
Despite High Hopes, Self-Driving Cars Are ‘Way in the Future’ - seibelj
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/business/self-driving-autonomous-cars.html
======
hateful
I think it would happen this way: firstly you would automate things that go on
a track - like trains - which I think we already have. Then secondly you could
have certain lanes or roads that are designed for specific self-driving
vehicles. This could help buses and trucks (in certain areas) get around. Then
you would keep adding more of those, until many roads have those and very few
manual lanes. It wouldn't immediately work in a big established city, but some
existing highways or interstates can be fitted easily. Anywhere that has an
HOV/Carpool/EV lane can be refitted to be an automated driving lane. Think of
it like the Cash Only vs. Easy Pass toll lanes. At first there was 1-2 Easy
Pass lanes, then the cash lane was just 1-2 - now we automate them reading
license plates.

So to sum up, I think that the self driving will start in very specific areas,
and then those specific areas would be expanded until they are the only areas.
Especially if those roads contain automated taxi (Uber, Lyft, etc) which you
can call with your mobile device. The main reason a lot of people drive is
because public transportation in their area is junk and you have to go by it's
schedule and route. But having a point-point self-driving option is way more
convenient. It's like the subway, but it doesn't need tracks.

~~~
AtlasBarfed
Seriously, please automate highway driving first. You get all the benefits for
shipping and efficiency and logistics, so the money is there. The problem is
so much more simple, and there can be convergent infrastructure (embedded
sensors, mesh network updates, higher standards of road quality).

On long trips on highways it just kills me that I have to stare at the same
image for hours basically, and that a program couldn't do that more safely
than me.

And if this happens, the airlines and all their fees and cramping and security
and bad customer service can be brutally competed against for any trip under
800 miles, and probably longer.

Even a one hour 500 mile trip in a plane is really 3-4 hours, and you don't
get a car at your destination, while driving there is about 5-6 hours. If I
could surf that whole time or nap, then I'll drive.

If I can sleep overnight, then 8-10 hour drives become far preferable to
flying.

If I have friends along the way to visit, or interesting places to vacation
in, two or three day trips are more preferable than 1500-2000 mile flights,
especially if you have a family and it is way way way cheaper.

Airlines have been reorienting themselves to shorter hops over the last couple
decades. Self driving on highways will decimate that business, and only long
haul/overseas will remain.

~~~
runarberg
It seems there is a solution for your problem already: Busses.

Although not strictly automated, they are externalized. That is you are not
the one doing the driving, and therefor you are free to sleep, read, work,
etc, while you wait to get to your destination.

The beauty about busses is that they exists. There is no unsolved technology
problems with busses. And they can be (and most likely already are)
implemented without any or minimal additional infrastructure in your area.

If busses are overcrowded your local government can simply buy more, so they
scale really well. If they become congested, we also have a solution called
trains. Trains also solves your problems with driving and as a bonus get you
to your destination far quicker then driving.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Your comment is how things "should work", but really not how they do. At least
in the U.S.

The drive from Las Vegas to Los Angeles is about 3.5 hours. It's a 90 minute
flight.

If you try to do it by Bus it takes 12 (often for about 1/2 the price of the
plane ticket), and for some reason a train with NO STOPS took 16 hours. Which
was discontinued just a couple years ago, because no one was using it.

Maybe someday we will get a high speed Mag Lev train for this commute, because
mass transit has completely failed this commute.

~~~
runarberg
> Your comment is how things "should work", but really not how they do. At
> least in the U.S.

Since this is a comment on a thread about the possibility of building the
infrastructure required for highway lanes reserved for autonomous cars, i.e. a
thread about how things "could work" I see no problems with giving my self the
same leeway for the established technology as the parent does for any future
technology.

------
tabtab
We _don 't_ need all-or-nothing.

A good many people stay off the road anyhow during poor weather, and those who
do go out usually stay on familiar routes, such as to work or their favorite
grocery store.

If self-driving cars/buses stick to a subset of streets and don't go out in
big storms, they can still be widely useful. Set up (require) a universal
network/database of road conditions on the main streets that all self-driving
vehicles can tap into. If a problem arises, it then only directly affects the
_first_ bot-vehicle that encounters it instead of all of them that use the
road. It's internet-like packet switching.

Thus, bots may get "confused" easier than humans, but they can also take
advantage of automation to work around confusing areas. The upsides of
automation thus counter the down-sides.

The biggest cost of taxis and buses is the driver. If you remove that, then
"hitching a ride" is a lot more affordable to those who can't or don't drive.

~~~
seibelj
By admitting this fact you dramatically reduce the value of self driving cars
and thus the inflated valuations of companies trying to create them. It is an
uncomfortable truth.

~~~
pas
The safe self driving is possible, but currently it is awkward, results in
honking (because slow speed).

That is still valuable for the occasional take me home from the pub mode.

The rest of the time it should work with me and disengage prematurely if
there's something going on.

~~~
tabtab
Re: "results in honking (because slow speed)"

Too bad. Cowboy Driving is obsolete.

------
skywhopper
This has been obvious all along to anyone who has ever driven or used a
computer before and thought about the reality for more than a couple of
minutes. But the press and VCs bought into the hype from the likes of Uber who
needed to keep generating huge new investment to stay afloat and Tesla which
is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit with the Model
S.

The shocking examples of crazy unexpected behavior in the article like street
sweepers that do exactly what they are supposed to be doing and cyclists who
don’t follow traffic rules blow my mind. Next we’ll learn that some streets
have poorly painted lines or that road construction exists or that most human
drivers exceed posted speed limits or that there is weather other than sunny
and clear.

~~~
baggachipz
> Tesla which is run by a delusional snake oil salesman who had a single hit
> with the Model S

Being that dismissive and willfully ignorant discredits your entire argument.
A snake oil salesman produces nothing and hoodwinks people. I drive my "snake
oil" every day and not only is it the best car I've ever driven, it's the
coolest thing I've ever owned. I routinely watch his "snake oil" launch huge
payloads to orbit and land the booster(s) autonomously for cheap re-use. Hate
the guy personally if you want, but slander like yours is simply holding back
progress.

~~~
almost_usual
It's hard to judge Tesla at this point, most automotive companies really can't
be judged until their vehicles are on the road heavily for over a decade. I've
said this before but I can't imagine a Tesla on the road today being on the
road in thirty years. Hopefully I'm wrong. Otherwise we're going to have a lot
of 'good for the environment' vehicles in landfills like cellphones. While the
gas guzzling 30+ year old Toyota will be chugging along.

~~~
tigershark
There are Teslas with 900,000 km. It's a bit less than 3 times the distance
from the earth to the moon and a lot of 30 years old card have less km than
that.

