
California to allow testing of self-driving cars without a driver present - doppp
https://techcrunch.com/2018/02/27/california-to-allow-testing-of-self-driving-cars-without-a-driver-present/
======
meri_dian
People are excited about self driving cars for their potential to reduce
accidents by removing human error from the equation. It's not just human error
that causes accidents though.

Human emotion in general causes dangerous situations. When we drive now, we're
restricted to driving and driving alone. We can listen to the radio but for
the most part we are restricted. Because of this, we tend to want to get to
our destination as quickly as possible. We drive fast to get the restrictive
experience of driving over with.

However if we were free to do other things, like get work done or sleep or
watch TV while in our cars, I think we would generally be much more tolerant
of travelling at a lower speed. While eventually our self driving systems may
be capable of being very safe at very high speeds, I think reduced speeds
tolerated by people could offer an extra layer of safety.

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
Have you never had the experience of being on a crawling train and counting
the minutes after the meeting you were supposed to be at has already started?

~~~
dmix
Well technically you could be telepresence into the meeting because your car
can be outfitted with a nice TV/monitor, audio recording equipment, and high
speed wifi... so you can have meetings while you drive to work. Or you spend
your quiet time in the car working, and instead use office time for meetings.

Besides, in the hypothetical self-driving future the transit times will likely
be far more predictable than it is today... with AI running and optimizing
everything.

~~~
blang
We can already telepresence into the meeting. I moderately understand your
argument, but I think the parent is talking about meetings you have to be in
physically. And if your argument is "Why do you have to be there physically" I
would counter that if you don't have to be there physically why do you ever
need to get into a self driving car.

~~~
throwaway76543
I can't telepresence into a meeting while I'm driving, or while I'm on public
transit.

Being able to videoconference during my commute would be an enormous boon.

~~~
maccard
Why not? We regularly have people join in in calls from home/on trains. They
just have to mute when they're not speaking.

~~~
fixermark
I'm curious what Utopia you live in that has network coverage reliable enough
in subway tunnels or on trains going through rural communities to make
teleconferencing from mass transit a tractable solution. ;)

(No, but more seriously: I'm a bit envious that this is working for your
teams. It's completely impractical in the East Coast US cities I've
frequented).

~~~
redfern314
In the SF Bay Area, Caltrain is aboveground and is more than quiet enough to
call into meetings. Think NYC's MetroNorth, there's no reason you wouldn't be
able to make a call until you get into the tunnels near Manhattan. On the
other hand, BART is underground with signal repeaters just about all the way
through - but it's very noisy so you could call in and listen but probably not
contribute.

If your transit system is underground without repeaters though, I agree that
you're out of luck. I can't imagine trying to take a call on the T.

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itissid
If self driving cars go mainstream, people's attitude and thinking of the car
as only a transport vehicle may change. Even in congested traffic one may view
it as a secondary home where they can work and eat breakfast in and not care
about the time it takes.

~~~
matte_black
Personally I'm not convinced. I wish we could just skip the self driving car
phase and go straight to personal self flying drones.

Less edge cases to deal with, and since most people are not pilots the drone
must be 100% automated, turning it into something more like a horse-drawn
carriage from days of old. Since air traffic is more tightly controlled they
do not have to compete much with piloted aircraft. No pedestrians to worry
about, minimal possibilities for accidents. Flying away and parking somewhere
away from your location is not just a feature – it's mandatory since our world
has no accommodations for consumer aircraft parking. Since most landings can
be done on the rooftops of tall buildings, it's conceivable that we may reduce
the amount of time we spend walking on dangerous or dirty streets, and also
opens the door for more creative skyward architecture and retail. And of
course there's the magnificent views you'll get of a city even in a boring
daily commute.

I will probably not own a self driving car given current technology, but I
can't wait to see the age of true flying transports for the masses.

~~~
ng-user
> Less edge cases to deal with

I believe this is wildly inaccurate.

We already have the infrastructure for self-driving vehicles. How do you
handle a mechanical failure of your personal flying drone? Does it drop you to
the ground or on a group of pedestrians nearby? This surely only increases
anxiety of people walking below. What is the recommended height for a self-
flying drone? 100's of ft above ground? Not to mention there are no drones (to
my knowledge) that can legally transport a human today in 2018, how long until
we develop/regulate that technology? (I understand it's the same with self-
driving vehicles but we've been working on this for _years_ already and things
have improved significantly in that time period)

While I like your outside the box thinking, I disagree with the notion that
there are less edge cases than self-driving cars, at minimum it's on par with
the same amount of edge cases as self-driving vehicles.

~~~
freehunter
I also believe there are far more edge cases to deal with: specifically the
edge of the blades on the propellers.

Whirling blades with an engine powerful enough to lift and transport a human
plus cargo whizzing through downtown areas, and everyone owns one? It only
makes sense in sci-fi movies.

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awestroke
This is great news.

There are two use cases that particularly excite me:

* For commuters, get a ride from your own vehicle to work, and then have it park cheaply outside of town (instead of paying for a parking spot close to work, which is common where I live).

* Have a self-driving van with a bed, have it drive you to a skiing resort while you sleep. Go to sleep in the car Friday night, have it drive at safe speeds using smaller roads, wake up where you wanted to go. Go to bed Sunday evening, wake up back at home. Shower, dress, go to work.

