• Tesla bootstrapping a ride service on the backs of buyers
• Waymo directly rolling their own fleet
• Uber trying to get a self-driving fleet up, burning mountains of money to maintain their "monopoly" on Uber for rides
• Lyft working with GM to get a fleet up
• All of the other car manufacturers trying to get autonomous vehicles going, presumably hoping for consumers to still want to own a vehicle rather than just pay $1 to get a ride
So: How much is Uber's market share worth? I suspect it'll evaporate overnight in every market where another service has autonomous vehicles and they don't.
Also: Private car ownership is going to fall off a cliff shortly after autonomous ride services arrive. Which probably means general demand for vehicles will fall off a cliff.
I predict blood on the walls.
I've seen this sentiment so many times now that I have to ask a serious question to anyone who echoes this sentiment:
Do you own a personal car right now? If so, why?
All of this... excitement over the transformations that self-driving vehicles will bring to the world of transit basically boils down to a model that's a mixture between taxi service and (really crappy) bus service, both of which exist today and have existed for several decades--and basically predate the automobile when you think about it. Yet somehow self-driving vehicles are supposed to completely change the mix of transit use when it's not really adding any capability changes. So I'm genuinely curious as to what the magic sauce is that makes people so giddy for this future.
Except that they are not really cheap, safe, or convenient. They are not door to door. Public bus/trains run at their own scheduled time, not at my desired time. Even services like Uber involve humans who are more concerned about their profit than my schedule or preferences, so they cancel rides when I need them the most because some other ride is more profitable for them. Moreover in countries like India where road accidents are the highest in the world, rash and unsafe driving is a big problem (government run bus, car drivers or private ones). This can just wipe that out! So personally, I'm super excited about this future.
Taxi service exists, but the reliability factor is very poor right now (in that you call and you have to wait n minutes, where n sometimes is a very large number). I see Uber is rolling out a pre-scheduled service and I wonder how good this has been so far for the markets that have it. This would basically be the same thing only with human drivers.
I don't think this pattern works for rural areas and all situations. I also envision some nostalgia and/or tech discomfort keeping the car ownership pattern going for a while. Still, I am wondering if there are a lot of 2+ car families that would be in the same boat. Even drastically reducing the 2+ car families will drop vehicle demand.
We need a radically new car seat design, either:
1. Super portable and quick to install/remove, or
2. Built into the car, safe for all ages, easily extended/retracted.
Also, cost is another big factor. I would also assume that taking a self driving car would be a smaller expense than owning for the average user.
And when self-driving cars are a viable option, insurance will strongly encourage it. And by strongly encourage it I probably mean "absurdly high fees for driving your own car", because people are much worse drivers. Which should drive up the price of car ownership significantly. The increased cost to car storage in populated areas will probably lag a long while behind, so the second cliff will be much slower to hit.
Self-driving vehicles could be at your door within a 1 minute timeframe (say). That's a huge change, and will nullify the benefits of owning a car.
Of course, this will be possible because driverless taxi companies will have the logistics in place to make this happen (they know where every car is, and they can compute where to send empty cars to increase the capacity).
I can imagine that a cheaper service will offer the same but, say, in 5 minutes.
Also, you will never have to find a parking spot, which may be an even better argument.
Not having to own, insure, maintain, or park a car. End to end transportation with no transfers that allows you to internet while you travel. Cheaper than human driven cabs (presumably).
Also, getting a driver has never been this easy. Taxis have existed for hundreds of years, but smartphones are a recent invention. There's a huge difference between calling a phone number and trying to setup a rendezvous than the current workflow on Uber or Lyft, that literally takes 10 seconds from the moment I unlock my phone.
I think the magic sauce is utilization. A fully autonomous car's utilization rate can be close to 100%.
Higher utilization --> same demand for mobility hours/miles can be satisfied with fewer vehicles --> ceteris paribus, fewer vehicles sold every year.
Viewed through this lens, it seems inevitable that, in equilibrium (ie once the non-autonomous to autonomous fleet transition is complete) annual per-capita demand for vehicles will be lower with the advent of fully autonomous cars.
I believe people like owning things, and using them to do stuff. This is a basic fact of being human. Probably goes right back to the stone age. I doubt autonomous cars will change that pattern.
Yes.
There isn't a reliable taxi service or public transportation in most suburbs. Even if you have Uber in your town, it's much more expensive than owning/leasing a personal car.
I can't use Uber when I need to go to another town 50 miles away or 500 miles away.
Autonomous ride service could change that.
Imagine you leave your laptop at home... Just get your car to drive home, receive it robotically, and bring it to your location before your next meeting!
It would work just like Uber (even better), only you would own it. Every delivery company would be out of a ride the moment your car can go make restaurant pickups.
