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Will the Google Car Turn Out To Be the Apple Newton of Automobiles?

Posted by samzenpus on from the flop-or-not dept.

An anonymous reader writes The better question may be whether it will ever be ready for the road at all? The car has fewer capabilities than most people seem to be aware of. The notion that it will be widely available any time soon is a stretch. From the article: "Noting that the Google car might not be able to handle an unmapped traffic light might sound like a cynical game of 'gotcha.' But MIT roboticist John Leonard says it goes to the heart of why the Google car project is so daunting. 'While the probability of a single driver encountering a newly installed traffic light is very low, the probability of at least one driver encountering one on a given day is very high,' Leonard says. The list of these 'rare' events is practically endless, said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (he’s 49)."

44 of 287 comments (clear)

  1. How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by Spy+Handler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    didnt RTFA but seriously? Google car can't recognize a red light??

    I would've thought some of the better Slashdotters could write software that recognizes a traffic light from a camera feed, let alone the geniuses at Google.

    1. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I'd imagine it's pretty damn hard. Harder still is figuring out whether that stop light applies to the lane you're in, and the direction you're turning. Stop lights don't always line up with lanes exactly, they don't always point straight, etc etc.

    2. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Informative

      didnt RTFA but seriously? Google car can't recognize a red light??

      Yes, the Google car can recognize a traffic light. TFA is written by a confused journalist. He found out that Google maps out roads, keeping a database of signs, lane markings, etc. He then concluded that the Google car only works on pre-mapped roads. That is not true. If the car is driving on a pre-mapped road, it will use the info from the database. But it can still drive on other roads with good accuracy. There are still come problems to be worked out, and plenty of testing to be done, before SDCs are ready for sale to the public. But TFA is a very inaccurate description of those problems.

    3. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think the problem is that "good accuracy" is not yet to the point where the driverless car is less likely to run over a pedestrian at an intersection than a car piloted by a human.

      I very much disagree with this assessment. Google's SDC has been tested thousands of times with a huge range of pedestrian scenarios. It may not be better than an alert and primed human, but it is almost certainly better than an average human, which is the important criteria. If I was walking across an intersection, I would trust a Google SDC far more than someone late for an appointment, driving a Chevy Tahoe with a cellphone in one hand, a Starbucks latte in the other, and two screaming kids in the back seat.

    4. Re: How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Oooh, it would be so fun to clone those RFID chips and put them in incorrect locations then watch the cars freak out...

    5. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      I'm interested in whether the car can set an appropriate speed when it comes upon a sign saying "Speed Limit 35 When Children Are Present" or "...When School In Session"

      It can use OCR to read signs. It also can make a decision about whether school is in session. Since it cannot reliably detect when children are present, it would most likely just default to the lower speed.

      whether the car can read and obey hand signals

      Hand signals are a problem. Google is working on it. But SDCs aren't going to just pop up on the road one day. Their release will be coordinated with the police. So one solution is for the police to use LED flashlight wands that the SDCs are programmed to recognize.

      whether the car knows right turns are prohibited at a particular intersection during rush hour.

      Sure. An SDC would know the same why a human would. By reading the sign, or by "remembering" by accessing the database on that intersection.

    6. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ls671 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > What we need is better geo-mapping from cities themselves

      For driver less cars to work, the whole city should be wired so the google car doesn't have to recognize the red light, it would just get the information through some type of wireless transmission thus knowing it has to stop. It may fall back on A.I. on country roads with not much traffic but then again.

      A.I. is not advanced as we sometimes think it is. Even good drivers can have trouble recognizing a red light in bright sunlight conditions.

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    7. Re: How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      Oooh, it would be so fun to clone those RFID chips and put them in incorrect locations then watch the cars freak out...

      The SDC would notice the conflict between the RFID and the sensor data, and pull over and stop, while alerting the human driver/passenger.

      Someone with sufficient education and expertise to clone an RFID would probably have better things to do than pull a stupid juvenile prank that could send them to prison for a long time. There are numerous ways that people can sabotage infrastructure and kill people. We can't prevent that, but it is rarely a problem, because most people are not motivated to murder random strangers. You can make human drivers "freak out" if you shoot at them with a sniper rifle. How often does that happen?

