Singapore Is the Perfect Place to Test Self-Driving Cars

http://www.citylab.com/commute/2016/08/why-singapore-leads-in-self-driving-cars/494222/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TheAtlanticCities+%28CityLab%29

by jseliger • 10 years ago

116 101 10 years ago

citylab.com

startupdiscuss3• 10 years ago

Seems like the correct title of this piece should be the less dramatic: "Singapore will also get self-driving cars."

serg_chernata• 10 years ago

I don't know, there's nothing groundbreaking here but they do explain why.

startupdiscuss3• 10 years ago

I didn't see that. They're not arguing that the US doesn't have places with "flat terrain" or "good weather" or many of the other things.

Just that Singapore also has it.

Now they are not evenly distributed in the US, so surely in the US it will happen in certain pockets first.

Someone1234• 10 years ago

Singapore makes a particularly good testing ground for automated vehicles. Its manageable size (it’s about three-and-a-half Districts of Columbia), flat terrain, warm weather, and well-kept roads provide about as simple of an urban landscape as one could ask for. And its government is supportive of such technology, having formed an Autonomous Vehicle Initiative to oversee research in 2014.

I'd argue we already have too much testing under "ideal conditions." I want to see self-driving vehicles tested in snow, in rain, in strong winds, in fog, and on mountain roads.

Don't get me wrong, you absolutely want to start developing it under best conditions, but if they legitimately want to get this live by 2020 then we need to expand the scope to less idealised situations.

czahedi2• 10 years ago

I'd argue we already have too much testing under "ideal conditions." I want to see self-driving vehicles tested in snow, in rain, in strong winds, in fog, and on mountain roads.

Unfortunately, the vehicles don't yet work perfectly under "ideal conditions". I think this ought to be the first step. There's no need to have a "blanket" rollout of autonomous vehicles - start in ideal cities and then spread further.

Granted, I DO think that they'll find driving in snow/rain/winds to be fundamentally different enough from ideal urban driving that the exact methods the vehicle AI has "learned" may not directly apply. So, it may merit testing in parallel, because as you've said we need to stop ignoring these cases.

I guess my point is a long-winded way of saying "Yes we need to test those cases, but in addition to ideal urban conditions, not instead of."

gpvos• 10 years ago

Singapore is a city, and therefore already quite challenging. I've never been there, but I suspect there will be streets with playing children, scooters, etc.

jessaustin• 10 years ago

Singapore certainly gets rain, of the solid-cube-of-water, when-you-hear-it-a-block-away-don't-keep-walking-to-your-destination-just-find-immediate-shelter, oh-so-that's-why-all-the-drainage-canals-are-so-deep variety.

It makes perfect sense to walk before running. I don't really see a "mountain road" use case for this tech anyway.

iandanforth• 10 years ago

Funny you should say that:

https://youtu.be/IFwIlflmk2Y

vvanders• 10 years ago

This is why I feel that Telsa's telemetry expertise will be the key to their success.

It's been covered a few times that they're constantly running AP algorithms in parallel with the driver when AP is not enabled and filtering the results back home. You're going to get a ton more real world scenarios that way, unknown unknowns and all that.

1_2__34• 10 years ago

It's not going to happen by 2020.

allemagne• 10 years ago

Seems like we're far from going "all the way" on autonomous vehicles by tomorrow or next year, but to me the progress on this tech is pretty hard to predict 4 years into the future.

nl• 10 years ago

Well, (human) drivers in Singapore are pretty bad (based on a few taxi rides), so there is that. Apparently lane markers are something your are supposed to drive on top of...

taneq• 10 years ago

The Singapore driving style doesn't make sense if you're used to driving on western roads in western traffic. It makes perfect sense if you think of the lanes as aisles in a packed supermarket, and each car as a trolley. Cars don't so much 'navigate' as 'flock'.

uberstuber• 10 years ago

Perhaps they’ll also help with the Singaporean phenomenon of the seeming complete disappearance of taxis when it rains

Are self-driving cars able to handle rainy conditions? I'm not in the industry but thought this was still an issue.

deelowe• 10 years ago

Weather is still an issue AFAIK. Perhaps a 3d visioning system can fix this at some point, but I don't think we're there yet as those solutions are too slow for RTC.

jacquesm• 10 years ago

The failsafe is to do what responsible drivers do when they can't cope with the conditions present: stop driving until conditions improve. The hard part is to reliably tell when the situation is no longer safe before something happens.

jimjimjim• 10 years ago

This is a good question.

