
Autonomous DeLorean drives sideways to move forward - 80mph
https://news.stanford.edu/2019/12/20/autonomous-delorean-drives-sideways-move-forward/
======
Animats
They did most of that back in 2015.[1] This is version 2.

It's interesting what's happening as the control theory people get into
machine learning. The controls people don't typically run a neural net as a
controller. They use the trained net as a tool for building a controller with
known continuity properties. The trouble with pure neural net controllers is
that they sometimes do something totally bogus for some data point within the
normal input space. That's not OK in control systems.

This has all the math of machine learning plus the math of control theory and
I don't understand it, although I sometimes look at the papers.

[1] [https://news.stanford.edu/2015/10/20/marty-autonomous-
delore...](https://news.stanford.edu/2015/10/20/marty-autonomous-
delorean-102015/)

~~~
allovernow
>The trouble with pure neural net controllers is that they sometimes do
something totally bogus for some data point within the normal input space.
That's not OK in control systems.

Is that actually true? Everything we do at work with neural nets seems to
indicate continuity. We do stuff with mathematical simulations and imagelike
processing. Latent space for auto encoders tend to be smoothly varying
throughout the range of outputs.

I thought the problem is just that it isn't proven that neural nets are
sufficiently smooth.

~~~
mjburgess
It's not a continuity problem. It's that "bogus" is defined with respect to
what it _should_ do, and that criteria requires a working understanding of the
environment which isn't present in the model.

If you had all possible images of all possible roads in all possible
(lighting, weather,..) conditions, etc. then the ideal behaviour is just a
function from all inputs to all desired actions. In the absence of this
infinity of data you need a model. Any model which has no explicit
understanding of the causal behaviour of an environment is going to misbehave
for one of those unseen data points (eg. an unseen road in a
weather/lighting/etc. condition).

"Correct"(/Safe) behaviour is not a function of pixels. No statistical model
which associates pixel patterns with action can be correct.

~~~
allovernow
>Any model which has no explicit understanding of the causal behaviour of an
environment is going to misbehave for one of those unseen data points (eg. an
unseen road in a weather/lighting/etc. condition

I disagree. That sounds like an older interpretation of behavior of simple
deep nets like the inception family. My experience with auto encoders and GANs
is such that the nets can and unquestionably do interpolate between training
data points. What's more, the latent spaces display order reflecting logic -
much in the way that you can perform arithmetic on BERT encodings in what
amounts to a form of logic. This is the where SOTA is now and I think it's a
strong step towards AI, though we're still far from it.

The trick is in understanding the boundaries in high dimensional space that
your training data represents. So there is some degree of covering all your
bases, so to speak, and that requires a new kind of intuition. These are very
exciting times in tech/ML.

~~~
mjburgess
Again you're treating this as-if its a problem of finding a sufficiently
smooth function over data points.

The problem is that the right behaviour is not a model fitted to that data. It
isn't "fitted" at all.

When I turn the thermostat the temperature in the room increases. If the
thermostat is broken, the temperature does not. The predicting the effect of
the thermostat on the room requires intervening in the room to find out if it
is broken; it requires having a model of the room, of the thermostat, etc.

No system that is not in direct causal contact with its environment can adapt
to it. The system -- as it is in contact --- needs to be explicitly modelling
the causally relevant features of that environment.

This isn't a statistical problem. You cannot learn a function over images to
actions because the environment is absent from those images.

An infinite number of 2D images contain no 3D information. An infinite number
of 3D images contain no skeletons (ie., inner-structure of objects). An
infinite number of images of object pieces contain no information on object
behaviour. An infinite number of videos of an object behaving contains no
information of its behaviour when broken. An infinite number of videos of all
possible breakages in all existing environments contains no information about
behaviour in new environments.

Animals solve this problem by playing with objects, building models _of those
objects_ (their causal properties, ie., how they interact with other objects).
That requires being-in an environment and explicitly modelling it.

There cannot be a "non-bogus" system arrived at via ML. Statistics itself is
deficient in providing tools to design systems that "do what they should".

