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I think https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws has something to say here.
What I mean is it's a fascinating but daunting task.
Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of which is certainly highway driving.
If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely transition either to a stop or human-piloting when those conditions aren't met), then at least 80% of the value is there.
Wrestling with the harder edges of the problem is still the right thing to do for tolerance reasons, but I hope we don't have to see last-mile problems solved before we start reaping the benefits.
If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily have self driving cars. However that would mean that everyone would have access to it. The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.
Staying inside a lane isn't the hard problem.
If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily have self driving cars. However that would mean that everyone would have access to it. The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.
Despite that, he's confident in VW's ability to make a Level 4 autonomous vehicle, saying that the upcoming I.D. Buzz electric van will be the first VW to receive the technology. He's poo-pooing level 5 autonomous driving and says that they just about have a level 4 autonomous vehicle? This article makes no sense. Honestly, the CEO of my company has very little idea of the details of the technology that we produce. I…
How does it make no sense? He’s saying we might never get past level 4. And they’re going to offer level 4. That statement is logically coherent.
Why not drone cars, driven remotely?
In the dot com era there was a self driving car startup that started with a simplifying assumption: don’t run the cars at grade. If you go up or down, the number and kind of obstacles reduces. The location of interactions between the vehicles is reduced, and the interactions with other classes of vehicle are zero, so you can negotiate. Solve a simpler problem, if you can.
Is the term "Grade" here used in the "Slope" sense, as in don't run the cars up and down the hill?
And if that's the interpretation, I don't necessarily agree with the next point that obstacles are reduced on slopes/hills... so I probably am not following correctly :-/
Thanks!
This is arguably one of the biggest competitive advantages Tesla has. For $47,000 I can get an EV from Tesla with a better self-driving system[1] than a $100k Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus. I haven’t pulled the trigger on a Tesla yet, but I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now. For many people Tesla has made EV and self-driving table-stakes and nobody else is delivering on that. [1]…
>>I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now It's personal & subjective, and nobody will persuade anybody in a thread, but FWIW I absolutely positively can. - I'm unlikely to utilize self-driving any time soon - The stories of their firmware terrify me. And I don't want a DAW and computer games running on my ECU :O - More pragmatically though, the Tesla UI paradigm is completely foreign…
If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily have self driving cars. However that would mean that everyone would have access to it. The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from licensing or going public at a high valuation.
A wire in the road can't handle stuff like a pedestrian. Pedestrians normally aren't in highways but sometimes are after break-downs, accidents, construction, etc. Lane-following is close to solved on the highway, it is all that other stuff and more that is an issue. A wire could still help, but you'd still need a complex system or significantly more infrastructure than just a wire (maybe caged barriers over the lane…
I see the future diverging into two paths, fully autonomous commercial vehicles, like taxis, delivery vehicles, semi-trucks, etc. that work within urban areas or other designated, mapped and specially prepared areas. This will possibly involve a centralized system of control and communication, something like an ATC but for cars. These will be owned by corporations and only used by people. It makes no sense for a person to buy one of these fully autonomous vehicles, although I imagine some people would pay extra to have priority access so they always have one available.
The other side of the coin will be privately owned cars that have autonomous capability, or autonomous cars with override. These will be able to go anywhere the driver wants, including unmapped villages, small towns, off road tracks, etc. I suspect these will be the domain of enthusiasts, people who really need them for work (ranchers and farmers, for example) and people who choose to live away from urban centers. They will be more expensive than cars now, but the need for these vehicles will never go away. Even if we get true AI capable of driving anywhere with only the sensors aboard the vehicle, there will still be the need for a human to override it, even if that involves just authorizing a risky maneuver or putting the AI into "unsafe driving" mode.
I think the movie I, Robot (with Will Smith) got the future of autonomous cars surprisingly right, autonomous inside cities and on highways, and using the manual override comes with penalties (higher insurance, being at fault in an accident, etc.).
On a personal note, and this may sound bad, but I would never buy a car which I cannot use to break the law. Even if I never plan to do it, being able to speed, jump the curb, intentionally crash into a wall (or another car) or even run over a person (for example, in self defense) may be at some point required or the least bad of many bad options. In this case any consequences should fall on me, but I don't think a thing I own should be designed to prevent me from breaking the law or doing something stupid if I really want or need to, although providing warnings or an optional safe-mode is fine. I suspect many people feel the same way, even if they don't put it in such an extreme way. This can be seen by the fact that a lot of cars, particularly those focused on performance or off-roading, come with switches to turn traction control off, and if they don't, it will get mentioned as a negative in any review done by publications focused on those audiences.