I'm curious what their first product will be and when it will be available. Chris Urmson stated the goal was to release a self-driving vehicle by 2020, after pushing it back from their original goal of 2017, and this was just before he left at the beginning of the year. Since then Google also lost its lead software engineer on the project who left to start a competing company and he also took another senior employee with him, and Google lost several more key members to Otto (which is now owned by Uber).
This space has become super competitive and it will be fun to watch what happens. I still think it will be many years before we see a fully self-driving car (where no driver is needed at all). I think the best way to do it is to redesign cities to specifically accommodate self-driving cars. Honestly though that might be something other countries such as China and Singapore are much more reticent to pursue.
Once self driving cars are widespread, changes are certain even if gradual.
Gradual examples include increasing density by replacing parking lots with buildings, relaxing zoning requirements for parking with new residential units, etc
I can see the commuter lanes in many cities being converted to self driving lanes with 100mph speed limits. That alone would push people into self driving vehicles.
You wouldn't even need 100mph speedlimits if self-driving cars can avoid some of the common high-traffic pitfalls [eg traffic waves [1]]
It's likely that even at equal or higher density, self-driving cars will be able to have higher throughput with comparable speed limits.
Initially, though, it might be sufficient to "encourage" them by allowing them in commuter lanes. [this should even be trivial, because it should be pretty easy to find passengers uber-pool style if adding passengers would improve the trip]
Slight tangent but one of the most interesting parts (to me) of lane splitting on a motorcycle is getting to navigate through these waves and actually see the dense and sparse segments as you pass through them
Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already.
So you'd need huge parking areas somewhere still.
And the "increade density, reduce parking requirements" — if you do that, you can just improve transit, and get the same advantage.
But that doesn't happen.
People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share.
I suspect it isn't about desire but income. A car can typically cost up to $10,000 per year regardless of specific purchase price there is insurance, fuel, repairs and/or car payments (lower purchase price on used vehicles raises maintenance significantly) ... sure you can shave a bit here and there, but on the whole if you're going to own a car, you're going to be out a lot of money.
Making the choice not to own gives you a leg up for other purchases.
Housing, I suspect is bennefitting from similar post-hoc analysis. "Millennials don't want to own homes" which I've seen in headlines should also be weighed against the fact the houses today cost many multiples more than a typical annual salary. I believe when my father was buying his first home the rule of thumb was "roughly 5* annual salary" nowadays in Toronto homes are easily 10*
This stuff (microhousing, ultra-mobility) isn't necessarily about "enlightenment amongst the youth" it's the crushing cost.
Crushing cost and income instability. I know very few people my age (35) or younger who've held a single job for longer than maybe 3-5 years, most of the time its even shorter than that. Our parents could count on a job being stable for decades at a time and with regular raises. When you don't know where you will be working 2 years from now its hard to predict where you will be living 30 years from now. Makes signing a mortgage kind of a dumb idea.
$10,000 per year?? That sounds... incredibly high. Insurance is maybe $1k? (I pay ~$650/yr). Fuel maybe another grand? (I've paid ~$750 year-to-date). Repairs can add up, but I don't think I've spent more than $1k in a year on repairs for my 23 year old car, which I bought for $2.5k three years ago.
10k a year only sounds reasonable if you're making payments, and I suspect the amortized cost once you (eventually) sell the vehicle will be much lower.
Granted, this is only my own experience, but considering it's so far off from 10k makes me wonder how accurate that statement is for the general population.
Buying a 23 year old car puts you in the outliers already. Typically with that age you'll have trouble keeping the yearly repairs averaged at below $1000, but you might.
Lots of people are eating a few grand in depreciation each year, plus higher fuel costs, plus higher insurance rates. And don't forget financing costs, licencing, taxes. Many people are clearly eating more on depreciation than you are spending, all in.
10k may be a little on the high side, but 5 or 6k isn't at all (you're already at, what 3 to 3.5 on the cheap end).
in fairness to you an hawaiianbrah I'll admit that the $10k is pretty close to an upper limit on that one... any maybe rounded up as well.
So my napkin calculation was roughly $30k for the base auto, financed at $500/month for 5 years. $1000/year on insurance and $50/week on gas.
$500 * 12 = $6000
$50 * 52 = $2600
+$1000
total = $9600
In the above calculation there's $0 spent on service & $0 on financing interest. The theory is that as age goes up, the annual repair cost increases as well.
I think there's also a bit of a confound in the fact that I'm operating in Canadian dollars where my numbers might be inflated... as well, I haven't owned a car myself since somewhere around 2005.
My payment at the time was $450 on a Mazda 5.
All said and done though $5k to $10k is not a wildly unreasonable range. Which I think we were generally agreeing on.
