
Tesla’s Elon Musk Says Autonomous Driving Not All That Hard to Achieve - T-A
http://www.wsj.com/articles/teslas-elon-musk-says-autonomous-driving-not-all-that-hard-to-achieve-1426624848
======
sjtrny
A better title would be

> Tesla’s Elon Musk Has No Fucking Idea What He’s Talking About

I guess going to space makes autonomous cars look simple. But in reality it's
probably far easier to launch a rocket and dock with the ISS than build a
autonomous car.

There are so many uncontrollable and unpredictable variables going on when you
are driving. The only way that it has been done so far is by Google on a small
set of roads that have been meticulously mapped and analysed. What happens if
that area changes due to roadworks? It won't work.

Attempts by others are just as limited. Take a look at the TerraMax wiki page:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraMax_(vehicle)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TerraMax_\(vehicle\)).
This is basically for more off road/rougher situations in which plowing over
small bushes and trees to the side of the path isn't an issue. But even still
note that it got confused by tumbleweeds in a DARPA challenge.

It isn't a solved problem, and won't be for a long time. This is like people
in the 80's claiming that we would have flying cars and hover boards by now.
The only way right now to get autonomous cars en masse is to embed
transmitters or magnetic strips in the road. Essentially we would need to put
the cars on tracks.

~~~
cma
This guy runs down a list of things that are unsolved and really fucking hard:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs#t=94](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5CZmlaMNCs#t=94)

~~~
dengnan
I think many issues mentioned in this video could be (partly?) solved with
better infrastructures. Just imagine how many infrastructures we have built
for the auto cars: We built roads, traffic lights, stop signs, parking signs,
we painted lanes, etc, etc. We've made a huge investment into the
infrastructures simply for the cars to run safely and efficiently.

With self-driving cars, new infrastructures need to be built, not for human,
but for different censors mounted on the car.

------
elmin
This seems like marketing-speak to me. Or perhaps they haven't gotten far
enough in their development for it to be really hard yet. Here are some
examples of reasons this is harder than you'd think:

\- At a complex intersection, how does the computer decide which traffic light
is yours?

\- You see an obstruction in the road. How do you decide if it's something
like a plastic bag you can drive through, or something you need to swerve
around?

A very experienced team has been working on this at Google for almost a
decade. I'm not sure how Elon's team would have skipped so many steps.

~~~
joe_the_user
Indeed,

And even the google car ignores _entirely_ the traffic lights that aren't on
the highly detailed map guiding the car [edit: that disappears when it loses
connectivity. But connectivity is a "solved problem" too, right?].

But the simple parts of the problem are solvable. The very simplest parts of
the problem could probably be solved with analog relays.

One theory: get enough hype and support for autonomous cars and cities will be
forced to install wireless guides for autonomous cars. Then the only problem
is people stepping in front of them. So you ignore that problem and away you
go.

I mean, regular automobiles, when they were first introduced, caused massive
casualties. Only in the eighties did we begin to get this under control with
air bags, sane speed limits and so-forth.

Cars have been just rolling death for a large portion of the history of people
using them. Well, autonomous cars can just leverage that fine history.

~~~
lkbm
We haven't been improving on drivers, though. Twenty years ago, humans as a
group were as bad as they are today and as they will be in another twenty
years. Or thirty or fifty. You can add seatbelts and rear parking cameras, and
you can legislate against texting while driving, but you can't legislate away
tired or distracted drivers, or just plain unskilled drivers. As a group, the
only way we improve is through demographic shift. But autonomous cars get
better, as a whole, and consistently, and rapidly.

Maybe autonomous cars will be at the 50th percentile in five years, but
they're only as good as the bottom 10% of drivers, well, we'd still be better
off with those 10% of drivers switching--which would lead to infrastructure to
improve it. (I think more importantly, social understanding/recognition of
them. The hard problems presented in Dr. Leonard's video posted on this thread
aren't peds stepping in front of them, but cops gesturing and unprotected left
turns across traffic where you need to make eye contact.)

Finding the bottom 10% sounds hard, because, yes, a lot of bad drivers think
they're good drivers, but I think the majority of us know we suck. For many,
their insurance companies know too.

------
mholt
> "I view it as a solved problem"

Wow. We've been trying to nail "simple" things like street light timing
algorithms for years and all of a sudden, self-driving cars are being
prototyped and promised for sale soon. I feel like this is popping out of
nowhere, even though self-driving cars are the type of things fantasized about
in science fiction from the 20th century. I even thought "I, Robot" was
presumptuous to depict automated cars being the majority in 2030. And yet here
we are...

~~~
Apocryphon
It's really weird for this sort of parallel invention to happen independently
due to corporate secrecy, rather than because of free exchange of ideas and
designs. Also: all of these working VR headsets are coming out of the woodwork
after decades of being insufficiently immersive.

