They're awful successful & have delivered on PR & hype in the past. It's always clear when its a concept (such as the hydrogen powered vehicles) or whether its for a consumer rollout.
They have demonstrated a lot of real-world success in building cars at scale and delivering new technologies to the market. They may be slower than other companies at innovating but when they do it's global and at significant scale.
You're getting downvotes but I don't see any links to examples of real-world Toyota autonomous driving.
Honestly I kind of feel like Toyota's still stuck in the 90s. They were ahead of the game but all they seem to have done since then is endlessly fine-tune and finesse the same vehicles.
I love the 1GR-FE/5VZ-FE/2UZ-FE engines, I would just keep buying the same car with those. Except they last for hundreds of thousands of miles, so I might only need one other in my lifetime.
The worst thing that stops me from even considering them is the absolutely attrocious and outdated infotainment and dashboard design. I drove a brand new Auris and Yaris recently and jesus, it felt like being in a car from 2004 - awful, slow touchscreens with animations straight from WindowsCE era, huge unnecessary buttons on the dash(why do you get the second/minute/hour buttons for setting the clock right on the top of the dash??? How many times in the lifetime of the vehicle are you going to use them? Why give them such a prominent place?). Even their most "futuristic" vehicles like the Prius feel extremely outdated inside.
True, they should stop being short sighted and get on board with CarPlay and Android Auto, but it's relatively simple to pop out the dashboard and put in an aftermarket $500 head unit. It is an added cost with installation of course, but I feel like it's worth it for the reliability and fixability of their reputable models.
> The driver might almost forget the help he’s getting, and attribute the success to his own powers
I really like this idea but I feel this is the key in getting it right. Several video games achieve this feeling of seamlessness when translating raw input from a controller to in-game actions. However this does occasionally go wrong and can be a frustrating experience in video games (especially if you're playing online competitively) but in the real world it can have much more drastic consequences.
Also, given the complexity of the real world, it's somewhat scary to think of a scenario where you're actually trying to take a drastic action on the road but are prevented by the system from doing-so because it feels that the action is unsafe.
The lane assist in my VW can get a little troublesome in areas of road construction where lane markers have been painted over and such. At times the car picks up the wrong lane area and encourages me to stay there instead of the real lane. It’s more of an annoyance than anything but it’s still a distraction when at highway speeds
Next version should detect whether a site is under-construction (# of cones per 100m, GPS-tagged construction zone from publicly available DB, sudden speed change, unexpected traffic etc.) and turn on the soft-mode for lane-assist where it says 'You might be driving through a construction zone, so lane assist will not fight'.
I feel that until a car can ascertain that it’s in a construction zone using only vision (like you and I do) we’ll never achieve what we need. Any autonomous system that relies on (or even incorporates) stored databases of any kind is implicitly worse than a teenage first time driver and should therefore not be considered acceptable.
Indeed, we don't get basic things like GPS signal 100% right 86400 seconds per day. Relying on some remote DB which can crash, be hacked, cut off from internet, down for maintenance etc will be a problem. Or car just losing data connection (like it happens with phones).
Its nice to dream about ideal future, but if lives rely on reliability, it either works 100%, or shouldn't.
100% is stronger than we need - humans are not 100%. If we were there would be no crashes. Even sudden mechanical failure could just affect the one car and not cause others if humans were perfect. We just need to be better than humans.
I once had lane assist on a rental car (so one unknown to me) hide that one of the front tires had a flat until things got too bad to hide and then suddenly give up and dump the problem on me. Luckily no accident, but I'm certain that on a car without electronic support I would have felt earlier that something is odd.
Speaking of video games. They need to get this system setup for race tracks like Nurburgring where the car doesn't let the driver go to hot into the corner by controlling the throttle response and braking. Also, control steering to prevent spinouts including auto counter steer.
What is the point of a race track if you even further abstract out the driver skill than we already have? (asks the person that races a fairly analog car)
You're never going to get skilled if you don't learn how to actually drive the car in the first place. A car that 100% sticks to the road with no slip is not as quick as a car that is being pushed to the point of carrying a slight slip angle through corners, and you're not going to find out how that works with constant intervention. It is about carrying speed through corners, not negotiating them with the help of some electronic aids and pinning the gas down the straights.
If I could show up at the Nürburgring and hot lap a 911 on nanny driver mode I'd do it in a heart beat. Until then I'll just stick with not getting into Berghain.
Speaking of DLCs, didn't Porsche sort of offer an hourly "Performance Package" for their cars that could be activated OTA. Or I guess the interviewed guy was just spit-balling ideas...
Developing skill is hard, buying a product is easy. What you're saying makes total sense if you want to become an excellent driver but most people just want to buy some related equipment and watch events from their couch. Nothing wrong with that if it makes them happy, though I think that advertising pushes people towards making less fullfilling choices.
It's like go-carting. People like to race cars without having to be skilled or deal with the risk of being in a car. Most cars already have a bunch of electronic nannies(eg: stability and traction control, abs brakes) to prevent people from spinning their car out into a tree. Also, nannies to prevent them from ruining their car like rev limiters.
People enjoy roller coasters. It's not a big stretch to imagine it being fun for plenty of folks to whiz around a race track with some of the work being handled by a computer.
> However this does occasionally go wrong and can be a frustrating experience in video games (especially if you're playing online competitively) but in the real world it can have much more drastic consequences.
Even a manual override would be insufficient because by the time you realize it won't behave correctly, it's too late to apply the override and then take corrective action. I would probably not trust this system, in my hubris.
I often see the argument that you might need to floor the throttle and swerve pulled out in these threads but I'm dubious that this is a real problem. My gut feel (and no, I don't have data to back this) is that far more accidents are made worse by people deciding to use that response than would be made better by the car overriding that decision and putting the brakes on to come to a somewhat controlled stop.
