A thread to discuss self-driving cars and other vehicles. No politics, please.
Technology, commercial aspects, legal considerations and marketing are all on-topic.
- Companies (e.g. Tesla Inc.) are only on-topic when discussing their self-driving products and research, not their wider activities. The exception is when those wider activities directly impact (or are impacted by) their other business areas - e.g. if self-driving car development is cut back due to losses in another part of the business.
- Technology that's not directly related to self-driving vehicles is off-topic unless you're discussing how it might be used for them in future.
- If we're talking about individuals here, that should only be because they've said or done something directly relevant to the topic. Specifically, posts about Tesla do not automatically need to mention Elon Musk. And Musk's views, politics and personal life are firmly off-topic unless you can somehow show that they're relevant to self-driving vehicles.
Cadillac plans to release a scaled back, more simple version of similar technology by 2015 - what they call "Super Cruise", which isn't total self-driving, but does let you relax on highways. It positions your car in the exact center of a lane, slows down or speeds up as necessary, and is said to be meant for ideal driving conditions (I'm guessing that means ideal weather, no rain or snow, etc.).
I am looking forward to such tech. If enough people prefer to drive this way, and the technology works reliably, it could result in safer roads with fewer accidents. Another possibility is that, using GPS and maybe the ability to know ahead of time which roads are most clogged, they can find the quickest route from place to place.
On the other hand, hacking could be a real concern, and I hope it doesn't become a serious threat. It's looking like we're living more and more like those sci-fi Everything Is Online worlds depicted in fiction for a long time.
(Mod edited to replace original post)
Edited by Mrph1 on Mar 29th 2024 at 4:19:56 PM
Jupiterian Local
In over a million miles of driving, self-driving car is partially responsible for a single fender-bender. This is far, far better than the average human driver.
In other words, people are afraid of self-driving cars because they're terrible at judging risk.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
It's probably also worth pointing out that if both vehicles were self driving there would be some sort of standardised protocol that would have allowed both vehicles to know more accurately which was going to yield and act accordingly.
But as accidents go... that's not really a biggy.
i still don't want a self-driving car
Bumbleby is best ship. busy spending time on r/RWBY and r/anime. Unapologetic Socialist
V
Or they don't trust the technology? I'm not a fan myself, coming from a country where manual gearboxes are normal.
edited 1st Mar '16 2:09:55 PM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
Jupiterian Local
Not trusting the technology is another way of saying that they're terrible at judging risk. Self-driving cars are objectively safer than manually driven cars.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Cape Malleum Majorem
I have trust issues with unproven technology.
Come to think of it, I have trust issues, full-stop. Whenever I'm driving, the one thought that's always going through my mind is: "Please don't hit me, you idiot." I'd say my judgment of risk is pretty good.
"Objectively" doesn't count for very much in the car market. Buying a car, self-driving or not, is mostly a gut decision. Oh sure, you may rationalize the decision afterwards, but that's like a PR man trying to put a positive spin on a potential scandal to minimize the damage.
For proof of that, just look at any guy who just bought a Corvette. Or as I call them, the Mid-Life Crisis-mobile. The same goes for the Toyota Prius: people buy Priuses to show off how eco-friendly they are. There are other hybrids available, but they look exactly like their non-hybrid counterparts. Only the Prius is distinctly a hybrid and nothing else.
edited 1st Mar '16 4:36:40 PM by pwiegle
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.
V
The BBC: Driverless lorries to be trialled in UK
The Times reported trials would take place on the M6 in Cumbria later in 2016, with vehicles in convoy headed by a driver in the leading lorry. The tests would take place on a quiet stretch of the motorway, it said. The paper said the plans could result in platoons of up to 10 computer-controlled lorries being driven metres apart from each other.
It said the chancellor was preparing to fund the trials as part of plans to speed up lorry deliveries and cut congestion.
Edmund King, the president of the AA, said while such a scheme might work in other countries, he was doubtful it was right for the UK. "The problem with the UK motorway network is that we have more entrances and exits of our motorways than any other motorways in Europe or indeed the world, and therefore it's very difficult to have a 44 tonne 10-lorry platoon, because other vehicles need to get past the platoon to enter or exit the road."
