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
Oh, bother.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
And now you're forcing me to imagine President Musk.
Thanks a bunch.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Lost in Space
Elon Musk creates successful, innovative businesses. Donald Trump runs businesses into the ground. Musk is a brilliant, imaginative futurist. Trump is a narcissistic, racist conservative. There is no comparison.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Oh, bother.
They both have the narcissism and inability to handle criticism with any kind of grace in common.
Edited by M84 on Jun 3rd 2019 at 6:45:48 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Elon Musk is still a narcissist, though; don't kid yourself. He's rather more functional, however.
He still gives signs of not being as stable as you might hope for, though. Elon is not Donald Trump; he's Frederick Trump, with much of the tolerable nasty that implies.
Keep an eye on the kids. Just saying.
Edited by Euodiachloris on Jun 3rd 2019 at 11:46:40 AM
Oh, bother.
Which is troubling, since Fred Trump Sr. was an abusive jackass of a father who played a large part in one son becoming an alcoholic who drank himself to death and another son becoming...Donald.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Lost in Space
This is rapidly approaching slander. It's also off topic for this thread.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Oh, bother.
It would be slander if it were untrue.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Lyft and Aptiv have completed 50,000 self-driving car rides in Las Vegas
:
"The Las Vegas program uses BMW sedans modified with self-driving sensors and a human safety driver."
Figure of Hourai
Narcissist = Trump is stretching it, though. Even if the first part is true, it's making a particularly negative comparison both directly relevant (Trump is a particularly awful businessman who started off rich) and irrelevant (the inability to string together a coherent sentence).
It's a bit excessive.
Avatar Source
Oh, bother.
Pointing out the common ground between Trump and Musk — the personality cult, the Twitter rants, the rampant narcissism, the inability to take criticism, his companies' struggles to earn profits and teetering on bankruptcy, labor abuses — is still not technically slander.
Edited by M84 on Jun 3rd 2019 at 10:37:35 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Lost in Space
The point is that there is an excessive amount of hatred directed at Musk personally for reasons that seem trivial compared to his accomplishments. By point of comparison with this , Tesla cars exceeded a billion miles driven on Autopilot at some time last year.
No, I really think you're the one reaching here. The comparison is utterly ridiculous at any macroscopic level.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 3rd 2019 at 10:37:54 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Oh, bother.
He's also got a really weird view of what counts as socialism. He's called Marx a capitalist, for one thing.
Honestly, going through Musk's Twitter feed is enough to give one a massive headache.
To say nothing of that pravduh.com thing, which really freaks me out.
To bring it back to the actual self-driving cars...why does Musk refuse to use lidar anyway?
Edited by M84 on Jun 3rd 2019 at 10:51:24 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Oh, bother.
Personally, I'd rather have the lidar and the cameras if I was going for a self-driving car. At least right now. Maybe after the tech improves we can forego the lidar.
Edited by M84 on Jun 3rd 2019 at 11:08:58 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Heck, having variety in your sensor array = built-in redundancy. Which, when safety is concerned, is less "inefficient" and more "thank God both didn't fritz at the same time!".
Cars kind of should follow planes when it comes to autopiloting. <gives Boeing a dirty look regarding slacking off>
Oh, bother.
It's madness to skip out on safety features like this, especially when the tech is still relatively new.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Lost in Space
There's a difference between redundancy and unnecessary extra cost. LiDAR is expensive and prone to mechanical breakdown. Per the article and the research, if you give your software a "bird's eye view" of the stereoscopic data from the cameras, it can do just as good a job at determining distances. Combine that with radar and there's no difference in safety.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Figure of Hourai
Though this becomes quibbling over what constitutes a safety feature or necessary sensor component.
If the purpose of lidar is range detection, and you can have equal range detection via a different processing of stereoscopic camera input, then at best lidar adds redundancy. Which is GOOD, but unless all companies are equipping their cars with both, then it doesn't really matter which it has.
If the more expensive approach doesn't offer anything significant on its own, then I agree that it's not a good way forward. Cameras are probably always going to stay cheaper and image processing from camera data is a much bigger research field.
Avatar Source
Oh, bother.
Personally, I don't think saving a few hundred bucks on a car that's already tens of thousands of dollars anyway is worth skipping out on something that might make it less likely for me to die in an accident.
Disgusted, but not surprised
Lost in Space
I don't think that's a serious consideration as a "one or the other" choice. You are not required to use self-driving on any car, even if it has that feature. To be sure, you're technically at the mercy of other drivers who may turn on autopilot and then take a nap, but you're at the mercy of other drivers anyway. It's not a new failure state, just a different one.
Frankly, the biggest threat to self-driving cars right now is human drivers (behaving irrationally or unpredictably). The sooner we can get them out of the equation entirely, the safer everyone will be overall.
Edited by Fighteer on Jun 3rd 2019 at 11:41:07 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"
Oh, bother.
I mean, the whole advertising point is that self-driving is safe. So it's probably a good idea to have all the tech available to ensure that.
Edited by M84 on Jun 3rd 2019 at 11:42:44 PM
Disgusted, but not surprised
Figure of Hourai
This makes the assumption that the few hundred extra is actually safer, however. When the point of the research (and seemingly Tesla's opinion) is that you can achieve equal range detection with cheaper components.
If, as Fighteer has said, lidar is prone to mechanical error, then the dual-camera option might actually be the safer of the two.
Both might be better if you could correctly diagnose which system had failed when they give conflicting answers (otherwise it won't work anyway so you'd be as screwed as if there was only one failed system), but that's a separate matter to "is lidar necessary".
Avatar Source
Oh, bother.
All this talk of safety of self-driving cars reminded me of this:
Tesla sued by family of man killed in Autopilot-related crash
Figure of Hourai
So it either did or did not have an emergency brake that's standard on the model and the basis for the suit. Not many conclusions to be drawn from that, until it's concluded.
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Still not a fair comparison. Elon Musk has never shut down a government, and Donald Trump has made no advancements in electric car technology.
"Any campaign world where an orc samurai can leap off a landcruiser to fight a herd of Bulbasaurs will always have my vote of confidence"