I'm sure there are certain types of crashes that can be avoided in that way, but I trust a collision avoidance system to make that judgement far more than I trust a human driver who was only half paying attention to the road five seconds ago.
What happens when someone who learns to "drive" with a system like this ends up in a rental car that doesn't have it? I've personally watched friends almost side swipe cars after becoming too dependent on "blind spot detection" telling them when it's safe to change lanes.
The same thing that happens when someone learns to "drive" with an automatic transmission and then ends up in a rental car with a manual transmission: They sheepishly admit they can't drive the vehicle, and ask for one with more automation.
You can't get out of a parking spot if you don't know how to drive stick. With this, I'm not so sure it's that straight forward. You know how to do all the functions required to drive, but then you get on the interstate, hit 70mph, turn too quickly and lose all ability to control the vehicle when it presents the slightest unexpected input, over correct, and then end up careening into 4 lanes of traffic.
It's immediately obvious to someone who can't drive a manual that they need to switch to a vehicle with an automatic transmission.
Someone who learned on or became accustomed to a vehicle that transparently corrects all of their mistakes could easily end up in way over their head before realizing that the car they're driving doesn't make up for their lack of basic lane keeping skills / etc.
I could picture someone in between with manual transmission skills who is used to an automatic getting into trouble. Due to lack of experience they could be fine under avaerage, non-stressful conditions. But if they need to make a quick evasive maneuver, and forget that they have a manual transmission or don’t know what gear to go into, they could end up stalling the car or revving in neutral when they meant to move out-of-the-way quickly.
I've driven manual vehicles for ~15 years now, and even I'm not sure I wouldn't forget to hit the clutch and stall if I had to brake really hard during a quick evasive maneuver.
I have had one incident where I had to swerve onto the wrong side of the road to dodge a car that suddenly pulled into my lane from a line of parked cars (with no indicator and no warning). I was lucky there was no oncoming traffic because there was no way I could have stopped without hitting the car that pulled out.
I didn't stall then but I also didn't have to come to a complete stop, like if a kid had jumped onto the road and I had nowhere to go and had to slam the brakes completely on.
I don't think stalling is really a major safety issue though. About the only example I can think of where you'd really have to accelerate to be safe is when your car is stalled on railway tracks, and in that case you'd be unlikely to have had to do some maneuver that landed you there.
99.99% of the time slowing down is safer than accelerating.
Yes. You can pass your test in an automatic, then buy a manual and have zero clue how to drive it and it's 100% legal. Just like you can pass your test in a little 1000kg 2 seater and immediately after the test go and buy a 12-tonne converted RV and drive that with no extra training or qualifications. US is extremely lax with its driver training.
In all of those cases you're dangerous for maybe a day while you familiarize yourself with the new vehicle and most people behave very, very conservatively when driving something different than they're used to. Nobody is passing their test in a Miata then renting a box truck and saying "yes, I can totally take this hairpin just as fast as I would in a Miata". The biggest danger from people switching from small to large vehicles seems to be bumping things in tight spaces (parking lots) and with manual the danger is rolling back too much on a hill start or stalling it when trying to pull into traffic. While certainly expensive and inconvenient I don't think those sorts of accidents are cause enough danger to the public or are common enough to prohibit people from driving a manual or renting a box truck without a special license.
I think people being unfamiliar with what they're driving is an edge case a lot like mechanical failure, everyone hand wrings over it, some jurisdictions take steps to try and prevent it but in the real world it's just such a tiny fraction of accidents (mostly minor single car accidents at that) compared to people being stupid that trying to prevent these edge cases is a waste of time and money. Resources are finite and they would be better spent elsewhere.
So I personally disagree with what you are saying. If anything, most countries are extremely under-regulated when it comes to driving - it just happens that US probably leads the way in how under-regulated it is. In most western countries it's far far far too easy to get a driving licence - I think it should be extremely difficult and it should be testing a whole range of different situations on the road, not just the operation of a vehicle + 30-60 minutes on the road. Mandatory 30-40 hours of training followed by a two practical tests in different conditions sounds like a good start.
And no, driving a bigger(especially larger than 3.5 tonnes) vehicle is not just about the vehicle being physically larger and harder to park. That's why the European categories for driving such large vehicles(C and D categories) have very different theoretical tests than a regular B category for driving small(<3.5 tonne) cars. There's a whole host of laws saying where and when you can drive such a vehicle, and speed limits are different for them, regardless of what the speed limit signs say.
Part of the test for C category includes safe loading of a heavy vehicle - like in your example, if you rent a box truck and put a 2 tonne pallet on one side, you're going to have a bad time. That's why the training is important.
In Australia, you are allowed to drive a manual if you do your test with an automatic when you are on your open license. It's only on your P's that you can't.
The "test" in the US is already a joke. We absolutely don't need to be making it any simpler.
If you're unable to meet the current standard, you probably shouldn't be allowed to walk down the street unescorted.. let alone drive a car, regardless of the "cleverness" of that vehicle.
It's getting harder to buy a car without crazy stuff.
I just want a car.
I got one that wants to take over steering, disturbing me as I drive. I disabled that. It also wants to slam on the brakes whenever it gets confused. That misfeature must be disabled every time I start the car. Then there is the built-in cellular data and GPS and the microphone and at least 3 cameras. Yes, they are tracking me, and if they don't do worse already then it's just an involuntary software update away.
Some day this will be hacked, and millions will die. That will be a memorable day.
I suspect, from pictures seen on the internet, that the cellular modem antenna can be disconnected if I pop out the center console. This is quite a bit of trouble, with a pretty strong "warranty voided" feel to it. I intend to try it.