~~~
jfim
The first model S has been released in 2012, about 370 weeks ago. 900 Mm would
be would be 2432 kilometres per week (1511 mi/wk), approximately 24 hours of
highway speed driving (100km/h) per week.

Do you have any additional information on this claimed 900000 km figure? Or
did you mean 90000 kilometres, which is just standard for such a car type.

~~~
DuskStar
Here: [0] It seems that 900Mm is the current record for a Model S.

0: [https://insideevs.com/news/359939/tesla-
model-s-900000-kilom...](https://insideevs.com/news/359939/tesla-
model-s-900000-kilometers-odometer/)

------
rwmj
We don't need self-driving cars that can go anywhere (ie. level 5) for them to
be widely useful. A car that only worked in bright sunshine on a preprogrammed
set of roads would be immediately useful to me.

~~~
tyingq
Semi trucks, solely on well done roads (Interstates in the US) seem more
likely to happen sooner. There's an obvious strategy for "ports", dealing with
exceptions, etc.

~~~
wbrinkley
Tesla frequently talks about platooning when touting their Semi. "Self-
driving" by almost blindly following a human-driven lead vehicle doesn't seem
that far off. But I'm not looking forward to the day when I see a "train" of
semi trucks speeding down the interstate only a foot or two apart from each
other!

~~~
AnimalMuppet
That could work, for the platoon, while on the interstate.

It might not work for other vehicles on the interstate, though. If there's not
room to pull in between them, then you have to pass _all_ of them at one time.
If you're a semi that wants to drive 1 or 2 MPH faster than them, that's going
to be a very long, slow, pass. It will be even worse if it's in hilly country,
where the semi attempting to pass may have higher speed on flat ground, but
less power for climbing. That could block both lanes for a _really_ long time.
Human drivers in cars (some of whom want to drive faster than semis, and have
more horsepower per ton at their disposal) will be very annoyed.

Then you get one "train" trying to pass another, and things get even worse.

Then the train gets off the interstate. They hit a traffic light. Less than
all of the train makes it through the light in one cycle. Now what?

~~~
DataGata
We could ban semis passing at all, that'd be fine with me.

------
gwbas1c
The following will happen before self-driving cars:

\- Robotic trash cans that perfectly sort recyclables and compostables without
any contamination

\- Drones that fly around and kill invasive plants

\- Landscapers that show up with robotic lawnmowers

\- A dishwasher that can load and unload itself automatically

\- My Tesla can keep in its lane when it passes an on ramp

(ect)

The problem, IMO, with self-driving cars is that there are other AI problems
that are easier to solve. Until we start seeing more "consumer AI" in lower-
risk products, self-driving cars will always be something coming in the
future.

~~~
LeanderK
> \- Robotic trash cans that perfectly sort recyclables and compostables
> without any contamination

Sorting trash is (at least to me) a surprisingly complicated problem. The
frauenhofer here in karlsruhe is working on bulk sorting using computer vision
with various sensors (sorting black plastic:
[https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-
news/2016/June/s...](https://www.fraunhofer.de/en/press/research-
news/2016/June/sorting-black-plastics-according-to-type.html) and sorting bulk
goods:
[https://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/servlet/is/15954/](https://www.iosb.fraunhofer.de/servlet/is/15954/))

If automated, it probably makes sense to not sort the stuff in your home, but
instead by your trash-collector companies.

~~~
Ididntdothis
I wish there was much more research in that area. It’s a very hard problem and
the benefit would be enormous. All the brain power that goes into ever better
surveillance and selling ads would be much better used there.

------
sam_goody
It is phenomenally simpler to have autonomous driving in an area where the
only things on the road are autonomous and there is a standard for interacting
cross manufacturer.

Many new cars, and in some countries all new cars (by law), have enough
sensors to be made self driving.

Standards are already being worked on. A basic level of autonomy - good enough
for an area without human drivers - is being worked on by every car
manufacturer. At some point, the vast majority of cars on the road (at least
in cities where leasing and turnover s highe) will have the capability to be
autonomous.

At that point I expect the car manufacturers to work with the larger cities to
make central city areas autonomous only. Software updates will be pushed to
all those existing cars, and overnight there will be self-driving on a level
which is sustainable.

Once that happens, it will push people to upgrade to newer cars, expanding the
number of autonomous-capable cars, and by extension allowing for the expansion
of autonomous only areas.

As autonomous becomes more standard and accepted in the public conscious,
solutions that will look obvious in hindsight will deal with many areas that
we consider fringe now.

I read that Fedex originally claimed there would be areas they would never
service. Even if they were right, it is less of a deal than they thought it
would be. Same thing will happen with autonomous cars.

~~~
gregkerzhner
I can see self driving cars and trucks on long haul freeways, but to me it
seems like self driving in city centers is going to be the hardest, not first
problem that is solved. Even if other drivers are taken out of the equation,
there are still so many variables in a city to account for. Pedestrians,
bicyclists, Lime scooters (I guess these will be self driving too?), dogs,
construction, etc...

The only way I see self driving cars dealing with all this in the near future
is if the roads were totally fenced off from everything else so that only self
driving cars were on them more like trains. However, this seems like such a
big infrastructure investment (and just a big change overall) that I just
don't see it happening within the next few years.

Our cities (at least in America) can't even put in bike lanes, or provide
reliable trains, which is a 200 year old technology, so how are we to expect
them to completely overhaul our infrastructure to help a technology that
barely even exists?

------
mojuba
> ... "autonomous vehicles" will be a reality for "ordinary people" in less
> than five years, Google co-founder Sergey Brin said Tuesday.

