

Nissan pledges commercially viable autonomous drive by 2020. - dhruvkaran
http://nissannews.com/en-US/nissan/usa/releases/nissan-announces-unprecedented-autonomous-drive-benchmarks

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mason240
"Work is already underway in Japan to build a dedicated autonomous driving
proving ground, to be completed by the end of fiscal year 2014. Featuring real
townscapes - masonry not mock-ups - it will be used to push vehicle testing
beyond the limits possible on public roads to ensure the technology is safe."

Meanwhile Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets with
their autonomous car.

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venus
> Google has driven +200K miles on real highways and streets

I have got to say, I am pretty amazed they have managed to swing that.
Permission to drive autonomous robot cars around the everyday streets of
litigation and safety-obsessed California? An accomplishment of equal size to
any one technical challenge in the car's making, I would say!

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hypersoar
As I understand, they didn't ask permission. They simply announced one day
that they'd been doing it for a year, and then lobbied California to legalize
it afterwards. Given the potential benefits of being the state that makes
autonomous cars a thing, I imagine it was an easy sell.

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wayne_h
Meanwhile... California is trying to build a 100 billion dollar bullet-train
boondogle that will be ready in 20 years. By that point our efficient electric
cars will be able to link together in high speed freeway 'trains'. What if
that money was invested in developing the autonomous cars?

The public thinks everyone else is going to ride the train and free the
highway up for them... what a waste.

~~~
tbrownaw
Cars cost something like $15+ per (calendar) day, and cause congestion when
used in big cities. Making them autonomous won't help with either of those,
but replacing them with usable mass transit does.

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hobs
Automation will certainly help with congestion by optimizing who is doing what
when. I am not a network engineer, but I cant imagine that people are driving
the most efficiently to even attempt to maximize throughput.

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schabernakk
especially when you think about the fact that a lot if not most traffic jams
are ghost jams, where a slight overreaction ripples through the following cars
causing them all to stop for no apparent reason.

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hobs
Exactly the kind of stuff I am talking about!

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hardtke
I don't see any feasible way to transition to high speed linked autonomous
cars. Unfortunately, there are a lot of people who need to get to work via
car, and these people will not be able to afford a new car. Transitioning from
a driver based to a driverless technology would take a government intervention
in the economy that is unacceptable to most Americans. If we utilize the same
road system, there would need to be massive subsidies for the poor to swap out
their cars and we would need to outlaw classic automobiles. Creating a
separate road system would take a massive public investment.

~~~
jerf
Nonsense. You start with driverless cars that can use existing infrastructure
with everybody else, then as the density of driverless cars goes up over time,
you take advantage of the other economies that emerge. At some point, probably
decades later, eventually society will simply ban driverless cars, but you
don't have to _start_ there. There's no need for a "big bang" event.

