Google Has Stopped Developing Its Own Self-Driving Car - Report (techcrunch.com)

Google has reportedly shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers. From an article on TechCrunch: The Information reports that Google's self-driving car unit -- known internally as Chauffeur -- is working with established automotive names to develop cars which will include some self-driving features, but won't ditch the steering wheel and pedal controls. The firm is already working with Fiat Chrysler, per a partnership announced in May, and that could be the start of others to come. Google first set out to do away with the steering wheel and pedals approach, but this backtrack is from Alphabet CEO Larry Page and CFO Ruth Porat who found the original approach to be "impractical," according to the report. That's despite Google's autonomous vehicles clocking over two million miles of tests on public roads.

Comments

Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Like everyone is going to abandon a well-proven UI just like that, on Google's say-so.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Rei]

You walk before you run.

Google's approach may be best in the long run. But good luck convincing regulators and the public to entirely eliminate drivers before you've fully convinced them on the benefits of letting computers assist drivers.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

There are simply too many conditions in which a self-driving car could occasionally need a human pilot, and the vast majority of those are when a quick decision that is not safety related is required, and the rest are when the vehicle is operating on something other than conventional roads.

For example, if I'm going to an event in a rural area I'm probably going to have to park in an improvised parking area on an unimproved or only marginally improved surface. I may have to drive down a trail that itself is unimproved or only marginally improved, either following the directions of humans waving at me or else following something like the occasional orange cone or even the tracks of previous vehicles. A self-driving car is probably not going to interpret the directions of a teenager with a yellow safety vest and will instead see the person merely as an object to avoid colliding with. It will not see bits of orange tape on the ground or ruts as a path. It probably won't handle being told to enqueue to park in rows, peeling off after the next vehicle to park per human-guided hand signals.

In this kind of scenario, which is common to outdoor concerts, festivals, campgrounds, renaissance festivals, theme-parks, lodges, and many other situations, a car that cannot be directly driven by a human being would not be able to function. The vehicle may well drive the vast majority of the time on its own, but it still needs to be capable of being occasionally human-operated or at least very directly human-instructed. Entirely eliminating the conventional driver controls makes that difficult.

Furthemore, having owned many vehicles in various states of repair and condition for around twenty years now, I do not want a vehicle to be stranded when its autonomous systems have malfuctioned. Flat out that's a non-starter. Vehicles break. This is a fact of life. I don't want a vehicle with no issues with the powertrain to strand me because the controller can't figure out how to drive on the road. If nothing else, in general emergencies it may be necessary for me to make decisions that the vehicle is not capable of making itself, like in having to drive in the aftermath of a hurricane or tornado when the roads are messed up with debris.

Don't get me wrong, the idea of a vehicle functioning as a hackney carriage, getting in and telling it where to go and it does that, has appeal, but I don't want it to only function that way.

Re:Colour me suprised

[AC-x]

Like everyone is going to abandon a well-proven UI just like that

Remember when someone said the iPhone "doesn't appeal to business customers because it doesn't have a keyboard" ...?

Re:Colour me suprised

[tripleevenfall]

Great, if Goo.., I mean Alphabet, won't develop a self-driving car I'm going to be stuck with a Samsung self-driving car.

Re:Colour me suprised

[flink]

For example, if I'm going to an event in a rural area I'm probably going to have to park in an improvised parking area on an unimproved or only marginally improved surface. I may have to drive down a trail that itself is unimproved or only marginally improved, either following the directions of humans waving at me or else following something like the occasional orange cone or even the tracks of previous vehicles.

Heck, this is pretty common in an urban environment. If there is utility work going on, you'll see a few cones strewn about to vaguely indicate you are to use one of the oncoming lanes, with a cop looking down at his phone waving at you desultorily.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

Yeah. One of my neighbors works for Intel and has been working on their autonomous vehicle project and we've talked about it. Basically in an urban environment where The Authorities are closing or modifying the route of the street it is expected that they would have to use some kind of barricade with the ability to instruct the cars that the road does not match the original configuration and to follow an alternate path, and the police officer or other traffic-control person would have to have some kind of similar technology in traffic-control devices.

Thing is, while it *might* be possible for a venue to obtain the cones or other barricades from a rental place, I would not expect that the human-held devices would be generally available if only to prevent them from being abused for things like stopping vehicles to rob the occupants or for carjacking. I would expect that tight controls would be necessary, and even the cones themselves might be subject to close regulation and scrutiny if they're capable of actively communicating with vehicle controllers. Otherwise it would be far too easy for someone to do something malicious.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Samsung_Motors

Samsung already has a history of producing automobiles, and that history predates their producing smartphones. I'd probably trust a Samsung automobile more than I would a Samsung phone.

Re:Colour me suprised

[dpidcoe]

To add a bit of ancedote to your statement, I have a work-issued iPhone and I find it to be pretty unappealing.

Re:Colour me suprised

[bondsbw]

The issue wasn't that a virtual keyboard was specifically unusable, but that people were used to physical keys. iPhones have now existed as long as RIM did before them, so it's safe to say that most people are now used to virtual keyboards.

Still, iPhones aren't great for business. The integration between normal apps is still pretty awful today, and it's made worse for business apps because many companies require enhanced containerization which make it even more difficult for their apps to integrate with the OS. I think there is a market for some really well-designed business phones, and I doubt Apple will ever provide it. (But Android, so far, hasn't given me much hope either.)

Re:Colour me suprised

[bondsbw]

Correction:

iPhones have now existed as long as RIM sold Blackberry devices before them

Re:Colour me suprised

[vtcodger]

I could quibble, but I won't because I'm 99% in agreement. My litmus test scenario. An autonomous vehicle -- with or without a driver -- starts over one of the multitude of ramps in the infamous downtown Los Angeles four level interchange. At rush hour. The battery connection fails. Just snaps. Fortuitously the USC Rugby team bus is just behind it. Eight strapping lads get out and prepare to push the broken vehicle out of the way. Except without power or a mechanical steering wheel and brake, how can they steer it? Or stop it?

Re:Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

This is nonsense. If your primitive human brain can understand to follow the instruction of the dude in the orange vest so can a computer be taught to do same. It's entirely a question of building a smart enough and big enough system. There is no physical activity the 8 watt bulb you call a brain can regulate that a computer can't regulate just as well given the right code, sensors and actuators. Driving is a very low IQ skill. 85 IQ people drive. A computer can be programmed to drive just as well as any of them. Anything this low IQ will be automated.

Re:Colour me suprised

[shadowrat]

This is just a job for the unemployed uber drivers. The automobile provider has a big facility full of human drivers waiting to operate the vehicle remotely. It solves 2 problems. People can have their fully autonomous cars. Non rich humans can be locked away in a warehouse out of sight.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

The silicon is about 2 orders of magnitude less likely to break down than the powertrain. In fact it likely will NEVER break down in the entire life of the car. There are Commodore 64's still running just fine today. Wanting a steering wheel for the 1 in a million chance that the self driving system breaks down and cant merely be rebooted is idiocy. It's not a jumbo jet. It doesn't need double and triple redundancy like that.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Joe_Dragon]

and when you drive out side the usa that data roaming cost that can run as high as $15-$20 a meg will cost you a NEW CAR after a few hours. Or a very high cost FAP free sat internet plan.

Re:Colour me suprised

[93 Escort Wagon]

Yeah. One of my neighbors works for Intel and has been working on their autonomous vehicle project and we've talked about it. Basically in an urban environment where The Authorities are closing or modifying the route of the street it is expected that they would have to use some kind of barricade with the ability to instruct the cars that the road does not match the original configuration and to follow an alternate path, and the police officer or other traffic-control person would have to have some kind of similar technology in traffic-control devices.

Good luck with that. While formal, scheduled road work usually includes markers and assigned human flaggers - when an unscheduled, urgent repair is being performed it seems quite common to just have some random guy out there half-assedly directing cars around the obstructed work area.

Re:Colour me suprised

[bigpat]

There are simply too many conditions in which a self-driving car could occasionally need a human pilot, and the vast majority of those are when a quick decision that is not safety related is required, and the rest are when the vehicle is operating on something other than conventional roads.

For example, if I'm going to an event in a rural area I'm probably going to have to park in an improvised parking area on an unimproved or only marginally improved surface. I may have to drive down a trail that itself is unimproved or only marginally improved, either following the directions of humans waving at me or else following something like the occasional orange cone or even the tracks of previous vehicles. A self-driving car is probably not going to interpret the directions of a teenager with a yellow safety vest and will instead see the person merely as an object to avoid colliding with. It will not see bits of orange tape on the ground or ruts as a path. It probably won't handle being told to enqueue to park in rows, peeling off after the next vehicle to park per human-guided hand signals.

In this kind of scenario, which is common to outdoor concerts, festivals, campgrounds, renaissance festivals, theme-parks, lodges, and many other situations, a car that cannot be directly driven by a human being would not be able to function. The vehicle may well drive the vast majority of the time on its own, but it still needs to be capable of being occasionally human-operated or at least very directly human-instructed. Entirely eliminating the conventional driver controls makes that difficult.

Furthemore, having owned many vehicles in various states of repair and condition for around twenty years now, I do not want a vehicle to be stranded when its autonomous systems have malfuctioned. Flat out that's a non-starter. Vehicles break. This is a fact of life. I don't want a vehicle with no issues with the powertrain to strand me because the controller can't figure out how to drive on the road. If nothing else, in general emergencies it may be necessary for me to make decisions that the vehicle is not capable of making itself, like in having to drive in the aftermath of a hurricane or tornado when the roads are messed up with debris.

Don't get me wrong, the idea of a vehicle functioning as a hackney carriage, getting in and telling it where to go and it does that, has appeal, but I don't want it to only function that way.

What you describe are the risks you are willing to take as an owner of a car.

The use cases of a fully autonomous car without allowing human control are equivalent of a taxi service where the passenger doesn't own or control the vehicle. As a business, as soon as you give over control over the vehicle to a passenger, then you are operating the equivalent of a rental service. So that would mean making sure that the person has a license and is insured and making sure there are rules of usage that are followed.

There are many many scenarios where you wouldn't want to provide the option of manual override to a passenger. At least not without popping the hood and flipping a switch or something... What if the only passenger doesn't have a license to drive? What if they are elderly and physically incapable of driving? What about a child that is old enough to be a passenger, say 14 years old, but not old enough to drive? What if the passenger is drunk?

Having an easily accessible manual override in many scenarios would open a taxi service up to liability and endanger the passengers, pedestrians, other vehicles and property.

I don't object to having a steering wheel and other manual controls in every car, but manual override shouldn't always be as easy as pressing a button on the dash and taking over control of the vehicle. The use case for autonomous cars as a service is that the passengers should not be expected to ever be in a position to take over manual control.

If that means the vehicle won't go off-r

Re:Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

The silicon is about 2 orders of magnitude less likely to break down than the powertrain. In fact it likely will NEVER break down in the entire life of the car.

What about the software? When doing failure analysis, you need to consider hardware and software reliability of all components and how all of that ties together into the overall system and critical system functions. A single out-of-spec input can induce a software failure that brings down the entire control system. When it happens in an airplane (outside of the critical phases of flight), you at least have some time to reboot the system and bring everything back up before things start going bad. The safety tolerances for ground traffic are much finer, sometimes only a few feet and/or a few hundred milliseconds.

Re:Colour me suprised

[timholman]

There are simply too many conditions in which a self-driving car could occasionally need a human pilot, and the vast majority of those are when a quick decision that is not safety related is required, and the rest are when the vehicle is operating on something other than conventional roads.

The problem is that every one of them assumes the person in the vehicle is able to drive, licensed to drive, or willing to drive. This is becoming less and less true as times goes on. Today, about a third of all 19-year-olds are not licensed to drive, and the trend is heading downward. Twenty years from now, the majority of people under the age of 30 may be unlicensed, with many more over the age of 70 unable to drive because of physical infirmity. In that scenario, how will having a steering wheel matter?

