Autonomous cars? I think not

[antigee]

deleted bad link bad info

[human909]

deleted bad link bad info

Now I'm more curious. Was the article you linked incorrect?

[bychosis]

We can drastically reduce the risk of death by ensuring all vehicles, autonomous or not travel, no faster than 30kph on urban roads without hard barriers

Just saying.

Auto drive cars being slower isn’t a bad idea, after all you’ll be able to actually do other stuff while driving instead of piloting the vehicle and trying to decide wether to run over the dog or the cat.

[antigee]

deleted bad link bad info

Now I'm more curious. Was the article you linked incorrect?

[dull]something in my news feed about Waymo (google) but despite having Nov 2018 date was a 2017 scraped/pieced together "article" with some malware looking adverts, clickbait so I accelerated the forum out of danger and culled it [/no_moral_conundrums]

[Strawburger]

Off topic slightly, here’s me being interviewed on autonomous vehicles (funded by transport for nsw).

I’ll link the interview once published...

[Strawburger]

Deleted.

[mikesbytes]

Roo detection for driverless cars https://www.prime7.com.au/news/5566-roo ... 12cSUhci9I

Bonus points for recoginising the BNA member in the video

[Thoglette]

7 Arguments Against the Autonomous-Vehicle Utopia, All the ways the self-driving future won’t come to pass
ALEXIS C. MADRIGAL 12:14 PM ET

Lots of good argument and worth reading but for the time poor, the cases against. Only one has to be true.

Bear Case 1: They Won’t Work Until Cars Are as Smart as Humans
Bear Case 2: They Won’t Work, Because They’ll Get Hacked
Bear Case 3: They Won’t Work as a Transportation Service
Bear Case 4: They Won’t Work, Because You Can’t Prove They’re Safe
Bear Case 5: They’ll Work, But Not Anytime Soon
Bear Case 6: Self-Driving Cars Will Mostly Mean Computer-Assisted Drivers
Bear Case 7: Self-Driving Cars Will Work, But Make Traffic and Emissions Worse

I think 5 is pretty weak, having watched the death of analog audio; the death of film (and now digital) cameras; and currently the last days of valve amplifiers.

Arguements 3 and 7 resonate for me: AVs are just driver-less taxis.

[find_bruce]

Bear Case 1: They Won’t Work Until Cars Are as Smart as Humans

Difficulty with that argument is that road safety is dictated by the lowest common denominator & that is a driver who is about as situationally aware as a rock. An autonomous car should easily pass the knowledge of the rules test & I wonder whether even the current autonomous cars would pass a driving test.

That said the real problem with driving is that humans make mistakes - always have, always will. What autonomous cars do is replace errors made by human drivers with errors made by human programmers & operators. The case that started this thread is an example of how those errors can arise in ways that beggar belief

[Thoglette]

What autonomous cars do is replace errors made by human drivers with errors made by human programmers & operators. The case that started this thread is an example of how those errors can arise in ways that beggar belief

“To err is human, but to really foul things up requires a computer.” Bill Vaughan, 1969 (probably)

[Strawburger]

Don’t think of them as being perfect. Think of them as improving what already exists.

Also, they will form a new public transport system. Ownership models and road usage (pay per use) will change.

Emissions will improve as long as we use wind and solar

Traffic will be similar, need to rely on hubs to mass transit (eg driverless cars to a mass transit provider such as airport or train)

Anything can be hacked, even your car today (except my 45 year old classic car )

Problems with theory vs practical. Theorists want to make perfect before release, hence never become perfect. Private sector gets 95% there and implement.

[Thoglette]

Also, they will form a new public transport system. Ownership models and road usage (pay per use) will change.

How? They have all the same problems as taxis and show no sign of being measurably cheaper (computers are cheap, sensors are not and complex, redundant, reliable systems are expensive, as evidenced by 1/3rd the cost of a current car being the electronics - unlike your 45yo beast)

As proposed, they have none of the features of an actual public transport system ( some PT systems do use taxis for the last mile as part of an integrated solution).

