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Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

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Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#101

Post by Hydraulix989 »

admax88q wrote: post #63
ecpottinger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In in Whitby, Ontario, Canada, a dad and his son were killed driving a car across a railway crossing with no gates. The dad (driver) was on his phone at the time and it is believed the phone blocked his view of the train and he was talking to much to hear the train. The person he was talking to said they were talking like normal and suddenly the phone cut off. Computers probably can not be worse that the people alrea…

If the bar is "better than someone talking on cell phone while crossing a railroad crossing without looking," I'll stick to manual driving. Self driving needs to be better than me, not better than average.

Does the average driver even look both ways at the railroad crossing? I do every single time. Such a low-cost preventative measure that could very well end up saving my life one day.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#102

Post by joe_the_user »

steve_adams_86 wrote: post #92
joe_the_user wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A human being can drive a million miles without a serious accident. 2018 saw 1.1 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles driven[1]. Human beings are extremely good at driving safely overall. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...

Yeah, I think people conflate seeing people drive erratically or doing dumb things in cars with an inability to operate a car in a way that ultimately prevents deaths. Humans are incredibly good at that in the bigger picture for reasons that are currently impossible to replicate with a computer. Criticize human driving all you want, but even the worst of us can typically manage to get from point a to point b... Someh…

One of the eye-opening things about the wikipedia statistics is that advent and universality of mobile phones at worst caused a very small uptick in fatalities. With all the bullshit you see with on the road, somehow people manage to mostly avoid death doing it. My guess is people can pull attention back to the road at moments it's really needed.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#103

Post by ghaff »

jonas21 wrote: post #94
okareaman wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I used to live in Mountain View where Waymo tests their cars so I would observe them quite often. I sat a railroad crossing with one, thinking about what could go wrong. What if the signal didn't work, but you could hear the train coming and see it way off to the right or left if you looked. Are Waymo cars listening for trains? Or are they looking at railroad guards only? I suppose they could program the train schedu…

To be honest, this seems like one of the easier edge cases to handle. Before crossing tracks, check if there's anything coming down the tracks. Much easier than all of the weird edge cases related to the behavior of other drivers or pedestrians.

In England at least, if you're crossing HSR by foot, you pick up a handset and call train operations to cross. Probably overly conservative but obviously a simple thing for a car to implement along with the usual safety measures (though those would presumably involve gates or not at grade anyway).

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#104

Post by darkwizard42 »

Not surprisingly it takes a lot of capital to make serious in-roads into self-driving. Ultimately if your main business is not profitable it is hard to justify spending 100m a year on L5 with no reasonable end in sight.

I think this is why only Waymo or Cruise or one of the other well-funded-by-profitable-other-business will continue to progress towards the true self-driving vehicle... its just too damn expensive and uncertain as to when the breakthrough/development will happen

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#105

Post by bidirectional »

omgwtfbyobbq wrote: post #15
quickthrowman wrote: post #7

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

Do you have a link to Elon's FSD claim? He definitely uses ambiguity to his benefit (eg "soon", "by fall/winter/spring/summer" (in which year?)), but I haven't heard anything about Tesla being L5 by the end of 2021.

If someone says by "fall/winter/spring/summer" and they don't mean the immediate upcoming instance of that season, they are lying. That is not being cleverly ambiguous, it is pure dishonesty.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#106

Post by Wowfunhappy »

rkalla wrote: post #9
quickthrowman wrote: post #7

Anyone hawking FSD is a stock promoter (liar). Uber/Tesla/Lyft. Elon Musk claims Tesla FSD will be L5 by end of 2021, but they recently filed a document with the CA DMV stating Tesla FSD is L2 automated. Which one do you think is more realistic, staying L2 by EOY 2021, or magically leaping forward to L5 FSD in 8 months? The only company working on self-driving that I believe when they issue press releases is Waymo, b…

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

That shouldn't be the standard. It probably will be, but it shouldn't be.

Humans are terrible drivers. If a self-driving car got into half as many accidents as the average human, it would save millions of lives. And kill people, to be sure, but fewer on net.

I also think you could make a reasonable argument that all cars should be banned, right now, based on how many people they kill, but since I don't think that's gonna happen...

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#109

Post by klmadfejno »

theluketaylor wrote: post #38
rkalla wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's those edge cases that make me think real FSD (vehicles with no steering wheels) is a decade-timescale problem. Figure out 99.9% of driving, but otherwise take a family off a bridge when the sun is blinding the camera? Still need a steering wheel.

The edge case that I always go to on why truly autonomous vehicles are decades+ away is winter driving. Lane markers and road signs disappear. Slush and salt spray constantly obscure sensors. Winter driving as a human driver requires an entirely different approach and Waymo hangs out in the Arizona desert where there is basically never any inclement weather.

Digital data instead of signs seems like the obvious solution.

Re: Subsidiary of Toyota to acquire Lyft’s self-driving car division

#110

Post by alonmower »

_____bee wrote: post #72

Most ride-hailing companies that invested in self-driving cars are giving up on these projects. Most of these startups struggle to sustain their business.

*Most ride-hailing companies that needed a narrative ahead of their IPO for why they had a defensible long term moat and leaned heavily on 'self driving' as their answer to that are now getting pressure from investors on why they keep sinking more money into a problem it doesn't seem they'll ever be able to solve
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