The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

https://medium.com/backchannel/the-view-from-the-front-seat-of-the-google-self-driving-car-46fc9f3e6088

by steven • 11 years ago

265 279 11 years ago

cyphunk• 11 years ago

Imagine that for a moment: Self driving car companies could promise to pay all accident expenses provided it was on auto drive at the time of accident.

Not only is that a marketing win, potentially reducing accidents and saving costs for owners... if you jump forward many years of Google (or other) defending owners in court you would reach a point even judges would be biased to believe that the auto-driven car could not have caused an accident, further disadvantaging non-auto cars in the market.

jalonso510• 11 years ago

Will be really interesting to see how insurance is priced for these cars.

fixermark8• 11 years ago

If the safety records meet goals, it's functionally free money for the insurance company regardless of insurance price. So one could predict a race to the bottom for insuring these machines.

ender72• 11 years ago

Keep in mind that every autocar will have an extremely accurate recording of the accident that can be analyzed and played back during a hearing. Determining fault will be trivial in almost all cases.

agumonkey10• 11 years ago

Accidents, when non fatal, are such a waste of anyone's resources. And there are so many way to be cheated. I'm stunned no manufacturer included a logging device. Nowadays you have dash cams though.

EvanKelly2• 11 years ago

Is "autocar" a thing?

The ambiguity between automatic/automobile/autonomous really makes me hope a better word surfaces.

Self-driving car is a bit too long.

DanaDanger• 11 years ago

All I hear is "this car gets in accidents." Maybe not the message marketing wants to send... ;)

freehunter3• 11 years ago

How do you hear that? It's basically a guarantee, and companies generally don't warrant against things they know will happen. The reason you get a 1 year warranty on things is because they are engineered to not break down within one year. After that, the incidence of failure goes up.

"We will pay for any accidents caused" means "this will not cause accidents". Because no company would do that unless they were sure it wasn't going to happen. Just like when Google gives $100,000 for bugs in Chrome. They wouldn't say that unless they were sure there were no or relatively few bugs.

baddox2• 11 years ago

It's already common for automobile manufacturers to explicitly market the collision safety features of their cars. Many car commercials have collision test footage.

btian• 11 years ago

I rather the marketing message be like "we tested the self-driving car for xx million miles, and we had zero at fault accident."

BurningFrog• 11 years ago

I think that will be necessary. The selling point is that these cars drive better than people and get into far fewer accidents. As the manufacturer, you have to show you believe in that.

comrade12• 11 years ago

One thing I'm looking forward to with self-driving cars is to be able to step into a street anywhere and have all the traffic stop automatically. Every inch of street now becomes a crosswalk. Even highways.

(This is an ironic statement)

chrismealy2• 11 years ago

No, that'd be awesome. If I could walk or bike everywhere safely I wouldn't need a car.

mrec• 11 years ago

Given that all the traffic will record you doing so, I don't imagine that this will be a huge problem in practice.

Might need to tighten up the jaywalking rules a bit, but nothing major.

xnxn• 11 years ago

You can already stop traffic by doing this. Why not give it a go? ;)

On a serious note: I'm sure strolling into highway traffic will be approximately as legal as it is presently.

pdxandi2• 11 years ago

All joking aside, that's exactly how traffic works in Portland.

fixermark8• 11 years ago

Not to mention that with the self-driving cars working as a functional panopticon, doing this and getting away with it for lengths of time is unlikely.

Even ignoring the privacy-scary scenarios of the car auto-emailing the cops to say "Dear local PD, this guy just jaywalked and halted traffic on Oak Ln, here's my [sensor gestalt] to prove it and a [photo of the offender]", it'd be pretty trivial for anyone owning a fleet of these machines who was tired of jaywalkers slowing down their commute to dump data on jaywalk-stops in the aggregate, giving cops all the numbers they need to target enforcement.

danielweber2• 11 years ago

A long long ago a science fiction story with self-driving cars had that scenario. Everyone jaywalked all the time because it was perfectly safe.

comrade12• 11 years ago

Are you talking about a vernor vinge story? I can't remember the name.

jessaustin3• 11 years ago

And if there were no self-important driver to get pissed off, would "jaywalking" even be a thing? If the first automobile drivers had been poor folks with little political power (haha yeah right), "jaywalking" would never have been made a crime in the first place. Some streets will have heavy pedestrian traffic; the rational robot routes around them to lower-traffic streets.

drzaiusapelord• 11 years ago

I imagine there will be pissed passengers in the car who are sitting stopped for far too long because some jackass things he's above traffic laws. I suspect the self-driving car will also usher the age of people getting beat up for fucking with self-driving cars.

There's a million social elements here we haven't explored. Imagine driving through a ghetto and lots of people rush over to your car to rob you (or worse). Your car will happily brake for them, when a human would have recognized the situation and accelerated and veered off to avoid them. Or weird edges cases like garbage on the road or somesuch and the car not being able to outmaneuver it because it may be illegal, but a human with a more lax acceptance of traffic laws will veer into the right lane close to another car to avoid it.

