Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

http://techcrunch.com/2012/08/07/google-cars-300000-miles-without-accident

by tbenst • 14 years ago

288 263 14 years ago

cygwin98• 14 years ago

I kind of wonder how Google's driverless car handles the situation in extremely populous cities such as Shanghai or HongKong.

agumonkey2• 14 years ago

That's part of what I'd like to see more.

  - scalability cases : many many moving obstacles.

  - reversal cases    : gCar behavior if a vehicle is misbehaving. 
                        What happens ? can they compute a safe avoidance path ? 
                        if not but with impact still being detected in advance 
                        by the system, can there be a pre-protection system ? 

  - systemic cases    : how 2 gCars react to each others, any oscillatory patterns ? 
                        computing a path using the same heuristic leading to 
                        avoidable collision. With more than 2 ?

sukuriant2• 14 years ago

Forgive me, but could you reformat that? In Firefox, the code-ified view of your text is taxing to read. It has an unpleasant scroll bar and I forget what I've read by the time I get halfway through it, since I can't see it.

krasin• 14 years ago

In the city, when there're many pedestrians on the roads, I would expect from autonomous car to drive slower and stop in case of pedestrian spotted (human drivers are smarter, but they usually violate speed limits and have worse reaction time)

pavel_lishin4• 14 years ago

I'm afraid that in New York, this would just lead to total gridlock as a few people would stop traffic by jaywalking, leading to a bigger flow of people following them.

colinhevans• 14 years ago

I see them in heavy traffic on highway 101 near Mountain View most days of the week.

JonnieCache• 14 years ago

I'd love to see it handle the 17th century layout of central london as well.

http://goo.gl/maps/PBaU1

hnriot• 14 years ago

While this is very encouraging, the TC article is also very misleading. For example: "There have, of course been some accidents that involved Google’s self-driving cars in the past. All of these, however, happened while humans were in control of the cars." - isn't this far more likely to be the case, since the human only takes control when the car can't figure it out?

Also, who's commute doesn't involve temporary construction signs?

jessriedel• 14 years ago

> All of these, however, happened while humans were in control of the cars." - isn't this far more likely to be the case, since the human only takes control when the car can't figure it out?

That's a really good point, all though I'd wager a guess that most catastrophic accidents (e.g. crashes at highway speeds and t-bones at left-hand turns) happen when the driver is lulled into complacency by normal conditions.

w0utert2• 14 years ago

Good points. Without any statistics about the frequency and nature of situations where the human driver still has to intervene, numbers like '300K miles without an accident' are meaningless. For all I know the Google cars might have had a near-accident every 10 miles if it weren't for the human driver that's always there to save the AI when it fails. The fact that Google never discloses anything besides mile counts, and only lets outsiders take a ride with the Google cars under extremely controlled situations, is quite telling. Statements about Google car achievements like this are not much more than propaganda to me, until Google starts to share actual in-depth details about the performance of the cars. If it really works as well as they claim it does, what can they lose by disclosing everything?

Myself, I'm extremely skeptical about self-driving cars, and I've never understood why I seem to be massively outnumbered by people who are utterly convinced it is possible to create AI that can handle the billions of different and sometimes completely arbitrary traffic situations you'll encounter while driving on current road infrastructure. Sure enough it will work great 90% of the time in some places, but that's not enough. It needs to work 99% of the time everywhere. Simply looking at the achievements made in AI in the last 50 years or something doesn't really warrant a whole lot of optimism we'll get there anytime soon.

doomslice2• 14 years ago

Would you be ok with a computer that augments your own driving (similar to those cars that automatically brake when they sense an accident)? If so, then it's just a matter of continuously improving on this augmentation.

Even if it never reaches the level where you can truly step away from the wheel while the computer drives 100 miles in rush hour traffic, attaching an AI to help avoid accidents in many common situations still sounds revolutionary. I forsee something similar to a plane's autopilot -- where it greatly reduces user error yet sometimes still needs a human to take over when it doesn't know what to do.

secoif• 14 years ago

This was the easy part.

The hard part will be fighting the technophobes when somebody drives into the side of one of these and kills themselves. I don't envy being in that battle.

daenz2• 14 years ago

I would bet they can reconstruct the entire environment through their LIDAR records, play by play, and show the events leading up to the collision.

huffman• 14 years ago

I hadn't even thought of that. I wonder how this will effect the car insurance industry.

