Why Self-Driving Cars Are Still a Long Way Down the Road

moon_unit2 writes "Technology Review has a piece on the reality behind all the hype surrounding self-driving, or driverless, cars. From the article: 'Vehicle automation is being developed at a blistering pace, and it should make driving safer, more fuel-efficient, and less tiring. But despite such progress and the attention surrounding Google's "self-driving" cars, full autonomy remains a distant destination. A truly autonomous car, one capable of dealing with any real-world situation, would require much smarter artificial intelligence than Google or anyone else has developed. The problem is that until the moment our cars can completely take over, we will need automotive technologies to strike a tricky balance: they will have to extend our abilities without doing too much for the driver.'"

Comments

Don't have to be perfect, just better

[JDG1980]

This writer makes a fundamental mistake: believing that if full driverless technology is not perfect or at least near-perfect, it is therefore unacceptable. But this is not true. Driverless technology becomes workable when it is better than the average human driver. That's a pretty low bar to clear. I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[icebike]

I know all of us think we're above-average drivers, but there are a lot of really bad drivers out there, and even a flawed automatic system could do a better job.

That depends entirely on the failure mode.

"Fail to Death" is actually acceptable to society as a whole as long as the dead person held his fate in his own hands at some point in the process. This is why we get so incensed about drunk drivers that kill others. A person doing everything right is still dead because of the actions of another. But if you drive under that railroad train by yourself, people regard it as "your own damn fault".

When the driverless car crosses the tracks in front of an oncoming train it will be regarded differently. Doesn't matter that the driver was a poor driver, and had a lot of fender benders. Most of those aren't fatal

In spite of that, I believe Google is far closer than the author gives them credit for. They have covered a lot of miles without accidents.

Granted, we don't know how many times there were errors in the Google cars, where one part of the system says there is nothing coming so change lanes, and the human or another part of the system notices the road is striped for no-passing and prevents it. Google is still playing a great deal of this pretty close to the vest.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Just because a self-driving car can't respond to outlier situations as well as a human can doesn't mean the car shouldn't be driving. By definition, those outlier situations aren't the norm. Most accidents are caused by someone picking something up they dropped, looing the wrong way at the time, changing the radio station, etc. or inibriation. These problems would be solved by a self-driving car, and while I don't have any numbers to back it up, something tells me that eliminating these will far outweigh the disasters that happen every once in a while.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[tnk1]

Point is, it is *not* better. Yes, it is probably better at normal driving situations, and certainly would probably be very welcome on a nice open highway. I imagine it would excel at preventing fender benders, which would be very nice indeed.

However, how would it react to sudden situations at high speed? According to the article and everything I know so far... not well. And the point of the article is that the automation would still require a driver for that, but the automation would actually cause the driver to be less alert than usual since they are less engaged. In turn that makes the driver be less capable in a sudden situation than they would have been without automation to begin with. In this way, it actually makes the average driver *worse* than they already are, just when they are needed to perform the most.

So, it is not necessarily good enough to improve one part of driving, if that improvement actually degrades another, equally important part of the system.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[ArsonSmith]

It'll be adopted just as quickly as the orders of magnitude safer Nuclear Power over coal has taken off despite a few relatively minor and contained accidents.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[Jeremi]

However, how would it react to sudden situations at high speed? According to the article and everything I know so far... not well.

In principle, at least, an automated system could react better than a human to sudden emergency situations... because a computer can process more input and faster decisions than a human can, and also (just as importantly) a computer never gets bored, sleepy, or distracted.

Dunno if Google's system reaches that potential or not, but if not it's just a matter of improving the technology until it can.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sorry but your comment is extremely clueless. You are asking about sudden situations at high speed. How would one end up in such a situation? By ignoring the laws and safe driving conditions. Just by obeying the speed limit and reducing it even more when sensor data gives warnings, the car can avoid such problems in the first place.

Almost %90 of the human drivers are confusing their luck of driving at 80+ Mph on bad weather (which is equal to playing Russian roulette with a gun with slightly higher capacity for ammo) with their driving abilities.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[spire3661]

Actually, some day it will get to the point where it will cost more in insurance to self-drive.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[Anubis IV]

There are two obvious solutions to that problem:
1) Subsidize the insurance carried by the car manufacturers in some way. It doesn't have to be done via the government either, since the manufacturers could simply introduce a new, ongoing cost with each purchase that arranges for the purchaser of the vehicle to pay their portion of the insurance cost being borne by the manufacturer. It's simple to do and the cost per person will go down over time as more people purchase the cars and rates go down due to a decreasing number of accidents as a result of human error. Of course, initial costs will be higher, but...

