
The dream of driverless cars is dying - doener
https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-cars-is-dying/
======
sentdex
People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience.

The time it takes to get from say a car that just drives about randomly to a
car that drives pretty well 75% of the time is about a day's worth of work
with today's technology. Going from 75-80% is a week or two. 80-85% is months.
Getting to the 90% is years, and who knows what we need for 99+%.

I did a self-driving car in GTA V project that streamed on Twitch 24/7\. If
the car wasn't improving noticeably day by day, people were getting angry and
frustrated, as if the car was meant to be perfectly driving within months,
surely!

There's definitely a major disconnect between the hype and reality of what the
challenge of self-driving cars is. The bubble is just simply bursting at the
moment, but the dream itself is not dying amongst actual engineers. It's just
dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the
problem actually is.

~~~
ghaff
I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying,
it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and
dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade.

I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the
growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never
having to own a car and being driven around everywhere. For that to be a
reality, self-driving has to happen right now--not incrementally over the
coming decades.

~~~
marcosdumay
> For that to be a reality...

Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than
owning a car. What you describe already exists.

~~~
nradov
Ride hailing services are only cheaper in a few dense urban areas where most
trips are short and parking is very expensive. Everywhere else they're still
an expensive luxury.

~~~
nojvek
Yep. I pay an insane amount of money to Lyft for rides to home because I live
away from city and we only have one car.

Could have gotten a second car but I hate driving in peak hour traffic so I
take the bus. Lyft is definitely convenient after hours since my last bus is
at 6pm. The convinience comes at a steep price though.

------
maxharris
Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995:
[https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-
nirv...](https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-
nirvana-185306)

> How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's
> an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the
> friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet
> Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon
> buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Takeaway: people expect way too much out of next five years of the future, and
typically it takes twenty years for those expectations to become fully
realized. (I believe there is an Andy Grove quote to the same effect, but I
couldn't find it in time.)

~~~
paganel
We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots, things that have
been prophetized 100 to 50 years ago. Going back more in time we still don’t
have a philosophical stone. The idea is that some technological prophecies are
indeed wrong.

~~~
freehunter
>We still don’t have flying cars

Why does no one consider a helicopter to be a "flying car"? What can a flying
car do that a helicopter can't? The only difference I see is that a flying car
would be cheaper and owned by more people, which a helicopter could easily be
if people _actually_ wanted a flying car. Helicopters are expensive because
they're very niche devices.

The fact that almost no one owns a helicopter proves that people don't
actually want flying cars.

~~~
hodgesrm
Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and
significant training to fly safely. It's hard to see how you would reduce even
the maintenance costs enough to make them practical for universal use.

To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy
them for personal use. (I know this anecdotally from a relative involved in
sales of Airbus helicopters.) If you addressed the cost and safety issues no
doubt more people would buy them.

~~~
freehunter
>Helicopters are complex machines that require lots of maintenance and
significant training to fly safely.

So did cars when they were first introduced. Since they solved a need, there
was a great incentive to make them easier to use and easier to repair. That
incentive doesn't exist for helicopters because most people don't own
helicopters.

>To your second point, people with enough money and training do commonly buy
them for personal use.

I'm glad you pointed this out, I didn't make that argument because it would
ruin the surprise, but yeah. People do use flying cars, and they're called
helicopters. They're just used by very rich people or people with enough
training to operate them. But think in cities like NYC, helicopters are used
just like cars would be, because using a car can be unpractical. Functionally
there is no difference between Michael Bloomberg traveling to Newark via a
limo versus via a helicopter: both park at his building and can transport him
from his home to his destination. It's a flying car.

>If you addressed the cost and safety issues no doubt more people would buy
them.

The incentive to improve cost and safety only exists if demand exists. Cars
only got cheaper and safer when the public began buying them. Flying cars
(helicopters) will only become safer and cheaper if people start demanding
them as well. The fact that they're _not_ , IMO, proves people don't actually
want flying cars.

~~~
mannykannot
There is plenty of incentive to make helicopters cheaper to own and operate,
have simpler and less frequent maintenance requirements, to be easier to fly,
require less space to take off and land, be quieter and safer. It hasn't
happened so far because these are genuinely difficult problems, not because of
lack of incentive.

No one in NYC, not even Bloomberg, is landing, let alone parking, his
helicopter at his office. It is completely impractical in terms of safety,
space and noise, even if it were just one person doing it, and absurdly
infeasible to think it could be scaled up to, say, just the number of people
using the Lincoln tunnel in any given half-hour. There are a few helipads
around the edges of the city (a number that is likely to decrease on account
of noise), that cater to some of the transportation needs of a number of
people that can be counted in the hundreds per day, not hundreds of thousands.

The idea that if there is a wish, a solution would have been found by now,
does not stand up to the most cursory examination - for one thing, if it were
so, not many people would be dying.

