Driverless Cars in 2016

Shonuff

Shonuff

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fris_sl said:
airlines are going to lose a ton of short flight business. long drive to work? no prob anymore.
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I tend to drive everywhere, even on vacation. The next car I get will be an SUV, equipped with TV's and videogames, that self-drives and has Wi-fi. Oh, and I remember when I lived in Atlanta and it took an hour and half to get to work one way. Now I'll be able to get some paperwork done in the car.
 
opiate82

opiate82

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Are there hurdles to get over with self-driving cars, sure. But I think anyone who doesn't think that they are a big part of our future are very naive. I bet within most of our lifetimes we'll be at the point where most people don't even own cars anymore outside of hobbyist. We'll just get on our app and an automated Uber car will show up at our house to pick us up for work.
 
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koljec_sl

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Lyrical_sl said:
If I'm reading this right, Tesla already is selling self-driving cars already?

Tesla Releases Autopilot Software, Elon Musk Talks Self-Driving Cars | Re/code
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Yes, but iirc there is a warning with the system that says something like "this feature is for use on private property in controlled circumstances, not for use, or legal on public roads".

Also, the law in CA right now still requires a pilot, even if the car is on auto-pilot. Which would seem to require that the pilot be sober and awake and alert. Liability will still get attached to the driver.

I like Musk:

The idiosyncratic exec also gave a peek inside his vision of a future. Does he imagine a future of fully autonomous cars, requiring no human driving whatsoever? That sounds ?boring,? he replied.

?It might be something like ?I, Robot,? where you can switch from manual to autopilot,? Musk offered. ?Maybe the steering wheel would come out of the dash. That?d be kind of cool.?

I can deal with his vision for the future. I am not sure Apple and Google's leadership is so enlightened, though.
 
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koljec_sl

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opiate82_sl said:
Are there hurdles to get over with self-driving cars, sure. But I think anyone who doesn't think that they are a big part of our future are very naive. I bet within most of our lifetimes we'll be at the point where most people don't even own cars anymore outside of hobbyist. We'll just get on our app and an automated Uber car will show up at our house to pick us up for work.
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See, the problem I have with this is that it's a stupid solution for a problem already solved by mass transit in Europe and Japan. These companies should just throw money at green mass transit rail systems. That's far more efficient than keeping the cars for what you're describing.

To be clear, I'm not saying your appreciation of self-driving cars is stupid, but the corporate vision for them on any large scale seems to be ignoring mass transit.
 
fris

fris

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mass transit won't wake my drunk ass up when it pulls into my driveway. i think the opposite will happen. self driving cars will replace some mass transit. if people are holding the wheel and pressing the gas, autos will transition back to smaller more efficient. HOV will be replaced w/ self driving lanes.
 
Lejina

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I like how legislations and manufacturers talk of requiring a driver at the wheel ready to take control whenever required and people talk of working, sleeping, playing games or being drunk at the wheel.

Talk about being out of synch with each other.
 
Guurn

Guurn

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Lejina_sl said:
I like how legislations and manufacturers talk of requiring a driver at the wheel ready to take control whenever required and people talk of working, sleeping, playing games or being drunk at the wheel.

Talk about being out of synch with each other.
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Except Google is going to produce cars with no steering wheels. Think of the bonuses to fewer drivers and more electric cars. Less highway patrols needed, driverless taxis (no taxi drivers needed), fewer car repair shops etc etc. Mass transit is a lovely pipe dream in the US. It kinda works in large cities, that's about it
 
jooka

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Pretty sure CA made the steering wheel a requirement so that version of it got cancelled
 
Joeboo

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Mass transit just isn't efficient in the majority of US cities. We have too much land and we're too spread out in all but the handful of largest cities. Most people would still need to own a car to drive to their nearest mass transit pickup spot. The population density just isn't there.

It's nice as a tourist/occasional use thing, see the light rail in St Louis that goes from the Airport to downtown/stadiums. Its nice for tourists hitting the big tourist destinations, but maybe 5% of the city actually lives within walking distance of it to use it on a daily basis for real transportation.

Unless your city is as dense as New York/London/Paris/Tokyo, large-scale rails/subways/monorails just aren't logistically feasible.

For instance, 54% on NY city households don't own a car, and can rely on public transit.

If Kansas City had a subway system as large as New Yorks, it would only be usable by about 1/3 of our metro population at most (KC proper is 500k, and the subway is large enough it would stretch a little ways into a few suburbs, so add another few hundred thousand, so you're looking at maybe 800k of our 2.4 million people that could feasably use it (and you know not 100% of them WOULD use it, some would keep a car). So it would take a subway system on par with New Yorks and maybe 25-30% of the city would use it regularly. Mass transit just isn't worth the cost in most cities in the US.
 
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Tenks

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Cincinnati tried to build a sub system and it got abandoned. Now crack heads enjoy the tunnels.

An issue I see with many people who try to emulate the Euro is that they don't quite understand just had spread out USA is. Like I drive "only" 180 miles to see my parents. In Europe that is like going to another country. If you look at population maps of nordic countries the population is all centralized in a few cities. I do feel like driverless electric cars would be a feasible solution to transit in America. Imagine how much we could save on things such as fewer highway lanes because we have driverless cars driving effeciently instead of "every man for themselves" as the current.
 
Palum

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Lejina_sl said:
I like how legislations and manufacturers talk of requiring a driver at the wheel ready to take control whenever required and people talk of working, sleeping, playing games or being drunk at the wheel.