The times I've seen it rain in Singapore or kuala Lumpur it's all or nothing. Fine weather -> 2 foot of water on the road -> Fine weather. I somehow don't think that scenario is in the test plan.

clock_tower• 10 years ago

At least it means that you can model RainIntensity as a bool... :)

up_and_up• 10 years ago

Are self-driving cars able to handle rainy conditions?

Seriously? I pretty sure all current vehicles need to go through extreme weather testing before they can be brought to market. For example my dad worked on a project testing Ford vehicles in extreme cold and snow conditions in northern MN.

Qworg• 10 years ago

Seriously. All self driving systems currently cannot cope with heavy rain or snow very well at all.

1_2__34• 10 years ago

The very fact that these manufacturers are being extraordinarily cagey about the circumstances under which their automation works and where it doesn't should tell everyone everything they need to know about how 'around the corner' this tech is.

Think of it this way: non-optimal driving conditions is nowhere near the last hurdle for full autonomy. We're a long ways off.

ptaipale4• 10 years ago

Do taxis actually disappear - which seems counter-intuitive; where would they go, and why would the drivers suddenly not want to take rides when it rains? - or is it just that all free taxis are grabbed immediately when it rains, thus there are no free taxis?

There we can answer that the seeming complete disappearance ox taxis when it rains will persist, because the ratio of customers per taxi shoots up when it starts to rain.

(Where I live (north Europe), you practically don't flag taxis on the street but order it on the phone; when I was living in Beijing, I think the rain phenomenon was simply that all taxis were taken as the first drops came down.)

beagle3• 10 years ago

In NYC, I've heard that quite a few drivers have an agreement with the taxi owner that makes it barely-profitable for them to do more than a given number of rides - and with a rain, that number is achieved much earlier in the shift.

gbog• 10 years ago

It's worse than that: taxi drivers count the amount of money they made in a day and stop when it's enough. Then if it rains they make their day quickly and go home, while they will cruise much longer during low demand days.

This is a classic example of short term view and the invisible hand going bad, found in Thinking fast and slow.

raldi2• 10 years ago

Click through to the article those words are linked to in the submission; the answer to your question is in its first two paragraphs.

myapplemenu• 10 years ago

During heavy rain, road conditions are not good and visibility is poor. Hence, the probability of getting into accidents is higher. (Think car and health insurance.) However, the fare price does not increase to compensate. In Singapore, where the demand of taxis regularly exceeds the supply, it makes more sense to go take your meal and wait out the downpour (typically over in one or two hours).

princeb• 10 years ago

combination of (1) more riders (2) fewer taxis because (a) taxi companies cover damage on a limited basis i think (b) driver pays for repairs out of pocket and then goes through a lengthy and painful assessment and reimbursement process (c) out of work while the car is in the workshop

jasonjei3• 10 years ago

Singapore also has a political framework that could force self-driving car adoption if the powers that be want it. Things that could be mandated such as self-driving only car lanes and motorways could be possible given the small size of Singapore and the powerful nature of the government. It would be unthinkable at present in America to force all cars on certain roads to be self-driving only. Singapore has the sort of culture that values "safety" over freedom.

In America, for better or worse, it would take a long time to mandate these things if they were even possible (considering that the same laws would need to be passed at least 52 times for states and territories). America has checks and balances--everybody gets their say.

ktRolster2• 10 years ago

  >It would be unthinkable in America to force all cars on certain roads to be self-driving only.

We have carpool lanes

chris_va• 10 years ago

And private tollways

jasonjei3• 10 years ago

That's only one lane that is enforced to a varying degree (hardly in CA), and subject to cheating. I think in order for cars to become safer we need to force the human out of the driver's seat. Even if we had a hybrid system, self-driving is still subject to other human drivers. Try taking away the keys of Americans. I ride a motorcycle and I would miss riding if it came to forcing people to adopt self-driving, but that's how we reduce highway deaths.