That's from 2012 [1]

[1] [https://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/self-
driving-c...](https://www.computerworld.com/article/2491635/self-driving-cars-
a-reality-for--ordinary-people--within-5-years--says-google-s-sergey-b.html)

~~~
bryanlarsen
Waymo had autonomous vehicles in Arizona giving selected members of the public
rides without safety drivers in November 2017. They since stopped.

So if you really stretch you can call that an accurate prediction.

------
casefields
Nothing makes a huge group of us cringe more, than people saying it's just
around the corner. The worst part is it also comes from people who should know
better.

>Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can
drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take
control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never
exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that
“autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving
cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at
certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on
autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change.

[https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-
kra...](https://www.cnet.com/news/alphabet-google-waymo-ceo-john-krafcik-
autonomous-cars-wont-ever-be-able-to-drive-in-all-conditions/)

[https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-
driverless-...](https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-
cars-is-dying/)

~~~
suprfnk
If a human can do it, I see no reason why an autonomous system can't,
eventually, do it. It might take a very long time, but "never" seems short-
sighted.

~~~
michaelt
Imagine you're driving down a street when a kid playing on the sidewalk runs
behind a truck and disappears from your view.

If the kid appears in the road from behind the truck, the computer can handle
slamming on the brakes very easily - probably faster than a human can -
without understanding the kid any better than a group of LIDAR points or a
rectangle of pixels labelled 'obstacle' by a neural network.

But if you want to brake _before_ the kid appears from behind the truck? For
that, a fully attentive human driver will be making a bunch of estimates about
what the kid is doing, whether they seemed to have noticed the car, how old
they were, and so on. In other words, applying a theory of mind.

Needless to say, if the latter is a must-have feature, that's a pretty hairy
problem.

Of course, it's possible the decrease in deaths from being fast on the brakes
in simple situations will outweigh the increase in deaths from lacking a
theory of mind in complex situations. If that's the case, the self-driving car
programmer's job would be a good deal simpler!

~~~
joefourier
There's no need for a theory of mind - the self driving car can identify the
kid as a pedestrian, recognize that it started moving in a possible collision
course, then disappeared, thus prompting either slowing down to a non-fatal
speed until the truck has been passed.

Children playing in the street are a common occurrence in residential areas, I
see no reason why you would not develop a set of rules and heuristics to
handle them. Identifying a pedestrian as child, and knowing whether it is
running or playing, is well within the capabilities of modern computer vision.

~~~
AnimalMuppet
It's worse than that. That small thing heading toward the road... was that a
leaf blown by the wind, or was it a ball? If it's a ball, _you 'd better be
already braking_, because a kid is likely coming right behind it, and paying
attention to the ball rather than the road. If it's a leaf, though... you
don't want to hit the brakes for every blowing leaf.

~~~
mamon
even worse: sometimes kids actually do chase leaves on the wind, or
butterflies.

------
HALtheWise
When read literally, there is no way that any system ever, human or automatic,
will be able to drive on "any road" with "perfect safety". Crazy freak
accidents happen, and human drivers regularly aren't able to handle them. On
top of that, most people just can't safely drive in thick fog, icy conditions,
or pouring rain. No amount of intelligence will allow a car to drive through a
sufficiently flooded street.

Just like with human cars, the important metric is just whether they can drive
acceptably safely in the environments that they attempt to go. There's enough
low-hanging fruit from faster reaction times and 360 sensing to make that
feasible without needing to solve the AI-complete problem. Nobody's asking
them to be able to drive at 70 MPH through a fog bank in Alaska with ice on
the road, even if that is technically part of the requirements for Level 5
that even humans can't obtain.

~~~
AtlasBarfed
If the standard of self-driving becomes something akin to how airplanes fly,
then weather will be a delay, bypass, or do not fly precondition to the
execution of the flight plan.

All this stuff about "it's right around the road" vs "it'll never happen" is
all unspoken assumptions around what it means to take a "safe" "trip" "in a
car" "driven" "autonomously".

Safe? Compared to humans that are alert, humans with smartphones, drunk
drivers? Airplanes?

Trip? Distance? Rural vs Urban? Highway? Speed?

"in a car"? Smart fortwo? Motorcycle? RV? Sedan? SUV?

"driven"? All by software all the time and no windshield? implicit backup if
uncertainties are too great and can be manually overridden?

I think what needs to happen is that you need programs tailored to specific
routes/roads. As you drive any distance, you download/cache the programs for
the routes and execute them.

You aren't going to be carrying around a "general driving AI", except as
emergency backup to specific route downloads.

Humans work this exact way. You have the idiot tourist drivers versus people
that commute on a route. Commuters know how different parts of the road's
concrete sound differently, how fast they can take curves if they had to,
which lane to be in to anticipate merge backups.

Those commuters know how to drive those routes in winter or summer as well,
deer season or not, rain or shine. So that implies conditions-specific
programs as well.

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _I think what needs to happen is that you need programs tailored to specific
> routes /roads. As you drive any distance, you download/cache the programs
> for the routes and execute them._

Wow. That's so obvious in retrospect. I wonder why I haven't considered it
before, nor why I haven't read of it before either.

I imagine having stationary "traffic controllers", semi- or completely
automated, that keep real-time information about conditions on the segments of
the roads they monitor, and which continuously assign "travel plans" to cars.
An autonomous car wouldn't have to recognize weather conditions or static
obstacles in fraction of a second, because there would be a static sensor
network and processing centres responsible for this. All a car would have to
do is follow assigned route at assigned speeds, and monitor its environment
for dynamic obstacles.

This makes more sense than trying to pack all the intelligence into the car,
and doubly more sense than having the car hooked up to the cloud.
Unfortunately, I feel companies of today may find it difficult to coordinate
on designing such a system.

~~~
rsync
"Wow. That's so obvious in retrospect. I wonder why I haven't considered it
before, nor why I haven't read of it before either."

Get ready to have your mind blown because the next leap in this line of logic
is to physically fix "tracks" to the road and run the cars on these "rails" \-
possibly on a schedule.

It's a future star-trek world we in the United States can only dream of ...

~~~
Raidion
Trains work incredibly well, but they don't solve the last mile problem. Hi-
rail trucks are pretty common in railway maintenance. There is probably some
sort of steam-punk past that could have happened where we're all driving hi-
rail cars on almost all highways, and just using cars for the few last mile
trips.

------
malvosenior
> _It’s much more difficult to prepare self-driving cars for unusual
> circumstances — pedestrians crossing the road when cars have the green
> light, cars making illegal turns. Researchers call these “corner cases,”
> although in city traffic they occur often._

These are difficult to deal with as human drivers too. This article is pretty
light on details and basically pins the lack of progress on a couple of Tesla
crashes. The thing is, regular people crash cars every day. I'd much rather
share the road with self-driving cars than cars driven by humans. Especially
with the advent of smart phones, not a day goes by that I don't see multiple
people heads down messing with Instagram _while driving_.

This technology is a lot closer to reality than the article makes it seems I
think.

------
beat
It doesn't have to work perfectly - it just has to work better than humans.

Our sensors ain't real great in snow and rain, either.

~~~
ben_w
It needs slightly more than that: when it fails, it needs to be able to
demonstrate that no human would’ve succeeded in its place.

