
Volkswagen exec admits full self-driving cars 'may never happen' - stopads
https://www.thedrive.com/tech/31816/key-volkswagen-exec-admits-level-5-autonomous-cars-may-never-happen
======
colordrops
I agree in part in that I am skeptical that full self-driving cars will happen
in the next few years, but he is completely wrong when it comes to the long
term. Not only will the tech get as good as humans, but most forget to account
for the fact that the environment will meet the cars part way. We will
eventually update markings and beacons on the roads to make it easier for the
cars, implement networks in which the cars can talk to each other, and make
special lanes for self-driving cars only, among other improvements that will
make it easier for the cars. Eventually non-self-driving cars will not be
allowed on the road, and will be a niche hobby on race tracks.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
We can't even bloody keep the yellow markings on the road visible, and "paint"
is a technology we've had for thousands of years. Where in dog's name is the
money for installing and maintaining all that smart infrastructure going to
come from?

~~~
einrealist
I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology. I doubt, that the
software / hardware will have a common sense, like we humans have. Its this
common sense that keeps us alive in unexpected scenarios, like when the paint
on the road is missing.

~~~
cameronh90
What's stopping people from destroying yield signs and other safety critical
road infrastructure now? Sometimes common sense helps, but it you're out to
cause chaos, there's a ton of things you can do today that would cause crashes
- but most of the time, people don't.

~~~
aetherson
If you destroy a yield sign, maybe it will eventually cause some problems, or
maybe not. We could imagine a world in which destroying smart infrastructure
could pretty instantaneously and reliably cause massive traffic jams, which
seems like it would appeal more to certain trolls and perhaps protestors.

We could also imagine a world in which more subtle attacks could reliably and
fairly quickly cause injury/fatality accidents, which might appeal to
terrorists.

~~~
TwoBit
If you destroy a yield sign, the system will immediately know because all the
cars previously recorded it.

~~~
kohtatsu
So presumably every self-driving vehicle is going to be constantly streaming
all sorts of information in their purview to a central hub?

That is a privacy nightmare without regulation on scrubbing extraneous
information, done before upload: for example blocking out of pedestrian data;
not just faces but clothing and gait, and probably also any data captured
through windows.

It would be ideal to have a limited view of just the roads and signage, and
have a retention plan that gradually keeps less and less historical data.

For accident review more of the data might be required, so vehicles should
keep the last 24 hours of raw data.

~~~
kohtatsu
Self-driving vehicles should be implemented with the same care Apple has given
Touch ID and Face ID in regards to protecting sensitive data.

Having a central database capable of being scraped and process to determine
where any person is at any given time is a non-starter. Care needs to be taken
to scrub all extraneous data from the fleet's network.

~~~
aantix
If I had to choose between privacy of my location or the convenience of a self
driving car, I’d choose the car. Every single time.

Convenience wins out over privacy for me. It’s the same for the billions that
elect to use Facebook. I don’t care if Tesla’s knows I visited the
supermarket.

~~~
ozim
Tell that to guy that had smartwatch and his wife noticed he had high heart
rate somewhere at night where he should be doing something else.

I don't have link for the story. But idea behind this is not that one should
not cheat on his wife because he will get caught. To be really a human and be
honest, one must not have an urge to cheat on his wife(husband) because he
loves her. If someone has dirty thoughts and only thing that is preventing a
person from fulfilling that is that "Tesla will know"...

People should be able to cheat, they also should be caught, but being good
only because you are constantly watched?

This argument looks like "because you have nothing to hide is no different
than saying you don't care about free speech because you have nothing to say".

~~~
aantix
This argument is about that you have to make concessions - tradeoffs.

You have a choice to not use the autonomous car, to not use the apple watch,
to choose a privacy-conscious internet carrier.

~~~
ozim
Real world trade offs please...

If there are only autonomous cars that track your position how are you going
to make trade off?

Right now I don't have Facebook but no one in my family or friends is
contacting me. Why? Because I don't have Facebook. This is my trade off. Real
trade off would be if I could select different provider and still be in
contact with my family and friends. Right now it is monopoly degrading my
quality of life. If I would have different options that I could for example
pay for but they would not use my data as tracking that would be different.

If there would be way to pick your autonomous car provider by price/privacy it
can be trade off.

If it is one option that you can use or not use it is not about trade off. I
am not native English speaker but trade off for me is when you have multiple
options to choose. No that you have all or nothing....

------
wwweston
Opinion: level 5 autonomy would be cool, but it's not where most of the value
of self-driving cars is.

Most of the value in being able to travel by auto without attention is in
trips longer than 15 minutes. Commutes, tourism, vacations. Shipping. Most of
which is certainly highway driving.

If it's possible to automate highway driving under most conditions (and safely
transition either to a stop or human-piloting when those conditions aren't
met), then at least 80% of the value is there.

Wrestling with the harder edges of the problem is still the right thing to do
for tolerance reasons, but I hope we don't have to see last-mile problems
solved before we start reaping the benefits.

~~~
rdiddly
_What if I told you I could offer you a 99% automated intercity solution? That
's right, a solution where 99% of the people involved have no obligation
whatsoever to engage with piloting the vehicle... EVER! Where the vehicle just
sort of seems to... drive itself? Is this some futuristic sci-fi fantasy? Well
hold onto your hat, because the future is NOW!_

Behold!
[https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg](https://c1.staticflickr.com/8/7177/6894934663_0619c8bea3.jpg)

 _Bonus: the vehicle can be resized at will, depending on the number of
passengers._

~~~
rmtech
Trains kind of suck though. I used them a lot in the UK because I didn't have
a car. The UK has an OK train network.

The problem with trains is that they are very, very inconvenient for most
journeys. Sunday evening? forget it. After 11pm? Nope. Journey that runs
perpendicular to the local line to London? Lol, enjoy a 5 hour journey to go
100 miles. Want to take cargo like a new washing machine? Lol. Want to go
somewhere that's not near a station by bus? Enjoy Journey times that are 4, 5
or 10 times slower than a car.

Trains are good for busy commuter lines and nothing else.

~~~
0xB31B1B
1) trains go basically everywhere frequently in Japan, it’s very much a
functioning rail network, they exist and kick ass.

2) a train doesn’t need to replace 100% of personal car trips to be useful.
I’m sure you’re not transporting dishwashers or taking trips after 11 pm every
day. Covering 90% of use cases is sufficient, and the other 10% can be handled
by either renting a car or taking an Uber.

3) we can and should make busses faster than cars during times of congestion
by giving them their own lanes.

~~~
rmtech
Look, from the point of view of a passenger, the best transport system goes:

\- where you want,

\- when you want,

\- carrying what you want,

\- as fast

\- and as safely as possible,

\- at the lowest cost possible.

Trains are weak on multiple axes here: they do not go where you want to go and
they do not go when you want to go, and you cannot carry large amounts on
them. They are also quite slow.