~~~
dronethinktank
The free exchange of ideas and designs will ultimately win out. This will be
evident by 3DRobotics outpacing a company like DJI. Also, I agree with the
whole VR thing. Have you heard of the Lighthouse tracking technology by Valve?
Crazy stuff

~~~
Apocryphon
My biggest puzzlement is why after decades, VR is now suddenly a viable thing.
But I've heard the answer is because the rise of smartphones have presented us
with cheaper high-resolution displays and motion sensors and other tech that
finally brought the medium out of the '80s.

As far as self-driving cars go, I remember this article, written just over a
decade ago:
[http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/robot_pr.html](http://archive.wired.com/wired/archive/12.03/robot_pr.html)

Now that's astounding advancement.

------
Untit1ed
I imagine a lot of things look not all that hard when you're trying to build a
rocket that can go to space, come back down and neatly land itself on a
helipad...

~~~
maxxxxx
To me that sounds much easier than an autonomous car that has to work any
time, deal with pedestrians, things falling off other cars, rain, snow, ice
and many other unpredictable factors.

~~~
taf2
I think those thing all on their own is not the hard problem - the hard
problem is deciding whether to avoid the child crossing the street by driving
over the cliff or slamming into the oncoming traffic...

~~~
bsder
Except that when you have self-driving cars, those other cars are making
similar decisions and opening a hole for a car that just might need to avoid
that child.

This is why self-driving cars are going to be far safer than humans. Your
self-driving cars will see a thousand hazardous situations as you are driving
and adjust to avoid them _pre-emptively_ and silently.

Yes, there will be some bugs on the way there. And it will kill a few people.
But we kill about 30,000 people in car crashes per year and about 5,000
pedestrians per year with cars.

The programs could be quite buggy, and still beat that by I suspect a very
wide margin.

~~~
brianobush
The decade or so long problem is the mix of self-driving cars and those
piloted by humans. And yes, the benefits will be obvious.

------
oroup
I'm a huge fan of Musk, but this was an intemperate thing to say. Inevitably
at some point someone is going to get killed by one of his autonomous cars and
at the wrongful death suit the plaintiffs lawyer will bring up video of him
calling the problem not that hard and "solved" and he will have a much worse
problem on his hands.

The truth is, it is hard to make any system as flawless as we're going to want
these systems to be.

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PinguTS
> Mr. Musk has said Tesla plans to be the first company to offer customers an
> autopilot feature. “I think we will be the leader in autonomous cars that
> you can actually buy,” he said.

That is interesting to read, especially with the knowledge that they brought
this technology from Bosch/Daimler. Without their technology cooperation Tesla
still would not even had adaptive cruise control, which every decent car of
the last 10 years offers.

BTW, from the technology point of view, we are at about 90% of the self
driving car. But developing the last 10% is hard. Besides that there are a lot
of ethical questions and insurance questions to answer.

Ethical: what happens when the car detects an unavoidable accident: where
should the crash in? Who decides that? Who is responsible for that? These days
it is easy to answer that questions: it's the driver. But in a self driving
car?

Insurance: what happens if an accident takes place and a person dies from it?
Who is responsible? The driver? The car owner? The car manufacturer? The sub-
system manufacturer? The developer?

There are a lot of non-technical issues to solve.

~~~
ghshephard
Re: Insurance - that one will be straight forward. Cars with Full On
automation/DriverAssist will be 10x (if not more) safer than human drivers, so
the accidents that do occur, will be fully covered by insurers. Your policy
will probably be 1/2 of what it is today as well.

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ghshephard
The one that gets me, is how to make decisions regarding people doing traffic
direction. What happens when there is someone standing in front of you,
wearing a traffic-safety vest, directing traffic down a lane. Do you go down
that lane. Do you ignore them and keep driving forward, potentially running
over the person if they don't get out of the way. Do you hit the brakes and
accelerate backwards? Depending on the context, any of those decisions might
be correct - but I doubt that any "Automated Driving" system will know how to
handle it in the next 30 years.