2) Eventually it will become safer to be driving in an automated car than not, and when that happens, there will start to be incentives from insurance companies to switch over to the self-driving cars. As a result, costs for personal insurance will eventually go down for passengers in driverless cars and rates will go up for people who choose to drive their own cars, since they'll increasingly be the ones responsible for causing accidents. As such, simple economics will eventually force most people to switch to driverless cars.

The second will happen on its own. Whether the first happens or not remains to be seen, but it'd certainly ease things along.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[VanessaE]

One problem it won't solve is the mindless moron behind you who nearly slams into your back end because you had to brake suddenly. This happened today in fact - I was on my way back from the store, doing about 35mph in a zone so marked, when a stray dog started to cross the street in front of my, and I instinctively stomped the brakes to avoid killing an innocent animal. Some little dipshit on a little blue moped was following too close and sounded his horn, then flipped me off two or three times, as if I was the one in the wrong.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[jonesy16]

I have to respectfully disagree. All of the situations that you've mentioned thus far are well within the realm of possibilities given current and near term technological advancements. Human beings will always be limited to 1) their imperfect memory of the route being driven assuming they've driven it before and 2) their sole source of input which is the visual electromagnetic spectrum. Driving doesn't require true AI, in my opinion. There are only so many things that can happen from a programmatic standpoint and it really boils down to collision avoidance. You have a route and a volume of space that you occupy along that route at any given time. Either something (an object, person, animal, etc) is going to occupy the same volume at the same time or it isn't. Collision detection is very easy to program, and the technology is sufficiently advanced at this point to be able to detect objects both big and large and make real-time assessments to determine the action that leads to the best chance for survival of both the object and the car. Those calculations are performed by a computer operating much faster and with near-instantaneous reaction time compared to its human equivalent that has to spend time deciding whether it's best to accelerate, brake, swerve (or a combination of those) and then perform the muscle actuations to initiate that action.

Remember, too, that a computer system can have access to near-perfect data such as GPS records for the route, as well as other object/road input systems beyond just the visual spectrum. That's not to say the right this minute we have a perfect set of data for every road, but certainly for the majority of traveled roads we have a pretty complete picture which could be used to provide the car's route in the absence of visual feedback. When it snows here, 4 lanes turns into 2 because humans can't see the lane boundaries, but that's not a limitation for a computer system programmed with the road trajectory to within inches. You may be able to interpolate where the road is 300 feet in front of you, but someone not familiar with the area might not. I drive on some country roads around here where, during a blizzard, you have no feedback about the roads location except for the random house every 1/4 mile. If I didn't know that road was perfect straight, I'd be off of it in no time. An advanced optics system can see further, clearer and more completely than ANY human.

I'm not trying to say that this whole process is trivial and there are reasons why it will take a long time to develop and implement. But I don't believe that there are any reasons which can't be overcome with present day technology.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[AK Marc]

WTF, most of the people who die from animal strikes die from trying to avoid the animal. People will choose to put their car in a tree, rather than hit a deer, though they don't necessarily think of that as the choice when they kill themselves. Avoiding animals is an issue. Dropping the emotion from dodging critters would be a great improvement in road safety. It would probably even improve safety of the animals. I've talked with one person who swerved to avoid a deer and the deer jumped in front of him and he hit it anyway. If he'd just braked as hard as practical in a straight line, he'd have never hit a deer.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[AK Marc]

The problem is that a computer only reacts to things it has been programmed to deal with, humans can be creative.

Humans "can be" creative, but in general aren't. A computer can be programmed to deal with anything. It's called "fail safe". Windows is programmed to deal with everything. If it's not sure what to do, it locks up with a blue screen. That's not useful, but is actually programmed for "everything."

It isn't hard to program it to slow and pull over when things are beyond the basic programming. If there is an unavoidable crash (someone over the center line on a road with a rock wall cliff on one side and a cliff drop on the other - guardrail or not, so no where to go, and even if you stopped in time, a crash would happen), then likely the best action is to slow as much as practical. The human may decide to drive into the rock cliff to reduce the chance of falling over the cliff drop, but the computer will just get you to slow. Perhaps not what you'd do, and it may take multiple traffic engineers a week to decide on the best course of action in that situation (and it may end up being something counter-intuitive and practically impossible like the best result for your occupants being to accelerate and steer into the other car to meet them at nearly the same speed in a flat-head on (not an offset one) that will minimize chances of going over the edge and allow all belts and bags to work as intended). And chances are no regular human would make that choice as a reflex. A computer might, as it would be based on rules programmed by engineers and many other smarter than the average driver.

