Lyft CEO: Self-Driving Cars Aren't the Future

Nerval's Lobster writes Google, Tesla, Mercedes and others are working hard to build the best self-driving car. But will anyone actually buy them? In a Q&A session at this year's South by Southwest, Lyft CEO Logan Green insisted the answer is "No." But does Green truly believe in this vision, or is he driven (so to speak) by other motivations? It's possible that Green's stance on self-driving cars has to do more with Uber's decision to aggressively fund research into that technology. Uber CEO Travis Kalanick announcing that self-driving cars were the future was something that greatly upset many Uber drivers, and Green may see that spasm of anger as an opportunity to differentiate Lyft in the hearts and minds of the drivers who work for his service. Whether or not Green's vision is genuine, we won't know the outcome for several more years, considering the probable timeframes before self-driving cars hit the road... if ever.

Comments

Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't...

[Anonymous Coward]

Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't the future.

Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't...

[pollarda]

That may be true. However, self driving cars are an entirely different matter. While they are really cool, do you really want to be in one hurling down the highway at 85MPH (I'm in Utah) and trusting that the automated systems are going to know the difference between a coyote or a tumbleweed? There are an incredible number of obstacles that a person can instantly recognize that even today, a computer can't. If a child and a dog run out into the street at the same time from opposite sides, do you trust the car to make the right decision as to which it will run over? How would you like to be legally responsible for your self driving car if it runs over a child? What about black ice? What if a person is in the road and the car has a choice of running over the person or crashing and possibly killing you. Do you trust the car to make the right decision?

As much as I like software (and writing it), there are IMHO too many judgement calls for a computer and in many situations too many for a lot of (supposedly sane) people.

The only way I can see self driving cars really working is to have special roads to carry them. These would be isolated from regular traffic and most of the regular road hazards. They would be in many ways analogous to a set of rail road tracks. (You don't see trains often running into problems with obstacles -- though when they do, the train usually comes out ahead.) Once you get to where you generally plan on going, you jump off and drive the rest of the way manually.

Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't...

[ShanghaiBill]

SDCs are not perfect. They will make mistakes. But, because of faster reaction times, and 100% attention span, they will make fewer mistakes than humans. If a dog and a child run into the road at the same time, a human might make a better decision, or a computer might make a better decision, but the computer will certainly have an extra 500ms of braking time.

Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't...

[tinkerton]

It's easy to see that self driving cars will come if you look at it as a feature. Take a normal car with a self driving button that you can switch on and off at your own judgement. You don't have to use it, but slowly you start to detect situations where the self driving button comes in really handy, such as traffic jams. And then some slow city traffic. And as confidence grows you switch it on on a long highway journey.
So you end up with all the cars having the option but some never use it, others sometime, some as much as possible.

Re:Buggy whip makers said automobiles aren't...

[AikonMGB]

For what, +1 Irrational Fear? Seems like that should be -1 to me. You won't see ubiquitous self-driving cars until the system is better than meat-popsicle cars. Once that happens, the rational argument flips: "do you want some incompetent person driving a hunk of steel on a road near where your child plays? *shudder* Think of what would happen if that human had to react to something!"

Sure, you could say you don't think self-driving cars will ever be safer than meat-popsicle cars, but that's like saying "640 kB ought to be enough for anybody". Technology is advancing at a staggering pace, and these systems are only getting better and more reliable.

Re:Death traps.

[GNious]

My prophecy:
Self driving cars will be better than humans in 99,99% of the situations within 3 years. Sadly it will take another 5 to wide scale adoption and yet another 10 years for human driven cars to be banned to racetracks.

Irrelevant - the moment a self-driving car has an accident that causes loss of life, there'll be a public outcry against them, and a demand that they be banned for being too unsafe, statistics-be-damned.

Re:Death traps.

[ShanghaiBill]

One problem is who will bear the responsibility for the accident.

We already know that. The insurance company is responsible.

Three states (California, Nevada, and Florida) already allow SDCs on their roads. The liability issue is already resolved.

Another problem is that when a self-driving car causes an accident, it will be something that would have been obvious to a human driver, resulting in the general opinion that self driving cars are stupid.

When a human causes an accident, it is almost always something that would have been obvious to another human driver, resulting in the general opinion that humans are stupid. Most people are intelligent enough to realize that SDCs will not be perfect, but they will prevent a lot more accidents that they will cause, and the tradeoff is worth it. Seat-belts and airbags also occasionally kill people, but they save ten lives for every one they take, and people accept the tradeoff.

Re:It won't understand situations, it shouldn't ma

[Kokuyo]

I'm really sorry to have to be so direct but that is the dumbest argument I've ever heard.

Driving is not a matter of intelligence. It's a matter of reaction. Sure, intelligence and experience help you anticipate when other drivers are being idiots, but there is very little involved in driving that can not be compensated by reaction time and adhering to proper distances.

The biggest hurdle to take is to correctly measure the surroundings. If you did that via image recognition, then yes, AI would be important. But there is laser, radar, GPS and so many other sensors involved that do nothing more than note distances to targets, location on road etc.

Autonomous driving certainly isn't trivial, but the other thing you have to keep in mind is that your oh so intelligent human drivers are actually driving like morons a lot of the time.

Please stop putting the bar for autonomous driving so high the systems have to practically be perfect the be viable. The moment they are twice as good as a human should be the moment we start switching. And we're not far from that.

Remember how badly the average driver actually drives. And then remember that half of them drive worse than that.

Add on top of that networked driving, where cars coordinate over several hundred meters and you'll see so much potential gain even from non-perfect systems it's staggering.

What happens in an emergency - roads all stop?

[Cafe Alpha]

Say there's an earthquake. Or a rockslide. Or an avalanche.

Humans can see if there's a gap in the road. They can see if the road has moved. They can judge unusual conditions.

If the roads are full of machine drivers will have to simply stop, because the machines won't have the judgement to handle the situations.

Re:Bulls... since when will self driving cars have

[Dagger2]

I don't know that. It should be perfectly possible to make a machine that can drive as well as, or better than, a human can. Have we managed to make that already? I don't know, but from the info Google have been publishing, it actually looks like we have, or are pretty damn close.

Just because it's a machine doesn't automatically mean that it sucks at making decisions. Humans are machines too, and we let them drive.