The dream of driverless cars is dying

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/07/the-dream-of-driverless-cars-is-dying/

by doener • 8 years ago

54 119 8 years ago

spectator.co.uk

montrose• 8 years ago

Though this article sounds plausible, I became more skeptical when I noticed he put the word "facility" in scare quotes.

maxharris• 8 years ago

Reminds me of this famously wrong column dismissing the Internet back in 1995: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...

How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it's an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can't tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Intenet. Uh, sure.

Takeaway: people expect way too much out of next five years of the future, and typically it takes twenty years for those expectations to become fully realized. (I believe there is an Andy Grove quote to the same effect, but I couldn't find it in time.)

blakesterz• 8 years ago

He wrote a great book "Silicon Snake Oil" that is full of things just like this he was so very wrong about, it's a great read still. He complains about how bad things were in the late 90s, but somehow misses how things will get better. It's really worth reading.

Somewhere there's a great review, written somewhat recently, on all the things he had wrong. I can't seem to find the one I'm thinking of. I guess he was correct about how things on the web are never permanent.

anoncoward111• 8 years ago

Well, much like in buying options, you have to guess both the outcome of a bet and the time at which it happens.

The author right, in 2003, I doubt you saw many people reading books on the beach with a clunky laptop or whatever version of kindle existed back then. So, from the mid 90s to mid 2000s, the author was decidedly right for 10 whole years, which is a long time.

Now, if he continued to say that not many people would read ebooks on the beach from 2008-2018, he would have been wrong about that bet. But I doubt he would have felt that way, because by 2008, it was much clearer where the internet was headed compared to in 1998

jghn• 8 years ago

I remember at the time he was always touted as a "futurist", but he didn't ever seem to get the "future" part of that word

Sharlin• 8 years ago

Several people have formulated the same idea.

Bill Gates:

We always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten.

Roy Amara:

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.

Kurzweil has called it ”the intuitive linear view” vs ”the historical exponential view”:

Most technology forecasts ignore altogether this “historical exponential view” of technological progress. That is why people tend to overestimate what can be achieved in the short term (because we tend to leave out necessary details), but underestimate what can be achieved in the long term (because the exponential growth is ignored).

Upvoter33• 8 years ago

However, there is a difference, and I think an important one. With the internet, every piece of needed technology was either in place or easily imagined; with driverless cars, I don't think anyone can claim that is true. While ML/deep learning have made impressive strides in the past years, it is still a big leap to say these same technologies are enough to drive a car in the wild. They may be, but it also may be many years until such a technology is realized.

KKKKkkkk1• 8 years ago

But ML and DNNs are not supposed to be driving cars. The big players (Waymo and Cruise) are using DNNs only for perception.

paganel2• 8 years ago

We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots, things that have been prophetized 100 to 50 years ago. Going back more in time we still don’t have a philosophical stone. The idea is that some technological prophecies are indeed wrong.

TulliusCicero4• 8 years ago

The former were pure prophecies with no viable, known methods to achieve them at the time. Self driving cars are in active development, and look to be within spitting distance of full autonomy at least for most driving scenarios. It's possible that last % of situations will be super hard to solve, sure, but it's still a very different thing than someone just going, "oh man it'll be cool when".

freehunter4• 8 years ago

We still don’t have flying cars

Why does no one consider a helicopter to be a "flying car"? What can a flying car do that a helicopter can't? The only difference I see is that a flying car would be cheaper and owned by more people, which a helicopter could easily be if people actually wanted a flying car. Helicopters are expensive because they're very niche devices.

The fact that almost no one owns a helicopter proves that people don't actually want flying cars.

tabtab• 8 years ago

Re: We still don’t have flying cars nor self-conscious robots

But the proof of concept of auto-cars generally works. The kinks don't seem insurmountable, just a series of incremental improvements and economies of scale.