The microphones usually have visible coverings in the headliner. However if privacy is your concern, just disabling the celluar modem should be enough.
As for voiding any warranty, should a problem arrise, it's up to the manufacturer to prove that whatever you did caused damage. Just taking apart and reassembling a console correctly will not void your warranty. "Warranty Voided if removed/opened" labels are not legally-enforceable in the US.
Just look for Youtube videos on how to take it apart (or look for repair videos for other items in the console).
If you watch recent crash test videos carefully, quite often you will see that the frontal camera is duct-taped over. If you don't do this, the car will refuse to be driven into the wall (due to automatic emergency braking). The future is here: you have to blindfold a car if you want to intentionally crash it.
I personally like those features in my Infinity Q50 and always keep them on. As these features get better I suspect most people would prefer to keep them enabled.
This is alien to me. Tell me more. Do you trust the software to not have dangerous bugs? Do you drive while text messaging, commenting on Hacker News, or watching video? Are you perfectly fine with your whereabouts and driving style being known and sold, for example to insurance companies or toll collectors or the police? Are you using the features to compensate for any kind of disability? Would you be fine with a car like HAL 9000, saying "I'm sorry muzika, I'm afraid I can't do that" to you?
Well, as many futurologists say... a self-driving car (or drive-assisting) doesn't have to be perfect. It merely needs to be better than a human driver. Data seems to suggest that that hurdle isn't that high.
Then again, I do share your concern about hackability. Just a single grand catastrophe would turn the scales over for a long time. And nothing suggests that car software is of high quality currently.
>Do you drive while text messaging
Amazingly many people do, even after being told that it's about as dangerous as driving drunk.
I have said this before. Auto manufacturers are not the greatest at security. Jeep was not exactly receptive to fixing its hacked vehicles until it was exposed at blackhat. I agree, someone is going to do something simple like hack whatever main system is talking to all the cars and do something simple like tell all of them to accelerate and that is their last order.
Can we all trust the car companies to do their due diligence and have all their software audited. Do we trust their proprietary algorithms?
At least when i am driving myself i know what is going on in my head. Yes it might sound a little conceded, but who do you really trust.
Also as a side mark (to get me downvoted :) ), i can understand automatic braking and some of the other things, but if you need the machine just to help maintain your lane for you...you probably should not be driving (i seriously work with someone who praises their car for helping them not drift out of their lane).
> but if you need the machine just to help maintain your lane for you...you probably should not be driving
This is not actually an argument against putting lane keeping assist functionality into cars. Yes, distracted driving is bad. But there's no way to completely prevent it, so the auto industry should do everything they can to mitigate the harm.
A five point racing harness is more secure. And a roll cage will help in rollovers. Not mandatory either, but would mitigate a lot of harm. There are a lot of other things they can do as well.
If you hold peoples hands on stuff they start slacking, they become dependent and cannot do something without assistance. My kid plays a FPS online on his xbox one, he started off doing ok and getting better. He found out you can turn on aim assist and got really good. If he turns off the aim assistance, he is worse than he ever was.
I am not disagreeing with you that lane assist, now that is exists, might not be useful. I just feel we are moving to a world like the people on the ship in the movie Wall-e.
> Do you trust the software to not have dangerous bugs?
I trust it as much as you trust a car to not have dangerous mechanical problems.
> Do you drive while text messaging, commenting on Hacker News, or watching video?
No. But distractions happen. Pretending otherwise is hubris.
> Are you perfectly fine with your whereabouts and driving style being known and sold, for example to insurance companies or toll collectors or the police?
These are addons that don't come with the car. With this, I've lowered my insurance costs, and now going through tolls is much easier and less dangerous.
> Are you using the features to compensate for any kind of disability?
Being human and knowing that I'm not perfect.
> Would you be fine with a car like HAL 9000, saying "I'm sorry muzika, I'm afraid I can't do that" to you?
That doesn't happen.
> This is alien to me.
That is clear. Judging by your questions, you have absolutely no idea what is in these cars. It's good thought that you are aware of your ignorance, admit to it, and seek to learn more. Hopefully the information I provide can help you.
> Do you trust the software to not have dangerous bugs?
I trust it as much as you trust a car to not have dangerous mechanical problems.
The problem with software is that you can't look at it to see if it's worn, you can't hear if it's about to fail, and it's not regularly inspected by experts to see how it is behaving. Also as programmers we are aware of hidden bugs that can only show up under certain circumstances. It's only a matter of time until an overflow or off-by-one error kills people.
Car makers and engineers have a very good idea how dangerous certain parts of cars are, and they have been built over many years to mitigate those weaknesses. So you wouldn't expect, for example, the five nuts holding a wheel on to all fail at once.
We programmers know that there can be far less certainty with software.
Even worse, others here have posted about the terrible software practices that were exposed at some manufacturers, and the reluctance by Jeep to react until the ability to crash their cars remotely was exposed at Blackhat.
I think it all comes down to how much trust you have and where that trust lies.
In my hubris, I'm going to have as analog a car as I can, and hold out without as many these features as I can until all the beta software bugs are ironed out. For mechanical failures, it took us many painful years to get to where we are now.
I guess what I'm saying is that I trust myself to pay attention and stay in the lane using the steering wheel more than I trust our current technology not to get confused and kill me by steering wrong. The reward just seems much less than the risk to me for that (and other) features. I don't trust automatic emergency braking to not slam the brakes on at a time when it will kill me either.
What scares me most is the perverse incentives the car manufacturers have to cover up their shortcomings. They have shown exactly how little they can be trusted to be honest with things such as VW cheating on emissions, exploding tires, faulty airbags and many many coverups to avoid recalls, etc, etc.
