I don't understand the pessimism in this thread. Google owns two of the most important pieces of the puzzle: maps and the mobile OS/app store in 80% of people's pockets. Not to mention lots of software and hardware IP related to autonomous vehicles. There are plenty of car companies in the world who can provide car frames, windows, leather seats, four wheels, and yes even an electric engine. I see Uber, Google, Apple, and others going head to head in this market, ultimately to the great benefit of consumers as transportation prices plummet. Imagine an airport run from 3rd and Market to SFO costing $15 (technically only $13 after 20% discount for paying with the UberRewards Capital One Visa Card), or a 4 hour trip (time to watch a long movie and send some email) from Santa Monica Pier to the Las Vegas Strip for $50 (or for a limited time, $55 if you stop at the selected partner gas/charging station for pre-paid lunch and bathroom break) - it will happen and sooner than most think.
Or put another way, electric + autonomous = inexpensive, intelligent, on-demand transportation.
It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars - every decade - in wasted costs on buying cars and then hardly ever utilizing them. While likely saving a quarter of a million lives every decade, and further sparing consumers a large percentage of the vast associated medical, insurance and lost-asset costs that go with those injuries and deaths.
The 'dumb pipe' of the Internet is going to eat the dumb car - as it'll try to do with everything it can touch - sucking out the complexity and inefficiencies with smart, hyper-available software.
A few decades from now, people will consider buying a 'dumb' $30,000 gasoline engine car to stick in your driveway and rarely use, to be comically absurd.
Sure cars are mostly idle / under-utilized, but when they are needed, what's the replacement? I don't really understand how a driverless world is going to solve the problem of X million people who have to drive to work every day at roughly the same time, and then get back home at night. For huge swaths of the country public transportation is unfeasible (basically outside of cities), and cars seem to fit the bill there nicely.
On top of that: "It'll merely spare consumers from a trillion plus dollars" -- seems a bit of an exaggeration, does it not? Transportation will still be needed, and it's going to have to be paid for somehow or another. If it's not directly towards paying for a car it's in taxes for infrastructure, or it's to companies who have to invest the capital and make a profit on it. It changes how the money is spent, I guess, and the hope is that it's more efficiently spent, but I suspect that the costs will just shift around and not necessarily save "trillions of dollars every decade".
If you need to leave to go to work at 8:00 AM, to get there at 8:30, it's a 5 minute drive from your office to my house, and I need to leave at 9 to get to my job at 9:30, then an on-demand driverless car can take care of both of us. It can also pick up the person who was able to take public transit in but needs to run errands on their lunch break, as well as the second shift worker, and take someone else home for dinner, and get someone else to the airport at 3 AM.
Right now, many people have cars sitting idle for a large portion of the day because they need them for an hour a day, or sometimes an hour every couple of days, or a couple of hours a week. While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks.
In addition, there may be other people who could take public transit, walk, or bike to work, but don't because there are other things that they need to do at various points that require a car, and so it's more convenient to just always have it available.
So yeah, driverless cars can only get you so far, you're right that the peak demand number is pretty much the minimum number you could have. But if I go an look at my residential street during the day, when commuters are presumably at work, I still see about half of the cars present. Those are all cars that wouldn't be necessary if everyone were riding in self driving cars that could rearrange themselves based on demand. That reduction in number of cars would also reduce the amount of space needed to store all of those cars, which could help bring everything closer together making it more walkable, bikeable, or efficient for public transit, which could further reduce the demand for cars.
> While it's true that there are surges in demand in the normal morning and evening commutes, there is still a lot of excess driving capacity that is needed for trips other than those surges, and so you only have to have enough cars to cover those peaks.
Do we really have excess capacity compared to the peak demand? Put another way, how many people own a car and aren't using it at e.g. 8:50AM? At a complete guess I'd say maybe 5%?
(Also, given zoning and city layout, most houses are a lot more than 5 minutes away from most offices. Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both).
