
Toyota Research Institute head says full autonomous driving is “not even close” - rbanffy
https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/04/toyotas-research-institute-head-says-full-autonomous-driving-is-not-even-close/
======
dperfect
I've been saying this for a while. The problem is that people are mostly
familiar with the rate of overcoming traditional technical challenges (e.g.,
making your current computer/phone more compact, improving graphics quality,
making cameras and screens with more pixels, etc.). What people don't realize
is that full autonomous driving will require more than just
faster/smaller/cheaper technical innovation - it will require the refinement
of innovations that probably haven't even been invented/researched yet.

I can't help but think about speech recognition 20 years ago. Many of the hot
software packages claimed something like 96% accuracy, and that sounded great
on paper. People thought intelligent voice-computer interfaces were just
around the corner, yet here we are in 2017, and Siri/Alexa/Cortana are barely
becoming usable (but still frustratingly lacking in many situations).

~~~
ageofwant
Intercontinental planes are mostly autonomous. Trains are autonomous. Massive
mine dump trucks are fully autonomous. These things are in use today and has
been for almost a decade. They need not be perfect to be useful, they only
need to be better than the average human driver.

Toyota is way behind in the game. What do you expect them to say about the
competition?

~~~
mandevil
Planes are a good argument for the opposite.

Do you ever wonder why there are two pilots on every commercial airliner? It's
not because airlines like paying so many more pilots- notice how fast flight
engineer/navigator positions disappeared as flight management technology and
GPS made them unnecessary. But still two pilots are there on every commercial
flight, why?

Simple answer: the airline industry has learned, through a lot of lessons in
blood over decades, that even with automation you really need a pilot who is
always ready to intervene _right this second_ , not in three minutes after
they've mentally caught up to what the situations is. And in order to provide
that sort of guarantee over many hours, you need two pilots, so they can
switch off responsibility. That's because commercial airliners on cruise, way
above any animals, terrain, etc. still have situations where immediate human
intervention is safety critical. (And when pilot minds fall behind the power
curve the result is things like AF447, so it seems like the industry is right
about the importance of this human monitoring and intervention.)

So if this well studied, easier externals problem requires someone on ready
for immediate intervention at all times, how quickly do you think that a much
harder problem like driving is going to get solved sufficient to allow human
free driving?

~~~
smileysteve
Because you reference AF447; Autopilot systems also added additional sensors
(satellite assisted speed) for the system to have redundancies.

------
Animats
Toyota got into autonomous driving late. Then they hired Gil Pratt from MIT.
Pratt used to run the MIT Leg Lab, which Raibert ran before Boston Dynamics,
but Pratt didn't do much there.

It's clear that autonomous driving can be made to work, because Google/Waymo
is doing it. It's hard and expensive and it takes a lot of sensors. It also
takes extensive testing. Waymo drives 25,000 autonomous miles a week. Volvo
has level 3 working on some freeways in Sweden; their 100 users are not
required to watch the road while in auto mode.

There are other startups trying to do it. There's the "fake it til you make
it" crowd - Otto and Cruise. (Otto's highly publicized Budweiser truck
delivery demo was on a nearly deserted freeway surrounded by chase cars.)
There's the "it's just a small matter of software" Tesla approach. There's the
"throw machine learning at vision and hope" crowd, some small startups. That's
what you get if you take the Udacity course and start coding. 43 companies
have California DMV licenses for autonomous vehicle testing.

Toyota has been making some bad business decisions lately. They don't make
battery electric cars. (They're fixing that, but won't be shipping until
2022.[1]) Instead, they've been pushing cars that run on hydrogen. Toyota
sells the Mirai in California, and has a few hydrogen stations so it can be
refueled. They sell about a hundred cars a month.[2]

[1] [https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toyota-electric-cars-
idUS...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-toyota-electric-cars-
idUSKBN1AA035) [2] [http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/toyota/toyota-
mira...](http://carsalesbase.com/us-car-sales-data/toyota/toyota-mirai/)

~~~
nihonde
Of all the companies you mentioned, only Toyota is a top ten automaker, and is
indeed number one by many measures. I guess you think experience and a track
record of phenomenal success is a disadvantage. I could agree with you in some
contexts, but not this one. The autonomous car hype is the emperor’s new
clothes, and Toyota is not your average industrial behemoth. Those guys
literally wrote the playbook on nimble manufacturing.

~~~
PeterisP
Toyota presumably treats reliability differently.

When Toyota talks about "full autonomous driving", they really mean _fully_
autonomous in a safe and predictable manner. When Uber or Tesla says the same,
the implication is that a "good enough" level will be good enough - and _that_
level can be achieved much sooner than whatever Toyota is talking about.

