
Google to Make Driverless Cars an Alphabet Company in 2016 - T-A
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-12-16/google-said-to-make-driverless-cars-an-alphabet-company-in-2016
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nugget
I don't understand the pessimism in this thread. Google owns two of the most
important pieces of the puzzle: maps and the mobile OS/app store in 80% of
people's pockets. Not to mention lots of software and hardware IP related to
autonomous vehicles. There are plenty of car companies in the world who can
provide car frames, windows, leather seats, four wheels, and yes even an
electric engine. I see Uber, Google, Apple, and others going head to head in
this market, ultimately to the great benefit of consumers as transportation
prices plummet. Imagine an airport run from 3rd and Market to SFO costing $15
(technically only $13 after 20% discount for paying with the UberRewards
Capital One Visa Card), or a 4 hour trip (time to watch a long movie and send
some email) from Santa Monica Pier to the Las Vegas Strip for $50 (or for a
limited time, $55 if you stop at the selected partner gas/charging station for
pre-paid lunch and bathroom break) - it will happen and sooner than most
think.

~~~
adventured
Or put another way, electric + autonomous = inexpensive, intelligent, on-
demand transportation.

It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars - every decade - in
wasted costs on buying cars and then hardly ever utilizing them. While likely
saving a quarter of a million lives every decade, and further sparing
consumers a large percentage of the vast associated medical, insurance and
lost-asset costs that go with those injuries and deaths.

The 'dumb pipe' of the Internet is going to eat the dumb car - as it'll try to
do with everything it can touch - sucking out the complexity and
inefficiencies with smart, hyper-available software.

A few decades from now, people will consider buying a 'dumb' $30,000 gasoline
engine car to stick in your driveway and rarely use, to be comically absurd.

~~~
JonFish85
Sure cars are mostly idle / under-utilized, but when they are needed, what's
the replacement? I don't really understand how a driverless world is going to
solve the problem of X million people who have to drive to work every day at
roughly the same time, and then get back home at night. For huge swaths of the
country public transportation is unfeasible (basically outside of cities), and
cars seem to fit the bill there nicely.

On top of that: "It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars"
\-- seems a bit of an exaggeration, does it not? Transportation will still be
needed, and it's going to have to be paid for somehow or another. If it's not
directly towards paying for a car it's in taxes for infrastructure, or it's to
companies who have to invest the capital and make a profit on it. It changes
how the money is spent, I guess, and the hope is that it's more efficiently
spent, but I suspect that the costs will just shift around and not necessarily
save "trillions of dollars every decade".

~~~
lambda
If you need to leave to go to work at 8:00 AM, to get there at 8:30, it's a 5
minute drive from your office to my house, and I need to leave at 9 to get to
my job at 9:30, then an on-demand driverless car can take care of both of us.
It can also pick up the person who was able to take public transit in but
needs to run errands on their lunch break, as well as the second shift worker,
and take someone else home for dinner, and get someone else to the airport at
3 AM.

Right now, many people have cars sitting idle for a large portion of the day
because they need them for an hour a day, or sometimes an hour every couple of
days, or a couple of hours a week. While it's true that there are surges in
demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of
excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and
so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks.

In addition, there may be other people who could take public transit, walk, or
bike to work, but don't because there are other things that they need to do at
various points that require a car, and so it's more convenient to just always
have it available.

So yeah, driverless cars can only get you so far, you're right that the peak
demand number is pretty much the minimum number you could have. But if I go an
look at my residential street during the day, when commuters are presumably at
work, I still see about half of the cars present. Those are all cars that
wouldn't be necessary if everyone were riding in self driving cars that could
rearrange themselves based on demand. That reduction in number of cars would
also reduce the amount of space needed to store all of those cars, which could
help bring everything closer together making it more walkable, bikeable, or
efficient for public transit, which could further reduce the demand for cars.

~~~
lmm
> While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and
> evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is
> needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have
> enough cars to cover those peaks.

