Waymo begins driverless rides in San Francisco
blog.waymo.com
blog.waymo.com
The fall-out is going to be intense:
* Fuel-stops are going to change completely, what's the point of half of the motels on long-haul drives when your car can drive all night and likely recharge automatically at a stop-point.
* Reduced downtime on goods movement will impact uptime in every other industry.
* Autonomous-vehicle-only lanes that line up with traffic timings creating a two-tier driving experience
* Huge influx of unemployed drivers who I guess might get "chauffeur" style jobs.
* Security issues, complex legal issues when there's accidents.
* Fake taxi's that drive a customer into a bad experience for "lols".
I know all this is extreme, but if history is studying the past to understand the present, science-fiction is studying the "future" to predict the problems of tomorrow.
And thank God. People are not robots. They shouldn't have to spend their valuable lives doing repetitive, monotonous tasks for 8+ hours a day to barely survive anyway. So long cashiers, so long truck drivers, and hello future.
That's sarcastic, right? Like "we'll have fusion power in 50 years"? Except that we might actually have fusion power in 50 years and I don't actually think we'll have truly driverless cars within 50 years.
A lot of people were expecting electric cars to kick off right after that, so OP's claim is not unreasonable.
But: there are very large numbers of these edge cases and they are of the kind where new ones keep popping up all the time. This is a very easy problem for the first 99% or so and then the last 1% is super hard.
Indeed, and we aren't any closer compared to say 5 years ago. That is more or less my point: you can solve for some of this and then you are still left with a mountain more. And then at some point there is an even harder problem to deal with: how to ensure that fixing one problem won't regress one or more others.
That's just flat wrong.
And that may well require another leap of capabilities on the AI front, it might even require GAI. But you are entirely welcome to your own opinion, as I am to mine, but after watching the self driving industry since the 80's my timeframe is something like 25 years before fusion will arrive.
There may be some intermediary 'artificial artificial intelligence' solution where when stuck a remote driver can take over. But that has its own set of problems and I don't want to set this up as a strawman.
It's real progress. Anyone around Mountain View, or SF will have seen the progress with their own eyes. It's not a theoretical debate.
But that's the whole point: if this were a reality there wouldn't be a maybe there. So thanks for making my point.
"Materially closer" isn't the bar to cross the bar to cross is "It just works" which is for me what I'm getting at when I say that we are not 'closer', because it's a binary thing, arrival means 'it works' not that we have made some incremental change towards an ill defined goal.
The 'it works some of the time or even most of the time' bar was crossed years ago, but it needs to work all of the time.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I think what the other commenter was getting at is that: if there were 10 problems that needed solving 5 years ago, and in the course of solving those 10 problems you discovered 100 more than needed solving that you weren't initially aware of, then sure you got closer to the goal, but the progress was so tiny that it's almost not relevant.
I'm personally not arguing one way or another, but that's how I read the other person's comment.
I know the whole human flight is different to bird flight argument, so I guess we'll just have to wait and see how it all plays out. Exciting times :)
If the technology stagnates, the hardware stops improving, and the software stops getting better, then we would hit the limit pretty quickly.
> After all humans don't drive by analysing 1 frame at a time, we have a model of how the world works, we anticipate, we have intuition etc...
All self driving cars also maintain those models as well, and use frame by frame input to correct those models in real time (but they have already guessed where something is going to be 100+ frames from now).
In your view we are within striking distance of the moon, another couple of piles of stones and we are there. In my view, I'm not sure that it will just take more stones and not a better technology, and I'm beginning to lean more and more towards the latter because the problems that we were seeing 10 years ago we are still seeing today: more and more edge cases. And edge cases can be a symptom of a problem that is almost solved or it can be a symptom of a problem that is being solved using the wrong toolset, especially when there are lots of them and new ones keep popping up all the time.
Clear now?
And by the way: none of this is to imply that what has been done isn't impressive, the MB statement that they will accept liability if their software is in control of the vehicle is a step in the right direction and shows a lot of confidence. But it's incremental progress towards a goal that might not be reachable in that way.
Just come visit San Francisco and see the evidence. Look in the horse's mouth, so to speak. The cars are driving around a complex city, without a driver, and doing an amazing job. The progress is real.
Whether the grid is pre-mapped or not isn't particularly relevant. It's just how the technology works. The vehicles aren't driving on rails, they just have more semantic information about the world around them.
Fortunately, we also have a developing world where we can pay humans $2/hour to mechanical-turk tele-operate our 'mostly-working' AI.
Yet we're in 2022 and the best of the best image recognition systems spew out absolute nonsense no matter how much money is poured into them.
It's just the same sort of issue. It can work amazingly well 90% of the time, but the remaining 10% is basically impossible without some kind of actual general AI that can understand the context of what it's looking at. I honestly believe that current approaches to this tech will not get us to general self driving tech that is safe enough for use on our roads.
The Earth is big and complex, I can't see the singularity on the horizon yet, but my vision is aging.
I don't know that creating super-accurate species trees is really the most important problem to solve in biology, though. Certainly DNA sequencing for health has been a really mixed bag.
Ah, the old why bother since it's a "mixed bag" argument. If it wasn't a mixed bag I'd be really worried, as someone has some pretty good snake oil.
I vaguely recall something about sequencing and its role in creating a vaciine that turned out to be pretty useful, something recent maybe?
What i'm troubled by is the projects that sequence a million people, using $1B to do so, and then just dump a bunch of genomes with some hand-wavy claims about how it's going to cure cancer. The costs here are rathre significant, but the health outcomes are not.
On the other hand, most of the commercial jets we do fly are basically 1950s designs with bigger engines and some computers in the cockpit, and HN thinks it was crazily irresponsible for Boeing to have decided to use sensor-triggered autonomous systems to do something as simple as temporarily adjust the trim system...
As I understand it, they will only operate within a "grid". In other words, its use case will be limited to essentially a customized route city bus.
> widely rolled out within ten years seems very plausible.
Define "widely". We are decades away from a driverless car driving in snow.
I agree snow is a lot harder (I don't think it's decades, though). But the cases moritonal brought up mostly don't require that.
The mere fact that it won't panic on black ice is already a huge advantage. And it will have very detailed feedback to and from the traction control systems.
Parktronics routinely get covered by snow/slush/ice when driving.
When that happens I hit a button to turn on the defroster that then gets rid of the snow and ice.
Could they use a similar system?
Can I patent that?
What's the basis for your imagining? Whenever I read some strong "computer > human" statement like that, I can't help but think it's substantially based on science fiction (which can make technology work fantastically well because it's not real, e.g. like Six Million Dollar Man vs actual prosthetic limbs).
Also, have you heard about the time I was driving on the highway in winter weather, and my adaptive cruise control would stop working every few dozen miles because I had to get out and scrape ice off the sensor?
That doesn't really matter, because I was responding to the the sci-fi sentiment that "of course the computer must be better because computer." It doesn't matter if the humans are doing a poor job if the computer is still worse.
Especially because the claim is only about snowy situations. Even in a reply about snow, someone that thinks computers are automatically better would normally just say that directly.
Literally the two easiest places it could go into
So people should have been able to correctly predict how easy it would be for a computer to master go, right?
Said differently, I start from the assumption that some problems are obviously easy, some problems are obviously hard, and every other problem is somewhere in the middle. Self-driving is in the "obviously hard" bucket. Feel free to argue for where you think Go sits in the spectrum, but I would argue no board game is in the "obviously hard" bucket
Hard and easy defined as the ability to solve in a reasonable amount of time with the algorithms and computational models we have today or in the near future -- regardless of ~marginally increasing processing power.
Really? It seems to me that if people over-estimated the difficulty of an "easy" problem like mastering go, then they're even more likely to over-estimate the difficulty of a hard problem like self-driving. In fact, the over-estimation could scale up faster than linearly, if estimating two problems of size X is easier than estimating one problem of size 2X.
> with the algorithms and computational models we have today or in the near future
That's the thing. When predictions were being made about the difficulty of mastering go, people didn't have the algorithms and computational models that we have today. Similarly, predictions made today about the progress of self-driving cars may be lacking critical information about the algorithms and computational models that will be available in the near future.
Guess you missed this distinction.
If "customized route" counts any drive, then that's not really a limitation any more.
I'm glad that Cruise beat Waymo to driverless in SF because they are providing the swift kick in the butt that Waymo seems to require to actually make progress in a reasonable amount of time.
Their crash rate is 1 in 4.4 billion miles. That's crash, not a fatality. And it's getting better.
https://cleantechnica.com/2021/12/07/tesla-1-crash-per-4-41-...
Not with one version of the software. They are cheating: they should reset the mileage whenever they update the software.
Rider 1: I have 20 years experience riding a motorbike.
Rider 2: 20 years experience or 1 years "experience" repeated 20 times?
Waymo has 20 million miles IRL driverless, and 15 billion miles in simulated driving.
Fatalaties are not the only metric. Accidents are much more frequent and driverless cars have already proven they're safer in that regard.
Simulated miles are not convincing. Miles with a safety driver are better but still ultimately different. Also the type of miles matters too, and Waymo has been focusing on the easiest miles possible until Cruise forced them to up their game and try something a little more valuable.
Source? Because since 2020 Waymo has been primarily touting their "contact events" metric, which is what most people consider to be accidents.
Simulated miles are still better than no miles. Given the better accident rate it seems to contribute to a degree.
The point is that it's an argument from ignorance to narrowly focus on one metric and say we don't have enough information on whether autonomous vehicles are safe. We do have a range of metrics and information already that point to them being safer.
Provided your starting point is AV software with some ability to drive, this isn't necessarily true. Tuning on simulated miles can lead towards over-optimization for the conditions of the simulation.
https://youtu.be/gW6Wt2WQotY?t=232
https://youtu.be/o8rCOKSDMcg?t=60
There are countless other examples. It's one of the first things they bring up in almost every presentation to the general public. It's how they present themselves to the world, as the answer to traffic fatalities.
You may think it "ignorant" but the fact is that fatalities are going to be the single most important metric that the public and journalists and governments are going to focus on, and that's why it matters. The first few driverless car fatalities are going to be a huge, huge deal and are likely to result in action from all three branches of government. There will be court cases, there will be regulatory action, and there will be a lot of noise from politicians about laws and maybe even some laws passed about it. The first one already forced Uber out of the game.
Driverless cars in a European city center, during snow, ice and rain seems unlikely within 10 years. But we don't need that to see transformational change.
The fun thing about European cities is that many of them are extremely willing to make (to Americans) unthinkable changes to traffic patterns under their jurisdiction. I would not be the least bit surprised to see those downtown centers closed to all but driverless traffic (if they are not closed already).
BTW, humans are not ready for bad weather either, even though we drive in it all the time. However with driverless cars we will collect statistics proving it isn't ready and never noticing that it is better than humans.
I lived in Phoenix for nearly a decade. I moved there from the snow belt.
Teaching a car to drive itself in Phoenix is barely a step up from teaching it to drive in an empty parking lot.
Look at advanced ports and inter-modal yards. That sort of human to vehicle ratio will probably move up the spectrum of complexity in which it can be deployed and down the spectrum of cost.
2014 - 90% capable of autopilot, for sure highway travel
2015 - autonomous driving for highways and relatively simple roads
2016 - S/X can drive autonomously with greater safety than a person - generally true, it still messes up for human-correctable situations but in general helps more than it hurts in terms of "crashes where autopilot was in control during impact or within 5 seconds of impact"[0]
2018 - incorrectly predicted - self driving will be 100-200% safer than a person by next year (this talking about their full self driving thing that will do turns and stop signs and whatnot)
Honestly don't believe that at all. The tech is immature and works only in a very narrow set of circumstances with a lot of constraints - it's so far away from being functional that the whole legal discussion around it is almost academic at this point.
That opinion doesn't diminish the progress that has already been made or the accomplishments of the various engineering teams involved. It's just saying that when people talk about self driving cars they're talking about it as a drop in replacement to the general population of car owners' cars not as a curated location/digital track limited taxi service.
