But I'd argue that concern is backwards. First, go for correctness. Perfect the algorithm and sensors, get the car working. Then look at scaling down the technology and making it cheaper. The fact that Google doesn't make cars (a point the author made) is kind of irrelevant, because this is a sensor/control/software problem, not a car problem.
Recognize that BMW/Daimler/et al really don't want true self driving cars. It's not really in their interest, because it would radically reduce the need for car ownership and would open up a new world of on-the-fly car rental. Human drivers required = good business. I'm not saying its a conspiracy, just that they have no passion to disrupt their industry in this way.
Even the cost is somewhat moot if the business model is different. Let's say the Google Car sensor package costs $100,000. That's cost prohibitive for individual ownership, but it would not be a problem for a business model like ZipCar + Uber, where you call a car on your mobile phone to get you, and 'rent it' for a short self-driving or assisted trip. If car use moves from ownership to renting, then many people can spread the cost of the sensors.
This is spot on. The car industry has done a quite wonderful job of transforming the 'mechanical horse', a contraption able to take you between locations with minimal effort from the occupants, into an extension of your personality and some form of lifestyle statement. The weak point in their advertising is that it is very often aimed at the driver and the driving experience.
Automated vehicles offer the opportunity for greater efficiencies which will translate into fewer cars as making use of a vehicle becomes much more common than ownership of one. Thus the price of purchasing these vehicles will remain high and many owners will need to ensure their vehicle is bringing in a decent income as some form of taxi in order to cover the cost of ownership (shouldn't be a problem as at the moment, most vehicles probably spend the vast majority of their time parked, waiting for their owner). However, I can see that if the whole system can be made to work as an uber-efficient taxi service most people will have no need to own a vehicle.
This is exactly what is happening, without self-driving cars. E.g. Drive Now is a very popular service in several german cities, and one of the reasons why I don't feel the need to own a car while living in Berlin. I can just hop in a car any time I like, drive around, and then park it anywhere in the city.
They don't have a passion to, but they must. Capitalism forces companies to adapt to competition, even when it isn't in their individual self-interest. BMW has to, because if they don't, Toyota will.
Companies make necessary self-defeating choices all the time. Newspaper companies have websites. Barnes & Noble sells e-books. The Empire made the Death Star.
I think Capitalism is a pretty broken concept, but I think this particular facet of it tends to work.
Only in theory, in practice this sort of thing happens: http://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/2012/november/lcd-price-fixi...
I highly doubt that. Self-driving cars are a revolutionary product. The first manufacturers to enter the market will definitely make a lot of money, as well as a technological advance on what is the future of cars.
They might be slow to invest in these technologies, because at this point it's still high risk and traditional car manufacturers are notorious for being very conservative, but there are definitely very high rewards for those who can make it.
Cars don't just sell a way to get from point A to point B. They sell an experience. If that experience becomes "put your destination into your GPS, then play Angry Birds for a while", then it will turn the car itself into a commodity.
They do a lot of R&D but in a very structured way that produces the consistent results their shareholders ask for. The market might be disrupted but until that happens convincingly they will do everything they can to prevent it while adopting the low hanging fruits of automatic parking etc.
They might consider licensing the technology from Google or buying startups working on the tech but even then they might just bury the startups to delay their main business model being disrupted. I think it's going to take disruption from outside the main car manufacturers - in the same way it took Tesla entering the electric car market to shake it up.
For that you would optimize being the most ready to run, but trying to get the group not to run for as long as possible.
You might have missed the part where it says that automated cars would allow much more cars to drive on the roads with less traffic congestion...
So in the end automated cars would more likely mean that owning is more convenient than it currently is.
In particular, if totally automatic driving is legalized, then many people will have a strong incentive to use on demand car services as they'll be cheaper and more dependable than existing taxi options. In parts of the world where labor is still extremely cheap this may not be the case, but it is the most likely outcome in the developed world.
Even with all these advantages, some automated vehicles will crash and kill their occupants. Some will even kill pedestrians, and sometimes this will be due to software error.
But humans do this already, and we do it so often that it doesn't even get on the news. Around 1.2 million people die in traffic accidents each year. That's just over 2% of all deaths[1]. Unless the automated vehicles of the future are orders of magnitude worse than current ones, switching to them will save millions of lives and prevent tens of millions of injuries.
It's sad that bureaucracy and human irrationality cause so much unnecessary death and suffering.
1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_motor_vehicle_c...
