Alphabet's Self-Driving Cars to Get Their First Real Riders
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If we are building the safest transportation system, what role do driverless vehicles play? Wouldn't that be the narrative that actually saves the most lives?
There are a host of obvious reasons why even a "simple" L4 car will beat a human hands down:
* Reaction time.
* 360 awareness / visibility.
* Lack of exaggerated "Human Reflex" to surprising events (i.e. swerving violently to avoid a dog, and hitting other vehicles)
* Keeping perfect space around the vehicle for safe stopping at all times. (don't tailgate, don't get rear-ended)
* Assuming a LIDAR-based system, virtually no difference in day vs. night vision. No "sun in your eyes" or "road glare".
* No fatigue related accidents.
* No DUI and related prescription drug accidents.
* No distraction-based accidents. (kids, cellphone, food)
* No "road rage" based accidents.
I could go on, but this should drive the point home pretty clearly, IMHO.
You make an argument like you have a hammer in your hand and you are looking at a row of nails. I'm suggesting it is short-sighted to look at the problem from only that lens.
For instance, with a more holistic lens you might explore the right place for humans drivers vs autonomous vehicles. You might simulate entire cities from the ground up, specifically optimized for transportation. What if the real breakthrough in transportation systems actually comes from the ability to quickly construct / deconstruct roads? Or dynamic city zoning? Or any number of non-vehicle innovations? What if we were actually optimizing for safety in transportation and not just trying to compare machine ability to human ability in limited contexts?
The worry is this, the cars will not fail like a human will. It may even be dangerous The car may not even be able to move in certain situations (like another car blocking them in front either purposefully or accidentally). Or it may not be able to even see certain conditions a human could.
You're operating on a completely archaic understanding of AI. Modern systems can and do adapt to situations on-the-fly. What's more, they can adapt on aggregate - the experiences gathered by a single car can be shared to all cars. Very quickly, every car in the fleet will have billions of hours of cumulative driving experience.
The overwhelming majority of motor vehicle accidents aren't weird and unpredictable edge cases. They're tragic but mundane events that result from a handful of root causes - inattention, excess speed, poor judgement and unnecessary risk-taking. "Driver/rider failed to look properly" is the key contributory factor in nearly half of road traffic accidents. Computers utterly dominate humans in this respect. For every accident caused by some bizarre and unpredictable set of circumstances, there are thousands caused by someone doing something obviously stupid.
A computer can be programmed to be ultra-cautious in difficult situations. A computer can maintain 100% vigilance 100% of the time. Humans can't. Self-driving cars will undoubtedly fail in new and unexpected ways, but it's abundantly clear that they'll fail much less often than humans.
In the same way, if the world is modelled accurately and succintly, can a car predict the various scenarios and adapt, even if the current sitation was not seen before (extremely high speeds or unusual number of cars, etc.)
From a human's perspective it's a stupid mistake. It seems stupid because computers think differently than people do. On the other hand a computer would probably think a human were stupid if it saw a human make a mistake when calculating the logarithms of every number between one and a million.
It's an improvement as long as those are few percent of the unsurprising and human ways human drivers fail.
It's more like humans can think, why should we trust a computer with a task where unforeseen circumstances can arise?
Further, if I got the current state correctly, no self-driving car system so far works in rainy conditions.
* Lack of software bugs due to careless programming.
* Millions of years of brain evolution allows adapting to unforeseen circumstances.
* Vastly decreased likelihood of being tricked by vandals exploiting flaws in recognition algorithms.
* Inability to be hacked en masse and driven into each other/houses/pedestrians.
* Much harder to back-door.
* Can be judged in court if they swerve to avoid a pigeon and hit a crowd of pedestrians.
I could go on, but this should drive the point home pretty clearly, IMHO.
They sell these features as "parking assist" or "smart cruise control" or similar, but don't kid yourself into thinking that there's not a very sophisticated software system that could, if hacked, take over control. Has this ever happened? Have there been catastrophic bugs documented?
More advanced vehicles (i.e. Tesla) have enough hardware to be be nearly fully autonomous today. (i.e. they could rend control from a driver and continue to pilot the vehicle to an alternate destination if hacked)
This is very much not true of humans.
> Vastly decreased likelihood of being tricked by vandals exploiting flaws in recognition algorithms
This is not particularly true of humans. The human eye is very easily tricked. It's true that there are things that would not fool us and would fool a computer, but the inverse is also true.
What in the last few millions of years caused humans to evolve to steer metal objects at 60mph?
For extra credit: describe what the reaction time is for Waymo's driverless cars are during various points of the garbage collection cycle.
People here have a tendency to imagine an idealized version of driverless cars and assume that actual driverless cars are the idealized versions of those cars, and then compare the idealized cars to very non-idealized humans.
I think that the real world is going to be more complicated than that.
It is easy to write code that takes a non-trivial amount of time to process to the point of output on any given hardware. I imagine that all of us have done that at various times. We can certainly imagine that reaction time could be a virtue of driverless cars -- even 99th percentile reaction time. Given sufficient hardware (and not just hardware on the core CPU/ram chips -- this is hardware out to the sensors and the subprocessors associated with each of them).
Similarly, we could imagine putting enough sensors on the vehicle that it truly has 360 degree awareness and visibility. But we do see real cars in the real world that have surprising blindspots.
There are cost tradeoffs to all of these things, and complexity tradeoffs. Is there a happy medium? I think that there very likely is, even without any fundamental advances in the state of the art. Are we within a year or two of that happy medium? Maybe.
>For extra credit: describe what the reaction time is for Waymo's driverless cars are during various points of the garbage collection cycle.
Aight, I'm not familiar with Waymo's cars specifically, but with <10K in hardware (maybe <5K now) you can design and build an autonomous vehicle kit that has a reaction loop that runs at a soft floor of 15 adjustments per second. I'm sure that with better hardware you can increase that to 60+, and 15 per second is already about 5x better than human reaction time, and fast enough that it can react to changes every 6 feet at highway speeds, and every foot at neighborhood speeds. A 60 aps loop means that its recalculating everything every 2 feet your car travels on the highway.
And yes, this isn't incredibly difficult.
For reference, in my experience, running 2 cameras and a low power lidar (along with associated outputs to hardware actuators and such) off of a 2013 (or maybe a 2011) macbook pro, the limiting factor was always the lidar's 15fps framerate.
you can say the same thing for rockets. There is entire field dedicated to this, its called Realtime Systems.
I don't think it's controversial to say that machines can easily beat those human reaction times.
Most or all autonomous vehicle software is written in C++, so garbage collection shouldn't be an issue. Of course, these programs need to be tested carefully and extremely before we trust them.
Not sure I see the point you are making... all cars have blind spots with drivers now. Human drivers are always blind to the spots they are not looking at the moment anyway. I can imagine cars being much safer than they are now.
