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

#51

Post by oneJob » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 10:42 PM UTC

slyall wrote: post #20

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. " You have to stop thinking like some guy from Mad Men and more like somebody buying AWS instances. Imagine that instead of buying a single car that you drive everywhere you instead reserve a car for your daily commute, you might get various options, eg: $500/month - Tesla Sports car, 30min journey, unshared occupancy $300/month…

First, I'm pretty far away from "some guy from Mad Men". That's actually quite a reach into my psyche; it would be interesting to see how you came to such an incisive reading while knowing so little about me.

But as far as the business model, as someone that does not own a car but instead utilizes a mix of public transit, bicycle, ZipCar (sometimes renting the VW Golf, sometimes the Jeep, etc.), and Uber to get around, I still think the Google car looks like something one buys for their four year old niece or nephew, and have faith that a car could check all the boxes functionality wise and still be designed to look, nice, at least. Maybe even really nice.

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

#52

Post by amelius » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 11:22 PM UTC

maxerickson wrote: post #30

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 enviro…

Yes, I thought about replaying the information too. But the problem is that every different reaction by the car will lead to new input from the environment. And you can't store what you didn't anticipate :)

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

#53

Post by Animats » Sat, Oct 31, 2015, 11:40 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #38

revelation wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that Teslas system is nothing special and more of a marketing win. But Google desperately needs to ship something that isn't a cool video or a swell PDF if they want to be relevant in this space.

Based both on what I've read and discussions with people who have some personal familiarity with the space, the issue is that, to date, Google is apparently not interested in anything incremental. (Which is also the reason that they haven't been able to work with the auto makers.) However,that means that Google won't have anything commercial for a long time--like decades--if their criterion remains robo-taxi levels o…

Almost-automatic driving is dangerous. There's a "deadly valley" which begins at the point where the driver starts to no longer pay attention. It ends when the automation is good enough that the driver doesn't need to pay attention. Between those two limits lies trouble.

The major vehicle manufacturers which have shipped driver assistant systems have put in controls that insist the driver pay attention. Mercedes, BMW, Tesla, and Ford check for hands-on-wheel.[1] They're desperately trying to stay out of the deadly valley.

Here's the problem with that.[2]

Volvo, and maybe BMW, have a second problem - too many modes and too many options. There are lots of semi-auto options available, and they may or may not be installed on any given vehicle. Here's what happened with someone who ordered self-parking without buying the "pedestrian detection" option.[3] Bad idea selling that option combination. It's been a learning experience for Volvo.

[1] http://www.greencarcongress.com/2015/07/20150713-eclass.html [2] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2903692/Warning-reck... [3] http://fusion.net/story/139703/self-parking-car-accident-no-...

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

#54

Post by Evolved » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 1:40 AM UTC

If Google's 25mph car is able to slam on the brakes and avoid an incident without swerving or taking other action then it could be argued that once we move to a fully autonomous society, 25mph (example; may not be accurate but for the sake of debate, 25mph is what I'll stick with for this scenario) may end up being the max speed for safety reasons.

This isn't to say that now trips will take longer and that will adversely impact our lives because I think what will end up happening is we will rearrange our lives so that we use these longer driving trips to sleep or work, converse with friends, do homework on the way to class, etc. and thus the time it takes to get from point A to point B becomes moot as we are now able to be orders of magnitude more productive in our vehicles.

Granted, this will not only reduce accidents as now the vehicles can communicate with each other and will instead know what the intentions of the other car are and adjust accordingly instead of trying to anticipate what the other car is going to do, but it will also reduce or eliminate speeding tickets and DUIs. Due to speeding tickets and DUIs being a large source of revenue for municipalities, I'd expect this to evolve as well, unfortunately.

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

#55

Post by melted » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 2:39 AM UTC

You people crack me up. Self driving car was never anything other than an elaborate PR ploy for Google, the company which derives the vast majority of its income from its advertising business. Who would you rather work for: a company that is "building a self driving car" or a company that tracks the living shit out of everything you do on the web and ruins the web with mostly irrelevant ads? That's what I thought.

And they want these PR gravy trains running as long as humanly possible, so launching a real product isn't even a goal.

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

#56

Post by greglindahl » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 6:06 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #53

ghaff wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Based both on what I've read and discussions with people who have some personal familiarity with the space, the issue is that, to date, Google is apparently not interested in anything incremental. (Which is also the reason that they haven't been able to work with the auto makers.) However,that means that Google won't have anything commercial for a long time--like decades--if their criterion remains robo-taxi levels o…

Almost-automatic driving is dangerous. There's a "deadly valley" which begins at the point where the driver starts to no longer pay attention. It ends when the automation is good enough that the driver doesn't need to pay attention. Between those two limits lies trouble. The major vehicle manufacturers which have shipped driver assistant systems have put in controls that insist the driver pay attention. Mercedes, BMW…

What's the problem with [2]? The driver knows he's bypassing safety interlocks. There many dumb things you can intentionally do in a car; adding one more is not necessarily a significant problem.

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

#57

Post by agumonkey » Sun, Nov 01, 2015, 6:06 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #28

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 h…

Reminds me that we didn't hear about Google SDV for a while (the last news was the 'View from the seat ..'). I expected a little increase in progress reports.

I just youtubed 25mph frontal crashes and it doesn't look pretty...