~~~
49para
[http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-
unintende...](http://www.safetyresearch.net/blog/articles/toyota-unintended-
acceleration-and-big-bowl-“spaghetti”-code)

They might do better with hardware than software ...

~~~
alex_anglin
Counterpoint from Malcolm Gladwell:
[http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-
game](http://revisionisthistory.com/episodes/08-blame-game)

The argument he puts forth is that pedal error on the drivers part is an
explanation for the unintended acceleration.

~~~
uep
I listened to that episode, and sort of regret it. I've heard these arguments,
and they still aren't convincing. Have you read the article on their spaghetti
code?

To be clear, I believe that most cases of unintended acceleration are caused
by pedal confusion/floormats. Just because that's true of most accidents, that
does not mean it's true of all of them.

Maybe it's because I work in the embedded space, but I've seen code written as
indicated and terrible code like that is not reliable. It might work 99.999%
of the time, but given 100,000 units, and a problem might occur every couple
weeks. There is nothing magical about automotive software.

------
limeblack
One thing I would love someone to explain is how can people assume cars are
going to be automated soon when both planes and trains haven't been automated
for various reasons. They are different issues I have gathered but essentially
shouldn't trains be dead simple but to this day at least the trains(not metras
though) often have someone to stop the train in case of emergencies. Planes
are more complex but have lower crash ratings and less obstacles but can't
stop and still have 2 plus pilots.

~~~
Eridrus
If we had autonomous planes it wouldn't significantly reduce cost or increase
usage. But there is a lot of investment in autonomous drones.

Planes also have a very high safety bar to begin with, which cars do not.

Same thing about trains, there's very little value in doing so, and resistance
in the form of unions in some locations. Some trains are fully automated
though, here's an article with some more info:
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-
dont-w...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wnj75z/why-dont-we-have-
driverless-trains-yet)

Frankly having some dude from Toyota, who don't seem to be very invested in
this space, tell me he doesn't think it's going to work isn't very convincing.
Chris Urmson saying it might take up to 30 years is far more convincing:
[http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/cars-that-
think/transportation/self-driving/google-selfdriving-car-will-be-ready-soon-
for-some-in-decades-for-others)

But that's 30 years for the entire planet, not until it works at all. WayMo is
already letting people ride their cars in Phoenix - presumably one of the
places with good weather and easy roads, so I think metro-level deployment in
the next 4 years seems about right.

[EDIT]: And on the topic of trains. The MTA in NYC can't even seem to handle
basic technical projects, like upgrading signaling infrastructure, or just
extending a rail line a few miles without spending billions of dollars, so
there's probably a decent chance that some of these are not automated due to
sheer incompetence.

~~~
gwbas1c
With software, it's always easy to make something appear to work. All the
corner cases make something take 10-100x longer than the functional prototype.

This became painfully obvious with the article floating around where a car
misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed limit
sign. It's pretty clear that if a car is mistaking a red sign for a white
sign, we have a very long time to go before the car can safely drive itself
without a human observer to intervene when needed.

When it comes to automated driving, we need to keep our optimism in check and
know that it can take decades before we have safe robotic taxis. They may
become legal in countries with lower bars for safety before they are legal in
the US.

The big problem, I think, will be when the drunks get into accidents because
they will turn on autonomous driving, and don't get pulled over. Instead, they
won't be sober enough to observe and intervene when the car screws up.

~~~
devmunchies
> _a car misread a stop sign with a small amount of marking as a 45MPH speed
> limit sign_

That's what happens when the sign were made for humans. They should start
putting QR codes under traffic signs, with the human sign as a fall back or as
a second point of reference.

~~~
nayuki
How can you verify at a glance that the QR Code associated with a human-
readable sign is correct?

~~~
devmunchies
I said this in my comment: "...with the human sign as a fall back or as a
second point of reference."

You wouldn't remove human sign identification from the algorithm, you just
supplement it with the small QR code under the sign.

------
moxious
It speaks to the trends of the day that an article which says something
patently obvious to people in the tech field is considered news.

This reality seems like it may pose a problem though, as some people's
business models and valuations depend on this article being wrong.

The thing is, we don't need full level 5 to get useful stuff out of this line
of tech development. But in terms of the futurist vision of driverless cars
everywhere, fleets of cars replacing private ownership, etc -- hard to see
that happening. If the tech takes more than 10 years to develop, it's very
likely something else will develop in the meantime which will essentially
invalidate all of those earlier visions, as the world will have gone in a
different direction in the meantime.