Re:Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that self-driving cars would not deal well with parking scenarios like you describe. But ultimately the hope is that they won't have to. Your self-driving car delivers you directly to the front entrance of the event and then it drives home or to some less crowded, less expensive parking area outside the immediate vicinity of the big event. When the event is done it drives up to the front door to pick you up.

Or better yet, it's not even your car and it goes and picks up someone else to go somewhere and some other automated car picks you up later.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

And in those cases the autonomous vehicle should detect that there's an obstruction and that there are adverse road conditions and to work around them.

Typically such a crew would have a truck. It would not be unreasonable to include, as a function of how that truck being used is upfit, to issue such broadcasts about the nature of the road work. Already light-trucks used for construction may be upfit with extra lights that strobe similarly to how many police and emergency vehicles strobe, it would not be unreasonable to require upfit with this extra system at the same time, that engages when the vehicle is strobing its lights.

In fact I would not be surprised if engineers at companies like Whalen are working on that very system.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

The human being knows when the directions provided are bullshit, or has a better chance of determining that.

To your 85-IQ example, the person whose job is to direct traffic to park in those conditions very well may be the person with the lowest intelligence in your little pet scenario. It may well be in the interest of the driver to ignore him because the directions are bad, ambiguous, or outright malicious.

Now how is your car computer going to know the difference and what choice is it going to make?

Re:Colour me suprised

[Catbeller]

You're imagining we're going to reengineer reality to fit the app?

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

There are Commodore 64's still running just fine today.

And nearly all Dell Optiplex GX270s and GX280s failed within five years because of faulty capacitors.

I have about 50,000 computers and about 3,000 switches and routers that I deal with on a regular basis. I have to replace enterprise-grade switches monthly due to failures in equipment that's less than five years old. We routinely replace circuit boards in laptops and tablets. I know how often computers and computing devices fail. Do you?

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

You integrate into the vehicle a means to safely ensure that only legitimate users can call forth its operation. As a subsystem of this you note the demographics of each user. You define what the various users are allowed and not allowed to do, and those are coupled with the environment in which the vehicle is operated.

A person that used to have a drivers' license and gave up that license while still in good standing might have greater rights in an emergency. Someone that lost good standing in order to lose a license, or a minor that has never had a driver's license might not. Or there might be nannies in the vehicle that give the occupant a degree of driving control but still prevent the person from doing something that will cause a collision or other form of accident or from grossly violating the rules of the road.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Rick Schumann]

You're being sarcastic, but it's really no surprise at all. People won't ever be comfortable with sitting in a box that can go anywhere it decides to at high speeds, and not have any positive and direct way to control what it's doing. Imagine a rollercoaster that has no tracks and a mind of it's own; it's the stuff of nightmares.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha! Good one. This, of course, explains why extended warranties cover 'power train' but always manage to exclude electrical systems. You may wish to look up manufacturers recalls and see how many are related to electrical components (hint, it is alot).

Re: Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Color it obvious. Anyone that thinks full autonomy is right around the corner is delusional, as a great many people have stated. Does this mean Silicon Valley is finally having to acknowledge reality? I hope so. Innovation is generally a process, not an event. A lot of potentially useful tech has been so soaked in pie-in-the-sky hype, it's been impossible to take seriously.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Knuckles]

This is nonsense. If your primitive human brain can understand to follow the instruction of the dude in the orange vest so can a computer be taught to do same. It's entirely a question of building a smart enough and big enough system. There is no physical activity the 8 watt bulb you call a brain can regulate that a computer can't regulate just as well given the right code, sensors and actuators. Driving is a very low IQ skill. 85 IQ people drive. A computer can be programmed to drive just as well as any of them. Anything this low IQ will be automated.

Not any time soon

Re:Colour me suprised

[Joe_Dragon]

and who is going pay for a big fleet with alot of down time? also big events with unpaved parking are likely in more rural areas. Big events in city areas have lots.

Re:Colour me suprised

[HornWumpus]

You pick up one side and lean it against the wall.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

You should read the wiki page you pointed to. RSM is really just Nissan and Renault. Samsung put some capital into the company, but that's about all. There isn't really any Samsung tech in those cars...

Re:Colour me suprised

[HornWumpus]

Doesn't match history. Not remotely.

Some ECUs are near bulletproof. Others have 100% failure rates. Many were made with crap chinese caps. If they haven't been rebuilt yet, the electrolyte has eaten the traces. That's about 5 years, all makes, all models. Including Japanese cars, who you would think should know better, as their industry were the ones to let the Chinese steel the bad design.

Then there is the generation of Chrysler ECUs that respond to a bad oxygen sensor by burning up their O2 sensor hardware.

The car companies are notorious corner cutters, 'not invented here'ers and generally slow to take up new tech. All of the big, non-botique ones anyhow.

I'll grant you that my examples are of 20 year old cars. But cars should last 20 years and more. The bad caps lasted between 10 and 15 years, then 100% failure and no good new parts anywhere on earth. I'm betting there are similar (not in specifics) in the current new car population. It's not like the car companies have any real incentive to make their cars last, their customers being 99+% ego driven anyhow.

Re:Colour me suprised

[fluffernutter]

Then why does every car I've ever had for more than 10 years have electrical problems before mechanical problems? It's not the silicone it's the solder joints I think. Freeze and thaw cycles are very hard on them. And when they break you usually have to put up with it until you buy a new car.

Re:Colour me suprised

[fluffernutter]

Put a C64 outside for five years in a place that freezes in the winter and use it year round, see how long it lasts.

Re:Colour me suprised

[fluffernutter]

So you're saying I should basically use a taxi service and not have a car. No thanks.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

When there are only limited points of contact that can be regulated, yes. We do it all of the time.

In my state, any vehicles that want "wagging" lights have to be licensed. School buses, ambulances, pickup trucks used by construction, tow trucks, all licensed. All are also upfit. This means there are two layers in the process that have very few points of contact for this kind of regulation to be imposed. To get a license you have to demonstrate that you've integrated the new technology. To upfit, you have to demonstrate that you're integrating the new technology into customers' vehicles.

I expect that most states operate this way, or they have similar rules on commercial vehicles including light trucks used by business that can serve as the point where this kind of upfit is required.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

*grin*

I've known several cases where even the existing automotive PCM failed, in a climate that does not freeze, and that computer is supposed to be hardened against this kind of problem.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

That's a nonstarter for me too. I have seen what people do to things that are not theirs. If I wanted to put up with a vandalized or dirty or smelly vehicle I'd take a bus. Hell, even taxis, which theoretically have an interested party there to pay attention to what the fare might be doing to the vehicle, don't always have tidy vehicles.

Re:Colour me suprised

[umghhh]

Hmm roaming costs you say. Well that is marginal problem with people crossing the boarder and can be addressed in ways any traveler knows already anyway.
The problem the GGP wanted to show is that there are always scenarios which could lead to the self driving vehicle to be confused - in your scenario with bad reception or lost connection for any other reason (aliens eating the antenna etc). This is what somebody pointed out already about airplanes - autonomous airplane control systems can let the pilot sleep most of the way after he programmed the target. The programming of the target may be wrong (in themiddle of Indian ocean?) or you end up in the airfield having no support for autonomous landing or it is out of service or whatever such thing. Good engineering practice and most likely also law will require to have a backup that can support such automatic system by not ideal but better than nothing system called human.
Unless of course we reach end of human development which is a completely different discussion but think of this - humans are last resort in such unpredictable situations because after appropriate training they are universal enough to realize what to do and give it a shot. System with such ability may be technologically possible one day but they would have enough of general human ability to adapt to environment that they would warrant some of our rights to be given to them. At the same time such systems will be complex enough that the probability of error will increase. The cost of such systems will increase too at least initially yet the problem with rights will have to be addressed - in other words at some point costs of enterprise will be not in technical ability but legal rights of the robots. Where this leads you can read up in Washing Machine Tragedy. This story may be a joke but the problems of complex systems will at some point arrive. I for one cannot wait for a good washing machine - a self driving car I do not really need.

Re:Colour me suprised

[fluffernutter]

Not only that, but people have rose colored glasses on if they think a service like this will spend money on having a car available instantly to everyone once they are the only viable solution. They will be as bad as taxis maybe worse.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

There are Commodore 64's still running just fine today.

And nearly all Dell Optiplex GX270s and GX280s failed within five years because of faulty capacitors.

I have about 50,000 computers and about 3,000 switches and routers that I deal with on a regular basis. I have to replace enterprise-grade switches monthly due to failures in equipment that's less than five years old. We routinely replace circuit boards in laptops and tablets. I know how often computers and computing devices fail. Do you?

How do you know that isn't because everyone cheaped out on their caps? I'll bet those Commodore 64's all have electrolytic or disc caps rated to 100+V...

Re:Colour me suprised

[bws111]

Around here it is pretty common for bystanders to take on the role of 'flaggers' around an obstruction until emergency equipment arrives. The 'obstruction' could be an injured (or dead) animal in the road, debris, an accident, a fallen tree, you name it.

Re:Colour me suprised

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, i want a modern phone with a sliding keyboard!
Some 5 or 5,5 inch screen with a physical sliding keyboard!

And they are not producing that thing. They are producing only more and more thinner phones ... Camoon, produce a ~1cm thick phone with 5 inch screen and i will give you my money!

Re:Colour me suprised

[SavSoul]

Being robbed requires no cones, you just simply have to stand in front of the car to make it stop. The number of pranks, robberies, and other chaos involved will be interesting to see. There are times you may want to drive over a curb to escape a person with a gun.

Re:Colour me suprised

[slew]

Or better yet, it's not even your car and it goes and picks up someone else to go somewhere and some other automated car picks you up later.

Or even better, we can invent some sort of publicly accessible vehicle that shuttles many people to a event and picks them up when they are done to reduce traffic. I suggest we call these vehicles a Basic User Shuttle aka a BUS.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

How is irrelevant. That it occurs in everything from computers to the sprinkler timer that runs one's irrigation system at home, or to the thermostats that regulate the HVAC, or to security cameras, or to water heater controls, is what's relevant, and it does not give me any warm fuzzy feelings for the automotive industry either. It's very likely they will make just as bad of decisions as everyone else that uses electronic components does.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

I've blocked the road before when a bicyclist was struck by a hit-and-run and was laying in the middle of the street. In those kinds of cases it makes sense to put the vehicle itself in the way and to activate the hazard lights, such that now the vehicle declares itself to be a hazard and for other vehicles to avoid it.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

I'm OK with quibbling or nitpicking or whatever, my attitudes on this stuff are not so firmly set that a convincing argument can't be enlightening. Please feel free.

As for your example of the vehicle stalling-out, it can be even simpler, they could run out of whatever it is that provides power. Whether the car detects the condition and intentionally shuts down or the vehicle unexpectedly just ceases operating, the result could be the same, a stalled vehicle in a travel lane without an easy ability to steer it. Having run out of gas once myself literally as I was waiting to turn left across traffic into the gas station, being able to push, steer , and stop the car without calling in professional help was essential.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

Heh. I once had a flat tire on I-40 near Kingman, AZ and had no cell service. The drivers of the two other vehicles in the same predicament (we all ran over the same debris) also had no cell service despite not being on the same carrier as I was.

If I can end up in a situation on an interstate highway where I have no service, then I fully expect to find other places without data or cell service. Even if automakers or some third-party provides remote-control driver service and manages to get the latency on the network connection low enough to make it safe there are still plenty of scenarios in which that service would not work when needed.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

It really annoys me when the sensors designed to detect a fault condition fail long before the fault condition itself occurs. I've had to replace O2 sensors, oil pressure sending units, coolant temp sending units, and help others with timing sensors because the damn electronics failed before anything else.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

I suppose the best analogy for right now is the sedan service. One can subscribe to a sedan service that provides unmarked sedans, usually black or white entry-level luxury cars like Lincolns or Chryslers, that chauffeur one from point to point. They're prompt, their drivers are courteous and dressed well, the cars are clean and well maintained. And three trips cost as much as a monthly car payment to buy your own vehicle. I know because we've looked into it for my inlaws, and it simply doesn't make fiscal sense to hire a sedan to ferry them around.