This isn’t a moral or a technical issue, just public relations. If a system
reduces road deaths from ~30,000 per year to 365 per year, but one of those
deaths was it mistaking a grey skirt for an open road [1], there will still be
calls for its use to be outlawed — basically what’s happening now with
antivaxxers, and they’re hard enough to deal with when all the evidence is
against them.

[1] just to give a concrete example

~~~
AtlasBarfed
By "fail" you mean crash, or it detects that it's uncertainty gets too large
and it pulls over safely, forcing you to wait or take over yourself?

Insurance companies will force the adoption once they become proven safe. The
added insurance costs for luddites will price them out of the market.

~~~
Majromax
> The added insurance costs for luddites will price them out of the market.

What added insurance costs? It's not like adding self-driving cars to the road
will make manual driving _more_ dangerous.

No safety technology could make insuring self-driving cars any cheaper than
free. Would free car insurance act as enough inducement to drive the fearful
away from their steering wheels?

~~~
bluGill
When people realize the self driving cars are better the damage claims from
human accidents can go up. Right now if you kill a kid with your car you get 7
months in jail and your insurance company pays a $150,000 (these are real
numbers from a 3 year old that I was really close to). If self driving cars
are really that much better courts will start handing out much larger
judgments.

------
geogra4
I would be immensely happy even if it was just on interstates/major highways
in clear weather. That's at least 80% of the worst and most mind-numbing
driving right there. The rest I don't have a problem doing myself.

------
noego
To be honest, 80% of what I want is a self-driving car that can drive itself
on the highways during regular weather conditions. Getting it on and off the
highway, I don't mind doing that manually. I would love to be able to read or
work during the hour that I spend on the highway everyday. I would love to
take a overnight road trip where I can go to sleep in SF and wake up the next
morning in LA. I'm aware that accidents/bugs will happen, and as long as the
car's safety record is better than that of humans, that's fine with me. I've
never spent more than $20k on a car before, but for a car that can drive
itself on the highways, I'd pay a whole lot more.

------
ChuckNorris89
Self-driving tech muggle here.

Could someone explain to me why any average Joe with minimal intellect can
drive a car using only a pair of eyes but it's difficult to build a fully
self-driving car even with 8+ cameras, GPS, LIDAR and other sensors us humans
don't have?

~~~
snarf21
A lot of those sensors and cameras are less accurate during the night or in
weather or with sun glare.

I think one of the biggest issues is that people will not accept self-driving
cars that are as safe as human drivers. They want perfect driving. If someone
hits a pedestrian that jumps out from between two cars unexpectedly, it might
get written off as an accident and the insurance company may not even have to
pay if it was clearly the pedestrians fault. If it was a "robot" car that hits
someone, there is going to be a suit for $500M because "Google killed my
son!!!!!!". This also leads to people trying to get non-lethally hit by robot
cars just to get money. The "robot" car has a big trolley problem that isn't
easily solvable.

~~~
leetcrew
> The "robot" car has a big trolley problem that isn't easily solvable.

I really think this is overblown. it's not hard to think of a solution to
these issues because we already have it in traffic laws for humans. there are
rules for accessing the right of way. if you follow the rules and make a good
faith effort to account for people who don't, it is pretty hard to be found at
fault for an accident, or even "cause" one to begin with. rear ending someone
starts with too close of a following distance (or too high a speed) for the
conditions. tbones and head on collisions can only happen when one or more
people are moving without the right of way. pedestrian strikes on the street
can only happen when the pedestrian or the driver is not observing the other's
legal right of way.

sideswipes are kinda ambiguous. it's possible for two vehicles to check that
there is space in the middle lane simultaneously, then merge into each other.
I don't think it's legally required, but I never merge into the middle lane
when there is a car to the far left/right.

------
luckydata
Having seen the evolution of AI in fits and starts from the early days to now
I don't understand why the skeptical stance is still default. We have made
enormous progress in the last five years and I don't see why it's not possible
to get to human-like performance in the next decade. I argue it would be
surprising if we don't get there relatively soon.

~~~
jopsen
Yes, especially with massive competing investments in the subject.

------
lanrh1836
Curious how a self driving car would’ve responded in the NYC blackout, and to
Good Samaritans directing traffic at various intersections

------
Animats
The state of the art is discouraging for the money and years poured into it.

Recognizing solid obstacles is still unreliable. On the one side, there's
Tesla running into stationary objects multiple times, and Uber running down a
pedestrian. On the other side, there's a false alarm rate which causes sudden
stops.

Low-speed self-driving vehicles ought to work reliably by now, but don't.
Google's cute little bubble car, top speed 25MPH, was discontinued. Voyage has
some cars in a retirement community. Some, as in 3. With safety drivers.[1]
Local Motors has been issuing press releases for years, but not much is on the
road. There are some self-driving shuttle buses, but they all have "safety
drivers". EasyMile has real autonomous shuttle buses, but they had to drop the
speed to about 10 MPH.

Worse, all these systems have a huge engineer to passenger ratio. Nothing is
close to being financially realistic. That's not a permanent problem; in the
early days of the Internet, it was said that the ratio of PhDs to packets was
too high. But this is a long way from profitability.

It shouldn't be this bad.

[1] [https://www.villages-news.com/2019/01/31/villager-treated-
to...](https://www.villages-news.com/2019/01/31/villager-treated-to-ride-in-
autonomous-vehicle/)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
The Uber did recognise Elaine Herzberg as a pedestrian in the last 2 seconds
before hitting her, after failing to do so for the 4 previous seconds [1]. It
could have activated its breaks and she may have had a chance to survive
(though probably not unscathed).

However, the car's auto-breaking decision had been disabled because it was
considered too conservative. So the only agent who could have reacted in time
was the woman driving the car, who, as we know, was on her phone.

Much as I find the hype around self-driving cars brain-dead, in this case, the
car's AI was not at fault. Even if it could have made the decision to stop in
time, the agency to act upon this decision was removed from it.

_____________

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Cause...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg#Cause_investigation)

~~~
bart_spoon
> Much as I find the hype around self-driving cars brain-dead, in this case,
> the car's AI was not at fault. Even if it could have made the decision to
> stop in time, the agency to act upon this decision was removed from it.

The agency to react was removed because its reactions are crap. If the AI is
braking due to false positives all the time, and the the only way to fix it is
to disable its ability to react, then I would say that indeed, it is the car’s
AI at fault, albeit indirectly.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Like I say, _in this case_ the car's AI was not at fault.

I don't know how good or bad is Uber's car AI. If by "crap" you mean that
image recognition in general is brittle when exposed to real world conditions,
as opposed to the controlled experimental conditions in published results,
then I agree.

------
DenisM
I can't help but notice that the hyper-enthusiastic media talk about self
driving cars died down right around the time of Uber and Lyft IPOs.

Like, if you want to sell something, you want to create a sense of urgency,
right? "If you don't invest into U/L you're missing out on the self-driving
revolution, and it's going to be huge! Just look at all the media going
crazy!".