Any paradigm which makes the cartesian assumption that "behaviour is a
function of data" is necessarily incapable of intelligent adaptation.
Environments "as data" are infinities.

ie., For statistics to work you need all the relevant variables of an
environment to make the "correct decision", and all the data needed to train
against those. That's infinite.

The "child on road" column isn't going to be fed into the machine. The machine
does not, and cannot, even model what a "child" is. Patterns among fractions
of infinites is not a basis for saftey (, nor for intelligence).

~~~
jdmichal
I think most of the systems do try to model the objects around them. Of
course, that is also subject to its own statistical anomalies. See report of
the Uber/pedestrian collision for what happens when that goes wrong.

I don't mean to dismiss your points, though. I wholely agree that if we really
want to be moving towards an AI that is anything like animal intelligence,
things like play are crucial. I'm a big fan of the attention schema theory.
And if that is right, then building systems that can generate such models _for
their own mental state and others_ is the way to "consciousness".

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

It's all well and good to build systems that can look at faces and
statistically say, "oh they're mad". And I think people have this idea that
maybe if we build enough of these systems and jam them together, we'll make an
SI. But until we can build systems that can model _why_ that person is mad,
based on the system's own experience and models, we're just making parlor
tricks.

~~~
mjburgess
I mean a very specific sort of model: a causal model.

A model of that kind has to be able to generate predictions _given_ the agents
interaction with the object. Ie., how will the thermostat behave if _I_ turn
on the air conditioning.

The problem is that we acquire these models during an entire lifetime of being
embedded in an environment, esp. a social one.

A self-driving car is never going to predict human behaviour _given its own
behaviour_ without having lived a human life. The question of what it should
do given how another driver/pedestrian/etc. behaves isn't something it can
solve with "mere statistics".

It might be that human behaviour around roads ends up being extremely
predictable, I'm doubtful that's the case. I think a car is going to need a
Theory-of-Mind to navigate complex social driving environments, ie., a causal
model of the behaviour of other animals.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
> I think a car is going to need a Theory-of-Mind to navigate complex social
> driving environments

As someone with a lot of experience in self-driving cars, my opinion has
changed over the course of the last decade from "we can create smart enough
models of these separate problems to create a statistically safer product" to
"first you need to invent general AI."

It becomes immediately obvious as you encounter more and more edge cases, but
you would never even begin to think of these edge cases and you have no idea
how to handle them (even when hard coding them on individual cases - and you
couldn't anyway as there are too many) so you realize the car actually has to
be able to think. What's worse, it has to be able to think far enough into the
future to anticipate anything that could end badly.

The most interesting part of self-driving cars is definitely on the prediction
teams - their job is to predict the world however many seconds into the future
and incorporate that into the path planning. As you can guess, the car often
predicts the future incorrectly. It's just a ridiculously hard problem. I
think the current toolbox of ML is just woefully, completely, entirely
inadequate to tackle this monster.

~~~
perl4ever
I happened to run across statistics (iihs I think) for fatalities to (human)
drivers per registered vehicle-years, and the number is about 30 per million.
You may or may not accept that this is the right type of metric, but it's
interesting to think about what the number implies. I read that Uber had a
fleet of 250 cars in testing. If an average human driver has a fatal accident
once in ~33,000 years, then to demonstrate parity in self driving, Uber would
have to operate their 250 vehicles for an average of 130 years between
fatalities. Granted, this is driver fatalities, so hitting pedestrians would
not count. But even so, it seems it is a high bar and you would need hundreds
of years of testing at the current rate to be confident you are better than
human drivers rather than having a statistical fluke.

------
asdfman123
Can we just stop for a minute and admire the fact that there are people out
there who have found a way to get paid to program a DeLorean to drift?

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
More like, if you can program a DeLorean to drift, someone will pay you for
it.

~~~
tachyonbeam
That's definitely not true. Making something cool and useful doesn't
necessarily translate into making money. In this case, these people are
getting funding because they convinced someone that this was useful research,
probably through a grant application of some kind.

