
Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality - dsr12
https://www.wsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-with-merciless-reality-1536831005
======
Animats
Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress.
The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til
you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed
people.

This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but
only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you
make it crowd had the fantasy that you just hook up some cameras to a machine
learning system, train it, and you have self driving. Doesn't work. Machine
learning is way too dumb.

You can maybe identify "traffic light", "car", "pedestrian", and "deer" with
machine learning. That's just used to guess what they're going to do next.
It's not used to decide if they're an obstacle. Obstacle detection and
avoidance is all sensors and geometry.

Also, "self driving car", "electric car", and "transportation as a service"
are all independent. All will be available, but not from the same companies.

~~~
erikpukinskis
Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net
beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

~~~
semi-extrinsic
How could it do that? The safety statistics quoted by Tesla is "fatalities per
mile of Autopilot-enabled vehicle", compared to "fatalities per mile for the
average car on the road". It's by no means an accurate comparison, in fact
they're inflating their relative safety versus other cars by more than an
order of magnitude.

~~~
Consultant32452
Tangential to your point, do you think it's fair to compare AI driven cars to
"average" drivers? I think it's more reasonable to compare them to "average
[worst_category_of_driver]." For example, how does the Tesla car compare to
teen drivers? If it's better than a meaningfully sized category of human
drivers, it's probably ready for the road. Being on the real road is where the
best data will be collected.

~~~
dwighttk
only if you are exclusively giving the Teslas to that smaller, worse, category
of driver

~~~
Consultant32452
The point is that we allow teen drivers on the road with the expectation and
understanding that they will improve over several years. Why would we not
expect to have to make the same concession for AI?

~~~
kart23
Because they are companies that sell a product to consumers, who expect that
this will keep them safe on the road. We need to hold them to a much higher
standard than a teenager.

~~~
Consultant32452
I feel like this position is too risk averse. Fear of a few hundred AI driver
deaths will result in hundreds of thousands more human driver deaths.

------
djsumdog
I think a lot of people in this field did see this coming. I knew a few people
in this space about a year ago and I pretty much hear: "realistically, 15
years out at the earliest."

I really really hate the concept of a driverless car. It's an incredibly
difficult problem space; and for the same cost, America could build up
municipal rail and bus infrastructure to where they were in the 1940s/1950s.
We need more cities like Seattle with its rail expansion and fewer New York
City where the infrastructure is finally getting money so it doesn't fall
apart.

There are already so many tax breaks going into driverless companies. If
Alphabet or Here want to do this on their own, go for it; but governments
around the world should stop giving tax breaks and municipal incentives for
this technology.

I can see it being more useful in Europe, where so much of the country is
connected and it'd help sold the last leg problem. But in most of America we
need to get back to the point where cars are no longer a necessity, not just
for those who can afford to live in the city, but all the people who are
barely making it who's lives fall apart if something on their car breaks.

~~~
save_ferris
> But in most of America we need to get back to the point where cars are no
> longer a necessity

While I completely agree with you, the cultural barriers to this are petty
much a non-starter in much of the country. I love not owning a car and being
able to rely on mass transit where I live (Austin, TX), but Texas is so
culturally opposed to anything like this.

A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor, and the car
represents independence and freedom. Go where you want, when you want (but
you're gonna be bumper-to-bumper most of the way there.)

I hate that mentality, but driverless cars represent the "have your cake and
eat it too" solution. It more closely aligns with the culture of driving here
in the US, while also claiming numerous commercial and infrastructure
benefits.

~~~
dpc59
­>A lot of people think that mass transit is for the poor

That's because it is. I had to take the metro in Montréal to get to work this
week, hadn't taken it in months because I usually bike, it's such a shitty
experience. It smells bad, it's hot, it's filled with tired people that don't
feel like going to work (you feel it in the air), beggars harass you, it's
slow (it can take 3x as much time as riding a bike to get where you want to)
and it's operating past maximum capacity during rush hour. I haven't even
gotten started on when service is interrupted and you show up over an hour
late to work or class. Anybody who can afford a bit more for reliability and
comfort will spend it without looking back.

~~~
tomjakubowski
I can't speak for Montreal, but there are countless counterexamples of cities
in wealthy countries (not as wealthy as the US) where metro users are drawn
from more or less every income level. Turns out you can actually make riding a
metro into a good experience with a bit of effort.

New York, Chicago, Tokyo, Taipei, London, Berlin, Munich come immediately to
mind.