It's borderline obvious we will have a taxi/Uber replacement for most of lower Manhattan, east San Francisco and southeast Phoenix before 2030. (Technologically, at least.) Less confident in long-distance interstate-only driving by 2030, but that's better than 50/50.
Beyond that, the edge cases are innumerable, so it's difficult to estimate. Nevertheless, we have clear line of sight to domains where, for all intents and purposes, a human-driven vehicle will be obsolete (if not necessarily yet unquestionably uneconomical) in well under ten years. That's far more than we have ever been able to say for fusion.
Just the other day my Tesla model 3 drove me home from a restaurant 10 miles away, at night, with plenty of other cars on the road, through side streets and on a highway, without intervention. Did it do weird things? Sure, but nothing that made me nervous enough to intervene. Compared to just a year ago when it was still phantom breaking on the highway and couldn’t do side streets at all. All the people saying it’s still decades away don’t realize how quickly things are progressing.
10 years is a long time and progress is not always linear. Think about what happened to the internet between 1995 and 2005.
I hope I'm wrong though, I would prefer it if my kids and other road users didn't have to drive.
And then I think about all the potholes that I dodge when I drive around town. And how 4-ton electric vehicles are going to make road wear worse, not better.
Here’s an autonomous drifting Delorean https://youtu.be/3x3SqeSdrAE
The physics and control of cars are quite well understood, even in extreme conditions. Further, sensors allow a car to detect changing road conditions much more quickly and adeptly than a typical human.
The hard part of self driving seems to be understanding and predicting the humans in its environment.
If the car is "smart," maybe it will simply refuse to travel (because the calculated risk of traveling over an icy parking lot is above some maximum threshold risk).
What happens the first time a steering wheel free car strands a family in a blizzard due to a few feet of icy pavement, ultimately freezing them to death?
And computers are better at reacting to unexpected things like icy road. And cameras are better at seeing through rain and fog. What's barely perceptible to you, computer sees clearly.
Other than random people saying this on the internet, I have seen zero indication that this will be the case. You cannot will something into existence just by strongly believing in it.
Driving in truly bad weather is still an open research problem, but it's also one that most of these companies haven't dedicated a lot of resources to, since they all have initial rollout plans in places that don't experience much extreme weather. But assuming these vehicles can drive well in good weather, I don't think it's a stretch to assume that progress will be made on driving in more extreme conditions once more resources are dedicated to it.
I am still hoping for fewer cars on the road overall. The car itself is inefficient and hopefully on its way out.
Traditional cars with drivers haven't solved the weather problem 100%. But they are here now. Sometimes we ban them in some conditions, but they are a game changer the rest if the time.
It’s not that traditional cars have solved for weather, it’s that self driving cars haven’t solved the problem of “being as good as human drivers in weather commonly encountered.”
I dig the commitment and passion, but as a consumer, I want the thing to work perfectly first time, every time. If it doesn't, I don't want it.
I know 5 people with the Tesla FSD Beta, and EVERY SINGLE ONE of them has admitted to letting Tesla drive them home when they drank too much and went past the legal limit. And not a single one of those 5 people has ever had a DUI. So FSD rapidly changed there drinking behavior.
Also I get that I have an atypical and shitty social circle. I don't think this represents all Tesla drivers.
Does anyone else remember that spyware?
Improved software, and maybe one hardware refresh should be sufficient to get us all the way there for 99.99% of drives.
Aside: some really old drive assist tech for snow plows on I-80 Donner pass - https://path.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/advanced_snowp... /// https://highways.dot.gov/public-roads/janfeb-2001/safe-plowi...
I'm still waiting to see how an AI would handle Figure 5-1 from that. And no, the snow plow's solution of burying magnets in the road isn't practical (Cost of infrastructure installation for the test sites is approximately $11,000 per kilometer ($17,000 per mile), including surveying, installation, and magnets).
99.99% means 1 in 10,000 "drives" has an accident of some sort? So 100 accidents per million people/drives?
Not sure how to compare if that is better or worse than what we have now.
We haven’t even begun to address emergent behaviors. You say your Tesla does “weird things.” What happens when all the cars on the road are Teslas and they do the same “weird things” at the same time (because they have the same programming)? This is an important aspect of systems engineering that we haven’t even scratched the surface of when it comes to self driving cars.
The cost, simplicity, and availability of self-driving cars will undoubtedly change the consumer.
Self-driving cars have been at 95% since the 90's. They've been at 98% since 2012. Humans are higher than 5 nines.
It turns out that human drivers, even poor ones, have a much better driving record than self-driving cars. With this latest Waymo experiment we may finally see some significant progress.
There are definitely people in the industry who are thinking about this and working on it, but AFAIK none of them work at Tesla.
1. People "hacking" cars for fun/malice. This could be anywhere from "painting on the road/sign" to wireless comms penetration attempts or nation state attacks.
2. People who OWN the cars replacing firmware/hardware for perceived benefits. IE put back the "rolling stop" feature. Or "improve" behaviour/performance. (Car modders changing headlights in a Tesla might mess with the optical only approach) Or change the default decision in "trolley problem" events.
Okay, so you've got a private company explicitly writing down the value of human life in a big list, top to bottom. Let's pretend we fast forward the several years to decades for the public to accept this new reality. Now we realise that different locations operate under different value systems. In Saudi Arabia, one man is worth three women. You best believe they will require the car to run down the woman. So each country/location is going to require an ethics update, and it's all going to have to be public. Imagine the heat Tesla is going to take by complying with Saudi rules and explicitly programming their cars to mow down women instead of men.
Yet there has been no report of this exploit used maliciously in the wild.
And then compare it to what happened to the internet between 2005 and 2022...
Progress isn't always linear but it tends towards diminishing returns more often than exponential progress.
And we're not talking simple things like "can billions of people and Moore's law result in something a bit more exciting than Facebook with a newsfeed and ads and YouTube without Flash", we're talking about progress in the form of monotonic improvement in complex intractable software to solve edge cases the dev team haven't even thought of where the failure mode involves corpses, and do it to the satisfaction of regulators across many jurisdictions.
The gap between "drive 10 miles without serious incident this time" and "consistently drives a billion miles between incidents serious enough to be fatal without any possibility of intervention" is enormous.
Doesn't sound like much of a data trail. No one disputes that it at least sort works (while also doing "weird things", as you put it) in some conditions. As long as, you know, nothing weird happens out on the road. Like for example rain.
It's the fat tail of "weird things" (and how these systems currently handle them) that leave the question of whether FSD will ever arrive -- very much up on the air.
Sure, it‘s apples to oranges, but for self-driving, we‘re solving the last (and obviously hardest) percent, while for fusion, we‘re still stuck solving the first.
The FSD is really good.
I rode in a fullY autonomous car, with nobody in the drivers seat, about a year ago (we have had fully autonomous waymos in Phoenix for a few years now).
For instance: I don’t like how close it drives to the curb. I don’t drive close to the curb (and bias towards the center of a road) because I only have two eyes, and can’t really see the curb as I’m moving. I have an intuitive sense of how close I am, but that’s it.
The car knows exactly how close I am. So it driving in the center of a lame, while it makes me nervous because it’s now how I drive, is perfectly acceptable.
What I wish Tesla would do: set up some closed courses for people to come and experience what FSD is actually capable of. It would help the current FSD users gain confidence in the system, and it would show it off to people who haven’t ever experienced it.
I seriously don’t believe that most of the people who are critical of this thing have spent much time with it. I’ll admit after the first day or so I was skeptical too, in the same way I was skeptical of lane keeping and proximity aware cruise control.
But at this point: I hate driving without these things. They are an almost indescribable upgrade to the driving experience for me.
FSD/Autonomous driving isn't an all or nothing scenario for me. I use it when I deem it safe to be used, and drive manually every other time.
Cars that can drive everywhere, in every condition, without humans intervening at least remotely and occasionally in some limited way? Probably not.
Robo-taxis in most major cities and trucks that can reliably handle the full interstate network, to be picked up by a human driver for the last mile? Why not?
[1] https://www.justtransitionfund.org/
[2] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2021/11/03/for-a-j...
[3] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/21533369.1999.96...
I'm would prefer to not derail this thread (as I really wanted to focus on the existing economic solutions for industry transitions), but this is patently false and can be determined as such with 5 minutes of using a search engine with terms around solar EROEI (energy return on energy invested) and the electrical generation mix of grids where solar panels are produced.
Takes less than 5 seconds "using a search engine" to discover this.
1. A 300 W solar panel weighs about 20 kg
2. Approximately 90% of most PV modules are made up of glass, so let's assume (incorrectly) that the other 10% (i.e. 2 kg) is PVC
3. It takes three pounds of coal to create one pound of polyvinyl chloride (PVC), so 6 kg of coal
4. 127 GW of new solar capacity was added in 2020, which would require 127 GW / (300 W / 6 kg) = 2,540,000 tonnes of coal
5. Global coal production in 2019 is estimated at 7.9 billion tonnes, which is 3110 times more than is needed
6. The coal mining industry employed 42,117 people in the United States in 2020.
Therefore if that number of people could be scaled down linearly with the amount of coal, to cover just the production needed for solar panels, less than 14 people would be needed to work in the US coal industry.
[1] https://ecowowlife.com/solar-panel-dimensions/#300w_monocrys...
[2] https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelshellenberger/2018/05/23...
[3] https://solvoltaics.com/much-coal-make-solar-panel/
[4] https://www.irena.org/newsroom/pressreleases/2021/Apr/World-...
[5] https://www.nrcan.gc.ca/our-natural-resources/minerals-minin...
[6] https://www.statista.com/statistics/215790/coal-mining-emplo...
I hope the companies making these things are calculating margins for safety, tripling them, adding triple failsafes for everything, and not compromising on any safety standard, ever.
But we all know they aren't. There's far too much money at stake.
If there ever was a case for the government to proactively apply standards, this is it. Yes, there would be a delay, but it would be worth it, measured against the psychological and legal damage that will occur when (not if) the unthinkable occurs. Given probability p, and sufficiently large N and t, it is inevitable.
I can't speak to every company in the space (and I can think of a couple that don't seem to have much in the way of safety), but all of organizations I've worked for are very diligent about safety and looking to improve. N > 1 here, so they exist.
There are surely interest groups and think thanks that are working on the problem, and they will (if they don't already), have some legislation either ready to go or close to it.
The politicians won't even think about it until it becomes an actual problem that threatens votes, and when they do start caring they will just take whatever they can get from friendly/trusted think tanks and try to ram it through. The bills will be thousands of pages long and practically nobody will read them before voting for them.
Oh fuck no. Social consensus is too slow. Look at the social consensus that tracking was bad followed expert consensus by like a decade, and really only started appearing after EU regulation.
How many lives are you willing to ruin and how much blood are you willing to spill getting things wrong? The power of the state shouldn't be thrown around on a whim or subject to subject specific industry fads and circle jerks.
Look, I invest in companies that stand to benefit in this transition and I want my stonks to go up -- but I'm horrified by the apathetic excuses people toss out to rationalize ignoring the externalities. Strengthening the safety net is the least we can do. "What if we get it wrong?" sounds an awful lot like "it's gonna cost money and I don't want to pay" to my ears.
I'm not saying don't do anything. I'm saying it's more than ill-advised to get the vast resources of the modern state involved in things on the whims of "experts" because hubris abounds.
I also think you're not really disagreeing. GP is talking about specific implementations while you are talking about high level philosophy.
> The "experts" also thought if Vietnam went communist the whole continent would.
The domino theory was advocated by politicians, not experts.
> The "experts" gave us the war on drugs.
Nixon gave us the war on drugs as an excuse to be racist towards black people and let cops beat up hippies. Experts have derided the war on drugs (as opposed to treatment for addicts) and the classification of weed as schedule 1.
> The fatherless black household [wasn't] stereotypes until the "experts" tried to help minorities.
The stereotype preceded the experts, but yeah, Moynihan fucked up there.
> How many lives are you willing to ruin and how much blood are you willing to spill getting things wrong?
I mean, a not insignificant number. The US has 350 million people. Any decision at that scale is likely to fuck over a lot of people, whether that's allowing any company to put out a self-driving car or changing fuel efficiency levels.
