
Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident - tbenst
http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/google-cars-300000-miles-without-accident
======
nostromo
Too bad it doesn't mention if this is better than a human or not. So, I
decided to figure it out...

2.9 trillion miles driven in 2009
<http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/09dectvt/09dectvt.pdf>

10.8 million traffic accidents in 2009
[http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.p...](http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.pdf)

If my math is correct the average american can expect to get in an accident
every ~250,000 miles driven, (NYC to LA 90 times) so this does seem to be an
improvement if all else is equal (which I'm sure is not the case!).

~~~
iskander
I don't know much about this google project. Can autonomous cars (i) drive on
the highway (ii) drive at night (iii) drive in snow or rain?

~~~
stephengillie
Could it handle Lombard Street?

How would it react to a roadway that's covered in several feet of water due to
flooding (and poor road design)? Or sinkholes? One-way streets? Freeways which
change directions at different times of day? Dirt roads? (Can we make it
autonomously offroad?) How will it react during an earthquake or tornado? How
will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's path,
when the car has a green light? When the car comes across kids playing
football/street hockey/baseball in the street, will it stop for them? How far
out of the way will the kids have to move before the car thinks it's safe to
go past?

Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage?

~~~
danweber
Google's algorithm (which Strum seems to be pollinating everywhere -- and
good, because the old algorithms were failing DARPA tests) is to pre-map the
road. The car knows exactly where it is and what is _supposed_ to be there,
which it also compared with what it sees _now_.

 _How will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's
path, when the car has a green light?_

It will stop. In fact, the "failure mode" of self-driving cars will be how
pedestrians can bully them by stepping in front of them so they stop.

 _When the car comes across kids playing football/street hockey/baseball in
the street, will it stop for them?_

There is already video of this. The radar/lidar isn't good enough to see a
baseball, but it's definitely good enough to see a kid.

 _Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage?_

It will probably pull over and stop if something is wrong.

~~~
nopassrecover
Interesting case here for carjackers. You're Google car probably won't floor
it in the middle of the night through a red light when an armed gang
approaches your car. Then again I guess that's what "manual" is for.

~~~
natrius
Carjacking a car loaded with recording equipment that probably phones home
with GPS and other environmental data probably isn't the best idea.

~~~
catweasel
carjackers aren't known for their brilliance

------
kevinalexbrown
The most amazing part is that autonomous cars have completed 300,000 miles at
all. Congratulations to the engineering team!

Around fifteen years ago, I read as a child with fascination an account in
Scientific American about an automated highway project where sensors were to
be placed every few feet on the road, and cars would follow them, until a
driver retook control at the end. I imagined a future network of roads in
which cars read from sensors to determine where they were, and was kind of
saddened that governments didn't immediately start putting these sensors into
highways. This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a
parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of
bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on
publicly owned land (which makes sense).

What this reminds me of, rather spectacularly, is that if one method of
getting to your solution fails, either because those sensors didn't work out,
or the bureaucracy didn't, if you come up with a solution, and say "oh by the
way I did it already", it's a lot harder for anyone to ignore it.

~~~
powerslave12r
I think trains/metro rails are just outright much more cost effective, given
it's not personal transport.

~~~
andybak
Actually, not when you factor in the need to serve unpopular routes and non-
Busyntimes. That's a lot of trains and buses running nearly empty.

Small, on-demand personalised mass transit has the potential to be the most
efficient transport system.

~~~
thrownaway2424
That's really just a negative externality of inefficient suburban development.
If the 'burbs didn't exist in the first place, there would be no need to
subsidize their barely-used mass transit services.

~~~
andybak
"That's really just a negative externality of inefficient suburban
development." Shouldn't public transit cover rural areas and small towns also?
Or is the only way to get an efficient transport system to have the entire
world living in huge urban centres? Personal mass transit could allow a much
wider range of city sizes to be served with relative efficiency.

~~~
thrownaway2424
Mass transit doesn't need "huge urban centers" and indeed can and does serve
cities of all sizes. What it requires, though, is a minimum density. You can't
serve a small, sprawling city. You can easily serve small, compact cities.
Compare, for example, the transit effectiveness between Zurich and Tulsa,
cities of comparable population.

------
andrewljohnson
Autonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up
there with computer, Internet, and smart phone.

When economists think about technology, they look at it as a productivity
booster. From that angle, robot cars will have a huge impact - so many commute
hours will be transformed to work, or even leisure, which also boosts
productivity.

So many smart people are about to be given a 10% or better bump in time to
make and to do.

~~~
paganel
> Autonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up
> there with computer, Internet, and smart phone.