> Do we really have excess capacity compared to the peak demand? Put another way, how many people own a car and aren't using it at e.g. 8:50AM? At a complete guess I'd say maybe 5%?
As I said, when I look out at my residential street at 8:50, I see about half of the cars still parked there, or maybe a third (very rough estimates, I haven't actually counted). Now, I do live in a city with good public transit options, that's also fairly walkable and bikable. But at least where I live, there's a pretty serious oversupply of capacity, just because people do need cars occasionally and the options for not owning a car are not good enough.
In fact, on the next street over, parking goes way up at around this time since I'm near a major subway stop, so a lot of people park here and take the subway the rest of the way in. Rather than just sitting there, going back up and shuttling more people to the subway would be a more efficient use of cars that you could do with self driving cars. The commutes from house to subway station are likely under 30 minutes, and since rush hour generally actually lasts about two hours from 7 AM to 9 AM, you could fit a couple of round trips in that time period.
> (Also, given zoning and city layout, most houses are a lot more than 5 minutes away from most offices. Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both).
This is increasingly untrue. Mixed use developments, companies moving out to the suburbs for cheaper real estate, people moving back in to the city, and so on mean that reverse commutes are increasingly common.
> Even if my commute is 8:20-8:50 and yours is 9:15-9:45, we're probably both heading into the city centre from outside, so the same car probably can't serve us both).
If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount).
Self-driving cars can make car-pooling easier - it can be a hyperlocal public transport system. Pick up 4 people who are traveling from/to within a 2-mile radius with each other, and peak traffic will be 25% of what it is now (best case). It's even simpler considering that most people commute the same route everyday.
> If you are willing to share the ride, you can have the same car serve you and someone else who shares a similar route and is willing to travel 10 minutes early (or late - can be incentivize by a discount).
What does the self-driving car change in that case? Wouldn't that be just the same as ordinary carpooling that we can do today?
Right now, I need to manually find someone who is carpooling. If there happens to be someone on my street that I know and is going to roughly the same place, that's fine. However, there are many trips which have overlapping segments that I'd never be able to find without an automated system.
For carpooling with my own car, that's really too much work to try and hunt down someone, figure out how cost sharing is going to work, ensure that our schedules are in sync often enough for it to work out, and so on.
With an automated system, it can just adapt to changing demands. Maybe some days schedules are too far out of sync, so it just sends dedicated cars. Maybe some days there's someone better to pool with.
You can already do this with systems like UberPool, but with self driving cars, you don't have to pay a dedicated driver, so it becomes even cheaper and more convenient.
> For huge swaths of the country public transportation is unfeasible
Well part of the idea here is that self-driving taxis can make public transport a lot more feasible.
The reason people usually can't combine driving and public transport at the moment is that there isn't enough parking. Once you have self-driving taxis, so people don't need to park, it's perfectly feasible to take a car ride to your nearest bus stop.
Plus, once people are able to do this, it makes public transport a lot more viable as a business. Instead of needing to make end-to-end networks, they can focus on improving efficiency on popular routes.
Cars have a peak utilization rate of about 30-40%. Cars sales certainly won't plummet to 5% of their current level as some would suggest, but I could certainly see them getting cut in half.
As well as providing tax incentives to businesses who support telecommuting/remote work, tax penalties for requiring workers to come to an office if their role can be performed remotely, or both.
I think Mazda made a smart move with its "Driving Matters" campaign. "Point A to Point B" econoboxes may not be long for this world, but there are many who will hold on to their manual steering for decades to come, just as they held on to their manual transmissions. Along with the driverless car revolution, I expect an utter gutting of the segment whose only selling point is being cheap and reliable, and a huge renaissance of the "fun to drive" class.
I disagree, but we'll have to wait and see I guess. I work in software and as a result I don't trust computers. I see every day how rollouts of "minor" changes or small oversights bring major production systems to a screeching halt. Google and Apple do not have a culture of the type of careful software engineering that I would trust my life with. The notion that they would bring cars back nightly for "updates" is positively hair-raising.
