Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

nissannews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 83 posts

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#11

Post by tbrownaw »

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.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#12

Post by stevewilhelm »

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.

People fail to realize that the California bullet-train project is primarily an economic stimulus exercise.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#13

Post by ebbv »

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.

If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower over all.

But there's two problems here:

1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars.

And

2) I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. The roads are far more dangerous than the air, and this is why I'm uncomfortable with the whole concept of automated cars on the road and I'm not uncomfortable with autopilot in planes.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#14

Post by jjcm »

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 eventually? Yes, then they'll be patched. New bugs will be found, but every accident that happens will make the cars safer. Each error improves how safe they are, and since they're currently safer than humans based on accident statistics, I'm more than happy to see something that's already safer get even more safe over time.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#15

Post by runako »

From no working prototype to multiple commercially available vehicles in 7 years. Yeah, okay.

I hate to be that guy, but it took ~3 years to get the Leaf to production. And the Leaf uses well-known technology that had been shipped by other vendors a decade earlier. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but this feels like a very long reach.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#16

Post by ebbv »

apsec112 wrote: post #10
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'd rather it be human error." Eventually - not this year, maybe not this decade, but eventually - technology will be better than human drivers. How many lives, then, would you be willing to sacrifice, on the grounds that human error is somehow better than (less frequent) machine error? Six? Sixty? Six hundred? Six thousand? Since 1985, nine hundred thousand people have died in car crashes in the US alone. That's mo…

As I stated to the reply above yours; we're not talking about replacing all cars on the road with automated cars overnight. We're talking about selling automated cars alongside regular cars. So your argument doesn't really hold water.

Yes if we had an automated car ready to replace everyone's normal car, we'd start saving tons of lives tomorrow and I'd be a monster for opposing it. But that's not reality, that's not what we're talking about.

And what I'm saying is, I'm uncomfortable and see problems ahead. And I seem to be totally alone in this, which is amazing to me.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#17

Post by mason240 »

"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.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#18

Post by ebbv »

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…

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.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#19

Post by hobs »

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.

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.

Re: Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020.

#20

Post by stephenhuey »

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…

As a developer, I agree there will be bugs. However, I'm also well aware that friends of mine have written code with a much more stringent level of testing than the web apps I typically work on. No doubt much of the public will raise an outcry against letting computers drive for them, but if the number of fatalities decreases by one or two orders of magnitude, that will be hard to ignore.
Post reply on HN