By the time that happens, the "poor" won't have to "replace" their car,
because they'll already have dumped the expensive rust-buckets for time-shared
rent-a-cars. It's the rich that will be the last holdouts, not the poor.

~~~
hardtke
By simply adding autonomous cars to the current infrastructure, it doesn't
improve peoples lives in a directly obvious way. They can't go any faster, and
traffic does not get reduced. Yes, there is the imperceptible benefit of a
slight reduction in the probability of death, but a recent New Yorker article
pointed out that antisepsis was slow to be adopted because the benefits were
not as easily measurable -- in contrast, anesthesia, invented at the same
time, was adopted worldwide almost instantly. I personally would only buy a
driverless car if it meant I could immediately get where I am going twice as
fast. Otherwise, I rather enjoy driving.

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jerf
It benefits the person owning the driverless car, who can now do something
other than drive while still moving from A to B. You seem to be insisting on
thinking collectively, but that's not how people decide or act. It only has to
benefit the owner for it to sell.

The rich will be the last to let their human driven cars go, but they'll also
obviously be the first to adopt them, once they're safe. In this case, the
rich other than the ultra rich, who can already afford cars-they-
don't-drive... giving further evidence that, yeah, people want this.

Your argument would, for instance, seem to explain why cars never took off...
why, one car hardly benefits anyone. There aren't even any car suitable roads,
after all, and think of all the horses the smelly, loud thing will spook!
But... that's not how people buy things.

The collective benefits come later. The individual benefits come first.

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hrvbr
Cars are way too dangerous. We accept the absurdly high number of injuries and
deaths they cause only by lack of a better mean of transportation.

I hope self-driving cars will have hyper-efficient safety mechanisms,
especially to protect pedestrians and bikers, not just the car's passengers.
This would be a huge progress for humanity.

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Contero
Making self-driving cars safer than people-driven cars is trivial. The hard
thing will be handling the tidal wave of FUD when the inevitable happens and
someone dies as a result of one. Google or Nissan or whoever will need a
mountain of good PR and safety statistics to be able to push it back. That
alone is enough reason to motivate the creation of "hyper-efficient safety
mechanisms".

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Apocryphon
I'm really wondering about how the social change will occur. Creating the
technology will end up the easy part. How do we deal with our cars being
software driven, and that software being created by companies which may not
have the best track record on consumer privacy? (That's a concern I have about
the hyperloop as well- wouldn't these proposed futuristic transportation
involve a lot of surveillance by default, compared to old-fashioned modes?)
How do we deal with the transition when the majority of cars are still people
driven? How does government handle this revolutionary shift?

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tbrownaw
What is "within two vehicle generations"?

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comrade_ogilvy
The auto industry works in cycles on the scale of approximately 5-6 years. So
technology that is not practical right now is 6+ years out.

They are basically promising to sell this as soon as possible. They have 1-3
years for the go or no go decision.

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runako
From no working prototype to multiple commercially available vehicles in 7
years. Yeah, okay.

I hate to be that guy, but it took ~3 years to get the Leaf to production. And
the Leaf uses well-known technology that had been shipped by other vendors a
decade earlier. I'd be happy to be proven wrong, but this feels like a very
long reach.

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ebbv
No thank you.

I am very dubious about other people's driving skills, I tend to assume
everyone else on the road is out to kill me and will do the dumbest thing
possible at any given moment.

But even so, I am also an experienced software developer, and I know that
software is only as good as the author(s). Bugs happen. It's inevitable. And I
don't want to die or be injured because of software errors. I'd rather it be
human error.

Now you might say to this, "Planes fly on auto pilot constantly. Every time
you fly you're basically in the hands of software." And this would be true.
But my response to that is:

1) The air is much less densely packed than the roads and highways.

2) In the air, even though you are traveling much, much faster than in a car,
the pilots have more time to react to a problem than a driver in a car.

3) The pilots are highly trained, experienced and hopefully alert. Drivers in
automated cars will be complacent and texting on their phones.

I think this is a terrible, terrible idea and misuse of technology, despite
the fact that humans are shitty drivers. I think it's only going to exacerbate
the problem, not improve it.

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daeken
Have you seen car accident stats? I'll concede that bugs do occur, but it
would take some _serious_ failure to make it any worse than the average
driver. Even decent or good drivers are not that great, especially when you
factor in distraction, tiredness, poor judgement of road conditions, etc.

~~~
ebbv
If you were to replace every human driven car on the road with only autonomous
cars, I will agree with you that the accident rate would likely be much lower
over all.

But there's two problems here:

1) We won't be replacing all the cars overnight. The problem comes with the
interaction between terrible human drivers doing wildly unpredictable, insane
things and the inflexible, unadaptable automated cars.

And

2) I'm not comfortable with dying or being injured due to a software error
regardless of whether its likelihood is higher or lower. The roads are far
more dangerous than the air, and this is why I'm uncomfortable with the whole
concept of automated cars on the road and I'm not uncomfortable with autopilot
in planes.

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comrade_ogilvy
My experience as a human driver is that most accidents can be avoided by
either (A) slowing down in ambiguous situations, or (B) aborting that lane
change (usually because two cars are attempting to go into the same space).

Those behaviors are easily improved upon by software. Dealing with lane
changes is something software is likely to be vastly better at, because they
can point sensors in all directions -- I only have one set of eyes.

Furthermore, a lot of horrific accidents are because of bizarre unexpected
things that the human does not react to in a timely fashion precisely they are
so far out of the normal scope of traffic flow.

For example, what if a car coming the other direction drifts in front of you
on a rainy night? This is an unfortunately common and very lethal kind of
accident in rural areas. It will take you 1 to 3 seconds to interpret the
scenarios and react appropriately. (You only get 3-4 seconds before your are
killed.) A computer can instantly recognize that car 100 yards away is
maneuvering in a potentially lethal manner and begin slowing down right now.
That buys more time for everyone.

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JoeAltmaier
Strangely, this might kill autonomous cars entirely. Any failure to properly
respond to something bizarre can be the subject of a lawsuit that could kill
the autopilot manufacturer.

Engineering solutions are a tiny part of getting this stuff to market.

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johansch
Why doesn't Google just buy Tesla already?

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enraged_camel
What a great idea! That way the NSA can know your real-time location on the
roads too, even if you have your cellphone off.

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johansch
That's a bug with the american government (your?), not Google. Tesla on its
own can't fight it any more than Google can, them both being american
companies.