~~~
ghostbrainalpha
Exactly. I park in a very small space in a busy city. While backing out I must
monitor the street, pedestrians, and the cars parked to the front, back, and
side of me.

Just this week, I missed one of those variables and cost myself $500 in
damage. This is something a backup camera and automated system can and already
does easily help with, and is a major efficacy leap. Small steps like this can
really add up.

What I would like to see next is a system that alerts the driver when the
light in front of them turns green. I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week
sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has
changed.

~~~
saosebastiao
> What I would like to see next is a system that alerts the driver when the
> light in front of them turns green. I feel like I lose 5-10 minutes a week
> sitting behind people who are checking their phones unaware the light has
> changed.

I wish I could upvote this idea straight into the car manufacturers inboxes.
Nothing more frustrating than having to sit through multiple light cycles
cause the dipshit in front of you is taking a nap, conveniently waking up with
enough time to get themselves through the light but not any of the people
behind them.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
You have one. It's called eyeballs and a horn.

~~~
saosebastiao
It works really well when it's the person right in front of you, because you
can see that they aren't paying attention. Put a few cars between you and
them, and all of a sudden you don't really know the reason they aren't moving
and there is a significant delay before you can infer that they aren't paying
attention. It would be so much better for their own car to recognize that they
are in la la land and remind them asap.

------
tabeth
Maybe I'm ignorant (very likely) but I've never understood the difference
between full autonomous driving and a fully intelligent AI.

If a car can drive in any environment and react to any circumstances surely
said AI could also do anything else, no?

EDIT: Thanks for the responses everyone. Though, to clarify, when I think of
"full autonomous" driving, I'm thinking of a car that can go from A to B
regardless of the context. Meaning, if some of it is offroad it'll handle
that, if there's traffic that'll be handled. If there's something wrong with
itself, aka the car, it'll be introspective and call for assistance, sending
its location, etc. Not just following marks on a road and pulling over and
giving up if it can't get there.

Also, I do not think a "fully intelligent AI" can necessarily solve any
problem, but is capable of learning such that it could. I the purposes of a
discussion I'd equate it to maybe a 5 year old.

~~~
brianwawok
Can you imagine writing a computer program than can drive a car in a video
game, but not provide relationship advice to two freshly married people, or
think of a fair and just and enforceable law to reduce discrimination at the
workplace?

Driving is quite a bit short of "same intelligence as humans"

~~~
damontal
what if there are 2 obstacles that the car can't brake fast enough to avoid so
it has to decide which to hit. one is a person pushing a baby in a baby
carriage, the other is a person pushing someone a wheelchair

~~~
throwawayjava
The exact same thing that happens now: someone dies, usually selected
arbitrarily based upon the driver's selfish desire to minimize harm to
themselves. Because that situation doesn't allow enough time to make anything
except instinctual choices.

The driver is found at fault for that death if they were not driving legally.
Otherwise, and very often times regardless, the whole thing is written off as
a tragic accident (millions happen every year, just in the USA), and the
insurance people do their thing.

Ethical dilemmas are a non-problem for self-driving cars.

~~~
ars
Millions???

You are off by two orders of magnitude. It was 35,000 two years ago.

Still a lot of people, but not millions.

Put in context, it's around one death per 100 million miles driven.

~~~
throwawayjava
Sorry, I mixed up the global and national numbers.

Thanks.

------
simonh
I'd not come across the different levels of autonomous driving before.

0 No Driving Automation

1 Driver Assistance

2 Partial Driving Automation

3 Conditional Driving Automation

4 High Driving Automation

5 Full Driving Automation

From
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Levels_of_dri...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Levels_of_driving_automation)

~~~
maxerickson
[https://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf](https://www.sae.org/misc/pdfs/automated_driving.pdf)
fills out the descriptions a bit.

------
skywhopper
The crux here is not really about semi-automation for highway driving in
personal cars, but about companies that can only hope to live up to their
investors' hype if they get rid of human costs, like Uber. And the idea that
the capabilities of a car-for-hire could be fully automated to the point of
removing any human from the service is utterly ridiculous to anyone who has
ever seriously considered what that problem entails. Navigating a vehicle from
point X to point Y via chaotic and ever-changing city streets and highways is
the _easy_ half of that problem.

~~~
euyyn
Well, have you ever seriously considered what that problem entails? What's the
_hard_ part of that problem?

------
jacquesm
It is quite a logical thing though. 90% full autonomous driving is not. And
the first 90% of autonomous driving could very well be within reach of our
software capabilities at the moment (or maybe 80%, but it will not change the
discussion much).

You can only release it when you reach 100%, and if that last fraction takes
the next 50 years then we really are not even close.

------
linsomniac
The Roman Rule: The one who says it can't be done shouldn't interrupt the one
doing it.

I agree that it's harder than, say, Musk or Waymo's teams want to admit. But
it also seems to me like Toyota has a bit of sour grapes, everyone around them
is doing interesting, useful things, and Toyota is stuck at lane departure and
adaptive cruise control and blind spot detection, all of which work pretty
well for them.