Devilboy• 14 years ago

I don't think this will be a problem because we're likely to see a gradual move towards fully self-driven cars where humans still drive but the computer takes over only when needed to avoid accidents. Volvo already has a system that stops you rear-ending other vehicles and BMW has a system that safely pulls the car over if the driver suddenly gets incapacitated. Eventually the most advanced cars will never cause an accident while still being human-driven. From there the leap to let go of the wheel is not that big and I think it will be reasonably easy.

vaksel• 14 years ago

It's probably a bit misleading.

The car is pretty eye catching: http://www.vibe.com/sites/vibe.com/files/styles/main_image/p...

So it gets attention...and most accidents happen when people don't pay attention.

Once these become more common, it won't be a huge deal, so people will stop noticing them and accident rates will go up. Probably not by much, since you'd eliminate most of the driver caused accidents

uncoder02• 14 years ago

You are suggesting human's will run into it more often right? I sincerely doubt we will see too many autonomous-car-at-fault crashes. The blacked out Lexus SUV's I saw at a Google event a few weeks ago were very discrete minus the velodyne sensor. If it adds an credibility I was on a team at the Victorville final in 2007. :)

As an aside, I've been waiting to buy my Google car for 5 long years. During this time I've become so disenfranchised with day to day driving that I avoid it at all costs. Commuting via roads in a car is such a mundane task that is, in my opinion, a solved problem. Bring on the autonomous cars!

ams61102• 14 years ago

Will you be OK with google tracking everywhere you go and serving you ads for every shop you pass?

apaitch• 14 years ago

Commuting does kind of suck if you're trying to roll in during rush hour. But without super-heavy traffic I find driving to be rather enjoyable in itself. Even more so if you're riding a motorcycle :) Perhaps the problem is not commuting, but the fact that many companies want their employees at work at 9:00 and out of work at 5:00?

hyperbovine• 14 years ago

On the other hand, staring at something is a great way to hit it. It's one of the first things they teach you in a motorcycle safety course.

mmanfrin2• 14 years ago

I'd love to live in a world where roads were full of auto-driving electric cars that automatically went to recharge and were replaced by fleet cars, and stopped at various points for people to load up. Like personal, on demand busses.

joshlegs2• 14 years ago

> Like personal, on demand buses

That use a heck of a lot more gas ;)

eblume3• 14 years ago

No reason they couldn't be electric. One of the big barriers for electric cars is a short running length and long recharge cycle. Neither is an issue if your 'car' is just an (autonomous) taxi service that runs off to recharge itself when you're done.

Obviously that doesn't mean it isn't using a fossil fuel somewhere along the power chain, but I imagine the efficiency isn't much worse than bus routes - and it's not like they need to target the exact same use case, either.

mmanfrin2• 14 years ago

Hence my use of the word 'electric' :]

zanny3• 14 years ago

> stopped at various points for people to load up.

By that point, we will all have integrated computers in our body, probably with some kind of brain-machine interface so we don't need to interact with them. We can just telepathically request a vehicle to take us somewhere.

Screw that, I want Star Trek style beaming up by the Scottie5000 bot in space.

tbenst• 14 years ago

I would love to see google incorporate the efforts of SARTRE, a system of caravaning cars on highways for reduced drag: http://www.sartre-project.eu/en/Sidor/default.aspx

debacle• 14 years ago

Put another way, Google's Autonomous cars complete less than half of the total daily commute of a small metropolitan workforce.

That's not a lot of miles, but the fact that they've done it completely without accident is relatively impressive.

andrewljohnson2• 14 years ago

Autonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up there with computer, Internet, and smart phone.

When economists think about technology, they look at it as a productivity booster. From that angle, robot cars will have a huge impact - so many commute hours will be transformed to work, or even leisure, which also boosts productivity.

So many smart people are about to be given a 10% or better bump in time to make and to do.

TylerE3• 14 years ago

So will susceptibility to car sickness become a federally-protected disability?

fghh45sdfhr3• 14 years ago

I wonder how much of car sickness is thanks to the driver. And if a good enough software could drive without causing car sickness?

paganel• 14 years ago

> Autonomous cars are the next big tech that changes the world - I put them up there with computer, Internet, and smart phone.

I wouldn't be so sure. Yeah, it might prove to be a very good thing for the United States, but for the rest of world there's first Europe's public transport networks (I'm 31, don't have a driver's license, I live in Europe, I'm doing perfectly fine, thank you), and short of us reaching the Singularity I honestly don't see any of these cars driving in the crazy traffic of Cairo, Istanbul, or any other metropolis from the rest of Asia or Africa.

adamsmith• 14 years ago

Cars will become more appealing than public transportation over time. As the downsides of cars fall away, their packet switched functionality will ultimately win out, particularly for wealthier people.

imgabe• 14 years ago

It's going to shift a lot of capital that's currently tied up in owning and maintaining cars into other uses. Right now, most cars are only in use for about 5% of their lifetimes. When everybody owns their own private car, those cars spend a lot of time sitting parked. If those cars could drive around and be used by other people who need them on demand, you'd need a lot fewer cars, as well as a lot less parking.