There are solutions to your proposed problem. You could require the car be taken into a shop for updates. This would make the update gradual (so the eggs are never all in one basket) and it would let mechanics ensure the update was applied correctly. You could also design the software to have a core that is never updated. It would monitor basic things like "Am I going too fast?" "Can I brake in time for any obstacles?" etc. Google uses this strategy IIRC.
Making self-driving cars safe isn't an unsolvable problem: we do this already for planes.
When the target gets big enough, it will happen. And how to protect against this, when we don't really understand the weaknesses yet - a rogue radar/lidar imitator sending false echoes, strong EM fields messing with electronic components - it could even be an intermittent connection fault in a communications bus. Plenty of unknown unknowns in this field.
What makes you think that updating your driving software will be like installing iOS 7?
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_in...
Once someone starts selling these things, insurance for city drivers who insist on driving themselves will skyrocket.
But yeah, testing is going to need to be very rigorous to make sure there are no regressions.
What is this bullshit? He basically dismisses the entire Google effort right off the bat, and provides no information about it whatsoever? Just like that? As far as I know, Google is in fact much farther along than BMW, and I'd really like to know what they're capable of. It doesn't matter that Google isn't a car company. If they can manage reliable driverless cars, car companies will be lining up to license their technology.
I can only imagine that either he didn't want to travel to the US, or that Google wouldn't give him a demo. So he justified it after the fact.
Particularly, his BMW demo occurred on the highway, not city streets. Conditions on the highway are far more predictable, there are no turning choices to make (just follow the road!), and no pedestrians. BMW also doesn't seem to be interested in self-driving on city streets. FTA: 'He said the company aims to be “one of the first in the world” to introduce highway autonomy.'
The typical "mess with this" kind of action would be walk up on the edge of a freeway and pop up a full sized STOP sign on the shoulder. Humans will say 'wtf?' and keep driving but autonomous cars, unable to know if it isn't a legit stop sign, will slam on the brakes to stop. Resulting in hugely funny (to some) traffic jams. Similarly with inflatable stoplights.
Then there are the things where even human drivers have issues (a person standing on the side of the road signalling traffic to slow down).
There are many situations that autonomous cars will need to be able to handle, that are handled in a fail safe way today by humans, yet to be programmed. Definitely will take longer than you think.
Self-driving cars are the future, but these solutions that seem simple will still need a lot of work.
I am pretty sure, these autonomous cars will get info about road signs, etc through an authorized satellite system. So you can pop up with whatever sign you want, it is not going to matter.
For example, lets assume highway traffic is caused primarily from exceeding road capacity, and road capacity is a function primarily of the size of the gap that we are taught to leave between cars. Why are we taught to leave a 2 second gap between cars? In theory, that's how much time/space you need if the car in front of you decides to go full-tilt on the breaks with no warning.
I've read about autonomous caravans (the article calls them platoons) where cars line up behind a follow vehicle. The follow-cars in that scenario typically also take over steering. Like in the 2014 Mercedes S-Class from the article;
A jovial safety engineer drove me around a test track, showing how the car can lock
onto a vehicle in front and follow it along the road at a safe distance. To follow
at a constant distance, the car’s computers take over not only braking and
accelerating, as with conventional adaptive cruise control, but steering too.
I think the key is giving the driver very high confidence that "no, there is no way that my car will let me rear-end the guy in front of me" even if you're just 30ft back at 85mph. That's not "scary close" but at that distance, you are trusting the car in front not to apply maximum breaks given human reaction times. Computers could apply sufficient stopping force in time, although the responsiveness required of the algorithm might make regular driving a bit "twitchy" depending on the human driver you're following.
I've never even driven a vehicle with adaptive cruise control, so I have no idea how "aggressive" the system is, or how it feels as the driver. I don't think any of the adaptive cruise systems out there will take you down to 0mph and then also start moving again, which seems like a must-have. But I bet if Tesla added "maintain Xmph or close follow" to their Model S, owners would trust it, use it, and look quite badass in the process.
You might benefit from some obvious (but not distracting) signal to other cars when this mode is active, and spend a boat-load of money on awareness, to try to avoid the inevitable "oh this asshole is tail-gating me, I better slow down."
Another caveat is that it's easier to steer smoothly at high speeds when you look far down the road ahead of you, which is kind of hard to do when you're breathing down the neck of the car in front of you. Obviously if drivers start losing the ability to stay in lane when following that closely, the idea falls apart.
Ultimately I think "cruise control" is something every driver understands and trusts. Make cruise control better. Call it "super cruise" and put it in the Tesla Model S. Try to educate other drivers about "super cruising" so that they know you're not actually driving like an ass. More brands will follow.