Edit: now that I think about it, cheating could be enforced by camera. Assuming the road had a computer network (like a much more reliable Bluetooth), I am sure cars could identify an unauthorized manually-driven vehicle and alert authorities.

dxbydt• 10 years ago

It would be unthinkable in America to force all cars on certain roads to be self-driving only.

There are private cities (Celebration, FL), private housing communities (1000s of them), private large corporate campuses, private shipping yards, private military complexes, private airports, industrial hangars - lots of places where you could safely force all cars to be self-driving without any governmental interference.

jasonjei3• 10 years ago

But I think for it to have meaningful impact we need interstate public roads to have self-driving. I haven't looked at the statistics, but most deadly accidents I read of late happen on interstate roads.

Edit: It's unthinkable at present but I believe if a city-state like Singapore undertook the experiment and it was successful it could eventually spread around the world like HD adoption. (That's why I said it would take a long time to happen in America.)

jdavis703• 10 years ago

Not to mention making crossings and chokepoints (bridges, tunnels, downtowns) autonomous-vehicle only. That should give people incentives to upgrade.

CyberDildonics• 10 years ago

the powers that be That is the long and short of their political framework

mikerichards2• 10 years ago

That's a good point. Singapore is an autocratic state and very small.

It'll be decades (maybe a century) before Americans give up their right to freely drive their cars.

The are huge individual american rights to move around freely that can't be denied.

L_Rahman• 10 years ago

From a product development and deployment perspective, it also makes a lot sense to start in Singapore. Unless a product is completely risk-free, it makes sense to validate outside of the largest and most valuable market.

mark_l_watson• 10 years ago

+1 I think you have it right, the political/social frameworks of Singapore could 'make this happen.'

I worked in Singapore in April and I loved the place. I felt very safe walking around at night for exercise, and the whole place was well run. I have read some criticisms of the government but people there seem happy, seemed to be employed, etc. A nice place and I would love to go back there!

limeyy• 10 years ago

All this attention to "self driving cars" makes news look pretty poor. It'll take years for them to become reliable.

ma2rten• 10 years ago

Do you have a source for that claim? I might have fallen victim to Google's PR here, but I was under the impression that they are reliable already - at least in controlled conditions (low speed, good weather, well mapped area).

adrianm• 10 years ago

You don't need a source for common sense. It will take years for self driving cars to become reliable. There are many adverse conditions the car will need to be able to deal with in the real world. Weather and all other chaotic systems are not to be dismissed casually if we want self driving cars to become a reality in our lifetime. Just because something will take a long time to reliably engineer doesn't mean it's not a worthy problem to solve.

ktRolster2• 10 years ago

Let's assume that we have all the algorithms discovered, the prototype works excellently. For example, all the problems with snow and weather have been solved, as well as the logistical problem of making an extremely accurate 3D map of the world. Google has their prototype working everywhere: it's ready to be implemented as production quality (it has to be better than Android).

Writing high quality, reliable code (for example, in airplane control software), including testing etc, tends to take 5-8 years. So from a project management perspective, that's the reasonable estimate.

semi-extrinsic• 10 years ago

Well, given the current safety level of new cars, which is coming down towards 1 fatality per one billion miles driven, and a fleet of 100 000 vehicles driving autonomously for 10 000 miles per year, you need to collect data for five to ten years just to show that your autonomous cars are safer than regular cars.

Tesla, with the current AutoPilot, will have to collect data for closer to 20 years in order to have good enough statistics to claim AutoPilot is safer. (Since AutoPilot only works in some situations, they wont get 10 000 miles per year.)

1_2__34• 10 years ago

Why would anyone believe a company's claims? I'm not trying to be a jerk, but why would we trust a source who has a vested interest in misleading us?

