
Uber’s self-driving cars start picking up passengers in San Francisco - orenbarzilai
https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/14/ubers-self-driving-cars-start-picking-up-passengers-in-san-francisco/
======
bigtones
Actually these Uber Volvo self driving cars have been picking up passengers
using UberX in San Francisco for weeks. They're easy to spot because they have
a huge lidar contraption on the roof and a lot of camera's mounted on the
roof, rear vision mirrors, and the rear tailgate of the vehicle. The depot
they use is on Harrison and 3rd so you see a lot of them driving around the
area just south of Market Street, which has a lot of traffic obstacles,
construction, and pedestrians. They go very slow and stop often out of an
abundance of caution, much to the consternation of impatient SF drivers behind
them.

~~~
saosebastiao
I've never understood why people think traffic will move faster with self
driving cars. The status quo is drivers driving well beyond the physical
capabilities to stop given the conditions at hand. Sure, they _might_ be able
to cut down on reaction time, but they still can't do anything about physics.

Given that these vehicles will shift the risk model from driver to
manufacturer, and subsequently programmed to obey the laws (which include
right of way), we might actually see pedestrians and cyclists using their
right of way instead of being bullied away from it.

The idea that cars can communicate with each other so they could drive closer
together and faster is complete bullshit...Sure, it's possible, but what
profit-driven company would ever take that risk knowing the real-world
reliability of wireless communication?

The idea that they won't drive around looking for parking? Welcome to your
traffic jam of the future:
[https://twitter.com/yann_rouen/status/807781862022246401](https://twitter.com/yann_rouen/status/807781862022246401)

Pretty much all the evidence points to very slow traffic in the future of self
driving cars. As someone who mostly walks everywhere, I'm pretty excited.

~~~
kabes
A lot of traffic jams are so called shockwave/phantom traffic jams and a lot
of other ones are where lanes have to merge in each other. Those could be
avoided with self driving cars. Maybe in the beginning they will be too
cautious for that, but after some time and experience, I'm sure these
optimizations will be implemented.

It may not make the traffic in downtown SF faster, but it sure will make the
traffic on the 101 from SF to San Jose faster. And good luck walking that.

~~~
saosebastiao
Those won't go away. They might be mitigated, but once again, you can only
mitigate the portion that is due to driver error, and the major problem in
those scenarios is physics.

The shock wave phenomenon is one caused by physics (it literally is modeled by
fluid dynamics simulation), exacerbated by limited visibility, and exacerbated
once again by human reaction times. You can only get rid of the human reaction
times, and maybe a little bit of visibility due to communication (although I'm
extremely skeptical that there is any incentive for cars to rely on wireless
communication to make decisions).

Lanes merging is a physical bottleneck. Sure, humans might make the merge
worse, but speed is still limited by the capacity bottleneck, not the friction
of the merge. The zipper merge has never proven to be faster, merely safer and
more space efficient. You'll get to the bottleneck faster, and cars that try
to exit before the bottleneck will get out of your way faster, but that's
about it.

~~~
jedberg
Those traffic waves are in large part psychology though. If every car traveled
at the average speed you wouldn't have them. If even just 10% are self driving
and have data on average speed for that section of road, they can not only
avoid the wave but break them up, making traffic better for everyone.

I've even done this myself. I see a standing wave in front of me and slow to
what I know is about average for that time of time. People cut in front of me
as the gap gets bigger, but by the time I get to the choke point the wave
dissolves as I pass through, and everyone behind me who was pissed about my
slow speed is suddenly happy.

~~~
saosebastiao
I'm not convinced, and I don't think there is very much evidence either way.
Are the traffic waves caused by erratic driving due to driver error at
misjudging average speed? Or is it more caused by small fluctuations due to
actual and unavoidable conditions? Would a self driving car see a plastic bag
blowing in the wind and slam on its brakes, or drive right through it? What
about a kitten? What about a bowling ball, or an unsecured 2x4 falling off a
truck? Any one of those situations can cause a shock wave.

We know, due to fluid dynamics simulation, that reduced reaction times will
make traffic more resilient to small fluctuations in speed (they can "recover"
from the shock wave with lower space requirements), but when the freeway is at
capacity there is no recovery room and the shock wave will happen regardless
of reaction time.

