
Google's self-driving cars will be available to 'ordinary people' within 5 years - moondistance
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9231707/Self_driving_cars_a_reality_for_39_ordinary_people_39_within_5_years_says_Google_39_s_Sergey_Brin
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tokenadult
I think the article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and a Good Thing"

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000087239639044352490457765...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443524904577651552635911824.html)

by Dan Neil of the Wall Street Journal, published two days ago, is a good
commentary on why "ordinary" people will mostly be glad to use driverless
cars, and regulators and insurers will be glad to nudge drivers to use them.

"As a mature, postindustrial society, the U.S. has in many ways topped out
economically (population growth, consumption) compared with younger
competitors on the world stage. Americans are learning hard lessons about the
value of their work in a race-to-the-bottom global economy.

"The one brilliant part of the U.S. economic profile is productivity. It turns
out, Americans are a little nutty when it comes to work.

"If autonomy were fully implemented today, there would be roughly 100 million
Americans sitting in their cars and trucks tomorrow, by themselves, with time
on their hands. It would be, from an economist's point of view, the
Pennsylvania oil fields of man-hours, a beautiful gusher, a bonanza of reverie
washing upon our shores."

The statement in the article submitted here from Sergey Brin "You can count on
one hand the number of years until ordinary people can experience this" is an
ambitious prediction, and I wonder what that suggests about the cost of the
self-driving system, as fewer and fewer cars look affordable to many "ordinary
people" these days. I would especially like to see self-driving cars
introduced in this state as soon as possible, where I expect they will perform
on the roads much better than the typical licensed human drivers here.

~~~
elchief
Over time, driverless cars will become much cheaper, as they won't crash, so
will not require heavy and expensive safety features, and can probably be made
out of plastic instead of steel.

~~~
freehunter
Unfortunatly, other cars are not the only things a driver needs to worry about
crashing into.

~~~
elchief
Which are you thinking about?

~~~
freehunter
At least here in the Midwest, deer and other animals pop onto the road
suddenly. Even with robotic, split second reaction times completing the
perfect action to avoid an accident, you're still going to have an accident.
Children still run into the road. Things drop off trucks unexpectedly. Road
conditions change extremely quickly as it rains in the winter then a gust of
wind suddenly freezes the rain under your tires. Vehicle malfunctions still
happen to cause a sudden blowout, loss of control, or accelerator/brake seize.

Cars may never crash into each other again due to driver error. Cars will
still need to be safe for the passengers because crashes will still happen.

------
jareds
As someone who’s been blind since birth this is the most conflicted I’ve ever
been about wanting to be an early adopter or beta tester.

~~~
freehunter
So far, the laws require one or more licensed and legal drivers in the car in
case it needs to hand over manual control.

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MiguelHudnandez
Reluctant to overcommit, Sergey clarified, saying "You can count on one hand
the number of years until ordinary people can experience this."

If you count in binary, that could be 31 years. More if you count on knuckles
and not just entire fingers as on/off. :)

~~~
jwoah12
By that logic, you could count to 100k on one hand in base10. If you count
your fingers in binary, it would still be 5 years, it would just be expressed
in writing as 101 instead of 5.

~~~
tree_of_item
No, you can really count to 31 on one hand.
<http://www.glassgiant.com/geek/count_to_31_on_one_hand/>

~~~
jwoah12
I jumped to conclusions there I suppose. I figured he was just taking
2^(number of fingers) and calling that counting.

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saberworks
If you have a problem with your Google-branded self driving car, don't bother
looking for a phone number to call or a dealer to talk to. Instead, you can
visit their support forums, which may or may not be visited by a google
employee in any given month, and your issue may or may not be read, and even
if it is read, it may not be responded to. But you can definitely look through
the google knowledge base which will helpfully describe how the self-driving
car is supposed to work.

~~~
timothya
Right, presuming you got your self-driving car for free.

Google has good support (including phone support) for the services that you
pay for.

And if you want to contact the teams without using the product forum, try
using Google+; I've seen that teams are often very responsive on there.