~~~
freehunter
I like your point about the number of people in the Lincoln Tunnel and people
dying in crashes.

I agree it's a genuinely difficult problem, but we might agree for different
reasons. I think it's a genuinely difficult problem because there is no way to
make a flying car as safe as a car that is stuck to the ground. There's just
not. Normal cars break down, they run out of gas, they stop working all the
time. You coast to a stop and call a tow truck. Flying cars break down and you
plummet to your death. Normal cars crash into each other in just 2 dimensions.
Flying cars crash into each other in three dimensions, and then you plummet to
your death. Normal cars get stuck in traffic and sit with their engines at
idle, producing small amounts of pollution, noise, wind and heat, yet still
contribute substantially to global warming. Flying cars sitting at idle in a
traffic jam still have to hover above the ground, which means they're running
their engines almost as hard as if they were actually moving, producing tons
more waste byproduct than even the most gas-guzzling SUV.

Of course, my argument isn't "flying cars are a bad idea", so all of those
points might seem offtopic. But it links back to the idea that _we already
have flying cars_ and we've _already realized_ that it's a terrible idea.
Short of true anti-gravity, a flying car is _always_ going to be less safe,
more polluting, more complicated mechanically, and is always a bad idea. If
people actually wanted flying cars, we would deal with the downsides long
enough for smart people to overcome the reliability and price issues, but
overcoming "plummeting to your death" is a genuinely difficult problem that
only has one solution: true anti-grav that works even when the power is
disconnected. Since that's a far-future sci-fi plot, the closest thing we have
to flying cars is a helicopter.

It just turns out that using them as reliable daily individual transport is a
really bad idea.

~~~
mannykannot
Flying cars are a bad idea, but that hasn't stopped a lot of people wanting
them. The vast majority don't give it any thought beyond 'that would be cool',
but a few are putting a lot of time and money into trying to make one. It's my
opinion that the hardest of all the hard problems is noise, because there
aren't many things that can be changed in how lift is generated, and
rotors/propellers are intrinsically noise-generating.

I think you may be misinterpreting my last sentence. What I mean is that, just
because medical science has not delivered immortality, it doesn't mean that
there aren't lots of people who would prefer not to die. You could substitute
specific causes of death, such as cancer or alzheimer's, into that argument,
if you think that most people have come to terms with their mortality.

------
CPLX
The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless
cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being
incremental.

It seems almost a certainty that we will _gradually_ ease into the concept.
Some cars will be able to do some things autonomously, a little, for some
people, some of the time. Eventually the cost/benefit levels will improve,
more features will roll out, and sure over a long time scale things might look
revolutionary.

In other words this big complicated category of tech will grow like most other
technology has. This isn't an individual app like Instagram or WhatsApp it's a
whole category of technology, like the concept of automated factories, or
container based shipping, or the internet itself. It could be decades, or
longer. Or not.

But as a casual observer it's pretty easy to look around and notice that there
really aren't any practical applications of autonomy with mass adoption, and
conclude that it's going to be a minute, and that we'll definitely have ample
time to notice as we slowly get closer.

~~~
StavrosK
This is how everything happens, and it's why we're living in the future even
though we never realized it. We have a small square in our pockets that can do
real-time translation, you talk into it and it'll say the same thing in
another language.

I remember reading about this exact thing in the 90s and thinking that it was
completely incredible, but I didn't even notice it when it happened. We first
got computers that could sort-of translate, but not impressively so, then
computers that could sort-of speak, but not impressively so, then computers
that could sort-of listen, but not impressively so. All these technologies
improved, little by little, until they got to a point where they _are_ pretty
impressive, but we're used to them.

