
Apple self-driving car in accident: California DMV filing - Varcht
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-autos/apple-self-driving-car-in-accident-california-dmv-filing-idUSKCN1LG2X1
======
egd
I genuinely do not understand Apple's move into this space.

They've made a trillion dollar business out of small, high-margin electronics
that consumers replace every couple year. Most of their products serve to
enhance this business model or have high complementarity from a technology
standpoint. The self-driving car project feels like an incredibly expensive
diversion from this core business with limited technological overlap to their
existing product lines. I'm trying not to see this as "Post-Jobs Apple finally
jumps the shark," but I'm just not getting what the vision here is.

This isn't snark, by the way - I'd really love to hear a good model for what
they're doing.

~~~
CharlesW
> _I genuinely do not understand Apple 's move into this space._

Many people didn't understand their move into MP3 players or mobile phones,
either.

If you take a step back, Apple is an "affordable luxury" technology products
company with a heavy emphasis on design and user experience.

In the luxury and "affordable luxury" tiers, cars are technology products with
a heavy emphasis on design and user experience.

Apple knows that smartphones, as we know them today, are likely to be an
anachronism by 2030. The market for transportation is large enough to be
interesting as a potential source of revenue when the iPhone cash cow falters.

~~~
stochastic_monk
I was surprised by the last paragraph. What kind of device or system of
devices do you think will fully replace the current concept of a smartphone?

~~~
ATsch
I understood this not as that smartphones will be replaced, but that they will
reach a plateu where few people will have a desire to upgrade or to pay the
apple premium over cheaper devices. I'd say it's very clear that this is
starting to happen already.

------
apo
_Apple executives have never publicly spoken about the company’s self-driving
car program, but filings in a criminal court case last month confirmed that
the company had at least 5,000 employees working on the project and that it
was working on circuit boards and a “proprietary chip” related to self-driving
cars._

That sounds like a lot of people working on this project. The estimate appears
to come from this July 2018 article:

 _But the complaint also for the first time gave an official account of some
details of the self-driving car program. About 5,000 employees were authorized
to access information about the program, including about 2,700 “core”
employees with access to secret databases._

[https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-
autonomous/criminal...](https://www.reuters.com/article/us-apple-
autonomous/criminal-case-sheds-light-on-apple-self-driving-car-technology-
idUSKBN1K109O)

What's the plan here? To retrofit a Lexus or similar car with self-driving
features or build a self-driving car from scratch?

------
GhostVII
Doesn't seem particularly notable, they got rear ended at 15 miles an hour
while essentially stopped.

~~~
userbinator
The important part is that it got rear-ended while waiting to merge --- I
suspect a strong factor in this was the fact that the car behind it was
expecting it to go and merge, but it suddenly stopped instead.

Even for a human, merging into flowing traffic is tricky and one of the more
difficult maneuvers; combine that with a (not obviously?) self-driving car
that doesn't behave quite like human drivers expect, and I can see how this
could happen.

If I saw a clearly-marked "autonomous test vehicle" I'd probably stay far away
from it, but I suspect this one wasn't. Imagine the surprise of the human
driver who thought the car in front that he hit was just driven by another
idiot...

~~~
refurb
Looks like it happened here:
[https://goo.gl/maps/RHiVTRSuDJ62](https://goo.gl/maps/RHiVTRSuDJ62)

Pretty short merge lane, more of a surface street than a highway. Probably not
atypical for a car to stop to wait for an opening to merge.

~~~
williamscales
I often get on to Lawrence at this particular intersection, using this merge
lane. The traffic you're merging in to can be going at 50 MPH in the right
lane with about one car length separation between cars. A human merging here
has their head craned back, watching for a gap to appear, and accelerates to
merge in to the gap. Who knows what exactly happened here, but this one is a
particularly tricky merge under traffic.

~~~
ma2rten
I feel like Santa Clara county has a bunch of these dangerous merging lanes.

------
comex
The actual filing:

[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/36a7cf14-592c-4197...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/36a7cf14-592c-4197-9226-fa40bb652c62/Apple_082418.pdf?MOD=AJPERES&CVID=)

~~~
trevyn
Was in autonomous mode, “waiting to merge”.

------
coatmatter
Those interested (or not interested) in self-driving cars might find this
thread quite interesting:
[https://twitter.com/amir/status/1034442936774258688](https://twitter.com/amir/status/1034442936774258688)
"Just out: The truth about Waymo..."

~~~
sofon
Interesting thread.

I think self-driving cars are short term doomed, and we've doomed them.

The problem is we view them as a purely technical problem where-as the real
issues are sociological. It's not possible to create a self-driving car that
acts perfectly on roads designed for humans (arguably, it's not possible to
have humans acts perfectly either).

There are two solutions to this problem. Either shift human expectations such
that they accept the failures of self-driving cars, or change the roads to
make it easier for automated cars to drive on them.

I believe we should overwhelmingly be doing the second. We should be
augmenting and instrumenting our road infrastructure to make self-driving
easier. And in particular, we should be concentrating our efforts where this
is easier, and has the most value (probably transit).

~~~
Nition
Possibly true, but some of the biggest hurdles to self driving are unexpected
road conditions. Debris on the road, people stepping out into traffic,
temporary roadworks etc.

~~~
CardenB
That’s actually not the case. It seems the biggest hurdles are actually quite
expected at this point, and enumerated by the article.

Self driving cars are actually quite good at spotting something unexpected
with a lot of diligence.

------
MBCook
I wonder when we will see the first accident between two self driving cars in
autonomous mode. Especially between different brands.