Worst case we end up with a "o-bike" situation with AVs:- broken down pieces of junk littering our cities; consumers and suppliers scammed; far-off investors and CEOs pocketing the $$$; and various levels of govt working out how to tidy the mess up.

[human909]

Also, they will form a new public transport system. Ownership models and road usage (pay per use) will change.

How? They have all the same problems as taxis and show no sign of being measurably cheaper (computers are cheap, sensors are not and complex, redundant, reliable systems are expensive, as evidenced by 1/3rd the cost of a current car being the electronics - unlike your 45yo beast)

Not to mention the issue of capacity. Even if they did form a new 'public transport system' they would face pretty much all the same congestion issues of the current road system.

Unless ride sharing becomes common place then it would be a very poor form of public transport.

[mikesbytes]

I can perceive the possibility that some of these self drive vehicles will become large mobile rooms such has a small cimena or almost anything that can happen while moving

[LateStarter]

It is not "when" autonomous will be ready or "good enough", it is happening now.

I am no fan boy for Google / Waymo but they say they are currently rolling out unattended (ie no safety driver) autonomous vehicles in "metro Phoenix", I am not familiar with their intended operational area (which no doubt will have every mm mapped) but this term according to Wikipedia describes a 40,000sq km area with almost 5 million population. They seem to have about 500 vehicles in this fleet and announced mid 2018 an order to "purchase up to 62,000 additional Chrysler Pacifica Hybrid minivans from FCA US starting later this (ie 2018) year to begin a national expansion of the company's public driverless ride-hailing fleet"

https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/31/1741 ... ving-fleet

plus they are adding another 20,000 fully electric Jaguar I-PACE vehicles to their driverless test fleet

With these they will be racking up over 10,000,000 km PER DAY with millions or riders

Sounds like it is already here, 80,000 vehicles is not a "test", it is the vanguard

[opik_bidin]

I maintain AVs are good if they have dedicated lanes/right of way and used as a public transport. Think of Trains and buses with no drivers. Some have dedicated route while others are demand based.

It's easy on a track where nothing can interfere unless the signal says the vehicle must stop.

[Thoglette]

It is not "when" autonomous will be ready or "good enough", it is happening now.

Exactly. Bugger waiting for "good enough" (or even working out what that is0, let's do it because we can (boost our share price ).

[Tamiya]

I maintain AVs are good if they have dedicated lanes/right of way and used as a public transport. Think of Trains and buses with no drivers. Some have dedicated route while others are demand based.

It's easy on a track where nothing can interfere unless the signal says the vehicle must stop.

Tesla + The Boring Company's underground transport tunnels

[opik_bidin]

I maintain AVs are good if they have dedicated lanes/right of way and used as a public transport. Think of Trains and buses with no drivers. Some have dedicated route while others are demand based.

It's easy on a track where nothing can interfere unless the signal says the vehicle must stop.

Tesla + The Boring Company's underground transport tunnels

nope

Elon just combined the worst of two worlds, the subway and the car. less capacity than a train, less freedom than a car

[LateStarter]

Exactly. Bugger waiting for "good enough" (or even working out what that is0, let's do it because we can (boost our share price ).

Given some of cowperson outfits (uber / tesla) pursuing driverless vehicle technology you are right to be sceptical but I draw a different conclusion from the announced 100+ fold increase (approx 600 to 62,000 to 80,000+) in the Waymo test fleet. If they are not actually "good enough", in fact if they are not significantly better than human drivers now then they will just be swapping 62,000 drivers for 62,000 lawyers because in a litigious country like the US they will have the pants sued off them.

I see their decision to significantly ramp up their fleet as indicating that they are confident they can defend the decision to federal. state, local authorities and in the courts and can demonstrate their driverless technology is significantly better / safer than human drivers. And if there is any doubt then doing millions of trips per day with their expanded vehicle fleet is going to build up an unassailable body of hard evidence that their confidence is well founded. The technology will only get better (the evidence is that human drivers are in aggregate getting worse) therefore the gap will only widen.

Better get ready for it.

[human909]

Elon just combined the worst of two worlds, the subway and the car. less capacity than a train, less freedom than a car

Pretty much this.