Flying cars on the other hand have some really big problems to tackle, such as noise pollution. And robots with "common sense" still seem a long ways off. There is no proof of concept that's even close.

api• 8 years ago

I think the quote is along the lines of people tending to overestimate progress in the next 5 years but underestimate it in the next 25.

However they also get it wrong. It's hard to predict. Others in the thread have pointed out Asimov's stories that featured FTL warp drives and computers that fit in only one room.

One thing I've noted from observing 20th century progress is that progress is much, much faster for things that are less capital intensive per iteration. It's one reason I've been predicting that solar power will eat the world. Nuclear power is capital intensive per iteration (per power plant or research reactor), so even if it's superior in some ways it has a longer iteration time and so it will lose the race. I think this neatly explains why space tech stagnated and computer tech zoomed way ahead. So today we still have chemical rockets and still get most of our electricity globally from burning coal and gas (100+ year old tech), but we have supercomputers in our pockets.

hyperbovine• 8 years ago

To be fair, I find the experience of reading a book or newspaper on <insert your favorite E-reader here> at the beach is still inferior to having the dead tree version.

mechanicalpulse• 8 years ago

To be fair, I find the experience of reading a book or newspaper on <insert your favorite E-reader here> at the beach is still inferior to having the dead tree version.

Oh, yes, sitting on a wet and windy beach trying to read a newspaper sounds superior to reading it on an e-reader in every conceivable way.

ghaff9• 8 years ago

To be fair, one of the main things Stoll was critiquing at the time was whatever the educational tech hype du jour was which he was more right than wrong about. And twenty years later there's still a huge amount to criticize about how little tech has transformed education, especially in K-12.

ADDED: One thing Stoll did get quite wrong was missing the utility of mass amounts of often uncurated information. Though, in this regard, he has a lot of good company among science fiction authors who mostly envisioned centralized encyclopedias created by experts, not Wikipedia or the Web generally.

CPLX2• 8 years ago

The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental.

It seems almost a certainty that we will gradually ease into the concept. Some cars will be able to do some things autonomously, a little, for some people, some of the time. Eventually the cost/benefit levels will improve, more features will roll out, and sure over a long time scale things might look revolutionary.

In other words this big complicated category of tech will grow like most other technology has. This isn't an individual app like Instagram or WhatsApp it's a whole category of technology, like the concept of automated factories, or container based shipping, or the internet itself. It could be decades, or longer. Or not.

But as a casual observer it's pretty easy to look around and notice that there really aren't any practical applications of autonomy with mass adoption, and conclude that it's going to be a minute, and that we'll definitely have ample time to notice as we slowly get closer.

chubot• 8 years ago

Yup, I cited a few knowledgeable people saying the same thing here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16353541

Here's my negative scenario: self-driving is "AI-complete"; you can't really hit all the edge cases without solving AI in general, which is more than 30 years away (Kurzweil is the wild optimist and predicts 2045).

edit: Although since writing that I have become aware that Kurzweil thinks the Turing test will be passed in 2029; the "singularity" is the 2045 date.

https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-wi...

In any case, I think it's realistic that level 4 self-driving cars won't be widely deployed for end-to-end trips until 2029-2045. This doesn't seem to be what many people think right now. They think it's going to be an "instant roll-out" like the iPhone -- either it works or it doesn't.

StavrosK• 8 years ago

This is how everything happens, and it's why we're living in the future even though we never realized it. We have a small square in our pockets that can do real-time translation, you talk into it and it'll say the same thing in another language.

I remember reading about this exact thing in the 90s and thinking that it was completely incredible, but I didn't even notice it when it happened. We first got computers that could sort-of translate, but not impressively so, then computers that could sort-of speak, but not impressively so, then computers that could sort-of listen, but not impressively so. All these technologies improved, little by little, until they got to a point where they are pretty impressive, but we're used to them.