It's well possible that this service could come down in price somewhat if a driver is not necessary anymore, but I expect that autonomous vehicles will cost more than the vehicles that these services use, and even without the driver there's still labor costs associated with running the front office and with the maintenance shop, costs that will not simply go away just because there's no driver. In fact, without a driver to identify when something feels like it's starting to go wrong, the shop might have to spend more time troubleshooting and repairing because little niggling issues were not brought to their attention promptly.

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

If the bus service were more hop-on, hop-off without requiring specific stops, and if the frequency were good, then I could see using buses. Unfortunately if I wanted to take a bus to work it would probably take me an hour and a half. Right now it takes me fifteen minutes if I drive. For the totality of the day, losing two and a half hours because of having to work around a city transit schedule is a complete nonstarter.

Re:Colour me suprised

[fluffernutter]

Correction, autonomous cars will cost way more to buy and maintain then current cars. And cost is never the indication of price (refer to Apple products). The more reliant people become on the service, the more expensive it will be. As long as the top 50% wealthiest of people will pay top dollar for it, the least 50% will be left behind and struggling to afford it. This is assuming it is a private service and not public. But that would take regulation, which no one here seems to like.

Re:Colour me suprised

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Meanwhile at work my iOS counterparts get native Office 365 integration in the mail / calender app, while I have to use a third party android app that only seems to automatically sync on Wifi. Same when we were on Lotus Traveler.

Plus the iOS viewers for PDF, Word, Excel, PPT open instantly, while you may have to find and install third party apps on Android.

For PDFs at least I found "Radaee PDF Reader" and "Mupdf" can provide almost instantaneous viewing capability, far better than Adobe, or any office suite.

For Office stuff (Word/excel/PPT) Kingston / WPS Office seem ok.

Re:Colour me suprised

[goose-incarnated]

85 IQ people drive.

And yet a computer cannot. A computer fails at tasks that an 85 IQ person can do.

Re:Colour me suprised

[goose-incarnated]

Today, about a third of all 19-year-olds are not licensed to drive, and the trend is heading downward.

That is because they are immature and stay with mommy or daddy who takes care of them. Once they are required to grow up they will very quickly realise what an advantage adults have with a drivers license.

Re:Colour me suprised

[tehcyder]

Here in the UK at least any actual road works would be set up with temporary traffic lights, and any emergency like a traffic accident would soon have emergency vehicles with flashing lights and bollards. Only in exceptional situations would you be down to a random guy standing in the road waving at cars.

Re:Colour me suprised

[tehcyder]

Driving is a very low IQ skill. 85 IQ people drive.

But current computers have IQs below 40 (or whatever the Idiot level is).

Re:Colour me suprised

[TWX]

I call those people ones that I out-compete. I have a good paying job that requires field work. As autonomous vehicles still aren't here and as they're probably going to be expensive, I don't expect that a lot of younger adults will be able to afford them. My job requires visiting facilities both to deal with scheduled work and to deal with unscheduled problems. Being able to drive means that I I can do this work, and I don't really care how technically skilled someone is, there's only so much someone can do remotely when equipment is not responding.

Dumb idea

[Geoffrey.landis]

Yep. Ditching the steering wheel and the pedals would be really, really dumb. It would mean that if the car had a problem it would be stuck where it is.

Steering wheels are useful.

Re:Dumb idea

[Mashiki]

Yep. Ditching the steering wheel and the pedals would be really, really dumb. It would mean that if the car had a problem it would be stuck where it is.

Surprise! The very high end cars have already done this. Lexus, BMW, Rolls Royce, several others all have drive-by-wire systems, the steering wheel is controlled by individual electric motors(sometimes a single motor). And and electric motor on the pedal simulates the feel of hydraulic pressure.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I think cars without steering wheels would be great for those with multiple DUI convictions - and those who might want to avoid them.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Where do you live that the roads even allow that? Around where I live the roads are way to bumpy for me to be comfortable with areas that sensitive to be that close to teeth.

Re:Dumb idea

[MightyYar]

Unless you know otherwise, the steering and brakes always have mechanical fail-safes. In particular I'm familiar with the Infinity Q50 system.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, you have electrical power steering, but there is still a steering column. You need it if the system fails and, more important, for direct feedback from the road.

Re:Dumb idea

[TWX]

That is so small a percentage of the population as to almost not be worth thinking over, and if autonomous capability indeed becomes ubiquitous will become an even smaller percentage yet. If courts do continue to order the use of technology to prevent a previously-convicted intoxicated person from directly operating the vehicle, it would be simple enough to program the vehicle to operate in autonomous mode by default and to only switch into human-operated mode after passing a breathalyzer test. Simply put, until the user proves that they're sober the car would simply self-drive instead of letting the user have a chance.

Re:Dumb idea

[K. S. Kyosuke]

It would mean that if the car had a problem it would be stuck where it is.

If your car has a problem, having a steering wheel and pedals is not likely to help you. It doesn't help you now either since all cars still have them yet they still get problems.

Re:Dumb idea

[Mashiki]

Unless you know otherwise, the steering and brakes always have mechanical fail-safes. In particular I'm familiar with the Infinity Q50 system.

Depends on what you define as "mechanical fail-safes" if in theory the electronic actuator is supposed to engage the clutch in the event of the motor failure is considered a fail-safe I guess so. Nissan dumped their "drive by wire" design because even when the electric motor system disengaged, there was a chance that the mechanical system wouldn't. And while there haven't been any failures on the Q50 yet, the chance that an electric re-engage of the linkage clutch failing is possible. In theory it's a 3-part system, but each part can independently fail because they all rely on one thing: Electricity. That in my book means that there is no mechanical fall back. Even on lift trucks that have steer-by-wire, if the electric motors for steering fail most designs are a complete cut of power and engaging of the brakes. But brakes have been known not to engage because of relay failures. The difference between a gasoline engine and most lift trucks though is that the electric motor that moves it, enables it to slowdown quickly. Even when the weights of a lift truck can be more then your average sedan when loaded.

Brakes get a bit more...interesting. The emergency brake is considered the fallback. But you can find cars that use an electric motor at the engage the system instead of a manual cable to engage those too.

Re: Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Depends on whom you're blowing

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

My VW has actuators on each real wheel for the e-brake and push button on the dash to enable them. The regular brakes are vacuum-assist.

Re:Dumb idea

[TWX]

E-brake is a misnomer anyway. The purpose of that kind of brake is to prevent the vehicle from rolling when it's off, should the transmission somehow end up out of park or gear. I don't know off-hand the amount of clamping-force that the electric-engaged parking brakes have, but if it's anything like the cable-actuated brakes then it's not much compared to the hydraulic with vacuum-assist or hydraulic with electric-assist that the brake pedal provides.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

His mom doesn't have teeth.

Re:Dumb idea

[TWX]

Steering hasn't really worked that way for decades. Under the dasboard, the column bolts to structural elements. A shaft from the column enters a universal-joint and then continues through another shaft to another universal-joint, then through the firewall and down to the rack and pinion bolted to the body of the car, which in-turn moves the tie rods to push and pull on the steering knuckles. Automakers usually introduce a series of rubber isolators through the shafts to further reduce vibration.

This system helps to protect the driver from being impaled on the steering column in a severe accident, the u-joints will allow the deforming car body to not press the whole column right at the driver, the part bolted to the dash remains bolted to the dash while the shafts bend around each other in a sufficiently serious accident.

You're probably going to get as much feel through the vibrations from the suspension through the chassis into the body then through the dash to where the column is mounted as you would through the shaft.

Re:Dumb idea

[0100010001010011]

steering and brakes always have mechanical fail-safes

Not automotive but.

Cat D7E, M series motor graders and a whole host of other products are 100% by wire.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

So there is still a means for a person to take control of the car, which would be the point of being totally at the mercy of a computer driven car. I have had GPS lead me down a narrow road that turned out to be dangerous, 3 inches of powdery snow, steep grades and embankments. Passed two cars that were gutter balled waiting on a tow. I steered out of it at the last minute off the path it was a slow 5-10mph crawl while at times sliding to the side.

Re:Dumb idea

[bws111]

If your car has a problem today (say, electrical failure) while you are moving you can steer to the side of the road. If your car has a problem today when you are not moving someone can push your car while you steer it to the side of the road. Neither of these are possible with no wheel, you are going to be sitting IN TRAFFIC with no way to move til the wrecker gets there.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

It would mean that if the car had a problem it would be stuck where it is.

If your car has a problem, having a steering wheel and pedals is not likely to help you. It doesn't help you now either since all cars still have them yet they still get problems.

Yes, but autonomous cars have a suite of sensors to determine where it is, where the road is and where obstacles are. A failure anywhere there would make the autonomous part unable to function, while the rest of the car of perfectly fine to drive manually if there are manual controls available...

Bad enough that cars today scream bloody murder over relatively minor things that disable 'higher order' functions, like ABS/ESP, that didn't even exist in cars of yesteryear, while the basic brake system still is functional and the car driveable, if you dare chance it when you don't know the exact issue and all the brake and STOP lights are flashing in the dash...

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, +1! I was like WTF Drive by Wire. Dude doesn't know shit about cars. Electric assist is all the rage for fuel savings. It's a pain in the ass to get the software right though so that it provides good steering feedback about the tire's contact patches.

Re:Dumb idea

[sinij]

I am 100% with you on potentially disastrous effects of this. For example, my new car has an electric switch in place of emergency brake. This means in all-out failure it won't be there. Thankfully, it is direct steering and manual hydraulic clutch gearbox - so I will be able to steer and slow down by downshifting if brakes and electronics both cut out.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

drive-by-wire systems

While this probably works for 50m long jumbo jet aircraft, it doesn't work for 4 meter long cars where the driver is two feet above the ground and one meter from the wheels.

It doesn't work. You can feel the disjunction between the where the steering wheel is and the wheels are. It's noticeable, and it affects steering. While I'm willing to put up with the usual excuses for input lag in SNES emulators, I am not willing to tolerate it when I am driving on public roads. A millimetre and a millisecond can mean the difference between a death and a near miss. Just mechanically link the wheels.

A lot of "modern" car tech is like this. Shiny new digital components that seem like improvements at first glance, but on closer inspection are either expensive boondoggles or -- very often -- inferior solutions to existing system. The best example so far has to be digital displays instead of mirrors. I will never buy that a rear view camera is a better solution to a bigger rear view mirror, side mirrors, or (as I was taught to do it) turning around and looking out the back window. Don't even get me started on the side "mirror" cameras. Who ordered that? Things like automatic fuel management systems or ABS maybe are good ideas, but a lot of this stuff comes off like bad web design.

And I will not put a radio in my car if it doesn't have a volume knob. Get off my dashboard!

Re:Dumb idea

[sinij]

You can slow down the car from highway speeds in reasonable time with e-brake. However, when used in this way it is sacrificial as it overheats and burns up pads.

Re:Dumb idea

[Jason Levine]

I wonder if a compromise could be worked out. Have the steering wheel and pedals fold away so that they are completely out of the way. However, if you need them, you could pull them out and use them.

Of course, the real issue is that people won't trust self-driving cars 100% right away (and likely shouldn't). The first models will come with steering wheels and pedals accessible. As self-driving car technology improves, the times when the human driver needs to take over will get fewer and fewer. Eventually, no pedals/steering wheel might make sense, but not right away.

Re:Dumb idea

[MightyYar]

Yeah, I was definitely only talking about automotive. I think all the newer airliner designs are fly by wire now, too.

Re:Dumb idea

[SuperKendall]

Thankfully, it is direct steering and manual hydraulic clutch gearbox - so I will be able to steer and slow down by downshifting if brakes and electronics both cut out.

My car has a lot of airbags so I'll be able to use any fixed nearby objects directly in my path to slow down and emerge somewhat whole.