Was it about some fundamental inherent desire in the first place, or increased income then too, plus ample advertising and touting it as the "american way"?
Other regions, even as rich, don't place as much emphasis on car ownership.
>Is that so? If americans want to live like that, why don’t american cities look like european cities already?
Because cities are expensive infrastructure that takes many decades to change after it has been built. Unless an earthquake or other natural disaster or war takes a city down, change at the level of changing the roads, moving whole neighborhoods, etc is very slow.
Older cities (the ones most comparable to cities in Europe) do look a lot like European cities. New York and Boston both have extensive public transport, including commuter rail to fairly large outlying settlements.
They are also incredibly popular (if you take housing prices as a proxy for desirability).
What if you don't live in a city? Almost every argument for self-driving cars and the sharing economy collapses when you don't live in Silicon Valley or higher density areas.
I live in a rural location and don't want to wait 30 mins for a car to arrive from the nearest city to take me 10 minutes away to fetch groceries. Also my children (7 months and 3 years) require car seats set to their size/weight for safety. I find it is inconceivable that I and my peers with young children in rural locations make up a market large enough for firms to target with ad-hoc rentals. Purchases (or PCP) already provide a plethora of reasonable priced options for us at a level of convenience that is actually useful.
The good news is that unlike a manned taxi, a robocab does have much fixed per-hour cost. Basically, when a community can afford to have a considerable number of personal vehicles on passive standby, it could be enough of a market to support a somewhat similar number of robocabs on passive standby. Remote areas will certainly not be where commercial robocabs will start, but there is no reason to assume that it would be generally impossible our necessarily more inconvenient.
Not-so-commercial robot car pools might even start getting viable in rural areas, because some countries mandate a minimum level of public transport coverage and basing a few robocabs in remote villages could be many orders of magnitude cheaper (and certainly more useful) than repeatedly driving an empty bus around just to fulfill a schedule so sparse that only the most desperate will ever bother using it. Another angle that might lead to pockets of rural adoption much earlier than expected: many rural populations already have a lot of experience with pooling agricultural vehicles, this could occasionally be a seed for adopting local pool e.g. to support the elderly and doubling as a fallback for personal vehicles.
My guess is some people will want to own a car, so they'll finance it partly by being a local cab. That way, their car is nearby when they need it, but serves other people who happen to want a ride.
Entire counties could offer cars to its residents similar to bus service now. One car could probably serve a dozen people. My guess is many people will want their own cat tho. It would be wonderful for me to go to bed and wake up 1000 miles away.
It's pretty much a universal law of economics: if you make something cheaper, people will find new uses for it and it will get used more.
Self-driving cars reduce the costs of cars quite substantially: risks go down substantially, expands the pool of people who can use it (young, elderly, drunk), the ability to multitask makes the time a commute takes much less expensive, the ability to call a car is hugely convenient.
And of course the fact that you don't need a driver means commercial driving gets a lot cheaper.
I expect self-driving cars to substantially increase the number of cars on the road.
> risks go down substantially, expands the pool of people who can use it (young, elderly, drunk), the ability to multitask makes the time a commute takes much less expensive, the ability to call a car is hugely convenient.
Rentable cars in most major areas and high-density transit system already fulfill exactly these requirements.
Take any city in Europe. ~15-20% of the people commute with cars.
Do you think these people, who could already use transit, suddenly will stop driving? What advantage do self-driving cars provide to them that transit and rentable cars don’t?
I also expect self-driving cars to substantially reduce the size of vehicles on the road. We typically buy cars for the max capacity we intend to use them for. Self-driving Smart (the brand) cars may be the new norm.
> Where would you park the self-driving cars then?
They will be driving around and not be parked..
> Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already.
Maybe self driving cars can be the "last/first mile" in transit so that more people actually will use public transit.
> People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share.
I don't want to own a car and no-one that I know of in my surroundings want to own a car. Car companies even do private leasing now because people do not want to own a car.
> Self-Driving cars provide no advantage there.
I think you have to think bigger. Why would you want to own a car if you could call one at any moment with your phone with an app?
> Maybe self driving cars can be the "last/first mile" in transit so that more people actually will use public transit.
So the Park+Ride concept. That’s already possible today, yet completely underutilized. A criticism often brought against transit is "I’d have to switch trains at some point", do you think these people would start using that now?
> They will be driving around and not be parked..
All the time? That’d be quite wasteful, considering most cars are only used for about 2h a day, during the rush hours, for the commute.
> I think you have to think bigger. Why would you want to own a car if you could call one at any moment with your phone with an app?
Why would you want to own a car if you could call a taxi at any moment with your phone with an app?
