Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle • Hacker News Board

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#251

Post by josephlord » Wed, May 28, 2014, 2:50 PM UTC

Touche wrote: post #236

e98cuenc wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is (indirectly) to me. I often visit the US, and I'm always amazed that I can't seem to go anywhere walking. The distances to go anywhere are huge. It seems to be that way because cities in the US where designed / build with cars in mind. In Europe cities were obviously not build with cars in mind, and as a result I enjoy here a much higher density of amenities (and suffer much worse driving conditions / parking t…

> It is (indirectly) to me. I often visit the US, and I'm always amazed that I can't seem to go anywhere walking. The distances to go anywhere are huge. It seems to be that way because cities in the US where designed / build with cars in mind. Huh, why would you think that? I'm not sure there's a major city in the U.S. that wasn't already a major city pre-car. And cities weren't redesigned post-car, that's why a lot…

Las Vegas. I know it isn't a typical case but it is definitely pedestrian unfriendly and largely if not entirely developed post-car.

Edit: Even along the strip itself it is hard to take a direct line and you need to go over bridges etc. Walking from the main part of the strip e.g. Bellagio to the convention centre is only a couple of miles but is a pretty unpleasant walk. Whether it is better than waiting for a bus/taxi from CES probably depends on the condition of your feet and the shoes you are wearing.

I do understand that in the Summer it would be a pretty unappealing walking any distance at all.

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#252

Post by bitL » Wed, May 28, 2014, 2:50 PM UTC

lmm wrote: post #243

bitL wrote: post #216

One of the few pleasures of modern world is now slowly being removed! :-D I guess I will treasure my memories of driving Lamborghini Murcielago over 200mph forever and will tell my grandchildren there was a time when you actually could drive a car yourself! And to those that argue young people don't want to own the car - it's mostly about not wanting to spend your life commuting, hunting parking spots or in traffic j…

> One of the few pleasures of modern world is now slowly being removed! :-D For most people the driving commute is the most unpleasant part of their life. > I guess I will treasure my memories of driving Lamborghini Murcielago over 200mph forever and will tell my grandchildren there was a time when you actually could drive a car yourself! Driving over 200mph has never been safe (and rarely been legal) on the public r…

Well, I live in Germany so go figure.

And please stop with your condemning talk! The ladies returning from a supermarket go often over 120mph over here on their way back home (legally!), you can see Porsche test drivers going full speed at 2am on an Autobahn almost every day, yet the accident/fatality rate is actually lower than on interstates in your country (I assume you are from the US). People here are drilled like crazy to obtain a driving license, unlike driving around the block and doing simple parking, and they behave well on the highways, letting faster cars ahead and not blocking them going 65mph in the fast lane or hastily switching lanes.

Not far from my city is probably the most hardcore racing circuit in the world open for public - Nürburgring, and what other car would be suitable for reaching 200mph if not one like perfectly serviced Murcielago? Yes, it's risky. So is eating HFCS in all your food daily and sticking to high-carb diet, depriving oneself of sleep due to working long hours or not taking vacation to recharge due to constant stress.

I am not talking about stupid reckless street racing - that's very uncommon over here.

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#253

Post by gambiting » Wed, May 28, 2014, 2:52 PM UTC

eurleif wrote: post #26

rquantz wrote: post #15

It seems like a mistake to remove manual controls entirely, not necessarily because of safety concerns, but because there are a fair number of times when you need the car to go somewhere without having a route. I'm thinking of things like: Moving your car ten feet so somebody else can get out of the driveway; handling double parking during alternate side parking hours; moving the car because you were waiting to pick…

If the car's display shows a map of the surrounding area, and that map includes not just static objects like buildings, but also includes other cars, people, etc. (based on sensor information), is touching a spot on the map to make the car go there really a chore?

Have you ever played any 3D game on a 2D screen, where you had to click on a position to tell the on-screen character to go somewhere? Did they always go where you wanted, or did you encounter problems created by projecting 2D points into 3D space?