~~~
bashinator
I try to leave 10-20 car lengths between myself and the next vehicle in this
kind of stop-and-go heavy traffic. No waves for me! The anti-traffic essays
indicate that doing what I'm doing will actually speed up the breakup of a
traffic jam.

~~~
galdosdi
That's true, but depending on the local driving culture, this may just lead to
many vehicles cutting in front of you and making the gap vanish. In metro
NY/NJ, at stop-and-go speeds on freeways, 1 to 2 car lengths seems to be about
as much as you can safely leave without it quickly being snatched away. Too
bad.

~~~
bashinator
Cars cutting you does not make the gap vanish - you just have to slow down
marginally more for a short amount of time.

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aedron
Uber's product is the company's stock. All of their "AI" and "self-driving"
stunts so far have been transparent hype fuel that anyone with the slightest
domain knowledge knows have no practical significance.

Their PR department are, as can be expected, top notch though. I especially
like how they put a populist spin on their announcements, like the beer
delivery (yay, beer!) and now picking up passengers with their proof-of-
concept vehicles, to make it look like self-driving cars are already part of
their business.

~~~
vivekd
Nah, Uber and Lyft CEOs both said they envision a future where we don't own
cars and just call self driving taxi services via app when we need them. They
both envision this happening in less than a decade. This seems to be coming
true, millennials have the lowest rate of car ownership and it seems to be the
best explanation for why both companies are willing to bleed money to expand
market-share as quickly a possible in the mobile taxi app game.

~~~
samfisher83
Why not use trains or buses. Thousands of cars compared to a single train
seems inefficient.

~~~
jonknee
The age old last mile problem. I don't think anyone is suggesting getting rid
of mass transit and in fact self driving cars could be the best thing ever
happen to mass transit (no need to park at the train station if coming from
the suburbs).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_(transportation)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_\(transportation\))

~~~
sampo
When a whole suburb is taking self-driving car every morning to get to the
train, I guess someone will innovate and start offering rides in a minibus or
even a bus.

~~~
ygjb-dupe
Nah, self driving electric vehicles with 6 seats operating on an UberPOOL
model will dominate, and it wouldn't be surprising to see the UberPOOL model
be extended to a subscription service as well where you simply pay a commit
for the service level each month, get an included number of trips, and a
further discounted on trips over that number.

Having the commit will make it maore feasible to fund vehicles that are
intended for a specific area, and the pool model allows Uber to recover margin
during pricing surges and users who don't want to pay the commit (after all,
the discount on the fare would only apply to the portion of the pool fare
ascribed to the subscribed to the passenger).

~~~
galdosdi
One neat thing about this (that probably won't end up making that big a
difference for most people, just those few with high-mileage commutes in low
traffic areas) is minivans can safely go faster on the freeway than buses.

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autotune
How is this going to combat people who make a mess inside the vehicle after
going 100 percent without human drivers/test engineers? If it picks up a drunk
person at 3 AM who then throws up inside the car, is it vomit-aware and knows
it needs a cleaning before picking up the next passenger?

~~~
umeshunni
The same way ZipCar, Car2Go and every other car-sharing solution deals with
this?

~~~
marblar
"Not very well."