Good luck everybody!

Re:Dumb idea

[vtcodger]

Last time I followed the GPS directions when I suspected they were wrong, I ended up 3km down a dirt track facing a pair of (closed) barn doors.

Re:Dumb idea

[MightyYar]

The clutch is fail-safe, though. The motor has to disengage the clutch when the system is operational, and a loss of electrical power should re-engage the clutch. But there are possible failure modes where the system still has electrical power yet is non-functional in a way that is not detected.

So yeah, there are edge cases where the system can theoretically fail. But that is also true of a mechanical linkage.

The "emergency brake" stopped being called that a long time ago - they now call it a "parking brake". Your parking brakes are laughably small things in the rear wheels. The "emergency" part was replaced by a dual master cylinder that separates the front and rear systems. In the event that you lose one, you get a light on the dash (and it will be very easy to tell from stopping performance and pedal feel). Even in the event that you lose electronic/vacuum assist, pushing hard enough on the pedal will stop your car.

Re:Dumb idea

[vtcodger]

"I will never buy that a rear view camera is a better solution to a bigger rear view mirror, side mirrors,"

Actually, my wife's car has a rear view camera and I quite like it. About the only thing on that mess of half baked electronics that I do like. I'm attempting to install an aftermarket rearview camera on my 17 year old Toyota. Someday I'll possibly figure out why it works fine on the test bench, but fails to deliver a picture when installed in the car and powered from the backup lights.

Re:Dumb idea

[skaralic]

Yep. Ditching the steering wheel and the pedals would be really, really dumb. It would mean that if the car had a problem it would be stuck where it is.

Surprise! The very high end cars have already done this. Lexus, BMW, Rolls Royce, several others all have drive-by-wire systems, the steering wheel is controlled by individual electric motors(sometimes a single motor). And and electric motor on the pedal simulates the feel of hydraulic pressure.

Steering and brakes have mechanical fallback mechanisms.

Re:Dumb idea

[MightyYar]

I don't think he meant road bumps, but the rotational pressures on the wheel as the tires encounter rotational forces. The trick for quality manufacturers is to get the steering to have very little slop so that the steering and road feel is accurate.

Re:Dumb idea

[MightyYar]

We carry around spare tires, jacks, jumper cables, flares, etc. It's not out of the realm of possibility for a little bar to be included to be used as an emergency steering wheel.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I know about the safety steering column that folds up in case of an accident, it's been around for decades.

It still does provide feedback from the road and, more important, makes 100% sure that your steering wheel and the wheels cannot go out of sync (even for fractions of a second) as would be the case with a pure steer by wire system.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

sure it gets stuck but then a rental vehicle could be sent to your location to keep you on the move and a service like AAA could then pick up the broken vehicle and return it to a service location for repair.

People have been dealing with stranded cars since cars were invented, this will be no different. There also exist services like AAA which exist to help drivers in these situations. the problems you have mentioned have already been solved and thus are a non issue.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

It is unlikely that the vehicles you describe would pass FMVSS or CMVSS. Brakes and steering have mechanically linked backup systems. Always.

Re:Dumb idea

[TWX]

My wife's '15 Renegade has electric-assist steering. It still uses a column but uses electricity to reduce the amount of effort that the driver has to exert instead of a hydraulic pump. Still offers resistance.

Re:Dumb idea

[TWX]

Electric-assist steering can be made to steer in addition to provide assist, right? You don't have to remove the column linkage at all.

On top of that there are already purely electric steering systems and have been for some time. There are heavy trucks whose steering and other controls can be moved from side to side so that the truck is easy to operate whether in a left-hand-drive or right-hand-drive country. They don't seem to have problem getting out of synch.

Re:Dumb idea

[TWX]

Why would it burn up pads any more than pressing the brake pedal would?

I've seen vehicles overcome their parking brakes. Hell, I've done it a couple of times myself by accident. I do not trust parking brakes to stop a vehicle at-speed, and especially when the throttle is wide open.

Re:Dumb idea

[bws111]

Yikes! So we replace the scenario of 'driving down the interstate, electrical failure!, steer to the side and stop' with 'driving down the interstate, electrical failure!, stop in travel lane, exit vehicle, find little metal bar, attach wherever it needs to go, get vehicle moving (or push), steer to side of road'.

Re:Dumb idea

[bws111]

It is different. If you can't steer you can't get off the road. That is a completely different situation than being stranded on the side of the road.

Re:Dumb idea

[Bruce Perens]

I have a Prius and a Jeep. The Jeep pulls a trailer, the Prius is for commuting. Both have something resembling a game controller for the accelerator pedal, the transmission control, and the ignition switch. If there's a computer problem, these vehicles very definitely won't move.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

because you are only using two brakes when using the emergency brakes as opposed to using all four brakes when pushing the brake pedal. In almost all cars there is a brake bias to the front, which means that under normal operation the front brakes do more work than the rear. this is by design because as you press the brake pedal the vehicle weight shifts forward putting more downward force on the front wheels thus increasing traction and the amount of braking pressure that can be used on the front wheels.

you should not be using the emergency brake to slow a vehicle that is under a WOT (wide open throttle) condition, first deal with the WOT condition then slow the vehicle down because even using the normal brakes under WOT can be dangerous and destroy your brakes. Most of the cars i have owned are old and prone to break down from time to time, I have used the parking break to slow down the vehicle from highway speeds and it works just fine.

Re:Dumb idea

[djbckr]

Surprise! The very high end cars have already done this. Lexus, BMW, Rolls Royce, several others all have drive-by-wire systems, the steering wheel is controlled by individual electric motors(sometimes a single motor). And and electric motor on the pedal simulates the feel of hydraulic pressure.

No, that's wrong. Consumer cars (Lexus for sure, not sure about RR) have a physical connection from the steering wheel to the steering mechanism attached to the axle. This system is *assisted* by either hydraulics or electric motors. If these fail, you can still steer the vehicle. Of course, it's more difficult, but it can still be done.

Re:Dumb idea

[CrimsonAvenger]

For example, my new car has an electric switch in place of emergency brake. This means in all-out failure it won't be there.

Unless, of course, it fails safe by engaging the emergency brake upon loss of electricity. Not like it's difficult to design such a system....

Re:Dumb idea

[HornWumpus]

Not all ebrake systems have the dual drum/disk setup. The ones that don't use the regular rear brake pads/shoes. Shitty brakes, but they will stop you eventually.

The drum/disk brakes particularly suck. Especially as they rust on slushbox cars as they are never used. Usually not even 'parking brakes'.

Ebrakes have all kinds of issues on slushboxes. Some back drum brakes only adjust when the ebrake is applied. Automatic trans cars with these brakes are typically stopping with zero rear brake action as the adjuster is rusted in the fully back position.

Re:Dumb idea

[HornWumpus]

There are plenty of 'numb' old school power steering systems in the world. See most trucks, cadillacs etc.

IIRC Acura/Honda has pure drive by wire cars. No connection between brake pedal and hydraulic system except computers.

No car has a brake system as scary as an old Cadillac Allante. Failure mode, pedal to the floor, e brake takes three pumps to engage and auto-releases if the car is in gear (so you can't get but one pump until you shift to N). Had a pedal to hydraulic connection, but used solenoids to release pressure for ABS and a high pressure system and solenoids for traction control and ABS. Lose the high pressure system, pedal to the floor on first ABS 'pump'. All with --Apple 2 (GM 1990) level technology. They die by rear ending someone. Only other car with that brake system was recalled for it, somehow GM's showpiece was not.

Re:Dumb idea

[HornWumpus]

Keep it up, you'll get the Darwin yet. Pick 'shortest route' around Death Valley for loads of fun.

Re:Dumb idea

[HornWumpus]

I think he's suggesting that a 'tiller' can pop out of the dash so the dumbfounded dipshits sitting there can be held liable for being 'in control' at the moment of impact.

Re:Dumb idea

[HornWumpus]

Install a god damn game controller on the dash and get it over with.

Don't forget to make the car refuse to work with KB and mouse or a gaming wheel.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought one time use pads were popular around here?

Re:Dumb idea

[sinij]

This would make it impossible to move the car with the dead battery.

Re:Dumb idea

[ColaMan]

Some cars with rear disc brakes have a tiny drum and a set of correspondingly tiny brake pads for the park brake inside the rotor. These aren't used in normal braking and can't deal with the heat generated when they're applied when the car is moving.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

In theory it's a 3-part system, but each part can independently fail because they all rely on one thing: Electricity.

That is a strange way to look at things. In theory a redundant mechanical system can fail because they all relies on mechanics.

Did you mean that all their systems rely on a single energy source? Then they have made a huge error in their design.
Typically each system should have local energy storage so that they can function even if the primary supply fails.
Even modern hard drives uses the motor as a generator to power the electronics so that the buffered data can be properly written in the event of a power failure.

Re:Dumb idea

[Geoffrey.landis]

If the camera in your Prius doesn't work the Prius won't drive?

Really?

You should take it back.

Re:Dumb idea

[MightyYar]

I was operating under the assumption that the car is indeed fully automatic, and it is legal and advisable to let the car do all the driving. Under such circumstances, the failure mode needs to be such that you would survive such an incident even if you were asleep or reading. Frankly, if my Electric Dingbat 2000 vehicle stopped in the middle of the freeway, I'd walk over to the shoulder and call AAA - no need for heroics.

Re:Dumb idea

[MightyYar]

Preferably it would rocket out and impale them.

Re:Dumb idea

[thebigmacd]

Many parking brakes use separate pads or a separate drum brake. These are much smaller in capacity than the main brakes.

Re:Dumb idea

[thebigmacd]

Airbus is 100% electronic, Boeing still sticks to their philosophy of "pilot is ultimately in charge" and retains electromechanical connections between controls and control surfaces.

Re:Dumb idea

[thebigmacd]

The trucks with sliding controls still have mechanical steering connections. For example, Unimog VarioPilot uses a horizontal shaft which engages the moveable steering column at either end.

Re:Dumb idea

[ishmaelflood]

Acura/Honda has pure drive by wire cars. .

cite please

Re:Dumb idea

[MightyYar]

Boeing and Airbus do take different approaches to programming their flight control computers, but both are now fly-by-wire. The 777 was Boeing's first fly-by-wire plane, even though the controls still have the classic layout and in certain modes move along with the control surfaces.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you kidding me? Have you ever driven a Ferrari or Porsche? It's all about steering feedback.

Re:Dumb idea

[mjwx]

Yep. Ditching the steering wheel and the pedals would be really, really dumb. It would mean that if the car had a problem it would be stuck where it is.

Surprise! The very high end cars have already done this. Lexus, BMW, Rolls Royce, several others all have drive-by-wire systems, the steering wheel is controlled by individual electric motors(sometimes a single motor). And and electric motor on the pedal simulates the feel of hydraulic pressure.

Suprise! They still haven't gotten rid of the steering wheel or other controls. They've just moved to drive by wire.

The problem isn't with Drive By Wire accepting input and translating that to output, the problem is with decision making. DBW is a proven technology, although I will lament the feedback you got from physical cables and pulleys, I cant fault the tech. The problem is with the speed and accuracy of the decision making by the autonomous systems. They've only been demonstrated in perfect conditions with a human backup making sure they didn't make mistakes.

Currently when they encounter a problem they just stop and throw control back to a human driver. That'll be completely useless when said driver is too busy playing Candy Crush to avoid a bag of sand left in the middle of the lane. Something I encountered this morning, fortunately I'm an attentive driver and knew the lane next to me was clear.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Dumb for a different reason. The people who buy new cars like driving. People who just need a car to get around usually buy a cheaper used vehicle.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

So it still has a steering wheel.

 

Re:Dumb idea

[Ichijo]

On the other hand, if you have a heart attack today while driving, you may not be able to slow down or move to the side of the road even though the car is functioning perfectly.

And if everybody drove autonomous cars, breaking down in traffic would be perfectly safe. Cars would signal and safely change lanes like we're all supposed to do.