Why would you want to own a car if busses and trains come every 2-5 minutes at every stop, and you’re never more than 400m from a stop?
Reality is, as European cities show, all these "advantages" can already be gotten with public transit today. I’m not sure what self-driving cars actually improve compared to existing public transit methods. And especially because they’re using space more inefficient than existing transit methods, these advantages would have to be huge to make any tradeoff worth it.
Otherwise you could just invest in better transit, not self-driving cars.
Park+ride combines more of the drawbacks of personal vehicles and public transportation than robocab+ride would. (Initial sunk cost, always having to return to your personal vehicle instead of free roaming using whatever mode and path available, requiring the personal vehicle being operational at all times)
Also, robocab+ride could work on both ends of the commute. Where I live, "office suburbs" tend to have transit connections just as bad as actual suburbs, or worse.
Are park and rides completely underutilized? I've always lived in the cities I've lived in, but whenever I happen to pass one, they seem quite full to me.
So we're going to have a bunch of self-driving cars driving around without people in them? Sounds like that's going to make our traffic problems worse, not better.
That's assuming our traffic problems are because of "too many cars" and not because of inefficient utilization / driving.
That said, I didn't say we'll have cars driving around with no people in them. I said that cars will be able to drive to remote parking areas by themselves.
In France there are more and more cities with electrical cars you can rent on the fly. In my street I have 3 of them, I can just book it in 1 minute and hop on. It's always awailable and clean. No need to pay for gaz, parking is garanteed. Maintenance and insurance is included. So really, I don't mind sharing it.
To what extent does that stay true when you can get picked up quickly, not have to worry about parking, and it works out to cost a fraction of the price of owning a vehicle?
In most European cities, the transit system does exactly that – even in my outermost suburb of a German 250k city we have 4 buslines nearby (within of 4min walking) with a frequency of 15-30min, and a few more with an hourly frequency.
So why do 15-30% of people in these cities still drive? What will self-driving cars provide that transit and rentable cars didn’t yet?
During rush hours, most of the cars only have one person in it. Cheap self driving taxis could reduce quite a bit the number of cars during rush hour by pooling rides.
Or you could have people use busses or other transit methods.
Yet a common criticism when that is suggested is that only the poor use public transit, and that everyone in public transit smells bad.
Which is what I’m questioning here: Self-Driving cars provide no real technological advantage over existing transit methods, and the real issues are social problems.
And we can’t solve social problems with technological solutions.
They very much do provide real technological advantage. They can be smarter than traditional public transit, allow you to be more flexible, reduce waiting times, allow you to get from A to B without changing trains / buses, get rid of stops, eliminate the last couple of hundred meters that you may have to walk today, etc.
Theoretically, you could have multiple self-driving bus operators, and price-discriminate between them. Rich people would pay more to commute in a bus with leather seats, premium coffee and fast wifi, with the added bonus of not having to breathe the same air as the poors.
> Where would you park the self-driving cars then?
Providing dense parking garages gets a lot easier if it doesn't need to be omfortable for people to get to the cars and you don't need to be able to open the doors when parked etc.
But the overall need for parking will also drop if more cars are shared.
> Considering in most cases > 80% of cars are on the road at the same time during rush hours, you can't save much with self-driving cars — not more than with a well-working transit system already.
But self-driving cars can be used to augment the transit system too. E.g. complement buses with mini-buses and smaller cars to handle overflow. Imagine an Uber-like service with an option to "call a bus" to any number of nearby "bus stops" at a lower price than if you call a car. If a full size bus is within 5 minutes, with space free, it'll make you wait for that, otherwise it'll dispatch a regular car at the same discounted price.
You could do away with normal bus schedules in favour of having the buses follow the busiest stretches at any time of day, and use cheaper/smaller vehicles to take other passengers.
E.g. near me the main bus route is used by two very distinct groups of people who either intend to go quite far, or who intend to go to the nearby train stations or high streets in either direction from me. During certain parts of the day the riders are often dominated by one or the other, and you'd get far more efficient use if you could shuttle people between the train stations/high streets and the longer distances separately. Knowing the start/end of each journey would allow you to "sort" the riders accordingly and dispatch vehicles much closer to optimal.
> And the "increade density, reduce parking requirements" — if you do that, you can just improve transit, and get the same advantage.
See above - automated vehicles will change transit too, but there are lots of situations where people still want to go door to door and are willing to pay accordingly. E.g. I take the bus from the local train station and home most of the time, but if I'm in a rush I might not be able to wait. Sometimes currently that's frustrating as getting a taxi her normally will take me 5 minutes. If I'm in a rush and there's a bus <10 minutes away, there's certainly a non-zero chance that the taxi will be late and the bus fast, and the bus will arrive first and I have to consider if I want to cancel the taxi or wait and be later than if I'd just taken the bus in the first place.
