Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#21

Post by olau » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 6:59 PM UTC

oneJob wrote: post #4

Tesla has stated publicly they believe that within three years their cars will be capable of full autonomy, and expect it to take another two years to receive regulatory approval. By fully autonomous they state you will be able to walk outside, have the car approach to meet you, it will open and close the door for you, you can fall asleep, and several hours later wake up at your destination. Yes, Tesla is taking an i…

I don't think that comparison is quite right.

As far as I'm aware, Tesla is selling cars to people who want to drive cars. Real cars, with muscles.

Google isn't selling anything, and again, as far as I'm aware, it's not settled whether they ever will, for instance there's been a lot of speculation on a rent-a-ride model.

And the prototype they have is clearly aimed at people who don't want to drive cars, i.e. more or less exactly the opposite segment.

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#22

Post by mikeash » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:03 PM UTC

kgwgk wrote: post #11

zyxley wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> get the software to the point it only makes mistakes in a timeframe that is, at a minimum, several orders of magnitude greater than Bob making the same mistake That seems to be more or less the case with the Google cars. 300,000 miles, with no accidents caused by the cars. Of course, so far that's limited to more-or-less good weather so far.

Unless you think Bob was causing accidents every thousand miles, I don't see how Google cars are "several orders of magnitude" better. Leaving aside the good-weather/known-roads aspect, of course.

The average accident rate in the US is something like one per 250,000 miles driven. (The average driver drives 15,000 miles per year, and goes about 18 years between accidents.)

So indeed, we can't draw much conclusion about the safety of Google's car relative to the average driver yet, except to say that it's not catastrophically worse.

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#23

Post by rconti » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:08 PM UTC

taytus wrote: post #12

oneJob wrote: post #4

Tesla has stated publicly they believe that within three years their cars will be capable of full autonomy, and expect it to take another two years to receive regulatory approval. By fully autonomous they state you will be able to walk outside, have the car approach to meet you, it will open and close the door for you, you can fall asleep, and several hours later wake up at your destination. Yes, Tesla is taking an i…

"...the Google cars look like something one buys for their four year old niece or nephew. " They really are quite ugly. I believe that will impact adoption rate.

Their sales must be TERRIBLE.

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#24

Post by erikstarck » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:08 PM UTC

A hundred thousand times better is only seventeen doublings.

Which approach has the fastest exponential growth curve? The one with thousands of cars on the road, learning from each other, or the one with a few but more capable cars? We'll see. Just remember to think exponential not linear.

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#25

Post by Evolved » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:13 PM UTC

Another way to improve the accident rate is the other side of the robocar argument wherein we, as humans, do a better job of driving and of watching/educating our kids.

I understand there are rules of the road and rights-of-way but a right-of-way for a pedestrian in a crosswalk with the walking signal is not going to stop a bus from running the light and killing the pedestrian.

Not that I'm blaming the pedestrian but it surely doesn't hurt to think defensively, look both ways and judge if that bus is going to be able to stop and act accordingly.

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#26

Post by amelius » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:17 PM UTC

I'm always wondering how Google's car will certify when new releases are made. Consider that an autonomous car will need X hours/miles of driving before it will be certified. Now, if Google updates 1 line of code, the whole certification process has to start all over.

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#27

Post by albertzeyer » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:19 PM UTC

Another interesting article about Tesla's Autopilot is this: http://electrek.co/2015/10/30/the-autopilot-is-learning-fast...

It's learning. That is an interesting approach. I wonder how far they get by that.

I guess Google's car will also collect data and help Google to improve the performance. My impression so far was that it's mostly engineered work however, and not so much learned (in a machine learning way).

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#28

Post by Animats » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:21 PM UTC

The Tesla "autopilot" is comparable to what BMW[1] and Mercedes[2] have been shipping for years.

Self-driving is much harder. The first-order problems of driving on a empty road were solved by the DARPA Grand Challenge, ten years ago. The second-order problems involve dealing with other road users. That's hard, and that's what Google is working on, with considerable success. So is the CMU/Cadillac consortium, which has demonstrated their self driving car to politicians in Washington traffic.[3] Nobody seems to pay much attention to that effort, although they may be closer to a production product than anyone else. (Or not; Uber hired some of the people involved away from CMU.)

Self-driving cars need and have a lot more sensors than semi-auto cars. There's a lot more sensing to the sides and rear, and more forward sensing than just being able to detect the next obstacle ahead. Vision processing is far more elaborate. Google's vision system explicitly recognizes humans and bicycles.

Google's little 25MPH driverless car is a way for them to enter the market. At 25MPH, slamming on the brakes is a good solution to situations the system can't handle. Those things are going to be all over senior communities in a few years. Google already has higher-performance cars on the road; they can be seen all over Mountain View most days.

[1] http://www.bmw.com/com/en/insights/technology/connecteddrive... [2] http://www.mercedes-benz-intelligent-drive.com/com/en/1_driv... [3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/dri...

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#29

Post by jaggederest » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:21 PM UTC

keehun wrote: post #19

I've always wondered how autonomous cars would handle the first and last quarter mile of the journey. I'm talking specifically like portions of the trip like the driveway, getting out of the parking ramp, or navigating small alleyways where the car could be parked (where GPS could be weak in the city). Things like even knowing which entrance to go to. Will fully autonomous will ever be able to take us from A to B 100…

> I'm talking specifically like portions of the trip like the driveway, getting out of the parking ramp, or navigating small alleyways where the car could be parked (where GPS could be weak in the city)

Relatively simple from a conceptual point of view: a human drives it the first time, and later times use sensors to apply basic rules and the original 'instructions' learned from driving it manually the first time.

Extend this to a network of cars sharing route information, and only a small sampling of the population ever needs to drive any given route manually.

Re: Why Tesla's Autopilot and Google's car are entirely different animals

#30

Post by maxerickson » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 7:23 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #26

I'm always wondering how Google's car will certify when new releases are made. Consider that an autonomous car will need X hours/miles of driving before it will be certified. Now, if Google updates 1 line of code, the whole certification process has to start all over.

I would think the certification might not exactly look like that. At least, they aren't going to release every revision if the certification is like that.

I sort of think they are collecting the super detailed sensor data so that they can play it back into new versions of their software and see if it notices things earlier and makes better choices and such. A mass market version needs to be able to function on environmental data (like a tree across the road), so I don't think they are building a perfect map to have as a crutch.