AV is basically level 4 or 5 in the SAE classification ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-driving_car ). And those vehicles are either not existing yet (i.e. just marketing ploys), or far from it (requiring remote drivers, for example), or just research prototypes that have not been really tried at scale.
>or just research prototypes that have not been really tried at scale.
Furthermore, all of those research prototypes are geofenced, since they rely on extremely detailed mapping and lots of training data from humans driving the same routes. There is not a single AV in the world close to capable of driving on any road, at any time, in any condition, that a skilled human could drive on without ever having seen it before.
In my mind, that means we are indeed nowhere close to a true AV.
I'm not sure I agree with this success metric: for one thing, there's plenty of roads any given human can't or won't drive on due to perceived difficulty.
But when I think "autonomous vehicle" I definitely don't think "arbitrarily capable of driving on roads" - I think something capable of navigating well-understood national roads. I don't see any inconsistency with the idea that there'd be "no automation" zones or roads, or that pre-approved travelways for AVs is a failure scenario.
What is the value add of AVs if they are only restricted to well-understood, national roads? Wouldn’t their purpose be better served by high speed trains along those roads instead?
My (and Doctorow’s) definition of AV is so stringent because AVs need to deliver the same value add of regular cars relative to other forms of transportation: i) relatively fast, ii) unscheduled, and most importantly, iii) point-to-point transportation between any two points connected by roads. Trains are bad at iii), decent at ii) if run often enough, and far superior at i). If iii) is off the table, then the relative value add of cars is greatly diminished.
When I was recently in SF, one early morning I came across a Cruise vehicle on a one way street at a 30 degree angle blocking traffic (of which there was very little at the time). Another was pulling up behind it (maintenance vehicle?). Not sure what the story was with it.
Why? The Medium article was much better and contained a lot of other interesting angles that had nothing to do with the Bloomberg article, which was just one source of many.
This article is kind of a wrapper for the linked bloomberg article, which is more interesting IMO.
Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what they are trying to do.
I always imagined the future of self driving cars wouldn't lie in cities (except maybe some main ringroads or arterial roalds) but in highways. Just tell the computer to go to highway X exit Y, and from there the driver can drive the last few miles.
Basically geofencing known 'sane' locations, which cuts down on the boring bits of driving significantly.
And then in those safe geofenced locations we could put down metal guide rails so that navigation is easier. And then use metal wheels with flanges to reduce rolling resistance. And then hook many cars together into one long vehicle. And ...
That would be great. But the minute I have to get out of my car to get in another vehicle to then get in another car at my “destination” then you’ve lost me.
I'd be impressed a train service that had 8 parallel lines plus dedicated lines at each station so that it was economical for 1-5 people to alight directly at their destination.
That could be more than just a joke though: special lanes for computerized slipstream driving could make cars and trucks approach railroad efficiency. A "driver agent" posts its itinerary to the routing network, finds peers going the same direction at roughly the same time, accelerates/decelerates to find them and hook (contactlessly) into the moving paceline, at a position that fits the vehicle's frontal area (you wouldn't want small cars breaking the slipstream between trucks). The routing network bills some of the slipstream savings on behalf of the vehicle(s) in less favorable positions at the front.
Like the visionary dream of individually routed rail cars, but built bottom-up, with cars/trucks that are perfectly useful in standalone driving on regular roads. And it could scale even closer to rail: perhaps some long-haul connections get metal rails integrated in the floor like tram rails, that some long-haul trucks with a special bogey option could slot in, in the fly? That would be an impressive stunt if performed by humans, but easy for computers. Perhaps some connections add overhead wires? Perhaps some trucks, with the overhead wire pantograph option, add a robotic power handover arm because that's cheaper than wear and tear on two pantographs? Could all start bottom up, with few installations.
Why should we change city infrastructure to work with less than AGI driven cars? It sounds instead like yes, AV companies are over selling what they can do and they should be restricted to things like highways and the like where the easier, less complex driving environment already exists.
Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?
One good reason is to help the AIs make better decisions through greater certainty. For example, if a road sign has machine readable data there is a greater certainty that an AI will interpret it correctly. This could affect safety and ease of implementation.
The question is what value would a city get after, what seems to be, a very expensive process? What value do they get from unlocking semi competent AI cars that's worth the time, effort, and requires dedicated street space and an inconvenience to everyone else who travels a different way? It doesn't seem like it's replacing public transit and if someone needs a private vehicle to go beyond the area that's optimized they'll need a different transportation solution. It seems like a lot of cost for a very small benefit.
A very small benefit for society but potentially a very large benefit for a select few stakeholders.
Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production), AND the promise of fully self driving cars (which will happen for Tesla immediately after flying cars).
I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption: a few benefit at the cost of everyone else.
It's an enormous benefit to society. A huge number of people are killed or seriously injured in car crashes every year. Plus the quality of life benefits and reduction in property damage.
> off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do)
That just simply not true. He became one of the richest people in the world when Tesla cracked really high volume productions of EVs at a quite amazing margin. That is what people didn't believe was possible when they did it in 2018.
And at the same time SpaceX, where Musk owns much more stock off, managed to re-usability operational and started to launch Starlink.
> production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production)
Tesla is by far largest BEV producer in the world so its actually true. And if you think all Tesla does is partnering with Panasonic you have not been paying attention.
Telsa has its own battery production and also is one of the largest costumers of CATL, LG and Panasonic. For quite a while Panasonic and Tesla have co-developed technology that Panasonic can just sell to anybody.
As you can see, Tesla has to be both a producer and a major consumer of most battery companies in the world to achieve the volume they do.
And others can not simply replicate it because the industry is supply constraint.
> I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption
Tesla is the largest BEV producer in the world, and just recently made a larger profit then Ford/GM combined (if I remember correctly). Tesla has industry leading margin and is still the fastest growing car company of any size.
SpaceX is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world and I don't think you will find anybody serious who disagrees with that.
The only argument you have that makes sense is that Musk over-promised Self-Driving. That is certainty true, but I wouldn't call it corruption. And I don't think that today the stock price of Tesla is hugely inflated by this as there is so much pessimism on self-driving.
If Tesla or SpaceX were to disappear tomorrow nobody would experience any existential crisis.
If you disappeared Microsoft, Apple or Amazon or Walmart overnight the whole economy would come to a halt. Same for JPMChase,WellsFargo, BoA etc.
Musk is the first guy to reach the top of the Forbes list while being at the helm of an aspirational company, not one that is structurally important one in the present.
It’s a dangerous precedent, and in fact soon enough it was repeated when bitcoiners and owners of exchanges such as Coinbase and FTX reached the top 10 of the Forbes list.
This is an awesome point, you put into words something I couldn't describe very well. A large part of the current economy, in multiple fields, is aspirational, not foundational.
How is my example, street signs, an inconvenience to others or needs dedicated street space? Signs need to be replaced anyway, just add a code at the next replacement.
You're thinking back and white "it's not replacing...". What does that matter? To me what matters is "can we make transport better"
I thought the question was "can we actually make fully autonomous vehicles?" If we have that, the value is pretty obvious.
Then someone spray paints the sign, a taxi parks in the bike lane just behind a box truck blocking half the entrance to where you're going, meanwhile a cyclist rides the other direction directly toward you because human agents are chaotic and cities are full of them. Oh, a racoon!
Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city centers for human scales and activities, rather than sending cars right through them at all. We already sacrifice so much for cars in their current state, if we have to optimize for their mobility even moreso we are going in the wrong direction I feel.
I'm not saying get rid of cars, just keep them out of the denser parts of cities and the CBD. Put them on roads, not streets.
Cars should just be blocked from cities unless very special situations. Removing cars from cities has huge health and economic benefits. Car free city centers are universally better then car invested cities.
Cars where they are still allowed should move significantly slower, on much thinner roads.
Self-Driving will not solve anything for cities. They will solve even less then EVs.
Not all driving outside city areas happens on the highways.
My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows on the road.
Sparsely populated rural areas are really the only place where personal autos make sense. Long distance highway travel is better serviced by train. And transportation inside the city is better serviced by literally anything except a car (bikes, e-bikes, subway, trams, scooters, walking).
Even cities with decent public transport networks (such as Prague) tend to have a problem with tangential relations. Most lines go from some periphery to the center and to another periphery. If you need to travel between two peripheries, you have to be somewhat lucky to have a line connecting them at your disposal. Going through the center and back to the other periphery is possible, but usually takes too long. (e.g. 1h 30 min instead of 15 minutes by car).
Having kids makes car sharing very unattractive. Finding car sharing with enough (and high quality) car seats can be quite challenging. And as much as I like public transport, with kids using the car is often much faster.
And this is just a single clip. The huge advantage Tesla has is their massive amount of training data. If it happens in the real world, they probably have a clip of it and can train on it.
Are there even any racing/sim games with solved driving AI? All the ones I can think of cheat, replay hardcoded paths, and/or are terrible. And thats with perfect information about the world and other cars.
Those games ai systems get substantially less budget and time than the automakers. There's also been a lot of talks about players not really having fun with ai that is too good, the players will always assume the ai is cheating whenever it out maneuvers them if you make it too well done
Practically all the AI-assisted automation systems I'm familiar with, whether its identifying objects in an image or parsing documents, have the same problem. They work for 90-95% of problems but get trumped up by edge cases and a human has to intervene.
That's not a problem when you're transcribing a video, but becomes a matter of life and death when you're driving a car.
This bullshit shows up in every HN thread on autonomous vehicles. Really only on HN. It's wrong, uninformed, and won't seem to go away.
The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do.
(However you may be correct that we need AGI or something close to it to do autonomous vehicles robustly)
Teslas, despite the ludicrous promises of "full self-driving in 6 months, just you wait", completely choke if there is so much as a traffic cone or a road-work barrier for it go around.
But here is Karpathy explaining how vision can be used to measure distance to objects accurately[0]
Here is the fact that LiDAR doesn't work in the rain[1]: "... In heavy rain, for example, the light pulses emitted from the lidar system are partially reflected off of rain droplets which adds noise to the data, called 'echoes'."
Which logically implies you need to revert to vision, as see [0] also for why Radar is unreliable.
Extra sensors also generate a lot of extra complexity in fusing all the sensors into a common consistent view of the world. And if your goal is just 'more data' then you might as well just add more cameras, that's also 'more data'. I guess what you wanted to say way 'diverse data'.
As with everything else there are benefits and costs to those approaches.
Unless… the infrastructure change they propose is removing the “other things on the road”. Sounds brilliant. You could call that system a “rail” road as the cars would be on rails in a manner of speaking
Object detection is an issue, but it doesn't only apply to "moving" objects. The current state of the art is having trouble differentiating between a "solid" stationary object like a tire or chunk of metal that must be navigated around, and something like an empty plastic bag that can be safely ignored. Regarding infrastructure, AVs also seem to have a lot of trouble with faded lane lines on roads.
If you're relying only on cameras, then yes, that's an issue. Level 4 vehicles can locate themselves without the need for lines on the road. Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time.
Well, it's been mostly done once with Google maps and street view. Presumably once it was done once and in use cities would have a vested interest in keeping it updated themselves. Judging by how many large potholes stick around for years near me I wouldn't keep my hopes up about it being well maintained though
> Everything has been carefully mapped out ahead of time
This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
There’s also no such thing as a Level 4 Autonomous vehicle. It doesn’t exist.
Many of the original Google self-driving car project members came over directly from Google Street view, which has since scaled all over the world. Autonomous vehicles have big scaling issues, but it's not the maps holding them back.
Street view is not an ultra-HD map for autonomous driving. Cruise isn’t using street view, or anything so primitive and easy to collect in comparison, to navigate SF. And it doesn’t scale in and of itself without being backed by a search ads monopoly that prints money at will.
Telsa doesn't have such ultra-HD maps at all. They build some maps for some simulations and training but the car does not locate itself in such maps when driving.
> Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube
This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes.
And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.
> Telsa doesn't have such ultra-HD maps at all. They build some maps for some simulations and training but the car does not locate itself in such maps when driving.
They do have such maps, but only for the routes of their demo videos. That’s the entire accusation — it’s a Fugazi. A man behind a curtain. A mechanical Turk. Fake.
I have never seen a Tesla perform as well as the one in that video in ANY user video. I drove a Model 3 with FSD for 4 months and it never came close to performing that well. Not even close. They either recorded a special map for that scam video, drove the route a thousand times and took the best recording, or both.
> This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes
In the real videos, the cars fail to navigate simple scenarios constantly. You can’t even watch the videos without cringing at the constant mistakes and dangerous maneuvers. For Pete’s sake, just search “Tesla phantom braking” on YouTube and behold.
> And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.
No, just unsophisticated customers paying $12k for vaporware and massive government subsidies. So sorry — they’re not scamming VCs. Just real customers and the taxpayers.
This pretty much. You've got to be able to rapidly identify everything you see and predict what it's reasonably likely to do, which sounds like an AGI-scale problem.
I recently drove a rented Tesla 3. On a highway in Norway it failed to detect speed limit signs in like 25% of cases. And if the speed limit sign was a temporary one due to road repairs it failed with those like 50% of times.
And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.
Signs are nice but the simplest way to know the speed is to store it in a database and look it up from position.
In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.
That's not really how speed limits work though. People take their cues from road design and conditions, not what the speed limit actually is. Virtually changing speed limits is dangerous because it causes you to think you are altering the behaviour of traffic without actually doing so.
Teslas do not read speed limit signs or basically any signs other than stop signs, including not reading “Do Not Enter” street signs. It is using the wrong speed limit because their maps do not list the correct speed limit.