Cars are already going the same way, my 5-year-old car can already
follow/match speed with the car in front of it and warn me about signs on the
road. Little by little, it'll do more things on its own, until I won't be
needed any more.

~~~
mannykannot
Your car has approached the point of difficulty for incremental improvement,
which is when human attention is needed, but only very rarely. The way for an
incremental approach to get beyond this is to have clearly-defined and well
separated domains, one being where automation works safely without a human
overseer, and the other being where advanced automation is not used.
Furthermore, it must be obvious to drivers when they are one and when they are
in the other; a distinction based on features of how the technology works does
not cut it unless it also leads to an obvious distinction for the non-
technical driver.

Limiting the use to highways appears to meet this criterion, but it does not
yet do so, on account of problems, like stationary-obstacle detection and
adverse weather, that are relevant to highway driving.

~~~
ghaff
Limited access highway driving, a la an iteration or two on what GM is doing
with Cadillac today, seems a pretty logical use case. Many people do a lot of
it, it's boring, it's easy to get over-tired.

It doesn't fire up the people who want robo-Ubers but it would have a lot of
benefits, including safety, and seems like a much more boundable problem. I
could actually imagine something like this being approved for consumer use
decades before the more general case.

------
grigjd3
While I'd agree that driverless cars are not here today, that the hype is
over-doing it, and that Tesla has tried to push too fast, there is a huge
economic incentive to have driverless cars. If a system can be built to
replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human
driver, that saves some on insurance and tons on labor, not to mention not
having to limit driving time per day. With those kinds of incentives, trucking
companies wouldn't blink an eye before going forward with it. People seem so
focused on personal vehicles that they ignore that people won't want to give
up control at first and don't realize how the change will take place.

~~~
mpweiher
> If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being
> slightly safer than a human driver

I think such a system can be built. It's called a _train_.

~~~
grigjd3
That's a disingenuous comment. Trains don't deliver to stores directly. In the
US, there is a severe infrastructure imbalance. Trains don't make sense for
smaller (less than train-sized) loads.

~~~
mpweiher
Thanks for the softball: the practice of heavy trucks delivering directly to
stores is a scourge on our cities, a practice that needs to be banned as
quickly as possible.

Here in Berlin, two children were killed by these monsters on one day last
month, with the children doing nothing wrong.

~~~
bachbach
I've always wanted a world in which pneumatic tubes played a bigger role - as
they used to with mail in London and Paris. It used to be possible to get a
letter in 4 hours.

I was walking down a street the other day, early morning, and it stank with
food scraps, garbage - it was one of those maintenance streets you find at the
back or sometimes even the front of fast food outlets, delis and cafes. The
backend of that industry looks unappealing and smells as bad even though the
businesses and city are doing everything they can to keep it organized.

With pneumatic tube rubbish disposal - which already exists - it would improve
the quality of a large portion of the city, not to mention those children
wouldn't have had to suffer.

More generally as I see it we are in the Dark Ages of underground tunnel
making but if it could be made 1000x affordable lots of problems start to go
away for our infrastructure. I've seen The Boring Company's proposals of
course but I suspect it's on the wrong track. What you want is a creation
capable of creating a criss-cross of tunnels - a whole network (similar to
dark fiber, just waiting for land development so it can be turned on) which is
deep beneath any other infrastructure and is linked to the surface through
vertical channels e.g. a connection to somebody's house goes up, not across as
we assume pipes are supposed to. I think the cost of extra pump power would be
as nothing to getting rid of every legal and utility availability headache!

~~~
bigpicture
What you are asking for existed 100 years ago. Cheap oil killed it. Oil isn't
so cheap anymore, maybe it would be viable again.

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

~~~
bachbach
We must go back to the future!

Seems like a recurring theme. It's near a half century for the moon landings.
Should revisit the concept of batteries too. I'm reading a book called This
Victorian Life and am constantly impressed by lots of little innovations now
forgotten. Two concepts I think we'll have to revisit: heliostats for indoor
natural lighting and terrariums aka self contained biospheres for
space/underground.

------
adrianmonk
> _While there is no doubting the scale of this industry, with billions being
> invested every year, none of the OEMs has yet made a penny from selling a
> driverless car. This money, benefiting these exhibitors, is therefore a
> punt, a high-stakes bet there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow._

For OEMs, I think it's less about a pot of gold and more of a defensive move.
They're willing to throw money at trying to mitigate a huge business risk.

