are negligent.

Insuring a vehicle is just figuring out what the likely payout ratio across a cohort of those vehicles is going to be, then working backwards from there to come up with a premium that will cover the claim amounts, administrative costs and provide a pool of funds to invest.

Lots of things are insured today with no interest in who is operating them. Automated cars are no different to that.

Essentially you're imaging a current situation (where a driver is insured) and transferring that to a situation with no driver. That's wrong.

Insurance companies don't care - they just want to be able to predict what the likely payout rate is. And that's how much it will cost. If that includes cover for buggy code, it just means a higher premium. Essentially younger drivers have buggier driving code, and that's why they cost more to insure.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#373

Post by gensym » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 3:37 AM UTC

jchrisa wrote: post #110

antr wrote: post #3

I love how the car understands the cyclist's hand signals. The self-driving car is going to have a gigantic impact on the world, I can't wait to see it commercialised.

I think it will only take a few on the road to teach motorists what legal driving looks like. Hopefully it'll have a traffic calming effect in general.

Right. I rarely drive and actually try to obey the law when I do so, but where I live (Chicago), obeying the law is a recipe for angering other drivers. Things like obeying the speed limit or stopping for pedestrians in crosswalks delay other drivers, who are quick to express their anger. In a few years, maybe they'll just think I'm in a robot car!

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#374

Post by brc » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 3:37 AM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #265

jsmthrowaway wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually don't follow the intuition. The thought of putting a smart fortwo into a barrier at speed terrifies me, whereas I've done it in a Toyota Camry (pedestrian on freeway over blind crest, nowhere to go), gotten out unharmed, and driven a rental to work the next day. Also if I hit a pedestrian at 25mph I don't think it matters which I'm driving. The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup…

Crumple zones and needing a 'big car' is old fashioned safety. Probably the best cars to study are the big brothers of the Smart Car - the Mercedes A and B series. The original A series had a problem with the elk test, that was fixed and is a side issue to the main safety advances. The passenger cell is the key part, ideally you want the engine to go under it rather than land in the passengers laps. That is a key inn…

All modern cars have crumple zones - though smaller cars like the smart and A/B Class have very short crumple zones.

The difference in your video is the improvements in passenger safety cell construction - much of which comes down to higher strength steel being used in the passenger safety cell. Compare the size of the door pillars between a modern car and one from the 90s - in modern cars they are often twice as thick.

A modern volvo of the same size will fare even better than the renault.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#375

Post by gensym » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 3:41 AM UTC

drzaiusapelord wrote: post #159

peteretep wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will a cyclist be able to troll you by continuing to signal in front of your car, stopping it from ever overtaking?

This is my concern. If we treat cyclists as the sacred cow of the roads, they'll more or less have the root password to my car and be able to dictate where it stops and for how long. I find cyclists to be much more disingenuous and reckless than any driver, at least here in Chicago where they'll put up next to your car on the right, on the shoulder to make a dangerous and illegal right, and pound on the side of your…

Haha, I knew as soon as I saw that you think respecting people's lives is treating them as "sacred cows" that you must be a Chicago driver.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#376

Post by astrange » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 4:01 AM UTC

_zen wrote: post #273

I think the coolest thing about self-driving cars is they can create a mesh network with one another. If I'm driving to work and a traffic accident occurs 2 miles ahead on my route, with multiple self-driving cars present at the accident, those cars can share traffic information with all self-driving cars in the area. My car will then plan an alternative route around the accident before I've even seen it. Communicati…

> Communication would be encrypted of course to prevent tampering.

There's little purpose in encrypting a signal like this. You're still proposing to trust random cars you've never met before, so how would you know which messages are fake and which aren't?

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#377

Post by gbog » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 4:06 AM UTC

john_b wrote: post #160

gbog wrote: post #120

In this discussion I very rarely see mentioned how heavy are cars. Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b? Here in northern China, many people have very small egg-cars, which are nothing more than an electric bike with a thin shell for the cold, and this is much less likely to kill someone by accident. I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so…

> "Since when do we need multi tons machine to move a being that is usually below 100kg from a to b" You don't always need them. Short intra-city drives don't require a large vehicle. But most public transportation in the US is rather poor, so people buy a car that will cover their worst case usage: driving multiple people and their luggage between cities, possibly hundreds of miles. An electric egg car isn't safe or…

> People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful.

You surely know that this cannot be true. In China, again, many rich people buy expensive luxury cars, and really have no need for them, except if you include "social status" in "needs".

I have a simple litmus test for detecting unneeded goods that people are trying to force into our minds: ads. We need normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc. Except if it is very different in the US, I think no big ads campain are selling these.

However, each product that require a heavy handed ad campaigns is certainly lacking in desirability or usefulness. And it also means these industries are spending a lot of money selling you goods, instead of spending money making these goods better or cheaper.

Anyways, my bet is that the car industry is rotten to the bones, selling worldwide dangerous and superfluous multi-tons machines that could be replaced by many other, more useful, safe and scalable transportation means. And I hope Google and others will break this industry apart as soon as possible.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#378

Post by fernly » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 4:09 AM UTC

TheEzEzz wrote: post #231

ignostic wrote: post #209

Everyone seems really concerned with the edge cases right now. What about insurance and liability? What about when X happens and it's raining? These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology. Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) th…

There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate. Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonom…

Yeah, but how many of those garages are packed full of stuff, with the car parked out in the driveway, anyway?

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#379

Post by kamaal » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 4:28 AM UTC

gamegoblin wrote: post #21

rwmj wrote: post #5

This is hardly city driving. Try driving in a European city. (I love this project and can't wait to buy or rent a self-driving car)

Harder yet, Southeast Asia. Hundreds of pedestrians, tons of vehicle variety (some entirely makeshift), uncontrolled intersections, very little regard to any regulations.

I will give you a more harder test environment. Try driving in any major Indian city, especially in the city core.

Super narrow roads. Zero adherence to traffic rules. Kids playing on the roads, sudden reactions from people on the road when they have to cross. Unsignalled sudden breaking, turns, U-turns, people popping up in front of the vehicle from no where etc etc.

What's more how should you expect the car to react when a dog comes chasing. Or when a traffic police guy asks you to stop or take a diversion(You won't believe how common this is here). How will you negotiate frequently occurring speed breakers and pot holes. The list is endless.

I believe starting to test some where in the streets of a city like Bangalore/Mumbai would help.

Re: The latest chapter for the self-driving car: mastering city street driving

#380

Post by omarhegazy » Tue, Apr 29, 2014, 4:35 AM UTC

Wilya wrote: post #251

TheEzEzz wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There must be at least 50 million residential garages in the US alone. If we automate all cars and switch to a Cars-as-a-Service model that is 50 million large rooms suddenly available. That's a lot of reclaimed real estate. Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonom…

Well, that's if you assume that Cars-as-a-Service don't need to be stored anywhere and magical disappear when they are not in use. I know Google has magical fairy powers, but last I checked, a self-driving car is exactly the same size as a regular car, and takes the same storage space.

Yes, the car is the same size. But the bottleneck -- the crucial part -- here is not the size of the car; rather the length of the maximum distance that the car can be parked away from you by.

When you're driving the car, it's really small. Has to be in a parking lot somewhere a walking distance away from you.

When it's driverless, the radius gets so much larger, increasing the amount of potential parking space, increasing the efficiency of the distribution of parked cars.

It doesn't have to park near you -- it just has to park. That makes the space issue so much better.