Re:Dumb idea

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife's '15 Renegade has electric-assist steering. It still uses a column but uses electricity to reduce the amount of effort that the driver has to exert instead of a hydraulic pump. Still offers resistance.

My 91 Toyota MR2 has electrical assisted steering, so its hardly new.

Self driving cars do add an interesting bit of difficulty, since the self driving loop has to really be as reliable as the manual loop. That doesn't mean it can never break, but it can never break in bad ways.

I can't really see a long term alternative than a design that is as close as possible to provable mathematically as impossible to fail in an uncontrolled way. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a better design than the conventional one with the electrical assist on top, say with redundant stepper motors or the equivalent. That way, if all the electrics fail you only lose the assist, but can still somewhat control the cars direction.

Basically I can't see any drive by wire system being more reliable than that...

Of course as soon as any fault in the self driving system is detected it must act on its best information to first alert the driver and then to slow down as quickly as it safely can. Once a fault is detected you probably have to have the thing serviced and completely checked out, since this is safety critical stuff there. The slowdown may be overridden temporarily by the driver taking positive control.

Re:Dumb idea

[Toshito]

I'm very late to the party, but AFAIK only Infinity has steer by wire, and on only one car model.

What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google abandoned a project?! No!

I worked for them for three years.

Behind the scenes it's a fucking catastrophe of half-assed and half-finished projects, with literally thousands of abandoned services that nobody knows anything about, because all the hot-shot college hires moved up or out after proving how badass they were to get hired by Google.

Nobody there wants to maintain anything, and their age discrimination practices prevent them from finding anyone who comprehends what that entails.

Fuck em.

Re:What!?

[Rei]

They really do seem to love the concept of getting "hot shots". They once tried to headhunt me after I won the Underhanded C contest one year. Um... that contest is about doing malicious things in the middle of tasks you were assigned to do and getting away with it - is that really a skill you want in your programmers?

Re:What!?

[TWX]

If I sanitize this for polite company, it sounds like you're describing a company that has ideas that are greater than its ability to follow-through with, and is short-sighted enough that it doesn't perform the kind of maintenance that brings the product to a state of long-term maturity.

Given their abandoning and shutting of several APIs throughout the years I happen to agree and I find it annoying that they do this. It's also definitely colored my view on trusting a third-party to continue to maintain services on my behalf that are not locally-hosted on my own equipment. After all, I don't really know when they'll yank the rug out from under me.

Re:What!?

[khallow]

Um... that contest is about doing malicious things in the middle of tasks you were assigned to do and getting away with it - is that really a skill you want in your programmers?

You have to ask?

Re:What!?

[OzPeter]

is that really a skill you want in your programmers?

Maybe not the malicious part, but I can see them coveting the part that implies you know the language and systems so well that you can see where assumptions would break down and have the intelligence to exploit them in novel ways. That shows a level of mastery that few people have (otherwise we all would have won such competitions).

Whether you apply your powers for good or for evil is a different conversation.

Re:What!?

[Ghostworks]

Besides Google's cultural issues, the fact remains that a whole car is difficult to build: heavily regulated, expensive components, very competitive established market. It is foolish for any company to enter making a new car when they could just sell their hot new tech into cars.

The feeling in the industry right now is that the car is the new cell phone: generally untapped and ready for rapid improvements and new service roll-outs. All the head units basically are Android devices now (to manage the tuner, the CD player, Bluetooth connectivity, the DVD player, GPS/maps, OTA updates, etc.).

Apple tried. Google tried. Samsung is about to try. And all of them learn sooner or later that these projects have 5-year ramps and 10 years of support, that the hardware is 10x costlier than they are used to, and that the OEMs and end-customers have zero tolerance for their "move fast, break shit" attitude. Completely difference business cultures. Honestly, the best way to make a buck is to partner with OEMs and sell a drop-in peripheral or service. Anything else will fail.

Re:What!?

[DogDude]

I see some of that on the sales ends, too. The salespeople we've spoken with have been young, 20-something guys who try to sell advertising like they're talking to some Silicon Valley angel-investor bullshit startup, because in their minds, that's what the whole world is. Very strange. I do wonder if they have grown-ups there who do the regular jobs to keep a company together.

Re: What!?

[reanjr]

Google is primarily a data analytics company. Any products which aren't directly tied to collecting, analyzing, and disseminating data are just side projects for Google to see if they can quickly take advantage of thier data to create new technologies.

Re:What!?

[swillden]

Google abandoned a project?! No!

Google isn't abandoning the project, they're just going to sell systems to carmakers rather than becoming a carmaker.

I worked for them for three years.

I'll have my six-year anniversary as a Google Software Engineer in February.

their age discrimination practices prevent them from finding anyone who comprehends what that entails.

I could debate the rest of this post, but I'm replying just to pick on this point. I see absolutely no indication of age discrimination at Google. I'm nearly 50 myself, and not the oldest person on my team. My previous team included several engineers in their 60s and one guy in his early 70s (former Bell Labs guy; crazy smart and achieved independent wealth decades earlier but enjoyed working).

About the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination is that the interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc. That stuff is clearly top of mind for new CS grads, not so much for professionals who've been in the field a few years.

However, professionals who know this and take a little time to brush up before going into the interview do fine. Recruiters point this out to candidates and are willing to delay scheduling the interviews if needed. I asked the recruiter to wait a couple of weeks so I could brush up and I was hired. On the occasions when I interview someone who seems pretty sharp but struggles because they're rusty I strongly encourage them to go refresh their memory and try again.

Re:What!?

[swillden]

They really do seem to love the concept of getting "hot shots". They once tried to headhunt me after I won the Underhanded C contest one year. Um... that contest is about doing malicious things in the middle of tasks you were assigned to do and getting away with it - is that really a skill you want in your programmers?

Makes perfect sense to me. No, that's not a skill Google is looking for, but it's evidence of cleverness and deep knowledge of C programming and programmers. You'll note that winning the contest got you an opportunity for an interview, it didn't get you a job offer.

Re:What!?

[godrik]

"Apple tried. Google tried. Samsung is about to try. And all of them learn sooner or later that these projects have 5-year ramps and 10 years of support, that the hardware is 10x costlier than they are used to, and that the OEMs and end-customers have zero tolerance for their "move fast, break shit" attitude."

Well, Samsung is a big conglomerate with part of the business is building ships, airplanes, and tanks. So they probably can manage a car :)

Re:What!?

[jdunn14]

It's also definitely colored my view on trusting a third-party to continue to maintain services on my behalf that are not locally-hosted on my own equipment. After all, I don't really know when they'll yank the rug out from under me.

This is incredibly important and I wish more people would kind of come to terms with this issue. I remember a while back when a javascript library was changed and broke a bunch of online applications. For a deployed project there is really no reason you should be pulling live from someone else's server/repository. Host it on your own server and periodically snap everything forward after testing that no one you rely on broke something you need. At the same time, make sure you actually DO test and move forward as things are updated, but if your app breaks because someone changed a library then the customer see the egg on your face, not theirs.

Re:What!?

[93 Escort Wagon]

Behind the scenes it's a fucking catastrophe of half-assed and half-finished projects, with literally thousands of abandoned services that nobody knows anything about

Sounds like Norm Abram's basement!

I remember an interview with Steve Thomas, who used to host This Old House and apparently was actually friends with Norm off-screen. He was saying that women were always telling him how great it would be to be married to Norm, since he's always making these wonderful hutches and other types of wooden furniture. But (according to Steve) Norm's basement is full of half-finished projects where he'd either started taken them just far enough to know it was a good "Yankee Workshop" concept, or else they were abandoned because of lack of interest.

Apparently Norm's real-life wife gets just as frustrated with him over this as most wives occasionally are with their husbands about other things (speaking from personal experience on the latter!).

Re:What!?

[avandesande]

It was always a dumb idea self driving modules will just be another low margin part like ABS or engine management system. Nobody gives a crap what it's called as long as it works.

Re:What!?

[TWX]

If you're talking about the likes of node.js and jquery, I have no idea why people seem to think it's a good idea to rely on them, hosted on someone else's server. That's really what "cloud services" are, "someone else's server". That doesn't mean that it's inherently evil, but it does mean that whoever's deciding to use cloud computing needs to understand that they're literally using someone else's server and to take steps to mitigate the damage caused if that someone else's server stops performing the way that they need it to. That could be as little as having a mirror of everything within one's control to spin-up services somewhere else, or it could mean having only part of one's enterprise on that cloud system, with some of one's production environment running on one's own systems so that the load balancer can drop the cloud portion if it must, but something has to be accounted for if it goes away.

Re: What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Samsung is building cars.

http://www.renaultsamsungm.com/

Re:What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

also all programmers on the internet have been head hunted by google.

Re:What!?

[Solandri]

Google realized pretty early on that the way technology advances isn't by careful planning and execution. It's by trying all sorts of different stuff and seeing what works. Normally this different stuff happens in different companies. The companies where stuff didn't work have to take a write-down or go bankrupt. The companies where stuff works becomes successful (at least for a time).

All Google did was bring this under a single roof, like other companies that did crazy stuff like this in the past - the R&D departments at Xerox (xerographic photocopying, ethernet, GUI, mouse, laser printer), HP (LED, pocket calculator - arguably the grandfather of mobile computing, inkjet printing, memristor), Bell Labs (transistor, error-correction coding, Unix,CCD).

Google isn't bothering to maintain anything unless it reaches critical mass and they decide it's important enough to turn it into an official (non-beta) product. They don't necessarily lack the ability to follow-through. Xerox was the champion of that (nearly all their ideas got poached), and Google is doing much better than them. Speaking as an engineer, it's just that a lot of stuff which seems great on paper and in the lab turns out to have a lot of problems in real-world use.

Re:What!?

[NoSalt]

It is foolish for any company to enter making a new car when they could just sell their hot new tech into cars.

Tell that to Elon Musk

Re: What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are most definitely divisions where anyone over 35 need not apply.

Obviously they don't say this, but you get the hint when you see the team comps.

Re:What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google abandoned a project?! No!

I worked for them for three years.

Behind the scenes it's a fucking catastrophe of half-assed and half-finished projects, with literally thousands of abandoned services that nobody knows anything about, because all the hot-shot college hires moved up or out after proving how badass they were to get hired by Google.

Nobody there wants to maintain anything, and their age discrimination practices prevent them from finding anyone who comprehends what that entails.

Fuck em.

t. google glass

Re:What!?

[lgw]

Congrats on winning that BTW - IMO it's the only impressive programming competition. Definite bragging rights.

Re:What!?

[lgw]

bout the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination

Google pays by algorithm, rather than market (for base comp). For the kids, they pay great, but Google has a hard time hiring older guys unless they can be brought into very senior positions in Google - the algorithm doesn't pay enough otherwise. They aren't the only company with this problem, but they might be the largest. It's an example of a system that both fair and discriminatory.

interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc.

When I interviewed there all that was in the background - maybe it wouldn't have been if I wasn't sharp? What they really seemed to be looking for was "would I design a cloud-scale system in the same way the existing old guys do". Everyone was nice and all, but it was about the worst interview experience I've had - very much "guess what I'm thinking" and not "explain how your design deals with X, Y, and Z, and is there a reason you don't like W". The design-focused interviews were the least interactive interviews I've had. At no point did I feel like I was having a design discussion. The experience (together with the fact the old guys all looked really stressed out and worn down) was enough to make me walk away.

The other red flag in the interview was a complete unconcern with designing systems to be easy to operate - deploy, patch, troubleshoot at 4am when the pager goes off. I guess I impressed in that area, since some Google team that focuses on that reached out to me the next week, but the guys interviewing me clearly weren't interested in that part of system design.

Re:What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Behind the scenes it's a fucking catastrophe of half-assed and half-finished projects, with literally thousands of abandoned services that nobody knows anything about, because all the hot-shot college hires moved up or out after proving how badass they were to get hired by Google.