Cars are already going the same way, my 5-year-old car can already follow/match speed with the car in front of it and warn me about signs on the road. Little by little, it'll do more things on its own, until I won't be needed any more.

mannykannot5• 8 years ago

Your car has approached the point of difficulty for incremental improvement, which is when human attention is needed, but only very rarely. The way for an incremental approach to get beyond this is to have clearly-defined and well separated domains, one being where automation works safely without a human overseer, and the other being where advanced automation is not used. Furthermore, it must be obvious to drivers when they are one and when they are in the other; a distinction based on features of how the technology works does not cut it unless it also leads to an obvious distinction for the non-technical driver.

Limiting the use to highways appears to meet this criterion, but it does not yet do so, on account of problems, like stationary-obstacle detection and adverse weather, that are relevant to highway driving.

YeGoblynQueenne• 8 years ago

> This is how everything happens, and it's why we're living in the future even though we never realized it. We have a small square in our pockets that can do real-time translation, you talk into it and it'll say the same thing in another language.

For arbitrary language pairs, it doesn't. Try translating between Greek and Chinese or Japanese at a level sufficient to get around town and do everyday, tourist-y things.

Machine translation works well between pairs of languages that are very similar and for which there are many parallel texts. It's all downhill from there (e.g. you have to go via an intermediary language, typically English, to get to the target language etc, which starts to seriously degrade performance).

Auto-cars are not different. In ideal (i.e. laboratory) conditions they may work sufficiently well. Diverge from those conditions and you're gambling with the passengers' lives.

This has been the case for a very long time. I learned something recently that surprised me. To phrase it as a quiz: when do you think was the first coast-to-coast (completely) driverless journey? Answer below.

______________

When are we going to get the first car, hands off the steering wheel, feet off the pedals, drive coast to coast in the US? Yeah, well, it actually happened in 1995 with the Navlab Project from Carnegie Mellon University.

Courtesy of Rodney Brooks:

https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/2nd-P...

TulliusCicero4• 8 years ago

Yes, and it's already happening. Automakers have already agreed to implement automatic collision avoidance in all their cars by 2022, IIRC, so there's one example.

darkerside• 8 years ago

Phase change is a great metaphor. Once conditions are right, network effects between particles coordinate to rapidly produce a reaction in the entire substance. The catalyzing particles here are people. Once people see that autonomous driving is "here", the incentives will be too powerful to ignore, for businesses, politicians, and others who live by exploiting opportunities. So yes, I think once change comes, it will be rapid and fairly complete. Possibly at cost of human life.

dragonwriter2• 8 years ago

The part that I can't figure out is why everyone seems to act like driverless cars will be some kind of all-at-once phase change transition instead of being incremental.

Because there is a significant difference in kind between human driving with driver assistance and self-driving, because having both on the road creates problems that's neither alone faces, and because once self-driving becomes viable for general use, regulatory and insurance factors will probably drive a rapid transition to a state where it's the only thing most people can do on most publicly accessible roads.

or container based shipping

Intermodal container-based shipping was a fairly rapid global phase change, going quickly from introduction to international standards to global dominance of shipping. So it's kind of an odd example to use to counter the idea of a rapid phase change.

agronick• 8 years ago

My 2016 23k Honda Civic can drive itself down the highway. Gas, break, stear - it can do it all on a clearly marked highway. As can Subarus and probably many others. I just know what my friends and coworkers have. Saying no car maker has shipped anything is a blatent lie.

CPLX2• 8 years ago

For that to happen does that 2016 Honda Civic have to have a driver in it?

That's how you can tell if it's driverless.

taneq2• 8 years ago

You don't have to have ubiquitous Turing-test-passing level 5+ robot vehicles. Lane Keep Assist style things are a good start.

sixstringtheory• 8 years ago

What kind of highway? We have a 2016 Outback with EyeSight and basically never use it. Lane keeping beeps for every line of tar sealant on the road. Adaptive cruise control puts the pedal to the metal once it's 2 MPH lower than the set speed. Like, I don't want the engine to rev to 8K RPM while I'm going uphill, alright? Has nobody heard of an easing curve?

allannienhuis• 8 years ago

Sounds like just a really poor implementation. My 2011 BMW does all of those things really well. I'd have hoped that safety systems like this wouldn't fall into the 'you get what you pay for' category, but I guess that's the case.