    8. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by cheater512 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      If the cars that fall back to AI then communicate their observations and decisions back to Google then to other cars then the next car wouldn't need AI and could improve knowledge of the area, plus any particularly bad problem spots can be highlighted for further investigation at Google HQ.

      Normal drivers don't have LIDAR. I assume it is a massive assistance for some aspects of Google's work.

    9. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by jklovanc · · Score: 2

      Sorry but this article has different information.

      The key advantage is that the car isn’t just seeing and figuring out the world as it drives along. It’s basing its actions on vast amounts of data the Google Self-Driving Car Project has already compiled about every road it travels. Before the car drives itself into new territory, the project team collects detailed information on permanent features: lane markers, the precise location of the curbs, the height of traffic lights, local speed limits, and so forth.

      “We require digital maps in order for our cars to be able to drive,” Andrew Chatham, who leads mapping on the project, said at a press event Tuesday. That data “makes the job of building the self-driving car software much simpler.”

      The car has a good idea of what to expect from any stretch of road, freeing up the software to deal with cars, pedestrians, cyclists, construction, and any other new obstacles in real time.

      That’s the “magic of maps,” Software Lead Dmitri Dolgov said. But that “magic” inherently limits the range of the self-driving car to areas Google has the data for. As Chatham pointed out, “If we have not already built our own maps in an area, the car cannot drive there.” He noted that as the car’s sensors get better, they will rely less on perfect accuracy, but Chris Urmson, the project director, emphasized the key role these maps play.

      Regular Google maps do not have enough accuracy.

    10. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by TheGavster · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I think the real goal would be to have all vehicles self-drive; then they can be coordinated to interlace at intersections, removing the need for stop lights and saving a ton of fuel!

      --
      "Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
    11. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by mjwx · · Score: 2

      If I was walking across an intersection, I would trust a Google SDC far more than someone late for an appointment, driving a Chevy Tahoe with a cellphone in one hand, a Starbucks latte in the other, and two screaming kids in the back seat.

      The problem you have is, someone like that wont let the car drive itself because a self driving car will stick to speed limits and slow down at pedestrian crossings because it will be programmed to anticipate stopping at a pedestrian crossing (like a defensive driver is trained to do). Nope, someone that self adsorbed and with such poor time management skills will be taking manual control with the pedal pressed to the floor whilst screaming into their phone. You simply cant overcome selfishness with a new technology.

      But actual autonomous cars are years away from practical use. Decades away from the way you're thinking. The first autonomous cars will be normal cars with an autonomous mode that only works on specially upgraded roads which you can guarantee will be limited access roads (freeways and motorways) with no traffic lights.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    12. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Yes, the Google car can recognize a traffic light. TFA is written by a confused journalist.

      If you're going to quibble about credentials, you ought to at least read the summary, where the MIT roboticist says he doesn't expect to see fully self-driving cars in his lifetime. Do you think he is confused too?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    13. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by Charliemopps · · Score: 2

      Describe for me, programmatically, the difference between a stoplight and a taillight.
      and a police light
      and a neon sign
      and every other red light on earth...

      and also, please include all the many shapes and sizes of the various stoplights all over the country.

      Stop signs have a very specific shape, and text printed on them. They do not very from place to place. They're piratically a damned bar code as far software is concerned. It's almost like they were designed for the task.

    14. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Google's SDC has been tested thousands of times with a huge range of pedestrian scenarios. It may not be better than an alert and primed human, but it is almost certainly better than an average human,

      I'd really be interested if you have a reference for this. Even if your reference is just a Google PR person, that's still better than nothing.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    15. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Incidentally, the author may be confused, but Google themselves have confirmed that the car has problems in a number of scenarios, including:

      The Google car doesn’t know much about parking: It can’t currently find a space in a supermarket lot or multilevel garage.
      It can't consistently handle coned-off road construction sites, and
      its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal.
      it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crumbled-up piece of newspaper

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    16. Re: How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 2

      Yes, your argument certainly convinced me that no one would ever vandalize street signs

      The question isn't whether someone would "ever" do it, but whether people would do it often enough for it to matter. Snipers occasionally shoot into traffic. But we don't consider that when we design roads and cars. Nonetheless, the algorithm to handle a sabotaged location sensor (RFID, Magenetic, or whatever) is brain dead obvious: pull over and stop the car. Stolen stop signs cause a few deaths every year. Those deaths would be eliminated with SDCs, because they could access their database and know the stop sign was supposed to be there. SDCs would likely be more resistant than human drivers to most forms of sabotage.