But how is this going to work? In cities, everyone uses their car at exactly the same time: roughly, between 8-9 in the morning and 5-7 in the evening. If you don't own a car, chances are you won't get one when you need it to get to work on time.
Or, if there are enough cars for peak hours, then demand for new cars will not fall that much (although the structure of ownership may in fact change).
Other things that could change is the need for infrastructure (at least in Europe); you don't need highways and high speed trains that much if speed of travel matters much less. If your car drives itself during the night and you can sleep comfortably in it (or read, or watch movies, whatever), then the length of the trip is not paramount.
Initially, no, but long-term you can move much parking to cheaper places around the periphery of the urban area rather than needing a parking spot where people live, one where they work, and fractions everywhere else they might go. So sustainable density of everything that isn't parking spaces in the city core goes up, walkability and transit access improve, so the cars/people ratio drops.
Ride sharing for rush hour would use a ton of compact vehicles. Even if the number of vehicles is the same to account for peak usage, the majority of the vehicles will be much smaller and much less capable, and therefore much less profitable for manufacturers.
Combine the two and you get a self driving car to central location > car or public transit to city center > self driving car in the city. Remember parking is often 10+$ a day due to land value, so two ~4$ trips can be a net savings.
Finally, even a 20-30% drop in demand would be huge in such a capital intense industry.
Don't think of it as replacing what historically was walking outside and hailing a cab, think of it as setting up a carpool with office mates except you don't have to know them, and you don't have to work out all the details, it will be handled for you.
Potentially cheap enough to be a good compromise between current uncomfortable public transport, and owning your own vehicle (but unable to put the commute time to good use).
With that being said... I am also pretty doubtful. People like to own cars.
Good question. How the system deals with congestion. Two things:
1) Taxis make variable pricing possible, which gives markets an incentive to spread out demand. "Would you like a $15, 45 minute ride to San Francisco by 9:15, or $4, 25 minute ride arriving at 10:30?"
2) In big cities we'll start to see quick transfers to- and from- mass transit.
You'll push a button on your phone. The phone will say "Ride begins in 8 minutes to minimize transfer time". You finish your email, put on your coat and walk outside. A car picks you up, drives you to the transit center. You get out, walk across the platform, get onto a train. Train stops, you walk back across the platform into another car. It takes you to your destination.
Why? It will save you time in traffic if you care about, and it'll be cheaper if you care about that. Of course during off peak times, you can just take the cab the whole way for the shortest trip.
Have you ever been in a car?
I've gotten plenty of sleep in cars, but never has the word "comfortable" crossed my mind when I woke up afterwards. I reckon it's something about that whole annoying safety thing requiring you to sit still upright strapped to your seat that ruins the comfort factor for me. YMMV though.
* All the big auto manufacturers are shipping self-driving cars. Volvo is the first to ship a Level 3 system to real customers.
* Tesla is doing OK, but the big electric car brand is Chevy.
* Waymo is a Tier I supplier to Fiat/Chrysler.
* GM and Ford are using their own self-driving technology.
* Uber is still around, but is out of investor cash, and has to be profitable to pay back its loans. The service is much more expensive to use. Their self-driving thing never works out for them because they can't spend big money to buy cars, build garages, and staff up for maintenance.
* Lyft is still around, about the same as it is now.
* The mini autonomous bus people have some installations, but they're rare outside airports and campuses.
I think people severely underestimate Uber's worldwide push in preparing themselves to be a force to be reckoned with when the autonomous vehicle takes off.
Uber's network effect is its driver network. It will find it a lot harder to compete if you no longer need drivers, when it has to compete with real car companies that could be able to undercut them on cost.
Furthermore, if there are a bunch of self-driving car services, that service will be commoditized the same way cabs are. These ride-giving services will [and kind of already do] only compete on price.
Uber's autonomous trucking model is likely to aid in the complete change of that industry, though.
Yes, Uber may have a global precense, but that's from burning VC cash and they're not exactly successful in major markets like China. And for what? Uber is essentially a messaging app between users and drivers, and their users/drivers are not loyal.
Uber as a self-driving company would need to sell hardware to drivers to convert their vehicles into self-driving cars, and I don't think they'll have the bank to get that far, especially against larger companies with deeper pockets and existing hardware experience/partnerships.
The rich are buying the future on the backs of the working class. When uber goes under, the jobs won't come back, but transit can't be that cheap. It's not like the cost of a ride was actually based on the cost of the car OR the labor.
I think ownership means more to most people than just convenience or being the cheapest option.
Otto was granted permission and began driving on actual highways in Ohio last week:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/self-driving-truck-h...
1 - http://www.reuters.com/article/us-uber-tech-volvo-otto-idUSK...
Head of the pack of dreams maybe. What does Uber have, in a tangible manner, right now? At least both Tesla and Google have real systems that are on the verge of full autonomy.