Now, _Driver Assist_ , in which the car keeps you in your lane, brakes before
hitting the care in front of you, swerves into the emergency lane in the event
someone is about to side swipe you, stops at traffic light/stop sign - _these_
are solved problems, and I expect will be rolled out (already are in many
cases) in most cars over the next 10 years.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Actually, it sounds simple. You never run over the person directing traffic
because of the usual anti-running-over mechanisms that the car will have. You
can teach the car to recognize the signs policemen use to wave, and it seems
feasible to learn the car to recognize gestures - after all, AFAIR, Google
already solved that for recognizing hand signals that cyclists give. And OTOH,
if you want to direct traffic in the world of mixed driver/driverless cars,
it's on you to know you might be dealing with a machine and make sure you
gesture clearly.

~~~
ghshephard
The point I was trying to make, is depending on the situation, all three
responses are entirely reasonable. If it's some idiot/kid/whackjob playing
games, you keep moving forward, making it clear he needs to clear out of the
way. Maybe lay on the horn. If it's East Palo Alto (or wherever the high-crime
area is in the United States right now), and you are about to get jacked, you
hit the brakes, reverse, and get the hell out of dodge. If it's a normal
traffic situation (Construction, Police Officer, etc...) - you follow their
directions.

A human can make that assessment in a few hundreds of milliseconds - it's
going to be 20+ years at least before any automated driving system is going to
figure out what to do in situations like these. (Please don't get overly
focussed on the "Some random person pretending to direct traffic situation" \-
I'm sure you can come up with a hundred other scenarios which require
executive, not tactical assessment.)

This is why I believe DriverAssist is going to be incredible, particularly on
freeways - and already is today - It's an awesome thing to have a recent model
BMW brake from 85 mph to a complete stop when the car in front of them slams
on the brakes. An entire category of accidents is going to be virtually
eliminated as DriverAssist is added to Vehicles.

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thehodge
I'm of the believe that my children will not have to learn to drive and the
children they have will not be allowed to drive (under normal circumstances)

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aheilbut
I'd like to propose finding a new street parking spot in NYC after moving out
of the way of the street-sweeper as a Turing test for the autonomous car.

------
nsxwolf
Does everyone really believe fully autonomous cars are just around the corner?
I thought Google was pretty much just snowing us with how close they really
are. They have a car trained to drive the same road, over and over again.

Every time I drive now, I noice one or two random events I have to negotiate
and wonder if the Google car is going to be able to handle them. Things like
misleading turn signals and body language from human drivers, the confusion
that occurs with multiple people messing up a 4 way stop, etc.

~~~
krapp
One thing i've noticed on Hacker News whenever subjects about AI come up,
particularly with autonomous cars, is that commenters who claim to actually
work in the field always call BS on the hype.

------
pseudometa
It has been interesting to see how many friends and relatives have an initial
"Why would I trust a driverless car on the road" reaction until I point out
the idiocy of "other" drivers on the road. People believe they are the best
drivers, yet readily agree that everyone else shouldn't be driving.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the progression of this. Seems like it
could be the next big change to society norms.

------
abalone
What about liability? Today if a driver makes a mistake and hurts someone, the
driver is responsible. If a self-driving car makes a mistake, is the automaker
responsible?

In 2013 auto insurance companies paid out $124 billion in liability and
property damage claims.[1] Plus who knows how much courts awarded in tort
trials for serious automobile accidents.

Even if a self-driving car is 10X safer than a human driver, that's still
equivalent to 10% of today's insurance and litigation burden being shifted to
automakers. Won't this have a significant impact on the cost of autonomous
cars?

I can't see courts upholding the standard software license agreement that
indemnifies software makers from bugs when it comes to autonomous vehicles.
Injury & death are not the same as data loss, and in any event that would only
cover the driver, not all victims.

For this reason alone I think the future will be one of _semi_ -autonomous
driving, where humans are still required to be trained and in control and
ultimately liable for decisions. "Cruise control on steroids."

[1] [http://www.iii.org/table-archive/21338](http://www.iii.org/table-
archive/21338)

~~~
dragonwriter
> What about liability? Today if a driver makes a mistake and hurts someone,
> the driver is responsible.

Most likely, liability will be addressed to some extent in statute authorizing
general use of driverless vehicles, but there's been quite a lot of analysis
of this issue just based on generally applicable liability principles.

For one example, see
[http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/04/products-
li...](http://www.brookings.edu/research/papers/2014/04/products-liability-
driverless-cars-villasenor)

> Even if a self-driving car is 10X safer than a human driver, that's still
> equivalent to 10% of today's insurance and litigation burden being shifted
> to automakers. Won't this have a significant impact on the cost of
> autonomous cars?

At the numbers you give, not particularly. Let's use that 10% number, and
assume that the $124 billion paid out in 2013 was spread out over _just_ the
new cars sold in the US 2013, rather than all cars sold in 2013, or all cars
on the road in 2013. 15.6 million cars were sold in that year, and we've got
to spread $12.4 billion in additional automaker liability across them --
that's less than $1,000 per car. (And, of course, if the automakers are taking
all the liability, that means 100% of the cost of liability _insurance_ to
drivers goes away for driverless car purchasers, so the total cost to the
consumer will be dramatically _lower_ , even with the cost added to pay for
the automaker's liability burden.)

------
cwyers
I feel like there needs to be a stronger phrase than "cognitive dissonance" to
describe someone who thinks that the software that can write captions of
pictures of cats is evidence of a possible existential threat to humanity but
advocates for letting software control what he himself calls "two-ton death
machine[s]."