    17. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by JasonGoatcher · · Score: 2

      Yeah, you don't want the military vehicle running over people, then the soldiers wouldn't have the fun of shooting them.

    18. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by phantomfive · · Score: 2

      Computers will be thousands, if not millions, of times more capable.

      Are you guessing this based on Moore's law?

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    19. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by NicBenjamin · · Score: 2

      Air travel is very simple in terms of dealing with traffic. The sky is big, so you simply point the direction you want to go and you go.

      But there's a whole host of things an aerial autopilot needs to be able to do that GoogleDrive doesn't.

      For example, for a plane to fly it has to have an Airspeed above it's stall-speed. Airspeed refers to the speed of the air going over the wings. If your aircraft is x lbs, you need x lbs of air under your wings at all times or you lose lift and instead of going up you're going down. The way you get more air under the wings is go through the air faster. So your computer needs to know how fast you are moving relative to the wind. This is related to the speed the aircraft is going relative to the ground, because if you add 150 MPH to airspeed you've generally added 150 MPH to groundspeed as well, but that really depends on things like the exact geometry of your vector related to the vector of the prevailing winds.

      Then there's fuel management. Commercial aircraft generally have fuel tanks in their wings because if you put the tanks in the fuselage there's less room for passengers. They also have fuel tanks bigger them most cars. Seriously. The Dreamliner package your talking about is available on an aircraft with 33k gallon fuel tanks in the small fuel tank model. That's more then 200k pounds of fuel. And if you burn all the fuel in the left fuel tank before you burn any in the right fuel tank your carefully calculated center of gravity moves to some spot on your right wing, which makes things very difficult. In routine flights this isn't an issue, because there's an engine on each wing, but if a goose runs into the right engine the computer has to know to start transferring fuel from the right tank to the left with a crossfeed pump or things get to be problematic.

      Ice is another issue. Ice on a wing changes the wings shape, which means the physics of how the wing interacts with the air changes, which in turn means how the pilot uses the wing to stay in the air has to change. The ice also adds weight, which changes both fuel consumption and flight characteristics. Ice is one of the leading causes of passenger plane crashes in the US. And it's something an autopilot has to deal with.

      There's a reason it's much harder to become a licensed pilot then a licensed driver.

    20. Re: How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

      would people do it often enough. Yes. Yes they would. Around my place it happens about once a week that somebody reprograms a construction sign. And you seem to not understand how teenagers work. When they steal a stop sign, are they thinking they're hoping to kill somebody? No, no they are not. They think it's funny. They don't stop and think what the consequences of their actions are. You're problem is, you're applying logic to a fundamentally illogical situation. People and logic are separate entities most of the time.

      And I'm glad your algorithm to handle sabotaged location sensors is so dead brain simple, but what about the algorithm to detect them. Remember, you have to assume somebody is trying to do it and not have it detected. That's where the lols are. Or are you proposing that a sensor bank is kept in the car? How is it updated? Kept in a cloud based server? What if there's a DDOS or wireless connection is currently unavailable? What happens if somebody forgets to enter a node into the database, remember, road workers probably aren't the most intelligent folks, and the bureaucrats will view entering that info as the road crews job.

      You've oversimplified a problem in the extreme. This is a stupidly difficult problem because the world is big, complex and extremely dynamic. Seriously, if the cars simply pull over if it detects sabotage, what's the average failure rate of these chips? even a 99.99% non-failure rate means there's going to be a hell of a lot of cars stopped on the side of the road for no reason, angering everybody who's now late for work.

    21. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by DrXym · · Score: 2

      But it can still drive on other roads with good accuracy.

      The lights are out at a junction. How does "good accuracy" help the car figure out when it's safe to proceed, or the order to proceed when there are buses, cars, trucks coming from all direction with an implied priority based on conditions and time people have waited?

      Now a cop turns up to direct the traffic because of a fender bender. How does the car with "good accuracy" know to obey the cop's hand signals?

      Now the repair crew turn up to fix the lights and put cones out so people turning have to do so from the adjacent lane. How does "good accuracy" cope with that?

      Now a crazy person turns up and begins directing traffic. How does "good accuracy" tell the difference between the cop and the crazy person.