~~~
mhermher
And any time Tesla is about to do a cap raise.

------
melling
They mean in America, right?

Because I’m sure China will simply build dedicated roads to kickstart the
process.

Dedicated self-driving roads for trucks to move products would likely be
profitable.

There’s no need to solve the entire problem for self-driving to be worthwhile.

~~~
petschge
These are called railways and every civilized country already has them.

~~~
NateEag
I believe you misspelled "small."

The US does actually have railroads, but it's so huge that it's utterly
unreasonable to build enough railways to be a major contender for general
transit.

At least, that's my perspective as a US citizen who commutes by train daily.

~~~
petschge
I US actually has ok railways ... for fright. Commuter trains are admittedly
underdeveloped, even in regions that have similar size and population density
to European countries.

------
pretendscholar
Strong but brittle is how you could describe most automated systems. They are
superhuman in the right context but fail comically if you alter the context
just slightly out of what the system can handle. I think the best way forward
is to set up infrastructure on roads to help the partially autonomous systems.
Its important to not let great get in the way of good.

------
pif
Every time I read about autonomous cars, I wonder if these points have ever
been discussed:

\- Yielding to an emergency vehicle with sirens on.

\- Moving backwards to a safe and large enough spot when the route is too
narrow to fit self-driving car and oncoming huge lorry (and there is no line
marking the limit between road and ravine).

\- Upon instructions from authority, recognizing that the highway is closed
due to an accident and, no matter what the driving code says, you actually
have to make a U-turn on the highway and follow the crowd. Alternatively, just
take that route (yes, the one with the large no-entry sign at the beginning)
or that narrow path in the wood (yes, it exists, even if Google Maps isn't
aware of it). At the bare minimum, park yourself off the road and let the
others move on.

\- Verifying whether a queue is forming behind you. Listening to the honkers,
they may be right. When you are an obstacle to the most part of traffic,
moving to the side and letting others pass from time to time is sincerely
appreciated.

~~~
AtlasBarfed
\- a broadcast radio signal and microphones can detect sirens. That seems
easy.

\- that's just flow analysis and basic perceptions of the environment. At a
minimum, just tell the driver to take over.

\- highways will benefit from convergent infrastructure, and alerts like this
will be part and parcel of highway driving automation. Flying does this
already, basically.

\- sensors have 360 degree vision, and mesh networking between cars would help
solve this, and automatically call towing/traffic control emergency vehicles
to help with disabled cars

I don't worry about any of those situations, those can be readily incorporated
into certification and testing of the algorithms/systems.

~~~
pif
> a broadcast radio signal...

> ...just tell the driver...

> ...alerts like this will be part and parcel of highway driving automation...

> ...mesh networking between cars...

You are not talking about _autonomous_ cars.

------
gfodor
I can't read the article, so only going off the headline, but how does the
conjecture that self driving cars are far off jive with the fact that my
understanding is they are already deployed in production in Phoenix, AZ? And
are being used regularly in the bay area in testing?

Obviously it's incremental. I fully expect in the next 24 months I will be
able to call an autonomous car via an app on my phone in the bay area under
certain known conditions, like good weather and common, low-risk routes. Or,
specifically, that I'll be able to direct my model 3 to drive me to the San
Jose airport (a 10 minute drive) without the need for me to actually take any
manual interventions along the way. (Though I will still be asked, by Tesla,
to be ready to take control.) If true, that's progress, and I expect the
progress to continue until eventually this technology is widespread and covers
the vast majority of routes and conditions.

------
Edmond
Detractors of self-driving cars are always eager to lap up a story like this
as proof that it will never happen or it would take decades...."Years" doesn't
mean decades, even 10 yrs is a relative short time, i owned my last care for
about 13 yrs.

Some proponents of self driving cars might have gotten too ahead of the hype
train but nevertheless, self-driving is here and soon would be common place.

It would obviously take some time to turn over the current inventory of non-
self-driving cars but even that would happen faster than most people
anticipate. Americans already replace their cars quite often and it is hard to
think of a more compelling nudge to replace your car than the prospect of not
having to actively drive it.

As for the outstanding technical challenges, I am often baffled when people
point to that as a reason for skepticism...it is the whole point of the
endeavor, to solve those problems.

~~~
aeturnum
The question of "how much and how fast" matters more than you give it credit
for, I think.

Take drones - drones are "here" in some sense. You can buy one, they work. But
there's a big question about how common drones will be and what they will be
used for. How much we care about drone regulations, safety, tracking, etc,
will depend a lot on how often we see them. Right now they're rare-ish, but if
delivery-by-drone works they could be very common.

The same is true of self driving cars. Of course we will have some number of
self driving cars and self-driving features will probably exist on most new
cars eventually. But how many and how much they can do matters a lot! I think
people point out existing problems to suggest that the magnitude and
universality of the technology is still unknown and impactful.