[LateStarter]

A few interesting articles...

“We humans can be good drivers when we are focused,” Krafcik says. “But because we are human, we are often not focused.” And despite having a century to get better at driving, we seem stuck in neutral, if not reverse (see: texting while driving). Yet we’ve come to accept a reality in which tens of thousands of people are killed on the roads each year, and many thousands more people seriously injured. Waymo’s vision is one in which every single crash is methodically pored over the way regulators study airline crashes, precisely because they have become so rare.

And getting rid of all that home to station traffic and stupid "commuter carparks", what will school drop off / pickup be like if done by driverless vehicles? With the cars being competent and safer to be around maybe commuters and school students might actually ride a bicycle again?

Beyond driverless cars themselves, Waymo may even be a boon to public transportation—for instance, a “last mile” solution in which passengers can be ferried to a transit hub without the worry of driving or parking. In July, Waymo and the Phoenix-area transit authority announced a pilot program to allow transit workers (and in time, seniors and the disabled) to hail Waymo cars from their homes to light-rail stations and back.

There is just one thing Waymo will not be doing, Krafcik says: creating its own vehicles. .... “We’re not building cars,” Krafcik says. “We’re building the driver.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovati ... 180970713/

Sharing the future

It’s already [June 2018] possible to book a ride in a Waymo vehicle with no human behind the steering wheel. That won’t just take work from human Lyft and Uber drivers; it will change life for millions of travelers in these cities.

That’s because these cars will be not just driverless but also probably ownerless, at least in the customary sense. Waymo appears to be aiming squarely at a shared-transportation model.

Pry the steering wheel from my cold dead hands

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/6114 ... -succeeds/

Waymo’s Phoenix Project Could Tell Us If Self-Driving Cars Can Improve Public Transportation

Last week [Aug 2018], autonomous car developer Waymo (a subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet) announced plans to conduct a two-stage experiment in Phoenix, AZ, by teaming up with Valley Metro, the region’s public transit system.

The goal: figure out if Waymo’s autonomous cars can increase access to public transportation. If people have a low-cost way to hail a ride to a bus/light rail station that is maybe a bit too far to walk to, they’ll be more inclined to use public transportation (rather than just making sure they have their own car to drive to work or wherever).

https://futurism.com/the-byte/public-tr ... enix-waymo

[Ross]

Wielding rocks and knives, Americans attack self-driving cars

https://www.smh.com.au/world/north-amer ... 50p21.html

Some people have pelted Waymo vans with rocks, according to police reports. Others have repeatedly tried to run the vehicles off the road. One woman screamed at one of the vans, telling it to get out of her suburban neighbourhood. A man pulled up alongside a Waymo vehicle and threatened the employee riding inside with a piece of PVC pipe.

In one of the more harrowing episodes, a man waved a gun at a Waymo vehicle and the emergency backup driver at the wheel. He told police that he "despises" driverless cars, referencing the killing of a female pedestrian in March in nearby Tempe by a self-driving Uber car.

"There are other places they can test," said Erik O'Polka, 37, who was issued a warning by police in November after multiple reports that his Jeep Wrangler had tried to run Waymo vans off the road — in one case, driving head-on toward one of the self-driving vehicles until it was forced to come to an abrupt stop.

His wife, Elizabeth, 35, admitted in an interview that her husband "finds it entertaining to brake hard" in front of the self-driving vans, and that she herself "may have forced them to pull over" so she could yell at them to get out of their neighbourhood. The trouble started, the couple said, when their 10-year-old son was nearly hit by one of the vehicles while he was playing in a nearby cul-de-sac.

"They said they need real-world examples, but I don't want to be their real-world mistake," said Erik, who runs his own company providing information technology to small businesses.

"They didn't ask us if we wanted to be part of their beta test," added his wife, who helps run the business.

[Thoglette]

With the cars being competent and safer to be around maybe commuters and school students might actually ride a bicycle again?

Not a hope. As our planners, technologists and market regulators refuse to learn the lessons of the past, we get to repeat history. Kindermort.

[find_bruce]

Sometimes points are best made in cartoon form