Don't get me wrong, I'm on team ban cars and replace every stroad with a light rail corridor and bike paths, but I think self driving cars will be fine in some number of years once the haters calm down. Hard for me to believe we can't achieve better than the average shitty driver level of safety.
People often make arguments that "oh it will still be less accidents than human drivers", which is true, but, the problem is that human accuracy is a very poor benchmark for autonomous systems. Autonomous systems need to be held to a higher bar, and it's better if that accountability and expectation is held from the beginning.
Why? Won't this lead to a lot of needless deaths at the hands of human drivers while we wait for driverless cars to improve? Why not roll them out once they are safer than human drivers?
Never let a good solution get in the way of a good problem.
“But this medicine, while it can cure cancer, has a 1% chance of death!” “Ah shit good point, fuck it then. As long as we can still get pissy with that musk fellow.”
So even if self driving works most of the time, it takes a lot of work to address weird edge cases even the most inebriated human would not mess up, that other drivers/pedestrians would not anticipate.
Also it can't figure out lanes at all and is always trying to change lanes into the wrong lane. The navigate on Autopilot stack seemed better than the current FSD stack.
Ultimately, to design a transport system that benefits all of society, it needs to go from point A to point B. Light rail / public transport will always need a +somethingelse, in order to do that. Or we end up expanding the rail infra so much that we have just reinvented roads, but a little more constrained. Or we end up with car shares. Either way is fine.
I just don't see how to cater for lots of different disabilities and needs without 'cars' being a (maybe small) part of it. Regardless of what path we take, I just see the evolution converging back on a car-like vehicle for a substantial portion of the freight/transport industry (albeit 'trains' of them, but not physically connected), even if it's mostly final mile. But people and things don't want to hop between transport modes. They want to step outside their door into a vehicle, then out again at the destination.
Anyway... Self driving vehicles could be worse than some drivers currently, but it sure is better than SOME drivers I have seen. For an industry that has only had 15yrs direct investment, it's already better than bad drivers from my view - So it's almost time to start making driving licenses slightly harder to get and keep, IMO (it's so easy to get a license. It's hard to take them away, unless it's after an incident. There are so many very unsafe drivers).
That's a long way of saying that I concur with your comment.
Just took a Waymo ride across San Francisco 3 nights ago in hard rain, at night. A hilly complex city with bike lanes, kinda oddball medians and bollards, many pedestrians, and homeless people wandering down the middle of streets. It did great.
I've taken 5 trips so far, and all have been great and better than the average uber driver.
I've had 3 sketchy Uber rides out of about 10 total in the last 3 months. One older woman was was peering over her steering wheel commenting that she really can't see that well at night, she'd kinda guess and head over to next lane, and had to abort once when she almost merged into another car. One plunged across 3 lanes of traffic without signaling while looking at the phone in her hand, twice! Another did a no look left turn while looking at the map and almost hit a pedestrian in the crosswalk. I said "stop!" and he did and looked up shocked. Slow enough that it would have only been a broken leg, but still...
Super cruise is a feature in GM cars.
If so I think it is unethical and false advertising to have a feature removed from something someone already owns.
Super Cruise - Hands free driving on highways Ultra Cruise - Hands free self driving cars almost anywhere
Ultra Cruise was never released.
"Ultra Cruise" is, or was going to be, a version of Super Cruise that worked anywhere.
I still believe divided highway trucking between major cities with last mile handoff to humans has legs, but I wonder how much the Tesla claims have poisoned the proverbial well of a more constrained system for the foreseeable future.
2. Cruise is in the corporate penalty box for being dishonest in withholding video data from the state of CA, but that was a stupid PR move. It doesn't tell us anything about the tech, which in fact is strong.
Waymo isn’t profitable and has been a massive money loser over the past several years. See “Other Bets” in Alphabet’s earnings. Where does this claim come from?
The former sounds like a massive (understating it probably) infrastructure investment. Trains sound better (as other comment while I was typing notes).
The latter doesn't solve the issues noted in the recent article here: https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri...
Am curious to hear more thoughts/insights.
I never trusted the Cruise cars, they would drive like a teenager that was afraid of the road. But Waymo seems a step up even from the Uber drivers.
After that, vehicle production and operations cost will be the main factor in the race to $0
I don't think divided lanes are required either. The problems with self-driving trucking aren't about following the lane.
Who is liable?
That’s what largely killed prior attempts, especially those using custom built roads. If the car crashes who is liable - the manufacturer, the road builder, or the driver? I think it is telling that the pull back we’re seeing is correlated with early cases in this becoming more salient.
Why does this have to be a technical limitation/success (im not saying it is or isn’t) only?
Do what you do excellently. Learn. Don't follow.
Cruise is dead regardless of how you spin it. And Waymo will continue to piddle around SF with their $500,000 frankenstein cars until eternity.
Meanwhile Tesla and Comma (both pure vision) are the only operational L3 systems being used every day by regular people to drive millions of miles. The legacy manufacturers will end up licensing one or the other, a la Android/iOS.
One can possibly compensate for an inferior “brain” by having more kinds of data to discern meaning from.
Maybe he'll be wrong in the future but for now even Tesla seems to have pulled the radar stuff from their cars.
Good luck finding non-press videos of it in action
In an interview some years ago (I think it was lex friedman) he was asked about Tesla and their radars etc and he said he thinks the future of self driving cars is vision only.