~~~
TeMPOraL
We then need a set of stronger phrases for "failing at reading comprehension
101", "uncharitable presentation" and "failing to think on a topic for even 30
seconds".

Also, I see no cognitive dissonance here - just a realistic understanding of
how powerful software can be.

------
mikerg87
I am always struck that you always see the autonomous driving demonstrations
in favorable climate conditions. I have never heard of a test at night with
low visibility due freezing rain on snow packed roads like you might
experience in the northern Midwest or Canada.

~~~
clarky07
Guess what, people really suck at that too. Most decide to stay home when it's
like that because it's not safe. No reason to focus on that now. Just say,
nope, this isn't safe you should stay home. If it's an emergency, you can
drive yourself in these terrible conditions.

------
ebuth
The hardest problem isn't a technical one; it has to do with liability. There
will be crashes and deaths, no doubt about it. But who is at fault now? The
car maker (or whomever wrote the software)?

Because of this, laws regulating autonomous driving will be the bottleneck. I
can envision something transitional: approval for long stretches of "easy"
driving will come first. For example, driving on the I-5 from LA to SF.

For me, this is the perfect use case for a self-driving car so I can enjoy
doing something else rather than paying attention to a boring drive.
Personally, self-driving cars in a downtown area isn't as crucial. Unless I
have no idea where the hell I'm going in a confusing city.

~~~
rhino369
There is no problem.

They both can be. The owner is responsible for the car they put out in the
road. The maker (software, hardware, hell even the retailer) will be liable
under products liability for any flaws in the design.

There will be some debate about negligence and autonomous car crashes. But you
don't even have to pass laws. Courts will just make the rules up as they go
along. It's the beauty of the common law system. Judges fill in the gaps when
new fact patterns are applied.

I'm guessing car companies will end up paying for it because they have the big
pockets and they can best handle it.

I'm not sure there aren't big technical problems still ahead. The stupid Uber
app won't stop sending drivers down alleys in Washington DC. LOL at there
being a computer driver in the next 10 years.

------
vessenes
I both love this future because I think it will save lives and be awesome, and
hate it because I am sure, totally sure, that we won't get a physical
disconnect button to turn the car off, open the doors and get out if the car
is malfunctioning, on fire, or taken over by hackers or the 'Car Safety
Administration and Prevention' department.

I think it's interesting there's so much billionaire scare-talk about skynet
and the risk of AI and none of these companies mention meatspace-level
security with their cool autonomous AI's they're building.

I genuinely wonder why that is; is it just preferring control (over the robot
product by the company)?

------
TamDenholm
For the guy that leads a company that has a rocket that can come back from
space, i reckon a car that can drive itself is a comparatively simple problem.
The real problem is laws. We're making progress but its going to be damned
slow.

I reckon there will be a future time where we look at human controlled cars as
the same as we look at horse and carts now, but also as very dangerous things
that are eventually outlawed unless you're on a racetrack. I think eventually
motorsport will be the last place you'll see human driven cars.

I cant work out if Formula E with completely autonomous cars would be
interesting, or really boring...

~~~
baddox
I think producing a consumer-ready autonomous automobile is a significantly
more difficult problem than sending a rocket to space and back.

------
phkn1
‘In the distant future people may outlaw driver cars. You can’t have a person
operating a two-ton death machine!’

I don't care how good the design is, people will always require a way to take
control when they wish. The trick will probably be to make the UX (passenger
experience - PX?) so much _easier_ than driving that nobody will want to.

But outlaw them? Nah...

~~~
manicdee
I am not allowed to take control of the plane I am flying in today. It is
actually illegal to do so and I face severe penalties for even trying.

Same deal for taxis, busses, trams, cable-cars, ferris wheels and ferries.

We have modes of transport we do not control, where attempting to take control
is illegal.

Why not the same for cars? They will simply be self-driving taxis after all.

~~~
phkn1
Because you don't own any of those things. If you own your own plane and have
a pilot's license, you are more than welcome to fly it yourself and to
disengage the autopilot should the situation demand it.

I wouldn't mind an autonomous car-share service. Just saying that Musk's
futurist vision of mandatory self-driving vehicles is incompatible with
personal control of personal technology, and practically, politically
infeasible in the US anytime soon.

------
robbrown451
I wonder if saying "it is a solved problem" might be a bit
discouraging/demotivating to the engineers who are continuing to work to make
it better.

------
adamconroy
Shouldn't Elon be concerned that the car might decide the human is
superfluous, open a door and swerve wildly until the body is ejected