Do we really have excess capacity compared to the _peak_ demand? Put another
way, how many people own a car and _aren 't_ using it at e.g. 8:50AM? At a
complete guess I'd say maybe 5%?

(Also, given zoning and city layout, most houses are a lot more than 5 minutes
away from most offices. Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is
9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so
the same car probably can't serve us both).

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sangnoir
> Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both
> heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't
> serve us both).

If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and
someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes
early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount).

Self-driving cars can make car-pooling easier - it can be a hyperlocal public
transport system. Pick up 4 people who are traveling from/to within a 2-mile
radius with each other, and peak traffic will be 25% of what it is now (best
case). It's even simpler considering that most people commute the same route
everyday.

~~~
lmm
> If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you
> and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10
> minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount).

What does the self-driving car change in that case? Wouldn't that be just the
same as ordinary carpooling that we can do today?

~~~
lambda
Right now, I need to manually find someone who is carpooling. If there happens
to be someone on my street that I know and is going to roughly the same place,
that's fine. However, there are many trips which have overlapping segments
that I'd never be able to find without an automated system.

For carpooling with my own car, that's really too much work to try and hunt
down someone, figure out how cost sharing is going to work, ensure that our
schedules are in sync often enough for it to work out, and so on.

With an automated system, it can just adapt to changing demands. Maybe some
days schedules are too far out of sync, so it just sends dedicated cars. Maybe
some days there's someone better to pool with.

You can already do this with systems like UberPool, but with self driving
cars, you don't have to pay a dedicated driver, so it becomes even cheaper and
more convenient.

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jhulla
Can someone with knowledge answer questions about the current state of
autonomous cars:

1) What do these cars do in ambiguous driving environments: construction
zones, poorly/under relined lanes, freshly paved roads, hazards, dark/rainy
roads where camera images are useless, etc.

2) How do these cars handle system failure while driving? Blown tire, engine
failure, etc.

3) Is there "Moral Decision Engine" code in current generation cars? E.g.
person runs out in front of an autonomous car, the car chooses to spare the
person by veering off and hitting some inanimate object. I can imagine a class
of accidents in traditional hands-on cars where a driver hurts himself in
order to avoid harming a pedestrian. Is such moral logic hard wired into
autonomous cars?

~~~
jzwinck
1) Some of the extant cars cede control to the human driver if things get too
difficult. This is a problem because people will context switch away from
driving and there is no way to get them back in the game in 100ms when the car
needs help.

2) Engine failure is not a big deal, it just means coast to a stop on the side
of the road with hazard lights on. Blowouts are a little trickier. But what
about unusual stuff like hitting a deer? A wheel falling off? Or another car
drifting into the side of our car on the expressway? Those are tricky but not
truly rare. This is an area where implementors will need to compete yet
purchasers will have a very incomplete view of the relative performance of
cars on the market (it's not a single number like HP).

3) Hitting a pole instead of a person is an easy choice. Yet one that many
humans would not be able to make quickly enough. I think autonomous cars will
outperform human drivers in "moral" decision making quite early on.

~~~
jhulla
Thanks.

1) Expecting a human to be on deck within some fraction of a second in
challenging times will not fly.

2) Perhaps software in cars can be independently safety tested. Just like cars
are collision tested today.

3) Understand about human reaction times. My question is about making moral
choices: hit a pedestrian or sacrifice the driver?

~~~
rjp0008
Your wording is very interesting on #3, "hit" a pedestrian versus
"sacrificing" a driver. I don't think this situation is very likely. A self
driving car should be aware of people and would likely be able to compensate
without killing the passenger.

If it was a case of hitting a pedestrian versus driving off a cliff I feel
like the pedestrian will just be SOL for getting in that situation. Otherwise
you could have murder by car relatively easily.

Maybe we could make people register their car settings at the DMV like we do
for organ donations. "Would you like to opt-in to the murder-children AI
driver, or the martyr driver?"

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msoad
More precisely, Alphabet wants to make Google Car an Alphabet company

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stuaxo
Looking forward to a few years time when they rename the company Google again.