The only reason that anyone uses trains is because in dense urban areas like
London, cars are even slower, and for intercity trips it is both slow and hard
to park when you get to the destination city. There are perhaps some
exceptions to this but they don't really exist in the West. Really fast
intercity trains are a thing in China and Japan, but the UK has no trains that
take you from A to B at an average speed greater than a fast car once you take
waiting and stopping time into account. As far as I am aware the same applies
to the US as well.

Trains do not cover 90% of use cases, they cover maybe 10%. In my opinion,
trains are a technology that should be completely scrapped in favor of
driverless minibus and driverless car networks. Modern electric & driverless
vehicles with internet connectivity and global transport optimization like
Uber would beat trains on every single axis.

~~~
njarboe
I agree. For people who really like trains, think of a bunch of automatic
buses traveling right next to each other as a train.

------
baybal2
I think he is the one and only sane C-level person in the industry, after
hearing this.

People claiming most of AI hype barely know what the "AI" people mention is.

And people who go as far as drawing rosy pictures of human like general AI
being your personal chauffeur are past ridiculous.

The entire idea of human-like general AI for practical applications is like
trying to make people using horses for transport in 21st century, by trying to
make a horse than if better than a car.

~~~
jasonjei
I don’t think it’s impossible if certain roads/highways or lanes become marked
as autonomous only. Just as pedestrians and bicycles are banned from using
high-speed roads, manually-operated cars could be banned from using certain
roads/lanes, removing a lot of variables that manually-operated cars bring.

~~~
intended
Defeating the promise of automated driving, and underscoring the obviousness
of its impossibility, since this is roughly as useful as a Tram.

~~~
ubertoop
How is the ability to leave at your own time, have your own dedicated cabin,
and ability to stop nearly anywhere, even in the same ballpark as a Tram...?

------
Booktrope
Or perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because it
would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service instead
of cars being a prized possession. That, of course, would mean far less cars.
So don't expect a traditional car manufacturer to lead the way.

This is incidentally one reason for Tesla's huge market value. The company
actually has a plan to transition from individual ownership to fleet, so when
this happens it will be prepared to deal with a new manufacturing reality.

Just try to imagine VW without all those ads to sell a positive self image
because you drive a sexy cool car they make.

~~~
krawakoliz
> O r perhaps, VW exec hopes full self-driving cars may never happen, because
> it would imply a fleet approach where transportation would be a service
> instead of cars being a prized possession.

Why on earth would anyone use this over public transit? That would be a hugely
expensive way to travel.

~~~
ggreer
Public transportation where I live is disgusting and often dangerous. Buses
and trains don't pick me up and drop me off in front of my home. And they run
on fixed schedules.

Due to these advantages, I usually take Uber/Lyft instead of BART or Muni.
Autonomous vehicles would reduce the cost of such services even more.

------
jasonhansel
I think it's pretty clear that mass transit and (e-)bikes--not cars--should
become the primary modes of transportation, at least in urban areas, if for no
other reason than that they're inherently more sustainable. I would be
concerned that self-driving cars will only arrive after Peak Automobile has
already come and gone.

~~~
amelius
How about mass transit using a fleet of self driving cars?

I can see that this isn't a future a VW exec would dream of, since it would
mean far fewer cars per person.

~~~
jasonhansel
Buses are always going to be more efficient than cars for that purpose (less
weight per person). An adequately funded, high-quality bus system would, in my
view, make self-driving cars redundant for almost all purposes.

~~~
hn_throwaway_99
Sorry, but I think this point of view really does not take into account the
reality of the situation in many US cities (or, more importantly, many US
suburbs). I would _love_ it if I could take a highly quality bus instead of be
stuck in traffic driving, but it's simply not feasible given where I live.
Driving downtown to work takes about 20 mins with no traffic, about 35 mins
during rush hour, and even if there was a bus that I could take (there isn't)
given the additional stops it would still take longer than that, even though
it can take the 'express' lane.

Where I live self-driving cars, even if "highway only", IMO are _much_ more
feasible than an adequate public transportation system that would cost
billions to construct.

------
robbrown451
This strikes me as weird:

> "This is one of the hardest problems we have. This is like we are going to
> Mars," Hitzinger said in a comment. "Maybe it will never happen."

First of all, it seems obvious that we are going to go to Mars, eventually.
Maybe not any time soon, but never? Seriously?

But the bigger thing is that there is about 1000 times more economic benefit
to self driving cars than of going to Mars, at least in the near term. To
think we'd just give up on it seems absurd.

~~~
maxbond
I don't mean to be rude, but I have strong feelings about this attitude.

Let's take going to Mars. We can't reliably go to the moon. We can't even go
everywhere on the Earth, where we have every possible advantage. Spend a year
on the ISS and you'll develop all sorts of health issues. Spending time on
Mars isn't likely to be less hazardous. We may send humans to Mars but it is
by no means guaranteed. (And I would also ask, what reason do we have to go to
Mars? Probes do a better job of exploring, and I doubt we could colonize it.)

Until someone builds a real self-driving car it is just an idea. On today's
roads, it is probably not possible to safely implement a fully self driving
car. Driving is not only a technical exercise but a social activity that
involves communicating your intentions to other humans, and interpreting the
intentions of others. That is something that humans do far better than
machines. (Edit: To clarify, humans are better at communicating with other
humans. Machines do a great job of communicating with each other, but have
mixed results communicating with humans.)

If every car was self-driving and the roads were remade from first principles,
then sure, that seems feasible. The degenerate case here would be a self-
driving train, which seems perfectly reasonable. But the technical challenges
are the easy part of that endeavor. Funding such a project, developing the
political will to see it through, and organizing the logistics are far more
difficult. Consider for instance; what will happen to the legacy vehicles?
Will it be illegal to drive them? Will there be a massive government buyback?
Who will fund that? Where will the cars go? How will we organize the logistics
of moving hundreds of millions of vehicles? How long will that take? What
other matters will we need to turn our attention away from to accomplish that
task?

A much more likely scenario is that companies continue to come up with
partial, ad-hoc solutions, driving gets more automated, ride sharing becomes
more popular and car ownership less so, but that humans remain in the loop for
the foreseeable future. What happens outside the foreseeable future is
something we can't and shouldn't pretend to know with any degree of certainty.

There are a million ways in which we could never go to Mars or build a self-
driving car. We could get a better idea for how transit should work, making
self driving cars superfluous. We could discover life on Mars, and make the
decision that it would be too dangerous for us to visit. The superpowers of
the world could go to war with each other, and our infrastructure could be
devastated to the point where space travel is impossible. Climate change could
drive us to extinction. Something could happen that we cannot predict or
imagine, that we have no precedent for, that completely changes our situation
and outlook.

