Fully driverless cars could be months away
arstechnica.com
Fully driverless cars could be months away
1–10 of 16 posts
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#2This is something you should never hear about a product which is life critical that it works correctly:
"Efrati reports that Waymo CEO John Krafcik faces pressure from his boss, Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, to transform Waymo's impressive self-driving technology into a shipping product."
Combined with releasing that product in the area with the least consumer and safety protections:
"Another important factor was the legal climate. Arizona has some of the nation's most permissive laws regarding self-driving vehicles."
So the TL;DR is that someone has been pressured to rush a product to release in an area with few safety regulations that could cause a lot of harm if it malfunctions.
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#3Fully driverless cars are here today, for that matter. But if you want want tamperproof driverless cars that perform well under adverse conditions and are thoroughly tested, then you're going to have to wait a lot longer than "months".
I think this snippet is pretty telling: "Waymo chose the Phoenix area for its favorable weather, its wide, well-maintained streets, and the relative lack of pedestrians." (Emphasis mine.) Probably wise, but I'm sure they've already carefully calculated the risk/return vs pedestrian fatalities and are coming out ahead.
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#4This is something you should never hear about a product which is life critical that it works correctly: "Efrati reports that Waymo CEO John Krafcik faces pressure from his boss, Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, to transform Waymo's impressive self-driving technology into a shipping product." Combined with releasing that product in the area with the least consumer and safety protections: "Another importa…
On the flip side, the status quo is killing 40000 people per year in the US alone:
http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#5This is something you should never hear about a product which is life critical that it works correctly: "Efrati reports that Waymo CEO John Krafcik faces pressure from his boss, Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, to transform Waymo's impressive self-driving technology into a shipping product." Combined with releasing that product in the area with the least consumer and safety protections: "Another importa…
On the flip side, the status quo is killing 40000 people per year in the US alone: http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf
So we should push out half-baked solutions?
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#6[deleted]
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the flip side, the status quo is killing 40000 people per year in the US alone: http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf
So we should push out half-baked solutions?
Depends on how half-baked.
From a PR perspective it's a definite "no". Even a single self-driving fatality would lead to global news headlines and a lawyer feeding frenzy.
But from a protecting people perspective? If making it "live" quicker would speed development and adoption... then maybe.
E.g. the first 5 year increase fatalities net by 1.1x. After that tech is actually dialed in and fatalities drop to 0.5x. Holding off gives you 400K fatalities whereas pushing earlier adoption gives you 320K. That would be 80K lives saved. (Under the assumptions of this shoot-from-the-hip model).
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#8This is something you should never hear about a product which is life critical that it works correctly: "Efrati reports that Waymo CEO John Krafcik faces pressure from his boss, Google co-founder and Alphabet CEO Larry Page, to transform Waymo's impressive self-driving technology into a shipping product." Combined with releasing that product in the area with the least consumer and safety protections: "Another importa…
On the flip side, the status quo is killing 40000 people per year in the US alone: http://www.nsc.org/NewsDocuments/2017/12-month-estimates.pdf
Which invites the question: how long before human-driven cars are no longer allowed on the public roads?
I'm guessing year 2035.
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#9Fully driverless cars are here today, for that matter. But if you want want tamperproof driverless cars that perform well under adverse conditions and are thoroughly tested, then you're going to have to wait a lot longer than "months". I think this snippet is pretty telling: "Waymo chose the Phoenix area for its favorable weather, its wide, well-maintained streets, and the relative lack of pedestrians ." (Emphasis mi…
How could a driverless car ever truly be tamperproof, though? At some point we'll just have to accept it as a potential risk.
Re: Fully driverless cars could be months away
#10…if ‘fully’ means ‘remotely operated, when the going gets tough’, such as, I guess, in bad weather (rare in Phoenix), or when there is a lot of traffic in one place, times when demand for taxis is highest.