
VW partners with Nvidia to expand its use of AI beyond autonomous vehicles - janober
https://techcrunch.com/2017/06/27/volkswagen-partners-with-nvidia-to-expand-its-use-of-ai-beyond-autonomous-vehicles
======
Lio
Leaving aside VW's liein' and cheatin' ways for a moment.

Adaptive cruise control on my Golf is a big thing for me right now. It's one
of the reasons I bought that car.

For the long journeys I do, not having to have foot on the gas is great.
(Normal cruise control doesn't cut the mustard for me as I'd spend the whole
drive worrying about the cars in front of me).

The current models also have lane assist and a crawl mode for traffic jams.
Can't wait to get a car with that.

In the short term, before fully autonomous vehicles are wide spread, I can see
loads of ways AI could make transport a more pleasant experience.

~~~
mrfusion
The problem is if traffic becomes more tolerable there will be more of it
since more people will be willing to endure it.

Reminds me of the old saying "there can never be too much traffic. If there
was people would stop driving"

~~~
Ambroos
Autonomous cars drive better in traffic though, since they're not as easily
scared by a brake light or caught off guard. I read some research that said
that if we'd replace 10% of the cars on high traffic highways with
autonomously driving ones, traffic jams would get much, much better. Way less
rubberbanding, for example.

I test drove an Audi with near complete autonomous driving in traffic jams
recently and promptly ordered one with those features as it is simply
brilliant in traffic. Much smoother than I can drive in traffic myself, and in
Belgium traffic jams are practically unavoidable.

~~~
computerex
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave)

You can place cars driving in a circle and spontaneously traffic jams will
occur without the apparent presence of a bottle neck. If a non-significant
number of vehicles are autonomous, it'd be easier to control for this.

If autonomous vehicles can communicate with one another (as I think will
eventually happen) then we'd be able to see something very special where
vehicles would be able to travel at speed while maintaining very small
marginal distances because machines react faster than humans.

~~~
wcummings
>we'd be able to see something very special where vehicles would be able to
travel at speed while maintaining very small marginal distances

Braking distance alone (excluding the reaction time) is going to be over 100ft
at highway speeds. Considering how often human drivers tailgate AVs will
probably have _more_ space between them on average.

~~~
computerex
Nah.
[https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-48847-8_...](https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-48847-8_16/fulltext.html)

The following distance for two autonomous vehicles is going to be very small,
much smaller than the distance a human can maintain. There is no point in
guessing, the above paper is very quantitative. Look at the section titled
"effects of autonomous vehicles".

~~~
wcummings
Autonomous vehicles (AV's) might allow for a smaller headway, by removing
reaction time, but this benefit will be minimal at higher speeds when cars
requires hundreds of feet to stop after the brake has been applied. Reaction
time becomes a smaller portion of the headway as speed increases.

Most human (American) drivers drive 80 MPH. That means they need 300 or 400ft
to stop, without including reaction time (these distances get even higher in
poor weather). Most people don't do this, as a result _lots of people die,
rear-end collisions are extremely common_. AV's will need to leave a few
hundred feet minimum between cars to operate safely at highway speeds, which
is more than most human drivers on a well trafficked road where I live.

This is where you see the safety benefits of AV's: conservative driving.

~~~
computerex
Since you couldn't bother even opening the paper I linked to you, I will post
an excerpt from it:

 _This analysis, with the help of the macroscopic traffic flow models, shows
that, in principle, a significant increase in capacity can be expected from
using autonomous vehicles and that this would also enable a more efficient use
of the existing transport infrastructure. Along with the expected increase in
capacity for existing traffic infrastructure, traffic jams and lost time are
reduced, which in turn improve the quality of traffic flow. In particular, two
factors are responsible for the increase in capacity:

(a) One factor is the shortening of headways between autonomous vehicles. In
this context, it is significant that ride comfort is maintained, despite the
short time gaps, by anticipating the actions of the preceding vehicles and
thereby enabling lower acceleration or deceleration. This could also be
important for column stability. The intercommunication of vehicles and
infrastructure appears to be an important prerequisite for this.

(b) In addition to the duration of the time gap, the speed of the vehicle
group is very important. The higher the speed at a constant density, the
higher the traffic volume over a cross section. However, achieving high speeds
while maintaining traffic density is possible only in purely autonomous
traffic. A single human-driven vehicle in the column would lead to slower
speeds and reduce the capacity gain._

tldr; fully autonomous traffic allows for the possibility of high density high
volume traffic flow.

------
RandomBookmarks
It seems German car companies are trying hard to not become the next Nokia.

Just recently Bosch, Mercedes and Porsche joined forces with local
universities in the "Cyber Valley" initiative:
[https://a9t9.com/blog/facebook-cyber-valley/](https://a9t9.com/blog/facebook-
cyber-valley/)

Time will tell if this is enough. It certainly is difficult to turn them into
software-focused companies. One reason is that everyone who works there _right
now_ , went there to work because she/he wants to work on ICE engines, and not
all this "modern stuff".

~~~
dom0
Bosch is (and always was) a company heavily focused on (1) making things
electronic (2) making things programmable (3) R&D, they're very modern. While
one of the biggest automotive suppliers they never supplied engines or most of
the heavy mechanics (gearbox etc.), but rather: [engine] control, which was
iirc invented by Bosch, sensors, electronics, firmware, ...

~~~
hengheng
ABS and ESP are Bosch _product names_.

------
netsharc
> in the field of mobility services

Cars will turn to more of an "as a Service" thing in the sooner-than-you'll-
expect-it future, so it makes sense that the manufacturers are doing this. And
with data analysis it can probably predict that you're going out tonight, just
like 10 other people in your area, so it will make sure to dispatch enough
cars to wait in your area, so your Vwuber shows up in 5 minutes instead of
needing 30 minutes to get from the giant parking structure outside of town.

------
techno_modus
It seems that companies try to deal with big technological challenges via
worldwide partnership programms. Here is another one:

Nvidia and Bosch team up on self-driving car AI supercomputer -
[https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/16/nvidia-and-bosch-team-
up-o...](https://techcrunch.com/2017/03/16/nvidia-and-bosch-team-up-on-self-
driving-car-ai-supercomputer/)

------
dovdovdov
yay, for better emissions testing detection! ;)

~~~
usrusr
“Obviously, I'm not going anywhere, might just as well switch off the engine
entirely"

Red light starts pulsing in center console, voice synthesizer: "Michael, are
you trying to mess with me?"

------
mtgx
How is their progress on EVs? That's what I'm more interested in. Before I'd
be interested in their self-driving solutions I'd also want to know they're
not cutting corners and cheating their way out of strong security
architectures for their cars.

------
frabbit
How about they just release Free drivers for the latest cards instead? Having
seen how wonky their proprietary drivers are I'd rather have something
auditable if they're to get anywhere near controlling thousands of Kgs of
metal on public roads.

~~~
2fifty3
They consider the low level information about how their GPU works a trade
secret. Source code won't be as helpful as documentation, but it's more work
than reverse engineering the driver binaries.

------
Cozumel
I'm sorry Dave, I can't tell you the emission levels!