And as sibling commenters have pointed out, in some places even smaller cities
and towns have excellent public transit networks that pretty much everyone
uses (maybe not always, but when convenient). Freiburg, Germany is one example
I've seen.

~~~
SlowRobotAhead
Taipei... yes, absolutely. That was a great experience and easy to use.

NYC... altright, better than 15 years ago but still not great at all. Not as
good as Germany or DC.

Tokyo... lol, no! While clean and efficient, it’s a joke that you have
different rail stations owned by different companies, different cards that may
work on each other but probably not. The ticket machines are almost all cash
only. And instructions in other languages might have well used Google
translate. Tokyo was one of the more difficult public transport systems I’ve
used and I’ve been around the world a bit.

~~~
alistairSH
_Not as good as Germany or DC._

Did you just claim DC public transit is good? Wow. Coherent bus lines are few
and far between. Light rail is non-existent. And the Metro is falling apart at
the seems... Prone to excessive delays. Entire lines are brought down for
extended periods to perform decades of deferred maintenance. There's no ring
routes - to get from Dulles to Rockville, you have to go all the way downtown
and back out again. The system was built without consideration for express
lines. And neither of the DC airports are on the same line as Union Station.

~~~
ahyattdev
A ring route from Bethesda to Largo is under construction and it's called the
Purple Line. Metrorail could be better and has it's own shortcomings but it is
one of the best in the US and far from nonexistent.

~~~
alistairSH
I said light rail (trams, streetcars) is non-existent. There is a test line in
South DC, but nothing that’s actually useful for commuting or getting across
the city.

My wife tried to use Metro for her Reston->downtown commute. It was a disaster
- rail delays made it completely untenable. Then she tried the bus. It was
more consistent, but overcrowded. She ended up driving 4/5 days because it was
faster, cheaper, and more consistent.

------
Zigurd
This assessment of the state of play is very uneven. For example, the
assertion made by Meredith Broussard quoted in the article "It’s also not true
that we must transition to self-driving cars because human-piloted ones are so
lethal" is a truism. The article goes on to say "Countless innovations have
made cars radically safer since the 1950s and continue to do so."

Yet vehicles remain as lethal as dread diseases, mostly down to the humans
piloting them. Just cutting that number of deaths and injuries significantly
would be a boon similar to eradicating malaria.

I expect the flourishing of autonomous vehicles to be sudden and
unanticipated. Just as you can't tell unless you are looking for the decals or
attuned to why back seats are suddenly more populated you might miss the fact
there are two million ride share drivers in the US now. One day we will
realize the wait for a bus is much shorter because busses are right-sized and
more frequent and can surge where they are needed because drivers aren't a
bottleneck and routes are dynamic.

------
cicero
"Our love affair with self-driving cars is a form of 'techno-chauvinism,'
Prof. Broussard says. 'It's the idea that technology is always the highest and
best solution, and is superior to the people-based solution.'"

~~~
Buldak
We like the idea of technological solutions that don't require us to change
our lifestyle or make hard choices. Driverless cars are appealing because they
would allow us to largely maintain the status quo (as opposed to, say,
reorienting toward public transportation). It's like an obese person who says,
"I don't want to eat healthy and exercise. Why can't scientists just invent
low-calorie versions of the food I like?"

~~~
amthewiz
Really? I don't like to fetch water from a lake every day to my house. Instead
of using technology to bring water to my house, what lifestyle changes or hard
choices should I rather make?

~~~
pjc50
The great invention for dealing with this is a public utility that provides
water to everyone. A mass transit system for water.

~~~
orthecreedence
But why not a fully-autonomous robot that employs machine learning to detect
nearby lakes and streams that can hand-deliver the water?

~~~
amthewiz
Tuche!

------
airstrike
I think Musk notwithstanding, folks who are actually developing ADAS
technologies are not* really touting driverless capabilities – that's the
ultimate goal but the genuine projects today are focused on HD mapping and
image recognition from cameras to overcome the LiDAR price hurdle.

OEMs are very interested in startups working on those specific issues, but for
various reasons these incremental steps aren't as widely reported so all we
get left is the hype that self driving cars "are here" and things like Tesla
Autopilot

------
iabacu
The argument that autonomous tech will save lives is the most dangerous. This
will take decades to be true.

The same companies who are pushing for that narrative, are also the first ones
to blame the drivers when their tech goes wrong.

There’s so much data fudging to push for those narratives — they want the
credit for lives saved, and at the same time don’t want the blame or liability
for accidents caused.

~~~
yannyu
Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people
die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are
injured or disabled.

Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good
enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?

~~~
Alupis
> Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents

Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally?

Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000
annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US.

When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000
(depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]. We can and should
fix this first and foremost.

With over 3.1 Trillion miles driven annually in the US, that's about 0.001
fatalities per 100,000 miles driven, or about 1 fatality per 80,000,000 miles
driven. Driving is pretty safe - although I agree we can make it safer.

[1] [https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-
releases-2016-fat...](https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/usdot-
releases-2016-fatal-traffic-crash-data)

[2] [https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-
safety/index.ht...](https://www.cdc.gov/vitalsigns/motor-vehicle-
safety/index.html)

[3] [https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-
statistics/fatali...](https://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-
statistics/fatalityfacts/state-by-state-overview)

[4]
[https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impa...](https://www.cdc.gov/motorvehiclesafety/impaired_driving/impaired-
drv_factsheet.html)

[5] [https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2017/02/21/516512439...](https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2017/02/21/516512439/record-number-of-miles-driven-in-u-s-last-year)

~~~
beat
Hey, you know what would fix the drunk driving problem?

Autonomous cars.

~~~
eckza
Cars don’t cause drunk driving.

Drunk drivers cause drunk driving.

~~~
alexgmcm
Yeah but you can make all the PSAs and laws you like and some people will
still drink and drive.

That's not a concern with a robot car.

------
airstrike
[https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-
wi...](https://www.fullwsj.com/articles/driverless-hype-collides-with-
merciless-reality-1536831005)

~~~
neonate
That doesn't work for me but
[http://archive.is/xKX1T](http://archive.is/xKX1T) does.

~~~
airstrike
Thanks. fullwsj.com links you to a facebook redirect which is not paywalled,
so YMMV depending on your treatment of facebook

~~~
neonate
The Facebook redirect takes me to the WSJ article, still paywalled.

~~~
m0skit0
Works fine for me

------
dboreham
Driverless vehicles are "the new fusion power". Always "about 10 years in the
future".

>Driverless cars are coming along just fine.

Even if this were true it doesn't mean humans will be fine with them being
deployed. We had working driverless trains 20+ years ago yet almost none are
deployed today (AND we have plenty of human-caused fatal train crashes that
might be a good reason to want driverless trains).

~~~
BurningFrog
There are plenty of driverless trains deployed all over the world:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_subway_systems)

------
hnburnsy
While I am still waiting for my Tesla Model 3 SR, I browse the Tesla forums
and find it amusing (or maybe just sad) that Tesla is charging $5000+ for Full
Self Driving (FSD). Owners are paying for the future possibility that the car
will be "conducting trips with no action required by the person in the
driver’s seat" [per Tesla Model 3 ordering page].

I think some Tesla owners are even expecting that their car will go self work
for Uber over night, generating the user income. Other customers seem to be
paying the fee, yet they are just leasing their car. Will these leasees ever
see any significant FSD features?

This article gets it right that self-driving is way, way off. It will be
interesting to see what and when Telsa delivers to its customers who prepaid
for FSD. I think Tesla already settled a lawsuit with some owners over self-
driving fees and associated delays.

~~~
kart23
Ha! I can just see the teenagers blocking the car, covering cameras with
paint, and leaving an empty Tesla in the middle of a busy intersection for the
cops to deal with. Pranks for the future generations are going to be really
interesting.

------
clay_the_ripper
I think it’s important to distinguish between a self driving car that can work
in every scenario, and a self driving car that can take over part of the time.
Personally, if someone could make a car that was extremely good at highway
driving so it could sit in traffic for me and drive on the highway (basically
if Tesla autopilot actually worked and was 99.9999% safe) that would be
AMAZING. that’s good enough for me. I don’t need a car that can self drive in
the snow.

------
woodandsteel
The people who argue that driverless cars can't match humans have a real
double standard going. They talk about all the conditions like snow and edge
cases that driverless cars can't handle now.

But they have nothing to say about all the real conditions that everyday make
human-driven cars unsafe, like lack of sleep, alcohol or illegal drugs,
youthful showing off, road rage, texting, arguing with a passenger, old age,
poor vision, and so on.

Remember, the problem is not to make driverless cars perfect, it is to make
them as good as humans, and that is much easier.

Also, let's remember, the transition to driverless cars will not come all at
once, with all vehicles handling all conditions. Instead we will gets lot of
partial, easier cases, like a truck that drives only along a well-mapped
route, or people using it only when weather conditions are reasonably good,
and so on. As the AI and sensors improve, new uses will be added, until
eventually we get it to be universal, or nearly so.

And finally there is the likelihood of infrastructure improvements to make it
easier.

So want we are going to have is not suddenly one day driverless cars take
over, rather a gradual increase in their use.