> The power of the state shouldn't be thrown around on a whim or subject to subject specific industry fads and circle jerks.
On the contrary, I'm advocating the power of the state to take action against industry fads faster than the public notices the issues. Such as using governmental power to limit invasive tracking of internet activity.
If we get driverless cars (meaning there literally isn't a steering wheel), it may happen within 10-years BUT only for last mile stuff (or vice versa for trucking). It won't be an overnight event. We won't see truly driverless vehicles across the board for decades, if at all.
TL;DR - It won't be as instant as you think.
Only if you believe that every person is equally able and qualified to perform every other job that exists in an economy.
People aren't cogs, and they're not universally interchangeable, no matter what the economic textbooks would like people on the internet to believe.
Exactly. They are extremely adaptive, capable of learning and doing many things. Sure, not everyone can do everything, but there are also no purpose-built humans capable of only one job.
People aren't, but humanity is...meaning those drivers might not adapt to new work, but at least their children will. The Luddites had huge problems with obsolescence, but their kids got by OK. A social safety net could take the edge of the transition rather than just delaying the transition indefinitely.
I can't say for taxis, but according to the newspapers, Texas has been running automated tractor trailers between Dallas and Houston (about 230 miles) for at least a year, and at least one other state has been doing it for at least two years. (Possibly Nevada, between Vegas and either Reno or Phoenix. But my memory is fuzzy on that, and I have zero confidence in Google.)
Texas has also been thinking about building special lanes or highways just for automated tractor trailers.
I know that there's last-mile advantages to this compared to what already exists, but god damn I just cannot get over the fact that we've just reinvented trains with a much larger environmental impact.
* cars sent to pick up stuff without drivers
* kids sent to school with the car to circle back and pick up the parents afterwards
* cars doing the minimum to stay 'in traffic' to avoid paying high fees for parking
* far more miles per car because the biggest limiting factor (the presence of a driver) will wall away
* huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
People buying personal cars at the moment tend to choose the latter: https://www.edmunds.com/most-popular-cars/
Only if the parents are WFH and going to lunch. School starts too early already.
Coupled with electrification going on at the same time (many countries and states have set 2030 or 2035 deadlines), the CO2 impact won't be as bad, although we should still focus on public mass transit.
Overall, automated road vehicles are a huge boon.
Isn't this backwards? Why should kids have to go earlier than parents if the parents don't need to drop them off before work?
> huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
Won't most automated vehicles be electric?
Because in most places school starts before work starts, this has always been the case, even in places where people don't have cars, and not everybody has a car in places where most people do.
> Won't most automated vehicles be electric?
Yes, but that doesn't automatically mean all that power is made with renewables.
Electric vehicles are consistently more carbon efficient than individual combustion engines, except for specific outlier instances in developing countries which are 100% dirty coal power grids.
This means a fleet of electric vehicles will have less of a carbon impact per mile than the average human driven vehicle.
But that's an entirely different subject. We are simply looking at the effect on the total number of miles driven here, which will absolutely explode once driverless vehicles are a reality. And those KWh will have to come from somewhere and they will have a carbon footprint even when they are entirely made with renewables.
The solution to this is to drive substantially less not to drive more with cleaner vehicles.
There is still no comparison between electric vehicles and combustion vehicles in terms of carbon footprint.
- Mass transit is full of big heavy vehicles running mostly empty on off-peak hours. It's more efficient only at rush hour. I'd expect net efficiency over the full usage is worse, compared to electric cars.
- As they start making custom robocar hardware, it'll become a mix probably including smaller lighter single-occupancy cars.
- Mass transit ought to become much more useful and attractive given on-demand robocar rides to and from your station.
- (Added:) Congestion pricing becomes more doable for cars that are already networked for other reasons. Congestion pricing is the obvious approach to really solving congestion.
That is really only true in the states right? In other countries with decent mass transit systems, it seems like they are really full during rush hour but only mostly full at other times, utilization is very good. American systems seem to be dysfunctional...probably because cars are more convenient for off peak travel. I can see how door-to-door automated vans or even taxis could fill in off peak travel here, while the big vehicles serve mostly peak demand (in the states, elsewhere it isn't as needed).
> * far more miles per car because the biggest limiting factor (the presence of a driver) will wall away
> * huge CO2 impact (negative) from all these extra miles
These are all very important. Most cars on the road are single occupancy. Once we can have zero occupancy the problem will only get worse.
For example, your fleet of low- or zero-emission vehicles would greatly offset the average vehicles that people would have been using instead.
Also, zero occupancy vehicles never have to drive around looking for parking near their destination. They are immediately reusable or could go to an out-of-the-way pool.
Parking will get cheaper, if anything:
- Electric AVs can park themselves 5x further away with no UX downside and minimal energy cost.
- Nobody needs to use the doors while parked, and AVs can cooperatively rearrange themselves to allow ingress or egress, meaning they can park with almost no clearance in all directions.
- Parking garages can be designed with the assumption that vehicles are driven with perfect precision, allowing wasted aisle space to be significantly reduced.
How does that speed compare?
So, the grid won't collapse. Drivers won't starve overnight. Legal issues will sort themselves out as early adopters encounter them, etc. Plenty of time for everybody to adapt.
Isn't that kind of the point of technological progress?
That case isn't true. The new generations had jobs well enough (increased productivity grew the economy much faster than before), they weren't committed to weaving clothes by hand. The Luddites themselves didn't fair as well in the short term, but many of them would have aged out of the work force in a few years anyways (manual weaving is pretty unforgiving on the body).
Truck drivers are rapidly aging as well, if self driving vehicles move retirement up by 5 or so years, it isn't going that huge of a deal (we can rely even on America's social safety net), and their kids didn't want to be truck drivers anyways.
That's quite optimistic. When did politicians ever talk about moving up the retirement age in the last decades.
The internet brought insane growth through productivity gains in all industries. Even more than I'd expect from self-driving cars. And we haven't talked about moving up the retirement age.
Also the question is what these people do now? In the next twenty years of unemployment until they reach the current retirement age?
Technology has a robust history of displacing jobs, and humans have a robust history of learning new skills. Change is never comfortable, but predictable.
I think hampering technological progress to protect jobs is the wrong approach though. We need to contend with the fact that traditional supply-side economics will start to break down as we enter an era where most or all human needs can be met with automation.
> Not everyone is cut out to be a software engineer, doctor, or lawyer.
Society used to say the same thing about reading and writing (not everyone is cut out to do that), and society was (mostly) wrong. Pushing people higher and higher up the value chain has been happening forever. Eventually we will hit singularity, but even the software engineers, doctors, and lawyers will be obsolete then.
1) We'll all need to collectively let go of our societal ideal that work is virtuous. We will need to accept that a significant portion of people have little to no productive work available to them, and that there is nothing wrong with that. It's just the natural culmination of increasing automation and societal advancement. UBI would be a necessity in this scenario.
2) We'll see an increasing number of "make work jobs" that exist solely to keep people busy, and to generate an illusion of productivity. These jobs may ultimately be government funded, although governments may obscure the source of the funding to keep the "productivity illusion" going. For example, governments may provide business grants to keep a certain number of low-wage workers employed. I suppose this essentially would be an indirect UBI program, except that we'd make people do some nominal amount of unproductive work to "prove" that they're worthy of the UBI.
I strongly suspect we'll head towards option 2.
I honestly can summarize it this way. Savers keep saving even when there is nothing left to save because there is no downside to having too much money but lots of upside to having more even if each single dollar is incrementally less useful. To maintain full employment all savings must be invested. The reason for that is quite simple. When you spend 50% of your income you are working more than you really need to. The extra hours that you are putting in mean someone else does not need to put in those work hours (50% less employment for them). So, you use the money which was previously sitting idle on a bank account by lending it out. Of course, the modern system has no direct connection between savings and actual money being lent out, rather it is the money hole (the money you have saved is not circulating) in the economy which causes unemployment that is driving further borrowing to restore full employment.
One could say that if you are working twice as much as you need, every second hour you are working is actually charity, it's not productive in the sense that you need it to maintain your lifestyle and it is not productive in the sense that anyone else has a need for it. There is no way you are getting a return off that charity when the economy is already saturated and everyone has everything they need. Yet money does not represent this act of charity, instead we pretend that you are still owed the same amount of products and services for all eternity, meaning what you are doing is not for the benefit of society, it's for your own benefit at the expense of someone else.
Probably the worst thing you can do is do what the Germany did before WW2. Do massive austerity programs during a depression hoping it makes things better. Homeless and starving people don't care that all the jobs are done by two thirds of the population if that means they don't get to eat. As I have said, if you are working more than you need to work for yourself, then you ought to work for the sake of someone else, anything else is selfish. If two thirds of the population is doing all the work and only doing it for itself then the rest is going to get angry very quickly.
> The extra hours that you are putting in mean someone else does not need to put in those work hours (50% less employment for them)
that's only true if you set the amount of necessary goods/services to a constant. I dont think that's true in the real economy - people have unlimited desires and demands, constrained only by the amount of money they have. The economy cannot be saturated, at least not until the world reaches star-trek level of tech where there's zero effort duplicators and materializers, and where no human labour is ever needed for anything.
Therefore, a person choosing a particular life-style that is less costly than they make in income is doing so because they expect to stop working in the future (and thus consume what they "save up" now, plus any improvements via productivity increases since). This savings takes a long and complicated path to turn into investment, but ultimately it would increase productivity, which is where the returns on investment comes from.
> if you are working more than you need to work for yourself, then you ought to work for the sake of someone else, anything else is selfish
well, the case study of communism ideal - that of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi... , vs what actually happened, tells me that this idealistic viewpoint doesn't work in reality. People will work more if it benefits themselves, and only if it benefit themselves.
If you shatter the "lie" that excess work is not for yourself, but for "charity", you also stop people from working more than bare sustenance, and it would stop the savings->investment->higher productivity cycle. Society would be poorer for it despite the equality that would result (everyone is equally poor).
That doesn't follow, it just means that the demand structure changes. One thing that happens is the comparative advantage for being human increases, but you are human so that makes it easier. eg YouTube is a new kind of automation that produced a job called YouTuber.
Job automation is great, but there are externalities that should be accounted for ahead of time. You can ask, "who pays for this?" Well, the obvious answer is the companies that will be enriching themselves due to society's sacrifice. Although, that has happened during the pandemic, so it's clear corporations aren't going to do so out of some sense of civic duty.
You understand. If the government can tell you that you can only drive even or odd days, tell you that you can't drive at all (and must use self driving cars inside the 4th or even 5th ring road) is a very distinct possibility.
Congestion arguably will worsen first.
They won't get stuck at left turns, on-ramps and rotarys due to an inability to use the skinny pedal to its full capacity.
That won't solve the sheer numbers problem but it's probably a solid sized constant factors improvement.
Millions of jobs will be lost within a few years.
And your comment didn't address of where these drivers will go in any way. "Adapt" is not an answer. Your average 46 year old truck driver will not be learning Javascript.
As in, a significant % of tractors are without human drivers, or as in, a significant % of tractors with human drivers have GPS-based assistance?
I live in a rural area and see several dozens of tractors every day, and FWIW, I've never seen a tractor without a human driver. Yet.
The issue in warehouses is that even before talking about control software behind automating, we simply don't have hardware for manipulators that are as versatile as human hands. That's why top of the line automated warehouses have sort of converged on automating everything except stations where humans can act like task reconfigurable pick and place machines. Better manipulators than biological hands is still an open research problem.
Automated cars don't have the hardware barrier, and as soon as the control software meets the required error rates, we should expect a rapid switchover to automated fleets.
When people hear that term they think of the robots that amazon installed that move product around the building for you and massive conveyor systems like UPS has for sorting packages. While those kind of machines are getting better and are slowly making their way into "smaller" companies (i.e. not the size of amazon) the biggest changes are on the ERP and data management side, tbh.
Cheap/plentiful handheld devices and robust/cheap wifi tech has been a game changer for us compared to the physical processes of using paper to direct staff on the floor. The processes we used 10-15 years ago are night and day to what we use in 2022, at least in my mid-sized fulfillment company.