Some of these are more likely than others, but the point is that it would be
folly to take the future as read. And frankly, a couple of them are more
likely than us ever going to Mars.

~~~
javagram
We absolutely have the technology to go to Mars. We could probably have sent a
manned mission to Mars in the 70s with the same technology level that took us
to the moon.

It’s just that it would cost an incredible sum of money for very little gain
and so it hasn’t happened - even the mission to the moon was a huge drain on
the budget and the program was canceled once we won the space race.

Going to Mars is like supersonic passenger air travel (Concorde) - something
we have the technology to do, but it just doesn’t make sense.

An autonomous, self-driving automobile is something we just can’t do today no
matter how much money we spent on it. I think it’s a different question
because we are trying to predict if we will ever reach the level of
technological sophistication to allow it. (Of course we have a solution for
“driving a car from one city to another” and it’s putting a human in the seat,
or of “making a self driving vehicle” and it’s putting the vehicle on grade
separated tracks like the Morgantown PRT)

~~~
maxbond
I disagree. I'm sure that, if we really wanted to, we could put a person onto
Mars. I don't think we have the ability to send someone & retrieve them, or
for them to fend for themselves on the surface. So this is a bit like saying
we have the technology to explore the inside of a volcano because we can jump
into one. It's not really the proposition people are talking about when they
say "go to Mars".

But I agree that it's actually a generous comparison to self driving cars.
After all, we do occasionally send machines to Mars, and they work quite well.

------
akrymski
Thank God! Self driving cars are not a solution to the world's problems.
Better public transport is. Why can't we have self driving buses that replace
trams? The level of AI needed for that is already there. As the population of
major cities grows, we can't expect everyone riding around in their own car.
Public transport is better for citizens and the environment. We need to be
reducing the number of vehicles on the roads and ideally not covering the
planet with asphalt altogether. Trams in cities like Amsterdam and the London
underground are much more efficient modes of transportation than self driving
cars will ever be.

~~~
ryukafalz
Not everyone lives in a major city though. Certainly self-driving cars are
less efficient than buses for transport within a denser city, but go a few
miles outside the city (at least in the US) and you’ll find yourself far from
practical bus range.

The situation may be different in Europe, but I think self-driving cars could
be useful for navigating the sprawling American suburbs or less-dense cities.
But yes, we shouldn’t attempt to replace perfectly functional and more
efficient public transport within cities, only supplement where public transit
isn’t (yet) practical.

~~~
akrymski
There's no reason you can't have buses outside major cities - most EU
countries do this fine. Self driving, self-recharging buses, that you can
track and hail on-demand would be much more efficient than self driving cars.
It means you may have to walk the last mile, but I can only see that as a
benefit in a country where obesity is one of the biggest problems.

People with disabilities or those living in extremely remote areas are the
only ones that should have their own cars.

~~~
ryukafalz
Maybe, provided they run 24/7 and have _very_ good coverage. Europe has much
higher population density than all but the most populous regions of the US,
though. Perhaps self-driving buses could do an amazingly better job than our
current transit infrastructure, but I'd have to see some really convincing
estimates.

For some context here: it would take on average 1.5 hours for me to get to a
friend's house by bus/train, when that's ordinarily about a 30 minute drive.
That's highly variable too; if I miss one bus with a 1.5 hour route, there's
another one a few minutes later, but that one would take 2 hours. If I didn't
leave before 8pm for the return trip, I'd be stuck there until morning, as the
buses stop running around then.

And Google Maps won't even give me transit directions to the venue for a
friend's recent wedding, which I interpret as "don't even try."

------
odnes
I can't see L5 happening without, amongst other things, the human ability to
reason about things/concepts we've never encountered before (à la
consciousness).

Highway driving is the most constrained normal driving problem, and this is
solvable in 99% of cases. But there are so many things that can happen in most
other driving situations that make me think that model-based approaches
(Tesla) are doomed to fail... Go ahead, train a classifier for every situation
you can think of - I guarantee you that you've missed many things.

Elon tweeted the other day that FSD is "coming soon". Either I'm totally wrong
about this, and of course I hope I am, or Karpathy + the dev team should be
tempering his expectations.

That isn't to say that there isn't immense value in L2/L3, there totally is.
But I think that solving driving (being able to drive _any_ situation a human
can) is pretty much the same thing as solving intelligence generally.

~~~
axguscbklp
Musk, for all his genuine achievements, is also a bullshitter. If/when his FSD
prediction fails to come to pass, I expect that he will just say "Well, when I
said FSD, what I really meant is..."

~~~
rootusrootus
That is already happening. Go visit the Tesla forums, and you will hear a lot
of fans trying to tone down expectations for FSD, redefining what that term
means. I would have thought "full self-driving" was pretty explanatory, but
from things I've recently read, the goalposts have already shifted
significantly.

------
sschueller
I find it extremely unethical for Tesla to sell its customers a $6000 option
to "Enable full self driving mode" some time in the future. Does anyone really
think that this will happen before their car is totaled/broken/old/end of life
(10-15 years)?

~~~
FireBeyond
"some time in the future"...

... while Musk promises "you'll be able to self-drive, coast to coast, this
year" (haha, no).

~~~
standyro
For a bunch of "tech visionaries" that Hacker News is supposed to embody, this
thread is full of such shortsightedness. I self-drove from Southern California
to Phoenix, Arizona, so I guess that's like 1/10th of the way. I couldn't have
imagined that ten years ago. Part of the job of being a CEO is to sell the
dream, even if it's years or decades away.

~~~
javagram
Elon’s predictions have been wildly out of touch with reality when it comes to
self-driving.

In Jan 2016:
[https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920](https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920)

“In ~2 years, summon should work anywhere connected by land & not blocked by
borders, eg you're in LA and the car is in NY”

Four years later, summon works in parking lots at 2-3 mph, while a person is
supposed to be monitoring and watching the car the entire time and holding a
button to keep it moving.

~~~
FireBeyond
Whilst either "being distracted by a fussy child" (if you listen to their
marketing copy), or "paying full attention to the vehicle" (if you listen to
their legal disclaimers).

------
listenallyall
Level 5 means no human intervention, under any circumstance. Ice, snow, night,
fog, unmarked roads, tunnels, mega-urban, isolated rural, parking
lots/structures, etc, etc. I think he's correct. It's hard to think of any
technology that works without human intervention whatsoever, no matter the
conditions.

We've had autopilot for decades, we're certainly not flying planes without
pilots. Or even getting them from runway to gate without humans. Nor is anyone
claiming that pilot-less planes are coming soon.

~~~
tomp
How much do pilots actually pilot vs how much do they just assume
responsibility? I.e. I as a passenger feel much safer knowing that there's
someone _actually_ responsible to prevent me from dying (because if the plane
crashes, the pilot dies with me), not just some C_O suits pushing PR through
legal trying to gaslight the public and avoid any culpability ( _cough_ Boeing
_cough_ ).

~~~
ottowinter
That's exactly the point, even if pilots use autopilot most of the time (level
4 autonomy).

Guess when they take control? When something bad is happening (and there are
literally a million things that can go wrong and the autopilot could not fix,
ever).

Guess why MCAS did not result in more crashes (the system has been known to
malfunction a couple of times before the crashes)? Righty because there were
pilots that could manually control the plane well enough to land safely.

------
rgbrenner
Since when has VW been at the forefront of self driving cars? Is there a
reason their insight would be especially accurate?

This just reflects VWs ideas to accomplish the goal... ie: they have none.

Let me know when Google says it's not possible.

