

Toyota previews self driving car - simonbarker87
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-20910769

======
ChuckMcM
This is an interesting article as an indicator that Toyota thinks self driving
cars are that critical. Perhaps it was in response to GM's messaging along the
same lines.

Consider the overall effectiveness vs engineering effort compared to say
'smarter mass transit'. Imagine how useful it would be to have a mass transit
system which took advantage of the extreme efficiency of rolling on rails,
with vehicle based switching system [1]. We don't do that today because a)
trains can't change lanes if something bad is going to happen, and b) the
system is optimized for large trains going on the same route.

But autonomously driving a train is a _much_ easier problem than autonomously
driving a car. And if you created a system where vehicles could self-select to
enter a station then you could create mass transit with 'call on demand'
vehicles which only stopped at the pickup and drop off stations. This
eliminates the scheduling friction which has empty trains running at 2AM and
overly full trains running at 5PM.

Building a system like _that_ is well within our current engineering
capabilities, would save energy (these things are electric not gas powered)
and achieve high ridership by being very nearly as convenient as a car without
the hassle of driving in traffic.

[1] Traditional rail switches use arms on the ground to configure a rail
switch to move a car on to one track or another, in a vehicle based system the
vehicle configures its wheels to take one path or the other, this allows the
track to be 'passive' and not need a central switching authority.

~~~
georgemcbay
One issue with automated trains is when something inevitably goes wrong, if it
happens in a heavy trafficked system like in NYC you might have dozens to
hundreds of people dead compared to a couple of people with a driver-less car
incident, which will make it much bigger news, which will mean a much bigger
backlash.

And safety experts will go on the news and explain how the train incident was
one issue among billions of safely-moved people and it was really a human
error that was the root cause and the automated trains are much, much safer
than human drivers by the statistics and they'll be completely right, but
people won't care because omg robots.

~~~
Anechoic
_One issue with automated trains is when something inevitably goes wrong, if
it happens in a heavy trafficked system like in NYC you might have dozens to
hundreds of people dead_

Can you give an example of a subway accident (in NYC or another US system)
that lead to that many dead? A head-on collision on the WMATA system resulted
in only 9 dead:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_trai...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/June_2009_Washington_Metro_train_collision)

From this list of NYC subway accidents, the worst involved an accident in 1991
that killed 5 passengers:
<http://www.nycsubway.org/wiki/Subway_FAQ:_Accidents>

~~~
georgemcbay
Nope I can't. The numbers I randomly made up are certainly on the high side,
but they were made on the assumption that along with automation there would be
other changes like increasing the average travelling speed of the trains by a
significant amount and having increased loads due to better scheduling
algorithms.

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Qworg
From the description the BBC gave, it seems they're behind the curve: "A
series of optical beacons on the roadside can detect the positions of
pedestrians and obstacles, and relay information to the prototype about
whether a traffic light is red or green, as part of ITS. The car can also
independently monitor pedestrians' positions."

What roads are going to be set up with special optical beacons so the car
knows where things are? If that was possible, we would have had self-driving
cars a decade ago.

~~~
TheAmazingIdiot
An open problem that Google has admitted with their car automation project is
a certain problem endemic to the northern part of this country: Snow and Ice.

Admittedly, ice is rather difficult in any condition. However, many human
drivers drive safely on snow cover with minimal problems. Accidents are higher
during those times, but traffic still keeps flowing. Google-car-AI cannot
handle these events at all (at this time).

~~~
blhack
If we're at a point where having to take manual control of a robot car during
icey weather is a problem, then I'd say we are in a pretty good place.

~~~
SoftwareMaven
I'm not sure I agree. If the only time perole's driving skills are used is
during the most treacherous time to be driving, that will be _scary_.

I already avoid driving during the first snow storm of the season because,
after six months, people have inevitably forgotten that ice is slippery
(seriously, it a frightening and dangerous to be on the roads during the first
storm!). Now factor in the fact nobody has driven _at all_ during the last six
months and it will be exceedingly messy.

~~~
protomyth
The Twin Cities (MN) two year ago had about 400 accidents during the big
blizzard at the start of the year. I hesitate to think what would have
happened if those folks hadn't had to drive all summer.

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ceeK
I think I'd trust Google more than a car company to make self driving cars.
That right there is one of the problems though, which self driving car do you
trust the most?

~~~
taligent
Car companies TODAY have been shipping en masse large number of self-parking
and automatic accident avoiding cars and have decades of experience in
building and shipping reliable control systems.

Google can't even produce bug-free software, make high quality hardware or
even ship anything at any decent scale.

~~~
viraptor
> self-parking and automatic accident avoiding

Unfortunately these are really simple systems relative to safely driving on
the road without supervision. If we're talking about the same things, then
self-parking is just a software for recognising the front/end of some vehicle
parked on the side and where is the good parking space - in some models also a
distance monitor for automatic stopping. It's not that difficult to implement
and all the tricky conditions still have to be checked by people - for example
my auto-parking car will completely ignore people in its way, anything on the
street, will abort if it's on a slope down, will not check for lots of issues
that you're supposed to correct manually.

Collision avoidance is for now a simple break when some object is getting
close fast. Only a handful of cars implement something more as far as I know,
since actively changing the course is actually a rather large challenge to do
it right...

I have to disagree with "Google can't even produce bug-free software" too.
There's a big difference between programming a web application and doing
something that's close to safety critical software. It's a completely
different set of skills and requires a specific approach in general. Even
then... regarding bug-free at scale, I think they're doing fairly well so far.

------
MatthewPhillips
The article is unclear, but it sounds like Google is not involved in this.

Why isn't Google selling this technology to car companies? It seems like an
excellent second revenue stream.