Also the remote access that is more and more prevalent in cars today. Hackers gaining access to the drivetrain functions of cars remotely is super scary to me. And when that happens, it will happen for every one of those cars on the road.
A DDOS of the morning rush would be very interesting at best. At worst, as bad as any terrorist attack.
Would you trust your life to the stability and security of even a major company's servers? I wouldn't either. There needs to be a LOT of regulation around these things, I believe, and we as a society should be able to decide exactly what we will accept and what we won't.
At the very least there should be rules about exactly how the systems in cars can be networked, and the security around those connections. The jeep hack was through a remote firmware update to the radio unit I believe. There are no important enough reasons to have a remotely-accessible radio directly networked to the drivetrain computer in my opinion.
It can't just be move fast and break things when lives are at stake. Everything I've heard sounds like it's the wild west at the moment.
More importantly, most people would prefer that the other drivers not disable those features in their arrogance. The false positive rate for things like automatic emergency braking is low enough that it definitely can't cause more harm than it prevents, and it really shouldn't be easy to turn off.
The same goes for the milder forms of lane keeping assist; that only gets problematic if the system does enough steering that the driver can get away with taking their hands off the wheel entirely when traveling on a typical interstate highway. The assist systems that give the wheel a minor nudge and audibly alert the driver are an obvious net safety gain, especially for the innocent bystanders in the next lane over.
Many of the more advanced safety features that are being rolled out to the market these days can be done wrong and become a danger of their own. But when implemented properly, complaints against them are no more valid than complaints about anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control overriding the driver's intentions.
Example for braking: A car ahead of me in a lane to the right of me moves a bit left for the moment in order to give more space for a bicycle. My car brakes. I could get rear-ended.
Example for lane following: I veer left a bit to avoid a bit of scrap wood with nails sticking out. The car counters this, steering me back toward the debris.
Nobody is trying to say that driver assist systems will be perfect. But we're trying to get you to understand that perfect isn't the goal. The scenarios you outline are relatively far-fetched and their consequences are less severe than the crashes automatic emergency braking and lane keeping assistance are designed to prevent. Simply constructing a hypothetical situation in which these technologies might be less than perfect does nothing to support your position that they are not a net improvement to safety.
4Runners/Tacomas are basically the same vehicle for most of the past 2 decades with some cosmetic upgrades, and as far as I know, don't come with all the unnecessary electronics.
I recently bought a Tacoma and was surprised to find out this is not always the case. Take a look at their privacy policy for "connected services": https://www.toyota.com/privacyvts/.
You can opt out when you buy the vehicle. Like anyone at a dealership will care or know to even give you the choice. I wasn't and only found out about it when I saw the IMEI number on the sticker with the engine information.
It won't let you drive into a ditch or into a wall (or into the back of a truck), it seems.
Jet fighters (also passenger ones) nowadays are flown by computers, you push the joystick to tell it where to go, and the computers control the flight surfaces to follow your request but not beyond the point that it would fall out of the sky. And TFA seems to suggest the system will prevent crashes, so it would probably stop you if you e.g. tried to swerve into an oncoming truck.
Jet fighters also require computer control because their aerodynamic design is such that they would not be stable without constant computer-commanded micro-adjustments in the control surfaces.
99% of new cars sold within the U.S. are going to have basic self-driving capability in less than three years. Not really seeing what's unique about what Toyota is doing here.
The story you link to refers to automatic emergency braking systems. AEB is standard in several of Toyota’s current models. The IEEE story refers to significantly more sophisticated driver-assist features. So, the difference is, different features.
From the last time I looked, none of the competitors have accident avoidance beyond automatic emergency braking. Full motion planning to avoid an accident seems like a huge step forward.
edit: Seeing your later comment, you seem to think this is emergency braking. The video clearly shows this goes beyond emergency braking.
I get that it's not just emergency breaking. My point though is that by 2022, all new cars are going to have both the sensors and the processing hardware needed to do this. So most new cars will probably have this sort of functionality, even if they're not required to by this specific industry agreement. (Lots of cars already have this, including ones that aren't even that expensive, e.g. pretty much any Subaru.)
The requirements for hardware and processing to achieve emergency braking is drastically different than the 360 degree situational awareness and avoidance that Toyota is showing here.
You can buy a 2017 Camry with emergency braking. It uses a laser and camera at the front and looks like a Camry. Compare the module to the Guardian sensor bank you see on the roof there. It's not for show. We will not see this sensor bank or these capabilities on every new car in 2022 and the article you posted doesn't remotely suggest that.
I think you're underestimating what Toyota is doing here.
How is that different than the active safety features on any other car? E.g. most cars already have an optional package to detect other cars in your blind spots, keep you centered in your lane, etc.
Toyota demonstrated a test where the car determines that it cannot brake in time to avoid hitting an obstacle, so it decides to swerve around it instead. No combination of blind spot warnings and lane keeping assist can come anywhere close to performing such a feat. I'm also not aware of any car currently for sale that will accelerate to avoid being hit from behind.
There are quite a few vehicles that have at least some of the sensor capability required for this kind of functionality, but the hard part is the software/AI, not the cameras and LIDAR.
>> I'm also not aware of any car currently for sale that will accelerate to avoid being hit from behind
Mercedes cars do that. They also preemptively play grey noise over the speakers if the collision is imminent, to protect your eardrums - that's something I don't think any other manufacturer is doing.
It should be all or nothing control, at least that way people will not become marginally complacent, just out of practice (although most drivers can not drive for a month and drive again no problem).
I feel like this angle is massively overplayed in articles about autonomous vehicles.