But when you look at how you imagine driverless cars to be, you might want to temper your imagination with how driverless cars actually behave, such as the Tesla running into a trailer because it was too high off the ground for its ultrasound sensors to detect.
http://www.theverge.com/2016/5/11/11656496/tesla-model-s-aut...
(Note that this is not the famous case of the Tesla being unable to detect a white semi against a bright sky, it's a low speed no-injuries collision).
Obviously, Tesla is not the be-all and end-all of driverless cars. But when you're dealing with sensors combined with AI where each is in many ways less capable than the human eye, with different failure modes, it gets expensive and difficult to design really good fields of vision.
"In the past year our autonomous cars have driven a total of 50 million miles in real-world conditions. Over that period there were 4 collisions, plus an estimated 12 which would have occurred if our trained staff in the drivers seat had not intervened. Insurance analysts estimate that if human drivers had driven under similar conditions there would have been 51 collisions."
Would that be sufficient for you to support the introduction of Level 4 automation?
All this would do is make me question the nature of the data collected. For instance, is that 50 million miles of diverse roads and weather conditions or the same mile over and over again on a sunny day? Or were the human-driven cars equipped with contemporary collision-avoidance equipment or a motley representative assortment of cars from the past half-century?
What would sway me is auto insurers offering a discount for relying on self-driving car technology. I can wait patiently for that to happen.
Edit to add... Have the crazy expensive and downright hostile self-driving John Deere tractors eliminated farming deaths?
Obviously, the assumption of all those involved is that the price will plummet as the technology becomes more adopted, so the goal is to get to a price point where the earliest adopters will be willing to pay. For self driving cars, talking about plumbers not buying this at the current price point is a bizarre argument.
Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car?
If flying were more affordable and less strict more people would own their own plane. It isn't and they don't. I see self-driving cars a lot like airplanes and John Deere tractors. That is, expensive proprietary tech that you have no control over. No thank you.
Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?
Because you don't need to own the car - you could feasibly rent one on demand (like a taxi), since you can now rent a car without the necessary wage overhead of the taxi driver, or the minimum costs of car-rental (i.e. car rental typically is per-day, for logistical reasons) or the logistical problems of car-rental (i.e. you need to drive to and from the car-rental place, to pick up and drop off the car - and by "drive" I mean "get a lift or use public transport").
Plus, the self-driving stuff shouldn't be particularly expensive, and will be counterbalanced by lower insurance premiums, and likely tax incentives once voters realise that they really do save lives.
"Why does everyone assume the cost will decrease with scale? How many people can afford a Tesla right now? Let alone a fully autonomous car?"
Because just about everything decreases with scale, and it's not inherently hard tech. Tesla's main problem is their lack of scale. As are autonomous cars.
"Why does everyone assume that most people want to share a vehicle?"
Money. It's not "want", it's "can tolerate so as to save money". Your car, when adding together all the costs (purchase, fuel, rego, maintenance, interest payments if you borrow instead of buying outright) is one of the biggest expenses that most people have. Sharing a car between several people should decrease the costs by an order of magnitude, which could be used to buy whatever people spend their money on these days, or saved.
I'd quite like the freedom to be able to commute to work, go out for drinks with people after work and come home again at the time of my choosing without relying upon someone else to cart me around, paid driver or otherwise.
THAT seems freedom-enhancing.
Yes, I know that Uber has started to tackle this problem, but as far as I know it only provides 1 car seat, and a car equipped this way may not always be nearby. Maybe this will be a completely solved problem soon, which would be great!
Remember when LCD screens came out and very few people could afford them? We were complaining then too about how could people possibly afford this and who will buy it??!
1. A Tesla with full self-driving hardware can be had today for ~$75k. And the model 3 will cut that in half. And the model after that will be even less. Millions of people can afford this.
2. Who said anything about retrofitting old cars? As far as I know, nobody is planning to do this.
3. This isn't a requirement, and it won't happen all at once. The plumber with an old F150 will continue to drive as he always has until the cost/benefit makes sense for him to upgrade.
4. Self driving tractors move at 3mph, and I don't think farm-field traffic fatalities are the big driver behind automated farming. Different use case.
Additionally maximizing profit (and this may read as condescending but I do not intend for it to be so) does not necessarily mean maximizing price. Obviously if you are not selling at a loss you can potentially make more money with a cheaper price point on volume.
I do agree, however, that first adopters will likely pay a premium.
Eventually I imagine insurance companies will help subsidize these things too - if the price does not become trivial.
Absolutely they will. That's [at least] $60K worth of driver's salary/benefits costs you've just eliminated. $75K is cheap to eliminate the cost of a human employee.
Most people who rely on a vehicle for work are local or long-haul trucking drivers, not local trade workers. The important work a plumber or a/c tech performs is separate from the driving. You're right, those people probably won't move to automated vehicles immediately.
But theoretically, in the future where they could have an automated van meet them at the job site with their tools? And return the tools to a secure storage facility afterwards? I don't see why they wouldn't go for that.
Ever call a taxi (not in city) ? 30+ minutes.
Also, tragedy of the commons ... who was the last one to use the car has to pay for clean up.
How to accomplish that ? ... "No the other guy did it ..."
http://www.thedrive.com/tech/9548/the-biggest-opportunity-ev...
There is a successful precedent in aviation. The latest fly-by-wire flight control systems treat the pilot's inputs as merely suggestions and will modify them as necessary to prevent departure from controlled flight, midair collisions, flight into terrain, and overstressing the airframe.
That seems like the most obvious statement I've read in the last year or so at least. I think the fact that Alphabet spent more than 10 years developing these self-driving cars already is a pretty strong indicator that there are non-trivial engineering challenges involved.
Yes, map services like Google have been receiving some data from government in addition to collecting user's current location and user's generous feedback (e.g. Waze user) to determine best route. But we are no where near the condition we can know what's happening ahead of us. What about weather condition? On intersection who goes first?
A safe driverless vehicles should be able to communicate (check, for as long as the communication is stable), and government and cars will share feedback to other cars. This is a crowd-sourcing effort to make fully autonomous car possible on road. If we just learn as we go on the road, these driverless cars will not work well in very complex road condition.
In reality, the problems encountered by cars are fairly classic and predictably where computers can be very good at: computer vision, 3d projection and modeling, project patterns, control loops (stearing vs. drifting). The beginning was expectedly bad, but is it not a stretch to imagine those solvable, just like Moore’s law and expecting cheaper electronics with mass-market “makes sense”.
Ignoring that, that ransomware wont' even exist for a number of reasons, the biggest being it wouldn't be profitable. Ransomware authors aren't going to get a payout, very few people are going to be able to buy Bitcoin in 30 minutes while unable to leave their car even if they wanted to. Not only that, it isn't remotely difficult to have a manual, physical, kill switch that physically stops the car in a life or death situation. Even if you didn't have a kill switch, you could simply call the police and they can lay down a spike strip.
>who are careful because they fear their own death just as much as I do.