I wouldn't be so sure. Yeah, it might prove to be a very good thing for the
United States, but for the rest of world there's first Europe's public
transport networks (I'm 31, don't have a driver's license, I live in Europe,
I'm doing perfectly fine, thank you), and short of us reaching the Singularity
I honestly don't see any of these cars driving in the crazy traffic of Cairo,
Istanbul, or any other metropolis from the rest of Asia or Africa.

~~~
imgabe
It's going to shift a lot of capital that's currently tied up in owning and
maintaining cars into other uses. Right now, most cars are only in use for
about 5% of their lifetimes. When everybody owns their own private car, those
cars spend a lot of time sitting parked. If those cars could drive around and
be used by other people who need them on demand, you'd need a lot fewer cars,
as well as a lot less parking.

~~~
danweber
Remember that the "5%" of the time you use your car is probably the same "5%"
of the time every one else wants to use their car, i.e. rush hours.

~~~
labcomputer
Yes, it seems unlikely that the same car could be re-used for multiple trips.
However, you _could_ move the parking lots far away from the places people
want to go because the car could drop you off at the door and then valet
itself to a remote lot. That would at least free some of the very valuable
space currently used by downtown parking lots.

------
hnriot
While this is very encouraging, the TC article is also very misleading. For
example: "There have, of course been some accidents that involved Google’s
self-driving cars in the past. All of these, however, happened while humans
were in control of the cars." - isn't this far more likely to be the case,
since the human only takes control when the car can't figure it out?

Also, who's commute _doesn't_ involve temporary construction signs?

~~~
w0utert
Good points. Without any statistics about the frequency and nature of
situations where the human driver still has to intervene, numbers like '300K
miles without an accident' are meaningless. For all I know the Google cars
might have had a near-accident every 10 miles if it weren't for the human
driver that's always there to save the AI when it fails. The fact that Google
never discloses anything besides mile counts, and only lets outsiders take a
ride with the Google cars under extremely controlled situations, is quite
telling. Statements about Google car achievements like this are not much more
than propaganda to me, until Google starts to share actual in-depth details
about the performance of the cars. If it really works as well as they claim it
does, what can they lose by disclosing everything?

Myself, I'm extremely skeptical about self-driving cars, and I've never
understood why I seem to be massively outnumbered by people who are utterly
convinced it is possible to create AI that can handle the billions of
different and sometimes completely arbitrary traffic situations you'll
encounter while driving on current road infrastructure. Sure enough it will
work great 90% of the time in some places, but that's not enough. It needs to
work 99% of the time everywhere. Simply looking at the achievements made in AI
in the last 50 years or something doesn't really warrant a whole lot of
optimism we'll get there anytime soon.

~~~
doomslice
Would you be ok with a computer that augments your own driving (similar to
those cars that automatically brake when they sense an accident)? If so, then
it's just a matter of continuously improving on this augmentation.

Even if it never reaches the level where you can truly step away from the
wheel while the computer drives 100 miles in rush hour traffic, attaching an
AI to help avoid accidents in many common situations still sounds
revolutionary. I forsee something similar to a plane's autopilot -- where it
greatly reduces user error yet sometimes still needs a human to take over when
it doesn't know what to do.

~~~
to3m
We are being promised a self-driving car. Either it drives itself, or it
doesn't. If it doesn't, it's not what it claims. And if it does, what are the
driving aids for?! That's like wearing a hat indoors.

~~~
doomslice
Who promised you that? To me it's not a binary yes/no on whether this project
is successful. Even a marginal reduction in the number of accidents will save
lots of money and lives -- even if you still end up behind the wheel helping
it along.

------
vaksel
It's probably a bit misleading.

The car is pretty eye catching:
[http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/p...](http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/public/article_images/self-
driving.jpg)

So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay
attention.

Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop
noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd
eliminate most of the driver caused accidents

~~~
uncoder0
You are suggesting human's will run into it more often right? I sincerely
doubt we will see too many autonomous-car-at-fault crashes. The blacked out
Lexus SUV's I saw at a Google event a few weeks ago were very discrete minus
the velodyne sensor. If it adds an credibility I was on a team at the
Victorville final in 2007. :)

As an aside, I've been waiting to buy my Google car for 5 long years. During
this time I've become so disenfranchised with day to day driving that I avoid
it at all costs. Commuting via roads in a car is such a mundane task that is,
in my opinion, a solved problem. Bring on the autonomous cars!

~~~
ams6110
Will you be OK with google tracking everywhere you go and serving you ads for
every shop you pass?

~~~
ceejayoz
My wife sees a neurosurgeon who's an eight hour round trip away. I've driven
her there and back at least six times this year.