Further, I expect the number of cars on the road to go way up because suddenly so many more people can use a car. For example, every one without a license. Kids, elderly, disabled. I also suspect it means there will be lots more long distance drives as suddenly it becomes "hey, wanna go to this place 3 hours away, we can play games and drink while the car drives us"
I'd certainly consider visiting my family 9hrs drive away more often if Friday at say 12am I could just climb in the backseat and go to sleep and arrive at 8am vs having to drive myself (usually 7am to 4pm)
Even in modern times we still have a surprising amount of Americans still use feature phones. The Pew Research Center found in 2018 that 17% of Americans still use feature phones. https://www.fool.com/investing/2018/02/19/a-foolish-take-17-...
See also: the internet. People still discussed seriously whether or not it had staying power as recently as 2008. It didn't really take off until the 2008 election pushed so many people to participate in new mediums. 2004 was kind of a prelude with Howard Dean's campaign, but he mostly reached the already online set. I was already on in the 1990s, and it still surprises me when I meet people my own age who didn't get on until the 2000s or 2010s even though it's the more common experience.
I find the idea that the Internet’s adoption was related to US presidential election cycles a little bizarre. I know they dominate the mainstream media for a few months every four years but surely the utility of the internet vastly exceeds that?
What about online shopping or even email displacing paper communications?
What they used to call feature phones back then (which I think are practically discontinued now - most current feature phones would be considered smartphones in 2006) supported texting but it was used less than on the 2006 concept of smartphones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helio_Ocean
When they said social network, they meant SMS Twitter. It was a very interesting time with lots of companies vying to be the next evolution of mobile.
Not to mention the rest of the planet. I'd like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the majority of the world is not-America, and views American presidential elections as a newsworthy diversion for a few weeks every four years, and not much more than that. Those elections don't really drive any changes in behaviour. Hell, my own country's elections don't really drive any changes in behaviour.
The main graph on the top of this page shows Internet Users as proportion of population in Developed countries went from 11% in 1997 to 31% in 2000.
It was basically right at 1999->2000 that you had internet stores completely melt down on Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.
This was the point where the Internet was escaping being some weird techie thing to being something that non-technical people were using.
This is not going to be a fast rollout.
In addition, each taxi will be replacing at least 10 cars, if it is sufficiently cheap and convenient.
According to RepairPal, the average Tesla maintenance cost is $832 per year. That compares to an average of $652 per year for all car models sold in the United States. Depending on which services your Tesla needs, you may end up spending much more than the average car owner on yearly maintenance needs.
Also, Tesla's aren't known for their reliability:
Though not much information exists yet about the overall reliability of Tesla models, early results aren’t encouraging. In the J.D. Power 2021 U.S. Vehicle Dependability StudySM, Tesla ranked 30th of 33 car brands for overall reliability. That’s better than only Jaguar, Alfa Romeo, and Land Rover among all automakers across the country.
J.D. Power reported an average of 176 mechanical issues per 100 Tesla vehicles, compared to an industry average of 121 issues. The organization notes, though, that it doesn’t rank the electric car brand with other major automakers because it doesn’t meet the study’s criteria.
What can be known is that Tesla models break down relatively regularly and that Tesla maintenance costs are pretty steep.
https://jalopnik.com/advisor/tesla-maintenance-cost/
Unreliable cars and a pretty steep per year cost to maintain them, along with steep repair costs (a broken door handle will run you about 1K plus labor)? This doesn't sound like the pipedream you're selling me here.
True reliability metrics are average years on the road and miles driven.
I wonder whether the average amount spent on non-warranty repairs would be a good metric to add to "average years on the road and miles driven". That would hopefully remove initial defects from the first few years and also remove defects that are so minor that most people won't pay to have them fixed.
Therefore Tesla's reliability might be even worse.
I would be very careful before relying on those maintenance cost figures - they are very dependant upon the age of the vehicles and neither figure sounds realistic, if you look at the following information.
https://www.yourmechanic.com/article/the-most-and-least-expe...
The link shows the cheapest average cost to maintain a vehicle over 10 years was $550/annum for a Toyota in 2016, and the most expensive was $1780/annum for BMW.
More importantly, further down, the article shows the cost increase over time for maintenance is about +$150/annum. At age 10 years the average maintenance is $1500, and it plateaus at about $2000/annum (because people retire vehicles when they get too expensive to maintain).
A Tesla doesn’t have oil changes or combustion engine problems, so some maintenance costs are reduced. However the battery eventually needs replacing, which is a large expense, so you must know whether the battery replacement is included in average yearly maintenance costs or not, before the figure is useable over the long term.
Gotta love how these numbers are both a decent sized integer multiple away from what you would think they are if you got your advice from the internet.
Your source seems to argue in favor of the numbers as well. If we just look at your Toyota and BMW numbers, the average holds true if there are 11 Toyotas to every BWM. That sounds plausible.
Electric cars are heavy, so expect more suspension failures. Running gear doesn't really change. AC is identical but with electric motors (prone to failure). Electrics will be worse if anything.
Tire wear may increase, but a robotaxi can also optimize driving style to reduce it.
None of those costs matter, compared to ICE. EVs just have less things that can break, and even less things that result in EOL or catastrophic failure. The more miles a taxi runs for, the more money it makes. Even if costs increased, the profit would easily make up for it.
Only because we regularly service them by replacing bushings, CV joints and ball joints regularly. And shock absorber failures are still commonplace.
> EVs aren't that much heavier
They're much heavier. It's obviously hard to make a direct comparison because there's no such thing as "equivalent but with an ICE engine" but a Golf E weighs about 250kg more than a Golf GTI.
> there are plenty of crazy heavy ICE vehicles that work without issue
And they have heavier duty components which require more servicing and are more expensive to replace.
> None of those costs matter, compared to ICE.
Can you show me some evidence for this? I am not making the claim that EVs are more expensive to maintain than ICE cars, but you made the claim that wear and tear costs (aka maintenance costs) on EVs are "negligible". You will need to show some receipts for a claim like that.
For an apples to oranges comparison, a Tesla Model 3 is 3,648 to 4,250 lbs; a Honda Accord is 3,150 to 3,430 lbs. Totally difference cars, but same-ish external size class. Those battery packs are heavy!
Personally I'd call 10% tiny.
Also you save a third of that when you remove the driver.
Maybe the demand would be even higher than that - I'm thinking of all people that cannot drive (e.g. because of age in a few years for my parents & other relatives), the ones that don't own a car (too costly, don't want it, whatever), introverted people that don't like driving in a taxi/uber (that's me! hehe), etc... .
Of course alternatives exist already now but often they lack something (e.g. bus to remote location X drives only once every few hours and/or only up to a certain time, taxi is very expensive and/or availability is unreliable) => a cheap robotaxi would be a game changer, there would be many indirect consequences (and in my opinion many would be positive, like less parking spaces needed, more mobility for old people, more flexibility about where-to-go-for-what, room in the trunk, etc...).
> Main cost now are the driver, and then fuel, and then vehicle wear/tear/depreciation
Especially thinking about an idle taxi vs. robotaxi (waiting for somebody wanting a ride): unbeatable, as the driver's cost not generating any revernue would not exist anymore (only vehicle deprecation based on time and cost of capital used to buy the vehicle, which are both very low) => the difference related to fixed costs would be incredible (but I assume that some additional/new cost will show up, e.g. some data-exchange-service to keep maps/routes extremely up-to-date, coverage for remote-assisted driver in the case that the car would get stuck, etc..., but that would probably still not increase costs a lot).
Another thing that would increase demand would be the cheaper cost of AI driven miles compared to human driven ones. Today, it's somewhat expensive to get anything delivered from local shops, due to how expensive it is to do local point to point delivery. But if the local bakery or restaurant could deliver for a dollar or two, that would change a lot of behaviors.
Also, if there is an unused resource for most of the day, capitalism will find a use for it!
How does autonomy reduce fuel consumption and wear?
"FSD" is another 12k IIRC
Total 59k
I don't understand this line of thought. Ownership will be relegated to ultra-luxury status if cars can drive themselves.
You're assuming that the cost will be much less with self-driving than ride share or cabs. It likely won't be a significant reduction for a while.
The same way a taxi or ride-share would drive you right now?
I actually agree that today’s Uber/taxi rates are probably a good estimate for many years even once self-driving is practical.
With autonomous vehicle adoption, we may see the concept of blockchain "gas" (fees paid with rates based on real-time demand) come full circle as a real-time congestion tax.
This sounds horrific for those of us who live in cities that are already overrun with cars.
The definition of "very very quick" is important here. The smart phone adoption took over a decade. to get to 80+%. [1]
Cars are much more expensive than phones, and last longer. The average age for a car in the US is 11.5 years [2] and people replace their cars between 5 and 7 years. [3] And my guess is self-driving technology will be used at the top-end of the market, and slowly trickle down. This is similar to pretty much any consumer technology: the technology starts off as a premium and becomes a commodity over a longer period if time.
So, if we use cell phones as a benchmark, it will take 10 years at a minimum. It likely will take 20 years given the duty cycle of vehicles. (Assuming we all still own a vehicle. If we all move to subscriptions, that might be a different story.)
Fleets will be replaced sooner, because the commercial ROI will be compelling. But it still takes a ton of capital to replace a fleet, and they need to get the ROI out of their _existing_ fleet before they invest in new ones. So even that won't be immediate.
But it might be uneven. I 100% agree with your example of sleeping through the night. If I can do that with a rental, and that's cheaper than flying, I might consider it.
[1] https://www.comscore.com/Insights/Blog/US-Smartphone-Penetra...
[2] https://www.carchex.com/research-center/auto-warranties/how-...
[3] https://www.quora.com/How-often-do-people-replace-their-cars
Even if the system + retrofit costs $50,000 that's an ROI of ~8 months. These numbers are made up but even with the most pessimistic of assumptions I believe widespread adoption will happen much faster than 10 years.
The big assumption is the retrofit market. Is that something anyone is talking about? Is that something Waymo and the like will be offering?
My point is: it makes sense, but is it the low hanging fruit someone will be going after right way? Or will this happen down the road?
It’s not just physical instillation their models would have to be adapted for different camera placement, vehicle weight, etc.
I think CommaAI is the closest to a kit, but it probably will never quite reach "no-human-required" autonomous driving; I don't think they're even aiming for that.
https://github.com/commaai/openpilot/blob/master/docs/CARS.m...
On top of this retrofits for every existing model is a non trivial problem on it’s own.
However delivering electrons to a powerpoint doesn't :)
I get your point though. The last mile stuff is tricky and fiddly, and will be done manually long after the long haul stuff has been automated.
This could be developed along-side trucking automation. Thus developing 2 networks meaning more resilience.
These couplings are a massive upgrade over the common hook&chain freight coupling, which requires substantial manual labor for (un-)hooking. The new ones theoretically allow for fully automatic freight shunting/train re-assembly.
Now we "just" need to up the speed limit for freight trains to at least the 140/160 km/h most commuter rail uses for max cruise speed, and retrofit the digital part as needed to the already-used mechanical coupling to some electric multiple units that operate on congested links with demand for intra-day freight. A few (1-4) box/container/"swap body (truck/rail only deriviates of ISO 20ft containers)" cars should typically be no problem for these EMUs (especially the longer ones), and would allow to realistically compete with trucks on interstates (Autobahn). Just needs some very small shunting engines, probably ideally remote-controlled (from the rail yard's tower), to add/remove freight cars from the tail while the passenger doors are open. Timings is tight, but some automation for fairly aggressive acceleration/deceleration profiles during that shunting should suffice. Maybe later even add a low tier electric car's drive train hardware-wise to some such container carrier wagons, to let them do the shunting and possibly last-mile trip simply on battery power, as that'd greatly speed up the shunting (low speed acceleration is friction limited, and a separate locomotive can't use the freight weight on the freight axles for traction. They're only outfitted with brakes on typical freight cars.)