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dzdt
They describe this as a third-generation vehicle, but it still requires
multiple human-driver interventions over a single journey. How many more
generations to reach reliable true autonomy?

~~~
bo1024
My opinion as a researcher in AI/ML but without any expertise in self-driving
tech:

We are a _long way_ from where I would be willing to trust my life to self-
driving cars - as a passenger, as another driver on the streets, as a cyclist,
or as a pedestrian. Much farther away than these companies press releases make
it seem.

Here's why. These driving algorithms are successful in large part because of
data. They train their systems, such as visual recognition (what are the
objects in the world around me), on millions of miles of visual data collected
on the roads, most of it in California in the sunny daytime.

This means they are very likely to perform well in the average case when
everything goes according to plan. And if deployed there they might live up to
the hype and save thousands of lives compared to human drivers.

But now say you're in a major city in the midwest or northeast, for instance.
It may be night time. It might be raining. There might be two feet of snow on
the ground, narrow lanes, road signs covered up and unreadable. There may be a
pedestrian crossing in dark colors. The street lines may be faded or
nonexistent. There may be a street that is marked one way on the GPS map but
is currently detoured the opposite direction due to construction.

There may be a policeman directing traffic. The police might pull the car over
and direct it to a parking lot. There might be a fire truck or ambulance
coming at an unusual time.

A computerized system trained on data can only perform well in situations very
similar to its training set. But its vision will have a hard time recognizing
objects it hasn't seen before. Its language processing will not understand
unusual or novel road signs. Even if it recognizes the objects around it
correclty, it lacks the "true" intelligence to deal with unforeseen situations
falling significantly outside its training set.

I believe that cars are quite likely to run into novel situations they haven't
experienced before, and I don't trust their reactions or decisionmaking in
these scenarios. So I think what we have are self-driving cars that perform
very well in the common, easy case, as we have already seen in numerous press
releases, but are in my opinion very unpredictable in the long, fat tail of
situations.

~~~
vladimirralev
I think you are missing the most important part here. These cars are always
online and share data between them. They have a detailed map of every street
and every road bump and every road pole/sign that can be used for navigation.
Even if everything is in snow and the camera/lidar is frozen and can't see
anything, these cars know exactly where they are and where the road is from
predictive navigation based on speed, direction, road shape/bumps from
previous data that was collected from 1000s of passes before that on that very
same road. At first AI cars will probably avoid certain areas that have not
been mapped. Each car will signal any unexpected road blocks, data will be
sent realtime to a human operator who will script a walkthrough in seconds.
Such as "ok, you are legitimately stuck in traffic right now, just wait" or
"ok, there is a crashed car ahead of you so the right-turning lane is closed,
move into the left lane and you can turn right from here as an exception".
There will be humans like ATC in all cases.

Police and emergency services will just coordinate with the "ATC" to pre-
script routes differently depending on the situation.

~~~
greenleafjacob
Dead reckoning is pretty bad by itself but with GPS it probably wouldn't be
too bad.

------
sankyo
I ride a motorcycle in SF daily and frequently "split lanes". I saw one of the
Ubers all decked out with spinning radar and wondered how it would react as I
passed through at 10-15mph. There was a person at the steering wheel, I am not
sure who was in control. Thankfully it was uneventful. I thought the car might
brake or veer away from me.

~~~
sf_rob
I'd be curious as well, but after lane splitting in the bay area, my default
assumption would be that a self-driving car would react in a safer way. In my
experience most lane splitting close calls are due to inattentive drivers
changing lanes without signalling or randomly shifting position within their
own lane.

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annerajb
Just saw this: [https://electrek.co/2016/12/14/uber-autonomous-rides-
califor...](https://electrek.co/2016/12/14/uber-autonomous-rides-california/)

I am confused do they require a permit or is uber changing the
claim/capabilities of the car to evade getting a permit?

~~~
mdorazio
No permit as far as I can tell. They have drivers actively monitoring their
vehicles at all times and are playing semantic games right now as that article
says. The biggest disappointment to me is the way they're deliberately
ignoring NHTSA's guidelines around collision and near-miss data sharing.

~~~
mdorazio
Definitely no permit. They just got slapped with a stop order:
[http://www.recode.net/2016/12/14/13962698/uber-dmv-self-
driv...](http://www.recode.net/2016/12/14/13962698/uber-dmv-self-driving-cars-
stop-order)

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joosters
I wonder if everything you say & do is recorded in these? The car has all
those cameras covering the outside of the vehicle, it would be little effort
to add another inside, and I doubt Uber will be able to resist.