I know they gobbled up a bunch of researchers, but moonshot engineering feats like autonomous driving is not (yet) in their DNA. And their current business model is not profitable and will die the moment they go up against an autonomous service.
They don't need to be last to market to lose, they need to be first in order to survive.
Certainly some auto makers may choose to go down the route of executive assisted suicide and maximize shareholder (and executive) profit distributions in the process, as IBM decided to do. To pretend than the next 50 years will be like the last 50, I'm not sure how long that charade can hold up.
Personally I think Google and Apple are the ones who hold all of the chips. This definitely can be turned in to a commodity business with a few OS adjustments. There are some cards Uber can play to avoid this, like exclusive infrastructure agreements, although not really sure where that will be permitted geographically.
A more interesting question is will this look like smartphones where a single company gets 90% of the profits and the rest of the companies do huge volume but capture small to zero margins.
And a pox on all of us if we hand firm control over regions to single players.
I really dont agree with this. Cars a so cheap now and I'd much rather use my own than some dirty shared car.
Already renting a car is annoying as you never know if you'll get charged for some damage that you didn't cause, I can't imagine having the same issue every day.
Having the car drop me off then go away and autopark is something that I'd value though. :)
Over the medium term, this will only encourage ever more massive and distant suburb creep. Also, with longer commutes less tiresome, the negative cost of having a longer commute will be mitigated.
As for the stranger effect, there are many innovations on that front as well. Google is already has a working app that tries to arrange commutes for true ride sharing where passengers only compensate the driver for the pure cost of the ride. It's cheap and effective if you are a bit flexible in the morning.
I can see autonomous services being so cheap that they become the new corporate perk and companies find value by having employees ride together, share ideas, socialize, etc.
Also, the economies of scale alone would make a private automated car trip still cheaper than owning privately an autonomous vehicle.
The technology will move fast enough that the vast majority people will be switching from a human operated car to a self-driving car service. I can see the ad campaigns now. Basically showing people how much cheaper and safer and more convenient it is.
Cars can be seen like horses were before them, an expensive hassle that requires land for storage and usage. If you think about it, people have whole buildings just for storing cars, garages, like we did with horses, barns.
15 years from now suburbs will be built without garages and driveways. There will be a cottage industry for people to convert garages and carparks into more usable space.
20 years from now, multistory car parking lots will be the new conversion buildings like the old meat packing and textile plans that used to be in downtown areas that were turned into lofts. Polished concrete floors will feature the original parking space numbers. The open sides will feature panoramic views.
Lastly, having your own car will be a throwback element. People who like to 4x4 or work on their own cars (a huge market that might actually grow in the medium term) will fill this but, even then they'll use automated services to commute. The number of people who have hobby cars (off-roading, auto racing, vintage collectibles, restoration) will skyrocket because a car no longer has to be a daily driver.
Or people might care less about cars, I don't presume to know the complex of a future of human desire. But, in a world full of cheap cars that you driver yourself, automated car services will still create so much value that people will still switch.
IMHO this is the reason Trump won the election, because there is no plan for these people.
The answer is of course the same as with any other reason people lose jobs and have done so in the past. It really is nothing new. Neither in scale, nor in severity.
Also, every state already has system to deal with that stuff. The hole point of a generalised systems is that you don't have a major political crisis everytime insert <big company or industy> suffers job loses.
That Trump won because of them is an assertion that is made often, but hard to proove or even show good evidence for.
Say initial cost of the electric self driving car is $50,000. It has life of 20 years. After 20 years, value will go to 0.
Per year: $2500
Service per year: $2500 (HN mechanics, is this reasonable?)
Miles travelled/ year: 50,000 (5x human utilization)
Miles/Kwh: 3 (based on tesla efficiency)
Avg electricity cost in US: 12c / Kwh
Cost to drive 50,000 miles: $2000
Total / year: $7000
Cost per mile: 14c / mile
Average trip length: 7 miles
Cost per trip: 98c (very close to $1)
I think this is definitely possible.
Uber hasn't demonstrated a capacity to succeed, but unlike their rivals, they need self-driving cars to succeed for their company to succeed. The CEO has called self-driving cars "existential" to Uber.
Contrast this with Google. Self-driving cars are an expensive hobby to Google, and completely inconsequential to the success of their core business.
1) It will take atleast 5-7 years for self-driving cars to become ubiquitous. Till then there is good uprising market for every player to make money. secondly, if you have a product ready, it might open up new markets in future which currently no one realizes.
2) Car ownership will still be there. People who can afford it will still prefer private self-driving car than waiting for Uber/Lyft. I would say self-driving private car will be seen as a new luxury status.
3) car manufacturing will definitely go down with less demand but car manufactures will venture into different pricing model with ride companies. Right now, a car is a one time sell for a manufacturer. It might be subscription which ride company uses.