For example, these "swap bodies" which are like ISO containers with fold-out legs, should IIUC be able to get put on their legs coming from a freight car (just by folding them out and maybe using some small lifting jack style hydraulics to get an inch or two clearance), followed by that freight car (if it has a battery pack and some small motors) driving away under remote control, and the truck trailer driving under it. This would only need a switch and non-electrified streetcar-style concrete pavement integrated track long enough for one or multiple of these, on the side of an existing railway station. Some $50-100k plus whatever the concrete truck yard pavement itself costs. Adding the battery drive system thing should probably be around $20-30k on top of what the freight car (with the digital automatic coupling) would cost normally, at least if it's only manually operated with sight contact. (It'd recharge via the train's electric heating bus that was originally designed to replace the steam heating for passenger carriages. The coupling that was/is used with hook&chain is 600A@1000V 16.7 Hz AC (in Germany), with one coupling either side of the coupling. This should leave ample recharging power for a small battery pack on the attached freight.)
This obviously only works where trains and existing road infrastructure are level, but on cursory inspection, many train stations here in Germany already have that. On many commuter links there's hourly or even twice-hourly service here, so even fairly short trips could realistically make use of this shifting of traffic from street to rail.
Training people to pump gas is possible but slow and a huge shift? Are you from Oregon or New Jersey, by any chance?
https://abovethelaw.com/2021/07/court-calls-bullst-on-cop-wh...
> The Court agrees with Gray that it is incredible that Officer Hiser—who self-admittedly does not have a heightened olfactory system—could smell the scent of two resealable sandwich sized plastic baggies of unburnt marijuana coming from a moving vehicle when patrolling in his cruiser. This occurrence is not only contrary to any common experiences, but is “implausible” and seemingly “contrary to the laws of nature.“
Adoption was also spread unevenly. Some parts of the country moved past flip phones long before others. There are still holdouts!
Cars will be an entirely different matter. People are trained to accept internet enabled devices and ridesharing already.
Once insurance rates for manual navigation clear those of an autonomous fleet vehicle, people won’t want the oil can Henry’s experience anymore.
You can already tell most people don’t want to drive anyway. They are looking at their smartphones as they idle down the street.
This could also play out totally opposite to that - think cheaper on demand rides, no need to park near your work if your car can just go do something else, etc. This might play out as actually less people owning a car, or families owning just one car instead of two, etc. I remember a prediction from a few years ago that it may reduce the number of cars by 80%, which I doubt, but I also don't think it will necessarily mean more people buying cars.
But let's ignore that fact, and instead look at a different definition of number of cars on the road: Instead of how many cars actually exist, count how many cars are on the road at any given time. It's not just that there might be more cars in the end, but even with fewer cars, each car will be doing more miles, because you don't need a driver. Children visiting each other while being less of a nuisance for parents mean more trips. Old people that are uncomfortable driving. People going further away in geneeral, because being driven would be less stressful when the technology is doing well. More visits to the bar, now that you don't have to call an uber, or risk a DUI on the way. And let's not forget letting the car go back home to park, instead of paying for expensive downtown parking: Same number of miles with a passenger, but bonus congestion for everyone else.
When driving is cheaper, the number of miles driven goes up, and therefore the number of cars that you actually find on the road goes up, even with fewer cars.
This is the wrong direction for the world to move in. We need to make our transportation efficient both to reduce emissions and not pillage the earth for rare minerals for these self driving electric cars.
MOST (not all) 3 hour drives can and should be done through train trips. Trains are efficient, they offer more equitable access to transportation, and they can be very fast. The American obsession with the automobile, and the way that obsession is pushed internationally through exported media, will ruin us all.
Price is another really big factor. Car buyers are generally not willing to spend even $3k on optional bells and whistles. My understanding is a lidar system costs like $20k. You can buy an entire car for that price tag.
Sleeper buses and the like also already exist and demand isn't really that high. Greyhound shut down a bunch of lines during the pandemic. I.e. if demand drops, an operator can go out of business. What makes a SDV fleet operator any less prone to the same sort of risk profile?
Another factor that seems suspiciously absent from Waymo discussions is Google's abysmal track record wrt customer support. Comms from Waymo always come out as carefully written press releases, but people actually using the service have to sign NDAs. Seems... kinda fishy?
That's just assuming rides will be dirt cheap. I don't expect that. With billions invested in R&D, costly hardware for self-driving car and tax starved governments to make money, these rides will be nowhere cheap where anyone could take ride anything between 10 min and 10 hours without second thought.
With all said and done I believe pricing will be in range of cab rides not bus rides.
And in areas with already bad traffic, it will only get worse. Much worse. You thought LA or SF pre-COVID were bad? Those will be the "good old days." And that's not just traffic, that's also hunting for parking everywhere you go (those cars have to be stored somewhere, after all).
A comprehensive public transportation system means people unable to drive can still get around. People act like self-driving cars are the solution when we already had a solution but (at least in America) proceeded to tear it apart as soon as we heard "cars are the future, get with the plan" and derided public transit as "welfare".
Fundamentally, we cannot "fix traffic", self-driving cars or no, because a 15-foot car holding 1-6 people cannot hope to compete with a 30-foot bus holding up to 30 passengers (on top of the driver), and that still doesn't hold a candle to a single train car (an 85-foot Bombardier MultiLevel railcar, for example, holds 132 people...and has a bathroom).
Compounding this is the American obsession with single-family housing and large minimum lot sizes: it is a fundamentally inefficient and unsustainable use of land. There is not enough space to build in this manner in the areas most in need of housing (which are, not so coincidentally, the areas where most of the jobs are), and it is this same inefficient use of land which makes public transportation difficult to run frequently enough that people stop using their cars for most trips.
When you build densely, you can run comprehensive public transportation that alleviates the need to have a car every time you need to go to work, the doctor, the grocery store, the park, etc. This also means people who cannot drive are afforded far more freedom than if they were to live in your average American suburb where sidewalks and pedestrian infrastructure more generally are an afterthought.
Far from a utopia, the future self-driving car advocates proclaim would be a nightmare. A nightmare where people are more isolated [0], more municipalities are struggling with debt [1], and even worse climate change [2]. This is not the future we should be excited for, it should be the one we are attempting to prevent at all costs.
Self-driving cars are fine (not having to deal with the TSA would be wonderful), but the way people think they will reshape society is nothing but a net-negative - we shot ourselves in the foot, but the proposed treatment is just putting on a band-aid and calling it a day. A high-tech band-aid, but a band-aid nonetheless.
[0]: https://citymonitor.ai/environment/citymetric-advent-22-snap...
[1]: https://www.strongtowns.org/the-growth-ponzi-scheme
[2]: https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/the-charac...
Edit: Another thing to consider - if self-driving cars enable way more people to get around, this isn't good for the environment because only 40% of US electricity is from renewable sources [3] (20% of that being nuclear, which we desperately need more of but which many environmentalists have an existential panic over due to envisioning them all as impending Chernobyls). Burning gas might be bad for the planet, but electric cars don't have a perfect footprint, either. In isolation, replacing all gas vehicles with electric (minus stuff like trucks) would likely reduce emissions, but adding a massive increase in trips would be far worse than if we had comprehensive public transportation in more cities and towns.
Have you ever done it via the bus. Because that gets you exactly what you want and overnight buses exist almost everywhere.
There's a reason most people prefer to fly.
Any source on that claim? I thought they reduced the costs of lidar to be in the order of a few k.
Waymo claims they will cost somewhere in the 150k range.
But regardless, I think even 100k is still quite different than "hundreds of thousands".
For that same reason, I think you're likely wrong about trucks. I suspect that autonomous - at least for the over the road portion of tips - will be highly compelling. American industry loves to substitute capital for labor costs, and that exactly what autonomous trucks do
Just some napkin calcs. In the US alone there are a total of 12.5 million heavy trucks registered (1). There were 288k heavy trucks manufactured in the US last year, up 20% from the last year (2). That works out to 43 years to replace the current fleet at the current production rate. It also passes the gut check because you'd expect to see trucks manufactured in the 80s to still be running, not so much trucks from the 70s. So even if we double production rates, it would be 20 years before we can replace all heavy trucks. That won't meet demand.
My takeaway is that there is a lot of money to be made in an add on solution that can somehow add the value of autonomous driving without manufacturing a new truck. This is low hanging fruit. It's a big deal to build and tool up an automotive plant. It's a different story when your bolting on a few parts and adding complex software controls. You don't need million dollar presses, welding robots, etc. You just need a few key components sourced from existing suppliers (motor drives for steering, brakes) a computer, likely with some nvidia edge computing stuff, and some fancy software that is hard to make initially, but easy to install on millions of trucks with the above hardware. This is a much more easily scalable business than making whole trucks, and therefore has potential to capture more market share faster, and ultimately could meet the demand faster. In a rate limited situation anything to increase that rate adds value, and I argue that this business model has a lower cost of entry, is more easily scalable, and avoids many of the pitfalls of starting an automotive/truck company.
It'll be a combination of both new autonomous heavy trucks and retrofits I imagine.
1. https://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/ourroads/large-trucks-and-buses-nu....
2. https://www.statista.com/statistics/412815/heavy-truck-produ...
Battery powered trucks are also expected to have lower downtime for maintenance and overhaul, so you can shave off another 5%. Rebuilding an engine and gearbox is an expensive maintenance activity that is completely eliminated, along with brake servicing due to regenerative braking.
Once the charger situation is figured out, probably an overhead catenary and dedicated charging lanes to keep the trucks in motion while charging, the savings will be compelling.
It's not true that brake services are eliminated, these trucks will still need conventional brakes. Yes there are some servicing savings, but these trucks have already been refined to be very reliable and have long periods of time between maintenance activities. The time savings due to less maintenance will be in the noise, maybe a few percent. The cost savings will be more, less fluids, etc.
The big factor here is the labor savings, all other efficiencies are there, but insignificant in comparison and will not be the driving factors for adoption - the labor savings will.
Not to mention the kid with the $500 Civic is almost certainly delivering faster than any autonomous vehicle will, robots won't chase lols and tips.
This is going to be singularly the biggest money making vector for any car/delivery business.
Whoever is first will be able to go to ford or any other car manufacture and buy/rent their business to 100% switch to their full-auto cars at whatever cost.
There will be no way to compete with autonomous vehicles, unless you are a train.
Even given transition would be slower 5-10years, you are still talking about massive support sector of the drivers' related economy wiped.
How do you recon all of those businesses and people adopt?
As soon as a tipping point is hit, major areas will open roads to self driving cars only.
Add to that that the latest generation of cars are electric (quiet, cleaner, more efficient, longer lasting), and as more people move to that there will be fewer gas stations, more ICE hate, etc.
The result will be a very sudden shift to electric self-driving cars. Which will create a loop, and perhaps a shift much more faster than one might think. My guess is two years from when Waymo is convinced their vehicles can go anywhere to where such cars are mainstream, and another two years till ICE are outlawed on all major roads.
Maybe living in lala land with that, but even if it takes 8 years - that will still throw a lot of people out of a job.
I still think your prediction is too optimist. IMO (I admit, based on gut feeling) either we won't have it or the goals will have changed and it will only work in special roads (almost like rails for trains). See you in 10 years (if hn still exists!)
Rail freight will probably be impacted by automated trucks sooner than road freight, weirdly enough.
My guess about the industry's progression:
* Automated trucks take over long haul routes (e.g. highway driving) between major distribution hubs, and previous long haul drivers move to middle and last mile routes.
* Shippers begin to shift freight away from trains and towards trucks (because price of trucks goes down, speed of delivery goes up)
* Automated truck centric freeways (or lanes) begin to show up, allowing for higher density and speeds of truck traffic. Price further falls, volume increases. More jobs created in short and medium haul trucking to handle increased volume of things being shipped.
* Automated trucks begin to be able to handle medium haul (inner city between warehouses), jobs start declining.
* Automated trucks begin to be able to handle short haul (last mile), truckers are a truly dying breed at this point.
Europe and America are about the same size. Why aren't you concerned about European scale? Why does it matter how your brain pictures administrative boundaries?