This reminds me of something the Rocket League devs said. Something to the effect that bots wouldn't be effective at the game because it's too challenging.
This is -not- my line of work, so I have no idea if that's true. But if it is, I don't see how we could have perfectly safe self driving vehicles.
This is where I see the problem being with autonomous vehicles, too. They can only react to other vehicles, they can't predict them.
Humans are good at predicting.
You don't consciously know you've seen the guy a couple of cars in front checking his mirror and his shoulder but you're hanging back because you just know he's going to pull out any second. The guy that's wavering a bit in the middle lane is about to dash across to the far lane of the sliproad that's coming up, clipping the zebra stripes a bit, because he's concentrating on the sat nav not the road, but you just know - out of all the other drivers in your space at the moment - that red Ford is the one that's going to do something boneheaded.
Autonomous Vehicles won't be able to do that, probably not ever.
Cars are bad. Electric cars are a bit better than ICE cars, and self-driving cars might one day be better than human-driven cars. But they're still terrible: they're still big, inefficient, polluting, loud, dangerous, and take up precious space. Cars are completely unsuited to cities, and cities which are designed around cars are terrible.
This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely. Focusing on self-driving technology, or on electric cars as if they're going to "save the planet", is entirely the wrong direction imo.
EV promotes energy independence of a country. In the worst case they can use electricity from coal that is widely available on this planet. And as long as the coal plant is modern they still will generate less CO2 than petrol-based cars.
Personally, I think while probably too futuristic large drones that are autonomous and deliver people would be safer. Its arguably easier to avoid objects when you can dodge in 360 degrees of direction.
It's also easier to avoid pedestrians as most can't fly.
It also could save on gas and energy as you can go directly as a bird flies to your destination instead of taking 20 minutes it takes 3.
Of course this would be a huge infrastructure ordeal as well probably and require a damn good system as you don't want vehicles landing on houses all over the place, but it'd be amazing for people with long commutes.
You could probably have airbuses that pick up like 30 people say in a small town and fly them to the city to be delivered individually by smaller vehicles locally. What took 45 minutes, now maybe takes 15.
These would be better if maybe electric with gas as an emergency backup system, and then just have good batteries and solar power fuel most trips.
I live in a small American suburb, have lived in large cities, and travel to Europe, NYC, LA, SF on the regular. And I wouldn’t trade my car and the ability to drive somewhere for anything in the world.
There are a lot of great things about cities but you are dependent on other people for everything in your life, and it can go sideways incredibly fast. I.e the energy situation in Europe, or with COVID-19. Personally I don’t know how it’s not obvious to the millions of people who live in places like that.
Make the boardwalk wider (so you can have fun things like restaurants on the boardwalk), add 2 direction bike lanes on both side and have thin single direction car lane in the middle.
Statements about X specialized task requiring AGI are questionable now, just like they were questionable when they were said about Chess, Go and Video Games.
Show me a chess engine that can deal with a chess peice that has been mangled so you can only tell what it is with context clues. Also a plastic bag occasionally obscures one of the other pieces. There's also construction on one side of the board every few turns that it has to route around using lanes that arnt normally legal. It has to do this while a drunk human is also moving the pieces, sometimes in ways that arnt legal, and if it takes too long it can hit a wall and die
> autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans.
This is really an astonishingly large claim without any evidence.
I question if you understand what AGI actually is? It's not "AI that can solve game theory" or "AI that can play cooperative games" - conventional video game AI's do this all the time in a myriad of permutations.
$100B is not that much when you compare it to the value self-driving cars will create.
There are over 1 billion cars on the road which need humans to drive them. How much are they used? I don't know. Let's say one ride per day. When cars turn into a service business, the "driver" will be software. What will be paid to the driver? Let's say $1 per ride.
That is 1B * $1 * 365 = $365B per year. Give that a p/e ratio of 10 and the value is $3650B.
So we could spent 30 times more and still break even.
I would like to nit-pick and say you're estimating some novel metric. The value add would be somewhat higher than that because the alternative is a human driver, so the value-add of the software is approximately ($/h value of driver x hours) that it frees up to do something else. Plus all the evidence I see suggests that whatever the current state, sooner rather than later computers are going to be superhuman at driving (like they are at most other discrete tasks) and save a lot of lives. Plus reduced wear & tear on vehicles.
$365B in value is probably a serious undercall. The only reason to complain here is if only $100B has been put in to the venture so far.
>>Plus all the evidence I see suggests that whatever the current state, sooner rather than later computers are going to be superhuman at driving (like they are at most other discrete tasks) and save a lot of lives.
What is that evidence, exactly? I agree that we might eventually get there, but the scale seems to be 50-100 years at this point. We are as arrogant as the researchers in the 60s who famously announced that absolutely perfect image recognition is only 1-2 years away - except the problem is several orders of magnitude harder.
Typically from what I've seen computers go a long period being hopeless at a task, then slightly subhuman-par-superhuman very quickly. It seems to me that as far as algorithm-and-Hz cares human intelligence lives in a very narrow window and once computers get close to it they tend to jump over it.
I'd judge self driving to be slightly subhuman right now - there are definitely worse drivers on the road (typically impaired - drunk, near-blind or high). I'd expect superhuman performance this decade just based on that and the rate of improvement in anything AI related right now.
I think computers will become superhuman at driving under the right conditions.
However, there will inevitably be conditions that require the use of general intelligence (rather than driving heuristics), and in those situations all you can do is pray the computer acts rationally despite not having GI.
I think self driving cars have already passed the test of "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile driven. But I don't think that's enough to sway the public, if every once in a billion miles a self driving car slowly drives off a cliff for no apparent reason.
>I think self driving cars have already passed the test of "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile driven.
This is not definitively known. The distribution of conditions under which self driving cars operate is very different from the distribution of human driving. Self driving car miles are disproportionately on the highway, with little traffic, in perfect weather (i.e. by far the safest driving conditions). In addition, we don’t know how many disengagements (or remote interventions) would have resulted in an accident.
True, true. However, if I had to bet... I'd bet in a fully self driving world (using today's tech) there'd be overall far fewer fatal accidents. However there'd also be a lot of bullshit we are simply unwilling to deal with (e.g. cars going 10mph in the rain; slow motion fender benders; car unwilling to turn left; gridlock at intersections; lots of random oddities). I guess my point is that safety metrics are certainly important stats to gauge self driving progress, but certainly not the only metrics that matter, and perhaps not even the most important.
I think that’s underestimating just how bad people are at driving. There is little meaningful difference for other drivers from a bunch of self driving cars suddenly blocking traffic and an actual traffic accident.
People aren’t going to trust cars to safely do level 5 if they can’t do level 4 99.999% of the time. So sure there will be occasional stories of i95 blocked for 3 hours due to software bug, but how is that different from a major accident that occurs regularly?
This is the argument self driving car companies are currently trying to make. My contention is this reason doesn't seem compelling to the general public. For whatever reason the public seems more tolerant of human error than machine error. At this point anyway. I foresee a long period of trust-building before widespread adoption.
An interesting experiment would be for Uber to send two cars for pickup, one human and one self driving. And let people choose.
That’s fair. I suspect we are at least 30 years from a drunk to be legally able to order their self driving car home without issue simply due to cultural inertia.
Assuming we get to that point it will probably be another 20 years after that before non self driving is seen in the same way as driving a motorcycle is today. Aka something that’s not suicidal, but defiantly excessively dangerous.
I'd agree with that estimate. But sheesh, 50 years from now seems like forever.
Two final thoughts...
(1) Maybe within the next 50 years devs can instill into AI, some meaning of death. As it is, I find some comfort knowing my driver realizes the difference between a field and a 40-foot cliff along the coast of Big Sur, and our shared theory of mind regarding the consequence of swerving to avoid something in those situations.
(2) Regarding humans being more tolerant of human error. I think this might be because when a human gets in an accident, there is always the ability to reason that person is different than us: old, tired, drunk, distracted, etc. And both the situation and the cognition are unique to one person. Naturally, we would have done something different to avoid the accident, we reason. If an AI gets into an accident, and we know that same exact AI is driving 10 million cars, including our own, that freaks us out a little.
I think (2) is more cultural than that. People reacted poorly to automatic elevators when they where first introduced and now people just don’t think about them as much more complicated than a light switch. The elevator broke and my light broke have the same feel of an inanimate object not working even though elevators are a lot more complicated.
I'm not sure if "the breaks on the train failed" and "the train's ai suddenly decided to start running in reverse" would get the same reception even if the result was the same.
Yea that feels different. I kind of want to say odd accidents definitely get attention or something, but I don’t have anything to back it up.
Yet aircraft autopilot fails, pilot error, and mechanical error seem to all get the same attention. That might be because the pilots are also at fault for autopilot issues, or it could be autopilot used to be really really dumb so there was a lot of stories that autopilot flying into a mountain etc to prep people with how dumb it was or it could be something else.
I actually do feel more comfortable with the idea that autopilot is landing the plane rather than a human pilot. Especially at night. And I don't even know if it actually works like that. Interesting. Good chat.
Nothing says self driving cars can’t phone a call center for the 0.001% edge cases. Just add a cellphone connection and a Starlink receiver in the roof for a backup. At which point we would need to add some cell reception to some tunnels and cars can have literally global coverage.
High drips the problem drops from near AGI to not outrunning the cars ability to stop without hitting anything.
It's not only off topic, it's also wildly unrealistic (IMO). 1$/day may seem little, but that's for middle-class US standards, and it gets proportionally worse when you realize many people make more than one trip per day. What incentive do you have for people to pay that amount?
No one is going to rent you a car for $1/ride, self driving or not in fact I doubt you could rent a bike for that much. Even if you eliminate the driver from the equation, you still have to pay for the value of the car, wear and tear, and fuel/electricity to run it. The $1 on top is an extremely optimistic cost of a self driving software only.
Let me put it this way - it would already be cheaper for me to just take an Uber to work than own my car. And yet, I(and I imagine most people will too) prefer to own my car.
I'm not sure I get your valuation model.
"we're" not investing in self driving it's the car companies, because (presumably) they believe that self driving will make their cars more sellable compared with other brands.
If after another $50B or $100B spent some companies start to pull back on funding because they think diverting funds to other areas will give a better return (better batteries, cheaper manufacturing etc), it's likely others will too.
So? Okay, we're not there yet with autonomous vehicles, and have spend tons of money on it. But the tech we have now didn't exist a decade ago. Give it another decade.
Another decade for prototype self-driving cars to cover another state part of the US? $100BN in funding these gadgets and contraptions that don't work. Not even Tesla FSD can drive itself reliably at night without supervision, because it is not Level 5.
Until LiDAR becomes more cheaper and these cars CAN drive themselves safely at night without supervision in any state at scale and as advertised like a robotaxi, then you're looking into multiple decades of these research prototypes being 'useful'.
So far, that $100BN is a VC scam until proven otherwise.
> So far, that $100BN is a VC scam until proven otherwise.
A lot of the self driving tech has already made its way into safety systems in cars. Things like automatic breaking seem generally useful. There's a question about if it's worth $100B for research into partially autonomous safety solutions, but I don't think it's useful to attribute zero value to self driving research until we get full self driving (certainly some value is being realized already).
>Another decade of researching a cancer cure to cover another different type of cancer? $1400BN in funding these cancer treatments that don't work. Not even radiotherapy can fully cure cancer...
Thats how I read it, sorry. We made tremendous leaps in the past decade with improving automated driving, is it fully automatic? No. Does it mean we should somehow stop funding it? No.
I repeat my comment on LiDAR that I gave a few days ago. The gist is that LiDAR is cheap and you will be able to buy a LiDAR with sufficient resolution for in the next 1-2 years because it will be integrated in normal passenger cars for L2/L3 assistants. These cars are coming out now or in the next year.
LiDAR is finally getting cheap. OEMs (like VW) are very price sensitive. It is estimated the sensors from Valeo cost about 500 dollars. The fact that you see more and more normal passenger cars with higher resolution LiDARs means that LiDARs are getting cheaper.
The Audi A8 used Valeo's (with Ibeo) first generation low resolution LiDAR Scala 1 from the automotive supplier Valeo. Mercedes new models will be using Valeo's second (or third) generation LiDAR. All these are used for L2/L3 assistants. Valeo is a traditional large automotive supplier.
Luminar, a public company from the US, cooperates with Volvo. Some models will come with a LiDAR in the base configuration. These are "new LiDARs" with high resolution.
Innoviz, a 'startup' from Isreal, will supplies LiDARs to VW. Its angular resolution is (in its focus area) about 0.1 (or 0.2) degrees, which is sufficient for higher levels of autonomy and surpasses/equals the resolution of the expensive Velodyne sensors of the past. They will probably be in the same price range. Due to the limited FOV due to the technology, you will need multiply LiDARs.
Many new models from Chinese car brands will also ve equipped with a LiDAR. Most of them with Chinese LiDAR manufacturers like RoboSense or Hesai. Some are equipped by European manufactures like Ibeo/ZF. For example, there is the automotive sensor AT128 by Hesai. It targets normals vehicles (see price range above) and claims a similar performance (except for FOV, so you need multiple) like the Velodyne Ultra Puck (~$50000).
So costs of LiDARs are a not the very expensive obstacle they were in the past. The only problem could be that the new LiDAR manufactures cannot scale up series production. For example, Ibeo just filed for insolvency because they could not close another round after aggressively increasing spending in the past years.
This. I recall most predictions saying 2024 would be the tipping point, but even then I doubt regulations at the local and national level will change that fast.