~~~
dingo_bat
To be honest, Toyota's cars and the systems in them feel rock solid. I don't
get the same confidence from, say, Tesla. Have a look at YouTube videos of
Tesla's cars doing scary stuff like trying to drive into the median suddenly.
It's nowhere near ready for public use. If they were selling the same number
of cars as Toyota, there'd be a lot more accidents happening.

------
dreamcompiler
Completely agree with this. It will be ridiculously difficult to get to Level
5 automation in cars. It's decades away, not years. Ironically though, part of
the reason it's so difficult is that during the transition the roads will
still be populated with human-driven cars. If we passed laws to the effect
that "as of date X, no human-driven vehicles or pedestrians will be allowed on
roads in the set {Y}", we could get to Level 5 _much_ faster.

~~~
cr0sh
> It will be ridiculously difficult to get to Level 5 automation in cars. It's
> decades away, not years.

One could make the convincing argument that Waymo's vehicles are already at
Level 5; where they probably struggle (I have no examples or data on this) is
probably in inclement conditions (rain, snow, fog, etc). That said, even in
such conditions, they probably perform much better than a human driver.

For instance, most human drivers in such conditions - even when they struggle
to see the road clearly - continue to drive anyhow, mostly blind, instead of
doing the right thing and pulling off to the side of the road and waiting,
which I bet is a behavior that Waymo's vehicle performs when it struggles
beyond a certain level.

In other words, Waymo's vehicle is likely better at determining when NOT to
drive, and acting on that determination, instead of being stubborn and
irrational in the face of evidence to the contrary.

~~~
dreamcompiler
I agree. The other day I was driving on the highway and ahead of me was a
pulled-over pickup and tons of personal belongings strewn all over the road.
Obviously the stuff had blown out of the truck. The driver was on foot,
dodging cars while trying to retrieve his cargo. I was able to slow down and
thread my way through the junk while avoiding hitting him -- or making myself
a target for the cars behind me -- but what would an automated system have
done? Probably its best choice would have been to pull over and stop because
it didn't know what the heck was going on or how to deal with it.

------
redbeard0x0a
People have a habit of thinking linearly, however technology builds on top of
technology (leading to exponential improvements).

Half way through the Genome project, they had only mapped out 1% of the
genome. A lot of people in that field and working on that project were
thinking the same thing - "not even close". But the next 7 years, they
completed the next 99%. This is the power of exponential progress.

The only thing that is going to halt this progress is to hit physical limits
_and_ not find a new way of doing things to get around the physical limits.
New technology opens new possibilities.

~~~
rayiner
Technological curves tend to look exponential at first, then logarithmic. We
went from first manned flight to first supersonic manned flight in just 44
years. _Seventy years later_ we still don't have supersonic commercial
flights. In the energy sector, the thermal efficiency of coal plants improved
dramatically from 1880 to 1950, then pretty much hasn't improved at all since
then. The number of years someone can expect to survive after qualifying for
Social Security at age 65 has gone up only about five years since the age was
first set to 65 back in 1935.

~~~
jacquesm
> Seventy years later we still don't have supersonic commercial flights.

Worse still, we have already had _and_ lost them.

And the age for qualifying for social security is going up faster than
longevity in plenty of countries.

------
alexhornbake
This is a migration problem. A network of only self driving cars is
effectively a more complex train without tracks. This does not require an AI,
just a very reliable and coordinated state machine. A mixed set of AI and
human drivers is much more complex. There is a possible future where towns,
countries , certain highways, etc adapt to the needs/demands of humans such
that the vehicles and rules of the road combined create the desired
environment for autonomous vehicles to thrive. Everyone assumes technology
will adapt to us, but history shows that humans do just as much if not more
adapting (see: suburbs/highways, industrial revolution, tech addiction,
tinder, uber, etc). In many cases this is powerful humans leveraging tech to
bend the will and change lives of the masses. Not saying this or good or bad.
Just saying... Futurists are generally wrong and overly optimistic (and/or
just really good marketers).