Or just the daily grind of speed limits. On the expressways I drive the posted speed is 65-70 yet most everyone does 80-85. Doing a steady 60-65mph because of how laws were written to get speeding ticket revenue might be annoying. Especially if you're the only non-human driven car and everyone is speeding past you and honking because you're not going the speed of traffic.

afarrell4• 11 years ago

Automatically != instantaneously. You'd have to make sure the car is far away enough that speed(car)^2/distance(you, car) < friction(rubber, pavement)*g.

You can't play blindfolded frogger.

EDIT: "friction" is a better function name than "mu", even though we all feel nostalgic for high school physics.

NovaS1X4• 11 years ago

Yep!

Latency and Inertia still exist with autocars. Anyone wishing to challenge physics may as well be awarded a Darwin Award.

Cakez0r2• 11 years ago

I can't possibly work that out. The only answer is self-driving segways!

happyscrappy• 11 years ago

There is a table saw that stops the blade the instant it senses the capacitance of a finger. It completely ruins the saw but saves the finger. Something like that could work here if the car could see the pedestrian far enough in advance to stay within parameters. Ruins the road and the car not the pedestrian.

darkmighty2• 11 years ago

It's more complicated, since cars can steer, but it's still approx. function of speed^2/distance, but a lot more permissive. And then there's emergency coordination among vehicles to prevent the crash among the vehicles themselves too.

pbw• 11 years ago

This could be a big deal actually. Will pedestrian and human driver's behavior change if there is the expectation that the self-driving cars are going react incredibly quickly and reliably? It's hard to imagine everything just stays the same everywhere and as self-driving cars become more and more common.

idbentley• 11 years ago

There are plenty of places people do this already. For example, this is common behaviour in Manhattan.

ceejayoz• 11 years ago

It might eventually just look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlyOom0bwwY

jdhawk2• 11 years ago

When visiting Vietnam, I was told to look straight ahead, and move at a consistent and predictable pace. The drivers are used to moving around pedestrians. Its a wild sensation.

agumonkey10• 11 years ago

Multi agent research looks like this :

https://youtu.be/5lz_HnOLBW4?t=166

vlunkr3• 11 years ago

In all seriousness though, what would happen in this case? Do self-driving cars have emergency stop procedures? And how safe are they? This is still a serious concern about self-driving cars for me. Especially since digital image recognition still isn't that great. What if the car sees a tumbleweed that it mistakes for a boulder and puts it into emergency stop mode?

munificent2• 11 years ago

Do self-driving cars have emergency stop procedures?

Yes, of course! Just staying on a road is a piece of cake. Most of the research for self-driving cars is dealing with unexpected cars and pedestrians.

And how safe are they?

According to the article, 1.7m miles driven without at at-fault accident. Self-driving cars drive very conservatively.

What if the car sees a tumbleweed that it mistakes for a boulder and puts it into emergency stop mode?

Probably the same thing that happens when humans make visual mistakes: it would slow down and stop.

Of course, the self-driving car is looking at the tumbleweed in the visible spectrum, using LIDAR, maybe IR and probably some other sensors. We just have our squishy eyeballs.

phaemon4• 11 years ago

Especially since digital image recognition still isn't that great.

I believe digital image recognition is better than human, and a lot faster to boot (hah!).

JshWright5• 11 years ago

Less ironically, I'm looking forward to pushing a button on the dashboard of my ambulance that automatically preempts the road ahead.

devsquid3• 11 years ago

Srsly, it amazes me when ppl don't get out of the way for emergency vehicles.

IMHO one random day out of the year, you should be equipped with heavy machine guns and allowed to blast anyone in your way. A simple solution for a simple problem.

kuschku2• 11 years ago

You could just go to Germany ;P

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Ak1eIyj3M

justinpaulson2• 11 years ago

I'm looking forward to when all of the self-driving cars will be so good at avoiding accidents that you can just take a manually-driven car and blast down the center of the road at 10-20 mph over the speed limit and watch all of the self-driven cars just move out of your way.

fixermark8• 11 years ago

Yep!

... until the smart-grid notices the disturbance in regular traffic flow and auto-notifies the authorities that there's something weird going on on Oak Ln. every Monday morning during rush hour... ;)

xbryanx• 11 years ago

There's a scene in The Mote in God's Eye, just like this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye

return0• 11 years ago

When the car is too good and fast to respond, it will get hit from behind it seems. I guess they could change their algorithm to be slow-reacting. dumbing down machines so that petty humans can catch up.

tablatom2• 11 years ago

You'd want to get smarter, not dumber: taking into account the fact that the unpredictable (to the car behind) braking could in itself cause an accident, and calculating a best compromise to avoid both collisions, with priority to the more dangerous of the two (the fender-bender could be a great option if you avoid another car doing 50). I'd be surprised if their software doesn't support this kind of thing already.

skrause• 11 years ago

The priority will be probably be not to hit the car in front of you so that you're not at fault for an accident.

ams61105• 11 years ago

I'd guess that most from-behind collisions are due to excessive speed for conditions, or driver inattention. Not much that the leading car can do about either of those.

