201–210 of 445 posts
I honestly think that even when we do get full self driving cars, you won’t be able to own one. They will be rideshare only. The reality is that autonomous vehicles are so complex that you need advanced mapping of very well known conditions to make this feasible. Companies will make these sort of maps for major cities where they run their ride service but anywhere else cars will just not be advanced enough to handle…
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Ah yes, because it's not like the Prius demonstrated that there was a market for green car, or the CA or federal green car credits and HOV access provided incentives to people to buy said green cars, or federal regulations regarding fleet emissions standards created the market for trading emissions credits that has singlehandedly kept Tesla afloat everytime it's come closer to running out of money. No, apparently Tes…
Tesla made it cool. Prius was never primarily known for being eco-friendly, it was known as the car that dorks and hippies drove. Ignoring the cultural impact of Tesla is why plenty of green vehicles failed in the past.
Outside of SV, Teslas aren't viewed as any cooler than Priuses. They're actually seen as much worse--elitist vehicles--since Priuses are affordable for most families and Teslas are not, plus require lots of expensive infrastructure just for basic use.
I know a few people who drive Teslas. Not one of them is someone who would even be remotely described as cool. I know a lot of people who drive Priuses, and they range the gamut from dorky to cool.
Ignoring the cultural impact of Tesla is why plenty of green vehicles failed in the past.
What cultural impact? Tesla's influence operates largely in a self-made echo chamber. Outside of the echo chamber, it's had literally no impact on car sales or car culture.
Green cars failed in the past because they were (a) super expensive and (b) had no marketing spend. Tesla's innovation was the same innovation that Toyota made a decade earlier with the Prius--green cars will sell if you market them to customers. (And despite Elon's claims that Tesla spends $0 on marketing, Tesla spends roughly $100m/year or more on marketing, per their SEC filings.)
When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic, will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions, or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a sufficiently flooded street. Just l…
All this stuff about "it's right around the road" vs "it'll never happen" is all unspoken assumptions around what it means to take a "safe" "trip" "in a car" "driven" "autonomously".
Safe? Compared to humans that are alert, humans with smartphones, drunk drivers? Airplanes?
Trip? Distance? Rural vs Urban? Highway? Speed?
"in a car"? Smart fortwo? Motorcycle? RV? Sedan? SUV?
"driven"? All by software all the time and no windshield? implicit backup if uncertainties are too great and can be manually overridden?
I think what needs to happen is that you need programs tailored to specific routes/roads. As you drive any distance, you download/cache the programs for the routes and execute them.
You aren't going to be carrying around a "general driving AI", except as emergency backup to specific route downloads.
Humans work this exact way. You have the idiot tourist drivers versus people that commute on a route. Commuters know how different parts of the road's concrete sound differently, how fast they can take curves if they had to, which lane to be in to anticipate merge backups.
Those commuters know how to drive those routes in winter or summer as well, deer season or not, rain or shine. So that implies conditions-specific programs as well.
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Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Found it: https://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt The parent response would have these ideas checked: (X) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ... (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ... (X) Technically illiterate politicians ... (X) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
>Someone should redo the old "Spam Solutions" form except for self-driving cars. Automating being dismissive of discussion does sound like a great idea... > Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once It requires setting stricter traffic rules and having them be followed. Something that's done everywhere in the world every year. It can be done as gradually and as locally-specific as needed. > Asshats…
I don't need to go into everything that was said, you can google it. There was one thing said, however, that I think would be appropriate to touch on here. Kamen, just like you, claimed that traffic laws and the streets could be restructured to better accommodate the segway. That was the instant I knew the segway would not be taking off for a long, long time. If you need for people to restructure their laws and cities solely to accommodate your new technology, you should probably work a little bit harder on perfecting your technology. Because restructuring society's laws and transportation infrastructure simply to use your technology is probably not going to happen. The only time you get a radical restructuring of that nature is when the invention frees you from needing the infrastructure at all.
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All these things are literally on the AI horizon.
There's an emotional component to art, and I don't see nearly as much work on artificial emotions as I do on task-oriented artificial intelligence. A lot of people are working to create a car smart enough to drive humans anywhere. How many people are working to create a car smart enough to refuse to drive because it's feeling inspired to write music instead?
I think it would happen this way: firstly you would automate things that go on a track - like trains - which I think we already have. Then secondly you could have certain lanes or roads that are designed for specific self-driving vehicles. This could help buses and trucks (in certain areas) get around. Then you would keep adding more of those, until many roads have those and very few manual lanes. It wouldn't immedia…
Obviously it's incremental. I fully expect in the next 24 months I will be able to call an autonomous car via an app on my phone in the bay area under certain known conditions, like good weather and common, low-risk routes. Or, specifically, that I'll be able to direct my model 3 to drive me to the San Jose airport (a 10 minute drive) without the need for me to actually take any manual interventions along the way. (Though I will still be asked, by Tesla, to be ready to take control.) If true, that's progress, and I expect the progress to continue until eventually this technology is widespread and covers the vast majority of routes and conditions.
It doesn't have to work perfectly - it just has to work better than humans. Our sensors ain't real great in snow and rain, either.
It needs slightly more than that: when it fails, it needs to be able to demonstrate that no human would’ve succeeded in its place. This isn’t a moral or a technical issue, just public relations. If a system reduces road deaths from ~30,000 per year to 365 per year, but one of those deaths was it mistaking a grey skirt for an open road [1], there will still be calls for its use to be outlawed — basically what’s happen…
Insurance companies will force the adoption once they become proven safe. The added insurance costs for luddites will price them out of the market.
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Saying that Tesla has "no compromises" is very much definition of selling snake oil.
Sorry to hear that's your opinion! Besides waiting a bit longer to Supercharge vs getting a tank of gas (which is rare, only when traveling, I charge at home every night), my experience has been much better with a Tesla than any internal combustion vehicle I've owned.
For my personal usage, when I am traveling (which usually is something like driving 2000 miles with a single long stop) filling/charging time makes all the difference between getting there how I want it or not, too.