~~~
sorokod
I think especially between same brand. The legal acrobatics by the
manufacturer will be interesting to watch.

~~~
MBCook
Between the same brand doesn’t seem to unlikely to me.

If you have a bunch of cars stored somewhere overnight (so you can fuel them
or charge them or whatever) it’s easy enough to imagine some situation where
two of them run into each other trying to get out of the lot. Or one going in
one coming.

Out on the road it’s kind of the same thing. There are lots of Waymo cars in
city X, so if they’re going to hit another automated vehicle there’s a decent
chance it would be one of their own.

To get a crash between different brands they both have to be in the same
space, running automated, at the same time, and both make or be unable to
avoid mistakes. That seems less likely, at least right now.

Of course if one brand runs into itself more than once I imagine the press
will have a field day.

------
somerandomness
Also interesting to see all autonomous accident reports:
[https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/auton...](https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/vr/autonomous/autonomousveh_ol316+)

------
mygo
Although the title is not inaccurate, we don’t have all the details yet.
“Apple self-driving car rear ended” would be a more accurate report..
especially considering what comes to mind for the average person when someone
mentions a self-driving car in an accident.

~~~
riffic
#CrashNotAccident

[https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/03/19/crashes-not-
acc...](https://daringfireball.net/linked/2018/03/19/crashes-not-accidents)

~~~
tialaramex
No, they're accidents.

The impetus behind trying to rename accidents is that Americans are perversely
enthusiastic about revenge.

Accepting that it was an accident doesn't stop us trying to ensure it doesn't
happen again, that is indeed exactly what Accident Investigators are for, and
you'll notice they aren't called "No, it wasn't an accident, it was a crash"
Investigators.

By re-framing this as "not an accident" we get to insist there's somebody to
blame, and we can start looking for revenge. That won't do a thing to undo
what happened or prevent it from happening again, it's one of our nastiest
human traits and it needs to be fought, not supported by reinforcing it with
language.

This (random example from another open tab) is what investigating accidents
looks like:

[https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/report-13-2018-near-miss-
wit...](https://www.gov.uk/raib-reports/report-13-2018-near-miss-with-track-
workers-at-pelaw-north-junction)

The investigators wanted to understand everything that went wrong, and how it
contributed to what happened (two people nearly got hit by a train), and then
they used that information to recommend how to avoid it happening again.

~~~
uresponsible
Accountability and revenge are not the same thing. In fact, accountability
within a legal framework is one of the central developments of human
civilization precisely because it preempts extra-legal vengeance.

Now, I personally prefer the term collision to crash, but I despise the use of
"accident" in the context of a motor vehicle collision. Maybe because I'm an
optimist, I assume that the overwhelming majority of collisions are
"accidental" only in the sense that the responsible operator is not acting
with malicious. However, in the overwhelming majority of situations, they are
not operating and/or maintaining their motor vehicle with due care, to the
harm of those around them.

I believe that use of the term "accident" connotes a lack of agency on the
part of the motor vehicle operator, and discourages accountability.
Accountability as deterrence is necessary because the consequence of reckless
driving and poor maintenance are so dire.

Of course, accountability for motor vehicle operators is not the only answer
to improving safety - road and junction design play huge parts, and I'd love
to see serious attention given to bad infrastructure as part of collision
investigations, with follow-up and remediation.

Unfortunately - and here is where we perhaps agree about accountability and
negative incentives - the parties most commonly investigating motor vehicle
collisions are rarely incentivized to look towards the contributions of
infrastructure (as they are organs of the same government that operates the
infrastructure.) It typically falls to citizen-activists to advocate for
changes to road or junction design, which is a shame.

------
listic
> Instead of many stand-alone embedded systems each doing one thing, we’ll
> have cheap dumb sensors and actuators controlled by software on a single
> central control board, running some sort of operating system

Is the approach of having a network of stand-alone embedded systems each doing
one thing really going away? I thought it is a sensible way of handling
complexity.

------
imranq
Why can’t all these companies just make one self driving car? Seems like a lot
of overlapping effort with all of these separate initiatives towards the same
goal.

The technology is agnostic unless you redesign the car from the ground up. All
the training data and model development should be open source with some
monetary incentive for the organization that contributes the most

~~~
sannee
Because there might be multiple different development approaches to solve the
same problem. It makes sense to explore more than one of them.

Some cars don't use LIDAR (Tesla), some use end-to-end machine learning
(geohot thing), some are more of an "assistant" systems and others aim at full
autonomy. It's unclear which of these approaches will yield results long term.

~~~
dplgk
Understood, but at the same time it's like multiple companies trying to fly to
the Mars. They might never achieve such a huge goal without combining efforts.
Instead, they're going to have their proprietary ways, patent them so no one
else can use them and all solutions will be less than the best that's
achievable.

------
protomyth
What is the black box situation with these cars? Is there a dump of the last
minute before the accident that the programmers or NTSB could look at to see
what and why the car made its decisions? I am curious if the merge looked
different from a human that got it rear ended.

------
throwaway255
Dupe
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17889132](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17889132)

~~~
taspeotis
Your submission doesn’t link anywhere.