Although I'm personally optimistic about driverless cars, traffic is a distributed autonomous-agent system: a failure of one driver is compensated for by other drivers. Someone does a "rude" merge, or an illegal U-turn—and everybody just modifies their own driving to let it happen, even though it's "against the rules." On the road, I'm not really trusting other drivers individually; I'm trusting traffic as a fluid.
My big worry is that we'll have autonomous-car-AI monoculture. If that happens, we'd lose the advantage of the "compensation" other drivers in traffic can do. We could end up seeing car-behavioral "prions": glitches in car software that cause a strange behavior, which in turn triggers the same glitch in the cars attempting to compensate for that behavior. You could see, for example, every car getting into a state where it thinks it needs to swerve "more right than other cars" to avoid an emergency, and thus an entire "pack" of cars driving off the road and into a fast clockwise-torquing circle.
Or, less eyecatching but more fatal in the near-term, you could see a monoculture-wide decision that works alright for single driverless cars, but actively harms drivered cars (and other driverless cars with other-model AIs) when the majority of a "pack" of cars is from the monoculture. For example, I could see a "pack" of driverless cars all deciding to jam on the brakes at once (because, say, a bunch of spike-strips suddenly popped out of the road in between them or somesuch)—leaving the one drivered car boxed in by them to keep going and crash into the vanguard of the pack.
I don't think this works because you can have very safe failure modes - much like nuclear reactor control rods. Instead of all swerving to the right the cars would all slow down as quickly as it is safe to do so. In the second example the situation is no worse than a human driver slamming on the brakes.
Sure there will be some accidents, but nowhere near the same frequency as today. Autonomous cars are much better/faster at "compensating" than humans are.
Actually, code is as error prone as the engineering process that creates it. You can have a process that takes risky, error prone engineers and creates very safe output. Airlines do this all the time.
A by-product of this might be an airline level of safety and after the accident investigation. There certainly would be the financial benefit for it. Once the autonomous car comes it will be safer than humans to start with and only become safer and safer with time. It might get to the point where we regularly travel at 90+ mph on the highway with barely a care in the world.
I trust Google's and Apple's software more than I trust the software that we use in many hospitals, to which people do approximately trust their health.
I have a friend who did medical equipment software. You should trust Google's and Apple's software more than the software in the typical piece of hospital equipment. Which is to say, hospital equipment software can be really really bad!
> Google and Apple do not have a culture of the type of careful software engineering that I would trust my life with.
No, but they have enough smart people, and engineers of every stripe that if your life did depend on it, they'd probably make it work. Google's driver-less cars seem to be doing pretty good at the moment.
Plus, when you have more driver-less cars on the roads, they can communicate with each other to adjust to similar speeds based on congestion, accelerate/decelerate in the most efficient manner (so as to not slow down the flow of traffic), and in the case of road hazards, they'd communicate together and avoid them.
Based on most of the drivers I see on the roads, I'd absolutely feel safer if most of them didn't control their vehicles, and I'd definitely trust a lot of smart people developing algorithms more than the average driver...
> A few decades from now, people will consider buying a 'dumb' $30,000 gasoline engine car to stick in your driveway and rarely use, to be comically absurd.
I'd say the $30,000+ price tag is fairly absurd right now. But let's not forget, an immense portion of US manufacturing revolves around people making this investment.
Last time I used google Earth it looked like buildings were added manually by someone modelling them one at a time :(
Google owns maps, video/photo database of almost all roads (streetview) and push for autonomous cars, yet they still didnt even start using all this data to build 3d map of the world a la Photosynth.
That was (still is?) precisely a program that Google Earth ran. Purdue University sponsored some students to map almost the entire campus in 3D many years ago.
entire campus - thats "nice". Im talking all of the roads of the world captured by streetview cars. Depth map of entire city as seen from the road would be of great value to autonomous car software dev team. Its crazy to me that they dont have it, unless they keep it a secret?