------
darepublic
Instead of individual cars we need a highly dense network of rail cars that
can merge and split and allow u to travel from any one block in the city to
another. Should be able to ship moving trucks via this system where it would
deliver them to the near address from where an operator autonomous or
otherwise takes over

~~~
opportune
I fully agree. If everyone knows that self-driving cars are the future, why
would we not just retrofit our roads to use some fixed transportation scheme
like trams or street cars? Self-driving cars seem extremely wasteful, like
some bad idea of public transit

------
learc83
There's a professor at Oklahoma State with a popular Youtube channel who has a
proposal to create an Autonomous Truck Corridor as a way to fix a lot of our
infrastructure problems. His proposal works with the autonomous driving
technology available today--not level 5 autonomous driving that may be
available sometime in the future.

[http://www.acpa.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/OKStateUniv-A...](http://www.acpa.org/wp-
content/uploads/2019/04/OKStateUniv-ATC-Concept.pdf)

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ev6hIQYKYY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ev6hIQYKYY)

------
growlist
I'd be quite happy if they could just drive up and down the motorway
themselves in reasonable conditions. Seems like we're pretty close to that
already, and that hasn't even required wiring them all up to talk to each
other.

------
jacquesm
I believe that self driving cars are here whenever they can take a standard
driving test in whatever conditions we feel are normal for the legislative
area they are employed in.

Until then any kind of self driving should be given the same penalties that we
would impose on a party operating a vehicle without the appropriate license.
This is such an obvious thing to me I really wonder why it has not been
implemented.

After all, if 'AI' is allowed to drive why aren't kids aged 12 allowed to
drive, they are obviously more intelligent. It's because they have not passed
a driving test and won't be eligible until they are of the right age.

------
Causality1
After Musk's announcement that Tesla will stop selling cars to consumers after
cracking Level 5 autonomy, I've stopped even looking forward to it because
he's right. Why would a manufacturer sell a self-driving car for $50000 when
they can make $300000 off of it as a taxi over its lifetime? Why would anyone
make a non self driving car when for a couple thousand dollars in parts they
can make money off of it for a decade?

Level 5 self-driving is the death of private car ownership. That may sound
great to people living in a city but for those of us to whom visiting family
means dirt roads it's stomach-churning.

------
JustSomeNobody
I don't understand why independent full automated self-driving is the goal.
This just leads to competing "standards" so to speak. I think auto
manufacturers should be working with governments to create smarter roadways
and define an automated driving standard. You'd have smarter cars that would
be able to link up in trains on the roadways. They'd be more efficient
aerodynamically. It would be safer. You'd have "road ranger" style e-vehicles
that could link up and charge you without ever stopping. And you could help
fund it all using tax payer money.

------
sunstone
The ugly part of this is that if drivers get used to self driving in
reasonable weather then, in the one percent of the time (or less) when
conditions get really horrible, their driving skills won't be up to the
challenge.

However as self driving becomes common investment will be made to make roads
easier for self driving technology and extend the technologies usefulness.

Even now in snow storms when temperatures are just below freezing human
drivers have a hard time coping. If self driving just has to do better than
that. It doesn't have to be perfect.

------
mlguy456
I wonder if this is partially because the people working on AI/ML
intentionally don't put enough efforts into this. I'm one of those people and
while I'm to increase accuracy of an existing ML model by 0.3% and collect a
fat paycheck, I'd never release any really novel ideas if I happen to come up
with some. The reason is our society isn't ready for AI: it's bent by greed
and doesn't even recognize this as a problem. Bezos makes billions out of
literally slave labor and is cool with that. The US ships containers with
firearms to middle East and Africa for profit. The first world people are ok
with slave labor in Africa and China as long as it makes the next iPhone
cheaper. China and UK are proud of making fast progress in making the
survelliance state happen. Australian billionaires open new coal mines and
don't care about the rest of the world as long as they have clean air where
they live. American healthcare mafia extorts outrageous prices for basic meds
and services and would rather let millions die than cut it's profits. What can
AI give to this world? Superpowers for the tiny ruling elite? Private armies
that can't possibly be challenged by common people. I don't want to live in
that world.

------
maskedinvader
Id take this article with a large pinch of salt, considering their previous
predictions about technology.

case in point below:

"Hence, if it requires, say, a thousand years to fit for easy flight a bird
which started with rudimentary wings, or ten thousand for one which started
with no wings at all and had to sprout them ab initio, it might be assumed
that the flying machine which will really fly might be evolved by the combined
and continuous efforts of mathematicians and mechanicians in from one million
to ten million years--provided, of course, we can meanwhile eliminate such
little drawbacks and embarrassments as the existing relation between weight
and strength in inorganic materials. "[Emphasis added.] The New York Times,
Oct 9, 1903, p. 6.

see -> [https://11points.com/11-ridiculously-terrible-predictions-
ma...](https://11points.com/11-ridiculously-terrible-predictions-made-new-
york-times/)

~~~
brk
Your best case example is a statement made over a century ago?

~~~
maskedinvader
well if you see the link I posted, there are 11 examples from various points
in the past. I was just making the point that their track record with
technology predictions isn't stellar.

------
acollins1331
On highway is where it's at. City corner cases are going to be Impossible for
a long time, but caravans of self driving trucks could easily happen in the
next couple years. It already happens with a person in the front vehicle that
is followed closesly in a train by robotic vehicles.

~~~
nradov
GM is already selling "Super Cruise" vehicles with level 4 autonomous
capability on a limited set of controlled access highways.

[https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-
cadillac/innovation/super-...](https://www.cadillac.com/world-of-
cadillac/innovation/super-cruise)

~~~
mc_blue
Super Cruise is considered level 2, not level 4.

------
celeritascelery
I honestly think that even when we do get full self driving cars, you won’t be
able to own one. They will be rideshare only. The reality is that autonomous
vehicles are so complex that you need advanced mapping of very well known
conditions to make this feasible. Companies will make these sort of maps for
major cities where they run their ride service but anywhere else cars will
just not be advanced enough to handle unexpected conditions. Self driving cars
will only ever work under controlled circumstances such as well known cities
and suburbs.

~~~
rossdavidh
It is also the case that the downtown area of cities is often the place where
parking your own car is the most problematic, so being able to use a self-
driving rideshare would be really helpful for that reason also.

------
winona
I'm going to be the contrarian here and say that they quoted people and events
from some of the laggards or less advanced companies (like Uber's crash, which
was totally preventable). I see much more optimism from the leaders in the
space, although it's not like they are planning 100% self-driving taxis next
year.

Also, keep in mind that the fair comparison is whether the cars outperform the
average rate of human drivers. It doesn't have to be perfect.

------
getalyft
How about just programming human driven cars to obey speed limits (downrated
in bad weather or visibility conditions). Many accidents are caused by people
driving at an unsafe speed (who has not gone into a turn a little bit too
fast). No AI needed, just a speed limit overlay onto existing GPS maps, plus a
bit of logic to reduce speeds in certain conditions (night, low visibility,
etc).

~~~
asark
Unexpected (by the driver) braking, possibly while making a turn, or controls
failing to respond (the accelerator, say) seems more dangerous than the status
quo.

Plus you'd have to roll it out everywhere at once, or my merge onto a 60mph
limit highway where flow-of-traffic is closer to 75, in my software-crippled
car that thinks I shouldn't exceed or maybe even match the speed limit in the
on-ramp, is gonna be _way_ more dangerous than having no such feature.

Then there's GPS often not quite knowing where you are most of the time (the
route-finding apps just guess a lot—watch what happens when you make a wrong
turn and it takes a few seconds to correct, because it's just assuming the
diff between where you are and the road you're supposed to be on is an error,
because there often _are_ errors that large)

------
jonplackett
The problem is that the mistakes even a much-better-statistically-than-human
driverless car will make are going to be different types of mistakes than a
human would make.

A driverless car that kills half as many people per mile as normal driver BUT
the ones it does kill are in ways that people feel sure that a human driver
would not have been killed then it’ll still be a problem.

------
hamilyon2
We need to regulate corner cases just like we did with trains, regular cars,
medicine, e.t.c

Someone supposed dedicated lanes - that is goog thinking, dedicated
intersections is the next step. No pedestrians allowed, but no lights
whatsoever. Then, a section of city where regular cars cannot drive, and
pedestrian areas are automaticaly driven at reasonably low speeds.

------
d--b
Just to play the devil's advocate: the level at which autonomous vehicles
operate today was unthinkable in 2000. Literally unthinkable.

The progress in AI has been a massive step forward in a very short amount of
time.

We may be years away, but the truth is we are one or two "massive
breakthrough" away. These could happen tomorrow, or in 50 years, or never at
all.