~~~
Mahn
I honestly think this will happen. Products like Chrome or Android just
wouldn't have survived as standalone companies, so why is it a good idea now
to detach projects?

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77ko
As Alphabet moves out projects from Google, does that make Google a less
interesting place to work at?

And introduce more bureaucracy as now Google Car has to negotiate with Google
for access to AI tech, computers, maps etc instead of just using whatever they
can?

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visarga
It's been years since the Google car has been in research. I've seen a video
of it, perfectly driving a blind man in 2012. It was amazing, but now it's
almost 2016 and I know nothing new.

What have they been doing over the last 3 years? I even tried reading their
blog, but they only report on building more prototypes or driving more miles.
It's a blackout of actual information about their challenges and achievements.
When will they be confident enough to launch it, or at least talk about it?

~~~
toomuchtodo
[https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/](https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/reports/)

------
tokenadult
The Associated Press article about the California Department of Motor Vehicles
proposed new rules for cars with autonomous driving features[1] suggests one
reason to be pessimistic about the vision of rentable self-driving cars
becoming a reality as soon as Google would like. (I would like it to be a
reality soon, too, but I have to wait for what the technologists and
regulators involved can do together to make that a reality for me.) A company
that rents out rides to paying riders has to have a market to operate in, and
any state could (and, if California is an example, maybe would) regulate that
company in ways that might not make it a feasible business. A follow-up
article on this news[2] says that Google is "disappointed" by the newly
announced California rules.

[1] "California: Self-driving cars must have driver behind wheel under DMV
proposed rules" (16 December 2015)

[http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_29262037/california-s...](http://www.mercurynews.com/business/ci_29262037/california-
self-driving-cars-must-have-driver-behind)

[2] "Google 'disappointed' by proposed restrictions on driverless cars" (16
December 2015)

[http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2015/12/16/google-
di...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/news/2015/12/16/google-disappointed-
by-proposed-rules-from-california-dmv/77447672/)

~~~
minwcnt5
I've never viewed these sorts of regulative barriers as anything more than a
headache for Google. There's going to be _some_ government somewhere on earth
that will be gung ho about self-driving cars. Americans will not stand for the
US not being #1, so regulators will be forced to do a rather quick 180 on
this.

~~~
glesica
Meh, Americans also don't like dying horribly and will freakout if they think
something makes that more likely. The FDA is relatively conservative compared
to many other countries and, especially after Thalidomide, most people
probably appreciate that.

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return0
How will driverless cars deal with crime? How is a passenger going to get away
from a car chasing to rob him? How will a self-driving car truck run away from
thieves in the highway?

~~~
edias
Is this a problem most people face? Not to mention a truck isn't gonna be able
to run away from anyone, driverless or not.

Kinda sounds like you're inventing problems here and pretending human
solutions exist (again, how will any truck run away in the first place?)

I'd imagine a car will hundreds of cameras and sensors in it would be better
equipped to deal with crime anyways.

~~~
IanCal
This kind of thing comes up in driverless car threads all the time, it's quite
odd. People trying to come up with complex situations that humans are likely
to be terrible at themselves.

I've seen plenty around constructing some trolley-problem style moral argument
about deciding who to kill in a crash. I don't know why it's expected that
they'd have to solve, in a fraction of a second, a problem that people have
been arguing over for years. The human reaction will probably be at the level
of "jerk wheel quickly".

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james33
C is for Car?

~~~
zeristor
and D is for Driverless

~~~
billybilly1920
And E is for Elon... woops, wrong driver-less car company.

~~~
ant6n
I'd say E is for Electric

~~~
ocdtrekkie
F is for Fantasy

~~~
ant6n
G is for ... on wait, we already Got that one.