Uber could claim they need to record passengers in order to spot damage or
dirtying of the cab. (Otherwise passengers could blame any damage on the
previous occupant.)

~~~
notheguyouthink
> The car has all those cameras covering the outside of the vehicle

This raises a good point i never thought about. If in some day all of our cars
have self driving or self aware features, then that means nearly all locations
in the city are within reach of cameras and possibly microphones. I'm not "a
paranoid" about privacy stuff, but that is quite impressive nonetheless.

The future is going to be quite interesting. I always thought we'd end up with
cameras on every street corner monitoring everything. I never thought our own
cars could become every present monitoring devices.

~~~
Taek
Your phone is more omnipresent and knows about as much as your car would.

~~~
notheguyouthink
Yes but i'm not trying to evade detection. If i was, i would obviously not
bring a phone with me. I can't however, avoid all cars, everywhere.

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Globz
As a Canadian, I wonder how anyone in this industry can create an autonomous
vehicle that can safely drive during winter?

~~~
ams6110
The biggest problem human drivers have in winter weather is simply driving too
fast. Self-driving cars won't get impatient and will presumably never exceed
safe speeds for given conditions.

~~~
artlogic
Having lived nearly my whole life in Michigan, I think this grossly
oversimplifies the problem. I'm sure my Canadian friends will agree. This
assumes there's some clear algorithm for determining a "safe" speed. There's
not.

Even in highway driving you can lose traction in an instant if you hit a patch
of black ice. Autonomous vehicles will need to be able to recover from a
complete loss of traction safely. This isn't trivial - in fact it's probably
the most complicated bit of driving I tend to do. Once you are sliding and
your steering wheel becomes more of a suggestion than a command, the entire
act of driving becomes a process of trying to coax the car off the road using
a combination of steering, brakes, and even occasionally gas. I think it's
possible for a computer to do this - but you can't avoid all slides just by
driving slowly.

Then there's the plethora of other winter fun you run into with a vehicle:
getting stuck (happens all the time on city streets) and all the techniques to
get unstuck, going too slow and losing your momentum (and thus traction),
having every indication you have traction and then discovering you actually
don't (it's very easy to be driving at a "safe" speed and still slide through
an intersection), white out conditions where you are guessing where the lane
is... etc...

To be clear, I believe most of these conditions could eventually be handled by
computers. I also believe a lot of people drive too fast in/on snow. However,
winter driving is in no way simple. It's a problem domain unto itself, and one
I've seen relatively little work being done on.

~~~
rconti
You may be correct that relatively little work is being done in this area,
however I think you overstate the difficulty.

Winter driving is really no different from any other kind of driving in which
the driver exceeds the limits of the vehicle's available traction. The methods
of recovery are mostly well-known; the problem is more often the driver's
inability to implement them in a timely manner.

Constant input from wheel speed and accelerometer sensor arrays, coupled with
the vehicle's ability to individually brake/slow wheels (which also gives the
vehicle the ability to accelerate individual wheels independently!) means that
it could be a far easier 'problem' for self-driving cars to solve than it is
for humans.

Again, if they're working on it :) But there's already been decades of work
put into ABS, traction/stability control, etc.

~~~
artlogic
> Winter driving is really no different from any other kind of driving in
> which the driver exceeds the limits of the vehicle's available traction.

I actually agree with this statement. The problem is that, in good conditions,
low traction events are rare, and often caused by catastrophic conditions. In
winter driving it's practically the norm, once you leave well traveled
roadways.

I think AI could be trained to drive a car that only occasionally has full
traction, and probably more effectively than a person given enough time. But
again - it's like you said - someone needs to be addressing this case
directly.

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lucker
Bit of a conspiracy theory sort of question, but... is there any reason to
believe that maybe self-driving car technology is being backed by the
military-industrial complex as a way to run R&D for military automation and
related technologies? That could explain why there was a sudden spike in
interest in this technology several years ago, and it could also explain why
enormous amounts of hype are continually being generated for a technology that
is probably still quite far away from being approved for fully automated road
use.