With a "combo service" with guaranteed pickup from specific locations in <5m by either bus/min-bus/car at the same price depending on what's closest, I think you'd see a lot more people here opting for something like that than people who currently use the bus, which could very well have the effect of making it viable to use far more buses.
A lot of the car users I see here (London suburb) mostly use public transport anyway, and have the car as "just in case" that will be increasingly hard to justify with solutions like the above.
Couple that with increasing pressure to reduce the number of allowed parking spaces in new developments further and it will keep getting less desirable to own cars many places.
> People want to own a car, have it always available, and don't want to share.
Do they? A lot of people feel they need a car, but I think far fewer want a car if they felt they had better options. Personally I don't even have a drivers license. Sometimes think about getting one, but it's an annoying time commitment for little benefit, when I can have a car here with a driver in 5 minutes so I can relax and read or play a game while I get to my destination. Ten years ago it was more annoying, but now it's gotten to a point where I don't think I'll get a drivers license in my lifetime (I'm 40), as the inconveniences keep dropping. The one remaining thing that makes me sometimes wish I had a car is for road trips on holidays to places outside of bus routes where it's expensive to hire a driver - self driving cars will take away that inconvenience too.
A lot of people do want to own a car still, but I suspect that car ownership will start trending downwards very quickly once self-driving cars drive the cost of car sharing services down further and make it easier to provide better guaranteed availability and shorter waits and more flexibility (e.g. get whatever type of car you happen to need)
A lot of people also have conflicting wants. E.g. they may actually want to own a car, but want that next holiday more, and so opt out of car ownership once a shared one ends up sufficiently cheaper.
>Providing dense parking garages gets a lot easier if it doesn't need to be omfortable for people to get to the cars and you don't need to be able to open the doors when parked etc.
You mean like they do in Manhattan today?
>But self-driving cars can be used to augment the transit system too.
Here's the thing. All these scenarios are possible with the addition of a $10-ish/hr driver today. Yet they don't exist. Maybe no one's made the right pitch to VCs or maybe, just maybe, there really isn't demand for this sort of thing (in the US). Variants of smaller ad hoc minibus services do exist in other countries.
I don't know, do they have parking garages with floors where an adult can't stand upright and can't actually get out of the cars? I know you can automate it and have robotic systems to lift cars in place etc., but that adds complexity and cost that will largely disappear if the cars can park in spaces humans can get out of all by themselves.
Maybe the robotic solutions will be the end game, but painting narrower bays for self-parking cars will be the much cheaper short term solution, and e.g. modifications to add messanine floors etc. the medium term solution.
> Here's the thing. All these scenarios are possible with the addition of a $10-ish/hr driver today. Yet they don't exist.
A $10-ish/hr driver is enough to make a big difference in cost. Let's assume some downtime for maintenance. An average 20 hour utilization over 360/days year for a car would add $72k/year in costs.
Now add in that models like Uber's are new and most places aren't anywhere close to optimizing pickup times, and most cab companies are technologically just leaving the stone age, and why should we be surprised that nobody has done exactly this yet?
There are additional differences. E.g. Tesla has indicated they want people to be able to opt-in to having your own vehicle used. The availability of cars can go through the roof without a massive increase in cost once you don't depend on a supply of drivers.
> Variants of smaller ad hoc minibus services do exist in other countries.
Actually variants of ad hoc minibus services do exist in the US too. Shuttle services from airports, for example. But they're nowhere near what I suggested.
To do this for bus lines you run into the same problem as above: Drivers is a big limiting factor. The bus companies near me constantly struggle to get enough drivers (and yes, they raise salaries, but then they'd be unable to survive under the constraints put on them - take away those salaries, and they'd have a lot more flexibility in what they'd be able to do)
>I don't know, do they have parking garages with floors where an adult can't stand upright and can't actually get out of the cars?
My understanding is that there are more sophisticated robotic garages elsewhere (probably in Japan). But attended parking lots with cars up on lifts is very common in Manhattan.
Interesting. I've never seen one in London. I think that probably speaks partly to how long the adoption cycles for these types of things are, and partly how high the property prices needs to get before they pay for themselves.
You tend to see them off to the edges of Manhattan. For the most part, land's so expensive downtown and in the central avenues that it's mostly just on-street parking and garages. But as you go out toward the rivers, there are small parking lot parcels. However, the land is still expensive enough that the space in those lots gets utilized as much as possible.
> All these scenarios are possible with the addition of a $10-ish/hr driver today.
Which easily multiplies cost by whole numbers if you allow multiple years for the hardware to break even.