I may be grossly oversimplifying the issue :)
Might require a built up of rail infrastructure and I don't know the limits of freight trains in general, but seeing passenger trains, going 2-3x faster than road speed limits I reckon while maybe not by as much, freight trains could still go quite a bit faster than driving the trucks long distances.
However, I could not see this working well in places like Chicago. I have a hard time believing a self driving car could safely navigate a road mostly covered in snow.
Either way it will be interesting to see what happens in the next 10 years.
Let me put it this way.... How often do any governments have a plan for changes *beforehand?."
Almost every western country saw "deindustrialization" at some point, predictably cutting off whole cohorts from wages, pensions and lifestyles. None had a plan.
They watched Walmart behead high streets and then watched Amazon behead the survivors. No plan. War is, arguably, the thing we plan and provision for the most. Wartime refugees always seem to take us by surprise.
I'm sure someone somewhere, in theory, had a plan for a pandemic. But when it happened, a whole lot seemed to be off the cuff.
Stuff happens, then we plan and react. At best.
Yang did a good job of grokking the implications, but he wasn't taken very seriously and his messaging wasn't great I think. But the crux of it was solid - "XX thousand mid 30's truckers w/ iffy education all out of work, and that work was one of the last solid, fairly high paying long term jobs that demographic could land so how happy will that demographic be?"
Buttigieg is a smart guy and he might be thinking about it per his DoT seat, but I haven't followed his takes on it if they exist. Watching some of the cybersec-focused hearings and comments from Ben Sasse also seem to indicate technical awareness.
Overall, I do think some of the more tuned-in politicians have read some Jaron Lanier though based on the policy ideas that nod in this direction I've heard about and how they mirror his writing. He doesn't paint a great mid-term picture (tldr a lot of unemployment) but long term he offers some interesting ideas on how there might be a positive landing - data-aggregators collapse under the weight of their own data management costs vs. ability to really parse it well for profit ("siren servers"), automation/internet taxes which open up a UBI based on the robot labor, that sort of thing.
This sounds really cynical and ageist but I do think we're in a standstill until Buttigieg and his generation are the senior leaders. Even breaching the surface of the pretty good certainty of what you describe (to include the sci fi -> real life mapping trend you mention, which I agree with) when watching these tech hearings makes me think we have some time to wait.
Some of the other points seem legitimate, but this one seems silly.
It's trivially easy _now_ for someone to sign up for uber and drive people to random locations, and that doesn't happen.
Presumably, with driverless taxis, we'll still have the same level of assurance we have now (use the app, app tells us a license plate for a valid car, that's the one you get into). Right now, you can get a driver who misbehaves, or uber could get hacked and send incorrect dropoff locations. In a driverless world, only the second attack matters since the chance of a malicious driver is gone.
Truck drivers jobs are the monitor and secure the shipment just as much as anything else. Taxi drivers have to keep their cars clean.
And a lower cost of shipping will just mean that more stuff gets shipped in what would otherwise be a less efficient way, no different than how faster computers often just lead to less efficient software design.
Anyone else wish there was a platform to place this bet on? Maybe with a smart contract? lol
Long haul drives are the edge case, last-mile trucking won't be anywhere near the first thing to get automated, people aren't suddenly going to want to sleep in their car to do overnight trips, etc. The biggest future change to fuel stops is electrification, not automated cars.
Consider for a moment that Waymo is very early into the "hey, we are allowing driverless rides on very well mapped roads!" situation. How many years have they been almost at that point already? Now put that together with the typical R&D timeline for a new car (perhaps 6 years plus or minus), and the average lifespan of a car (11 years and climbing, last I checked). No manufacturer has legitimate driverless cars in the production pipeline. We're quite a lot farther than 10 years from seeing any consumer driverless cars on the road, much less a significant enough number of them to worry about 'two-tier' driving experiences. The EV transition is going lightning fast by comparison.
But we should expect that this transition will be very similar to the transition from horses to cars. The first cars were unreliable and unsafe and didn't work well on roads designed for horses. But as cars improved the advantages quickly became huge and demand for horses dropped quickly.
The same situation is happening with Tesla. FSD is unreliable and unsafe today but once it hits an inflection point the advantages are so big more and more people become willing to accept the downsides.
The big deal is the second order effects. Cars can driver 50 MPH so we build highways and now we can have suburbs.
For autonomy it means that logistics systems can be centrally planned and programmed like never before with no need to factor in the human costs or restraints around sleeping, stopping for food, etc. Then the third order effects of that are very hard to predict
Early cars were designed as [carriages with the horses removed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseless_carriage). It would not be until many years later until we saw car designs that leveraged the unique technological advantages of horseless cars to deliver designs that looked and functioned nothing like horse-drawn carriages. We're still at this stage with automated driving.
As automated vehicles become more commonplace, we'll see designs that leverage the inherent benefits of automaton. For example, we might see designs that essentially function as moving living rooms, bedrooms or meeting rooms on wheels. We might see other designs that resemble small busses, where groups of people travelling to geographically proximate locations can carpool into a single automated vehicle. Heck, we might even see something like moving diners on wheels (potentially serving several clients at once), because why wouldn't you want to eat a hot breakfast in the "car" while on the way to the airport or work.
Once these new designs and use cases become commonplace, people in the future will view our car designs as increasingly archaic and restrictive (just like how we view horse-drawn carriages today).
If you can sleep comfortably as your car drives you from SF to LA, it is a game-changer. If you can WFH from your car as you commute to the office for mid-morning meetings, you can live farther from town.
Removing the labor costs of having a driver allows everyone to experience the transformative benefits of having a chauffeur. Rich people like chauffeurs because they buy time, the most-precious commodity.
It’s annoying to drive a car, but a self driving car isn’t going to massively change things. The bottleneck in most road systems are where they interface with pedestrians and cyclists (one can only cross the street so fast); self driving cars might improve highway capacities but the bottleneck is usually a backup from too many people coming or going on the same ramp into a traffic light.
So we can put an end to all the death they cause, and the pollution they create.
Motorbikes are a thing. Apart from weight/balance relationships to control, many riders are "take control from my dead hands" types so I don't think the market will easily convert to self-driving.
It'll be interesting to see what happens. Maybe motorcycles will fade out or be banned. I will enjoy mine while I can.
There will still be plenty of jobs for drivers for the next 10-20 years. We'll see a mix of people retiring early, retraining, and switching into support and operational roles.
Out legal system is extremely flexible and will easily accommodate self driving cars. It already handles more complex ownership issues related to product liability.
There won't be a problem with fake taxis just like there isn't problem with fake mail delivery (delivering bombs for the "lols").
I really don't want a world in which governments get out of the way of food regulation, building codes, and other such things.
Reorganizing the economy around trucker job displacement is not something the government needs to be involved in.
We really need to start implementing universal basic income
Why is it assumed, a priori, that those displaced people cannot be retrained for some other useful job?
I think the actual anxiety is about being put out of work by self-driving trucks. Truckers can see the future of trucking and don't see themselves in it. Nobody seems to be working on a plan for the millions of workers whose skills will no longer be needed.
How Many Truckers Are There? Approximately 3.5 million truck drivers are employed in the United States, out of which 1 in 9 are independent, and most are owner-operators.
https://policyadvice.net/insurance/insights/how-many-truckin...
EDIT: Actually it was very quick and easy: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1419897600&dateRange=custom&...
Autonomous cars that can "tattle" to the authorities on vehicles that break speed limits or violate traffic laws. Maybe the owner of the autonomous vehicle would even get a cut of any traffic fines.
It's not really clear what you mean by this - we have driverless cars now, but I assume you're talking about them being ubiquitous.
My assumption is that we haven't really gotten any closer to generalizing autonomous car behaviour outside of very "clean" situations (like exhaustively tested routes in a city with known intersections) in the past 10 years, and I'm not sure we're going to make much progress on that in the next 10 years either, without a significant shift in the ways we're solving these problems.
To echo another commenter - people were saying this 10 years ago too.
How does one "know" this exactly?
You certainly don't know that - at least on roads generally. You might have a reasonable hope that in some highly constrained environments they might be an option, but that's very different.
The same arguments are made about EVs and not enough power on the grid, but those are similarly false for the same reason, the change will be gradual. Also people love to hate on capitalism but it does a very good job of adjusting for this type of thing, especially when changes are slow.
Impact will be minimal. Truckers don't pay much, and over the years, truckers business has gone down significantly.
At the same time, motels aren't likely the big losers here as I believe most long-haul truckers sleep in the beds in the truck
* reduced income for cities from speeding and parking tickets, and the reduction in people who give the tickets, all the processing that goes along with that.
* availability of large lots of urban land due to lower parking needs (though there are many good uses for this like urban farming)
* significant decrease in the need for auto repair shops. Partly because electric cars have less moving parts and are more reliable than ICE, but also because autonomous cars (possibly/likely) have fewer accidents. This may not happen all at once, but as they improve..
I used to have a much larger list, but I forget what many of those are.
That's deep. Are you quoting this or its your own words, either case this is nice quote.
It is also hard to imagine anyone in government is incentivized to go after such issues. The huge lobby machinery that will influence the planning when the time comes.
That solves part of the unemployment problem, at least for the more photogenic "teens".
In typical human fashion, we're not going to do anything until everything blows up.
For example, it's going to take years (I'd put my money on 15-20 years at least) to get general availability in NYC. The roads are terrible, inconsistent, and often lacking in clear markings; the density of cyclists and pedestrians is high; and the regulators hate any kind of change, let alone one that challenges employment.
Then there's all the infrastructure that needs building - charging stations, road improvements (I assume, for example, many highways will get some kind of infrastructure dedicated to making autonomous easier), maybe some last mile handoff to human drivers in certain jurisdictions, upskilled maintenance centers, warehouse facilities that can handle the presumably increased loads, communications infrastructure, etc, etc.
TLDR the build out is going to be a much bigger lift than you might think. Just look at how slow the rollout of 5G is going.
It will be in a states best interest to create a tax structure around autonomous vehicles from other states performing services within its borders. Possibly a defensively high tax rate in order to promote in-state ownership of in-state autonomous vehicles.
* Inner city car transport will become more popular, since parking won't be a huge limit
* Self-driving rideshare cars can outcompete there consumer counterparts on price - there's no need for a powerful engine, and a large battery since it will be used for small distances at low speeds.
* Car ownership will plummet, which will free a ton of expensive parking lot real-estate to be developed
* Ridesharing will reduce the amount of cars by 2x-4x, eliminating traffic jams
* Owning a house with an 1 hour commute outside city limits will be much more feasible, as you can just sit in the car, and commute into the city, generally the value of inner city lots will go down.
I think this is an absolutely monumental shift.
My dream is to call a car to a place near my home, get in, and automatically drive me to one or more locations, before returning me home. I’m 45, and I doubt this will happen in my lifetime.
Edit: anxiety also because I wasn't sure it would recognize the bike trailer as a real thing. How many bike trailers end up in the training set?
In fact, the very same channel (JJ Ricks) has a ton of in-the-field Waymo videos where it works exceedingly well.
Perhaps that not everyone records a taxi ride and posts it on YouTube.
It's the kind of thing that could all be fixed in a few days of rehearsals of what to do when cars get into this state. I suspect that the main failure was that rider support had a button to 'pull over', but that the route to pull over was blocked by a cone, so the car failed to pull over, and then rider support seeing the failure probably tried to cancel the pullover (to try again), and it ended up keeping driving.
A simple logic change or even just better training/documentation could have fixed this.
Waymo has one (now two) heavily geofenced service areas with a few dozen cars. It won't take highways. It won't enter certain intersections or transit certain neighborhoods.
Just recognize that there's some level of cherry-picking error in this kind of analysis. FSD beta and Waymo both make mistakes (mine curbed a tire once, there's the now-famous video of the car hitting the plastic bollard in San Jose, etc...), but you're going to see far more of those from one system than the other.
Wait. “Keep your hands on the wheel” drives are NOT fully autonomous. By definition.
-> Tesla is actively killing people. -> Tesla has much higher rate of requiring driver intervention, and mostly drives in safer environments.