Is automation paradox a real issue? Absolutely. But at present, all the evidence seems to indicate that the people automated cars will save far outnumber the people they will kill.
Focusing on the dangers is alarmist and misleading. The 737 crash is a good example really - I've never heard anyone with experience in the field suggest anything other than that the automation makes planes safer. Focusing instead on the fact that the automation isn't perfectly safe only makes sense if you're a media company looking to scare people.
I don't think it's overplayed at all. It gives people a false sense of a security when they have automation that works 99% of the time. Look at all the people who think that Teslas can drive themselves. Most of the time they are fine, but then they are lulled into a false sense of security. Sure, they get a ton of warnings, but you start to ignore the warnings when it keeps working most of the time.
Heck, my car has adaptive cruise control, and I already find myself wandering sometimes, assuming that it will slam on the brakes if someone gets in front of me. And I'm well aware of the automation paradox and its dangers.
The issue I have is that when people talk about the dangers of automation they never compare them to the dangers of non-automated driving. They always make it sound as if automation is making things more dangerous.
The current evidence suggests that semi-autonomous cars are on balance safer than purely human driven cars. The evidence isn't conclusive, but I've literally seen no evidence presented to support the case that semi-autonomous cars are more dangerous - at best I've seen people argue that we can't yet trust the safety claims. Teslas have been on the road long enough now and in large enough numbers that if they were really more dangerous than non-semi-autonomous cars, I think we'd have seen some non-anecdotal evidence by now.
The reasonable presentation of the issue would be "semi-autonomous vehicles likely make people safer, but there are still dangers and people should pay attention."
Instead, the story you're telling is "Tesla drivers are dying, semi-autonomous cars are dangerous, and you should be scared."
You must see how this is misleading at best, and likely downright counterproductive from an overall safety point of view.
Bit of an aside, but; I recently was talking to a engineering lead at Rolls Royce and asked why it seems like Silicon Valley is coming in and eating car manufacturers lunch on autopilot/auto-assist/driver-assist and he said they aren't really, none of them are very far along compared to the car companies. It's to do with the car companies engineering with an eye to redundant systems that all play harmoniously with each other rather than just tacking LIDAR onto a car and using TensorFlow to do image recognition.
He pointed me to GeorgeHotz YouTube channel who developed in the open for CommaAI (now shut down), this company got 8m in funding (small cheese to a VC, but still showed there was interest in the project) and he was just googling answers and training his model on one single video he downloaded of the internet.
The 'play loose and fast' with the rules approach won't fly with self-driving and the car companies are looking to build something that works in the field with as close to imperceptible failures as can be realistically allowed.
The incumbents are building it right, but slow. And I would much prefer that approach if it leads to increased safety
I always discount someone in a discussion, as you might w/ that engineering lead, when they point to the worst examples as the norm. Especially when they trivialize real efforts with things like "just tacking on X and using Y". There are arguments for methodical, and there are some methodical approaches happening outside the car industry, but to pretend that methodical is the same as opaque is folly. I think a more appropriate answer by that lead as to why it "seems" that way is due to the guardedness of the industry. Whether that manifests as safety or stagnation is a different discussion compared to what it appears like.
Until it's done correctly by any side, nobody is "right" and the way it seems or not is a PR thing. At the very least, one defending the traditional car manufacturers' approaches would at least concede the impetus might never had arisen, or not for a long time, with their closeted and often-unrealized research methods. Especially if it's counter to the traditional income funnel.
You can bet this is the kind of argument the car industry is making all over though. "They're doing it quick but we're doing it right".
The reality is that Silicon Valley is very very good at moving fast and building very high tech solutions very quickly. The car industry isn't exactly known for being fast movers and they were very slow to get on this bandwagon.
I'm sure Silicon Valley has a few things to learn from the incumbent car industry too but let's face it - the car industry is mostly just desperate not to have their lunch eaten at this point.
Sure his background is limited to jailbreaking multiple iphones and playstation, but geohot actually released a product, far from just using youtube vidya for training.
Google:George Hotz as Rolls Royce: a Pinto. If you squint your eyes they both look the same, but comparing the two will offend pretty much anyone working on the left side of those comparisons, for good reason.
If I were in your shoes, I totally would have gone there.
Waymo claims to have autonomously driven 8 million miles on public roads, and 5 billion miles in simulation. That doesn't seem "fast and loose". Has any commercial automaker conducted anywhere near that amount of testing?
And what is there go-to market strategy? Most cars that people can buy today have active safety features as an option or in the case of Toyota, a standard in all of their cars. How is google technology, which is so advanced, mitigating crashes and fatalities today?
And Tesla’s Autopilot has driven a bit over 1 billion miles autonomously, and a lot more than that in “shadow mode” where autopilot runs without doing anything while humans are in control.
> The incumbents are building it right, but slow. And I would much prefer that approach if it leads to increased safety
Wait, are you serious? But I mean, I thought the whole point of driving a car in the first place was that you could "move fast and break things!" So, clearly Silicon Valley has the most appealing approach!
Your entire comment is hinged on one person's opinion who works at Rolls Royce, basically a non-entity in the SDC world. Has he worked at Tesla, Waymo, Cruise, or any of the other actual players? What does he engineer specifically? What data is he basing his claims upon?
From every source I've read that's publicly available, SV IS eating the major automakers' lunch. An anecdotal claim with zero evidence isn't enough to convince me otherwise, nor should it convince you.
Cruise is owned by GM, Tesla has a decent level 2 system but only sells ~100,000 cars a year, and waymo has zero technology in consumers hands at this point. Also most of the automakers have offices and research facilities in SV, with hundreds of engineers working in them.
Tesla sold 90k cars in Q4 of last year. They sold 244,920 cars in 2018 and are now at a much higher rate of production than they were for the first 1/2 of the year. You’re off by quite a bit.