Or, if everyone has a self-driving car of their own (or one that can be converted to self-driving), people will rent out their cars AirBnB-style when they aren't using them. I mean, why not? You've already got a garage, a driveway, etc. Might as well make a few extra bucks with your vehicle...
Uber drivers at first were mostly just driving in their spare time, but over the years the professionals came in and crowded them out.
The lesson here is that it takes work to provide a level of service that consumers are willing to pay for. That work is best done through organization and professionalization. Some guy renting his car out during the work day isn't going to find it profitable enough to continue doing when he has to compete against dedicated on-demand rental services.
Heck, why have driveways? In cities, at least, I could fully imagine new townhouse developments operating more like apartment buildings: one central parking lot for the "pool" of (mostly) driverless cars. Your car drops you off at your door and then parks in the pool; then comes back out to get you in the morning.
I am not from U.S. but the experience I have had with using local air travel (with Southwest) in the U.S. I am prepared to caffine up and drive up to 400mi rather than bother with the hassles of flying. (I have done that a few times and found it quite enjoyable, maybe there was a novelty factor to it)
A fleet would be able to handle these sorts of things better.
So far sharing economy companies don't want to vertically integrate their whole service stack down to physical goods. It requires capital raising, and is low margin compared to the value that they provide by scaling their main services. Maybe they will once they've achieved full market penetration and are struggling to increase their profit, but that's decades away IMO.
In a cooperative environment, bad players bring everyone down. In competition, they drown, and only the strongest survive.
bold prediction: They won't have fully autonomous cars.
- communication with other human drivers. In London, this is required all the time, like when parked cars block the road, allowing just one car through. Or traffic light out of action, so you negotiate with other cars using hand gestures, light flashes etc
- endless roadworks, that change what lane you're allowed to go on, turn a two way road to one way road.
- random debris on road. Plastic bag - safe to drive through, wooden plank - safe, plank with nail - not safe.
- loss of GPS, mobile data, or both (again, surprisingly frequent)
- making way for emergency vehicles (sometimes need to drive into lane you're not normally allowed to go, I.e. Bus lane, pavement)
- policeman coordinating traffic
So far, I haven't found any evidence of autonomous cars dealing with the above. If anyone has, please post.
> By early 2015, Fairfield thought they were getting close: The cars were clocking full days at Google’s testing grounds without needing human takeovers. They had driven 1.2 million miles on public roads and could pull over for emergency vehicles. They could detect and brake for squirrels, and read hand signals from cops and construction workers. They knew when to honk politely (Just making sure you see me here) and when to blare it (You’re about to slam into me!). Then the team spent the next year putting another 800,000 miles on the fleet’s collective odometer, to fine tune everything. And it gave 10,000 rides to employees and “guests.”
For example getting out of the way of emergency vehicles on a blocked road. It will ask you what to do and if you tell it to drive up the pavement or into a bus lane or cross to the wrong side of the road -- the car will just do it.
I do wonder about all the non-verbal human-to-human communication. But a friendly baxter type screen with eyes that move (and messages that scroll across) would solve that.
We have to remember that these cars are all feeding unusual situations back to the google BRAIN that is learning. It'll watch us react to an emergency and learn. It'll see that 20 or 30 times a day and generalise a response.
Imagine I am a cyclist and I don't signal but I swiftly swerve to the right. Unless the self-driving car is already at a slow speed, it would impose an undue risk. Or, it is hard to expect that humans will rigorously adhere to this traffic discipline.
This is why these cars will drive slow for the foreseeable future and will frustrate a good chunk of the drivers.
Unless it gets dedicated lanes, the way bicycles do.
These cars are overhyped. They've been just around the corner for the last 10 years. They are the Duke Nukem Forever of Silicon Valley.
But you have touched some use cases that are more frequent than most people think. London is a great example. My hometown Athens is much more closer to London as far as driving is concerned as opposed to LA or NY. I guess many other metropolis also.
How will AI brand A communicate with AI brand B about life critical decisions ? Hey we can either both crash to each other or kill that kid on the pavement. ( just an example , I don't want to go to the morality of the situation)
I assume there is going to be a "standard " . But have a look at your everyday tech. Standards are not easy. There are still WiFi routers/repeaters that cannot talk to each other nicely, just to give an example.
Usually in life critical systems you don't have interoperability issues because there is no interoperability. Huge fail-safe systems from a single vendor.
Driverless cars will never (until we have general AI) be able to fully replace a human driver. However we don't need to get to 100% for the technology to become useful. It might be that driverless cars will be restricted to only driving on certain mapped roads. Or every car's movements are tracked in a central control room and if a problem is detected either by the car or the passenger it could be controlled remotely. Or let's say a GPS sensor breaks an actual human driver might be issued to come and rescue you. Lastly we might even accept a certain failure rate. Society is willing to tolerate failure of technology to a certain degree in cars and planes today. All we need is is for the technology to make us all better off on average for it to be successful.