------
chkaloon
Back in the late 70s, my high school driving instructor said "don't tell your
parents, but the best way to learn how to control a car is to go out to the
school parking lot on a snowy night and spin donuts." Funny that they are
finding that artificial intelligence can use the same method.

~~~
perl4ever
I've never tried it with a RWD car, but as a teenager, I thought the behavior
of FWD in the snow was really fun. Go around a turn as fast as possible, and
push on the gas pedal, it slides towards the outside, front first. Let off on
the gas, and the front snaps back to the inside of the turn. I also buried my
car in a snowbank more than once and had to dig it out.

~~~
chkaloon
I always thought RWD was more intuitive, and in this video the car appears to
be RWD. It probably depends on what you grew up with.

------
mensetmanusman
This group has done good work, and at talks about their work I was able to
come away with an interesting trivia.

When they try to compete with the best racers in the world, they do lose by a
consistent amount. It turns out the human racers are constantly pushing the
vehicle+tires to the limit of control to understand the sharpest possible
turns they can make without losing time. As the tires wear, the human is in
constant learning mode to compensate turn approaches as the coefficient of
friction changes.

Work on the DeLorean will hopefully feed into their racing controls and then
they might be able to beat the best human racers in the world on arbitrary
tracks.

------
ohadron
Somewhat reminds the progress airplanes did in the 1970s with fly-by-wire
technology. Specifically they way it was utilised in the F-16.

Moving from directly piloted controlled surfaces (rudder, elevator, flaps,
ailerons etc) to using a computer to convert the pilot command input to servo
actuators. Flight surfaces had much more authority, much better performance
could be achieved, but the flight computer was in charge of safety and keeping
the aircraft within limits.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-by-wire](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fly-
by-wire)

~~~
Neil44
Steer and brake by wire is a safety thing, all manufacturers so far have kept
a mechanical link in place despite electric assistance because of the
potential for lawsuits. Infinity has gone the closest to full steer by wire so
far that I’m aware of.

~~~
bborud
Well, a very key factor of steering is that it connects your fingers to the
interface between tyres and road surface and imparts critical information
about what’s going on there. If you decouple the steering completely from the
mechanical bits you have to recreate that channel of information. Which isn’t
necessarily easy to get right.

Even servo assisted steering systems can easily become a bit numb. If you have
ever driven a tractor it is very different from a light sports car without
power steering for instance.

~~~
Too
I’ve heard steer by wire can have faster feedback than pure mechanical
systems. Even a mechanical steering has lag in cogs and there is never 100%
stiffness in the steering column, etc.

~~~
tsimionescu
I think the poster above wasn't talkng about input lag, but about the fact
that the steering wheel acts as both input and output - you control the car
through it, but you also get back information on the state of the car on the
ad. If your motion was simply interpreted by computer, you would lose that
information; so you in fact need a two way system, that reads your inputs and
controls the car, but also reads the state of the car on the road and conveys
that information to you.

Sort of like how gaming driving peripherals added force feedback to make the
controls more intuitive.

------
jamestimmins
So is the general idea that by removing the automated controls, which normally
limit drift so human drivers don't lose control, they're able to gather data
at the extremes of car handling?

I'm curious how this would be applied in the real world. It almost seemed to
suggest that a self-driving car would operate with those stability controls
turned off, allowing it operate evasive maneuvers that would be impossible in
a human-driven car.

~~~
dharmab
Drifting is objectively less effective and safe than normal manuevering and
braking.

Drifting as a sport exists to look cool and stylish. It's like figure skating
with cars.

(There is one exception- off road racing on loose surfaces requires drifting.
But driving that way off road is only useful for speed at the expense of
safety and reliability.)

~~~
tempestn
Another exception of a sort, and I believe the one this research is meant to
address, is when the drift is initiated unintentionally. Say you hit a patch
of black ice mid-corner, for example. This kind of work can expand the envelop
of the control system to encompass these scenarios.

~~~
OnlineGladiator
I don't think this is true. If you hit black ice and the tire skids, the
problem is you just have no friction. Modern traction control systems already
account for this as best they can - I don't see how this model would help any
more except for trying to go _faster_ through patches of black ice. And even
then, drifting inherently requires traction in order to modulate the throttle
and control the vehicle.

If you can't get the wheels to connect with the road, the first thing you'd
want to fix are your tires - not your traction control system. Most people
don't recognize how much better modern winter tires are compared to all season
tires for driving on snow and ice.

[https://youtu.be/atayHQYqA3g](https://youtu.be/atayHQYqA3g)

