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Comment by NumberCruncher | Hacker News Reader

> riding around Miami Beach in self-driving test cars several days a week

I watched the video. 2+1+2 lanes, no trucks parking on the side, no bicycles, no bicycles-lanes. No pedestrians crossing the road, no pedestrians at all. Clear blue sky. The car can take a left turn alone. That's cool, until you realise that the majority of the cities outside of the USA doesn't look like Miami Beach. I highly doubt that any "self-driving" car could travel through Munich today without killing at least a couple of pedestrians or cyclists. And still, Munich is like a dream compared to Rome or Ho-Chi-Minh-City.

BTW, only because sometimes I feel safe enough to ride my bike without hands on, it doesn't means I have a self-riding-bike.

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You're not wrong, but at the very least it'd be handy to have self-driving at least on, say, highways. It could help with traffic flow efficiency, as well as help eliminating traffic waves:

* http://trafficwaves.org

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave

In cities, perhaps streetcars/trams could be made self-driving at least. Labour is a big expense in transit, and if we want more frequent service (which could encourage ridership), then scaling more drivers may not be economical.

> very least it'd be handy to have self-driving at least on, say, highways

Me too, like driving home after a long day on the highway, being sleepy, in the night, while raining. Good luck with that: [1]

[1] https://9gag.com/gag/azMv16z

I live in Canada. Good luck with snow-covered roads:

* http://icyroadsafety.com/icyroad1d.shtml

lol, have you seen humans try and drive in the snow? Especially any of them who have AWD/4WD and snow tires makes them invincible? If you've ever had to brake in below-freezing conditions and ABS has kicked in, you're already trusting a computer to be better than a human at that task. Now granted, ABS is a far more limited system, with way more limited inputs and outputs, so the calculation and algorithms and code involved are dramatically easier, and self driving cars have a long way to go still, imo, but trivializing it to "lol snow" disregards the interesting technical challenges involved before self driving in snow can be solved for. You seem to think you have some expertise driving in winter - what is the biggest single challenge that self-driving cars face trying to drive in the snow?

> lol, have you seen humans try and drive ...

This hints at an interesting issue.

The difficult problems with self driving are not going to be the technical ones (driving in X environmental conditions) but the social ones.

Self driving cars are going to need a theory of mind (be able to make good guesses about what mistakes other road users could make), and also behave in ways that don't make human road users uncomfortable. The latter is relatively easy, but the former is hard - never mind Theory of Mind, some self driving software doesn't even seem to have object permanence.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_mind

2. https://www.simplypsychology.org/Object-Permanence.html

If the car takes over-the-air software updates, they are advertising up front that they don't believe themselves able to debug the car before they sell it to you. Normal ECU's, ABS brakes etc. do not need OTA updates. There is no absolute certainty about anything, but such issues are rare enough to be handled with product recalls.

Snow is opaque to light, but not radar, which means it’s actually fairly easy to work around this in car sensor suites.

The same also applies to many types of foliage and grasses.

The metal content of the line paint and the material of the roadway surface and guard rails are pretty easy to differentiate with other sensors.

This is one of the reasons that I really hope we get self-driving cars working well. They have the potential to do so much better at avoiding creating traffic issues. Short traffic lights have for a decade+ now made me wish humans weren't involved in driving.

You get that traffic wave effect except it's extremely noticeable what's happening as you see each car ahead of you delayed in reacting to the light changing to green, so you end up having half the number of cars get through than it seems should be able to. The optimal handling in terms of getting cars through the intersection would be every car in the line moving at the exact same time, something that only self-driving cars would be able to do safely.

This will only work if the cars ahead of you accelerate stronger than you. Standing cars don't need as much distance as driving cars. Self-driving cars might not need the distance if they are networked because if the first car brakes all cars in the group brake simultaneously.

Yes, of course it would also require them to be communicating to completely avoid the delay between each car being able to start moving. But I still believe that even only having information from its own sensors a self-driving car could safely begin accelerating sooner than a human driver since the largest buffer zone it really needs is just the braking distance. Slow human reaction time is removed from the equation.

How do you discriminate a typical slowdown due to road conditions from full braking?

You really cannot without additional information. But a sensor equipped (not even self driving) car can and forward this information.

Simple things like broadcasting brake status, turning lights status and engine RPM of the nearby vehicles, and if available, emergency braking notice or traction control notice would do wonders, but we have not standardized on any such system of info somehow. Not even for people. A simple info about being passed or nearby road signs send to a car's HUD/console would do a lot for safety, potentially.

Smart road, then smart cars, then self driving cars. Skipping steps won't do.

Fast trains have these systems already (both local radio and central) despite much more controlled conditions, but somehow car roads don't get them.

> That's cool, until you realise that the majority of the cities outside of the USA doesn't look like Miami Beach. I highly doubt that any "self-driving" car could travel through Munich today without killing at least a couple of pedestrians or cyclists.

Yeah, simply stating that they aren't yet at GA status seems pretty uncontroversial. Gotta start somewhere though :)

> BTW, only because sometimes I feel safe enough to ride my bike without hands on, it doesn't means I have a self-riding-bike.

Right, that was pretty much the point of the article.

> Right, that was pretty much the point of the article.

Agree. Nevertheless there is a flood of articles showing videos recorded under similar conditions but missing this point.

It's called Level 4 autonomy.

Level 4 ("mind off"): no driver attention is ever required for safety, the driver may safely go to sleep or leave the driver's seat. Self-driving is supported only in limited spatial areas (geofenced) or under special circumstances. Outside of these areas or circumstances, the vehicle must be able to safely abort the trip.

Level 5 ("full autonomy"): No human intervention is required at all. Vehicle drives autonomously on all public roads, in all weather conditions, all surfaces, all over the world, year around.

The majority of cities in the US don't look like Miami beach.

It just so happens that a bunch of cities where most of the people currently developing this kind of tech live do look like Miami beach and those people believe (or at least develop products like they do) there is no land beyond the valley.

Geofenced full self-driving would be much more valuable than a non-geofenced, almost-full-self-driving.

Being able to travel between LA and SF in a sleeper car would immediately eliminate a ton of flights, and is probably already doable with today's technology. Trucks could drive across the U.S. on their own with last-mile human drivers.

Being able to play a video game while your car drives around your pedestrian-heavy city center in the rain is indeed much further off, but also much less valuable.

How do I invest in the idea that Apple is the only one that has cash and trust to revamp the highway system?

You may find this video interesting : https://youtu.be/jKFV7qjWaD4

It's a self driving car spending an hour in Guangzhou traffic and managing to not hit anyone. I'm sure there is still a lot of progress to be made though.

Second comment on the video: would of been nice to see inside of the car.. its easy to say "there was a human driving!"

I mean, I am working at a start-up too, fake it till you make it is our daily bread...

Munich is still child's play. Try Sicily or Istanbul. At least the other drivers in Munich are good. In some places they're straight up murderous.

Nonetheless I know what you mean. It requires your full attention with the pedestrians, cyclists, electric scooters and trams going all around.

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