LOL! That's a good one! Have you actually even been on the roads before!?! When I worked drive thru I had people who were so drunk they could hardly form a sentence come through my drive thru. That's just ONE example.
You share the road with these upstanding citizens who are clearly very careful and concerned for their own wellbeing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcnuIWNv8lw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hddt4bWNns
> Road fatalities are already the number 1 killer of some age groups
You're hiding a weakness in your argument by not specifying the age groups. You're hiding a weakness in your argument by restricting to cross-sections of the population that support your argument. You're misleading your listener by hiding the fact that this statement isn't because traffic accidents are unusually high, but that other causes of death are unusually low.
> Around 40,000 in the US last year.
Careful using absolute numbers, using 40,000 which is a very small number compared to other kinds of deaths like hard disease (800,000 deaths last year) can be misleading because 40,000 sounds like a big number.
> its estimated that over a million people worldwide die on the roads every year
You're hiding the fact that the US has 4% of the world's automobile deaths but 20% of the world's cars. You're using aggregate data to smooth over deaths that are caused by dangerous driving environments, roads, or ineffective traffic laws and misleading your listener into assuming that they're caused by human error.
Total deaths is not a useful statistic. The deaths that could have been prevented by L4 autonomous cars but could have not been prevented by L1-L3 or more conventional safety practices is what you should be presenting.
Give as little surface area as possible to people who would use it to push back.
As for sharing roads with others who fear death as much as I do. That's a wonderful idea, however in my case a pipe dream. I share the roads with people who have no problem speeding, driving under the influence or even refusing to use seatbelts.
Ultimately I'm more optimistic about solving the ransomware problem than I am about putting the fear of death into other humans.
Such malware are only possible because the targeted system has vulnerabilities to begin with. One just has to ensure the absence of such vulnerabilities, possibly using machine checked proofs.
One obvious approach is to properly isolate the driving software and sensors from external input.
Or what if an actor uses something like this:
https://techcrunch.com/2016/06/29/now-you-see-me-now-you-don...
that confounds the car's sensors. Self-driving cars have a whole spectrum of attack vectors that human beings don't have.
Yes, hostile input will have to be taken into account. Fortunately, this is easily detectable (just look at the logs). And if people die as the result, it will count as murder. Finally, one does not simply jam sensors from across the planet. You need a physical presence on site, and that's riskier than a remote hack.
Of course even machine checked proofs will have trouble finding vulnerabilities that creep in during the specifications stage or exist in the realm of hardware.
How do you isolate your sensors from external input and expect to do anything?
I did say "very expensive". But yes, if we're serious about correctness, safety, and security, I don't see any other choice. We should scrap the crap and spend the $billions necessary to rebuild it right.
Ideally. We don't really need to go that far. Isolation is possible and not that hard, see Qmail: http://hillside.net/plop/2004/papers/mhafiz1/PLoP2004_mhafiz...
> Of course even machine checked proofs will have trouble finding vulnerabilities that creep in during the specifications stage or exist in the realm of hardware.
I'm no hardware specialist, but you can still prove the correctness of the design of such and such hardware. The actual chips can still fail the specifications, but that's easier to test once you know the design itself is correct.
Also, specifications themselves can be checked. Only the high-level properties must ultimately be decided and reviewed by hand. Not that they won't be complicated or numerous, but that's still much smaller and easier to deal with than the entire implementation.
> How do you isolate your sensors from external input and expect to do anything?
I wasn't talking about the normal sensor input, which of course can be tricked the same way human sensory input can (for instance with a big flash or something). I was thinking about sensor command, such as which way they should be oriented or something. Though I expect most sensors will have no such input, and will only output to the system.
I used to think that was unlikely. Then I had a few discussions with people about the state of C, and things that could be done to make it default to a slightly more deterministic case by changing how undefined behavior is dealt with in regards to optimization. Now I think it's impossible, because nobody is willing to give up even theoretical unknown performance increases for more security. At least for C. You would have to use something that's much more strict about behavior, like Ada with SPARK, or possibly Rust.
I'm willing to bet most the code already written for these projects is C or C++. Good luck getting that changed if so.
Correct software is expensive. But if we make sure incorrect software is even more expensive, we'll get correct software.
Once the industry is forced to get serious about correctness, they will move away from the C/C++ minefield real quick —or at least come up with safe ways of using C and C++.
Correct software can be compromised via the update process, or social engineering. It's necessary, but not sufficient to ensure integrity.
A cheaper, correct option would be a mechanical lever/breaker labelled "manual override" for licensed drivers or "emergency stop" like they have on every industrial robot or heavy machinery since the 60's. Sometimes the answer to a software problem isn't more/better software.
http://cdn.static-economist.com/sites/default/files/images/2...
Since 1970 total airplane casualties have halved, while there are now 7 times the number of passengers. Much of this improvement has been due taking decisions away from pilots and into the hands of 'unfeeling' automated systems.
And then the cops/secret-service would get involved. If there's a death involved (and reason to believe more will occur in the future, which would be necessary for ransom as a prolonged business model), then they will come down on any ransomware (and responsible negligent parties, such as auto companies with shitty security) like a TON OF BRICKS.
Plus, there's still a lucrative malware model that goes like this: Infect the car, then quietly make it steal itself in the middle of the night (or at your moment of choice). Bam, you now have a stolen car that you can't be connected to, and nobody will notice for a while.
People will pay a fair amount of money to avoid a major inconvenience, but "my car won't start" is a lot less likely to have the FBI beating down your door.
Internet infrastructure is decentralized in nature, making it hard to control. Though rogue individuals can have outsized effects: https://www.wired.com/2008/02/pakistans-accid/
One big way in which automated drivers could improve traffic: By not being a jackass. I remember at one point driving down Westheimer, which is four lanes wide and one of the major thoroughfares of Houston, when I had to slow down for someone making a right turn to merge into traffic into a middle lane while their head was buried deep into the passenger side footwell looking through their stuff.
Then, there are the people who feel like they have to tailgate you within 6 feet during rush hour traffic on the highway. Also, the people who won't let you in for some personal justice you can't possibly understand.
It would only take a smallish fraction of cars implementing the "stay between" algorithm that CGP Grey mentions in his video to significantly improve traffic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHzzSao6ypE
I've implemented this algorithm manually. (Much easier to do since I have the instant accelerator response of an electric car.) It does seem to improve traffic flow. Also, jackass tailgaters are sometimes confused by this, and decide to pass.
That seems like an odd question to ask. There are huge reams of traffic safety data collected every year by the NTSB and others. Traffic accidents are one of the top two or three treatable public health issues in the modern world, and they get very significant public funding for their study.
Honestly I think the question has to be the reverse: what is is about "driverless" safety data that makes you think it won't be well-measured by the existing "validation" regime?
Obviously not all other things are equal, and potentially we could create greater loss of life by attempting to get self-driving cars on the road too quickly. But that is the nature of problem: how do we avoid moving too quickly while recognizing that the current danger that is human drivers should be removed from the equation as quickly as feasible.