~~~
petschge
The thing is: By the time the car has traction again it might have rotated
around the up-axis. Getting back from that configuration do a less unstable
configuration can very well improve if the car knows how to drift, especially
how to go into the desired direction even before the drift has ended. Doing so
would make the (result from the) initial lose of control on the black ice more
limited and more controlled, hence less risky.

tl;dr. nothing you can do on the black ice. but if you have tracking again
there might be faster and saver ways then "first stop drifting, second start
driving in the correct direction".

~~~
tempestn
Yes, this is exactly what I meant by a drift that was unintentionally
initiated, such as by hitting a patch of black ice. Thanks for elaborating.

------
fieldmeasure
Don't get me wrong I think this is an impressive feat and I am always
impressed to see universities pull off these kinds of complex system and
control projects. Yet, there are a few things that I would like to mention.

The article says that the car does "doughnuts with inhuman precision" and they
want to develop vehicles that can handle "emergency maneuvers or slippery
surfaces like ice or snow". In this context, I feel this demo falls a bit
short. The car can drive with superhuman precision, but it also gets
superhuman capabilities like inch-precision localization (and an IMU is my
guess) or superhuman steering wheel turning speeds. And the vehicle is heavily
modified for this specific use-case. Drifting looks stable in the video but I
really cannot judge how much easier it is with this car than a normal car. In
addition, the asphalt also looks fresh and clean. I would like to see what
happens if it suddenly encounters wet surfaces (or ice).

edit: typos

~~~
matt-attack
Don’t forget a “normal” car is typically front wheel drive. I’m fairly certain
drifting like this is nearly impossible with front wheel drive.

~~~
Jamwinner
Correct in this case. And to a pro driver, this is not drifting. This is
donuts. Mashing the gass to lose grip is the lowest tier of 'drifting'. Real
drifting as racers do it uses mostly the momentum and changing inerta from
braking at corner entry to get sideways, using the gas only to modulye
traction. That can be done in any car, fwd included.

------
grecy
I genuinely hope Tesla get a 2020 Roadster to lap the Nurburgring on
autopiliot with nobody inside. If it lives up to promises, it will easily set
the all time lap record as the fastest vehicle ever.

It will be an interesting time when a $200k production car can whip the pants
of a multi-million dollar F1 racecar.

~~~
ForHackernews
Tesla cars historically are pretty terrible on the track. They're too heavy,
and they wind up overheating.

The torque from the electric motors means they do really well in a straight
line drag race, but they're fairly pathetic at any race that involves
manoeuvring over a longer course.

~~~
grecy
The prototype of the Plaid Model S recently was significantly faster around
the 'ring than the new Porsche Taycan.

[https://www.thedrive.com/news/30846/tesla-model-s-
prototype-...](https://www.thedrive.com/news/30846/tesla-model-s-prototype-
laps-nurburgring-30-seconds-faster-than-porsche-taycan-report)

------
tzs
I wonder if it would be feasible to make a fleet of race cars that have self
driving technology that has each car communicating with the others and
monitoring the human drivers, with the car letting the human drive but able to
step in if the human tries to do something that would cause a crash?

I bet you could make some pretty good money with such a fleet running open
races that members of the public can pay to drive in.

The self driving system could keep track of the number and severity of its
safety interventions which could be used to give time penalties at the end of
the race [1], so that the winner is determined by the skills of the humans.

Besides racing, you could also do car chases that recreate scenarios from
action movies. Add in something to simulate guns, and you could do scenarios
where a car with a driver and a couple armed passengers is trying to escape a
couple pursuing cars, each with a driver and armed passenger.

[1] Or maybe actually do the time penalties during the race. If the self
driving system has to take over from you, it could slow you down for a bit
before returning control to you.

~~~
DreamScatter
I doubt race car drivers (who are better drivers than the average car driver)
would want a computer to yank their steering or do something unexpected in a
race.