JoshTriplett• 11 years ago

The leading car can do several things in those scenarios, ranging from increased stopping time (which it should already likely be doing to maximize fuel efficiency), brake light usage, or in extreme cases changing lanes to get out of the way.

agumonkey10• 11 years ago

I hope they already did that, they say they can track all moving agents around, and roboticists know physics so they know they have to dissipate energy as smoothly as possible in the system including all neighbors.

emptybits2• 11 years ago

For balance: In the past eight months, four of the 48 self-driving cars licensed in California were involved in accidents. Three were Lexus SUVs from Google. http://www.startribune.com/ap-exclusive-self-driving-cars-ge... This does not assign blame. It is an observation.

ender72• 11 years ago

From your own link:

"Google and Delphi said their cars were not at fault in any accidents, which the companies said were minor."

toomuchtodo• 11 years ago

Also from article this thread is tied to:

If you spend enough time on the road, accidents will happen whether you’re in a car or a self-driving car. Over the 6 years since we started the project, we’ve been involved in 11 minor accidents (light damage, no injuries) during those 1.7 million miles of autonomous and manual driving with our safety drivers behind the wheel, and not once was the self-driving car the cause of the accident.

emptybits2• 11 years ago

To not be legally "at fault" is important, particularly for a company with liability and public image at stake.

I genuinely look forward to future stats that will tell us self-driven cars have a much lower likelihood of even being involved in accidents, independent of fault. To me, that level of defensiveness and net safety is also a measure of progress.

As an example: Let's say a particular self-driven car has a low threshold to "stomp on the brakes, hard" at the slightest sign of danger. Will this keep it from accumulating "at fault" accidents? Probably. But can that behaviour effectively contribute to causing accidents that it's not "at fault" for (being rear-ended)? Probably. Safer roads? Difficult to say.

Squarel2• 11 years ago

For balance, the property only damage rate that I could find per 100 million vehicle miles for passenger cars was 145, so, 1.45 per million vehicle miles. Trends table 11 in the link http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-tr...

Now, many PDO incidents go unreported, but, medium does not offer a number for comparison, so, when you see the headline "11 accidents in 1.7m miles" you have no reference to whether this is high or low.

Tenhundfeld• 11 years ago

Good find. The text of the DOT website is a little vague, but I think you're right that the 1.45 per 1M number is only from police reports.

  Data for GES [General Estimates System] come from a nationally representative 
  sample of police reported motor vehicle crashes of all types, from minor to fatal. 
  ... Although various sources suggest that about half the motor vehicle crashes in 
  the country are not reported to the police, the majority of these unreported crashes 
  involve only minor property damage and no significant personal injury.

I guess that's saying the actual number should be about double, so ~3 per 1M.

I'm also wondering if any private operators of fleets publish stats. For example, does FedEx or UPS publish accident rates? I know those numbers would also be skewed, larger vehicles, more frequent stops, etc. But it could be another data point.

jws• 11 years ago

According to the companies involved, none of the accidents were the fault of the self driving car.

The Delphi car was stopped at a light, in manual driving mode, when another vehicle lost control, crossed a median, and hit the delphi car.

I haven't seen a statement from Google other than that the accidents were minor and the fault of the other vehicles.

I think today's news article flurry might better be titled: Humans run into self driving cars about as often as human driven ones, meanwhile self driving cars do not run into other vehicles.

jonknee• 11 years ago

For more balance, they have been driven a ridiculous number of miles more than the average car so saying "4 of 48" got ran into (since none were the fault of the self-driving car!) is intentionally misleading.

jordn• 11 years ago

I'm wondering if the self driving cars should report these bad drivers.

tablatom2• 11 years ago

I was thinking the same thing. If Google start logging license plate numbers (and, hey, it's Google), they could build a database of known dangerous vehicles and automatically give them a wide berth.

drhodes• 11 years ago

At that point they'd necessarily have some way to quantify dangerousity. There will be a ranking. Somewhere deep in the bowels of google, there will be a list, Top Ten most dangerous drivers. Google is about to get into the car insurance business.

ams61105• 11 years ago

So it's OK for Google to record license plates, but it's flip-out time when the police do it?

adrianN• 11 years ago

That would probably be very problematic here in Germany.

pluma6• 11 years ago

Unsolicited bulk data collection. How American.

Good luck trying to make that work in places with privacy laws.

dilipd• 11 years ago

DMV/Police could benefit by buying a few of these cars to monitor traffic. Good cost/benefit for 24 hour untiring watch.

Buge• 11 years ago

I was also wondering if the car should be programmed to honk.

pluma6• 11 years ago

I'm not sure how this varies from country to country, but in Germany honking is considered a warning signal (similar to hazard lights, but more direct) and intended to be used as such.