I'm not sure this rider trial thing strongly signals any of them. You would want real world end-customer experiences regardless, I would think.
However I don't really like hearing about tax money going into these projects. At least in America, self driving cars won't solve gridlock. It will be 15 ~ 30 years before we can have autonomous car only highways, and even then, self driving cars don't even touch the capacity of a real train based mass transit network. Singapore has had self driving trains for years (it's a much easier problem) and London is automating more of their lines.
Self driving cars are cool tech, but they're not going to solve grid lock or many of the major transport problems we face today:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
And you could replace the train with a self driving bus. It can carry multiple people efficiently for the majority of their journey. And unlike current buses or trains, it can automatically adapt it's route based on where the occupants want to go. The buses can cooperate with the taxis to bring people to and from convenient pick up points.
The main problem with gridlock is that there is no limit to the number of vehicles on the road. There needs to be an economic advantage to things like buses that transport multiple people. A high tax on using the road in the city might work, if it could be enforced.
The benefits would be:
1) Compounds traffic on minor roads, encouraging people to fund the city via payroad taxes or begin using self-driving vehicles to get away from the traffic, which is now worse, for "human drivers".
2) Gets human drivers away from self-driving vehicles on major roads, which should reduce accidents. Less accidents means less traffic and more throughput.
Note: I don't think this would be realistically implementable. The regulations alone would be a nightmare to try and get passed.
It might be better to think of it as an investment in public health rather than public transportation. Preventing the huge number of deaths caused by human drivers is more important than speeding up traffic.
Auto insurance companies would probably have a clause saying that their policy is void if the vehicle isn't updated within X days of the software update becoming available and that would be the end of that.
Edit: And I assume the car could drive itself to preventive maintenance appointments if it's something that can't be done OTA.
I guess "DRM" for self driving cars is something people will complain about, but for vehicles that have controls it doesn't seem real horrible to have an autonomous system do a check to see if it is still licensed.
There could be an emergency override if the person that needed the vehicle didn't know how to drive, an override that automatically issued a fixit ticket.
Couldn't this be solved as easily as you car telling you that while you're at work it will head over to the repair shop to get its sensors checked up?
IMHO, it may be a little short sighted to look at Waymo and self-driving cars by itself, I believe it fits into the broader DL-AI initiatives within Alphabet as yet another DL-AI application. Whether it becomes an end in itself or simply feeds into other DL-AI initiatives is most likely still undefined.
I think they're clear:
"We're at the point when it's really important to find how real people, outside the Google environment, will use this technology," said John Krafcik, Waymo's chief executive officer. "Our goal is that they will use this for all their transportation needs."
It seems they are split on whether car ownership or ride-sharing will be more viable:
"Yes, self-driving technology makes sense for ride-sharing," said Krafcik, [...] "It also makes sense for personal car ownership." Transportation to and from transit hubs and logistics also made his list.
While Tesla and Uber have both just recklessly (imo) jumped in and started setting loose self driving cars and making bold claims, Google/Waymo has really taken a slow and measured approach and given great care to making sure their cars are actually safe.
33,000 people die each year on US roads and self driving cars offer the chance to dramatically reduce that figure over time. The more aggressively we can test self-driving software now, the faster the software can be improved.
So as long as the accident rate for autonomous Teslas is initially no more than for human drivers, the Tesla approach will lead to fewer deaths in the long run.
It's unlikely that Tesla gets much useful data from vehicles. To debug a vision system, they'd need the camera data from all the cameras, and that's too big to upload over the cell phone data link.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/brookecrothers/2017/04/23/tesla...
They just need to send back data from a few seconds before either of those scenarios to quickly accumulate a giant library of one-in-a-million edge cases they can test future algorithm tweaks against. I think it's a reasonable strategy.
This article summarizes the latest AP2 software release: https://electrek.co/2017/03/30/tesla-autopilot-2-0-camera-8-...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/28/tesla_autopilot_dea...
Here's an article which describes a 40% drop in the accident rate:
https://electrek.co/2017/01/19/tesla-crash-rate-autopilot-nh...
The NHTSA's figures show a drop from 1.3 crashes per million miles before Autosteer to 0.8 crashes after Autosteer.
Would any of those crashes have been fatal? I don't have the numbers to answer that but I posit that introducing Autopilot has prevented more deaths than it has caused.
people have died using teslas autopilot
(Disclaimer: I work for an Alphabet company.)
I'd be curious to know if Waymo vehicles experience more, less, or the same number of not-at-fault accidents per mile driven as human-driven ones.
That is more cautious, but that doesn't, on its own, suggest better tech. That is that the Google cars are actually safer, more advanced, etc.
Those are the Koala cars. Before those, there were the Lexus which went in highways too.
Either way there's not nearly enough data to draw conclusions from.
Just to clarify the downvotes.
Highway driving is safer.
The outfall is that it led to bad PR for self-driving cars.
Bad PR? Example? I haven't seen much negative spin on self-driving cars in mainstream coverage recently. If anything it's been highly optimistic while still being honest by mentioning the difficulties the companies are trying to overcome.
I don't think people are under-estimating the challenge here, even the layman. But the potential ROI when it does work would dramatically be safer, environmentally friendly, and efficient with human time.
Given the current state of driving is highly dangerous, we'd benefit from iterative progress towards self-driving cars, ala what Tesla is doing. Controlling risks doesn't have to mean holding tech back until it's perfected.
Do we know how many lives have been saved from Tesla's autopilot? I've only seen anecdotes but I get the impression that it's already a big net win for safety.
Their current implementation doesn't seem to be learning any higher level behaviors (there's a Youtube video of guy using it in a park where it repeatedly accelerates towards islands in the road and then flails off the road as it goes too fast around the island).
It may have gone the other way. Remember, the primary sensor technology in 99.999% of cars out there is two front facing visual-light cameras pointing the same way on a swivel and couple of mirrors.
There's no evidence to suggest that is the case. If anything, Tesla has made it more dangerous to assume that it's safe and falsely autonomous.
When you create new drugs, the FDA definitely doesn't look to kindly on people who think like Silicon Valley. "Killing people is product testing" won't fly in pharmaceuticals.
I'm glad that we don't have people like you designing drugs for the masses!
Is there any evidence that these companies haven't gone through closed circuit tests and passed before testing in public roads?
The next step in drug trials is, in fact, testing on humans and some do suffer serious injury or death. I don't think there's any way around it and the greater good of having a pharmaceutical industry at all outweighs those unfortunate incidents.
Not sure you can attribute that thinking to any of the actual engineers working on this.
For example, nuTonomy, the start-up at which I work, has deployed a similar trial in Singapore in August 2016. (btw, we are hiring in everything!).
It's not a "race", it's more like a "marathon": there is a big difference in making something that works 99% of the times (sufficient for a trial like the above), and something that works 99.9999...% of the times (a product that can be actually deployed).