Autonomous cars aren't necessarily better than race car drivers.. would be
interesting if human racers and autonomous compete

~~~
Jamwinner
There has been progress since the millenium on race traction control. In the
beginning, it was a crut h for bad drivers. Some systems today are banned in
racing. Both for ocassional advantange, and for not-occasional mishaps that
endanger other drivers. It always seemed odd to me that tech not safe enough
for racing is now mandated on the road.

------
dragosmocrii
Article mentions each tire gets 7,000Nm torque from its electric motor. Is
that a typo?

~~~
jcims
Probably not. Teslas, for example, have a ~9:1 drive reduction from motor
output shaft to drive wheels. 1000Nm is a high torque motor to be sure, but
not that hard to find.

------
spectramax
This could be a pay-to-ride-for-thrill startup idea. What a ride!

~~~
m0zg
Until someone spills a bit of oil on the pavement and it drifts straight into
a nearby wall because oily pavement is "out of domain" for its deep learning
systems.

~~~
djmips
If you notice in the video there are no nearby hard walls, it's a giant open
parking lot and the course is set up by soft pieces like plastic traffic
cones. I'm sure a course could be made with appropriate margins for safety.
Even so, in the ride world there are accidents but that doesn't stop people
from riding.

~~~
chongli
Not to mention the fact that this system is monitoring the traction of all 4
wheels constantly and would detect the slip in milliseconds, transferring
power to other wheels. It would be fine.

They probably already have a bunch of lubricant on that lot in order to reduce
wear on the tires.

~~~
metaphor
> _They probably already have a bunch of lubricant on that lot in order to
> reduce wear on the tires._

That's a real skid pad at a real road course[1] with real rules and
regulations[2], not some expendable engineering testbed greased up to save
tires.

[1] [https://www.thunderhill.com/renting/skid-
pad](https://www.thunderhill.com/renting/skid-pad)

[2] [https://www.thunderhill.com/s/Skidpad-Event-
Guidelines-2018-...](https://www.thunderhill.com/s/Skidpad-Event-
Guidelines-2018-V14.pdf)

------
devit
Doesn't this sort of movement cause a lot of wear on the tires, thus making it
unsuitable for routine use?

~~~
Digit-Al
It's not supposed to be for routine use. The idea is that if the car gets into
a situation where stability is lost it will know how to handle it.

As an example, imagine an autonomous car is going around a bend and hits a
large patch of black ice and goes into a slide. Current systems will struggle
to handle the car and it could result in a crash. With this knowledge added
the car will know how to handle slides and will recover easily.

Another example (given in the article) is if a person darts out into the path
of the car it can perform a sharp turn and gracefully handle manoeuvring
around them without losing control using this knowledge.

~~~
HeWhoLurksLate
This is _exactly_ right.

Recently, I drove a big 4WD SUV at about 5 mph onto ice in the middle of a 90
degree turn and lost traction in the front, and instead of doing anything
helpful, the system decided the thing to do was engage the parking brake,
which instead of stopping the vehicle put it into a slide, and almost got
damaged because of it- when the vehicle stopped, it was less than half an inch
away from a big transformer box in the front and less than 5 inches away from
a concrete pole on the passenger's side.

I think I honestly could have done better _without_ traction control than the
stupid stutter-stutter _click_ slide that came with it in that situation.

------
zzzeek
they have gotten this car to do complex and exotic movements via automated
manipulations of the car's human-oriented interface, that is, a single
steering wheel, four wheels that turn in the same direction, and then the
brakes / accelerator.