~~~
saberworks
I appreciate the sentiment and wish it were true. Here's another example:
[http://consumerist.com/2012/09/27/google-voice-customers-
cry...](http://consumerist.com/2012/09/27/google-voice-customers-cry-out-for-
help-no-one-at-google-hears-them/)

------
smokey_the_bear
My husband and I are expecting our first child very shortly. We were having a
slightly worried conversation about how it would be teaching our son to drive,
since we both grew up in the midwest where driving is a little more laidback.
Then we remembered cars would drive themselves by then!

~~~
hnriot
...and they will fly too.

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jentulman
Time to roll out the xkcd Researcher Translation table <http://xkcd.com/678/>

More seriously Brin is quoted "You can count on one hand the number of years
until ordinary people can experience this." which is not equivalent to owning
them, which I think the title baitingly implies.

~~~
jws
I predict "ordinary people can experience this" means as an E-ticket ride in
Disney's "Tomorrow Land".

~~~
jentulman
I'm trying to be optimistic that it will mean at least a few taxis or some
form of public transport running in (probably tightly controlled and limited)
inner city areas.

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stretchwithme
Can it drive in the rain and at night? Can it stop when a dog runs across its
path?

Before robotic cars are viable, we'll first need cars that prevent human
drivers from causing an accident. If a car can't stop a human driver from
crashing, how can it stop itself?

And if people were to see accident rates plummeting for new cars, they would
have the confidence that robotic vehicles will be safe too.

We can test robotic safety before the first robotic car takes to the road.

~~~
tomkarlo
A robotic car can adjust to inclement conditions more effectively than a human
will - not only can it use detection systems that are less hampered by rain
than our vision, it also can adjust its driving to account for the change in
braking distances, etc.

We already have cars today that can stop a human from crashing - there are
cars that will automatically apply the brakes to avoid a collision (Volvo has
one for pedestrians, Toyota for objects, some are in production), and can
maintain a set distance to the car in front of them on a roadway (auto cruise
control).

Those are both a form of automation / robotics, even if the car makers don't
like to call it that.

~~~
Qworg
No, sorry, it can't. It comes down to sensor systems. The Google Car uses a
Velodyne - and it is terrible in heavy rain, snow, or fog. It has radar, but
that isn't accurate enough to allow driving.

The human eye is an amazing sensor, one we can't even get close to with our
current technology.

~~~
tomkarlo
So you're taking the current state of the prototype, and projecting it out
five-odd years to the capabilities of the final projection model? Google can
make the sensors on the car better in each iteration, but our eyes aren't
going to be changing.

The human eye is amazing, yes, but it has severe limitations relative to other
types of sensors, which we have to compensate for with systems like headlights
and street lamps. It's also backed by a recognition system that wasn't really
ever designed to work at >20 MPH.

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waterlesscloud
Google doesn't make cars, so who is the partner on this? Given the cycle times
for car models, they had to have started already...

~~~
roc
They could deliver a taxi service initially.

Given that the sensor tech is only theoretically going to become affordable as
production ramps up, they may have to start there to keep pushing things
forward.

~~~
thematt
HA! Yeah right. Look at the outrage that is coming just from Uber offering a
service that is basically a comfortable taxi you can hail from your phone. Now
imagine what the reaction is going to be when you tell them you want to
eliminate the need for a driver altogether.

It'll inevitably happen, but there's a ton of legal battles that will need to
be fought between now and then.

~~~
roc
Medallion/contract holders would get to squeeze out the overhead costs of
employing drivers and would no longer need to ensure/insure the drivers'
personal safety. This sort of automation promises to increase their profits
directly.

So long as this was pitched as a service _for_ them as opposed to _competing_
with them, I doubt they'd fight it.

The only place I think you'd see push-back, is where drivers are not
medallion/contract-holders but have (union) contracts that protect their place
as the vehicle operator. But that's far from universal.

------
dandrews
It'll likely be another ten years after that before the Googlecars are trusted
to drive by themselves. I'd love to be able to send my car down the road to
pick up my Mom, but the government will probably want to have a responsible
driver to oversee the automation. Baby steps.

------
agumonkey
I wish there could be synergy between google cars and tesla/solarcity grid.

------
tomkarlo
"...Google CEO Sergey Brin said on Tuesday."

It doesn't say great things about the reporting or fact checking here that
they got the CEO of Google wrong in a publication entitled "Computerworld".

------
Aloisius
I will buy one. Maybe not the first year, but certainly after they've been out
for five years.

I don't care if they can't drive in the snow, heavy rain or fog. As long as
the car can tell when driving conditions are too difficult for it and pull
over to let me take over, I'm happy because 99% of my driving time is in
decent conditions.

Even if I drive to Tahoe in the winter and have to deal with driving perhaps
as much as 75% of the time, I'll still take automation the other 25%.

------
hnriot
in the form of airport shuttles between terminals maybe. but as great at tech
as Google are, they haven't even thought about the real world issues. Even
something as simple as who the technology puts out of work. And aside from the
hn community who aren't even all for this, I wonder if this is something that
regular people even want. if they don't the economics wont work out. you need
mass demand to drive down price, and i am not sure there is mass demand.

I bet the next quarter century will see this come to high end cars, not as
self-driving, but as augmented safety, like a glorified cruise control that
tracks other vehicles, intervenes when the driver is txting and fails to
notice the cars in front are stopped, that kind of thing. Then very slowly the
car will take on more and more of the role of driver and the cars the tech is
installed in will eventually make its way down to the family Honda and
computer augmented driving will be the norm. But that's probably mid century.