      That's just a trivial demonstration of the problems a self drive vehicle would face. It's trivial to think of others - road flooding, narrow roads, diversions, vehicle break downs, animals running out, snow / leaves obstructing sensors etc. Of course in every case the simplest answer would be for the driver to override the car and manually drive it. But that naturally puts a dampener on some of the absurd expectations people have for these vehicles (e.g. that they can drive off and park themselves, self drive taxis, sleeping or drunk drivers etc.). And if the car gets confused too often or "fails to safe" for no reason then it will be infuriating.

      It would be far more productive to concentrate on advanced driver assistance - cruise control, distance maintenance, lane tracking / marker detection, collision / hazard avoidance and parking assistance.

    22. Re:How hard is it to recognize a stoplight? by N1AK · · Score: 2

      A human, I might add that's breaking the law. Distracted driving is illegal.

      Do you have any idea how stupid that point is? I suppose the people being held by ISIS shouldn't worry because most people wouldn't behead them, only someone breaking the law and that's illegal! I can stop locking my house as well because entering and taking my stuff is a crime! That must mean I shouldn't be concerned about it because it's illegal.

      It's pretty fucking obvious that illegal, distracted or poor driving causes the vast majority of accidents. Unfortunately there's a lot of illegal, distracted or poor driving. If you can suggest somewhere one can drive where there isn't then maybe people there don't need to consider it, but people everywhere else do.

  2. Rain and snow? by iotaborg · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Perhaps more of a concern is the issue where the car will fail in rain/snow, both of things people in the Bay Area rarely experience.

    1. Re:Rain and snow? by ShanghaiBill · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Perhaps more of a concern is the issue where the car will fail in rain/snow

      LIDAR does not "fail" in rain/snow/fog. It just doesn't work as well. So what? Neither do human eyeballs. Sure performance will be degraded in bad weather, and the car will have to slow down to compensate. Which is exactly what humans do.

    2. Re:Rain and snow? by Type44Q · · Score: 3, Funny

      Sure performance will be degraded in bad weather, and the car will have to slow down to compensate. Which is exactly what humans do.

      Considering that Texans and Okies tend to speed up when the streets are slippery and visibility's been reduced, I suspect this confirms my suspicion: hicks aren't human! :p

    3. Re:Rain and snow? by Guspaz · · Score: 2

      LIDAR still works to detect surfaces, but when the road is covered in snow, the surface it's seeing isn't the road.

      How can the car know where the lanes are if it can't even tell where the road starts and ends? GPS isn't accurate enough for the car to guess which lane it's in without visual cues, and if there are no visual cues, then the car effectively can't operate.

      And, as it happens, Google does say that their cars don't work on snow-covered roads. That's a bit of a problem where I live, where you can have snow up to 7 months a year.

  3. I could see it used in specific cases.... by ArcadeNut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If they built special lanes or only worked on places like the Freeway. It would be nice to have a self driving car for a 6 hour road trip and then manually take over in the cities or where the car had issues.

    --
    Visit the Arcade Restoration Workshop @ http://www.arcaderestoration.com
    1. Re:I could see it used in specific cases.... by phantomfive · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I think his point was:

      1) The car can drive for 2.5 hours on the freeway by itself, while you are not paying attention.
      2) When the car arrives to an offramp, it will notify you (in advanced) that it's your turn to start driving.
      3) If there is a problem along the way, the car will pull over and stop (or similar) before handing you control.

      That way, you don't have to focus intently while the car is in control.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
  4. Limited Vision by pubwvj · · Score: 2, Interesting

    "said Leonard, who does not expect a full self-driving car in his lifetime (heâ(TM)s 49)."

    He is a man of limited vision. I did a lot of AI research and development, long ago, back in the dark ages of computing, and I disagree. I'm only a few years older and I do expect to see fully self-driving cars in my lifetime. Perhaps I merely will live longer...

  5. Re:At least ... by sexconker · · Score: 3, Funny

    Beat up Martin.
    Eat up Martha.
    http://i.imgur.com/06fu9sE.jpg

  6. Re:At least ... by MightyYar · · Score: 2, Informative

    Unless my history is rusty, Newton begat the ARM chip that we all know so well.

    --
    W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
  7. Cars will be the secondary market by Bryan+Bytehead · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The first vehicle with this technology is not going to be a personal car, or anything that resembles a personal car (like a taxi). It's going to be semi trucks with trailers.