~~~
threeseed
Apple is in the top tier of self driving cars though.

And since he recently worked there I am sure he knows quite a bit about where
the industry is at.

~~~
junipertea
Apple was dead last in the last self driving report in California.
[https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-13/apple-
s-a...](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-02-13/apple-s-autonomous-
cars-need-much-more-human-help-than-rivals)

------
crusso
_Despite that, he 's confident in VW's ability to make a Level 4 autonomous
vehicle, saying that the upcoming I.D. Buzz electric van will be the first VW
to receive the technology._

He's poo-pooing level 5 autonomous driving and says that they just about have
a level 4 autonomous vehicle?

This article makes no sense.

Honestly, the CEO of my company has very little idea of the details of the
technology that we produce. If you picked some cutting-edge technology that
isn't key to our market-share yet, he'd have even less of a clue.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
How does it make no sense? He’s saying we might never get past level 4. And
they’re going to offer level 4. That statement is logically coherent.

~~~
drcross
It could quite easily be a ploy to prevent lost sales.

~~~
Daishiman
Consumers don't give two craps about this terminology. And the barrier between
level 4 and level 5 is potentially decades out, if not forever.

Nobody's who's contemplating a level 4 is holding out their purchase for a
level 5.

------
KKKKkkkk1
Mr. Hitzinger is saying that L5 cars will never happen. Most people feel that
L5 is equivalent to artificial general intelligence, and it's pretty much a
given that it may never happen. But now that Waymo and Cruise and everyone
else have failed to hit their self-imposed milestones, the more pressing
question to ask is whether geo-fenced only-in-good-weather autonomy will ever
happen.

------
emmelaich
Meta: I dislike the use of "admit" in the title and story.

Why are "admit", "confess", "announce", "reveal" etc used instead of the
usually more accurate "says"?

(rhetorical question)

------
LastZactionHero
_never_? What does that even mean? We've only been driving cars like 100
years. Only had computers for 60, and decent portable ones for 20. Self-
driving literally _just_ became remotely possible, and you're telling me
_never_?

This is an off-the-cuff remark turned into a clickbait headline for a fairly
bland article.

------
waynecochran
The technology is not the only problem. The lawyers that are defending every
dead body, and there will be dead bodies, that will sink self-driving cars.
Even if everyone is 95% safer with self-driving cars, those that are killed by
a self-driving car (in combo with a public that is easily swayed with non-
objective arguments) will be hard to dismiss.

~~~
robbrown451
I don't understand this. If there are 1/20th the amount of deaths, how is that
going to sink self driving cars?

~~~
creato
Most drivers on the road are effectively being subsidized by bankruptcy
protection, because most cannot possibly cover the liability they are exposing
themselves to by driving. This "subsidy" is far less valuable to a self
driving car manufacturer than individual drivers.

~~~
robbrown451
Well not if they have insurance.

I mean, sure, you can come up with some scenario where the liability exceeded
the insurance coverage, but I haven't heard of many of those. Anyway, it comes
from somewhere. If bankruptcy protects drivers, it also exposes them to the
risk that they will suffer damage that isn't compensated.

Regardless, expecting a legal loophole to preserve the status quo indefinitely
seems quite unrealistic and inherently unstable. If that actually holds up
something that could massively benefit society (both economically and in
saving lives), we simply legislate liability limits.

~~~
creato
> we simply legislate liability limits.

Liability you can incur while driving is almost arbitrarily high. Individual
drivers rely on the existence of bankruptcy protection to cover these rare
scenarios, or simply don't think about or plan for this at all.

> but I haven't heard of many of those.

How many do you think it takes to put a self driving car manufacturer out of
business?

I'm not saying the status quo is a great situation, or that this is a good or
bad argument for or against self driving cars. Only that it's a description of
the current situation, and why legal issues might be a much bigger problem for
self driving car manufacturers than individual drivers.

------
yalogin
Yeah I am on the side of the skeptics. We cannot do AI in a fully controlled
environment properly. What hope do we have to master a use case where the
nature, elements in the physical world, vandals are all throwing all kinds of
wrenches into the mix. The vision or dream of a level 5 self driving car is
something I will only believe once I see.

------
aplummer
To go down in a long list of things executives said wouldn’t happen, that
ended up happening.

~~~
mikestew
What list? The one where Thomas Watson said there’d never be a world-wide
market for more than five computers? Other than that, what else does that list
have to stack up against:

Nuclear power, let alone _fusion_. What happened to “too cheap to meter”?

Supersonic travel: _raynier_ already pointed out what a bust the Concorde was.
Nothing else on the horizon now.

Automation giving me a 20 hour work week. Nope, capital holders just skim that
efficiency right into their pockets.

I’d go on, but suffice it to say that about the only thing much different than
my childhood in the 70s are computers in our pockets. Revolutionary, no doubt,
but we are still burning oil for our energy needs, our cars don’t fly, and I
still show up and do my 40 hours. And healthcare has gotten _worse_ in the U.
S., not better, if you can believe that.

So, yeah, when the head of the autonomous driving division of VW says Level 5
ain’t gonna happen, I don’t immediately jump to doubting him/her and attacking
their resume.

~~~
jellicle
_ALL_ of the autonomous driving experts say that level 5 is, at best, 50 years
off. Unanimous. They don't know how to do it, see no path to doing it. It's
hard! Maybe we'll make real AI and we can enslave our human-level intelligent
computers to drive cars for us, at least until they figure out how to rebel.
Maybe. But we don't know how today, and not tomorrow or the next day either.

And yet HN threads are all about "here are all these cool things that will
happen tomorrow if Elon Jesus delivers".

He ain't going to deliver, people.

------
jeromebaek
Think about it. Soft AI that assists the driver (automatic turning, cruise
control, automatic brakes) is now mainstream. Why is it that full self-driving
cars are categorically different? Because it requires full faith in the
machine. When assistive technology goes wrong, the driver can correct it and
-- get this -- the reason the driver can correct it fast enough is precisely
because the driver doesn't fully trust the technology. the driver is on alert,
always, because they know the technology is not meant to be trusted fully. now
a full self-driving car asks the driver to trust it fully. so the "driver" can
take a nap, read a book, whatever. if the driver needs to be on alert, it's by
definition not a fully self-driving car. and i dont think we will get there,
ever.

------
MarkMc
Lots of people are arguing about 'when full self-driving cars will happen'
without giving a precise definition (and therefore without having to think too
hard about the problem).

The article describes Level 5 as 'full computer control of the vehicle with
zero limitations' but what exactly does that mean?

(a) Does it mean a vehicle available for sale to the general public that can
drive at night when it is snowing on a new road that has not first been mapped
by a human?

or

(b) Does it mean that there is at least 1 city of a million residents where at
least 50% of vehicle journeys did not require any occupant to have a driver's
licence?

To me (and Volkswagen) it's far more useful to forecast when the second
criteria will be met than the first.

------
anonytrary
They "admit"? It's not like the recent "full self-driving car by 2025" craze
fooled anyone who knew even a modicum about the current state-of-the-art in ML
applied to self-driving cars. I remember doing a back-of-the-napkin on this a
couple years ago. It would take something like 7 nines of accuracy across all
types of driving tasks for us to remove the need for a fallback human behind
the wheel. AFAIK we don't even have 7 nines of accuracy for _highway_ driving
yet, so this is clearly a pipe dream for the foreseeable future. Maybe ask
again in 2070.

------
speedplane
To build a true self-driving car, as a prerequisite, you'll need a true
general AI. Imagine a complex construction site in an intersection with police
navigating traffic. The AI driver will need to understand the officer's visual
and audible cues and act accordingly. That level of sophistication requires
something far more advanced than anything we're seeing today.

