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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.
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.
I'll tell you what the future is, and the CEOs of Lyft, Uber, etc. know it as well:
Self-driving car-sharing vehicles.
I'm a huge fan of the new car-sharing services that have popped up in recent years. The ones where you simply pick up a car wherever you find it (your iPhone App will show you the nearest ones if you are looking), drive to where you want, and leave it there for the next person to take.
You have a car when you need it, don't need to bother with it when you don't, you don't need to worry about fuel, inspections, washing it - nothing. And you can take the car you need for today. Good weather? Cabrio. Need to transport something? Bigger trunk. etc.
Main disadvantage? Sometimes there's no car nearby, and of course the usual parking space hunt in the city.
Solution: Self-driving cars. Tap a button on your smartphone, the nearest car comes and picks you up. Just exit it at destination and it'll go away by itself, either finding a parking space or going to the next person who called one. If it's an electric car, it can also go and find a charging station if it wants.
Who needs taxis? Who needs Lyft?
They know this, of course, and they know it's coming.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Not only do automated cars not panic, but they can notify and coordinate with other cars on the road. With human drivers, even if you spot the obstacle up ahead, what's to prevent the asshole behind you from rear-ending you as you brake? With automated cars, the braking car can signal the cars behind it, and they can start applying the brakes before it's even humanly possible to react.
Automated cars will surely not be perfect, but human drivers have an atrocious safety record.
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.
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.
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.
Self driving cars operated by the owner are a different situation from that of self driving taxis. The owner and rider interests diverge when those are different people. A self driving taxi has to protect itself from theft & abuse and protect its owner from lawsuits. That mean the person riding in the taxi won't be allowed to arbitrarily stop it, assume manual control, or exit in locations considered by the taxi owner to be unsafe. Putting my car in self driving mode with my average speed 10 mph in gridlock sounds attractive. Getting into a little vehicle capable of traveling to arbitrary locations and trusting it like I would a train takes the early adopter impulse right out of me. Maybe self driving buses would make the transition better.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amen, as long as avoiding risking behavior is a mandatory feature in autonomous driving software. I'd speculate a majority of accidents and road fatalities are nearly all avoidable, brought on by either poor choices, risky behavior, or bad driving habits. Case in point just today on my way to work I narrowly avoided two accidents. The first, the driver did not scrape his windows from ice and could not see any of the drivers around him - nearly plowing into me and others around him as he was changing lanes. The second, another driver decided to use the right lane as a passing lane in a 4 lane road, driving 55 while everyone else is going 35, denying anyone in the left lanes the ability to change lanes and make a right turn. Let me repeat, that was just today. Stuff like this happens everyday to millions of people. For myself, getting tail gated while I'm already going 10 above the limit is a regular *daily* occurrence. I'm barely even going to bring up the young, inexperienced, risk-loving drivers because all of the problems there should be understood without even saying.
I for one am eagerly looking forward to autonomous cars purely because of the minor few that make the roads dangerous for everyone else. But like the poster above, it's probably going to be awhile before they're reliable enough for use. But it will happen because technology will be improved over time. Changing, people's attitudes and driving habits? Yeah, far more difficult and expensive than technology with diminishing returns. Good luck on that!