Not sure how to address that except through more regulation which doesn't exactly help on the innovation front...

3pt141592• 8 years ago

We're going to get driverless cars one way or another. Even if the problems are much more intractable than we first gave them credit for people are too clever.

Take driving in the snow, for instance. It might be completely impossible to do it safely for the next twenty years by having a computer manage the drive path, but designs might create the ability for cars to form mini-trains where the lead car is driven by a human and the cars fall in line together. Then you could still get in a self-driving car, it could still get you from Toronto to Ottawa. It could even get you right to your front door! They'd just have to pay some train drivers (conductors?) when the weather is too harsh for to put it in full auto mode.

We're going to get there. The benefits are too obvious and we can work around the persistent problems.

paganel2• 8 years ago

Obvious question: why just not take the train? In your example I’d have to depend on other strangers for my private travel, one of the most important things that made me purchase my first car in my 30s, I don’t want that.

kd0amg• 8 years ago

I'd rather depend just on there being a handful of other people who want to go where I want to go than on there being an active railroad as well.

TulliusCicero4• 8 years ago

At least in the US, transit is unfortunately quite bad on average, and that doesn't look to change anytime soon in most areas.

3pt141592• 8 years ago

I actually think the European model is superior (dense towns with trains between), but we have what we have.

jaclaz• 8 years ago

We're going to get driverless cars one way or another.

Sure we will, no doubt about that.

The question is when?

In 10 to 20 years from now level 4 sounds reasonable, in 2 to 5 years from now it sounds not, notwithstanding the (daily) announces about this or that new autonomous driving system or related "breakthrough".

TulliusCicero4• 8 years ago

Snow seems like one of the easier problems, honestly. Pretty much all the "technical" problems seem pretty straightforward. Waymo already posted an article where they talked about how they can filter falling snow out of their LIDAR input, for example.

It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around. Those don't always have easily generalizable answers.

amelius2• 8 years ago

It's the social problems that are hard for AI, like how to handle a construction zone that looks like you need to break the law to get around.

For these cases, the car could have a manual mode (?)

jpindar• 8 years ago

How can it be both hard to handle a construction zone that you need to break the law to get around and also easy to handle snow piles that you need to break the law to get around?

omg_ketchup• 8 years ago

So construction signs now need a QR code on them to provide guidance. Companies that work on the road like that are presumably regulated somehow, right?

taneq2• 8 years ago

This seems fixated on driverless vehicles' availability for purchase by the general public. I thought it was becoming pretty clear that, early on at least, the common approach is fleets operated by manufacturers, a la Waymo?

sakopov• 8 years ago

Wouldn't we need "smart" roads to make driverless cars operate at the same safety level as, say, airplanes?

qrbLPHiKpiux• 8 years ago

What would a TOS look like for a self driving car?

“Shall hold manufacturer, software developer, etc not liable for any injury or death from the result of using car...”

ilikehurdles2• 8 years ago

How does a pedestrian agree to that TOS?

chopin2• 8 years ago

By being outdoors. It's the same way as you currently "consent" to third-party cookies by visiting a site.

grigjd32• 8 years ago

While I'd agree that driverless cars are not here today, that the hype is over-doing it, and that Tesla has tried to push too fast, there is a huge economic incentive to have driverless cars. If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver, that saves some on insurance and tons on labor, not to mention not having to limit driving time per day. With those kinds of incentives, trucking companies wouldn't blink an eye before going forward with it. People seem so focused on personal vehicles that they ignore that people won't want to give up control at first and don't realize how the change will take place.

mpweiher2• 8 years ago

If a system can be built to replace long haul truck drivers with even being slightly safer than a human driver

I think such a system can be built. It's called a train.

grigjd32• 8 years ago

That's a disingenuous comment. Trains don't deliver to stores directly. In the US, there is a severe infrastructure imbalance. Trains don't make sense for smaller (less than train-sized) loads.