Of course most drivers are still primarily using it to vent their aggressions, but doing that is abusive and can result in a fine.

What would complicate automated honking, however, is that the specifics are likely different from legislation to legislation.

buss2• 11 years ago

Every time I hear about the amazingly low accident rates in current generation self-driving cars I'm reminded of this joke (unfortunately I can't remember the source):

Grandpa, what did you do before self-driving cars?

Well, we just drove them ourselves. We just needed a little practice and to take a test.

Wow, and nobody got killed!?

Oh, no, millions of people died.

Squarel2• 11 years ago

This will only be the case when all cars are self-driving.

Many of these articles do not give a comparison...so,11 per 1.7m miles sounds awesome, but how do you know what the current rate is?

The data I found had a passenger vehicle fatal crash per 100m miles as between 1.0 and 1.33, and a property damage only crash rate per 100m miles of 145, which relate to 0.01 fatalities per 1m miles, and 1.45 property only crashes per 1m miles.

EDIT for link because posting went silly http://www.fmcsa.dot.gov/safety/data-and-statistics/large-tr...

pdxandi2• 11 years ago

I think it's important to note that the 11 accidents the self-driving cars were involved in were the fault of the other driver.

Anm• 11 years ago

The article is pretty clear that most of the light-damage, no-injury accidents don't get reported, and that all 11 accidents fell in that category. Half the point of the article is that this data is not well known.

Granted, taking those 1.45 and 55% figures, we might compare the 11 accidents to approximately 3.2 accident (reported and unreported) per million miles in passenger vehicles. Emphasis on "approximately".

dysfunction• 11 years ago

So it would seem purely based on these numbers that the Google cars have had about 4.5 times the mean rate of property-damage-only crashes. However, these statistics don't show us what the shape of the curve looks like, so we have no idea what percentile the Google cars are in.

If we take Google at their word that not one of the 11 crashes was caused by the self-driving system, then these numbers aren't evidence against the self-driving car being safer even with human drivers sharing the road. It's possible the car was driving unsafely in some way that increased its risk of accident without ever directly causing them, but we can't even guess at that without knowing the probability of their crash rate being this distance from the mean by pure chance.

So, do you really think the roads will only be safer when all cars are self-driving--you don't believe there will either be an incremental benefit in overall safety as more self-driving cars get on the road, or a specific safety benefit to owners of self-driving cars?

Cakez0r2• 11 years ago

Large Truck and Bus Crash Facts 2012

dfan• 11 years ago

I thought it was original when I saw it last month: https://twitter.com/cat_beltane/status/588359354136403969

Had you encountered it before?

buss2• 11 years ago

I vaguely remember seeing it many months ago, but my memory has been known to lie to me. This may very well be the original source, thanks!

Zirro• 11 years ago

I can already imagine intense debates about whether to outlaw human-driven cars in a (perhaps not so) distant future.

koenigdavidmj• 11 years ago

I've been thinking a bit about good places to adopt this early.

Lānaʻi might be a good candidate: absolute isolation from other road systems, a small population (3000 people), and a single owner (Larry Ellison) who's just the sort of filthy rich technophile who might be willing to replace an entire island's cars.

Singapore could be the first major city to make the move, due to its authoritarian government (hey, I don't like it, but it might make this easier), strict rules to keep the stock of vehicles relatively new, and relative isolation from other road systems (only two bridges to Malaysia).

fixermark8• 11 years ago

I imagine this going one of two ways: either human-operated vehicles might be outlawed, or auto companies will apply market pressure to favor people not manually driving (steep, steep discounts in insurance for self-driving vehicles, since many states still require insurance but if the self-driving cars reach the safety goals they're aiming at, it's basically free money for insurers to insure them at any price).

branchan11• 11 years ago

Probably very unlikely unless you solve poverty.

grecy2• 11 years ago

I see a future where governments will make a laws about "manual control" like they make laws about airbags, minimum mileage and TPMS now.

In 2025 automakers simply won't be allowed to make a "manual control" car, and by 2050 there will be basically none left on the roads.

superuser22• 11 years ago

If we can require all self-driving cars to take orders from a central authority, we can do some pretty amazing things:

- Most traffic problems are a result of human (over)caution and poor merging technique. A centrally coordinated system of self-driving cars are perfectly aware of each other's intentions and could run much smaller safety margins, as well as make lane/exit access perfectly equitable. The effective carrying capacity of highways would increase immensely, and traffic jams would be a thing of the past.

- 100% of cars on the same coordination system would also allow us to do away with most stoplights, as it could simply modulate speed so that intersections are always running in both directions, but cars never collide. (This could be overridden for pedestrian crossings, and wouldn't be much of a benefit in the city, but in places that are already pedestrian-hostile - i.e. most of Real America - it wouldn't make things much worse and pedestrians would be pretty rare.)

ams61105• 11 years ago

Considering that the number of vehicle-miles driven annually is in the trillions, that is still a pretty small sample size. Do we know whether it's statistically significant?

gwern• 11 years ago

The number that people drive isn't important, what's important is the accident rate: do humans get into enough minor accidents over 1.7m vehicle-miles that 14 is clearly bigger or smaller? Your answer is going to be driven almost entirely by what human-rate you select.