People get this stuff wrong all the time. Especially when they're drunk, tired or texting. These cars won't be perfect but I think pretty good and conservative under uncertainty will be better than human, drunk and overconfident.
The cars don't have to be perfectly safe, just safer than the average driver.
Traffic lights will send out the same messages they send to humans by red/green lights to the cars using radio.
Emergency vehicles, roadworks, traffic signs etc will do the same.
Or so I assume, because it makes so much of sense. I know there is vehicle-to-vehicle communication in the works: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-vehicle
I live in the capital city of an EU country, population 2 million, and there's a traffic light about two blocks away from where I live which has not been functional for about 2 weeks now. And the bad thing is that the other traffic lights from that intersection DO work, so you cannot rely on the road-signs, like one usually does when ALL traffic light from an intersection malfunction (from loss of power, mostly). So I'm a little skeptic that traffic lights will be able to "reliably" guide no-driver vehicles using radio signals anytime soon.
Most of the traffic lights in Las Vegas already support vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication, although you need an Audi A4, Q7 or Allroad manufactured after 1st June 2016 and an Audi Connect Prime subscription ($33.33/month) to make use of it [1].
[1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/12/13923254/audi-v2i-las-veg...
I should also add: - very fast mobile data, with no blackspots, so a remote driver can take over a car that's confused by a situation - a replacement for GPS, it's not reliable enough, the signal is far too weak - digital signal beacons embedded in lane markings, and edges of the road, and on traffic cones for roadworks
... that's right, now you know what the driving force behind all those flying cars in sci-fi was. It's simply a way to separate the autonomous and old-style vehicles.
I would also add; that I will stay consider these vehicles to be unsafe until the manufacturers can prove to be beyond a shadow of doubt that I or the local computer are the ones piloting the vehicle.
When a random person can remotely take control of a vehicle; whether it be the windshield wipers, or full control of the vehicle, then it is not safe to contain a power source in the vehicle near a public road. I don't want 4chan driving me into another vehicle.
If there was some chance my car could get hacked, or other weird vulnerabilities that robocars had that traditional cars did not, I would still want to be in a robocar if my chance of dying was cut in half.
It's also not particularly clear that the costs will drop rapidly to zero or even to a level that leads to mass adoption (see air travel at Mach 1+, Segways...).
I would shorten that to "other humans", to specifically include pedestrians. That 1/2-second eye contact between driver and human is key. Would anyone here dare walk in front of a car without that little nod from the driver?
The other edge case, one that is never discussed, is how these things expect to deal with off-road driving. I regularly use car ferries. Getting on and off those, and negotiating the terminals, stumps many human drives.
They just have to make them safer than human drivers.
And these days with everyone swerving as they text, the bar isn't exactly set very high.
That system can fix the negatives of human drivers without affecting the advantages of humans over machines
Now you've reduced all your problems down to simply "identify problem and alert a remote human".
If each of those problems only happen once per day, and they are resolved in 30 seconds, it's going to cost only about $30 per car per year to have that remote expert on hand.
I think we'd need a huge infrastructure upgrade to make life easier for autonomous cars. It'd have to be >100 Mb/s mobile data, with extremely good coverage (for the recovery mechanism you mention). Think GPS would need to be replaced too, the signal is way too weak and unreliable. We'd have to embed digital markers/emitters alongside lane markings, traffic lights, signs etc, so they're easier to deal with.
But that's an obvious chicken or egg problem that has unrealistic solutions like making sure everyone starts driving a networked car at all once.
Something I've never seen adressed is how SDV fleets behave when change occurs. Are there chaotic oscillation patterns that emerge from AI trying similar avoiding behavior.
There's research in massive multi agent behavior, but I've never seen it tested on the field with SDV makers actual models.
It doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to be better than average human drivers. Sure there will be cases it can't handle. But the same is much more true for human.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/alanohnsman/2016/12/13/googles-s...
TL;DR:
> “We’re now an independent company within the Alphabet umbrella,”
> Google is currently equipping a fleet of 100 hybrid Chrysler minivans with its sensors and computing gear that will soon join its nearly 60 prototype autonomous vehicles. The company hasn't yet disclosed when and how it will begin generating revenue from its efforts and Krafcik declined to discuss specific business plans today.
By the sound of it, they already have an L4 going (can drive itself in 99.99% of the situations, might need user take over in very rare cases).
Why not for now release an initial car with L4, and collect pile and pile of data, which is what they need to get over that last 0.01%.
(The thought is you'd hand off to a real driver once you get in to a city)
Freightliner recently did a PR stunt where a self driving truck delivered a load of beer: http://www.computerworld.com/article/3134879/car-tech/self-d...