------
briatx
Generalized self driving cars seems like such a hard problem, laced with a
huge amount of hard to handle edge cases and a huge amount of hard to
enumerate possible scenarios.

I think it will still happen, but they need to simplify the problem. The way
to simplify it is to create automated driving lanes, similar to the current
HOV lanes, that have standardized markers that are easy for computers to read,
and then eventually extend it to automated driving routes.

That will take some amount of buy-in by the government to install, but I have
faith in our well paid lobbyists.

~~~
danenania
Afaik, highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved, so I’m
not sure that special lanes would make much difference, except perhaps during
snow storms.

The edge cases seem to be mostly around city driving, rural back roads, and
bad weather.

~~~
briatx
> highways in non-severe weather are already pretty much solved

And yet all the automated driving driver fatalities have been on the highway,
with the Mountain View crash in particular having been caused by weathered /
confusing road markings.

I wouldn't consider that solved at all.

But to the larger point, self driving lanes would only be a first step.
Eventually it would develop into a standard set of markings and signage for
automated driving friendly roads so that you could safely have self driving
cars in things like snow storms.

There's no need to limit it to highways only, although there I think there is
some benefit in the near term to segregating automated driving cars from human
driving ones.

------
expertentipp
Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money.
Graduating the car from break-clutch-engine machine to airliner level of
complexity vehicle is a perfect money sink.

~~~
landryraccoon
> Automotive industries never had problems with attracting taxpayer’s money.

I wasn't aware that the government is funding self driving car development. Do
you have a source?

~~~
ModernMech
In the 00s driverless car tech was heavily incubated by DARPA, a branch of the
US DOD.

------
izzydata
I'm still skeptical that this will happen anytime soon outside of selected
small zones. I may be wrong, but I feel like the US or wherever these get
deployed need a major infrastructure update to be better or more consistent.
Even with the most advanced automated driving system imaginable you will still
have poor and inconsistent infrastructure everywhere.

------
stretchwithme
I think we underestimate how amazingly versatile even an 85 year old
grandmother's brain truly is.

I am certain AVs will work EVENTUALLY. And that will radically change the
economy.

But robotic killing machines will be working long before that happens. And you
can bet somebody is working on that.

Maybe we're focusing on the wrong things.

------
person_of_color
Anyone joined and then left an SDC company because they thought the product
was too far away?

------
tenaciousDaniel
Seems like a good interim solution is to build infrastructure for designated
"driverless" lanes. I assume there's a good reason why this isn't being
pursued though?

------
kuroguro
[https://outline.com/Psn6Px](https://outline.com/Psn6Px)