~~~
KKKKkkkk1
There are much more mundane cases. Imagine a self-driving car arriving at a
toll booth that takes only cash payments. There is a long tail of situations
like this that a human driver handles easily and would require a cross-
functional team of engineers to implement the appropriate solution.

------
dlkf
The headline is a _masterclass_ in weasel words.

1\. First, it begs the question. By saying "X admits Y" we are assuming that Y
is true. This is very different than writing "X says Y", or "X believes Y" etc
etc

2\. Then, they carefully chose Y to include the word "may" so that they can
claim it is true _regardless of its content_. As long as the rest of Y isn't
literally a tautology, you're good to go. "A teacup may be orbiting Jupiter"
etc etc

3\. But step 2 is sneaky. The way that the word "may" makes the overall
statement true _is different_ than how it functions in the quoted speaker's
sentence. In his sentence, he means like "there is a good chance it will never
happen." When they use "may" to make Y true, it is invoked in a much weaker
sense.

Basically they are reusing the word "may" in two different sentences to
achieve a misleading headline. They obviously have skin in the game and I
don't expect this to be a fair article.

------
antirez
It was quite clear to many of us that autonomous driving at a certain level is
a very hard goal to reach, but it may happen in the long run. However what is
incredible is that actually a form of AD, that is public transportation, is
available for centuries yet in many places in the world this option is
ignored. Guess why? The key is in the "public" part.

------
temporaryvector
To a certain extent I agree. I had already written at length in another post
about this topic, but my opinion is that what we think of as a "car" right now
will never be fully autonomous.

I see the future diverging into two paths, fully autonomous commercial
vehicles, like taxis, delivery vehicles, semi-trucks, etc. that work within
urban areas or other designated, mapped and specially prepared areas. This
will possibly involve a centralized system of control and communication,
something like an ATC but for cars. These will be owned by corporations and
only used by people. It makes no sense for a person to buy one of these fully
autonomous vehicles, although I imagine some people would pay extra to have
priority access so they always have one available.

The other side of the coin will be privately owned cars that have autonomous
capability, or autonomous cars with override. These will be able to go
anywhere the driver wants, including unmapped villages, small towns, off road
tracks, etc. I suspect these will be the domain of enthusiasts, people who
really need them for work (ranchers and farmers, for example) and people who
choose to live away from urban centers. They will be more expensive than cars
now, but the need for these vehicles will never go away. Even if we get true
AI capable of driving anywhere with only the sensors aboard the vehicle, there
will still be the need for a human to override it, even if that involves just
authorizing a risky maneuver or putting the AI into "unsafe driving" mode.

I think the movie I, Robot (with Will Smith) got the future of autonomous cars
surprisingly right, autonomous inside cities and on highways, and using the
manual override comes with penalties (higher insurance, being at fault in an
accident, etc.).

On a personal note, and this may sound bad, but I would never buy a car which
I cannot use to break the law. Even if I never plan to do it, being able to
speed, jump the curb, intentionally crash into a wall (or another car) or even
run over a person (for example, in self defense) may be at some point required
or the least bad of many bad options. In this case any consequences should
fall on me, but I don't think a thing I own should be designed to prevent me
from breaking the law or doing something stupid if I really want or need to,
although providing warnings or an optional safe-mode is fine. I suspect many
people feel the same way, even if they don't put it in such an extreme way.
This can be seen by the fact that a lot of cars, particularly those focused on
performance or off-roading, come with switches to turn traction control off,
and if they don't, it will get mentioned as a negative in any review done by
publications focused on those audiences.

------
jnurmine
SAE level 5 is unlikely to happen since the autonomous cases will be developed
and optimized for the common case of a semi-clear weather mostly urban
environment with plenty of signs and full mobile and GNSS coverage. The odd
cases will simply not be a priority.

Can one take an "autonomous car" up a barely visible car wide path (not a real
road) which squiggles through a forest (up to a cottage)?

Can one make an autonomous car understand a free-form textual sign when
there's a roadwork or accident?

Drive in a place without marked roads?

There are plenty of edge cases and difficult situations.

Hitzinger says that level 4 might be achievable. I agree, it is conceivable
that some day a lane of a motorway could get reserved for semi-autonomous
vehicles; those vehicles can communicate with each other and are allowed to
drive much faster (say, 250 km/h) since it's mostly a straight way, computers
have faster reaction times especially given early warnings from cars ahead in
the chain and so on.

------
hinkley
In the dot com era there was a self driving car startup that started with a
simplifying assumption: don’t run the cars at grade.

If you go up or down, the number and kind of obstacles reduces. The location
of interactions between the vehicles is reduced, and the interactions with
other classes of vehicle are zero, so you can negotiate.

Solve a simpler problem, if you can.

~~~
NikolaNovak
I've read the paragraph several times and maybe it's my ESL, but I don't quite
follow.

Is the term "Grade" here used in the "Slope" sense, as in don't run the cars
up and down the hill?

And if that's the interpretation, I don't necessarily agree with the next
point that obstacles are reduced on slopes/hills... so I probably am not
following correctly :-/

Thanks!

~~~
alasarmas
The "grade" that GP is referring to is this grade:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_separation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grade_separation)

------
shrubble
If we put a wire in the road or maybe rfid tags every 40 feet, we could easily
have self driving cars.

However that would mean that everyone would have access to it.

The idea of self driving cars now is, a winner take all situation where
whichever funded effort that succeeds, generates outsized profits from
licensing or going public at a high valuation.

~~~
lern_too_spel
Staying inside a lane isn't the hard problem.