For example, if I use https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci... , then I see that most of the quoted accident-rates are 1.8-3.29 per million miles. If I use a rate of 2.2/1m and use the simple binomial approach of x events per million miles, then the self-driving cars are statistically-significantly higher accident rates (since 14>3.74, and `binom.test(14, 1700000, p=(2.2/1000000)) ~> _p_=3.778543e-05`).

But what kinds of accidents are those? If I instead look at https://www.dot.ny.gov/divisions/operating/osss/highway/acci... and look at "Property Damage Only" accident-rates, it seems the human rate per million mile is more like 65-85. Now, unsurprisingly, the robots look superior (14<110, `binom.test(14, 1700000, p=(65/1000000)) ~> _p_=2.2204e-16`).

And if you try to argue apples and apples and use fatal accidents from the same source, noting a range of 0-1.33 fatal accidents per million miles, and 0 fatalities due to the robots' 1.7m so far then the difference is unclear (0<0.85 but `binom.test(0, 1700000, p=(0.5/1000000)) ~> _p_=1`) because the usual tests don't like 0-counts and the robots have not driven enough to clearly distinguish themselves from normal human rates.

coldcode• 11 years ago

I want to know how the person playing the trumpet was able to drive. And how well did they play?

the8472• 11 years ago

I guess by actuating the steering wheel with their knees

munificent2• 11 years ago

I'd be more impressed if they actuated the trumpet with their knees.

mng2• 11 years ago

The trumpet can be played one-handed, actually. Gets a little heavy after a while, but you can rest the bell on the dashboard. Also you won't be able to use the first and third valve slides to correct the lower notes, but who's listening?

paulornothing• 11 years ago

I'm pretty excited for the prospect of a self driving car. My commute is about 40 miles round trip not too traffic ridden but I wouldn't mind relaxing a little. I would rather telework more often than two days a week, but it looks like he self driving car is more imminent.

NovaS1X4• 11 years ago

I want to hear the argument about people who want to drive.

I enjoy driving. I like driving cars. I still drive a manual and will not buy an automatic transmission. I participate in car clubs and I compete in autocross events. I enjoy automotive photography and I do my own maintenance on my vehicles.

What happens to people like me who actually enjoy driving and the act of owning a car? Do my loves get phased out because the majority of people just think of cars as appliances? Will this give birth to "classic-driving shows" just like we have classic-car shows and cruises?

Not saying I don't like innovation, I'd absolutely love to own a Tesla Roadster, but some things need to be preserved.

wwkeyboard• 11 years ago

People still ride horses and we've had cars for over 100 years. I don't see driving going away, it just might be constrained in when and where you are allowed to drive(maybe like Autobahn in Chicago and Motorsports Ranch in Houston).

JshWright5• 11 years ago

Pretty easy to s/cars/guns/g and s/driving/shooting/g in your comment and I think you may have a reasonable idea what the future holds...

calvin_c• 11 years ago

I think it's perfectly acceptable to expect that the enthusiasts will be the ones to preserve the things they love that fall out of favor. I enjoy driving on a nice empty road as well, but I don't think it's something that "need[s] to be preserved." It's something we have to do that we've learned to enjoy and do more than we need to. If it stops being something we have to do it's up to us to make time to do it for pleasure.

trequartista• 11 years ago

Driving isn't going to go anywhere, but I can see driving being "penalized" via exorbitant insurance rates - so much so that the it probably might offset the cost of buying a manually driven car. It'll probably end up being a hobby, albeit an expensive one.

jcromartie3• 11 years ago

Wouldn't insurance rates just go down in general? Car insurance would be incredibly streamlined with self-driving cars.

sorenbs• 11 years ago

It will probably be more expensive to insure a self-driven car but I don't se it being banned outright. It will be a luxury, a sport.

nazgulnarsil• 11 years ago

I want to hear the argument about people who want to ride. I enjoy riding. I like riding horses. I still ride a horse and will not buy an automobile. I participate in riding clubs and I compete in horse racing events. I enjoy horse photography and I do my own hoof maintenance on my steeds. What happens to people like me who actually enjoy riding and the act of owning a horse? Do my loves get phased out because the majority of people just think of transportation as appliances? Will this give birth to "classic-riding shows"? Not saying I don't like innovation, I'd absolutely love to own a model-T, but some things need to be preserved.

NovaS1X4• 11 years ago

Didn't think of the horse perspective. Thanks for that.