Jimbotron• 14 years ago

I'll tell google to stop work because it doesn't help with your daily commute :-)

roblev• 14 years ago

Not having to own a car opens up more options

Want a big car for a family trip? Just order one and it turns up where you are, ready to take you where you want to go.

A sleeper car for two? A flash sports car for the afternoon? A van for the day?

Pay-as-you-go personal transport from anywhere to anywhere where you can still be productive during the journey... Sounds pretty revolutionary to me.

spindritf• 14 years ago

> I'm 31, don't have a driver's license, I live in Europe, I'm doing perfectly fine, thank you

I have a license but don't have a car (actually owning a car was too much of a hassle) and you're only telling half the story. Yes, day to day not having a car is fine, but every once in a while you want to buy something larger that is not delivered, or move some stuff, or go for a short vacation, or even just drive out of the city to pick some mushrooms and you're stuck. You either borrow/rent a car or skip on the activity.

A car does provide a kind of freedom that public transport simply can't. A car that drives itself, or, even better, a car that I can cheaply rent that will drive itself to my doorsteps, then drive me wherever I want to go, and then return itself would be absolutely perfect.

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

> I honestly don't see any of these cars driving in the crazy traffic of Cairo, Istanbul, or any other metropolis from the rest of Asia or Africa.

You're wrong. Japan is also planning on introducing self-driving cars shortly.

roel_v5• 14 years ago

"(I'm 31, don't have a driver's license, I live in Europe, I'm doing perfectly fine, thank you)"

Anecdote does not data make. I'm 32, I have a drivers license and two cars, I live in Europe, and my quality of life would be severely impacted if I didn't have a car. The vast majority of Europeans live in places where the population density is too low for it to be sensible to depend solely on public transport, not to mention that only a part of Europe has any 'reliable' (I use that word loosely, because name me one public transport system outside of the German one that works 'reliably') form of public transport at all.

It only takes one or two times a month that you need a car (for big groceries, visiting a far away friend or relative, or going somewhere where there is no public transport) to make it worth while to get a car, and once you have it, it's better to use it as much as possible to make it pay for itself. Public transport is not a viable long-term option to satisfy our transportation needs - it's too expensive, inconvenient and inefficient. Lean, pay-per-use and easily rentable autonomously driven cars are the way of the future, and the near future, at that.

flyinRyan2• 14 years ago

Either you have the perfect commute (rent must be expensive?) or you're just not paying attention to how much time you're using in travel. Public transport takes longer than driving in virtually every possible situation. The only equalizer is if your commute were near perfect, and short you might gain a slight advantage since the driver has to park.

But if we go to robot cars we no longer have to park.

Also, places like Cairo are bad because of the human drivers. If you only allow robot cars that all goes away. The system can know where everyone is and where they are going and adjust speeds to the point of having your car end up 20cm behind the next car instead of having to use the breaks if you went 1/kmph faster for the last 200km.

adolfojp• 14 years ago

Eating food from a tube could also give us a lot more free time but we don't do it because it is not an enjoyable experience. We not only enjoy the flavors and textures that regular food provides, we also enjoy the rituals that accompany eating. In this regard driving cars is somewhat similar. A lot of people enjoy driving and many actually find it therapeutic. Some exceptions do exist, like driving in heavy traffic, driving long distances, and driving to places where parking spaces are limited, but better public transportation would solve those problems much more efficiently than autonomous cars ever will.

So, while autonomous cars could and probably will replace regular cars in places that have regular roads and good infrastructure they will definitely face a lot of resistance from consumers.

enraged_camel2• 14 years ago

>> Eating food from a tube could also give us a lot more free time but we don't do it because it is not an enjoyable experience. We not only enjoy the flavors and textures that regular food provides, we also enjoy the rituals that accompany eating. In this regard driving cars is somewhat similar.

Yeah, I felt this way for about two weeks after I learned how to drive. After that, it quickly got tedious and boring.

bartonfink2• 14 years ago

Not all eating is for enjoyment, though, just like not all driving is for enjoyment. People eat fast food which is certainly not as enjoyable as a well-prepared meal because of the convenience. People may like to drive sometimes (nice day, low traffic, they're on vacation - whatever), but it would take an unusual dedication to hedonism to completely set convenience aside for pleasure of driving yourself.