------
yehosef
"We've learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a
decent phone, PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They're not going
to just walk in."

\- Palm's CEO Ed Colligan on the persistent rumors that Apple will be
introducing a Apple phone in the near future (2006)

------
jessriedel
Does anyone have concrete evidence on an over-under date for something
commercial, e.g., availability of self-driving (or at least a self-delivering)
taxi? The most specific hint at a number I've seen recently was in the
neighborhood of 2022, which comes from a recent Morgan Stanley report on
Waymo: "The analysts believe Waymo can get to an operating profit by 2022 and
reach 8% margins by 2030."

[https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2017/06/12/self-
driv...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2017/06/12/self-driving-cars-
could-add-140-billion-in-alphabet-shareholder-value/#3579d5c4c318)

~~~
ilaksh
There is actually no reason to predict this to be years away except for like
just future shock or something. Which is the big thing holding it back is just
general disbelief.

Waymo is actually testing for real in Arizona with selected people from the
public.

Yes, they include an employee in the car to monitor or take over if necessary.
But from the numbers I saw they reported to the DMV like a year ago, with
Waymo's cars that happens surprisingly little.
[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/946b3502-c959-4e3b-b119-91319c27788f/GoogleAutoWaymo_disengage_report_2016.pdf?MOD=AJPERES)
Like very, very little. 635,868 miles and 124 reportable disengages. As of
last year. Significantly improved now. In the rare case of a problem they can
send a human to help.

If they had legal clearance or a waiver or something, they could TODAY just
take some routes and times that had little traffic and not include the
test/backup employee. Again, the number of times they report the driver needs
to take over now is minuscule. They could then start charging for the rides.
Then that would be a commercial deployment.

For them to make that widely available, at first for selected low traffic
areas and times to reduce the risk of any incident or needing to send a human
driver, is just a matter of scaling up their fleet and the legal issues.

Tesla is pushing very hard to the point of being unsafe to get their autopilot
to actually work in as many circumstances as possible. They literally have
been selling self-driving cars. The cars are collecting massive amounts of
real-world data. They have hired many genius AI experts. Unless there are too
many crashes or the company goes down in flames (which is possible considering
how aggressively they are testing and releasing software even with issues),
they will push to decrease the amount of driving the human has to do down to
close to 0 as soon as is possible. Musk will try as hard as he can to get 75%
to 100% there before the end of the year, because that is literally what he
has promised. By the end of next year his actual conservative expectation is
to be more than 80%.

As far as operating profit who knows, but there is no way that we will be
waiting until 2022 for this to be deployed, at least in somewhat limited
routes and times.

~~~
jessriedel
> there is no way that we will be waiting until 2022 for this to be deployed

How sure would you say you are? Want to put some money on that?

~~~
ilaksh
Before 2022? Yes, I should take that wager.

The tricky part about a wager is that it gives people a strong incentive to
reinterpret events to their advantage, and its tough to define this in an
objective way. Even if it is defined objectively there is ambiguity in
language and again they may not realize they disagree on what they are
wagering about.

But maybe in a few days when I get paid again I could make a wager if there
was some agreement on what we were wagering. I have a feeling that once that
got pinned down you wouldn't want to continue the wager.

2021 is four years from now. Do you really think that, in the next four years,
this early rider program [https://waymo.com/apply/](https://waymo.com/apply/)
won't progress to allowing rides without the supervisor employee present on
some rides? Once they have that working on a regular basis, should we not
assume they will start charging for rides? They could actually do that now for
certain routes and times if they had the government sign off on it. So it is
feasible (although unlikely) that you could lose the bet tomorrow.

There are several other advanced self-driving vehicle programs out there
including Cruise, Uber, etc. They are also using the LIDAR technology and
detailed maps etc. Audi has announced they will have a 'level 4' self pilot
mode for freeways in 2020-2021 [https://media.audiusa.com/models/piloted-
driving](https://media.audiusa.com/models/piloted-driving) They announced that
in 2017 (or maybe 2016) because they have been partnering with nVidia and saw
nVidia actually demonstrated deep neural network autonomous driving.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmVWLr0X1Sk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmVWLr0X1Sk)

GM, Ford, Honda, Tesla have all made announcements that they plan to deploy
self driving vehicles on or before 2021.
[https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car-
timeline...](https://venturebeat.com/2017/06/04/self-driving-car-timeline-
for-11-top-automakers/)

~~~
jessriedel
You seem to have a more liberal interpretation of "somewhat limited" than I
do.