~~~
dx034
> For commuters, get a ride from your own vehicle to work, and then have it
> park cheaply outside of town (instead of paying for a parking spot close to
> work, which is common where I live).

Not sure if I'm excited about that. This would double the traffic during rush
hour. I'd sincerely hope they introduce a tax on vehicles driven without
driver.

~~~
dtech
Rush hour traffic is usually the heaviest in a single direction, the empty
self-driving cars would mostly be going into the other direction.

~~~
Piskvorrr
...if there's ten of them. If there's 1000 of them, now the rush hour traffic
is both ways. _That_ is the expected scenario, not "I have my very special car
like nobody else has."

~~~
adrianmonk
The self-driving cars are not in a hurry to get to their parking space. The
commuters don't want to be late for a meeting, but the self-driving cars don't
care about being late for a parking space.

~~~
Piskvorrr
Yes, and...? Doesn't change the fact that they're creating congestion (not
only for themselves but also for other road users); plus the return trip can
be expected to be "pick me up at $location at $time", which is again a
scheduling problem.

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simion314
Is any Californian citizen here that is worried that the IT companies will
move fast and break things?

Are the laws in place to determine who is guilty and who will pay the damages
in case of accidents?

As a developer I am always worried when I have to put some big update live, I
think I personally could not handle the responsibility of doing such an update
for self driving cars.

~~~
3pt14159
I've been concerned about the "move fast and actually break things" aspect of
autonomous devices for the past year and a half because I view malcode pushed
from the update server as a mass damage event / equivalent to weapons of mass
destruction if intentional.

I'm not sure how it is now, but according to someone talking to me privately
at one company early programmers were SSHing into fucking moving cars with
passengers and running commands on them and had it not been for the layers of
redundant code would have crashed the car.

We need to regulate autonomous devices and we need to do it _before_ there are
billions of them. We need a public effort to get policy makers open source
outlines of regulations; otherwise the car companies are going to be writing
them and they aren't going to write in protections against black swan events
and we're going to get the autonomous equivalent of a BP oil spill or worse
one day.

~~~
simion314
I think if there is a large enough penalty for crashes then the car companies
would take quality more serious, if the costs are too low I can see them
pushing updates with just a few hours of testing,

There is also the issue with adversarial inputs to the AI, you could have
someone put stickers everywhere that would crash the AI .

~~~
MBCook
The penalty only works after someone has been caught at it once (it seems
clear to me these companies aren’t proactive about his stuff).

That ‘once’ could be One (or many) very bad accidents.

‘Company X fines $750m for incident where they caused 250 car crashes and 478
deaths’ is not a headline I want to see.

~~~
komali2
>[In Texas] in 2016, 987 people lost their lives to DUI incidents

[https://www.rightstep.com/resources/texas-addiction-
informat...](https://www.rightstep.com/resources/texas-addiction-
information/texas-drunk-driving-statistics/)

I'll take that headline.

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edshiro
Interesting development, happening earlier than what I had assumed! The
TechCrunch article states that companies running fully driverless vehicles
will need to enable the ability for secure remote access and control of
vehicles, but I wonder whether:

1\. Companies developing autonomous vehicles have focused much of their
efforts on remote piloting

2\. Latency won't be a killer, especially if a quick intervention is required

3\. From a safety point of view, this regulation seems too earlier as some
companies with lagging tech may attempt to offer driverless services without
safety driver to generate PR, please investors, etc. - basically "fake it 'til
you make it", but playing with people's lives this time.

~~~
manmal
5G will have decent latency (3-5ms or stgh), this might suffice to steer in
real-time.

~~~
wbl
Is that guaranteed for safety critical applications?

~~~
Piskvorrr
Nope. Also, handwaving - "let's assume that there's perfect 5G coverage, now a
quarter our issues is gone, success!" In reality, this would be more of a
"move fast and break things" scenario.

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yohann305
My prediction: A new kind of lifestyle will emerge.

Nomads 2.0, i.e self-driving car travellers: People who are constantly
traveling to new destinations while being able to work from the comfort of
their car.

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russellbeattie
I wonder if it'd be easy to steal one of these cars? Drop a black-cloth
Faraday-cage net over the top of the car as it is driving by... It'll lose
sight and radio communication, so will naturally stop and be at your mercy!
I'm not a car thief, so I'm not sure what I'd do after, but it was just a
thought...