The fixed hourly cost for the driver is also why cabs are orbiting for hails (unless regulated not to) instead of waiting cold, further increasing cost per use.
With passive minutes basically free, the economic threshold between passive waiting and active orbiting would be considerably shifted, resulting in additional efficiency gains.
No. You don't want to burden human drivers with, for example, the mental stress of a constantly-shifting route that would be driven by a computer-optimized shared taxi system. You also increase efficiency by 33% when you free up the driver's seat.
On what are you basing this timeline? You realize that Google already has completely driverless cars roaming around public streets in silicon valley, right? There's even the story from an entire year ago about one of them getting pulled over by a police officer [1]. Every major auto manufacturer plus Google, Apple, Uber, and Lyft, and several other software companies are all working on this and they all have stated timelines of public-ready autonomous vehicles around a 2020 - 2021 timeframe. Will they handle every possible road condition in every possible location? No, but I'd be willing to bet money that in 2021 I'll be able to hail a completely driverless taxi/Uber in several major cities.
Based on the fact that no one is anywhere remotely near being able to do arbitrary pickups and dropoffs of passengers without a driver being present today. And that's totally ignoring any regulatory, legal, etc. realities which I expect will get worked out once the tech is rock solid--which it isn't remotely.
But they are near being able to do exactly that. Uber is testing and training its autonomous-capable cars in Pittsburgh right now, picking up and dropping off passengers on real routes every day. At their current rate of testing and expansion they'll have more than enough training data in the next two years or so. The biggest hurdle is regulatory, but there's so much money and so many lives (remember, human drivers kill people on roads every single day) at stake here that even regulatory approvals are moving quickly. See: Michigan [1].
Small flying vehicles for daily travel seem insanely unlikely. The energy expenditure is wasteful, especially if you need vertical takeoff. Seems like not the best future for typical commuter traffic, I feel like.
If takeoff is still complicated, that would really make the typical commute take a long time anyway, no? You're still going to have to move between runways and a place of work somehow. Feels like it couldn't make sense for a majority of folk
for a one seat fixed wing aircraft you need a flat paved or grass surface the lenght of a court of tennis for takeoff and landing, no airport runway needed.
For 100% autonomy, you are probably right. But there are some useful steps along the way. For example, the first ones will likely just manage the interstate and long stretches of road during a commute.
The driver can "take over" in some form for parking, though even that may operate in a way that is completely different from today's vehicles. I expect to see a lot of things like this over the next 10 years.
Can you explain how you reach the 30 year figure? There's a lot of evidence suggesting that they will be available in some places under certain conditions in 3 years or less. Google and Tesla seem to think so, and they're the current experts on this.
Rain,
Snow,
Fog,
Traffic cops,
Construction zones,
Yielding to emergency vehicles,
Malfunctioning traffic lights,
Newly repaved roads without lane markers,
Pot holes,
Railroad crossings,
Standing water
I think much of this can be circumvented with real time data from apps like Waze.
However if the car is not able to find an alternate route, it may require the driver to take over, so it wouldn't be fully autonomous.
In either case, the car has to be able to reliably identify conditions in which it is necessary for the person to take over, which is definitely far away from being solved at a level that would be required to meet consumer levels of safety.
Apps can probably help in determining that there's an area where a driver is going to need to take over. I can even imagine a central database that construction sites, etc. need to make an entry into.
However, there still needs to be a driver who can take over which means it can't function as an autonomous taxi.
Considering that Elon Musk says we'll have full self-diving cars (from an engineering standpoint) in 2 or 3 years, this estimate seems very pessimistic.
2-3 years in OK conditions, 30 years to cater for all the odd edge cases humans take cars. Bad human drivers, Indian traffic, cyclists, animals, narrow, unlit or poor roads etc. The other question is will the tech be there before the licensing/legislation.
Somewhere in the middle there's probably a point where self driving is demonstrably safer than human, even before they're "ready" for everywhere.
You're grotesquely underestimating what fleet learning will do for traffic issues.
The way I see it (as a software engineer myself), is that each wreck that the AP did not prevent gets added as a test case in the AP unit tests that all have to pass. Also, each time a human wrecks, it could/will send the data to Tesla to continue simulations and ensure AP would not wreck in the same conditions.
How many of the wrecks, even fatal ones, essentially a different driver making the same mistake over and over? Likely millions. Real fleet learning would simply solve that problem once, and prevent thousands of fatalities as a result. As more and more AP capable cars hit the road, this simply will exponentially increase. Thirty years is laughable seeing how much computing has improved in merely the past 20. Maybe 5 tops assuming the legal hurdles are actually surmountable.
That's such an inethical way to do it. You're suggesting that we just let it learn from wrecks in the real world, instead of trying to prevent those wrecks by other means? This, the Tesla strategy, feels despicable.