I have ascribed a 45% chance to this statement, and last year bet $500 against
it taking place:

"By July 2023, a self-driving car can be reliably hailed by a member of the
general public in at least 10 North American cities. At least 8 cities must be
outside the San Fransisco Bay Area. The car must available on at least 50% of
days, i.e., not confined to very narrow weather or traffic situations. No
back-up human may be physically present to take over in an emergency."

[http://blog.jessriedel.com/2016/04/](http://blog.jessriedel.com/2016/04/)

Would you bet on that happening by July 2022? I would take on another $500.

~~~
ilaksh
50% of days in any city means it can handle Minnesota snow and ice.

As you have stated it, implying the car can go anywhere at any time (no
constraints on routes mentioned) and is available in most major cities, that's
very speculative that it would be deployed to that degree.

It will be deployed within a few years although with some reasonable
constraints and it will be extremely useful even with those constraints.

Edit: Actually, looking at that statement again, some of what I read as
implied is actually just ambiguous. I would make the bet if I could correct
the ambiguous parts to be more realistic.

------
clairity
the hype around it is fun, but the reality is that autonomous driving is
harder than anything we've done before as a species and we have a bunch of the
best minds working on it already (as the article notes).

rockets and electric cars are really cool, but those have largely been
engineering challenges. autonomous vehicles are in the basic scientific
research stage. i can't imagine we'll see true autonomous vehicles within the
next 20 years.

i say this not to discourage the efforts to build this wonderful technology,
but only to temper expectations, so that we avoid implausible conclusions like
"uber will save itself by replacing its fleet with autonomous cars in the next
5 years".

~~~
cr0sh
> autonomous vehicles are in the basic scientific research stage.

Autonomous vehicles have been virtually out of the "basic scientific research
stage" ever since Darpa's Grand Challenge in 2005 and 2007.

While there is still a ton of research being done, most of it has been focused
on refining existing solutions, or applying existing solutions into new
problem spaces. For the most part, we know what is needed both in hardware and
software to gain Level 5 capability, and for the most part we have working
examples of all those functions.

What is left is refinement.

I also believe that Tesla is on the right path by using cameras for it's main
sensor input (augmented by radar, and probably some LIDAR too). We already
know that our road system can be navigated visually - it's inherently designed
for this. In theory, radar and LIDAR shouldn't be needed at all, but just as
they are useful augmentations for humans (in those areas that they are used -
such as proximity detection on some vehicles), so they are also useful for
self-driving systems.

------
Fricken
Level 5 is way out there. But at least from a technological standpoint, if
Waymo isn't already at a minimum viable product for L4 commercial deployment,
they're pretty damn close. Deploying 600 vehicles is a huge financial
commitment, they wouldn't be doing it if they felt their self driving car
project would remain in the science experiment phase for another decade. They
were ready to roll in 2015 with their Koala cars, driving slowly on
Mountainview roads, but were derailed by regulations.

------
danellis
Seems like the curse of the 80/20 rule. Cars that can drive themselves,
monitor their surroundings using cameras, react to unpredictable moving
obstacles etc are pretty impressive. That's the 80%. The other 20% is about
things like bad weather (especially snow, which can completely cover road
markings and signs) and "no win" situations. It's not hard to see a close-
enough-to-perfect system taking the other 80% of the time.

------
CalChris
This will probably have a chilling effect on VCs investing in this space.
Maybe not White Walker chilling but it can't be seen as enthusiasm coming from
the world's largest car manufacturer. I worked for a router company and our
likely exit scenario Cisco leaned ever so slightly in the other direction and
the VCs pulled our funding. Poof.

------
MarkMc
Pratt says, "Historically human beings have shown zero tolerance for injury or
death caused by flaws in a machine"

Now imagine an autonomous car that had an accident rate one fifth the rate of
human drivers. Would society really decide not to allow such a car on the
road?

------
0xbear
I will start paying attention to self-driving hype when they make cars that
can drive themselves in Alaskan snowstorm. Until then it's just California-
only decoy for companies that make their money on shit smart people don't want
to work on.

------
0xbear
First step should be a car with driver assistance so sophisticated, a human
driver can't crash it. Seems like a much more tractable problem, and one I
personally would pay quite a bit of money for in a few years, when my son is
old enough to drive.

~~~
hnaccy
Probably more efficient to just have another kid.

~~~
0xbear
For you maybe. Redundancy in my case comes at a price: kids are about $300k+ a
pop nowadays between ages 0 and 18, assuming upper middle class lifestyle.
More if you pay for college. That being the case, I'd be willing to pay double
the price for a car that verifiably makes it darn near impossible for the
driver to kill himself.