Still feels bad that some I love doing every day will be regulated to somewhere far removed from where I live and done only a few times a month at best.

branchan11• 11 years ago

Funny analogy but it doesn't quite work here. Driverless cars are still cars. They both still use the same roads and infrastructure.

cmelbye• 11 years ago

You mentioned cars as appliances, but you forgot the part where humans driving cars has cause of millions of deaths and many more injuries. I expect it will still be possible to drive cars manually, but in dedicated or isolated areas.

pat2man• 11 years ago

People love to fly but not everyone should be a pilot. Same goes with driving. The driving test could get more vigorous and you might not be able to drive on all roads but you will still be able to drive.

kmano8• 11 years ago

From a sentimental perspective, I hear you. I've also enjoyed driving, taking care of my car, etc. That said, the idea that some things need to be preserved isn't going to keep human-driven cars in the mainstream if the world wants to go in a different direction.

Take a look at newspapers -- I have no fewer than 5 relatives bemoaning the collapse of physical newspapers. Because nostalgia. It's decidedly more efficient to get your news electronically. How long before The Times discontinues home delivery?

Even if (when?) self-driving cars become the majority, I think you'll still see hobbyist avenues for enjoying cars -- with, my guess is, higher expense to you and a lot more regulation on use (e.g. not allowed to drive in cities?).

agumonkey10• 11 years ago

I have an issue with the efficiency argument. Far too often when things driven by efficiency reach a certain 'point', the density of effort put into it plummets and so does quality (food, music, ...). I'm biased toward old, non automated way of doing things, because people do care about the craft/art and that's where the value is. I'd run a mile to buy a newspaper if the journalists are worth it. Sure, these industry don't thrive like they used to when the underlying tech was the best or only one, but that's a hard fact of nature.

jcromartie3• 11 years ago

Self-driving cars will still have manual controls, for all of the minutiae at the beginning and end of a trip (mostly to do with parking).

benkuykendall• 11 years ago

Does the Google car not do parking?

davmre• 11 years ago

Parking is one of the easiest and most valuable things to automate; it's finicky and humans basically suck at it. Self-driving cars may have manual controls but it probably won't be driven by parking.

tdees40• 11 years ago

I wonder if there will come a day when you can still drive your car, but you'll have to pay exorbitant insurance rates. That seems like a reasonable midpoint.

anigbrowl• 11 years ago

Rent time on a track pr a private road. You can have all the excitement you want, and if you crash there's no risk to the rest of the public.

TulliusCicero• 11 years ago

Do my loves get phased out because the majority of people just think of cars as appliances?

Oh, you'll still be able to drive, alright. On private roads designated for those who want to take their life into their own hands.

For regular, public roads, your love of driving will take a backseat to others' love of continuing to be alive and uninjured.

redbeard0x0a• 11 years ago

Manual driven cars will not disappear, what will happen is Insurance will go through the roof as more self-driving cars are added to the roads. There will be some roads declared for self-driven cars only and some that will allow both.

Enjoy your cars now!

NovaS1X4• 11 years ago

I see this being the most plausible thing to happen. Separate insurance classes for manual and automatic cars, the costs of each being supported by their perspective groups.

However that begs the question: by sheer numbers would that make insurance on a automatic car comparable to a manually driven one? If there are significantly less manual cars, there are less accidents to pay out. An accident in a manual car is not a guarantee just like no accidents in automatic cars is not a guarantee.

I think if manual insurance was more expensive it would be an artificial premium based on the fear of something happening.

EvanKelly2• 11 years ago

I haven't thought about how this affects car insurance.

Who has the liability for collisions? Manufacturer? Owner? Last mechanic who serviced it?

jmilloy• 11 years ago

Your only argument seems to be that people should be allowed to do/have things that they like. I don't think this a very strong argument. We can come up a long list of things that people like(d) are no longer allowed because they are considered too harmful.

shkkmo4• 11 years ago

I agree in that I hope that ability for people to drive cars will go not away completely. Driving can be a pleasure and a rush.

I do hope that we would start holding drivers legally responsible for the deaths and injuries they cause. If you choose to drive a car yourself and you cause an accident that kills someone, then you should face a manslaughter charge. If you hit or injure someone, that should be an assault charge. I think it is ridiculous that this currently is not the case.

brc2• 11 years ago

Most likely driving tests will be tightened and be made more difficult to pass. The main barrier to doin this right now is that so many people need to drive.

It doesn't need to be spelled out that crashes are not evenly distributed between the driving population, and taking the 20% worst drivers off the road is going to reduce crashes by 80%.

My insurance rates are low because of a very good driving history despite owning high powered cars. I don't see any reasons why that would change.

castell• 11 years ago

I enjoy driving, but I dislike rush hour traffic / traffic jams.