This is an important piece I have not seen addressed in the US. In places where there is snow and ice on the road a good part of the year self driving cars will need help from sensors and guide objects in some form. Perhaps sensors injected into the road? Humans barely manage in my area because people have a cognitive awareness and memory of the terrain. Road lines are often absent. Sidewalks are obscured. Even simple things like parking at the grocery store is relative parking and people just make a best-guess as to where a spot is.
I am also curious if any testing has been done in snow blizzards and squalls. Squalls can occur without warning and visibility drops to nothing.
That’s way too expensive on the order of trillions of dollars. Not worth it and not worth the extra regulation that will come with requiring new roads to support them.
maybe its just the case that we have already picked the low hanging fruit in computing...from this point forward, the remaining loftier goals will take decades and billions to achieve
don't fall into the trap of thinking something can't be done if it can't be done easily. quickly and cheaply
The main lesson here seems to be about the value of incrementalism. This project was always pitched as self driving cars in one leap, which set huge expectations and more or less ruled out just shipping incrementally better driver assistance year after year. Probably because the space became dominated by Google and Page-ist futurism, so they weren't able to sell anything that would be expected to come with an actual car because "automotive supply chain" didn't fit with Google's self image. And then everyone got scared that they'd succeed and tried to copy their approach.
The mining site thing is probably where things should have begun, or highway driving only, but the question is, could a company have motivated ML and programming experts with such a humble starting point? Or was the hole-in-one approach required to build a team that could get anywhere at all?
It’s because self driving doesn’t provide much value until you can remove the human. If you can remove the human, last mile package delivery is suddenly super cheap; taxis are cheap; trucking is much cheaper; share car services are transformed as a business model.
With the human still required you get nothing, so why invest at all?
I think a lot of people would be happy to put their feet up once they'd navigated onto a highway, or have their car go find a parking spot by itself, or come back from one. The sort of stuff Tesla is trying to do is in many ways far more practical except they keep diverting resources to FSD and end up not nailing thee more prosaic conveniences.
The cost benefit analysis just doesn’t add up though. I can see this adding a small amount to the purchasing decision of a prospective buyer, but without “remove the human” as the end goal these technologies do not provide the return on investment. No one has a crystal ball though, and a few years ago “autonomous vehicles” looked promising. It’s just that we are now looking at the sunken cost fallacy when it hasn’t worked out.
I've said it before, if you truly want to experience what a real life raod looks like in most of the World, just go to Eastern Europe and create the test models there.
Absolutely agreed. No road markings, speed bumps also not marked. Lack of road signs, potholes, what about non-clearly defined sidewalks, because nature has taken most of the sidewalks' blocks or even overgrown with grass.
And then there is India. Please come here if you want zero infra AND zero adherence to basic rules of driving AND the language and script changes every few hundred kilometers AND all roads have human and non-human users at all hours of the day.
It's odd that it's treated as a matter of pride that, while other cities have AVs today, your own city or nation will take much longer simply because it's full of dangerous drivers breaking the law and infrastructure full of literal roadblocks. It's like claiming that cars are infeasible globally because the roads around you are full of potholes and manure. Congratulations?
Rather than assume this is a death knell for self-driving cars, a more pragmatic view would be other nations will be able to benefit from them while you are left behind. Self-driving cars don't need global saturation to be worthwhile.
In my experience, roads in Czechia and Slovakia are better than much of (most?) of the US. But I can't speak for Eastern Europe in general. (And I guess those countries would prefer to be called Central Europe anyway...)
WHY is a fully autonomous vehicle even interesting to pursue, given that wheeled vehicles and their infrastructural requirements are such a large expense and social and environmental problem relative to the benefits provided?
I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill?
I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in suburban US locales coupled with maglev capsules being routed around electronically by magnetic field switching, etc…
Or flying jetson mobiles etc…
Why is the current obsession a robotic driver of a boring old car ?
Cars and trucks continuously degrade the roads beneath them. The infrastructure requirement is never satisfied -- it requires constant, very expensive upkeep.
What if cars were mini maglev trains (or pods), hovering above buried tracks on the road and can 'convert' into a car for last-mile delivery, and parking.
Then you'd still have the asphalt etc, but hovering over it - you degrade it less than actually driving on it. In this situation you could order up any size vehicle you need from 2 seater to 20 seater.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has released its early estimate of traffic fatalities for 2021. NHTSA projects that an estimated 42,915 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year, a 10.5% increase from the 38,824 fatalities in 2020. The projection is the highest number of fatalities since 2005 and the largest annual percentage increase in the Fatality Analysis Reporting System’s history. Behind each of these numbers is a life tragically lost, and a family left behind.
Shouldn’t these numbers _always_ get reported in relation to how many people are driving (and for how long)? This increase in deaths would actually be step forward in death rates if for example people drove twice as much this year compared to last year.
Not to mention that the upside of self-driving cars is capped at the cost of an uber driver, and even in a world with ubiquitous fully autonomous cars you still want public transportation.
Driver assistance on highways is probably the right 80/20 solution, at least for the foreseeable future.
Parking lot problem is also demand problem. Demand is not sufficiently elastic. How many people would be happy have their commute car available on one day maybe at 6 and then next on 10 or 11 or 12...
I think what looks interesting on the surface for self-driving cars is that "it is just a software problem". The other projects you describe require actual "stuff".
Still, that argument doesn't count if the software problem is "impossible" to implement, or if it turns out that you also need "stuff" for it.
I dunno, being able to easily get places (to visit or work or have fun) is pretty important. Time is finite and valuable, so things that less us spend time in more satisfying ways are valuable.
> existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything)
I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do other things with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires predetermined stops which people outside the US shrugs and just walk or bike the last feet). Also, they're proven to work: even China (which previously didn't have trains to its far-flung places) and they've done what you've expect. I think that the sole reason that anyone wants to invest in automated (non-train) driving is because trains are boring while AI is oh-so-shiny.
But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.
You’re right. It’d definitely decrease maintenance. I’m not sure how much maintenance is from usage vs wear from the weather (especially in cold areas)
> with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to
This, and leaving from the exact starting point you want to, at the exact time you want to, without out-of-the-way intermediate stops that you don't want, without switching lines. I can also easily move a table, couch, 2 shopping carts full of groceries, etc.
It's not an insignificant difference in convenience
(although the risk is clearly that vehicles will transition into subscription services that cost many thousands of dollars a year and price them all out)
> 1.3 million deaths worldwide, annually (94% cause by human error)
You don't need full autonomy to mostly fix this, but the fixes are politically untenable (currently). The cars should be speed-governed, they should be speed-limit aware -- the car should routinely be overriding the desire of the driver. No, you can't go into the bike lane to get around traffic. No, you can't make the split-second decision to swerve around a car braking in front of you. No, you can't operate the vehicle at 100 mph in a residential zone. No, you can't go that fast right now; it's raining way too hard, doofus. No, you can't operate your vehicle onto a scheduled parade route.
You don't need full autonomy to create cars that prevent a significant percentage of driver -- to put it charitably -- errors. These are fairly straightforward problems. The opposition is political.
In the real world political tenability matters a lot, so I don’t really think ”fixes” that ignore it are very interesting to discuss. But if we’re already assuming politics doesn’t matter there’s a much more effective solution: ban cars entirely.
I'm not so hopeless as this. Seatbelts, speed limits, and drunk driving laws were similarly unpopular. That opposition was overcome primarily, I think, because it's so stupid, in the end, and the argument for those things is so compelling that it can't be ignored forever.
We will find ourselves in the same position with speed regulators, etc. Once some country does it, the reduction in lives lost will be impossible to ignore.
Those are all problems dependent on the existing auto-mobile centric transport landscape, and would be better solved by moving away from that landscape.
A) people want transportation as a service without the human of a taxi or driver, not just for cost but comfort and not having to associate with people (of a lower class)
B) creating a scalable transportation as a service business for profit and power (data)
Regarding A): Exactly! I don’t really mind traveling together with people from my own class (I might even prefer it), but I don’t really want to travel with lower class people. That just makes me feel like I’m one of them.
I think this attitude is quite common, but people won’t admit it. I would never admit it like I just did if I didn’t have an anonymous account. And I don’t see how technology will change this basic preference.
A hyperloop is a much, much harder problem. Not technically, but practically. Just look at California's high speed rail and how that's gone - with that history, the idea that we could introduce hyperloops in US cities is, to put it only mildly punnily, a pipe dream.
As others have pointed out, millions are dying in car accidents now, so a "more compelling vision for the future" is much less important than something that can get done. While we certainly haven't seen the progress many have hoped for/promised on self-driving cars, I'd wager everything I own that we'll see a significant percent of cars on the road in CA operating autonomously before we see that high speed rail finished.
Hyperloop is crap, just go with highspeed trains. They get the job done in city corridors.
But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads.
Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.
Hyperloop is still cool because you could have really fast transit over large areas. Mass transit across cities is still quite slow. High speed trains are fine but just not fast enough. Imagine a large city where you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes.
Musk coined Hyperloop as a distraction to high speed rail. He wanted people to buy Teslas instead of thinking about high speed rail in California. A lot of people fell for his con.
It is a shame that other partial vacuum systems are not being developed. They seem like a useful concept, fast, less air resistance means less energy use. Surely a technology you'd want to have in a future city.
why does it need to be a vacuum system? Couldn't a similar device be a pod-like maglev device that floats above a magnetic track and maybe can temporarily hover albeit more slowly via some drone-like propeller on the bottom when 'off track', or for final-mile portions, could even turn into a car when not in maglev mode.
On concept level they kinda make sense. But the trade-offs are just too stupid. Basically it is equivalent of building tunnel around all of the roads. The energy investment in that sort of infrastructure is unfeasible. And then partial vacuum, that needs more infra and energy to be spend.
And then the safety, on ground level open air is great, you can exit at any point to any direction. But tunnels especially small ones... That would be nightmare in best case and death trap in the worst.
If you chose to build a train with only two stops, yes you could get from one side to the other in only a few minutes. That would have its downsides, like the station not being near your destination, which is why it's rarely done. You would also need a very straight track, which means lots of space for points (places where trains separate from the route onto platforms). This constraint is also shared by Hyperloop.
For anything except sparsely populated rural areas, a train gets you to the city/town, and a mix of public transport + e-bike/e-scooter gets you to your final destination. This is potentially quicker, and much much more efficient than lugging 2-ton capsules around and needing hundreds of thousands of square km of land to keep the things parked 95% of the time.
Tunnels might now be cheaper to build than roads just because of land rights. It's very difficult/impossible to acquire the property rights to build a new roads/rail lines nowadays.
I think non-human payloads make more sense for virtually every kind of innovation:
-- Radically reduced safety margins, if the vehicle itself contains no humans.
-- You can often move cargo at any time of day or night, and therefore do a much more sophisticated job of collaboratively load-levelling traffic.
-- Doesn't matter how uncomfortable a non-human payload is with in reason. Acceleration, cornering, waiting, daylight, motion sickness are all constraints that are eased for cargo.
-- It would be nice if you can move freight anywhere, but even if you can only serve a very limited network its still useful - say between fixed points in major cities. By contrast, a car that can't go almost everywhere is very severely limited.
Example: in major cities, all the freight moves in lorries, which are extremely dangerous and polluting. Meanwhile, the humans are packed into trains in underground tunnels. Surely freight should be moving in autonomous underground trains and the humans enjoying lorry free surface travel?
Humans are freight units that embark and disembark and change vehicles autonomously with very little instruction. Other freight units aren't. Parcel hubs are a hard problem that's far from solved enough to set them up in masses.
People in the US will absolutely die on a hill for their car.
Companies will invest endless amounts of money to convince you cars are the future, their infrastructure isn’t wasteful, and they’re good for the environment.
People buy into this because it fits their existing lifestyle.
There’s nothing boring about a car. It’s private, facilitates living outside of cities so it’s not dense and gross and offers the freedom to go anywhere with roads.
Hyperloop has long since been proven to be infeasible to the point of being practically impossible. Please stop drinking the Musk koolaid. It was never going to happen and it never will.
Didn’t musk literally out himself (boastfully) as having pursued hyperloop as a way to stifle funding for some other related but competing ventures? I can’t recall, but he literally never believed in it.
I never understood how people have so little understanding of basic physics and practicalities of engineering that it even got cursory pass. Like pointing it out to be stupid only takes handful of questions.
Could is the question, but should is never asked or answered, same goes to other projects like solar roofs with the shingles.
If you like private transport, then you should be doing whatever you can to get as many people as possible to use public transport so there’s less traffic on the road for you.
Then public transit should be built to wherever you live. given the amount of investment to self driving cars and maintenance of roads that are way bigger than they should be, we could be using that capital for transit.
I'd rather see we remove all non professionnal motorized vehicles from the road and invest those billions in high frequency and coverage public transport. That would mean more accessible transport to everyone, including disabled people, less people dying on the road, safer transport for pedestriants, cyclists, bicycles, scooters, rollerskates, better emergency services who don't have to deal with ugly traffic.
"Where I live, it's not unreasonable for everyone to need a couple of vehicles each depending on what they're doing. "
Because you guys and your parents chose to make you dependent on that. The solution is not to build more killing machines and spend more time behind the wheel. All that has been done in the second half of the century can be made differently.
Self driving trains would be far more achievable and practical…more tiny engines and smaller cars means latency and switching delays would go down. I don’t think it even needs much technology.
> "more tiny engines and smaller cars means latency and switching delays would go down."
Thorougly disagree.
The whole reason why trains are so efficient is due to their ability to haul so much weight in one go without practically any other traffic being in the way. Train track infrastructure could not handle multiple mini trains without more track which, as we know from the excessive road construction for car traffice, does not solve the congestion issue.