I really struggle w/ how to communicate to non-industry people how deeply wrong-misleading the Tesla pitch is.
Literally this is why I trust it more, the people running the company are willing to realistically evaluate the limitations of their systems and act responsibly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Safety_concern...
For context, I live in a major city. I've seen people pulling these things round busy multi-lane roundabouts and the like.
I was thinking about this other day with my 4 month old. We were looking at four or so houses to purchase with a real estate agent. We were having to load her in and out of her car seat in the car repeatedly which is not fun (she cries when you set her in the thing). One of the houses was 1/2 a mile or so away and it crossed my mind that I could just hold her in the back seat while we coast through a few intersections. I then pictured the outcome of a minor accident and decided that it was worth the additional effort to ensure that my kid wouldn't be ejected.
Everything we do is a risk calculation and some people have decided that the risk is worth the convenience or cost.
I suppose my thought was illegal while toting your child around in a bike trailer isn't so there is that factor too...
Those kid trailers seem very dangerous, I ride my bike in cities all the time (NYC and SF) and get very close to reckless drivers. I have to imagine being a passenger in a bike trailer, in a city, is quite a risk
I have no idea why parents use those bike with the kids in the back. Why not just use a car? It's not even like those bikes are particularly cheap. The ones I see sell for thousands of dollars.
36/80,000 = 0.00045
80% drive a car and about 250 die a year:
250/3200000 = 0.000078125
So its not quite a full order of magnitude more dangerous, but either way I'd say your odds are pretty low in either case. Even lower if you choose to bike safely, such as taking less busy residential streets vs commercial arteries or even opting for the sidewalk on those busy arteries, wearing helmets and using lights, using defensive bike strategies like avoiding lefts in favor of utilizing a perpendicular street, not being drunk, etc. I bet out of those 36 deaths in my city, none took place on like a 25mph residential street.
(There has been one death so far, with Uber behaving super irresponsibly: https://www.jefftk.com/p/uber-self-driving-crash)
Dangerous human drivers are likely to be consistently erratic (e.g., drunk), or distracted and oblivious in certain situations (bikes, intersections, lane changes).
For all we know, an AI driver might drive perfectly for three hours, and then accelerate full speed onto the sidewalk.
And that's valid for now. That a company has not had a major accident so far does not mean that I'm not going to be their first victim.
I love the idea of self driving cars.
But they are also really scary.
They're being brought to us by the same industry that gave us
* BSOD
* "why the heck can't I share my screen right now? can you share your screen? yes? well why can't I share my screen?"
* Your account has been terminated for breaking the terms and conditions. You cannot appeal this decision. We are now deleting 4TB of your life's work.
* An attacker has gained access to your email account. Your life is now ruined.
`But they're safer than human drivers!`
So what. They're new, they're capable of killing you, they're brought to you by tech.
They're f'n scary.
Self-driving advocates will do well to acknowledge this rather than being dismissive.
Uber's murder car was not autonomous. It was not capable of ever operating without a "safety driver". Therefore it was not an autonomous vehicle. Nor is any Tesla.
Waymo has operated cars with zero humans aboard at various points going back quite a few years. They are legitimate autonomous vehicles.
I think the risk of a malfunction is much higher with a robot than a sober human, and probably most legally intoxicated humans.
I don't base it on Hollywood, but in years of programming experience. Anyway, did you hear about the 737 that crashed due to a software bug last month?
Thank you for a textbook example of begging the question.
What is that based on? Do you mean the proportions of AI and human drivers?
Something similar to checking if driver is paying attention and is aware that I'm going to cross in front of their car by looking at direction where driver is looking or a hand gesture.
Maybe they were on to something with the Jonny Cab mannequin in Total Recall.
Good idea. Maybe the car can turn on an indicator when it has made the decision it is going to move, something that even gives an idea of where it is intending to move.
[1] https://www.wallpaper.com/transport/waymo-division-autonomou...
Pulling your kid in a bike trailer in SF is awesome and admirable, but also a little bit crazy :-)
I expect it to be friendlier to bikers and pedestrians than human drivers.
As a biker, most of close calls are due to impatient drivers who try to overtake me through close calls and when they enter turns without looking first. AFAIK, Self-driving cars do not initiate same-lane overtakes and can be hardcoded to be paragons of patience.
With how hostile American drivers are towards bikers, self-driving cars would need Skynet-esque malice towards us to match those injury rates.
LIDAR can usually distinguish translucent smoke from solid objects like bikes/pedestrians even before the ML algorithm kicks in.
Paper bags are tricky, because a bag on the ground could just as likely be a solid object that the car should be stopping for. Stopping or slowing down for bags may be a good idea.
This is why you have radar as well. The paper bag absorbs minimal energy and you roll through it. (also it's "brake")
It's worth noting that TED talk is from 7 years ago and it's still much better than what a modern Tesla appears to be able to determine.
Could you clarify? In which direction does it make a difference?
EDIT: This was posted above for different reasons, but you can see the render is real-time. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdKCQKBvH-A&t=401s
For some reason Tesla still uses old visualization software for non-FSD beta vehicles. This both means objects the system sees aren't on-screen and the interpolation algorithm for making the 3d models look smooth-moving is pretty bad.
You can’t see that with your eyes because brain compensates and smoothes visual experience.
Tesla accurately represents reality.
It's kind of hard to tell, but they do seem a lot more reliable than Tesla's. Of course that's not surprising seeing as they use LIDAR.
As far as I know, they still don't/won't drive in the rain, and they operate safely and slowly. I want to believe this thing is moving forward, but I'm skeptical about building a marketplace where the service is unavailable exactly when demand is highest. It creates conflicts of interest, that at best, encourage actors to take risks that can undermine the entire industry.
So I wonder, have regulators stalled or stop pushing for new safety features under the false belief that we’re going to have self driving cars any day now, so what’s the hurry? I feel like it has, although admittedly it’s just a feeling and I’ve done no research.
Collision avoidance systems are our generations seat belt. It’s still pretty shocking to me this tech isn’t mandated as a safety feature yet considering the very real potential to save lives from distracted driving.
Has the pr shit storm all these companies shamelessly capitalize on affected this technology implementation?
We generally think of these sorts of lies as harmless and a result of overly ambitious visionaries. But I think in a real way this is the type of thing that could cost lives, in the sense that if regulators understood they are 20-30 years away from mass market, they might actually push for more safety reforms which could save lives.
Consider that airlines are a well established and reliable business worth trillions around the globe. And yet they also don’t take off or land in adverse weather conditions. Sometimes there’s a snowstorm and a whole day of flights is canceled.
But none of that invalidates the existence of the industry as a whole.
A driverless taxi service in any city where it snows will never exist.
It will not be possible to replace my personal car with a driverless car.
Relatives who are in the southern states (with driverless cars) will not be able to visit for many winter holidays.
---
Self driving cars are very interesting - but can you get to the point where it is possible to replace them in Chicago or Minneapolis with the same availability for personal or services as a human driven one?
With airlines, yes, shutting canceling the flights out of O'Hare is certainly inconvenient. Is it reasonable to also make it so that people can't get to work via local commuting because of snow?
To get to the point where self driving is default, it needs to be able to handle the conditions that a human driver currently does with the same availability. This goes for taxis, trucks, and the daily commute and errands.
For self driving cars to succeed, there just has to be a few good use cases where people prefer them to normal cars, and there's sufficient economic value to run a business. They do not have to murder the existing car industry in order to 'succeed'.
Look at electric vehicles - they've been around for more than a decade now. Many ppl have one and it adds value to their life. Still you can't do _everything_ a gas car can do like drive 1000 miles in a single day. But that's not important because there are places they do shine.
And even though there's still way more ICE cars than EVs on the road, you probably wouldn't argue that EVs "aren't a thing".
Also, you're assuming that the world/environment around the innovation is static, when in most cases the world adapts around the innovation. For EVs, we now see charging stations at grocery stores and office buildings to assist people which the battery capacity problem
In the driver's defense (computer or human), SF's signals have gotten very complicated in the last ~10 yrs and even non-robot drivers fail to follow the rules about 20% of the time. 3 places I can see this happen every day are (1) 4th and Townsend on Townsend facing NE (the one above). The issue is the left lane has a green light but the right lane has a separate right turn signal because there is a bike lane further to the right that gets green first. Sit at the corner and I guarantee within 10 right turning cars someone will turn on red.
Similarly, 5th and Bryant on 5th going NW (into the city). This has a similar deal. There's an on ramp to the freeway but it has a separate right turn signal from the green forward signal. This one, for me, is around 100% violation by which I mean I've never NOT seen a violation at the corner. Not ever car, but ever signal at least one car will turn right on to the freeway even though there are 2 large no right turn lights and a green bike light.
The last is 4th and King, on 4th going SE facing the bay. I'm not sure these are technically violations. The left lane is painted as left turn only. The right as right turn only. The middle lane crosses King. Again, this is close to 100% for at least one car per signal ignoring those markings. I don't blame them as there's no way to see the markings until you're just a few car lengths from the intersection and if there are other cars there you can't see them at all. Further, looking up the law, solid white lines are just guidelines. It's legal to cross them. (double white are not). Still, people in the center lane get angry and honk when people in the left or right lanes cut them off since they weren't expecting it.
"Waymo and Cruise self-driving cars took over San Francisco streets at record levels in 2021 — so did collisions with other cars, scooters, and bikes" [1]
"...Many of the accidents, which the companies are required to report to the California Department of Motor Vehicles, occurred while the vehicles were operating in manual mode, with a safety driver in control.
...But according to an analysis by Insider, a majority of the 98 reported accidents in 2021 occurred while the vehicles were in autonomous mode, or within seconds after the autonomous mode technology had been switched off..."
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/self-driving-car-accidents-w...
Waymo has been scaling their level of testing with their level of safety. What has changed is that Waymo think they are safe enough to start doing more widespread testing in SF without a safety driver.
This seems to be a strong counter to all those who were claiming that level 4 self-driving cars would be limited to flat, dry climates for the forseable future.
Now the question is, did the government officials who approved this, been given access to this data? And if not, why not?
> The Waymo AV was stopped in traffic, eastbound on Irving Street in autonomous mode. A parked car to the right of the Waymo AV began reversing into the street and made contact with the rear right side of the Waymo AV.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
1. liability cross section scales with size of fleet if waymo is solely responsible for developing their algorithms
2. added operational cost of running a self driving car - is it worth it to average consumer? This is something everyone throws numbers out for but here is what i'm thinking:
- we have lots of examples of transportation systems that have some level of automation (eg. train, subway, planes) but even after decades of robust operations, nearly all of them still require operators in the loop. This is especially striking since rail systems/subways are as closed-loop and simple as you can get in terms of automation. As an outsider, it's unclear to me why they are needed but they are there. Is it because as fleets age, their parts wear down in unpredictable ways? Is it some regulatory requirement?
- for self driving cars, will the same expectation be there eventually? either a remote assistance driver or a chauffer safety driver? If that is the case, then it will be difficult for a self driving car to be cheaper esp with the added cost of all self driving tech stack and operational costs.
Early high-cost self-driving cars largely won't be owned by individual consumers where the cars spend the majority of their time parked. They will be owned by companies that sell access to them as taxis by the minute/mile and can justify the cost by minimizing downtime.
A problem I spotted is, shortly after that turn, it sees the person ahead trying to parallel park... and then it give them several car lengths of distance while it waits. It's waiting so far back that the vehicle behind it couldn't fully clear the intersection.
That's not particularly "fair" of it to do that.. nor is giving such a large space to the parallel parking particularly useful or expected. I do not have high expectations for a road filled with this level of barely autonomous agents operating smoothly en masse.
That said, I’ve seen Waymo still being too cautious relative to Cruise. Like I was waiting on the crosswalk with my bike at a 45-degree angle, and Waymo seemed terrified that I was going to bike diagonally through on-coming traffic. It was kind of hilarious.
That said when I’ve tried to test the safety parameters on Cruise while on my bike or skateboard and the system has called my bluff. I don’t know if this means Cruise is less safe. Or they’ve found a way to give the AI a sense of confidence and assertiveness against people using micromobility to aggressively bypass urban traffic congestion.