With a Google car, I'd a) be able to send her by herself and b) even if I had
to come, I could work on the way, meaning I'd have more than a week's worth of
vacation/sick time restored.

Yes, I'd happily accept ads.

~~~
tedunangst
You could also hire a limo. I suppose in the future you'll be able to rent a
google car for a day, but you don't have to wait for self-driving cars.
They're here today, the self just happens to be a human.

~~~
ericd
That's not really reasonably cost effective for most people.

~~~
sp332
Neither is a Google car, though. Adding self-driving requires five figures,
probably even in production.

~~~
danweber
I think $10,000 is a big over-estimate, but even that would be spread out over
the life of the car. I'd happily pay $1000 a year to not have to worry about
driving.

~~~
tedunangst
I'd happily pay $1000 a year for a car that doesn't drive itself.

------
duck
_The cars still need to learn how to handle snow-covered roads_

That is going to be hard to pull off. For places that get a lot of snow, often
you can't even be sure if you're on the road or not.

~~~
abraham
In theory autonomous care would be able to include a number of other factor to
decide if they are on the road or not. Including, GPS, wifi signals, the grade
of the road, the texture of the road, etc.

~~~
bryans
What about situations where lanes have been plowed off-center? Even the most
accurate GPS and accelerometers aren't going to help the vehicle understand
that the appropriate path has been shifted.

~~~
abraham
The car would still factor in the 3d analysis of nearby objects so assuming
the use technology that works in heavy snow/rain fall they wouldn't run into
anything.

------
melling
Long-haul tractor trailers. We need long stretches of highway where autonomous
tractor trailers can carry goods. It'll provide a good business case and limit
liability.

~~~
dpcx
It would be nice, but I can see the reaction from truckers who become out of
work already...

~~~
pavel_lishin
Aren't autonomous cars required to have a human "driver" while on the road? I
can definitely see truckers lobbying to have some sort of law of that nature -
they sit behind the wheel "in case something goes wrong", but would be allowed
to drive longer hours with fewer mandated breaks. Sounds like a win for the
profession in general... setting aside that longer drive times mean that at
least some will be out of work.

~~~
dpcx
They do now. Doesn't necessarily mean that in 5 years they still will.

~~~
pavel_lishin
Do unions still hold significant political sway these days? I can definitely
see truckers pulling their weight to keep those laws on the books for
commercial freight at least long enough to stay employed 'til retirement.

~~~
simonbrown
Assuming the laws are removed at some point, there would still be a huge
transition between companies needing truck drivers and not needing truck
drivers.

------
secoif
This was the easy part.

The hard part will be fighting the technophobes when somebody drives into the
side of one of these and kills themselves. I don't envy being in that battle.

~~~
daenz
I would bet they can reconstruct the entire environment through their LIDAR
records, play by play, and show the events leading up to the collision.

~~~
huffman
I hadn't even thought of that. I wonder how this will effect the car insurance
industry.

------
mmanfrin
I'd love to live in a world where roads were full of auto-driving electric
cars that automatically went to recharge and were replaced by fleet cars, and
stopped at various points for people to load up. Like personal, on demand
busses.

~~~
joshlegs
> Like personal, on demand buses

That use a heck of a lot more gas ;)

~~~
eblume
No reason they couldn't be electric. One of the big barriers for electric cars
is a short running length and long recharge cycle. Neither is an issue if your
'car' is just an (autonomous) taxi service that runs off to recharge itself
when you're done.

Obviously that doesn't mean it isn't using a fossil fuel somewhere along the
power chain, but I imagine the efficiency isn't much worse than bus routes -
and it's not like they need to target the exact same use case, either.

------
andrewljohnson
It won't be consumers who drive the adoption of robot cars, it will be the
logistics companies. This will all start with factory-to-doorstep supply chain
integration.

First, Amazon and Wal-Mart and Fed-Ex will have giant fleets - then consumers
and mid-sized businesses will follow. Small local governments and developed
Asian nations like South Korea and Japan will also drive adoption.

Having a fully-automated supply chain will break the competition who doesn't
have the capital to get there fast enough. The big companies already automate
the factories, and once delivery is automated, the circle is complete.

------
ShabbyDoo
>Google warns that “there’s still a long road ahead.” The cars >still need to
learn how to handle snow-covered roads, ...

What if the car was smart enough to identify situations where it was unable to
auto-navigate safely? It could pull-over and ask the human to take-over for
awhile. I would rather see a mostly capable self-driving car come to market
sooner than wait around for near perfection.

On this note, it seems that the trucking industry could adopt a self-driving
truck even if it was only good enough to travel along long stretches of
highway. The first/last miles would be manually driven just like today. Could
the trucking companies use remote navigation (much like military drones) to
handle first/last mile and perhaps problem spots along the way?

What's the minimum viable product?