Namely, that Google relies heavily on their mapping services to make their cars work. This makes a lot of sense for Google, because of self-driving cars require their mapping data, there's a big new market for them. The maps they run on are significantly more detailed than the public-facing Google Maps/Street View. They work in Phoenix, AZ, Mountain View, CA and Austin, TX and like... nowhere else. (Was there one other city in Oregon maybe?)
As an aside, note the "As an early rider, you’ll be able to use our self-driving cars to go places you frequent every day, from work, to school, to the movies and more." I am curious if this suggests you have to tell Waymo in advance a set list of destinations they can ensure work correctly or something similar, or if I'm reading too much into it.
Tesla, Comma.ai, etc. are not relying on special map data as much as they are relying more heavily on road signals and lane lines and such, and then having machine learning decide how to navigate them locally.
While they may not have the same driving record, everyone else's approach works nationwide (and wouldn't be exceptionally hard to extend to a global scope, presuming you taught them different countries' markers and signage), whereas Google's approach currently does not scale.
There is also the possibility that having a detailed map accelerates progress (better automatic scoring of sensor based modeling systems).
Do you want a system that only works on forward facing vision? Or only lidar? Or only gps and road databases? Or only machine learning? We know all of these have holes and blind spots, and a safe system wood have redundancy.
I think the actual distance between Waymo and those that evolved from lane keeping is far bigger than people realize and the biggest danger is people shipping MVPs that kill someone or run into a school playground, if that happens, congress will ban these cars or regulate so heavily that progress will be slowed.
Bear in mind, with this announcement, they aren't even committing to "it works in the Phoenix metro area". There's that "parts of" statement, that indicates that only parts of the area is mapped and hence the cars are only capable of operating in parts of the Phoenix metro area.
If you have evidence to the contrary, please, by all means, feel free to share.
How would Waymo possibly build a car with Level 3 or 4 capability if they weren't doing a hellava lot of onboard visual field processing? Accurate maps data won't let you deal with bicyclists or pedestrians properly, it won't deal with all kinds of hazards.
There's a reason Waymo cars are festooned with LIDAR and cameras and other HW in a giant boxy minivan, and it isn't purely for show to make them ugly on purpose.
* People can apply to use/borrow a Waymo vehicle (RX450 or Pacifica) for some period of time.
* "as part of this early trial, there will be a test driver in each vehicle monitoring the rides at all times."
* Limited to Phoenix metro area for the time being.
* You apply here: https://waymo.com/apply/
* Waymo will be adding 500 more of the Pacifica minivans for this program.
-----------------------------
After almost a decade of research, Google's autonomous car project is close to becoming a real service.
Now known as Waymo, the Alphabet Inc. self-driving car unit is letting residents of Phoenix sign up to use its vehicles, a major step toward commercializing a technology that could one day upend transportation.
For the service, Waymo is adding 500 customized Chrysler Pacifica minivans to its fleet. Waymo has already tested these vehicles, plus other makes and models, on public roads, but only with its employees and contractors as testers. By opening the doors to the general public with a larger fleet, the company will get data on how people experience and use self-driving cars -- and clues on ways to generate revenue from the technology.
"We're at the point when it's really important to find how real people, outside the Google environment, will use this technology," said John Krafcik, Waymo's chief executive officer. "Our goal is that they will use this for all their transportation needs."
Waymo is letting people across parts of the Phoenix metropolitan area apply for the service as part of an "early rider program." Initial users will be able to book Waymo's minivans using an app, but won't have to pay. Dollars will flow eventually, Krafcik said, yet he declined to share details. The company is signing up hundreds of people with diverse backgrounds and transportation needs.
Google is a pioneer in autonomous cars, launching its research program in 2009. After mostly ignoring the project for several years, the auto industry has recently rushed to catch up, pumping billions of dollars into similar technology and engineering talent. A bevy of newcomers have joined too, including some founded by former Waymo engineers, making the field incredibly competitive before anyone has made money.
Uber Technologies Inc. has emerged as a particularly bitter rival. Last year, autonomous vehicles run by the ride-hailing giant began picking up paying customers in Pittsburgh. Earlier this year, it started doing the same in Tempe, a town in the eastern part of the Phoenix metro area. (Waymo is currently suing Uber over the technology.) Yet Waymo insists its business model will be broader than Uber's.
"Yes, self-driving technology makes sense for ride-sharing," said Krafcik, a former executive at Hyundai Motor Co.'s U.S. operations and Ford Motor Co. "It also makes sense for personal car ownership." Transportation to and from transit hubs and logistics also made his list. In Phoenix, Krafcik said participants will use the autonomous minivan fleet every day, at any time, to go anywhere within an area twice the size of San Francisco.
Last year, Waymo inked a deal with Fiat Chrysler Automobiles NV for 100 Pacifica vans outfitted with Waymo's software and tailored hardware. Waymo added the fleet to the to 70 other cars it is testing in California, Texas, Washington and Arizona, which it entered in 2016. Since Google started its program, those vehicles have racked up nearly 3 million test miles on public roads, primarily to refine the autonomous software and ensure the system could handle rare but potentially dangerous edge cases.
Waymo has faced criticism for not launching a commercial service sooner. This was especially true last yar when it lost several top engineers, and Uber launched its limited test service. Krafcik has often responded by pointing to safety concerns and technical obstacles to deploying fully driverless cars.
The Phoenix service answers some of these concerns. It's a clear move beyond the research phase that focuses on passenger experience and business model development. Waymo's staff has worked on new displays and controls to get people comfortable being inside self-driving cars. The Phoenix passengers will be the first to see these tools in action.
Waymo is still moving cautiously. Chosen users for the Phoenix service will sit in passenger seats, and Waymo will put contractor or employee testers in the driver seat -- although Krafcik said the goal is to remove them eventually.
The company has quietly been testing the service with a handful of Phoenix residents for two months. From those trials, he noted one behavior trait when no one has to drive. "People have a better opportunity to bond and connect inside the vehicle," he said.
Self driving waymo/uber cars around Tempe (the suburb where Arizona State University is) have become part of the landscape.
Uber has also done a really good job of using their self-driving cars for marketing. My partner and I have taken quite a few uber trips that we wouldn't have otherwise, just because we've wanted to try and get a ride in one of the self-drivers.
So far, no luck though.
Probably. It seems way more convenient and efficient to be able to summon a car to any location on demand than to have just one car that you use for everything.
No more parking, no more refueling, no more vehicle maintenance; just push a button and a car shows up within minutes (or in some cases, seconds) to pick you up, and step out of the vehicle when you reach your destination. Want a specific model or paint color? It's just a couple taps on your phone away. Car breaks down and needs a tow? Replacement gets summoned automatically, and the car company credits a couple bucks to your account for the inconvenience.
If that kind of service becomes available at a reasonable price point, I suspect it won't be long before car ownership becomes much less common.
Under the no-private ownership model, you are going to get screwed by surge pricing.