Yeah, efficiency for a train means cargo divided by the cost of the driver and the costs of the locomotive.
Take the driver out of the equation, and suddenly making the train longer doesn’t provide any savings. You might as well switch to smaller and cheaper engines and divide one train into 10.
There are a lot of variables that affect efficiency but new technology alters the landscape. Self driving public transit is one such thing. Would you rather be on a bus with one driver or a self driving taxi that costs the same?
They wont go anywhere until theres a legal way for the company making the tech to shift liability to drivers for the odd chance it'll crash. That's the issue, that needs to be solved more.
Driver liability should never be lost. Trusting a marketing campaign to not kill someone is a (bad) choice, that that user must be liable for. They are still driving the car; recklessly. It's their job to be in control of these megajoules.
Conventionally, drivers are liable on the physics level... because they have skin in the game. When I pass another car on a 2 lane road at 100mph+ relative velocity, we both (conventionally) have a strong incentive to not mess up.
That's a feature. Same goes (unfortunately) for people who make life or death decisions based on marketing campaigns.
Is it a data problem? If you have data modeling every nook and corner of the world and every possible combination of human, objects, roads and traffic/ weather conditions, then the AI can learn. If not, it keeps getting confused, will enter private driveways or get bamboozled by traffic cones. Till then it will be an iterative process where the AV companies will keep learning from incidents like those described in the article.
On the other hand, I do think the biggest impact of AV will be in controlled environments like the mine dump trucks in the article or the relatively easier long-distance highway only trucks (AV trucks haul till city outskirts, human drivers supply into cities).
It's quite sad. Even not-so-bright representatives of our civilization can drive a car successfully, and we still can not achieve this level in software. It means that we are extremely far from implementing something more interesting and sophisticated.
All of these “AI” are too much “neural networks” and don’t have enough “intelligence”.
Because we are nowhere close to Artificial Intelligence in layman's sense of understanding. Not even close, as long our computing principles are still based on zero and one.
It's a non-trivial amount of our society's wealth, doesn't really matter who owns it in regards to talking about it's use. Just like we can talk about how spending a billion hours on reality TV is probably not an amazing use of time. It's not our time, do what you want, but you can still talk about it.
That’s really not true. Americans love good public transportation where it’s available and works well. Most US cities have lots of buses, and many have light rail. But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.
American corporations perhaps aren’t as interested in public transportation, because there is no money to be made. And that is who is largely funding this self-driving vehicle research.
> But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.
This is oft-repeated, but it doesn't really survive a moment's scrutiny. You might as well say it's pointless to build a path from your back door to your shed, because the county is just too big.
> Americans love good public transportation […] Most US cities have lots of buses
So… Apparently not…
The USA is probably the worst place in the world for 1) high speed trains 2) buses. And the only place I know where the train _waits_ for cars to go through.
If only they could see by themselves how bad it is during their next trip to Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, London, Paris (even France in general) and many many other countries and cities that have a functional network of high speed trains, metro, tramway and regional lines…
From everything I am learning about the US on Youtube by transport people, they universally despise bus service in North America cities.
Some have light rail but at a far smaller rate then cities in Europe.
There are tiny cities in Europe that have more light rail then cities 10x the size in North America.
My tiny town of less then 100k people literally has more extensive bus and train connection then most cities in the US that have million+ people.
> But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.
Compare for example Switzerland (lots of maintains, rivers, hills and so on), with a equally sized metro area like Torronto, Dalles and so on.
The reality is many of your metro areas are the literal exact opposite of spread out, they are just badly designed.
Zürich for example is a city that has only like 600k people, with maybe 1.5M in the larger metro area and Zürich has more trains and trams going then whole Texas city triangle.
So please stop with the excuse about how everything is so spread out in the US. Its not spread out, its just badly designed.
Self driving tech could and will be applied to public transportation too. With self-driving mini-buses we can serve more destination much more efficiently, fine-tuning commute supply to better fit the exact demand.
This is probably a good model for the future of public transit. We use large buses because of the high cost of drivers. For less popular routes and times it currently doesn’t make sense but self-driving mini-buses would.
At least in SF there has been little discussion due to the influence of the unlicensed transit unions. The idea of eliminating drivers can’t even be discussed.
While this is somewhat true, in the overall problem of transit, this is a tiny problem dwarfed by far larger problems. For this argument to make sense, there are about 5000 ways to improve current US cities in terms of transport that don't require this amazing technology.
Its not technology that is limiting good transit, but will.
Yes, as a hyper individualistic American fuck public transport. I don’t want to travel with other people, I don’t want to live in dense cities and I don’t want to go to like the 10 places with public transport. I love national parks, camping, hiking, road-tripping etc.
You do understand that sprawl and suburbia (and car infrastructure) takes away from nature, not adds to it, right? We have paved over a huge portion of the country and that beautiful nature you so claim to enjoy.
You can't have both like that. Cars will need to lose priority to make public transit usable.
Car infrastructure spreads everything out, puts parking lots everywhere, makes walking or cycling impossible or really unpleasant. You can't have working public transit if visiting two businesses requires walking 10 minutes along a loud boulevard.
America has tried cars-first infrastructure. It has failed. The spread is unsustainable, and it's bankrupting suburban areas.
Here is an idea. You can have a 'full fledged car infrastructure' with about 1/5 of the car infrastructure you ALREADY HAVE. In fact, there is already way to much car infrastructure, far more then anybody can maintain. Most town in the US and the highway system have maintenance backlogs that will literally never be cleared.
Here is an idea, build public transports so that less people use the car infrastructure, and just like that you get higher utility out of your existing car infrastructure.
Seriously, the amount of 8 way stroads in the US is a fucking joke. There is essentially never a need for an 8 way road anywhere at any time. And for sure not absurd 20 way highways.
I also like the benefits of invidualistic cultures, but there's a cost to it too.
The US got this way because it was super-charged between pre-WWII and the dotcom boom. Both economically and culturally. The post-WWII high wages allowed the rise of suburbia, the Cold War induced WW3 scare led to the highway system, and so on.
The low-efficiency of it is taking its toll. (Sitting in traffic for hours each day, pollution, etc.)
Traffic is usually only a problem in major cities and that’s about the only good usecase for public transport. I don’t want to lose the amazing infrastructure we have for cars everywhere that isn’t a major urban center.
Traffic is one thing. Low-density sprawl itself is more costly. (More roads to maintain, more poles along roadsides, more distance to drive, more pipes, more wiring, every SFH is a big box with a lot more surface where heat exchange happens (and then folks want to keep it warm/cool), every backyard is one more sad lifeless walled garden to water and mow. It adds up.)
And I'm not saying there are no benefits, nor am I saying that the alternatives are so perfect people just somehow don't see it. (I'm saying let's quantify the costs and let people choose. For example I'd spend a lot more on soundproofing and a lot less on backyards and frown lawns, but mostly there's no such option. [Hence the big push for more permissive zoning/permitting/etc.])
Having been the victim of public transport for the first 30 years of my life: nope. You just can’t polish a turd. (Maybe other countries can but here in Germany it’s a lost cause and you can’t make individual mobility expensive enough for me to ever take public transport again).
As a counter-anecdote, I’ve been using public transport exclusively for 35 years (since first grade) in Helsinki, London and New York, and never felt like I’m a “victim” of anything.
I only ever take a car for trips outside the city.
Indeed, and I think you’re quietly pointing at the nub of the problem: if you like in a major city or sufficiently close to one of its public transport ‘spokes’, and you want to travel to somewhere also covered in a similar manner (be that short- or long-distance) public transport is usually somewhere between great and acceptable. As soon as you fall outside that usability window, it often becomes close to unusable.
(One exception: local countryside bud services can sometimes be really valuable for local travel; but they often don’t link well with other public transport modalities, IME.)
I'm about as big of a fan of mass transit as you can get, but this is completely overblown.
That's $1Bn for the hundred largest cities in the world.
Assuming even 40% of that went to the US, that's $1Bn for the top 40 cities. That leaves out 22 entire states [0], and like 75% of the population...
Look to NYC, LA, and SF for what $1Bn gets you... It's about 1 mile of subway [1]. And it takes close to 15 years to build.
We wouldn't all be riding around on space elevators with materially better lives if this money was invested in subways or trains.
If you spent $40Bn on busses - you'd have to spend another $250Bn to pay people to ride them...
Self-driving cars will eventually change cities. I think there's evidence it's already starting to happen.
I don't think this money would've been better spent on trains, and definitely not busses.
What else are you thinking of?
I'd be interested in a better cost breakdown of bike lanes and how much it would cost to get a significant percentage of people in cities biking & scootering around - but I'm skeptical, and also, it's not mass transit!
NYC installed 29.5 miles of protected bike lanes last year [2]. I can't find the cost, but next year they're asking for $3.1Bn to build 500 miles of protected bike lanes, among many other things [3]. I know it costs less than $1M to pave a two-lane road one mile [4] - so a protected bike lane should be well under $1M - but then everything costs way more in the city...
If protected bike lanes cost substantially less than $5M per mile in the city (like $0.5M) - $40Bn could get you pretty far!
That's 80k miles of protected bike lanes! That's about 4x the amount of total bike lanes we have now.
Bike commute rates in NYC are decent (by US standards). I'd love to see a study on how much bike commute rates increased after these new lanes were completed.
Copenhagen has only 240 miles of bike lanes and 600 miles of paths for 70 square miles and 750k people [4]. That's enough to get 62% of people commuting by bike [5]!
For the top 40 cities, you'd be looking at like 80k miles of protected bike lanes for 4000 square miles and 81M people. That's better than Copenhagen!
That could potentially get you close to 62% of people biking instead of driving - just depends on if that many people live within 5 miles of work / school / going out. 5 miles being the average commute distance in Copenhagen [6].
62% of cars off the road in the top 40 US cities would DEFINITELY change my life for the better - but I'd be surprised if we could even get 15%. Still, it's something you could do in a couple of years - and for $40Bn - would definitely be worth it. But it's decidedly not mass transit.
I don't think you're refuting the parent post so much as lamenting the difficulty of doing anything "infrastructure" in today's America.
There are lots of places all over the world where $1B would make a big difference in many, many people's lives -- and where people eagerly ride the busses they actually have, which are often not that nice.
Do we need things to work in the USA for them to be worth doing?
I think the goal is to solve public transport by having a fleet of autonomous vehicles that pick you up where you are and drop you off where you need to go and would roam freely in between - basically driverless, electric ueber.
As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.
Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.
I guess it's just a question of capacity. If you can cram a lot of travelers into a subway train during rush hour, you could just as well imagine an uber pool type function where clever route finding combines riders into a single car during rush hour.
Carpooling failed because people prefer having everything under control in the face of how cheap car-based travel is already. Thinking self-driving cars will fix a luxury problem is a pipedream.
Whether it is self-driving with an incredibly optimized algorithm (good luck with that) or manual carpooling, the same problems are still going to bubble up. The solutions already exist. We, as a society, just don't want to deal with the consequences.
Driving individual cars isn't cheap. The overall for society are huge. Roads are massively subsidized. Car dependency hurts housing prices as well.
Carpooling failed because it doesn't make sense to use amateur drivers on the same overfilled road network to carry a couple more people. If the entrance to the city is backed up, car-pool lanes don't add much.
If you have a networked grid of cars you can run them much closer together and increase road capacity. (Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.) You can also automate away the poor behaviours that contribute to delays.
This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-research individual self-driving we have today.
But really most people shouldn't be commuting anyway. WFH should be much more of a thing, even if it's not full-time.
Brilliant option, we could cut the front off one car and the back off another and weld them together, think of the room saved for more people! Talk about a dense network!
Yes, exactly. The whole premise of self-driving removing peak load rests on arguments which exist in theory, but are stupidly difficult to create in practice. The costs made today will pale in comparison to the costs required to get this off the ground.
Meanwhile, we have solutions which work today, several of which can be done today. WFH, incentivizing working outside peak hours, building more densely and closer to cities, investing in public transport, and more. We just don't want to do it.
We see this in The Netherlands. Public transport has gotten noticeably worse, car usage is going up as a result, and roads are expanding to compensate. In a country where housing is a massive problem, which means people will move to less desirable places (read: places further away from work hubs). Now we have a chicken-and-egg problem with regards to public transport, and increased car usage is pressuring space which could be used to create more homes and remove cars from the peak.
We simply don't need to wait another 10-15 years for self-driving to finally be a thing. What needs to be done, is accepting that things will suck for a bit to then get better eventually. Continuing on the same path with self-driving cars will only stall the problem instead of solve it, anyway.
This is true but the gains are surprisingly limited. From Algorithmic game theory there’s the concept of “the price of anarchy” it measures the gap between cooperation (a centrally designed or coordinated solution) and competition (where each participant is independently trying to maximize the outcome for themselves). Selfish routing basically what we have now has price of 4/3. This means the greedy status quo is only 33% worse than perfect coordination.
I’ll quote from one of my favorite books Algorithms to Live By:
“It’s true that self-driving cars should reduce the number of road accidents and may be able to drive more closely together, both of which would speed up traffic. But from a congestion standpoint, the fact that the price of anarchy is only 4/3 as congested as perfect coordination means that perfectly coordinated commutes will only be 3/4 as congested as they are now.”
So you are assuming there are essentially no more humans driving?
Also, if you want to improve capacity, how about bicycles and buses?
> Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.
You know what's even less dangerous, like essentially no danger, train.
> This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving
So the most complex possible solution that is 100% unproven and even in the best cases is far worse then having a city optimized for walking, biking and trains?
