
Google's self-driving technology is real, but the car itself is vaporware - prawn
http://www.thedrive.com/article/1512/the-google-car-is-a-hoax
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_pmf_
It's not vaporware if Google never promised anything for consumers; it has
been Silicon Valley's drooling mouth-breathing press outlets that perpetuated
this crap, feeding the hubris of their audience (consisting of people who
think a landing page and a vague idea is a product) who believe they can make
better vehicles than established manufacturers.

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jdc
There is truth in what you say, but I find this comment gratuitously negative.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

~~~
kzhahou
Why?

* Google never promised a product, which is a requirement for vaporware.

* The idea that it's a consumer product was promoted by SV channels.

* SV audience is uncritical of ideas when it feeds into its own hubris (established players are slow/dumb compared to new entrants).

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Others
This article seems a bit aggressive about its point. Sure, the "Google Car"
was super overhyped, and probably will never be a consumer product. However,
there is no doubt that Google's software has pushed the idea of a self-driving
car forward, and the car will have an impact on the future of the auto
industry.

~~~
cLeEOGPw
It certainly proved that self-driving car can be a real thing.

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capitalsigma
> Thanks to the wonderful world of metadata that got Edward Snowden exiled,
> Google (and Facebook and phone companies and the NSA) already has a great
> idea of not only what you do online,

IMO this shows the author doesn't really know what he's talking about --- the
metadata that the NSA collects has literally nothing to do with the tracking
data that Google and Facebook collect.

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JupiterMoon
The NSA are according to the Snowden files extracting data from Google
Facebook etc's databases. Both with and without the companies knowledge and
cooperation.

I.E. They are literally the same thing in some cases.

~~~
capitalsigma
That's separate from the issue of metadata collection, which is only relevant
to phone companies.

~~~
JupiterMoon
I would suspect that the NSA put all their data (and metadata is really just
data) together.

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foxhedgehog
Sounds like this author sold his Google stock early.

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angryasian
this guy sounds extremely butt hurt over a non story. I've never even heard a
rumor about google getting into the car manufacturing industry.

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sandworm101
Google doesn't want to build cars. Google wants to be the Microsoft of cars,
to relegate the Fords and GMs of the world to hardware-builders akin to IBM.

It is a mistake to try. As I've said in a hundred other threads, some basic
autodrive functionality has been available for years and every focus group has
dismissed it. Speed regulators, automatic enforcement of follow distance, the
automatic seatbelt (which only existed to delay the airbag requirement) anti-
distraction devices such as entertainment systems that lock down at speed ...
all would be trivial to implement but have been summarily rejected by the
general market. The concept that Google will somehow implement all of those
things at once, and that people will buy in, seems fanciful.

I still haven't seen any safety numbers that account for the most dangerous
driving hazard. I haven't seen any evidence that drunk people crash less often
in an auto-drive car. All on the road so far have had driver overrides, which
a drunk would of course be able to use. Nobody has dared to put drunks in
charge of these things. So we do not know whether they will reduce drunk
driving accidents or not. It might perhaps increase the issue if lots of
drunks decide to rely on autodrive cars, creating a greater opportunity for
them to wrest control from the robot.

And I've yet to see the google cars react to unusual situations such as a
person directing traffic or boarding a ferry. Those driver overrides, which
allow the drunk to take control, remain necessary.

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dclowd9901
I'm finding it very difficult to dig up actual statistics on what percentage
of accidents each year are caused by drunk drivers, most likely because I
suspect the percentage is extremely low. The nearest I could find was a
statistic that about 7% of all vehicle accidents involved an alcohol impaired
operator
([http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3403100014.html](http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G2-3403100014.html)).

That said, why do you think impaired drivers are the biggest danger on the
road? I firmly believe it is simply bad, irresponsible, untrained drivers
caused by 1) the ease of obtaining a driver's license, 2) the lack of expense
overall in owning and driving a car and 3) the very low standard of acceptable
driving that's the most troublesome. It's going to be easy to throw a drunk in
an autonomous vehicle and ship them home. It's going to be exponentially more
difficult to provide access to autonomous vehicles to the general population.

~~~
nabla9
[http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812102.pdf](http://www-
nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/812102.pdf)

In 2013, 10,076 people were killed in alcohol-impaired- driving crashes, an
average of one alcohol-impaired-driving fatality occurred every 52 minutes.
These alcohol-impaired-driving fatalities accounted for 31 percent of the
total motor vehicle traffic fatalities in the United States.

~~~
dclowd9901
This is a percentage of fatal accidents, which on the whole are very
statistically unlikely (they account for less than 1% of all accidents). Just
because someone didn't die doesn't mean an accident was inconsequential.

In other words, if I told you 1/3 of fatal airline crashes were caused by
drunken pilots but half of all airline crashes were caused by fatigued pilots,
which would you try to fix first?

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kumarm
Sounds like an article written about cell phones in 2005 :).

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hkmurakami
Well, such an article would have been largely correct. :)

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facepalm
If the evilness of Google consists of creating self-driving, low impact cars
just so that people can read ads while driving, I'd say more of that evilness!

Also, for all of Google's evilness, it seems to me they never forced people to
use their products. On Android, you are not typically forced to use Google
search or anything.

I thought the concept of the Google car is brilliant and it is nor even
competing with Ford or what not. I want a city with lightweight, self-driving
cars, not autonomous steel monsters rushing about.

I think the self-driving thingies could be even smaller. For example in my
city there are bicycle taxis. Those things could be autonomous. They might be
much slower than cars, but since they could take more direct routes they could
reach the other end of the city just as quickly as the cars on the highway.

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hkmurakami
And thus as a researcher working on the technology, it may make sense now to
go join a company that is intent on providing the full stack for automated
driving, as James Kuffner has done.

[http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/googles_james_kuffner_...](http://www.roboticstrends.com/article/googles_james_kuffner_leaves_to_pursue_robotics_and_a.i._at_toyota/ces)

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pbreit
Was anyone expecting Google to build the cars?

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amelius
I guess they just want the benefits of people driving the car, while pushing
all liability to car manufacturers. Somewhat like they do with Android: Google
also makes no phones.

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ck2
Self-driving cars are the new jetpack.

Sure there are lots of prototypes.

None are practical/safe in the real world for the unwashed masses.

However will get driving assist out of this.

Which will probably kill a great many more people as they start assuming it is
a full automated driving mode or attempt to treat it that way. Many of those
people killed will be innocent bystanders. Then you'll see claims like we see
now where "the car just accelerated" where they accidentally just stepped on
the accelerator instead of the brake and blame the car.

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hb43
" For them, the time you spend in your car is a critical node to fill in the
remaining blanks. It’s a kill-or-be-killed opportunity to develop or dominate
the networks that control automated cars and in-car infotainment."

Relevant for the US only ?

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azinman2
There's commute traffic world wide.

Bigger issue is what driving environments could support this. Currently you
could never do this in India. The car would not be able to handle such a
dynamic environment. How humans do is already beyond my comprehension (as an
American). China itself might be a better target but already has some level of
dynamism to it.