But..but...but innovation! Disruption! And all the other bullshit Silicon Valley spews forth while insisting that only 20 somethings can ever work in tech.

One wonders how many "futurists" are crying in their beer right now when it seems that self driving cars might actually, you know, be hard to do and could possibly have pitfalls and flaws that they can't see through their rose colored glasses.

Re:What!?

[swillden]

bout the only thing I can see in Google's hiring process (for SWEs, anyway; I have no knowledge of the process for other areas) that remotely smacks of age discrimination

Google pays by algorithm, rather than market (for base comp). For the kids, they pay great, but Google has a hard time hiring older guys unless they can be brought into very senior positions in Google - the algorithm doesn't pay enough otherwise. They aren't the only company with this problem, but they might be the largest. It's an example of a system that both fair and discriminatory.

My own compensation begs to differ. When I was hired as a SWE with 20+ years of industry experience, from another large enterprise company with a national pay scale (IBM), I got a 20% raise, and I was pretty well-compensated before. That's base salary only. My total compensation package is more than double what I was making at IBM... and I'm not in a particularly senior position. I was hired as level 4, which means "competent individual contributor", and have seen been promoted to level 5 which means "expert individual contributor or small team lead". Level 3 is "new grad".

interview questions assume that the candidate knows their CS fundamentals well: algorithms, data structures, big-O complexity, etc.

When I interviewed there all that was in the background - maybe it wouldn't have been if I wasn't sharp? What they really seemed to be looking for was "would I design a cloud-scale system in the same way the existing old guys do". Everyone was nice and all, but it was about the worst interview experience I've had - very much "guess what I'm thinking" and not "explain how your design deals with X, Y, and Z, and is there a reason you don't like W". The design-focused interviews were the least interactive interviews I've had.

It sounds like you were unlucky enough to hit some particularly bad interviewers. Sorry, that happens, but it doesn't represent the norm.

the old guys all looked really stressed out and worn down

This doesn't match my experience at all.

The other red flag in the interview was a complete unconcern with designing systems to be easy to operate - deploy, patch, troubleshoot at 4am when the pager goes off.

That sounds like a completely different company than the Google I'm familiar with. <shrug/>

Re: What!?

[swillden]

There are most definitely divisions where anyone over 35 need not apply.

Obviously they don't say this, but you get the hint when you see the team comps.

Not in software engineering.

Re:What!?

[lgw]

Just so you know: it's not Google paying great, it's IBM paying crap - though at the "competent individual contributor" level, maybe the algorithm does well by people - I don't have the data to argue otherwise. If you're happy, clearly they're paying enough.

It sounds like you were unlucky enough to hit some particularly bad interviewers.

Maybe so - they certainly seemed like very senior people, so maybe it wasn't their main concern. They did all seem stressed out and worn out though.

Re:What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

All Google did was bring this under a single roof, like other companies that did crazy stuff like this in the past - the R&D departments at Xerox (xerographic photocopying, ethernet, GUI, mouse, laser printer), HP (LED, pocket calculator - arguably the grandfather of mobile computing, inkjet printing, memristor), Bell Labs (transistor, error-correction coding, Unix,CCD).

What has Google done that would ever put it among the others in that list? Increase the amount of advertising on the web? Maybe make internet searching better for a little while before letting it go to shit again, which is definitely on par with inventing the transistor and the LED.

Re:What!?

[swillden]

Just so you know: it's not Google paying great, it's IBM paying crap - though at the "competent individual contributor" level, maybe the algorithm does well by people - I don't have the data to argue otherwise. If you're happy, clearly they're paying enough.

Um, I have a very good understanding of what SWE salaries are, thank you very much for the condescension, and my IBM salary wasn't bad at all. I was making $140K, in Utah, almost six years ago. When I joined Google I had to move to Colorado, which has a comparable cost of living. Then later the bonus and stock grants started to kick in and it got really nice. Even in Silicon Valley my salary would be perfectly adequate to raise a family, though I'd probably have to live 40 minutes' bus ride from the office, which is exactly what all of my colleagues with families who work in Mountain View do.

However, my colleagues in Mountain View make more money than I do, though, all things being equal. If I were to move to MTV I'd get a bump to compensate for the increased cost of living.

Re: What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

I recently interviewed for them, and for various reasons I didn't get the job. During the interview process I did get the feeling that what you just said is true.

I can't help but think I dodged a bullet on that one.

Re:What!?

[Waccoon]

After all, I don't really know when they'll yank the rug out from under me.

To be fair, this is pretty much why I stopped upgrading things in general, and I acquire physical media as much as possible. The whole industry is like this. Even the open-source community is guilty, as I can't tell you how many times I've tried to update something, only to be greeted with a 404 or have my current workflow get screwed.

Cloud, web-anything, and "apps" can die in a fire.

Re:What!?

[Waccoon]

Tell that to him again if they can't get their head out of their ass and stop making things like the Model X. The luxury market tolerates cool shit that breaks often, but the general public will not.

Re:What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple tried. Google tried. Samsung is about to try. And all of them learn sooner or later that these projects have 5-year ramps and 10 years of support, that the hardware is 10x costlier than they are used to, and that the OEMs and end-customers have zero tolerance for their "move fast, break shit" attitude.

I think you have a limited view of Samsung: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renault_Samsung_Motors

Re:What!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same deal here. Worked for them for 3 years. Everyone enters as a T4 usually but there's an expectation that you *must* be promoted to T5 as a minimum by the end of the 2nd year. Those who don't typically have a tough 3rd year and don't last. The whole process breeds a protectionist attitude in the programmers and people will fight to get and hang on to work that is sufficiently impactful to make a good promo packet. Maintenance isn't impact so anyone who cares about the quality of code will likely be out on their arse in short order. The whole place is full of Linux hackers - people who can quickly shovel some prototypes together out of nuts and bolts they cherrypick from GitHub. They pretend to do design by drawing pictures of their hacks and writing documents about them. Be suspicious if anyone ever punts work at you saying it'll be easy - it usually isn't and it's a push to re-assign ownership of the bugs. That kind of underhanded hot-potato behavior is rife.

The place functions on lies, adrenaline and sheer panic. The codebase is an ENORMOUS bonfire with all the programmers slowly roasting to death on top.

I sank into suicidal depression twice and I'm on 6 different medications now. Was supposed to be the height of my 15-year career but it really only taught me that I don't want to be a programmer anymore.

Lucasphlegm

[Pseudonymous Powers]

Nothing takes a crap on creativity more consistently than age plus success.

Sigh.

[ledow]

Because the hard bit of building a car is building something that drives in the first place, and the easy bit of building a self-driving car is the car itself.

When the inputs are reduced to accelerator, brake, left, right, it quickly becomes two projects - build a car, and make a car autonomous.

Doing both simultaneously is stupid and expensive and without advantage. Doing them separately means you could just use any car, without the hassle and worry.

But doing either still needs the autonomous control, computer vision, "AI" bits, and those are almost unaffected by what the car is or how it works (even if the wheels turn all the way round to park sideways, the decisions behind the steering logic barely change).

As stuntmen the world over have proven, controlling a car with a computer isn't hard. That's the easy bit. It's a remote control and a few actuators.

But deciding WHAT to do to control it is much harder and complicated by anything else.

That a multi-billion dollar company doesn't realise this is pretty much stupid. Build the AI, when that works put it into an existing car, then integrate the AI and car. Trying to do both at once is stupid, costly, and a waste.

To be honest, though, if they've got this far, I'm going to suggest that they are having their funding cut and the easy part to get rid of while keeping the project alive is the car. If the AI doesn't start performing soon, or a suitable business model found at all, they're going to be ditched.

All these self-driving cars and the only model actually on the road (sorry, that's "not self-driving", but "automatic pilot", right, Tesla?) is getting bad press everywhere? Either you have to come up with something fabulously different, or you lose your market before you even start.

Re:Sigh.

[TWX]

Build the AI, when that works put it into an existing car, then integrate the AI and car. Trying to do both at once is stupid, costly, and a waste.

That may work for prototypes, but at some point the design of the control system informs the design of the car, and the design of the car informs the design of the control system. It becomes necessary to evolve the design of the two in-concert with each other.

If you look at the systems they use to autonomously drive, there are all kinds of sensors mounted high-up on vehicles. Basically no customer would be willing to have that kind of configuration strapped on to an existing car. It becomes necessary to design the car body to accommodate the sensors, and it becomes necessary to make sensors that can be packaged in ways that the buyer finds acceptable.

I sort of expect windshields to return to the angles that were common in the sixties through the early nineties, when the glass was more vertical than horizontal. Hell, we could even see bubbled-out windshields like were common in the fifties return it that allows the sensory equipment to stick out further to get a wider field of view.

Re:Sigh.

[Dutch Gun]

No, the sensors will be integrated into the vehicle and more or less hidden from view. Anything you saw with a visible sensor just meant it was a very early prototype device, and would never come to market designed like that. "Third party system" doesn't mean something bolted on top like aftermarket devices. It just means they'll work with the manufacturer to incorporate that software into the design and manufacturing process.

Google did the right thing here. I always thought their "all or nothing" approach with the car was terribly foolish, even if the underlying tech was impressive.

Re:Sigh.

[vtcodger]

"Because the hard bit of building a car is building something that drives in the first place, and the easy bit of building a self-driving car is the car itself."

Exactly. Trying to build logic that can, for example, recognize and safely navigate a construction zone is enormously difficult.

So is building a drivetrain that won't spend more time in the shop than on the road.

Elon Musk is trying to do both. I suspect he won't quite succeed.

Google is probably wise to stick to the half they know.

Re:Sigh.

[TWX]

Obviously they'll be hidden from view, but the design of the car body must put the sensors where they need to be in order to function, hence my commentary on windshields and rooflines.

We already see this trend beginning with the boxes installed up against the glass in front of the rearview mirrors on many new vehicles, they hide all sorts of stuff in there depending on how the vehicle was ordered.

In some ways Tesla is the aberration in teh all-or-nothing approach. Granted they started by upfitting Lotus bodies but they didn't stay there for long before producing whole vehicles successfully.

Re:Sigh.

[HornWumpus]

downfitting Lotus bodies...MUCH slower than the original in anything but a drag race.

Spy Car

[Anonymous Coward]

Is all it would ever be. G-Cars for the G-Men.

Re:I wonder...

[geek]

How many self-driving cars went into tunnels and stopped when they lost GPS and Internet connectivity?

None. They cache the GPS + map data for several miles in all directions for this type of scenario.

Everyone is ditching self-driving cars

[Anonymous Coward]

Google, Apple...

Maybe this is harder than the sales speak says it is? Also, who's going to be liable when these things crash?

Re:Everyone is ditching self-driving cars

[hackwrench]

That's to be determined court case by court case. Not much different than before.

Re:Everyone is ditching self-driving cars

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's going to be liable when these things crash?

What a novel question! I do believe that you, Sir, are the very first sentient being ever to ask this!

Re:Everyone is ditching self-driving cars

[hackwrench]

It's worked for software because nobody ever tried pinning big enough problems to a flaw in a piece of software to sue. You would think maybe medical equipment software, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... and others mention no lawsuit, either succeeding or failing. Strange.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=...

More partnerships? Doubt it.

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> The firm is already working with Fiat Chrysler, per a partnership announced in May, and that could be the start of others to come.

You think that will lead to MORE partnerships? More likely, Alphabet (you know, the holding company Google built to spin off its non-core businesses) will sell the division to Chrysler.

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[hypertex]

ditto

Re:I wonder...

[Pascoea]

Probably none. (Couldn't find any news articles on it happening anyway.) GPS only provides a reference, the Internet just updates software and other references. The actual direction of the control is derived from a myriad of other sensors by sophisticated on-board software using historical information about the environment. That pre-loaded data, combined with cameras, LIDAR, RADAR, inertial sensors etc. are used to calculate the cars position, direction, environment, obstacles, traffic controls, etc.

So what?

