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Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

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Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#21

Post by nmcfarl »

ape4 wrote: post #4
GnarfGnarf wrote: post #2

Volvo have stopped selling manual transmission ("stick") cars in North America. They have lost me as a customer.

If you dislike automatic transition I guess you'll not like self driving cars.

It’s quite possible that’s true of many people.

But I like manual transmissions as they force me to pay attention to the act of driving quite frequently. Without that constant reminder, I have a tendency to zone out and go on autopilot myself, which is of course dangerous.

Manual transmissions are my hack to attack this issue - but I’d love to have a self driving car where I was reasonably confident that my zoning out would not be a safety hazard. (As a manual transmission isn’t a great hack, and I live in an urban area, I mainly take the bus, which solves the "zoned out problem" completely.)

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#22

Post by protomyth »

nmcfarl wrote: post #16
haberman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This effort does not appear to be as ambitious as the Google approach. The cars drive a specific test route around "50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg." That's quite a different thing than a system where you key in an arbitrary destination and the car drives you there.

In addition to what other’s have said it stuck me as very important that Volvo is having customers, not employees drive these cars. I imagine they react very differently, and will be better at simulating what the real world is like.

"Volvo is having customers, not employees drive these cars"

Given the court system, I don't think you could do that in the US.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#23

Post by ghaff »

Qworg wrote: post #13
haberman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This effort does not appear to be as ambitious as the Google approach. The cars drive a specific test route around "50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg." That's quite a different thing than a system where you key in an arbitrary destination and the car drives you there.

Google's system is not yet arbitrary. They prerun the roads the system drives on. I'm excited to see more "in the wild" units - more competition and innovation is always a good thing.

This quote from a long New York Times article on Google is highly relevant:

"The self-driving algorithms do not work because there has been some breakthrough in artificial intelligence; they run on maps. Every road that Google’s robo-cars drive on was first surveyed by a human-driven pilot car outfitted with sensors accurate enough to measure the thickness of the painted lines in the middle of the road. Every detail of the road has been mapped beforehand. According to Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there."

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/googles-plan-for-...

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#24

Post by haberman »

Qworg wrote: post #13
haberman wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This effort does not appear to be as ambitious as the Google approach. The cars drive a specific test route around "50 kilometers of selected roads in and around Gothenburg." That's quite a different thing than a system where you key in an arbitrary destination and the car drives you there.

Google's system is not yet arbitrary. They prerun the roads the system drives on. I'm excited to see more "in the wild" units - more competition and innovation is always a good thing.

Yes, it is clear that the Google system needs quite a lot of data about the roads it is driving on. But given those roads with a high amount of detail, the Google system can (from my understanding) support keying in an arbitrary destination.

I may be reading too much into this, but when I read "test route" in the article, it gave me the impression that the Volvo approach is sort of like a train without the tracks -- only able to follow a pre-programmed route from point A to point B.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#26

Post by pedrocr »

threeseed wrote: post #18
alkonaut wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are probably trying to solve the same problem from two different directions. Google appears to be making an advanced and expensive solution to "full" autonomous driving. The limitation will not be in where it can go, but it is initially limited in weather/environmental conditions. The target audience is likely not production cars in the short term, but a system like theirs can for example make their stre…

Never thought of this before but you might be spot on. Maybe Google has no intention of making autonomous cars for normal use but exclusively for Street View. Street View is hopelessly out of date in many places (4 years in some parts of Sydney for example) and it has to be super expensive to keep thousands of people continuously driving around the world. And Street View will likely be a vital and profitable data sou…

>Maybe Google has no intention of making autonomous cars for normal use but exclusively for Street View.

Sounds like too much expense for just that. If the problem of street view was it's cost you could just pay people to add a StreetView system to the roof of their cars and get the data much cheaper than having your own car. They may very well want to start by using Street View to validate the technology but the end-game must be larger.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#27

Post by glenra »

threeseed wrote: post #17
nabla9 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LIDAR does not work in rain, on wet roads or in the snow. Google car drives only in good weather in California for a reason. In Sweden they could drive maybe a week in a year. ... Sommaren är kort de mesta regnar bort ..

Apparently LIDAR does work in rain albeit with degradation in it's effectiveness. Regardless I wasn't aware of this before. Why would Google chose this technology ? It's bizarre.

A car that only reliably self-drives in good weather conditions is still (a) quite a hard problem, (b) almost certainly a commercially viable product on its own (c) a pretty good start on a car that reliably self-drives in any weather.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#29

Post by aianus »

glenra wrote: post #27
threeseed wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apparently LIDAR does work in rain albeit with degradation in it's effectiveness. Regardless I wasn't aware of this before. Why would Google chose this technology ? It's bizarre.

A car that only reliably self-drives in good weather conditions is still (a) quite a hard problem, (b) almost certainly a commercially viable product on its own (c) a pretty good start on a car that reliably self-drives in any weather.

I'm not sure about (b) since you'd need to buy two cars unless your boss will accept "but it was raining" as an excuse not to show up for work.

Re: Volvo’s first self-driving cars now being tested live on public roads in Sweden

#30

Post by jotm »

I can't wait for self driving tech to be put into use - transportation will get cheaper and faster (no more 8-10 hours driving limit bs), not to mention that one or two persons could drive a dozen trucks filled with cargo (though a lot of truckers will hate that)...
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