~~~
qznc
"Literally unthinkable" is too much. Here is a self-driving van back in 1993:
[https://youtu.be/JTnBiTIvGqY](https://youtu.be/JTnBiTIvGqY)

Sure, it is an empty highway. I guess that is what you mean by "the level at
which autonomous vehicles operate today". Still, people surely were thinking
about Waymo like performance.

------
almost_usual
Serious question, do you think Self-Driving vehicles would be as heavily
invested in if cellphones did not exist?

------
accnumnplus1
So, the singularity isn't imminent?

~~~
mirceal
if and when are 2 separate questions. i’m giving the singularity anywhere
between 500-2000 years to happen if we manage to stay alive as a species

------
kerng
Level 5 AV will never exist, because there isn't even a Level 5 human.

How about we just see if an AV can pass a license test to operate in a
jurisdiction? They probably can already- but we do have higher expectations on
AV then we have with humans I think. Which is good.

------
rmolin88
>Waymo’s CEO, John Krafcik, has admitted that a self-driving car that can
drive in any condition, on any road, without ever needing a human to take
control—usually called a “level five” autonomous vehicle—will basically never
exist. At the Wall Street Journal’s D.Live conference, Krafcik said that
“autonomy will always have constraints.” It will take decades for self-driving
cars to become common on roads. Even then, they will not be able to drive at
certain times of the year or in all weather conditions. In short, sensors on
autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain—and that may never change.

This reminds me of the time Bill Gates allegedly said: "640K ought to be
enough for anybody", taking about RAM memory.

Why would you say it will never happen? That is just silly. It may be decades
out, today sensors may have a long way to go. But it's just silly to say it
will NEVER happen.

Never say never!

~~~
landryraccoon
> In short, sensors on autonomous vehicles don’t work well in snow or rain

This is a curious line of reasoning for me. Why are humans allowed to drive in
snow or rain though? Your sensors work considerably worse in snow or rain, and
there is abundant evidence over the entire history of cars that humans butcher
each other with motor vehicles in snow or rain constantly.

The bar is simply that an autonomous car has to be significantly less likely
to cause an injury in snow or rain than a human is.

~~~
shareIdeas
5G will give vehicle position better than GPS, will they use this instead of
sensors for Lane detection?

~~~
untog
Lane detection isn't really the big problem here, though. It's whether there
is an obstacle on the road in front of you.

------
tarwater11
It seems like the easy answer is to kick human drivers off the road, right?
That will eliminate a great deal of the unpredictability. Start with a small
section of a city, and if the results are good, people will want to expand it.

~~~
exhilaration
Also bicyclists, and also human pedestrians -- they decide to cross roads at
the craziest times. A city without humans is what we need.

~~~
mirceal
this sounds exactly what machines silently taking over would say

------
bryanlarsen
The really interesting thing (to me) is that Waymo operated self-driving cars
on public streets in Arizona without safety drivers during November 2017 but
stopped within a month. (google waymo "november 7 2017") Why did they stop?
I'm sure it was partially because they realized there were some situations it
wasn't handling properly, but my conjecture is mostly that expectations have
changed.

I bet that Waymo cars are massively safer than human drivers in many
situations, and that they're not as safe in a few others, and that there are a
bunch of situations they don't handle well and "freeze up" or otherwise behave
unpredictably. Waymo has probably realized that the bar isn't "as good as a
human" but "significantly better than humans".

------
beefield
Just give me platooning on highways and approximately 95% of my personal use
cases for self driving cars are satisfactorily fulfilled. And the problem is
vastly simpler to solve.

------
standyro
the only thing I see in this thread are hundreds and hundreds of people who
have never had the opportunity to drive a car with Tesla Autopilot or Comma.ai
EON (this article included)

Those two products are literally the best purchase I've made in years, and
have enabled hours of mental energy in my life freed up from the confines of
soul crushing traffic in major American cities.

remember that slashdot comment about iPods being lame?

people will look at articles like this, and threads like this in the same way
in 5 years...

~~~
skizm
Can Tesla's autopilot really navigate "major American city" areas with no
human interaction? I thought it was just a slightly smarter cruise control for
highways only and the driver still needs to be somewhat alert?

------
georgecmu
But the billions of dollars in investment are here and now.

------
jsnider3
Given that people feel confident falling asleep in their Teslas while it
drives, I think the writer should just lower their standards.

------
serioussecurity
Despite high hopes, incompetent new comers discover they can't compete in new
industry...

------
celeritascelery
I have been saying this for years. Even if self driving cars handle 99% of
situations correctly, they don’t become feasible until they can do that last
1%, which is 100x more difficult then previous 99. The reality is, if the car
drives itself, people will be doing other things in the car and will be unable
to respond to emergencies.

~~~
bryanlarsen
If they get in a situation they cannot handle, the car can stop and pull over
to the side of the road before asking the human to take over. And it can
refuse to navigate to areas where it wouldn't be able to do that. (And if
you're in an area where an emergency stop is unsafe, it's unsafe for human
drivers too. Getting rear-ended for an emergency stop is that fault of the
following car for that reason.)

~~~
umanwizard
So I’ll still need to have a drivers license to use an autonomous vehicle?
That pretty much defeats the whole purpose, at least for me.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Or you'll need to call a tow truck when it gets disabled, or you'll need a
stage 5 vehicle rather than stage 4, or you'll have to subscribe to an
emergency low-speed teleoperation service that has been hypothesized.

------
api
"Never" is kind of equally absurd. It's just a brutally hard problem.