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#254

Post by nlh » Wed, May 28, 2014, 2:53 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #216

One of the few pleasures of modern world is now slowly being removed! :-D I guess I will treasure my memories of driving Lamborghini Murcielago over 200mph forever and will tell my grandchildren there was a time when you actually could drive a car yourself! And to those that argue young people don't want to own the car - it's mostly about not wanting to spend your life commuting, hunting parking spots or in traffic j…

I hear ya. And I don't think it's going to be quite so bad in the future. I doubt we'll see a time anytime soon where "traditional" cars completely disappear, but I bet cars like a Murcielago will be relegated to an even-smaller niche than they already hold.

The best analogy I can come up with is this: Plenty of folks still ride horses, it's still possible to get a horse-drawn carriage in many places, and there are more than a handful (though not much more) of Model Ts still on the road. But in all cases, that's not the majority anymore, and those that do that do so as hobbyists. I bet that's the future we'll most likely see, at least in the near term (~50 years).

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#255

Post by samstave » Wed, May 28, 2014, 2:54 PM UTC

revelation wrote: post #192

The comments here are rather disappointing. It doesn't have manual controls? Well thats the point! I want to leave my crap in it and paint it some ugly color? Get with the times, young people already opt to not own cars. I can't double park in the city? Why are you imposing your steel box on people living in cities, many of which do not own cars and want walkable streets? I mean, this is the news website for a startu…

While I do love this and think it is going to mae for a fantastic future, why wait also, for this and ignore fixing two of the biggest blights in the SFBay area; train and bus service.

BART is a cancer, Caltrain and Amtrak have service schedules designed by morons and make, I think, literally TWO farking connections to BART.

There is a hell of a lot of improvement that could be done to fix public transportation in addition to working on this.

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#256

Post by revelation » Wed, May 28, 2014, 3:07 PM UTC

gambiting wrote: post #247

revelation wrote: post #192

The comments here are rather disappointing. It doesn't have manual controls? Well thats the point! I want to leave my crap in it and paint it some ugly color? Get with the times, young people already opt to not own cars. I can't double park in the city? Why are you imposing your steel box on people living in cities, many of which do not own cars and want walkable streets? I mean, this is the news website for a startu…

Are you saying that if my opinions are unlike yours, then I should not be visiting HN, or even voice my opinions? Not everyone on HN is from the US - US has a massive car problem, because Americans had a very strong car culture for 7 decades now - so for them, not having a car is "new". I come from a country where 25 years ago pretty much no one had a car, because you had to have a permission from the government to o…

This isn't even about cars (self driving or not) per se. It's about someone doing something different and all the comments amounting to this isn't how I'm used to things working, and I don't like change anyway. As Elon Musk puts it, you can't necessarily ask people what they want because the answers will be incremental updates to the status quo.

Since you insisted on cars: the short answer is that theres lots of evidence humans can't drive cars. It goes well 99.9% of the time and the rest ends up being 30000 people dead every year, many of them not in a car at their death. So they died for somebody elses convenience, and that turns out to be a rather common occurence with cars and all the things they bring along (just look for the free parking debate below). So the sentiment in countries that have had cars for a long a time and have seen the effects of that is shifting to no longer put up with it, certainly in cities where suburbia descends every morning.

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#257

Post by lmm » Wed, May 28, 2014, 3:12 PM UTC

bitL wrote: post #252

lmm wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One of the few pleasures of modern world is now slowly being removed! :-D For most people the driving commute is the most unpleasant part of their life. > I guess I will treasure my memories of driving Lamborghini Murcielago over 200mph forever and will tell my grandchildren there was a time when you actually could drive a car yourself! Driving over 200mph has never been safe (and rarely been legal) on the public r…

Well, I live in Germany so go figure. And please stop with your condemning talk! The ladies returning from a supermarket go often over 120mph over here on their way back home (legally!), you can see Porsche test drivers going full speed at 2am on an Autobahn almost every day, yet the accident/fatality rate is actually lower than on interstates in your country (I assume you are from the US). People here are drilled li…

Wrong guess, I'm not from the US. I've turned down high-paying job offers because they expected unreasonable hours or didn't have enough holiday allowance, and would do so again.