He said the "only feasible place" to trial the plans would be the M6, north of Preston towards Scotland, because it "tends to have less traffic and there are slightly fewer entrances and exits".
A driverless lorry developed by Daimler has already been tested on a public road in Germany in October. The vehicles have a "highway pilot" - which can be activated at the press of a button - that helps them avoid other road users via a radar and camera sensing system. But the company has a requirement that a human driver be present and focused on the road at all times.
A Department for Transport spokesman said: "New technology has the potential to bring major improvements to journeys and the UK is in a unique position to lead the way for the testing of connected and driverless vehicles.
"We are planning trials of HGV platoons - which enable vehicles to move in a group so they use less fuel - and will be in a position to say more in due course."
Lost in Space
I've been studying up on Tesla lately, partly out of curiosity, and partly out of a crossover fascination with all things Elon Musk driven by recent advances from SpaceX. This topic has been quiet for a while but I figure this is as good a time as any to resurrect it.
So, the news is that Tesla has been shipping all new Model S, 3, and X cars with its latest "Full Self Driving" chips for the past month or two. There are articles all over the place about it, and a lot of videos, but here's just one of them (The Verge).
Full Self-Driving is supposed to become release-ready at some time this year, and it costs 6,000 USD to activate on any vehicle. (Autonomous driving is available at the base price, including lane following and collision avoidance, but runs on the same hardware and software.) From my light reading, I'm seeing some confusion as to whether this will result in a completely autonomous vehicle or a more limited form that can handle highway and on/off-ramp driving, but require user attention for city driving.
It's really exciting in general, but Tesla seems to be particularly targeting the FSD cars at fleet users, like taxis and Uber, with the idea of allowing passengers to order driverless cars on-demand. I've read that Uber has already been doing this experimentally in some markets with Google cars, but I don't know all the details.
Speaking purely for myself, the feature that lets your car find you in a parking lot is probably one of the coolest things I've heard recently, and I can only imagine how it will freak out people in the lot. ![[lol]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/lol2v12_4863.png "[lol]"){kind=small}
Edited by Fighteer on May 28th 2019 at 11:05:05 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Wait, hold on, is that separate from the price of the car itself?
Lost in Space
Yes. Well, you could look at it both ways: the base price of the car is X, and you can get it without FSD for X-6000, or the base price of the car is Y, and you can get it with FSD for Y+6000. The Tesla website shows it as an addon.
Since you get the hardware either way, it's mainly a question of whether you want to pay for the self-driving capability, and you can presumably upgrade whenever you want.
Autonomous driving works now, doesn't cost anything above the base price, and includes most of the basic self-driving features, but you are only supposed to use it for highways and ramps, and you are supposed to keep your hands on the wheel and watch the road. It's quite smart as-is.
Edit: I think I may be wrong, or at least have misread the website.
What you get at the base purchase price is Autopilot, which features collision avoidance and lane following. Full Self-Driving, which costs extra, includes:
- Navigate on Autopilot: The car will follow highways and ramps to your destination.
- Auto Lane Change: The car will change lanes on the highway automatically.
- Autopark: The car can parallel and perpendicular park on its own.
- Summon: The car will find you in a parking lot.
Features coming later in 2019 include:
- City driving
- Stop sign and traffic light recognition and response
As I said before, it's all software-driven, so you can upgrade to FSD at any point after buying the car. Tesla says the price will increase over time, so getting in early will have advantages.
Link to Tesla's website showing this information (warning: commercial)
Edited by Fighteer on May 28th 2019 at 4:52:44 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Jupiterian Local
I am deeply skeptical of Telsa's FSD claims. I expect them to get there eventually, but I also expect it to be later and more expensive than they're saying. It's an extremely difficult computational problem with literally life-or-death consequences, and Elon Musk is promising that it can be done with fewer hardware sensors and less software development (both of which translate to "cheaper") than the rest of the industry. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. I'm especially skeptical because it's not entirely clear what exactly that $6k gets you. Additional sensors? Upgraded processors? Or are they just flipping the switch that says "full self-driving on" and there's no actual hardware difference? It reeks of sketchy ways of gathering venture capital under the guise of preorders. "Pay now, get The Thing* soon**! (*The Thing subject to change at our discretion. **Guaranteed within 5 years, or never, whichever comes last.)"