~~~
adrianmonk
What do you do after you've stopped it? Now you have a parked car, you don't
have the ability to drive it away. (If you did, you would have skipped the
faraday cage net.)

So you need a tow truck to actually take the car into your control where you
can do with it what you will (sell it, etc.). But if you had a tow truck, you
could just steal any parked car, so how is the self-driving car worse off?

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andys627
This is cool tech, but more cars/miles travelled is bad, not good. We would be
healthier, happier, less harmful to environment, richer, have more friends, be
better connected to our communities, etc. if we built mobility around walking,
biking, transit, AND cars... not ONLY cars.

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tonyquart
I have just read an article that talks about this matter especially when
there's accident with self-driving cars involved, at
[https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-
accid...](https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident-
injury-lawyers-attorneys/). I think regulation will be the most important part
that should be done before publicly release these cars.

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bitL
The main draw for me is saving time by not needing to drive. It is currently
luxury to have own chauffeur so that one can focus on more interesting things
than to keep attention on the road during daily commute. Mass transit allows
this but it doesn't really allow you to fully focus on something else while
you are traveling.

And from engineering perspective, it's absolutely awesome to work on it, I
wish everybody could experience the feeling when a self-driving car you
programmed makes its first drive on its own (I have experienced it).

Ethical risks are real though, both about who is responsible in case of
fatality as well as what if the technology is going to be abused for military
purposes (I already rejected to lead self-driving part of an off-road military
vehicle in the past).

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sosilkj
What guarantee do I have that a car will take me where I want to go if I
cannot drive it myself and I cannot inspect the software?

~~~
tdb7893
What's the guarantee that a taxi driver will take you where you want to go?
You can't inspect his software either. A taxi driver could feasibly just leave
the taxi and take his keys with him but practically that doesn't happen. Also
you would have a cell phone so could call their support or arrange another car

~~~
tree_of_item
The taxi driver is a human, humans have different, less spectacular failure
modes. In a world with self-driving cars, it's plausible that there's a
bug/hack that makes EVERY car on the road do something wrong or malicious like
take you to the wrong destination/drive in to a crowd of people etc.

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wehadfun
Why not have a driver present? Just don't understand how that improves the
test.

~~~
lern_too_spel
If you don't need a driver in the car, you can test more vehicles with fewer
people and ultimately deploy a mobility service cost-effectively.

~~~
MBCook
Exactly.

Except when you get in a situation with 100 vehicles, 12 of which need help,
and you have 10 drivers.

Oops. Someone died.

~~~
lern_too_spel
If the situation is a matter of immediate life or death, having remote humans
is no help at all to prevent death, so your scenario isn't likely.

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golergka
> The cars will also need to be hardened against cyber attacks

How exactly, and who's going to test it?

~~~
subway
The only folks willing to perform security testing on _any_ product -- anyone
who can benefit from exploiting it. /s

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nvahalik
So...

What happens if a "self driving car" gets a speeding ticket? Who is liable?
The owner of the car? The programmer? The manufacturer?

What happens if it gets into a wreck? Same question.

How do self-driving cars respond to police? Do they pull over?

Call me skeptical but it really seems like there are far more issues with this
than we realize...

~~~
pattycake
They're still in development and testing

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yalogin
Is google at a position to do tests in traffic without a driver present?

~~~
datguacdoh
They are already doing this in Arizona:
[https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-
drivi...](https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/7/16615290/waymo-self-driving-
safety-driver-chandler-autonomous)

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davidkuhta
Can anyone with some legal background comment on liability implications?

~~~
awestroke
IANAL, but it seems straightforward to me. The vehicle will have to be fully
insured. While this is a strange concept in America, where each driver is
insured for a specific vehicle, this is how insurance is done in many
countries in Europe; an insured vehicle is insured no matter who drives it. So
American insurance companies will just need to start insuring vehicles by
themselves, and if something happens then the insurance company will pay up.

~~~
gambiting
>> this is how insurance is done in many countries in Europe.

Not all though. For example in Poland you insure the vehicle and anyone with a
valid driver licence is allowed to drive it and is fully covered. As a matter
of fact it's enshrined in law that insurance companies have to provide cover
no matter who drives the car, as long as there is insurance on the car.

~~~
walshemj
Strange normally insurance is tied to the person in the UK

~~~
gambiting
I know, it was really strange to me when I moved to UK - what do you mean, I
can't just let someone else drive my car? I have to add them to my insurance?
Why?

I mean, I understand how it works now, but to me it still seems like an excuse
to extract a lot more money from British drivers.

~~~
jk563
I'm not sure about that. The flip side of that is that my standard insurance
insures me on my car, but I'm also insured to drive someone else's car too
without further premiums required.

~~~
gambiting
Well.....that's not _quite_ true - British insurance usually covers you for
driving other cars, but only gives you 3rd party insurance....so I would never
risk driving someone's car unless it was some really old beater not worth
much.

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a-b
Please make them special license plates.