    From a conference I sat in on last week (dealing with railroads, not trucks themselves), the turnover rate for truck drivers is over 100% per year. This is considered a plus for the railroads. I say that this is a plus for autonomous trucks. They drive autonomously site to site, and then, a driver takes over to get them parked into the loading dock (most likely), the trucks manage to do this autonomously (maybe, but not the scenario I see winning out, not at the beginning), or the docks are redesigned to make it easy for the autonomous trucks to park them in loading position (what will happen once autonomous trucks are widely used).

    Yes, I realize other changes will have to be made. Refueling will have to be done manually in the beginning. That may mean the truck stop hires a person or two, that then takes care of the autonomous trucks, and I'm sure the owners will gladly pay a bit of a premium to get their trucks fueled. At least until the automated fuel pumps for the trucks are in place, at existing or new truck stops.

    I have zero doubt that my great grandchildren won't have to learn how to drive a vehicle. I have grandchildren, and yes, I expect that they will have to learn how to drive, the technology is moving that fast.

    Yet.

    --
    Bryan
  8. Humans have rules for driving by Beeftopia · · Score: 2

    Humans have rules for driving. For example:

    -> If you see a traffic light, identify what color it is, then continue, slow down, or stop based on one of those 3 colors.

    So the Google Car cannot identify a traffic light? Or if it does, it cannot identify its color? If so, is that a weakness in the computing power? Like, a supercomputer could do these things, but a reasonably sized onboard computer cannot? Or a weakness in "vision" sensors?

    -> Paper versus rock in the road: This, I can understand. There are a myriad things in the road. The decision here is, can the car safely pass over it? Inability to determine this is due to vision sensors or limitations in computing power?

    I saw an interesting problem the other day: a piece of wood baseboard trim (for a wall) blew off a truck. It seemingly hung suspended in air then came down. I hit my brakes but kept going straight, hoping for the best. It hit the ground, bounced and lay flat. I imagine that might legitimately freak out an autonomous car.

    A moron can drive safely, through city traffic, if he's highly motivated, manages to keep his attention on the road and his speed down. I guess a moron is still more capable of navigating the world than a computer.

  9. Another stupid viewpoint from slate that is by Beck_Neard · · Score: 3, Insightful

    almost genius in its idiocy. If self-driving cars really start to hit the roads, cities would definitely mandate that all traffic lights show up in maps, and require that traffic lights show up in maps before being installed. This is not a problem of the driving car, it's a problem of trying to imagine future technology in a current context, which is of course always going to lead you astray.

    Plus, as other commenters have said, self-driving cars can definitely recognize traffic lights. It's just that right now they aren't quite as good at doing that as humans are. The reason is that traffic lights and construction cones and stuff like that are optimized for human visibility, not robot visibility. It's quite trivial to adapt them for robot visibility as well (perhaps even incorporating stuff like specialized radio signals).

    I predict that horseless carriages will never take off because without an animal like a horse with hooves on the ground, you could hit rocks and fall into ditches without knowing it.

    --
    A fool and his hard drive are soon parted.
  10. Re:Government doesn't have records by ewibble · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It really depends on how much "safer" autonomous cars are doesn't it. The current problem with software is that when it fails it fails usually catastrophically, what do you do when you fail, stop that could be dangerous, keep going dangerous too. People don't usually fail as completely as software they make lots of small mistakes but usually do a good enough job.

    the road toll is 14.9 per 100,000 per year that is quite low considering how much people drive, you would need a lot of testing, in real life scenarios to convince me that automated car was safer. And each release would need that level of testing. Yes you may get one driver who is bad kill a few people but a bad software release could kill much more.

    I am not saying automated cars aren't safer, just that just because they are automated doesn't automatically make them so.

  11. Some issues not mentioned in the summary by phantomfive · · Score: 2
    Here is a list of issues mentioned in the article, but not in the summary:

    The Google car doesn’t know much about parking: It can’t currently find a space in a supermarket lot or multilevel garage.
    It can't consistently handle coned-off road construction sites, and
    its video cameras can sometimes be blinded by the sun when trying to detect the color of a traffic signal.
    Because it can't tell the difference between a big rock and a crumbled-up piece of newspaper, it will try to drive around both if it encounters either sitting in the middle of the road.

    Use a little imagination and you can surely think of other issues.

