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How Tesla's Autopilot and Google's Car Are Entirely Different Animals (robohub.org)
Hallie Siegel writes: Developers and futurologists have long talked of two paths to autonomous cars: the incremental path (where autonomous features such as adaptive cruise control, autonomous parking etc are slowly added to make the car increasingly autonomous) and the revolutionary path that abandons the human driver altogether — the Google car approach. Robocar expert Brad Templeton compares Tesla's latest autopilot technology to the approach Google is taking, explaining why some people think autonomous cars are still decades away, while others believe they are just around the corner.
yet?
Regardless of how they get there I'll certainly never buy one. The technology if of course interesting and in some parts very advanced but even so this seems like an awful lot of effort to remove a steering wheel.
You must not hate driving like I hate driving.
"He is so stupid. And now back to the wall!" Moe Szyslak
One looks like it was designed for adults, the other for toddlers. The google car couldn't look any more childish if had pedals inside and coloured wheels.
seems like an awful lot of effort to remove a steering wheel.
Yeah, who needs to reduce the 1.24 million deaths and millions more injuries suffered?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I love driving, I hate driving with all the drooling morons on the road that cant do safe lane changes or drive with any semblance of skill.
So I want everyone else to get self driving cars.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Just this morning, after it's not been driven for about six years for various reasons, I paid a very large garage bill for fixing up my 1991 Honda Civic.
This car has no engine ECU, no ABS, no airbags, no lane assist, no automatic braking, no shit at all. What it DOES have is four wheels, brakes, lights and something to steer it with. It also has twin carburettors and a manual choke.
First job was to fill it with petrol, and as the engine warmed up I started to remember just how good this old car is to drive. The large garage bill was well worth every single penny. It puts a huge grin on my face every single time. There's not many '91 Civics around these days, but if you have the opportunity to buy a decent one, do so and care for it. You will be rewarded.
So, as I started to say at the top, Google and Tesla, you can take your autonomous vehicles and shove them high up where the sun don't shine.
Google approach of map everything in excruciating detail has one big flaw - it assumes that we could know in advance how the driving environment would look like and navigate based on this. This is not a reasonable assumption, simply because mapping every back road is gargantuan task. Therefore, we will end up with 'good enough' Google cars, that can drive major roads and urban centers.
Tesla (and all other car manufacturers) approach is to have car react to environment with little advanced knowledge. This is gargantuan task and is still computationally unfeasible. Therefor, we will end up with 'good enough' Tesla-like car, that can drive anywhere but still require driver's supervision.
Who needs compatibility? The "standard" you're talking about is the rules of the road, as we all experience them. The only thing missing is person to person communication... eye contact, waving someone to go first at a 4-way stop, etc.. Eventually, it would also be nice to have cars that can talk to each other well enough to safely form "draft trains" to conserve energy, but that will require some changes to the law anyway. In the meantime, since Elon is pals with the Google guys, I wouldn't be surprised if they're already talking about that sort of thing with each other. On the contrary, I'd be surprised if they weren't.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
. . . where the speaker compared the two approaches like this:
Gradually trying to move towards driverless cars instead of working directly on that goal is like thinking that by practicing jumping and getting better and better a jumping that you'll eventually be able to fly.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Driverless cars are going to be hugely disruptive to a large number of industry. The first Uber/Lyft like company to get them going will be able to undercut every taxi service in the entire developed world. We are talking a billion dollar industry there. They will likely be able to gain a significant share of the existing public transit spend in almost every city in the world - even those with good public transit infrastructure - another billion dollar industry. For many individuals it will be more attractive to spend the considerable amounts of money they currently spend owning a private car on an automated taxi service, which is another billion dollar industry.
The first trucking company to use driverless cars will be able to run trucks more often, for cheaper, undercutting everyone else. This is again a billion dollar industry. Eventually companies like Amazon and Walmart will have vending machine vans that circulate around an area and come to your door with milk and bread faster than you can walk down to your local store. This will change the nature of bricks and mortar retail again. That is another billion dollar industry.
A fleet of driverless taxi services would potentially make the economics of electric cars look unbeatable. The high load factor of taxis means that you can afford to pay a lot more in capital costs in exchange for massively reduced operating costs. Automated taxis could also manage their own charging, and with apps that pre-plan journeys the car sent to you would be able to ensure it had enough charge to get you to your destination, eliminating the main problem with electric cars right now. The system could probably be built with small (cheap) onboard batteries and a limited number of swapping stations throughout a city. This could massively undercut both gas cars and private vehicle ownership without any further reductions in battery prices. Now you are talking about a trillion dollar industry.
There is no doubt that driverless cars are a challenging technology to develop. It will be extremely difficult to make them as reliable and safe as we would all like them to be. But in the end, as long as they are, say, an order of magnitude safer than human drivers, the massive economic benefits (i.e. potential profits) will ensure that they are put on the roads. When there is this level of money to be made, capitalism will find a way.
I've seen a thousand texters on the highway that are just as dangerous as that video. You can't cure stupidity, but a car that will automatically slow down before hitting the one in front is better than someone using their smartphone while driving without such a feature.
I'm all for improving public transit, but it takes a generation or so for everything to reorient itself to suit it. So, sure, I'm all for increased spending on public transit infrastructure. Then the 20 year buildout. Then another 25 before businesses and housing re-orient themselves around it. In the meantime you can improve other things without hurting that work. It's not fantasy or sci-fi - it's happening now and improving constantly.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I would characterise it differently. One is trying to engineer out all the risk, while the other is going to shape the perception of the risk in the market.
The reality is that no matter how long Google spends trying to make their cars safer and safer (and apparently it is already significantly safer than a human) one day their car is going to have a serious accident. Maybe it is not even the car's fault, and some grandma has a heart attack and smashes into the side of it and dies. It doesn't matter, at that point the thing that will decide whether there is a massive backlash against the cars or not is going to be who can spin the story the best. On one side you'll have professional drivers, non-driverless car makers and a sensationalist media who will jump all over the story, showing pictures of granny's sobbing family and Sergey climbing out of his private jet. On the other side Google will probably wheel out some geeks with terrible communication skills trying to explain the numbers. They will lose, set back the acceptance of the cars for a decade, and not understand at all why.
Elon Musk, on the other hand, has learnt a lot about how much of the non-tech world is both ignorant and irrational (remember the whole battery fire thing). What he will be betting on is that by the time his car has a minor accident he will be able to turn up on TV and say how Tesla drivers have used the autopilot for whatever millions of miles and this is the first incident. He will probably have a few canned stories lined up about Sarah the housewife who's toddler was saved from being involved in an accident by the feature. He will fight the PR battle and eventually the media will move onto the next story and subsequent driverless car crashes will get less and less airtime. This will pave the way for the widespread adoption of them. Ultimately the biggest beneficiary of this will probably be Google as it will make it easier for them to bring their undoubtedly far superior technology into the real world. Unless, of course, Musk has gambled too big, and the cars kill a bunch of people due to a software bug.
combine this story about wireless EV charging autonomous cars and a crazy software developer and i wonder how long it will be before someone programs their autonomous car to drive them around in an infinite loop after they die...or at least until the car breaks down.
Not to mention, that self driving cars will very rarely commit traffic violations (speeding, etc). That will dry up a major revenue source for a lot of smaller towns, another billion dollar industry.
*Summon car from parking space*
*Drive like maniac to destination*
*Let car find it's own damned parking space*
*Summon car from parking space*
*Drive like maniac home*
*Let car find it's own damned parking space*
rinse and repeat
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
Or even, let the car go home to be available for other family members to use until it's time to come pick you up from work.
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