Last time I checked Warsaw(capital of EU country) in google earth there was maybe 20 biggest buildings, all hand modelled. Actually even calling them modelled is too much, those were pretty much boxes of approximate size.
Can someone with knowledge answer questions about the current state of autonomous cars:
1) What do these cars do in ambiguous driving environments: construction zones, poorly/under relined lanes, freshly paved roads, hazards, dark/rainy roads where camera images are useless, etc.
2) How do these cars handle system failure while driving? Blown tire, engine failure, etc.
3) Is there "Moral Decision Engine" code in current generation cars? E.g. person runs out in front of an autonomous car, the car chooses to spare the person by veering off and hitting some inanimate object. I can imagine a class of accidents in traditional hands-on cars where a driver hurts himself in order to avoid harming a pedestrian. Is such moral logic hard wired into autonomous cars?
>Miles driven since start of project in 2009: “Autonomous mode” means the software is driving the vehicle, and test drivers are not touching the manual controls. “Manual mode” means the test drivers are driving the car.
> Autonomous mode: 1,320,755 miles
> Manual mode: 955,771 miles
So it seems the cars are self-driving only half of the time! The answer to 1) seems to be driver takes over all the time.
1) Some of the extant cars cede control to the human driver if things get too difficult. This is a problem because people will context switch away from driving and there is no way to get them back in the game in 100ms when the car needs help.
2) Engine failure is not a big deal, it just means coast to a stop on the side of the road with hazard lights on. Blowouts are a little trickier. But what about unusual stuff like hitting a deer? A wheel falling off? Or another car drifting into the side of our car on the expressway? Those are tricky but not truly rare. This is an area where implementors will need to compete yet purchasers will have a very incomplete view of the relative performance of cars on the market (it's not a single number like HP).
3) Hitting a pole instead of a person is an easy choice. Yet one that many humans would not be able to make quickly enough. I think autonomous cars will outperform human drivers in "moral" decision making quite early on.
Your wording is very interesting on #3, "hit" a pedestrian versus "sacrificing" a driver. I don't think this situation is very likely. A self driving car should be aware of people and would likely be able to compensate without killing the passenger.
If it was a case of hitting a pedestrian versus driving off a cliff I feel like the pedestrian will just be SOL for getting in that situation. Otherwise you could have murder by car relatively easily.
Maybe we could make people register their car settings at the DMV like we do for organ donations. "Would you like to opt-in to the murder-children AI driver, or the martyr driver?"
That article raises an interesting question that I've seen before. Namely: in the event where loss of life is inevitable, who does the car choose to save, and who does it choose to kill? Pedestrians or occupants?
I expect auto insurance companies will have the final decision on this one. They'll provide lower insurance rates for cars that make the correct decisions minimizing total insurance payouts (whatever those happen to be). With lower insurance costs and therefore a lower effective price, sales of that particular brand of self-driving software should increase. Competitors will then rush to do the same.
In the driving class I took when I was 16, we were taught to always prefer crashing into another car instead of a pedestrian if there was no alternative - humans don't have crumple zones designed into them, cars do.
I would assume self-driving cars would be programmed similarly.
The problem with developing autonomous cars is that the 80-20 rule doesn't apply. They need to be 100% capable of handling any situation that come their way... unless a person is expected to watch the road as if they're driving ready to take control... in which case there's almost no benefit.
Regarding "dark/rainy roads where camera images are useless", camera images are not the main input, but rather one of many (radar, laser, collision detection, etc.).
It may be comparable to landing a plane automatically without visibility, as is commonplace nowadays...
I honestly think this will happen. Products like Chrome or Android just wouldn't have survived as standalone companies, so why is it a good idea now to detach projects?
As Alphabet moves out projects from Google, does that make Google a less interesting place to work at?
And introduce more bureaucracy as now Google Car has to negotiate with Google for access to AI tech, computers, maps etc instead of just using whatever they can?
It's been years since the Google car has been in research. I've seen a video of it, perfectly driving a blind man in 2012. It was amazing, but now it's almost 2016 and I know nothing new.