[hackwrench]

So there are projects around that aren't in a finished state. Sounds like things someone can find opportunities for.

Re:So what?

[Anonymous Coward]

That implies someone will finish them. GPs point is the culture is counter to that mindset.

Re:So what?

[hackwrench]

He makes a lousy case for there not being the possibility of anyone feeling like picking one of the projects back up choosing instead to focus on the fact that they merely exist.

Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[Anonymous Coward]

Two things hamper self driving vehicles. First off, how many actually want this, and second how safe will the transition be with both human driven and self driving vehicles be? Google's vehicle was just plain impractical and poorly designed. Yes, it crept along and was very safe, but never really challenged. How many will stand for a self driving vehicle that mopes along. Obviously a lot of these engineers overlook the importance of the human factor in autonomous vehicles. Case in point commercial air craft, which can fly themselves, but not many of us would fly a pilot-less air craft. Human's are fallible but we seem to trust humans more than machines.

Re:Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[0100010001010011]

First off, how many actually want this

Everyone that will be buying them. That is no longer the individual consumer. The F150 isn't the best selling truck in America because a bunch of individual owners buy them it's because of fleets.

Uber, Lyft and all of the rental car companies are going to be buying self driving cars by the lot. Younger consumers have shown they don't want to deal with car ownership. They'll still have the 'old models' for those home buyers that insist on it but they're going to put less and less engineering effort into those since they won't be as profitable.

How many will stand for a self driving vehicle that mopes along.

I would buy a self driving car that took twice as long to get somewhere if it meant I could spend that 'twice as long' doing something else. Pour a beer, fire up my IDE and code on the way to grandma's house.

Re:Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[Dragonslicer]

How many will stand for a self driving vehicle that mopes along.

As many as stand for buses and trains that may take more time to get to your destination than driving would. Judging by my personal experience, that number is pretty high.

Re:Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[SScorpio]

That's fine, I'll stick with buying my own self driving car and not have to deal with sitting in someone else's vomit or jizz.

Re:Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[0100010001010011]

Come visit parts of the midwest, we leave the Amish well enough alone.

Re:Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[Anonymous Coward]

Younger consumers have shown they don't want to deal with car ownership.

Many young people don't have cars because they've become too damn expensive, I have younger friends who complain all the time about this but none who rave about how much they enjoy public transit or summoning Uber whenever someone can't come pick them up. They also tend to rent more because they can't afford houses these days, something that was found when a study actually interviewed a lot of them instead of just drawing conclusions from statistics.

I would buy a self driving car that took twice as long to get somewhere if it meant I could spend that 'twice as long' doing something else. Pour a beer, fire up my IDE and code on the way to grandma's house.

Except that you're required to take over at a seconds notice, especially so you don't end up like a particular Tesla owner.

Re:Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[0100010001010011]

Except that you're required to take over at a seconds notice,

Why? I'm not going to buy a model that I still have to pay attention to.

Re: Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine running a taxi company without paying for a driver.

Eventually, once the technology matures, insurance breaks for autonomous cars will make the driving experience a luxury to pay for.

Thus, there are many reasons to see this technology gain widespread adoption besides drivers and/or passangers wanting to get rid for the driver.

Re:Not sure enough want self driving vehicles.

[Anonymous Coward]

I look forward to the day where I can drive in manual mode, on a road full of autonomous cars. I'm going to cut off, swerve, and speed.. and merge erratically, and all cars will magically move out of my way. Paradise.

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, those other little projects like Gmail, Android, and YouTube are such losers.

Not surprising

[110010001000]

I said a long time ago that there will never be commercially available self driving cars on the roads. There is no such thing as "AI" or "autonomous cars", just marketing. We aren't even close to the level of technology required to build them. And now that Moore's Law is ending, we may never see it unless we come up with some other breakthrough beyond digital processors. Google investors are the winners here. That was a money pit.

Re:Not surprising

[OneSmartFellow]

That is possibly the most idiotic post I have read in a long time.

Re:Not surprising

[0100010001010011]

there will never be commercially available self driving cars on the roads.

Less Space than a Nomad, Lame.

It's coming, deal with it.

We aren't even close to the level of technology required to build them

Says who? They're out there, right now. It's in cars, semis, off road trucks, bulldozers, etc. The 2004 DARPA project was 12 years ago and we went from 'never finished the race' to 'multiple people finishing' in 2 years.

And before you move the goalposts again pointing to a rare 1 in a billion scenario they won't work in and claiming you were right, what exactly are you saying will never hit the market?

Years ago we tossed a PID controller into cars so that they could maintain a set speed. Germany has had cars that automatically brake and maintain a following distance for ~5 years now. My wife's 2017 Subaru will maintain its lane all on its own. (And it wouldn't surprise me if most automated driving was just a software upgrade at this point). Self driving cars are just the next iteration of technology that is already on the market.

Re:Not surprising

[Catbeller]

Those things on the road are not self-driving cars. They are apps that can, with human oversight, kinda imitate a human driver in careully orchestrated conditions. But there are *no* self-driving cars out there. And Google just gave up.

The real goal is self-driving trucks and taxis. They want to fire all the drivers and keep all the money, so there is a lot of *want* on the part of capital. But we haven't built an AI that can match a trained human. If we have such, they'd have shown the robots proudly whipping around the streets, unpiloted. There aren't. Maybe someday we can do it, but right now we're being bamboozed by billionaires who are bamboozling themselves.

Missouri rule: Show me.

Too many things a toaster can't do. The most important: actual human thought.

Re:Not surprising

[Catbeller]

And yet, Google gave up. Time to accept.

Re:Not surprising

[0100010001010011]

*no* self-driving cars out there

Other than the ones Uber bought running around Pittsburgh.

But we haven't built an AI that can match a trained human.

Unfortunately all of our AIs have ended up being better than humans. They don't drink and drive, they watch the road at all times, they can look forward and back at the same time. I don't see the point in training an AI that can match a 16 year old behind the wheel, I think we can do better.

Like I said above, tell me where your goal posts are so you stop moving them on me. The second a car meets your criteria they'll move to a "But they can't do X".

There are already autonomous vehicle racing circuits. Audi's cars in 2012 were just seconds slower than a race car driver (and probably much better than the average driver) http://newatlas.com/stanford-a...

The road is 'production'. These vehicles have been running around all types of environments since the first DARPA challenge in 2004. In 2010 Audi went up Pikes Peak in one. I've seen multiple Slashdot statements claiming what these cars "can't" do that they've been doing for nearly a decade.

And Google just gave up.

Google gives up on everything.

Re:Not surprising

[bartle]

It really does feel like an "emperor has no clothes" situation. Companies are spending billions of dollars and articles are being published daily about a technology that hasn't remotely even shown to be feasible. Sure, they've figured out how get a car to do highway driving and that's making some long distance commuters very happy. But the stuff they're talking about, like replacing Uber drivers with a computer... there's no reason to think that's even possible with our current level of technology. Moving from highway driving to city driving at least an order of magnitude more difficult to do. Building a car that can detect lane markers does not mean you're going to be able to figure out how to detect jaywalkers or interpret road cones. An effective driver needs to be able to look several cars ahead in order to navigate complicated traffic situations and there's no indication that anyone has come close to technology required do this.

What's really disappointing is that the tech community, like those of us on Slashdot, really should know better. For a website that so often displays Luddite tendencies, it's strange that so few are willing to point out that autonomous cars just aren't going to happen.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

but they didn't ... https://techcrunch.com/2016/12/13/googles-self-driving-car-unit-spins-out-as-waymo/
this is posted today as well -- on the same techcrunch site even.

Re:Not surprising

[Catbeller]

How much of all this is just misanthropy.

Plenty of CEOs drinking and operating companies; plenty of sociopaths, too. Such are planning to replace tens of millions of people and crash a good chunk of the planet into depression. I'll be impressed when the CEOs get replaced by AI.

Circuits are by definition the opposite of real world. The Pittsburg taxis have drivers. The Ohio trucks have drivers. And they are crashing plenty; they just are not telling us about it.

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[Anonymous Coward]

Six Google products with over 1 billion active users: YouTube, Android, Search, Maps, Chrome, and Google Play.

Re:I wonder...

[TWX]

And more to the point, a self-driving car is not going to be reliant on a single technology to operate. Sure it uses GPS, but it also actively looks at the damn road and presumably would expect GPS to cut in and out, so it would simply keep following the road for a predetermined amount of time as it anticipates re-establishing GPS. Arguably it would only need to observe GPS signals intermittently anyway since it should understand its bearing and odometer to know how far it's driven and in what direction, using GPS to help maintain calibration.

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[NatasRevol]

Does any of those except youtube make money?

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[Anonymous Coward]

All of them except Youtube makes money. Youtube has always lost money for Google.

Agreed. Volvo gets it.

[bdwoolman]

I saw a short TV report about Volvo's autonomous car program. The idea is that the car will drive itself when driving is boring, and under good conditions. Roads in Sweden are usually very well marked BTW. They are actually testing a significant number of cars in Gothenburg.

When conditions merit human control the car will signal the driver to take control. If this does not happen in a reasonable amount of time the car will pull out of traffic and stop. The stated goal is zero deaths in Volvos by 2020. Also the CEO said that the liability issue was simple. Volvo would take full responsibility. He added that any company unwilling to own the consequences of this tech had no business making it. The interior of the car was modified so that the driver could do other stuff during the "boring" bits. I remember this because I cannot wait for autonomous cars to really start saving lives (Maybe my own). Thirty thousand dead in car crashes every year in the US alone. Let me count the ways. Okay. Maybe not right now.

Re:Agreed. Volvo gets it.

[omfglearntoplay]

I like Volvo's attitude about this self-driving topic, but I had a class in college that pointed out the "stat" that Volvos were safer was mostly BS or unproven due to other factors. What factors? Well, at the time something like over 90% of Volvo drivers in the US were boring middle-aged people that didn't like to drive fast. The drivers were safer, they are supposedly also "more safety conscious" and so buy Volvos that tout being safer... and you see what potentially happens in this self-fulfilling prophecy.

Re: Agreed. Volvo gets it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well your class should redo your research. Over here in Sweden the majority of drivers would drive either a Volvo or a Saab and at the time the Volvo 240 became common, the anount of traffic deaths went down.

Re: Agreed. Volvo gets it.

[TWX]

It's been a very long time since the 240 debuted. I will not dispute that Volvo as an automaker probably has the most comprehensive crash-test and general vehicle safety lab, but it's not like the rest of the mainstream automakers are actively ignoring safety like they once did. The gap is not nearly so vast as it once was.

Re: Agreed. Volvo gets it.

[lars_stefan_axelsson]

No, that's true. Volvo (and SAAB) picked the low hanging fruit earlier, but most others have more or less caught up. If for the fact that much of safety standards have been mandated by law in many/most countries these days. (Which is something that Volvo engineers complain about; "You can either do well in the EuroNCAP tests, or on the road, but not both...")

So they're increasingly trying to solve more niche cases; saving the life of the pedestrian you hit, for example. Or I remember when they looked at saving the unborn fetus in a collision (turns out you can't)...

But their main problem now is actually erroneous usage. They lament the fact that whatever they do they cannot make americans to put their children facing the right way, i.e. backwards. You keep insisting on turning them around, much, much too soon (they should stay facing backwards until 4-5 years of age. I.e. until their ear line is above the top of the seat). To the detriment of their safety. But no amount of work seems to be able to change that. So what can they do?

Re:Agreed. Volvo gets it.

[tehcyder]

I like Volvo's attitude about this self-driving topic, but I had a class in college that pointed out the "stat" that Volvos were safer was mostly BS or unproven due to other factors. What factors? Well, at the time something like over 90% of Volvo drivers in the US were boring middle-aged people that didn't like to drive fast. The drivers were safer, they are supposedly also "more safety conscious" and so buy Volvos that tout being safer... and you see what potentially happens in this self-fulfilling prophecy.

I know it's hard for young people to understand, but the majority of the population are boring middle-aged (or older) people. The average driver is not a nineteen year old in a Ferrari. .