MegaDeKay• 8 years ago

I don't think "slightly safer" is enough. Slightly safer would likely be determined based on the average accident rate, but the problems lie farther out on the bell curve. It is one thing if, say, a driverless Model 3 hits a bus full of people: almost everyone involved woud probably walk away from that. But if a driverless Tesla Semi hauling two full trailers of heavy batteries does the same thing, the results would be horrific. Lawyers would appear out of nowhere, claim that people aren't perfect sure, but the trucking company took an undue risk on a technology with known flaws etc. Bad press everywhere, said trucking company then gets sued out of existence, etc.

Given our litigious society, I think that driverless systems for big trucks need to be far far safer than the human-guided equivalent. When accidents happen, they have the potential to do far more damage.

maym86• 8 years ago

It will happen but the timelines are looking much longer than people were promising two years ago to get investment. The reality of the difficulty of the edge cases and long term reliability has been made more clear and the hype is fading. Now it's time to slog through the real and difficult work of making what we have reliable and safe.

netfire• 8 years ago

Personally, I’d be happy with just automated freeway driving. That seems like an easier problem to solve (no pedestrians, complex traffic controls, cars going the other way or turning across your path, and visibility is usually pretty good). Why not focus on and perfect that first?

nradov4• 8 years ago

While driving on California freeways I have seen: pedestrians, complex traffic controls (law enforcement rerouting traffic or running moving breaks due to incidents), cars going the other way (drunk or confused), and terrible visibility (fog, snow, dust, heavy rain). It's going to take decades before automated freeway driving is perfected. Those edge cases can't just be ignored.

ghaff9• 8 years ago

You can to at least some degree though once you've imposed the constraint that there needs to be a competent licensed driver in the car because they need to handle the endpoints in any case.

Certainly, the car needs to be able to recognize conditions where it needs to turn over control with, say, one minute warning. And we're not at that point today. But one can imagine things like radio beacons for construction zones for example. It's not easy but it seems much easier than the more general case and it's also possible to get too hung up on truly weird corner cases like traffic going down the freeway in the wrong direction.

Shorel2• 8 years ago

Those edge cases can't just be ignored.

A general enough system would have no edge cases. It is IMO the required solution, and a driver always on the defensive is what we all are, at lease here in South America.

Just following the rules would have killed me years ago. Other drivers are reckless.

sentdex• 8 years ago

People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience.

The time it takes to get from say a car that just drives about randomly to a car that drives pretty well 75% of the time is about a day's worth of work with today's technology. Going from 75-80% is a week or two. 80-85% is months. Getting to the 90% is years, and who knows what we need for 99+%.

I did a self-driving car in GTA V project that streamed on Twitch 24/7. If the car wasn't improving noticeably day by day, people were getting angry and frustrated, as if the car was meant to be perfectly driving within months, surely!

There's definitely a major disconnect between the hype and reality of what the challenge of self-driving cars is. The bubble is just simply bursting at the moment, but the dream itself is not dying amongst actual engineers. It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.

ghaff9• 8 years ago

I'm not sure why anyone would say the "dream" is dying. If anything is dying, it's unrealistic hopes that fully autonomous vehicles will be widespread and dirt cheap to be driven around in by the end of this decade.

I suspect the hype's been fueled by--in addition to the usual suspects--the growth of young professionals in urban areas who have this vision of never having to own a car and being driven around everywhere. For that to be a reality, self-driving has to happen right now--not incrementally over the coming decades.

marcosdumay• 8 years ago

For that to be a reality...

Those on demand trip services (Uber, Lyft, etc) are already cheaper than owning a car. What you describe already exists.

mschwaig• 8 years ago

I watched some of the progress updates that you posted on youtube for that project and I was amazed by what you could acheive at home with a powerful GPU and publicly available software.