It seems though that if you are actually trying to design autonomous cars that
feature greater maneuverability than what is normally possible you'd instead
ditch the whole assumption of a single steering column and all of that and
just consider all the wheels as independent, or maybe add more wheels that
engage for some kinds of maneuvers, or probably a whole lot of other things
that im sure all the car people here know are possible if you are no longer
constrained to controls created for a single human with only four limbs and
extremely limited coordination and reaction time.

~~~
DreamScatter
The people working on this car are designing a vehicle control system, not an
actual new vehicle.

------
dehrmann
[https://www.youtube.com/embed/3x3SqeSdrAE?rel=0&autoplay=1&a...](https://www.youtube.com/embed/3x3SqeSdrAE?rel=0&autoplay=1&autohide=1)

Wish theme parks had rides like this.

------
keyle
That's incredible footage just on its own :)

------
EGreg
Can an autonomous car beat the best version of Frank Martin in The Transporter
series, let alone any of the Fast & Furious drivers?

Now we have the answer. It’s game over people! Even the fictional drivers in
the movies have no chance against real world AI today.

This means in the future when an autonomous car or robot is chasing you — you
may as well give up. You just better hope it doesn’t get cheap enough that
someone can simply hire a swarm of robots or autonomous cars to kidnap people
or incapacitate them or wreak havoc en masse (eg crashing into 10,000 gas
stations at once).

------
deepsun
Imagine if the car could also do that in the air, where the "ground" is
unstable and changes all the time, but autonomy system should still maintain
narrow range glissade.

Wait, that's called landing autopilot.

------
freedomben
> _Besides, MARTY, the driver_

:-D

Too many software engineers overlook the fantastic opportunity for cleverness
when naming things. It's one of the hardest problems in computer science, but
one of the most rewarding.

------
saagarjha
I was half expecting a Toyota Sprinter Trueno and Eurobeat. Pop references
aside, though, what is this useful for? I thought cars were designed to not
skid normally due to ABS?

~~~
sudhirj
ABS is a very human-centric system the tries to keep the car controllable
under low traction, often by sacrificing something aspect of movement. The
neural nets here throw all that out of the window, and control the car with
direct physics, without being once or twice removed from reality.

The video also has some very interesting points about how the AI should be
able to control the acceleration and braking on each wheel individually - so
we really don't need to limit AI driving with human safety or control systems.

~~~
taneq
This was what finally killed my long-held attitude of "we don't need no
stinkin' ABS". No matter how good I am, I will never be able to independently
limit-brake each wheel of my car.

~~~
Jamwinner
Yet, in snow, non-abs cars still stop faster. Hmmm.

~~~
taneq
Same on gravel, and for the same reason. Neither of those are something I run
into particularly often, though. Painted lines on wet roads that will cause
the wheels on one side to lock up, though...

------
fourthark
It sounded like it precomputed the route, steering, drift for the whole course
first, then executed it.

If the friction were variable and unknown it would get completely lost.

~~~
ehnto
Which is very common, even in controlled drift events. Over the course of a
single run, tires can completely change grip coefficients.

~~~
fourthark
So you got the sense that it was recalculating based on the response it got?

I wasn’t clear on that from the article.

~~~
ehnto
I combed through the article and a previous article linked in it, but I can't
find any concrete answer one way or the other. My intuition is that it would
have to be recalculating it's inputs as the environmental variables change.
They could have modeled in expected tire friction coefficient changes, or
perhaps the task is more forgiving of that changing variable than I expected.

One of their stated goals is to drift in tandem with another human driven
vehicle though, so they are likely aiming for complete, adaptable autonomy.

------
taneq
"This leads to the physically insightful result that one can use the rotation
rate of the vehicle's velocity vector to track the path, while simultaneously
using the yaw acceleration to stabilize sideslip."

This sounds like what every racer will tell you: When the car is sliding, you
control your direction with the throttle and control the angle of the slide
with the steering.

~~~
bborud
it’s generally a bit more complicated than that.

~~~
Jamwinner
Not really. The hard parts are initiating the slide and recovering from it, in
the correct trajectory. The actual slide can be done with a rope and a 2x4.

~~~
bborud
Most cars sold in Europe these days are FWD.

------
sap9433
If self-driving tech has become so advanced, I wonder why Waymo is not
delivering anything? I wonder why is Tesla taking forever to deliver self-
driving, why Uber discontinued its self-driving program, Why Apple ain't
serious about Apple car yet?

Does this demo hide something that we should know?