Re:Don't have to be perfect, just better

[tompatman]

Good point, So, of these who is the better driver? The doctor who just finished an 18 hour shift half asleep at the wheel, the idiot teen texting while driving, the guy who had one too many at the bar or Google's self driving car? I know which one I'd vote for.

Taxis first

[Guano_Jim]

I think we'll probably see self-driving cars in congested, relatively low-speed environments like inner cities before they're screaming down the highway at 75mph.

The first robot taxi company is going to make a mint when they integrate a smartphone taxi-summoning app with their robo-chauffeur.

Re:Taxis first

[Attila Dimedici]

Most governments justify limiting taxi services by claiming it is to control safety, when in fact it is to control transportation (and to reward those taxi companies that support the correct government officials and initiatives).

And when one is involved in an acident ...

[Anonymous Coward]

... because they will be, who is going to be sued?

If I was a car manufacturer I don't think I'd be mad keen on going down the self-driving route - it's only going to mean more lawsuits.

Its not here yet but.

[maliqua]

i like to think of them more as personal variable path trains. whats really needed to make it work is a road infrastructure designed around this. when the focus moves away from the AI that can replace regular driver and more towards a combination of smart roads and smart cars that work together, then we will have what they hype is suggesting

Maybe AUTO drive only express lanes that cars will

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe AUTO drive only express lanes that cars will go at high speed at near bumper to bumper

If a human has to be in the driver's seat

[Spy Handler]

ready to take over in case of an emergency, what is the point of the whole thing?

And assuming the human will be tweeting on his Facebook Amazon phone with his hands nowhere near the steering wheel and feet propped up on the dashboard, how is he going to take over control of the car in a split second when an emergency occurs? He can't. So that means he will have to be alert and in a ready driving posture and paying attention to the road like he's really driving. But then what is the point? Might as well have him drive it himself and save money by not buying the Google Car stuff in the first place.

Either make a car that can go 100% without a human driver, or go back to web advertising and forget about the whole thing.

Re:What's wrong with Google cars

[compro01]

What happens next?

The driving computer sees the 4 feet of water ahead using the cameras/radar and stops because it determines the water is too deep to ford?

Computers can't bluff

[BetterSense]

Self-driving cars won't work for a completely different reason than all this...they will never work because they can't bluff.

As soon as people figure out that a computer is driving a car, they will pull out in front of it knowing they won't be hit. They will change lanes into it, knowing that it will slow down and get out of the way. And they will loath it, because it will never flatter their feelings.

Self-driving cars will be bullied off the road, because there is a lot more to driving with people than being able to control the car. There is a lot of social/herd/mental/aggression dynamics that are instinctive for people but not for computers.

Assisted driving first, insurance second

[EmperorOfCanada]

My prediction is that people will be so resistant to just letting go of the steering wheel that the major car companies will give up with that route and pursue having super assisted driving. That is basically cruise control on steroids. Already companies like Mercedes have cruise control that will maintain a safe distance from the car in front, matching their slower speed or even emergency braking if needed. Other cars will do what they can from having you change lanes and side-swiping another car. So I suspect that all the robot driver technology will end up holding your hand more and more. Technically you will be the driver but the robot will be ready to prevent stupidity and also react when you don't. After a while it will finally reach a point where you can just take your hands off the wheel (the car will probably bleat plaintively) and the car will maintain speed and the lane. But nobody will call it robotic driving.

But then the breakthrough will be that some company that has crossed some critical line of self-driving capability will say that full liability insurance is included with the price of the car. Potentially they will even cover all insurance short of trees falling on the car and whatnot as they will be sure the car can't cause an accident and that with all the cameras and sensors that some other fool can't blame you or your car if they are the cause of the accident.

At this point my money would be on cars finally being marketed and sold as robotic self-driving cars. Shortly after this the tidal wave will wash away all the non-robotic cars as being a dangerous menace. The key here is that most cars by this point will be largely capable of being autonomous or very close to autonomous with only antiques being the hold outs.

But, and the big but, is that some robotic car will drive off a cliff or into a train or whatever and that single incident or small collection of incidents (and their Youtube videos) will get everyone saying, "Those things are death traps, I'll never let the car drive." This will temporarily postpone the inevitable but going from 35,000 US annual road deaths to 35 will be too much reality for foolish people to fight for long.