Further, better public transportation isn't a practical substitute for many scenarios in the United States where these driverless cars could make great inroads (no pun intended). It's not at all uncommon for someone to live 20+ miles away from the nearest public transportation in the United States without being "rural." If you're already far enough away from public transportation that it's unusable, you aren't likely to move without at least considering whether a driverless car will ease the pain of your commute.

Further, there are plenty of reasons that public transportation simply isn't a feasible option but a driverless car would rule. Two of my very good friends got married this summer, for instance, and their wives were from extremely rural areas such that plane tickets were ~$700 a piece. Instead of buying ~$3000 worth of plane tickets for my wife and I to attend each wedding, we drove 800 miles to each for far cheaper. If I could tell my car on Saturday night "Take me to Peioria, IL - and I need to be there by 3 PM on Sunday. Pace yourself accordingly." and know that I'd get there on time and safely, I'd absolutely do it.

I think that, within 20 years, driving manually will be seen in a similar vein to how driving a stickshift is seen now, and within 50 years, it'll be unusual for anyone to drive themselves anywhere.

jrockway• 14 years ago

I'd eat food from a tube. I don't enjoy the flavors, textures, or rituals that accompany eating. (Sometimes, I even have a caffeine pill instead of a cup of coffee in the morning. Gasp!)

orangecat• 14 years ago

Some exceptions do exist, like driving in heavy traffic

Which is a large "exception", since by definition lots of driving occurs in heavy traffic.

alwaysinshade4• 14 years ago

> Eating food from a tube could also give us a lot more free time but we don't do it because it is not an enjoyable experience.

Even if you thoroughly enjoy driving, a driverless car would afford other emotional highs from:

- Allowing you to get an extra [insert unit of time] of sleep - A bit of hanky-panky (even the one-man party variety) - Eating a meal (preferably not from a tube) - Playing games (a driving simulator if so inclined) - Reading HN

I love driving as well but I can see the benefits that'll come from automated cars will easily outweigh the negatives. One of those positives might be a more energised, happier workforce.

roel_v5• 14 years ago

"but we don't do it because it is not an enjoyable experience."

Eh, no we don't, we don't do it because it's not available on the market and because there is no way to make such food sit well with our digestive systems, otherwise many many people would 'eat' (or should I say 'drink' or just 'swallow') food like that. I'd pay good money for not having to think about what to cook, actually cooking it, doing dishes etc. 3x7 times a week (if I still had the option to eat recreationally - i.e. no solutions that replace my digestive system with something else allowed).

robertszkutak• 14 years ago

I wonder how well these cars handle heavy snowfall or ice on the roads. I know firsthand how driving becomes infinitely more complicated under these conditions and it would be major selling point for these cars if they could handle it smoothly.

SoftwareMaven• 14 years ago

They don't handle snow at all yet. There is no question that will be quite a hurdle to cross, but I doubt it will be for the reasons most think. My guess is figuring out where the road is at is going to be the hardest part; where I bet most people think it is "how do I drive on ice". Without impatient, jacked-up-4x4 drivers driving a twice what conditions warrant, it is just a slightly different calculation of static and dynamic frictions.

melling• 14 years ago

Long-haul tractor trailers. We need long stretches of highway where autonomous tractor trailers can carry goods. It'll provide a good business case and limit liability.

dpcx2• 14 years ago

It would be nice, but I can see the reaction from truckers who become out of work already...

pavel_lishin4• 14 years ago

Aren't autonomous cars required to have a human "driver" while on the road? I can definitely see truckers lobbying to have some sort of law of that nature - they sit behind the wheel "in case something goes wrong", but would be allowed to drive longer hours with fewer mandated breaks. Sounds like a win for the profession in general... setting aside that longer drive times mean that at least some will be out of work.

w1ntermute2• 14 years ago

They could just stop hiring new truckers (forgot what it's called when you just let the current staff dwindle, instead of actively firing them) and let the current ones gradually retire. Either way, this is a problem that has been faced before countless times as new technology has appeared.

e1ven• 14 years ago

We have (one of the) largest freight-train networks in the world. It's great for things like that.

Trains are basically semi-autonomous, and out of the way of cars anyway.

protomyth3• 14 years ago

Our freight network is great, but trucks are now a vital partner to trains and go more places. If all the trucks in the US stopped and only trains ran, we'd be in a serious world of hurt.

duck2• 14 years ago

While impressive, not as big as this guy who has driven 3 million miles without one: http://compass.ups.com/article.aspx?id=370

nostromo• 14 years ago

Too bad it doesn't mention if this is better than a human or not. So, I decided to figure it out...