~~~
marssaxman
There's no conspiracy about it - that is exactly what happened, and it
happened right out in the open, in the form of the DARPA Grand Challenge races
in 2004-2007. The explicitly stated goal of those races was to motivate
research into autonomous vehicles that would enable the US military to begin
converting its ground vehicles to autonomous operation. The much-hyped
commercial applications are a spin-off.

~~~
linkregister
The DARPA challenge is somewhat of an orthogonal use case. The DARPA challenge
was based off of an autonomous vehicle that doesn't have extensively pre-
mapped roads; it is in rough terrain. The vehicle had to alter its route on-
the-fly if it encountered impassable obstacles. It also didn't have to concern
itself with traffic. I presume the use case is getting materiel to troops
without risking human drivers. This is important considering IEDs were a major
source of injury and death for coalition troops in the most recent wars.

Google/Waymo and its successors are using pre-mapped courses with many
heuristics and edge case tweaks. Routes are generated from existing resources
(Google Maps, etc). Much effort is devoted to avoiding other vehicles and
pedestrians. Much of the rules are based off of U.S. traffic rules, such as
speed limits, stop signs, traffic signals, and lane markings.

They both share technology (computer vision, momentum/traction control), but I
conjecture the bulk of the work for commercial autonomous driving was not
related to the DARPA challenge and wasn't paid by its grants.

~~~
marssaxman
That was true for the first two Grand Challenges, but once that prize was
claimed DARPA simply cranked up the difficulty level; the 2007 race was all
about navigation in urban environments, and compliance with traffic laws was a
condition of success.

Sure, of course you're right that "the bulk of the work" is not related. But
it's also no secret that the "sudden spike in interest in this technology"
lucker referred to above happened because the US government paid for it to
happen, as a means of advancing military vehicle automation technology.

------
TheMagician0
Will a Self-Driving Car be available for ride service by the end of 2018?
[http://www.metaculus.com/questions/181/will-a-self-
driving-c...](http://www.metaculus.com/questions/181/will-a-self-driving-car-
be-available-for-ride-service-by-the-end-of-2018/)

------
ckinnan
> “a blade architecture, a whole bunch of CPUs and GPUs that we can swap out
> under there,” though he wouldn’t speak to who’s supplying those components
> specifically.

Does anyone have more info or speculation on the tech stack sitting in the
trunk?

~~~
lsv1
I think it might be Nvidia -
[http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/08/22/nvidia-
un...](http://www.forbes.com/sites/aarontilley/2016/08/22/nvidia-unveils-new-
processor-for-its-self-driving-car-supercomputer/#47c8fc686339)

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yalogin
Is this a voluntary thing? Do I get a discount to sit in those? I would at the
very least want to know in advance that an autonomous car is going to pick me
up so if I want I can reject it if I want to and not waste time.

~~~
diogenescynic
They sent an email this morning saying you will be notified that it is an
autonomous vehicle, you have the option to cancel, and prices are the same.

------
luhn
One thing that's still not clear to me is how autonomous these truly are.
There's still a human in the driver's seat, but how much intervention is
required from them?

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kabes
Does anybody know what the chance of getting a self driving car is? I could
try to use uberX instead of pool for a while, if there's a sufficient chance
of getting one.

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jasoncchild
There is an amazing amount of hand waiving and conjecture in this discussion.

~~~
acedinlowball
Your comment is very dismissive and hand-wavy. What do you think your
conjecture has contributed to the discussion?

------
vit05
I have more expectation about self drive Bus and Trucks than cars.

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dvdhnt
No thanks.

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bryanrasmussen
and never letting them go.