That said, even the basics of things like adaptive cruise control and automatic lane keeping are pretty impressive on their own, and that seems to be more or less an industry standard at this point. I don't really have any issues with what they're offering as-is right now, only that they're promising more than I think they'll be able to deliver in the future.
Edited by NativeJovian on Jun 1st 2019 at 4:45:35 AM
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
One of the things I'll note as a software developer is that even if it is only a software upgrade and all of the physical sensors and computers are already in the car, software development takes work and money. A purely software upgrade to a car is still an upgrade to a car.
Jupiterian Local
Oh, definitely, I'm not denying that. I'm just saying that they're not being up front about what you're actually paying six thousand dollars for, except that you'll definitely get it (whatever it is) at some point in the near future (for a given definition of "near").
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
Lost in Space
The thing about this software is that it's in use now. It's working. Being used by drivers all over the world, both in the current version and the "beta" prototypes for the more advanced versions. By putting it in the mass market and letting it be used, Tesla (and Google, and other companies) generate vast amounts of data to feed into their machine learning algorithms to improve the performance.
Elon has claimed, and I have no reason to doubt him, that FSD is already better than human drivers by 45 percent. (I think I'm remembering him correctly.) He certainly has no reason to lie. The newest version coming out this year is supposed to improve that by 2-3 times. It's an AI problem that is going to be solved sooner or later. It's mainly a question of when it will be solved enough to be trusted by drivers, and, just as importantly, by regulators and insurance companies.
Think about the car's software like a student driver. You can give it the basics very easily, but it has to learn more and more complex situations over time. Tesla's autopilot, again according to Musk, gets 99% of situations right. It's the edge cases that they have to keep working out solutions for, and that involves feeding them to the learning algorithm and letting it solve them. "Here's a weird situation, here's how you recognize it, here's the solution space for it." Just keep building on that until the software knows how to respond to every situation.
Part of this is the hardware. The latest model Teslas have a "full self-driving" chip in them, which is built in-house, with two redundant processors that have to agree on the solution to take action. It's a massively parallel artificial intelligence system. The cars have eight cameras whose images are processed visually. Basically, the car has eyes and it's taught to see things the way a human driver would see them. No radar or lidar.
As for what you get, all the hardware and software is in every car, out of the factory, and gets software updates automatically while it's not being driven. Your car will have the latest software for free, forever (that's compatible with its hardware). The price difference is you paying to use the more advanced features of that software. Sort of like upgrading from Windows 10 Home to Windows 10 Professional: all the features are already on your computer, you're just buying the rights to use them.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 1st 2019 at 5:08:17 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Jupiterian Local
To put it succinctly, Musk runs Tesla like a tech company rather than a car company, and one of Silicon Valley's unofficial mottos is "fail faster" (the idea being that by doing so you can find and correct the issue causing the failure faster). And that's not really something I'm comfortable with in the context of self-driving cars.
As for the 45% claim, that seems to be a reference to a comment made by the NHTSA that there was a 40% reduction in crashes that resulted in airbag deployment between Teslas that were equipped with Autosteer vs those that weren't. However, independent analysis has called that conclusion into question, noting that the NHTSA interpretation didn't check for things like whether Autosteer was actually active on the vehicles they were looking at. An analysis of the same data reduced to the set of those that had Autosteer installed showed an almost 60% increase in airbag deployments — but they also point out that using the same flawed, incomplete data in both cases does not allow for any confidence in an accurate, reliable conclusion on the safety or effectiveness of Autosteer.