2.9 trillion miles driven in 2009 http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/tvtw/09dectvt/09dectvt.pdf

10.8 million traffic accidents in 2009 http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s1103.p...

If my math is correct the average american can expect to get in an accident every ~250,000 miles driven, (NYC to LA 90 times) so this does seem to be an improvement if all else is equal (which I'm sure is not the case!).

iskander• 14 years ago

I don't know much about this google project. Can autonomous cars (i) drive on the highway (ii) drive at night (iii) drive in snow or rain?

jacobquick• 14 years ago

I thought they were limited to driving on the highway in the empty parts of nevada?

bartonfink2• 14 years ago

Autonomous cars have driven on the highway in real-traffic conditions [1], [2], although they had a driver at the ready in the event of any problem. I don't know about night or weather conditions for these instances.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VaMP (their citations pages aren't responding at the moment)

[2] http://www.argo.ce.unipr.it/argo/english/index.html

stephengillie6• 14 years ago

Could it handle Lombard Street?

How would it react to a roadway that's covered in several feet of water due to flooding (and poor road design)? Or sinkholes? One-way streets? Freeways which change directions at different times of day? Dirt roads? (Can we make it autonomously offroad?) How will it react during an earthquake or tornado? How will it react to a bicyclist running a red stoplight and into the car's path, when the car has a green light? When the car comes across kids playing football/street hockey/baseball in the street, will it stop for them? How far out of the way will the kids have to move before the car thinks it's safe to go past?

Will these cars have systems to react when they take damage?

archgoon• 14 years ago

They talk about weather issues in this video at 3:40.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkYFIhJ3rnY

In summary: They can handle darkness and rain, but not snow.

If you're interested, Sebastian Thrun has an intro to the topic as this course (you can preview all videos and problems)

http://www.udacity.com/overview/Course/cs373/CourseRev/apr20...

danweber10• 14 years ago

Driving at night and the rain will probably be where autonomous cars really outshine humans. Lidar systems don't care if you are wearing all black during a night at new moon.

Snow is much harder for the time being. A snow drift falling off a car can make a google car think a cooler has appeared in the road.

arrrg• 14 years ago

What I’m interested in is whether they counted hypothetical accidents. As far as I know, there always has to be someone in the driver’s seat, ready to step in at any time. How often did that person have to step in? Now that would be an interesting metric, especially when plotted over time.

As is, it should be pretty unlikely for the autonomous cars to cause accidents, even if they were much less reliable than human drivers (since there is always a human ready to step in).

I think autonomous cars are awesome and very clearly the future, but I find it hard to believe that humans never had to step in, especially not in the beginning. I mean, that’s why they do those extensive test drives, right? To find bugs that they can squash.

ShabbyDoo3• 14 years ago

Agree. Did humans step-in when they noted conditions which they believed the car unable to handle and perhaps prevent the majority of likely accidents?

rogerbinns3• 14 years ago

Computer driven cars also have the option of just stopping when things aren't looking good (analogous to a panic). For all we know they could stop when a leaf blows across the road - unlikely to cause an accident because of the reaction time.

The "just stop" approach isn't available for planes or nuclear power plants for example.

spitfire• 14 years ago

What type of accidents though? Do people get in a number of fender benders over their lives? or head on at 65mph?

What sort of accidents will GoogleCar be prone to? Fender benders, or a head on at 65mph every 500K?

I'm very hopeful about this. Most people don't want to drive most of the time. As long as I can still drive my V12 Aston martin manually when I want to, this is awesome.

mike-cardwell2• 14 years ago

I imagine, once automated cars are safe and popular enough, they will mandate that all new cars must have it and set a date after which only automated cars are allowed on the road. It will become an offence to take over and drive manually unless the circumstance demands it. You'll be fine driving your Aston Martin, but your kids, or their kids might not be.

freiheit2• 14 years ago

I believe that 10.8M accident figure is an estimate counting all kinds of crashes, even the ones not reported to police.

6M police-reported crashes in 2007. 1.71 million police-reported crashes with an injury. 37,000 traffic fatalities in 2007, 30,862 in 2009.

Traffic fatality data is here with only some high-level info about non-fatality crashes: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

ridiculous_fish• 14 years ago

I'm guessing that more accidents happen in intersections than on the highway. My understanding is that Google's self-driving cars are currently limited to highways and known-course driving.

I don't think it's going to do a very good job driving in San Francisco city streets (but then, who does?)

danweber10• 14 years ago

From what I know it's always known-course. If you were to get a google car today for your commute (you can't), you would first drive to and from work yourself, probably more than once, so it can map everything.

