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

Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

371–380 of 434 posts

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#371

Post by nradov »

ars wrote: post #360
nradov wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No that's not how it works. Look at a regular car tire. It's basically flat perpendicular to the direction of travel so the entire width of the tire is in contact with the ground. With a spherical tire the sides bend up away from the ground and only a single point is in contact. In order to get a larger contact patch you would have to run much lower tire pressure leading to worse handling, higher fuel consumption, an…

Yes, that is actually how it works. Weight of car / Contact patch / number of wheels = PSI + strength of sidewall. Doesn't matter if it's a cylinder or a sphere, the equation doesn't change. PSI literally means: Pounds per square inch. Pounds of car per square inch of contact patch.

No that's not how it works and you're missing the point. In order to achieve an equivalent size contact patch a spherical tire will have to deform more than an equivalent cylindrical tire. With current materials this means you'll have to run it at a lower inflation pressure in order to achieve the necessary deformation, leading to all the problems described above.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#372

Post by MarkMc »

stevenwoo wrote: post #338
MarkMc wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article you linked to indicates that places with good weather and good roads could see the technology in 3 years. For all places in all conditions it may take 30 years: "this technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally. We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence wit…

Even in the Bay Area, there is periodically bad to less than perfect weather - we had 30+ straight days of rain about 15 years ago in one of the El Nino years, and that would have killed Waymo's steering wheel-less cars' useability. It's almost like none of the people who made that decision were here when that happened.

Yes the Bay Area is probably not ideal, yet still much better than Jakarta or New Delhi.

But even an area that was unsuitable for self-driving cars half the time would see huge demand for self driving cars: half the time the car would drive itself, the other half it would be a regular taxi driven by a human being.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#373

Post by usrusr »

simonh wrote: post #222
josteink wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We have the iPhone because Apple was so ambitious. When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re -invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing, which already sold in spades in the tech/enterprise market. They took something which existed and was awkward to use, and re-did the UI layer of the whole thing. They refined something else which was already proven. They didn't invent something original from…

>When you say that, you conventiently forget that Apple re-invented the smartphone. It was an proven thing... That's what it looks like from the outside, but listening to interviews with current and former Apple people that's not at all how it looked from the inside. When they initially developed the OSX derived core OS, System architecture and UI libraries they weren't thinking about phones at all. It was intended t…

Interesting what-if: would the iPod touch have been significantly less irrelevant in absence of the iPhone? Could the iPad have been a success without the iPhone paving the way for apps?

I remember the last generations of high end feature phones as quite capable media consumption devices, who knows what could have come from that strain of development had they stayed in the limelight a few years longer.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#374

Post by patrickyan »

runholm wrote: post #293
c3534l wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Counter arguments: Walmart, Google and Amazon.

Not well known in the west, but Mitsubishi has been and is active in an insane number of business sectors: Shipping, motor vehicles, home electronics, bank and finance (UFJ holdings), nuclear power, cameras and optics (Nikon), industrial chemistry, beer brewing (Kirin) and real estate.

That's just the zaibatsu/keiretsu/chaebol system. Samsung also does everything from shopping malls to credit cards to heavy industry.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#375

Post by coldtea »

ars wrote: post #363
coldtea wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That would mean they redesigned something that they are not able to build in realistically at least the next 5-10 years. Or to go even further, they tried to make something better that does not exist yet. At Apple don't do basic research and leave it at that. They are trying to build a commercial product. In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be…

> In that sense, it makes sense to try to solve the problem of self-driving along with how an Apple car should be like (besides self driving). No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there. They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driv…

>No it doesn't. Self driving takes decades to solve, designing pretty cars takes a year or two. There is an order of magnitude difference there.

They are not the same teams doing each, so there's no opportunity cost involved.

And whether it might or might not actually "take decades", if Apple considered it would "take decades to solve" they wouldn't be interested in it in the first place. The idea was that we are close to a breakthrough and commercial applications, not that we'll have something in the market by 2040, maybe.

So, for Apple it was more like "can we get something out in 5-10 years at most? Oh, and if it just self-drives, nobody will care -- by that time there would be 10 more self-driving cars from Google, Tesla, Audi, GM, etc. We also want it to be great/different in other aspects".

>They were seriously trying to constrain the location of the LIDAR before actually knowing what types and numbers of LIDAR a self driving car actually needs! That is utterly backwards.

There's nothing backwards about it -- given that the car will need a LIDAR (which I don't think their self-driving researchers where doubting), they should explorer the design space for placement/hiding it etc.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#376

Post by coldtea »

jacquesm wrote: post #368
coldtea wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The degree to which globular wheels would complicate such a design is such that it would leave you being passed by your competitors right out of the gate We don't know that. We just know that we're not familiar with them. If anything, globular wheels could make some kind of automated steering easier. And of course, it's obviously not like Apple only tried that design: they tried globular wheels, fat wheels, thinner…

> tried globular wheels, fat wheels, thinner wheels, wooden wheels, and what have you to see what works better Yes, and 'standard wheels' would have saved them time, money and other resources and would have increased the chances of bringing a self driving car to market.

>Yes, and 'standard wheels' would have saved them time, money and other resources

Time from what? It's not some team considering other kinds of wheels was holding back their self-driving researchers...