Here's the playlist with all of those videos if anyone else is interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLQVvvaa0QuDeETZEOy4Vd...

Analemma_• 8 years ago

People just expect it to happen much too quickly, there's no patience.
It's just dying for the people who never understood how absolutely challenging the problem actually is.

You're laying a lot of blame at the feet of the excited people, but in their defense, much of their excitement is thanks to hucksters (cough Elon cough) who've been insisting that fully autonomous cars are just a year or two away. It's not like these people can be reasonably expected to understand how difficult the problem domain is, especially when they've seen recent AI successes at other problems that were popularly considered impossible (e.g. AlphaGo).

ghaff9• 8 years ago

Hucksters in combination with a massive game of Topper. The company that's honest and says they're 20 years away from door-to-door autonomy gets their stock downgraded and negative press because they're so far behind.

And, as you say, a lot of people assume the mostly unanticipated advances in deep learning in a short period of time carry over to everything even vaguely related to AI and cognitive science more broadly.

jfoster• 8 years ago

This is a troll article.

XalvinX3• 8 years ago

i tend to agree

Invictus0• 8 years ago

Wolmar's argument is horribly uncompelling and betrays a bizzare technophobia. He talks about the hardware as if they're dark magic tools and his argument for the death of the cars is that reality hasn't lived up to press releases. This is an argument made with no understanding of the technological underpinnings of driverless cars, and while I agree that driverless cars are farther away than the press would have you believe, the author needs to dig in further to get a real understanding of what he's discussing.

Consultant32452• 8 years ago

Right now roadways are designed for maximizing the value of the kinds of sensors that evolved in humans. We need roadways designed for the kinds of sensors we can manufacture. Imo, that's how we'll get driverless cars.

hodgesrm4• 8 years ago

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion and (b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles.

Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves. It seems more productive to solve congestion by getting at least some of the vehicles off the ground using emerging passenger drone technology. [0] That incidentally looks like an easier place to attack automation as there are fewer corner cases. Commercial aircraft achieved high levels of automated flight decades ago.

[0] https://www.dezeen.com/2017/04/28/kitty-hawk-prototype-perso...

falcolas• 8 years ago

Automation for flight is easier because there is a central authority controlling all (major) flights. Airspace and behavior therein is very tightly regulated, and the automation has a lot of dependencies upon extra-vehicular infrastructure (navigation aids, approach radio beacons, etc). There's also relatively few planes in the air at any given time. Scaling that up would not be trivial.

As for that Kittyhawk prototype - one prop failure at altitude and the pilot is dead. There's a reason they're testing over water at very low altitudes. Quadcopters have a very bad failure mode: they always crash. You want at least six motors, if not more, to avoid a crash every time a single motor fails. But, of course, more motors requires more battery power, which raises the weight, which makes it less maneuverable, and so forth.

From a pure "worst case failure mode" ground traffic is a better first automation target for moving small quantities of people.

hodgesrm4• 8 years ago

You are right that it's not an easy problem to solve but I think you would also agree the economic incentives are there and you don't necessarily have to have people in the vehicles to see improvements on the problems I cited above.

Amazon's scheme for drone delivery seemed kind of crazy at first glance but it does have some sound economics behind it. Here's a reference that seems to have a reasonably balanced view: http://thedronegirl.com/2017/05/07/drone-delivery-economics-...

dragonwriter2• 8 years ago

One thing I have never understood about the driverless vision is how it seems to ignore economically significant problems like (a) traffic congestion

Capacity is a function of maximum density at speed, which both consistency of behaviour and speed and accuracy of detection and reaction have a role in setting. Automated driving — if it is exclusive — addresses congestion (provided added “deadhead” runs don't offset max density gains), and that's always been part of the self-driving vision, even back when it was about “smart roads” and not smart cars on dumb roads.

(b) extremely inefficient energy use in transportation, especially personal vehicles.