Knowing where there should be a stop sign and traffic lights significantly reduces risks. The computer still needs to be able to learn when new ones appear, of course.

zitterbewegung• 14 years ago

Only problem is sample size really. We need 2.9 trillion miles on Google cars with x accidents then.

ShabbyDoo3• 14 years ago

If the Google Car had gotten into 100 accidents over 300 miles, we easily could claim it much worse than most drivers. However, as with most rare events...

fl3tch• 14 years ago

A lot of those accidents happen in rain and snow, which the Google folks admit are not as well tested. Under clear conditions on open roads, humans probably do better than 300K miles too.

danweber10• 14 years ago

That doesn't seem right to me. A person driving 10K a year will hit 300,000 miles over the course of 30 years. Does the average person really have less than 1 accident every 30 years? Especially when they are younger?

freiheit2• 14 years ago

That's 10.8M crashes. The vast majority aren't really "accidents", since they are caused by human actions.

Census needs to fix their reports to be consistent with Department of Transportation terminology...

exue• 14 years ago

I think the true rate of human accidents is higher than 1 per 250K miles - many are simply never reported to the police or DMV, especially because many states have a cost threshold ($750 in California, higher in other states) or require an injury to be reported

Homunculiheaded• 14 years ago

Does anybody have a citation for accidents per mile for a human driver? I've seen, uncited, 1/200,000 but when I tried to verify this I came up with 2,967 billion miles traveled in 2010 [0] and 5,419,000 crashes total (based on police reports for: property damage, injury, or fatality) [1]. Which, unless there is an error in my math, is roughly 1 crash every 550,000 miles.

0. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Trends/TrendsGeneral.aspx

1. http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811552.pdf table 4

diggan• 14 years ago

What happen if I have a accident in the car? Will Google pay my damages if it's the car's fault?

How quickly will we adapt to the car?

hbharadwaj• 14 years ago

That's the current problem. If it gets into litigation, whose fault is it?

Currently, the person who is operating the vehicle is responsible for what the car does.

zanny3• 14 years ago

If it is gcar on gcar, it is googles fault, because they programmed it wrong / poorly.

If it is gcar on car, with the normal car responsible, it is the traditional fault model.

If it is car on gcar and it is gcars fault, Google really fudged it up.

If it is no ones fault (ie, falling rocks on top of the thing) then that falls into the same catagory as natural disaster damage.

I would hope, at least.

hiker• 14 years ago

I would guess that it's still your responsibility as you're supervising the car while it's been driven by Google's software. The same way you're responsible for your speed even if you're using cruise control.

duck2• 14 years ago

The cars still need to learn how to handle snow-covered roads

That is going to be hard to pull off. For places that get a lot of snow, often you can't even be sure if you're on the road or not.

abraham2• 14 years ago

In theory autonomous care would be able to include a number of other factor to decide if they are on the road or not. Including, GPS, wifi signals, the grade of the road, the texture of the road, etc.

bryans• 14 years ago

What about situations where lanes have been plowed off-center? Even the most accurate GPS and accelerometers aren't going to help the vehicle understand that the appropriate path has been shifted.

stephengillie6• 14 years ago

A snow-covered road is a situation where:

  1. Road indicators are difficult to identify
  2. Roadway has less traction than usual
  3. Humans are having emotional reactions (joy, terror) which impacts their processing abilities.

3 is mitigated by design. 1 is a sensor issue, it's also a problem that very accurate GPS can solve.

There are many causes of slick road surfaces, from snow and ice to excessive water, spilled materials, collision debris, and low-quality roadways (dirt and gravel roads). Driving in reduced-traction situations shouldn't be an edge-case.

stephengillie6• 14 years ago

This brings up another question: How will these cars react when a street is blocked and unpassable, due to heavy snowfall (unplowed), heavy rainfall over the street, mudslides & rock slides, etc?

What about where a street has parked cars on both sides and just enough room for one car to go through the middle of the street - one of the narrow city streets where drivers have to wait in the intersection for oncoming cars - will these autonomous cars wait and let drivers through, or will they get stuck?

greyboy• 14 years ago

Personally, I can think of lots of edge cases that will be interesting to see answers to. For instance, a 4-way stop - we know how to handle that easily, and can overcome someone jumping out of turn, again, quite easily.

More importantly - who will be maintaining all the traffic changes? An example - a section of Interstate or road is closed for months, whether by damage or construction. And then, when it's clear again?