~~~
Cushman
> What if the car was smart enough to identify situations where it was unable
> to auto-navigate safely? It could pull-over and ask the human to take-over
> for awhile.

This is precisely what the Google car does, in fact.

------
Homunculiheaded
Does anybody have a citation for accidents per mile for a human driver? I've
seen, uncited, 1/200,000 but when I tried to verify this I came up with 2,967
billion miles traveled in 2010 [0] and 5,419,000 crashes total (based on
police reports for: property damage, injury, or fatality) [1]. Which, unless
there is an error in my math, is roughly 1 crash every 550,000 miles.

0\. <http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Trends/TrendsGeneral.aspx>

1\. <http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811552.pdf> table 4

------
bengl3rt
I'm of two minds on these.

On the one hand, these will help close the "fun gap" between the city and the
suburbs. One big problem with living in the suburbs is that you can't really
drink a lot wherever you are, because you have to drive home afterwards. If
your car drove itself that restriction would be removed, and over time the
suburbs could start to compete with cities for nightlife despite the large
delta in density. Places might even start staying open later because they
could make more money selling alcohol.

On the other hand, I have a power-nothing manual-everything sports car that I
love to drive. Already most people I know drive cars with automatic
transmissions, and now some manufacturers don't even ofter manuals anymore,
even on fairly powerful high-end cars. I can imagine many of the same people
who choose an automatic transmission today will choose a fully automatic self-
driving car tomorrow because to them it's a utility and not a form of
entertainment. Eventually, the market for non-self-driving cars will shrink in
the same way the market for cars with manual transmissions has.

------
eloisant
The problem is, if it gets to production, the first real accident will be
considered totally inacceptable.

It doesn't matter if you reduce by a 1000 the risk of accident. When an
accident is caused by a human error you have someone to blame, you can think
"I would have done better". But when the accident is cause by a machine, then
people will stop trusting the car and be done with it.

~~~
hooande
I've seen this argument made in many forms. The short response is: "Google
already thought of that."

People will be upset, even outraged, by the first few autonomous car
accidents. But as long as they're still legal, they'll be building up a safety
record that will quickly surpass what humans can achieve. Google has already
invested enough money in the legislative system to prevent laws from being
yanked off the books after one accident.

The general form of "People won't like it when machines do X" doesn't have a
lot of merit. There are always problems and people never like it at first.
Then they get used to it and quality of life improves over time. I'm sure
similar arguments were made about the automobile itself.

------
nileshtrivedi
Paraphrasing Peter Norvig: ".. if you do experiments and you're not failing
half of the time, then you aren't getting enough information out of those
experiments."

(from
[http://www.slate.com/blogs/thewrongstuff/2010/08/03/error_me...](http://www.slate.com/blogs/thewrongstuff/2010/08/03/error_message_google_research_director_peter_norvig_on_being_wrong.html)
)

;-)

------
3amOpsGuy
I wonder what kind of denial of service attacks we'll see on autonomous cars
once they're popular.

Trivial example, could i choose to always pull out in front of the robot even
if it's not my right of way? (presumably safe in the knowledge the robot will
always give way to avoid a collision)

Could that escalate to the robot being treated as a mobile speed trap / felony
snitch?

Interesting times.

------
cygwin98
I kind of wonder how Google's driverless car handles the situation in
extremely populous cities such as Shanghai or HongKong.

~~~
agumonkey
That's part of what I'd like to see more.

    
    
      - scalability cases : many many moving obstacles.
    
      - reversal cases    : gCar behavior if a vehicle is misbehaving. 
                            What happens ? can they compute a safe avoidance path ? 
                            if not but with impact still being detected in advance 
                            by the system, can there be a pre-protection system ? 
    
      - systemic cases    : how 2 gCars react to each others, any oscillatory patterns ? 
                            computing a path using the same heuristic leading to 
                            avoidable collision. With more than 2 ?

~~~
sukuriant
Forgive me, but could you reformat that? In Firefox, the code-ified view of
your text is taxing to read. It has an unpleasant scroll bar and I forget what
I've read by the time I get halfway through it, since I can't see it.