These companies might not know (or even have an opinion on) how close the
leaders like Waymo are to making it work. But they know that, if it does work,
a new era will begin when nobody will be able to sell a car without it.

And it's almost moot whether they believe it will work. They're protected as
long as they're putting sufficient resources into it that they stay roughly as
far along as others.

------
bryanlarsen
Isn't the author already wrong? There are Waymo autonomous cars operating
right now on public roads in Chandler, Arizona without safety drivers. Sure,
those are very carefully mapped and selected routes, but they are not closed
routes, they have to deal with anything that can happen on a public road. As
any engineer knows, the last 10% is always harder than expected, but scaling
from 0.1% to 90% coverage seems fairly straightforward IMO.

~~~
sidibe
I don't understand how the people considering driverless cars infeasible can
reconcile this with what is happening already. Why would Waymo order 80,000
cars in the next year if they thought their project is all hype?

------
netfire
Personally, I’d be happy with just automated freeway driving. That seems like
an easier problem to solve (no pedestrians, complex traffic controls, cars
going the other way or turning across your path, and visibility is usually
pretty good). Why not focus on and perfect that first?

~~~
nradov
While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic
controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to
incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible
visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before
automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be
ignored.

~~~
ghaff
You can to at least some degree though once you've imposed the constraint that
there needs to be a competent licensed driver in the car because they need to
handle the endpoints in any case.

Certainly, the car needs to be able to recognize conditions where it needs to
turn over control with, say, one minute warning. And we're not at that point
today. But one can imagine things like radio beacons for construction zones
for example. It's not easy but it seems much easier than the more general case
and it's also possible to get too hung up on truly weird corner cases like
traffic going down the freeway in the wrong direction.

~~~
nradov
You're never going to get a one-minute warning about stupid people doing
stupid things. Like when some idiot decides to play Frogger across four lanes
of traffic because his car stalled out in the median. I suppose we could just
accept some collisions in those cases but it would be a mess.

------
taneq
This seems fixated on driverless vehicles' availability for purchase by the
general public. I thought it was becoming pretty clear that, early on at
least, the common approach is fleets operated by manufacturers, a la Waymo?

------
hodgesrm
One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems
to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and
(b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal
vehicles.

Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway,
regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to
solve congestion by getting at least some of the vehicles off the ground using
emerging passenger drone technology. [0] That incidentally looks like an
easier place to attack automation as there are fewer corner cases. Commercial
aircraft achieved high levels of automated flight decades ago.

[0] [https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/28/kitty-hawk-prototype-
perso...](https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/28/kitty-hawk-prototype-personal-
aircraft-flies-over-water-transport-design-technology/)

~~~
glenra
> Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane
> highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves.

Lanes are as wide as they are and following distances are as long as they are
because people are terrible at driving. A mostly-driverless 4-lane highway
could more than double capacity just by reducing following distances when
computers rather than human beings are making the decision when to brake and
how hard to brake.

Humans also cause traffic jams by causing accidents or rubbernecking at
accidents - that'll get better too.

~~~
chopin
The basic problem is that generally more capacity invites more traffic. This
isn't solved with autonomous vehicles. As well I expect more empty traffic.

Example: I currently drive to work 20km. As my wife needs occasionally as
well, we have two. With an autonomous car we could forgo one and I send it
back after I arrive at work. In the evening it'll pick me up again.

~~~
glenra
In cities a substantial fraction of traffic is people circling the block
trying to find parking near their destination and some fraction of traffic
holdups is from people stopping in a lane while waiting for somebody else to
pull out of a parking space. These problems are _substantially reduced_ with
autonomous vehicles. Instead of slowly going around the block looking for a
parking spot, you get out at your destination and _the car_ drives away to
some place where parking is cheap and a spot is known to be available. (When
you need to leave, you tell the car via an app and it comes back to get you.)

Self-driving cars can park far more densely without fear of being blocked in
and can park inconveniently far away while still being reasonably available.
Thus cities will need less on-street or near-street parking and can reclaim a
lot of that space for traffic or transit or bikes or people or commerce.

If your wife only _occasionally_ needs a car, couldn't she call a local on-
demand one - an automated uber? That seems cheaper than paying to send an
empty car on two daily 20km trips...

------
maym86
It will happen but the timelines are looking much longer than people were
promising two years ago to get investment. The reality of the difficulty of
the edge cases and long term reliability has been made more clear and the hype
is fading. Now it's time to slog through the real and difficult work of making
what we have reliable and safe.

------
3pt14159
We're going to get driverless cars one way or another. Even if the problems
are much more intractable than we first gave them credit for people are too
clever.

Take driving in the snow, for instance. It might be completely impossible to
do it safely for the next twenty years by having a computer manage the drive
path, but designs might create the ability for cars to form mini-trains where
the lead car is driven by a human and the cars fall in line together. Then you
could still get in a self-driving car, it could still get you from Toronto to
Ottawa. It could even get you right to your front door! They'd just have to
pay some train drivers (conductors?) when the weather is too harsh for to put
it in full auto mode.

We're going to get there. The benefits are too obvious and we can work around
the persistent problems.