Like I just don't understand. Why do you start with the most inefficient solution possible, and then try to apply (expensive) technology to try to make it better.
How about you start with the most efficient, cheapest technology and apply that in 60% of the cases. Then solve the next 35% of the problem with existing technologies that already solve these problems.
And then for the last 5% you can try to solve them with some amazing future tech.
Its quite simple, design cities to be walkable. Make that safe and a priority. Then extend that by the most energy efficient (and space efficient) mode of transport, bicycles. Then use trains to connect different walkable parts of the city with each other.
Then at the very last step, maybe have some fancy self driving cars for a few special cases.
We know this works. It has been done. And its not expensive, it in fact safes money.
I feel that this one is a rather realistic solution. It uses existing technology (cars), existing infrastructure (streets) and existing data infrastructure (cloud providers) to solve a massive problem. The "only" thing that's missing is the self driving part (the only being in very large quotes of course).
This means its much less of a stretch to get this scenario working than proposals like Hyperloop, Flying Taxis or other things that require a lot more innovation and infrastructure work before they become feasable.
Here is an idea. Take 2 lanes of that already existing street. Block them off from cars and make dedicated bike lanes. Then take another 2 lane and make a dedicated bus or tram line.
> It uses existing technology (cars)
A technology that kills a huge number of people and destroys the environment.
> existing infrastructure (streets)
Infrastructure that when uses for cars is very expensive to maintain and a safety risk.
> existing data infrastructure (cloud providers)
This computation not fixed, if you want to use it you have to pay more then somebody else is willing to pay. Its note like an unused road at all. So sure it exists, but its not idle.
> As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.
Great so you have constantly cars driving form the city center to outside of the city, that for sure will cause no traffic at all.
Will be fun when people proposes new elevated highways out of the city so the self driving car can go outside of town to the coal power plant to charge.
The only thing worse then having vehicles driving around with 1-preson, is vehicles with 0-people. Its literally the most inefficient use of space ever.
It makes traffic worse, not better and it makes the city worse, not better.
How about this, a city optimized for walking and biking, where different parts of the city are connected threw buses, trams, subways or regional trains.
> Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.
Turns out that cities where people can, walk, bike and take trains they don't own cars. Shocking.
The budget for just the MTA in NYC is 18 billion / year and that’s really only for the ongoing costs. A 100 billion investment in public transportation over the entire US over 10 years once wouldn’t have done shit.
A fleet of self driving cars are realistically the only scalable public transportation because the costs increase with the number of people not the area to be served. Do people just forget how unbelievably spread out everything but the densest cities are? 24/7 bus service to within 0.5 miles of every house in my city is already impossible even if you allowed them to be on the every 4 hour. To replace cars people would realistically need them on the hour and want on the 20 minutes. Bet you my shirt at that point it would just be cheaper for the city to just run a free taxi service.
This pretty much. Building public infrastructure is insanely expensive and there are capacity limits that can't easily be solved. We need to add public transport to the mix that 1) doesn't require heavy additional investment in infrastructure and 2) solves convenience concerns that make buses unappealing and 3) can reliably replace privately owned vehicles.
Well, why not then create bigger cars, or smaller buses? Between 5 people in a car or a 100 people in a bus, an optimal solution should be able to converge slowly, to 20 people in a vehicle. It would be different for every city, or region or country.
Most cars spend most of their time, being stationary in a parking lot or a garage, 93 percent of the time to be more specific, or 23 hours/day. Buses spend a lot less time being stationary. The trade off here is the speed of driving. Cars offer an unlimited amount of speed, while buses do not. An optimal economic solution should exist in which the economic actors, i.e. people will figure it out after a lot of trial n error.
A crucial factor in self driving cars no one mentioned, is the data the machine uses to drive should be incorruptible. A blockchain which supports billions of tps, offer a solution to that.
Additionally road variables change over time, and data should change as well. Economic actors, not just people should feed the machines with updated data every day. That means that a marketplace of information is required, in which the most efficient economic actors with the best accuracy and the best reputation are rewarded, and the worst economic actors, who's data aggregation cause a lot of crashes, fall off the market.
A marketplace of information, doesn't exist for the time being, so there is no chance for self driving cars to be safe and effective.
This is all private money. If these companies didn't spend the $100B developing autonomous vehicles, it wouldn't suddenly be available for building public transit.
Beyond that, $100B doesn't go as far toward building transit as you might expect. For example, San Diego recently spent $2.3 billion on a light rail extension that's projected to have 34,700 daily trips by 2030. If you assume most of these are round-trips, it's serving fewer than 18,000 people. Spending $100B at this rate would serve around 750,000 people (0.2% of the U.S. population).
The most cost-effective form of public transit in most places is busses because they can reuse existing road infrastructure, and in the U.S., labor accounts for around 70% of the cost of operating busses. As a result, autonomous driving technology should be helpful in scaling public transit systems as well.
Do you mean the La Jolla trolley line? It seems like a nice idea (I’ve lived next to several trolley stops) but the virtually nonexistent ticket validation tends to make the trolley a magnet for negativity, and keeps me in my car.
You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it. Any bus-like thing would need far too many stops to be practical to be able to get people to a reasonable walking distance of where they want to go. That's why in basically every city where they've been added (distinct from being created due to organic demand), pretty much nobody who can afford any alternatives rides them, no matter how much money is dumped into them.
To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians. Which is pretty much a non-starter, and even if you wanted to try would cost many orders of magnitude more than all of the self-driving car projects.
> You cannot just add "public transport" to most of our existing cities to replace peoples' cars. The reason is that everything is too spread out, mostly due to the large parking lots everywhere. That may be sub-optimal in a certain sense, but it's the reality and you can't just snap your fingers and change it.
Its not about 'snapping your finger'. Neither Netherlands or Switzerland built their systems from 1 day to the other.
You need to make decision to change and then consistently and incrementally work on it. Put it in your standards and invest ever $ you have for new roads to that instead.
You need to change your tax policy so that horrible inefficient land uses like parking lots cost a lot more. You need to enable mixed use development so these parking lots can be built on.
> To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians.
I'm sorry that is complete and utter nonsense. Like seriously, completely insane.
If you look into some urbanist and city planning literature you will see that lots of places where there used to be total car shitshows, are now beautiful. Often you would never have guessed that just 10-20 years earlier it was horrible road and a parking lot.
Again, small and incremental steps. Here are some really basic steps you can take:
- Remove parking requirements
- Slow speed of cars
- Don't allow turn right on red
- Make the lanes thinner
- Make the sidewalk broader, maybe add some trees
- Take one of the existing lanes and add painted bike lanes, later add protection for those lanes
- Rezone for mixed use (specially existing commercial zones)
- Change property tax policy to discourage sub-optimal land use
I could literally keep going on and on. Non of this, requires you to demolish anything.
Specifically for the US, there is whole movement about incrementally improving your city, see Strong Towns (https://www.strongtowns.org/). They have lots of podcasts and books. Specially: 'Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity'.
They also point out in detail with real data how these changes make your city safer and economically much better (They have some seriously amazing visualization of city finances that shows how such chances can improve cities).
And this is not some hippy organization, these are coming from a somewhat conservative small towns perspective.
Honestly your attitude of 'we are stuck with this' is horrible. I can understand frustration and bleak outlook, about the situation. But put your hope into incremental low cost change, not some techno futurism and you will be less disappointed.
What's wrong with "turn right on red"? It'd be a big problem in that exact form in Australia, but as a cyclist especially I'd rather we had the equivalent "turn left on red" law, and to be honest, cyclists can generally get away with it anyway. But I can't see why it would really be a huge issue if it was allowed for cars, unless they were persistently ignoring pedestrians/cyclists and turning into their path as they crossed in front of you.
The big one for me is traffic lights - cyclists/pedestrians should be able to trigger traffic/pedestrian lights to turn green instantly in most cases (with some reasonable lower limit on the amount of time they've been red for, although ideally all traffic lights in urban areas would be hooked up to sensors able to determine if there was any traffic approaching), and ideally approaching cyclists should be able to trigger them without even stopping to press a button - I gather they have something like this in Copenhagen. There's realistically no way to set up traffic light sequences so that they suit all modes of travel, but they're often especially bad for cyclists, and the act of having to stop and start all the time is far more onerous (and even dangerous, esp. if you're clipped in) for cyclists than it is for cars.
Turn right on red kills cyclists and pedestrians. It was always unsafe but the introduced it in the 1970 during the oil crisis with the idea that there would be less idling on red.
In most cases you shouldn't even need traffic lights at all but there is certainty a lot you can do with traffic lights if you optimize them, there are lots of videos on this from the Netherlnads. There they have separate sensors for different transport modes and also multiple levels so the intersection can respond smartly based on lots of info about what is coming from what direction. It can also let people cross half the road to the protect middle in a smart way. Forcing to press a button is horrible design!
But this is just one of many tools. Having flat bicycle and pedestrian ways where cars have to go over bumbs. There are many methods that are used.
The most import one is just slowing cars down cars.
Netherlands deliberately bans cars from some streets to kill certainty routes completely and forcing people to take different longer routes. That means also less cars on that route even in the parts that the car could have taken.
Have you noticed that lately there has been a symphony of media news to bash everything related to green energy, including EVs, self driving cars, batteries and so on?
It feels like we are getting brainstormed to induce us to remove investments in this sector so that others can get in at a much lower entry point.
What does self-driving have to do with any of the other things though? Whether there's a human behind the wheel of an EV or an algorithm doesn't make any difference for climate change. If anything, the money wasted on self-driving could have gone into more pragmatic goals.
Fewer people owning cars and instead hailing from a shared pool of autonomous EVs as needed sounds like a solid improvement over the current situation.
Car sharing is already a thing without self-driving, yet people still seem to prefer their own car. That all sounds to me a bit too much like the 50's flying car utopia.
I think the big difference is convenience. Car sharing as it exists requires prior planning/coordination, you can’t just grab one on a whim. That’s enough friction that a lot of people would prefer to own a car instead, especially when you consider that a huge part of the appeal of a car is agency and freedom — no need to operate on anybody else’s time tables or predefined stops, just step out and go wherever you please. The closest we have to autonomous hailing is Uber/Lyft, but that becomes prohibitively expensive, not to mention there’s places Uber drivers won’t want to pick you up from or take you to.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of public transportation )lived in Japan for a while and loved the trains) and think it should be greatly expanded, but driving in the US isn’t going away any time soon and so alongside efforts to improve public transportation, efforts should also go into autonomous driving to try to take even more cars off the road. Ideally the bulk of commuters and errandrunners would be using rail, with the second largest group using autonomous car sharing, and the last and by far smallest group still owning their cars.
It seems like some metrics and well named domains might help with this. There are different levels of driving challenge and self driving cars can handle some of the most basic challenges already. Cars are used for all kinds of tasks in all kinds of places, but currently self driving cars are making a significant impact on taxi services in some big cities. All of that is limited and should be noted as such, but having mastered many of the basics and now offering taxi service in many areas it is clear that self driving cars have made and continue to make progress which is very different from the "going nowhere" this clickbait article claims.
Companies are going to die on that hill.
I would not call it a waste of money.
It might work in the end, and even if the current tech is not sufficient to attain the goal of fully autonomous driving, the car is a very good guinea pig for robotic research.
We're collectively learning a lot in this process.
I am not surprised that it turns out to be much more difficult than anticipated.
I think it is 95% vaporware, but I liked the ideas behind the latest Nvidia presentation.
Machine learning is all about the training quality, useful robots (such as autonomous vehicles) have to operate in the real world.
We can't have robots that kills by accident.
It is difficult/risky/costly to train them in the real world. Good virtual twins are needed to achieve safe training with infinite repetitions in extreme situations.
Not sure if that is sufficient, but it is worth trying.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 330 ms ] threadCorrect me if im wrong, but Honda has done this?
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35729591/honda-legend-lev...
https://global.honda/newsroom/news/2021/4210304eng-legend.ht...
Toyota:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2021-08-02/toyota...
And Cruise:
https://www.motorauthority.com/news/1132494_cruise-opens-up-...
I don't really see how this all qualifies as "not close to AV", when really, it looks quite viable (with some already driving autonomously...?)
Furthermore, all of those research prototypes are geofenced, since they rely on extremely detailed mapping and lots of training data from humans driving the same routes. There is not a single AV in the world close to capable of driving on any road, at any time, in any condition, that a skilled human could drive on without ever having seen it before.
In my mind, that means we are indeed nowhere close to a true AV.
But when I think "autonomous vehicle" I definitely don't think "arbitrarily capable of driving on roads" - I think something capable of navigating well-understood national roads. I don't see any inconsistency with the idea that there'd be "no automation" zones or roads, or that pre-approved travelways for AVs is a failure scenario.
My (and Doctorow’s) definition of AV is so stringent because AVs need to deliver the same value add of regular cars relative to other forms of transportation: i) relatively fast, ii) unscheduled, and most importantly, iii) point-to-point transportation between any two points connected by roads. Trains are bad at iii), decent at ii) if run often enough, and far superior at i). If iii) is off the table, then the relative value add of cars is greatly diminished.
Obviously we don't know to what extent they have remote drivers but you wouldn't be able to run such a service if every ride required them.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCP1rvCYiruh4SDHyPqcxlJw
Also Tesla. You can see real advancements in these videos of Tesla FSD Beta [0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/c/AIDRIVR/videos
The Medium article is primarily a gloss on the Bloomberg article and even copies quite a lot from it.