~~~
jlgreco
> _"I bet the next quarter century will see this come to high end cars, not as
> self-driving, but as augmented safety, like a glorified cruise control that
> tracks other vehicles, intervenes when the driver is txting and fails to
> notice the cars in front are stopped, that kind of thing."_

High end luxury cars already have _exactly_ these things. I expect to see them
trickle down to "regular" cars, as safety features in luxury cars usually do,
rather soon.

In fact, there is already talk of requiring systems like AEB on certain
classes of new vehicles: <http://www.unece.org/press/pr2011/11trans_p10e.html>

In addition to AEBs, driver monitoring systems have been in high end cars for
years, as have autonomous cruise control systems and lane departure warning
systems.

Luxury cars are _already_ so close to driving themselves, it is pretty wild.

~~~
hnriot
If you've ever driven the 880 you'll know that none of those trucks have
anything like this, where staying in lane means very little to these drivers.

we don't have augmented vehicles yet, we have simple warning systems, there's
no car that will slam the brakes on for you if you didn't already and the car
in front is stopped. There's nothing that will steer you back into lane, the
closest thing we have to augmented driving is the stupid self-parking mode on
some cars for the parking challenged.

~~~
ceejayoz
_"we don't have augmented vehicles yet, we have simple warning systems,
there's no car that will slam the brakes on for you if you didn't already and
the car in front is stopped. There's nothing that will steer you back into
lane, the closest thing we have to augmented driving is the stupid self-
parking mode on some cars for the parking challenged."_

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_syste...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_system)

> Mercedes introduced Distronic in late 1998 on the S-class.[12] For 2006,
> Mercedes-Benz refined the Distronic system to completely halt the car if
> necessary (now called 'Distronic Plus' and offered on their E-Class and
> S-Class range of luxury sedans), a feature now also offered by Bosch as 'ACC
> plus' and available in the Audi Q7, the Audi Q5, 2009 Audi A6 and the new
> 2010 Audi A8. The Audi A4 is available with an older version of the ACC that
> does not stop the car completely. In an episode of Top Gear, Jeremy
> Clarkson[citation needed] demonstrated the effectiveness of the cruise
> control system in the S-class by coming to a complete halt from motorway
> speeds to a round-about and getting out, without touching the pedals.

> Jaguar began offering a system in 1999; BMW's Active Cruise Control system
> went on sale in 2000[citation needed] on the 7-series and later in 2007,
> added a system called Stop-and-Go system to the 5-series.[13] Volkswagen and
> Audi introduced their own systems in 2002[citation needed] through the radar
> manufacturer Autocruise.

> In the United States, Acura first introduced Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC)
> integrated with a Collision Mitigation Braking System (CMBS) in the late
> calendar year 2005 in the model year 2006 Acura RL as an optional
> feature.[14] ACC and CMBS also became available as optional features in the
> model year the 2010 Acura MDX[15][not in citation given] Mid Model Change
> (MMC) and the newly introduced model year 2010 Acura ZDX.[16]

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Qworg
Until they can solve the sensor issues, they won't be. Heavy rain, snow and
fog are still damnably difficult for them to deal with in a reasonable
fashion.

~~~
thezilch
I'd quip that it is just as or more difficult for humans, and this is just
FUD.

------
unholycrab
Any clue as to how much they will cost?

~~~
FireBeyond
Right now, prohibitive... I believe the LIDAR system alone is around $80,000
on the current prototype cars. But down the road, we'll see.