With a self-driving car fleet there are probably lots of other little tricks you can do too, like offer discounts for sharing a vehicle with another passenger, or use machine learning to predict what locations will have the highest demand during particular parts of the day and move portions of the fleet to cover those areas.
I want to go out to shop. Right now, I get out in my car, drive for twenty minutes to the mall, and leave when I want to do so. My kid is with me, but on the way back he gets sick, so I have to cut short my drive and head back home. he throws up in the car. I clean it when I get home, and go back out to the store five minutes away by car to pick up some medicine for him as my wife watches him.
HN "solution."
I page a car. It takes maybe ten to fifteen minutes to drive to me from the last passenger, since it only is designed to head back to dispatch every so often. The car reeks of weed, because why not light up a bud? It's not like they can arrest you or anything. I punch in a complaint on the app.
We get to the mall. I shop, and summon a car. This time it takes a little less, maybe five to ten minutes, because the mall is closer to dispatch or a place where a lot of cars get dumped off. I program my next shopping route. My kid gets sick mid-ride though.
I have to hit the emergency button, and reroute back to my house. My kid gets sick in the car. When we get home, I have to hit another button to "rent" the car another period so I can clean it, but it still gets sent back due to the emergency button being hit, and I can hit with a nice big fee due to cleanliness issues. I now need to go back out to get medicine, but five minutes by car is 30-45 min by walking. So it's another 15 minutes to get a car.
Even if all goes well, I could be looking at an additional 45 minutes just getting stuff done, as well as cost and loss of passenger quality because I don't own the vehicle. Hell, it could show up at my door full of shit, semen, and vomit, because some homeless guy is using it as his own personal hangout to sleep in. Or it could take even longer because I need to rent a driverless suv so I can bring furniture home to me, and those are relatively rare and command a premium to rent.
No one here is thinking of day to day use by all kinds of people, or what benefits ownership provides. I own my car, that means I dont have to worry about it showing up in a horrid state, I don't have to worry about paying large amounts for minor cosmetic damage, I don't have to budget extra time summoning the vehicle on site (which escalates the farther out from a city hub you are...you're doubling your travel time, and this would heavily penalize rural people), and there are a host of issues eliminated as well. Just the fact that I don't need to put a destination in is one thing. I can change my mind en route, I can wander, and if my wife calls me and tells me to come home, I can do so near instantly.
What makes you say that? The median wait time for an Uber in many cities these days is [around 3 minutes][1]. Were self-driving cars to become widespread, I imagine that time would be significantly reduced due to a drastically higher density of available cars. (Instead of just a few Ubers, imagine if nearly every car on the road could potentially come pick you up.)
> The car reeks of weed, because why not light up a bud? It's not like they can arrest you or anything. I punch in a complaint on the app.
Plausible. Passengers who do that though would most likely get fined the same way you would if you tried that in a rental car, so I don't imagine it'll be widespread. And if you prefer you can always summon another car. Should be there in another 60 seconds or so, if not less. The weed-scented car will head back to dispatch for cleaning so none of its future passengers have to deal with the smell.
> We get to the mall. I shop, and summon a car. This time it takes a little less, maybe five to ten minutes, because the mall is closer to dispatch or a place where a lot of cars get dumped off.
Probably more like seconds because there would be 5 or so cars already waiting in the parking lot for shoppers who might want to leave soon. In fact, it might even be faster than having your own car in this case since the self-driving car can pull right up to the mall exit to pick you up.
> I have to hit the emergency button, and reroute back to my house.
No emergency button necessary, the app lets you change your destination in-flight. Actually, you might even just be able to call out "okay Google, take me home" and the car will hear you and reroute.
> When we get home, I have to hit another button to "rent" the car another period so I can clean it
Well, no. You just report a mess in the car and it drives back to dispatch for cleaning. A bit expensive for you due to cleaning fees sure, but necessary to ensure the car is clean for other passengers, and as a bonus you don't have to clean up the vomit yourself. Hopefully this isn't a regular occurrence for you.
> I now need to go back out to get medicine, but five minutes by car is 30-45 min by walking. So it's another 15 minutes to get a car.
Again, probably 3 at most. More likely under a minute.
> Hell, it could show up at my door full of shit, semen, and vomit, because some homeless guy is using it as his own personal hangout to sleep in.
Again, probably a pretty rare occurrence, and if it does occur all that means is another minute or so of waiting for another car to show up.
> Or it could take even longer because I need to rent a driverless suv so I can bring furniture home to me, and those are relatively rare and command a premium to rent.
SUVs aren't nearly that rare on today's streets. In a driverless car future they might be somewhat more rare because people will only request them when they need the extra trunk space, but even then it's hard to imagine the wait time being more than 10 minutes in even a small city. If you're requesting one from the furniture store it might even show up in seconds (because lots of people coming from that location want SUVs, so a computer algorithm has arranged to have several nearby at all times). If not, you can always schedule a pick up a few minutes in advance to make sure the car is there waiting for you by the time you get out of the store.
[1]: http://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-heres-how-long-it-takes-ge...
I hope so.
Presumably. It's pooling for cost-saving reasons, much like cloud computing. If people want to be frugal, they won't buy a car.
I tried a bunch of zip codes in California, none are available. Phoenix, Arizona works though, I think they're still only testing there.
> * Limited to Phoenix metro area for the time being.
I'm curious what sort of unconsidered edge cases they'll find out in the real world. I'm sure test passengers are much more "disciplined" than real world ones.
That would be pretty amazing. Why they are sticking shit all over 2 ton vehicles? If they are solving Fuel and Emissions and Driver, can't they just take the final step of a revolution? I am pretty sure governments would be throwing notes at it.
I believe the cars are also pressure vessels and life support systems. My student team looked into this side of the problem last year, and making the entire ~40 ft long Hyperloop pod a pressure vessel is really tricky. The two competing forces are the obvious premium on extra mass, and the need for a large opening to load cargo into the pods.
Dealing with all the "human compatibility" problems at the scale of the cars lets you use much smaller pressure vessels (lighter), and makes loading unpressurized cargo drop dead easy.
The other big benefit is that loading the Hyperloop pods is really difficult. You'd ideally like to be launching a pod into the tube every 30 seconds or less, to get the best return on your infrastructure investment. Achieving that by walking people right up to the 40 ft vehicles and having them all file in like a commercial flight is just about impossible. With mobile sub-pods you can have a far smaller station, and just load sub-pods as they arrive into the next departing pod.
But I agree the it is ludicrous to continue with these massive vehicles if we can find a way to move forward. I think the other massive vehicles present a safety hazard to small vehicles so you may need to separate them physically.
I think it is great that they are getting additional exposure to nominally real world users here. However, I'm not exactly sure what they are learning in user behaviors. Is it "Can we make a less expensive livery service?" or is it "How freaked out do people get in self driving cars?" or is it something else?
I went to a conference last week where there were several talks that were pretty critical of self driving 'hype' given the HLS[1] issues and the ability to inexpensively 'spoof' the AI[2] to see something that isn't actually there (road signs being particularly vulnerable). It left me thinking I might be more optimistic about the technology than I should be.