120mph maybe, but 200mph simply can't be safe, sheer human reaction times dictate otherwise. We don't allow trains to go above 125mph without in-cab signalling because that's too fast for a driver to observe lineside signals - and that's as simple as observing a coloured light when you know exactly where it's going to be.

No-one's going to close the Nurburgring, you'll be able to continue driving 200mph there with other people who've chosen to drive on a circuit like that as long as you like. But not on the road I have to take to work; I shouldn't have to put up with that risk.

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#258

Post by bitL » Wed, May 28, 2014, 3:15 PM UTC

nlh wrote: post #254

bitL wrote: post #216

One of the few pleasures of modern world is now slowly being removed! :-D I guess I will treasure my memories of driving Lamborghini Murcielago over 200mph forever and will tell my grandchildren there was a time when you actually could drive a car yourself! And to those that argue young people don't want to own the car - it's mostly about not wanting to spend your life commuting, hunting parking spots or in traffic j…

I hear ya. And I don't think it's going to be quite so bad in the future. I doubt we'll see a time anytime soon where "traditional" cars completely disappear, but I bet cars like a Murcielago will be relegated to an even-smaller niche than they already hold. The best analogy I can come up with is this: Plenty of folks still ride horses, it's still possible to get a horse-drawn carriage in many places, and there are m…

I agree with your assessment. It's probably inevitable and actually will do a lot of good allowing people that are unable to drive to reach their destinations, as well as avoiding the need to waste time on learning how to drive (I know in the US it's pretty easy, but in most of other countries it's a fairly difficult and non-trivial endeavor to acquire a driving license).

If we can really pull it off in all real-world conditions, it would be pretty cool. At that point I wouldn't see any future for old school technological marvels like Murcielago anymore, as they wouldn't be allowed to interfere with automated traffic (human factor is unpredictable and we probably won't crack the problem of safely handling all situations automatically, though maybe with a huge sensor coverage the risks could diminish).

Personally, I can't wait until we invent teleports capable of transferring living subjects, though that seems to be a task for a century far away ;-)

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#259

Post by melling » Wed, May 28, 2014, 3:19 PM UTC

danielweber wrote: post #238

melling wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. This has been discussed on the Internet quite a bit. Not sure if exact reason has been determined. I'm not young but I sold my car years ago because it's expensive, inconvenient, and seldom used where I now live on the US east coast. Here's one article, you can Google hundreds more. http://www.digitaltrends.com/cars/5-reasons-young-people-are...

and seldom used where I now live on the US east coast. Seldom used? Even New York City has lots of cars. I think people are assuming everyone else is just like them. As for universal car-sharing, it starts with the idea that "cars are idle 90% of the time" and ignores the fact that 80% of people want to use them at the same time: on their morning and evening commutes.

I live in New Jersey. Sure, lots of people spend $400/month to park so they can drive on the weekends. Anyway, so we can stop talking in generalities, here are some numbers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_most_h...

It would appear that many people do live without cars so there is an untapped market.

Re: Just press go: designing a self-driving vehicle

#260

Post by greeneggs » Wed, May 28, 2014, 3:40 PM UTC

001sky wrote: post #61

FireBeyond wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think, too, that there's a logical disconnect between "we focused on learning, not luxury", and "we want to hear about what you want in a vehicle where you sit back and enjoy the ride" (probably, to most, -not- a dearth of comforts).

Think of this as a bike-commute substitute with a roof.

An interesting thought. How small can self-driving vehicles be? Would you ride a self-driving motorcycle? A self-driving wheelchair? How about a self-driving Segway? You get on, hold on, and it does the rest. The technology for getting this working at all (let alone safely) is a long way away, but perhaps it could happen.