~~~
mhermher
You will never define a complete and consistent algebra. You will never
exactly measure the momentum and position of a particle. They're not brutally
hard problems, they're not possible. We know that there are a set of things
that are impossible. Why is recreating human intelligence in silicon beyond
that consideration?

~~~
chillacy
Things are impossible till they aren’t. It’s not like we solved Go the board
game, but we did build some killer AI which has now surpassed all human
players. And that was within a matter of years: first it was a fluid game of
human intelligence impossible for a machine, then it was obvious machines
could be better.. but look at this other thing humans are still better at.

~~~
beat
Google's AlphaZero AI went from not knowing chess at all to beating the best
current software (Stockfish) in mere hours. It's a whole new world out there.

~~~
reroute1
For playing computer games maybe. Chess is such a simple proposition compared
to real life and you are only comparing this AI against other AI...

~~~
beat
Stockfish isn't an AI, just an expert system. It was designed from the ground
up to play chess.

AlphaZero is generalized AI. It was designed to learn how to do things - like
play chess. The fact that it easily beat a custom-designed expert system with
only a few hours of learning time is incredible. It's a different order of
complexity altogether. It may not be human intelligence, but it's a great deal
closer to how humans function than how machines (like Stockfish) function.

------
0x262d
can someone please advertise public transit to these deep-pocketed VC
dumbasses as somehow being an artificially intelligent city network

something something we have a real bridge to sell you

------
iron0013
Is it just me, or is the Argo CEO interviewed for every single article that's
pessimistic about self-driving cars?

------
rorykoehler
No one will ever need more than 64kb ram - Bill Gates

~~~
tyingq
He didn't say that, and it was 640k at the time.

------
gurkancaner
I think there is no reel need for driverless cars. Having technological
difficulties aside we should question whether there is really a need for self-
driving cars. Life is not that bad without autonomous cars. I don't hear
anybody complain about in real life not having driverless cars. Basically a
driverless car is same thing having a private chauffeur and I know quite a few
people who don't want to use their private chauffeurs lots of time.

~~~
empath75
There's no real need for anything in life other than food and shelter. If
driverless cars work and don't cost much, some people will use them and enjoy
them and that's enough.

~~~
gurkancaner
There are levels above food and shelter. Having a car is a real need and it
solves a problem for lots of people. However having a self-driving car may
solves some people's problem but that don't seem to big part of human
population. I think that makes the development of self-driving cars slower.

------
satyavh
Even if it will be technically possible, and I'm pretty sure some day that
will be solved. That's the easiest part.

The biggest hurdle for self-driving cars will be ethics, such as 'the car
brakes for a child suddenly crossing the street but then kills the old woman'
or perhaps even make decisions based upon social status. Lots of options here.

Those ethics have to be agreed upon, and they will likely differ per culture,
state, country, etc. It's a political and sociological challenge. It will be
interesting crossing borders.

And then those ethics need to be implemented in software. I would refrain from
saying it's never going to happen, but I doubt very much this will happen in
our lifetime.

~~~
bryanlarsen
I believe that this scenario is very over-blown. If you're in a situation
where you have to choose between swerving into another car or hitting a child
that darts out onto the street then the question really is: why were you in
that situation in the first place? At 20mph pedestrian collisions are almost
invariably non-fatal and emergency stops are almost instantaneous. So if
you're on a street where a child can appear instantly, why are you going
faster than 20mph in the first place?

~~~
leetcrew
a child can appear instantly on any street. they can even run into the highway
if their parent pulls onto the shoulder for a bathroom break or something.

of course, it's much more likely to happen in a neighborhood than on the
highway, so we drive slower in the neighborhood. but anything that can happen
eventually will, so there ought to be some policy.

that said, I think there is a certain segment of the population that gets
overly excited about mapping the trolley problem onto autonomous driving. I
expect that little will change other than the liable party (the car driver vs
the company) and it will mostly work out.

~~~
bryanlarsen
Exactly. The maximum safe speed in a neighborhood is 20mph, and the maximum
safe speed passing a stopped car on the freeway is a lot less than 60mph.

~~~
leetcrew
sure, but I don't think the whole highway is obligated to slow down for a
stopped car on the right shouler, only the lane next to the shoulder (and I
would argue that this lane suddenly slowing all the way down to 20mph would
create a worse hazard). theoretically the child could make it all the way to
to left before being struck. I'm not saying this is likely, just that there is
no speed where you can _guarantee_ that you won't hit a pedestrian that is
behaving erratically. the best you can do is make it very unlikely in most
cases.

------
kpU8efre7r
Could be saying that to defeat competition. Don't bother trying it's decades
away! And Ford is notoriously behind the rest of the pack so I'd believe even
less of what they say as well. I don't listen to executives with a stake in
the game regardless of which side they are playing.

The barriers to this seem mosly man made. Regulations, restrictions, taxi
lobby, trucker unions, etc. A lot of it depends on where the line is drawn for
safety or versatility. Does one vehicle need to operate in all climates with 0
accidents a year? Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already
there.

I'd be happy to even see more and more driver assist to the point where you
can't crash even if you jerk the wheel and try to.

I think the bar has been set incredibly high, almost impossibly out of reach,
by people interested in things staying the same.

~~~
peteradio
> Simply being safer than humans is easy- we are already there.

Seriously?

~~~
kpU8efre7r
Just Waymo was driving over 1 million miles a month in 2018. How many people
have they killed? The fact that an autonomous vehicle or Tesla "autopilot"
fatality makes national news is telling. It's not commonplace.

~~~
crispyambulance
It's not sufficient for these systems to just be "better" than humans in terms
of accidents/mile/vehicle, they have to be FAR BETTER than humans.

Today, when accidents occur, blame and liability goes to the responsible
parties. We're talking about millions of accidents and millions of drivers.

If you suddenly have a car that drives, the blame and liability for all
accidents then gets focused like a giant magnifying glass onto ONE (or a few)
companies which have made the self-driving car.

I don't know how many accidents/mile/vehicle is the "magic number" but I
expect it is going to have to be far far _far_ lower than what it is now.
Otherwise, these self-driving car vendors won't be able to survive the legal
onslaught.

~~~
magashna
Why can't we accept a little better now and keep striving for far better?
Seems stupid to have an all or nothing approach, especially when plenty of
luxury vehicles have pieces of automated driving in them already. Liability is
for insurance leeches to figure out

~~~
ABCLAW
Because the proper comparison isn't X accidents vs Y accidents. It's X
accidents and Z billion dollars spent vs Y accidents, where that Z billion
dollars could have gone to other efforts. If the delta between X and Y is
minor, Z is wasted.