, noting that Tesla's development timeline is wildly optimistic and the language of their announcements on the subject seem to treat navigation of static route conditions (the lane markers, road signs, stationary obstacles, etc) as sufficient for full self driving. This entirely ignores dynamic conditions, which includes things like vehicle traffic, cyclists, pedestrians, animals, debris falling on the road, etc etc — basically anything that can move and thus change driving conditions on the fly. Obviously the latter is both absolutely vital for safe driving and a much more complicated problem to solve than the former, but Tesla is treating solving the static problem as if they've solved the entire self-driving problem, which is either them intentionally misleading people about their progress or them dangerously underestimating the complexity of the problem. Neither is good.
Telsa's continued insistence that the more limited set of sensors that they use compared to others in the self-driving industry is sufficient to attain safe self-driving is another thing in the same vein. Their sensor suite includes nothing but cameras, while other self-driving companies use things like lidar for more accurate range detection. Musk insists that these additional sensors actually make self-driving worse, which again strikes me as either deliberately misleading or dangerously naive.
Really from Jupiter, but not an alien.
I'm terrified of driving outside of Downtown and my house. This is a godsend for me.
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Lost in Space
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
Look, I don't want to come across as tooting Tesla's horn (har, har). Obviously there are still many obstacles to full adoption of self-driving. However, the advantages that Tesla has in the race seem to be very strong, and I will argue one point: Elon Musk has every reason not to lie in this regard. The consequences of overpromising in the self-driving market are way worse than the consequences of underpromising. Sure, you want to sell cars, but if those cars kill people, you won't be selling cars for long.
There's this memetic disdain for Musk that I don't quite understand. I think it's partly borne of jealousy, partly of mistrust (nobody can be that good), partly from the inability to understand people who are so clearly driven by a vision of the future, and partly out of simple fear of things that are new or unknown. He's an engineer: he approaches problems from the question of "how can we efficiently solve this", not "what will people like" or "what will investors like". I appreciate that.
Tesla clearly believes that they can make fully autonomous vehicles without using lidar. I'm not an AI engineer; I can't speak to the truth of that statement, but it'll be borne out (or not) soon enough.
Speaking for myself, I'm willing to wait a few more years before going all in on the SDEV (self-driving electric vehicle) thing, if only for affordability and practicality reasons. My current car won't need replacement for at least that long, and even the cheapest Model 3 is out of my up-front price range. Tesla's nearest dealership and service center are over an hour away, which isn't ideal. Also, Tesla is still young, and I want to feel certain that I'll have support for my car over its lifetime.
One of the most promising features of full self-driving, and the one that I'm possibly the most excited about from an economic perspective, is private vehicles serving as robo-taxis. That's amazingly cool: your car can earn its keep while you're at work or at home. It can pay off its own cost of purchase many times over. That, if nothing else, may permanently end the professional taxi industry. Apparently, Tesla is going to insure its own vehicles while on Autopilot. That's another really cool thing, and it absolves the consumer of most of the inherent risk.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2019 at 2:35:17 PM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Well there's also the fact it's partially because on a personal level Elon Musk is a bit of douchebag (see his reaction to his mini-sub solution for getting the children stranded in a flooded cave in Thailand out being turned down).
His personal behaviour also leaves open the question that how much of his promises are driven by a genuine belief in the technology and what it's capable of and how much is about feeding his ego.
Elon Musk has accomplished quite a few things. He's also been a billionaire for a long time based on people believing in his promises that are...unrealistic and have yet to be proven possible. Well, let's just say Musk's accomplishments are great but they're in incriminates versus leaps.
Literally the greatest thing he's done was his open source publication of ideas.
He's a guy that promises the moon and we've gotten upper atmosphere.
Edited by CharlesPhipps on Jun 2nd 2019 at 3:21:22 AM
Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.
Lost in Space
Sorry, I'm not following you. Elon and his companies have, and this is just a very small list...
- Launched the first private rocket into orbit.
- Propulsively landed the first orbital rocket booster in history.
- Been the first private company to reuse an orbital rocket booster.
- Cut the cost of orbital launches by over 80 percent (!).
- Currently developing the first fully functional methane-liquid oxygen rocket engine.