Talk about being out of synch with each other.
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"Officer, it's all Google's fault, I was too drunk to take control! SIRI HELP ME!"
 
Borzak

Borzak

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I would have limited use for auto driving without the ability to have a set of human driver controls as I go too many places without designated roads,without designated parking spots, and such that I think an AI vehicle would have much difficulty with.

However, what would be handy as hell is if I drove or the vehicle drove someplace that was busy such as shopping, football game and such and dropped me off at the door. Then have the ability to summon it to the door when I got ready to leave. 4" of rain per hour downpour, I don't care I'm walking 3 feet to the car/truck.
 
Tuco

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Lyrical_sl said:
Are we really doing this?
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Yes.

http://www.nhtsa.gov/staticfiles/rul...les_Policy.pdf

We've had level 1 automation for years.

Tesla is rolling out level 2 automation with their supercruise (lane following + automated cruise control that keeps speed with whatever is in front of you) in consumer's hands.

Bosch and Delphi are releasing their supercruise this year on a few OEMs. Other Tier1s are playing catch up to them. Ford recently started a massive effort toward catching up to google.

Every sensor manufacturer ( lidar, GPS, radar, sonar, IMU, mono/stereo/infrared cam) is trying to improve and reduce the cost of their systems. Despite people with one eye being able to drive just fine you need a MASSIVE amount of sensing on these vehicles for fully autonomous driving. Lidar are generally the most expensive perception sensors, but provide a lot of functionality where radar, sonar and cameras fail. I'm pretty excited aboutQuanergy | Future of Mapping and Navigationwho are making a solid state lidar.

Computing hardware is increasing nicely with Moore's law which is making the immense processing task of autonomous driving much tractable. The earlier autonomous vehicles you might see in DARPA's grand challenge 2007 were basically SUVs with huge racks of computing hardware. Improvements to our processers have shrunk that down nicely, and further improvements (plus refining to our algorithms/custom processing hardware for intensive actions like object recognition, ray tracing etc) will enable that processing to fit on traditional ECMs.


The problem with ALL automation, from factories to roombas to roadways is this: The problem gets harder the closer you get to covering 100% of the situations you encounter. And roadways feature a massive variety of problems from construction, to pedestrians, to weather conditions, to other drivers. I was at a presentation last year from one of Google's autonomous cars leaders, Chris Urmson, who said they found an instance of the car being blocked by an old lady in a wheel chair chasing ducks.

Tesla only needs a forward facing cam + radar for their system. The increase in sensor payload to get from level 2 to 3 is massive.

So just because we have solved a certain level of automation does not mean that future levels are imminent.

All that being said, don't expect level 3 automation (what google has) to roll out this decade to consumers like what Tesla has done with their level 2 automation. The gains will be hard fought and many of those new cases will require new technological breakthroughs from both software and hardware.


Here's a good presentation on onroad autonomy:
Chris Urmson: How a driverless car sees the road | TED Talk | TED.com
 
Dr Neir

Dr Neir

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Waiting to hear the crying from thousands of Truck drivers when this rolls into the Semi transport market.
Waiting to hear the crying from small town cops unable to pick on the new young drivers and those that would have had the piece together old POS car.
Waiting to hear about the increase of drug trafficking from the over use of child/adolescent passengers sitting in it to active the thing.
Waiting to hear the old stories on how ppl used to own a car and needed a license to get around.
Waiting to hear about traffic jams on the interstates when some protestors leave ones of tens of garbage cans in the lanes with their messages on them and noone around but the cans.
 
Rajaah

Rajaah

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Reviving this old thread because I got into a tangent about this in the Rustled thread.

Bandwagon said:
The only scary thought is having driverless cars AND human drivers on the same roads. Overall, I'd put my faith in driverless cars for safety.
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So would I. Having them mixed might be a bad thing. It's a situation where in order to have everything functioning at peak efficiency, like 95% of the cars would need to be under AI control with the computers communicating with each other wirelessly. Maybe 100%. An old pickup truck with no computer tech in it might end up being functionally invisible to the AI-driven cars, at least until it gets close enough to register as an object.

Conefed said:
Solid reason why I welcome self-driving/assisted-driving cars
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There's a good possibility that those cars could alleviate most city congestion. Everyone would need to be using them though, or almost everyone. Cause then the cars can all coordinate and go through lights efficiently, etc. If the lights are also hooked into the system, even better. No more sitting at a red light with nothing going on the other side. The light could adjust on the fly and turn green to let the lane with actual cars in it go.

All in all there's a good chance everyone would get where they're going a lot faster, and without having to stress behind the wheel, they wouldn't be road raging and all that. Course this is all probably 5+ years in the future if it happens at all.

Come to think of it, FLYING cars would actually be a lot more feasible under this paradigm, as well. Cause right now, we probably have the tech to develop them, but nobody's going to because of the risk of people using them as flying missiles. Essentially small planes that anyone can hijack. If they were all under computer control, that risk would mostly disappear (outside of, say, hackers in terror groups trying to get into the system, I guess).

So if all the kinks were ironed out and this self-driving system had a 100% success rate, flying cars could gradually be developed and added to it. First for wealthy people of course, then more and more common as the production costs come down. Whenever you see flying cars in sci-fi, they're usually all flying in a perfect straight line right? That's an AI system at work. It'd alleviate even more traffic. Maybe by 2050, getting around won't be any kind of hassle at all because there'll be people in the air and everyone on the ground will be moving with actual efficiency.

And speaking of efficiency, productivity would also go up because people could spend their commute time getting work / school stuff done. Also we'd have more leisure time to play games or whatnot.
 
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