~~~
paganel
Obvious question: why just not take the train? In your example I’d have to
depend on other strangers for my private travel, one of the most important
things that made me purchase my first car in my 30s, I don’t want that.

~~~
TulliusCicero
At least in the US, transit is unfortunately quite bad on average, and that
doesn't look to change anytime soon in most areas.

------
Invictus0
Wolmar's argument is horribly uncompelling and betrays a bizzare technophobia.
He talks about the hardware as if they're dark magic tools and his argument
for the death of the cars is that reality hasn't lived up to press releases.
This is an argument made with no understanding of the technological
underpinnings of driverless cars, and while I agree that driverless cars are
farther away than the press would have you believe, the author needs to dig in
further to get a real understanding of what he's discussing.

------
nolemurs
The substance of this article can be sumarized as "I talked to a bunch of
people at a convention, and some had concerns, ohh, and I wrote a book about
how I'm skeptical of driverless cars."

Regardless of how you feel about the future of driverless cars, this is a safe
article to skip - there's no content.

------
throw2016
There have literally been hundreds of threads advocating self driving cars
saying it's here and now, max 10 years, and rubbishing anyone advocating
caution.

Since the hype and exuberance was entirely self created, how can anyone else
be blamed? This is like blaming others for taking you seriously.

------
stevew20
How many years did it take for cars to go from beta to wide spread use?

It would be nice if it would happen faster, we could cut the number of car
accidents in half, car related fatalities by a quarter, and zero speeding
tickets...

------
qrbLPHiKpiux
What would a TOS look like for a self driving car?

“Shall hold manufacturer, software developer, etc not liable for any injury or
death from the result of using car...”

~~~
ilikehurdles
How does a pedestrian agree to that TOS?

~~~
chopin
By being outdoors. It's the same way as you currently "consent" to third-party
cookies by visiting a site.

------
montrose
Though this article sounds plausible, I became more skeptical when I noticed
he put the word "facility" in scare quotes.

------
sakopov
Wouldn't we need "smart" roads to make driverless cars operate at the same
safety level as, say, airplanes?

------
Consultant32452
Right now roadways are designed for maximizing the value of the kinds of
sensors that evolved in humans. We need roadways designed for the kinds of
sensors we can manufacture. Imo, that's how we'll get driverless cars.

------
XalvinX
I thought I just read that Google will have some operating in Arizona "by the
end of this year" ...no? These things are basically a solved problem already
and just waiting to get approval.

------
agronick
My 2016 23k Honda Civic can drive itself down the highway. Gas, break, stear -
it can do it all on a clearly marked highway. As can Subarus and probably many
others. I just know what my friends and coworkers have. Saying no car maker
has shipped anything is a blatent lie.

~~~
CPLX
For that to happen does that 2016 Honda Civic have to have a driver in it?

That's how you can tell if it's driverless.

~~~
taneq
You don't have to have ubiquitous Turing-test-passing level 5+ robot vehicles.
Lane Keep Assist style things are a good start.

~~~
blattimwind
Lane assist is unimpressive, requirements, technology and capability wise.
Also, a fourteen year old can do it from the passenger seat.

(Also they don't really work reliably: try using lane assist with roadworks
markings and watch your car veer off into the barricades. Or just too-unclear-
for-machine—but-blatantly-obvious-for-human markings, like the dead Tesla
driver from a few weeks ago encountered. Even a fourteen year old doesn't make
that sort of mistake.)

------
jfoster
This is a troll article.

~~~
XalvinX
i tend to agree