Tesla sold that many in the last two quarters because it was trying to fill a massive backlog of orders. Also VW, Toyota and Nissan/Renault each sold over 10 million vehicles in 2017, so my point that they are not a major automaker still holds.
This sounds completely out of character and in direct opposition to the actual history we know of the automotive industry. Remember the 'unintended acceleration' issue that Toyota cars featured a few years ago? During the court case it was revealed that Toyota firmware developers did not have access to even a bug tracker, and that out of 90+ 'suggested' or 'recommended' coding practices, Toyota's code followed only 4. While they might claim to engineer toward redundancy and safety, one thing is pretty clear about the automotive industry: They aren't talking about software when they say that.
That is colossally stupid statement, Toyota, Volvo and the big oems have been pushing ADAS features and safety since day 1, with the next logical step being this guardian type of system. Are you saying a company that builds 10 million cars a year has zero incentive to work on active safety?
If you phrased your colossally stupid argument in terms of ISP's....
Are you saying that Comcast, a company that has a monopoly on internet access, has zero incentive to work on increasing bandwidth speeds and lowering prices for end users?
You see how wrong and colossally stupid your argument is, saying that corporations with essentially a monopoly, without incentive, will just happily increase the quality of their product?
Your argument is so wrong and colossally stupid that I feel like Humanity as a whole, has taken a step back due to the ignorance that has happened here today.
Are you really comparing the ISP market to the automotive market?! The global auto market is one of the lowest margin, most competitive markets that exists. You can go out and pick from one of 20 brands in pretty much any segment (cars, trucks, hatchbacks, hybrids etc). Toyota has nowhere near a monopoly on any market except maybe the city that the HQ is in.
IMHO, Toyota's more cautious approach to AI-augmented driving is the correct way to move towards autonomous vehicles. If we want humans to trust a computer to drive, start off by having the computer only intervene to save humans from situations where they would have crashed otherwise.
Tesla's so-called "autopilot" looks shockingly dangerous and reckless in comparison, and may hinder acceptance of autonomous driving in the long-term.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 212 ms ] threadHonestly I kind of feel like Toyota's still stuck in the 90s. They were ahead of the game but all they seem to have done since then is endlessly fine-tune and finesse the same vehicles.
If only the other mainstream manufacturers would follow suit?
I really like this idea but I feel this is the key in getting it right. Several video games achieve this feeling of seamlessness when translating raw input from a controller to in-game actions. However this does occasionally go wrong and can be a frustrating experience in video games (especially if you're playing online competitively) but in the real world it can have much more drastic consequences.
Also, given the complexity of the real world, it's somewhat scary to think of a scenario where you're actually trying to take a drastic action on the road but are prevented by the system from doing-so because it feels that the action is unsafe.
Its nice to dream about ideal future, but if lives rely on reliability, it either works 100%, or shouldn't.
People like to go fast in their cars without having to be as skilled? It’s not exactly a mystery.
Do they want to be skilled or do they just want to have some easy fun?
If I could show up at the Nürburgring and hot lap a 911 on nanny driver mode I'd do it in a heart beat. Until then I'll just stick with not getting into Berghain.
Even a manual override would be insufficient because by the time you realize it won't behave correctly, it's too late to apply the override and then take corrective action. I would probably not trust this system, in my hubris.
https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2018-volvo-xc60-arrives-s...
It's immediately obvious to someone who can't drive a manual that they need to switch to a vehicle with an automatic transmission.
Someone who learned on or became accustomed to a vehicle that transparently corrects all of their mistakes could easily end up in way over their head before realizing that the car they're driving doesn't make up for their lack of basic lane keeping skills / etc.
I have had one incident where I had to swerve onto the wrong side of the road to dodge a car that suddenly pulled into my lane from a line of parked cars (with no indicator and no warning). I was lucky there was no oncoming traffic because there was no way I could have stopped without hitting the car that pulled out.
I didn't stall then but I also didn't have to come to a complete stop, like if a kid had jumped onto the road and I had nowhere to go and had to slam the brakes completely on.
I don't think stalling is really a major safety issue though. About the only example I can think of where you'd really have to accelerate to be safe is when your car is stalled on railway tracks, and in that case you'd be unlikely to have had to do some maneuver that landed you there.
99.99% of the time slowing down is safer than accelerating.
In all of those cases you're dangerous for maybe a day while you familiarize yourself with the new vehicle and most people behave very, very conservatively when driving something different than they're used to. Nobody is passing their test in a Miata then renting a box truck and saying "yes, I can totally take this hairpin just as fast as I would in a Miata". The biggest danger from people switching from small to large vehicles seems to be bumping things in tight spaces (parking lots) and with manual the danger is rolling back too much on a hill start or stalling it when trying to pull into traffic. While certainly expensive and inconvenient I don't think those sorts of accidents are cause enough danger to the public or are common enough to prohibit people from driving a manual or renting a box truck without a special license.
I think people being unfamiliar with what they're driving is an edge case a lot like mechanical failure, everyone hand wrings over it, some jurisdictions take steps to try and prevent it but in the real world it's just such a tiny fraction of accidents (mostly minor single car accidents at that) compared to people being stupid that trying to prevent these edge cases is a waste of time and money. Resources are finite and they would be better spent elsewhere.
And no, driving a bigger(especially larger than 3.5 tonnes) vehicle is not just about the vehicle being physically larger and harder to park. That's why the European categories for driving such large vehicles(C and D categories) have very different theoretical tests than a regular B category for driving small(<3.5 tonne) cars. There's a whole host of laws saying where and when you can drive such a vehicle, and speed limits are different for them, regardless of what the speed limit signs say. Part of the test for C category includes safe loading of a heavy vehicle - like in your example, if you rent a box truck and put a 2 tonne pallet on one side, you're going to have a bad time. That's why the training is important.
