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Google Unveils New Self-Driving Car Prototype
colinneagle writes In May, Google released a teaser image showing a mock-up of the autonomous vehicle it planned to build. Today, the company followed up with an image showing the finished product. Google says the first edition of its self-made self-driving car will feature "temporary manual controls as needed while we continue to test and learn." When Google introduced its prototype back in May, the company claimed its self-driving cars "won't have a steering wheel, accelerator pad, or brake pedal because they don't need them." Apparently, it still has yet to reach that point. The development is an important step forward for Google's driverless car efforts, which have been deemed impractical by many of late. Last year, the Financial Times reported that Google had difficulty finding manufacturing partners that would build vehicles featuring the self-driving capabilities used in its Prius. In that light, maybe Google's willingness to build its own hardware just to get the technology on the road means that its self-driving car team knows something the rest of the industry doesn't."
The Oatmeal posted a review of the car and state of Google's technology in general:
http://theoatmeal.com/blog/goo...
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
Actually, the controls were added because of a California state law requirement for them, not because Goggle thought they were necessary...
It looks like it is designed for indoor, otherwise it is too dangerous to drive it because other drivers can just miss it :)
Why Google? WHY? Why does every manufacturer of cutting edge vehicles, like EVs, have to make them so damned ugly? Why can't we get a car flavored car?
So if I buy a production Google car without controls, and the vehicle runs off the road and kills 20 kids in a playground, who is at fault?
A. Me (for owning it)?
B. Google (for shoddy programming)?
C. The state (for allowing driverless cars)?
D. The Kids (because they should have gotten out of the way)?
Related question - do I need to carry insurance to use one of these cars as I am not driving, I'm merely riding?
Essentially, what is the model for this type of vehicle - am I the 'driver', or am I 'passenger' (like on a bus or taxi)?
If they can sort this out maybe I'll buy one someday.
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>> maybe Google's willingness to build its own hardware just to get the technology on the road means that its self-driving car team knows something the rest of the industry doesn't
Or...that the rest of the auto industry doesn't want to get tagged with the "first death caused by an automated car."
Or maybe the rest of the industry isn't willing to risk the liability for when something goes horribly wrong. Fear of litigation is a real impediment to innovation. But in this case, there is a huge amount of risk. Dealing with the real world happing around you while you're trying to make the computer drive the car has a ton of non-trivial potential disasters waiting to be exposed.
Marissa Mayer's 2011 concept car sketch for BMW vs. Google's 2014 built vehicle
The Oatmeal review I linked (looks like as first post) includes a discussion of a similar scenario, which the car handled better than many people would.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
On my way to lunch today I was driving on a residential street, and the gas company had the road dug up. There was a guy there with a 'slow' sign indicating that the 'road' was now a few pieces of plywood on someones lawn. How do you prepare for something like that?
No. I fully believe that the cars HAVE reached that point.
The thing is, many people (including legislators and insurance underwriters) don't trust such a system yet. Thus, the car has conventional controls as a "failover to manual" in cases of catastrophic systems failure.
Honestly, while I believe that you can build self-driving cars. And that they can be safer. *I*, personally, don't want one.
Put simply, I refuse to relinquish that level of control over my driving experience. Ever.
Well, maybe when I'm in my 80's or something. By that point, I'll have little left to lose.
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They are "solved" better than a human. I don't know how good that is, as humans solving that problem fail rather regularly.
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Realistically, if the car has been driving on auto with the passangers not paying constant attention (in which case, why do you have the auto controls? and people are really bad at paying constant attention to something that they can't control), do you really think that having someone grab for the wheel in an emergancy is going to do more good than harm? the big red panic button to stop the car is about all that is meanignful in any case.
The situation they require manual controls for is when you drive into a blizzard/flood, and the car drives until it's unsafe to stop and unsafe to continue. When you give the computer the choice between two bad things, something bad will happen. The regulators would rather that bad choice be in the hands of a human, when the "fix" is to work out as many "unsafe to continue, unsafe to stop" conditions, and improve stopping before them. It's not about the instant hand-over, but the impossible situation.
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That same article stated outright that it can't handle construction zones... so I wouldn't say "better than many people would" quite yet.
I love the idea of self driving cars, and I believe they will be better drivers than humans are. I don't for a moment believe we are at that point today. There are just too many situations like construction zones (or for that matter, rain and snow were also mentioned as un-navigable) to call this "ready" yet.
I hope they keep working, and I hope they get there, but if anything, this just proves how incredibly far away they are.
A driverless car with no pedals and steering wheel doesn't need to be like a normal car. Where's the sleeping area? Where's the flip-down table to work on? I don't want to stare at the road if I'm not allowed to drive.
That's actually where we are quickly headed from a legal stand point.
As much as there is hype around this "self driving" car, it simply can't. It's well know that this car can't handle rare situations like heavy rain, snow, construction zones, or any of a multitude of other situations. and that won't change for decades to come. There are simply too many variables, and one thing that computers are awful at right now is interpreting that sort of thing. What we WILL see instead is the steady introduction of more and more "driver assistance" features, we already have cars that can follow the lanes on a highway, maintain safe distances behind other cars, adjust speeds accordingly, and brake as needed. The technology to read speed limit signs is also there. These driver assistance features will eventually become fully autonomous vehicles, just not overnight as Google is trying here.