I'm interested in seeing how these things play out.

vladoh• 14 years ago

Actually the problem with snow is specific to Google's approach and is not limited to snow, but to all changes of the environment. They use the 360 degree LIDAR (Velodyne) and drive multiple times over each street in order to create a 3D map which is used for localization after that. Therefore the snow changes the layout of the environment significantly and localization stops working, which in turn makes functions like lane keeping, car detection, traffic light detection etc impossible. This will also happen if the environment changes a lot in another way.

bengl3rt• 14 years ago

I'm of two minds on these.

On the one hand, these will help close the "fun gap" between the city and the suburbs. One big problem with living in the suburbs is that you can't really drink a lot wherever you are, because you have to drive home afterwards. If your car drove itself that restriction would be removed, and over time the suburbs could start to compete with cities for nightlife despite the large delta in density. Places might even start staying open later because they could make more money selling alcohol.

On the other hand, I have a power-nothing manual-everything sports car that I love to drive. Already most people I know drive cars with automatic transmissions, and now some manufacturers don't even ofter manuals anymore, even on fairly powerful high-end cars. I can imagine many of the same people who choose an automatic transmission today will choose a fully automatic self-driving car tomorrow because to them it's a utility and not a form of entertainment. Eventually, the market for non-self-driving cars will shrink in the same way the market for cars with manual transmissions has.

damoncali3• 14 years ago

Important detail: "It’s not clear how many of these 300,000 miles were driven on Google’s secret racecourse, by the way."

kevinalexbrown• 14 years ago

The most amazing part is that autonomous cars have completed 300,000 miles at all. Congratulations to the engineering team!

Around fifteen years ago, I read as a child with fascination an account in Scientific American about an automated highway project where sensors were to be placed every few feet on the road, and cars would follow them, until a driver retook control at the end. I imagined a future network of roads in which cars read from sensors to determine where they were, and was kind of saddened that governments didn't immediately start putting these sensors into highways. This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense).

What this reminds me of, rather spectacularly, is that if one method of getting to your solution fails, either because those sensors didn't work out, or the bureaucracy didn't, if you come up with a solution, and say "oh by the way I did it already", it's a lot harder for anyone to ignore it.

saraid216• 14 years ago

> This is such a cooler solution, one that doesn't depend on a parallel development of infrastructure, one that would presumably take lots of bureaucratic steps that are naturally associated with usage decisions on publicly owned land (which makes sense).

And taxes. Google isn't being funded by our dollars, except through a series of indirections.

waterlesscloud2• 14 years ago

I wonder if they get a tax credit for this kind of research?

Seems possible, and certain kinds of tax credit may as well be subsidies. All speculation on my part, though. I wonder if anyone knows?

powerslave12r• 14 years ago

I think trains/metro rails are just outright much more cost effective, given it's not personal transport.

andybak3• 14 years ago

Actually, not when you factor in the need to serve unpopular routes and non-Busyntimes. That's a lot of trains and buses running nearly empty.

Small, on-demand personalised mass transit has the potential to be the most efficient transport system.

icebraining5• 14 years ago

It depends on the population density, on whether you have to (and can) build it underground, etc.

flyinRyan2• 14 years ago

What? No way, trains/metro are an awful system that needs to be displaced by robot cars as soon as possible. A train is a large vehicle taking a lot of people to somewhere that no one wants to go. A robot car can pick me up at my door and drop me off at the front door of my job. It would only need to drive when there are people who want to go somewhere instead of "every 15 minutes regardless of how few people use it".

3amOpsGuy• 14 years ago

I wonder what kind of denial of service attacks we'll see on autonomous cars once they're popular.

Trivial example, could i choose to always pull out in front of the robot even if it's not my right of way? (presumably safe in the knowledge the robot will always give way to avoid a collision)

Could that escalate to the robot being treated as a mobile speed trap / felony snitch?

Interesting times.

johngalt• 14 years ago

Will it be a problem when you have 50 autonomous cars in close proximity? Potential for crosstalk from the sensors? Similar to headlights at night making it so you can see, but blinding oncoming traffic.

danweber10• 14 years ago

The people doing this have talked about how their autonomous car met another company's autonomous car. There didn't seem to be a problem.

Really, when there are more autonomous cars on the road, each and every one will get better from their neighbors. They can directly share the data they see and what they are doing. The network effects will be huge.

rondon1• 14 years ago

You will not know how safe they are until accidents happen. I would love to see someone with money run an experiment with real drivers vs google cars. Create a worst case scenario course with simulated drunk drivers, blown tires, missing stop signs, etc.. and run this with real and fake drivers. I suspect the average driver would crash 10% of the time, autonomous car would crash 1% of the time, and a professional driver would crash never.

