51–60 of 183 posts
“The test cars are now able to handle lane following, speed adaption, and merging traffic all by themselves,” This is an important step, although I must say they appear to be far behind Google. My money is on Google getting to an acceptable deployment phase far earlier.
It's a science experiment.
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)...
> transportation will get cheaper and faster (no more 8-10 hours driving limit bs) Why do you say that? Somebody is still going to need to be awake at the controls, at least for the first few decades of self driving tech. There's a reason pilots on planes don't go to sleep when the auto-pilot kicks on.
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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 Street View is hopelessly out of date in many places (4 years in some parts of Sydney for example) and it has to be super expensive to keep thousands of people continuously driving around the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…
I think you're underestimating the number of people you'd have to pay to get full coverage of cities. Most people do not drive around on every street in a systematic way; they have a small number of destinations and they usually take the same routes between them every time.
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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 --…
No, they picked a test route to be decently representative and allow them to setup their tests correctly. It is not an A to B thing. role_v's comment is a pretty good explanation https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698495 The quote ghaff posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7698610 it seems like you are describing Google more than Volvo.
That's not an explanation, it's speculation just like my speculation is.
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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.
There is nothing else that gets the accuracy Google needs. Sensors are currently unsolved problem. Multi wavelength radars don't yet have the accuracy and they don't work well with nonmetallic objects (There is limit of how much radar can use power (safely) and how expensive it can be. What works for F-22 don't work for Google) Google is not planning to monetize this technology anytime soon, despite the hype. The dif…
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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…
4-way stop turn-taking is a problem that does not exist in europe btw
> Vissa korsningar har en stoppskylt vid varje väg, ett så kallat flervägsstopp. Det innebär att alla som kommer till korsningen måste stanna, oavsett vilken väg man kommer på. Tanken är att man vid flervägsstopp ska ta ögonkontakt med medtrafikanter för att på så sätt komma överens om vem som ska köra först.
Or my translation "Certain intersections have a stop sign at every way, a so-called multi-way stop. This means that everyone who comes to the intersection must stop, despite which way they come from. The thought is that people at the multi-way stop will make eye contact with their fellow drivers in order to come to an agreement on who shall drive first.
(Apparently the actual law says "ömsesidig hänsyn" - "mutual consideration.")
That said, they aren't anywhere near as common as the US.
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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.
There is nothing else that gets the accuracy Google needs. Sensors are currently unsolved problem. Multi wavelength radars don't yet have the accuracy and they don't work well with nonmetallic objects (There is limit of how much radar can use power (safely) and how expensive it can be. What works for F-22 don't work for Google) Google is not planning to monetize this technology anytime soon, despite the hype. The dif…
I was with you up to there.
I wonder what the first country that will allow completely automated cars with no human driver is? As a blind person I wonder if that would be enough to have me consider migrating from the U.S. depending on the country.
Volvo have stopped selling manual transmission ("stick") cars in North America. They have lost me as a customer.
Maybe if you'd bought a lot more Volvos, they still would've had a market for that option.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAFE#Agreed_standards_by_model_...
[2] I'm not saying the days of the V8 are over (like in Mad Max 2 -- "The last of the V8 Interceptors. A piece of history.") .. but if you want one, you might want to start thinking about buying one to keep.
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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.
(1) Delivery-bot. A car that drives itself to drop off a package and only delivers on non-rainy days. (if you need delivery on a rainy day, you pay extra for a person-driven delivery service. Otherwise the package waits at the warehouse)
(2) Transport option for people who can't or shouldn't drive themselves - too old, too blind, too young, or physically impaired. The self-driving car takes them where they need to go when weather permits, otherwise they have to call a cab or van service as a backup option.
(Much of California only has a couple weeks of rain per year.)