------
noobermin
I have to wonder what motivates him to admit this, surely hyping his
technology is a formula for attracting funding, right? Why admit your job has
such a long-time until return?

~~~
dingo_bat
Probably because Toyota doesn't need to attract funding.

------
projectileboy
Something that I think is sometimes missed is that the insurance companies
along with major freight haulers may drive this more than the public at large.
Self driving systems don't have to be perfect; they just have to be better
than humans, and that may be attainable sooner than the naysayers imagine.
We're still north of 30k auto deaths per year in the U.S. alone - I'd bet
money that if you waved a magic wand and replaced every car on the road today
with an autopilot Tesla, traffic deaths would fall off a cliff.

------
bpicolo
> unveiled a new concept car, the Concept-i

Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually
released. They do look fancy and futuristic.

~~~
cr0sh
> Man sure would be cool if any concept car ever presented were actually
> released.

Not many are, but some are occasionally. I personally own one of the few
existing Isuzu VehiCROSS vehicles. It started out as a concept car in the
1990s, then went into production virtually unchanged (only a tad under 6000
were ever made).

~~~
csours
I saw one of those earlier this year in the Austin area. It was distinctive
for sure. There aren't very many 2 door hatches and SUVs

------
rcMgD2BwE72F
It's from January. Could the title reflect that?

------
RandomedaA
SDC's could be very disruptive to the the traditional automotive business
model of selling a personal car to each adult who needs transport. Autonomous
hire cars mean cheaper transport for users and and potentially a much smaller
market for new cars. While we have traditional manufacturers on both sides of
the fence, I'm more inclined to believe companies like Ford who are running
towards an autonomous future despite the effect it will have on the way they
do business.

~~~
cr0sh
While I don't have any example articles, I do know there have been a few
written on the reality that millennials and the following generation are much
less likely to own their own vehicle or to even drive. This has been
attributed to a number of various factors (a large portion being attributed to
those generations widespread and intense usage of various social media
platforms).

So manufacturers are already feeling the pinch, so to speak.

While (as you put it) "autonomous hire cars" will make the market for new car
sales (and car ownership in general) smaller, I don't think it will completely
go away, for a couple of reasons.

First off, such form of "public transportation" is still subject to "the drunk
person who pukes in the seat" syndrome. You will quickly get vehicles on the
road that are virtually rolling trash cans, and when you encounter one, you'll
have to make the choice to either use it anyhow, or send it back and wait for
another to come (potentially making you late to whatever it is you are doing).

Secondly, a service of "hire out your personal car" might become something;
kinda like driving for uber, but not actually driving. Make money with your
car when you aren't using it. Of course, you could also find your car trashed
in the process (I'm sure AirBnB suffers from a similar problem).

Ford and other companies are just likely hedging their bets, plus whatever
tech they do develop can also bring them a tidy sum by licensing it forward,
or selling it off.

------
likelynew
Just 10 years before, achieving better than human performance on image
recognition task was not even close.

------
gboudrias
I'm sure he's right, but then why is everyone joining the race now? Wouldn't
it be way less expensive to wait until at least some of the problems are
solved?

Also, it sure seems like level 5 autonomous driving is just a few steps short
of general AI, which is still lightyears away.

~~~
skywhopper
People are jumping in because they get attention and money for doing so (and
because lots of non-experts who tend to be the money-distributors believe the
hype) including government grants. The real threat is not that the hype will
waste private investors' money (although it is) but that it will draw
government funds away from transit projects that would be a far better
investment.

~~~
w0utert
>> _draw government funds away from transit projects that would be a far
better investment._

Not just government funds, but also car maker funds. I honestly don't
understand why all the research in automated driving doesn't focus on making
better versions of the driver assists we already have first, instead of
shooting for full autonomy, which I honestly believe to be a pipe dream.

Of course many of the advances in researching autonomous driving will trickle
down to safety systems for 'normal' cars, so that's a good thing. I just feel
like everyone is approaching the problem from the wrong direction, wasting a
lot of R&D effort that could have produced much better results much sooner if
car companies would start from what we already have and incrementally improve
it. You can blame car companies for being slow to adopt many things that could
benefit all of us (such as electric drivetrains), but you can hardly deny car
safety has already improved tremendously in a relatively short timespan.
Whether they were forced by regulation or because they thought making safer
cars would be more profitable doesn't really matter.

------
wtvanhest
It is closer than it was 50 years ago! The way I see it, I need it working in
30 years. I'm confident it will be here by then.