If most highway traffic is caused by exceeding road capacity by just 1 or 2% (personally hard to believe, but that's what experts say) then in theory if "super cruise" reduced inter-car gap by 50% for 5% of cars on the highway, then POOF no more traffic jams. Of course as adoption increased much past 5%, only then you would need to add software to support zipper merging ;-)
Autonomous Cruise Control [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_cruise_control_syste...] for changing speed up/down and even breaking depending on the car in front.
Lane Departure Warning System [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lane_departure_warning_system] for ensuring you stay in the right lane, some cars will even steer you back in.
Audi has a gearbox that changes it's shift pattern based on upcoming corners identified by the GPS.
Mercedes has advanced pedestrian/object detection integrated into their higher-end cars to prevent collisions.
and there are probably many other advances already present in cars that basically allow them to drive themselves without much user-concentration these days.
Latest BMW 7-series: "A new Enhanced Active Cruise Control system builds on the last-generation Active Cruise Control System with Stop & Go to add the ability to brake to a complete stop if the driver doesn't react to stopping traffic in time. The system alerts the driver to the situation along the way, but will ultimately take over if it deems it necessary."
That sounds quite lame actually. Not the kind of system that instills trust and confidence in the driver. I don't want to hear the damn thing beeping at me every time it has to do its job.
For example, see: http://f10.5post.com/forums/showthread.php?t=457861 - seems like a pretty knowledgeable bunch of BMW owners speaking from experience.
Maybe by the time you solve it well enough, you may as well be steering.
Something a bit like cruise control (in the way that it can be quickly overridden) would be a start. Put it in robo-mode and get a warning if you need to take the wheel within the next few seconds.
I don't even like cruise control (although I can see the use when covering massive distances with little traffic) and drive a manual (stick shift car).
The article notes, about an expected transitional phase of development when driverless cars augment rather than replace human driving, "An important challenge with a system that drives all by itself, but only some of the time, is that it must be able to predict when it may be about to fail, to give the driver enough time to take over. This ability is limited by the range of a car’s sensors and by the inherent difficulty of predicting the outcome of a complex situation. 'Maybe the driver is completely distracted,' Werner Huber said. 'He takes five, six, seven seconds to come back to the driving task—that means the car has to know [in advance] when its limitation is reached. The challenge is very big.'"
My dream is the dream of fully door-to-door driverless cars. I think the article "Why Driverless Cars Are Inevitable--and a Good Thing"
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000087239639044352490...
by Dan Neil of the Wall Street Journal, published last year, is a good commentary on why ordinary people will mostly be glad to use driverless cars, and regulators and insurers will be glad to nudge drivers to use them. But that's only if they work, and it's not clear how soon driverless cars will work reliably and be manufactured inexpensively enough to become routine on our streets and roads.
Exactly!
a) As it says in OP's text, the most dangerous point in driving these automated cars is when a half-distracted driver takes over; having a fully automated car prevents this.
b) OP's text seems to see the biggest danger in automated cars not reacting properly to other humans driving erratically. This is easy to fix - once 100% of a road's cars are automated (and ideally communicate with each other), the problem of erratic driving simply disappears.
A question for thought: If I'm drunk in a driverless car, current laws would say that's illegal, since I'm still the main driver. But if it's fully automated, why should I stay sober?
The article is fundamentally missing the point of autonomous vehicles---namely, that this is a _software_ problem, not a mechanical problem, so car building is an irrelevant skill. Automakers have decades of experience with all sorts of useful things, like machine design, manufacturing, fit and finish, etc. But they suck at software, as evidenced by the hilariously low quality of all* dashboard media/navigation/tech clusters ever. Google, on the other hand, is pretty good at software, and is therefore much better positioned to win in this space. Empiricism verifies this, because the Google autonomous cars work better than the automakers'.
In fairness, the article's claim about the high cost of Google LIDAR is solid.
*Yeah, I know. Tesla's doesn't suck. But they're not a real automaker yet.
They can license their technology to UPS and Fedex and make billions. They can license their technology to Uber, ZipCar and taxi companies and make billions. They can license the technology to traditional automakers and make billions.
The self-driving car ecosystem might end up very similar to Android. Google makes the software, and others make the hardware. Or they can just buy an automaker if they want to sell their own cars.
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=17a_1382454285
It's probably even harder to handle if your car starts braking unexpectedly.
In the video you show 2 out of 3 affected cars crashed. In an automated car world eventually 0 out of 3 cars would have crashed.