The real safety improvements will come when all cars are autonomous and they talk to each other.

danweber10• 14 years ago

"Missing stop signs" is one place where a google car would be great, since they pre-map the area and would know a stop sign has disappeared. Knowing that would cause them to slow down and be even more careful.

Autonomous cars never get distracted, have 360 degree vision, look at all things all the time, and can react in tens of milliseconds versus hundreds of milliseconds. I'd trust that over a "professional driver."

joshlegs2• 14 years ago

Now just imagine putting in an address into the GPS and not missing any turns on the way there cuz your computer-car does everything for you.

Now also imagine if that address isn't up-to-date (I found it on the web!), or there is some other problem with the address.

ShabbyDoo3• 14 years ago

>Google warns that “there’s still a long road ahead.” The cars >still need to learn how to handle snow-covered roads, ...

What if the car was smart enough to identify situations where it was unable to auto-navigate safely? It could pull-over and ask the human to take-over for awhile. I would rather see a mostly capable self-driving car come to market sooner than wait around for near perfection.

On this note, it seems that the trucking industry could adopt a self-driving truck even if it was only good enough to travel along long stretches of highway. The first/last miles would be manually driven just like today. Could the trucking companies use remote navigation (much like military drones) to handle first/last mile and perhaps problem spots along the way?

What's the minimum viable product?

Cushman• 14 years ago

> What if the car was smart enough to identify situations where it was unable to auto-navigate safely? It could pull-over and ask the human to take-over for awhile.

This is precisely what the Google car does, in fact.

andrewljohnson2• 14 years ago

It won't be consumers who drive the adoption of robot cars, it will be the logistics companies. This will all start with factory-to-doorstep supply chain integration.

First, Amazon and Wal-Mart and Fed-Ex will have giant fleets - then consumers and mid-sized businesses will follow. Small local governments and developed Asian nations like South Korea and Japan will also drive adoption.

Having a fully-automated supply chain will break the competition who doesn't have the capital to get there fast enough. The big companies already automate the factories, and once delivery is automated, the circle is complete.

malkia• 14 years ago

In the future, there must be some communication between vehicles how to minimize the effect of the crash - e.g. if in one vehicles there is no-one, and no hazardous material - then this car somehow should be able to take more of the damage.

Oh, and I would very much like if every vehicle put on the back and front of the car - it's current speed measured by the car.

ilaksh• 14 years ago

I doubt that there were really no accidents at all or close calls, but even if that is the case, you have to expect some accidents as more and more of these vehicles get out there. But even if there are 1000 accidents in the next 300000 miles or whatever, I hope people are realistic and give the technology time rather than writing it off as soon as a very well-publicized collisions occur.

tocomment• 14 years ago

Does anyone know how an autonomous car can handle stop lights being out? Or a traffic cop at an intersection? Will it has to learn and recognize the hand gestures?

elchief• 14 years ago

Predictions of the economic effects of the GCars:

http://vancouverdata.blogspot.ca/2012/08/googles-self-drivin...

vibrunazo• 14 years ago

Here's a much better and through article on the subject the RWW:

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_self-driving_ca...

eloisant• 14 years ago

The problem is, if it gets to production, the first real accident will be considered totally inacceptable.

It doesn't matter if you reduce by a 1000 the risk of accident. When an accident is caused by a human error you have someone to blame, you can think "I would have done better". But when the accident is cause by a machine, then people will stop trusting the car and be done with it.

hooande• 14 years ago

I've seen this argument made in many forms. The short response is: "Google already thought of that."

People will be upset, even outraged, by the first few autonomous car accidents. But as long as they're still legal, they'll be building up a safety record that will quickly surpass what humans can achieve. Google has already invested enough money in the legislative system to prevent laws from being yanked off the books after one accident.

The general form of "People won't like it when machines do X" doesn't have a lot of merit. There are always problems and people never like it at first. Then they get used to it and quality of life improves over time. I'm sure similar arguments were made about the automobile itself.

kayoone• 14 years ago

may i remind people here cheering for automated cars that most of the world hasnt even accepted automatic transmission because they want to control their car themselves? This will take decades

GFischer3• 14 years ago

Erm, at least over here (Uruguay) we don't buy automatic transmission because it's more expensive.

If they were priced the same, I'd probably buy automatic.

nileshtrivedi• 14 years ago

Paraphrasing Peter Norvig: ".. if you do experiments and you're not failing half of the time, then you aren't getting enough information out of those experiments."

(from http://www.slate.com/blogs/thewrongstuff/2010/08/03/error_me... )

;-)

Google's Autonomous cars complete 300,000 miles without an accident

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