Driving of cars is a massive cooperative game with high stakes, and autonomous cars essentially need AGI in order to play to a degree that is safer than a human with other humans. Fully autonomous cars would be sick, but IMO you'd need massive infrastructure changes (realistically restricted to cities/urbanized areas) if you want autonomous cars to work with anything less than AGI. Until companies start pursuing that, they are actually unknowingly using all that money to push for AGI and obviously coming up short because they don't even understand what they are trying to do.
Especially in an RV. Enter the interstate, sleep for 8 hours, wake up 600 miles down the road.
That’s the dream!
Like the visionary dream of individually routed rail cars, but built bottom-up, with cars/trucks that are perfectly useful in standalone driving on regular roads. And it could scale even closer to rail: perhaps some long-haul connections get metal rails integrated in the floor like tram rails, that some long-haul trucks with a special bogey option could slot in, in the fly? That would be an impressive stunt if performed by humans, but easy for computers. Perhaps some connections add overhead wires? Perhaps some trucks, with the overhead wire pantograph option, add a robotic power handover arm because that's cheaper than wear and tear on two pantographs? Could all start bottom up, with few installations.
Cities are by far the most complex relative to every other driving environment, in fact there is a good argument that, in cities, cars should be much more restricted because of health effects and traffic deaths, and the less complex areas (highways) are already the bulk of the drudgery in driving, but are much easier to automate, so why not do it for there?
Musk largely became the richest person on the planet off the back of the promise that nobody else would have decent EV tech (turns out, they do), nobody else would have the battery production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production), AND the promise of fully self driving cars (which will happen for Tesla immediately after flying cars).
I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption: a few benefit at the cost of everyone else.
What you're referring to doesn't exist. Right now it's vaporware, and for all we know, we could be 1 century away from solving it up to human levels.
That just simply not true. He became one of the richest people in the world when Tesla cracked really high volume productions of EVs at a quite amazing margin. That is what people didn't believe was possible when they did it in 2018.
And at the same time SpaceX, where Musk owns much more stock off, managed to re-usability operational and started to launch Starlink.
> production capacity (turns out, they do, plus super ironic when Tesla is partnering with Panasonic for battery production)
Tesla is by far largest BEV producer in the world so its actually true. And if you think all Tesla does is partnering with Panasonic you have not been paying attention.
Telsa has its own battery production and also is one of the largest costumers of CATL, LG and Panasonic. For quite a while Panasonic and Tesla have co-developed technology that Panasonic can just sell to anybody.
As you can see, Tesla has to be both a producer and a major consumer of most battery companies in the world to achieve the volume they do.
And others can not simply replicate it because the industry is supply constraint.
> I don't have a good term for this, but it's basically corruption
Tesla is the largest BEV producer in the world, and just recently made a larger profit then Ford/GM combined (if I remember correctly). Tesla has industry leading margin and is still the fastest growing car company of any size.
SpaceX is one of the most advanced technology companies in the world and I don't think you will find anybody serious who disagrees with that.
The only argument you have that makes sense is that Musk over-promised Self-Driving. That is certainty true, but I wouldn't call it corruption. And I don't think that today the stock price of Tesla is hugely inflated by this as there is so much pessimism on self-driving.
If Tesla or SpaceX were to disappear tomorrow nobody would experience any existential crisis.
If you disappeared Microsoft, Apple or Amazon or Walmart overnight the whole economy would come to a halt. Same for JPMChase,WellsFargo, BoA etc.
Musk is the first guy to reach the top of the Forbes list while being at the helm of an aspirational company, not one that is structurally important one in the present.
It’s a dangerous precedent, and in fact soon enough it was repeated when bitcoiners and owners of exchanges such as Coinbase and FTX reached the top 10 of the Forbes list.
You're thinking back and white "it's not replacing...". What does that matter? To me what matters is "can we make transport better"
I thought the question was "can we actually make fully autonomous vehicles?" If we have that, the value is pretty obvious.
Less tongue in cheek: I think we should optimize city centers for human scales and activities, rather than sending cars right through them at all. We already sacrifice so much for cars in their current state, if we have to optimize for their mobility even moreso we are going in the wrong direction I feel.
I'm not saying get rid of cars, just keep them out of the denser parts of cities and the CBD. Put them on roads, not streets.
Cars where they are still allowed should move significantly slower, on much thinner roads.
Self-Driving will not solve anything for cities. They will solve even less then EVs.
My brother lives in the countryside (somewhere in the EU), and, as a driver, he shares the paved road just outside his house with the village’s cows (including his two cows). I don’t see any non-AGI system being able to negotiate that, as at times is difficult even for me, a reasonably AGI system, to make sense of it all when I encounter a herd of loose cows on the road.
This might be true, if rural areas and densely populated uran areas were the only 2 states, but there's a lot of intermediate density in between
This discussion is so absurd. :)
And this is just a single clip. The huge advantage Tesla has is their massive amount of training data. If it happens in the real world, they probably have a clip of it and can train on it.
That's not a problem when you're transcribing a video, but becomes a matter of life and death when you're driving a car.
The challenges self-driving cars have nothing to do with infrastructure and everything to do with the other moving objects on the road. It's not that the vehicles can't detect the other things on the road. It's that they can't anticipate reliably what they're going to do.
(However you may be correct that we need AGI or something close to it to do autonomous vehicles robustly)
Tesla has famously removed all radar/ultrasonic sensors from their newer cars in favor of a purely camera-based system.
LiDAR doesn’t make sense as a sensor to me because it only works in good weather. Its Like a car without windscreen wipers.
But here is Karpathy explaining how vision can be used to measure distance to objects accurately[0]
Here is the fact that LiDAR doesn't work in the rain[1]: "... In heavy rain, for example, the light pulses emitted from the lidar system are partially reflected off of rain droplets which adds noise to the data, called 'echoes'."
Which logically implies you need to revert to vision, as see [0] also for why Radar is unreliable.
[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6bOwQdCJrc [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidar
As with everything else there are benefits and costs to those approaches.
That sounds sustainable and scalable to earth-size, for sure.
https://www.dangerousroads.org/africa/madagascar/3415-route-...
(A colleague is there now.)
This doesn’t scale. This is also how Zoox, Tesla, and Cruise do their demo videos to scam more money out of investors: they collect ultra-HD maps in a very narrow area or a very specific route. Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube. Just like me taking a thousand half-court shots with a basketball, hitting one, and then claiming I can do it every try. There, I just gave you the formula to raise $100mm from FOMOing VCs.
There’s also no such thing as a Level 4 Autonomous vehicle. It doesn’t exist.
> Then they drive the route/area about a thousand times, recording each drive. Then they upload the drive with the fewest mistakes to YouTube
This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes.
And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.
They do have such maps, but only for the routes of their demo videos. That’s the entire accusation — it’s a Fugazi. A man behind a curtain. A mechanical Turk. Fake.
This video was posted 3 years ago: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tlThdr3O5Qo
I have never seen a Tesla perform as well as the one in that video in ANY user video. I drove a Model 3 with FSD for 4 months and it never came close to performing that well. Not even close. They either recorded a special map for that scam video, drove the route a thousand times and took the best recording, or both.
> This is certainty not what Tesla does, from Tesla vehicles you will find literally 1000s of videos uploaded by Testers on every possible routes
In the real videos, the cars fail to navigate simple scenarios constantly. You can’t even watch the videos without cringing at the constant mistakes and dangerous maneuvers. For Pete’s sake, just search “Tesla phantom braking” on YouTube and behold.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Zu18KYAhSzo
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9iGWDdnoONE&t=50
> And Tesla has also never relied on VC funding for any of its self-driving tech.
No, just unsophisticated customers paying $12k for vaporware and massive government subsidies. So sorry — they’re not scamming VCs. Just real customers and the taxpayers.
And this is with stationary objects designed to be seen and easily grasped by humans.
In fact roads should have barcoded position markers everywhere. That way you could navigate without gps and all road signs could become virtual. Just download a road marker update.
https://youtu.be/bglWCuCMSWc?t=280 goes into detail on this
This is -not- my line of work, so I have no idea if that's true. But if it is, I don't see how we could have perfectly safe self driving vehicles.
Humans are good at predicting.
You don't consciously know you've seen the guy a couple of cars in front checking his mirror and his shoulder but you're hanging back because you just know he's going to pull out any second. The guy that's wavering a bit in the middle lane is about to dash across to the far lane of the sliproad that's coming up, clipping the zebra stripes a bit, because he's concentrating on the sat nav not the road, but you just know - out of all the other drivers in your space at the moment - that red Ford is the one that's going to do something boneheaded.
Autonomous Vehicles won't be able to do that, probably not ever.
This to say: the future is having cars removed from cities entirely. Focusing on self-driving technology, or on electric cars as if they're going to "save the planet", is entirely the wrong direction imo.
Everyone is committed to being green as long as their lifestyle isn’t inconvenienced and they have the funds to buy the green equivalent technology.
It's also easier to avoid pedestrians as most can't fly.
It also could save on gas and energy as you can go directly as a bird flies to your destination instead of taking 20 minutes it takes 3.
Of course this would be a huge infrastructure ordeal as well probably and require a damn good system as you don't want vehicles landing on houses all over the place, but it'd be amazing for people with long commutes.
You could probably have airbuses that pick up like 30 people say in a small town and fly them to the city to be delivered individually by smaller vehicles locally. What took 45 minutes, now maybe takes 15.
These would be better if maybe electric with gas as an emergency backup system, and then just have good batteries and solar power fuel most trips.
Sounds somewhat authoritarian to impose your idea of the 'future' to inconvenience a large number of people.
There are a lot of great things about cities but you are dependent on other people for everything in your life, and it can go sideways incredibly fast. I.e the energy situation in Europe, or with COVID-19. Personally I don’t know how it’s not obvious to the millions of people who live in places like that.
This is everywhere true past, present and future. I would argue your small suburb gives you an illusion that isn't true.
This is really an astonishingly large claim without any evidence.
I question if you understand what AGI actually is? It's not "AI that can solve game theory" or "AI that can play cooperative games" - conventional video game AI's do this all the time in a myriad of permutations.
For others agreeing autonomous driving needs "AGI", first read what it is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) is the ability of an intelligent agent to understand or learn *any intellectual task that a human being can*.
It's a very difficult engineering problem but we don't need AGI to solve it.
There are over 1 billion cars on the road which need humans to drive them. How much are they used? I don't know. Let's say one ride per day. When cars turn into a service business, the "driver" will be software. What will be paid to the driver? Let's say $1 per ride.
That is 1B * $1 * 365 = $365B per year. Give that a p/e ratio of 10 and the value is $3650B.
So we could spent 30 times more and still break even.
$365B in value is probably a serious undercall. The only reason to complain here is if only $100B has been put in to the venture so far.
What is that evidence, exactly? I agree that we might eventually get there, but the scale seems to be 50-100 years at this point. We are as arrogant as the researchers in the 60s who famously announced that absolutely perfect image recognition is only 1-2 years away - except the problem is several orders of magnitude harder.
I'd judge self driving to be slightly subhuman right now - there are definitely worse drivers on the road (typically impaired - drunk, near-blind or high). I'd expect superhuman performance this decade just based on that and the rate of improvement in anything AI related right now.
However, there will inevitably be conditions that require the use of general intelligence (rather than driving heuristics), and in those situations all you can do is pray the computer acts rationally despite not having GI.
I think self driving cars have already passed the test of "number of crashes" or "number of fatalities" per mile driven. But I don't think that's enough to sway the public, if every once in a billion miles a self driving car slowly drives off a cliff for no apparent reason.
This is not definitively known. The distribution of conditions under which self driving cars operate is very different from the distribution of human driving. Self driving car miles are disproportionately on the highway, with little traffic, in perfect weather (i.e. by far the safest driving conditions). In addition, we don’t know how many disengagements (or remote interventions) would have resulted in an accident.
People aren’t going to trust cars to safely do level 5 if they can’t do level 4 99.999% of the time. So sure there will be occasional stories of i95 blocked for 3 hours due to software bug, but how is that different from a major accident that occurs regularly?
An interesting experiment would be for Uber to send two cars for pickup, one human and one self driving. And let people choose.
Assuming we get to that point it will probably be another 20 years after that before non self driving is seen in the same way as driving a motorcycle is today. Aka something that’s not suicidal, but defiantly excessively dangerous.
Two final thoughts...
(1) Maybe within the next 50 years devs can instill into AI, some meaning of death. As it is, I find some comfort knowing my driver realizes the difference between a field and a 40-foot cliff along the coast of Big Sur, and our shared theory of mind regarding the consequence of swerving to avoid something in those situations.
(2) Regarding humans being more tolerant of human error. I think this might be because when a human gets in an accident, there is always the ability to reason that person is different than us: old, tired, drunk, distracted, etc. And both the situation and the cognition are unique to one person. Naturally, we would have done something different to avoid the accident, we reason. If an AI gets into an accident, and we know that same exact AI is driving 10 million cars, including our own, that freaks us out a little.
Yet aircraft autopilot fails, pilot error, and mechanical error seem to all get the same attention. That might be because the pilots are also at fault for autopilot issues, or it could be autopilot used to be really really dumb so there was a lot of stories that autopilot flying into a mountain etc to prep people with how dumb it was or it could be something else.
If that makes sense?
High drips the problem drops from near AGI to not outrunning the cars ability to stop without hitting anything.
Let me put it this way - it would already be cheaper for me to just take an Uber to work than own my car. And yet, I(and I imagine most people will too) prefer to own my car.
