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0 pointsfredkbloggs11y ago0 comments

The reason I believe this problem won't be solved any time soon is that I don't live there, though I have in the past. It's very easy for someone who commutes along hwy 280, for example, to imagine an autonomous vehicle making the same drive instead. It's a bit more of a stretch, but still within reason, to assert that you could do the same on the Central Expressway or Zanker or places like that.

Not all environments are as friendly. Downtown San Francisco will be extremely hard to get right -- note that I say get right, not dump a robot car there and hope for the best. There are going to be a lot of crushed pedestrians and damaged parked cars, and I'm not sure the people who live there will value having autonomous vehicles enough to overlook that series of incidents. Then there are suburban and rural environments with their own challenges: poor mapping, roads that aren't obviously roads, one-lane roads, poor visibility, lack of signage, and so on. Not every location has weather like the Valley, either; suppose an autonomous car gets stuck in snow. A human driver can usually get out, possibly with the aid of a shovel, carpet, sand, etc. The robot can't do those things, and the passengers may not be able to (for example, it's unlikely that a robotic taxicab would have any provision for passengers to control it).

The world is a much bigger place than the Valley, and comes with much bigger challenges. That's why I don't see any real likelihood that fully autonomous vehicles will be developed any time soon. It's easy to get lost in narrow thinking when your entire world consists of a single place and a bunch of people all living in that same place practicing groupthink. This problem is much more difficult than you imagine.

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nostrademons11y ago· 1 in thread

The valley's not the only place I've ever lived. I grew up in Boston, which certainly has its share of inclement weather, one-lane roads, roads without lane markers, one-way streets, 3 left turns that don't make a right, lack of signage, etc. All of these are challenges, but they're not insurmountable challenges.

I'm pretty sure I've seen self-driving cars on Highway 1 in California, for example, which has construction, cattle gratings, one-lane segments, a lot of twists and turns, pull-offs, and places where it gets very narrow and you have to pull off and let opposing traffic pass. They had safety drivers, but I think this means that Google's at least considering these driving conditions in their software.

fredkbloggsOP11y ago

All I can say is "we'll see". I personally don't believe these challenges will be addressed in 5 years. Perhaps you do (not putting words in your mouth, since you never claimed this), though we agree that no challenge is insurmountable. 50 years is a good marker here. The PCH is tough but it represents but one slice of the challenge; how about hwy 130 to Mt Hamilton? In January? The idea of a car without a steering wheel is far off to me, even in California.

We'll see.