[1] "Health, Life, Safety" the general basket of things that are super critical to minimizing injury and death.
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13507542/facial-recogniti... -- on Facial Recognition but sign recognition has the same problem.
Those evil corporations, being all corporate-y!
I haven't seen the movie Logan but the gist is that you think BigCorp will modify their cars so they drive dangerously fast, threatening the other non-AI cars on the road? And they will risk killing people or damaging vehicles in order to improve shipping time? And you think this will be prevalent? There won't be economic, legal, hiring, or social consequences from police, shareholders, politicians, employees, and the AI companies? Because they're big corporations run by greedy CEOs who get away with anything?
Someone brings this up every self-driving car thread. But has there been any incidents caused by code released too early? Google has been working on this for almost a decade and hasn't released anything. Tesla released what is basically a glorified cruise control and deployed an advanced sensor package that is disabled by default.
I'm not seeing this recklessness that everyone is so worried about.
Again, the bar is a system better than current human drivers - as we know for a fact that driver error is one of the leading causes of accidents (over 1/3 of accidents).
Source: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/movie_script.php?mov...
CTRL+F for "So they were on highways today on those trucks"
The whole scene is about Big Corn trying to take a specific plot of land whose owner would not sell.
In that situation, it's less about the dangers of autonomous vehicles, and more about corporations are willing to murder others. The next scene involves guns and fighting.
Commutes are one of the only things that seem to limit urban sprawl.
I do wonder if there is some vehicle ownership path dependence that feeds into sprawl though. If vehicle access becomes less of a binary choice, people don't double down on choices related to ownership.
Not quite true - generating upstream is much more efficient, since the power plant doesn't have the weight restrictions that a car (which needs to haul itself around on four wheels efficiently) has. So even if power plants didn't ditch fossil fuels, electric cars are largely a step up.
That said, we are moving heavily towards renewables, and charging isn't time-critical so peaking power sources like Wind will be more than good enough.
while many choose to live outside of cities many are forced to because of bad city planning, regulations, and other government practices, which only served to protect vested business and political interest.
still I say though, you should be free to live where ever you want and can afford to.
I find both just as bad. I had a 1 hour commute by train in Chicago. Was terribad. Cannot even imagine the 90 or 120 minute commute guys.
People think the autonomous car is going to solve a lot of the current problems; Accidents, Parking, Congestion. It kind of makes me giggle a bit, as I ponder what may happen. That is, the conclusions drawn from "self-driving" vehicles are possibly way over cooked.
The certification process for these cars are going to be very, very expensive. Think about the software involved for the operation of aircraft and the review / testing process then apply it for the road. That is level of scrutiny that will be placed on "self-driving" vehicles.
Hacking, equipment failures, environmental surprises and more will be sure to keep a healthy portion of the public skeptical and possibly downright hostile to the idea for at least a decade, post certification, in my opinion. "Self-driving" will be contained and tightly regulated.
What people on the coasts forget about is, really, the rest of the country. The people that actually enjoy driving, where parking isn't a problem, and congestion takes place in the morning and after work, but only lasts about 5 minutes. Metro areas of > 2 million people don't have much problems with traffic in flyover country... at least not when compared to the coasts.
The counter arguments to the piece are plentiful for the foreseeable future.
Insurance companies will charge steep premiums to the risk takers who want to drive their own car. Alphabet etc. will have a well-oiled team of lobbyists in every state and country to pass laws to make driving safer for everybody (i.e. more optimized for Waymo cars).
There will be a lot of people who join the NRA (National Retrovehicle Association), who'll make a stink about things. And they'll fight a rearguard action and probably win some guarantees in the more rural states. But where 90% of Americans live, the economics and legalities will work out to push everyone to self-driving cars.
And then economies of scale will be lost, and even in the remaining areas human car driving will become a luxury for people who own their own private roads.
That sounds like a bold claim. I mean, the current standard of technology works to quite a good extent already, performing many aspects of driving with considerably greater acumen than humans and being able to operate for extended periods without human intervention. It's also fairly well documented that the number of situations in which the software would have caused an accident without human intervention is above the average accident rate for human drivers, despite being tested in favourable conditions with sensibly conservative rules around humans intervening for a wide range of reasons before a critical situation can develop.
So it already works whilst being substantially less safe than the average human driver (without human intervention). They're working on the making-it-safer part, but given the number of edge cases they've got to deal with for Level 5 driving capability I'm not sure we should be so sure it'll surpass human driving abilities in all road conditions.
People make this claim. Why would there be a premium over what is paid today? Maybe there's a big premium relative to much lower premiums associated with new types of vehicles although there will still be insurance needed. But that's relative to a future state, not relative to today.
Doesn't something like 80% of the US live in urban areas? And hasn't that number been continuously increasing for decades. People in the cities enjoy driving too, hell I love driving when their isn't any traffic. But I'd give it up in a heartbeat if it meant less needless traffic deaths and a far more streamlined lifestyle.
Technically speaking by US Census classifications but the definition of urban is very broad. You basically need a population of over 2500 to be in an urban cluster.
So where I live is "urban" and between myself and two neighbors, we're on about 70 acres of land.
This is one of the most scariest points to me. Are any entities working on lobbying Congress about this? I've seen nothing on it, yet we already have a handful of these technologies on the road. One can retort with what offerings there are are "safer" than humans, but that's missing the point entirely.
Also, basically drivers of all kinds will no longer have jobs.
Insurance is a small fraction of the cost of transport by car, so dropping the insurance cost by some fraction won't drop the total cost by that much.
1. http://www.commercialtruckinsurancehq.com/owner-operator-ins...
The average US driver files a collision claim once every 18 years. I'd like to know the distribution on that one, but anyway, it doesn't seem like there is a reason to believe this.
For the record, I think this technology will make the prices for these vehicles prohibitively expensive for the mass market.
Same reason robots in manufacturing are better than humans. They don't have bad mood, they don't have bad day, they don't need to speak on the phone while driving, they don't drink etc.
> how is this technology going to be make everything less expensive
Because in Europe/USA most part of the cost in low-weight vehicle transportation is salary of the driver. Also self driving cars will be less costly to maintain (less accidents, better monitoring), if big fleet operated by companies they also have benefit of large scale etc
They make things safer because they don't drive drunk.
Can an hunter ride share the pacifica out to the forest with his/her hunting gear? How about bicyclists? People with kids know about activity shuffling... I am not sure that sharing will work for my families schedule.
Driving drunk isn't the bulk of the accidents I go to on a regular basis. If we could just eliminate texting while driving, we could see a significant drop in accidents.
I mean, let's say I use it for a total of 12,000 miles per year. that's 10% of the time. If I rent it out for an additional 50% of the total time, that's going to hit 72k miles in a year! For the average person they are going to have to replace cars ridiculously fast, and increase, not lessen, the burden of car ownership.
processing power = cheap
software (marginal cost) = just gotta pay for updates and fixes
sensor package = expensive now because nobody is making 6 million of them a month. Once they do, it'll be a lot more affordable.