I would actually be very pleased if in the future there is a simpler test for driving a "clever" car, but which doesn't convey a regular license.
If you're unable to meet the current standard, you probably shouldn't be allowed to walk down the street unescorted.. let alone drive a car, regardless of the "cleverness" of that vehicle.
I just want a car.
I got one that wants to take over steering, disturbing me as I drive. I disabled that. It also wants to slam on the brakes whenever it gets confused. That misfeature must be disabled every time I start the car. Then there is the built-in cellular data and GPS and the microphone and at least 3 cameras. Yes, they are tracking me, and if they don't do worse already then it's just an involuntary software update away.
Some day this will be hacked, and millions will die. That will be a memorable day.
I wouldn't know where to find the microphone.
As for voiding any warranty, should a problem arrise, it's up to the manufacturer to prove that whatever you did caused damage. Just taking apart and reassembling a console correctly will not void your warranty. "Warranty Voided if removed/opened" labels are not legally-enforceable in the US.
Just look for Youtube videos on how to take it apart (or look for repair videos for other items in the console).
https://www.iihs.org/iihs/ratings/ratings-info/side-test
Then again, I do share your concern about hackability. Just a single grand catastrophe would turn the scales over for a long time. And nothing suggests that car software is of high quality currently.
>Do you drive while text messaging
Amazingly many people do, even after being told that it's about as dangerous as driving drunk.
Can we all trust the car companies to do their due diligence and have all their software audited. Do we trust their proprietary algorithms?
At least when i am driving myself i know what is going on in my head. Yes it might sound a little conceded, but who do you really trust.
Also as a side mark (to get me downvoted :) ), i can understand automatic braking and some of the other things, but if you need the machine just to help maintain your lane for you...you probably should not be driving (i seriously work with someone who praises their car for helping them not drift out of their lane).
This is not actually an argument against putting lane keeping assist functionality into cars. Yes, distracted driving is bad. But there's no way to completely prevent it, so the auto industry should do everything they can to mitigate the harm.
If you hold peoples hands on stuff they start slacking, they become dependent and cannot do something without assistance. My kid plays a FPS online on his xbox one, he started off doing ok and getting better. He found out you can turn on aim assist and got really good. If he turns off the aim assistance, he is worse than he ever was.
I am not disagreeing with you that lane assist, now that is exists, might not be useful. I just feel we are moving to a world like the people on the ship in the movie Wall-e.
I trust it as much as you trust a car to not have dangerous mechanical problems.
> Do you drive while text messaging, commenting on Hacker News, or watching video?
No. But distractions happen. Pretending otherwise is hubris.
> Are you perfectly fine with your whereabouts and driving style being known and sold, for example to insurance companies or toll collectors or the police?
These are addons that don't come with the car. With this, I've lowered my insurance costs, and now going through tolls is much easier and less dangerous.
> Are you using the features to compensate for any kind of disability?
Being human and knowing that I'm not perfect.
> Would you be fine with a car like HAL 9000, saying "I'm sorry muzika, I'm afraid I can't do that" to you?
That doesn't happen.
> This is alien to me.
That is clear. Judging by your questions, you have absolutely no idea what is in these cars. It's good thought that you are aware of your ignorance, admit to it, and seek to learn more. Hopefully the information I provide can help you.
I trust it as much as you trust a car to not have dangerous mechanical problems.
The problem with software is that you can't look at it to see if it's worn, you can't hear if it's about to fail, and it's not regularly inspected by experts to see how it is behaving. Also as programmers we are aware of hidden bugs that can only show up under certain circumstances. It's only a matter of time until an overflow or off-by-one error kills people.
Car makers and engineers have a very good idea how dangerous certain parts of cars are, and they have been built over many years to mitigate those weaknesses. So you wouldn't expect, for example, the five nuts holding a wheel on to all fail at once.
We programmers know that there can be far less certainty with software.
Even worse, others here have posted about the terrible software practices that were exposed at some manufacturers, and the reluctance by Jeep to react until the ability to crash their cars remotely was exposed at Blackhat.
I think it all comes down to how much trust you have and where that trust lies.
In my hubris, I'm going to have as analog a car as I can, and hold out without as many these features as I can until all the beta software bugs are ironed out. For mechanical failures, it took us many painful years to get to where we are now.
I guess what I'm saying is that I trust myself to pay attention and stay in the lane using the steering wheel more than I trust our current technology not to get confused and kill me by steering wrong. The reward just seems much less than the risk to me for that (and other) features. I don't trust automatic emergency braking to not slam the brakes on at a time when it will kill me either.
What scares me most is the perverse incentives the car manufacturers have to cover up their shortcomings. They have shown exactly how little they can be trusted to be honest with things such as VW cheating on emissions, exploding tires, faulty airbags and many many coverups to avoid recalls, etc, etc.
Also the remote access that is more and more prevalent in cars today. Hackers gaining access to the drivetrain functions of cars remotely is super scary to me. And when that happens, it will happen for every one of those cars on the road.
A DDOS of the morning rush would be very interesting at best. At worst, as bad as any terrorist attack.
Would you trust your life to the stability and security of even a major company's servers? I wouldn't either. There needs to be a LOT of regulation around these things, I believe, and we as a society should be able to decide exactly what we will accept and what we won't.
At the very least there should be rules about exactly how the systems in cars can be networked, and the security around those connections. The jeep hack was through a remote firmware update to the radio unit I believe. There are no important enough reasons to have a remotely-accessible radio directly networked to the drivetrain computer in my opinion.