~~~
agumonkey
Right, made it a fair bit more readable now. I'm difficult to read anyway.

~~~
sukuriant
Much better, thanks!

------
damoncali
Important detail: "It’s not clear how many of these 300,000 miles were driven
on Google’s secret racecourse, by the way."

------
tbenst
I would love to see google incorporate the efforts of SARTRE, a system of
caravaning cars on highways for reduced drag: <http://www.sartre-
project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx>

------
robertszkutak
I wonder how well these cars handle heavy snowfall or ice on the roads. I know
firsthand how driving becomes infinitely more complicated under these
conditions and it would be major selling point for these cars if they could
handle it smoothly.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
They don't handle snow at all yet. There is no question that will be quite a
hurdle to cross, but I doubt it will be for the reasons most think. My guess
is figuring out where the road is at is going to be the hardest part; where I
bet most people think it is "how do I drive on ice". Without impatient,
jacked-up-4x4 drivers driving a twice what conditions warrant, it is just a
slightly different calculation of static and dynamic frictions.

------
debacle
Put another way, Google's Autonomous cars complete less than half of the total
daily commute of a small metropolitan workforce.

That's not a lot of miles, but the fact that they've done it completely
without accident is relatively impressive.

------
rondon1
You will not know how safe they are until accidents happen. I would love to
see someone with money run an experiment with real drivers vs google cars.
Create a worst case scenario course with simulated drunk drivers, blown tires,
missing stop signs, etc.. and run this with real and fake drivers. I suspect
the average driver would crash 10% of the time, autonomous car would crash 1%
of the time, and a professional driver would crash never.

The real safety improvements will come when all cars are autonomous and they
talk to each other.

~~~
danweber
"Missing stop signs" is one place where a google car would be great, since
they pre-map the area and would know a stop sign has disappeared. Knowing that
would cause them to slow down and be even more careful.

Autonomous cars never get distracted, have 360 degree vision, look at all
things all the time, and can react in tens of milliseconds versus hundreds of
milliseconds. I'd trust that over a "professional driver."

------
ilaksh
I doubt that there were really no accidents at all or close calls, but even if
that is the case, you have to expect some accidents as more and more of these
vehicles get out there. But even if there are 1000 accidents in the next
300000 miles or whatever, I hope people are realistic and give the technology
time rather than writing it off as soon as a very well-publicized collisions
occur.

------
malkia
In the future, there must be some communication between vehicles how to
minimize the effect of the crash - e.g. if in one vehicles there is no-one,
and no hazardous material - then this car somehow should be able to take more
of the damage.

Oh, and I would very much like if every vehicle put on the back and front of
the car - it's current speed measured by the car.

------
joshlegs
Now just imagine putting in an address into the GPS and not missing any turns
on the way there cuz your computer-car does everything for you.

Now also imagine if that address isn't up-to-date (I found it on the web!), or
there is some other problem with the address.

------
vibrunazo
Here's a much better and through article on the subject the RWW:

[http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_self-
driving_ca...](http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_self-
driving_car_where_it_stands_in_histor.php)

------
elchief
Predictions of the economic effects of the GCars:

[http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self-
drivin...](http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self-driving-cars-
are-going-to.html)

------
johngalt
Will it be a problem when you have 50 autonomous cars in close proximity?
Potential for crosstalk from the sensors? Similar to headlights at night
making it so you can see, but blinding oncoming traffic.

~~~
danweber
The people doing this have talked about how their autonomous car met another
company's autonomous car. There didn't seem to be a problem.

Really, when there are more autonomous cars on the road, each and every one
will get better from their neighbors. They can directly share the data they
see and what they are doing. The network effects will be huge.

------
duck
While impressive, not as big as this guy who has driven 3 million miles
without one: <http://compass.ups.com/article.aspx?id=370>

------
tocomment
Does anyone know how an autonomous car can handle stop lights being out? Or a
traffic cop at an intersection? Will it has to learn and recognize the hand
gestures?

------
diggan
What happen if I have a accident in the car? Will Google pay my damages if
it's the car's fault?

How quickly will we adapt to the car?

~~~
hbharadwaj
That's the current problem. If it gets into litigation, whose fault is it?

Currently, the person who is operating the vehicle is responsible for what the
car does.

~~~
zanny
If it is gcar on gcar, it is googles fault, because they programmed it wrong /
poorly.

If it is gcar on car, with the normal car responsible, it is the traditional
fault model.

If it is car on gcar and it is gcars fault, Google really fudged it up.

If it is no ones fault (ie, falling rocks on top of the thing) then that falls
into the same catagory as natural disaster damage.

I would hope, at least.

------
kayoone
may i remind people here cheering for automated cars that most of the world
hasnt even accepted automatic transmission because they want to control their
car themselves? This will take decades

~~~
GFischer
Erm, at least over here (Uruguay) we don't buy automatic transmission because
it's more expensive.

If they were priced the same, I'd probably buy automatic.