That doesn't mean it'll pay off for Google, uber, Telsa, Ford, etc., but if they build it, it'll move to all cars rather quickly.
Go talk to a pilot and ask them about Garmin products and the autopilot of their plane. Also ask them about update the software on these devices. Ask how much money they are asked to fork over for software...
Have a look at the self-driving tech of the John Deere tractors and how well that has gone for the farmers. I don't think the bulk of people here have really thought about this in a negative light.
As of right now, waymo has only been doing what could metaphorically be called unit testing. That is, they test the cars behavior in very controlled but unrealistic environments, looking for very specific responses. The accident rate that they've incurred is likely ridiculously skewed: they've been driving in good weather, on meaningless routes (not chosen by destination, but by route features), at relatively safe times of day, at slow speeds, and they've been doing it extremely cautiously with engineers ready to take over in a moments notice.
This is exactly what they should have been doing, but politically it is misleading. Most human drivers, given those same constraints, would also do extremely well and way better than average. They've done well, but we have little basis for comparison with the average driver.
This is the first step towards integration testing. They get to see how the cars behavior integrates together across various scenarios that are much closer to real life. They are driving on actual routes that real people travel on...routes that aren't chosen in order to test a specific behavior.
Accident rates are going to go up. That's a good thing...its a move towards the things humans find more difficult too. We should, however, expect slowing progress to level 4 autonomy. This is typical of system capability growth; exponential in the beginning, asymptotic near the end. People that are rushing this are out of line; akin to immediate commercializations of lab rat successes. Give them time.
Are you sure about this? Google has had self-driving cars in Austin for years and I'm pretty sure there's never a good time to be driving here.
But it doesn't stop there. Google hasn't tested snow at all. I'd be surprised if their testing locations represented rainy weather that is representative for more than 10% of the US. They don't test freeways, and by extension, do not test onramps and offramps. In California, they don't even go over 25 mph. Under those conditions they have been ostensibly pretty good at not causing accidents, but how good are they at avoiding accidents that are not their fault? This means accidents caused by other drivers and acts of god. Safety is far more than just causality.
But more importantly, their miles traveled very easily exclude small snippets of time where an engineer takes over, but still counts the rest of the journey where the computer did fine. How representative is that? How good are humans when we let jesus take the wheel the moment driving gets slightly complicated? If a human overrides the computer only 1% of the time, that could still be anywhere from 1% to 100% of trips with at least one human override.
It's very easy to catastrophically mislead yourself when working with averages [0]. Statisticians and Economists go through absolutely absurd lengths to make comparisons robust. Even if we had access to 100% of the data on Waymo's self driving cars, I don't know a single statistician that would be comfortable making a comparison to extremely coarsely aggregated data on human driving. Only through extensive testing in situations that are representative of how humans (and not just test engineers) drive will we be able to conclude that one is safer than the other. And that's why Phoenix is important to Waymo.
[0] https://www.google.com/search?client=ubuntu&channel=fs&q=the...
No I'm very serious: we are unable to protect smart TVs. Networked smart cars (because let's be real - Google and co. would want to monetize this with Uber-like services, Ads in cars etc.) are a magnitude more likely to be hacked by both the state actors and rogue individuals (altho I don't see why we make this distinction...both are criminal acts).
The worst that can happen if your smart tv is hacked, is that they can listen and maybe watch you in your living room. If your car is hacked, they can probably kill you and hurt others while they are at it. If this happens on a large scale, it's extremely dangerous.
So while I have no problems with self driving in itself (or with Google for that matter of fact), I have a problem with banning human driving cars on the road without a viable (non-intrusive) alternative.
But, as evidenced by terrorism paranoia, people do care about their personal safety--perhaps excessively and irrationally so. Security in a networked self-driving car won't be treated as an afterthought, if nothing else because of the massive legal liability.
Every year, every major browser and major OS gets cracked in Pwn2Own. The cost of these zero-days is going up thanks to good security practices like sandboxing in Chrome et al., but they still happen. Every. Single. Year. Think about that for a second.
The fact is, we can't write secure software, especially secure networked software. I can't imagine writing secure software for cars using current best practices---let alone imagine car manufacturers doing that. To solve this, we'll need (in addition to everything we're doing now) something along the lines of Rust to prevent these sorts of bugs. And even then, it's likely that the net effect will be similar to sandboxing: the cost of an attack will go up, but not enough to prevent random individuals (let alone larger organizations) from finding zero-day security vulnerabilities on a regular basis.
It's extremely important not to be cavalier about this security risk. The combination of zero-days and self-driving cars is a scary one.
It's the same reason that you pay relatively high car insurance premiums when you are in your teens and twenties.
I think way too many people are viewing self driving vehicles with rose colored glasses. They underestimate the cost and overestimate the utility to the public.
Improving human driving skills collectively is much more difficult. Even if one driver learns from their own mistake, other drivers and the next generation of drivers will still be just as prone as before to make that mistake. Better education can only do so much anyway, since people often don't think rationally and don't necessarily make safety the number one priority (e.g. drunk driving, trying to get to the destination as quickly as possible, or reckless driving for entertainment purposes).
Right. Except that 40 years later computers still crash. The more complex a system the harder it becomes to debug and there is no complex software system without bugs. It's like rocks in a field, you'll never get the last one out even if you think you did.
Being such an important feature (not crashing) it shouldn't be ignored. I am also skeptical but we have examples of reliable systems so I believe they can work.
It's just not worth the effort in the vast majority of circumstances -- so you get computer crashes.
Other computers are more predictable to computers than humans are, especially with automatic communication of acceleration, lane changes, etc.
The current human-driver-driven model is a stopgap; they lose a lot of other people's money on every ride. Possible outcomes:
- Uber achieves a credible 1st-3rd place dominance in self-driving vehicles. Investors, frat boys win.
- Uber doesn't. Keeps human drivers, prices surge, Uber tanks.
- Uber doesn't. Contracts with Waymo or someone else for cars. Survives, but doesn't have much more than a crappy brand-name. Joins the ranks beside Yellow Cab.
- Uber implodes in a puff lawsuits, acrimony and skunked beer kegs. Sucks for the investors, but, eh. Uber is a cancer.
https://stratechery.com/2016/google-uber-and-the-evolution-o...
However, the reality is Uber is only looking into self driving cars because otherwise it's going to destroy their business long term and they don't want their stock to tank today.
They also spend VC bucks funding operations (so their huge losses aren't just because of investments in technology, they are a direct result of operating at a loss).
However, there are different classifications[1] of autonomous vehicles. Google's car is currently somewhere around level 3. It's true nobody has a level 4 car yet.
[0] https://www.engadget.com/2016/07/05/google-autonomous-cars-c... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car#Classification