We'll see commercial self driving trucks before we see consumer self driving cars. Self driving trucks will first connect depots outside of cities, with humans solving the local driving problem, but eventually, they'll just completely drive themselves.
Take a look at the distribution of current jobs [1]. What perspective can you give people working as a truck driver right now?
I believe, america first has to find an answer to this question before there will be automated trucks.
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/07/convoy-se...
If we are riding along in the current heaviest production car, the Rolls Royce Phantom Extended-wheelbase[1], which weighs in at 6000 pounds, and we are moving at 70 miles per hour, we have a kinetic energy of 1.33 Megajoules. [2]
Now, let's hop in the heaviest federally allowed tractor-trailer, which weighs 80,000 pounds, and get ourselves to 60 mph, a more reasonable speed for such a massive object. This comes to 13 Megajoules. [3]
The upshot is, one fully loaded truck moving at 60mph could cause the same amount of damage as 10 passenger cars all moving at 70mph. This means that as a firm, your liability is 10 times greater per vehicle. Insurance is 10 times more expensive. Regulation is 10 times as strict. At that level of risk, it'd be stupid to not put a human in the cab of your autonomous truck right? Just in case, and to shield yourselves from legal issues. But wait, why not just get him to drive and save yourself a lot of R&D money?
I work in the commercial trucking industry and real-world challenges mean this self-driving equation is not as lucrative as people believe. And we haven't even touched the Jobs Problem. Hence the focus on passenger vehicles. I do think autonomous trucking will become popular eventually, but this industry moves at a glacial pace for a reason.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_superlative...
[2]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.5+*+6000+pounds+*+70...
[3]: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=0.5+*+80000+pounds+*+6...
[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2015/02/05/382664837/map-t...
Yes, it's easy and safe if competing traffic is only fellow truckers or other level-headed, observant drivers.
It's when you mix in the distracted, newbie, or skittish drivers that things get difficult. Long-haul truckers (the majority, the good ones) develop a sixth sense about such risks; I can't imagine thoroughly coding a software replacement.
Ie. you're gonna have to get new laws in place allowing empty vehicles in not just one, but many states.
Current driverless carpool plans might well only allow use when someone is in the vehicle, and they will likley only operate in a single state. The people-transport industry is also worth more than the goods transport industry.
In my town (a suburban town with a low crime rate), the police spend the majority of their time enforcing traffic laws. The municipal courthouse is always filled with people, and if I had to guess, I’d say that 80% of the people are there as a result of a traffic violation, while the other 20% are there for drug offenses/other.
It seems like autonomous cars would lead to a drop in traffic offenses and thus revenue. Even if only a tiny portion of the town’s revenue actually comes from traffic violations (when compared to local property tax), there would probably be a lot more idle time for police.
I suspect that they will first start to raise our property taxes to compensate for the lost revenue, but I would think that the long term effect would be a reduction of municipal workers/police.
Of course, this doesn’t apply to other areas like Philadelphia, where police spend only a small percentage of their time enforcing traffic laws.
[1]: http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/13/us/google-self-driving-car-pul...
Google/Waymo is actually piloting a car from origin to destination without a steering wheel or pedals. That's a much more difficult challenge.
Put another way, no blind person is going to sit behind the wheel of a Tesla and tell the car to take him/her to the supermarket. Google's car actually does this, on real roads, today... and that's amazing.
Given that Tesla doesn't even have emergency braking and auto-steering, I'd guess they compare quite favorably...
To the surprise of many folks (myself included) it has turned out that SDC tech is probably for existing manufacturers to develop versus software guys learning how to build cars without the massive supply chains needed to assemble 4000lb widgets. Before anyone points to Tesla, try getting inside a $140k Tesla and then a $140k Mercedes and it will be obvious what advantages there are to having manufacturing experience stretching decades.
The Tesla is putting most of your money into the tech.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/regulators-call-on-cars-to-chat-...
What's becoming clear is that the self-driving car industry will be the car industry. Autonomous driving equipment may come from suppliers, but they'll just be suppliers to the automakers. That's not a great place to be; the margins are low and suppliers are totally under the thumb of the automakers.
Volvo, which will deploy 100 self driving cars with actual customers in Gothenberg, Sweden in 2017, is way ahead on the user interface.[2] Volvo takes the firm position that, in autonomous mode, the driver is not required to pay attention at all, and if something goes wrong, it's Volvo's problem. They have redundant sensors, actuators, and computers.
Volvo is also way ahead on ads for self-driving.[3]
[1] http://www.volvocars.com/intl/about/our-innovation-brands/in...
But I wonder about the snow though. How does the car know where to go when there are no identifying lane features? Maybe its not as hard of a problem as I believe it to be?