What does this have to do with anything? Well if we had self driving cars tomorrow, the laws would be re-written to accommodate them, but with minor tweaks here and there, the laws don't change the same way. The end result that I'm envisioning is that we won't be allowed to drive ourselves, but due to "distracted driving" laws, we also won't be allowed to do anything else. Sure this will be fixed eventually, but again, due to the process being a gradual change and not an all-or-nothing situation, we're in for some painfully boring "driving" in the meantime.
I'd prefer a steering wheel so I can do stuff that the AI won't let me do, like drive through my backward to drop off heavy things in the garden, etc...
You can probably plug in a USB keyboard and use the arrow keys -- or hjkl in the bad-ass variant.
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The somewhat clever answer would be that the computer would have already contacted Google Maps and been rerouted around a problematic area. When the computer is making the route instead of a far less knowledgeable driver, it should be an easy thing to require all roadwork to be submitted to a central database that would inform all routing operations. In other words, this scenario is anachronistic - in the future, the routing accounts for all those weird situations.
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Don't be silly. They can't even get Google Maps to quit crashing.
No. I fully believe that the cars HAVE reached that point.
It does not matter what you believe we factually have not reached that point yet. Google themselves have admitted that their vehicle does not work well in rain, snow or fog. There is also the issue that every road would have to be scanned and manually gone over for current technology cars to drive on them. I have yet to see a valid test of a vehicle driving into a random, unaugmented parking lot and parking.
Just last week I encountered a cop with a lighted baton who was directing traffic from the side of the road. He would stop traffic, walk to the middle of the road while motioning people across the road with his baton, then walk off the road while waving the baton *behind his back* to signal "go ahead".
Does the self-driving car recognize this sort of thing?
Will it drive when there's snow on the ground?
I think I'd keep the steering wheel and manual control - just in case..
the routing accounts for all those weird situations.
Except if the construction was on a street without another exit. There will be situations where routing will not work.
Two Words; Seat belts. You will still be a passenger in a small vehicle which could be involved in an accident. Personal restrains will still be required.
More here: Is Google CEO's "Tiny Bubble Car" Yahoo CEO's "Little Bubble Car"?. Thought it was interesting that the no-frills bubble car Google came out with in 2014 was closer to Mayer's 2011 vision, and quite a departure from the modded Priuses and Lexuses that Google had shown off in the past. Your mileage may vary. :-)
Did you just say it is an anachronism to do what every living creature does - react? Maybe computers are not quite as advanced as you think.
I'm sorry Dave, I can't let you go home now. Someone is working on your street and I am too stupid to work around that unless someone gives me an alternate route. Too bad I am so much more knowledgeable than you.
Sure, machine logic has strange seemingly obvious gaps. The pedestrian trying to cross though was spot on, and half of humans would just pull out without seeing him at all.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The gaps are obvious. And not in the sense of "should be easy" but I'm the sense of "it's obvious that a machine can't do this yet"
it's "easy" to get a machine to interpret road signs, follow pavement markings, identify and anticipate the location and trajectory of many moving objects simultaneously, and act accordingly (ok, not easy, but no real truly new problems here)
What's hard is figuring out what to do when the road markings contradict a guy in a uniform telling you what to do, or figuring out where to go in heavy rain or snow where signs and road lines are often obscured. I don't anticipate the car crashing in any of these circumstances, but I also don't expect it to continue, even though any human driver could.
Get back to me after websites start using captchas to keep humans out and only let computers in, then I'll know the technology is at a point we can use it to drive full time. (And if you think that self driving will happen before reliable captcha solving by machines, I think you're mistaken about which one has more resources behind it)
Who said emergency? An emergency is probably exactly when you want a computer to be in control, simply because it can process more information more quickly, and the decisions to be made are trivial and minimal (aka "bring vehicle to a safe stop, right now").
But I would want manual controls on my car of the future because on some weekends I drive into the countryside and I drive on small dirt roads that may or may not be on the map. Or to festivals or other big events where at the end you park on a field. Or you drive through a really crowded street where the computer will most likely just stop and stand because there's always someone in front of the car.
There are plenty of non-emergency situations that I'm not sure the automatic driver can handle.
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Whilst she may be Yahoo's CEO, back in 2011 she was working at Google.
The situation they require manual controls for is when you drive into a blizzard/flood, and the car drives until it's unsafe to stop and unsafe to continue.
I can imagine that going over so well with consumers "Hi! It's me, your autonomous car here. You know how I drove you up in the mountains and to this mountain pass? Well now there's a blizzard coming so I quit. Now I know you haven't touched the wheel in a month because I've been doing your commute and I wouldn't drive under these conditions, but you'll probably freeze to death if you don't get down so... best of luck? Toodeloo."
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Thats' why the GPS the car uses should take weather and mountain passes into consideration, and refuse to leave the garage if the weather conditions outside are unsafe at any speed.
The only failure I've ever seen anyone focus on with self-driving cars is where the user makes multiple errors "urging" a car into a known unsafe area. The "fix" to that is to remove more power from the driver. If "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." were the response to all the stupid human requests, then 99% of complaints against driverless cars would be invalid. Is that really the reality you want to push for?
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