- Built some of the first mass-market fully electric vehicles since the 1990s, and (per Wikipedia) inspired the relaunch of the market.
- Become the largest manufacturer of lithium-ion batteries in the world.
- Become a major player in the home solar power market.
- Soon to become the first major LEO broadband Internet provider.
- May be the first to deliver on the promise of fully self-driving cars.
There is very little that Elon has promised that he has not delivered in some form, or is at least working on delivering. Anyway, this is off-topic, but as far as I'm concerned, the man can have his personal quirks.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 2nd 2019 at 6:59:38 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
There is also the history of production problems that Tesla has had. Still, I agree that we will know for sure how well this thing works soon after people start buying it. The most reliable sign will be what price insurers charge for driving one.
Oh, bother.
Elon Musk is basically the Trump of Silicon Valley.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Figure of Hourai
Musk seems to have good judgement for electric cars (or at least pushing the matter enough that it matters) and funding space travel. And enough self-awareness that half of what he does now is invoke industry attention onto some niche so that it suddenly gets consume attention. Still a lot of questionable judgements and arguments, though.
And it's unfair to compare Musk to Trump. At least he wasn't born with a silver spoon in his mouth.
Avatar Source
Oh, bother.
An op-ed from last year made the case for said comparison. It makes some good points.
Elon Musk, the Donald of Silicon Valley
I speak of Tesla chief executive Elon Musk, the Donald Trump of Silicon Valley.
Edited by M84 on Jun 2nd 2019 at 11:53:52 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
So in case anyone hadn't heard, the self-driving car hit a bus
, or more accurately got itself hit by a bus.
Google has previously said there were 17 minor accidents involving its self-driving cars, but said none of them had been the cars' fault.
But on February 14, a Lexus 450 hybrid SUV with Google's self-driving technology had a scrape with a city bus in Mountain View, California, the company's hometown. It said no one was injured in the accident. Google said the car was in the right lane of a city street, and was about to turn right. But after initially moving to the right side of the lane, it moved back to the center of the lane to avoid sand bags that had been placed around a storm drain. The bus, coming from behind, hit the left side of the car.
"This type of misunderstanding happens between human drivers on the road every day. This is a classic example of the negotiation that's a normal part of driving — we're all trying to predict each other's movements," Google said in a statement.
The company said the Google test driver who was behind the wheel thought the bus was going to yield, and the bus driver likely thought the Google car was going to yield to the bus. "In this case, we clearly bear some responsibility, because if our car hadn't moved, there wouldn't have been a collision," Google said.
Google said its car was traveling less than 2 mph, the bus about 15 mph. Its car sustained some damage to the left side; it did not report what damage the bus sustained. Google said it has accumulated more than 1 million miles of autonomous driving, and said it has made changes to its software to try to avoid future accidents like this.
"From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles, and we hope to handle situations like this more gracefully in the future," said the company.
Still, 60% drivers would like to get some kind of self-driving feature, such as automatic braking or self-parking, the next time they buy a new car. The attitudes are in a new AAA survey of 1,800 drivers.
Advocates of self-driving cars argue they would be safer than cars driven by humans because they can't get distracted or drive when tired or impaired. Google has tested its self-driving cars on the road for more than 1 million miles. It suffered its first accident partly caused by the car, a minor fender bender involving a bus, only last month. Other automakers are also testing self-driving cars. Tesla has started offering hands free driving on its cars. But those surveyed by AAA say they trust their own driving skills. Many feel the technology is too new and unproven.
John Nielsen, AAA's managing director of automotive engineering and repair, said tests suggest drivers may be overestimating their own abilities. He also believes they will be more likely to trust self-driving cars as they become more familiar with features such as automatic braking or parking.
"People who have these features tend to like them and trust them. That will go a long way for them to start to accept the self-driving technology," he said. He estimated that the "comfort level" will increase in five to ten years.
edited 1st Mar '16 12:38:56 PM by BlueNinja0
That’s the epitome of privilege right there, not considering armed nazis a threat to your life. - Silasw