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Comment by orthoganol | Hacker News Reader

I think almost certainly their profitability is dependent on a future of driverless cars, and I'm sure that's what they are pitching investors.

Fearfully, since their survival means going driverless and they are now losing $800 million a quarter, they will race to get driverless cars on the road, it will be rushed, and it could be reckless. I'm thinking the two driverless cars filmed blowing red lights in SF recently (at the very start of their SF driverless program), not to mention possibly many other traffic violations that no one happened to be filming. They are going to wrangle regulators and skirt laws to make it happen with urgency. They now have an advisor to Trump.

I'm just here watching the rushing of driverless cars onto the road by Uber so that their company doesn't collapse. We'll see what happens.

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Reckless and non-viable in much of the world. Nobody is going to get an autonomous car working in a winter climate for a long time. Lines on the road can't be seen, there are potholes, driving through deep piles of snow are common, communicating with other drivers and accomidating and anticipating their actions in snow narrowed streets is necessary....

There are plenty of times of year where I'd be wary trusting a human driver from the bay area in a Minneapolis snow storm much less a computer designed by them. I can see how it would be easy not being able to imagine difficult road conditions when you spend your whole life in a place where the worst weather is a tiny bit of rain.

Multiple instances of running red lights right when they start testing? To me that says driverless cars are decades away and some people are so optimistic that they aren't going to see it before there are several tragedies and driverless cars are legislated away.

There are lots of very common driving mistakes that are orders of magnitude more common than stopping for a red light.

Your comment got me thinking that to tackle driving in rough and ambiguous terrains, like snow-covered or muddy roads, they need better integration of vibration and bodily balance sensory signals into the autonomous driving system.

I wonder if the most advanced autonomous vehicles already have those sensors installed and how well the signals are integrated into the prediction and decision making processes.

Uber autonomous doesn't have to be better than the best human drivers in all conditions. They only have to be much better than the average human driver in all conditions. This isn't a very high threshold to meet.

It IS a high threshold to meet. People on HN handwave it all the time, but the fact is that not only are driverless cars still less capable than human drivers, they're also less safe today. And if you believe that that will change in the very new future, your belief is essentially faith.

I would point out that as much as people complain about how well cabbies drive, they have way more hours behind the wheel than most people.

Quick calculation: Lets think about people who drive their whole lives, not city folks. Lets think about work hours driving as it's likely to be the most by quantity, and vacation or pleasure driving should be roughly equivalent.

30 minutes each average way 5 days a week starting at 16, so by 40 they've driven 5/7365 = 260hrs / year. 260 24 years = 6240 hours.

8 Hours a day, 5 days a week, with salaried level vacations is 2000 hours a year. Many drivers are likely to work way more than that. Anyway, 6240 / 2000 = 3.12 years. That means that if you started driving at 18, you'd have the same hours driving as a 40 year old.

This also means that by the gladwell definition of 10,000 hours, you don't become an expert driver till 54.5 years.

However a pro driver becomes and expert after 5 YEARS of driving.

This also means that only 22% (those over 55) of america is likely to be an expert driver. http://www.infoplease.com/us/census/data/demographic.html

If HN population is the same as americans (it's likely skewed older), then 78% of hacker news isn't a gladwellian "Expert".

So self driving cars don't need to be better than most people they need to be better than a group of people who are very likely to be experts.

A couple things to note:

1) Average driver drives ~13.5K miles/year (http://cars.lovetoknow.com/about-cars/how-many-miles-do-amer...) with an average speed of ~32 mph (http://www.ridetowork.org/transportation-fact-sheet). This translates into 420 hours/year. Or a person becoming an expert driver by the age of 40, if we accept the "10,000 hours rule"...

2) But the Gladwell's "10,000 hours rule" was proven wrong (http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0956797614535810). For example, if we follow FAA that recently changed the rules to require 1500 hours for ATP (i.e. airline pilots) license, then you are talking about 3.5 years (for average driver) vs. 9 months (for taxi driver). Not that big of a difference.

This means that on average the US driver becomes an "expert" by the age of 21-22. This actually matches quite well with the insurance company rates that drop drastically at about this age.

This is a false equivalence that I've seen a few times here and elsewhere. It's wrong because:

The majority of car accidents are correlated with someone's fault, related to altered state, inexperience, distraction, or bad judgment. Some types of people are prone to accidents, others are less prone.

But in the self driving car world it's all equal - it's completely arbitrary who is a victim of an accident.

Someone who has never run a red light or had an accident in their life because they are an alert, careful, experienced, defensive driver suddenly has all that stripped from them and now they are driving at just an "above average" level.

Why should the good, consistent drivers be punished? (And they absolutely would if we settle for just "better than average"). I'm all for driverless cars, but only with patience; no one should even entertain mass adoption of self-driving cars without a minimum of multiple years of testing in live traffic with zero accidents or major traffic violations (by fault of self-driving car).

Seeing the traffic violations at the start of the SF program, we probably ought to expect the mass adoption minimum 5 years out, more likely 10-15.

>But in the self driving car world it's all equal...

And that, my friend, is a very good thing. We slowly raise the bar and eventually get rid of bad drivers - because in the future only people with a near perfect driving record will be granted a license.

> driving at just an "above average" level

I did say "much better than average" I agree that if "just above average" this would be a fail.

The average human driver includes what? Babies? Blind people? Drunks?

Ironically, one of Uber's current cost advantages is that they don't own their fleet of cars, and their drivers are bad at estimating depreciation.

Once they go driverless, they won't have to pay drivers anymore, but they will no longer have drivers renting them their car at a discounted rate.

If taxis could survive there's no reason uber couldn't.

Uber can survive, but will it survive as a global monopoly? Taxi companies survived as local monopolies.

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