    --
    "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    1. Re:Some issues not mentioned in the summary by jklovanc · · Score: 2

      Right now objects are just blobs of pixels. The way the current car tells the difference between a postbox and a person is that the route has been pre scanned and gone over by a person to identify all post boxes. What happens when a post box is installed after the scan is done? The Google car will assume it is a person.

      The second issue is that Google car is very good at not running into a person that is moving but not so good a yielding to a person waiting to cross. Say you have a person standing on a corner waiting to cross. Since Google car can not identify what that person is doing it may not stop and yield as required by law.

  12. Pre-mapped environments are a dead end by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The only way a car can be designed to safely self-drive is doing it just the way we do: by creating a local, up-to-date mapping of the surrounding area in real time and working within that representation with sufficient skill to respond to anything that might appear.

    Pre-existing environmental mapping simply cannot keep up. Construction, pets crossing the road, wild animals, falling rocks, pedestrians, vandalism of road signs and traffic indicators and lane painting, washouts, drunks, heart attacks, stinging insects, oversize loads swinging around traffic lights and signs, special transports, some guy at the side of the road madly waving a hand-printed sign that says "BRIDGE IS OUT!"... the list of unpredictable effects upon the local driving environment seems almost endless -- and keep in mind these things can occur in combinations of more than one type and more than one incident. Often suddenly.

    Further, if the car is smart enough to be capable of updating the environmental map in real time and deal with any combination of changes, then it's already smart enough to maintain a completely dynamic local mapping and doesn't need a pre-existing mapping for anything but gross navigational purposes (route planning) and even that can require the vehicle to adapt.

    Contrariwise, if it isn't smart enough to maintain a full local environmental mapping, then it is inherently unsafe.

    Someone(s) at Google didn't think this one through.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:Pre-mapped environments are a dead end by mjwx · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Someone(s) at Google didn't think this one through.

      I think quite a few people at Google have thought about that, came to the same conclusion as you and started working on the problem.

      The thing that people dont get is that it will take years, if not decades to get fully autonomous cars onto the road. They aren't due out in 2018 and yes we know what models are coming in 2018, an updated 370z, a new NSX and a few others no-one has any interest in.

      The first autonomous cars wont be by Google, in fact I doubt there will be a Google car, the first autonomous cars will be Merc's or Toyotas built using Googles technologies and the autonomous part will only work on specially outfitted roads (and they will be controlled, limited access roads at first) so you'll still be required to drive a car. In fact you probably wont see a car without a steering wheel or other controls in your lifetime.

      You're quite right that roads will need to be upgraded to provide telemetry to autonomous cars, and this will happen gradually over many, many decades.

      --
      Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
    2. Re:Pre-mapped environments are a dead end by ibwolf · · Score: 2

      Building a car that gets a new traffic light right 99% of the time is probably trivial

      Maybe. But considering that I go through about 15 traffic lights on my way to work (and then the same 15 again on my way home), a car that handled them correctly 99% of the time would have about a 1 in 3 of messing at least one of them up EACH DAY.

      We're looking for five nines here, minimum.

  13. Silly expectations by NitWit005 · · Score: 2

    The expectation of this article is that Google will somehow shortly produce a car which will completely replace drivers in all circumstances. Clearly, that's the eventual goal, but that's not needed to produce something useful. Car companies are already churning out various incomplete solutions that help with highway driving or parking.

    I expect their initial product to be something that works as a taxi in semi-controlled circumstances, or something that makes driving more convenient, but which requires intervention some of the time. Either of which would be a viable product.

    Early cell phones were overpriced bricks, but they were still useful to some people. It took a huge investment from many companies and quite a bit of time to get to the point where people considered dropping their land lines. Replacing the old generation of technology is not usually a sudden process, but involves a lot of gradual improvement.

  14. Re:my motoo is, just let go of the wheel by kelemvor4 · · Score: 2

    My motto is "Find a fucking dictionary"

    You're welcome

  15. Like the first product in a class in the hands of by iamacat · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sounds good! Newton was commercially available, has a loyal fan base and inspired successive generations of more polished and popular products, including Palm and Apple's own iPhone. True, there is no guarantee that just because you release an early adopter product, you will reap most of the benefits when technology matures. But not being on a lookout for new things guarantees slide into irrelevance, like Kodak or Borders. Besides someone got to do it.