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Cringely Pans Self-Driving Car Hype, Says They're Years Away (cringely.com)
In what may be his final year of technology predictions, columnist Robert X. Cringely argues "I can't say that we're going to see anything beyond more beta tests of self-driving cars in 2019... We simply aren't ready and probably won't be for years to come...."
"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me." It will eventually happen. Once half the fleet has been replaced with cars that could be self-drivers if we allowed them to be, then there will be a huge financial incentive to get the other half off the street. This will be especially the case if climate change is still accelerating. I'm guessing that most cars from 2020-on could be self-driving with only a software upgrade, which is why Elon Musk is predicting Tesla will have full autonomy by the end of 2019. But notice that Elon isn't predicting Tesla will be allowed to have its cars drive themselves everywhere...
So why is the world talking so much about self-driving cars and full autonomy? Some of it is Tesla hype, some of it is marketing as the car companies try to get us to buy cars that will eventually be self-driving, but probably not until their second owners. And the other reason why we're talking so much about self-driving cars is because Uber is planning to go public later this year...an IPO that will go smoother if the driving public thinks autonomous cars are something that we'll be seeing soon. Uber has a labor problem. If it can spin a story that surly and expensive human drivers are soon to be replaced with electrons, that will be very reassuring to Wall Street. But as I explained, it also isn't true.
The world isn't yet ready -- something Uber and Tesla and all the others will suddenly admit in about a year (post-IPO).
Cringely also argues that the problem isn't just the "millions of drivers who are still controlling their vehicles the old fashion way, which is often in a barely competent fashion..."
"We keep our cars longer because they don't rust and we can't afford to replace them so often. The result is that while we could expect a complete turnover in car technology every decade, now it takes closer to two decades."
"The problem isn't with the self-driving cars, it's with the cars that aren't self-driving, cars that are driven by idiots like me." It will eventually happen. Once half the fleet has been replaced with cars that could be self-drivers if we allowed them to be, then there will be a huge financial incentive to get the other half off the street. This will be especially the case if climate change is still accelerating. I'm guessing that most cars from 2020-on could be self-driving with only a software upgrade, which is why Elon Musk is predicting Tesla will have full autonomy by the end of 2019. But notice that Elon isn't predicting Tesla will be allowed to have its cars drive themselves everywhere...
So why is the world talking so much about self-driving cars and full autonomy? Some of it is Tesla hype, some of it is marketing as the car companies try to get us to buy cars that will eventually be self-driving, but probably not until their second owners. And the other reason why we're talking so much about self-driving cars is because Uber is planning to go public later this year...an IPO that will go smoother if the driving public thinks autonomous cars are something that we'll be seeing soon. Uber has a labor problem. If it can spin a story that surly and expensive human drivers are soon to be replaced with electrons, that will be very reassuring to Wall Street. But as I explained, it also isn't true.
The world isn't yet ready -- something Uber and Tesla and all the others will suddenly admit in about a year (post-IPO).
Cringely also argues that the problem isn't just the "millions of drivers who are still controlling their vehicles the old fashion way, which is often in a barely competent fashion..."
"We keep our cars longer because they don't rust and we can't afford to replace them so often. The result is that while we could expect a complete turnover in car technology every decade, now it takes closer to two decades."
Cringly is a familiar old idiot.
Watson & Crick predicted it was going to take 30 years to sequence the human genome. Venter did it in a fraction of that time, because he thought outside the box.
Just a few years ago I had the pleasure of being surrounded by crusty old defense contractor types who prattled on about how Elon Musk and his stupid little rockets were literally nothing but a flash-in-the -pan publicity stunt. They insisted that self-landing re-usable rockets were not feasible or we'd already be doing it....
Same argument here. Self driving cars are stupid, they don't work well enough, they'll get people killed, they are years away from being practical, Tesla sucks, blah blah blah.
"Every time I see an adult on a bicycle, I no longer despair for the future of the human race." - H. G. Wells
In the future most cars won't have second owners.
In the future, most cars won't have first owners (unless you count the automated-fleet service's assets department). Most cars will spend their entire services-lives operating as driverless taxis. As for how long they will last before becoming unusable, it will probably be quite a long time, assuming their battery-packs can be economically replaced. Competition will see to that; nobody running a driverless-taxi fleet is going to put up with cars that don't yield a good return on their investment.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Average miles driven per year is ~13k in the USA, so if your car is under 100k, you're driving around a third of average. Even a '90s era car could expect to do 100k miles without major issues, so "runs great" is assumed as long as it wasn't exposed to excessive environmental problems.
That said, you are correct. It will take a "long" time for the shift. I tend to rate it in milestones. We're currently at "testing on public roads". Some other milestones:
First self-driving commercial vehicles available for sale/lease - taxis, delivery, intra-company transfers, areas where a certain amount of limitations are acceptable, and more attention can be made for specialized maintenance requirements. Looking cool matters less than practical.
Next, self-driving car available for public sale to private individuals/parties.
Self driving cars become dominant, IE over 50% of sales
Self driving cars become exclusive - only special duty vehicles aren't self driving.
Note, these milestones are basically at the dealer - it isn't what is actually on the road.
so you realize that the average age of cars on the road today are 11.7 years, so if half of new cars sold are self driving, that doesn't mean that half of the cars on the road are. Maybe 5% are.
So, if each milestone takes only 5 years(them moving to dominate could happen very quickly, but we're lagging on the introduction itself), that's 20 years before virtually all cars sold are self-driving. Then, another 20 years to get most of the remaining human driven cars off the road. Time for virtually all cars on the road, short of the occasional dude taking his Model-T out for a spin? 40+ years.
I don't read AC A human right
You also have the Sam Vines boot theory. A good set of boots that will last you for life might cost as much as 5 sets of boots that each last a year, especially if you take care of them, but it's the rich people who will buy the good boots, while the poor stay in the hole buying a new pair of boots every year or less, despite it costing more over the long run.
It's expensive to be poor.
In this case there's a good chance that Gava bought a good car, though I'd argue his car is lasting mostly because he doesn't drive it much. Less than 100k miles on a car that old is extremely low mileage, less than 5k/year, when the average is 12-15k.
I don't read AC A human right
Just look at Boeing and MCAS
That said, fact remains that Boeing makes planes that fly millions of miles without a crash. I thought here on Slashdot we were trying to rise above the media hype?
because people can think "I don't drive drunk, but it looks like the AI could, I want my manual car back"
Yeah and people think that vaccines are bad. There's always going to be that group of people who look at one event and use that as evidence that something is bad in spite of the volumes of evidence otherwise. Who knew we lived in such a world?!
Since we trust software so much
Software not so much, but there is a profit motive to ensure that say an automated Semi deliver it's load correctly. Online voting might hurt the public at large if hacked, but wouldn't exactly hurt any particular companies' bottom line, heck look at Equifax hack as an example of that. I trust that the profit motive in getting automated vehicles right is vastly higher than getting an online voting system right.