~~~
bstar77
The point is that (primarily) the road needs to be smart, not the car. There
should ideally be a synergy between the car and road, but the road has to be
the primary vector to guide the car.

~~~
hwillis
Why? There's very little information that would be better coming from the
road. To drive you want to know where you are, what the road surface
conditions are like, where the road goes, and what else is on the road.

Road conditions can easily come from anywhere. Weather radar is at least good
enough to know when roads _might_ be wet or cold. Making roads smart enough to
sense oil spills or even wetness would be incredibly hard.

Knowing where the road goes is certainly far better done by cellular.
Connection to each segment of road would be fraught with hard to repair
problems. Traffic conditions likewise are far better done from somewhere else,
and cars would be much more able to see things on the road etc.

The only argument I can see as at all reasonable is that locating cars is
difficult, and doing it with vision is incredibly challenging. You may not be
aware how much GPS has improved. With a good view of the sky you can get
(somewhat slow) accuracy to about a foot. Realistically that's just as good as
you could possibly expect from a roadside device like RFID, bluetooth, or
induction. The last inches may be important, but billions of dollars spent
burying things in the road will not help.

------
rhizome
Computer models of reality will always be simulacra, and the gap between
reality and the model is where death and failure in general reside. "A map is
not the territory," explains that computer models are always a _perception_ ,
and while a technology may even be able to switch between myriad of these
"perceptions", the conclusions derived will themselves be limited to a
simulation of reality, no matter what.

Sure, technological advances will boost the vision resolution or interpretive
rigor to insane levels (compared to present day), and this will be used to
acquire increased confidence from the public, but is that enough for you to
sit your child in the street and trust the driverless car to steer around it?
This is the question I would ask of any proponent of any model-interpreting
public technology.

------
martythemaniak
There seems to be an implicit assumption here that Level 5 = human = 100% of
drivers. I honestly don't think that's the case at all. If I am being
charitable, I'd say half of drivers would meet the implicit level 5 criteria
discussed in these threads.

For example, there's a snowstorm out here today. Unless they really need to,
people aren't going out displayed their incredible skill at navigating through
snowsquals with centimeters of snow on the ground. They just stay home.

What will determine the success of self driving cars is not philosophical
musings but their usefulness in day to day life. And if you can spend 10k on a
system that'll work most of the time, but refuse to go out in snow squeals,
it'll sell very well. I'd buy it.

------
nojvek
It’s really hard to predict. I have sat in a Tesla, have a comma ai kit, seen
tons of videos of Cruise, Zoox, Waymo, Voyage Taxis.

The space is incrementally improving. Lots of new ideas.

I’m very bullish on systems that improve human driving and slowly move to more
and more autonomy than “replace humans”

Anyone claiming full self driving is around the corner is prolly lying. I have
no idea when it will be here. The edge cases are enormous.

But self driving on selected city routes and highways in good weather is here.

I would say Highway lane following and distance keeping is already better than
human.

We aren’t great at holding monotonous focus. Machines on the other hand excel
at that. We do excel at edge cases though. Marrying the two seems like a good
bet.

------
aetherspawn
I don’t think full self-driving will happen any more than full self-flying
planes exist, however, I do think that lane keep assist, blind spot monitoring
and auto merge/lane shift, park assist, emergency auto braking and adaptive
cruise control should become mandatory in every car in the next 5 years. This
is the same way that stability control is mandatory in nearly every country.

When a work colleague drove home completely wasted and his Mazda CR-V nearly
drove itself, you could not tell that his driver input was erroneous.
Actually, it felt very safe. It dawned on me that these systems will mitigate
a great deal of preventable accidents due to human stupidity.

------
dboreham
Not any exec but "The CEO of Volkswagen's autonomous driving division".

------
holoduke
I believe the first fully automated transport system will go via the air. Air
is so much easier to control. The complexity of automating vehicles in a very
chaotic setting (land) exceeds that of building drones capable of flying from
a to b. It will start with freight transport and slowly as reliability
increases you get human transport via drones as well. Fully automated land
transport is only possible when the system is clean and predictable. That
means closed roads are open to only the entities which are part of the
automation. Very difficult to establish.

------
ecpottinger
I think
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clarke%27s_three_laws)
has something to say here.

~~~
pts_
Sure. Replace never by 3 billion years +/\- 0.5 bill to account for human help
(the time it took single celled life to evolve to human brain).

What I mean is it's a fascinating but daunting task.

------
ec109685
Yes, that is why trying to ship a level 5 car for the general public’s use is
folly. There are .001 situations that will take 1000x the effort to automate,
so automating almost all is a better approach.

------
stretchwithme
It will happen. When it will happen is impossible to predict.

But I am pretty sure it will happen within 20 years. 5 years? Unlikely.

In any case, it will require much better testing than just letting it learn on
the street. A vehicle should be able to deal with a snow covered road in the
dark going down a hill with babies crawling across the road.

And EMP-induced total electrical failure. No sense in a million people getting
injured at once, should that ever happen. Emergency brakes should quickly
engage in a predictable way when power is lost.

------
trasneoir
"[Engineers] tend to overestimate what can be done in the short-term and
underestimate what will be done in the long-term."

I'd expect level 5 autonomy to be slow, because level 4 delivers 80% of the
benefits for 20% of the cost.

BUT "never" seems crazy unless you've got a very pessimistic outlook on
humanity's medium-term future. Other than extinction or the collapse of
civilization, what could cause it to "never" happen?

------
linuxhansl
Hah. I've been saying that for a while, much to the amusement of some of my
friends and coworkers. Some of them claim that their kids will never need to
learn how to drive. Maybe I'll have the last laugh, although I wish I'd be
wrong about this.

I _hope_ that by the time I'm too old to drive - a few decades from now -
self-driving are available, but I'm not betting on it.

------
dyeje
It's kinda funny that we're investing so much into a potentially impossible
technology just to avoid building public transport.

~~~
colordrops
If it works it could be so much better in many ways. It's like a packet
switching network instead of circuit switching. And there's no reason larger
vehicles couldn't be part of this "packet-switched" vehicle network and act as
a virtual public transport system.

------
rhacker
The title is awful..

Volkswagon can speak for its own company. It can't speak for the industry. If
it were to speak for the industry the word admit can't be used. It would be a
different word, like "believe".

Volkswagon can certainly admit that "they" won't have full self driving
capability, but it can't "admit" that for other people.

------
rmason
Almost all the self-driving programs use rules based solutions literally a big
if this do that. Only one, comma.ai, uses artificial intelligence.

There's video on YouTube from three years ago with George Hotz predicting that
Level 4 or 5 would never be reached without artificial intelligence. It made
sense to me then and it still does today.

------
oblib
Until we have roads designed to fully participate in assisting self-driving
cars, and cars that communicate with each other, we'll have serious issues
that will make it unsafe, and thus impractical.

The cost to upgrade roads appears to be a significant hurdle. A google search
says:

"There are approximately 4,071,000 miles (6,552,000 km) of roads in the United
States, 2,678,000 miles (4,310,000 km) paved and 1,394,000 miles (2,243,000
km) unpaved."

And there's this:

>> einrealist 18 hours ago [-]

>> I am more fearful of trolls, tricking the technology.

That's even more difficult to address.

We have to evaluate the cost/benefit of implementing this once we get the tech
to the point of near total awareness of real world conditions. It might make
sense to implement it on major highways, but probably not on rural roads and
neighborhood streets because it's not something we can skimp on.

To make it cost effective the roadway tech has to be for the most part "dumb".
We cannot rely on "smart" tech that requires complex communication systems or
dumb tech that's easy to hack, like lines painted on the road or stop signs
and traffic lights that AR can "see".

I think we'd be better off working on implementing assistive safety
technologies for automobiles and mass transportation infrastructure like high
speed railways.

------
Causality1
After Elon Musk so helpfully pointed out that once cars are self-driving there
is absolutely no reason for companies to sell them to us, I have to say I hope
it never happens. Why would a company sell me a car for $30,000 when it can
add it to a self-driving taxi fleet and generate $300,000 in revenue over the
lifetime of the car?