I'm looking forward to mass robotics.
I'm not looking forward to corporate dark patterns in mass robotics.
I feel like Cruises are a bit more cautious, to the point of making me skeptical. But again, I’m struggling to think of any example in particular.
This might be silly but I also think the Cruise cars are much more ugly.
Cruise is limited (by their own choice) to operating between 11 PM and 5 AM. Waymo is operating at all hours of the day. That alone indicates a much greater level of confidence in their capabilities. The complexity of driving in a busy street in SF at daytime is dramatically higher than at night, especially in SF, which tends to be pretty sleepy after hours. Note that both companies avoid driving in SOMA, FIDI, and other challenging parts of the city.
This new announcement doesn't specify their driverless hours. I suspect that they would have highlighted it if they were the first to be driving around SF in the daytime, just as they highlighted the first of being driverlessly deployed in multiple cities.
My guess (also in the industry) would be that Waymo combines Google's incredible technical skill with Google's incredible incompetence at focused execution. This is why they haven't had a milestone in a couple years since their deployment in Phoenix. I also think that this combination of strengths and weaknesses is a good fit for the AV industry.
2. Waymo's service area in SF is more than twice that of Cruise's. Unsurprisingly, both of them avoid downtown areas.
3. Waymo has hundreds of vehicles in San Francisco. Cruise only has a fraction of that — last I heard, only <10 of them were providing driverless rides.
4. According to CA DMV 2021 disengagement data, Waymo is driving almost 3x more miles than Cruise.
Waymo seems to love a slow and steady approach, but when they announce a service it's fully featured as we've seen in Chandler, AZ.
It sounds like Waymo, sure, but not like Google. There's a reason they're separate companies.
Waymo’s “Waymo One” app makes you fill out a pretty extensive questionnaire to sign up and suggests they will do some kind of checks about the other members of your household. Filled out rather invasive info out yet still no access.
Cruise makes you fill out a simpler form but puts you in a cue to get the actual app. Know several people who have filled it out but none have gotten the app.
So far no actual robotaxis in SF.
It sounds like you think "a vehicle that works in a limited set of circumstances" qualifies as a car. As a mode of transport in some areas, I get why that would seem useful. Busses, trams and trains work like that. And subways! I use all those: they're great.
I imagine the GP thinks of cars as "can go almost anywhere with limited immediate infrastructure, even some way off-road". That's how I think of them. I can imagine "driverless cars that operate like 1-5 person taxis in urban areas that have specialised roadways" could show up. But to me, these are not "cars". They don't get me to a party in the woods; they don't let me park up illegally when I need to sleep; they probably don't let me rush an injured person or someone giving birth to prepared to deal with the legal consequences later.. etc.
These things will not be "cars"; they'll be non-mass-public-transit.
... do we even need n-gate anymore?
I don't understand at all what you mean by "should". The comment I was responding to said that [whatever this is] "wasn't a reality". This was a top-level comment to the announcement itself, not a response to a comment claiming "well, human-operated cars are officially over". Doing exactly what a current, human-operated car is an irrelevant, arbitrary point of comparison, introduced by the GP comment.
This makes exactly as much sense as saying that the first motor vehicles "weren't a reality" until, like a horse, you could take them on trails, jump over low obstacles, and live in the wilderness with them indefinitely.
That's what I'm pushing back against: it's classic ignorant Luddism to set imaginary bars for new technologies and then insist that the new tech isn't valuable at all on that basis. I know this is super-common, but it's an eternal pet peeve of mine, as I can't help but imagine how much better the world would be without people like this.
Many cars today have severely limited ability to drive on even rough roads (let alone off-road), that doesn't make them not "cars".
In general, I think the argument you are poorly phrasing the argument you are trying to make.
You seem to be trying to say that until self-driving technology can handle all use cases, you don't want to own a car without human driving controls.
I don't think such exclusively driverless cars will be marketed to consumers for a long time.
What we will see in the nearer is more standard consumer cars with varying ranges of level 4 self driving capabilities. These cars will match every one of your criteria.
Roads currently exist that human beings can currently drive on. If you tell me you have a fully autonomous car, I would expect that to mean it can do everything a human can do on currently existing roads in all conditions that a human being can operate in. This seems entirely reasonable.
This has nothing to do with "sustainability".
Your comment was not "these are not 100% replacement for cars yet", which would obviously be uncontroversial. It was "these are not a reality yet". You've chosen an arbitrary bar for considering these "real", in exactly the same way that serving small rural communities is an arbitrary bar with which to dismiss the real value that subways create.
A level 4 car would, by definition, never require you to take over while the vehicle is in motion. This level of automation operates safely with nobody in the driver's seat.
A level 3 car requires a driver to pay full attention and "zoning out" would be unsafe behavior on behalf of the driver. Level 3 is considered by many to be dangerous given the human propensity to zone out despite being responsible.
One key question here is how you'd handle the cases where the system can't reliably perform at the top level. Consider the scenario I described earlier with a system which was level 4 in reasonable conditions: attempting to switch between full self-driving and human oversight frequently would be a safety hazard but you could probably safely release a system which is, say, L4 for long highway trips where a human driver could take a nap for an hour before having to take control to enter a complex city like Boston where the system would you to treat it as L3 or less for the entire trip during bad storm conditions or construction because it's safer to set the expected level of attention clearly at the beginning of the trip.
That isn't level 4, that is level 5.
> you are going to have build systems which safely handle that challenge of inconsistent attention
Level 4 is geofenced, but able to perform safely without any level of attention from any human driver. If a human is required to be in the driver's seat to take over on demand, then you are describing level 3, not level 4.
> attempting to switch between full self-driving and human oversight frequently would be a safety hazard
It shouldn't be. If a self-driving system can't safely reach a place to park in a region, with no human interaction, it is not level 4 in that region.
Technology doesn’t arrive perfectly in its final form. Progress for AVs is going to look painfully iterative from here. Waymo and others will roll out their AVs to increasingly more difficult areas while also reducing the number of disengagements. They will all likely have a human operator fallback for quite some time.
Everyone keeps going on about the edge cases, about self driving cars not being ready until they can handle everything. Half the people on the road can't handle all the edge cases. They exist, they are drivers.
Let's not pretend the bar to be a "driver" is so high.
Despite the claims of "no human driver behind the wheel", there'll still be what amounts to a driver, they're just calling the person a "specialist" instead of a "driver":
> Just as we’ve done before, we'll start with Waymo employees hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the wheel, with the goal of opening it up to members of the public via our Trusted Tester program soon after.
Edit: looking at the full context of that quote, they’re talking about their plan for removing the safety driver in downtown Phoenix.
>Our commitment to Phoenix and the community there remains strong, and we’ll soon be expanding to another area: Downtown Phoenix. Just as we’ve done before, we'll start with Waymo employees hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the wheel, with the goal of opening it up to members of the public via our Trusted Tester program soon after.
"Our commitment to Phoenix and the community there remains strong, and we’ll soon be expanding to another area: Downtown Phoenix. Just as we’ve done before, we'll start with Waymo employees hailing trips with autonomous specialists behind the wheel, with the goal of opening it up to members of the public via our Trusted Tester program soon after."
(Disclosure: I work for Google, a sibling company to Waymo.)
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/37.76628/-122.46048
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7663897,-122.4603632,19.6z?h...
Google Maps has this level of detail in. S.F. and Phoenix, their two self-driving launch cities, and not in other places like say Denver or Charlotte, so I surmise this data is attributable to Waymo.
[1] - https://blog.google/products/maps/google-maps-101-ai-power-n...
Here's a screenshot of the region in JOSM https://share.getcloudapp.com/X6uEexZo, and here in iD [3]: https://share.getcloudapp.com/7KuQPyLg
The benches are even mapped with their 'viewing direction' and color :)
[1]: The standard style on osm.org: https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
[2]: The powerful editor for OSM data: https://josm.openstreetmap.de
[3]: The editor behind the 'Edit' button on osm.org: https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD
And I think it's actually a problem if it's possible to pay up for expedited routing. Implementing faster car travel for rich people is not the same as HOV lanes.
And if I took one to the pub and later that night it could get my intoxicated body home safely without my guidance yeah that would be a huge plus.
I'm tired of cars and trucks and segways and scooters.
I want robotic electro auto-tauntauns.
And I have this dream of owning and driving around this very particular supercar. I've been slowly saving up, and within a few years I'll probably be able to outright buy it. And I plan to keep it for about 15 years atleast.
This car is neither electric nor self-drive capable.
Should I abandon that dream because I might not be allowed to drive around for too long?
And yes, I do understand and agree that in the long run, autonomous cars are probably going to be safer overall. Like, I'm not opposed to it.
(Please don't lecture me on why buying a car outright (instead of leasing) is financially stupid, or why buying cars with internal combustion engines or high CO2 emissions is a crime, or how my conscience allows me to buy a fancy car when there are a million other problems in this world).
Who's saying this? And why?
"On March 24th, 2022, I was riding my bike near the beach in San Francisco down a slight slope. My hands were on my brakes to make sure the bike was in control. About 150 feet ahead of me, a vehicle suddenly stopped in the middle of the road. To avoid oncoming traffic, I veered towards the vehicle's right, which suddenly moved directly in front of me.
At that point, I could not avoid impact and crashed through the vehicle's back window with my bike. As I lay on the road, I saw that the car that hit me did not have a driver."
If anything, it'll increase the police state.
Also, this is just driverless rides for Google employees, not everybody.
Are you aware of any such video for AutoX?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE
It shows a waymo/google driverless car driving a multi-mile route on public streets with no supervision.
And today we're seeing... Pretty much the exact same thing!
Not really the same thing.
I live in the Phoenix area and have wanted to try Waymo, but, sadly, it doesn't go anywhere useful for me.
Ten years to transition? Try twenty at least. Most people still buy second hand vehicles and those are still gonna be gas. Think about the motorcycles too, and the pedestrians, and the cyclists.
Adoption will be much slower due to costs, safety concerns and privacy.
It would be better to just spend the money on better infrastructure and public transport, but that’s a pipe dream in the States at least.
I think the replacement of manually driven vehicles will be decently rapid - the bottom 1/3rd of drivers cause a large percentage of motor vehicle accidents, as soon as they’re better than that group I think the financial incentives (like insurance) will dramatically change and it will be cheaper to ride in someone else’s self driving car than to own your own older vehicle.
Guess we will see.
For those that are more price-sensitive, well, new cars become used cars in a relatively short amount of time.
Maybe even have them powered by electricity straight from the grid instead of batteries.
Tracks are expensive, precise and single-purpose. A road is cheap, flexible and multi-purpose. Being tied to the grid means you can't go where you need to get to, only pre-set destinations. And since every train-car can now drive itself, there's no longer a need to tie them together, so instead of 5 cars bunched up all at once every 10 minutes, you can get a single car every 2 minutes.
That is, once this tech matures, no new train development will make sense.
I suppose it's more a legal issue. Cars just need permission within a city, whereas trucks cross lots of legal boundaries?
Automated trucking is a much more impactful, and frankly easier problem to solve. You could simply automate highway part and have manual take over near cities to remove 90% of the challenge.
(Yes I know, I've just reinvented trains, but trains would likely coexist with this, and they serve different purposes (trucks are better at going over mountains, for instance))
This seemed like the first real contender for Tesla in my view. Would love to hear everyone else's take.
Say 2 people die in a Waymo car in a year … we gotta be cool with that and not ban the whole thing.
Wait what?
Also, it was a pain to book it. I tried once and there were no vehicles available. I tried a couple days later and it told me I would have to wait a half hour for a ride.
Ok. I tell you what, I've got an innovative idea. You see, these "autonomous specialists". They sound expensive, right? Got to be trained not just to drive, but to debug the computer, to have higher concentration levels to mitigate the inevitable higher risk of sudden interventions. So what you do - and stay with me now - you strip out the autonomous tech and just replace it with a steering wheel. All of a sudden you no longer need these useless "autonomous specialists" and anyone could drive it. It's a billion dollar idea, I guarantee it!