Self-driving cars would be great to drive to the workplace and back home. But on weekend I want to drive myself on lonely scenic roads.

swalsh• 11 years ago

My newly born son will be 16 in 2031. I wonder if he will ever get a drivers license.

danans3• 11 years ago

When my 4 year old asks me when she will be allowed to drive, I tell her she won't have to, and that she'll just tell her watch to call a car for her, the same way she sees me talking to my smartwatch now.

holri4• 11 years ago

The driver is not the problem of cars. It is the fact that in average 1,5 t and 10 m2 are used to transport 100 kg and 1 m2. Driverlessness does not change the bad physics of car transportation decisively.

branchan11• 11 years ago

That's not the problem it is trying to solve. The problem description is: drivers cause accidents.

holri4• 11 years ago

A technology that solves the wrong problem is doomed to die.

thrownaway24246• 11 years ago

It sorta kinda might, if the cars have high utilization and don't need to park at their passengers' destinations.

holri4• 11 years ago

There is already working car sharing. No driverlessness needed.

sparkzilla• 11 years ago

The solution is driverless motorbikes

notatoad• 11 years ago

Even worse than that inefficiency is that for most cars, for 22+ hours per day, they are a 1.5T 10m2 beast thats doing absolutely nothing but taking up space. On a big slab of asphalt that we've poured just so it can sit there.

Self driving cars might not be more compact, but if they can keep themselves occupied for a higher percentage of the day they can be a big win for efficiency.

js22• 11 years ago

This is why we’ve programmed our cars to pause briefly after a light turns green before proceeding into the intersection

I programmed my brain to do this after learning to drive in Miami. I always look both ways before proceeding, just as I would before crossing as a pedestrian. When approaching an intersection, especially at night, I also try to look for what's coming from the side.

Intersections can be scary places

As a runner I find intersections terrifying and will typically cross instead a few hundred yards away. I'd rather jaywalk and have to deal with cars from only two directions. In my experience crosswalks are often the least safe place to cross.

Also, some comic relief:

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6NEFYCaKakE (Starman)

- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_BtPZRbZxY (George Carlin)

rhino3692• 11 years ago

Some areas just give a "brief" period where both lights are red. I'm surprised not everywhere does, or that is isn't increased.

Tloewald3• 11 years ago

What completely infuriates me is pedestrian crossings that don't automatically allow pedestrians to cross when the lights are in a state that would allow it.

themartorana• 11 years ago

Well, lights are often programmed with revenue in mind, as opposed to safety.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-red-light-camera-yello...

http://time.com/3505994/red-light-camera-problems-tickets/

Steuard• 11 years ago

It doesn't work, or so I've heard. Drivers in those cities learn to expect the safety margin of the delay, and statistically they become more willing to run a red light right after it changes.

benihana• 11 years ago

I programmed my brain to do this after learning to drive in Miami.

Same after living in Orlando and now New York. Just because you have the right of way doesn't mean it's safe.

The 2 ton block of metal that hits your meaty body at 45 miles per hour doesn't care that societal rules said you were safe to cross.

AceJohnny2• 11 years ago

As someone once quipped: "A green light only means it's legal to cross."

msiebuhr• 11 years ago

Newton's laws of motion ≫ Traffic law

girvo• 11 years ago

My friend was put into a coma for 6 weeks, suffered a traumatic brain injury and spent a year and a half in rehabilitation because she drove through an intersection on a green light as soon as it went green. The worst part is that the driver that hit her got off scott-free because she suffered memory loss so her testimony was void, and apparently the truck driver that witnessed it wasn't enough.

yinghang• 11 years ago

This intersection crash footage scares the fuck outta me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oZG1HgOyFkU

jedberg• 11 years ago

I'll admit that every time I see one of the self driving cars, I'm tempted to do something crazy nearby to see what it does, like cut it off or swerve towards it.

So far I've been a responsible adult and not done that But it's so tempting. Until I think of all the lives I will put in danger. Maybe they can invite me to a test track so I can be an a-hole to the self driving car in a safe and controlled environment. :)

jcoffland3• 11 years ago

Why is it that we feel this strong urge to mess with robots? They may exact their revenge one day.

_dark_matter_• 11 years ago

You are already too late...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk

fixermark8• 11 years ago

Possibly because of this effect.

http://www.nomachetejuggling.com/assets/machete_juggling.gif

grecy2• 11 years ago

You just described my ultimate "marketing" video for a self-driving car. Google should take one to a test track and get other drivers to mess with it and show us the video of what it does :)

js22• 11 years ago

About 33,000 people die on America’s roads every year.

There will eventually be a fatality caused by a self-driving car. I wonder how many of these we will be willing to accept. Say self-driving cars reduce fatalities by 10x. That is, by switching 100% to self-driving cars there are 3300 deaths a year, but they are all caused by self-driving cars.

Would America accept that?

I personally doubt we would. I think the number will have to be in the hundreds at most, closer to what we accept from plane crashes.

How safe do self-driving cars have to be before we start using them?

sp332• 11 years ago

Why not?

jdhawk2• 11 years ago

Because its easier to accept it if it was a humans fault, not some piece of code.

dubcanada• 11 years ago

I think the problem is, people really don't care about autonomous objects.