------
CyberDroiDz
What's the opposite of FUD? That's what's driving the hype.

~~~
moxious
If FUD = fear, uncertainty, and doubt, then the opposite would be Joy,
Certainty, and Credulousness. (JCC doesn't roll off of the tongue though)

Sounds about right. The same stuff market bubbles are made of!

~~~
mhermher
Hope, inevitability, belief. HIB

------
dotBen
(FYI this article is 6 months old)

------
m3kw9
Elon Musk begs to differ..

~~~
mhermher
But apparently, his engineers don't.

------
hulton
Encouraging.

------
chrismealy
Humans are never going to live on Mars either, but at this point these things
are matter of religious conviction for techies.

------
bsenftner
Now all the poor journalists get egg on their faces, as the driverless future
is revealed as hype.

------
flunhat
I've always had a hunch (and mind you, I have no proof of this, I'm just
talking here) that the software required for a level 5 self driving car is, on
some mathematical level, equivalent to the software needed to pass the Turing
Test (w/out hacking the rules). In other words, if we have the capacity to do
one of those things, we will have the capacity to do the other (in much the
same way that seemingly unrelated problems in theoretical CS are actually
restatements of the same problem). It's probably BS, but it's an interesting
idea that I can't quite seem to shake.

~~~
cr0sh
So are you saying Waymo's cars are capable of passing the Turing Test? Because
they are arguably at level 5 capability.

I highly doubt it, though.

The thing is, while I believe they are already at this level, their technology
is obviously not perfect. It never will be. Perfection in any space of
technology is just not possible, because perfection is not possible in the
physical world for anything. Perfection is a mathematical abstract at best.

Instead, what we can hope to achieve is "better than human drivers", and
Waymo's vehicles have certainly achieved that, imho. They have logged more
miles with their self-driving vehicle technology than most people will drive
any single car of their own, with an accident rate far below that of the
average human driver.

For the accidents they have had, most of them were when the car was in manual
mode, and for the rest, they were low-speed incidents. None of them, that
occurred while in self-driving mode (that I am aware of) caused any injury or
death to any occupant of the vehicle.

I'll leave this comment with this video, to show what was capable of
autonomous vehicles in what now seems like the distant past (and I honestly
know it wasn't, but time sure flies with this tech):

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_piO849uRdI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_piO849uRdI)

Note that this was in 2010, using the tech in Stanford's Junior car (tech that
would eventually lead to Google's and later Waymo's vehicles), and far from
perfect; I can guarantee you that the systems used are much more advanced and
better at control today.

~~~
flunhat
Waymo's self driving tech is definitely not anywhere near level 5 capability
(if that were true, they'd rule the world right now and we'd all be using
their tech). From Waymo's Wikipedia article:

>As of 28 August 2014, according to Computer World Google's self-driving cars
were in fact unable to use about 99% of US roads.[57] As of the same date, the
latest prototype had not been tested in heavy rain or snow due to safety
concerns.[58] Because the cars rely primarily on pre-programmed route data,
they do not obey temporary traffic lights and, in some situations, revert to a
slower "extra cautious" mode in complex unmapped intersections. The vehicle
has difficulty identifying when objects, such as trash and light debris, are
harmless, causing the vehicle to veer unnecessarily. Additionally, the lidar
technology cannot spot some potholes or discern when humans, such as a police
officer, are signaling the car to stop.[59] Google projects plan on having
these issues fixed by 2020.[60]

It's really not better than human drivers, and I don't know where this myth
comes from.

~~~
ilaksh
You know 2014 was three years ago right?

~~~
flunhat
The point is that they're not at level 5 capability yet, and won't be for
another 3 years at least (by their deadline, 2020).

------
BeStaXP
I think Toyota exists in a different dimension than the rest of us. Toyota is
so convinced that the future of cars is hydrogen that their electric car
efforts boil down to a four man team. Dinosaurs! As for self driving tech
wasn't there a successful multi manufacturer trans Europe truck convoy last
year? Self-driving tech is already at work at mines. Decades? Really, Toyota.

~~~
oblio
We'll, are you so sure that solving hydrogen delivery and storage is
ultimately harder than making safe and cheap batteries for practical cars with
an autonomy over 600km?

------
lern_too_spel
Alternate title: Toyota executive frantically tries to convince people to keep
buying non-automated cars to protect Toyota's revenue stream while other
companies say automated cars are imminent [January 2017].

California is on the verge of approving new regulations that allow automated
cars on public roads with no humans in the vehicle, and as soon as that
happens, things are going to move faster than the people who believe 10-years-
late Toyota think.