Any attempt to prevent wrecks we do now are based on learning from past real world experience. All fleet learning does is automate that process and apply it to self-driving systems so that the learning is systematic and will help everyone using said self learning system instead of having to wait for new advice and/or new safety mechanisms.
They also have every single human driver wreck captured with AP capable hardware to make fully autonomous vehicles safer. The way they are doing it right now is brilliant.
Edit: As Elon has previously said, not releasing something that saves lives is actually unethical. If a single life is saved by AP software that would have died if the vehicle was driven by human meatware, not releasing it is the unethical thing.
For a deep learning machine with LIDAR , there's only small difference between animals, indian traffic, bad drivers, and narrow/unlit/poor roads.
It's just a question of more training(altough a recent NHTSA? regulation says the planning stage cannot use black box techniques like DNNs).
And once self-driving is a business, i suspect we'll find ways to get said training data for cheap enough and fast enough. For example Tesla/Uber drivers as trainers .
It is unsurprising futurists working on pushing their cars that allegedly self-drive would tell you that the technology is closer to practicality than it is.
When I see news about self-driving cars I can't help but think about car DoS, ransomware and hijacking. Not that this doesn't apply to "normal" cars, but I suspect that "intelligent" cars will have Internet connection and, at some point in the near future, inter-vehicle communication in order to cooperate better. We already have a PoC smartlight worm.
- If the hack/virus was already installed, a network shutoff won't help much.
- If a car is 10 years old with 10 years of safety updates/patches, resetting to the original firmware might not be a viable solution. But there needs to be a failsafe way of knowing the running software has not been tampered with.
> - If the hack/virus was already installed, a network shutoff won't help much.
Master battery disconnect which auto locks all brakes
> - If a car is 10 years old with 10 years of safety updates/patches, resetting to the original firmware might not be a viable solution. But there needs to be a failsafe way of knowing the running software has not been tampered with.
> Master battery disconnect which auto locks all brakes
probably want to separate those. Kill the engine at 80 mph, you can coast to stop. If you lock the brakes at 80 mph, you immediately lose most of your control, and, since you killed the battery, you lost traction control and probably ABS. And you risk blowing the tires.
"Super simple" would be nice, but as I understand it, even "dumb car" software is incredibly huge and complicated. (It's very unclear to me why that needs to be so)
If self-driving cars really take of, "just be a dumb car" won't help in a few decades. The 'driver' may not know how to drive his car, and even if he did, the car may not have a steering wheel.
Also, I guess one would press this 'I want to take control' button in an emergency. That means the persons suddenly finding themselves driving this vehicle have to be above-average drivers.
This would partially solve the issues but it would also limit the usage of cars as a service (as in, autonomous taxis vs owning a car). From my point of view car-sharing is one of the main selling points of self-driving cars.
As for the inter-vehicle communication, if it proves to be effective in improving security, I guess it will eventually be mandatory or at least "encouraged" by making your insurance more expensive if you disable them.
Ha! Why kill the gold egg laying goose? Look at the bot-nets that are already in your daughter's talking Barbie. They don't interrupt the functionality of the device/car, they only take the extra clock cycles there are when the processor is not in use and then use them to try to sell you Viagra. The same will be true of real cars. If they get too bold, then legislators will orbitally lazer your bots and the small spaces that the bot makers exist in. Sure, some mafia guys will pay to get it figured out how to lock you in your car (or your kid on a really hot day) until you pay up/brick your Tesla from Outer Bongostan, but if they do it too much, it'll kill the whole enterprise. Yeah, hackers are stupid, but they more greedy than that.
I haven't paid attention to the exploits in many years. But are they still using the Stack buffer overflow to execute the malicious code or are there other techniques modern exploits use?
If you are referring to the smart lights, if I recall correctly they used a side-channel attack to extract the keys used to decrypt/verify new firmwares in various models. So they basically abused OTA firmware updates to take control of the lights.
Assuming that devices don't have cryptographic issues, IoT security is still a mess. So yes firmwares are probably full of BO vulnerabilities. As for more recent techniques, I'm aware of some of them but I'm no expert so I can't comment properly :)
That's mostly because most people don't think about trucks at all. And economically speaking you're definitely right. But that isn't to say that there arent other ways that self driving cars can be transformative. I mostly walk everywhere, and at least 2-3 times a week I run across a hurried or inattentive driver that can't be bothered to stop before turning right on red, or turning left after waiting for traffic to clear without looking for pedestrians, or stop for pedestrians at an uncontrolled intersection. It would be a huge benefit to my quality of life to not have to worry about being killed by a selfish asshole like that.