------
rounce
Totally unrelated to the article's content but is _Refactor_ now part of
common english?

~~~
sowbug
If you factored algebraic expressions in high school, and you agree that the
"re" prefix generally can be added to a verb, then it's already part of your
lexicon.

The process of code refactoring, especially extracting common code into a
method, is very similar to the process of simplifying algebraic expressions.
So it's not just a grammar argument; the two words really do represent related
concepts.

------
rdlecler1
The web link to google often doesn’t work to find the non paywall version
anymore. I’d be happier having a setting in my HN profile that ghosted these
publications.

------
ur-whale
Paywalled.

[http://archive.is/xKX1T](http://archive.is/xKX1T)

------
chubot
I can't read this paywall article, but here are some similar counterpoints to
hype, starting in 2016. They are from people actually working on self-driving
technology or executives/investors close to it. (I'm interested in any earlier
"expectation setting", having heard a lot of this at Google.)

March 2016:

Chris Urmson: _How quickly can we get this into people 's hands? If you read
the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's thirty years. And I am
here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both._

[https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/sel...](https://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-
for-some-in-decades-for-others)

[https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-
level-5-fallacy-2...](https://mondaynote.com/autonomous-cars-the-
level-5-fallacy-247ae9614e14)

\----

April 2017:

 _It will be 25 years before self-driving cars take off in America, says early
Uber investor Bill Gurley_

[https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-
se...](https://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/06/bill-gurley-uber-investor-self-driving-
cars-25-years-away-in-us.html)

\----

October 2017:

[https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-
view...](https://medium.com/self-driven/a-decade-after-darpa-our-view-on-the-
state-of-the-art-in-self-driving-cars-3e8698e6afe8)

 _Those who think fully self-driving vehicles will be ubiquitous on city
streets months from now or even in a few years are not well connected to the
state of the art or committed to the safe deployment of the technology. For
those of us who have been working on the technology for a long time, we’re
going to tell you the issue is still really hard, as the systems are as
complex as ever._

------
quotemstr
I wish cities would create zones specifically designed around facilitating
autonomous car operation. For example, there's zero reason to allow random
private cars in Manhattan south of 96th street. In a small, dense area like
this, it should be possible to optimize around the limits of current
autonomous car software.

------
ocdtrekkie
I think the car manufacturers will, in the end, win out with the continued,
steady progress of smarter and more capable driver assistance systems. Cruise
control gave way to super cruise with lane keeping, warnings when your back
bumper was approaching something gave way to features that stop the car for
you before you hit something.

Eventually, the car will be less dependent on the human's attention, as the
safety features will make the human's attention less important (while not
telling the human their attention is less important), until it's good enough
to take over for the human.

I think a lot of the issue is that dream and expectation that "hey, I can just
watch a movie, I don't really need to pay attention" is crazy, and will
continue to be for many years to come. We need to stop marketing that future.

------
agentultra
I was just having this discussion last night as it happens. We sat at an
impasse as everyone was quite inebriated and didn't have any real empirical
evidence to back any of our claims up. I was rather curious if the rate of
deaths caused by human drivers would continue to dwarf those caused by edge
cases of deployed self-driving cars if we scaled up the number of self-driving
vehicles.

Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars. However
even despite the edge cases of machine learning, which can be adapted for
relatively quickly, would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even
if we replaced all of the cars with robot ones? We've been trying for decades
to minimize the damage caused by drunk drivers but policies don't seem to have
much of an effect. Compared to the massive amount of data we could collect
from robot cars in order to optimize them and adapt them... it seems like we'd
be faster at making them safer than preventing humans from making poor
decisions.

I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of
humans... I'd trust technology more in this case. It did wonders for the
aviation industry and while cars are more complicated to pilot in many cases I
don't see how we can make current human-piloted cars safer vs. optimizing
robot piloted cars. We've been trying the former for decades with diminishing
success.

~~~
akira2501
> didn't have any real empirical evidence to back any of our claims up.

NHTSA publishes the FARS every year. It is their database of every known
roadway fatality in the United States. It's free to the public. It's well
worth study. Here's an example: Texas has more fatalities than California. Not
per-capita, but in total. California has 10m more people living there than
Texas. This is not a uniform problem.

> Presently human drivers cause an awful number of deaths with cars.

Yes, a majority of accidents only involve a single vehicle. It is often the
case that a driver exceeds their ability or roadway conditions and kills only
themselves.

> would drunk drivers still kill more people every year even if we replaced
> all of the cars with robot ones?

Replaced them with cars that have no manual control option. Given everything
we've learned about automation, this is a bad idea given our current
infrastructure. So, it's highly unlikely that they will have much of an impact
for this group.

> it seems like we'd be faster at making them safer than preventing humans
> from making poor decisions.

This ignores the nearly 100 years of saftey history that we already have. We
have already reduced roadway fatalities by a staggering amount and have
created a regulatory framework that has successfully created higher saftey
margins for all drivers.

We already drive Trillions of miles every year in the US and we only have 36k
fatalities. Further: 6k of those are pedestrians and 8k of those are
motorcycles. 7k are young men under 24 and 7k were drivers under the
influence. There are not a lot of "easy gains" left out there where it's
obvious that self-driving cars will have a major impact.

> I think in the case of piloting a slow-moving bullet around crowds of humans

Which is one thing. However, we're talking about piloting thousands of slow-
moving bullets around crowds of humans _and_ each-other. There will not be a
single manufacturer of technology, nor will there be a single auto-pilot
system.

Plus we haven't experienced any automation failures yet that have caused us to
establish best-practices around this system. For example, should the
autonomous system have full 100% authority over the cars controls? It may be
useful in an accident that the car can use full authority to avoid an
accident. It may be disastrous in a situation where the car has bad data from
it's sensors. So, should we limit control authority to reduce the opportunity
for failure here and also leave some margins for a human to override the
machine? Will drivers actually understand the complicated and subtle
difference?

What happens when we need to roll out regulatory changes to autopilot
functions? Do we do that all at once? How do we force drivers to do these
updates? How do we keep drivers safe now that we've changed a major
operational mode of their vehicle? We expect airline pilots to engage in
simulations and continual training to ensure that they are on top of these
changes, what are we going to do in vehicles?

> It did wonders for the aviation industry

It wasn't without it's own set of challenges[0]. Upshot of the video is,
switching to a lower level of automation is now recommended practice in many
situations because it's actually safer.

[0]:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN41LvuSz10)