What have they been doing over the last 3 years? I even tried reading their blog, but they only report on building more prototypes or driving more miles. It's a blackout of actual information about their challenges and achievements. When will they be confident enough to launch it, or at least talk about it?
The Associated Press article about the California Department of Motor Vehicles proposed new rules for cars with autonomous driving features[1] suggests one reason to be pessimistic about the vision of rentable self-driving cars becoming a reality as soon as Google would like. (I would like it to be a reality soon, too, but I have to wait for what the technologists and regulators involved can do together to make that a reality for me.) A company that rents out rides to paying riders has to have a market to operate in, and any state could (and, if California is an example, maybe would) regulate that company in ways that might not make it a feasible business. A follow-up article on this news[2] says that Google is "disappointed" by the newly announced California rules.
[1] "California: Self-driving cars must have driver behind wheel under DMV proposed rules" (16 December 2015)
I've never viewed these sorts of regulative barriers as anything more than a headache for Google. There's going to be some government somewhere on earth that will be gung ho about self-driving cars. Americans will not stand for the US not being #1, so regulators will be forced to do a rather quick 180 on this.
Meh, Americans also don't like dying horribly and will freakout if they think something makes that more likely. The FDA is relatively conservative compared to many other countries and, especially after Thalidomide, most people probably appreciate that.
How will driverless cars deal with crime? How is a passenger going to get away from a car chasing to rob him? How will a self-driving car truck run away from thieves in the highway?
This kind of thing comes up in driverless car threads all the time, it's quite odd. People trying to come up with complex situations that humans are likely to be terrible at themselves.
I've seen plenty around constructing some trolley-problem style moral argument about deciding who to kill in a crash. I don't know why it's expected that they'd have to solve, in a fraction of a second, a problem that people have been arguing over for years. The human reaction will probably be at the level of "jerk wheel quickly".
Almost every one of these criticisms I have seen of "self-driving cars" posit world situations that don't happen under the current regime despite nothing limiting them.
Why is this a problem unique to self-driving cars? Is it that it "won't" runover the counterparty? Have you ever even considered the idea of running over a thief? I suspect our legal infrastructure would not look kindly upon you in most jurisdictions.
An override or panic mode. Live broadcast of vision of attackers might discourage them, plus immediate reporting to police. It will be cheaper in many cases to replace contents through insurance than perfectly cover for rare events like highway robberies.
> like Tesla, which loses ~$4K on every Model S they sell
Could we please stop parroting this blatant falsehood? Their net loss for a particular operating period, when amortized over all the vehicles they sold in that period, came out to ~$4,000 per vehicle. That is not, in any way, shape, or form, the same as losing that money on each vehicle sold.
Nobody disputes that Tesla currently operates at a net loss. They sell only one product at the moment but incur R&D expenses on several products that are not yet shipping in significant volume (Model X, Model 3, PowerPack/PowerWall). They're ramping SG&A in anticipation of those offerings as well.
That is a separate issue than the deliberately misleading meme that the company "loses ~$4K on every Model S they sell"
It's just wrong and completely disingenuous. If Tesla sells an incremental Model S this quarter, the impact on their cash flow is +28K not -4K.
That is not a sound logic. If Apple invests X in R&D where X is greater than revenue, it does not mean every Iphone/Ipad/Mac was sold on a loss. It just means they spend more than they made.
This is a pretty narrow view of things. I had a couple decades worth of negative "earnings per share" before graduating from college and getting a job.
> Could just be a way to let it die without loss of face.
An odd way to save face: promoting it to a listed company whose financials they are going to have to regularly provide information on? This makes it higher profile and provides more documentation on any demise.
If they wanted to save face, the right thing to do would be to keep it as part of the research division to continue burying its expenses as part of aggregates, slash it, and a few years from now post on an obscure blog "we are pleased at the success of the many self-driving car companies which followed our groundbreaking results, and consider our goals achieved; hence, we will be deleting all our websites related to that a year from now".