Does this mean that Alphabet will keep on working on building their own cars but under a different company? The association between the two is a little confusing at the moment.
I think autonomous transport will be very popular but shared vehicles will be hardly more popular than Uber / taxis are now. If you think that shared autonomous vehicles will be significantly more popular than shared conventional vehicles are today, I'd be interested to hear why. Is it primarily cost savings?
How do you get to work every day? How often do you go to the grocery store? What about going out to dinner?
For myself, living in the Bay Area, anything related to driving or owning a car is a nightmare -- not that that has stopped me from owning a car. Driving from Mountain View to San Mateo takes about 45 minutes in the morning at 75 minutes in the evening. I went to SF to have breakfast with a friend this past weekend and finding parking took half an hour. I'd love a self-driving car that could just drop me at my door. Autonomous cars should also lead to drastic traffic improvements, assuming the cars will eventually be able to communicate with each other in a reliable way.
Maybe you live in a less densely-populated area? I have an aunt that lives in a rural area and I couldn't imagine a need or desire for autonomous cars there.
There is definitely a long way to go, but think of all the advantages! Parking can be automated and condensed, which means more land is available for buildings or parks or anything else. If you suffer from traffic problems now, your daily commute could be cut by 50% or more. Shared vehicles should cost less than what you pay for gas and insurance now. High availability is a real possibility if someone can figure out how to make the economics work. Ride sharing can be almost completely automated, leading to less pollution.
The lack of control is still kind of terrifying so I think they're trying to make it as non-threatening as possible.
This is true of all Google products, and has been the basis of Google's branding strategy from the very beginning. The dorky, colorful logo isn't an accident. They are a scary, dangerous and harmful company with an extremely friendly face.
Tesla's auto-pilot can be over-ridden due to the presence of the steering wheels and the pedals. But in a car that has none, you're not in control. And that, is scary no matter how you look at it.
Anything more than that would mean your system is not fully autonomous, because the driver would have to pay attention all the time. What good is manual override if there's nobody paying attention? It would also mean you need a qualified driver, you couldn't use it to ferry around children, disabled people or simply people without a license.
They seem pretty clearly, however, to have changed their minds on the topic. It's enlightening to compare the information on this new site with information on the old site (https://www.google.com/selfdrivingcar/). You can see what language they've either removed, or toned down.
Honestly, with Google's track record, I'm starting to doubt that this will ever ship. It just seems like a huge marketing tactic at this point. Plus. all of the talent has moved to companies like Otto and comma.ai; who are making tangible progress in this space.
I also really think someone should invent a solution to convert existing modern cars with brake, gas and steering from CANbus to self driving cars by installing a kit.
The current car manufacturers can simply make really good cars with cameras and sensors integrated. One can then install open software adapted for the region that is always getting updates. The test cases and lidar data is put in a giant shared repo whose ownership is the community. E.g OpenStreetMap and wikipedia.
Same software can be used for smaller robots to dispatch packages to the front door, or robotic lawn mowers, rubbish trucks, cleaning trucks e.t.c
That would be a fantastic future to be part of.
They tried the kit that can be self installed[2] but decided not to continue[3]
They also have a dataset that can be downloaded by anyone[4]
And they have open sourced the software on their github, [1]: http://comma.ai/ [2]: https://techcrunch.com/2016/09/13/comma-ai-will-ship-a-999-a... [3]: http://www.theverge.com/2016/10/28/13453344/comma-ai-self-dr... [4]: http://research.comma.ai/
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/?url=...
In my view, all of this technology is much better suited to aid the human driver as a safety enhancement system rather than a full replacement for vehicle navigation.
Q: "I'd like to join the team. Where can I find a list of open roles?" A: "You can learn more about available roles here[1]."
And interestingly, that link[1] is broken :)
Update: it's fixed NOW!
How are CARS supposed to be automated??
> subways aren't completely automated
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_urban_metro_...
> planes aren't completely automated
A car is more than a commuting tool, it really matters how it looks.
1. Pedestrian->driver observation and interaction are the primary factors in deciding what's safe.
2. Roads full of networked autonomous vehicles are a hack away from becoming hoards of hurtling tonnage.
In my opinion this is all a solution looking for a problem and we should know better than to make our roads so utterly hostile to our own kind.
Seriously, Google has had so many growth businesses in their hands and just fails to execute on them. This might be for one part because of its internal structure but I get the impression that many of these things look not exciting enough for its leadership.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2016/11/17/humans-will...
In 2013, though, there's a regression in number of new miles logged, and it took until 2015 to catch up to 2012 numbers. Can anyone give insight into the cause?
While I'm excited, I'd love to know how they actually plan to roll this out!
I don't really think we should place drunk driving at the same level as tired or distracted driving.
