Self-Driving Cars

[BigPiney]

I wish Tesla's software were smart enough to move the car over to the right lane where it belongs.

That would be nice. People that drive in the #1 lane exclusively are assholes.

[Jeff Lebowski]

Walter and I were right on this one.

[Donuthole]

Self-Driving Cars

Interesting info from a company who tried to go about automated driving the right (safe) way:

While competitors expended effort adding machine learning-based features such as enabling trucks to change lanes on their own, Seltz-Axmacher said he threw resources into safety engineering. The company was the first autonomous trucking company to submit a Voluntary Safety Self Assessment to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

But a problem emerged: that safety focus didn’t excite investors. Venture capitalists, Seltz-Axmacher said, had trouble grasping why the company expended massive resources preparing, validating and vetting his system, then preparing a backup system, before the initial unmanned test run. That work essentially didn’t matter when he went in search of more funding.

“There’s not a lot of Silicon Valley companies that have shipped safety-critical products,” he said. “They measured progress on interesting features.”

https://jalopnik.com/the-failure-of-this-self-driving-truck-company-tells-yo-1842417033?utm_medium

[Walter Sobchak]

https://jalopnik.com/the-failure-of-...033?utm_medium

Along the way, he also became a disbeliever, mainly because of the problem with edge cases, or solving for obstacles and other things on the road a self-driving car will encounter that it doesn’t usually do. That could be a deer, for example, or challenging weather conditions, but each case is different, and it turns out that it gets exponentially harder and more expensive for machines to learn them the rarer they get.

Which Seltz-Axmacher ultimately concludes is a big problem for the industry, since to get a machine to be at least as good as a human will take billions and billions of more dollars of investment and likely years of testing. And now that the VC firms are getting wise to this fact, it makes it even less likely that the companies like Starsky will even be given the chance.

Earlier in this thread, someone was talking about edge cases... just can't remember who that was. Hmmm.

[Omaha 680]

Earlier in this thread, someone was talking about edge cases... just can't remember who that was. Hmmm.

I was going to respond with a summon Walter but I knew you'd find your way in short order. Your thoughts in this thread went a long way in persuading me from thinking widespread use of autonomous automobiles were less than 10 years away to thinking I may not see it in my lifetime. Bottom line: trains will remain useful and I dont have to change careers!

Sent from my SM-G970U using Tapatalk

[beefytee]

I think I agree with the premise of this Cringley article although I'm a lot less bullish on the possibility of complete autonomy anytime in the near future:

https://www.cringely.com/2020/09/17/tesla-won-the-self-driving-car-war-they-just-arent-telling-us/

Let’s contrast Tesla and Waymo, Google’s autonomous car operation. Waymo came first and they have had cars driving around Mountain View for more than a decade, but most of Waymo’s algorithm development has been based on computer simulations, not actual driving. Waymo has driven millions of miles, sure, but they have simulated driving billions of miles. The only problem with this — basing algorithms on simulations — is that real life isn’t a simulation and it brings unexpected conditions — those exceptions I referred to above — that a designer might never think of. That’s where Tesla, with hundreds of thousands of cars out on the road every day, driving half-a-billion miles-per-week, has a huge advantage.

Waymo/Google has taken a terrible approach. Autonomous functionality is going to come in small incremental steps and Tesla seems to be taking that approach and gathering lots of data from real drivers to better understand how things work on the road.

[Uncle Ted]

The beginning of the end for BSU graduates:

Self-Driving Trucks Ready to Make FedEx Deliveries in Texas

Aurora Innovation, a California-based self-driving technology company, this week begins testing autonomous trucks made by Bellevue-based Paccar, hauling FedEx loads between Dallas and Houston. The pilot marks the next phase of a partnership between the three companies that was announced in January.

"There's nothing that will be more transformational" to the trucking industry's economics than the possibility of removing drivers, said Paccar chief technology officer John Rich.
[...]

https://www.govtech.com/fs/self-driving-trucks-ready-to-make-fedex-deliveries-in-texas

What could go wrong?

[beefytee]

Looking to bring back Walter here:

https://www.theguardian.com/technolo...-the-slow-lane

I would be shocked if we do not achieve full self-driving safer than a human this year,” said Tesla chief executive, Elon Musk, in January. For anyone who follows Musk’s commentary, this might sound familiar. In 2020, he promised autonomous cars the same year, saying: “There are no fundamental challenges.” In 2019, he promised Teslas would be able to drive themselves by 2020 – converting into a fleet of 1m “robotaxis”. He has made similar predictions every year going back to 2014.

Maybe this is the year, Elon!

We all know it isn't.

[YOhio]

Self-driving cars can't come soon enough. Just in the past couple days 3 kids playing outside were hit and killed by drivers, another kid injured and an adult killed in a hit and run.

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/5-year-old-hit-and-killed-by-car-in-sandy

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/1-killed-in-salt-lake-city-hit-and-run

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/5-year-old-hit-and-killed-by-car-in-sandy

[Bo Diddley]

Self-driving cars can't come soon enough. Just in the past couple days 3 kids playing outside were hit and killed by drivers, another kid injured and an adult killed in a hit and run.

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/5-year-old-hit-and-killed-by-car-in-sandy

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-news/1-killed-in-salt-lake-city-hit-and-run

https://www.fox13now.com/news/local-...y-car-in-sandy

Amen. I say this all the time. Just take a look at the drivers around you at any given time. Half of them are looking down at their phones--or at least looking at other drivers looking at their phones--instead of paying attention to the road!

[BigFatMeanie]

I think you folks really mean not just "self-driving cars" but actually "mandatory use of self-driving cars", no?

And how many deaths from self-driving cars will it take before you start bemoaning them?

[Jeff Lebowski]

True self-driving cars are still decades away.

In the meantime, they should make the collision detection/lane assist/automatic braking/360-camera/etc stuff mandatory like they did with backup cameras a few years ago.

[Bo Diddley]

And how many deaths from self-driving cars will it take before you start bemoaning them?

When they exceed the deaths that occurred under human driven cars, I'll start to worry.

[YOhio]

I think you folks really mean not just "self-driving cars" but actually "mandatory use of self-driving cars", no?

And how many deaths from self-driving cars will it take before you start bemoaning them?

[chrisrenrut]

Not good. I wonder what level of criminal and/or civil liability the driver will have for this, since the the manufacture still warns that drivers must still stay aware and avoid collisions.

https://www.ksl.com/article/50445474...ilot-uhp-says-