Self-driving might help address that, too, as it allows lower friction exchanges between local personal transport and higher capacity—and higher efficiency—shared long-range transport.

glenra2• 8 years ago

Just looking at the first problem, a four lane highway is a four lane highway, regardless of how vehicles comport themselves.

Lanes are as wide as they are and following distances are as long as they are because people are terrible at driving. A mostly-driverless 4-lane highway could more than double capacity just by reducing following distances when computers rather than human beings are making the decision when to brake and how hard to brake.

Humans also cause traffic jams by causing accidents or rubbernecking at accidents - that'll get better too.

hodgesrm4• 8 years ago

This would need some modeling to prove that you actually get that level of efficiency. Autonomous vehicles have a brownfield problem in that they would have to share the road capacity with conventional vehicles for a fair distance into the future. That consideration alone would likely reduce the efficiency gain considerably.

On the other hand if you could distribute traffic flow vertically the potential for scaling goes up considerably. It's a hard problem to solve (read: expensive) but building roads is not exactly cheap either.

BTW I'm not against autonomous vehicles. It would be great if they worked. But I think we're more likely to see near-term investment payoffs using it for incremental safety improvements, something that already seems to be happening.

chopin2• 8 years ago

The basic problem is that generally more capacity invites more traffic. This isn't solved with autonomous vehicles. As well I expect more empty traffic.

Example: I currently drive to work 20km. As my wife needs occasionally as well, we have two. With an autonomous car we could forgo one and I send it back after I arrive at work. In the evening it'll pick me up again.

tonyedgecombe• 8 years ago

I wouldn't be surprised to see it make congestion worse, that one hour journey to work that was unacceptable before might become bearable if you can read a book or surf the web during your trip.

bryanlarsen• 8 years ago

Isn't the author already wrong? There are Waymo autonomous cars operating right now on public roads in Chandler, Arizona without safety drivers. Sure, those are very carefully mapped and selected routes, but they are not closed routes, they have to deal with anything that can happen on a public road. As any engineer knows, the last 10% is always harder than expected, but scaling from 0.1% to 90% coverage seems fairly straightforward IMO.

sidibe• 8 years ago

I don't understand how the people considering driverless cars infeasible can reconcile this with what is happening already. Why would Waymo order 80,000 cars in the next year if they thought their project is all hype?

stevew20• 8 years ago

How many years did it take for cars to go from beta to wide spread use?

It would be nice if it would happen faster, we could cut the number of car accidents in half, car related fatalities by a quarter, and zero speeding tickets...

nolemurs• 8 years ago

The substance of this article can be sumarized as "I talked to a bunch of people at a convention, and some had concerns, ohh, and I wrote a book about how I'm skeptical of driverless cars."

Regardless of how you feel about the future of driverless cars, this is a safe article to skip - there's no content.

throw2016• 8 years ago

There have literally been hundreds of threads advocating self driving cars saying it's here and now, max 10 years, and rubbishing anyone advocating caution.

Since the hype and exuberance was entirely self created, how can anyone else be blamed? This is like blaming others for taking you seriously.

adrianmonk• 8 years ago

While there is no doubting the scale of this industry, with billions being invested every year, none of the OEMs has yet made a penny from selling a driverless car. This money, benefiting these exhibitors, is therefore a punt, a high-stakes bet there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

For OEMs, I think it's less about a pot of gold and more of a defensive move. They're willing to throw money at trying to mitigate a huge business risk.

These companies might not know (or even have an opinion on) how close the leaders like Waymo are to making it work. But they know that, if it does work, a new era will begin when nobody will be able to sell a car without it.

And it's almost moot whether they believe it will work. They're protected as long as they're putting sufficient resources into it that they stay roughly as far along as others.

XalvinX3• 8 years ago

I thought I just read that Google will have some operating in Arizona "by the end of this year" ...no? These things are basically a solved problem already and just waiting to get approval.

The dream of driverless cars is dying

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