I wonder about the internationalization of this product, especially if (or when?) it's brought to other countries and regions, such as the Middle East. In some of those countries, women aren't allowed to drive and men drive with extreme speed (and park in the most horrible of ways). While this will cut down on things like speeding / drinking / etc, it may also potentially impact social norms as well.
I'm hoping to keep a level-head about this project, but any step forward in this endeavor is worth being excited about.
So I don't think self driving cars will solve that problem at all, sadly.
[0]: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/10/-ne...
Quora answers from people that appear to be saudi: https://www.quora.com/Why-are-women-not-allowed-to-drive-in-...
Well decided Alphabet, very well decided!
Probably safe to say they're in talks with other auto manufacturers that are looking to add self-driving software to their portfolios.
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/california/mountain_v...
"Snowfall is 0 inches."
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/arizona/phoenix
"Snowfall is 0 inches."
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/texas/austin
"Snowfall is 1 inches."
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/washington/kirkland
"Snowfall is 4 inches."
I hope they are driving far enough from their home bases to get some snow miles under their belt.
http://www.bestplaces.net/climate/city/massachusetts/boston
"Snowfall is 47 inches."
Tesla's goal is high fidelity GPS mapping of roads and their landmarks, so that the car can navigate down a lane in the absence of normal visual signals (i.e. clear road markings). It will be interesting to see how everyone else deals with weather conditions, but it's also not a problem that needs to be solved instantly.
I am not a self-driving car expert (software or hardware). Nor am I an expert in ML, computer vision, etc. But I do have minor experience in each of those. Currently, I am enrolled and taking Udacity's new "Self-Driving Car Engineer" nanodegree course. For my cohort (November), we just completed the first basic project - Lane Finding.
This project utilized Python and OpenCV, and was far from a robust enough system for it to be used on a real vehicle (for one thing, it wasn't fast enough - it does well with non-real time video and still photos, but it would likely need to be re-written in C/C++ for it to stand a chance in a real-time situation). It couldn't deal with curves, and it has other corner cases.
We had several still pictures to work with, then two required videos, and one bonus "challenge" (ie - extra credit) video. If we had time, we could try our hand with our own videos, etc. It was very easy to get things working with the still images, and the two regular videos. But the challenge video was something else entirely.
In that video, you had to deal with not only different color lines, but also a section of different color roadway, shadows and varying light conditions. With enough effort and thought, it was easy enough to get things working properly, but it highlighted the fact that humans do some amazing things when they drive.
For one thing, our eyes are better capable to handle subtle differences in color, shadow, and lighting (particularly brightness and contrast) than most traditional image sensors. Furthermore, we can "fill in gaps" and "infer" where and how things should be, based on other information in the environment. In cases of rain or snow, we can - for instance - watch where other cars go, follow the "tracks" other cars make in front of us, follow road "edges", and use other subtle cues to help us guide our vehicles as we drive (another instance - recently they repaved the road near my work - but haven't painted new lane markings - I and probably others instead used the "seams" between the asphault runs as "lane markers" instead).
These and many other issues likely are "edge cases" that haven't been fully explored in this relatively new cycle in self-driving car engineering. I am confident that the problems will be solved, likely with deep learning systems of varying kinds, as well as better sensors. Sensor data fusion and priority could also help (ie - use a LIDAR to "follow" a car in front of you, perhaps? Of course, filter out the noise of the falling rain/snow, first).
So far, this course has enlightened me more on just how hard of a problem overall self-driving vehicle systems are to solve. Furthermore, there aren't many players (companies nor individuals) in the market (which is why I am taking the course - to expand on my current skills). Solving these kinds of hard problems will be paramount for a successful self-driving vehicle to last in the market.
The site loads large pictures for all viewport widths (ideally they'd load downscaled images for smaller viewports — it's wasteful to load a large image for small devices) and the image files are PNGs when they should be jpeg or webp (example: http://waymo.com/static/images/journey/streets.png)
That's pretty much all you need to know about performance.
Not that the site in question isn't bloated brochure-ware. Just that I wouldn't characterize Google that way.
Yes, they may only work in places with clearly marked streets but if I could use my autonomous car for daily commute or roughly 50% of the time it's still an incredible achievement and well worth the cost.
I think that there are a lot of little steps towards 100% autonomy that will still provide tremendous value to people, even if the product is far from perfect.
- Instead of talking about their car's capabilities on the front page, they include a pathos about drunk driving. I feel embarrassed how Google doesn't have more things to say about the car.
- It looks really unattractive, I could hardly call it cute.
- It's not in production, it's in testing.
These companies are sitting on mountains of cash! And they still fail to do things effectively! Apple and Google are just sitting on their fat cashflows while the world is getting very scary very fast. I'm tired of these "technology" companies doing complete fails of R&D projects, too damn shy to leave their advertising revenues. We need leaders with real courage.