There is so many unknowns with this, it's really hard to know. Like if the self-driving car gets in an accident (that is a result of the self-driving car), who is responsible? Google? Me? Other driver? Car maker? Car seller? Insurance company?

Humans have kind of accepted that humans make mistakes, you're trained from day 1 to when you die, humans make mistakes. It's a bit different when it's a program with a giant state machine.

_lce02• 11 years ago

two self-driving cars, from different owners, crash: who is going to pay for that?

dragonwriter2• 11 years ago

Like if the self-driving car gets in an accident (that is a result of the self-driving car), who is responsible? Google? Me? Other driver? Car maker? Car seller? Insurance company?

The insurance company is not going to be responsible in the first instance, though it may be insuring someone who is responsible.

For the rest, its hardly as if the responsibility for damages that aren't attributable to improper operation but are instead result from the design/manufacture of the vehicle and/or the failure of the owner to properly maintain the vehicle in a safely operable condition have not been extensively litigated already; so, while "self-driving cars" might be a new thing, the legal system isn't devoid of guidance on how liability could apply to them.

Humans have kind of accepted that humans make mistakes

Self-driving car errors are all human mistakes, even if the mistake becomes visible distantly (potentially in both time and space) from the error itself.

kpil• 11 years ago

I think one of the problems is that when a self-driving car do cause an accident ,it will probably do so in an obviously incompetent way. Like running into a tree that was not mapped correctly, in a way a human would never do.

The cars may not be wrong often, but I think we would have a hard time accepting accidents that we cannot understand why they happened.

danans3• 11 years ago

(Disclaimer: I work at Google but not on self driving cars. My opinion, not my employer's, follows)

What about the reduced individual and societal costs (in insurance, medical, lost productivity, psychological trauma) that come with a 10x reduction in driving fatalities?

People might see the value of a 10x (or even smaller) reduction if it is expressed in those terms.

pluma6• 11 years ago

Common misconception amongst technophiles like us: humans aren't rational. We accept flaws in humans, not so much in machines. Because we can sympathise with human error but a machine error is always a defect.

sesutton• 11 years ago

I don't think it's so different than people being killed by a mechanical failure in a plane. Sure you can put the failure back on the mechanic or engineer who designed the plane but you can do that with software too.

devsquid3• 11 years ago

I would love to watch some vids of that visualization they showed off towards the end

justinpaulson2• 11 years ago

It's your lucky day! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsaES--OTzM cut to 0:55

devsquid3• 11 years ago

Awesome thank you

Tloewald3• 11 years ago

My takeaway — pause slightly before responding to a green light. (Something I usually do already as it happens.)

jcoffland3• 11 years ago

Google says their self-driving cars were not at fault in all 11 cases and perhaps technically they were not but I don't think you can discount the possibility that the self-driving cars may have behaved in an unexpected manner that may have contributed to the accidents. A machine might make choices that are logical but which throw off other drivers. Strict adherence to the rules could cause problems. For example, there are cases where changing lanes in an intersection, although illegal, could avoid an accident. If a machine controlled car insisted on following the rules an accident might be unavoidable or the action could force another driver in to an unavoidable accident.

I don't look forward to the day when I'm no longer allowed to drive my own car but it would be awesome if robot controlled cars coordinated among themselves to avoid traffic jams and to operate safely at much higher speeds. I could see cars of the future running normally at 200MPH+ were typical human drivers would find it difficult to operate safely. Hey and no more traffic tickets. One possible way to move in this direction would be to introduce robot only lanes.

fixermark8• 11 years ago

Given the information available on how people actually drive (besides that mentioned directly in this article), how would one distinguish the automated car behaving "strangely" from regular human driver weirdness?

I bet if you quiz twenty of your driving friends, you'll find more than three opinions on the right way to clear a four-way stop, for example.

cheshire1372• 11 years ago

Pause long enough that everyone else is equally hesitant, then gun it into the intersection!

andrewtbham• 11 years ago

how cool would it be to have a drone above your self driving car to augment it's perception and add another dimension to the driving conditions?

branchan11• 11 years ago

Come to think of it. Imagine driving a car yourself on a road full of self-driving cars. You would be able to drive as fast as you like and cut off anybody without ever being afriad of retaliation. Self-driving cars will always let you in because they do not want to cause a collision.

danans3• 11 years ago

I imagine that reckless driving laws will still be in effect in that scenario, so that will likely deter the behavior, unless it is sociopathic in motivation.

crocowhile2• 11 years ago

self-driving cars will have cameras and sensors all over them. I expect them to act as vigilantes by alerting police of reckless behaviour.

cheshire1372• 11 years ago

Arrrgh those diagrams are giving me road rage.

kabouseng• 11 years ago

What will be interesting will be how human behaviour will change once all cars are self driving cars. Some cyclist / pedestrians might blatantly cross a red light intersection because he knows the self driving cars will detect and stop for him... something to think about.

The View from the Front Seat of the Google Self-Driving Car

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