Hacker News Reader

Comment by fgnoplm | Hacker News Reader

It amazes me how many otherwise intelligent people believe in the bullshit hype of fully-self-driving cars. In reality, a car that can drive you from New York to Boston with zero human intervention as safely as an average human driver is probably several decades away at least.

View on HN

The amount of hype for self-driving cars, even if they come several decades from now, is not 'bullshit.' Just because things don't happen immediately doesn't make them 'bullshit hype.'

Yeah, but the hype is that they are right around the corner.

According to who?

Waymo committed and failed to launch a public driverless taxi service in 2018. Cruise is still publicly committing to 2019 although it's widely believed they will miss that mark. Zoox says 2020. Argo is aiming for 2021. Not to mention whatever timeline Musk tweets for Tesla's constantly moving target.

There are more, so there is a lot of hype. Otherwise how would these companies be raising billions of dollars on unproven technology?

So what they should just stop and not develop it? What is your point?

I was just answering the question of the parent comment.

I think you're likely completely misinformed on the state and progress rate of the solutions to this particular problem. I would be shocked if it were legal to drive as a human being on public roads in "several decades"

Imagine getting into a self-driving car parked in front of a Brooklyn apartment, falling asleep in the back seat, and waking up in front of some house in Boston.

Realistically speaking, how far away do you think we are from such an adventure being something that would be safer on average than having an average somewhat road-experienced human driving you to Boston?

me personally? I'm pretty optimistic, I think 8-10 years and that would be safer than having a human drive you. at the current rate of improvement I think 20 years would be shocking, I can't imagine it taking more than that.

When I was a kid, scientists told me we'd be going to mars within a couple of decades. According to them, it should've happened about a decade ago. Same thing for supersonic airliners, etc.

And a crackpot non-expert politician told you that the USA would go to the moon in under a decade. Just can’t trust people. Check out Peter Thiel’s take on this.

Are you saying supersonic airlines never happened?

We never worked out the gating issues to make them commercially viable. The last 10% is 90% of the work and whatnot.

It will always be legal to drive as a human being as long as I'm alive. I'm not that young, but, yes, I do expect to be alive for "several decades" more.

On Route 66, maybe, but IMO it's coming to the interstate much sooner.

Could be, but then it would just be a glorified train system. People generally want to be driven from some building far from the interstate to some other building far from the interstate, not from onramp to exit.

I doubt that self-driving car technology is even close to being interstate-ready, though.

I think NYC to Boston has traffic and bad drivers and that's why GP used it as an example of something today's tech is far from being ready for.

I think it will take a lot of work but that it will happen rapidly.

Did you mean Route 1? Route 66 isn't an option for NY to Boston...

My take is the use case where you manually merge on to the interstate freeway in clear weather and say "hey google wake me up when we're approaching downtown Boston" is right around the corner. Its all those other use cases which effectively mean there will always need to be a human with a steering wheel.

Twenty years ago the idea seemed several centuries away.

I was in high school 20 years ago, and a robotics nerd, and back then it definitely didn't seem "several centuries away." The DARPA grand challenge was back in 2004.

Twenty years ago they had prototype self-driving cars. They sucked, but they were good enough that planning started for the DARPA Grand Challenge. Some of the winners were hired by Google and became Waymo. They've been working on this for a long time.

20 years ago was 1999. I think that it was very easy to imagine self-driving cars being within a few decades' reach back then. Not much harder than to imagine it today.

Most of the talk of self driving cars was always on purpose built lanes/roads. That certainly has been in discussion for 50 years.

I remember there being an example around that area of a caravan of cars that could drive themselves.

Autonomous driving is the new nuclear fusion. It's a couple decades away.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com