Google was never going to make cars

[sjbe]

Google has reportedly shelved its long-standing plan to develop its own autonomous vehicle in favor of pursuing partnerships with existing car makers.

This should surprise no one. The notion that Google was going to get into the low margin car manufacturing business was always preposterous. Google has no expertise in manufacturing nor any competitive advantage. Even if they did develop some self driving tech that was marketable they would still have to build and sell a car which is an expensive and low margin endeavor. And self driving cars is a completely new market which nobody really understands the economics of at all right now. There was no way Google would go from getting 25% net margins to 10% net margins in an industry they have no experience in. Google can't even be bothered to take manufacturing a smartphone seriously and we were supposed to believe they were going to get into automobile manufacturing? Google is a software company. Building cars was always going to be a bridge too far for them.

Re:Google was never going to make cars

[WindBourne]

actually, either apple or google could have bought faraday future and had it going.
Likewise, I have no doubt that Musk would gladly have helped either Apple or Google create auto making companies.

Hype wave is cresting...

[Anonymous Coward]

It really does look like the tech bubble is about to have a big dose of reality applied to it:

1. 3D printers on every desktop. Still has a little while to run with products like Carbon to be exposed as nowhere near as revolutionary as they make out.

2. Wearables. Pebble is now dead, and Tim Cook has the reality distortion machine turned to 12 on the Apple Watch.

3. VR/AR. Actually I'm pretty impressed with the progress, but there is a lot of hype to wash out of the sector - e.g. Magic Leap.

4. iHealth. Theranos.

5. Driverless cars. Seems like this idea needs some more tech advances.

The last big one is AI, and it won't be long before people realise that the work being done at Deep Mind is going to need a couple more decades of Moore's law to be useful, while regular AI doesn't look too different from Excel macros.

Trouble down the road

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at the state of android on cellphones. Malware, late or no updates, various half-finished abandoned versions. Is that what you want with mission-critical software running on your car? Searches from google are okay - software and software ecosystems from google suck bad.

Re:Trouble down the road

[Catbeller]

Indded. We'd be committing everyone - poor, old, rich, young - to constantly rebuy cars on a schedule that automakers decide. They could obsolete cars at will. Or set up subsciption services - brake control, GPS maps, charge us for our own surveillance.

What is unbelievable is they think that cars are retired every five years or so, so obsolence won't be a problem. They know perfectly well that people keep cars for ten - fifteen years because, well, they're bloody expensive. They want that option gone. We'll be on an upgrade cycle like PCs, and enormously profitable one.

Cars, esp. electric cars, can easily last twenty years. Change the batteries, the motor bearings, seals, and it can keep going. That is a huge problem for car manufacturers. Computer controlled everything fixes all that for them.

Re:I wonder...

[rockmuelle]

How do you cache the GPS? I didn't know Google could predict the future.

Sure, cached maps, but you're not caching GPS, you're switching to a dead-reckoning system or turning the auto-pilot off.

-Chris

Good news, everybody

[Kjella]

That might mean the project is approaching commercial feasibility, that they'd do research projects and concept cars by themselves is fine but I never believed Google would become a car manufacturer. You can't compare Chromebooks or Chromecast to the engineering complexity of a car, to start from the ground up like Tesla they'd need forever both in time and money. OTOH there's no reason to start partnering until you're really close to something so you have to mate the sensor grid with a particular car design. Let's get this show on the road :)

It's bitztream

[Anonymous Coward]

the autism-hating, custom EpiPen-hating, Musk-hating Slashdot troll!

Seems to be still testing? In MV at least...

[Hadlock]

I saw a self driving Google Lexus SUV taking a left turn on to a busy 2 way street just Thursday morning last week, and I've seen at least two or three other self driving cars around Mountain View in the last two weeks. If anything they've stepped up their testing in the last month, not stopped it. Actually for the first time, I saw two Google Self driving cars in line at a stop sign, at the same time. Usually you're lucky to see just one a week in my neighborhood.

Re:Seems to be still testing? In MV at least...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Google Has Stopped Developing Its Own Self-Driving Car - Report " Keyword is OWN. You saw a LEXUS.

And so

[Anonymous Coward]

When asked about the possible ethical implications of presenting such a false public image and misleading investors and competitors alike, Google replied, "uhm... we, er, um, that is to say, you people as a nation, just put Trump in the white house. Fuck you, that's the ethics of today"

Re:I wonder...

[zm]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[NatasRevol]

Gonna need a source on all of that.

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[vtcodger]

I should think that Google now owns a whole raft of patents on various aspects of self driving technology. Over the next two decades, licensing fees will likely recoup them their investment ... and then some.

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[soft_guy]

YouTube was a separate company that Google acquired.

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[Anonymous Coward]

Regardless of money, any product with over a billion users is probably providing a useful service.

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

A self driving car has to be able to operate on input from its onboard sensors alone. Cellular communication might be offline and someone might have mucked with GPS somehow. The car still needs to be able to navigate. After all, there are road signs and with the built in map, it should be able to determine where it currently is. At least down to a few miles which is good enough in most cases.

Also, if GPS and what the car sees disagree, it needs to disregard GPS and go with the sensor input. Meaning if the GPS tells it it's in New York, but just passed a traffic sign 'Los Angeles 5 miles', it better assume it's in California.

Driving is a social activity...

[skaralic]

What a lot of people fail to take into consideration about self-driving cars is that driving (in a city) is a deeply social activity (well, for good drivers at least). There are many signals that a person can read (vehicle type and condition, their occupants, the environment, time and day, pedestrians etc.) that do not fall into the standard list of signals you might associate with driving speed, turn signals etc. A lot of these can be very area-specific and require local knowledge. It will be difficult for software to ever match a human in these tasks. Having said that, computers excel in other areas, such as reaction time, so a hybrid approach where both the human and the computer are used should yield the best results. For really mind-numbing stop and go highway driving you can be on full auto. For city driving you switch to manual plus assist...

Besides, after a few years your on-board computer will stop receiving OTA updates and the required APIs will be discontinued so you will need that full-manual capability.

Re:Driving is a social activity...

[speedplane]

What a lot of people fail to take into consideration about self-driving cars is that driving (in a city) is a deeply social activity ... It will be difficult for software to ever match a human in these tasks.

I agree, but still very disappointed about Google's decision. Self driving cars will likely require thousands, or perhaps millions of little computer programs that can catch every possible scenario or combination thereof. It's a huge undertaking, but if anyone could do it, Google could. Now it seems they are backpeddling from that in order to get something to market faster. We'll end up seeing more half-assed product rushed to market (e.g., Tesla Autopilot) to please investors and the press. Long term prospects are not good.

Waymo?

[trenobus]

Waymo

Re: Google is a one-trick pony

[Anonymous Coward]

Android was bought too.

wow. google continues to make huge mistakes

[WindBourne]

Seriously, they started a great project and now they are killing it. Sadly, they have been doing this to a number of innovative ideas.

Re:wow. google continues to make huge mistakes

[HornWumpus]

Sound's like it was a mistake to spend any money on this bad idea. Someone came to their senses and called bullshit.

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

BUT how will entity X overcome trivial yet simultaneously CRTICIAL issue Y, that armchair internet expert extraordinaire (ME) uncovered with only 20 seconds of brain power. OH the HUMANITY

Google's podcar isn't spectacular...

[golgotha007]

I see Google "podcars" on my way home from work everyday. I drive on Central Expressway between Palo Alto and Santa Clara. These podcars are slow as shit, typically doing about 20mph in a 50 and holding up lots of traffic. They are over cautious and have their safety thresholds dialed way too high, as I've had numerous occasions to "play" with it by invading its personal space; good fun by the way, highly recommended.

From what I've seen with Google podcars, we're a long way off from having these all over. And I mean a loooong way off.

what about when GPS is off by just a little bit?

[Joe_Dragon]

Like marking you on a side road / forage road and not the highway that you are on?

Saying that you are on the overpass when you are really on the road under it?

Run into out of date map data?

Needs to have a criminal case where the NDA &

[Joe_Dragon]

Needs to have a criminal case where the NDA & EULA are killed by an hard ass judge like the one in my cousin vinny. A few days in a local jail for contempt of court will fix BS like that or lead to the prosecutor they have used there system of contractors and sub-contractors to cover up code faults and logs. Can lead to a jury convincing.

even with them just selling self-driving tech they

[Joe_Dragon]

even with them just selling self-driving tech they will still get sued.

We are going to sue!

Google
The car manufacture
The manufacture of the cameras
The providers of the map data.
The state
The fleet owner of the auto drive car.
The renter of the auto drive car.

It's being spun off as Waymo

[jhecht]

They NY Times (maybe paywalled) reports that Google is spinning off its automous car group as Waymo.

Re:Google is a one-trick pony

[lgw]

It's common knowledge. Google sells ads - it's really their only successful business. There's enough common infrastructure that the marginal cost of operating something like gmail is small compared to the ad revenue. YouTube is the exception, because the bandwidth costs are relatively high - http://www.wsj.com/articles/vi...

Android is a bit of an odd duck, and profits were total guesswork outside of Google until the court case: https://www.bloomberg.com/news...

Re:I wonder...

[HornWumpus]

Like everybody else says, none. But none had the sense to open up 700 ponies and burn the tires off ether.

Google car company

[Anonymous Coward]

I was just on Wired's page reading an article 4 hours old about how"Google's Self-Driving Car Company is Finally Here."

The problem when you put a steering wheel in

[presidenteloco]

I've read various estimates that it takes a human somewhere between 5 and 17 seconds to take over from a self-driving car when notfied, when they were concentrating on something else.

So this poses an interesting design dilemma. If you put in a steering wheel and manual brake pedal etc, and have a situation requiring emergency rapid action, and the automation system is in the middle of taking the action it computed is best, how do you PREVENT the human from providing contrary control input which in all likelihood will mess up the overall response to the situation, especially since they are very likely coming in way late.

In what circumstances do you keep the human input disabled, for reasons like mentioned above, and in what circumstances or after what delay do you let them take over. A combined control-input situation would be disastrous, like having the "backseat" driver sitting beside you grab the wheel in panic while you're in evasive driving.

Re:The problem when you put a steering wheel in

[Anonymous Coward]

Practicality wise you need manual controls because there are times cars needs to moved in such a way its not for getting from point A to point B on a map. Example, could a autonomous car drive into a car wash with wheel guides? Could it pull into a garage? Can it park in a parking structure? Can it park on a ferry?

Oops, did someone just say...

[Anonymous Coward]

RECESSION??!!!

O FFS

[ishmaelflood]

Your description of the mechanical path is correct, but most manufacturers who care still allow the driver to sense some of the torque being applied to the steering axis of the tire. That is to say, if I plot unassisted SW (steering wheel) torque vs latacc, compared with assisted torque vs latacc, the EPAS removes a large, but not all, the torque, even when parking which is where the most assistance is used.

Various companies do intentionally or unintentionally get rid of all the Mz (torque on the tire about the vertical axis) feedback to the driver.

Of the other forces/torques on the tire it is reasonable to say that most manufacturers tend to try and eliminate steering wheel torque as a response. For instance, torque steer, single wheel bumps, braking on unequal mu surfaces, should all ideally be isolated from the SW, although I must admit in the latter case I don't mind a bit of feedback via the SW.

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can cache the last GPS fix, use dead reckoning in combination with inertial sensors, and every now and then the cameras will be able to give you a new fix based on the cached map data.

So...

[BitztreamNotARealNam]

How's life in the hypocrite lane?

Re:I wonder...

[Anonymous Coward]

None. But all of them fail to navigate snow. But everyone has nice weather like California, right?

Hello Waymo

[watice]

So they decided to develop it as a feature addon to existing cars? I'm not understanding it here. The Waymo promo video definitely looks like they're developing this themselves, would be interested to see them partner with others. Waymo Promo Vid: https://youtu.be/uHbMt6WDhQ8