~~~
cremnob
Why should they buy it? I think a lot of people in the tech community are
under the impression that this is something Google has invented and that this
will be a new cash cow. The reality is car companies have been working on this
technology for a while, with many "intelligent" features already existing in
higher end cars.

~~~
MatthewPhillips
Google seems to be ahead of the curve in this tech. I'd love to be proven
wrong, have any links?

~~~
cremnob
I've been reading about this randomly over the years so I don't have any links
in mind, these are off Wikipedia.

[http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/an-
automated-a...](http://www.thenational.ae/business/technology/an-automated-
adventure-at-the-wheel-of-a-driverless-bmw)
<http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/01/gm-says-driverl/>
[http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/07/n...](http://www.audiusa.com/us/brand/en/tools/news/pool/2010/07/new_look__reaffirmed.html)
[http://media.vw.com/newsrelease.do;jsessionid=89FFC8CECBE997...](http://media.vw.com/newsrelease.do;jsessionid=89FFC8CECBE997E4488B0F78F529C3B2?&id=746&allImage=1&teaser=driving-
without-driver-volkswagen-presents-temporary-auto-pilot&mid=138)
[http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1068584_2013-mercedes-
ben...](http://www.motorauthority.com/news/1068584_2013-mercedes-benz-s-class-
to-debut-autonomous-driving-system)
[http://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.h...](http://media.cadillac.com/media/us/en/cadillac/news.detail.html/content/Pages/news/us/en/2012/Apr/0420_cadillac.html)
<http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-19829906>

~~~
Someone
Also: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EUREKA_Prometheus_Project>.

A mean time between human interventions of 9 km may not seem something to brag
about, but this project ended before Google was founded aka 10 Moore's
generations ago. I think Mercedes has continued working on driverless cars
ever since.

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yannickmahe
How much time to mainstream acceptance? I'd say ten years.

~~~
holri
Not in Europe. Still shifting manually. To be in control.

~~~
ableal
The European mood is shifting (no pun intended). I see an increasing number of
models being offered with automatic gearboxes, even at the lower end of the
price scale.

Sales numbers are probably available somewhere, but, for a quick sample, I
took a cursory look at a local used car site - out of 5058 cars listed from
2010 onwards, some 716 are automatic. Nearly 15% is pretty good for something
that used to be much harder to come by.

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TheAmazingIdiot
"The car can also communicate with other vehicles"

This topic is interesting in quite a few aspects. Firstly, it's something I
thought of long ago, but due to implementation details (ECM is a closed,
obfuscated PITA).

The biggest ideas revolving around this com device is how it processes the
communication. Is the communication an authenticated protocol? Being an
amateur radio operator and a fellow hacker, I can think of plenty of things to
do regarding this device, both good and bad. Does it take "suggestions" from
other devices? If so, do these suggestions get stored in a sort of a log to
prove action your AI takes is the fault of another?

And there's the security involved in the local processor. Many in this
community are turned off to the idea of secure computing. In this case
however, could lead to a bad user fake-signing messages to other cars. This is
an open question, due to many secure implementations successfully hacked
(Nintendo DS, PS2, PS3, Blu-Ray, various media stores).

I'm sure there is a way to make a car-puter that interfaces with other
vehicles for a mesh network. However, I would believe that this network would
have to be one of those close to being mathematically provable languages. And
I would not think that TOYOTA would be capable of this.

~~~
holri
Car 2 Car communication is already ready:

[https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5095.en....](https://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5095.en.html)

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jspthrowaway2
Food for thought: the only reason traffic jams happen is because humans are
imperfect creatures that can't maintain a uniform speed (barring a total-
closure collision or some other abnormal event).

Imagine the impact on humans if traffic jams just vanished. Engineers have
known for a while that even in the heaviest congestion (think 405 or 580) it's
usually only a mistake by a driver that will completely stop traffic. I
wouldn't mind an auto-drive that was just speed control, enforced in
situations of congestion. Rather than one person braking too hard and
completely stopping a mile of 880, everybody gets programmed to travel at a
fixed speed.

A lot of things to work out there, but if vehicles worked together with the
road to maintain their own speed, traffic would be _light years_ better.

~~~
aggie
It's really a matter of slow and inconsistent reaction to changes in speed,
not the change in speed itself. The delayed reaction of one car causes it to
decelerate more then they would have had to, then for the car behind the
impact is greater and so on. Simulations suggest that as little as 20% of
vehicles having computer-controlled reactions (very fast) would just about
eliminate these shockwave traffic jams.

Related, see #6 in this article:
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innov...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/06/03/magazine/innovations-
issue.html)