~~~
btbuildem
I think in this demo they simply paint a path for the car to follow. The cones
etc are there just to help us see whether it's following the path well. If
there was a cone in the middle of the path, it would've run right over it.

~~~
thr0w__4w4y
Yes, this. Not trying to take anything away from this, but this car is
essentially "running a program." I would love for someone to come on here from
the program and publicly repudiate what I'm about to say. I bet they ran that
"dance" hundreds of times, no cones or hay or obstacles, got it to the point
where it was precise and repeatable enough to then set up the cones and
barriers (I mean, we have robots that place parts to within 0.001" or better
repeatably).

What would impress me (seriously). I go out the L.A. Colliseum parking lot,
set up cones / a track that the car can definitely do (based on radiuses &
turns in this video), the car "studies" the track (I don't care if a drone
looks at it & takes measurements), and then the car calculates and executes a
perfect path through the course the first time without hitting anything.

Again, not trying to crap on this, I'm just saying that anyone who's worked in
controls, automation, engine control, etc. (I've done all these & more) isn't
utterly wow'ed by this. Kudos, but we didn't just put a man on Mars.

------
lecarore
I'm impressed by how well this complicated page renders without javascript.

------
cdnsteve
Ken Block eat your heart out. He should trademark an enable Block mode.

------
slowhand09
Response is twofold: I think the cars maneuvering is impressive. How did they
get enough power from a a DeLorean to drift? Hail to MrFusion!

~~~
Jamwinner
Exactly, that terrible french engine makes a delorean a terrible car to
actually drive. It is likely one of the many with an engine swap. As cool as
they look, buy are they crappy cars. The lotus designed suspension cant help
being overweight, underpowered, and assembled in northern ireland during rough
years. I wonder if the tesla truck will fare better.

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fnord77
I seem to recall a video Thrun's/Stanford's DARPA car "Junior" drifting in a
parking lot autonomously. Around 2007.

Cannot find the video, though.

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campfireveteran

        echo $NICK | s/80mph/88mph/

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fouc
Seems like a DeLorean isn't necessarily that expensive, prices range from
$20,000 to $45,000.

~~~
Already__Taken
Looks like they had fun with it given the car didn't matter as they replaced
the brakes, engine and suspension.

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jayeshsalvi
Next step: Controlled flip!

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natch
“It almost like as if we did some math for this.” lol, awesome.

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Jamwinner
Funny, I built a mechanical rig to do figure 8s years ago. It was some rope
and a few pulleys, and caster adjustment on the car. This seems like using a
laser to peel an apple for internet points.

~~~
nkrisc
> This seems like using a laser to peel an apple for internet points.

How so? From what I can tell they're working to improve autonomous vehicle
handling in extreme situations. That seems very practical and useful. I'm
curious how you arrived at that conclusion about "internet points." Because
the question I really want to ask you is against the rules here.

Also the capabilities of your mechanical rig pale in comparison to what this
can apparently do.

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Fjolsvith
I see James Bond plot twists in the future.

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philliphaydon
Soon we will have autonomous f1.

~~~
mileycyrusXOXO
That would be a lot of fun to see one AI vehicle competing in a field of
drivers.

~~~
playeren
The asymmetry in mortality risk might lead to different strategies used by
human drivers vs ai.

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GistNoesis
So, in Back to the future : Tokyo drift, did MARTY met Sally when Flash tried
to bring back Doc (Hudson)...

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joejerryronnie
You’re telling me that not one Stanford engineering student could come up with
a mock Flux Capacitor?!!

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mootzville
I want a longer version of the drifting with some classical music as a
backdrop

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joshu
Thunderhill sighting!

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Luechkt
Where we're going, we don't need roads.

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crooked-v
"You built an AI... into a _DeLorean_?"

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hirundo
I guess if you can afford a DeLorean you can afford to keep replacing the
tires you burn up by drifting on pavement. I'd rather have my car programmed
for long tire life and high mpg please.

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campfireveteran
In the US, a new DeLorean isn't all that expensive compared to typical "jelly-
bean" vehicles that are the most common. Back in 2005, I narrowed down a
vehicle purchase decision to a new DeLorean, an used Lotus Elise or a new G
coupe. I went with a bone-stock manual G that I kept for a few years before I
got into Cold War-era West German and French vehicles. I'm not a rich person,
far from it.

~~~
chrisseaton
> a new DeLorean

They're still making them?

~~~
A_Parr
Sort of. Someone bought the leftover parts from the original factory, and
brought back the company name, selling completely refurbished ones. They've
been trying to sell completely new ones as a low-volume automaker, but haven't
successfully navigated the bureaucracy on that so far.