I question how much peace-of-mind self-driving cars bring to the intersection situation. While the inattentive human drivers are annoying, they're also predictable. As a pedestrian, I just wait for the driver to look up and go (or stop) before I proceed. The behavior of self-driving cars is, in my opinion, much harder to predict. Who knows when the buggy control software will cause the car to slam on the gas? Of course the software will be carefully written and tested. However, anyone who writes software for a living knows that carefully written and tested code often goes against economic incentives like "release fast" and "add more features to sell more".
Most of the automation efforts revolve around "drive on the highway from point A to point B" scenario. If you have a container that's that simple, rail is much more cost-effective.
Trucking has fairly complex loading/unloading requirements, with scenarios such as "haul 8 vehicles, unload them at 8 different addresses", "haul a load of tomatoes and lettuce, do 5 drops at In'n'Out locations, 1 at Safeway, 1 at Albertsons" fairly common. There's an understandable lack of trust in the system, where the trucker is also responsible for ensuring the staff on the recipient side is not unloading (i.e. stealing) too much or helping themselves into another customer's load.
There's also "stop and wait your turn at weight stations", "stop to refuel" as well as "stop at random checkpoints when crossing state borders" scenarios that seem to require just way too much of human involvement.
Uber's "Otto" is already making autonomous trucks.
You're describing a traveling salesman problem - which there are plenty of working solutions (even if we don't know the best solution yet)
And then an autonomous forklift problem - there are a few companies already making them. And packaging + placement can simplify any issues if they exist. Maybe throw in a robotic arm in the back of the truck for good measure.
Autonomously refilling a tank of gas could be a fun problem to solve. But full service stations already exist. Those should be able to stand in until there is a better solution, such as Tesla's battery swap stations but for trucks.
Now, without a human driver the trucks can be working 24/7. No need for sleep. Which might be worth it even if a human accompanies the truck and just sleeps in a back section. Also who wants to pay a person to drive a truck, when the truck can drive itself for free?
an automated truck doesn't mean a driverless truck. it means the driver can be sleeping/tweeting/whatever during the boring hours between checkpoints/stops.
The levels overlap and vary by environment. Your truck can be level 5 on long stretch of highway, but then ring alarm bells and (if necessary, if the driver does not take over) slow down to a graceful stop on the shoulder before exiting the highway or maneuvering through a checkpoint or delivery.
Automating trucks could also be simpler over long, boring stretches of highway than navigating complex city streets, lights, and cross-traffic, especially via brute-force - simply mapping the entire highway in high detail.
Maybe someday. Automation could be a significant safety win for the highway given tired drivers today and could increase utilization as well. But I strongly suspect that there are too many reasons to keep a human present and in the loop (at least relatively near-time) to dispense with drivers entirely.
In addition, societal issues of unemployed drivers aside, are the economics of having human drivers really such an impediment to shipping goods economically today? At least in the US, rail is mostly used for long distance shipments which is effectively automated--to a first approximation.
Absolutely. A lot of people are fixated on the (IMO many decades out) "Johnny Cab" whereas there are potentially significant safety and driving comfort gains just from autonomy with, say, a 1 minute handoff time for limited access highway driving. And that seems much more achievable over the next decade or so.
(And even the sort of features you can buy today in luxury cars are pretty nice from what I see.)
>Automating trucks would be much more trans-formative than cars
This is already in-progress and isn't that transformative. To most people the delivery or long-distance truck drivers pretty much are invisible driver less machines.
That would be the first real step, right? That rather changes the scope of the big rig driving job.
I imagine automating limited access highway travel is much easier than automating the "final mile". I actually can see this sort of thing happening well before cars are automated to be honest.
In order to see most of the benefit from self driving trucks, you need a fully autonomous vehicle that can travel without a person paid to sit in it, right?
No, even packs of 3 trucks with 1 driver (on the interstates or other long distance routes) would be substantial savings (and a huge impact on employment).
Maybe this is related to the new laws in Michigan that allow self driving cars - http://fortune.com/2016/12/09/michigan-self-driving-cars/ . Now they have a potential market - doesn't matter how large, they count on it that other states/countries will follow.
It's probably too early to make that sort of assumption. That said, I can easily see the day coming when Alphabet decides that 100% autonomy or bust is looking like a very long horizon play without any clear path to productization on Google's part. Which could lead it to either shut things down, redirect them to a more modest play, or figure out some partnership/licensing agreement (though the latter certainly hasn't been in its DNA to date).
Think to have a car, that Google is tracking all time (just for your own security) haha
- What a "Orwellian" dream life we gonna have. Cannot wait google to go on medicine also. Then we all can use pills from google. But what will happend to your car, your medicine and your home, if you dare to be opinionated away from mainstream ? - what a nightmare!