Maybe phrased less combatively: Do you have a source that's not Google (or a Google-slanted PR piece) that has hard data about what's possible today and what will be possible soon?

notahacker4• 10 years ago

Depends on the threshold for reliability. As of the end of 2015 in the 1.3 million miles Google cars had driven on public roads in California, human drivers had been required to prevent 13 incidents where Google assessed a collision would have happened without human intervention, a further 56 where the driver intervened for safety reasons and 272 times due to more minor sensor issues (using quite conservative thresholds)

That might not be bad for new technology and was showing trend improvement, but it doesn't compare favourably with accident rates for human drivers

https://static.googleusercontent.com/media/www.google.com/en...

mwfunk• 10 years ago

If they're only reliable in controlled conditions, they're not reliable. The really hard problems that would impact the feasibility of self-driving cars (as the popular imagination sees them) arise in unanticipated situations.

After all the work that was done with the DARPA Grand Challenge(s) in the past decade, it would be an embarrassment to Google if they couldn't get the cars to work in controlled conditions, rather than it being a staggering achievement in getting them to where things are at now.

I really want self-driving cars to happen, but I see the biggest impediment to that vision of the future being the general public's level of optimism and credulity WRT this stuff, to say nothing of the tech community's optimism and credulity. It's a domain that is a nearly infinite bucket of incredibly hard problems, problems that may ultimately prove insoluble as currently specified. If everything goes well, then maybe in 20 or 50 years a lot of transportation will take place in self-driving cars which operate with sets of known constraints in environments that are (to some degree) controlled.

If everything doesn't go well, then people will keep talking about how self-driving cars are inevitable, and how in a just a few years they're going to pick you up at your house and drive you to work using the exact same roads set up the exact same way as roads are now, doing the exact same commute that they might've been doing when driving themselves. This credulity will push the money and the technology forward, until too many disappointing setbacks occur, and then all the money dries up and nobody's talking about self-driving cars anymore.

If you tell somebody that something is inevitable and almost here and it's just a matter of throwing enough resources at it, it's much easier to get people to give you money to do those things, but as soon as anything happens that doesn't fit that script, they will assume you've been lying to them all along (or just aren't credible), and the R&D money goes away. Whereas if expectations are set appropriately, it's harder to get that money, but as long as there are achievable, realistic goals and people aren't basically pitching magic, then the funding is more likely to stick around during the rough patches.

upgraded• 10 years ago

I love the Autonomous trend. When will the government put in actual firm consumer policy to encourage Tesla and other electric car makers to return ?

samfisher83• 10 years ago

Singapore is a country that is less than half the size of houston,tx. It might be more manageable there compared to many other places.

projectramo• 10 years ago

Only if there is a particular value in getting the whole country to shift at exactly the same time.

What harm is there in, say, letting a suburb of Pittsburgh try it out. Then extend it to Detroit and so on.

squozzer• 10 years ago

I can foresee several phases in the development of "robocars".

Phase 1 - dedicated lanes for robocars, to mitigate problems with the still-dominant human-piloted cars. Robocars capabilities at primitive level, will likely have human-usable controls.

Phase 2 - once their safety and compatibility have been established, robocars will freely mix with human-piloted cars. Robocars will accommodate errors committed by human-piloted cars, and will no longer need human control.

Phase 3 - robocars dominate the roads, while laws and economic structures (e.g. insurance) will favor robocars. Robocars will have localized coordination capability.

Phase 4 - robocars will act in concert over large (metropolitan) distances to smooth traffic flows. Human-piloted cars will become as horses are today - a hobby for the rich.

Admittedly, I am mixing adoption phases with technological ones.

jefe_• 10 years ago

Test in Thailand... if you can dodge a tuk-tuk, you can dodge a toddler.

hellofunk3• 10 years ago

Singapore definitely has some of the worst driving standards of any major city I've lived in around the world, so if you can stand up against them with a self-driving car, that is definitely promising.

keldlundgaard• 10 years ago

Please elaborate.

Gigablah• 10 years ago

In other words, the poster hasn't lived anywhere else in Asia.

dharma1• 10 years ago

It would, but there are a lot of "uncles" driving cabs today who would not have any jobs left once self driving cars took off

system16• 10 years ago

There were a lot of uncles who lost jobs when rickshaws were banned. Progress requires change.

jakeogh• 10 years ago

Of course totalitarian regimes want self driving cars. They take control away from the people and all kinds of ways to track the people.

Singapore Is the Perfect Place to Test Self-Driving Cars

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