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Comment by PinguTS | Hacker News Reader

> Google’s project started in 2009, long before carmakers and most other companies seriously considered the technology.

Always wondering who writes up that shit. Car makers are way long before in autonomous driving. It is a huge difference in "just doing things and not talking about as long as technology is not ready" vs. "talking about technology and presenting even unfinished products." Especially Tesla is very big in the later once.

Car makers are in self driving since technology went into cars. Without that research we would not had any driving assistants these days. I remember mid 1990s when I was an intern at then DASA (Daimler Benz Aerospace) and they worked with a self-driving S-class powered by a new chipset developed by then TEMIC (now Continental) based on Radar technology. Today we have this technology in any decent new car as part of the adaptive cruise control. Back then the test drives where made on a airport runway.

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It's pretty interesting how little the tech press seems to know about the efforts of the established car manufacturers.

> Google’s project started in 2009, long before carmakers and most other companies seriously considered the technology.

Luxury cars (Audis / Mercedes / Jaguars / BMWs) have had semi-autonomous options for at least 10 years with lane-keeping, adaptive cruise control, emergency braking, etc. They've been working on the technology for decades. Improvements in the accuracy and cost of sensors along with processing power makes this a much easier problem now but to say they hadn't considered this before is so silly.

I think what most people are missing is that self driving cars are not a disruptive innovation. All the major car markers are going to get to fully self driving cars through incremental improvements and they'll get their faster than Google because they already have actual customers who are willing to pay more for the technology. Tesla/Mercedes/etc. don't have to worry about this project being shelved or not getting the attention it deserves because of a lack of a path to profitability.

Just because Google talks big doesn't mean the other car makers are stupid idiots who can't see a technology trend coming from a mile away.

1956 GM Motorama: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx6keHpeYak

It looks kind of (extremely) ridiculous now, but think about all the things that changed between then and now. The iPhone is ubiquitous now, but it only came out in 2007, and we really only got modern cellular internet after that.

I think that the Smartphone revolution had a huge impact on the way most people think, to the point where it is hard to remember what life was like before them.

The autonomous, decentralized nature of smartphones, along with the cloud for updates and backup is beyond game changing, and software designed before this REALLY shows its age.

DISCLAIMER: I work for GM, any opinions are solely my own, etc.

I didn't know that. It shows for how long that is a vision and how long it took. Still, the vision is far away from happening. (But may be not an additional 60 years.)

This may blow your mind: in the 1930s GM owned some aircraft manufacturing and investigated flying cars. Spoiler Alert: that never worked out, as you wind up with a crappy car AND a crappy airplane.

Wow. I love the retro looks at the future. They nearly always sheer mass of people and scalability wrong, imagine a human road traffic controller working with each car over radio! They applied how planes work to the road but still the whole get onto a seperate lane, follow the red line thing would work very well for interstate haulage.

Thanks for posting that, very fun 8 min watch.

Branding the special lane as the 'High Speed Safety Lane' is brilliant. Only autopilot/lane keeping/autobraking enabled cars allowed. Increase the speed limit since you know that all of the vehicles are able to prevent accidents in the majority of cases.

Thank you for posting this. A brilliant slice of the past. The decision to make this one a musical... just spectacular haha.

My grandfather was a radar engineer with the now defunct silicon valley company Varian Associates. He claims that they had contracts with automakers interested in radar controlled braking as early as the mid seventies. Funny to think that today's headline making technology was being worked on (in a very different way) two generations ago.

If only there was some sort of an online resource that documented the history of autonomous cars... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_autonomous_cars

Which mentions only publicly available presentation but no internal projects. It even lacks some work I have seen years ago in German TV.

Though I'm probably wrong, it'd be nice to consider the key phrase in that sentence is "...before (they) seriously considered the technology". While automakers and others have been testing the technology for years, Google was probably the first to drop huge $$ into the effort, with what we can assume was aimed at bringing it to mass-market / production-level. So, yeah they probably were the first to "seriously consider" the idea of mass-market autonomous vehicles.

Likewise, despite Apple's other faults, bringing quality touchscreen technology to high volume mobile devices back in 2007 is the what made that company stand out from those who preceded them in that endeavor.

That’s also wrong, VW had projects cooperating with Sony on the same scale Google is doing with Toyota right now already in 2008.

Three DARPA contests jumpstarted the truly driverless car. No one but the military seriously interested. The first contest was a joke with almost no one making it more that partway. But got pretty good by the third one. Googlr boughtnthe Stanford team. Like the Internet, this was another federal funding success, when private industry lacked the imagination.

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