This is written very confrontational, but worth a discussion, so I vouched for it:
Google has been known to lock users out of all their services if they are believed to have violated the ToS of even one service.
Having self-driving cars from Google integrated into the same ecosystem could have serious repercussions for users, so is this wise? Do we need legal changes, or should Google just change their model for locking out users?
Forcing companies to serve users isn't really an option either, but Taxis have to do that — how can we solve these issues in a realistic way?
>Having self-driving cars from Google integrated into the same ecosystem could have serious repercussions for users, so is this wise? Do we need legal changes, or should Google just change their model for locking out users?
Break them up, and force the patents to be openly available for a nominal fee (like the patent on the transistor once was). Refuse to license a self-driving car for street use if a centralized firm, rather than the car's owner, can decide how it's used.
It is then considered the "property" of the university, which is sold as IPR to the highest bidder to make money for the university. It is also summarily locked behind academic paywalls but there are some solutions to that (icanhazpdf , scihub).
We just fail on everything else in that sentence: make results free, and increase competition.
Things might change if those laws were revoked, turning public universities back to the public, and then funding them appropriately. 30% tax funding is not "funding"... Let the privates do what they want.
Is there a truly private quality university? When I say private, I mean one that is not considered a non-profit and thus pays no taxes on the piles of money it rakes in.
I have yet to hear Google has solved the main reason their Self-Driving Cars aren't practical: That every road they drive on must be precisely mapped ahead of time, at a much higher fidelity level than Google Maps/Street View is normally done nationwide.
Tesla and other self-driving developers are working without the luxury of a worldwide mapping database, and while not perfect, their products more or less could work on any road, because they're based on input from the sensors. But Google cars are dependent on input from Google servers, which means, where that data is lacking, the cars can't drive.
If they're looking to run some sort of business to start making money, I could maybe see like an Uber-like service across very small geographic areas they have mapped. But the narrow fence around the area you can practically drive with one makes it useless to sell as a consumer vehicle.
If I'm not mistaken, this is the presentation that discusses mapping the roads before autonomous travel. They compare the maps to what the car sees as it drives.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXylqtEQ0tk
But there are a number of reasons the need pre-mapping are not a huge issue. A) When autonomous cars start to be introduced people will still know how to drive, and can pilot the car through unmapped areas. By the time everyone has an autonomous car, and no one knows how to drive the world will be mapped. B) Google has already shown with Streetview that they can create detailed, up-to-date maps of most roads. C) This problem will likely be solved in time.
In fact, Google has the most expensive set of sensors on any self-driving prototype out there, AFAIK. They spend about $150k per car on sensors. But almost all the technology they've shown is about detecting people, dogs, other obstacles, on a largely unchanging setting.
As of late 2014[0], Google engineers admitted the mapping required for their cars to work wasn't feasible at a nationwide scale, and that if they didn't know to look for say, a stoplight, on their maps, they'd run right through it. (Looking for arbitrary red lights is probably a hard problem too.)
That's two years ago, yes, but they've announced nothing, technologically, in this field in this time (please comment if you have an additional source relating to the mapping of the roadway for a Google car), despite tons of PR about the number of miles they've driven or what cities they were driving in, with the same technology they've already had. Also bear in mind, almost all of Google's senior talent in self-driving cars has left Google X. So if they were having trouble with this problem in 2014, their newer, less experienced people now, probably are having more difficulty in 2016.
I highly doubt this is still the case considering auto manufacturers far behind the curve on this tech [1] are doing things like recognizing stop signs and reading speed limit signs using on-board cameras. Lane keeping also uses onboard sensors. As far as I know, the most important thing high-resolution maps are needed for is decision-making for things more than a few hundred feet ahead (ex. when to get in the right lane to exit or turn). It also helps with driving in adverse conditions where it's difficult to use normal sensors to see road markings. There are plenty of players working on this, though, so I don't think it's a huge obstacle. For example, [2].
My impression was the Google uses both approaches, so I don't think they are at any disadvantage here.
I also don't think precisely mapping each road is going to be a difficult problem if you enlist a huge network of cars contributing data. The problem is highly parallelizable.
It's difficult to map with a car that is reliant on the map to function. As far as I know, they need a human-driven map car ahead of time on any route their self-driving cars will run on. Tesla could maybe solve this problem just from using their sensors on cars that aren't self-driving, but again, their cars aren't reliant on an authoritative map to begin with.
This space has become super competitive and it will be fun to watch what happens. I still think it will be many years before we see a fully self-driving car (where no driver is needed at all). I think the best way to do it is to redesign cities to specifically accommodate self-driving cars. Honestly though that might be something other countries such as China and Singapore are much more reticent to pursue.