If after another $50B or $100B spent some companies start to pull back on funding because they think diverting funds to other areas will give a better return (better batteries, cheaper manufacturing etc), it's likely others will too.
just think of the huge economic value that faster-than-light travel will unlock!!
you're assuming your conclusion
Until LiDAR becomes more cheaper and these cars CAN drive themselves safely at night without supervision in any state at scale and as advertised like a robotaxi, then you're looking into multiple decades of these research prototypes being 'useful'.
So far, that $100BN is a VC scam until proven otherwise.
A lot of the self driving tech has already made its way into safety systems in cars. Things like automatic breaking seem generally useful. There's a question about if it's worth $100B for research into partially autonomous safety solutions, but I don't think it's useful to attribute zero value to self driving research until we get full self driving (certainly some value is being realized already).
Thats how I read it, sorry. We made tremendous leaps in the past decade with improving automated driving, is it fully automatic? No. Does it mean we should somehow stop funding it? No.
When a human drives a car, their only sensors are eyes, ears, and maybe vibration. Somehow we manage to muddle through it.
Why do L4/L5 cars need anything extra sensors-wise?
I repeat my comment on LiDAR that I gave a few days ago. The gist is that LiDAR is cheap and you will be able to buy a LiDAR with sufficient resolution for in the next 1-2 years because it will be integrated in normal passenger cars for L2/L3 assistants. These cars are coming out now or in the next year.
LiDAR is finally getting cheap. OEMs (like VW) are very price sensitive. It is estimated the sensors from Valeo cost about 500 dollars. The fact that you see more and more normal passenger cars with higher resolution LiDARs means that LiDARs are getting cheaper.
The Audi A8 used Valeo's (with Ibeo) first generation low resolution LiDAR Scala 1 from the automotive supplier Valeo. Mercedes new models will be using Valeo's second (or third) generation LiDAR. All these are used for L2/L3 assistants. Valeo is a traditional large automotive supplier.
Luminar, a public company from the US, cooperates with Volvo. Some models will come with a LiDAR in the base configuration. These are "new LiDARs" with high resolution.
Innoviz, a 'startup' from Isreal, will supplies LiDARs to VW. Its angular resolution is (in its focus area) about 0.1 (or 0.2) degrees, which is sufficient for higher levels of autonomy and surpasses/equals the resolution of the expensive Velodyne sensors of the past. They will probably be in the same price range. Due to the limited FOV due to the technology, you will need multiply LiDARs.
Many new models from Chinese car brands will also ve equipped with a LiDAR. Most of them with Chinese LiDAR manufacturers like RoboSense or Hesai. Some are equipped by European manufactures like Ibeo/ZF. For example, there is the automotive sensor AT128 by Hesai. It targets normals vehicles (see price range above) and claims a similar performance (except for FOV, so you need multiple) like the Velodyne Ultra Puck (~$50000).
So costs of LiDARs are a not the very expensive obstacle they were in the past. The only problem could be that the new LiDAR manufactures cannot scale up series production. For example, Ibeo just filed for insolvency because they could not close another round after aggressively increasing spending in the past years.
And perhaps we can design city centers to be car free.
This is an important piece I have not seen addressed in the US. In places where there is snow and ice on the road a good part of the year self driving cars will need help from sensors and guide objects in some form. Perhaps sensors injected into the road? Humans barely manage in my area because people have a cognitive awareness and memory of the terrain. Road lines are often absent. Sidewalks are obscured. Even simple things like parking at the grocery store is relative parking and people just make a best-guess as to where a spot is.
I am also curious if any testing has been done in snow blizzards and squalls. Squalls can occur without warning and visibility drops to nothing.
maybe its just the case that we have already picked the low hanging fruit in computing...from this point forward, the remaining loftier goals will take decades and billions to achieve
don't fall into the trap of thinking something can't be done if it can't be done easily. quickly and cheaply
The mining site thing is probably where things should have begun, or highway driving only, but the question is, could a company have motivated ML and programming experts with such a humble starting point? Or was the hole-in-one approach required to build a team that could get anywhere at all?
With the human still required you get nothing, so why invest at all?
Rather than assume this is a death knell for self-driving cars, a more pragmatic view would be other nations will be able to benefit from them while you are left behind. Self-driving cars don't need global saturation to be worthwhile.
We are talking tens of trillions in value unlocked around the world.
I mean, out of all the moonshots, why die on this particular hill?
I consider an actual hyperloop to be a much more compelling vision for the future: those pneumatic tubes the banks use in suburban US locales coupled with maglev capsules being routed around electronically by magnetic field switching, etc… Or flying jetson mobiles etc…
Why is the current obsession a robotic driver of a boring old car ?
Then you'd still have the asphalt etc, but hovering over it - you degrade it less than actually driving on it. In this situation you could order up any size vehicle you need from 2 seater to 20 seater.
https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/early-estimate-2021-tra...
Driver assistance on highways is probably the right 80/20 solution, at least for the foreseeable future.
An uber driver that can drive 24/7. Also there are a lot of cars that sit in parking lots 95% of the day that can be used.
Still, that argument doesn't count if the software problem is "impossible" to implement, or if it turns out that you also need "stuff" for it.
Edit: typo
Cars are also nice for shopping and taking things to the dump.
- existing infrastructure (roads) isn't going anywhere (no need to build anything)
- reduced traffic congestion (autonomous vehicles can better react/drive)
- improved supply chains (autonomous trucks) (can work 0-24)
just to name a few off top of my head
I think that this is a sunk-cost fallacy. Sure, you would need to build infrastructure for trains, but after that trains are now reasonably automated, can carry cargo, and do other things with the exception of stopping at the exact destination you wanted to (in other words, it requires predetermined stops which people outside the US shrugs and just walk or bike the last feet). Also, they're proven to work: even China (which previously didn't have trains to its far-flung places) and they've done what you've expect. I think that the sole reason that anyone wants to invest in automated (non-train) driving is because trains are boring while AI is oh-so-shiny.
But with the levels of investment in cars and roads, we could have mini trains on reduced tracks (think stuff like mine tracks) going almost anywhere, probably for a fraction of maintaining our road infrastructure and cars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Highway_System_(Unite...
This, and leaving from the exact starting point you want to, at the exact time you want to, without out-of-the-way intermediate stops that you don't want, without switching lines. I can also easily move a table, couch, 2 shopping carts full of groceries, etc.
It's not an insignificant difference in convenience
(although the risk is clearly that vehicles will transition into subscription services that cost many thousands of dollars a year and price them all out)
You don't need full autonomy to mostly fix this, but the fixes are politically untenable (currently). The cars should be speed-governed, they should be speed-limit aware -- the car should routinely be overriding the desire of the driver. No, you can't go into the bike lane to get around traffic. No, you can't make the split-second decision to swerve around a car braking in front of you. No, you can't operate the vehicle at 100 mph in a residential zone. No, you can't go that fast right now; it's raining way too hard, doofus. No, you can't operate your vehicle onto a scheduled parade route.
You don't need full autonomy to create cars that prevent a significant percentage of driver -- to put it charitably -- errors. These are fairly straightforward problems. The opposition is political.
We will find ourselves in the same position with speed regulators, etc. Once some country does it, the reduction in lives lost will be impossible to ignore.
That's at least one reason to warrant the investment.
B) creating a scalable transportation as a service business for profit and power (data)
I think this attitude is quite common, but people won’t admit it. I would never admit it like I just did if I didn’t have an anonymous account. And I don’t see how technology will change this basic preference.
As others have pointed out, millions are dying in car accidents now, so a "more compelling vision for the future" is much less important than something that can get done. While we certainly haven't seen the progress many have hoped for/promised on self-driving cars, I'd wager everything I own that we'll see a significant percent of cars on the road in CA operating autonomously before we see that high speed rail finished.
But you can't have a train stop in front of your house... Nor can you build massive tubes everywhere in place of cheap roads.
Walking, Bikes, Busses, Metros, Trains, Cars, Planes. They all have a place in how we transport, right now the distribution between them is just out of whack.
And then the safety, on ground level open air is great, you can exit at any point to any direction. But tunnels especially small ones... That would be nightmare in best case and death trap in the worst.
-- Radically reduced safety margins, if the vehicle itself contains no humans.
-- You can often move cargo at any time of day or night, and therefore do a much more sophisticated job of collaboratively load-levelling traffic.
-- Doesn't matter how uncomfortable a non-human payload is with in reason. Acceleration, cornering, waiting, daylight, motion sickness are all constraints that are eased for cargo.
-- It would be nice if you can move freight anywhere, but even if you can only serve a very limited network its still useful - say between fixed points in major cities. By contrast, a car that can't go almost everywhere is very severely limited.
Example: in major cities, all the freight moves in lorries, which are extremely dangerous and polluting. Meanwhile, the humans are packed into trains in underground tunnels. Surely freight should be moving in autonomous underground trains and the humans enjoying lorry free surface travel?
Companies will invest endless amounts of money to convince you cars are the future, their infrastructure isn’t wasteful, and they’re good for the environment.
People buy into this because it fits their existing lifestyle.
Could is the question, but should is never asked or answered, same goes to other projects like solar roofs with the shingles.
Our world do not need one car for everyone.
Where you live.
Where I live, it's not unreasonable for everyone to need a couple of vehicles each depending on what they're doing.
Because you guys and your parents chose to make you dependent on that. The solution is not to build more killing machines and spend more time behind the wheel. All that has been done in the second half of the century can be made differently.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automated_train_system...
Thorougly disagree.
The whole reason why trains are so efficient is due to their ability to haul so much weight in one go without practically any other traffic being in the way. Train track infrastructure could not handle multiple mini trains without more track which, as we know from the excessive road construction for car traffice, does not solve the congestion issue.
Take the driver out of the equation, and suddenly making the train longer doesn’t provide any savings. You might as well switch to smaller and cheaper engines and divide one train into 10.
There are a lot of variables that affect efficiency but new technology alters the landscape. Self driving public transit is one such thing. Would you rather be on a bus with one driver or a self driving taxi that costs the same?
Conventionally, drivers are liable on the physics level... because they have skin in the game. When I pass another car on a 2 lane road at 100mph+ relative velocity, we both (conventionally) have a strong incentive to not mess up.
That's a feature. Same goes (unfortunately) for people who make life or death decisions based on marketing campaigns.
All that said while skipping over the elephant, which is that they do not work; for fundamental reasons: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33221575
On the other hand, I do think the biggest impact of AV will be in controlled environments like the mine dump trucks in the article or the relatively easier long-distance highway only trucks (AV trucks haul till city outskirts, human drivers supply into cities).
All of these “AI” are too much “neural networks” and don’t have enough “intelligence”.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22087410
We have our priorities all twisted.
in fact, the information is probably constantly leaking out of the company. It’s hard to keep secrets.
Most of this research is funded in the US and the hyper individualistic Americans as a group don't believe in public transport.
American corporations perhaps aren’t as interested in public transportation, because there is no money to be made. And that is who is largely funding this self-driving vehicle research.
Nobody cares about the Rockies or farm fields or Death Valley.
This is oft-repeated, but it doesn't really survive a moment's scrutiny. You might as well say it's pointless to build a path from your back door to your shed, because the county is just too big.
So… Apparently not…
The USA is probably the worst place in the world for 1) high speed trains 2) buses. And the only place I know where the train _waits_ for cars to go through.
If only they could see by themselves how bad it is during their next trip to Switzerland, the Netherlands, Japan, London, Paris (even France in general) and many many other countries and cities that have a functional network of high speed trains, metro, tramway and regional lines…
I hope you’re not ready to die on that hill.
Some have light rail but at a far smaller rate then cities in Europe.
There are tiny cities in Europe that have more light rail then cities 10x the size in North America.
My tiny town of less then 100k people literally has more extensive bus and train connection then most cities in the US that have million+ people.
> But in a big country with a spread-out population, public transportation is tough.
Compare for example Switzerland (lots of maintains, rivers, hills and so on), with a equally sized metro area like Torronto, Dalles and so on.
The reality is many of your metro areas are the literal exact opposite of spread out, they are just badly designed.
Zürich for example is a city that has only like 600k people, with maybe 1.5M in the larger metro area and Zürich has more trains and trams going then whole Texas city triangle.
So please stop with the excuse about how everything is so spread out in the US. Its not spread out, its just badly designed.
At least in SF there has been little discussion due to the influence of the unlicensed transit unions. The idea of eliminating drivers can’t even be discussed.
Then again if you want a reason to hate Feinstein she's the one that got rid of the gypsy cabs in San Francisco.
Its not technology that is limiting good transit, but will.
Car infrastructure spreads everything out, puts parking lots everywhere, makes walking or cycling impossible or really unpleasant. You can't have working public transit if visiting two businesses requires walking 10 minutes along a loud boulevard.
America has tried cars-first infrastructure. It has failed. The spread is unsustainable, and it's bankrupting suburban areas.
Here is an idea, build public transports so that less people use the car infrastructure, and just like that you get higher utility out of your existing car infrastructure.
Seriously, the amount of 8 way stroads in the US is a fucking joke. There is essentially never a need for an 8 way road anywhere at any time. And for sure not absurd 20 way highways.
The US got this way because it was super-charged between pre-WWII and the dotcom boom. Both economically and culturally. The post-WWII high wages allowed the rise of suburbia, the Cold War induced WW3 scare led to the highway system, and so on.
The low-efficiency of it is taking its toll. (Sitting in traffic for hours each day, pollution, etc.)
And I'm not saying there are no benefits, nor am I saying that the alternatives are so perfect people just somehow don't see it. (I'm saying let's quantify the costs and let people choose. For example I'd spend a lot more on soundproofing and a lot less on backyards and frown lawns, but mostly there's no such option. [Hence the big push for more permissive zoning/permitting/etc.])