You seem to have an overly linear and heavy-first concept of how such a development should go.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#377

Post by ars »

drusepth wrote: post #365
Jyaif wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The surface contact of perfect cylinder (a regular car tire), and a perfect sphere (the iTire) is the same: 0 cm^2. From that fact, you are saying that "obviously" the deformation of a cylinder (with some diameter/width ratio) filled with gaz at a certain pressure against a flat surface will lead to a higher surface than a sphere with the same pressure? It's not obvious at all. Give me math+physics proof or GTFO.

>The surface contact of perfect cylinder (a regular car tire), and a perfect sphere (the iTire) is the same: 0 cm^2. A perfect cylinder has a line of contact with the road: the width of the wheel. A perfect sphere has a point of contact. Obviously you wouldn't see perfect eithers when talking about real-world tire implementations, but the perfect examples here are indicative of cylinders having more surface area with…

> A perfect cylinder has a line of contact with the road: the width of the wheel. A perfect sphere has a point of contact.

And both have an area of zero. And the area is what matters here.

> but the perfect examples here are indicative of cylinders having more surface area with higher air pressure

This is not true. It's physically impossible. (What you have done is the geometrical equivalent of dividing by zero to prove 1 = 2.)

    Weight of car / Contact patch / number of wheels = PSI + strength of sidewall.
This equation is exact. The geometry of the tire makes no difference. You can not create pressure out of nothing. The pressure on the ground must exactly equal the weight of the car.

And the pressure on the ground must exactly equal the pressure in the tire adjusted for the size of the area of ground contact.

Do you see how for any given PSI (including the strength of the sidewall) the contact patch is an exact figure? The forces must all be equal, it's a basic law of physics.

There are certainly engineering issues, I'm not arguing about that. But the size of contact patch is not one of them. Put the same PSI in a cylindrical or spherical tire (neglecting the PSI contribution of the rubber) and the contact patch will have an identical size.

Typically wheels are made of metal wires and are stiff - so they don't like large contact areas because it means lots of flex. But it doesn't have to be that way. You can make a material that doesn't care about flex - if would be harder to make obviously, but it's not an impossible obstacle.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#378

Post by ars »

nradov wrote: post #371
ars wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, that is actually how it works. Weight of car / Contact patch / number of wheels = PSI + strength of sidewall. Doesn't matter if it's a cylinder or a sphere, the equation doesn't change. PSI literally means: Pounds per square inch. Pounds of car per square inch of contact patch.

No that's not how it works and you're missing the point. In order to achieve an equivalent size contact patch a spherical tire will have to deform more than an equivalent cylindrical tire. With current materials this means you'll have to run it at a lower inflation pressure in order to achieve the necessary deformation, leading to all the problems described above.

Yes, it is. The forces must all balance exactly.

> a spherical tire will have to deform more than an equivalent cylindrical tire

This is true.

> With current materials this means you'll have to run it at a lower inflation pressure

This is not true. Yes, the strength of the rubber plays a part (adding to the effective PSI), but not a large effect unless you are almost flat.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#379

Post by moxious »

freehunter wrote: post #107
moxious wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Throughout all of that development, computers remained remarkably dumb. We still program them manually and they do what we tell them to even if it's disastrous. Driving on open roads with other humans is going to require elements of real intelligence that are qualitatively different than your OS example where they just did more programming, better, faster. It's apples and dump trucks. What if computers are just the w…

One thing that isn't getting better: humans ability to drive cars. Actually with computers getting smarter, we might even be getting worse at driving cars because we're spending more time on our computers when we should be driving. Take a modern computer and show it to a programmer from 1970 and try to convince him that computers are still remarkably dumb. I doubt he'd agree. AI always falls into this trap. Once it's…

Alan Turing established a gold standard for what intelligence is quite some time ago. Modern computers still fail the unrestricted Turing test.

No doubt he'd be impressed at the progress, but failing the test is failing the test.

There is a difference between behaviors which seem intelligent (your roomba) and actual intelligence. Seemingly intelligent behavior (like Eliza) only works when your counterparty isn't too probing or discriminating. It's like a Potemkin village of intelligence; looks great, as long as you don't look too closely.

Re: Apple Scales Back Its Ambitions for a Self-Driving Car

#380

Post by aninhumer »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #352
lmm wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Individual houses (or even apartments) are less efficient than having everybody living in barracks, hot-bunking the beds in three shifts, and eating some sort of nutrient-balanced kibble in cafeterias. Efficient at what? The comment you replied to explicitly talked about what's "efficient at moving people". Of course some people like cars for reasons other than how good they are at getting from A to B, but is that…

"Efficient at what?" Efficient in terms of resource usage, which is exactly how the comment I replied to was using it. "but is that a matter of fundamental human needs, or something more like fashion?" I'm pretty sure that being able to go where you want, any time you want, in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine, isn't just a "fashion".

>being able to go where you want, any time you want

And self-driving taxis mean you can use them for those journeys, and rely on more efficient public transport for everything else.

> in a conveyance that doesn't smell like urine

This is not an inherent issue with public transport. I take the bus to work every day and it's never smelled of urine.

Post reply on HN