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Slashdot Asks: How Long Before Self-Driving Cars Become Mainstream?
Here's the thing, regardless of one's stand on self-driving cars, they are no longer a futuristic idea. Major car companies such as Tesla, BMW, and Mercedes have already released an autonomous vehicle or plan to release one soon. Sergio Marchionne, an Italian-Canadian executive who is currently the CEO of Fiat Chrysler Automobiles, recently said: It isn't pie in the sky. People are talking about 20 years. I think we will have it in five years. ZDNet has published its interview of Jim McBride, technical leader in Ford's autonomous vehicles team, who thinks self-driving cars are five years away from changing the world. At the same time, we must acknowledge the talks about these smart vehicles killing many jobs, and the security vulnerabilities we read every once in a while. What's your take on this?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but we're not quite at the stage where you can just take a car off the road, slap on some sensors and some jazz in the steering wheel/pedals, and the car is ready to self-drive. I would imagine each car model has to be optimized for this, and that will take awhile. So in 5 years, we might have self-driving cars coming off the assembly lines, but it's gonna take a lot more than 5 years before that's a sizable percentage of the cars on the road.
I think we will have it in five years
Sounds like a good candidate for the osborne effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
I pulled it because we had already run it a week ago. A few readers submitted it today (actually, plenty of outlets have run the story today), hence the confusion.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/678/
Are we actually trying to keep dupes off the front page now? Wow times they are a changin.
Thanks for letting us know.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
OT I have a feeling /. got better recently. Articles got little bit more interesting and strangely the inflow of obscenities from disturbed users (or their bots) decreased slightly. I hope the trend holds on.
They need to define what 'self driving' means to get an answer. Self driving features such as parking assist or other very specific functions are already here, but I don't consider it self driving if I can't get from one location to another without driving. Maybe if I could travel an interstate with no interaction, that might qualify.
In order to kill jobs, you have to have a fully autonomous vehicle which is not 5 years away.
Not so. The needs to replace long-haul truckers are a lot different from the needs to replace New York cabbies. A lot of jobs are of the low-hanging variety that can be easily replaced. Others may take more work, but suggesting that it won't happen until it can cover every specific need is like arguing that the printing press won't replace copying by hand because it can't do calligraphy.
As for concerns about sudden and unexpected obstructions, no amount of smarts, whether human or artificial, will allow a car to avoid hitting, say, a guy who suddenly lands in front of them after jumping off a highway overpass to commit suicide. But an autonomous car doesn't need to be able to do that to be better than us, since we can't do it either. For the stuff that is avoidable, the sensors on many of these cars are already good enough that they detect children running into the street and respond appropriately before a human has even noticed the issue. I've heard about a few cases where passengers wondered why their car was suddenly slowing down, only to realize as they moved forward that the car had apparently seen the feet of someone walking out from behind a parked car and taken the appropriate steps to ensure it didn't hit them.
Which isn't to say that the future is now, but it IS close.
> Sergio Marchionne, an Italian-Canadian executive who is currently the CEO
I don't see any relevance at all to mentioning Marchionne's nationalities.
Particularly when there's no mention of nationality for the second person mentioned:
> Jim McBride, technical leader in Ford's autonomous vehicles team
I often wonder why they do that. To me, it's an annoying interruption to the flow of the story.
And piling on ... they didn't say which parent was the Canadian or the Italian (although the name is a clue), and whether or not it was the immediate parents for a 50-50 genetic split, or if it was just a single male great-grandparent that was Italian.
If they're going to tell us he's Italian-Canadian, then why wouldn't they tell us which nationality donated the Y chromosome, and who donated the mitochondria? Without that knowledge, it's just pointless to say "Italian-Canadian".
Furthermore, there's cultural issues at stake.
If the mother was Canadian and the father Italian, then who did the cooking? Is it possible that Sergio had an Italian parent and was raised on Canadian food? If so, how would that affect his outlook on life? If that happened to me, I would be angry all the time.
Are we supposed to infer that as a Italian-Canadian he waves only one of his hands when he speaks?
Or it's possible that Starless is correct, and that the nationality is irrelevant.
Ditto. People come up with all of these oddball scenarios (A dozen kids suddenly appear in the middle of highway. Hit them or run into a wall?), but fail to recognize the fact that a typical human driver would have only have looked up from his phone after he felt his car bowling over kids like tenpins.
To be successful a self driving car doesn't need to be perfect. It just needs to avoid killing 30,000 people a year as well as avoiding about 5.5 million auto accidents that in turn injured 2.5 million people.
Humans sort of suck at driving, actually, and I've got to think a vehicle with 360-degree sensors that can see and react to conditions in microseconds can do a lot better than us tired, distracted, drunk, road-raging meatbags.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
no amount of smarts, whether human or artificial, will allow a car to avoid hitting, say, a guy who suddenly lands in front of them after jumping off a highway overpass to commit suicide.
Actually, the self-driving car is more likely to avoid an accident in a situation like that because it will react from 700 to 1500 milliseconds faster. At normal highway speed, that means about 100 feet (or 30 meters) of extra braking distance.
Pulling it is the worst thing you can do, even if it's a dupe, because *comments*.
If you can't detect dupes before putting them up, don't bother.
At the bottom of the
Maybe if I could travel an interstate with no interaction, that might qualify.
You can. Tesla autopilot doesn't do intersections, or on-ramps, but once you are on the freeway, you can engage it, and it will self-drive until you reach your exit.
In Teslas with Autopilot, all the hardware is already present for full self-driving, and new features will be added as the software matures.
Or until you run into snow, poor lane markings, etc.... But hey, in ideal conditions it kinda works... It's a step forward, but there are still miles to go...
Yes, it is a step forward. And it is an important step forward. In terms of bootstrapping technology and making iterative improvements based on real world requirements, you now have a consumer car that can autonomously drive from point A to point B on the highway and then have a person take over. Combine that with already available features like self parking, and autonomous braking and you have most of the autonomous abilities you are talking about for fully autonomous. If all that is left is cars that have difficulty driving in poor weather and bad roads, then you are at least on-par with human drivers.
And better than human drivers if the car tells you to not drive in bad weather. The best way to drive in bad weather is not to.