Compared to any driver, a driverless car will react faster, and knows more accurately its own speed, and the speed and position of the object moving across in front of it.
A driverless also knows better than most drivers what is possible, including braking distance, turn radius etc.
So when the software is written to handle that situation it will always do better than I would, and sometimes do better than a fully alert Sebastian Vettel.
These are roads where only driverless cars will be allowed (perhaps just a lane on an existing road), and all the traffic, and lane, markings are designed for the computer to read. The roads are very carefully mapped out.
In some ways kind of like a train track.
The computer knows when it's almost time to exit the road and go to a regular road, and can alert the driver in advance. (Or simply pull off into a parking lot.)
With sonar, infrared, sign reading, gps, rain sensor, traffic management integration, line reading... exactly what does the cpu not "know" that a driver does?
This reminds of the frame problem in earlier AI[1]. Artificial systems can be built to deal well with a given frame having given specification but they can to the boundary of these frames, they fail to gracefully change their approach.
[1] http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/Frames/frames.html
Edit: changed link since the Minsky article is more descriptive. Wikipedia only describes a frame as a data structure but I (and I think Minsky) would see them as a metaphor for the structure and limitation of AI system.
Driverless cars are only 90% there for complete autonomy, and the last 10% could take another 50 years.
"The difficulty of re-engaging distracted drivers" - This is the danger that will be faced in driverless cars just like Asiana 214. If the expectation is that drivers must retain full "Situational Awareness", it seems like a lot of the benefits of being "driverless" are lost.
Perhaps it should be called "Assisted Driving" instead under given this expectation.
I can't believe they'd call such a vehicle a "driverless car", when the software simply gives up when there are too many things going on. Seriously, that software problem needs to be solved.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asiana_Airlines_Flight_214
[2] http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2013/07/13/asiana-crash-t...
The entire article is summed up fairly well in this one line "But for all its expertise in developing search technology and software, Google has zero experience building cars."
He effectively ignores the fact that Google is demonstrably farther along in development than any other company. Not to mention this isn't even a problem of building cars, it is a problem of software and AI, both of which Google is slightly more experienced than BMW, Audi, or any of the other companies he mentions.
All of his concerns about the timeline of this work seem to be based on some idea that in ten years, automation will only be ready for "limited highway driving" and that there are a lot of "Uncertain road" issues that aren't accounted for in these estimates. This differs greatly from Google's claims I read last year.
I couldn't bring myself to do more than skim the second half of the article but I saw no actual evidence to support his thesis of automation being farther away than expected (i.e., ten years). I only saw evidence to suggest I shouldn't bank on the auto-makers to get there first.
Imagine reading HN from a mobile phone and then suddenly shifting to driving mode: it's obvious that you will be very disoriented for a few seconds. Thus, we need to constraint the consumption setting: projecting a screen to the front window is likely to shave a couple of seconds off from the disorientation phase. initially both mobile phones and sleeping are banned while driving self-driving cars. Constantly projecting extra peripheral sensory information to the screen is also needed. This would be immensely useful already today without self-driving cars.
However, it's obvious that the shift of attention will take a couple of seconds thus the car can't change the control mode in dangerous situations. It's likely that there will be self-driving zones like highways and the control is changed mostly at borders of these
A fully autonomous car with the ability to make complex decisions on local roads is miles different from the adaptive cruise control and lane following/changing they're talking about here, and Google is the only one tackling the whole package.
And the gulf in safety between something that can drive all the time and something that needs the driver to jump back in when it hits a situation it doesn't know how to solve is huge to the point that I probably wouldn't touch the halfway solution with a pole.
There was another article on here the other day in which Elon Musk said that the last 10% was very difficult but it's easy to see how a car sharing company could offer a self driving service by avoiding that last 10%. They could do this because:
* The car might not have to go very far from it's pod to your location * They don't necessarily have to go in driveways and other hard to reach places. "closer than public transport would get you" is good enough. * The service can be restricted to urban areas with good map coverage
As other people have noted the opinions and even the technology of the major car companies is irrelevant.
"But for all its expertise in developing automobiles, Ford has zero experience feeding horses. To understand where the world is going, it's more instructive to interview coachmen"
Wat? How is Google not relevant or "instructive"??
I'd be surprised if autonomous cars become widespread before the last human train conductor is decruited. Driving a train is a simpler problem in a lot of ways, and yet we still feel the need for people in those jobs.
Because? What's your argument that this isn't an algorithm and price reduction on select parts of the system sort of problem at this point?