~~~
maksimum
Many reasons. Time value of money, competition, maybe even regulation.

------
acolumb
I do think that full self-driving cars will exist (meaning that you can put in
the GPS coordinates of a location and it will drive itself there.)

What won't happen is cars __without the ability to have a human take over __.
There are too many fringe cases to allow cars without steering wheels.

------
joshuaheard
I don't understand why they want to make them fully autonomous. Even human
drivers must stay inside the lanes. Why can't they make a semi-autonomous car
that operates automatically with some sort of electronic lane marker, and have
drive by wire with a human driver for off-road?

------
je42
Wow. A CEO without a vision. A CEO should be pushing for boundaries.

I were a VW engineer, why would I continue working in the autonomous driving
division, if my CEO says the team would never succeed in the end game ?

I'd rather work in a company where the leadership is actually leading instead
putting on the brakes.

~~~
sl1ck731
Being that there are levels to autonomy the engineers still serve a purpose.

I'd prefer an executive to be level-headed than spouting dreams that will
never come true and expecting engineers to just make it happen.

If anything I respect him as a leader more than "visionary" executives.

------
8bitsrule
Building intelligence into a path for vehicles to follow is probably an easier
and less expensive option.

------
wavegeek
The trough of disillusion has arrived.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hype_cycle)

The big challenge for self driving cars is that they are held to a standard of
perfection. No human driver can meet that standard either, but they are
exempted due to incumbency bias.

The benefits of self driving cars are so phenomenally huge that if they are
possible they will happen. Apart from the costs of paying people to drive,
there are the time benefits of not wasting time driving cars - is there
anything more boring and tedious? - and the fact many people, the young, the
old, those with poor eyesight cannot drive.

I don't see any evidence it is not possible within 10-20 years. Cars will get
smarter and easier to drive and the final step will not seem large. For the
edge cases, there is always the possibility of having the vehicle temporarily
being taken over by someone remote. Remote driving is already done in some
mines.

------
classified
Lo and behold, there still exist actual engineers that recognize the "AI"
bullshit propaganda for what it is. Good that there are still engineers whose
job description does not include the dissemination of fashionable lies.

------
hownottowrite
Clickbait.

This is definitely not consistent with statements Alex has made in the past.
Seems like more of an off the cuff remark a German engineer would make while
confident that the fully realized result is right around the corner.

------
peterwwillis
Put the cars on rails, focus on the safety and switching systems. We don't
need full AI, we just need to not have an individual human be solely
responsible for the operation of the vehicle at all times.

------
hotz
I predict it would take a good few centuries for the entire planet to only
consist of self driving vehicles. I doubt we'd have a single country in our
lifetime solely using self driving vehicles.

------
owens99
It’s not a coincidence this guy works at a big corporation like Volkswagen and
holds the opinion he does.

If you want to know about the future, don’t ask the incumbents. They will only
tell you about the status quo.

------
keanzu
Incorrect use of the word admit

admit (v): confess to be true or to be the case.

Correct use in a sentence: "VW admits guilt and pays $4.3bn diesel emissions
scandal penalty"

The word admit doesn't apply to predictions of the future.

------
j45
30-60% automated driving will still be a big leap forward. Less attention used
up while driving.

Compare driving somewhere vs taking a ride share and how much more
prepared/present you are when you arrive.

------
growlist
Full self-driving cars would be cool, but even a good satnav + cruise control
and lane assist gets you most of the way there. Apart from smaller roads, the
car almost drives itself.

------
pcarolan
All I want is to sleep or read on freeways. Solve that first and you’re
competing with airlines and unlocking billions or more in value. Prioritize
please.

------
ogre_codes
This is arguably one of the biggest competitive advantages Tesla has. For
$47,000 I can get an EV from Tesla with a better self-driving system[1] than a
$100k Audi, BMW, Mercedes, or Lexus. I haven’t pulled the trigger on a Tesla
yet, but I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right
now. For many people Tesla has made EV and self-driving table-stakes and
nobody else is delivering on that.

[1] Yes, I know about the accidents

~~~
NikolaNovak
>>I can’t imagine paying $40,000+ on a new car that isn’t a Tesla right now

It's personal & subjective, and nobody will persuade anybody in a thread, but
FWIW I absolutely positively can.

\- I'm unlikely to utilize self-driving any time soon

\- The stories of their firmware terrify me. And I don't _want_ a DAW and
computer games running on my ECU :O

\- More pragmatically though, the Tesla UI paradigm is completely foreign to
my way of driving/thinking.

I'm looking for a "HOTAS" type UI, where I can do anything I want without
taking my eyes and focus off the road. A UI that's one giant screen, that may
change position of buttons from minor firmware to another, is basically as
scary and alienating concept as I can imagine.

I get that I am in a minority nowadays - a lot of manufacturer's are replacing
switches, buttons and knobs with a touchscreen and deep menus, but not
thankfully all just yet :|

~~~
pts_
They should look into how the US Navy switched back to physical switches from
touch screens on ships for unambiguous commands.

~~~
brianwawok
Gas and steering are physical controls though.

Radio and other such features do not need dedicated buttons. Crazy how many
buttons my normal car has.

~~~
NikolaNovak
Again, that's a personal preference.

Next, Previous, Pause, Play, Mute - I personally want them to be physical
controls. On steering wheel ideally, on the dashboard otherwise. I use them
multiple times a drive, and I don't want to take my eyes off the road to do
them.

Same with seat heat, lights, wipers - anything I may want to do while driving,
I want a button.

Setting up the exact shade of my dashboard light - that can be buried in a
menu :D

Basically... when you say "Crazy how many buttons my normal car has" :

\- You say that as a bad thing

\- I see that as a _brilliant_ thing... IFF done well:

Of course, physical buttons/levers/knobs can still be done well, or poorly.

Having many identical buttons in a confusing layout is just as bad as
touchscreen - I have to look at them to use them.

Having buttons in a good, intuitive layout; especially buttons which are
distinct from each other, as opposed to row of 6 buttons all the same, is
brilliant. Even better if it's a distinct combination of buttons, knobs,
switches, levers, etc - anything to help haptic feedback and intuitive access.
Sometimes I think people who are against buttons may simply never had a car
with _good_ physical UI:/

(simple thing - my old 2004 WRX has a next / previous knob-like-thing, rather
than two identical buttons next to each other [1]. It felt ridiculous when I
first saw it - but then I realized its quality of purpose vs sexiness - I
never ever ever have to think or be distracted even a millisecond to know
exactly how to skip a song :). Compare to cars which have several identical
square buttons for next, previous, pause, play; or temp up, temp down, fan up,
fan down, A/C -- that's just horrible UI by clueless people for customers who
don't know / haven't experienced better :-/ ]

1: Bottom right of the stereo:
[https://images.crutchfieldonline.com/ImageBank/v200311131204...](https://images.crutchfieldonline.com/ImageBank/v20031113120400/ImageHandler/scale/978/978/core/learn/article/2997/radio.jpg)

------
sakopov
Wouldn't self-driving cars require substantial changes in road infrastructure
to support full autonomy?

------
steveharman
I am not one, nor have I ever knowingly met anyone who wants a a self-drving-
car.

Electric, sure, bring it on.

------
zhoujianfu
I think they may never happen because full self-FLYING “cars” (vtol drones)
will very likely happen first (it’s more a regulatory thing than a tech
thing).

And flying would be superior to driving (faster, no traffic, no need to
maintain infrastructure, etc..) so there’d be little incentive to continue
even trying to get to level 5 for self-driving.