I only ever take a car for trips outside the city.
(One exception: local countryside bud services can sometimes be really valuable for local travel; but they often don’t link well with other public transport modalities, IME.)
That's $1Bn for the hundred largest cities in the world.
Assuming even 40% of that went to the US, that's $1Bn for the top 40 cities. That leaves out 22 entire states [0], and like 75% of the population...
Look to NYC, LA, and SF for what $1Bn gets you... It's about 1 mile of subway [1]. And it takes close to 15 years to build.
We wouldn't all be riding around on space elevators with materially better lives if this money was invested in subways or trains.
If you spent $40Bn on busses - you'd have to spend another $250Bn to pay people to ride them...
Self-driving cars will eventually change cities. I think there's evidence it's already starting to happen.
I don't think this money would've been better spent on trains, and definitely not busses.
What else are you thinking of?
I'd be interested in a better cost breakdown of bike lanes and how much it would cost to get a significant percentage of people in cities biking & scootering around - but I'm skeptical, and also, it's not mass transit!
NYC installed 29.5 miles of protected bike lanes last year [2]. I can't find the cost, but next year they're asking for $3.1Bn to build 500 miles of protected bike lanes, among many other things [3]. I know it costs less than $1M to pave a two-lane road one mile [4] - so a protected bike lane should be well under $1M - but then everything costs way more in the city...
If protected bike lanes cost substantially less than $5M per mile in the city (like $0.5M) - $40Bn could get you pretty far!
That's 80k miles of protected bike lanes! That's about 4x the amount of total bike lanes we have now.
Bike commute rates in NYC are decent (by US standards). I'd love to see a study on how much bike commute rates increased after these new lanes were completed.
Copenhagen has only 240 miles of bike lanes and 600 miles of paths for 70 square miles and 750k people [4]. That's enough to get 62% of people commuting by bike [5]!
For the top 40 cities, you'd be looking at like 80k miles of protected bike lanes for 4000 square miles and 81M people. That's better than Copenhagen!
That could potentially get you close to 62% of people biking instead of driving - just depends on if that many people live within 5 miles of work / school / going out. 5 miles being the average commute distance in Copenhagen [6].
62% of cars off the road in the top 40 US cities would DEFINITELY change my life for the better - but I'd be surprised if we could even get 15%. Still, it's something you could do in a couple of years - and for $40Bn - would definitely be worth it. But it's decidedly not mass transit.
[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/vividmaps.com/map-of-largest-me...
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyre...
[2] https://www1.nyc.gov/html/dot/html/bicyclists/cyclingintheci...
[3] https://www.6sqft.com/council-wants-additional-3-1b-to-build...
[4] TheOtherHobbes ↗ How far has the $100bn spent on self-driving cars moved the needle? biztos ↗ I don't think you're refuting the parent post so much as lamenting the difficulty of doing anything "infrastructure" in today's America.
There are lots of places all over the world where $1B would make a big difference in many, many people's lives -- and where people eagerly ride the busses they actually have, which are often not that nice.
Do we need things to work in the USA for them to be worth doing?
Instead of wasting research money on computer networking, you could spend it on stamps and envelopes.
Hindsight is a wonderful thing. But you don't know what's going to come out of that research before hand.
As cars need charging, they would congregate at some charging plot outside the busy areas.
Personally, I rather like this vision as it combines the best of public transport and car traffic. Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.
If you're still stuck with peak road usage nearly equivalent to that today, your goal isn't to solve prominent issues today.
Whether it is self-driving with an incredibly optimized algorithm (good luck with that) or manual carpooling, the same problems are still going to bubble up. The solutions already exist. We, as a society, just don't want to deal with the consequences.
Carpooling failed because it doesn't make sense to use amateur drivers on the same overfilled road network to carry a couple more people. If the entrance to the city is backed up, car-pool lanes don't add much.
This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving, which is not the same as the let's-use-this-as-an-excuse-for-AI-research individual self-driving we have today.
But really most people shouldn't be commuting anyway. WFH should be much more of a thing, even if it's not full-time.
Meanwhile, we have solutions which work today, several of which can be done today. WFH, incentivizing working outside peak hours, building more densely and closer to cities, investing in public transport, and more. We just don't want to do it.
We see this in The Netherlands. Public transport has gotten noticeably worse, car usage is going up as a result, and roads are expanding to compensate. In a country where housing is a massive problem, which means people will move to less desirable places (read: places further away from work hubs). Now we have a chicken-and-egg problem with regards to public transport, and increased car usage is pressuring space which could be used to create more homes and remove cars from the peak.
We simply don't need to wait another 10-15 years for self-driving to finally be a thing. What needs to be done, is accepting that things will suck for a bit to then get better eventually. Continuing on the same path with self-driving cars will only stall the problem instead of solve it, anyway.
I’ll quote from one of my favorite books Algorithms to Live By:
“It’s true that self-driving cars should reduce the number of road accidents and may be able to drive more closely together, both of which would speed up traffic. But from a congestion standpoint, the fact that the price of anarchy is only 4/3 as congested as perfect coordination means that perfectly coordinated commutes will only be 3/4 as congested as they are now.”
So you are assuming there are essentially no more humans driving?
Also, if you want to improve capacity, how about bicycles and buses?
> Even with failures, likely less dangerous than leaving critical decisions to individual human drivers.
You know what's even less dangerous, like essentially no danger, train.
> This would require collaborative networked/distributed self-driving
So the most complex possible solution that is 100% unproven and even in the best cases is far worse then having a city optimized for walking, biking and trains?
Like I just don't understand. Why do you start with the most inefficient solution possible, and then try to apply (expensive) technology to try to make it better.
How about you start with the most efficient, cheapest technology and apply that in 60% of the cases. Then solve the next 35% of the problem with existing technologies that already solve these problems.
And then for the last 5% you can try to solve them with some amazing future tech.
Its quite simple, design cities to be walkable. Make that safe and a priority. Then extend that by the most energy efficient (and space efficient) mode of transport, bicycles. Then use trains to connect different walkable parts of the city with each other.
Then at the very last step, maybe have some fancy self driving cars for a few special cases.
We know this works. It has been done. And its not expensive, it in fact safes money.
This means its much less of a stretch to get this scenario working than proposals like Hyperloop, Flying Taxis or other things that require a lot more innovation and infrastructure work before they become feasable.
Source: https://youtu.be/DkGMY63FF3Q
> It uses existing technology (cars)
A technology that kills a huge number of people and destroys the environment.
> existing infrastructure (streets)
Infrastructure that when uses for cars is very expensive to maintain and a safety risk.
> existing data infrastructure (cloud providers)
This computation not fixed, if you want to use it you have to pay more then somebody else is willing to pay. Its note like an unused road at all. So sure it exists, but its not idle.
Great so you have constantly cars driving form the city center to outside of the city, that for sure will cause no traffic at all.
Will be fun when people proposes new elevated highways out of the city so the self driving car can go outside of town to the coal power plant to charge.
The only thing worse then having vehicles driving around with 1-preson, is vehicles with 0-people. Its literally the most inefficient use of space ever.
It makes traffic worse, not better and it makes the city worse, not better.
How about this, a city optimized for walking and biking, where different parts of the city are connected threw buses, trams, subways or regional trains.
> Especially, if the existing, personally owned cars that just stand around 99% of the time vanish over time.
Turns out that cities where people can, walk, bike and take trains they don't own cars. Shocking.
A fleet of self driving cars are realistically the only scalable public transportation because the costs increase with the number of people not the area to be served. Do people just forget how unbelievably spread out everything but the densest cities are? 24/7 bus service to within 0.5 miles of every house in my city is already impossible even if you allowed them to be on the every 4 hour. To replace cars people would realistically need them on the hour and want on the 20 minutes. Bet you my shirt at that point it would just be cheaper for the city to just run a free taxi service.
Most cars spend most of their time, being stationary in a parking lot or a garage, 93 percent of the time to be more specific, or 23 hours/day. Buses spend a lot less time being stationary. The trade off here is the speed of driving. Cars offer an unlimited amount of speed, while buses do not. An optimal economic solution should exist in which the economic actors, i.e. people will figure it out after a lot of trial n error.
A crucial factor in self driving cars no one mentioned, is the data the machine uses to drive should be incorruptible. A blockchain which supports billions of tps, offer a solution to that.
Additionally road variables change over time, and data should change as well. Economic actors, not just people should feed the machines with updated data every day. That means that a marketplace of information is required, in which the most efficient economic actors with the best accuracy and the best reputation are rewarded, and the worst economic actors, who's data aggregation cause a lot of crashes, fall off the market.
A marketplace of information, doesn't exist for the time being, so there is no chance for self driving cars to be safe and effective.
Beyond that, $100B doesn't go as far toward building transit as you might expect. For example, San Diego recently spent $2.3 billion on a light rail extension that's projected to have 34,700 daily trips by 2030. If you assume most of these are round-trips, it's serving fewer than 18,000 people. Spending $100B at this rate would serve around 750,000 people (0.2% of the U.S. population).
The most cost-effective form of public transit in most places is busses because they can reuse existing road infrastructure, and in the U.S., labor accounts for around 70% of the cost of operating busses. As a result, autonomous driving technology should be helpful in scaling public transit systems as well.
To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians. Which is pretty much a non-starter, and even if you wanted to try would cost many orders of magnitude more than all of the self-driving car projects.
Its not about 'snapping your finger'. Neither Netherlands or Switzerland built their systems from 1 day to the other.
You need to make decision to change and then consistently and incrementally work on it. Put it in your standards and invest ever $ you have for new roads to that instead.
You need to change your tax policy so that horrible inefficient land uses like parking lots cost a lot more. You need to enable mixed use development so these parking lots can be built on.
> To do public transport right, you'd have to basically demolish the entire city and re-build everything from scratch to be friendly to pedestrians.
I'm sorry that is complete and utter nonsense. Like seriously, completely insane.
If you look into some urbanist and city planning literature you will see that lots of places where there used to be total car shitshows, are now beautiful. Often you would never have guessed that just 10-20 years earlier it was horrible road and a parking lot.
Again, small and incremental steps. Here are some really basic steps you can take:
- Remove parking requirements
- Slow speed of cars
- Don't allow turn right on red
- Make the lanes thinner
- Make the sidewalk broader, maybe add some trees
- Take one of the existing lanes and add painted bike lanes, later add protection for those lanes
- Rezone for mixed use (specially existing commercial zones)
- Change property tax policy to discourage sub-optimal land use
I could literally keep going on and on. Non of this, requires you to demolish anything.
Specifically for the US, there is whole movement about incrementally improving your city, see Strong Towns (https://www.strongtowns.org/). They have lots of podcasts and books. Specially: 'Strong Towns: A Bottom-Up Revolution to Rebuild American Prosperity'.
They also point out in detail with real data how these changes make your city safer and economically much better (They have some seriously amazing visualization of city finances that shows how such chances can improve cities).
And this is not some hippy organization, these are coming from a somewhat conservative small towns perspective.
Honestly your attitude of 'we are stuck with this' is horrible. I can understand frustration and bleak outlook, about the situation. But put your hope into incremental low cost change, not some techno futurism and you will be less disappointed.
The big one for me is traffic lights - cyclists/pedestrians should be able to trigger traffic/pedestrian lights to turn green instantly in most cases (with some reasonable lower limit on the amount of time they've been red for, although ideally all traffic lights in urban areas would be hooked up to sensors able to determine if there was any traffic approaching), and ideally approaching cyclists should be able to trigger them without even stopping to press a button - I gather they have something like this in Copenhagen. There's realistically no way to set up traffic light sequences so that they suit all modes of travel, but they're often especially bad for cyclists, and the act of having to stop and start all the time is far more onerous (and even dangerous, esp. if you're clipped in) for cyclists than it is for cars.
In most cases you shouldn't even need traffic lights at all but there is certainty a lot you can do with traffic lights if you optimize them, there are lots of videos on this from the Netherlnads. There they have separate sensors for different transport modes and also multiple levels so the intersection can respond smartly based on lots of info about what is coming from what direction. It can also let people cross half the road to the protect middle in a smart way. Forcing to press a button is horrible design!
But this is just one of many tools. Having flat bicycle and pedestrian ways where cars have to go over bumbs. There are many methods that are used.
The most import one is just slowing cars down cars.
Netherlands deliberately bans cars from some streets to kill certainty routes completely and forcing people to take different longer routes. That means also less cars on that route even in the parts that the car could have taken.
It feels like we are getting brainstormed to induce us to remove investments in this sector so that others can get in at a much lower entry point.
Is it just in my head?
Don’t get me wrong, I’m a big fan of public transportation )lived in Japan for a while and loved the trains) and think it should be greatly expanded, but driving in the US isn’t going away any time soon and so alongside efforts to improve public transportation, efforts should also go into autonomous driving to try to take even more cars off the road. Ideally the bulk of commuters and errandrunners would be using rail, with the second largest group using autonomous car sharing, and the last and by far smallest group still owning their cars.
It might work in the end, and even if the current tech is not sufficient to attain the goal of fully autonomous driving, the car is a very good guinea pig for robotic research.
We're collectively learning a lot in this process.
I am not surprised that it turns out to be much more difficult than anticipated.
I think it is 95% vaporware, but I liked the ideas behind the latest Nvidia presentation.
Machine learning is all about the training quality, useful robots (such as autonomous vehicles) have to operate in the real world.
We can't have robots that kills by accident.
It is difficult/risky/costly to train them in the real world. Good virtual twins are needed to achieve safe training with infinite repetitions in extreme situations.
Not sure if that is sufficient, but it is worth trying.