It can't just be move fast and break things when lives are at stake. Everything I've heard sounds like it's the wild west at the moment.
The same goes for the milder forms of lane keeping assist; that only gets problematic if the system does enough steering that the driver can get away with taking their hands off the wheel entirely when traveling on a typical interstate highway. The assist systems that give the wheel a minor nudge and audibly alert the driver are an obvious net safety gain, especially for the innocent bystanders in the next lane over.
Many of the more advanced safety features that are being rolled out to the market these days can be done wrong and become a danger of their own. But when implemented properly, complaints against them are no more valid than complaints about anti-lock brakes and electronic stability control overriding the driver's intentions.
Example for lane following: I veer left a bit to avoid a bit of scrap wood with nails sticking out. The car counters this, steering me back toward the debris.
Essentially, anything cheap likely won't have this technology in.
Jet fighters (also passenger ones) nowadays are flown by computers, you push the joystick to tell it where to go, and the computers control the flight surfaces to follow your request but not beyond the point that it would fall out of the sky. And TFA seems to suggest the system will prevent crashes, so it would probably stop you if you e.g. tried to swerve into an oncoming truck.
Regular planes are inherently stable so they can fly closer to a glider.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/03/17/automat...
So actually less than four years, I thought it was for the 2022 models which would be released in late 2021.
edit: Seeing your later comment, you seem to think this is emergency braking. The video clearly shows this goes beyond emergency braking.
You can buy a 2017 Camry with emergency braking. It uses a laser and camera at the front and looks like a Camry. Compare the module to the Guardian sensor bank you see on the roof there. It's not for show. We will not see this sensor bank or these capabilities on every new car in 2022 and the article you posted doesn't remotely suggest that.
I think you're underestimating what Toyota is doing here.
There are quite a few vehicles that have at least some of the sensor capability required for this kind of functionality, but the hard part is the software/AI, not the cameras and LIDAR.
Mercedes cars do that. They also preemptively play grey noise over the speakers if the collision is imminent, to protect your eardrums - that's something I don't think any other manufacturer is doing.
It should be all or nothing control, at least that way people will not become marginally complacent, just out of practice (although most drivers can not drive for a month and drive again no problem).
Is automation paradox a real issue? Absolutely. But at present, all the evidence seems to indicate that the people automated cars will save far outnumber the people they will kill.
Focusing on the dangers is alarmist and misleading. The 737 crash is a good example really - I've never heard anyone with experience in the field suggest anything other than that the automation makes planes safer. Focusing instead on the fact that the automation isn't perfectly safe only makes sense if you're a media company looking to scare people.
Heck, my car has adaptive cruise control, and I already find myself wandering sometimes, assuming that it will slam on the brakes if someone gets in front of me. And I'm well aware of the automation paradox and its dangers.
The current evidence suggests that semi-autonomous cars are on balance safer than purely human driven cars. The evidence isn't conclusive, but I've literally seen no evidence presented to support the case that semi-autonomous cars are more dangerous - at best I've seen people argue that we can't yet trust the safety claims. Teslas have been on the road long enough now and in large enough numbers that if they were really more dangerous than non-semi-autonomous cars, I think we'd have seen some non-anecdotal evidence by now.
The reasonable presentation of the issue would be "semi-autonomous vehicles likely make people safer, but there are still dangers and people should pay attention."
Instead, the story you're telling is "Tesla drivers are dying, semi-autonomous cars are dangerous, and you should be scared."
You must see how this is misleading at best, and likely downright counterproductive from an overall safety point of view.
He pointed me to GeorgeHotz YouTube channel who developed in the open for CommaAI (now shut down), this company got 8m in funding (small cheese to a VC, but still showed there was interest in the project) and he was just googling answers and training his model on one single video he downloaded of the internet.
The 'play loose and fast' with the rules approach won't fly with self-driving and the car companies are looking to build something that works in the field with as close to imperceptible failures as can be realistically allowed.
The incumbents are building it right, but slow. And I would much prefer that approach if it leads to increased safety
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-52xEXhjXmY
Until it's done correctly by any side, nobody is "right" and the way it seems or not is a PR thing. At the very least, one defending the traditional car manufacturers' approaches would at least concede the impetus might never had arisen, or not for a long time, with their closeted and often-unrealized research methods. Especially if it's counter to the traditional income funnel.
The reality is that Silicon Valley is very very good at moving fast and building very high tech solutions very quickly. The car industry isn't exactly known for being fast movers and they were very slow to get on this bandwagon.
I'm sure Silicon Valley has a few things to learn from the incumbent car industry too but let's face it - the car industry is mostly just desperate not to have their lunch eaten at this point.
If I were in your shoes, I totally would have gone there.
Wait, are you serious? But I mean, I thought the whole point of driving a car in the first place was that you could "move fast and break things!" So, clearly Silicon Valley has the most appealing approach!
From every source I've read that's publicly available, SV IS eating the major automakers' lunch. An anecdotal claim with zero evidence isn't enough to convince me otherwise, nor should it convince you.
What lunch are they eating?
In short: the likely explanation for those failures, regardless of bad coding practices, were most likely 100% human error
Are you saying that Comcast, a company that has a monopoly on internet access, has zero incentive to work on increasing bandwidth speeds and lowering prices for end users?
You see how wrong and colossally stupid your argument is, saying that corporations with essentially a monopoly, without incentive, will just happily increase the quality of their product?
Your argument is so wrong and colossally stupid that I feel like Humanity as a whole, has taken a step back due to the ignorance that has happened here today.
Tesla's so-called "autopilot" looks shockingly dangerous and reckless in comparison, and may hinder acceptance of autonomous driving in the long-term.