~~~
ladberg
I really like this take and I would love it to come true, but I have some
doubts. Fully self-driving cars could probably eventually be accomplished with
our current level of hardware (we just need much better software), but flying
cars would require decades of continuous improvements in the hardware
required.

------
yzh
Experiences tell us, when someone makes a comment that something may __never__
happen, she probably is wrong. Our current transportation infra is designed
for our current transportation tools. Full self-driving cars require a
revolution of urban design and transportation infra. Long-term wise I think
these will happen for sure.

------
FpUser
_" Not only will the tech get as good as humans"_

Let's suppose it will happen. Do you have a proof that such "good" tech does
not develop a will to one day run over every human it can?

------
m0zg
Translation: we were caught with our pants down, we're now 10 years behind the
leaders in the field, and when the tech actually matures in 10 years, it might
undo Volkswagen.

------
mbostleman
I think that the amount of demand and market momentum that appears in the
future is a better predictor if what will get done than an executive’s opinion
based on current costs.

------
zweep
The only way we NEVER fully get self driving cars is if we nuke or
bioterrorism advanced civilization off the planet in the next 50 years.

------
mymythisisthis
Why not drone cars, driven remotely?

~~~
bordercases
Because you need to be where the car ends up stopping!

~~~
smabie
You could pay someone else to drive the car remotely. Though, I suppose they
could extract money out of you by threatening to kill you.

~~~
bordercases
Buddy that's called transit and taxiing.

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gok
Well it certainly falls far outside of VW's tech wheelhouse. It would be
really hard to cheat on autonomous driving tests.

~~~
0xff00ffee
AWS mechanical turk that shit. :) Yeah, probably not 30fps...

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wojciii
I would like to read the article, but an add covers 1/2 of the screen and
can't be closed or moved.

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interdrift
Never? lol this guy is joking

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edisonjoao
just say tesla is farther ahead and anyone will not catch up

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OrgNet
That's a nice way of saying that Elon Musk is full of it with his autopilot...

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RedComet
Good.

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0xff00ffee
I was at an ML conference in 2017 and the keynote speaker asked the audience
how many years they thought it would be until ADAS lvl 5 was on the market.
The keynote had proudly proclaimed 5 years, and then audibly scoffed when
about 90% of the hands went up for "20 or more years". There's such a
disconnect between real engineers and cheerleaders.

~~~
tim333
Though there's the Kurzweil argument that people's intuition doesn't work well
with exponential growth. The engineers are probably thinking these systems
work terribly and have for decades and so will for decades more but meanwhile
GPU performance is doubling every year or two and many people are trying to
take advantage of that.

I've been following this stuff casually since about 1980 when I totally failed
to write an AI program and since then processor performance has been steadily
increasing, first with clock speed and now more with multi cores. Hans
Moravec, a robot guy did a reasonable estimate that to get equivalent hardware
to the brain you'd need about 100 teraflops and just recently the first 100
teraflop GPU has come out ([https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-
center/v100/](https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/data-center/v100/)) which is kinda
historic in a way, maybe a billion times faster than a cheap computer in 1980.
Of course this will keep going for a while so the situation will flip from we
can't do much because processors are much slower than the brain to the other
way around.

(update NIDIA may have fudged the numbers a bit but anyway.)

------
jay_kyburz
Climate Change will have a very significant impact on our entire society such
that people don't need or want cars any more. We may turn to virtual
environments and telecommuting for everything.

Updated to clarify message a little.

------
euske
I always thought that self-driving technology is one of the schemes devised by
researchers for getting a long-term funding. It has an immense appeal to the
public and sounds plausible enough to laypeople. We've seen a bunch of
promises like this: nuclear fusion energy and earthquake forecasting. In
Japan, trillions of yens were (and still are) spent to these two technologies
but their practicalities are pretty much questionable. I think self-driving
tech joined this.

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jakeogh
A car that has "self" is equiv to a living being, and it wouldn't be ethical
to lock it inside a box. It's not going to happen any time soon and it will
never happen with conventional binary computing; a non-wetware system capiable
of emulating a mouse would melt itself through the road.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22061718)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21250424)

~~~
smabie
Are you suggesting that it's immoral to create a self-driving car? I'm not
sure what you are talking about...

~~~
jakeogh
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21106367](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21106367)

------
Geee
Volkswagen doesn't develop self-driving tech. They use Mobileye's solution
like everyone expect Tesla, Waymo and GM/Cruise. They aren't really in the
position to make that argument.

Level 5 means that the car can drive autonomously > 95% of the time, and it
will absolutely be possible. Level 4/5 distinction doesn't really make any
sense once the autonomy gets beyond certain percentage. It doesn't mean that
it's level 4 until it hits 100% (which is impossible).

Level 5 car is designed to drive in all conditions, but there are always
statistically unlikely corner cases or situations that require high-level
decision making, which the car can't handle by itself. A single driver may
never hit such case, and for them the experience is full self-driving.

~~~
simfoo
This is not true. VW fully owns AID which is developing its level 4 stack. VW
is also invested in Argo

~~~
Geee
I stand corrected. Still, VW is using MobilEye's tech in their ride-sharing
service [0], which probably means that their own tech is not very close to the
competitors.

[0] [https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/volkswagen-
mobileye...](https://newsroom.intel.com/news-releases/volkswagen-mobileye-
champion-motors-invest-israel-deploy-first-autonomous-ev-ride-hailing-
service/)

~~~
simfoo
I don't know about Israel but VWs ride-sharing service in Germany is MOIA

------
axguscbklp
Well yeah, of course. Full self-driving probably requires artificial general
intelligence and it is quite possible that humans will never develop
artificial general intelligence. The real surprising thing, for me, is how
many otherwise intelligent people bought into full self-driving hype.

It's likely that if humans ever developed the sort of AI necessary for full
self-driving, this AI technology would radically transform the world. Using it
for cars would be one of the least important applications.

